When I was a teenager, I came across a book by Clark Ashton Smith called Out of Space and Time Volume 1. It was a used book which was among a pile of others in a comic book store (of all places), even though it was all prose writing with very few graphics. The other 'volumes' of this series seem to have escaped me, but I certainly remember the garish cover: an animate skeleton with a green background and a kind of supine figure floating in the foreground. The book was an anthology of short stories in the genres of fantasy and science fiction, much of which had fascinated me at that time. I seem to have recalled one particular story in Smith's collection: a first person narrative about the experience of being buried alive, and the kinds of feelings that accompany it. Although it was a gruesome story, I afterward reflected: life itself sometimes 'buries' us when we are still alive. Has anyone ever not experienced the emotion of being trapped or engulfed in the everyday? I also started to wonder: when a person is overwhelmed, what do they have that keeps them intact? What prevents them from disappearing altogether in the avalanche of experiences?
Now that I am much older, I probably don't relate to science fiction with the same fascination that I did as a teenager. For instance, I am not one to imagine other worlds or fantastic beings the way I used to at one time. But when I had the opportunity to re-read Smith's short stories in his collection Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies, I have other views about Smith. In one of the stories, "The Last Incantation", Smith writes about a jaded sorcerer of dark magic who is simply bored with his powers and nearing the end of his life. He is such an adept magician that he has subdued most spirits and has power over a great many things, but his heart is dissatisfied. Reflecting on his past, he recalls a girl he had fallen in love with when he was younger, Nylissa. Smith's prose is quite magical here:
Then Malygris groped backward to the years of his youth, to the misty, remote, incredible year, where, like an alien star, one memory still burned with unfailing luster---the memory of the girl Nylissa whom he had loved in days ere the lust of unpermitted knowledge and necromantic dominion had ever entered his soul. (p.17)
Nylissa dies of illness at a young age, and Malygris decides to devise a spell that would revive her spirit. With the help of a talking viper, Malygris manages to conjure a spirit who resembles Nylissa in every respect, yet he seems to doubt that it is the 'real' Nylissa:
...somehow, as he gazed and listened, there grew a tiny doubt--a doubt no less absurd than intolerable, but nevertheless insistent: was this altogether the same Nylissa he had known? Was there not some elusive change, too subtle to be named or defined, had time and the grave not taken something away---an innominable something that his magic had not wholly restored?(p.20)
Concluding that the spirit in front of him couldn't possibly be the real Nylissa, Malygris orders this spirit to leave. It is later that the viper reveals to Malygris that the girl was the real Nylissa, and it is Malygris' own youth that has eluded him after all: "no necromantic spell could recall for you your own lost youth or the fervent and guileless hear that loved Nylissa, or the ardent eyes that beheld her then." (p.20) The one thing that Malygris has no power to restore is his own emotions, as well as the newness of the experience he had as a youth.
Some might think that this story is a kind of romance, but I think the story speaks of the effort to try to make something in the past into something new. What is the source of Malygris suffering after all? To me, the story is about impermanence. There is just no way to recover a thought that has already passed, and conditions are constantly changing. Malygris longs for something that symbolizes an eternal youth, when in fact every waking moment is eternal. Why does he get stuck in the past?
Another interpretation of the story is that it is a meditation on the nature of power. Even when a person has achieved power over the natural world and even over themselves, this power somehow corrupts experience. The more powerful I feel I am, the more I think I can create my own happiness, or control how I feel just by manipulating the conditions around me. But as the story suggests, Malygris has no power over himself at all: even when he can restore the dead, he still cannot feel the same way that he did when he was younger. It seems that the sense of power leads to more discontentment.
On a deeper level, the things that people think they have power over are actually already passed. Take a scientific discovery as an example. I might think I have mastered a result by setting up the right conditions, but this mastery is a kind of generalization which ignores the complexity of the present moment. Think of technological discoveries as an example. On the short term, technology offers a solution, but in the end, it creates new problems and challenges that were not foreseen in the past. I might think that I have more power, but this power is always about things that have passed, and they don't relate to the present conditions. Technology is only a temporary fix for a set of conditions we might already be familiar with, but it doesn't consider consequences or repercussions that are bound to arise. Much of the climate problems we now experience are the result of recent technologies.
I wonder, then, does Clark's story suggest that people need to get rid of the past to see things with new eyes of wonder? Or does it mean the opposite--that there is simply no way to recover the sense of wonder once it has passed? I think that both possibilities are there. On the one hand, trying to chase after a memory is futile, because it's an attachment to something that is already gone, and was never permanent to begin with. Most 'phantoms' are just memories of things that weren't meant to be forever. On the other hand, if Malygris had let go of the past and wanting to control himself to be happier, who knows--he might have realized that the sense of wonder is in every moment. There is no simple answer, but Smith's story raises interesting meditations about the nature of memory and how people's sense of being changes over time.
Smith, Clark Ashton (2014), The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies. New York: Penguin Books
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