“Man is a self-conscious Nothing.”
- Julius Bahnsen
"To live is to war with trolls."
- Henrik Ibsen
Julius Bahsen, Ligotti and life as a puppet.
The philosophical pessimism of German writer Bahnsen states, “The only pessimism worthy of the name is a pessimism tragically earnest and at the same time grimly humorous: I am a puppet in the hands of Infinite Perversity, and there is absolutely no way out of it, but I know it, and so take the puppet-play in which I take a part with a sense of humor; I laugh at the puller of the strings, and this is my revenge."
Having recognized this as a source of my own ‘grimly humorous’ reaction to Ligotti’s, ‘The Clown Puppet’ a short and perhaps even trivial story which nonetheless reawakens in me a wonderful old spark of awareness in the absurdity of my life. As a new reader of Ligotti, and someone who has never read horror fiction before, I am now seeking out more instances of this sort of writing from Mr. Ligotti and others, although I prefer the living modern Ligotti to the more arcane, dead Lovecraft and Poe.
As Ligotti tells us himself in ‘The Conspiracy Against the Human Race’, "While Bahnsen does not figure in the following pages, I should say that his negative spirit is nonetheless present in this work, the brunt of which is concerned with how blind we are to the horrors of our existence as well as how adept we have become at sloughing them off". Ligotti offers us two rules of thumb to guide us in our confusion: the first is that "our positive estimate of ourselves and our lives is all in our heads"; and, second, "if you must open your mouth, steer away from argumentation"
I read this before I had read any of Ligotti’s fiction, as a response to learning of his existence from watching the HBO True Detective series and finding some of the character Rust Cohle’s words to be worth pursuing as far as what the philosophy could be in which Rust espoused such nihilistic yet poetic rhetoric.
While trying to find out what, if anything has been said by Ligotti himself on this puppet philosophy with its pessimistic humor of the gallows that marks the spirit of negativity pervading Ligotti's work, I have thus far found the following. Of humans and puppets he says, "We are somebodies who move freely about and think what we choose. Puppets are not like that. They have nothing in their heads. They are unreal. When they are in motion, we know they are moved by an outside force. When they speak, their voices come from elsewhere. Their orders come from somewhere behind and beyond them. And were they ever to become aware of that fact, they would collapse at the horror of it all, as would we" I think in Ligotti's stories that the puppet figures as the insensate and sub-personal reality hidden beneath the ‘mindless mirrors’ of our naive reality. Puppets function as ‘conduits to the unreal’,
Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing, and over which they have no control. Ligotti wrote, “The puppet is not merely an mocking parody of man, it is the unmasking of the animate face of insensate reality, the unveiling of the inexorable mechanics of the personal".
It is my own understanding and assertion, reawakened by discovering Ligotti’s writings that we are victims of our own success, animals who know that they are alive, who invent solutions to impossible threats against veritable extinction and annihilation; governed by the wayward knowledge of our conscious minds we wander through the maze of time like puppets on the strings of a master magician. But the only magical manipulator behind the scenes is the mad philosophy of a disquieting thought: the insidious parody of a dream turned nightmare revealing that there is no one and nothing behind the curtain of being to pull the strings. Instead we are faced with a stupidly chaotic universe of which we know nothing more than the rudimentary fragments of delirious thoughts.
To further quote Ligotti, "Whether we are sovereign or enslaved in our being, what of it? Our species would still look to the future and see no need to abdicate its puppet dance of replication in a puppet universe where the strings pull themselves. What a laugh that we would do anything else, or could do anything else. That we might be only self-conscious nothings would not really be a secret too terrible to know—a paradox and a horror . . . the insufferable condition of a planet of puppets that are aware they will die, shadows without selves enshrouding the earth, puppet-heads bobbing in the wind and disappearing into a dark sky like lost balloons. If that is the way things are, go shout it from the rooftops and see where it gets you"
Hannah Gerber, 2014
