Retinal pessimism and the “nothing-to-see” [Reading diary]

Fludd

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From: Starry Speculative Corpse (2015) by Eugene Thacker

Chapter 2. Prayers for Darkness

[....] black is not just dark, but, well, black. If darkness implies a shrouding, a tenebrous obfuscation, should we then say that blackness is a blotting-out, a nullification of every existent? If darkness both "is" and "is not," is this also the case with blackness?

  In his discussion of the crucifixion, Nicola Masciandaro shows us a moment in which darkness becomes blackness. His takeoff point is the interim of uncertainty, confusion, and anguish when Christ, on the cross, cries out "My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?" The Gospels describe this interim period as one of a profound, even universal darkness: "Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour"; "It was now about the sixth hour, and there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour, while the sun's light failed."67 In one traditional reading of this passage, Christ's cries of sorrowful doubt are not just the cries of one individual, but, allegorically, of every individual. In this breach between an anguished self and a seemingly indifferent cosmos, something appears. What appears is this breach, this fracture or lacuna at the core of existence. What appears is this "darkness"; what appears is precisely what one cannot see, and what one apprehends is, in anguish, that one cannot apprehend. Masciandaro: "It becomes a strange place where the only way to discern where you are with certainty is to see that you are hopelessly lost."68 Masciandaro names this enigmatic breach "sorrow."

  It is in this breach, this sorrow, that Masciandaro suggests an even more radical reading of this "crucifixion darkness." Beyond the suffering of Christ on the cross, and beyond the allegorical suffering of all individuals vis-à-vis a world that seems indifferent to them, there is a sorrow that is not simply that of individual human subjects that feel emotions. For Masciandaro the real lesson of crucifixion darkness is that sorrow is, in a way, exterior to the human being: "it is the image of a cosmos that cries, the image of tears that are materially at the heart of its being made."69 It is here that darkness becomes blackness. For, "the universe itself, an entity that most certainly includes your being in it, and vice-versa, is… the dark realm of a literally authentic melancholy, that is, sorrow humorially proper to black earth."70

  In this philosophical, or rather, mystical sense, black is less a color and more the withdrawal of every relation between self and world, resulting in this breach which, nevertheless, makes itself apparent as such. The sorrow that results is not simply the forlorn sorrow of finite, emotive human beings, but something impersonal and withering in existence itself. "There rests the difference between black and darkness," Masciandaro notes. "Darkness is a property of black, but black is not darkness. Shadow, nothingness, void look black and black is something before shadow, nothingness, void…"71 If, in this formulation, darkness always exists in some relation to light, however gradated, tenebrous, and shadowy, then blackness is something anterior to both light and dark. François Laruelle encapsulates this in one of his early, experimental texts, "Du noir univers": "Black is anterior to the absence of light, whether this absence be the shadows that extinguish it, whether it be its nothingness or its positive opposite."72 Masciandaro extends this: "It is true that black is what is seen in the absence of light. But black is not that absence. Black is its own presence, not the presence of the absence of light."73 Color and cosmos become intertwined in this blackness, something that neither exists nor does not exist; it's "is" is precisely it's "is not."

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[....] black as a color has a rich and varied history in terms of its symbolic meanings, it would take a modern, scientific theory of color to begin to address such questions. When Goethe published his Color Theory in 1810, such conundrums were largely ignored in aesthetics, and often not discussed in the science of optics. But Goethe, being the polymath that he was, was not content to write a treatise of aesthetics. The Color Theory is as much a science of color as it is an aesthetics; indeed, the aim is to attempt the synthesis of the two. Goethe's major contribution was to distinguish the "visible" from the "optical" spectrum, and to make possible a science of optics that would be distinct from that of aesthetics, but which would overlap with it as well.74 Goethe's project is determined to consider color as a physiological phenomenon, to "search for nothing beyond the phenomena" of seeing color through the apparatus of the eye. For Goethe, any theory of color must begin from the physio-logical event of seeing color.

  But black proves to be a difficult color to discuss for Goethe. In the opening sections of his treatise, "black" is often interchangeable with "dark" and "shadow," all three terms denoting a physiological state when the eye is deprived of light: "If we keep the eyes open in a totally dark place, a certain sense of privation is experienced. The organ is abandoned to itself; it retires into itself. That stimulating and grateful contact is wanting by means of which it is connected with the external world…"75 Black is conceived of in privative terms, in terms of the absence of light – not unlike Fludd's cosmic black square. And, black is even moralized by Goethe (as it is in Fludd), for the light that enables sight is not just a physiological stimulation, but a quasi-divine gift. When Goethe does briefly discuss black later on in his treatise, it is largely to discuss the combustion and oxidation processes that produce blackness in objects such as wood or metal. Strangely, Goethe does not raise the problem of black as a color, choosing instead to analyze the chemical process of blackening, and in the process sounding very much like a Renaissance alchemist.

  Goethe's Color Theory had an immediate impact on the philosophy and science of color. One person particularly taken by it was Arthur Schopenhauer, who knew Goethe and discussed color theory with him on several occasions. While Schopenhauer does not depart from Goethe's distinction between the visible and the optical, he does attempt to root color theory in philosophy more than science. Schopenhauer's On Vision and Colors was published in 1816, just three years after the completion of his doctoral dissertation. A short book, it does not display the systematicity of The World as Will and Representation nor the aphoristic pessimism of his late writings. What it does do is drive a wedge into Goethe's Color Theory. Goethe, Schopenhauer claimed, does not really present a theory of color, foremost because he never considers what color is – that color exists is something assumed in his treatise.

  Furthermore, Schopenhauer took Goethe to task for another assumption – that the perception of color necessarily corresponded to color itself, as if it were a physical thing in itself. Being a good Kantian, Schopenhauer tended to understand color as a cognitive process that began with the sensation of light and resulted in the cognitive representation of color. Schopenhauer was even more precise in identifying the "intensive activity of the retina" as the main apparatus for the perception of color. The trick was to understand what it was that made an impression on the retina in the first place; was color something identifiable in the world as such (i.e. as light), or was it merely a by-product of the physiology of vision?76 Where did color take place? To say that we receive light that stimulates our retina is one thing, but to show how color is necessarily produced from this activity is quite another. In Schopenhauer's theory of perception, the theory of color begins to ever so slightly slip away – and yet, he admits, some vague entity called "color" could be identified, classified, measured, even agreed upon in an everyday context.

  As with Goethe, for Schopenhauer the problem is black, which he sees as inseparable from white. Black and white are strange entities in Schopenhauer's treatise. At some points they seem to be additions or privations of light, much in line with Goethe: "The influence of light and white on the retina and its ensuing activity have degrees according to which light steadily approaches darkness and white approaches black."77 But at other points black and white function more as logical necessities, forming the absolute poles of color perception; that is, black and white are never actually seen, and yet they determine the perception of color.78 And, later in the treatise, there is even a third, more naturalistic interpretation, one that has to do specifically with black and not with white: that black is simply the physiological state of "retinal inactivity."79 The eye without sight – or without vision.

  After all is said and done, Schopenhauer's questions prove to be more interesting than his answers. All the same, it is tempting to make some connections between Schopenhauer's color theory and his pessimistic philosophy. A central ambiguity of Schopenhauer's On Vision and Colors has to do with black. Is black something that can be seen, like any other color? Or is black simply the name for something in the structure of vision that conditions color perception – but which can never be seen in itself? Perhaps there is a black that is seen – the black of shading and gradients – as well as a black that is unseen – the black of retinal inactivity. And here again we seem to return to the paradox of Fludd's black square – the black that can only be seen at the expense of ceasing to be black (where black becomes "dark" or "shade"). Perhaps – and here we're being generous to Schopenhauer's text – there is a retinal pessimism that secretly underlies color theory, encapsulated in the notion of black as privation (Goethe), black as retinal inactivity (Schopenhauer), black as that which precedes the very existence of light itself (Fludd). Retinal pessimism is not simply the failure of the phenomena of perception, the physiology of the retina, or the science of optics. Nor is it the conviction that whatever one is seeing is the worst of all possible things that could be seen. Both are intriguing options. But, retinal pessimism is something else, and it is encapsulated in the strange status of black: at once present and absent, at once a fullness and an emptiness, at once the absorption of all light and the total absence of light. Black is at once the foundation of all color and, in its absence or emptiness, it is also what undermines the substantiality of all color. If one is willing to go down this path, retinal pessimism is not just about the non-color that is black, but it is about the perception of color itself. It is, ultimately, the suspicion that all colors are black, that all retinal activity is retinal inactivity. Retinal pessimism: there is nothing to see (and you're seeing it).

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Black on Black. The question is, what would such a retinal pessimism see, if it is not simply the physiological state of blindness, or the metaphorical state of "inner vision"? Not surprisingly, artists have thought about this question, and there is, of course, a history of black painting in modern art.80 For me the most notable example is that of Ad Reinhardt, who, in the 1960s, produced a number of paintings that, at first glance, appear to be all matte black, much in the tradition of Malevich. But after looking at the painting for some time, what appears to be black is not black at all. Instead, subtle hues of deep mauve, purple, magenta, and gray become apparent. And the uniform black canvas reveals a grid, or a series of squares within the canvas, each of a slightly different color. The painting actually changes within the duration of its viewing. "Black" literally vanishes as one looks at it, and what quietly emerges are colors and shapes. Reinhardt's paintings are almost visual analogues for Fludd's cosmology.

  But modern black painting is, in a way, too predictable a place to begin, for black paintings always push black up front, in front of the viewer, as something to be seen. My own fascination with black in painting comes not from abstract expressionism, but from an earlier period – the infinite, stark, black backgrounds in Velázquez's "The Water Seller of Seville" (1618-22), the black clouds that envelop Rembrandt's "The Abduction of Proserpine" (1631), the almost Surreal flatness of Zurburan's "Christ on the Cross" (1627). As a painter of black, the artist that stands out from the rest for me is Caravaggio. In fact, I only came to appreciate modern black painting in seeing paintings like "The Crucifixion of St. Peter" (1601), "St. Matthew and the Angel" (1602), and "David with the Head of Goliath" (1605; 1609/10). One painting in particular I never tire of, and that is Caravaggio's "St. Jerome Writing" (c.1606).

   

  Certainly in paintings like this Caravaggio makes extreme use of chiaroscuro, and he is not the first to do so. But there is a sense that Caravaggio took as much care painting the black backgrounds as he did the lighted figures in the foreground. Caravaggio's black is ambiguous. In one part of the canvas the black background is flat and full. In another part it is an empty, infinite depth. In still another part it is a thick black cloud, miasmatically embracing the foreground figures. The wonderful echo between the saint's barely haloed head and the skull holding open the book is accentuated by one kind of black – a black of shadows, shading, and contour. But behind both skull and head there is only outer space, at once flat and infinite. In a strange optical illusion, this same cosmic black seems to also inhabit the edges of the books, the space underneath the table, the creases of the fabric, and Jerome's own wrists. For me, this is "black painting" – black as a background that is always about to eclipse the foreground, the groundlessness of the figure/ground distinction itself, the presence of an absence, a retinal pessimism.

  Black painting – of the abstract expressionist type – has had a long career in modern art. And a survey of contemporary art suggests that black is always back, in some shape or form. But what I find interesting about black artworks today is the way they seem to combine the likes of abstract expressionism with that of Caravaggio and his tenebrist contemporaries. An example is Terence Hannum's series "Veils" (2012), which consists of images of disembodied hair on a black background – St. Jerome as a headbanger, as it were.

  The wisps of hair not only recall the black drawings of abstract expressionism, but they give the same sense of flat depth evoked in Caravaggio, in which we see figures almost drowning in black. Black is not only flat background, but a background that literally engulfs the foreground figure into a seemingly infinite abyss below, above, behind, everywhere.

  A further play on the foreground/background distinction comes in Jonah Groeneboer's drawings, which often feature luminous, geometric forms against a cloudy black background. In a different vein, Juliet Jacobson's series of black drawings, with their dense, thick, pulverizing of graphite on paper, pick up a different aspect of Fludd and the occult philosophers – that of their material, chemical, and alchemical commitment to the connection between the microcosm and macrocosm. And it is worth noting that each of these contemporary artists produces their black artworks through very material, physical processes that are also processes of negation: rubbing, smearing, smudging, and erasing material like graphite or charcoal into shards of powder and dust. The process seems adequate for the result, the showing of nothing, the revealing of black less as a color and more as this "nothing-to-see."

   

  It is this transition – from black as a color you see, to black as a non-color you don't see, to black as "nothing-to-see" (and you're seeing it) – that Fludd encapsulates in his simple black square. For Fludd, black was the "color" of non-existence, of pre-existence, of an un-universe prior to its possibility. This idea has also come full circle in contemporary philosophy. In a short and opaque text entitled "On the Black Universe," the French thinker François Laruelle extends this idea of black as a cosmological principle. Neither an aesthetics of color nor a metaphor for knowledge and ignorance, black is, for Laruelle, inseparable from the conditions of thought and its limit. Separate from "the World" we make in our own, all-too-human image, and apart from "the Earth" which tolerates our habitation of its surface, there is "the Universe" – indifferent, opaque, black: "Black prior to light is the substance of the Universe, what escaped from the World before the World was born into the World."81

  In such a scenario, human beings probe the Earth and manufacture the World, but neither of these respond to the groping around that constitutes being, or being-there, or becoming-this-or-that, or the event, or what have you. The human being "is answered only by the Universe, being black and mute."82 And yet, it is this enigmatic response that leads us into thinking that this black universe, the black of Fludd's un-universe, is something "out there" – the nature of reality, the fabric of the universe, a consensual hallucination, something that I can see and touch and feel, a color. Laruelle again: "A phenomenal blackness entirely fills the essence of the human. Because of it, the most ancient stars of the paleo-cosmos, together with the most venerable stones of the archeo-earth, appear to the human as being outside the World…"83 Fludd's cosmic black square, his un-universe, is not temporally prior to the universe, but neither is it some cataclysm to come; it is right here. But you can't see it. (And you're seeing it.)

  Black is the color of ink, oil, crows, mourning, and outer space. Black is not just one color among others, and neither is it one element or material among others. Black bathes all things in an absence, makes apparent an opacity, evaporates all the nuances of shadow and light. I leave the last word to an alchemist of a different sort, Yohji Yamamoto, who provides yet another variation of black: "…Above all, black says this: I don't bother you – don't bother me."

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Jay

30 April 2023

A midcentury modern style in U.S. horror fiction? Five stories from The Century's Best Horror Fiction 1951-2000 (2012) edited by John Pelan

Readers unfamiliar with the contents of The Century's Best Horror Fiction 1951-2000 may prefer to read these notes only after reading the story.

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Where was everyone tonight?

"Lonely Road" (1956) by Richard Wilson is a moving and powerful short story of cosmic horror. It is slickly written in what I'll term "mid-century modern" style: the nimble, supremely competent, unembellished, realist-seeming prose of enchanters who graced the pages of magazines from The New Yorker to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in the period 1945-1969. (In fact, "Lonely Road" appeared in the September 1956 issue of F&SF).

"Lonely Road" begins with motorist Clarence Spruance heading home. He has twelve hours ahead of him on a modern two-lane road. He stops to eat, but the diner is empty, so he makes himself a pot of coffee and a sandwich and pays. It's the same later that night at a gas station; he pumps it himself and leaves money in the office.

There are no other cars on the road that night. Nor anyone at a small town's all-night drug store. No response at a payphone when he calls the operator, or 411, or 611. No one at the motel where he stops, leaving cash in the guest book. In his room he "prayed on his knees for the. first time since childhood."

Next day, at a toll booth forty miles from home, normality seems to return. But in the next town there are no copies of the previous day's newspapers. And in all the people he observes, "hostility was general. Everyone was being distant with everyone

else."

Once home, Spruance and his wife compare notes. She had noticed something off the previous day while in the attic, visiting the stored possessions of their late son and only child.

  Bobby had been very good about his illness. He became a tropical fish enthusiast, spending hours, watching the gaily-colored creatures dart among the water plants and in and out of the pottery castle in the sand at the bottom of the big tank.

  Then one day Bobby had asked for another aquarium, exactly like the first, down to the last plant and the castle. They had bought it for him, of course, and set it beside the other near his bed. Bobby made adjustments in the slope of the sand, the angle of the castle and the spacing of the plants.

  His mother wanted to know about the twin aquarium but he wouldn't tell her anything except that it was an experiment. Later, when she'd left the room, closing the door at his request, he'd transferred the fish from the old tank to the new one.

  Bobby died not long after that. Later the fish died, too, and they'd emptied the two aquariums and put them in the attic.

  "That afternoon," Joan said, "I picked up one of the aquariums and was holding it in both hands. I'd forgotten how heavy it was.

  "Then I felt as if I was being moved. Not lifted or pushed, but moved in some positive way. The light flickered for an instant, then the feeling stopped. I was still holding the aquarium. I put it down. Everything seemed the same. Only it wasn't. There were three aquariums now."

  "Three?" her husband asked.

  "Yes." She looked at him as if he were far away. He waited for her to go on. "Then, this afternoon, I was here in the living room, dusting, wearing my yellow dust mitt. I had the feeling of being moved again. I went to the broom closet to put the dust mitt away-and it was there already."

  "Two dust mitts?"

  She laughed tensely. "Yes, two. So after I thought about it a while I went up to the attic. There was only one aquarium."

  Spruance got up and went to the window. The stars seemed close in the clear black sky.

  "You and everybody else went away; and then came back," he said. "But why not me?"

  Joan didn't reply. He turned quickly. She was still there, looking past him at the bright stars.

  "What are you thinking?" he asked.

  "Oh-nothing. Well ... actually I was thinking about the snail in the aquarium."

  "The snail?"

  "Yes. Remember how proud Bobby was when he'd transferred all the fish to the new tank? But then I told him he'd forgotten the snail. It was still in the old tank, hiding inside the castle."

  "I remember," he said. "Bobby sure was annoyed with that snail. But then he said: 'It was just an old experiment.' And, instead of putting the snail in the new tank too, he put all the fish back in the old tank."

  "Yes. He said he thought they liked it better there."

  For an instant he glimpsed that world some other where (with three aquariums now, and no yellow dust mitt), empty again, abandoned after the sterile experiment. He did not dare try to glimpse the experimenter....

With an almost audible wallop, Wilson has aesthetically jarred the two hemispheres of his tale: the lonely road and the parents' memories of their child's final hobby. The convergence, and the insight it generates, explode in the final abyssal insight.

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Suburban sacrifice

"The Altar" (1953) by Robert Sheckley gives us a droll springtime Lovecraft festival story for the era and suburban milieu of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. 

Sprightly Mr. Slater of North Ambrose, New Jersey, on his way to the train one fine morning, meets a stranger.

  "Pardon me, sir," the man said. "Could you direct me to the Altar of Baz-Matain?"

All day Mr. Slater puzzles over the fact that such an altar might exist without him knowing about it. And he is a twenty-year resident of North Ambrose!

The next morning the stranger assures him he found the right location:

  "Right beside the Temple of Dark Mysteries of Isis," the stranger said. "Stupid of me. I should have asked for that in the first place. I knew it was here, but it never occurred to me—" 

  "The temple of what?" Mr. Slater asked.

Mr. Slater cannot find the organizations in the phone book, or by using directory assistance.

  Altar of Baz-Matain. Dark Mysteries of Isis. They sounded like cults. Could there be such places in his town? It seemed impossible. No one would rent to people like that.

His spouse Mrs. Slater assures him "no one's going to start any cults in this town. The Better Business Bureau wouldn't allow it. To say nothing of the Woman's Club, or the P.T.A."

A few days later Mr. Slater is glad to come across the stranger again, and enquires how his cult is prospering.

  "So-so," the man said, his hands clasped behind his back. "To tell you the truth, we're having a bit of trouble." 

  "Oh?" Mr. Slater asked. 

  "Yes," the dark man said, his face stern. "Old Atherhotep, the mayor, is threatening to revoke our license in North Ambrose. Says we aren't fulfilling our charter. But I ask you, how can we? What with the Dionysus-Africanus set across the street grabbing everyone likely, and the Papa Legba-Damballa combine two doors down, taking even the unlikely ones well, what can you do?" 

  "It doesn't sound too good," Mr. Slater agreed."

  "That's not all," the stranger said [....] 

  It was such a little town. Mr. Slater knew a good percentage of the inhabitants by their first names. How could something like this go on unnoticed?

The next day, at another chance meeting, the stranger complains about his group having insufficient members to face its tasks.

  "Could I come?" Mr. Slater asked, without hesitation. "I mean, if you're short-handed—" 

  "Well," Elor mused. "It's unprecedented." 

  "I'd really like to," Mr. Slater said, seeing a chance to get to the bottom of the mystery. 

  "I really don't think it's fair to you," Elor went on, his thin, dark face thoughtful. "Without preparation and all."

Mr. Slater, tired of everyone denying the existence of underground cults in his North Ambrose, feels he is close to proving it. "He would really have something to dump in the mayor's lap if this worked!"

That night Elor leads Mr. Slater to the event via many circuitous and back-doubled routes.

[....] as they approached familiar streets from unfamiliar directions, Mr. Slater became just a trifle confused. He knew where he was, of course, but the constant circling had thrown him off.

[....] How very strange, he thought. One can get lost in one's own town, even after living there almost twenty years.

[....] The buildings became stranger and stranger as they walked down the dim street. They were of all shapes and sizes, some new and glistening, others ancient and decayed. Mr. Slater couldn't imagine any section in North Ambrose like this. Was there a town within the town? Could there be a North Ambrose by night that the daytime inhabitants knew nothing of? A North Ambrose approached only by devious turns through familiar streets?

At last they reach the address, and head down to the meeting chamber.

  "Have you got it ?" a thin voice asked from beside the light.

Elor assents and assures his comrades: "And he was willing, too." 

   The white light was suspended over a stone altar, Mr. Slater realized. In a single reflex action he turned to run, but Elor's hand was tight on his arm.

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I'm not sure why editor John Pelan would choose "Founding Father" (1957) by Clifford D. Simak for inclusion in The Century's Best Horror Fiction 1951-2000. Aside from the crossing back and forth between mean barrack settler reality on a newly colonized planet and a computer-aided ("dimemsino") solipsistic fantasy of friends, material fecundity, and bourgeois living, what horror is there? That a single immortal man might fail to educate and cultivate an embryonic settlement of humans far from earth?

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Is "The House" (1960) by Fredric Brown posthumous fantasy? Self-satisfied solipsism?  In hundreds of short stories Brown was either perfectly timed over his target, or misfired for want of what used to be called the "objective correlative." The o. c.'s absence is certainly felt acutely in "The House."

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"The Aquarium" (1962) by Carl Jacobi

English painter Emily Rhodes rents the house of the late conchologist Horatio Lear. In its library, Lear's massive aquarium remains, cloudy water concealing what?

Emily's companion Edith Halbin joins her. Their domestic bliss is short-lived. Emily is horrified by the contents of Lear's library. Edith takes up sleepwalking. Emily is troubled by a throbbing sound, "as if... well, as if a large hollow shell were placed against the ear and held there..."

Next door neighbor Lucius Bates is conversant with Horation Lear's theory and practice.

  [Miss Rhodes] became aware of a man on a stepladder on the adjoining property. It was Lucius Bates. She crossed over and bade him good morning.

  "But a wet, gloomy one," he said, resting his saw in the branch of the plane tree he had been trimming. "It seems one bad day follows another."

  They exchanged idle talk. "You still haven't got rid of that stone monstrosity, I see," he said.

  "Monstros ? Oh, you mean the aquarium! But why...?"

  Bates adjusted his oversized spectacles. "You have a rather nice library. That oversized tank is out of taste. I've often wondered why Horatio put it there in the first place." 

  "Presumably because it was close to his place of work." "Fiddlesticks! I should think a dry table would have been as good a place to keep his shell specimens on. But then, Horatio was a little touched."

  Miss Rhodes was going to mention Lear's queer papers and books when she thought better of it. Instead she said, "In what way— touched, I mean?"

  Bates smiled slightly. "Well, for one thing, his pet theory about a form of undersea life. He had some wild idea that somewhere in the unplumbed ocean depths there exists a highly developed kind of mollusk capable of emulating certain characteristics of those life forms it devours.

  "That was his original theory. In later years he apparently cloaked it with a pattern of demonology and what amounted to a modern adaptation of prehistoric superstition and folklore. He believed that these super undersea species are the incarnation of those Elder Gods who ruled the antediluvian deep and whose existence has been brought down to us in the dark myths and legends of a primitive past; that commanded by the great Cthulhu, they have lain dormant these eons in the sunken city of Flann, awaiting the time they would rise again to feed and rule. He believed further that this metempsychosis of the Elder Gods carried with it a latent incredible power and that if he could aid them to their destiny some of that power would be transmitted to him. Oh, Horatio really went all out in this mystic fol-de-rol. I even overheard him promise his brother, Edmund, all kinds of maledictions if he continued to ridicule his beliefs."

"The Aquarium" is not what I referred to above as "mid-century modern" horror. While Jacobi's style is carefully unadorned, the story (to be polite) still strikes the reader as a work designed to hit a targeted niche market. Despite its central symbolic apparatus of a tank of murky salt water and its claustrophobic interiors filled with somnambulism, auto-hypnosis, and unacknowledged lesbianism, it is far from the cosmopolitanism of writers like Shirley Jackson, Richard Matheson, Carson McCullers, the Bowles's, or Burroughs.

Still, Jacobi's studied climax does not stint in blood or thunder:

  "Edith!" she called. "Let me in."

  That same ringing silence answered her. Again she pounded on the door.

  "Edith! Why don't you answer?"

  Her unease gave way to alarm. She turned and ran down the corridor to the kitchen where a master key hung from a hook on the wall. A moment later, she had unlocked the library door and entered the room.

  At first glance, she thought the room was empty. Her eyes lowered to the floor and she advanced several steps. For a long moment she stood there, looking down. A dribble of saliva ran from a corner of her mouth. Then she turned very quietly and left the room.

  The rain, coming down harder, wrapped itself about her as she went out the door and down the outside steps to the street. She walked down Haney Lane to Brompton Road, heading south east toward Embankment. She moved into Basil Street and followed Basil into Walton, threading her way blindly through the night traffic, unaware of her surroundings, not knowing where she was or where she was going. She entered Pont Street and as she went on, she saw again in her mind's eye what she had seen in the library—the sight which would live forever in her memory—the body of Edith Halbin lying limp on the floor... a body that was all but unrecognizable because the head and face had been partially devoured! And the aquarium that no longer showed a milky grey solution, was now a sickening pink. And most hideous of all—the marks on the floor, the still wet red convolutions extending from the aquarium to the body of Edith Halbin and from there back to the tank again—marks that might have been made by some crawling thing, satiated and slobbered with blood.

  Miss Rhodes came into Cadogan Square. Here she suddenly stopped, threw back her head and screamed....

That dribble of saliva is certainly worthy of Sheckley or Wilson, if nothing else in "The Aquarium" comes close.

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Jay

29 April 2023