This whole crush thing is messing with my head in a big way, but I feel a little more lucid now(if "lucid" is the right word). There is something about being emotionally torn that feels a great deal like an out of body experience. I realise now that I may have made a mistake by sharing what I did with someone I'm interested in(like that), but I have been so affected by what I found today, that the depressing thought of having to severe my ties with him because I became too intimate too soon is not enough to undo the euphoria that comes with reading
Ghost Stories for the Dead as many times as I have.
A few days after that I sent him a link to
The Red Tower and he seemed to like it. He said that it was gripping, but it seemed like something someone would only dream up if they were on powerful drugs. I mentioned LSD and that's the explanation we settled on. It's unlikely that Ligotti would need LSD to dream up something like that. I don't. And I have much less experience(read: none) writing weird fiction.
A few months ago, I felt something quite intense that caused my heart to hurt and I had a weird thought without the help of LSD. My heart hurts a lot, but this time was different somehow. It felt like there was a tiny goblin running around inside my heart, ripping pieces of muscle off my the walls of my heart. This image started to grow inside my mind, even turning into a little story about a horror house having one room with walls made of flesh. Inside this room is small, sexless creature with long sharp talons and an unmoving smirk. It darts back and forth with an unnatural speed, grabbing chunks of meat and ripping the chunks off the wall, throwing them onto a growing pile in the middle of the room. The fleshy tearing can be hear throughout the house which seems to visibly wince with every mutilation. I kinda got lost in the image, it felt like sublimation.
The first thing I ever read by Thomas Ligotti was quote I came across when I was trying to learn more about him. It was from The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. When I read it I felt an overwhelming darkness come over me, painless but heavy and almost suffocating. It effortlessly sucked the little light I had left right out of me and then sank to the ground before disappearing into the earth. It was as if something horrible had been unveiled before my eyes and I couldn't stop staring into its terrible face. I understood, for a moment what profound bleakness must overcome those who had ever seen me naked. To look at things as they truly are and to have it finally confirmed that this world is a material hell in which to be born is a curse and suffering is a trait of existence in it. I realised that I was completely powerless. It was a relief.
The more I think about the things he says and write, the more I understand that I don't read his works to learn more about pessimism or suffering(how much more can there be for me to learn on either of those subjects?), I read him so that I can feel less alone in the world. And I learned a little bit about some people, like me, feel the need to consume horror in a world teeming with it. To hear my thoughts and feelings articulated by someone so much more intelligent than I am.
"For in the new dream beings-wrenched from eternity and returned to the earth-are capable of anything from indiscretion to atrocity. Those who have suffered most know how to inflict it best-it’s a law of the universe. The suicides, the murdered . . . the unfulfilled, the broken-hearted: veterans of the extraordinary suffering and mercenaries of its perpetuation."
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