The Great Lover
Page 1
The Great Lover
The Great Lover
Michael Cisco
Foreword
By Rhys Hughes
Chômu Press
The Great Lover
by Michael Cisco
Published by Chômu Press, MMXI
The Great Lover copyright © Michael Cisco 2010
Foreword copyright © Rhys Hughes 2010
The right of Michael Cisco to be identified as Author of this
Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Published inApril 2011 by Chômu Press.
by arrangement with the author.
All rights reserved by the author.
First Kindle Edition
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Design and layout by: Bigeyebrow and Chômu Press
E-mail: info@chomupress.com
Internet: chomupress.com
For Autumn
“It seemed as if The Tyrant was the biggest monster Cisco could make, but The Great Lover is now his new masterpiece. Brilliant, light-years beyond … still marauding. He should receive plaudits for conceiving the Prosthetic Libido alone. Cisco has an identity as much as any writer I’ve read.”
Thomas Ligotti
“The subterranean mindscape of The Great Lover is a cosmos entirely unto itself, a mysterious, reeking, unutterably strange, hazardous, fecund and carnivalesque digestion of events, ideas, opportunities, revelations and mutations. Cisco’s imagination is the most monumentally Tartarean of any dark fantasy writer currently writing.”
Rhys Hughes
“The surreal narrative [of The Great Lover] is something like a 400-page T.S. Eliot poem: otherworldly, lyrical, deeply philosophical, and supersaturated with extraordinary imagery and ideas (like the Prosthetic Libido, a golem-like device constructed to house a scientist's unwanted desire). Fans of stylish and thematically sophisticated weird fiction should seek out this mad testament to Cisco's visionary genius.”
Publishers Weekly
Contents
Foreword by Rhys Hughes
The Great Lover
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Foreword
by Rhys Hughes
Is it possible to say anything at all about a perfect work of art? I ask this question not merely for rhetorical effect, but because I genuinely want to know the answer. I’m fairly sure the answer is “no” but I’m willing to be corrected on this point. Certainly the idea of writing about music has been ridiculed, not least by Wittgenstein, who argued that it is fundamentally absurd to describe one language in terms of another.
Michael Cisco’s work, The Great Lover, is prose rather than music and thus should be a valid construct to write about. Yet because of its special rhythmic force and dark energy, the way it inhabits its own length exactly but does so by propelling itself constantly forward like the purest melody, it seems to me to be the closest any example of writing can get to being music without producing audible sound. I know of almost no other writer who can do this. So does Cisco’s sublime use of language in this manner position his book beyond critical discussion?
I say “almost” no other writer, for there are a small number who also know the secret. Cisco is not an entirely isolated author but certainly he belongs to an extremely rarefied group. Last year I discovered a book entitled The Blind Owl, a short novel, almost a cosmic horror prose poem, by an author previously unknown to me, Sadegh Hedayat. The theme of Hedayat’s remarkable book is partly the effect of isolation on the creative mind. It is heady stuff indeed, blackly rapturous.
When I was younger I remember feeling a particular kind of shudder at the sheer strangeness of certain passages in Michel Leiris’ Aurora: the clarity of the oddness was awful but also somehow ecstatic. In Leiris it comes in waves; in Hedayat the effect is constant. The Blind Owl is a deeply disturbing book and one feels there is a malignant intelligence about it that is independent of its author; that once it has been read one may never escape from its influence. It is difficult for me to explain this feeling rationally, because by definition it is a feeling rather than an analysis. On some level I believe this book has planted a seed in my soul and I don’t know what sort of nourishment the growth will take from me, nor what sort its fruit may eventually provide.
Cisco’s work is powerful in precisely the same way and has the same effect on me. In terms of narrative drive, dynamic form and force, The Great Lover is radically different from The Blind Owl, but it haunts the waking mind with equal conviction and bittersweet dread. It therefore comes as little surprise that Cisco is an expert on Hedayat; but it doesn’t seem that the Persian writer, who committed suicide in 1951, is a direct influence on the contemporary voice of Cisco: rather it is a case of two great and odd minds inventing authentic forms of mystical terror that despite many cultural differences have also a few parallels, or perhaps meta-parallels, utter originality being one of them and an ability to root itself into a reader’s soul being another.
The conclusion is slightly worrying, for it implies that there is more to the printed page than the end product of playing with patterns, shuffling conventions, the mechanical games of sentence structure. A cluster of monkeys bashing on anachronistic typewriters might eventually recreate the books of, say, Anatole France or Olaf Stapledon, two writers I admire enormously, but one feels they could never properly replicate Hedayat or Cisco. Even if an infinity of years was available to those poor primates and the inevitability of eternal randomness meant that Cisco’s exact words were reproduced in perfect order, there still lurks the mysterious suspicion that the nous would be missing.
Wittgenstein once postulated a magical pill that could fill the man who swallowed it with the same feelings, to the same degree of intensity, as if he had just listened to a Bach fugue. He asked us to consider whether the existence of the magical pill would make the fugue superfluous. His own answer was that the pill could never be a substitute, because a fugue, both in idea and reality, is more than its final effect. It is a process in time and space, and the process is the thing itself.
Those teeth are like fence pickets. I touch the oily lapels and collar. Their grit clings to my palms like wet sand. I throw my arms around his neck — it’s so thick my hands don’t meet… I climb up onto him and press against the unyielding surface, with my cheek to the pebbly pig-iron of his bulging, bull-like neck… Now it’s turning into skin, the metal is changing, and begins to yield. It softens — it yields. The statue is turning its face to me, turning into a human being.
The ultimate value of The Great Lover is not merely in the sensations generated by its resolution, which are more than the sum of the sensations created in the reader during the reading itself, but the peculiar fact that during the reading one begins to feel the text really is alive, transforming itself into something human too. That is its process, or life cycle. Cisco doesn’t rely on horror props to manipulate the reader’s reactions in this regard. He has created an organism rather than a machine, and the resultant entity, this book, seeks to engage with its reader on a basis that is still, for me at least, unclear. Symbiosis or predation?
Although that s
ounds rather fanciful, this impression is tangible, not purely lyrical or symbolic. Perhaps it is the sheer wealth of imagery and multitude of concepts that achieve this daunting effect. The Great Lover is full of clever conceits, tangential ideas that fly off, twist and re-root themselves back into the main body of the text. It is a densely layered work consisting of so many strata of meaning that its dynamic has the appearance of accelerated geology, passages rising, enveloping, drifting into new configurations like the continents of an unknown world buried beneath our own, rather than merely queuing up and waiting their turn to perform, as passages in the vast majority of novels do.
“Given the proper conditions,” declares the character Ptarmagant, “life could arise spontaneously again, as it did at first. Nothing prevents this. It could happen… anywhere. New, unevolved organisms, living by wholly other principles.” One wonders if what is possible for life might also be feasible for works of fiction. The works of Cisco, Hedayat, a precious few others, do give the impression they belong to a separate tree of existence, growing in parallel with the more familiar trunk of mainstream weird writers, perhaps even in pre-established harmony with it, but not dependent upon its shade or support.
As for Michael Cisco himself: I know very little about him. In fact I have deliberately avoided researching the man. Bizarrely, it feels almost sacrilegious to do so; better by far to preserve the riddle. I received a copy of The Divinity Student through the mail several years ago and was excited to discover a writer who cared about philosophy and used it in a way that was beguiling and dreamlike, but also highly controlled and assured. In my mind, Cisco forms an unholy trinity with Hedayat and Ligotti as the chthonic gods of existential horror.
The subterranean mindscape of The Great Lover is a cosmos entirely unto itself, a mysterious, reeking, unutterably strange, hazardous, fecund and carnivalesque digestion of events, ideas, opportunities, revelations and mutations. Cisco’s imagination is the most monumentally Tartarean of any dark fantasy writer currently writing. In this endlessly unfolding network of cavities and situations, nothing at all is predictable. Cisco, after all, is the man who dared dream not only of invasion of the celestial realms by the denizens of hell, but a counter invasion of hell by those of heaven, for the sake of a perverse balance.
In one of my own forthcoming books there is a scene in a tavern where are gathered a selection of notable modern authors. Michael Cisco is the first of them to be introduced by a guide to the narrator, with the words, “He’s a writer of elegantly dark philosophic fantasy but one who is often overlooked — he’s philosophical about everything except that fact.” This is making an assumption about Cisco’s attitude that has no basis in reality; I don’t really know how he regards himself. Yet I suspect the time is coming when to overlook him will be still to see him, for if anyone has the ability to bend light it is surely Michael Cisco.
To sum up briefly, The Great Lover is a disturbing and enormously powerful work, a valuable addition to Cisco’s impressive bibliography. Among other things it creates a perfect equilibrium, by compression, between external and internal reality. Never before have I laboured so helplessly over writing a foreword to a novel. Immediately after reading it, I realised I had nothing much to say. It’s a perfect work of art.
THE GREAT LOVER
The birds suddenly leap into the air from the grass and from the trees, come together and rise in a palpitating clot, then disperse to the horizon... each one black against the darkening blue sky. The wind leaps from the grass and trees, it rises and grows stronger, more alarming. Over my grave the turf is ruffled, the dry flowers knock against my stone battering their petals away. The world is filled with energy; these minute events each impart another twist to this or that hidden coil, and behind our earthen walls decay rifles our bodies like hot wind — we feel it, too. The wind rises and flickers through our sere, pompous grave clothes. At its far extremity a woman in a costume raises her veiled head and howls softly at the sky. She is turning into a coyote with a light heart, though her appearance stays the same.
Though I can turn my head neither to the left or right and so am unable to look at my neighbors in the earth, our nerves have grown and penetrate our caskets. They wove a nervous lace through the solid rock. Batteries of memory in random series — we are there wherever wind blows fire burns water laps dirt melts because there are memories of yours in all these things, memory to heal or harm. In the story the weapons of memory cross with the present’s weapons; in the world, no one ever tells a story in which we have no part. The line passes through us, and we can feel every train go by. We can feel every word on every train going by.
My coffin is suddenly ablaze with light. A luminous vapor appears with a pop like a cloud in a cloud chamber directly above me and my coffin glows like a fluorescent tube. I can see myself, all withered. The ridgy skin is stretched taut over my deflated eyesockets; my eyes appear to be open but cast down; and it is this modest, still face that I bring to you. My lips have dried and stretched themselves over my teeth in a flattened ellipse, and it is through this crooning aperture that my voice passes out to you by way of those subterranean vibrations I mentioned by way of those subterranean vibrations. Now off to the left, I see another coffin, lit from within, transparent, its tenant bows her head. One by one, in some cases two at a time, like the lights of a theatre marquee, coffins around me burst alight with pale, blonde flame, tenuous as mist; the light is absolute. Irresistible commands drift horizontally through space and through matter like flakes of marine snow, evenly spreading on their own. Whenever one collides with a secret germ of happiness inside, it joins itself to it ardently, becomes it, so that it is a joy to obey. The turning of a page, an irresistible command.
The pale road presses out from between my lips, the anonymous skull voice. In the dark, we are hanging together on the billowing canopy our nerves made, a diamond of eight coffins trailing long nervous manes. We hang in fertile flesh-eating graveyard earth. Its spray flecks my skin with bright cinders, and lying here I experience the onset of spring, a warm elongation of limbs, of gently rising sap, the distention of lungs as they greedily fill themselves with the fragrance of new flowers.
A thrill of suspense draws us taught on nerve-lanyards. Something is happening. Our nerves rise like weary hands and clasp together, forming mercurial connections sealed with white coagulant. Dry and brittle as straw, they creak as they lean toward each other; as they knit, they become humid and supple. Now they gleam with perspiration, a salt mist gathers around an elastic web of thickening white cables. I feel a draught in my skull, sly jets and whistles of air — we eight are no longer strangers. Above us jaws open wide even blacker on the inside — now one by one our jaws also drop open. We will unhurriedly draw this light into our desiccated bodies. It will consume us and alchemize us, and when we are done, we will die again. Our frail bodies shudder, vibrate with strain. Our voices burn together into one voice, like rising from a terrible fire a ball of black smoke that is our voice speaking loud enough for you to hear. We are the undergrounders.
You can hear my words, but you cannot hear the wild gaiety with which I speak them. I am the voice from the midst of eight golden coffins.
“hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae”
“this is the place where death rejoices to teach those who live”
—motto from an autopsy room
CHAPTER ONE
The morning raises the city’s tide so you feel the whole city wobble, climbing up round your belt like weightless gelatin. (This is the map just breaking in to remind you to keep a look out for me.) On into the afternoon here it is again, the staggered city struts along tripping but never less full of itself than in the hours leading up to quitting time and sunset. The wind slaps a man going along the pavement full in the chest with a windblown leaflet. He peels it back and looks at the big black words without scanning them, only taking the whole sheet in at once shallowly; it says “Respect to the Skeletons of the Robbery Victims
, To the Bones Red Without Blood, To the creeping Grins of Ghouls and Gibbons with Eyes like Full Moons, To all Nocturnal Animals that have not yet been mastered, To Sardonic Teeth, the Of of Of and the And The And The and To the destructive detriment of all thrones of every nation and the steady development of all astonishing disintegrations and transformations in and throughout all the Cardinal and Ordinal Worlds, and in All Spaces and Times, This Goes Out to Trim Hand and the two Stolen Skeletons, This Goes Out to Laughing Eyes, This Goes Out to You Here, This is a Four Noble Truths: Life is Joy — Desire is Life — Lose Desire and You Are DEAD — Strong Desire willing and desiring are one dance move the Very Biggest, distribute in and through your bodies with perfect ease and effortlessness.” — The Preta Sa Terma [70 B.C.E. (M.T.A/c.m.a.p.)] All right fine I drop the paper in a can and cross the street. Swivelling my head and shoulders around to look for cars I don’t see the open manhole. Falling in, I crack my head on the metal rim — knocked unconscious. A splash down there — only a whisper, unnoticed on the street.
Down below the streets, he is going to die. He floats face down, a bubble of air inside his coat makes a glistening hump in the brown water. A few viscous bubbles rattle in grey-brown froth around his ears and temples. The current carries him beneath slimy brick arches smooth as intestines, past a spacious concrete platform bristling with iron rods.