Astrophobia II: Clark Ashton Smith

Lovecraft’s colleague and protege, Clark Ashton Smith, presents a more complex case. In Smith’s poem “Desire of Vastness,” the poetic persona wishes to possess “the brazen empire of a bournless waste/ the unstayed dominions of a brazen sky” as a means of attaining a kind of demonic ascension [1.] In the first stanza, he queries “what high mysteriarch […] undreamt-of god” imparts the wish to conquer heavenly expanse. This mysterious divinity of extraterrestrial provenance “past the moon/ Circling some wild world outmost in the dark” at first only initiates enrapturement: “this unfathomed wish to hark/ what central sea […] plangent to what enormous plenilune/ that lifts in silence…?” However, the poem’s climactic final lines betray the speaker’s megalomaniacal intentions. To attain the heavens is to be “lifted past the level years” and “taste/ the cup of an Olympian ecstasy/ Titanic dream, and Cyclopean sleep”— all images of a Hellenic immortality. We are left with the image of a crazed despot, trying to dominate the cosmos to attain a mythic godhead. Yet the madness seems to descend from the cosmos itself.

In his long poem “The Hashish Eater: Or the Apocalypse of Evil” a similar cosmic seeker— one claiming to be “the emperor of dreams”— is pursued by a “dragon-route” of winged demons [2.] As the poetic protagonist contemplates the infinity of astral space, he is beset by “cloud on hellish cloud” of aerial monstrosity, “the roar of torrent wings/ inseparably mingled.” Here are “Griffins, rocs/ And sluggish, dark chimeras, heavy winged/ After the ravin of dispeopled lands/ And harpies, and the vulture-birds from hell.” This interplanetary danse macabre is accompanied by a different sort of harmony of the spheres: “the shriek of wyverns, loud and shrill/ As tempests in a broken fane, and roar/ Of sphinxes, like relentless tolls of bells.” The stars, then, both transfix and terrify: they derange the contemplative astrophile, seduce with visions of heavenly glory, then let loose a torrent of monsters.

Yet Smith also tells other kinds of stories. In his poem “The Star Treader,” the contemplation of the heavens is associated not with the desire to master, but with an unsettling injunction to remember. This poem recounts another cosmic journey, set onto a narrative frame of dreaming and awakening. Yet this time, the dreamer’s sojourn through deep space is also a journey into the recesses of the self: “through the stars and deeps I watched the dream unroll/ Those folds that form the raiment of the soul.”[3] The planets and suns form an analogue for the years of conscious life— “lineal, ordered spheres/ The twisting of the threads of years”— that the poetic persona “retrace[s]” to “[know] again each former world.” The conceit is striking: If for Lovecraft the drifting fog is the effluvium of foul otherworlds, for Smith the otherworlds themselves are the dark corners of the soul: “Each sun had radiance to relume/ A sealed, disused, and darkened room/ Within the soul’s immensity.” To explore the strangeness of cosmic space is to “delve in each forgotten mind/ those units that had builded me,” yielding a chiasmatic formulation in which subjectivity itself is interlarded with pockets of spatiotemporal otherness. For Smith, the “unimagined spheres” in which are “found/ the sequence of my being’s round” reveal images of past lives: “those anterior ones/ Whose lives in mine were blent.” The heart of cosmic space discloses a Self that is temporally fractured, as variegated as the stars in the galaxy.

This could be read as mere solipsism: the universe as but a mirror of the Self. Yet Smith extends this theme in other poems, elaborating the quotidian as the site of otherworldly estrangement. In “The Motes” it is specks of dust floating through the air, “whirled away in gleaming flight” that conjure the image of a tiny cosmos [4.] To their observer, each one “had its swift and tiny noon,” as the penumbra is “revealed and lit” by a “disclosing bar of light.” The tone of the poem is elegiacal— the dust-world “briefly dawned and sank away”— yet its figuration of nature as the site of other, hidden natures is none the less comprehensive for that. The poetic persona declares: “I saw a universe today.” What other universes dwell in the atmosphere around us, and how might they come into view? Smith’s brief poem “In the Wind” multiplies this sense of hidden, nested worlds via synaesthetic transmutation. Here, the wind evokes a rushing crowd: “In the wind what legions pass/ Phantom, innumerable, fleet!” [5] Yet the poetic image of sound, the aerial susurration that evokes the sound of “pauseless feet” also resonates in a different register: the “pauseless feet” of the windy crowd are also “lights that run upon the grass.” Smith’s kaleidoscope of immanent worlds creates a mise-en-abyme effect: if the wind discloses a hidden public that is also “dreamed” by the spectator as the scattering of light, what scene of nature is not the site of unfolding emergence?

By contrast to Lovecraft’s overt astrophobia, Smith’s poems express a less pathologically phobic view of the difference figured by the dark void of cosmic supernature. Instead he articulates a polyadic conception of earthly being, one that is always already also extraterrestrial [6.] In the poems above, Smith explores concepts of multiple and interstitial— even “intervital” [7]— realities not even hinted at by the cosmophiliacs, who tend to write of alien societies in teleological terms as either positive foils or benevolent angels who can help humanity realize its true potential. By contrast, Smith presents human reality as dotted with monadologically figured otherworlds, a stance that, if not politically radical, at least registers uneasy acceptance of the multiplicity inextricable from terrestrial being. After all, contact with interplanetary life may not go smoothly; there is no reason to presume a premature cosmic harmony. Smith himself was no progressive, and both his writings and personal history attest to a tangled relationship with reactionary sexual and racial prejudices. But his writing does not betray Lovecraft’s morbid rejection of difference. Instead, these poems register the uncomfortable intimacy that marks any collective project: the poetic tension of human exposure to nature and the universe.

Notes:

[1] Smith, Clark Ashton. “Desire of Vastness” in The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies. Ed. and Intro by S.T. Joshi. New York, NY: Penguin Books. 2014. Print, p. 298

[2] _____________. “The Hashish Eater; or The Apocalypse of Evil” in The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies. Ed. and Intro by S.T. Joshi. New York, NY: Penguin Books. 2014. Print, p. 318

[3] _____________. “The Star-Treader” in The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies. Ed. and Intro by S.T. Joshi. New York, NY: Penguin Books. 2014. Print, pp. 287-289

[4] _____________. “The Motes” in The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies. Ed. and Intro by S.T. Joshi. New York, NY: Penguin Books. 2014. Print, p. 303

[5] _____________. “In the Wind” in Poetry, Vol. 6. No. 4. July 1915. Web. p. 178

[6] The concept of polyadic worlds is inspired by Lubomír Doležel, who writes of dyadic worlds in Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1998. Print. pp. 128-132

[7] This term is from Smith. In “The Star-Treader” the poetic narrator is “from planet unto planet whirled/ through gulfs that mightily divide/ like to an intervital sleep” p. 287.