The brief ninth paragraph describes the world into which he falls “as falls a meteor-stone” (479), a common metaphor for the fall of Lucifer/Satan. Here he wanders through a bizarre forest of fungi whose tops “clamber hour by hour / To touch the suns of iris” (483–84) showing again the contrast between his current position and his former one. Bizarre insect-like and daemonic creatures inhabit this world.
This scene may invert a Paradise or Eden topos.
He wanders onward and now discovers “an empty desert, all ablaze / With ame-
thysts and rubies, and the dust / Of garnets or carnelians” (499–501) which recalls the common topos of the Heavenly City made of gemstones, prominent in Apocalyptic literature, most notably the Book of Revelations. He roams onward to an adamantine plain that abuts the very edge of the world, to which “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). Here we see the building materials from the top of a hardness and permanency paradigm set converted into destructible liquids, running together in a time vs. timeless image common to mystic literature, though of course the image has become negativized. The next paragraph further amplifies the image.
In the twelfth and final paragraph (note that epics traditionally have twelve
books or sections), the entire rout of ferocious monsters has caught up to the
hashish-eater, and they fill the horizon flapping their wings, blowing him to the edge of the ultimate abyss. He looks over it:
But
when
I
reach
The verge, and seek through sun-defeating 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-changèd dreams,
122 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
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. . . . (568–81; ellipsis in original)
Once again, we have much imagery that inverts that of the opening lines. In-
stead of the “million-colored sun” we have “sun-defeating gloom,” “a tiny star”
with a “hueless orb” and “The light as of a million million moons,” which finally eclipses everything else. Instead of the “emperor of dreams,” we have nightmarish
“horror-changèd dreams.” The final image of the “huge white eyeless Face” arises from conversion of typical descriptions of enlightenment, for which the opening of the Third Eye in Europe, or the Eye of Shiva in India, stand as conventional metaphors. In place of a stereotypical symbol of consciousness (the eye), we have a stereotypical symbol of unconsciousness (blindness), arising by inversion. And yet, in another commonplace symbolism, blindness indicates spiritual insight, as compensation for material loss of sight. These two symbolic meanings here combine to form a powerfully ambiguous image, as they interplay to indicate a negative view of cosmic consciousness as unbearable to a mere human. The image has particular
significance in light of the hashish-eater’s claim as the “emperor of dreams” who convokes the “Babel of their visions.”
The “lips of flame” invert the common positive image of lips as moist and lus-
cious, particularly in sexualized descriptions; indirectly, this negativizes the mystic attainment matrix through the common metaphor of sensual ecstasy for mystical
ecstasy. The ellipsis at the end of the poem no doubt indicates that the hashish-eater has, in the world of his vision, been devoured by the Face, and, in the fictional real world of the poem, stopped talking as he has gone hopelessly mad.
This close reading should suffice to remove any doubt about the construction
of The Hashish-Eater. The poem demonstrably derives from a matrix that can be paraphrased as mystic attainment or cosmic consciousness; difficulty in its interpretation derives solely from ignorance of its various intertexts and hypograms, particularly the much-changed culturally defined sememe of the word hashish. Important intertexts for The Hashish-Eater and other of Smith’s works include the biblical, classical, Hindu, and contemporary occultist mythologies; poets such as
Milton, Shelley, Byron, Keats, Poe, Baudelaire, Swinburne, and Sterling; and many more arcane sources. Smith’s works presuppose a wide acquaintance with such
sources on the part of the reader. Any particular reader may miss some of these references, yet should discover enough of them to realize their significance in the text at hand.
The Babel of Visions
123
Works Cited or Consulted
Allen, Richard Hinckley. Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning. 1899. New York: Dover, 1963.
Borges, Jorge Luis, and Margarita Gerrero. The Book of Imaginary Beings. Revised, enlarged, and translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni in collaboration with the author. New York: Avon, 1969.
Bucke, Richard Maurice. Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind.
1901. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1969.
De Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings. 1821. New York: New American Library, 1966.
Eco, Umberto. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976.
Jakobson, Roman. Language in Literature. Edited by Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.
James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. 1902. New York: Macmillan, 1961.
Joshi, S. T. “What Happens in The Hashish-Eater. ” The Dark Eidolon No. 3 (Winter 1993): 16–20.
Jung, C. G. Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy. 1963. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.
Regardie, Israel. Editor. Roll Away the Stone: An Introduction to Aleister Crowley’s Essays on the Psychology of Hashish, with the Complete Text of “The Herb Dangerous” by Aleister Crowley. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 1968. Includes extracts from Ludlow’s Hasheesh Eater and Crowley’s translation of Baudelaire’s “The Poem of Hashish.”
Crowley’s essay actually treats more of the nature and typology of mystical experiences than of hashish.
Riffaterre, Michael. Fictional Truth. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1990.
———. “Generating Lautréamont’s Text.” In Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism. Edited and introduced by Josué V. Harari. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979.
———. Semiotics of Poetry. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978.
Smith, Clark Ashton. The Last Incantation. Introduced by Donald Sidney-Fryer. New York: Timescape, 1982.
Solomon, David. Editor. The Marihuana Papers. Introduced by Alfred R. Lindesmith.
New York: Signet, 1966. Includes Gautier’s “The Hashish Club” and extracts from Ludlow’s Hasheesh Eater and Baudelaire’s “Poem of Hashish.”
Wilson, Peter Lamborn. Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1988. Information on the Noble Order of Assassins and the use of hashish and
other psychotropic drugs in Islamic mysticism.
Clark Ashton Smith’s “Nero”
Carl Jay Buchanan
When someone in a general conversation said: “When I am dead, be earth con-
sumed by fire,” he rejoined “Nay, rather while I live,” and his action was wholly in accord. For under cover of displeasure at the ugl
iness of the old buildings and the narrow, crooked streets, he set fire to the city so openly that several ex-consuls did not venture to lay hands on his chamberlains although they caught them on their estates with tow and firebrands, while some granaries near the Golden House, whose room he particularly desired, were demolished by engines of war and then set on fire, because their walls were of stone. For six days and seven nights destruction raged, while the people were driven for shelter to monuments and tombs…. Viewing the conflagration from the tower of Maecenas, and exulting, as he said, “with the beauty of the flames,” he sang the whole time the “Sack of Ilium. . . .” Suetonius: De Vita Caesarum, “Nero” 38. —Nero, c. C.E. 110. Translated by J. C. Rolfe.
“Nero” ( LO 49–51), first published in 1912 in The Star-Treader and Other Poems (A. M. Robertson), is a poem of paradox and irony. The primary contrasts are established in stanza one, where “my darkling dream” has become, with Rome’s
burning, the emperor’s “effulgency,” or “radiant splendor,” and the 800-year history and pre-history (“ages piled on ages”) of labor to build the Eternal City is contrasted with the “[f]ierce ecstasy of one tremendous hour.” From a dream born
“darkling” (in darkness), a pyre now burns in a moment separated from all the time that has come before and from all time to come.
The enormity of Nero’s opening words in this stanza evokes grandeur, as his-
toric Rome was perceived by Poe, a favorite poet of Smith’s.1 Labor and “the toil of many years” is also contrasted with Nero’s dream (his desire to destroy the city) and its fulfillment in relative insouciance. The stance of the opening is clear and even simply delimited, although the lush diction and careful craft of its blank verse is ornate and elegant, like a royal proclamation, or the conversation of a pharaoh.
As we observe the carefully reasoned elaboration of Nero’s philosophy of super-
nihilism in succeeding stanzas, we are seduced by him into a momentary agreement with an infinite megalomania, and that is the measure of the poem’s success. Smith has used the dramatic monologue and extended its reach beyond that of his poetic forbears, and the poem is a high achievement in that broadening.
Now let us follow the chain of Nero’s reasoning. The ironies of a bright
dream born from darkness and of an instant obliterating ages are conjoined in the comparison Nero makes of his urban pyre with “any sunset.” Nero’s sunset is bet-
Clark Ashton Smith’s “Nero”
125
ter than the quotidian one because it is destructive of much more than the light of day, and his sunset affects Matter itself on a grand scale, and its redness is more effective, being imbued with “the blood of men.” The second complete sentence
of stanza two says that the aftereffect that results from an ordinary sunset is that nothing material changes. After the sun’s setting, it’s simply dark when night has come, and an ordinary night, for Nero, consists of inexpressiveness, a lack. His sunset, however, has changed reality in three significant ways: by creating a great deal of motion, for his fire has rapid motility; by causing a music of screaming (refers also to his harp); and its hue endures, even after the “normal sun” has gone down, as the burned city glares and smolders for days.
Nero considers himself an artist. The historical Nero considered himself a great singer and poet, says the Catholic Encyclopedia. After the fire, “the emperor started on a pleasure tour through lower Italy and Greece; as actor, singer, and harp player he gained the scorn of the world.” Smith imagines for us Nero’s aesthetics of self-conceit, which Smith certainly developed from the Romantic conceptions of Byron and the other English poets he knew well. Their Promethean and Titanic hero-figures were (antedated by Poe and Baudelaire) later abandoned by the turn-of-the-nineteenth century Decadent poets in favor of nihilism, emotional languor, and despair, as well as a repudiation of all traditional values except, in the Symbolist instance, music, and in the Wildean and more popular case, irony derived from simply reversing the traditional. The sheer size of Nero’s desire is Byronic, and exemplified throughout the poem, leading to a climax that goes beyond the Romantic poets. We must go back to Milton’s Satan to find a poem whose speaker has such evil magnitude:
Hail,
horrors!
hail,
Infernal world! and thou, profoundest Hell,
Receive thy new possessor—one who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less than he
Whom thunder hath made greater?
Paradise
Lost, 1.249–57
The poem is highly musical, as was blind Milton’s verse. Moreover, music is
mentioned prominently in lines 11–15:
Yet any sunset were as much as this,
Save for the music forced from tongueless things,
The rape of Matter’s huge, unchorded harp
By the many-fringed fire—a music pierced
With the tense voice of Life, more quick to cry
Its agony . . .
126 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
Nero, according to Suetonius, sings/recites the Lay of Troy, presumably Homer’s Iliad, while Rome burns. He would have accompanied the recitation of this epic poem on the hand-held harp, and we may imagine that the poem we are reading is
likewise sung to harp accompaniment.
The essential reversal, the paradox that destruction is, for Nero, creative, is explained beautifully and rigorously, even in the face of our automatic rejection of such a belief, in the third stanza. The first sentence repeats “toil” and “labor” from the poem’s first two lines, extending their application from the physical building of Rome to any creative action of great duration and moment. The sheer effort involved in such creation, he opines, must exhaust the creator so that, having given form to his desire, he lacks both “capacity and power” to enjoy its fruits. (One may guess that Nero, perhaps seeing the created universe as having been abandoned by God, refers here to the belief, known long before the Deists, that after having made the world, God no longer acts, but leaves it to his creations to do with as they will.) By contrast, in the latter sentence of stanza two, Nero explains that duration of effort and ability of effort (“faculty”) are not requisite for destruction, creation’s opposite, and there is no division of purpose in the parts of the thing unmade as opposed to the complex artifact. We cannot disagree, listening to this argument, that a certain purity is nihilism’s main attraction, as we generally agree that death levels all men and all things, and one thinks of the refining fire of the Buddhists and of Sati, the Indian rite of bride-burning still extant. Fire purifies, literally and medically, as it destroys. Nero then relates the distinction of the destructive from the creative action back to the artist himself: rather than experiencing a waning of his energies, or post-partum despair, as Coleridge felt in his immemorial “Dejection: An Ode,” and as poets have frequently complained (including Catullus), the destroyer
“draws a heightened and completer life.” Reality may be poorer of some of its created things, but the artist has lost no energy and has remains intact, with the addition of the sensual enjoyment of his pure and nihilistic act. Further, he “both extends and vindicates himself” in that he increases his scope and meaning
(“beauty, I suppose, opens the heart, extends the consciousness”—Algernon
Blackwood2) as well as lays claim to and avenges himself. Nero thus prepares us for his self-aggrandizement into godhood in the remainder of the poem, claims Rome
(by destroying it), and avenges himself on creation, which displeases him greatly.
The poem’s preamble is over at this point. Stanzas four and five consist of the speaker’s frustration: the fundamental paradox of possessing seemingly
absolute power as overlord of the Roman Empire at its height, yet feeling that a man’s reach should exceed his grasp (ironically twisting Browning’s dictum), no matter how
great that extension of one’s power may be. As only an emperor, with the power to kill others, Nero regrets that he is not god of his own destiny in some sense, for if he were, he would make himself omnipotent.
An extended metaphor on the image of dust follows. Dead kings turn into
dust, which may sting and annoy the eyes of those who survive them, as their im-
Clark Ashton Smith’s “Nero”
127
ages may, after their death, vex succeeding kings and emperors. Smith references Shelley’s “Ozymandias” here, a poem about two kinds of despair: that of the dead king, whose final works and words must be ironic, as the desert sands conquer his ancient stone image which he thought would endure everlastingly; and the despair of the kings who come after him that they will end as he did, dust to dust, so that Napoleon looking at the Great Sphinx of Giza realized his own mighty works were transitory, and his men opened fire on the face of lion-bodied Rameses.
To break the cycle of creating works to memorialize one’s greatness which will
only be destroyed in time, one would have to be a god. Now “breath” (l. 51) is the internal rhyming opposite of “death,” for the breath is the animating spirit which moved over the waters in Genesis, and which impels matter (“dust”) in all forms.
Mortality, the dust of death (Psalm 22: “Thou has brought Me into the dust of
death”) clogs the lungs and prevents the free breath of the body (as metaphor for spirit), the eyeballs of line 49 being abstracted into “perception” in line 54 and clear exercise of will; that is, clear rather than obscured by dust, Nero’s material self and its attached limitations to his self-extension into godhood.
The next passage is structured on a dog versus bird image, which is very likely inspired by the Egyptian mythology, in which jackal-headed Anubis, who weighed
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