On Morbidity by T.Ligotti.
Isolation, mental derangement, strange emotional states, visions, well-tended fevers, neglected well-being: only a few of the many techniques cultivated by the virtuoso of morbidity. Just as vital to his development is a real feeling for supernatural horror. Retreating from a world of “health” and “sanity,” or at least one that daily invests in such commodities, the morbid man seeks the shadows behind the scenes of life. He backs himself into a corner alive with cool drafts and fragrant with centuries of must. The flowers he finds on the wallpaper seem half-real and cause him to dream of vampire gardens and dwarfish creatures with flesh of thorns. There, in that corner, he builds a world of ruins out of the battered stones of his imagination.
But this world is not one of pure romance, not all a dazzling music hall of lyrical mania. So let us condemn it for a moment, this deep end of dreams. Though there is no name for the morbid man’s sin, it still seems in violation of some law or other, perhaps many laws, probably all of them. He does not appear to be doing any good, either for himself or others. And while we all know that the macabre and uncanny are quite palatable as side-dishes of existence, he has turned them into a hideous specialty of the house! Ultimately, however, he may meet these charges of wrongdoing with a simple “What of it?”
Now, such a response assumes morbidity to be a certain class of vice, one to be pursued without apology, and one whose advantages and disadvantages must be enjoyed or endured outside the law. But as a sower of vice, if only in his own soul, the morbid man incurs this criticism: that he is a symptom or a cause of decay within various individual and social spheres of being. And decay, like every other process of becoming, hurts everybody. “Good!” shouts the morbid man. “Not good!” counters the crowd. Born of extremely narrow and personal feelings, both positions betray inadmirable origins: the one in resentment, the other in fear. And when the ethical debate on this issue eventually reaches an impasse or becomes too tangled for truth, then the psychiatric one can begin. Later on we will find other angles from which this problem may be attacked, enough to keep us occupied for the rest of our lives.
Meanwhile, the morbid man keeps putting his time to no good use, until in the end—amidst mad winds, moonlight, and craving specters—he uses his exactly like everyone else uses theirs: all up.
Thank you, don’t forget to read the assignment.
Isolation, mental derangement, strange emotional states, visions, well-tended fevers, neglected well-being: only a few of the many techniques cultivated by the virtuoso of morbidity. Just as vital to his development is a real feeling for supernatural horror. Retreating from a world of “health” and “sanity,” or at least one that daily invests in such commodities, the morbid man seeks the shadows behind the scenes of life. He backs himself into a corner alive with cool drafts and fragrant with centuries of must. The flowers he finds on the wallpaper seem half-real and cause him to dream of vampire gardens and dwarfish creatures with flesh of thorns. There, in that corner, he builds a world of ruins out of the battered stones of his imagination.
But this world is not one of pure romance, not all a dazzling music hall of lyrical mania. So let us condemn it for a moment, this deep end of dreams. Though there is no name for the morbid man’s sin, it still seems in violation of some law or other, perhaps many laws, probably all of them. He does not appear to be doing any good, either for himself or others. And while we all know that the macabre and uncanny are quite palatable as side-dishes of existence, he has turned them into a hideous specialty of the house! Ultimately, however, he may meet these charges of wrongdoing with a simple “What of it?”
Now, such a response assumes morbidity to be a certain class of vice, one to be pursued without apology, and one whose advantages and disadvantages must be enjoyed or endured outside the law. But as a sower of vice, if only in his own soul, the morbid man incurs this criticism: that he is a symptom or a cause of decay within various individual and social spheres of being. And decay, like every other process of becoming, hurts everybody. “Good!” shouts the morbid man. “Not good!” counters the crowd. Born of extremely narrow and personal feelings, both positions betray inadmirable origins: the one in resentment, the other in fear. And when the ethical debate on this issue eventually reaches an impasse or becomes too tangled for truth, then the psychiatric one can begin. Later on we will find other angles from which this problem may be attacked, enough to keep us occupied for the rest of our lives.
Meanwhile, the morbid man keeps putting his time to no good use, until in the end—amidst mad winds, moonlight, and craving specters—he uses his exactly like everyone else uses theirs: all up.
Thank you, don’t forget to read the assignment.
