Russell Hoban - Medusa Frequency

I was shocked but I can’t honestly say I was surprised when Istvan Fallok told me about Gösta Kraken. It could have been any one of us; art is a tough business.

I’m going to tell about what happened last November and early December. Whether it’ll be of any use to anybody I don’t know but I’ve been getting it all down on paper as it happened so here it is, beginning with the night when the flyer came through the letterbox.

Nnvsnu Tsrungh, said the green letters on the monitor screen of my Apple II computer that rainy night in November. This screen isn’t like a piece of paper; the words come out of a green dancing and the excitation of phosphors. I’m the one who makes the words appear but I don’t always know who or what is speaking.

Who’s there? I said letter by letter on the screen.

No answer.

Speak up, I said. What are you afraid of?

NNVSNU TSRUNGH, it said.

You’re afraid that you exist.

NNVSNU NNGH.

You don’t want to exist.

NNVSNU RRNDU TS’IRNH TS’IRNH TS’IRNH NNGRH.

An existence such as yours is too dreadful to be thought of. Is this the Kraken speaking?

DON’T THINK OF ME. IF YOU THINK OF ME I MAY BE REAL. LET ME NOT BE REAL.

What was I to say to it? The reality of the Kraken isn’t up to me, I’m not the final authority on such things. With its first words this creature was already as real to me as anything else; it was more real than the VAT figures that had appeared on this same screen the day before. The Customs and Excise Office isn’t real to me in any way that really matters, it isn’t there at three o’clock in the morning when the words come out of the green dancing and the singing comes from thousands of miles away.

No, what passes for reality seems to me mostly a load of old rubbish invented by not very inventive minds. The reality that interests me is strange and flickering and haunting. For example:

987 A SUPERB FIGURE OF A FISHERGIRL WITH A GIANT SQUID, the girl reclining with a contented expression as she embraces the huge beast, whose skin is stippled, giving a mottled effect, its eyes inlaid in pearl with dark pupils, the group forming a long flat composition, the details are finely carved and the slightly worn ivory has a remarkable colour and patina, early 19th century. Ex F. Meinertzhagen collection. This is a magnificent Netsuke of a smooth compact form, ideal for its use.

There’s a drawing of it in the book as well: the fishergirl entranced as with her left hand she grips the mantle of the squid whose eyes look up at her. She speaks to me, this fishergirl, and not simply as herself. Letter by letter words appear on the monitor screen:

Always in the dream are

the sea and the dream of the sea.

In the dream I am the fishergirl in

the twining embrace of the giant squid,

its dark eyes are on me as

it penetrates and inseminates me.

The giant squid has been dreaming of me age-long,

rising in the black night,

rising in the moony ocean night and never, never finding,

never until now finding

the mystery of me so long dreamt of, so long lusted after.

Eurydice, whispers the long sea, Eurydice, Eurydice, and the giant squid is frightened by the beauty of me, it trembles as it holds me in its twined embrace.

At three o’clock in the morning Eurydice is bound to come into it. After all, why did I sit here like a telegrapher at a lost outpost if not to receive messages from everywhere about the lost Eurydice who was never mine to begin with but whom I lamented and sought continually both professionally and amateurishly. This is not a digression. Where I am at three o’clock in the morning — and by now every hour is three o’clock in the morning — there are no digressions, it’s all one thing.

LET ME NOT BE REAL, the Kraken said again.

There was nothing I could do about that and I didn’t know what to say so I said nothing.

YOU DON’T TELL ME THAT I’M NOT REAL.

Again I didn’t say anything.

THEN I AM REAL. I HAVE BEEN THOUGHT OF TOO MANY TIMES UNTIL THERE HAS COME TO BE SUCH A THING AS I, THE KRAKEN, LIVING WHERE I LIVE AND PERCIPIENT ALWAYS.

Tell me about your beginning.

IN THE BEGINNING OF ALL THINGS WAS MY BEGINNING, IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE TERROR.

Whose was the terror?

THE TERROR WAS ITSELF AND THE TERROR WAS OF ITSELF. THERE WAS NOTHING ELSE, THERE WAS NO ONE TO HOLD THE TERROR, THERE WAS ONLY THE TERROR.

Terror of what?

TERROR OF WHAT MIGHT BE, OF UNIVERSES AND WORLDS THAT MIGHT BE, AND THE ILLUSION OF TIME.

What came then?

FROM THE TERROR CAME THE AWARENESS OF IT. FROM THE TERROR CAME A TREMBLING AND A WRINKLING OF THE SILENCE THAT LISTENED.

Nothing else? No one to listen with the silence?

NO ONE TO LISTEN, NO ONE TO HOLD THE TERROR; ONLY THE ELECTRIC SILENCE THAT SHOOK AND WRINKLED AS IT BECAME YOUR MIND.

My mind holding the terror, my mind alone.

YOUR MIND HOLDING THE TERROR BUT IT WAS TOO MUCH FOR YOU TO HOLD ALONE. YOU THOUGHT OF ME AND YOU MADE ME HOLD THE TERROR THAT YOU COULD NOT HOLD. YOU THINK OF ME STILL, YOU THINK OF ME NOW.

I have always thought of you, have always had you in mind, have always heard the circles of your terror widening in the deeps. I think of you as the great cephalopod, ancient of the deeps, great thinking head in the blackness of the ultimate deep. I think of you as the Kraken. Even little children have an idea of you, they draw a great head with all the limbs growing out of it.

I AM THE KRAKEN, ANCIENT OF THE DEEPS, MONSTROUS CEPHALOPOD, GREAT HEAD AT THE CENTRE OF MY MILES OF WRITHING TENTACLES IN THE BLACKNESS OF THE ULTIMATE DEEP; THE KRAKEN, MY DARK MIND WILD WITH THE TERROR OF ITSELF, SHUDDERING, WRITHING, AFRAID TO SLEEP, AFRAID TO DREAM BUT SLEEPING AGE-LONG AND DREAMING OF IMMENSITIES, OF BURSTINGS AND TRANSITIONS AND UNIMAGINABLE STATES OF BEING, DREAMING A UNIVERSE IN WHICH THERE IS SUCH A THING AS THE KRAKEN, DREAMING THAT I AM THE KRAKEN.

Will you show yourself to me?

I WILL SHOW MYSELF TO YOU IN SEVERAL WAYS AND WITH SEVERAL FACES.

Have you so many faces?

The Kraken said no more that night. But Eurydice has said in those three-o’clock-in-the-morning dancing green phosphors:

Of me the terror, I squatted and gave birth:

born of me the Kraken in its terror

at the bottom of the sea. Born of me

its terror of Eurydice.

My name is Herman Orff. At parties when people ask me what I do I say I’m a novelist and then they say, ‘Oh, should I have heard of you?’ and I say, ‘I think not.’ Then we both find somebody else to talk to.

My first novel, Slope of Hell (Mumchance Press, 1977), sold 1,731 copies before being remaindered. The Times found the writing ‘a little slippery’; the Guardian noted that the story was ‘a downhill sort of thing’. My second one, World of Shadows (Reedham & Weap, 1978), sold 1,247 copies before the publisher went into receivership. What I do for a living is write comics. I came to that via an advertising agency called Slithe & Tovey where I used to write copy for Orpheus Men’s Toiletries, Hermes Foot Powder, Pluto Drain Magic, and several non-classical accounts. When we lost Hermes I was sacked and so was Sol Mazzaroth the account executive. Soon after that he became Editor in Chief of Classic Comics and that was the beginning of my freelance comic career. Classic Comics became for Sol Mazzaroth the earthen ramp by which he reached higher things, namely his own hardback imprint, the Avernus Press, where he published such rising talents as Boumboume Letunga, Hermione Thrust, and Juan de Fulmé. It was understood between us that my non-comic writing was not quite the thing for the Avernus list; I hewed wood and drew water at Classic Comics but I led my muse into insolvency elsewhere.