Clark Ashton Smith, Zothique: The Final Cycle

 Introduction

Opening Passage: Zothique is a collection of (mostly) short stories. The first short story is "The Empire of the Necromancers":

The legend of Mmatmuor and Sodosma shall arise only in the latter cycles of the Earth, when the glad legends of the prime have been forgotten. Before the time of its telling, many eopochs shall have passed away, and the seas shall have fallen in their beds, and new continents shall have come to birth. Perhaps, in that day, it will serve to beguile for a little the black weariness of a dying race, grown hopeless of all but oblivion. I tell the tale as men shall tell it in Zothique, the last continent, beneath a dim sun and sad heavens where the stars come out in terrible brightness before eventide. (p. 19)

Summary: Zothique is the last inhabited continent of the Earth. Civilizations have risen, civilizations have fallen, and the traces of them have vanished in sea and cataclysm. Continents have risen, continents have collapsed beneath the sea, and continents have risen again, and this, the last one that humanity, in any sense of humanity, will ever know, is all that is left. Scientific knowledge and machinery have vanished, and humanity is again returned to savage kingdoms built out from force,  worshipping gods and devils with barbaric rites, of whom the darkest and most terrible is Thasaidon, ruler of the seven hells. Empires rise by sorcery and necromancy, for devil-taught arts to rule the dead are the last, most terrible arts.

The stories and poems in the collection are quite diverse, although they all concern some form of inevitability and inescapability. Despite the dark background, or perhaps because of it, the stories are not relentlessly dark, in part because much of the darkness defeats itself. All these dark things will also pass, and they show it in their own self-destruction. The necromancers Mmatmuor and Sodosma in "The Empire of the Necromancers" build a powerful kingdom of undead by their necromantic arts, and are ultimately destroyed by them. The would-be tomb-desecrators in "The Weaver in the Vault" find darker things than they intend. "The Witchcraft of Ulua" shows the victory of ascetic restraint over lascivious demonry. In "The Charnel God", asorceror tries to steal from the dark death-god Mondiggian, who punishes him, but Mondiggian is fair to those who do not cross his claim to the dead. The mighty sorceror Namirrha takes his vengeance on King Zotulla in "The Dark Eidolon", but oversteps himself and finds that there are powers relative to whom he is as nothing. The list could be continued. Even in a world ruled by devils and abominations, evil is the beginning of its own inescapable devastation. That does not make it less evil, or less abominable; but the last delusion is thinking that one's evil can give one an escape from the inevitable. This is, of course, what necromancy is: the attempt to deny what in the end admits no denial.

The stories are quite different. I very much liked "The Witchcraft of Ulua", in which Sabmon the anchorite, learned in the dark arts, protects his great-nephew Amalzain from the temptations of Miraab, "a city of strange sins and strange witcheries and sorceries" (p. 148). In Miraab he catches the eye of the dissolute sorceress, Princess Ulua, who wants him as a lover. When he refuses, she attempts to take vengeance, haunting him with dark and troubled visions, which would make him mad; but he returns to Sabmon in time to save his mind and witness Miraab reap the harvest of its sins.

The story that I perhaps liked best was "The Black Abbot of Puthuum". Zobal the archer and Cushara the pike-bearer are friends who are assigned by their king, Hoaraph, the mission of finding a legendary maiden of great beauty, whom Hoaraph wants for his harem. They find her; her name is Rubalsa, and of course they fall in love immediately. As they are returning a strange darkness overtakes them, they meet a man who calls himself Ujuk, the abbot of Puthuum, who offers his hospitality. Zobal and Cushara are skeptical, but they follow him to a great monastery, where they are offered a feast. They refrain from all food and drink, and rather than sleep, they stay vigilant in the night. They are separated in the night when Zobal goes to get their own food, and Zobal is led down a dark stairway by a voice until he comes to the monastic catacombs, and finds that the voice comes from a half-decayed corpse. This is Uldor, the true abbot of the monastery of Puthuum and once a great magic-worker; Ujuk is the spawn of Uldor and a succubus, the result of a momentary lapse and giving-in to temptation. Ujuk put Uldor in the catacombs to be always dying, never dead, an agony of repentance for a thousand years. From Uldor Zobal learns the way to save themselves from being prey to Ujuk.

The combination of the fantastical and Smith's lush, poetic style often gives the stories something of a fairy-tale quality, which becomes particularly intense when the stories are at their most honest about darkness being its own punishment. As with the old fairyland, Zothique is a strange and uncertain place, alien in its demands, perilous on every side. But, last of all lands, it is a realm of endings, for there is one inescapable: that all things on Earth will pass away.

Favorite Passage: From "The Voyage of King Euvoran":

Thereat the ruler of the birds, as if amazed and more indignant than before, made question of Euvoran and interrogated him sharply concerning the gazolba. And, learning that this bird had been slain by sailors and afterward stuffed, and that the whole purpose of Euvoran in his voyage was to catch and kill it a second time and re-stuff it if necessary, the ruler cried out in a great and wrathful voice:

"This helpeth not thy case, but showeth thee guilty of a twofold crime and a triple infamy: for thou has owned a most abominable thing, and one that subverteth nature. In this my tower, as is right and proper, I keep the bodies of men that my taxidermists have stuffed for me, but truly, it is not allowable or sufferable that man should thus to birds. So, for the sake of justice and retribution, I shall presently commit thee to the care of my taxidermists. Indeed, methinks that a stuffed king (since even the vermin have kings) will serve to enhance my collection." (pp. 287-288)

Recommendation: Recommended; as a collection, it's uneven, but at its best it is very good.

***

Clark Ashton Smith, Zothique: The Final Cycle, Hippocampus Press (New York: 2022).

KnowSoda Philosophy Test

 

Not too far off. You can take the test here. (There are several versions, of different lengths; I took the longest one.)

Dashed Off XXXIII

 Human beings create para-moral systems to facilitate moral living; but we are also tempted to treat the para-moral as moral, especially where the para-moral is more convenient to us.

Many people effectively treat murder as an effect (stripping of consciousness) and not as an act of injustice toward the innocent.

the ecclesiological reading of the sacraments

Both 'popular culture' and 'high culture' tend to suffer when disconnected from each other; they work best when popular culture is popularized high culture and high culture is exalted popular culture.

Universally human beings think through transitions on the model of births and conjugal unions and deaths.

Where there is no conception of sacrilege, nothing is conserved.

"Love of the highest kind is a pilgrimage to a place of purification." Roger Scruton
"Literature and painting represent things, not by copying them, but by expressing thoughts about them."

Rhetoric is not a technique but an art of many techniques.

Semiosis always takes place against a background and within a context of intelligibility of being. (Intelligibility 'folded' into mediate intelligibility through co-intelligibility.)

It is because of co-intelligibility that we can use signs to elucidate the meanings of other signs, and do so successfully.

The Garden of Gethsemane is the proper model of all martyrdom.

Social problems involve an intensive aspect (how bad it is), an extensive aspect (how much it affects), and a protensive aspect (how it will shape events).

"The absolute has placed its mark on the fundamental tendency of our intelligence, such that this tendency constantly transcends particular intellections: the mind, through its internal dynamism, is driven from intellection to intellection, from object to object, but as long as it remains in the realm of the finite, it strives in vain to equal its own internal movement." Marechal

the moral pathology of moralizing difficulty (this is related to, but perhaps sometimes distinct from, tutiorism)

Every political faction stretches its principles until they reach incoherence.

Politics is dangerous because it can destroy things it has no power to rebuild.

Sometimes you have to find the right answer by luck before you find the evidence that shows it to be the right answer.

Useless commentary on events as they happen seems natural to human beings.

All people are capable of being friends in the pursuit of the true, the good, and the beautiful.

"Any predominant, majority, or common statement distributes its subject iff its subject is the minor term." Bruce Thompson
P: predominant: Few
T: majority: most
K: common: many
P > T > K
The conclusion cannot be stronger than the weakest premise. (Note that Few acts the way it does because it is really negative.)

If we make the phenomenal/noumenal distinction, it has to be relativized: one thing may be phenom. or noum. depending on the person. The variations can arise from: natural ability, acquired skill, infused grace.

plurative subalternation: All A is B & Most A is A; therefore Most A is B.

When we have a counterexample to p, then, assuming the counterexample is good as a counterexample, p may be 
(1) false
(2) true with exceptions (i.e., idealized or ceteris paribus true)
(3) true in a more restricted domain (i.e.,, the counterexample is in a region to which p does not actually apply).

the material "is" vs the quidditative "is" (Chastek)

Passionate subtlety is often difficult to distinguish externally from dishonesty.

Scripture is vast; it cannot only be read and interpreted on only one flat level. It mst be read and interpreted authentically, in and through the liturgy; and also in common preaching and hearing and in common prayer; and also personally in application to one's own life.

truth articulated in inquiry vs truth permeating inquiry like an atmosphere

the 'monuments of antiquity' approach to tradition vs the 'prophetical office' approach to tradition

One of the best customary protections of liberty is the English custom of refusing to suppress moderate eccentricities.

titles in tradition (title to regard something as traditional)
(1) titulus per se
--- --- (a) recurring presentation in monuments and documents
--- --- (b) widespread at least semi-indpendent acceptance
(2) titulus per accidens
--- --- (a) occasional notice indicating continual handing-down
--- --- (b) probability in light of established doctrines and principles
(3) titulus coloratus
--- --- (a) handed down in defective and distorted form
--- --- (b) handed down in such a way that it appears only gappily
(4) titulus fictus
--- --- (a) accepted only because thought to be traditional
--- --- (b) handed down but in a manner displaced from its necessary and proper conditions
(5) titulus simpliciter nullus
--- --- (a) not handed down
--- --- (b) garbled into incoherence

Many of the woes of scientific inquiry arise not so much from particular defects in particular inquiries but from scientists bungling scientific inquiry as a tradition of inquiry -- thus replication crises, common sloppinesses, poorly trained researchers, deteriorating research ethics, collapse of relevant teaching institutions, etc.

Scientific inquiry depends on things that scientific inquiry does not itself maintain.

Exactly half of S are P: Some S are P, and Not most S are P, and Not most S are not P.
At least half of S are P: Some S are P and Not Most S are not P
No more than half of S are P: Some S are P and Not most S are not P.
(have to be careful with meaning of 'most' here)

All dog's heads are furry; therefore some heads are furry.

The important thing to understand about mathematical practice is that mathematical principles are both invented and discovered; we construct in order to understand what we cannot construct, and creatively articluate what we do not create.

It is difficult for great minds to know themselves.

Young men often fall into polemics because judgment anticipating completion of evidence is a practical necessity of both youth and polemic.

The Twenty-Second Article explicitly rejects "Romish Doctrine" on
(1) Purgatory
(2) Pardons
(3) Veneration of Icons and Relics
(4) Invocation of Saints.
It is notable that in Catholic doctrine all of these are linked to the doctrine of the communion of saints.

Most of what we call belief is at least partly socially constructed.

probabilistic predication vs probabilistic consequence

One of the factors contributing to a powerful economy is recurrent fretting over the defects and deficiencies of the economy.

absurdity comedy: extreme intensification of incongruity
surprise comedy: sudden intensification of incongruity
relief comedy: sudden dissolution/remission of incongruity

Everyone is skeptical of something; it is lack of care in skepticism that is the problem.

As the Church is the sacramental and social extension of Christ, its miracles mostly attest to its sacramental and social instrumentality.

Moral interpretation of phenomena is a moral phenomenon.

Incense is a sign simultaneously of our prayer and God's grace because our devout prayers are simultaneously works of divine grace.

God gave to the Israelites a Temple-service; Christ and the Apostles participated in the Temple and its rites; while the Temple was destroyed, the authentci worship of the Church must at least share principles with that of the Temple.

The Pauline epistles are explicitly occasional writings and show the Apostles explicating doctrine not by rote but by living response.

The living character of the Church is the expression of divine life into the world; it is the moving eventuation of that life which is eternal and immutable.

the meaning of Scripture
(1) explicit statement
(2) contextual insinuation
(3) logical implication
(4) pragmatic implicature
(5) exemplary analogy
(6) precedential applicability
(7) poetic suggestion

The Protestant Reformation broke the Catholic Church out of a deteriorating cycle of reform and corruption, in which today's poorly thought-out reform created the conditions of tomorrow's egregious corruption, and in which people repeatedly tried to force solutions to work that had, also repeatedly, been shown to be inadequate at best.

We must always be wary of the danger of oversystematizing partial truths.

assume as Box, posit as Diamond, the strong plurative modality as 'posit generally'

I owe him  my life -> I owe him -> I owe
I owe him my life -> I owe my life -> I owe

We have no intrinsic title to determine how others attend to us.

All fine arts involve our memorative capabilities, with music perhaps doing so at the most basic level of endurance and recurrence in memory.

The theoretical is always practicalized and the practical always theorized.

"A principle is both an origin and something which gives order to that which it originates." Brian Kemple

Make-believe as an activity is not a single thing; the same is true of pretending.

'since' and 'until' for nontemporal modal logics
-- this seems straightforward in spatial logics (until/to point in space, since/from point in space)
-- we can make sense of 'permissible until/up to a condition' and 'permissible since/given a condition'

Reductionisms have a tendency to reduce too soon or with too little.

'according to' as a Diamond operator

the conditions for reasonable incredulous stare

possibility and necessity as actual relations to what is actual

A correct analysis need not be immediately recognized as such by a competent speaker, but a correct analysis needs a connection to the competence of the competent speaker.

Box-phi holds at w if phi holds at w' when w' is accessible from w. (Any accessible world will have p.)
Window-phi holds at w if w' is accessible from w when phi holds at w'. (Any world with p will be accessible.)

Box : necessity :: Window : sufficiency

Window as an accessibility operator

Fiction has to involve assumptions about what is possible given elements of the fiction; this is a problem for modal fictionalism.

One gets the impression throughout Newman's life of a poetic talent never given adequate poetic development and scope. And indeed, more broadly, the Tractarians were a poetic revolt squeezed into nonpetic form, a Romanticism of unusual kind.

The world and its history is the memory of the poet.

Often we gather general impressions until they crystallize into specific insights.

Part of any adequate professional ethics must always be that professionals are first and foremost people, and have responsibilities as such that fall outside the profession, and rights that follow from those responsibilities.

Neither birth nor death are instants.

Many stories exist as substories within themselves (this is often, even if not always, now narrative voice works).

liturgy in general as a blending of creation, church history, and prayer

the kind of hearing of prayer that is co-prayer

the sense of humor, of novelty, of beauty, etc., as pedagogical hooks

the creative scope of the human mind
(1) --> infinite intelligible
(2) --> divine exemplar ideas
(3) --> divine creative power as principal agent

concurring vs converging probable reasons

transformer // gear
voltage // torque

Most of everyone's politics is undertaken in a haze of confusions.

In political systems, human beings are inconsistently reasonable, comply only loosely with any principles, and interact variously with other societies.

What makes a reason for acting a reason for acting is its at-least-partial conformity to moral principle.

The sensible knave, by choosing to be a sensible knave, thereby puts himself into context with the rest of humanity, because human beings, being what they are, try and test each other in the attempt to protect themselves from and to root out knavery, even sensible knavery.

"A Thrasymachean view of friendship would instantly be recognized as wrong." Philippa Foot

Normativity is always somehting had in a context.

an isekai: The Great Mage Reincarnates on a World Called 'Earth'

"For the prerogative of Christians consists in the possession, not of exclusive knowledge and spiritual aid, but of gifts high and peculiar." Newman

Much of knowledge lies in just finding ways to organize thought about the world.

In practice, sameness of measurement is always only imperfectly transitive.

Iphigeneia was always, in one way or another, going to be sacrificed for the good (or 'good') of the Greeks; the tragedy arises when the drive to war forces all the Greeks to do it clearly and deliberately and in the most public and brutal way.

Descartes treats the 'I think' as 'I am being my thinking'; we get something different if we treat it as 'I am making my thinking to be'.

Philosophy is always both theoretical and practical, but we may emphasize one over the other (without, however, wholly eliminating it).

Real-life reasoning is often not compact; it can sprawl over years.

four criteria of creativity (Carl Hausman, "Criteria of Creativity")
(1) irreducible intelligible structures
(2) unpredictable outcomes
(3) inehrently and often instrumental valuable structure
(4) spontaneous source actions
"...creativity occurs on condition that a new and valuable intelligibility comes into being."

Skill expands the capacity for creativity.

creativity as a kind of responsibility

words, ways, and works

ewe, cow, sow
kine, swine

'Bull'-related words have a long history in talking about deception, fraud, trickery and (later) nonsense; it is probable that both 'bollocks' and 'bullshit' are deliberate vulgarisms based on them, using the closest vulgarity as a means of emphasis.

gibber: to talk inarticulately
jabber: to talk rapidly
gobbledy-gook: (Texan neologism by Maury Maverick, alluding to a turkey): to talk in a way taht is pompous and verbose rather than concise and plain.

Prudent sympathy is the only real therapy.

In all areas of life, we grow stronger by healing well.

There is a natural human equality in two people laughing at the same joke.

Sir Patrick Stewart (1940-2026)

 Sir Patrick Stewart died yesterday; he had been deteriorating severely due to a combination of Alzheimer's and Lewy body dementia. 

He was a talented stage actor throughout his career. In 1987, he was convinced to participate in a Star Trek revival. He was very reluctant to do so; he wanted to act on stage, but the contract for the television show required six years. He decided to do it when his agent pointed out that it was extremely unlikely to last more than a year or two, and would be decent money in the meantime. Thus he became known to everyone as Jean-Luc Picard, captain of the Enterprise. For quite a while he hated it; he didn't like much of his dialogue (too much technobabble), he was not used to the grueling scheduling that television requires (because, unlike with the stage, everything has to be done in scattered parts), he thought his fellow actors were often unprofessional. But he eventually became reconciled to it, and realized that the much more relaxed approach of television actors was to make it easier to deal with precisely the problems he was having. On the other side, Stewart's discipline meant that the Star Trek: The Next Generation cast became well known in television circles for being unusually professional. 

He still missed stage-acting, and obviously a television-acting schedule couldn't allow full participation. So he invented another part of his career for which he became famous: he began doing one-man shows for acting classes, the most famous of which was his one-man version of A Christmas Carol. He was eventually able to perform that one on Broadway, to considerable acclaim.

Till the Oft-Rerisen Bells from Young Atlantis Call

 Cycles
by Clark Ashton Smith 

The sorcerer departs . . . and his high tower is drowned
Slowly by low flat communal seas that level all . . .
While crowding centuries retreat, return and fall
Into the cyclic gulf that girds the cosmos round,
Widening, deepening ever outward without bound . . .
Till the oft-rerisen bells from young Atlantis call;
And again the wizard-mortised tower upbuilds its wall
Above a rebeginning cycle, turret-crowned. 

New-born, the mage resummons stronger spells, and spirits
With dazzling darkness clad about, and fierier flame
Renewed by aeon-curtained slumber. All the powers
Of genii and Solomon the sage inherits;
And there, to blaze with blinding glory the bored hours,
He calls upon Shem-hamphorash, the nameless Name.

In the epilogue to Zothique: The Final Cycle, Ronald S. Hilger notes that this was written just a few months before Smith's death in 1961, and is his last poem.

The Whole Plenitude of Excellencies and Qualities

 The distinguishing characteristic of man, and the peculiar eminence of his nature and his destiny, as these are universally felt and acknowledged by mankind, are usually defined to consist, either in reason, or in the faculty of speech. But this definition is defective in this respect, that, on one hand, reason is a mere abstract faculty, which to be judged, requires a psychological investigation or analysis; and that on the other hand, the faculty of speech is a mere potentiality, or a germ which must be unfolded before it can become a real entity. We should therefore give a much more correct and comprehensive definition, if, instead of this, we said: The peculiar pre-eminence of man consists in this—that to him alone among all other of earth's creatures, the word has been imparted and communicated. The word actually delivered and really communicated is not a mere dead faculty, but an historical reality and occurrence; and for that very reason, the definition we have given stands much more fitly at the head of history, than the other more abstract one. 

 In the idea of the word, considered as the basis of man's dignity and peculiar destination, the internal light of consciousness and of our own understanding, is undoubtedly first included—this word is not a mere faculty of speech, but the fertile root whence the stately trunk of all language has sprung. But the word is not confined to this only—it next includes a living, working power—it is not merely an object and organ of knowledge—an instrument of teaching and learning; but the medium of affectionate union and conciliatory accommodation, judicial arbitrement and efficacious command, or even creative productiveness, as our own experience and life itself manifest each of those significations of the word; and thus it embraces the whole plenitude of the excellencies and qualities which characterize man.

[Friedrich Schlegel, The Philosophy of History, Volume I, James Burton Robertson, tr.,  Lecture 1.]

The Desert Where a City's Bones are Strewn

 A Dead City
by Clark Ashton Smith 

Twilight ascends the abandoned ramps of noon
Within an ancient land, whose after-time
Unfathomably shadows its ruined prime.
Like rising mist the night increases soon
Round shattered palaces, ere yet the moon
On mute, unsentried walls and turrets climb,
And touch with pallor of sepulchral rime
The desert where a city's bones are strewn.

She comes at last: unsepultured, they show
In all the hoary starkness of old stone.
From out a shadow like the lips of Death
Issues a wind, that through the ruins blown,
Cries like a prophet's ghost, with waiting breath,
The weirds of finished and forgotten woe.