Enjoyed this! I’ve just finished reading Tim Lilburn’s ‘Living In The World As If It Were Home’, which seems to speak to the same existential questions but from a different perspective. Drawing on the ‘Negative Way’ of mystical Christianity, Lilburn posits that the desire to know the other is fundamentally unfulfillable, and that it is this very unquenchable thirst that brings us to a deeper awe, a greater sense of presence in the world. In this way, the movement towards the other does end in madness or recoiling fear.
(Not sure how coherent this is as a reply, but I felt a connection of some sort as I was reading your piece.)
I definitely see the thematic resonance. The mystery of the other. The question of how sensing this mystery vividly and intimately deepens experience. Definitely there.
"What counts is the actual understanding—the realization and recognition—that the one who seemed trapped within the vision was always and actually the one in whom the vision was unfolding, whether that vision involved a goose in a bottle or a person in a cosmic nightmare." That's a great way to end it. And I also think that's a novel interpretation of Lovecraft. Isn't it interesting that the essay just unfolded from you as an inspiration this morning? Your writing has a natural structure and momentum to it, so it supports the idea that we discover the form of our writing in the act of writing itself.
I'm glad it resonated, Sean. And yes, these experiences of flow and structure that just kind of present themselves, and that unfold under their own motivating logic, really to reinforce and underscore the point, don't they? That natural coherence of one's own self that William Stafford referred to as evident in deeply honest writing across time.
The goose in a bottle is disturbing to me; I am unable to unsee all the goose poop collecting in that bottle, which must be symbolic of humanity's trashing of our planet.
I love it when someone insightfully interrogates a metaphor to draw further value from it. The question of excrement piling up in the famous Zen goose bottle definitely strikes me as such a case.
This particular line of thinking has been on my mind recently too. I just finished reading Ligotti’s “The Shadows, the Darkness,” which was a fantastic cap on Teatro Grottesco. In that story, the central figure, Grossvogel, is compelled into what one might justly call enlightenment, though he has to suffer an excruciating gastrointestinal illness in order to arrive there (not unlike Ligotti himself).
There is a striking parallel between the Zen Master who claps, forcing his student out of his intellectual entanglement, and Grossvogel, who inflicts the same disease on his followers, thus bringing them face to face with the same wretched truth that he was forced to contend with. In both cases, those seeking enlightenment end up running headfirst into that horror that is so particular to the human experience: subjectivity.
Yes and definitely. “The Shadow, the Darkness” is prime Ligottian fare, a literary and philosophical feast. One of Tom’s main inspirations for the character of Grossvogel and the particular tone and character of the spiritual sight or enlightenment that visited him was, as I recall, the work of U. G. Krishnamurti, which I believe Tom was reading a lot of at the time when he wrote this one. U. G.’s “catastrophe” of an enlightenment, as he called it, was the proximate inspiration for the story of Grossvogel’s equally catastrophic awakening experience, which led him to see beyond what people normally see, and to possess capacity for transmitting that same annihilating vision to others.
I first read this story in 1999 in editor Al Sarrantonio’s anthology 999, and I still vividly remember sitting in my office at the mortgage company where I was working at the time and drinking in the text in huge gulps—an act that, I can tell you, imparted quite a different emotional tone to the rest of the day’s financially focused interactions with customers than what might have been customary.
Ive often thought that Lovecrafts view of man as a kind of civilized, intellectual investigative process into the enormity and horror of the cosmos, (I.e the titanic beings that are either indifferent or hostile to humans and could wipe us out at at time) as
just basically driving humanity to madness and a dark age again, forever, as being kind of conservative.. or it has no real vision of the future. I think that connects with your idea that it his entire conception in the first place is developed and constrained by the ego/ self in the first place. Which is interesting.
Your point about the Zen Koan, that we put ourselves in the glass bottle, accumulating ourselves in a way that we would break if we tried to get out, is answering a question I think I am also dwelling on. How do we shape ourselves to be constitutive of a larger whole. These days it seems like there could be many possible larger entities on the horizon in some form or another, real and imagined.
The response cannot be purely rational, or the mind would break. A loosely related idea of the disappearance of the Dwemer in the elder scrolls series. Essentially a metaphysically logical positivisthyper rationalistic people collectively realizethey can’t understand the ultimate truth of reality through rationalism and completely disappear without a trace.
I think the koan contains this sense of disappearing while also irrationally holding something that makes us human. I am thinking Heidegger later conception of Being may hold something form of the answer. How you can’t know what anything really is in the light of the clearing, and you listen to what reveals itself when you step outside of yourself. This also involves a disappearance to me of the self. Which I believe relies on some form of trust or care as what you hurl out there into the clearing.
ooohhh, excited to read this later today!
Enjoyed this! I’ve just finished reading Tim Lilburn’s ‘Living In The World As If It Were Home’, which seems to speak to the same existential questions but from a different perspective. Drawing on the ‘Negative Way’ of mystical Christianity, Lilburn posits that the desire to know the other is fundamentally unfulfillable, and that it is this very unquenchable thirst that brings us to a deeper awe, a greater sense of presence in the world. In this way, the movement towards the other does end in madness or recoiling fear.
(Not sure how coherent this is as a reply, but I felt a connection of some sort as I was reading your piece.)
I definitely see the thematic resonance. The mystery of the other. The question of how sensing this mystery vividly and intimately deepens experience. Definitely there.
"What counts is the actual understanding—the realization and recognition—that the one who seemed trapped within the vision was always and actually the one in whom the vision was unfolding, whether that vision involved a goose in a bottle or a person in a cosmic nightmare." That's a great way to end it. And I also think that's a novel interpretation of Lovecraft. Isn't it interesting that the essay just unfolded from you as an inspiration this morning? Your writing has a natural structure and momentum to it, so it supports the idea that we discover the form of our writing in the act of writing itself.
I'm glad it resonated, Sean. And yes, these experiences of flow and structure that just kind of present themselves, and that unfold under their own motivating logic, really to reinforce and underscore the point, don't they? That natural coherence of one's own self that William Stafford referred to as evident in deeply honest writing across time.
The goose in a bottle is disturbing to me; I am unable to unsee all the goose poop collecting in that bottle, which must be symbolic of humanity's trashing of our planet.
I love it when someone insightfully interrogates a metaphor to draw further value from it. The question of excrement piling up in the famous Zen goose bottle definitely strikes me as such a case.
This particular line of thinking has been on my mind recently too. I just finished reading Ligotti’s “The Shadows, the Darkness,” which was a fantastic cap on Teatro Grottesco. In that story, the central figure, Grossvogel, is compelled into what one might justly call enlightenment, though he has to suffer an excruciating gastrointestinal illness in order to arrive there (not unlike Ligotti himself).
There is a striking parallel between the Zen Master who claps, forcing his student out of his intellectual entanglement, and Grossvogel, who inflicts the same disease on his followers, thus bringing them face to face with the same wretched truth that he was forced to contend with. In both cases, those seeking enlightenment end up running headfirst into that horror that is so particular to the human experience: subjectivity.
Yes and definitely. “The Shadow, the Darkness” is prime Ligottian fare, a literary and philosophical feast. One of Tom’s main inspirations for the character of Grossvogel and the particular tone and character of the spiritual sight or enlightenment that visited him was, as I recall, the work of U. G. Krishnamurti, which I believe Tom was reading a lot of at the time when he wrote this one. U. G.’s “catastrophe” of an enlightenment, as he called it, was the proximate inspiration for the story of Grossvogel’s equally catastrophic awakening experience, which led him to see beyond what people normally see, and to possess capacity for transmitting that same annihilating vision to others.
I first read this story in 1999 in editor Al Sarrantonio’s anthology 999, and I still vividly remember sitting in my office at the mortgage company where I was working at the time and drinking in the text in huge gulps—an act that, I can tell you, imparted quite a different emotional tone to the rest of the day’s financially focused interactions with customers than what might have been customary.
Awesome, another miserable writer to add to my increasingly miserable to-read list :D
Ive often thought that Lovecrafts view of man as a kind of civilized, intellectual investigative process into the enormity and horror of the cosmos, (I.e the titanic beings that are either indifferent or hostile to humans and could wipe us out at at time) as
just basically driving humanity to madness and a dark age again, forever, as being kind of conservative.. or it has no real vision of the future. I think that connects with your idea that it his entire conception in the first place is developed and constrained by the ego/ self in the first place. Which is interesting.
Your point about the Zen Koan, that we put ourselves in the glass bottle, accumulating ourselves in a way that we would break if we tried to get out, is answering a question I think I am also dwelling on. How do we shape ourselves to be constitutive of a larger whole. These days it seems like there could be many possible larger entities on the horizon in some form or another, real and imagined.
The response cannot be purely rational, or the mind would break. A loosely related idea of the disappearance of the Dwemer in the elder scrolls series. Essentially a metaphysically logical positivisthyper rationalistic people collectively realizethey can’t understand the ultimate truth of reality through rationalism and completely disappear without a trace.
I think the koan contains this sense of disappearing while also irrationally holding something that makes us human. I am thinking Heidegger later conception of Being may hold something form of the answer. How you can’t know what anything really is in the light of the clearing, and you listen to what reveals itself when you step outside of yourself. This also involves a disappearance to me of the self. Which I believe relies on some form of trust or care as what you hurl out there into the clearing.