The Teeming Brain

To celebrate Halloween, I thought I’d offer everybody a gift to all of my readers in the form of an excerpt from a new story I’m currently writing. This marks the first time I’ve ever shared any portion of an unfinished story with anybody else. I don’t know why it even crossed my mind to do this, but the idea seemed fine when it occurred, especially since the story in question is definitely a horror piece, so I figured I’d run with it.

The story presently has no title, not even a working one. I’m writing it for a specific purpose, but currently I’m not at liberty to reveal what that is. The excerpt below is just one step above raw first-draft material. So please excuse any stylistic lumps, spelling errors, conceptual contradictions, and any other clumsy faults that may show up in it. Also be aware that it may not make much sense in its context-less state.

So anyway, with those provisos borne firmly in mind, enjoy! And also, Happy Halloween!

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The bizarre metaphysical breakdown in things, which came to define life in the city soon after I awoke to my strange existence, was heralded by a brief outburst of what the newspapers, quoting the hastily delivered verdicts of psychiatric professionals and government offices, dubbed “mass hysteria.” It took the form of what one prominent mental health authority described as a “hallucinatory disfiguration” of the city’s religious architecture.

For a period of about five minutes on a weekday afternoon, approximately half of the city’s population saw the facades of churches, temples, synagogues, mosques, and meditation halls transmogrified into human or humanoid faces frozen in expressions of horror. The event made itself known in a ripple of panic that radiated outward from those buildings like waves on the surface of a lake. Everyone who laid eyes on such a structure saw the change occur. Some people blanched and stared in mute shock. Others groaned or screamed and covered their heads. Still others fell to their knees or fainted. Some vomited or went into convulsions. Later, the story that emerged from these thousands upon thousands of individual witnesses was uniform in its assertion of the unearthly influence those faces had exerted. The sheer sight of the grotesquely twisted visages had, as one man stated it, “saturated my vision” and “spilled over into my stomach.” Countless people told the same story of experiencing an overpowering sense of mingled terror and revulsion that seemed to bloat their very sense of sight and then “spill” or “burst” or “flood” into other regions of their bodies—stomach, bowels, genitals, limbs—and bring with it an excruciating illness.

The vision vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, and in the ensuing days and weeks, more than one artist attempted to draw or paint a semblance of those spectral faces. Invariably, the attempts fell short, at least according to the people who had actually seen the vision for themselves. I myself examined several of these drawings and paintings when they appeared in the newspapers, and they were hideous in the extreme, with mouths, eyes, and other features displaying some strange perversion of proportion that rendered them utterly noxious. But it was impossible to isolate the precise details that achieved such a striking effect. In some of the pictures, the eyes were blank and white, staring blindly without irises or pupils. In others the eyes were made demonic by pupils in the shape of serpentine or catlike slits, or sometimes goat-like wedges. Still others had the bulbous black eyes of an insect or the berry-cluster eyes of a spider. In all of them the mouths gaped wide in screams of torment, but the details of these mouths differed. Some displayed reptilian rows of fangs. Others revealed a mouth lined with rotten sores like leprosy. In others a strange stone tunnel with an arched entrance had taken the place of the throat, suggesting a coiling journey downward, inward, toward a pit of indescribable darkness and dread.

Even in my frozen state of emotional paralysis, I could clearly see the dreadfulness of these illustrations. But I was left to wonder about their relative lack of fidelity, and about the gulf that separated them from the reality that had inspired them, for I was among those who had not seen the faces on the buildings. My own case was different from that of any other, however, because so far as I was aware, I was the only person who had been in view of a church and yet failed to see the transition. I had been out on one of my walks, and had been standing directly before and beneath the façade of a great cathedral when the event occurred. People on the sidewalk around me had screamed and clutched their neighbors as they gazed up at the building. But when I looked up myself, I had seen only the unchanged spires and arches rearing toward the pale blue sky, and the massive mazework of stained glass glinting in the slanting afternoon sunlight. Then the people had begun to fall and thrash, gasping and retching in a fit of supernatural sickness, but still I had seen nothing to induce such a reaction. Eventually I had been the only one left standing, a rag-wrapped figure surrounded by writhing forms that struck me suddenly as wormlike and obscene.

For many nights I pondered this strangeness as I lay inside my grotto and felt the darkness breathe. I could not decide whether my failure to see the faces indicated a deficit of spiritual vision or a surplus of it. Regardless of which way my opinion inclined on a given night, these inner debates always ended by my becoming suddenly aware of the coolness of the feathery air against my face. I would reach up to feel my disfigured features, and would sometimes be seized by a mental image, milder than a full-blown vision but more intense than a mere imagining, of the great cathedral shuddering and twisting and transforming itself into a polished mirror, upon whose silvery-crystalline surface I saw my own reflection screaming in eternal horror.

* * * * *

Next to my discovery of the grotto, and the events surrounding the vision of the faces, my most vivid “first” memory was of the man who bled to death through his eyes. The event occurred during my daily journey, when I was at one of the farthest points away from my domain, tracing my preordained path through a part of town where people wore nicer clothing and drove nicer vehicles, and where the tall buildings gleamed with the freshness of new-cut stone and polished glass. As always, the river of bodies streaming down the sidewalk parted like biblical waters to let me pass, men in business suits and women in flashier attire stepping aside and averting their eyes lest we lock gazes and some unstated catastrophe occur.

What first drew my attention, the first indicator that something alarming might be happening, were the screams. They came in a male voice, harsh and piercing, and were so very sincere in their expression of frantic horror that I thought they must surely shred the throat of the one voicing them. Like everyone else within earshot, I turned to look, and my eyes located a man in a smart gray business suit standing at the open door of a taxicab and clutching his face with both hands. Blood spurted from between his fingers, which were capped over his eyes.

The sight proved mesmerizing to us all. We stopped and stared dumbly as he shrieked in pain and horror. We remained motionless as he doubled over, bending at the waist to vomit on his stylish leather shoes while the blood still squirted from between his rigid pale fingers. Then he fell into the crook of the cab door and began clawing at his eyes while his legs kicked a spastic dance-hall pattern.

This transition triggered the panic that had been waiting for a release. The crowd exploded in multiple directions, the surge of people becoming a confusion of forces, some of them leading toward the man and others away from him. I was caught in one of the former, which swept me to within a few feet of him before drawing to a fearful halt.

I heard the new noise when everyone else did, the one that had been obscured by the general commotion and the man’s screams, which were now dwindling into chokes and gasps as his voice gave out. The new noise was a whispery hiss, like the scalding sound of ice melting in a bed of hot coals. It filled the air with a preternatural loudness and vividness—I wondered whether the people pressed around me in unaccustomed intimacy noticed it as well—and its source was immediately evident.

The blood from the man’s eyes was sizzling and burning like acid. It was eating away at the flesh of his hands and face, the fabric of his suit, the leather of his shoes, even the yellow paint on the side of the cab. Where it had spattered on the black pavement, it bubbled like oil in a hot skillet and emitted a curling white plume of smoke.

Pandemonium ensued. The sea of people burst into atoms yet again, fleeing with many shrieks and shouts while the fallen man’s limbs began to twitch and convulse in a manner that reminded me of the crazies back in my usual part of the city. The driver of the cab, who had been twisted around in his seat and watching the scene transpire with open mouth and eyes, now shot out of his vehicle and fled with the rest. I alone stayed near to watch, and as in all things, my lack of emotion intrigued me. My initial surprise became a calm curiosity. I felt no shock or horror, although I recognized their absence as abnormal, and even perverse, since the dying man was rapidly mutating into a figure drawn from a nightmare as the acidic blood continued to eat into his flesh, and then deeper, into his very bone. The structure of his skull began to shift, threatening full collapse. The index finger of one hand dangled by a shred of tissue and then dropped into his lap. His legs gave a last mighty kick that I recognized as a death throe. Then he lay still.

I stayed near, watching his cooling corpse with an interest that was at once keen and detached, until the sound of approaching sirens told me I ought to leave. Then I calmly started walking again, intent on finishing my circuit of the city. When I arrived back at my alley, I crawled inside my grotto even though several hours of daylight still remained. And I lay there the rest of that day and then through the night, letting what I had seen replay again and again in the theatre of my thoughts. The entire incident seemed charged from first to last with a special significance. In my mind’s eye, the steely grays of the automobiles and skyscrapers assumed a greater intensity, as did the shocking redness of the man’s corrosive blood, and the sounds of his screams, and the sizzling of the blood as it liquefied his flesh and scarred the pavement, and the horrified expressions on the pale, wide-eyed faces of the crowd. It was all transformed in my mental vision, swollen from the inside, as it seemed, with a surfeit of meaning that threatened to burst through the skin of the world and reveal sense itself, the abstract substance of meaningfulness rendered visible and tangible.

As I thought these things—or rather, as I watched them play out spontaneously in the privacy of my mind, with no feeling of voluntary intellection—I was gratified and even delighted to feel the darkness of my grotto respond favorably, lovingly, to this elevation of my inner state to a fever pitch of powerful focus. The very air seemed to savor and consider me, drawing the heat from my burning brow, cooling my face and hands, siphoning away all the mounting confusion and leaving me finally in the same state of utter calm and detachment that I had come to recognize as my lot.

Although I could not be completely confident about the order of events that formed the earliest days of my life, since my mental clarity developed only gradually, over a period of time, and the earliest days were therefore a jumble, still whenever I thought back to that day and the man with the bleeding eyes, I felt certain that it was on the very next morning that I first picked up a wad of garbage, fashioned it into a ball, and stuck it on the sharp end of some broken-glass neck. Thus, my little friends, those grotesque parodies of the human shape that soon came to populate my alley, owed their birth to my having witnessed that initial incursion of absolute reality into a corruptible human form.

If you haven’t yet read my first post in this series of posts about a special mood of ethereal longing that occasionally overcomes me, then please read that one before this one, since it lays the groundwork to explain what I’m getting at here.

H.P. Lovecraft was an early 20th century American horror author who has long been associated in mainstream memory with Weird Tales and the other 1920s and 1930s pulp magazines that were devoted to fantasy, science fiction, and horror. What has been less well known outside of his relatively small but passionately devoted circle of admirers is that he was also a fantastically prolific epistolarian, an accomplished literary critic, a student of architecture, a devoted antiquarian, an amateur chemist and astronomer, and a philosopher and political theorist of enormous insight and acumen. It is only now, these seven decades after his untimely death in 1937 at the age of 46, that he is beginning to receive mainstream recognition as a classic American author on the level of Poe. (Not incidentally, the many parallels between Poe and Lovecraft are fascinating. Both were preoccupied by moods and themes of beauty, horror, dread, and the gothic sublime. Both were neurotic and emotionally hypersensitive. Both were denied canonical literary status until long after their deaths. Both were first championed by the French literati before achieving widespread critical recognition back in their home country.)

Lovecraft’s most famous literary creation has hitherto been the inaptly named “Cthulhu mythos,” which, as stated in the Wikipedia article by that title, “is the term coined by the writer August Derleth [one of Lovecraft’s literary executors] to describe the shared elements, characters, settings, and themes in the works of H. P. Lovecraft and associated writers.” The mythos is built around the idea of monstrous extracosmic entities who are waging a war against each other, with earth as one of their central battlegrounds. Although Lovecraft did occasionally write about such things, or at least about something resembling them, Derleth and later writers codified and modified his so-called “mythos” in ways that were explicitly un-Lovecraftian, giving it, for example, a pseudo-Christian slant by recasting it in the form of a Manichaean war between “good” entities and “bad” ones. The resulting literary mishmash contributed enormously to the public’s misremembering of Lovecraft as nothing more than a pulp hack who produced a body of b-grade horror stories about tentacular monsters.

Fortunately, a vigorous scholarly movement arose in the 1970s, spearheaded by the precocious young scholar S.T. Joshi, that reclaimed Lovecraft’s memory from the morass of inaccuracies that had come to obscure it. Today, thanks primarily to Joshi and the other scholars involved in the movement, Lovecraft is increasingly being remembered and recognized as the significant literary figure that he truly was and is.

Among the aspects of his character that were obscured by the false image of him that reigned during most of the 20th century, none was more central to his overall personality than his burning sense of sehnsucht (regarding which, see my first post in this series for an explanation). His deep longing for, and exquisite responsiveness to, scenes of natural and architectural beauty which would evoke a piercing sense of “adventurous expectancy,” as he often called it, mingled with a tantalizing sense of deja vu or lost memory, led him to produce many poems and a veritable ocean of letters in which he described and tracked this delicate mood. As with C.S. Lewis’s writings about his own piercing experience of sehnsucht, I find that Lovecraft’s descriptions of the emotion awaken a startling sense of identification within me. I know exactly, precisely, poignantly, what he is talking about when he describes the ethereal sense of longing that arises in connection with certain scenes and seasons to intoxicate him with a sense of imminent revelation and transcendence.

I wrote about this aspect of his personality in my paper “The Masters’ Eyes Shining with Secrets: H.P. Lovecraft and His Influence on Thomas Ligotti,” so for this post about HPL’s experience of sehnsucht, I’ve decided to go ahead and quote a passage from that paper, since it includes several significant excerpts from his writings.

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Lovecraft, as both a human being and an artist, was powerfully shaped by a lifelong experience of sehnsucht. . . . [His] poignant yearning after an experience of absolute beauty can be seen in many of his stories, such as “The Silver Key,” where young Randolph Carter, Lovecraft’s fictional alter ego, yearns for a return to the reimagined supernal peace and beauty of his childhood world; and also in his letters and essays, where he speaks repeatedly of finding himself overcome by aesthetic rapture and a sense of longing and “adventurous expectancy” at the sight of sunsets, cloudscapes, winding streets, rooftops angled in certain suggestive arrangements, and the like. The following passage from a 1927 letter to Donald Wandrei is typical:

Sometimes I stumble accidentally on rare combinations of slope, curved street-line, roofs & gables & chimneys, & accessory details of verdure & background, which in the magic of late afternoon assume a mystic majesty and exotic significance beyond the power of words to describe. Absolutely nothing else in life now has the power to move me so much; for in these momentary vistas there seem to open before me bewildering avenues to all the wonders & lovelinesses I have ever sought, & to all those gardens of eld whose memory trembles just beyond the rim of conscious recollection, yet close enough to lend to life all the significance it possesses (Selected Letters II.125-6).

Or again, from a 1930 letter to Clark Ashton Smith:

My most vivid experiences are efforts to recapture fleeting & tantalising mnemonic fragments expressed in unknown or half-known architectural or landscape vistas, especially in connexion with a sunset. Some instantaneous fragment of a picture will well up suddenly through some chain of subconscious association—the immediate excitant being usually half-irrelevant on the surface—& fill me with a sense of wistful memory & bafflement; with the impression that the scene in question represents something I have seen & visited before under circumstances of superhuman liberation & adventurous expectancy, yet which I have almost completely forgotten, & which is so bewilderingly uncorrelated & unoriented as to be forever inaccessible in the future (Selected Letters III.197).

Additional examples could be multiplied at length, and all would show, like the above passages, that Lovecraft was gripped by an ingrained and, we might say, “classical” sense of sehnsucht, the “infinite longing that is the essence of romanticism,” as E.T.A. Hoffmann famously formulated it. It was precisely this faculty that led him to respond with such intense delight to the mystically charged writings of Lord Dunsany, which exerted an enormous influence on his own subsequent work. Lovecraft’s Dunsanian stories can and should be read not only as outflowings of his love for Dunsany’s aesthetic vision, but as expressions of his own personal sense of infinite longing.

Lovecraft even went so far as to assert that this feeling of longing, this heightened responsiveness to beauty that seems to hint at a transcendent world of absolute aesthetic fulfillment, is

the impulse which justifies authorship . . . . The time to begin writing is when the events of the world seem to suggest things larger than the world—strangenesses and patterns and rhythms and uniquities of combination which no one ever saw or heard before, but which are so vast and marvellous and beautiful that they absolutely demand proclamation with a fanfare of silver trumpets. Space and time become vitalised with literary significance when they begin to make us subtly homesick for something ‘out of space, out of time.’ . . . To find those other lives, other worlds, and other dreamlands, is the true author’s task. That is what literature is; and if any piece of writing is motivated by anything apart from this mystic and never-finished quest, it is base and unjustified imitation (Selected Letters II.142-3).

. . . . In ["Notes on the Writing of Weird Fiction"], he explain[ed] why he wrote the particular kind of story that his readers have come to associate him with. . . . :

I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis. These stories frequently emphasize the element of horror because fear is our deepest and strongest emotion, and the one which best lends itself to the creation of Nature-defying illusions. Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected, so that it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law or cosmic alienage or “outsideness” without laying stress on the emotion of fear (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 113; emphasis added).

The import of this statement for Lovecraft’s status as a horror writer is obvious: he was saying, circa 1933, that he only wrote horror because it was efficacious for achieving another effect that is not intrinsically horrific. In other words, for him, horror was a means and not an end. It was his poignant, wistful longing after transcendent beauty and cosmic freedom that animated his authorial life—and not only that, but his life in general: in the same letter where he described his “vague impressions of adventurous expectancy coupled with elusive memory,” he claimed that this intense emotional experience was chief amongst the reasons why he did not commit suicide—“the reasons, that is, why I still find existence enough of a compensation to atone for its dominantly burthernsome quality” (Selected Letters III.243).

* * * * *

I’ll note tangentially that if the above excerpt interests you, you should be aware that the entire essay will be published in the next issue of Studies in Weird Fiction, the long-running journal edited by Joshi. The essay was also available for a time at Thomas Ligotti Online, but right now I’m getting an error message when I try to access it there.

At the risk of redundancy, I’ve decided to go ahead and post a handful of those “additional passages” mentioned above: those excerpts from Lovecraft’s letters, poems, and essays that further embody his extraordinarily intense experience of infinite longing. I hope the repetitiveness may serve not to bore, but to underscore and even clarify the emotion in question via Lovecraft’s many variations of expression, all centered around a common nexus of tropes and themes. Note especially his frequent return to certain key elements — the mystical emotional effect of sunsets and skyscapes, the evocative nature of certain architectural scenes, the sense of lost memory, the craving for a vision of absolute beauty, the maddening and tantalizing nature of the elusive longing — that help to flesh out exactly what he is talking about, if indeed such a mystical-seeming emotion can be adequately and definitively pinpointed.

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From The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1927)

Three times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvellous city, and three times was he snatched away while still he paused on the high terrace above it. All golden and lovely it blazed in the sunset, with walls, temples, colonnades, and arched bridges of veined marble, silver-basined fountains of prismatic spray in broad squares and perfumed gardens, and wide streets marching between delicate trees and blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows; while on steep northward slopes climbed tiers of red roofs and old peaked gables harbouring little lanes of grassy cobbles. It was a fever of the gods; a fanfare of supernal trumpets and a clash of immortal cymbals. Mystery hung about it as clouds about a fabulous unvisited mountain; and as Carter stood breathless and expectant on that balustraded parapet there swept up to him the poignancy and suspense of almost-vanished memory, the pain of lost things, and the maddening need to place again what once had an awesome and momentous place.

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From a letter to James F. Morton, March 12, 1930 (cf. Selected Letters III.123-4; emphases in original)

It is never any definite experience which gives me pleasure, but always the quality of mystic adventurous expectancy itself—the indefiniteness which permits me to foster the momentary illusion that almost any vista of wonder and beauty might open up, or almost any law of time or space or matter or energy be marvellously defeated or reversed or modified or transcended….that sense of expansion, freedom, adventure, power, expectancy, symmetry, drama, beauty-absorption, surprise, and cosmic wonder (i.e. the illusory promise of a majestic revelation which shall gratify man’s ever-flaming, ever-tormenting curiosity about the outer voids and ultimate gulfs of entity)….the illusion of being poised on the edge of the infinite amidst a vast cosmic unfolding which might reveal almost anything reveal . . . . a sense of soaring outward from all temporal, spatial, and material limitations along broad vistas of slanting yellow radiance from unimagined gulfs beyond the chrysoberyl gates of sunset……soaring outward toward the discovery of stupendous, cosmic, inconceivable things, and toward the envisagement and comprehension of awesome rhythms and patterns and symmetries too Titanic, too unparticled, too trans-galactic, and too overpowering for the relatively flat, tame, and local name of “beauty”. When a city or landscape or experience can give me this sense of untrammelled and starward soaring, I account it worth my while to go after it.

* * * * *

From a letter to August Derleth, December 25, 1930 (cf. Selected Letters III.197)

I am perfectly confident that I could never adequately convey to any other human being the precise reasons why I continue to refrain from suicide—the reasons, that is, why I still find existence enough of a compensation to atone for its dominantly burthernsome quality. These reasons are strongly linked with architecture, scenery, and lighting and atmospheric effects, and take the form of vague impressions of adventurous expectancy coupled with elusive memory—impressions that certain vistas, particularly those associated with sunsets, are avenues of approach to spheres or conditions of wholly undefined delights and freedoms which I have known in the past and have a slender possibility of knowing again in the future. Just what those delights and freedoms are, or even what they may approximately resemble, I could not concretely imagine to save my life; save that they seem to concern some ethereal quality of indefinite expansion and mobility, and of a heightened perception which shall make all forms and combinations of beauty simultaneously visible to me, and realisable by me.

* * * * *

From a letter to August Derleth, September 2, 1931 (Selected Letters III.405)

Certain collocations of scenic or architectural details have the most powerful imaginable effect on my emotions—evoking curious combinations of poignant images derived from reading, pictures, and experience. Old farmhouses and orchards move me about as profoundly as any one kind of thing I know—though general rural landscapes are also supremely potent. They give me a vague, elusive sense of half-remembering something of great and favourable significance—just as city spires and domes against a sunset, or the twinkling lights of a violet city twilight seen from neighboring heights, always inspires a vaguely stimulating sense of adventurous expectancy.

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From a letter to Robert E. Howard, May 7, 1932 (Selected Letters IV.39)

What you say of your dreams of cold, grey skies—and of the actual skies and sunsets in your part of the world—interests me vastly. I am myself extremely susceptible to sky effects, particularly gorgeous and apocalyptic sunsets. Sunsets arouse in me vague feelings of pseudo-memory, mystical revelation, and adventurous expectancy, which nothing else can even begin to conjure up. They always seem to me to be about to unveil supernal vistas of other (yet half-familiar) worlds and other dimensions. I am also ineffably fascinated by the golden light of late afternoon which somewhat precedes the sunset. Any sort of scene bathed in this unearthly splendour—with tinges of crimson and long, fantastic shadows—seems to my fancy part of a strange, ethereal realm of wonder and beauty but faintly allied to anything in the domain of prosaic reality.

* * * * *

As before, I hope you enjoy these contributions to your experience of the autumn season. Reading such words and thoughts, which express with aching clarity an emotion and sensation that I have labored for years to articulate for myself, never fails to intensity my own experience of the season’s bittersweet poignancy.

In the early and mid-1990s, beginning immediately after my graduation from college, I began to suffer from a recurring experience of sleep paralysis. If you’re not familiar with this phenomenon, click the link just given or do a Web search. There’s plenty of detailed information available. The link above will take you to an article titled “Sleep Paralysis and Associated Hypnagogic and Hypnopompic Experiences” by a professor at the University of Waterloo. Its opening paragraph gives as direct and accurate an explanation of the term as I could hope for:

“Sleep paralysis, or more properly, sleep paralysis with hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations have been singled out as a particularly likely source of beliefs concerning not only alien abductions, but all manner of beliefs in alternative realities and otherworldly creatures. Sleep paralysis is a condition in which someone, most often lying in a supine position, about to drop off to sleep, or just upon waking from sleep realizes that s/he is unable to move, or speak, or cry out. This may last a few seconds or several moments, occasionally longer. People frequently report feeling a ‘presence’ that is often described as malevolent, threatening, or evil. An intense sense of dread and terror is very common. The presence is likely to be vaguely felt or sensed just out of sight but thought to be watching or monitoring, often with intense interest, sometimes standing by, or sitting on, the bed. On some occasions the presence may attack, strangling and exerting crushing pressure on the chest. People also report auditory, visual, proprioceptive, and tactile hallucinations, as well as floating sensations and out-of-body experiences. These various sensory experiences have been referred to collectively as hypnagogic and hypnopompic experiences (HHEs). People frequently try, unsuccessfully, to cry out. After seconds or minutes one feels suddenly released from the paralysis, but may be left with a lingering anxiety.”

My own bouts with the condition have included most of the above, minus the out-of-body experiences. I have been overtaken by the customary hypnagogic visions of being visited by a malevolent presence in my bedroom. I have also experienced various other commonly reported phenomena, such as a sense of burning electricity surging through my body, and a rushing, swishing, or sizzling sound that seems preternaturally loud and vivid. These phenomena didn’t seem like dreams, but like actual experiences that were occurring in some sort of nightmarish otherworld, or sometimes in the real waking world itself. The most vivid such episode involved my emerging from a very deep sleep and becoming aware of the experience already in progress, which thus made for an authentically John Carpenter-ish sense of waking up into a nightmare (Carpenter plays masterfully upon this trope in his films In the Mouth of Madness and Prince of Darkness). That particular episode involved an especially nasty and vivid sense of a malevolent presence hovering at the foot of the bed like a black vortex and regarding me with supernaturally intense hatred. When my wife began shaking me in an effort to wake me — I was trying to thrash and scream — I thought she was reacting in terror to the very same presence I was seeing. It was an unnerving moment, I assure you.

My mature birth as a writer can actually be attributed in some measure to these sleep disruptions. Although I had already been addicted to horror literature and film for many years when the nocturnal problems started, and had tried my hand at writing a few stories, even winning a local writing contest in my hometown when I was a senior in high school, it was the changes that these episodes wrought upon my overall sense of psychic stability that led to my mature efforts at fiction writing. The pervasive mood of absolute, unbearable terror and horror that characterized many of my nights began to seep into my daylight hours and plague me with fears that I might be losing my mind. I was already a huge fan of H.P. Lovecraft, but as my worldview darkened, I began to sense a greater significance in the cosmic horror and twisted ontology of Lovecraft’s fictional worlds. Some years later, when I first began reading the works of Thomas Ligotti, my overwhelmingly powerful and appreciative response to them was due in large measure to the changes that had been worked upon my intellectual and emotional cast by my sleep disruptions. In Tom’s works I saw a miraculously pure and direct expression of the same principle or realm of ultimate, absolute nightmarishness that had opened up to me on many a bad night.

Again, if you’re not familiar with sleep paralysis, I urge you to do a Google search, because I think it’s probably a fascinating subject even for those who haven’t been afflicted with it. I recall that The Learning Channel produced a documentary about it a few years ago, so if you can get your hands on that, it might prove interesting. It certainly did to me, in part because it leaned in the direction of sensationalizing the experience by speculating that it really does involve paranormal visitation. This isn’t a new claim, of course; sleep paralysis is widely thought to be the origin of beliefs about supernatural nocturnal attacks throughout history, and also, perhaps, of stories about supernatural monsters in general, and even of mythology as a whole. As stated in another article at the University of Waterloo site, “Nightmares and nocturnal attacks have been closely connected to myths and monsters across time a cultures. It has even been even suggested that the nightmare is the origin of all mythology. Although few modern scholars would be quite so bold or sweeping in their claims, the pervasiveness of the nocturnal attack in mythology, religion, and legend is quite striking.”

As mentioned earlier, sleep paralysis has also been cited by numerous researchers as a likely contributing factor in the modern rash of alien abduction stories. Alas, I’ve never been abducted myself, but who can say what might happen tonight? I still suffer from occasional, although milder, bouts with this disorder, so I may well wake up tomorrow with a chip implanted at the base of my skull.

Seriously, though, sleep paralysis is the most dreadful thing you can imagine. The term “soul-searing” comes to mind but hardly does it justice. I wouldn’t wish the experience on anybody. But at least it provides useful grist for the mill; you’re more likely to write a decent horror story when your entire life has been overtaken to some degree by the experience of horror itself.

I’ve decided to hold another contest to promote my musical project Daemonyx. As always, the contest involves your visiting Daemonyx at MySpace in order to listen to some music and answer a question about it. Also as always, the prizes include DVDs and books (well, a single book this time) with a horror slant.

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The autumn season has always carried a special emotional potency for me. When the weather turns crisp and the colors of nature change first to vibrant reds, oranges, and golds, and then progress onward toward rustling browns, tending toward the death-sleep of winter, I’m struck with feelings of poignancy and melancholy that burn more brightly, or perhaps more darkly, than at any other time of the year. I’m also more exquisitely sensitive to the aesthetic influence of art, whether literary, musical, visual, or otherwise.

It was many years ago that I first realized and articulated to myself that this autumnal mood is inextricably bound up with a certain, strange longing. When the mood of autumn comes over me, it is always characterized by a kind of nostalgia for something I have never really known, as if I possess some vestigial memory of a lost knowledge or emotion that flits maddeningly and elusively on the edge of my ability to recall directly. It’s truly a numinous experience, that is, an experience that makes me feel as I’ve come into brief contact with some sort of transcendent spiritual truth. It tends to generate the impression of an absolute, unmediated experience of supernal beauty hovering just beyond the edge of my inner grasp. All the flickering hints of this beauty that I sometimes encounter in literature, film, music, and scenic natural vistas and skyscapes, seem to reach their apotheosis in this ungraspable ultimacy, as if they are merely finite carriers that filter and refract partial glimpses of an infinite reality, like the Platonic Form of the Beautiful itself.

Naturally, with this experience forming an important part of my psychological makeup, I am exceedingly fascinated by the accounts of others who have also felt it. Some years ago I began collecting quotes and passages from the works of various writers who have described their own encounters with this strange longing. Given that it is presently the height of October as I write these words, with the world outside my window standing fully in the grip of that special autumnal alchemy of bittersweet exuberance commingled with twilit dreariness, I thought there could be no better time for me to share some of these writers and their words.

The emotion in question has no essential connection to autumn, by the way. My own first memory of it actually hails from early summertime, from a lost day in my early adolescence — I think I was around twelve years old — when I walked out of my house and into the front yard, and was overcome suddenly by a kind of mental melding together of the soft greens of the trees and grasses, aided by the caress of a delicate warm breeze, that brought the emotion vividly to life. I spent several minutes standing there silently in the sway of an overpowering impression that I had forgotten something, some crucial event from years past, or perhaps a bit of intellectual or emotional knowledge, that would explain this explosion of pleasurable nostalgia. I never did grasp the elusive (or perhaps illusive) memory, but the memory of that first self-aware experience of the mysterious longing marked me permanently.

So as I said, this longing has no especial, essential connection to autumn. I simply associate it with the autumn season because that’s what seems to awaken it the most readily for me. In this, I am of course not alone, as attested by the veritable reams of autumn-themed poetry, centered around or inspired by a feeling of longing, that populate the pages of many a literary anthology

In my bookish wanderings in search of others who have shared this experience, I have been most interested to find writings that describe the longing, as distinct from literary attempts to evoke it. For the latter, any number of famous poets and poems will do: Sarah Teasdale, William Blake, Algernon Swinburne, Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen Dobyns, Emily Dickinson, Percy Shelley, William Wordsworth — the list could be extended indefinitely. But I’ve found that it’s all too rare, and therefore all the more special, to find a writer who attempts to provide an actual account of this special emotion of longing itself. What I want are the equivalent of phenomenological descriptions of what it feels like to be possessed by this strange and sui generis emotion, perhaps accompanied by a few ruminations on the possible meaning of it all.

To my knowledge, nobody has fulfilled this wish more completely than C.S. Lewis, who famously developed a Christian apologetic whose very foundation is rooted in the experience of nostalgic, transcendent longing. One might disagree with the conclusions he draws from his own lifelong experiences of it — “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world,” he wrote in Mere Christianity — but the power and precision of his phenomenological description itself is undeniable. In fact, I find that his words in this vein tend to reawaken my own longing, no matter how many times I reread them.

The following paragraphs come from the preface to C.S. Lewis’s allegorical novel, The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933), which was the first book he wrote after his adult conversion to Protestant Christianity. Subtitled “An Allegorical Apology for Christianity Reason and Romanticism,” the book presents an explicit allegory that depicts Lewis’s own journey from the dry, dead, inherited Christianity of his boyhood, through the problematic philosophies of the modern world, to the vibrant Christian faith of his adulthood. He intended it to serve as a Pilgrim’s Progress for the 20th century.

Lewis added the preface in 1943, ten years after the novel’s initial publication, because he wanted to clarify his use of the word “Romanticism” to describe “the experience which is central in this book.” After discussing several different ways in which the word is commonly understood, he explained his own idiosyncratic use of it to refer to “an experience of intense longing,” and in doing so, he came close to giving what is for me the quintessential description of the matter. I don’t necessarily endorse his argument in the latter paragraphs quoted below, where he explains the thought process that led him to accord this longing the status of evidence in a novel type of theological apologia. But still, I can’t deny that his very speculations in this area tend to arouse and intensify the longing within me.

* * * * *

“What I meant by ‘Romanticism’ when I wrote the Pilgrim’s Regress — and what I would still be taken to mean on the title page of this book—was . . . a particular recurrent experience which dominated my childhood and adolescence and which I hastily called ‘Romantic’ because inanimate nature and marvelous literature were among the things that evoked it. I still believe that the experience is common, commonly misunderstood, and of immense importance: but I know now that in other minds it arises under other stimuli and is entangled with other irrelevancies and that to bring it into the forefront of consciousness is not so easy as I once supposed. I will now try to describe it sufficiently to make the following pages intelligible.

“The experience is one of intense longing. It is distinguished from other longings by two things. In the first place, though the sense of want is acute and even painful, yet the mere wanting is felt to be somehow a delight. Other desires are felt as pleasures only if satisfaction is expected in the near future: hunger is pleasant only while we know (or believe) that we are soon going to eat. But this desire, even when there is no hope of possible satisfaction, continues to be prized, and even to be preferred to anything else in the world, by those who have once felt it. This hunger is better than any other fullness; this poverty better than all other wealth. And thus it comes about, that if the desire is long absent, it may itself be desired, and that new desiring becomes a new instance of the original desire, though the subject may not at once recognize the fact and thus cries out for his lost youth of soul at the very moment in which he is being rejuvenated. This sounds complicated, but it is simple when we live it. ‘Oh to feel as I did then!’ we cry; not noticing that even while we say the words the very feeling whose loss we lament is rising again in all its old bitter-sweetness. For this sweet Desire cuts across our ordinary distinctions between wanting and having. To have it is, by definition, a want: to want it, we find, is to have it.

“In the second place, there is a peculiar mystery about the object of this Desire. Inexperienced people (and inattention leaves some inexperienced all their lives) suppose, when they feel it, that they know what they are desiring. Thus if it comes to a child while he is looking at a far off hillside he at once thinks ‘if only I were there’; if it comes when he is remembering some event in the past, he thinks ‘if only I could go back to those days.’ If it comes (a little later) while he is reading a ‘romantic’ tale or poem of ‘perilous seas and faerie lands forlorn,’ he thinks he is wishing that such places really existed and that he could reach them. If it comes (later still) in a context with erotic suggestions he believes he is desiring the perfect beloved. If he falls upon literature (like Maeterlinck or the early Yeats) which treats of spirits and the like with some show of serious belief, he may think that he is hankering for real magic and occultism. When it darts out upon him from his studies in history or science, he may confuse it with the intellectual craving for knowledge.

“But every one of these impressions is wrong. The sole merit I claim for this book is that it is written by one who has proved them all to be wrong. There is no room for vanity in the claim: I know them to be wrong not by intelligence but by experience, such experience as would not have come my way if my youth had been wiser, more virtuous, and less self-centered than it was. For I have myself been deluded by every one of these false answers in turn, and have contemplated each one of them earnestly enough to discover the cheat. To have embraced so many false Florimels is no matter for boasting: it is fools, they say, who learn by experience. But since they do at last learn, let a fool bring his experience into the common stock that wiser men may profit by it.

“Every one of these supposed objects for the Desire is inadequate to it. An easy experiment will show that by going to the far hillside you will get either nothing, or else a recurrence of the same desire which sent you thither. A rather more difficult, but still possible, study of your own memories, will prove that by returning to the past you could not find, as a possession, that ecstasy which some sudden reminder of the past now moves you to desire. Those remembered moments were either quite commonplace at the time (and owe all their enchantment to memory) or else were themselves moments of desiring. The same is true of the things described in the poets and marvelous romancers. The moment we endeavor to think out seriously what it would be like if they were actual, we discover this. When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle claimed to have photographed a fairy, I did not, in fact, believe it: but the mere making of the claim — the approach of the fairy to within even that hailing distance of actuality — revealed to me at once that if the claim had succeeded it would have chilled rather than satisfied the desire which fairy literature had hitherto aroused. Once grant your fairy, your enchanted forest, your satyr, faun, wood-nymph and well of immortality real, and amidst all the scientific, social and practical interest which the discovery would awake, the Sweet Desire would have disappeared, would have shifted its ground, like the cuckoo’s voice or the rainbow’s end, and be now calling us from beyond a further hill. With Magic in the darker sense (as it has been and is actually practised) we should fare even worse. How if one had gone that way — had actually called for something and it had come? What would one feel? Terror, pride, guilt, tingling excitement . . . but what would all that have to do with our Sweet Desire? It is not at Black Mass or séance that the Blue Flower grows. As for the sexual answer, that I suppose to be the most obviously false Florimel of all. On whatever plane you take it, it is not what we were looking for. Lust can be gratified. Another personality can become to us ‘our America, our New-found-land.’ A happy marriage can be achieved. But what has any of the three, or any mixture of the three, to do with that unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of a bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of Kubla Khan, the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves?

“It appeared to me therefore that if a man diligently followed this desire, pursuing the false objects until their falsity appeared and then resolutely abandoning them, he must come out at last into the clear knowledge that the human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given — nay, cannot even be imagined as given — in our present mode of subjective and spatio-temporal existence. This Desire was, in the soul, as the Siege Perilous in Arthur’s castle — the chair in which only one could sit. And if nature makes nothing in vain, the One who can sit in this chair must exist. I knew only too well how easily the longing accepts false objects and through what dark ways the pursuit of them leads us: but I also saw that the Desire itself contains the corrective of all these errors. The only fatal error was to pretend that you had passed from desire to fruition, when, in reality, you had found either nothing, or desire itself, or the satisfaction of some different desire. The dialectic of Desire, faithfully followed, would retrieve all mistakes, head you off from all false paths, and force you not to propound, but to live through, a sort of ontological proof. This lived dialectic, and the mere argued dialectic of my philosophical progress, seemed to have converged on one goal; accordingly I tried to put them both into my allegory which thus became a defense of Romanticism (in my peculiar sense) as well as of Reason and Christianity.”

* * * * *

Not incidentally, Lewis later seized upon the German word sehnsucht to refer to this emotion. Sehnsucht refers to a wistful, nostalgic longing, and was employed by, for example, E.T.A. Hoffmann (19th cent.) in reference to Beethoven’s music, which in Hoffmann’s words “awakens just that infinite longing [sehnsucht] which is essence of romanticism.” I find it absolutely fascinating to observe the teeming cross section of outlooks and attitudes spanned by the experience of sehnsucht, which is a term that I have found to be as practically and emotionally useful as Lewis did.

For example, another author whose work I cherish, H.P. Lovecraft, was an ardent atheist and materialist, and yet he was gripped by precisely the same experience that gripped Lewis. Of course he drew different conclusions about the emotion, and accorded it a far different ontological and philosophical status. But as with Lewis, Lovecraft’s experience of sehnsucht was so central to his emotional makeup that it could not help but assume a central place in his art.

Other famous cases of sehnsucht-in-action can be seen in the writings of such disparate authors as Colin Wilson, William Wordsworth, Alan Watts, Arthur Machen, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Eugene O’Neill, Henri Amiel, Li Po, George Gissing, Anne Frank, and more. In future blog posts, I plan to offer quotes from some or all of these — most of them, I assure you, in much briefer form than the Lewis quote above. Perhaps one or more of them will prove as useful for you, in clarifying and articulating some of your own emotional tendencies, as they have been for me.

Back when I first created this blog in June, I thought I might occasionally post excerpts from the journal I’ve kept for nigh on 16 years now. This is the same journal that went into the creation of my currently unpublished manuscript There Is No Grand Scheme, which I culled from entries ranging over a nine-year span ending in 2003, and portions of which were published earlier this year in a book titled In Pieces: An Anthology of Fragmentary Writing, from the very worthy Impassio Press. I even claimed up front, in my inaugural post, that I would probably share excerpts from this journal, which has served more than any other forum as the place where I have honed my thought processes and writer’s voice. Right now I’m about to make good on that claim.

I’ve always used plain old spiral notebooks for keeping my journal. Sometimes I find it fascinating to open one of these and flip randomly to an entry, since I’m often surprised to see what I was thinking and feeling at a given point in my past. Many times when I go back to reread previous entries, it’s like rediscovering a forgotten portion of my inner life, since I have no recollection of having written those particular words.

That’s what happened this morning when I randomly opened one of these notebooks and was presented with an entry dated Thursday, February 19, 2004, at 12:40 p.m. The subject of the entry was education, which seemed eerily appropriate to present itself this very morning since I was about to leave the house to attend an all-day professional development seminar where teachers from public schools in my regional conference were slated to convene and share their personal strategies for improving student performance on the MAP test. MAP is the acronym for the Missouri Assessment Program, which is Missouri’s official academic tool for measuring student academic achievement in public schools. I hate it. So does every other teacher in the state, as far as I can tell. As with all top-down, government-mandated tests, the MAP, far from being an objective measurement of academic achievement, is instead an intrusive animal that has little or nothing to do with authentic education and everything to do with bureaucracy, red tape, political pressures, and the quantified, socially engineered approach to teaching that’s based on a muddled mingling of behaviorism, “outcome-based education,” and the economic commodification of every aspect of life. As such, it’ an academic avatar of the contemporary American zeitgeist — a dreadful, deadening academic tool that is fully in harmony with the tenor of the times.

But I digress. Below is the journal entry I flipped to this morning. I wrote it nearly three years ago as I was nearing the end of my third year of teaching. I don’t remember writing it, nor do I remember what event or events motivated me to do so. But I can tell you that my thoughts haven’t changed at all in the intervening two and a half years:

“Nobody will ever succeed in quantifying nobility of mind and character. The approach to education that prevails in the U.S. right now is based on a crude cause-and-effect model. It holds that you, as a teacher, should teach your subject in a certain manner, using certain carefully defined methods and curriculum materials, the selection of which is based on all of the latest, most up-to-date theories and data obtained by educational researchers. The result of your efforts — according to this model — will be determined by the soundness of your methods and materials. If these are good, then your teaching will result in the formation of truly educated individuals: knowledgeable, noble-minded, and possessed of high intellectual and moral character. If, on the other hand, your methods and materials are bad, then your teaching will result in the formation of poorly educated or even uneducated individuals: obtuse, benighted, and marred by mangled souls and barbaric tendencies.

“This is so wrong-headed that it staggers the imagination. What the above-described model fails to take into account is the fact of individual inclination and drive. Some people possess an innate predisposition toward the things a true education requires and provides. Others are predisposed against the very same things. It is this predisposition, more than any other factor, which will produce a given result in a person’s life. And this predisposition is inherently elusive. Its rhyme and reason categorically defy capture and quantification by the educational theorists.

“True education depends on the presence of a factor in a person’s spirit or soul that cannot be manipulated or instilled — or removed, for that matter — by any external force or influence. This factor is, or is related to, the Unquantifiable itself, the Transcendent, one might even say the Perverse, which dwells in the depths of the human self and reality at large, and makes its presence known as an unaccountable, undeniable daimonic directive.

“Thus, the only kind of education that counts is the kind one achieves for oneself, under one’s own propulsion, even as one is sometimes duped into projecting or displacing the locus of the motivating force onto something external — which may occasionally and temporarily be a useful psychological gambit. “

* * * * *

So that’s how I sound when I talk to myself. Sometimes my sentences curl in on themselves until they’re almost unintelligible even to me when I return to read them later. (I must admit that I cleaned up a few of them in the above transcription.) Regarding the content of this particular entry, I find it interesting that I didn’t think to mention, even in passing, the important role of daimonic passion on the part of the teacher. Oh, well. Surely the reason lies somewhere within the long-forgotten impetus that led me to write those paragraphs in the first place. And in any case, I’ll probably share a few more journal entries about other topics in the future.

On another note entirely, I received my contributor’s copy of Dark Arts a few days ago and am very pleased with it. The production values are high and the interior is beautifully laid out. I’m also pleased to report that when I went and reread Mark McLaughlin’s and my story, it satisfied me as much as I had remembered. I had intentionally held off on rereading it for the past five years, and a part of me had begun to worry that I might be disappointed when the anthology was finally published and I took a second look at our story. But no, “Nightmares, Imported and Domestic” still ranks as one of the two or three stories that I’m most satisfied with. Mark and I were truly in the zone when we wrote that one. It deals successfully (in my opinion, anyway) with a plethora of themes that are very dear to both of us, including the nature of creative inspiration, its association with madness and despair, the subjective layers of human selfhood, and the horror of the infinite. If you happen to procure a copy of the anthology, I do hope you enjoy the story.

Of course, I feel unwontedly comfortable bragging about this one because I didn’t write it alone. Hats off to Mark!

I thought I’d devote a blog post to bragging about my wife, Teresa, who recently achieved a milestone in her life as a cook. She’s been entering and occasionally winning national recipe contests for three or four years now. A couple of weekends ago, she was flown down to Atlanta to compete in a cookoff to determine the winner of the second annual contest being held by Edwards Pies, a division of Schwan’s. The challenge was to come up with a creative use of the company’s products. Teresa’s recipe, titled “Apple Pecan Pull-Apart Calzone,” advanced her to the finals, where she ended up taking home second prize.

You can read the full story here:

EDWARDS® PIES Announces ‘06 Indulgence Contest Winners

In the past Teresa has placed in contests held by Kraft, Blue Bonnet, Colavita, and several others. Her biggest win prior to the current one occurred back in ‘03, when she was a grand prize winner in a contest held by Mission tortillas. You can still find the winning recipe, titled “Snickerito,” running around online. This got the whole family flown out to Anaheim, to Disneyland, for the royal treatment. She’s happiest about the current win, though, because when she first got into the recipe contest circuit, one of her fondest desires was to advance to a final cookoff round (something that not all contests involve).

So it’s been great to see her achieve this goal. I’m quite proud of her and happy for her. Oh, and I’m proud of myself, too, but not for anything having to do with Edwards. You see, I was the one who came up with the brilliant term “Snickerito” three years ago. Come to think of it, I provided most of the title for the Edwards pie recipe as well. Gosh, I’m helpful!

Now, if only Teresa can manage to win the Southern Living contest (grand prize: $100,000) or the Pillsbury contest (grand prize: $1,000,000), then life will be sweet indeed.

* * * * *

Speaking of milestones, I just noticed that the hit counter here at The Teeming Brain has broken the 10,000 mark. This is gratifying, and I thank you sincerely for your continued interest. I’m enjoying the blogging experience, and can furthermore tell you — which amazes me even as I say it — that it has somehow contributed to or played into a thawing of my long-frozen muse of fiction. I’m currently in the middle of writing three new stories. Well, make that two new ones and a collaborative one with a fellow horror author that got stalled quite awhile back. But they’re all going well, which again astonishes me to say. It’s a nice feeling. So to repeat: Many thanks to you, my bloggish reader, for your patronage of The Teeming Brain. Here’s to 10,000 more.

Once again, an online conversation has elicited enough words from me that I’ve realized they would make for a good blog post. A word of warning, though: I’m afraid it reads like a sermon or lecture. And a rambling one at that. Or worse, it may read like a one-sided conversation — which indeed it is. So caveat lector (let the reader beware).

The topic is the U.S. Senate’s passage last Thursday of the detainee interrogation bill that President Bush had been pushing. In the words of an AP wire piece, “The bill would create military commissions to prosecute terrorism suspects. It also would prohibit some of the worst abuses of detainees like mutilation and rape, but grant the president leeway to decide which other interrogation techniques are permissible.” On the positive side — at least as I see it — the bill “would prohibit war crimes and define such atrocities as rape and torture,” but on the negative side it “otherwise would allow the president to interpret the Geneva Conventions, the treaty that sets standards for the treatment of war prisoners.” In other words, it allows the President to flout international laws, as the AP piece specifically explains: “The legislation . . . says the president can ‘interpret the meaning and application’ of international standards for prisoner treatment, a provision intended to allow him to authorize aggressive interrogation methods that might otherwise be seen as illegal by international courts. ” It also strips away certain standard rights from prisoners who are being held on suspicion of terrorism, including the right to habeas corpus, which allows them to challenge the lawfulness of their imprisonment.

Over at the trusty Shocklines message board, which, if you’re not using it, I can recommend to you as a haven for civilized, intelligent discourse on all sorts of topics beyond the board’s primary association with horror entertainment, someone started a discussion thread about the Senate’s passage of the bill. The thread rapidly grew to gargantuan proportions, with a great many people weighing in with all sorts of views and opinions, some conservative, some liberal, some approving of the content and/or general intent of the bill, others disapproving strongly.

Among many other interesting tangents and angles, one thing that grabbed my attention was the assertion that the U.S. government should simply be allowed to do “whatever it has to do” in order to deal with terrorists and terrorism, including resorting to the “aggressive interrogation methods” — i.e., the use of torture — made possible by the bill in question. This view was stated and supported by more than one participant in the conversation.

It is a view that I simply cannot endorse, for the simple reason that its adoption would ultimately destroy anything of value that America still represents. If we in the U.S. truly give in to the mentality and morality represented by the “whatever we have to do” position, then we may as well go ahead and drop the facade of being a nation founded on principles. The United States was the first nation in history to be founded consciously, rationally, and intentionally upon a set of philosophical, ethical, political, and economic principles, as opposed to just growing up from the soil, as it were, of ethnic loyalties, tribal wars, and the like. Yes, of course, in actual execution the founding of the nation involved all sorts of gritty real-world realities and eventualities that departed from this principled stance. But still, the principles themselves stood front and center for the first time ever, anywhere, on planet earth, and were drawn from the 18th century Enlightenment tradition, which itself emerged out of Renaissance-style humanism, which itself represented a rebirth of classical Roman and, especially, Greek humanism. These principles were central to the whole “American experiment,” as it came to be called, which was nothing more nor less than an attempt to found a nation and a people based not upon inherited membership or identity in a group, but upon rational adherence to an agreed-upon code, a set of rational truths, a philosophy and a worldview. Central to this philosophy were the ideas that all humans are possessed of innate dignity; that government should serve its citizens and not vice versa; that people, both collectively and individually, are and should be treated as ends in themselves instead of means (an idea picked up from Kant); that adherence to reason places all people on an equal footing, regardless of social or ethnic origin; and so on.

If we ever depart definitively from this basis in principles, then we’re finished. And to say that we should just do “whatever is necessary” in a given situation constitutes that very act of abandonment. It’s been repeated so many times that it’s come to sound like a whiny liberal hobby horse, but that doesn’t make it any less true: If we let our enemies goad us into becoming the monstrous entity they say we are, then they’ve definitively won, regardless of any other outcomes.

I think one of the most potent speeches in recent history comes not from a real-world political leader but from Denzel Washington’s character in The Siege, when he argues passionately with Bruce Willis’s character to try and convince him not to torture an Arab prisoner. By that point in the movie’s storyline, a series of coordinated terrorist attacks against the U.S., inspired by the U.S.’ capture of a popular sheikh and terrorist leader, has aroused a general panic. The U.S. government has begun rounding up Middle Eastern people and placing them in detention camps. A certain prisoner is thought to possess information that might help lead to the capture of other terrorist leaders. And Washington, standing right there in the room with the man about to be tortured, says to Willis, “Come on General! You’ve lost men, I’ve lost men, but you can’t do this! What if they don’t even want the sheikh? Have you considered that? What if what they really want is for us to herd our children into stadiums like we’re doing? And put soldiers on the street and have Americans looking over their shoulders? Bend the law, shred the Constitution just a little bit. Because if we torture him, General, we do that, and everything we have fought, and bled, and died for, is over. And they’ve won. They’ve already won!”

Of course, the standard response that can be invoked to counter this type of thinking is obvious: “Okay, then what are we supposed to do if we’re not allowed to use any means necessary to extract vital information from prisoners?” I must admit that I have no specific answers to this. I’m not sure anybody does, and there’s the rub. But I will reiterate my personal opinion, which may seem hopelessly unhelpful and naive, that if we can’t find a better way to go about it than to emulate the very actions we have historically condemned our enemies for — and not just enemies of us, but of liberal humanism and democratic ideals in general — then we really ought to drop all pretense of still being the same nation we set out to be, and just admit that the American experiment has failed.

* * * * *

Upon reading the argument that I’m advancing here, several participants in the above-described online conversation gave what I consider to be the single most bothersome response that it’s possible to give. One of them in particular stated it with especial blatancy, which I now pass on to you in a paraphrase: “Who cares about principles and standards? Certainly not America’s enemies! They don’t give a flying fuck about our principles and standards, so it’s counterproductive for us to get hung up on them when we’re dealing with such people.”

I can only respond to this with a hearty, “Huh?” I mean, okay, so our enemies don’t share our standards. But what the hell does that matter? The people for whom it’s important that our standards matter is us. If your principles and standards fly out the window as soon as the provocation or opportunity arises — such as, especially, when you find yourself obliged to confont and deal with people who don’t share your standards and may even be hostile to them — then you’re nobody. Or rather, you’re letting the other side define who you are, when in fact it’s those abandoned principles that ought to be doing the defining.

And this is most emphatically not just pie-in-the-sky bullshit. It’s the basic, foundational understanding that underlies and precedes all moral behavior, and all truly civilized behavior in general, in the real world of real people, guns, and wars. You must be the thing you value and the ideal you represent, most especially when you find yourself engaged in a conflict with those who oppose and challenge that ideal. Otherwise you’re just acting as an animal, propagating the jungle law of might-makes-right. And when the conflict is over, if you’ve won, you’ve lost, because what you supposedly stood for has been shredded, and you’ve become your enemy, and you deserve to be destroyed just like they did. In gradeschool terms, if you treat other people the way you don’t like to be treated, then you’re no better than they are.

If you’ll forgive me for pursuing something of a tangent, regarding the U.S. response to 9/11, which legitimately factors into any discussion like the present one, on Friday, September 29th, there was a really pertinent and fascinating interview on NPR with historian Niall Ferguson. The NPR Website summarizes it this way: “Historian Niall Ferguson’s latest book, The War of the World, examines a century of history and finds that the West is well on the way to being eclipsed by Asia. Ferguson tells Steve Inskeep that it’s a destiny that was set a long time ago.” In the course of the interview, Ferguson explained that the current and future failure of the Iraq invasion was predictable based on past experiences in which an outside force tried to spread democracy too quickly to ethnically diverse areas that did not possess a native tradition of civil peace and the rule of law. He worked this into his overall thesis of his book, which presents a rereading of the 20th century’s overall historical arc. In contrast to the traditional view of the 20th century as the “American” century, Ferguson says the decline of America and the West as the major world power began in the first decade of the century with the nascent collapse of the Western empires in Asia and the rise of various eastern nations, most especially Japan, with China close behind, to positions of economic and political importance. He thinks the growing debacle in the Middle East is another front where this trend is making itself known.

Not incidentally, this ties in precisely with Morris Berman’s thesis in Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire, wherein Berman argues that America is pretty much finished, that our decline on the world stage is not only inevitable but is currently in progress. He reminds us that the British Empire had feet of clay by the turn of the 20th century, which “was really when the rot set in” (cf. an interview posted at his blog). But it took several decades for this reality to become apparent to everybody, including the British themselves. To quote Berman at length:

“The appearance of England in 1902 — after all, Queen Victoria was still alive — was the sun never sets on the British Empire. This was the great power. Down to something like 1950, that was still the image of England. Then an interesting thing happened — the Suez Crisis. Eisenhower was very angry with England, France and Israel, and he threatened to cause the pound to be devalued if England didn’t back off. They knew they had to do it. At that moment, the cultural lag caught up to reality. At that moment there was an international shift. Everybody understood what some people understood in 1910 and 1920 and 1930: that England was no longer a serious player. We are no longer a serious player. It’s just that there are very few people now who recognize it. There has to be something that’s equivalent to Suez. There was some hint of that when Rumsfeld went over to Germany and said to Joschka Fischer, who was then the foreign minister, you’ve got to join us and we’re going to defeat Iraq, and he said, ‘I’m not convinced of any of this.’ That Germany would say to the United States that you’re full of crap, there was already a hint that something had shifted, but it didn’t have the international force of something like Suez. But Suez is in our future. There is no doubt in my mind about that. There will come a time when there will be an incident, and it will be understood that the United States has eaten itself alive and doesn’t have the clout to respond. After that, it will slowly drift in the direction that England has drifted today. People will pay lip service to its grandeur and its history and all that, but a poodle is not a tiger.”

I think this relates directly to what I’ve been talking about here, because all of the dominoes are lining up for America to be exposed badly in our own Suez Crisis, which is probably underway right now in the form of the Iraq disaster and its various political effects and offshoots. And a large part of the recognition that may occur globally — correction, that is occurring and has already occurred to a great many people, and not only abroad but also here at home — is not just that America is politically and economically a paper tiger, but also that we no longer stand for anything like the America of historical myth and Jeffersonian philosophy. That, I think, is and will continue to be at least as important as the more empirical issues of political and economic decline. I think we may have already defeated ourselves, morally speaking — forget about our being overcome by a force from without — and that the current flap over the torture of prisoners is just one example this. That there can even be a debate about it pretty much proves the point. Many influential people want to frame the issue by saying that the U.S. has always tortured prisoners in time of war, and that now we’re just hypersensitive about it because more people are aware of it, probably due to the machinations of a liberal-biased media that hates America. Get over it, this viewpoint counsels us. Sometimes it’s necessary to get tough and commit unpleasant acts. Well, sorry, but I don’t buy it, for reasons outlined above.

For the sake of clarity, I probably should add that I don’t oppose the use of force. There are indeed just wars. In the present case, I agree wholeheartedly that if we’re dealing with enemies who can’t be reasoned with, then we should forego the reasoning and simply convince them by more physically direct means that they’re fucking with the wrong people. On the other hand, we really need to avoid falling prey to the common delusion that history began on 9/11/01. We’ve manipulated and exploited the Middle East and its people quite egregiously in the name of oil and open markets. So it’s a muddled distribution of blame all around.

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Astute followers of my argument may have noted that I seem to be contradicting myself, since I’m saying in one breath that I don’t buy the claim that sometimes it’s “necessary to get tough and commit unpleasant acts,” but then in the next breath I aver that some wars are just, and that force is sometimes needed. A participant in the Shocklines conversation picked up on this and asked me not only what I think about the present issue of torture, but also about such massively violent acts as America’s use of atomic weapons against Japan in World War II. Did this, he asked, have the effect I’ve been describing here?  Did it degrade us to the level of our enemies?  My answer is that I’m afraid it is indeed a hairsplitting distinction I’m making, with which I’m not entirely comfortable.

The dicey moral dividing line I’m talking about (or attempting to, with much clumsiness probably built in) is found in, for example, the fact that the Geneva Conventions don’t condemn war per se but they do prohibit torture of prisoners, and they define and condemn war crimes. Similarly, the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights says in article 5, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” but the document itself doesn’t go so far as to condemn war outright.

In my view, war is justified in self defense, and all violence of any kind is justified solely in response to aggression. I’ve never been able to avoid feeling ambiguous about some of the huger real-life events and issues, such as the use of atomic weapons against Japan in WWII. Doubtlessly, Truman’s decision saved many thousands of lives in the long run — or more accurately, tens or hundreds of thousands — but then it also led to the by-now almost proverbial observation that while quite a few nations have gone on to acquire nuclear weapons, the U.S. has heretofore been the only one crazy enough to actually use them. In the end, yes, I do have to condone Truman’s decision, based simply on the utilitarian, John Stuart Mill-influenced doctrine of the greatest good for the greatest number.

But there are some acts that I think cannot be justified under any circumstances, and torture falls among them. Some acts are so very personal, and so very intimate and immediate in their violation of the individual human subject, that they are dehumanizing in the most powerful and literal sense of the word. And this dehumanization applies not only the victim but to the perpetrator as well. It is precisely the sanctity of the individual that lies at the heart of classical American idealism. If America departs from this, it has truly lost its soul.

Having said all that, I return to the recognition of the difficulties inherent in what I’m saying. I do recognize that yes, obviously, there’s a bizarrity of proportion in my position, since I can sit here and type, “I approve of the use of atomic weapons that killed hundreds of thousands,” and then type two seconds later that I disapprove of the torture of one person who possesses information that might help to save a great number of people. I’m not completely comfortable with it, either, but I also can’t deny my own reasoning process with regard to principled action as laid out above. I do take comfort in knowing that I’m pretty much aligned with both the U.N. and the Geneva Conventions, which also harbor this type of contradiction implicitly within their respective ideological worlds.

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There’s surely more to say, and indeed, more was said in the original conversation that elicited all these thoughts from me. But the gist of it all is apparent above. I certainly don’t claim to possess the final word on the matter. I just happen to run this particular blog, and so I’ll use it to present my own thoughts on things. One thing’s for certain, though: It’s a disconcerting and difficult time to be alive and awake as a citizen of the U.S. and a passenger of spaceship earth.