Quentin S. Crisp's Blog

My 2016 novella set in the Japanese mountains, Out There, is now available to order in standard hardback and leather-bound editions from Occult Press, at this link.

I'm glad to see it come out again, so that more people have a chance to read it, if they are interested. (It was previously in a very limited edition.) I have a feeling it's even become more topical in the intervening decade, in a somewhat oblique way: space age ambitions are pitted against the gloomily lambent enchantments of folkloric manifestations. Et cetera.



I dare say I'll post here with more news before long.

It's about time I posted some news. Not all of it is mine, but let me start by suggesting that readers scroll down the page at the Occult Press website to the titles listed as "Forthcoming". At the top of the list you will find, next to my name, the title, Out There. Out There was first published in 2016, in a very limited edition of 107. I won't give a synopsis here. Suffice it to say that the novella is influenced by Japanese folklore and literature and involves two friends, one of whom wishes to travel to Mars, hiking in the Japanese mountains.

The second item of news is that I have now (as of last month) started writing at Substack. If you are interested, you may find my Substack account here:

https://quentinscrisp.substack.com/

Thirdly, I would also like to draw attention to the existence of an anthology from British Library Publishing with the title, Spores of Doom: Dank Tales of the Fungal Weird . This volume contains a tale from Mark Samuels. For some reason there is no table of contents for the book anywhere obvious online. (This kind of negligence and incompetence grows apace in recent years and I suspect it is symptomatic of the age: an age in which we emulate machines and submit hastily to the idea of our own obsolescence.) Nonetheless, I have very good reason to believe that the Mark Samuels story included therein is 'Cesare Thodol: Some Lines Written on a Wall'. (This tale first appeared, I believe, in the Strange Attractor journal and later in Mark's collection Glyphotech.) Together with 'The White Hands', included in the Folio Society's Weird Tales anthology (a selection by Michael Dirda), that makes two of Mark's tales that have been anthologised posthumously so far, both in prestigious venues. I hope this bodes well for his future readership. Nothing is guaranteed, of course, in life or death, and I hope those who appreciate Mark's work will do their best to make sure it is remembered and passed on.

Well, that's all the news, but I'll end with a couple of reminders. First, a reminder that I have a Patreon account, which you may find here:

https://www.patreon.com/c/user?u=2730...

And also, the permanent link to the interview I did with Nina Power and Doug Lain back in January of this year for Sublation is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8oUb...

I will update with more news as and when.

In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche tells us that, "He who has a 'why' for which to live can bear almost any 'how'." This is followed by the line: "Humanity does not strive for happiness; only the English do."

Meaning, in other words, is more important than the kind of utilitarian happiness that was, in the nineteenth century, being advocated by English philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, and which remains an influential model in the Anglosphere today.

Later, in the twentieth century, Viktor Frankl founded logotherapy, which has come to be called the third school of Viennese psychotherapy, on the principle that Nietzsche's words encapsulate. Frankl illustrates the principle in Man's Search for Meaning, his memoir of Auschwitz and Dachau, where he was a prisoner. His contention was that it is precisely meaning, purpose, which is decisive in surviving such conditions.

Recently, we have seen a spate of AI images in the style of Japan's Studio Ghibli, this supposedly marking some new watershed in AI development. People have been converting photos of themselves, or other images of choice, into the warm, slightly otherworldly style familiar from the animated films of Miyazaki Hayao, and this has been surrounded by a virtual tornado of rhetoric and outrage. There are concerns about copyright issues as well as the devaluing of the original artworks in a more metaphysical, aesthetic or spiritual way. Mention has been made of a "semantic apocalypse". Some of these concerns are subtle but they might, nonetheless, point to phenomena that will have far-reaching consequences. I will, for now, focus on one of the existential questions.

While doomscrolling on the AI theme on X/Twitter, I found mention of Christy Brown, the Irish artist born with such severe cerebral palsy that he only had motor control of his left leg. I can't find the 'tweet' in question now, but here is another one mentioning him in the same context:

https://x.com/MannysMyName/status/190...

It was using his operational left leg that Brown became a painter, thus, through the means given by the struggle to master the art of painting, finding the purpose needed to continue living in the face of the great suffering to which his memoir, My Left Foot , attests.

Now, we may ask, what would have happened if, rather than being encouraged to be a painter, Christy had been told not to bother, because there is an AI that can do it all better and he only needs to feed in a few prompts? This is the situation in which we might now find ourselves as a human species. The question is not whether AI programmes actually make this or that obsolete, though this is a related and important question to which we must return. No, the current live question is whether the tech industry can convince people on a large enough scale that AI makes this or that obsolete. And since, for decades, the value of the humanities has been eroded from both left and right -- from the left, because we are supposed either to have no heritage or to be ashamed of it, and because what remains is devoted to mere left-wing propaganda, and from the right because the arts and humanities are effeminate, decadent and are too often subsidised -- big tech will have a much easier time of persuading people than if people had the benefits of a rounded education, giving full value to the arts and humanities, to those things, in other words, which help us understand ourselves as human beings, morally, culturally, psychologically and existentially.

The voices we hear from big tech and its advocates show that either they do not understand the damage they are doing, or they do not care, or they positively revel in it. Perhaps you, too, revel in the idea of depriving artists of first, their income, and then, any sense of purpose, but do not think for a moment that if the tech companies can do this to artists (I hope they cannot) that they will stop there. All of us need a living of some kind, and all of us need purpose. In our society, with its complex division of social roles and labour, artists, writers, musicians and so on, have the often thankless and usually precarious task of working at the coalface of the Nietzschean 'Why'. We are the purpose-detectors and the purpose-developers for the human race. If you think you will not be demoralised if we are, I put it to you that you are very wrong, and that, if we are allowed actually to be demoralised en masse in this way (further than, frankly, we already are), you will discover in time, and to your great detriment, exactly how wrong you are.

I am keeping this brief for now because I am in the middle of a change of address, made necessary by financial considerations. I can no longer afford the modest flat that I have been living in. What I have written above is not theoretical for me, I am in the very belly of it. However, I intend to expand on this later when I have time, since there is much to say about it. And no, I do not welcome our new, tech overlords.

An update on my previous post.

I am to be interviewed by Nina Power tonight at 5.00 pm GMT:

https://substack.com/@ninapower/note/...

I suppose, but am not sure, that if you wish to watch it live, you need to go to the 'Live' tab at the Sublation YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/@sublationmed...

Either that or the 'Video' tab:

https://www.youtube.com/@sublationmed...

In any case, it will be there as an upload after streaming.

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I mentioned in my previous post that I am soon to be interviewed by the legend that is Nina Power. I have a date, and, since, as I understand it, the interview is to be live-streamed, I even have a time. It will be this coming Monday, the 27th, at five o'clock in the evening, GMT.

The interview will be #2 in the new podcast, at the Sublation Media YouTube channel, 21st Century Internet Lit. Here is #1 in that series, from last month, with Nina interviewing the writer Udith Dematagoda:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P684H...

I presume that, if you want to watch the interview live on Monday, you simply have to go to the Sublation channel and the video will be there. (I don't know much about these things.) Here is the channel itself:

https://www.youtube.com/@sublationmedia

I might update this post with relevant links or information.

I hope all is well, ridiculous as that sounds.

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I'm just writing briefly with some updates.

Sherds Podcast (Sam Pulham) uploaded a 'ten best reads of 2024' video a couple of weeks ago. You may view it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOMcD...

It's an interesting list, featuring Brendan Connell's Cannibals of West Papua, Daniel Mills's A Song in the Night, In Youth is Pleasure, by Denton Welch, my own I Reign in Hell, which was released in June of last year, and six others.

Please note that I am also soon to be interviewed by the brilliant Nina Power:

https://substack.com/@ninapower/note/...?

It will be a video interview, I gather. I shall post an update here with more information on that soon.

And for those who missed it, I was mentioned in connection with the writing process on the Weird Studies podcast at the end of 2024, here:

https://www.weirdstudies.com/181b

If I get time, which I might not, I might even post the second half of my 2024 reading here before long.

I hope everyone is coping reasonably well, or even better.

A touching message was left last night (I found it this morning) on the 2017 video of me interviewing Mark Samuels on my YouTube channel. This is the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiXUa...

The comment reads:

En esta triste noche hace un año que nos dejó Mark Samuels. Como homenaje voy a disfrutar esta noche de su obra "La era del futuro degradado" de la editorial española Valdemar :)

It has, indeed, been a year.

I will not add comments of my own today. I will only paste here links to a couple of songs by Roky Erickson, of whom Mark was fond, who one might call, in fact, the supremely Samuelsian rock musician:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4-Ru...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEg2D...

Mishima died on this day in 1970. I've been thinking of him. It seems there were some elements to his suicide that were related to Japanese politics, but more broadly, one can see it as a gesture of defiance against the soullessness of modern life. Here are some words from his last speech, in which he addressed the assembled garrison at a Self-Defence Force military base in Tokyo before committing seppuku:

Where has the soul of the warrior gone? How will you go on, as nothing but a giant armory whose soul is dead?

No doubt Mishima would not have wished his death to be thought of as suicide in the usual way. Since he ritually disembowelled himself, with his head severed by his companion Morita, after an abortive military coup, it does, indeed, qualify as unusual. Still, thinking of Mishima's death now leads me on to think of suicide in general. I suspect there is often, in our age, as a significant part of the motivation for suicide, a general desire to defy or to escape the grinding soullessness that has come to dominate everything.

Having said that, I was struck a while back by the following short film about suicide, under the title, 'Men Are Dying and Nobody Cares', which presents suicide as far from a considered choice:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKcV6...

The basic thesis of the film is borrowed from David Foster Wallace, who wrote an arresting passage about the reasons why a depressed person will kill herself. I will paste here the passage in question. I don't know how well it is transcribed. It differs from the way the passage is quoted in the film. Notably, we find that DFW uses "herself", presumably as the now common alternative to the universalistic 'he/him', or perhaps there are other reasons that would be clear if we had more of the context of the passage:

The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

This strikes me as very true. With many who are suicidal, asking them why they want to kill themselves is as nonsensical as asking someone who jumps from a building to escape fire why they want to jump from a building. It's hardly a matter of wanting.

"I don't want to kill myself," they might reply. "I am being forced."

Until you are in that position yourself, you might not be able to understand. Nonetheless, it is real.

David Foster Wallace, who wrote that passage, incidentally, or not so incidentally, killed himself in 2008. We must assume that the flames had become too close and too scorching.

Though Mishima's suicide was unusual, and we might suspect that his was a more willed and deliberate death, he nonetheless fits the demographic most vulnerable to suicide in the UK at present:

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/...

Most obviously, he was male.

"Suicide in England and Wales is three times more common among men than among women."

This is a figure I first read in a penetrating piece on suicide in the present age (called, in fact, 'Piece on Suicide') by Nina Power and Pierre d’Alancaisez:

https://ninapower.net/2023/12/02/piec...

Mishima was also in the right age group:

"The risk of suicide in England and Wales is usually highest among people aged between 45 and 54 ..."

Something not mentioned in the statistics linked to at the House of Commons Library, is another factor that may have been relevant in Mishima's case. Mishima was also a writer, and various sources tell us that writers are about twice as likely as the general population to kill themselves:

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/ar...

So, being a male writer in the age group between 45 and 54 is not a good combination, especially (going by the statistics) for those living in the UK and perhaps the Anglophone world generally right now.

There are many other relevant factors, of course.

The film, 'Men Are Dying and Nobody Cares', asks towards the end, "Does it have to be like this?" It then tells the story of Tim Ferriss, who was planning to kill himself but was caught off guard by a concerned phone call from his mother. (The film doesn't say this, but I believe that his mother had received a notice from the library that a book on how to commit suicide was overdue.) The point the filmmaker wishes to make is that suicide can be averted, if it is caught early enough, a point very much opposed to the received wisdom that a person talking about suicide will not do it. This received wisdom is emphatically not true. When I was a child, I walked into a room in my father's house where a man had hanged himself. (The police had woken me without telling me what was happening.) It transpired that the man in question had told a number of people he was going to kill himself. Indeed, it was not his first attempt.

The film ends with a message for those currently suffering:

"No darkness lasts forever."

I hope this is true. After a certain age, one is able to see all too closely that lives can run their course with no redemption, at least not in this world. Then we are faced with the question of the ultimate end of all things. (Could the the Lady Julian of Norwich be right?)

For my own part, I wish that no one felt forced into suicide. If there is an element in suicide of defying the hideous soullessness of this world, I hope we can do that by staying rather than by leaving. I know it's not easy.

Even unreasoningly (that is, I cannot fathom my reasons, but trust that they are deep), I am glad when suicide is averted, and, without knowing precisely how to counsel against suicide, I would, nonetheless, counsel against it. I have heard from more than one person that reading my 'Suicide Watch' kept them alive:

https://www.ligotti.net/showthread.ph...

I can only say, I was glad to hear this. Perhaps I felt that the soulless machine had been deprived of a victim. In any case, I was glad.

Someone reminded me recently that this year it is forty years since Morbid Tales came out. Forty years? I thought, but I've only been alive for . . . oh wait, he means Morbid Tales, the album by Celtic Frost, and not Morbid Tales, my second collection of short fiction. That one came out . . . twenty years ago this year. It's been around for half the time of the album after which it was named. How strangely time passes. In another twenty years . . . another forty . . . It doesn't bear thinking about. And yet, the advent of the Celtic Frost album, and that of my later book, do not seem, retrospectively, that distant. They are a little like the moon, which sometimes looks deceptively as if you can touch it.

The 2nd of this month was apparently All Souls' Day, otherwise known as Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed, or, in Polish, Zaduszki. As one grows older, there are, of course, more departed souls to remember. One anticipates joining them. Will we? What will it be like?

I am reading an edition of The Monk, by Matthew 'Monk' Lewis, given to me by a friend who left us less than a year ago. The following lines from a poem head one of the chapters:

Tell us, ye Dead! will none of you, in pity
To those you left behind, disclose the secret?
Oh! That some courteous Ghost would blab it out;
What 'tis you are, and we must shortly be.
I've heard that Souls departed have sometimes
Fore-warn'd Men of their deaths: 'Twas kindly done
To knock, and give the alarum.

The poem is apparently The Grave by Robert Blair. There is more of it (I don't know if it's the whole thing) transcribed here:

https://allpoetry.com/The-Grave-

Tell us, ye dead! will none of you, in pity
To those you left behind, disclose the secret?
Oh! that some courteous ghost would blab it out;
What 'tis you are, and we must shortly be.
I've heard that souls departed have sometimes
Forewarn'd men of their death:—'twas kindly done
To knock, and give the alarm.—But what means
This stinted charity?—'Tis but lame kindness
That does its work by halves.—Why might you not
Tell us what 'tis to die? do the strict laws
Of your society forbid your speaking
Upon a point so nice?—I'll ask no more:
Sullen, like lamps in sepulchres, your shine
Enlightens but yourselves. Well, 'tis no matter;
A very little time will clear up all,
And make us learn'd as you are, and as close.

Etc.

I don't know which transcription is more faithful, though for the most part I find internet transcription to be very careless and sketchy.

You can read a little about 'Mortality Maths' here:

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-st...

Who knows which of us will still be here in a year's time, and which will be gone? This post might have readers then, perhaps, but no longer a living author.

Well, here's to absent friends, the dear and irreplaceable, and to present friends, too, so caught up in troubles and never knowing how wonderfully they fall at times upon the eyes of those close to them. Let us hope we can be good company to each other for the little time that we have left. Or to put it another way, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.

There is a new brightly-lit and many-imaged interview with me, conducted by Kevin Miller, now up at the website of "the global culture underground", The Aither. Here is the link:

https://theaither.com/kevin-chats-wit...

I hope you will find time to read it and will enjoy it when you do.

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