We Have Never Been Allowed The Light

Eliot Hudson

We have never been allowed the light, and so I beheld him in the silver of moonbeams, his tired breath heaving the night as if I had agreed to this. Had I? Responsible for my hand in this?

Outside, a train whistle blows from a faraway place like a distant recollection I once knew but can’t place. Like a place I once recalled but can’t fathom. A feeling of knowing, until I can’t, so I remain. The Maker of Law yawns this asylum of aimless days. His dull skin like the sallow complexion of a dungeon. Sleeping without slumber, slumbering without sleep. Eating mechanically. Monotonous meat. Dry and over-salted like fields of our vanquished bodies. My eyes muzzle and squirm beneath his gaze. His cold touch clings to my goosebumps. My ears clinging to a hideous promise. Had I believed him? I believed him once. I think. And when I try to scream no sound comes out. A silent blasphemy puffing from within which once resembled a voice.

Beyond my chamber, a wilderness of buzzing and crawling sprawls amongst the fluttering of stinging things. Where can I run? The hills and valleys are deep with woods no axe has ever cut. Glens where no sunlight has ever penetrated angrily. The deep ruts of his face run like the dell of the forest beneath the straggly trees of his beard. Where the moss dare not whisper the secrets of the things it has seen.

What is left of this kingdom? Ancient and rocky with great ledges, but crumbling chimneys and tired shingles. All is but gluttonous ash.

Where have the maidens gone? Scavenging for entrails like foreigners in our own land.

And here he lies with his leaden crown and grizzled scepter.

There was once a road over the highland and through the valley where the blasted heath is now, but they say it’s cursed. That to travel that road is to abandon your body into another’s hands. What peril hides within those nettles? What forsaken civilization or wilderness will pummel our body yearning for escape? Flooded hollows and dark paths among the ashen cosmos. All trails are entrails. Vales of evil echoing the lore of forefathers, evasive mutterings and restless gossip.

Am I but an evasive dream? A recollection of a lifetime before the lore of forefathers?

His body leans forward and his righteous forefinger points and shakes prodigiously. I shiver despite the balm. I gaze unto the smoky sunset, this hoary prism of ash. Even the stars look away, trembling in a huddled nausea.

He ordered my daughter before me. Crushed and distorted. The stench was beyond enduring. They dragged her like some sort of specimen. Like an unclean species groveling. A hateful mangle of what had once been a face whimpering in a godless calm, crawling and convulsing.

They dragged her away and something within me erupted.

We have never been allowed the light. Allowed that which glows and burns, but I leapt up with all the strength of my sinews. And before he could lift his gargantua, I grabbed for the torch and upended oil lamps, casting them against drab curtains, brandishing my raving impulse. Suddenly the chamber erupted and I beheld a blush I could barely comprehend.

The flame cast a spectrum, a confusing and elaborate array of continuum which I’d never seen. Like a halo emitting a field of chromaticity, a cosmic gulf opened before my eyes, incinerating this pallid chamber.

The feverish kaleidoscope of gleaming cataclysm erupted in unnatural sparks, blurring his gaze, a zenith of bombarding supernova in such a fantastic frequency that our civilization must disown it and I hungered for it, to saturate my body with it. To stain and dye all the parts of my flesh which had never been emblazoned, enlivening and infusing my radiance.

I heard him whimper, a once thick voice now shrill and pleading. The undulating shape of burning, luminous and violent. A fitful of epileptic madness with noxious limbs writhing and struggling in unhallowed radiance like St. Elmo’s fire.

A hot sensation divined through my eyes. Persistent in its verboseness, choking me with its pigments like otherworldly fruit erupting over my body, painting through me a vibrancy I had never known and I wept the ashen tears from my eyes so that they trickled over the glow of my body which outshone in the pale ash.

A quivering incandescence streaked the sky. Bedazzling radiation glistened from my skin. He shielded his eyes from my brilliance of flaring aurora which saturated and destroyed all which had held me, staining my body with the veracity of it all in a lustre and blooming iridescence these dregs have never seen.

I have become the torch. I am the beacon. The nameless color which consumes that which consumes. I am defiance.

Interview by L. Valena
August 29, 2023

I guess we should start at the beginning. What was the prompt that you responded to?

Even before beginning, I had worked with Bait/Switch once before and I absolutely loved it. I produced a poem about my firstborn, Lance. I recently had a second child who's about six months old now and I thought this would be an opportunity to write a poem about him if I could shoehorn it into my response. But then I received the prompt, and I realized I could not do that at all! That's one of the amazing things about Bait/Switch: you might go in with one idea and then when you're confronted with the material, you realize you have to go in a different direction. That’s why it’s so fun.

The piece that I was shown is a very striking picture. It’s an image of a woman. She has paint all over her body and she's very colorful. She's topless and she has a flame in her hand that she’s flickering, and she seems somewhat wild. The backdrop is pallid with some cracks, and the incongruity between the level of color and that background helped inform a lot of the feeling that I got from the image.

What did you make of it?

I was startled. First of all, I didn't expect to see so much color or such a provocative image. It actually got me intellectually excited because there's so much there to work with. Because she was topless, it reminded me of “Liberty Leading the People,” that famous French Revolution painting by Eugène Delacroix. Naturally, there's this idea of liberty and breaking out of constraint, especially as this image has tons of colors.

Secondly, there was so much color in stark contrast to the background, that I immediately thought of HP Lovecraft. He has this story, “Color Out of Space.” In it, an extraterrestrial makes it to Earth and people come in contact with it. They’re encountered by colors that are so vibrant that their minds can't even comprehend them. So this piece naturally lent itself to that.

That’s part of my process. Whenever I embark on a project, I always take a brief inventory of some of the materials around that can help inform it. Lovecraft was very helpful in conjuring this sort of brooding compulsion. Furthermore, there's something very feminine and feminist about this piece and I couldn't necessarily put my finger on it. I think that helped lead to the vagueness in the story, that overall sense of impending doom and dread, which I was able to work with within a feminist movement.

The vagueness in your piece that struck me was that we're already in the middle of a situation that we haven't been introduced to. The reader hasn’t gotten acclimated and found their feet yet.

Chekhov famously had that slice of life, in that you don't always need the beginning and the end, you just need that little slice. That's always stayed with me very much.

How did you actually start writing this piece?

It's kind of funny how much similarity there was between my process and the piece itself. Lovecraft helped me with a lot of the language. I constructed a word matrix out of some of the most evocative language, and then I created another matrix of “color,” “eruption,” “light…” That way, as I'm writing, I'm not at a stalemate for any words. I just look at my paper and say, “Oh, here's a strong word that connects the feeling with the resonance and the story that I'm going with.”

Also, because it's so amorphous, there were a lot of similar sentences. When I noticed that, I color-coded things. I put anything describing color on her body in pink, the eruption and the flames in purple, etc. I noticed if I had too much pink or purple on the page and could edit it down a little bit. But then I looked at the paper, with black and white, purple, pink, orange, for my editing process. And then at the picture, and the paper and the picture, and it struck me, “These are very similar!”

And that wasn't deliberate?

No! It was happenstantial. That's one of the reasons why I love Bait/Switch so much. Not only is it the fun process of receiving material and producing something, but it also helps you think about process and praxis. You don't usually have the time to think about it, and you're not usually asked to. Anyway, I found that to be a pleasant serendipity.

How does this piece relate to the rest of your work?

Lately, I've been focused on historical articles because I've been writing for The Hoboken Girl and putting together some book pitches for historical articles. But I really want to be writing fiction. I'm not sure that people consume fiction as much as they consume historical articles these days, so when I was given this opportunity to delve back into fiction, I got so excited. There are a couple of authors that I identify with in their language. For example, I'm less of a Hemingway and more of a Fitzgerald. I love Lovecraft, if you just look at his language and not his troubling attitudes of race. If you just look at the words he chooses, they’re magnanimous. I liked very textured language. Tom Robbins! So many of those authors, it's like they're painting a canvas with their words.

I definitely see that type of influence in your work. It’s a prose piece, but I think it reads very poetically because of a lot of your word choices and your phrasing. And the previous piece you did for us was a poem. What's the difference for you?

I think it was Baudelaire who said that what he was trying to create was prose poetry. You see some of that in other absurdist artists, too. I’m not sure that ever can be conjured, but if so that would be wonderful. Obviously, people try. And I'm sure there are many people who say it has been done, but it's almost like Derrida. He looked at two binary opposites, saw the membrane between them, and then erased the membrane to show that this never existed to begin with. You know, you have these dual opposites, but they’re just constructs and somewhere in between lies a lot of magic.

Oh I love that. I had a teacher in high school who told me that the difference between poetry and prose is that poetry looks like a poem. [Eliot laughs] He said that’s what it basically comes down to. And I can see how that’s true.

Yeah, that's going to be one that I repeat to people.

Can you tell me about some of the images you provided? Reading your piece, I wouldn’t expect to see a photograph of Notorious BIG. What was this excursion you went on?

Somebody said writing is a discipline because it takes discipline to do it, just like all the other arts. It really is just about making time to sit down and do the work and put the hours in. So that's very important to me. However, sometimes with the editing process, it's helpful to read your stuff outside of where you're working it, because that is sometimes how you consume material. For example, I might best enjoy something on a park bench in Brooklyn.

So I was on an errand to Paisanos, a butcher in Brooklyn, and I wound up sitting down in the park. A nice thing about New York is you're just always struck by coincidence. There's just so much nice pleasantness like that around. There's this Biggie statue, which is right across the park from Henry Ward Beecher. So you have the classical on one end and the postmodern on the other end. You know, one of the tenets of post-modernism is taking the old and reusing it to invent something new. That’s what the Biggie sculpture showed so wonderfully, and that’s also something like what I was doing in taking some older, more archaic words of Lovecraft and reapplying them to something modern.

But then, as happenstance would have it, I realized I was right around the corner from Lovecraft's house! He lived in New York for a very short period of time. And though it was short, it was one of the most explosive periods of time during his writing. That would have been his Brooklyn Heights apartment, where he lived for maybe a year, year and a half, and where he wrote “The Call of Cthulhu” and “Cool Air.” “Cool Air” is one of the most hilarious short stories ever because you realize, “Oh you’re just writing about air conditioning and you’re very scared about it.” [laughs] That’s quintessential Lovecraft: anything that you’re not used to terrifies you. So I happened to be right by that apartment. It was just another very pleasant serendipity.

Now that you have participated in this project twice, what's your advice for a new person who's just about to start?

Oh man. Take it for everything that you can. I went in thinking I was going to write about my second-born child, but instead I had to confront my pre-expectations and realize what I can and can't do. For me it was just so freeing, which I guess also comes across in the piece itself. I’d obviously been so confined, having a toddler and an infant, as well as working with history articles, which I do love, but my passion really is prose and poetry. So to be given two weeks to be able to think about something really cool that you want to do is just so freeing, you know?

I do! In these interviews, I sometimes ask people if they find working from a prompt to be more restrictive or more freeing. So far, the winner seems to be freeing.

Exactly! It's such an ironic juxtaposition to use constraints to become liberated. It has a BDSM quality, doesn’t it? [laughs] But that contradiction is something I've never considered before. I now understand better why a lot of creative people set parameters like that.

Call Number: Y112VA | Y114PP.huWe

Eliot Hudson is a New York City based writer and musician. His fiction, poetry, history articles, and music can be found at EliotHudson.com. He’s completed his first novel and is seeking representation from publishers and agents.