Kinglake's Nightmare

KINGLAKE’S NIGHTMARE

Over a dish of gumbo (vegetarian for me please) he talks of ancient Egypt. Pyramids, mummies, sarcophagi. People don’t talk like this. I never understand people when they talk. But I understand Lafcadio Hearn.   

The New Orleans custom house is like “Kinglake’s nightmare of ‘solid immensity.‘” Naturally I’m intrigued. Who is Kinglake? And what is this nightmare of his? 

Now this is conversation! 

Alexander William Kinglake, I learn, is the author of Eothen – a Middle Eastern travelogue. This is the sort of thing Hearn reads. This is the sort of thing that comes up in dinner conversation with him. 

In Eothen, Kinglake describes his first impression of the Great Pyramid of Giza. It reminds him of a childhood nightmare. 

“I lay in my bed perfectly conscious, and with open eyes, but without power to speak, or to move, and all the while my brain was oppressed to distraction by the presence of a single and abstract idea, – the idea of solid Immensity. It seemed to me in my agonies, that the horror of this visitation arose from its coming upon me without form or shape – that the close presence of the direst monster ever bred in Hell would have been a thousand times more tolerable than that simple idea of solid size; my aching mind was fixed and riveted down upon the mere quality of vastness, vastness, vastness; and was not permitted to invest with it any particular object. If I could have done so, the torment would have ceased. When at last I was roused from this state of suffering, I could not of course in those days (knowing no verbal metaphysics, and no metaphysics at all, except by the dreadful experience of an abstract idea) I could not of course find words to describe the nature of my sensations, and even now I cannot explain why it is that the forced contemplation of a mere quality, distinct from matter, should be so terrible.” 

So now my mind is blown and I cannot eat my gumbo. I wanted the dream told to me because I am fascinated by dreams. I never expected the nightmare to mirror so closely the recurring nightmare of my own childhood. I too experienced an abstract idea divested of any particular object. I too lacked the words to describe the oppression and the horror of that pure abstraction. Such is the mind of a child. 

Many years later, the nightmare of my childhood was made manifest before my eyes just as it was for Kinglake, though it happened in The Metropolitan Museum of Art rather than the Egyptian desert. I had seen reproductions of Pollack’s paintings in my art history text, but walking into the gallery where “Autumn Rhythm” was hung – all seventeen feet of it – was a different experience entirely, just as Kinglake’s sight of the great pyramid differed from the images he saw in a book. 

For Kinglake it was “immensity.” For me it was chaos.

When I was a child, I had a
recurring nightmare. It was like
being trapped in a Jackson Pollock
painting. There were no people in
the dream. There was no landscape.
There was nothing to define it
spatially. No direction. No far or
near. No object and no context.
There was only disorder. A feeling
of compression coexisted with a
sense of oceanic vastness. There
may have been sound, a dissonant
sound that added to the horror of
the experience. It was like a mental
cancer, but instead of cells gone wild,
thoughts had multiplied monstrously,
becoming deformed and malevolent.
Surely this was a vision of chaos.

I cannot say why “the forced contemplation of a mere quality, distinct from matter, should be so terrible.” I can only say that Kinglake does not exaggerate the experience. 

My untouched gumbo has gone cold, but I don’t care. I do not dine with Hearn for the cuisine. I am here for the conversation. And today, Hearn’s conversation, his likening of the New Orleans Custom House to an Egyptian pyramid, has led in the most delightfully oblique way to a marvelous revelation. A nightmare so like my own. Up until this moment, I imagined myself alone in this experience. Then Hearn turns me on to Kinglake and I leave the dinner table with a head as full as my belly is empty.