Duke Elric - Michael Moorcock [96]
While Isaak looks on in puzzlement the priest holds his head in his hands, sweating…
MONK: “And they had offspring …”
Isaak is horrified.
ISAAK: “Where are they now? What were they like?”
Monk again looks into the middle distance, unwilling to image what he speaks about. His head is superimposed over a page where two demonic figures—Elric and a woman who has to be his twin—both with blazing red eyes—charge into battle against frightened human figures while overhead fly part of the dragon swarm, the Phoorn, their shadows falling across the battle panorama which is lit by fires from a burning city…
MONK: “We can only imagine …”
AN END
ASPECTS OF FANTASY (2)
ASPECTS OF FANTASY
(1963)
In this second article in our new series, Michael Moorcock likens
the early Gothic writings to drug-induced states, which had a similar
effect upon both author and reader. The eighteenth century
laid the foundation to many outstanding macabre tales to come.
John Carnell, Science Fantasy No. 62, December 1963
2. THE FLOODGATES OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
TRANCE-INDUCING DRUGS like mescalin, LSD and opium produce in the individual spectacular visions. I have experienced similar visions without recourse to drugs, meditation or fasting. I have been awake and conversing rationally while at the same time everything I see has taken on a surrealistic perspective. People's faces have appeared to change; I have had a condensed or extended time sense, heightened sensibility to the point where I feel aware of the individual muscles, nerves and sinews at work, the very blood-cells racing through both my own veins and the veins of whoever has been with me; I have observed people in the minutest detail and their conversation has had profound significance far beyond its intended content.
Secondly, I have at à later stage been overwhelmed by an intense and irrational fear, have found myself running madly upstairs, stumbling, falling—quite unable to control my limbs except by an extreme effort of will. Later still I have lain in the dark surrounded by hallucinations of the utmost horror.
I'm as sane as most; it is simply that my experiences were similar to those of people under the influence of drugs. Thomas de Quincey:
The unimaginable horror which these dreams of oriental imagery and mythological tortures impressed upon me … I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by paroquets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas, and was fixed for centuries at the summit, or in secret rooms; I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed … I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris: I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. Thousands of years I lived and was buried in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles, and was laid, confounded with all unutterable abortions, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.
(Confessions of an English Opium Eater)
Aldous Huxley:
That chair—shall I ever forget it? Where the shadows fell on the canvas upholstery, stripes of a deep but glowing indigo alternated with stripes of an incandescence so intensely bright that it was hard to believe they could be made of anything but blue fire. For what seemed an immensely long time I gazed without knowing, even without wishing to know, what it was that confronted me. At any other time I would have seen a chair barred with alternate light and shade. Today the percept had swallowed up the concept. I was so completely struck by what I actually saw, that I could not be aware of anything else … The event was this succession of azure furnace-doors separated by gulfs of unfathomable gentian. It was inexpressibly wonderful, wonderful to the point, almost, of being terrifying. And suddenly I had an inkling of what it must be like to be mad.
(The Doors of Perception)
Both these passages describe drug-induced hallucinations. You have read my experience. I have never in my life taken opium or mescalin.