a pluto tulpa

on a voyage of many years

1.

These are liminal times. A color between green and gray. The naming will come after, when things are settled and done. For now, it is only the shore (“Chthulucene” or “Cthulhucene”, take your pick), and that shore is surely Plutonian.

“Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!” 

--“The Raven”

Pluto itself was only the last name on a rote list as I was reading those words, a child playing checkers in the park with an old man whose name I never asked. I was also reading a lot of Asimov (eventually, all the science essays in book form that had been published up to that time); one that struck me the most, was his well-reasoned prediction that all our total Industrial-Revolution CO2 emissions would result in causing Earth’s polar caps to melt completely within a hundred years.

I studiously made the comparisons, and concluded that Dallas, at three hundred feet [actually 430-550] above sea level, would be one of the few major cities still above water at the end of that inexorable slow flood-rise. They would make it the new capital. I then put the thought out of my mind, as the consensus (in the 60s) was still in flux, and people who were in a position to know were still arguing over the equal likelihood of a return to the Ice Ages.

I won as many games as I lost.

Pluto as a known and named object was younger than I am today.

There’s a passage in the Aeneid that haunts me, VI. 125-136, particularly the line “facilis descensus Averno”, which my memory stubbornly kept inserting an “est” after the first word (for an iambic pentameter, I suppose), for many years, until I went back to check it early in the 21c. In 1984 I translated:

Gentle is the journey down to Hades
(by night and day the door of dark Dis gapes);
but to take back your stepping and escape
to the upper breezes, that’s the work–this task.
A few whom jovial Jupiter had loved,
or ardent courage lifted to the skies,
god-born, could.
        Gliding Cocytus circles
a gloomy valley, and every kind of forest
occupies the middle.
        But if you have
so much love of heart, if so much lust
twice to sail on Stygian lakes, to see
midnight Tartarus–twice, and with outrageous
hardship, it’s any use to grant,

accept what harrowings precede.

By that time, I had also learned to love Baudelaire’s lines:

Chaque jour vers l'Enfer nous descendons d'un pas,
Sans horreur, à travers des ténèbres qui puent.

“Each day towards the Pit we take a step/ Smiling still, through vapors dark and noisome.” (Neglecting for the shape of the stanza those sharp sounds at the end, K- and P- that are almost like he’s spitting.) That burgundy faux leather, all-French edition, I picked up at a bookstall on Portobello Rd (along with a slightly ornate, I thought Baudelairesque, hash pipe).

2.

Our climate locally remained eminently predictable: interminable “triple-digit” summers, tumultuous springs (with the once-a-generational deadly tornado to spice things up), and delicious “sweater weather” around about State Fair time, in my favorite month October. I  began to go wandering: western Canada, Delphi, Prague. My poems accumulated, like the air’s share of toxic refuse, imperceptibly day by day.

Huysmans talks of “the poem of Ermold the Black, celebrating the exploits of Louis le Débonnaire, a poem written in regular hexameters, in a severe, black style, in a diction of iron tempered in monastic waters, with here and there threads of sentiment imbedded in the hard metal…”

“Ermold le Noir, que son seul nom sonore et farouche pare de séductions apocryphes : il est supposé écrire ‘dans un latin de fer trempé dans les eaux monastiques, avec, çà et là, des paillettes de sentiment dans le dur metal’…’”

At once this became my ideal of how to write, even though I had no clear notion how to attain it. The last of all the works mentioned in Against the Grain for me to track down, it was actually during Quarantine Lockdown that I finally put my hands on a real translation, in Charlemagne and Louis the Pious (tr Thomas F X Noble, 2009). From which I learned: “I myself bore a shield on my shoulder and sword at my side, but no one came to any hardship because I did so. When Pippin saw this, he laughed, marveled, and said: ‘Lay down your arms, brother; it’s better to stick to your writing’ ” (iv. p. 173).

By this time, we had reached Pluto.

3.

In recent years, I had seen friends chased repeatedly from their homes in California due to the imminent onrush of fire and fire-nadoes, and soon I could not help but be transfixed by each analogous emergency, whether in Siberia, Australia, Italy, China, or Portugal. The crisis came to my own town not long after, and though when the next big tornado (after only 25 years, when the previous had been in 1957—which, I liked to pretend, coincided with the moment of my own conception--) came through way ahead of schedule, both my wife and I were out in our cars; with trees tossing and lightning flash-flash-flashing overhead, neither of us had any idea the direction it was coming from.

Another dear friend survived Katrina, ending up in the hellish Superdome sequestration where, with typical savvy, she attached herself to an old lady in a wheelchair and got hoicked away out in a medevac chopper.

I thought it rude but nothing more when the IAU demoted Pluto to the slightly-less-mythological “Asteroid 134340” (a number that is the sum of the primes 67153 and 67187, for those who care). For me it was still, in some ways, Lovecraft’s Yuggoth.

After the first time it rained all summer, I joked that as Dallas’s weather couldn’t get any worse, Global Warming would even improve it; we had now progressed to something like that found in New Orleans. “All we need now is New Orleans food, New Orleans music, and New Orleans architecture.”

But when the first close-up picture of Pluto’s features appeared on the internet (a four-hour journey even at the speed of light), I had it printed out on my lunch hour, and drove straight to a Target where I found the perfect little black frame for it. It sits on my desk to this day.

I had already started ruminating, in my desultory way, the novel I planned to write. It would be about the sentient inhabitants (either fifteen-foot praying mantises (“calaveras”), or Lovecraftian starfish-monsters) of planet Pluto. I could easily imagine chemical reactions so unstable they would only be capable of powering a whole biosphere at three hundred degrees below zero. (Noble-gas compounds.)  Miles-long plants could generate energy from the tidal forces caused by Charon. Maybe animals would carry their own lampadophores, like deep-sea fish. I had also created a fourfold metaphysics, based on Pluto’s four known moons, but along the way that number increased to five. That wasn’t the only difficulty.

“He felt as if he were embarking on a chess match in which he would be both a player and a piece.”  --Benjamin Black (John Banville), Christine Falls (2006)

Well enough to let “air-summer” last 50 years out of the complete circuit’s 248. During that time, and only then, they would have out-loud speech, balloons, and music. The question was, really, to what degree the fate of those exoskeletal Plutovites should mirror ours. What kind of allegorical catastrophe was about to fall on them, that they should be caught all unawares? Maybe I should call it The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, and write it as if we did not destroy ourselves…

4.

Planets where the sun rises in the West: Venus, Uranus, Pluto.

Frozen nitrogen (“azote”) changes from a hexagonal to a cubic crystal as it cools past 35.6 degrees Kelvin. This change, occurring in the coldest time of the poles in mid-winter (120 years of uninterrupted darkness, “Fimbul-night”), would have to be culturally significant. (I called it “pallaksh”.) The heat released by the phase-transition means that the freeze-out of the atmosphere (which ought to be a very pretty snowfall) lags decades beyond aphelion…

Tombaugh Regio is near the equator, Pandemonium Dorsa is near the pole.

Meanwhile I wrote a longpoem about Santa Muerte, and started observing, with help from a NASA website, the exact morning and evening hours when the amount of available sunlight made our City of Magnificent Splendors (as I sometimes termed it) resemble a landscape illuminated by the attenuated sunlight on Pluto.

I took pictures at Plutotime. I put them on my blog. Its bleak, crepuscular landscapes popped up in my poems.

One of the New Horizons photos seemed to show a large, strangely-shaped object. In fact, it looked like nothing so much as a colossal gastropod. Which was calculated to be 1½ times the height of the Sears Tower (at 1451 ft) and as long as the Chicago Loop (2000 ft). I thought of it as the “Hyper-Whelk”. These creatures just follow their own inscrutable paths, paying no attention at all to lesser beings, but they would not be the ones that my story was about.

I figured, like humans, most of their lives would be engrossed, not by grappling with the environment so much as with their ideas about the environment. These would in time become complex conceptual edifices, to make up for the barrenness of their physical environment. Occultists call these, when summoned by a dedicated group, an Egregore. Another point of view is given by the early Tibetan traveller, Alexandra David-Neel. She learned from the lamas the technique of creating, by intense concentration, an imaginary but autonomous being—a Tulpa. (It took her still more trouble to get rid of it, after she decided she didn’t want it around anymore.) The novel as a Tulpa.

“ ‘You think people are silly to believe in ghosts?’ an old man had asked Fred Foley a long time ago. ‘Boy, you should hear some of the things that ghosts believe in!’ “  --RA Lafferty, Fourth Mansions (1969)

5.

Meanwhile our own consensus reality was breaking up. People were choosing to disbelieve in Climate Change, in Epidemiology, in certified Election Results, in the Human Rights of select demographics. And of course, there were Pluto Truthers. The tulpas, like ghostly kaiju, were fighting above our heads, in the momentary atmosphere, where our dreams and dream-baggage remain despite our problem-laden plight. I remembered the eerie real-life landscape at the end of William Friedkin’s 1977 flop-masterpiece, Sorcerer. Only one truck, full of the precious but highly unstable, ageing dynamite, has made it this far—and then it stops. The exhausted and still desperate driver gets out and carries the last box on foot into the town where it is needed. His mission succeeds. But his assassin finds him there.

Over Quarantine, I got sick. What started as a cough developed over months into (not Covid but, just as nasty--) pneumonia. By the time I could get a shot and was willing to sit vaccinated in a doctor’s waiting room, I needed to be hospitalized. One fever-dream particularly lingers. The fluid which filled my lungs was a red-black ocean, and my consciousness floated a tiny silver bubble in that ocean. Somehow, I had shifted to the point of view of the sickness. I idly wondered when the bubble would burst.

The Norwegian neo-folk group Wardruna has a song about crossing-over to death, “Helvegen”. Not only is it a rather haunting melody, the comments on Youtube are full of stories about its value in comforting those grieving for a loved one who died. At the height of the pandemic, when I myself teetered on somesuch sky-bridge, three thousand people a day were dying, just in the United States. I thought about this often. It was like an iceberg, melting away. Shipload after shipload guided by Charon. A snail civilization that built a mountain of salt.

My book did not get written. The air-summer was over.

“Make black pots and dark cauldrons out of Jupiter; let them love the fire just as he does. Make yourself a nice water jug out of Neptune, for as a pitcher he will always have the honor of water” (Ermoldus Nigellus, op cit, 179-80).

Michael Helsem

9-3-22