Goat Mother and Others: The Collected Mythos Fiction of Pierre Comtois

by Pierre V. Comtois

  FORSYTH: (Gripping Melbourne tightly with his left hand.) Show me, Brian. Point out the book to me.

  MELBOURNE: (Shrugging himself loose from Forsyth’s grip.) You don’t know what you’re asking. It’s not worth it. It’s said that ignorance is bliss, but I never knew how wonderful blind delusion could be! The Truth, Clifton, the Truth! Think about it! Do you want to know the Truth? The Truth about God? The Truth about the human Soul? The Truth about you, the human race, the Earth, or the universe? The real Truth? The Truth about…Angelique? Stop and think!

  FORSYTH: (Stops a moment and appears to think hard.) I’ve thought and imagined about the worst disillusionments on those things that I could and none of it would matter to me. I don’t believe in a God or a soul, humans are mere mammals and the Earth and universe accidents of nature. But Angelique…I must know all there is about her.

  MELBOURNE: (Slowly shaking his head.) You poor, blind bastard. You think your cynicism protects you from disillusionment, shields you from disappointment. You think your attitude makes you superior to the rest of humanity whom you consider no better than a rabble. You remind me of myself before… (Shrugs and looks around.) Angelique’s not here. (Turns back to Forsyth.) So you’d like to read The King In Yellow.

  FORSYTH: Show it to me.

  MELBOURNE: (Leads Forsyth across the room to the corner shelves. When they arrive there, all the lights on the stage fade except for two on each of the two men; all sounds of the party gradually cease.) Let’s see now, it was kept on the top shelf…Ah, here it is. (He reaches up and takes down a heavy volume covered in faded yellow cloth.) It’s not much to look at, but it’s still the most dangerous object in the world. Humanity must have its delusions, just as it must have its sleep, its dreams, they help man cope with life. Strip men of the outlet of dreams, and they become mad. Can you live without your dreams, Clifton?

  FORSYTH: (Reaches out and takes the book.) If dreams are keeping me from seeing Angelique, then I can live without them.

  MELBOURNE: (Smiling.) Then join me and be damned. (Melbourne motions Forsyth to a chair. Forsyth sits, opens the book after a slight hesitation and begins to read. His head moves slightly from side to side as he reads and his hands begin to tremble. Then, with a great effort, he slams the book shut and looks about dazedly.) Something wrong?

  FORSYTH: I…don’t know. Everything seems different…it all looks the same, but now…

  MELBOURNE: Now you perceive the world as it really is. Ordinary objects are burningly clear in their utter reality.

  FORSYTH: The world is beautiful and terrible. There are strange moons in the sky…

  MELBOURNE: It’s Carcosa you perceive. Reality as it is, not as our dulled human senses interpret it for us. (Very slowly, the lights come back on again. The party is still in progress in the same room, but there are subtle changes in the room’s look and the party-goers are clad in strange, beautiful attire. A woman approaches them.)

  CASSILDA: Clifton, reading while a party is in progress?

  MELBOURNE: It’s a rather riveting book, my dear.

  FORSYTH: (Still appearing a bit dazed.) Angelique?

  CASSILDA: Is that what the dullards call me?

  MELBOURNE: The blind cannot help their blindness, Cassilda. And besides, does not the King hide his own visage behind a Pallid Mask lest we see his Face?

  CASSILDA: (Visibly shaken.) Speak not of the King!

  MELBOURNE: So, Truth still holds some of its terrors even in Carcosa!

  CASSILDA: I must return to my guests. (She moves off.)

  MELBOURNE: You see, Cassilda is not what you expected.

  FORSYTH: She’s so beautiful and…

  MELBOURNE: …vain, petty, fearful… (Forsyth looks down slowly and after some hesitation, reopens the book that rests on his lap and begins to read again.)

  MELBOURNE: The Truth is never pretty, always disappointing. But go on, keep reading. Perhaps with more knowledge, there will come better perception…but don’t count on it!

  (The spotlight on Melbourne now fades to black, leaving only Forsyth as the sole illuminated figure on the darkened stage. Forsyth sits stock still, reading for a full five minutes until the spotlight on him begins to fade, very, very slowly, to black.)

  (At stage left, a lone spotlight comes on, illuminating the figure of the Chorus.)

  CHORUS: There was once an Inhabitant of Carcosa who met an acquaintance he did not recognize and asked of him to “direct me, I beseech you, to Carcosa.” The familiar stranger broke into a barbarous chant in an unknown tongue and walked away. The Inhabitant could only stare after him in wonder, unaware of the depths of his own ignorance and the happy fortune that prevented him from breaching it.

  “The Pallid Masque,” is copyright © 1968, Perseus Press Inc., 196 West Huston St., New York, NY, 10014. Caution: No part of this play may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the publisher. This play is fully protected in whole, in part, or in any form under the Copyright Laws of the United States of America, the British Empire including the Dominion of Canada, and all other countries of the Copyright Union, and is subject to royalty. All rights, including professional, amateur, motion picture, radio, television, recitation, public reading and any method of photographic reproduction, are strictly reserved. For amateur rights, apply to Dramatists Professional Play Service, Inc., 440 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10016. For stock rights, apply to Samuel Floren, Inc., 28 West 45th Street, New York, NY, 10036. For all other rights, apply to Perseus Press, Inc., 196 West Huston St., New York, NY., 10014.

  Afterword

  by Gregorio Montejo

  Charles Vaughan was a haunted man, his works possessed by the pale eidolons of remembrance and desire, the ineradicable dualities of mind and body. Behind and between the words, you catch brief glimpses of the white specter of Cartesian doubt, the unquiet ghost of disbelief, deracinating the tangible, the finite, the contingent, the material, until it leaves the lone cogitator forsaken in the barren plane of his own consciousness. Cogito ergo sum: the spirit voice of skepticism is the mind’s I, the thinker thinking himself, trapped in the dark cage of the Self, calling forth into the indeterminate space he calls Other, only to hear the faint echo of his own voice.

  In an empty room

  Two mirrors reflect

  Each other’s blank stares,

  Their desire for light

  Bound in eternal stasis,

  An invisible rope held taut

  Above an infinite void.

  “narcissi” (1926)

  Here we are listening to the voice of the phantom of solitariness, the anchorite soul, consumed by the desire to connect with-that-which-is-not-itself, immured in the isolation chamber of the Self.

  After Descarte, a dark spirit of solipsism lodged in some of the brightest minds of the Age of Light. George Berkeley, the venerable Bishop of Cloyne, avowed the nonexistence of matter. Esse est percipi: to be is to be perceived. If it were not for the Mind of God, which perceives all things at all times, the world would be a ceaselessly metamorphosing universe of objects continuously coming into and out of creation depending upon the consciousness of individual perceivers. Hume exorcised the fantastic ideational teleology — the infinitely perceptive God — of Bishop Berkeley, then deconsecrated causality, casting doubt upon the possibility of knowledge itself.

  All probable reasoning is nothing but a species of sensation. ‘Tis not solely in poetry and music, we must follow our taste and sentiment, but likewise in philosophy. When I am convinced of any principle, ‘tis only an idea, which strikes more strongly upon me. When I give the preference to one set of arguments above another, I do nothing but decide from my feeling concerning the superiority of their influence. Objects have no discoverable connexion together; nor is it from any other principle but custom operating upon the imagination, that we can draw any inferen
ce from the appearance of one to the existence of another.

  A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40)

  There is an anecdote, perhaps apocryphal, about Dr. Johnson: once, while engaged in a debate with an adherent of Hume’s skepticism, he kicked a stone vehemently and declared, “thus I refute Hume!” By kicking the stone, Johnson thought (or at least hoped), to touch the metaphysical ground of reality — despite Hume, Johnson’s foot could not be fooled about the solidity and stability of Being. Kant, Hume’s most profound critic, if he had been present, would undoubtedly have told Dr. Johnson that we can never ultimately know the stone in itself, only our own limited knowledge about the stone. Kant’s Critiques saved the integrity of cognition, restored causality and codified the categories of the understanding, but at the terrible cost of significantly reducing the scope of all possible knowledge. From the high, desolate peak upon which man hoped to contemplate the plenary universe of created things, Kant leads him to the narrower vistas of the shallow epistemological plane/plain called Mind. Vaughan’s corpus is one of the authentic poetic voices of the Age of Epistemology — capturing the claustrophobia of consciousness, the ontological indeterminacy of the quotidian (the object is always, in some way, the creation of the subject), the incessant, mysterious influx of sense-impressions from the spatio-temporal manifold (after originating in the imperceptible, unknowable realm of things-in-themselves) into the synthesizing sphere of the a priori pure concepts of the understanding.

  The Labyrinth’s wynd

  Wound back upon itself,

  This stone cochlea I entail

  Domiciled at the locus

  Of convergent spirals,

  Manumitted coils

  Of sprung contingents

  Woven delicately in spar;

  I inhabit my concretions.

  “daidalos” (1931)

  The subjective experience of cognition is captured in the very act of creating a poetic representation of itself. The metaphor of the Cretan labyrinth of thought — of the poet as both the architect of the maze and the monstrous Minotaur trapped at its center — is seamlessly melded to the figurative trope of the chambered nautilus of experiential awareness — that fatal burden of memory and finitude, the accidental exigencies of corporeity and transience, that the self perpetually constructs upon itself.

  “Daidalos” inaugurates the period of Vaughan’s most profound exploration of the dichotomy between the Self and the Other, the seemingly unbridgeable gulf which now partitioned epistemology from ontology, and the problematic point at which they potentially met: language. More specifically, Vaughan’s poetry queried the uncertain metaphysical status of poetic discourse itself. Is literary language referential or figurative? Can the linguistic sign reconcile the schism between mind and body, between the spirit and the world? Vaughan’s work throughout the decade of the 1930s, can be seen as a series of poetic interpolations of the basic matter and position of words. Vaughan’s conceptual starting point for these investigations — indeed for all of his work — was the Post-Symbolist poetics of Mallarme and his great pupil Valery, whose Cimetier Marin (1920), had a profound effect on Vaughan’s own emerging poetics. In a letter to Valery, dated February 4, 1930, Vaughan presciently mapped the future course of his explorations:

  As you have brilliantly shown in your own work, the poet, since Mallarme, has been confronted with the precariousness of words, he has been made aware of the fault lines along which poems (perhaps along with language itself) shift and buckle. Mallarme located the epicenter of the quake in the ineffable ptyx, the delitescent conflux where the meaningful and the meaningless, where order and chaos contend. But I will confess to you that where Mallarme perceived a deliverance from the merely denotative, the pregnant silence in the wake of signification, the infinite white spaces behind words waiting to be filled with worlds of latent sound, I see only a fathomless void.

  Letters: Vol II 1929-1941 (1933)

  The “infinite white spaces” of Mallarme, frigid and lifeless, symbolic of silence and death, began to dominate Vaughan’s poetry at this time:

  The muted rime-bound weirs,

  The black alders white with the castings of Ophion,

  The dormant lids of blank hillocks

  Blindly shadowing the silent flight of snow owls

  The frozen cataracts asleep in calcite caverns,

  Flowing tongues crypted in the catacombs of Morpheus

  Lips fastened by the white locks of sempiternal winters…

  “hibernia” (1931)

  Vaughan had begun his trek into the boundless polar landscape of Arthur Gordon Pym, his inquiry into the whiteness of the White Whale, where he would be called upon to paint a monochromatic portrait of the pale skull beneath the pallid Masque/Mask, and compose tone poems on the white noise of poetic aphonia:

  The memory of whiteness

  Is traced in the subtile interstices

  Between the dark markings of your passing,

  The cicatricose web of arrivals and departures

  A gauze veil hung between two broken black branches,

  The snow field punctuated by crows’ feet,

  The dark rictus amid white poppies.

  “albus” (1933)

  The black branches, the prints in the snow are the calligraphic marks of the pen, the configuration of words the poet places before the vertiginous white abyss of the paper. But the words seem tainted by the fatal transiency of the objects they name, the branches are broken, the traces of the crows’ passage will disappear under new snows, and the “dark rictus amid white poppies” is the grinning skull beneath the skin. The word, the logos, is the instrument the poet uses to name the world, and the Logos is the rational order of that world, of the universe, which Plato called nous — the first principle (arche) of everything — the source of paradigmatic forms which emanate from the inelligible realm (neotos topos) before descending into the visible realm (boratos topos). The visible objects which compose the world are merely shadows projected upon the wall of Platos’ Cave, and poets, the metaphorizers of objects, are dispensers of illusion (eikasia). Only by escaping from the Cave in order to contemplate the bright light of the Logos, the pure forms of the nous, Plato tells us, can we hope to liberate ourselves from eikasia. Descarte retreated into his Mind to find the Logos, Nietzsche, coming after Hume and Kant, postulated that the Cartesian Mind is a cave upon which the Mind’s Eye/I projects its own shades:

  “There is thinking: therefore there is something that thinks: this is the upshot of all Descarte’s argumentation. But that means positing as “rue a priori” our belief in the concept of substance — that “when there is thought there has to be something that thinks” is simply a formulation of our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed. In short, this is not merely the substantiation of a fact, but a logical-metaphysical postulate. Along the lines followed by Descarte one does not come upon something absolutely certain but only upon the fact of a very strong belief. If one reduces the proposition to “There is thinking therefore there are thoughts,” one has produced a mere tautology: and precisely that which is in question, the reality of thought, is not touched upon — that is, in this form the “apparent reality,” but a reality in itself.

  The Will To Power (1901)

  For Nietzsche, the world is a text. “I am” is literally a figure of speech. In the triadic equation of object/poet/text, the crucial middle term, the Cartesian Mind or Kantian Pure Concept, becomes an impenetrable barrier between the Platonic topoi. The word (logos) refers only to itself. As does the Logos when it descends into the boratos topos and becomes incarnate: “And the Logos was made flesh, and dwelt among us…” (John 1:14). In embodying the indeterminacy of the text/world, the Logos itself subverts the possibility of a hermeneutics — the anagogic decipherment of the sign/object:

  MELBOURNE: The blind cannot help their blindness, Cassilda. And besides, does not the King hide his own visage behind a Pallid Mask lest we see his Face?

  CASSI
LDA: (Visibly shaken). Speak not of the King!

  I have read encheridions of inquietude

  In the epigraphy of continuance,

  And in the unspoken evasions of grammars and breviaries

  Oblique flights by which we aspire

  To arrive, without inordinate abasement or loss,

  At the concealed heart of our displacements:

  In the lacunae of sufferance,

  And in the forgotten dogmas of abrogated syllabaries;

  In the effaced palimpsests of claustral scriveners,

  And in the mortal remains of the Word

  I have sought clemency