Drink to Me Only with Labyrinthine Eyes - the second story in Thomas Ligotti's Nyctalops Trilogy bookended by The Chymist and Eye of the Lynx. And that's Nyctalops as in night blindness, an inability to see clearly in dim light.
The
tale's narrator tells us he was born with the full power of a master
hypnotist, not a business or profession but a calling, a master
hypnotist with eyes so singular they're taken for strange crystallized
lenses, eyes befitting one whose destiny has been marked by fate's
stigmata.
The narrator mingles with the guests at a party for
high society where he will soon take the stage with his stunningly
beautiful assistant, an assistant who is, as he tells us, a somnambule.
He asks a gentleman if he would like to meet her; however, he knows the
answer: “They all do. They all want to know you, my angel.” Sidebar: a
somnambule for an assistant is most appropriate since the author's Nyctalops Trilogy is included among those tales under the heading Dreams for Sleepwalkers as part of his Songs of a Dead Dreamer.
Here
we have a tale of hypnosis with language that seems to purr, language
so flowing, so soothing it can work its hypnotic magic on a reader, as
when “a spotlight focuses on a pair of metronomes, their batons sweeping
back and forth in perfect unison like windshield wipers in the rain:
smoothly back and smoothly forth, back and forth, back and forth. And at
the tip of each baton is a replica of each of my eyes swaying left and
right in full view of everyone, while my voice speaks to them from a
shadowy edge of the stage."
Once again, Thomas Ligotti proves himself master of the craft. Having read Labyrinthine Eyes
multiple times, I can assure you the narrator's every single word
counts. Thus, rather than offering a synopsis or recounting the
evening's entertainment, I will shift to a number of questions readers
are invited to explore -
Magical Arts – Can we detect a
similarity between the narrator and author Thomas Ligotti, that is, as
the narrator was born with the full power of a master hypnotist, so
Ligotti was born with the full power of a master storyteller?
Rotten
Candy Apple - The narrator tells us: “Even now I hear those
high-society vulgarians still laughing, still dancing, still making a
fuss over my charismatic doll of the dead.” Is there a sense all those
members of high-society are blind to the destructive, putrid
consequences they have wrought against others less fortunate and against
society at large? Is the opulent, alluring world they've created for
themselves, in fact, rancid at its core? Hint: One of these well-dressed
scums asks the narrator if his hypnotic skills could serve as a tool
for his advertising business.
Light and Darkness – At one point
in the evening's performance, the narrator alludes to his assistant as a
star. “Already you can see the glowing. She begins to effloresce. She
begins to incandesce. And now she approaches such radiance that she
almost disappears into it.” Recognizing the female beauty is, in fact, a
corpse, is the narrator gifting (or damning) his audience with the
Angel of Death?
Thrills and Chills – What are we to make of our
modern society's obsession with watching other people suffer? "They
wanted the death stuff, the pain stuff. All that flashy junk. They
wanted cartwheels of agony; somersaults through fires of doom; nosedives
of vulnerable flesh into the meat grinder of life." Turns out, the
master hypnotist gives the crowd exactly what it wants – but in
unexpected ways.
Mash the Puppet - As in The Chymist, the
narrator exerts complete control over the female character’s form.
Among other atrocities, he breaks her neck and bones in order to stuff
her into an impossibly small box. Could this be the same woman made
incapable of screaming from the author's first tale in the trilogy?
Childish
Innocence – The hypnotist has a private session with a child. As both he
and we as readers discover, the child possess a sharpness of perception;
the young boy can see his assistant as a yucky corpse. Recall the boy
in the medieval tale who cries out, “The emperor has no clothes!” What is
it that separates this youth from those odious bastions of the upper
crust?
Plato's Cave – The hypnotist performed in a room where
there were no windows, only mirrors. Ha! Scratch the surface and you
have the grotesque. Is living in a hall of mirrors any better than
looking at shadows in a cave? This brings to mind that famous Gilles
Deleuze quote: “If you're trapped in the dream of the Other, you're
fucked.”
Death and More Death - The hypnotist's telling
pronouncement, “Well, frolic while you can, you dullards. The show isn't
over yet.” Are these women and men in store for more death than that of
the beautiful assistant? Who knows, perhaps she carries the deadly
plague. Echoes of Edgar Allan Poe's Masque of the Red Death.
Thomas Ligotti, born 1953
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