Episode 46: Thomas Ligotti's Angel

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 8 May 2019

⏱️ 89 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In his short story "Mrs. Rinaldi's Angel," contemporary horror author Thomas Ligotti contrasts the chaotic monstrosity of dreams with the cold, indifferent, and no less monstrous purity of angels. It is the story of a boy whose vivid dream life is sapping his vital force, and who resorts to esoteric measures to rectify the situation. In this episode, Phil and JF discuss the beauty and horror of dreams, the metaphysical signifiance of angels and demons, and the potential dangers of seeking the peace of absolute "purity" in the wondrous flux of lived experience. REFERENCES Thomas Ligotti, "Mrs. Rinaldi's Angel" (read by Jon Padgett) Roger Scruton, The Face of God Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer Thomas Ligotti, "The Last Feast of Harlequin" in Grimscribe: His Lives and Works Robert Aickman, English author H. P. Lovecraft, American author H. R. Giger, Swiss artist Jean Giraud a.k.a. Moebius, French comic book artist Donald Barthelme, American author Pierre Soulages, French artist Bruno Schulz, Polish author Thomas Bernhard, Austrian author Edgar Allan Poe, American author J. F. Martel, "The Beautiful Madness: Primacy of Wonder in the Works of Thomas Ligotti" (Forthcoming in James Curcio (ed.), Masks: Bowie and the Artists of Artifice from Intellect Books) Algernon Blackwood, "The Wendigo" Thomas Ligotti, "The Dark Beauty of Unheard of Horrors" in The Thomas Ligotti Reader: Essays and Explorations Dogen Zenji, Zen master Manichaeism Spencer Brown, The Laws of Form Ramsey Dukes, Words Made Flesh: Information In Formation Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical Thomas Ligotti, "Purity," in Teatro Grottesco James Joyce, Ulysses Advaita Vedanta Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld P. J. O’Rourke, political satirist Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Spectrevision Radio
0:02.0	Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.
0:23.3	For more episodes or to support the podcast, go to weirdstud J.F.
0:52.8	For a good part of my childhood, my after-school babysitter was a middle-aged French-Canadian woman.
0:59.0	We affectionately called Mammy.
1:01.0	Mammy was a fastidious woman.
1:03.0	She didn't like my brother and I wandering around the apartment, so our area of play was restricted to the kitchen and the hallway.
1:10.0	Fortunately, the hallway.
1:14.6	Fortunately, the hallway was where Mammy kept her small collection of books,
1:18.5	which included a picture Bible that I became fascinated with.
1:24.4	One image that seared itself into my mind was of an angel leading Lot and his wife out of Sodom,
1:27.5	the city it had just destroyed with divine fire.
1:32.1	What struck me was the cold indifference in the angel's eyes.
1:35.0	It made it more terrifying than any demon.
1:38.9	Demons are closer to humans because they've fallen into evil.
1:42.0	Angels haven't fallen, and they aren't evil.
1:46.8	They are pure, unchanging, and in their static purity,
1:54.1	they appear absolutely indifferent to our plight. In his book, the face of God, the British philosopher Roger Scruton writes about the peculiar nature of that divine love that drives the angelic hosts.
2:00.6	He describes a sculpture of an angel found
2:02.8	in a French cathedral. Quote, the smile on the angel's face makes us uncomfortable. It is not the
2:10.0	tender smile, the smile of the flesh that one lover confers on another, or that a mother confers on
2:15.7	her child. It has a willed and abstract quality.
	...

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