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Of wars renewed, which shall commemorate
Some enmity of wivern-headed kings
Even to the brink of time.
(85–91)
The interlude in this first section (113–71) suggests for the first time the limits of the narrator’s control over his realm, and foreshadows his reduction to a helpless and inconsequential mote at the end of the poem. In spite of having earlier asserted his “omniscience” (50), the narrator now encounters a “mighty city” (114) whose origin he does not know:
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But
whose
hands
Were sculptors of its doors, and columns wrought
To semblance of prodigious blooms of old,
No eremite hath lingered there to say,
And no man comes to learn . . .
(118–22)
By line 152 the narrator attempts to reclaim his omnipotence:
Surveyed
From this my throne, as from a central sun,
The pageantries of worlds and cycles pass . . . (152–54)
And yet there are chinks in his armour even here. He mentions “The face of some averted god” (160), but appears not to know his identity; later, there are “hooded stars inscrutable to God” (168) and also, one supposes, inscrutable to him.
By the beginning of the second section (171f.) the narrator tries to take charge of his visions by bodily entering them:
I am
The neophyte who serves a nameless god,
Within whose fane the fanes of Hecatompylos
Were arks the Titan worshippers might bear,
Or flags to pave the threshold; or I am
The god himself . . .
(174–79)
There is scarcely a greater way of asserting one’s power than by claiming godhead, and yet we have already read of those “stars inscrutable to God,” which suggests that in this cosmos gods are anything but omniscient; and earlier we read of “plains with no horizon, where a god / Might lose his way for centuries” (147–48): like those of Dunsany, Smith’s gods seem all too pathetically fragile in the midst of a vast and unknowable cosmos.
Then, beginning with the third section (242f.), the narrator begins his long descent from emperor to pawn; from pursuer of cosmic visions to pursued:
Hark!
What word was whispered in a tongue unknown,
In crypts of some impenetrable world?
Whose is the dark, dethroning secrecy
I cannot share, though I am king of suns,
And king therewith of strong eternity,
Whose gnomons with their swords of shadow guard
My gates, and slay the intruder?
(242–49)
In line 245, “dethroning” is of especial note, explicitly contrasting with the
“throne” (153) the narrator earlier claimed as his own. He now confesses that
“Fear is born / In crypts below the nadir” (258–59), and his “heart suspends / Its
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clamor as within the clutch of death” (275–76). At 283f. the narrator strives to re-assert his power by calling up visions of beauty, but instead of “meads of shining moly” (284) he finds instead “A corpse the ebbing water will not keep” (289). He flees to a mountaintop, but a huge “silver python” (305) pursues him. He summons a hippogriff to rescue him and take him to a remote planet “where the out-
wearied wings of time / Might pause and furl for respite” (321–22). Here he finds a castle that appears to be the antithesis of the hostility he has found throughout the cosmos:
There I find
A lonely castle, calm, and unbeset
Save by the purple spears of amaranth,
And leafing iris tender-sworded. Walls
of flushed marble, wonderful with rose,
And domes like golden bubbles, and minarets
That take the clouds as coronal—these are mine,
For voiceless looms the peaceful barbican,
And the heavy-teethed portcullis hangs aloft
To grin a welcome.
(328–37)
This castle is “unbeset” by enemies; the only weapons are “spears” of delicate and
“tender-sworded” flowers. Even the “heavy-teethed” portcullis is rendered harmless in that it “grin[s] a welcome.” But the peace is short-lived. A “chuckle sharp as crepitating ice” (353) is heard, and the narrator stumbles into a
monster-guarded
room,
Where marble apes with wings of griffins crowd
On walls an evil sculptor wrought, and beasts
Wherein the sloth and vampire-bat unite,
Pendulous by their toes, of tarnished bronze,
Usurp the shadowy interval of lamps
That hang from ebon arches.
(357–63)
The narrator is again struck with a “fear / That found no name in Babel” (368–69), and he flees from a series of horrors, each worse than the last, including
a wan, enormous Worm, whose bulk,
Tumid with all the rottenness of kings,
Overflows its arms with fold on creased fold
Obscenely bloating.
(386–89)
Now the narrator hears a mutter “from beyond the horizon’s rim” (403) and real-
ises what it is:
They come,
The Sabaoth of retribution, drawn
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From all dread spheres that knew my trespassing,
And led by vengeful fiends and dire alastors
That owned my sway aforetime!
(415–19)
These may be the most important lines of the poem, and mark the point where the narrator can no longer maintain his pretence of control over the cosmos. Instead, he becomes aware that his previous “sway” was only a sham, and that a paltry human can never have suzerainty over the cosmos. All the monsters of history, legend, and myth arise to pursue the hapless narrator, and his flight is abject:
In my tenfold fear,
A monstrous dread unnamed in any hell,
I rise, and flee with the fleeing wind for wings,
And in a trice the wizard palace reels,
And spiring to a single tower of flame,
Goes out, and leaves nor shard nor ember! Flown
Beyond the world upon that fleeing wind
I reach the gulf s irrespirable verge,
Where fails the strongest storm for breath, and fall,
Supportless, through the nadir-plunged gloom,
Beyond the scope and vision of the sun,
To other skies and systems.
(465–76)
As we begin the fourth section (476f.), we find the narrator in a peculiar realm that the “Argument” terms “a gulf into which falls in cataracts the ruin and rubble of the universe.” This description does not seem immediately to apply to the region in which the narrator at first finds himself, for it appears to be simply another exotic world not entirely different in kind from the one he left. But eventually the narrator finds that the lush trees around him fall away, and he sees “an empty desert, all ablaze / With amethysts and rubies, and the dust / Of garnets or carnelians” (499–
501). The symbolism appears to suggest the uselessness of these valued gems in this realm of waste and vacancy. Later “the grinding sands give place / To stone or
metal” (506–7), and still later:
A hundred streams of shattered marble run,
And streams of broken steel, and streams of bronze,
Like to the ruin of all the wars of time,
To plunge with clangor of timeless cataracts
Adown the gulfs eternal.
(514–18)
These substances represent the building materials—and, by an elementary meton-
ymy, the entire civilisations—of all the cultures of
earth: primitive man is represented by stone and bronze, classical culture by marble, and the modern age by
steel. All have met a similar ignominious fate at the end of time. And when the narrator follows “a river of steel and a river of bronze” (519) whose ripples are
106 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
“loud and timeless as the clash / Of a million lutes” (520–21), we understand that both the material accomplishments and the aesthetic achievements of mankind,
and perhaps the entire cosmos, are no more. The conclusion is now inevitable:
But when I reach
The verge, and seek through sun-deafening gloom
To measure with my gaze the dread descent,
I see a tiny star within the depths—
A light that stays me while the wings of doom
Convene their thickening thousands: for the star
Increases, taking to its hueless orb,
With all the speed of horror-changed dreams,
The light as of a million million moons;
And floating up through gulfs and glooms eclipsed
It grows and grows, a huge white eyeless Face
That fills the void and fills the universe,
And bloats against the limits of the world
With lips of flame that open . . .
(568–82)
The universe is finished, and the narrator cannot complete his line because he has perished along with everything else in the cosmos.
Let us now return to the question of how convincing is this portrayal of the
rise and fall of the universe in this poem. As stated earlier, the title leads one to suspect merely a farrago of drug-induced delusions; but under this interpretation the subtitle, “The Apocalypse of Evil,” could have no coherent meaning. Smith
states in the “Argument” that the drug was “used here as a symbol”—or perhaps
as a vehicle for the envisioning of the cosmic spectacle. The subtitle clearly points to some cataclysm that will occur at some point in the poem, a cataclysm that will affect not merely the narrator but the world in which he finds himself. In effect, the narrative structure of The Hashish-Eater should be evident even without Smith’s
“Argument”: no aesthetic work should require such an external aid to explicate it, and a close reading will establish the direction and purpose of the poem perhaps better than any prose account, whether by Smith or by anyone else.
How much the poem and its symbolism mirror Smith’s own philosophy is
something that may be left for later study; but the poem may help to shed light on a recent issue in Smith studies. In a provocative article, Steve Behrends queried whether Smith should be regarded as a cosmicist or a misanthrope, and suggests that the latter is closer to Smith’s own view. But The Hashish-Eater may indicate that Smith’s misanthropy (of which his letters offer abundant evidence) was born in part through his cosmicism. In a manner very similar to Lovecraft’s, Smith’s perception of the vastness of the cosmos could have suggested to him the grotesque puniness of the human puppets who inhabit one tiny corner of it for a twinkling of an eye; and to a man of Smith’s keen sensitivity, the spectacle of humanity’s ignorance of its own
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insignificance, or even its pompous claims of actual importance in the cosmos, may have triggered a contempt that ultimately developed into actual misanthropy. Con-versely, misanthropy could have led Smith to seek release from petty human con-
cerns and failings in the vastness of the cosmos. Whatever the case, misanthropy and cosmicism need not be perceived as mutually exclusive: one could easily have led to the other. And the “indifference” that Behrends rightly sees as the hallmark of Lovecraft’s cosmicism may not be so different from misanthropy as one might think: indifference to human affairs may well be the purest form of misanthropy. In any
event, The Hashish-Eater may occupy a significant place in Smith’s thought as well as his work, as a narrative of cosmic decline and the hubris of the derisive little human insects who are helpless to avert it.
Notes
1. First published in Klarkash-Ton No. 1 (June 1988): 22.
2. No recent editions of the poem—the Necronomicon Press edition, the Arkham
House edition ( Selected Poems, 1971), nor the Hippocampus Press edition ( The Last Oblivion, 2002)—print the line numbers of the poem, but I shall refer to the text in general by line numbers.
Works Cited
Behrends, Steve. “Clark Ashton Smith: Cosmicist or Misanthrope?,” The Dark Eidolon No. 2 (July 1989): 12–14.
Smith, Clark Ashton. The Hashish-Eater; or, The Apocalypse of Evil. West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1989.
The Babel of Visions:
The Structuration of Clark Ashton Smith’s
The Hashish-Eater
Dan Clore
Clark Ashton Smith’s celebrated poem The Hashish-Eater derives by expansion from a matrix that can be paraphrased with some such term as cosmic consciousness or mystic attainment, together with another interwoven matrix of conflict in the twin forms of tyranny and rebellion. Every detail of the text derives, directly or indirectly, from these matrices, which technically form a single matrix through the agency of the poem’s title. However, before proceeding to a textual explication, some collateral, co-textual evidence seems in order. Strange Shadows includes Smith’s “Argument of ‘The Hashish-Eater’” which also appears in the Necronomicon Press edition of The Hashish-Eater and runs as follows:
By some exaltation and expansion of cosmic consciousness, rather than a mere
drug, used here as a symbol, the dreamer is carried to a height from which he beholds the strange and multiform scenes of existence in alien worlds; he maintains control of his visions, evokes and dismisses them at will. Then, in a state similar to the Buddhic plane, he is able to mingle with them and identify himself with their actors and objects. Still later, there is a transition in which the visions, and the monstrous and demonic forces he has evoked, begin to overpower him, to hurry him on helplessly, under circumstances of fright and panic. Armies of fiends and monsters, many drawn from the worlds of myth and fable, muster against him, pursue him
through a terrible cosmos, and he is driven at last to the verge of a gulf into which falls in cataracts the ruin and rubble of the universe; a gulf from which the face of infinity itself, in all its awful blankness, beyond stars and worlds, beyond created things, even fiends and monsters, rises up to confront him. (245–46)
Strange Shadows supplements this with a quotation from a letter of Smith’s that calls The Hashish-Eater “a much misunderstood poem, which was intended as a study in the possibilities of cosmic consciousness, drawing heavily on myth and fable for its imagery. It is my own theory that if the infinite worlds of the cosmos were opened to human vision, the visionary would be overwhelmed by horror in
the end, like the hero of this poem” (264).
We need not worry about the “intentional fallacy” of new-critic-speak in quot-
ing such evidence: it merely provides explicit confirmation of the text’s own im-
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plicit significance. In any case, a text is not its author’s intentions, and such resort to co-textual evidence constitutes a normal method of interpretation. Indeed, every sign has its significance only by virtue of its placement into a gestalt with other signs; a receiver normally uses other messages emitted by a sender to help infer the correct meaning of a message.
The relationship of the title to the matrices of the poem has become obscured
by changes in the culturally determined semantic encyclopedia. The hashish sememe that the title alludes to includes semes that differ from the current sememe. The sememe Smith draws on derives from a literary tradition that begins, properly speaking, with De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. That work, although dealing with opium rather than hashish
or marijuana, set the pattern for the works on hashish that followed it. It emphasizes the dreams or visions created by the drug’s influence, the experience’s gradual conversion from positive to negative, and the similarity between the drug-state and mystic states as described in eastern religions. Three influential works that follow it, more or less, on these points, come in Théophile Gautier’s “The Hashish Club,” Charles Baudelaire’s Les Paradis Artificiels (translated as The Artificial Paradise) in a section titled “The Poem of Hashish,” and Fitz-Hugh Ludlow’s The Hasheesh Eater. Even the title of the last clearly shows De Quincey’s influence; it and Baudelaire’s work had an especial influence on conceptions of the effects of hashish. The third point I listed above, the similarity of the drugs’ effects to mystic states, has an even greater relevance to hashish, as a number of Muslim and Hindu sects use the drug specifically to induce mystic states—most notably, the Noble Order of Assassins, a term that popular etymology derived from “hashishin” or hashish-eater (a more likely etymological meaning: “saint” or “holy man”)—as does also the Ethiopian Coptic Church (the oldest surviving Christian church, oddly enough).
In addition, works that treated mystic experiences, such as William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, which particularly instances ether and other anesthetics as producing mystic experiences.
The title therefore clearly derives from the “mystic attainment” sememe. Fur-
ther, it provides the motivation for the “cosmic consciousness,” for the nature of the mystic state as one of visions, and for the progression from positive to negative over the narrative’s course. It motivates the mystic attainment in the first place by providing its cause. The other elements figure as direct consequences. In addition, the title provides, as a metonym of the hashish itself, the hashish-eater, signaling that this character will serve as the poem’s speaker, following an oft-used poetic convention that allows a poet to give voice to another person or being (the rhetorical figure pro-sopopoeia), allowing the expression of information not normally available to others—