Fantastic Metropolis

Neddal Ayad: What’s your writing process?

Thomas Ligotti: If I’m writing, I start work as soon as I wake up, and really before I’m fully awake.

Neddal Ayad: In his book Fiction author/editor Michael Seidman wrote that he thought younger writers were shortchanging themselves by not doing longhand or typewritten drafts and then retyping them into the computer. Any thoughts?

Thomas Ligotti: There’s a lot of truth to that. I found that I edited myself as I wrote in longhand, and then I edited myself again when I typed or keyed the manuscript. The latter was an important step in learning to edit my own writing that’s lost if you start off keying your work directly to the computer.

Neddal Ayad: You’ve stated that several of your stories had their beginnings in dreams (or nightmares). You’ve also stated that you have taken antidepressants. Certain classes of those drugs have been known to amplify, intensify, or alter dreams. Did they have that effect on you and if so, do you think it had any influence on the stories.

Thomas Ligotti: I’ve had vivid nightmares for as long as I can remember. Some of the antidepressants I’ve taken have intensified my dreams and some of them have dulled them. It depends on what chemicals in the brain they’re designed to affect. In general, I would say that taking a significant daily dosage of any antidepressant is more likely to diminish one’s creative urges, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Aside from myself, I know people who take these drugs, and I’ve read posts from people in the depression and suicide newsgroups, who have said the same thing. It’s not that antidepressants have a normalizing or emotionally beneficial action that accounts for this phenomenon—would that this were true. The anti-creative effect is primarily due to the fact that antidepressants flatten out one’s emotions and scramble one’s thought processes. You lose the concentration and impulse required to write or draw or play an instrument. This is true of people who are genuinely depressed. A lot of people who don’t really need to take antidepressants—and the drug companies wouldn’t be raking in the money if there weren’t plenty of these—feel energized by taking relatively small dose of an antidepressant.

Neddal Ayad: You’re extraordinarily frank in your discussion of depression and its effect on your quality of life. It’s something that a lot of people still seem to consider taboo.

Thomas Ligotti: Mental illness will remain taboo until it becomes universal. Not that it isn’t already universal from a certain perspective. But the very existence of the mentally and emotionally perturbed is a genuine threat to the socioeconomic system in which we are imprisoned. If you’re going to be crazy, your craziness better take the same form as that of your boss, the law-enforcement authorities, and the president of the United States. Otherwise, you are screwed.

Neddal Ayad: Have you ever written anything that you consider too dark or too heavy to publish?

Thomas Ligotti: No, but I’ve conceived of stories that were just too disturbing for me to write. If you can write something, then it’s only so disturbing. Anything truly disturbing can’t even be written. Even if it could, no one could stand to read it. And writing is essentially a means of entertainment for both the writer and the reader. I don’t care who the writer is—literature is entertainment or it is nothing. Some readers would object and point to someone like Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror. If they want to see it that way, it’s fine with me. Who am I deny someone their demonic heroes? No one has that much credibility in the history of humanity, nor ever will.

Neddal Ayad: You started using light drugs at a relatively young age. What was the attraction?

Thomas Ligotti: That seems like such a strange question to me. Essentially you seem to be asking, “Why would someone want to feel better than they normally feel?” I can understand why some people might have an aversion to drugs and alcohol due to unfortunate experiences in their childhood with drug-using or alcoholic relatives… or because they have a fear of losing control… or even because they’re lucky enough not to feel the need to alter median emotional state. But none of these was the case with me. Nor do they seem to be the case with the human race in general. There seems to be an inborn drive in all human beings not to live in a steady emotional state, which would suggest that such a state is not tolerable to most people. Why else would someone succumb to the attractions of romantic love more than once? Didn’t they learn their lesson the first time or the tenth time or the twentieth time? And it’s the same old lesson: everything in this life—I repeat, everything—is more trouble than it’s worth. And simply being alive is the basic trouble. This is something that is more recognized in Eastern societies than in the West. There’s a minor tradition in Greek philosophy that instructs us to seek a state of equanimity rather than one of ecstasy, but it never really caught on for obvious reasons. Buddhism advises its practitioners not to seek highs or lows but to follow a middle path to personal salvation from the painful cravings of the average sensual life, which is why it was pretty much reviled by the masses and mutated into forms more suited to human drives and desires. It seems evident that very few people can simply sit still. Children spin in circles until they collapse with dizziness.

Through art, either as creators or consumers, people are transported into other realms of consciousness. This seems harmless enough… until the art is taken away. Everyone takes it for granted that they can always fall back on art. But talk to a writer who can no longer write. Or witness the spectacle of a musician or a music lover who suffers from chronic pain or depression and is no longer capable of escaping into their beloved world of sound. Then there are infirm athletes who can no longer avail themselves of the adrenalin rush they once received on a regular basis. And all these methods are mere candy when it comes to getting high. As the saying goes, candy is dandy but liquor is quicker. Drugs, of course, are the quickest of all. The fact that they, too, are more trouble than they’re worth as much due to legal and societal sanctions against them as it is to their primary effects.