To S. L.
“Apropos of sleep, that sinister adventure of all our nights, we may
say that men go to bed daily with an audacity that would be
incomprehensible if we did not know that it is the result of
ignorance of the danger.”
—Baudelaire.
May the merciful gods, if indeed there be such, guard those hours when
no power of the will, or drug that the cunning of man devises, can keep
me from the chasm of sleep. Death is merciful, for there is no return
therefrom, but with him who has come back out of the nethermost
chambers of night, haggard and knowing, peace rests nevermore. Fool
that I was to plunge with such unsanctioned phrensy into mysteries no
man was meant to penetrate; fool or god that he was—my only friend, who
led me and went before me, and who in the end passed into terrors which
may yet be mine.
We met, I recall, in a railway station, where he was the centre of a
crowd of the vulgarly curious. He was unconscious, having fallen in a
kind of convulsion which imparted to his slight black-clad body a
strange rigidity. I think he was then approaching forty years of age,
for there were deep lines in the face, wan and hollow-cheeked, but oval
and actually beautiful; and touches of grey in the thick, waving hair
and small full beard which had once been of the deepest raven black.
His brow was white as the marble of Pentelicus, and of a height and
breadth almost godlike. I said to myself, with all the ardour of a
sculptor, that this man was a faun’s statue out of antique Hellas, dug
from a temple’s ruins and brought somehow to life in our stifling age
only to feel the chill and pressure of devastating years. And when he
opened his immense, sunken, and wildly luminous black eyes I knew he
would be thenceforth my only friend—the only friend of one who had
never possessed a friend before—for I saw that such eyes must have
looked fully upon the grandeur and the terror of realms beyond normal
consciousness and reality; realms which I had cherished in fancy, but
vainly sought. So as I drove the crowd away I told him he must come
home with me and be my teacher and leader in unfathomed mysteries, and
he assented without speaking a word. Afterward I found that his voice
was music—the music of deep viols and of crystalline spheres. We talked
often in the night, and in the day, when I chiselled busts of him and
carved miniature heads in ivory to immortalise his different
expressions.
Of our studies it is impossible to speak, since they held so slight a
connexion with anything of the world as living men conceive it. They
were of that vaster and more appalling universe of dim entity and
consciousness which lies deeper than matter, time, and space, and whose
existence we suspect only in certain forms of sleep—those rare dreams
beyond dreams which come never to common men, and but once or twice in
the lifetime of imaginative men. The cosmos of our waking knowledge,
born from such an universe as a bubble is born from the pipe of a
jester, touches it only as such a bubble may touch its sardonic source
when sucked back by the jester’s whim. Men of learning suspect it
little, and ignore it mostly. Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the
gods have laughed. One man with Oriental eyes has said that all time
and space are relative, and men have laughed. But even that man with
Oriental eyes has done no more than suspect. I had wished and tried to
do more than suspect, and my friend had tried and partly succeeded.
Then we both tried together, and with exotic drugs courted terrible and
forbidden dreams in the tower studio chamber of the old manor-house in
hoary Kent.
Among the agonies of these after days is that chief of
torments—inarticulateness. What I learned and saw in those hours of
impious exploration can never be told—for want of symbols or
suggestions in any language. I say this because from first to last our
discoveries partook only of the nature of sensations; sensations
correlated with no impression which the nervous system of normal
humanity is capable of receiving. They were sensations, yet within them
lay unbelievable elements of time and space—things which at bottom
possess no distinct and definite existence. Human utterance can best
convey the general character of our experiences by calling them
plungings or soarings; for in every period of revelation some part of
our minds broke boldly away from all that is real and present, rushing
aërially along shocking, unlighted, and fear-haunted abysses, and
occasionally tearing through certain well-marked and typical obstacles
describable only as viscous, uncouth clouds or vapours. In these black
and bodiless flights we were sometimes alone and sometimes together.
When we were together, my friend was always far ahead; I could
comprehend his presence despite the absence of form by a species of
pictorial memory whereby his face appeared to me, golden from a strange
light and frightful with its weird beauty, its anomalously youthful
cheeks, its burning eyes, its Olympian brow, and its shadowing hair and
growth of beard.
Of the progress of time we kept no record, for time had become to us
the merest illusion. I know only that there must have been something
very singular involved, since we came at length to marvel why we did
not grow old. Our discourse was unholy, and always hideously
ambitious—no god or daemon could have aspired to discoveries and
conquests like those which we planned in whispers. I shiver as I speak
of them, and dare not be explicit; though I will say that my friend
once wrote on paper a wish which he dared not utter with his tongue,
and which made me burn the paper and look affrightedly out of the
window at the spangled night sky. I will hint—only hint—that he had
designs which involved the rulership of the visible universe and more;
designs whereby the earth and the stars would move at his command, and
the destinies of all living things be his. I affirm—I swear—that I had
no share in these extreme aspirations. Anything my friend may have said
or written to the contrary must be erroneous, for I am no man of
strength to risk the unmentionable warfare in unmentionable spheres by
which alone one might achieve success.
There was a night when winds from unknown spaces whirled us
irresistibly into limitless vacua beyond all thought and entity.
Perceptions of the most maddeningly untransmissible sort thronged upon
us; perceptions of infinity which at the time convulsed us with joy,
yet which are now partly lost to my memory and partly incapable of
presentation to others. Viscous obstacles were clawed through in rapid
succession, and at length I felt that we had been borne to realms of
greater remoteness than any we had previously known. My friend was
vastly in advance as we plunged into this awesome ocean of virgin
aether, and I could see the sinister exultation on his floating,
luminous, too youthful memory-face. Suddenly that face became dim and
quickly disappeared, and in a brief space I found myself projected
against an obstacle which I could not penetrate. It was like the
others, yet incalculably denser; a sticky, clammy mass, if such terms
can be applied to analogous qualities in a non-material sphere.
I had, I felt, been halted by a barrier which my friend and leader had
successfully passed. Struggling anew, I came to the end of the
drug-dream and opened my physical eyes to the tower studio in whose
opposite corner reclined the pallid and still unconscious form of my
fellow-dreamer, weirdly haggard and wildly beautiful as the moon shed
gold-green light on his marble features. Then, after a short interval,
the form in the corner stirred; and may pitying heaven keep from my
sight and sound another thing like that which took place before me. I
cannot tell you how he shrieked, or what vistas of unvisitable hells
gleamed for a second in black eyes crazed with fright. I can only say
that I fainted, and did not stir till he himself recovered and shook me
in his phrensy for someone to keep away the horror and desolation.
That was the end of our voluntary searchings in the caverns of dream.
Awed, shaken, and portentous, my friend who had been beyond the barrier
warned me that we must never venture within those realms again. What he
had seen, he dared not tell me; but he said from his wisdom that we
must sleep as little as possible, even if drugs were necessary to keep
us awake. That he was right, I soon learned from the unutterable fear
which engulfed me whenever consciousness lapsed. After each short and
inevitable sleep I seemed older, whilst my friend aged with a rapidity
almost shocking. It is hideous to see wrinkles form and hair whiten
almost before one’s eyes. Our mode of life was now totally altered.
Heretofore a recluse so far as I know—his true name and origin never
having passed his lips—my friend now became frantic in his fear of
solitude. At night he would not be alone, nor would the company of a
few persons calm him. His sole relief was obtained in revelry of the
most general and boisterous sort; so that few assemblies of the young
and the gay were unknown to us. Our appearance and age seemed to excite
in most cases a ridicule which I keenly resented, but which my friend
considered a lesser evil than solitude. Especially was he afraid to be
out of doors alone when the stars were shining, and if forced to this
condition he would often glance furtively at the sky as if hunted by
some monstrous thing therein. He did not always glance at the same
place in the sky—it seemed to be a different place at different times.
On spring evenings it would be low in the northeast. In the summer it
would be nearly overhead. In the autumn it would be in the northwest.
In winter it would be in the east, but mostly if in the small hours of
morning. Midwinter evenings seemed least dreadful to him. Only after
two years did I connect this fear with anything in particular; but then
I began to see that he must be looking at a special spot on the
celestial vault whose position at different times corresponded to the
direction of his glance—a spot roughly marked by the constellation
Corona Borealis.
We now had a studio in London, never separating, but never discussing
the days when we had sought to plumb the mysteries of the unreal world.
We were aged and weak from our drugs, dissipations, and nervous
overstrain, and the thinning hair and beard of my friend had become
snow-white. Our freedom from long sleep was surprising, for seldom did
we succumb more than an hour or two at a time to the shadow which had
now grown so frightful a menace. Then came one January of fog and rain,
when money ran low and drugs were hard to buy. My statues and ivory
heads were all sold, and I had no means to purchase new materials, or
energy to fashion them even had I possessed them. We suffered terribly,
and on a certain night my friend sank into a deep-breathing sleep from
which I could not awaken him. I can recall the scene now—the desolate,
pitch-black garret studio under the eaves with the rain beating down;
the ticking of the lone clock; the fancied ticking of our watches as
they rested on the dressing-table; the creaking of some swaying shutter
in a remote part of the house; certain distant city noises muffled by
fog and space; and worst of all the deep, steady, sinister breathing of
my friend on the couch—a rhythmical breathing which seemed to measure
moments of supernal fear and agony for his spirit as it wandered in
spheres forbidden, unimagined, and hideously remote.
The tension of my vigil became oppressive, and a wild train of trivial
impressions and associations thronged through my almost unhinged mind.
I heard a clock strike somewhere—not ours, for that was not a striking
clock—and my morbid fancy found in this a new starting-point for idle
wanderings. Clocks—time—space—infinity—and then my fancy reverted to
the local as I reflected that even now, beyond the roof and the fog and
the rain and the atmosphere, Corona Borealis was rising in the
northeast. Corona Borealis, which my friend had appeared to dread, and
whose scintillant semicircle of stars must even now be glowing unseen
through the measureless abysses of aether. All at once my feverishly
sensitive ears seemed to detect a new and wholly distinct component in
the soft medley of drug-magnified sounds—a low and damnably insistent
whine from very far away; droning, clamouring, mocking, calling, from
the northeast.
But it was not that distant whine which robbed me of my faculties and
set upon my soul such a seal of fright as may never in life be removed;
not that which drew the shrieks and excited the convulsions which
caused lodgers and police to break down the door. It was not what I
heard, but what I saw; for in that dark, locked, shuttered, and
curtained room there appeared from the black northeast corner a shaft
of horrible red-gold light—a shaft which bore with it no glow to
disperse the darkness, but which streamed only upon the recumbent head
of the troubled sleeper, bringing out in hideous duplication the
luminous and strangely youthful memory-face as I had known it in dreams
of abysmal space and unshackled time, when my friend had pushed behind
the barrier to those secret, innermost, and forbidden caverns of
nightmare.
And as I looked, I beheld the head rise, the black, liquid, and
deep-sunken eyes open in terror, and the thin, shadowed lips part as if
for a scream too frightful to be uttered. There dwelt in that ghastly
and flexible face, as it shone bodiless, luminous, and rejuvenated in
the blackness, more of stark, teeming, brain-shattering fear than all
the rest of heaven and earth has ever revealed to me. No word was
spoken amidst the distant sound that grew nearer and nearer, but as I
followed the memory-face’s mad stare along that cursed shaft of light
to its source, the source whence also the whining came, I too saw for
an instant what it saw, and fell with ringing ears in that fit of
shrieking and epilepsy which brought the lodgers and the police. Never
could I tell, try as I might, what it actually was that I saw; nor
could the still face tell, for although it must have seen more than I
did, it will never speak again. But always I shall guard against the
mocking and insatiate Hypnos, lord of sleep, against the night sky, and
against the mad ambitions of knowledge and philosophy.
Just what happened is unknown, for not only was my own mind unseated by
the strange and hideous thing, but others were tainted with a
forgetfulness which can mean nothing if not madness. They have said, I
know not for what reason, that I never had a friend, but that art,
philosophy, and insanity had filled all my tragic life. The lodgers and
police on that night soothed me, and the doctor administered something
to quiet me, nor did anyone see what a nightmare event had taken place.
My stricken friend moved them to no pity, but what they found on the
couch in the studio made them give me a praise which sickened me, and
now a fame which I spurn in despair as I sit for hours, bald,
grey-bearded, shrivelled, palsied, drug-crazed, and broken, adoring and
praying to the object they found.
For they deny that I sold the last of my statuary, and point with
ecstasy at the thing which the shining shaft of light left cold,
petrified, and unvocal. It is all that remains of my friend; the friend
who led me on to madness and wreckage; a godlike head of such marble as
only old Hellas could yield, young with the youth that is outside time,
and with beauteous bearded face, curved, smiling lips, Olympian brow,
and dense locks waving and poppy-crowned. They say that that haunting
memory-face is modelled from my own, as it was at twenty-five, but upon
the marble base is carven a single name in the letters of
Attica—’ΥΠΝΟΣ.
Return to “Hypnos”
questions, comments, suggestions/feedback, take-down requests, contribute, etc
contact me @ integralyogin@gmail.com or via the comments below
or join the integral discord server (chatrooms)
if the page you visited was empty, it may be noted and I will try to fill it out. cheers