TLO Welcomes Unwary Traveller
- Thread starter TLO
- Start date
ThisCreepingEvil
Mystic
Bonning the Jours as the French probably say XD
Unwary Traveller
Acolyte
Hello! I’ve been lurking here, between the trees, for quite some time now, and I’m pleased to finally draw closer to the fire and join the exalted company of the Nightmare Network. A brief intro has somehow morphed into a 1500-word manifesto for psychedelic horror, but then again, it has been said that things are too quiet around here.
My interest in weird fiction came via a circuitous route. A couple of brief encounters with psychedelics as a teen got me fascinated with the idea of consciousness and led me to study philosophy, with a particular interest in the philosophy of mind. In my 20s I knuckled down to a boring office job, living a quiet, depressing life in a dismal English town. I remember the moment of epiphany that brought me to the realisation that this existence would never satisfy me. I was watching a TV programme about a group of young psychonauts on a bus or RV going to the Burning Man festival. It looked like so much fun when my life was heading in the opposite direction. I wanted to be on that bus, or at least on some kind of psychedelic quest of my own.
It wasn’t until I hit 30 that I found myself in Amsterdam, eating magic mushrooms in my hotel room and rekindling that lost excitement. I visited Amsterdam several times before the mushrooms were banned there… but then ‘magic truffles’ were still available, so I carried on visiting several times a year.
About this time, I was browsing a mail-order book catalogue where my attention was drawn to a Robert E Howard collection titled The Haunter of the Ring and Other Tales in the Wordsworth ‘Tales of Mystery & the Supernatural’ series. The lurid paragraph describing the contents sounded like something out of a bad trip, and brought back childhood memories of ghost story anthologies by Mary Danby, and being genuinely scared by M.R. James “Lost Hearts.” I bought the Robert E Howard book and had my first taste of the output of Weird Tales magazine. I wasn’t disappointed, and started collecting the Wordsworth Mystery & Supernatural books, which eventually brought me to Lovecraft.
I distinctly remember reading “Dagon” in the Caffe Nero coffee shop at Liverpool Street Station, while waiting for the Harwich boat train. The tale had the indefinable quality of a psychedelic experience, where reality has shifted and can no longer be trusted, as deeper realms open up and unthinkable possibilities crowd your mind. I was fascinated. Here was someone writing in the first half of the 20th century, I thought, who seems to instinctively understand the kind of experiences I am having. I read books by S.T. Joshi. I obtained almost everything described in “Supernatural Horror in Literature” and started delving into the authors mentioned there.
In Thomas Ligotti I found an equally fascinating author with his own nightmarish style, with some intriguing psychedelic overtones in a few stories, most noticeable in “The Spectacles in the Drawer”. I found some Ligotti interviews online, and sure enough there are mentions of teenage psychedelic use and hints of frightening experiences. This was the point when I discovered TLO and in particular Matt Cardin’s essay “His Master’s Eyes Shining with Secrets.” Inspired by this, for years afterward I had the notion of writing an essay titled “The Dark Psychedelia of Lovecraft and Ligotti,” but I was too busy with work and frequent trips to Amsterdam to ever get around to starting it – at least until COVID put an end to my travels.
I began the essay earlier this year and its gradually ballooned in scope, reaching 20,000 words before I’ve even got very far into looking at individual stories. My intention is to divide it into sections and post it on TLO whenever it gets completed. It’s an exploration of possible influences on Lovecraft, and a more general look at weird fiction viewed through the lens of the psychedelic experience. It’s focused more on Lovecraft than Ligotti but my plan is to end by comparing the way that the two authors explore these ideas.
My interest in the link between psychedelics and weird literature is partly due to the fact that during all of my psilocybin experiences I’ve kept a trip journal – they’ve been solo experiments in consciousness exploration rather than anything particularly hedonistic. What started off as a simple intention to describe the visual experience became derailed at higher doses, with the strangeness of the trip manifesting itself in my writing. Wildly tangential and rambling thoughts. A manic urge to keep writing as ideas flow uncontrollably onto the page. Paranoid delusions. Grandiose delusions. At high doses I would find myself in the stereotypical position of a Lovecraftian protagonist – losing my mind, writing of the horrors from beyond that were becoming increasingly real to me. Staring into the shifting walls as they turned yellowy-green, or closing my eyes to face a seething vortex of closed-eye-visuals – the “writhing inferno of fluorescent death” as I once described it.
I had terrifying apprehensions of the wrath of God, and several times became convinced of my imminent death; panic attacks within paranoid delusions, my conscious experience slowly disintegrating in the maelstrom, only to re-emerge from the void into a stunningly blissful transcendent experience which was totally unexpected. I would become God in a solipsistic universe, grandiose delusions cascading into a web of incoherent religiosity. A materialist by instinct, an atheist with a distaste for spirituality, it was hard to understand the framework of these experiences beyond the simple terms of delusion, mania, psychosis and hallucination. Depending on the dose I could end up in a state where alien entities “scratching at the outer rim” became genuinely feared, or I could perish in apocalyptic fires into transcendent states of oneness, returning to myself believing I had died and become God. Less extreme doses could produce a conviction of the reality of God and a comforting sense of his presence. Mystical experiences depended entirely on dosage calculations and estimates of potency.
I became interested in the concept of the numinous and the mysterium tremendum, relating both to the psychedelic experience and weird fiction. Matt Cardin’s “Teeming Brain” blog was very useful. He writes of a “searing fusion of the horrific with the beatific in a liminal zone where supernatural horror and religion are inextricably merged with each other.” A familiar place. (By coincidence, with my eyes closed during a trip I’ve seen giant fish-like creatures gliding through an inky void, resembling the ones on the cover of To Rouse Leviathan). Where religion and supernatural horror meet, I conceive of psychedelics forming the third side of a triangle, a technology of consciousness that allows you to navigate these spaces. Here was the realm I had been exploring.
Irritated by the delusional religiosity during my trips which invariably followed any full-blown mystical states, by this time I had dialled back my regular dose, with the aim of exploring that numinous realm where the beyond is pressing close, but you haven’t yet been lost to the black hole of ego dissolution. In this weird but lucid headspace, the mood of heightened significance and deep strangeness is fertile for writing. Visuals and visions offer portents of things to come. Unusual phrases drift into the mind out of nowhere. A theme emerges from the chaos, a direction to the journey. The push of mania brings forth the words onto the page, so that writing becomes a process of writing down sentences which are coming from elsewhere – from the unconscious mind. Suspension of disbelief is enhanced by the delusional mood. And what are delusions if not stories created by the mind to explain its own convolutions?
The ‘unwary traveller’ name originates from a trip journal. The words of a cloaked figure met in a dark forest, a bizarre fusion of the Erl-King and De Quincey. Beneath the folds of his cloak, as it sweeps over your head, is a circus tent, the theatre of the mind…
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