First published in Teatro Grottesco, 2006 (Durtro Press edition).
What Good Is Your Head?
The mysteries of a nightmare
or the ill magic of hallucinations
or even the way you are
conditioned to react
to an image of the moon
delivered straight into your eyes -
Why do they hide
what these things really are
and how they operate?
Why do they only answer
in such confused and conflicting terms?
The reason is simple.
Because who knows what might happen
if you could understand
the whining of nightmare-dogs
in your dreams
or the voices in your head
that never tell you
anything you want to hear
not to mention why you feel
a certain way
when images invade your eyes
and intrude upon the brain
that floats in the darkness
inside your head?
What would happen
if you knew what
these things really are
and how they operate -
What would happen to you
as a person who understands
what it means to have a head?
With this knowledge
you certainly might decide
to take your head right off
and just sit quietly in the dark
of your new headlessness.
What Happens To Faces
A tear in the face
it was as if you were dreaming
because they never said a word
and you were hiding
in a place
with no one around
when a tear in the face
and all the things
that came out
put an end to the world
that you always thought you knew.
And as if you were dreaming
a tear in the face
made you awake in a darkness
unlike any you have ever seen.
They could easily tell you
and then say you were dreaming
about a tear in the face
of a world in a mirror
where faces are glass
and are smooth
and are shining
till the glass starts to crack
all the faces are broken
and their scars are the shadows
that you always knew were there.
And as if you were dreaming
a tear in the face
was the last thing
and the worst that you ever saw.
They never will speak
even when you are dreaming
about a tear in the face
of a face that is made
of all the flesh that is grown
like a world in the body
that bursts forth from the darkness
shimmering in the darkness
or quivering for just a moment
in the face of a face
that will always be unknown.
But it was all so much dreaming
you finally see
it was just so much dreaming
you finally know -
a tear in the face
they would have to tell something
about something like that...
about a tear in the face.
What Happens To Faces
A little black box
they can hide
in the darkness
where it can never be found
and opened to you eyes
not because they are kind
or because they are wise
but only because...
A little black box
they can hide
in the darkness
is just the right thing
to keep you forever guessing
what they never would tell you
not that they are really concerned
you ever might find...
That little black box
and take out like toys
what is contained inside
and unearth all their secrets
such as how they deceive you
till the death of your body
and make you believe
that there actually might be
a little black box
that they hide in the darkness.
Introductions and Afterwords
This section contains forewords, introductions, commentary, prefaces and afterwords from any of Ligotti's published works.
Sadly, it is not complete.
Introduction To Grimscribe (1991)
HIS NAME IS...
Will it ever come to me? There is a grand lapse of memory that may be the only thing to save us from ultimate horror. Perhaps they know the truth who preach the passing of one life into another, vowing that between a certain death and a certain birth there is an interval in which an old name is forgotten before a new one is learned. And to remember the name of a former life is to begin the backward slide into that great blackness in which all names have their source, becoming incarnate in a succession of bodies like numberless verses of an infinite scripture.
To find that you have had so many names is to lose the claim to any one of them. To gain the memory of so many lives is to lose them all.
So he keeps his name secret, his many names. He hides each one from all the others, so that they will not become lost among themselves. Protecting his life from all his lives, from the memory of so many lives, he hides behind the mask of anonymity.
But even if I cannot know his name, I have always known his voice. That is one thing he can never disguise, even if it sounds like many different voices. I know his voice when I hear it speak, because it is always speaking of terrible secrets. It speaks of the most grotesque mysteries and encounters, sometimes with despair, sometimes with delight, and sometimes with a voice not possible to define. What crime or curse has kept him turning upon this same wheel of terror, spinning out his tales which always tell of the strangeness and horror of things? When will he make an end to his telling?
He has told us so many things, and he will tell us more. Yet he will never tell his name. Not before the very end of his old life, and not after the beginning of each new one. Not until time itself has erased every name and taken away every life.
But until then, everyone needs a name. Everyone must be called something. So what can we say is the name of everyone?
Our name is Grimscribe. This is our voice.
Introduction To The Agonizing Resurrection Of Victor Frankenstein, Citizen Of Geneva (1994)
Good-Tom-Go-Lightly by Michael Shea
In vault or tunnel, catacomb or tomb
In cellar, basement, attic, shuttered room
They lurk, lurch, limp, snake, scuttle, shamble, slither,
On vast membraneous wings swoop hence, or hither;
They snarl, gasp, croak, hiss, cackle, groan or quaver;
Leak slime, putrescence, venom, gore or slaver;
Stretch feelers, talons, tentacles or paws
To seize and stuff us in their reeking maws!
All scribblers who the Snake-Haired Muse invoke,
So be their styles post-modern or baroque,
Have summoned up with profit—ours and theirs—
These well-known monsters with their baleful stares,
And oft and oft we of their tribe have joyed
To see these veteran legionnaires deployed
These, Dame Horror's host of Damned Things
(Long sung by sonorous P-es and gaseous K—gs)
Still, Dame Medusa freezes up the heart
As well by subtler and more various art.
Tis true that demons fronted face to face
Do pluck us to a vaster Time and Space,
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br /> By their mere being make th' Abyss sublime—
Still, more intricately awe-ful Space and Time
Are wrought by indirection, melody,
A calm unravelling of reality...
Good Tom-Go-Lightly, tunefullest of fellows!
It's not his style to wave his arms and bellow,
Nor grunt, nor rant—he loves the English tongue!
Lute-limpid lines across his page are strung,
Whence eyes pluck that which woos the inner ear
Through inward mazes, to new realms of fear.
Not that ghastly, snouted Things are lacking,
Nor mindless screams from those they are attacking—
Nor human food a-squirm with larvel bulges
Whose rupture the Unspeakable divulges...
But best in Tom is where his tales are set;
His webs of streets and rooms, flung like a net,
Capture cosmoi quite outside our own;
The streets and rooms of Tom-Go-Lightly's town
Feel astir, we sense they're membrane-thin
That adjunct mazes stretch without/within
Breathing and murmuring through th' environing walls,
While Unreal things steal rat-like through the halls.
Thus gladly do we hail this Resurrection—
These graceful pizzicati give selection
Of all the notes that tuneful Tom can hit—
There's magic here in every whim-some bit!
Come tread these floating bridges, hung between
Marvels known and marvels not yet seen—
Spans of rare language islanded betwixt
Great works foregone, and where they might go next
Unanchored arcs of fancy that convey
The wonder-lusting mind up, and away!
Michael Shea
Healdsburg, California
July 16, 1994
In The Night, In The Dark (1994)
A Note on the Appreciation of Weird Fiction
No one needs to be told about what is weird. It is something that becomes known in the early stages of every life. With the very first nightmare or a childhood bout of fever, an initiation takes place into a universal, and at the same time very secret society. Membership in this society is renewed by a lifelong series of encounters with the weird, which may assume a variety of forms and wears many faces. Some of these forms and faces are familiar only to oneself, while others are recognized by practically everybody, whether they will admit it or not.
Weird experience is in fact so prevalent that it is taken profoundly for granted, lying unnoticed in the back rooms of a person's life and even further removed in the life of the world at large. But it is always there, waiting to be recalled in those special moments that are all its own. These moments are for the most part rather brief and relatively rare: the intense weirdness of a dream fades upon waking and is often utterly forgotten; the twisted thoughts of a delirium soon uncoil themselves upon recovery from illness; even a first-hand, wide-awake confrontation with the extraordinary may lose the shocking strangeness it initially possessed and ultimately consign itself to one of those back rooms, those waiting rooms of the weird.
So the point is clear: experience of the weird is a fundamental and inescapable fact of life. And, like all such facts, it eventually finds its way into forms of artistic expression. One of those forms has been termed, of all things, weird fiction. The stories that constitute this literary genre are repositories of the weird; they are something like those remote rooms where the dreams and deliriums and spectral encounters are kept, except that they may be visited at any time and thus make up a vast museum where the weird is on permanent display.
But does anyone need to be told what weird fiction is all about, anymore than an introduction is required to the weird itself? It is strongly possible that the answer to this question is yes. The reason for this answer is that weird fiction is not something experienced in the same way by everyone: it is not a nightmare or a fit of fever; certainly it is not a meeting in the mist with something that is not supposed to be. It is only a type of story, and a story is an echo or a transmutation of experience, while also an experience in its own right, different from any other in the way it happens to someone and in the way it is felt. It seems probable, then, that the experience of weird stories can be enhanced and illuminated by focusing on their special qualities, their various forms and many faces.
For example, there is a well-known story that goes as follows: A man awakes in the darkness and reaches over for his eyeglasses on the nightstand. The eyeglasses are placed in his hand.
This is the bare bones of so many tales that have caused readers to shiver with a sense of the weird. You might simply accept this shiver and pass on to other things; you might even try to suppress the full power of this episode if it be too vividly conceived. On the other hand, it is possible, and considered by some to be desirable, to achieve the optimal receptiveness to the incident in question, to open up to it in order to allow its complete effect and suggestiveness to take hold.
This is not a matter of deliberate effort; on the contrary, how much more difficult it is to put this scene out of one's mind, especially if such a story is read at the proper time and under proper circumstances. Then it happens that a reader's own mind is filled with the darkness of that room in which someone, anyone, awakes. Then it happens that the inside of a reader's skull becomes the shadow-draped walls of that room and the whole drama is contained in a place from which there is no escape.
Stripped-down as this tale is, it nonetheless does not lack for plot. There is the most natural of beginnings, the perfect action of the middle, and a curtain-closer of an end that drops down darkness upon darkness. There is a protagonist and an antagonist and a meeting between them which, abrupt as it is, remains crystalline in its fateful nature. No epilogue is required to settle the issue that the man has awakened to something that has been waiting for him, and for no one else, in that dark room. And the weirdness of it, looked full in the face, can be quite affecting.
Once again: A man awakes in the darkness and reaches over for his eyeglasses on the nightstand. The eyeglasses are placed in his hand.
At this point it should be recalled that there is an old identity between the words "weird" and "fate" (of which one notable modern instance is Clark Ashton Smith's "The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan," the fate of the title character being one that is prophesied by a beggar and consummated by a famished monstrosity). And this old pair of synonyms insists on the resurrection of an old philosophy, even the oldest—that of fatalism.
To perceive, even if mistakenly, that all one's steps have been heading toward a prearranged appointment, to realize one has come face to face with what seems to have been waiting all along—this is the necessary framework, the supporting skeleton of the weird. Of course, fatalism, as a philosophical slant on human existence, has long since been out of fashion, eclipsed by a taste for indeterminacy and a mock-up of an "open-ended" universe. It nevertheless happens that certain ordeals in the lives of actual people may reinstate an ancient, irrational view of things. Such ordeals always strike one with their strangeness, their digression from the normal flow of events, and often provoke a universal protest: "Why me?" Be sure that this is not a question but an outcry. The person who screams it has been instilled with an astonishing suspicion that he, in fact, has been the perfect subject for a very specific "weird," a tailor-made fate, and that a prior engagement, in all its weirdness, was fulfilled at the appointed time and place.
No doubt this queer sense of destiny is an illusion. And the illusion is created by the same stuff that fleshes out the skeletal framework of the weird. This is the stuff of dreams, of fever, of unheard-of encounters; it clings to the bones of the weird and fills out its various forms and fills in its many faces. Because in order for the illusion of fate to be most deeply established, it must be connected to some matter that is out of the ordinary, something that was not considered p
art of the existential plan, though in retrospect cannot be seen otherwise.
After all, no weird revelation is involved when someone sees a dime on the sidewalk, picks up the coin, and pockets it. Even if this is not an everyday occurrence for a given individual, it remains without any overtones or implications of the fateful, the extraordinary. But suppose this coin has some unusual feature that, upon investigation, makes it a token of considerable wealth. Suddenly a great change, or at least the potential for change, enters into someone's life; suddenly the expected course of things threatens to veer off toward wholly unforeseen destinations.
It could seem that the coin might have been overlooked as it lay on the pavement, that its finder might easily have passed it by as others surely had done. But whoever has found this unusual object and discovers its significance soon realizes something: he has been lured into a trap and is finding it difficult to imagine that things might have been different. The former prospects of his life become distant and can now be seen to have been tentative in any case: what did he ever really know about the path his life was on before he came upon that coin? Obviously very little. But what does he know about such things now that they have taken a rather melodramatic turn? No more than he ever did, which becomes even more apparent when he eventually falls victim to a spectral numismatist who wants his rare coin returned. Then our finder-keeper comes into a terrible knowledge about the unknowable, the mysterious, the truly weird aspect of his existence—the extraordinary fact of the universe and of one's being in it. Paradoxically, it is the uncommon event that may best demonstrate the common predicament.
At the same time the weird is, to repeat, a relatively elusive, unwonted phenomenon making its appearance in the moments that upset the routine and that are most willingly forgotten. As it happens in real life, the nightmare serves primarily to impart an awareness of what it means to be awake; the unfavorable diagnosis most often merely offers a lesson in the definition of health; and the supernatural itself cannot exist without the predominant norms of nature.
In fiction, however, those periods may be prolonged in which someone is trapped in an extraordinary fate. The entrapments presented in weird fiction may go so far as to be absolute, a full illustration of what was always in the works and only awaited discovery. Because the end of any weird story is also quite often a definitive end for the characters involved. Thus, it only remains for the reader to appreciate a foregone conclusion, a fate that is presented, in a manner of speaking, at arm's length.
The Collected Short Fiction Page 126