Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

Downward Curve


I’d like to talk a little about one of my favourite writers, Thomas Ligotti. I’m not really sure where I’m going with this, but recently I noticed some similarities between my own conception of, or fascination with, Daoism, and the work of Ligotti. I don’t even know when I began to notice this, exactly, only that it’s been on my mind for some time.

Well, let me start with The Unholy City. The Unholy City is a CD that comes free with the filmscript Crampton, by Thomas Ligotti and Brandon Trenz. It consists of six tracks, all of which are written and performed exclusively by Ligotti. I say ‘tracks’ because they are not exactly songs. They are soundscapes over which Ligotti recites six prose-poems that centre on the concept of a place, or state of existence, known as The Unholy City. The tracks are, in order, The Player Who Takes No Chances, You Do Not Own Your Head, No one Knows The Big News, The Unholy City, The Name is Nothing and Nobody is Anybody. The first track, describing the human race as pawns in a sinister game that it will never understand, returns frequently to the refrain, "There is a greater blackness", and perhaps it is really here where the similarity I have spoken of begins.

What is it that first makes Daoism seem attractive to me? What is it that makes it seem different to other religious or mystical systems? Let us look at the opening verse of the Tao Te Ching (Dao De Jing):

The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.

(Above translation copyright to Stephen Mitchell)

"Darkness within darkness." Christianity speaks of the light of God, the light that blinded Paul on the road to Damascus. Buddhism, too, seems to lean towards the abstract, one might say, 'asexual', otherness of the 'light' within enlightenment. But in the first verse of the first Daoist text we are confronted immediately with darkness, which is "the gateway to all understanding". Immediately, instead of the ungraspable of light, I see the black mud that clings to roots of trees, and rivers flowing blindly underground. These things are earthy, they are watery – you might say that they are opposite to the air and fire that is inspiration and enlightenment. They also suggest movement and mutability. The light, on the other hand, stands for something that does not have shape or movement, but exists abstractly outside of time. "The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao." It is mutable, changing, like clay under one’s fingers as one tries to grasp it. But there is also a suggestion here of the beyond, since the Tao is beyond the tao, the Name is beyond the name, and this tallies with Ligotti's 'greater blackness'. There is always one shade of blackness beyond, and beyond, and beyond.

I have mentioned the mutability of the Tao. Mutability, that is, the lack of any substantial and consistent reality, is another aspect of the nightmare atmosphere conjured up in Ligotti's work. For instance, the story 'The Cocoons' features one Dr. Dublanc and a patient of his, the latter obsessed with the notion that things are changing form around him. The story opens with the doctor waking the patient in the small hours to go on some therapeutic excursion:

Side by side, the doctor and I proceeded over uneven pavement and through blotched vapors emerging from the fumaroles of several sewer covers. But I could see the moon shining between the close rooftops, and I thought that it subtly shifted phases before my eyes, bloating a bit into fullness. The doctor caught me staring.

"It’s not going haywire up there, if that’s what is bothering you."

In another story, 'The Mystics of Muelenberg', he describes a town that undergoes nightmare transformations:

At last the faces of Muelenberg became subject to changing expressions which at first were quite subtle, though later these divergences were so exaggerated that it was no longer possible to recapture original forms. It follows that the townspeople could no more recognize themselves than they could one another. All were carried off in the great torrent of their dreams, all spinning in that grayish whirlpool of indefinite twilight, all churning and in the end merging into utter blackness.



In my mind, however, the work of Ligotti diverges from Daoism in that Daoism suggests a kind of cosmic cycle, and a cycle, in turn, suggests something like order. When I question myself as to why Daoism suggests a cycle, I am hard put to find a particular quote to back this up. I think the impression rests upon the pairing of opposites that one find in the Tao Te Ching, for instance, difficult and easy, long and short, high and low. These are given as examples of opposites supporting each other’s existence. One might easily add, for instance, night and day, summer and winter. And when one adds to these the famous symbol of Daoism, the Yin/Yang design, the cycle concept seems to become even more definite. After all, Yin/Yang is a circle.



Daoism has a lot to do with accepting things for what they are:

When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.

This is a philosophy that I find increasingly necessary, because, if the universe is indeed cyclical in nature, then the Yin/Yang wheel is now turning into shadow. We are on the downward curve. Do you doubt this? The tree of the world is facing autumn. Leaves are falling, and soon it shall be winter. The tree shall be utterly barren.

Watch the leaves fall. There they go:

A murderous beast man is elected to the White House.

And look, there’s another one:

Global frog crisis.

And another one:

Three million dead in Congo war.

One by one they fall. Thousands of them. Millions of them.



We are the unlucky ones. We have been born on the edge of cosmic winter. Perhaps there is nothing for us to do but, in the spirit of the Tao, find the beauty in barren plains of ice. The beauty in extinction and darkness. Anyway, it seems we must accept it. In this spirit I see myself as a dead leaf already detached from the tree, floating through the air to oblivion. I yield to this great extinction. The human parasite has been too successful and is killing its host. Now extinction is good – human extinction. So I will not strive, or, if I cannot help but to strive in some way, at least I shall not reproduce and add to this heartbreaking, barren struggle.

I think now of a scene from The Setting Sun by Dazai Osamu. The female narrator has an affair with a hard-drinking artist. They are walking at night and she points to a leafless tree. "It’s beautiful," she says. "The contrast between the buds and the branch, you mean?" But she doesn’t. She means the branches themselves. "Even like that, with no leaves, they are still alive."

And so, perhaps, if there is a cycle, the Earth will eventually recover, having rid itself of the human parasite, and a beautiful spring will come again, which, by definition we will not be able to see, since everywhere we go we destroy the spring.

But perhaps, after all, the universe is not cyclical. Maybe the Tao and the mutability of the Dao extends beyond even the order of cycles. After all, doesn’t global warming herald the end of the seasons? As Ligotti says in The Name is Nothing, when deconstructing the name he has constructed, 'The Unholy City':

As for the quality or characteristic of unholiness, this is also misleading, a nominal façade designed to make things interesting for a world born out of blackness where nothing holy or unholy has ever existed, where nothing exists at all, except dreams and fevers and names for nothing, the creation, so to speak, of that original blackness which pulls itself over every world like a hangman’s hood over a condemned man’s head.

Yes, the name that can be named is not the eternal Name. Perhaps everything, despite the dubious Dr. Dublanc’s diagnosis, has indeed gone haywire. Perhaps the moon has shifted its phase.