This Worm Ouroboros

The other day I mentioned the symbolic worm ouroboros in reference to Weird Tales #367 and its authors. That symbol has meant different things to different people. My use is after Camille Paglia in her book Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990; Vintage, 1991), in which she called it a serpent and spelled it uroboros. She quoted Erich Neumann in reference to uroboros: "the serpent which at once bears, begets, and devours." (p. 88) That can work for my purposes, but it's not quite what I was looking for.

Here's a longer quote:

To find one's life sensational is to be aroused by oneself. [. . .] Gwendolen [from The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde] reading her diary is lost in autoerotic skopophilia, titillation of the eye. If books can corrupt, and we know from Dorian Gray that they can, then one can be corrupted by one's own diary. To be corrupted by oneself is sexually solipsistic [. . .]. Gwendolen is an uroboros of amorous self-study, an Art Nouveau serpent devouring itself. (p. 540)

Remember that "Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan is told in the first person, like a diary. Remember, too, that the narrator (diarist) opens a box (book) so that the viewer (reader) might be corrupted.

In thinking about these things, the story "'All You Zombies --'" by Robert A. Heinlein has come into my head again and again. If you haven't read it, you should. It may be the most solipsistic story ever written. As Camille Paglia pointed out, circular ouroboros is solipsistic as are so many people in our world.* In his story, Heinlein foresaw something of our current situation. It's nice to see the concept of solipsism in someone else's thinking on these things. But now I find in rereading parts of Sexual Personae that solipsism and related phenomena, including the subject of today's essay, are ancient, if not prehistoric in their origins. They are also pagan and shamanistic, thus, it becomes apparent, the story "Teoquitla the Golden" by Ramòn de las Cuevas, also known as Mark R. Harrington, who would have encountered phenomena like these in his work as an anthropologist. His story of changing sexes was in Weird Tales in November 1924, one hundred years ago this month.

(*In Glory Road by Robert A. Heinlein [1963], the hero tricks the ogre Igli into swallowing himself, and--poof!--he's gone into nowhere. If only he were here with us, Igli could warn the worm ouroboros of the dangers of autophagy at the organismic level.)

Camille Paglia's thoughts on the character Gwendolen gets closer to my idea than the first quote above. This idea is that uroboros is turned inward upon itself and devours itself--inverted, curled like an embryo, self-centered, self-absorbed, it makes of itself its whole world. The image I have of these authors is that they are tagmata in the body of the worm, if not many of them the worm itself.

A third quote is too obscene to reproduce (no pun intended) here. You will find it on page 587. It's in reference to an episode in Moby Dick by Herman Melville. It's obscene but also obscenely funny, in its original and in Ms. Paglia's reference to it. That quote also gets to what I'm talking about in reference to the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales. I hate to say it, but that one might be closest of all.

Worm, by the way, is from the Old English wurm or wyrm, meaning "serpent, snake, dragon, reptile." The Indo-European root is the same as for the word weird or wyrd: "to bend."

* * *

In his introductory essay in "The Eyrie," editor Jonathan Maberry mentioned the names of several dozen authors, including Ramsey Campbell, Thomas Ligotti, Caitlín R. Kiernan, and China Miéville. Poor Jeff VanderMeer. He got left out. But we should remember that in 2012, he had a tussle with the current publisher, John Harlacher, and the previous editor, Marvin Kaye. Maybe things haven't settled down just yet, even after the death of Mr. Kaye in 2021. We should remember, too, that Mr. VanderMeer wants us to move past Lovecraft, whereas Weird Tales #367 is essentially a Lovecraft issue.

Essayist Nicholas Diak is in Weird Tales #367. Near the end of his contribution, he wrote:

In 2023 Weird Tales celebrates its centennial. The periodical has seen cycles of inactivity and resurrection (not dead, but dreaming), but also high-water marks from the stewardship of unflappable editors, including its current prosperity under Jonathan Maberry. (p. 19)

On his own website, Mr. Diak posted interviews with three other contributors to the Cosmic Horror Issue, three of the five women in fact. They are Angela Yuriko Smith, Samantha Underhill, and Carol Gyzander. Jonathan Maberry wrote the introduction to Samantha Underhill's poetry collection Sadness of the Siren, issued in 2022. Carol Gyzander appeared with Mr. Maberry at Philcon, held in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, on November 17-19, 2023. Angela Yuriko Smith co-edited a collection called Worlds of Light and Darkness (2021). In its pages is a story by Jonathan Maberry.

Speaking of introductions, Jeff VanderMeer, who is married to Ann VanderMeer, former editor of Weird Tales, wrote a not very interesting foreword for Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti (Penguin, 2015). (Mr. Ligotti is far more interesting and erudite.) In his forward, Mr. VanderMeer mentioned Mr. Kiernan, but only in passing. The former covered the latter in depth in an interview conducted in 2012. In a response to a comment on that online interview, Jeff VanderMeer wrote: "I totally agree, Craig. She [sic] is one of my favorite, favorite writers because her [sic] work shows progression and she [sic] isn’t content to stick with just one thing." 

Sic, sic, sic.

In that same interview, Caitlín R. Kiernan appears to have expressed admiration for the work of Thomas Ligotti. I wouldn't be surprised to find that Mr. Kiernan does in fact admire Mr. Ligotti. They both appear to come from the same kind of place and to write the same kind of story, although I confess I have read only one by the former author and only four or five by the latter. Also in that interview, Mr. Kiernan called China Miéville "brilliant." Jeff VanderMeer has also interviewed Mr. Miéville. No word on what Mr. Miéville thinks of Mr. Kiernan. Can anyone find the missing tagma for this self-swallowing worm?

In 2005, Caitlín R. Kiernan published a short story collection called To Charles Fort, With Love. (We knew from just one story, "Night Fishing," that Mr. Kiernan is a reader of Charles Fort.) The author of the afterword in that book, entitled "A Certain Inexplicability," is Ramsey Campbell. Mr. Campbell also wrote an introduction to the first edition of Mr. Ligotti's Songs of a Dead Dreamer, published in 1985.

In September 2020, Ramsey Campbell attached his signature to a lie. The lie is part of a letter drawn up by British authors Kiran Millwood Hargrave and Daisy Johnson. You can read the letter and the names of its signatories by clicking here. The letter is tacitly against J.K. Rowling, a woman who has shown herself to be fearless in the face of the most hateful verbal attacks made by followers of a harmful, destructive, and oppressive belief system afoot in our world. She is a woman in the only sense of the word. They call her by a derogatory term, a slur: trans-exclusionary radical feminist, or TERF. That letter, signed by 200 small people plus Ramsey Campbell (we have to admit he has stature), was in response to a previous letter in support of Ms. Rowling, this one signed by 58 writers, actors, musicians, and artists. As usual, cowards outnumber the courageous, and liars the speakers of truth. You can read the initial letter, signed by the courageous 58, by clicking here.

J.K. Rowling writes genre fiction, including short works. I have a feeling, though, that if she were to stoop to approach Weird Tales with a submission, the people behind the magazine--and who inhabit the larger world of contemporary weird fiction--would tell her to go away. She would not be wanted, for she speaks the truth and many of them traffic in lies, one lie in particular.

In this I say thank God for China Miéville. At least his leftism and progressivism are still class-based instead of sex-and-gender-based. At least Marxism is a product of the mind.

George Orwell famously said, "In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act." Progressives like to think of themselves as bravely ushering in new worlds. They are actually counterrevolutionaries who want to take us backward to that pagan and shamanistic fog of circling and turning years that preceded the onset of history. J.K. Rowling and people like her are the true revolutionaries, for they believe in freedom, reason, and civilization.

To paraphrase a recent presidential campaign, the current and recent Weird Tales appears to  be about they and them. You can decide for yourself who they are and to whom them refers.** You could begin with lists and names appearing in the Cosmic Horror Issue. The original Weird Tales--thirty-one years' worth, from 1923 to 1954--was about you--about us, the readers. Remember what Farnsworth Wright wrote in 1925 in "The Eyrie," the column that in its original form and for its original purpose was a readers' column:

Weird Tales belongs to the readers.

(**Robert A. Heinlein wrote another solipsistic story called "They," published in Unknown Fantasy Fiction in April 1941.)

* * *

I have been writing a lot about the meanings of words. Thank you to the Online Etymology Dictionary for so much fascinating information. I began in that because it's really interesting. After a while, though, it became something else, something really important, and I'll tell you why. If we as writers, readers, speakers, and listeners are to understand each other and communicate with each other, we must agree on the meanings of words. If those meanings break down, then understanding and communication break down, too.

Words and language do not belong to any one person or group of people. They are our common property. No one shall claim ownership of them, and no one shall forbid others from using any word in its proper sense. Nor shall anyone alter the meanings or uses of words, unilaterally or for his own purposes. Each of us has rights, but no one's rights extend into the lives of others. There are rules in every language. Call them law. To misuse words, damage them, vandalize them, do violence to them is to break the law we all must respect if we are to go on. These things are an offense against us all.

There has been a lot of lawbreaking, damage, vandalism, and violence done to our language. This is especially true of a single word: woman. Woman means just one thing. It doesn't mean more than one thing, nor does it mean whatever you want it to mean. One thing, one fixed meaning, one kind of person--woman--to the exclusion of all who are not women. Those who seek to change the meaning of the word seek to silence women, erase women, cancel women, take from women; to deprive them of their rights, their privacy, their safety, their security, their prerogatives and their exclusive privileges as women; to deprive them also of their being and experience as women; to invade the country of womanhood, take it over, subdue it, punish, enslave, or imprison all of its inhabitants, and steal or wipe away everything that was theirs and theirs alone. These invaders and usurpers should be ashamed of themselves, but they know no shame. They will go on hurting people and destroying things by their lies and beliefs and by their system. I think and I hope that the election just past in America has broken the wave of this hateful and destructive belief system. But systems without any built-in limits will never relent. We will always have to remain vigilant.

Next: An Alien Abduction.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Reactions to "Teoquitla the Golden" by Ramòn de las Cuevas

"Teoquitla the Golden" by Ramòn de las Cuevas (Mark R. Harrington) was the cover story for the November 1924 issue of Weird Tales. The issue of January 1925 was the first in which readers had a chance to respond to that issue and its stories. Before printing their responses in the revived letters column, called "The Eyrie," the new editor, Farnsworth Wright, provided some answers to his question about what kind of stories Weird Tales should print. Should they be horror stories or something else? The readers would have their say.

Reader W.S. Charles of Pendleton, Oregon, wrote: "I herewith put in my oar against 'horror stories,' particularly that class that are somber and in the main vicious, beyond the realm of reason." By "beyond the realm of reason," I think he meant "unreasonably" or "extremely." Too bad W.S. Charles and people like him (or her) are not around today to make their demands. I think we would have better and more enjoyable stories, as well as a higher level of art and accomplishment in weird fiction, if they were. Instead we have writers indulging in their sickness for the sake of themselves, their sick friends, and their sick readers.

Farnsworth Wright took the measure of the readers in 1924-1925, responding:

Well, readers, we are going to keep the magazine weird, but NOT disgusting. The votes for the necrophilic tales were so few that we are satisfied you want us to keep the magazine clean. Stories of the [Edgar Allan] Poe type -- scary stories -- spooky stories -- mystic and occult fiction -- thrilling mysteries -- bizarre crime stories -- all these will find place in Weird Tales, but those of you who want tales of blood-drinking and cannibalism will have to make your opinion register a great deal more strongly than you have yet done before we let down the bars to this type of stories [sic]. We repeat here what we have said before: Weird Tales belongs to you, the readers, and we will be guided by your wishes.

That last part bears repeating (and condensing):

Weird Tales belongs to the readers.

Authors, editors, publishers, and critics of today would never allow that, though. Never. For to allow Weird Tales and weird fiction in general to belong to the readers would make of all of this a democratic instead of an elitist thing. They would have to give up control and open up their clique. And as we have seen in election after election, democracy is intolerable to self-anointed elites, for if the people are allowed their say, they will inevitably choose things the elites must hate.

* * *

Also in November 1924, Farnsworth Wright instituted a voting process among readers for their favorite stories in every issue. The first winner was "The Brain in the Jar" by Norman Elwood Hammerstrom (Hamerstrom). Second place went to "Teoquitla the Golden." In the issue of January 1925, Lieutenant Arthur J. Burks wrote to say: "Ramón de las Cuevas is a writing hombre." (Sometimes the accent mark went one way and sometimes the other.) I like that compliment. Having served in the Caribbean, Burks recognized the meaning behind the pseudonym, continuing: "Also keep 'Ramón of the Caves' busy--he knows his stuff! His description of the old beggar woman took me bodily back to the West Indies. In any case my vote for the best story goes to him." In the March 1925 issue, Cecil Fuller of Tulare, California, asked for a second story by Ramón de las Cuevas. Alas, this was not to be.

In its May issue of 1925, Weird Tales observed (obliquely) its second anniversary. Among the letters in "The Eyrie" was one from an anonymous correspondent in Moscow, Idaho, in which he criticized what he termed "impossibilities":

"Just one instance: Teoquitla the Golden was very clever and entertaining, but the permutation of sex described is a biological impossibility. Let me qualify that. Sex has apparently been changed experimentally in certain lower animals; varying degrees of change from female to male are known to take place in cattle (the freemartin phenomenon), and possibly may also occur in other mammals. But the important point is this: such changes can only take place during the embryonic stage of development. After that, they are impossible. Any biologist will tell you that. Of course, fiction of the weird sort is not intended to stick to scientific facts, although realism in any story will be enhanced if the scientific basis is properly regarded. Still, Teoquitla the Golden was clever."

What was true at the beginning of time was also true in 1924 and is still true today: sex in human beings cannot be changed from one to the other. (Yes, there are only two.) A man cannot be a woman and a woman cannot be a man. There are those of us who like to think of history as being a positive progression and people of the past as being primitive, while we are naturally more advanced. But at least in 1924, someone in small-town Idaho knew and wrote the truth. He could have been a grade school dropout, a factory worker, farmhand, or common laborer, and he would still have been smarter and more sensible than so many people of today, including politicians, pundits, commentators, physicians, surgeons, teachers, librarians, college professors and administrators, journalists, authors, artists, and people in entertainment, sports, and the media. The worst of them are vicious, hateful, violent, aggressive, destructive. They wish to carry out--and do--the kind of necrophilic and cannibalistic horrors that readers in 1924 objected to. Worse yet, they wish to do these things to children. And the best of them? Dupes--people too weak in will and in the mind to think for themselves or to stand up for the truth. They are people who have fallen for lies, believe lies, and tell lies, even if it means women and children are harmed in the process. And they're always so sure they're smarter and better than those of us who speak and act on the truth. They are always so sure they're morally and intellectually superior to us. Shame on them all. If there are forces in history, surely the most powerful of these is divine in its origins. This force is expressed directly through truth, fact, unalterable reality, and immutable law, and their most horrible ideas will surely fall before it.

* * *

One thing the anonymous letter-writer here might have missed by a little is that weird fiction need not be scientific, for weird fiction is the fiction of weird. Science fiction is the fiction of science. In reading weird fiction, we seek a departure from strict realism and into weird realms. The whole point in "Teoquitla the Golden" is that it's a story in which Weird has her way. A man who was a hater of a woman meets his weird in being transformed into and living as a woman.

In looking for a candidate writer of that letter in Weird Tales regarding Teoquitla and science, I have come upon Dr. Carl DeWitt Garby (1890 or 1892-1928), lifelong friend of then unpublished but soon-to-be renowned science fiction author E.E. "Doc" Smith (1890-1965). Smith and Garby were roommates at the University of Idaho in Moscow. Both graduated in 1914. Like Smith, Garby was a fan of science fiction. Garby's wife, Lee Hawkins Garby (1890-1957), was, too. She collaborated with Doc Smith on his famed serial, then novel, The Skylark of Space (1928). All three lived and worked in Washington, D.C. Poor Dr. Garby died while quite young, presumably in that city. I can't say that Dr. Garby was the author of that letter to "The Eyrie"--I don't know about the timeline exactly. Could he have been in Moscow in 1924? Or could his friend Doc Smith have been the writer? The world, I guess, will never know.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"Teoquitla the Golden" by Ramòn de las Cuevas

One hundred years ago this month, in November 1924, Weird Tales came back. It had been gone for three months by its cover date but closer to six or even seven in actuality. The last issue before the hiatus was the first and only quarterly issue of the magazine, dated May/June/July 1924. There was an overhaul of the magazine, the business behind the magazine, and some of its staff in that time. There was a new editor in November 1924, Farnsworth Wright, and a new cover artist, Andrew Brosnatch (1896-1965). Brosnatch's first cover illustration was for a story called "Teoquitla the Golden" by a pseudonymous author, Ramòn de las Cuevas.

Ramòn de las Cuevas was actually the archaeologist, anthropologist, and museum curator Mark R. Harrington (1882-1971). He is supposed to have taken his nom de plume from the name of a Spanish-American historian. I haven't found a historian by that name, but Harrington mentioned a historian called Las Casas in his story. He was Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566). I wonder if Harrington transmuted las Casas' name to arrive at his own pseudonym. In Spanish, las Casas means "the houses," and las Cuevas, "the caves." And so Ramòn de las Cuevas means "Ramòn of the Caves." Harrington's middle name, by the way, was Raymond.

Caves meant something to Harrington, I think. In his story, he wrote:

     Dr. Branson turned to his new friend, Lewis, who lolled in a deck-chair beside him. "I'll bet," he suggested, "the old Indians used to have great times up in those caves before Brother Columbus butted in!"

     "Yes," agreed his companion, "the Cronistas tell us that the Taino tribes held some of their most important ceremonies in caves."

"Teoquitla the Golden" was Harrington's only story in Weird Tales. I wonder if there was an original in the folk tales, mythologies, or histories--the European Cronistas--of Mesoamerican Indians. If so, he would have been the right person to have come across it.

Set in Mesoamerica, "Teoquitla the Golden" is about an American explorer named Robert Sanderson who discovers a place called Nahuatlan, located "in the Hidden Valley, the last stand of the Aztec nation." The discovery of a hidden or lost valley is a convention in genre fiction. You can call it a trope if you want. Otherwise, "Teoquitla the Golden" is a very unusual story. And I mean very unusual.

I'll cut to the chase: "Teoquitla the Golden" is about the transformation of a man into a woman. This isn't by any of the fake-scientific or pseudo-medical butchery employed today. The transformation is actually carried out with ancient ways and the use of potions--evidently plant-based--blown into the man's body through straws. (Is he a genetically modified organism?) The transformation is gradual. It is also complete. I should add that Sanderson did not like women before his transformation. His weird is that he would become something he once disliked. This idea makes me think of the movie Watermelon Man (1970) starring Godfrey Cambridge and directed by Mario Van Peebles.

I'm surprised that Weird Tales would have printed a story like this one in 1924, but then it was "The Unique Magazine." "Teoquitla the Golden"--the title refers to the man after he has been transformed into a woman--is an unusual and weird story, but it isn't told in a weird or sensationalistic way. The tone is actually pretty even, as you might expect from a man working in a science-based discipline. And the narrative is sympathetic to the man in his transformed state.

The online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction has an entry on what it calls "Transgender SF," SF indicating science fiction. Science fiction is of course supposed to be based in science--real science and not fake. Science is right there in the name of the genre after all. Transgenderism, though, is not scientific. There is no science in it. In fact it's antiscientific, as well as pseudoscientific. Its true nature is political. In fact, transgenderism is a political belief system that is totalitarian in all of its intensity, scope, and ambitions. If you doubt that, just speak those words and wait for the blowback from people who want you not only to shut up, but who also want to force you to accept, embrace, and internalize their belief system. If you transgress, you must grovel in apology. You must be humiliated into speaking lies as the truth. And if you hold to the truth, you must be silenced, shouted down, banned, canceled, ostracized, and even fined or imprisoned. Dissent simply cannot be tolerated. Once you have spoken the truth, it won't take long for them to lash out. They are likely to be exceedingly vicious in doing it. Don't falter, though. Stand up for yourself, and tell it like it is. In this, it's helpful to have knowledge of the totalitarian principle, possibly first articulated in genre fiction: "Everything not forbidden is compulsory." This is how they think. You must agree with them. And if you won't on your own, you must be made to agree. This is what they have planned for you. So remember: to be forewarned is to be forearmed against their certain assaults.

As for the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, it has obviously been ideologically captured, the evidence of that being, if nothing else, its use of the phrase "gender reassignment surgery," which is an atrocious euphemism for the mutilation and removal of breasts and genitalia: healthy and normally functioning tissues and organs, removed from healthy and normally functioning human bodies, including--and seemingly as an especial target--the bodies of children. And here I thought the first command of medicine is to do no harm.

I hesitated to write about "Teoquitla the Golden." I don't like to fuel people's delusions and ideological insanity. I also don't want to point the way to a work of art that will no doubt be used for propagandistic--i.e., anti-art--purposes. But this blog is about Weird Tales, its authors, artists, stories, and poems, and so I feel an obligation to do it. This is also an anniversary, the 100-year anniversary of what very well could have been the first sex-switch in the history of pulp fiction. And "Teoquitla the Golden" is actually a good and interesting story. But if you read it, you should set aside your twenty-first-century self and attempt to read it in the mindset of a person from one hundred years ago. Forget politics. Forget insanity. Remember art and literature and their purposes.

Weird Tales, November 1924. Cover story: "Teoquitla the Golden" by Ramòn de las Cuevas. Cover art by Andrew Brosnatch. Considering the subject matter of the story, you could take Brosnatch's last name as an obscene pun. Try not to.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan-Part Five

In "Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan and The Incredible Shrinking Man, screenplay by Richard Matheson, the night sky or galaxy is referred to as a tapestry. That image makes me think of an expression, the fabric of space. In graphic representations of the fabric of space, we see a two-dimensional grid, sometimes warped into a third by a representation of the spherical mass of a star or planet. So maybe we can say that there is a y-coordinate for the warp and an x-coordinate for the woof in this fabric of space, and that every point in it--every location on the tapestry--can be described using a pair of numbers. The word warp--related to the word weird--does double duty here. The word order, by the way, is related to weaving as well.

* * *

At the end of The Incredible Shrinking Man, the hero passes through an opening in a window screen to gaze at the night sky, to peer into infinitude. The screen is a grid. It, too, has x- and y-coordinates. Passing through this manmade screen or grid or fabric, something that formerly would have blocked him, he now has unobstructed access to and an unobstructed view of the "vast majesty of creation." He has emerged from a literal underworld, the dark, nightmarish, spider-crawling cellar of his previously mundane home, into a view of the stars. All else shrinks away as he puts the things of the earth behind him and encounters the heavens. He may shrink, too, but he grows in wisdom and spiritual stature. As he says, to God, there is no zero.

* * *

Remember that the Fates are spinners and weavers. They make the fabric of our lives. The third of the Moirai, the Greek precursors to the Roman Fata, is Atropos. Her name means "un-turnable" or "unbending." She is not to be denied. Remember that the root of the word weird, or wyrd, means "to bend." I think the opposition here means that we bend and Wyrd does not. It is her will and not ours. We bend to it. We all must dree our weird. The second of the Morai is Lachesis, the allotter. We speak of drawing lots. The words dree and draw may be related.

* * *

The title "Night Fishing" made me think of the R.E.M. song "Nightswimming." Now I find that Caitlín R. Kiernan, an adopted Southerner, is a fan of that Southern group.

* * *

Although Mr. Kiernan was born in Ireland, he grew up and lives in the South. I don't know whether he sees himself this way, but maybe he can be considered a Southern Gothic writer. Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers were two others with Irish names.

Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) had an ambiguous name, but that's because she dropped her given name, Mary. Some of her stories have been described as horror stories, but she was a devout Catholic. In a letter, she wrote: "The stories are hard, but they are hard, because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism. When I see these stories described as horror stories, I am always amused, because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror." I would like to read more. Strangely, a rock group called Killdozer, named for a story by Theodore Sturgeon, referred to her in a song called "Lupus," released in 1989. The disease that killed her refers to the appearance on the skin of rashes like wolf bites. Ghastly stigmata.

Carson McCullers (1917-1967) also had an ambiguous name, but that's because she dropped her given name, Lula. The McCullers part came from her marriage to Reeves McCullers. Her surname at birth was Smith. In contrast to Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers was ambiguous in terms of her sex. However, she was a woman, the word woman, of course, meaning woman. She said: "Writing, for me, is a search for God." Contrast that with the search among many current authors, which is evidently for the opposite of God.

* * *

There is imagery in "Night Fishing" that could be taken as sexual: holes, pricks, boxes. There is also the imagery of the sea, which can be taken as representing the oceanic quality of woman, including in a sexual sense. I don't really think that there is a sexual purpose here, though, even if a transvestite makes his entrance--and soon his offstage exit--at the end of the story. Or if there is a sexual purpose, I don't see it as the main purpose. The main purpose seems to be to tell a story about the abysses that are or may be inside of us, especially when we go looking for them, make a home for them, and invite them in.

* * *

In all of this thinking and writing about the void--or Void--the idea of the Ouija board has come into my head again and again. I have thought about how people using the Ouija board might be opening a door and inviting in spirits or forces that we don't want coming into our world. They have been banished for a reason.

The moveable part of the Ouija setup is the planchette. The word planchette is from an Old French word meaning "plank," originally "to be flat." Planchets are used in coin making. They are basically blanks, blank in one of its meanings signifying an empty space, or nothing. I have thought of the psychopath or serial killer as a blank, as a human-looking thing that lacks a soul and is empty inside. Not knowing what is inside of us that makes us human--believing we are mere, mechanistic material--he wants to cut us open to see what makes us tick. (His tic is to find out what makes us tick.) The narrator in "Night Fishing" is a serial killer and is empty inside. Serial killing usually has an aberrant sexual aspect to it. The narrator isn't obviously sexually aberrant, even if he recruits a transvestite into his abyssal world. Significantly, the narrator is nameless; lacking words to signify himself, he is not part of Creation but descended from the wordless and disordered void that preceded it.

The planchette used with a Ouija board has its own subtle sexual imagery. In the middle is a hole. The planchette is shaped like a heart, but turn it around and you might see a subtle representation of a woman's anatomy, woman in the only real sense of the word instead of the insane, depraved, delusional, 21st-century sense. I'll say this to close out this too-long series on "Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan: A woman is a woman, and only a woman can be a woman.

Next: The First Sex-Switch in "The Unique Magazine"

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan-Part Four

I speculated the other day on the possible motivations of writers who use brandnames and product placement in their fiction. I'm not sure that I have an answer to the question of why they do it, but I have another possible explanation. Commercial products, commercial services, and brandnames are obviously on their minds. Actually, I think that what these writers do is unconscious, and so it's not so much on their minds as in them. They have been so steeped in commercialism and consumerism all of their lives that it probably comes naturally for them to throw around these labels and names. This is their natural vocabulary and their natural habit.

My alternate explanation for product placement and the use of brandnames is that these writers and so many like them are signaling their virtue. This isn't a moral or intellectual kind of virtue signaling. They are actually signaling their commercial virtue. It's a display of a kind of street cred. They're basically showing that they're hip and cool and with it. They know what the good stuff is, they know where and how to buy it, and they want you to know that they know. They have the means and the apps, the subscriptions and the accounts, the access and the cash to get it all. To them, I guess, this is a kind of skill, a display of taste, an indication of their superior status, or a status at least equal to yours. They're with it. They're keeping up. They're putting themselves on display. At its base, this kind of thing probably comes from pressures to conform. People who do it want to fit in and be accepted. They want to sit at the cool table, even though they will never be able to sit at the cool table because that was in high school and we're not in high school any more.

Anyone trying to be cool should know that cool isn't trying. Cool is.

Here's Langston Hughes' poem "Motto," first collected in book form in 1951:

Motto
By Langston Hughes

I play it cool
And dig all jive
That's the reason
I stay alive.

My motto,
As I live and learn,
            is:
Dig And Be Dug
In Return.

-----

That's cool.

* * *

"Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan is not a pleasant story. The author, I think, claims not to write horror stories, but this is one. The horror has to do with the narrator himself and what he has inside him. He carries that horror around with him. He exposes others to it. And in one way or another, they are destroyed by it. Or apparently they are destroyed, maybe murdered, but still ruined and their souls wiped away by exposure to his abysses and voids. If you read this story only at its surface--as if you were floating on the surface of a lake sprinkled with the reflections of stars--you would believe that the abyss is external to the narrator. But if you peer into its darkest depths, you might see that the abyss is inside him. I have a feeling that the author knows abysses like these. I think we have to acknowledge that there is some autobiographical content here. So is he Edgar Allan Poe, exploring very human and very dark depths? Or is he acting as his own psychologist, examining his own torments, exploring his own abysses through his art?

So a third question for today: did the author of this story put himself into it (the way he inserted various commercial products in its pages)? And if he did, is he represented only in the narrator? Or is the boy at the end also a representation of himself? In the story, the narrator says that a thing need not be just one thing. It can actually be more than one. I take that as an artist's statement. Maybe the murderer and the murdered--the exploiter and the exploited, the recruiter and the recruited, the groomer and the groomed--are both the same person, separated only by time. (Remember that the psychiatrist asks if the thing in the lake has followed him through time, from his childhood to now.) What was done to him, he will do to others, another inversion of a biblical idea.

In reading the stories of Poe, I'm not convinced that he was like or sympathized with his darkest and most depraved characters. He may have understood the darker side of life and the dark depths of the human soul, but it's clear that we are not to think of the narrator in "The Tell-Tale Heart" or Montresor in "The Cask of Amontillado" as a hero, or someone admirable, or someone whom we might aspire to be like. In other words, we're not supposed to take his side or to be on his side. I'm not sure the same kind of thing is true in the fantasy fiction of our time.

I have been reading stories by Thomas Ligotti. The first in the collection I have next to me is called "The Frolic." Mr. Kiernan's story reminds me of "The Frolic," which I think can be included in the category of cosmic horror. In "The Frolic," the situation is reversed, though, for we get things from the point of a view of a psychologist who is treating a serial killer whose names are legion but is called John Doe. The psychologist describes Doe as:

"[. . .] a comparatively lazy demi-demon from a Neverland where dizzy chaos is the norm, a state of affairs on which he gluttonously thrives. Which is as good a description as any of the metaphysical economy of a psychotic's universe."

Note the word chaos, which, as we have seen, is a synonym of abyss or void. Here is some of what Doe writes in his final note to his psychologist:

[. . . ] for in the black-foaming gutters and back alleys of paradise, in the dank windowless gloom of some intergalactic cellar, in the hollow pearly whorls found in sewerlike seas in starless cities of insanity, and in their slums . . .

(The italics are in the original.)

Here also is the imagery of cosmic horror, including mention of the sea, a word for which abyss and void might be synonyms.

I think it fair to say that the author of "The Frolic" is mentally ill. I don't take any pleasure in saying that. I don't say it gratuitously. I say it to make a point, which is that authors of today may very well write, specifically and with purpose, about the things that most torment them. One reason they might do this is as a kind of self-treatment. They are acting as their own therapists. Another might be more significant and it is that authors may attempt to bring these things, through their art, into the real world, thereby making of them a kind of affirmation of what they have inside themselves. For as long as they are inside, they are formless, chaotic, even abyssal. But if an author can speak them through word into creation, then they can be made real and ordered, after some fashion. But just because something exists in the real world doesn't mean that it's good and right and true. Material is not necessarily good, even if you're a materialist. In addition, what you might make true for yourself through your creation is not necessarily true about the universe, nor for all of us, nor for any one of us. It might still be your own private horror. I have a feeling, though, that readers of a certain type go looking for dark, negative, violent, nihilistic, atheistic, materialistic, death-dealing fiction because they believe it affirms their view of the world and all of its people, including themselves, as a terrible place. It doesn't though. There is no affirmation. The universe is not like that. All of that exists only in your head, in your heart, in the gutters and gloom, in the cellars and sewers inside you, in the God-shaped hollows you have carved out of yourself and that you keep open inside like a niche made for Nothing.

* * *

So there appear to be parallels between, first, the narrator and the box, and second, the author and his fiction. The narrator says, Open the box to see what's inside me. The author says, Open the book to see what's inside me. The hope (or despair) in each case is that the viewer or reader will be drawn into the narrator's/author's worldview--into the abyss of himself and his beliefs--and thereby converted, thereby ruined. Note that "Night Fishing" is told in the first person.

* * *

Although the words box and book are similar, they are apparently unrelated. It's interesting that both refer to the names of trees, box to boxwood and book to beech.

* * *

A hollow is a void, the numeral zero, a rim around a hole, the hole being the point and the operative part. It's no wonder, I guess, that so much of the depravity, insanity, and departures from normality of our time--that so much of atheism, materialism, nihilism, gnosticism, leftism, progressivism, and so on--that so much psychopathology and narcissism and delusional thinking--is about sex, for it's all about trying to fill a hole, to grow something self-punishers and self-sufferers hope to be good and positive inside their own voids. But you can't create yourself, you can't give birth to yourself, and you can't christen yourself. You have to get over yourself and be what you are, what you were created to be, which is a God-made human being, in your essence entirely unalterable.

To be concluded . . .

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan-Part Three

In "Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan, the narrator, a physics professor with psychiatric problems--actually problems far more profound than any psychiatrist could treat--reveals to the reader that he has committed murder, or something approaching murder. Actually there is more than one murder, for, like a serial killer, he has gone after people, one after another, who live on the fringes of society. But are these really murders? Or is he a recruiter of sorts--a groomer--who lures his victims into his abysses? He writes:

If not murder, then let's say a fisher of men.

That suggestion is ironic of course, an inversion of the original. In Matthew 4:19, Jesus says:

"Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men."

In his own story, the narrator alludes to Edmond Hamilton, who alluded to Charles Fort before him, writing:

I think we're fished for.

The fish is a Christian symbol of course. Darwinists have co-opted that symbol for humorous and satirical purposes. You see it mostly on their cars. Darwinist or not, if we're fished for, we're all sooner or later going into the creel.

By the way, one who fishes draws in his catch. Remember the word.

* * *

The narrator remembers night fishing with his grandfather and his grandfather's friends. One of those friends, named Snuffy Smith after the comic strip character, tells a story of his own childhood in which he went into the cellar to look for some canned peaches for his mother. There he found the shape of a girl that changed as he looked upon it. "And her eyes were like burning white pinpricks in the darkness." Elsewhere in the story, the narrator describes a night on the lake:

     The stars wheel above the lake like a drunken tapestry, a billion blazing pin pricks [. . .].

There are, then, stars in the shape-shifters and shape-shifters in the stars. Or, shape-shifters are star stuff, just like us, except they're not the good kind. Remember here how the hero in The Incredible Shrinking Man describes the stars: "God's silver tapestry spread across the night." Setting aside the mixed metaphor of a tapestry that wheels, we can say that God's tapestry is not drunken but properly ordered. It is designed, just as every tapestry is designed.

* * *

There is also in "Night Fishing" a story of something pulled up from the bottom of the lake, the way the aliens in Hamilton's story trawl the surface of the earth from their high-atmospheric ships. The narrator is keeping secrets from his psychiatrist--and from us. What was the drawn-up thing? Was it an alien entity, a visitor from the void? Or was it simply a dead body? The author may also be keeping secrets from us. Is there really something cosmic, supernatural, or super-scientific going on in his story? Or does the thing of which he writes exist only in the abyssal depths of the narrator's soul? In other words, is the horror external or internal? Another question: has the author put himself into his own story? It is, after all, about transformations. He writes: "[T]his does not have to be any one thing." It, and possibly everything else, can be many, or any of its own choosing.

* * *

The thing in the box that the narrator has bought from an estate sale--the thing from the abyss--is a shape-shifter. It is in service to this shape-shifter that the narrator, now in adulthood, does his own night fishing among outcasts, what people might call the dregs of society. For example, the narrator's latest victim, the only one who actually makes an appearance in the story, is a transvestite. (Trawl, draw, drag, dredge, and possibly dregs are related words.) In an imaginary session with his psychiatrist, the psychiatrist asks him, "You think it followed you . . . through time, from that night on the lake?" After a while, the narrator says, "That night on the lake, it saw my face [. . . .] It saw something wrong with my soul. It saw an easy mark." In other words, a thing brought up--like Dagon or Cthulhu--from an abyss looked into him and recognized also an abyss. And now he goes about its work and his.

* * *

The author of "Night Fishing" is one person but has attempted to become another, complete with a name change. Emulating God, he has attempted to speak word into the creation of something new. Similarly, the thing in his story is one thing, then becomes another. The narrator may have been one person before becoming another, but his soul appears to have been already ruined when he first saw the thing. Maybe he was ruined at his conception. This can't be original sin, though, because the law governing this story--and the author's beliefs--won't allow it. The boy in the story is a transvestite, in other words, someone pretending to be another he is not. Using the object that was one thing before transforming itself into another, the narrator introduces the boy into his world. The boy thereby also becomes something else. You could say that he undergoes a transition. So the narrator, more or less a groomer, recruits the boy into his abyss. He is a fisher of men but an inversion of Christian fishers of men, who recruit their fellows into faith in God and his Creation, also called Cosmos.

* * *

In "Night Fishing," Caitlín R. Kiernan has synthesized what I think are the two main themes or images in Weird Tales #367, first, the abyss or void, and, second, an alien presence among us. Both are treated in this issue as sources of cosmic horror. Or maybe his story was the starting point for this themed issue and the other authors were invited to write variations on his two themes. (Probably not. More likely this was convergent evolution--or conformist creation, if there can be such a thing. Or maybe a better word for it is groupthink.) I should also emphasize here the theme and imagery of the sea, for the sea is in "Night Fishing" as well as in the other works so far in the Cosmic Horror Issue. But then we should remember that abyss and void may also refer to the sea and did from the beginning, for they are both in the creation story, in the Book of Genesis.

So far, these allusions or references--other connections, too--are to:

• The Book of Genesis, specifically the story of creation

• The New Testament

• "The City in the Sea" by Edgar Allan Poe

• Mythical and pseudoscientific lost continents

• "Nemesis" by H.P. Lovecraft

• "Dreamland" by Edgar Allan Poe

• "The Space Visitors" by Edmond Hamilton

• The Book of the Damned by Charles Fort

• Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future by Friedrich Nietzsche

• "There's a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea," a traditional song

• "And Death Shall Have No Dominion" by Dylan Thomas

I hope this list is complete. It may not be.

* * *

There is also a theme in Mr. Kiernan's story of shape-shifting, transition, or transformation. This shape-shifting is nothing but horrific. That's something for us to remember. The shape-shifter or skin-walker is a monster among us. Watch out.

* * *

Believers in God are seekers after spiritual transcendence. Non-believers pursue in its place transition, transformation, transgression, transgenderism, transvestism, trans-humanism, and other trans-systems, trans-processes, trans-experiences, trans-beliefs, trans-etc. Believers in God also believe in Cosmos--order, law, purpose, meaning. Non-believers see, fear, love, hate, pursue, and embrace Chaos--disorder, confusion, the void, the abyss, meaninglessness, destruction, ultimately death.

* * *

Another theme, motif, or plot device: the opening. In "The City in the Sea," the old man is sent on his journey after opening a package. In "A Ghost Story for Christmas," the narrator encounters black emptiness upon opening a door. In "The Forest Gate," the narrator passes through the eponymous opening to experience his own horrors. And in "Night Fishing," the narrator and his victim peer into an abyss by opening a box. One aspect of the thing in the box is "a book with a cracked leather binding, like the family Bible my mother kept on the coffee table." One of course opens a book, like a door through which one may pass. Inside--on the other side--may be glories. On the other hand, as in the Necronomicon or "The King in Yellow," there may be horrors. Opening has two meanings. First is from the verb, to open, the action of opening. Second is the noun, opening, denoting an empty space, a doorway or gateway, a gap, a hole, an open mouth, an orifice, the hole in the numeral zero, a void, such as the void in the narrator's soul.

* * *

Another aspect of the thing is "a stone disk with seven sides, carved from greenish soapstone that feels oddly greasy to the touch." As in "The City in the Sea," there is a strange object, a kind of sculpture. The strange object or sculpture, sometimes a box, is in all kinds of genre fiction, including The Maltese Falcon, "The Call of Cthulhu," "Claimed!" by Francis Stevens, "The Calamander Chest" by Joseph Payne Brennan, "The Striped Chest" by Arthur Conan Doyle, and so on. There are so many that there could be an Internet Strange Object, Sculpture, and Box Database.

* * *

See what happens when you read Nietzsche? You write in brevities and put little breaks between them. He used numbers, I have used asterisks, and in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales, the designer used little black Cthulhus.

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan-Part Two

The narrator in "Night Fishing" has a cosmic horror problem. We get a hint of that in the first column of the story as it appears in Weird Tales #367:

There's a hallway that seems a lot longer than it can possibly be.

Dread stretches time and space.

Time and space being the dimensions and scales in which cosmic horror operates.

Telling about night fishing with his grandfather, the narrator relates to his psychiatrist: "We'd just drift around out there on the lake, the stars wheeling overhead--I swear there were more stars in the sky when I was a kid. I look up now at night, and it's like something came along and ate most of them." Remember the image of the zero: a gaping maw. Remember the consuming, engulfing void: now an eater of stars.

Instead of using an epigraph, the author of this story, Caitlín R. Kiernan, quotes from other works within its main body. These include a traditional song called "There's a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea" and the poem "And Death Shall Have No Dominion" by Dylan Thomas, which also has imagery of the sea. (Another variation on a theme in the Cosmic Horror Issue.) There is also an allusion to a story by a long-ago teller of weird tales, paraphrased from an idea by an author before him.

Read on . . .

In Mr. Kiernan's story, there are these words in italics, which he uses to connote quotations from other works:

I think we're fished for.

Right away, I recognized that as an idea originally in The Book of the Damned (1919), the first of Charles Fort's four books on strange and anomalous phenomena. In Chapter 12 of that book, Fort concluded: "I think we're property," meaning, we are the property of races alien to Earth. This, I think, could very well have been the origin of the ancient astronauts hypothesis so popular today. And it's one of the two main themes I have identified in the Cosmic Horror Issue, or one of two main sources of these feelings of cosmic horror about which its authors write. We have this vast cosmos in which to work and yet they have come up with only two sources of horror at our apprehension of it. At least Mr. Kiernan put these things together in interesting ways, even if they are, again, meta-references.

Eleven years after The Book of the Damned was published, author Edmond Hamilton had a story called "The Space Visitors" in Air Wonder Stories. The date was March 1930. His story was reprinted in Startling Stories in September 1939, the month in which the Second World War began. Hamilton's story is a Fortean story--or a storified plot really--of a visitation made by aliens to Earth. (Storified is my new word. There were lots of storified plots in the early years of science fiction.) The aliens' purpose is unknown except that they seem to be studying us. Their study is, however, extremely destructive and heedless of human life and pain. In the story, a Dr. Jason Howard, of Gotham University no less, theorizes on the matter at hand:

Did we live at the bottom of an ocean, an atmospheric sea? Were we merely crawling things upon earth's surface, to be fished for and examined curiously by unimaginable beings and vessels far above?

Emphasis added. As in the Cosmic Horror Issue, there is imagery here of the sea. And coincidentally or not, Hamilton's second banana to Dr. Howard has the same surname, Ransome vs. Ransom, as C.S. Lewis' hero in his Space Trilogy of 1938-1945.

Soon after the allusion to an allusion to Charles Fort, there is an allusion to another, earlier figure. The narrator of "Night Fishing" has purchased a box containing some objects from an estate sale. Unfortunately, these objects--or is it just one self-transforming artifact?--have strange properties. He wonders about it. Then he writes:

     I stare at the box, and I imagine it stares back at me.

And now Friedrich Nietzsche rears his head, for in Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (1886), he wrote:

     Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

Emphasis added again. This aphorism is from Chapter 4, being all of No. 146. In my Vintage edition of 1966, it appears on page 89. Nietzsche wrote a prelude to a philosophy of the future. Remember that the protagonist in The Incredible Shrinking Man saw himself as a possible man of the future.

And so we have that word again, abyss, roughly equivalent to void, and the condition of chaos that preceded God's speaking Cosmos into existence. Abyss is also in the imagery of the sea, as in the scientific term abyssal zone, or that layer that is among the deepest in the ocean. The word abyss is also in "Dagon" by H.P. Lovecraft, one of the earliest stories--if not the earliest--in Weird Tales (Oct. 1923) that has in it cosmic scales and cosmic scope. It's also in "The Call of Cthulhu," which appeared in "The Ghost Table" Issue of Weird Tales in February 1928. Both usages are in regards to the depths of the sea. Dagon is from the sea, but Cthulhu is from the stars.

So, from Charles Fort comes the idea that there are aliens among or above us, who own us, prey upon us, or are fishing for us, and from Friedrich Nietzsche comes the image of the abyss as not just emptiness but something that is watching us, waiting for an opening through which it might gain access to our world.

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan-Part One

Caitlín R. Kiernan was born on May 26, 1964, in Dublin, Ireland, and came to the United States as a child with his mother and sister. I believe his is an assumed name. That's okay. There have been lots of tellers of weird tales with pseudonyms, adopted names, or assumed names. Last week I heard from the son of Robert Spencer Carr (1909-1994), who let me know that his father's name at birth was Theodore Bonifield. I used that knowledge to update my biography of him. So the truth has come out more than one hundred years after Carr's birth. We're probably not allowed to know Mr. Kiernan's real name. There is supposed to be truth in art. Artists, though, are human beings, and human beings keep secrets, sometimes for all of their lives.

Mr. Kiernan is a writer, publisher, paleontologist, and onetime musician. His credits include novels, short stories, comic book scripts, and at least one screenplay. His first published short story was in 1995 and his first published novel in 1998. Mr. Kiernan lives and works in Alabama. I believe he also lived in Providence, Rhode Island. Although he's still living, his papers are deposited at the John Hay Library at Brown University. If authors' papers are stored in that library alphabetically (I doubt that they are), then Mr. Kiernan's can't be very far away from those of H.P. Lovecraft. Anyway, the author is another comic book and movie person, but his credits are mostly in prose form. Good for him. He's pretty prolific, too, so double good for him.

Caitlín R. Kiernan's story in Weird Tales #367 is called "Night Fishing." It's nine pages long, plus a full-page, illustrated title page. This is the most psychologically and thematically complex of all of the stories so far in the Cosmic Horror Issue. It's probably the best in stylistic terms, too. I especially like an image from his story: "patient as a spider." "Night Fishing" is also the first to refer overtly to the two main themes or images I have identified in this issue. More on that in a while.

Like "A Ghost Story for Christmas" by Paul Cornell, "Night Fishing" begins with a meta image on its title page. In Mr. Cornell's story, that meta image is a picture of a television set showing on its screen an image of John Mills in the British TV serial Quatermass, broadcast in 1979. (Thanks to reader Mike Harwood for identifying the source and the actor.) In Mr. Kiernan's story, the meta image is a picture of an office with a picture on the wall, an image of the painting "Christina's World" by Andrew Wyeth (1948). So the illustration is a picture of a picture. We as readers, then, are looking at a picture of a picture of a woman looking at a house. Could there be in the house a picture on a wall? And in that picture could there be another picture, or even a picture of a picture?

(Actually, the illustration on the title page is a printed image made from an image engraved on a printer's plate and then transferred to a roller--assuming the magazine was printed by an offset process--of an original digital image that does not exist in the real world, showing a picture of an image of a woman looking at the image of a house. In other words, we are at remove after remove from any real, original, physical thing.)

"Night Fishing" is about a troubled man who is undergoing psychiatric treatment. Or is it merely psychological treatment? I have already written about some lack of precision in Weird Tales #367. In "Night Fishing," the narrator lets us know in his first sentence that he's going to a psychiatrist (pg. 33, col. 1). A while later, the psychiatrist is now a psychologist (pg. 33, col. 2). Then he goes back to being a psychiatrist again. There's an important difference to be made between the two, as a psychiatrist is a medical doctor who may treat his or her patients using drugs. In other words, psychiatry takes what could be interpreted as a materialistic approach to problems that may not be materialistic after all. I forgot to mention that Caitlín R. Kiernan is an atheist. And I forgot to mention that his narrator is a physicist.

There are lots of brandnames and a lot of product placement in "Night Fishing." Taco Bell, Coleman, Old Crow and Jack Daniels, Mason jars, Craftsman, Crayola crayons, Xanax, Case knife, TV Guide, Hershey's. There are other proper nouns, too: Snuffy Smith, Red Angus bulls, Sunset Boulevard, Mandelbrot set, Alabaman place names, Schrödinger and Heisenberg, Eisenhower, the King James Bible. Some of that is okay. Some of it makes for concrete detail and lends verisimilitude to a story. But to come across, as you read, a brandname in every few sentences or paragraphs in a story of just nine pages becomes a distraction. It points to something larger going on.

So why do they do it?

Why do writers of today so easily turn to using brandnames in their works? I guess it's a kind of conditioning. They grew up in a consumerist culture, and it all comes naturally to them. They think in terms of what they can buy, or what they might buy one day. In this culture, we are, every day, bombarded with commercial messages. Our favorite names are brandnames. Again and again in the comments section of this blog, I have asked readers to refrain from mentioning where they have bought this thing or that. If you're going to talk about a book, talk about the book, not about where you bought it. Sadly, even fans of fiction and readers of literature are commercially minded. I guess, too, that if your life is largely emptied out of real, human things, you have only commercial products with which to share your thoughts, your feelings, and your days. You develop relationships with them and they become your friends and lovers. Maybe that's one of the reasons that hoarding has become such a problem in our society. People objectify other people and humanize material things. We have it all backwards.

Many people, especially on the left, complain about materialism--commercial materialism--without understanding that to be of the left--Marxist, socialist, generically progressive--is to be, necessarily, a materialist. Erich Fromm, one of the Frankfurt School, was of the left. And yet in his book The Art of Loving (1956), he diagnosed a problem in which people see each other as material objects rather than as real human beings (a real human being being not material but non-material). In seeking after love, we commodify each other. We engage in decision-making as if we were in the marketplace. This is especially pronounced in a liberal, i.e., capitalist society. (This is obviously a Marxian critique. And now I wonder if there is product placement in the work of China Miéville, a known--and whiny--Marxist.) So maybe there is a similar kind of commodification carried out by the artists in our society, a commodification not only within and of their works but also of themselves. Commercial products have become an object of art, equal in importance perhaps to feelings, meaning, relationships, and so on, the original and true currency in the making of art. (Yes, I see the irony here in using the word currency.) And so writers in Weird Tales and elsewhere are like children watching Saturday morning cartoons, focused on the commercials and the brandnames as much as on their favorite shows. What's next as an epigraph? A jingle? A slogan?

But at least Caitlín R. Kiernan knows that there is a bird called a mockingbird and a snake called a water snake. Authors can name every brand of TV show, movie, comic book, and video game they have ever consumed, but they don't know the difference between a bass and a basswood. They should work on that.

To be continued . . .

Copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

What Is Cosmic Horror?

Weird Tales #367, from 2023, is a themed issue. The theme is cosmic horror. I'm not sure that a themed issue is a good idea. What happens if you as a reader don't like the theme? Well, you go elsewhere for your reading, and your money follows you. That was one of the really good things about the original Weird Tales: no matter what your tastes were when it came to weird fiction, fantasy, or even science fiction, you would probably find something you liked in every issue.

There has been a proliferation of genres, sub-genres, and sub-sub-genres in genre fiction. It's pretty ridiculous actually. I'm not sure why there should be such proliferation except that I think everybody is trying to be extraordinary. Democracy has its discontents. People ask themselves, if we're all equal, how am I to stand out from everybody else? How am I to show myself to be above others? One way of doing it, I guess, is to make yourself extraordinary within a subset or sub-subset of our larger society and culture, even if you have to invent that subset or sub-subset for yourself. The other day, I wrote about an interview that one contributor to the Cosmic Horror Issue conducted with another. In his introductory paragraph to that interview, Nicholas Diak wrote of "The Forest Gate" by Samantha Underhill: "Using cosmic horror and existential dread poetic styles, this poem . . ." and so on. So I guess cosmic horror and existential dread are poetic styles and the proliferation extends into not only genres but also forms and styles. I have used the word proliferation here. Actually I think it's a balkanization of culture, more accurately an atomization. People working in culture are in pursuit of the infinitesimal, for if you can divide culture finely enough, then you can be extraordinary within your own self-created infinitesimal. If your world is your navel, then you can easily occupy your whole world. You can be within it the greatest of anything and everything you can think of.

So what is cosmic horror? Well I'll let you know that my title is a trick. I don't know what it is. But then I didn't invent the thing. I'm not sure that it even exists. The other day, I pointed out that cosmos and chaos are opposites. Cosmos is order. It is the universe. It's where we live and it's a place governed by laws. Although there is emptiness in the universe, the emptiness is not what counts. The important parts lie among the emptiness. If time is what keeps everything from happening all at once (a quote attributed to Ray Cummings), then emptiness--space--is what keeps everything from happening all in the same place.

Chaos is cosmos' opposite. It is disorder, confusion, emptiness. The Online Etymology Dictionary explains its meaning as "gaping void; empty, immeasurable space." The original Greek word, khaos, means "abyss." Those two words, void and abyss, appear again and again in the Cosmic Horror Issue. That was my point in suggesting that cosmic horror should probably be called chaotic horror, for the horror appears to be in encounters with or contemplation of the void or the abyss. Alternatively, this invented, theoretical, or critical (versus natural, organic, or evolved) sub-sub-genre could be called abyssal horror or voidal horror. There isn't any such word as voidal, I guess, but if we can invent one thing, we can invent another.

I have a copy of Otto Struve's Elementary Astronomy, published in 1959 and reprinted in 1961. Struve's book is brimming with black-and-white photographs of immense galaxies and countless stars. In the first page of text, there are numbers representing immense quantities: 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the observable universe, a like number of cubic inches of almost empty space in the Milky Way galaxy. That's a lot of zeroes, kept from emptiness or void by an initial non-zero integer. More such numbers appear on the next page. These, then, are cosmic scales, cosmic here having mathematical value but being empty of any value judgments, or at least any outright negative value judgments. Dr. Struve was a dispassionate scientist after all. Even though they are cosmic, we can still write about things of this scale. Otto Struve did it in his textbook. Other authors have done it in their fiction. I should add that zero represents nothing. The numeral looks like a hole, an opening, a gaping maw.

I guess cosmic horror is an expression or a feeling of horror that arises from apprehending or contemplating the cosmic scale of the universe. Maybe it's not the cosmos itself that gives rise to this feeling, though. Again, cosmos is order. Chaos is its opposite. In the biblical story of the creation of the universe, what we call cosmos was preceded by chaos, emptiness, a void:

Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep

or:

the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep

or:

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

(Genesis 1:2)

We live in an atheistic and nihilistic age. Maybe the horror that some people feel in their contemplation of the universe is the horror not of cosmos but of the void that preceded it. In intervening and in his act of creation, God put an end to chaos. The void, which was non-existence, is now doubly non-existent. There cannot be a void if there is cosmos. But people don't believe in God any longer. I suspect that many if not most of the authors and poets who contributed to the Cosmic Horror Issue are non-believers, if not atheists, materialists, nihilists, or even anti-natalists, as Thomas Ligotti (not a contributor to this issue) so famously (or infamously) is. And so if there is not God to keep back the void--if it can poke through wherever he is not on watch--then horror might emerge and erupt and engulf. If you don't believe in God, then maybe you must fear the void.

In his first paragraph of Elementary Astronomy, Dr. Struve wrote that the word astronomy is from two Greek words, the first, obviously, for "star," the second, significantly, for "law." To fear or to feel horror at the great scale of the universe in terms of both space and time is, I think, off the mark. It is to ignore the fundamental order and lawfulness of the universe. There are people who feel small or insignificant, their lives essentially meaningless, when they they think about the immensity of the universe. Why should that be? They're having, I think, an inappropriate response. I would say that their response is actually self-centered, possibly tipping into a kind of solipsism. If you feel this way, you need to get over yourself. If you think these things, you're actually putting yourself at the center of the universe in that you're thinking about the effect the universe has on you and that your feeling this way is somehow significant, that it is indicative of something that is out there instead of in here. Or maybe you're trying to make of yourself the universe, or vice versa.

Carl Sagan had a better view of it, I think. He saw us as the products--perhaps the end-products--of an orderly universe. "We are star stuff," he famously said in his series Cosmos. The stars have existed so that we might also exist and grow to contemplate them, ourselves, and the cosmos in which we live. We are the mind and consciousness of the cosmos. He gloried in the immensity and magnificence of that great structure, process, and more after which he named his show. I still remember a montage from Cosmos over which exultant music, composed by Beethoven, played, a montage of us, made from star stuff, formed from the dust of stars, set about our tasks of living, thinking, loving, and creating.

At the end of his novel Contact, Dr. Sagan indicated that the universe is actually designed, a curious conclusion for an atheist. And though he might have been an atheist, he was obviously not a nihilist, nor was he negative, depressed, anxious, or fearful in his contemplation of the universe. He could hardly have studied it and accomplished what he did if he had felt those kinds of feelings. In that he was wise. Those who are horrified by the cosmos are, I think, unwise.

I suspect that cosmic horror is actually not based on anything especially serious or meaningful. As Nicholas Diak wrote in his essay, it's actually something done for fun. We like thrills. We like to be scared. Especially when we return from reading, return to what is safe and sure. I think it best to look at it this way, that cosmic horror in storytelling is done for fun. Unfortunately, most of the works in the Cosmic Horror Issue are pretty limited in their approach to cosmic horror. Again, there seem to be two main themes or images in these pages: the void or the abyss, and the alien presence. If there is a cosmos through which chaos occasionally breaks through, and if there is actually a genre of cosmic horror, then the possibilities for telling stories within that genre would seem vast, theoretically endless. Why limit ourselves? Why have the authors of cosmic horror so limited themselves? Maybe it's because we as a culture--and the creators of our culture in particular--have run out of ideas. And maybe we have run out of skills, too, and so we accomplish almost nothing of note.

Now comes the really fun part in all of this, for opposite cosmic horror is cosmic insight, cosmic happiness, cosmic transcendence. Richard Matheson, a teller of weird tales, wrote the screenplay for The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). In the end, that film shows itself as a vehicle for an uplifting, even exultant, philosophical and theological conclusion. Here are the final words spoken by the title character (with my own paragraphing of a transcript of the narration):

I was continuing to shrink, to become . . . What? The infinitesimal? What was I? Still a human being? Or was I the man of the future? If there were other bursts of radiation, other clouds drifting across seas and continents, would other beings follow me into this vast new world?

So close, the infinitesimal and the infinite. But suddenly I knew they were really the two ends of the same concept. The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet, like the closing of a gigantic circle.

I looked up, as if somehow I would grasp the heavens, the universe, worlds beyond number. God's silver tapestry spread across the night.

And in that moment I knew the answer to the riddle of the infinite. I had thought in terms of Man's own limited dimension. I had presumed upon Nature. That existence begins and ends is Man's conception, not Nature's.

And I felt my body dwindling, melting, becoming nothing. My fears melted away and in their place came acceptance. All this vast majesty of creation, it had to mean something. And then I meant something too.

Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something too.

To God, there is no zero.

I still exist.

"My fears melted away," he says. "To God, there is no zero." Those, I think, are proper responses as we contemplate the cosmos. And I should point out that The Incredible Shrinking Man closes with swelling music played over photographs of the stars and galaxies, just as in Otto Struve's book, which is full of so many zeroes, all of them made from nothing into something by God's word and law.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley