I was talking to a friend about the kind of horror stories I read these days. Thomas Ligotti, for instance, I've been enjoying because the stories have a way of making you feel like you're losing your mind. He does kind of a baroque thing, repetition with variation, that is a perfect distillation of that feeling when I pick up a book with no bookmark in it and try to find the place where I left off. A moment where the act of reading is almost secondary and I'm outside myself a little, trying to see if I'm recognizing it. Memory being so closely tied to emotion; have I felt this before?

It's unsettling and good. Makes me empathize with the protagonist and that feeling that I'm missing something very important right at the edge of my understanding. And then, even more unnerving, is the feeling that I'm NOT missing anything and what is happening is just what's happening and I'll never get an answer.

It's unsettling and good.

There's a lot of disease of the body analogy to disease of the mind. Stomach problems. Which is a perfect, I think, because there's a sort of impending unknown fear with stomach pain. Your body still works, but something in the fuel of the self is corrupted and there's no limit to how far it can spread. Every new or imagined pain could be related to it, or not. Could be cramps, could be cancer. Could be anything, except anything good.

Lovecraft and Darwin both had digestion issues, didn't they? Hmm....