Aphantasia -:- Where No Thoughts Go
Journey with the Banshee, the Low Owl and the Gamma Wolf
Not thought. But spirit. Ghosts, not dreams. Where do they come from and where do they go? Is there a place that no one can imagine? What if we could talk to the dead and return from the future? What if humanity had made thinking machines hundreds of thousands of years ago? What if all thought was a restless reflection on the surface of a deeper truth, one deeper than skin or bone, where light and shadow are one, and madness turns the night into insight?
These are the questions I am asking myself these days, more than what time or exact place of the mythology that has been percolating inside me since I was a child — a hobby, a project, a vision — an obsession, that has waxed and waned over the years, but now halfway on my mortal road, gleams ever brighter in the darkness. Like a spectral gem, it refracts the kooky glow of a fool moon.
That world, and that story, I have titled Aphantasia — a place that cannot be easily imagined or perhaps even pictured at all. Something boggling and at the edge of consciousness: right there, at the moment of perception, is creation. Following in the footsteps of J.R.R. Tolkien, this world I am going to and where I hope to take you is not some alien planet, but our own Earth. Back in time perhaps, or maybe it is forward. It is covered in the mists of time. It starts at the end of a life-age of the Earth: the ebbing of an ice eon, glaciers in retreat, melting mountains of frost, lakes and rivers babbling, and long buried secrets unfolding.
I’ve seen a green tower standing in the vast land of ice where once the hills and rocks were dusted with powdered green tea. High up, it rises into the clouds, and airships hover about, and giant dragonflies buzz around. A messenger flees his cage and flies across oceans to a razor-cut valley, where he is rescued by a girl, a watcher, a huntress. It just so happens, her ancestors knew this bird. It just so happens that she also knows a moth, the oldest living thing not of this Earth.
An ancient knowledge comes to the girl, who learns to engrave the sacred riddles of all time and all worlds onto a box that will hold a gem that holds all the dreams of all living things in its endless prismatic glim: where mazes and doors open onto different ends of the universe. That is where she finds the Half Owl, far from its home, alone in Irèlia, far from anything she can imagine, where no thoughts go...
In the weeks and months ahead, I will start to publish some of the short stories and early drafts of the Aphantasia cycle.* There you will meet Greil (Banshee, the wizard Low Owl, and the Gamma Wolf). Related to my work exploring the magic of Tolkien’s legendarium, Aphantasia is a conscious and unconscious mythology that will be a journey in itself, as I try to transmute memories, sensibilities, and I hope what wisdom is available to me, into a modern dream narrative. The long-term goal is to craft and sculpt a lasting epic for any who may find or need it.
Why? Because these days I believe that we’re in dire need of new mythologies that can speak to the moment by reconnecting us with something older and something deeper. Which means over time, our metaphors and our language must evolve in order to introduce new ways of seeing things. I am not trying to best Tolkien or surpass his legendarium. If I’ve learned anything the past several months going through The History of Middle-Earth, it’s simply that what Tolkien achieved, over decades, is practically superhuman. Certainly, he was often stumbling through darkness. But he was also a unique and complex person, a conundrum of loss, triumphs, passions, revelations, and idiosyncrasies. He burned so very bright.
I’m both scared and enlivened by the challenge to do anything even a little bit worthy. As the late fantasy author Terry Pratchett so beautifully said of Tolkien: “J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji.”
Reading that quote, I have often wondered if Pratchett was also alluding to the fact that Tolkien owned and admired Japanese prints, likely woodblock prints by the great master painters Hokusai and Hiroshige, who so often painted Mt. Fuji as their muse, whose works inspired Vincent Van Gogh and so many other artists. Being “hafu,” or “hapa,” or “half” Japanese, as if my DNA were some racial mathematical equation cut right down the middle, I find this to be apt and mysterious. I’m not going “against the mountain.”
No. If I’m lucky, and if I can get out of my own way, I’m going to try to go “through the mountain,” go “into” the volcano, trample over Fuji-san’s white snows and look out on the sea from its black-sand slopes, and then down into its heat and smoke, and hopefully through some miracle or trick, and perseverance, come out the other side and rediscover some previously unknown dream place. It’s a fool’s hope and a fool’s errand under a fool moon. But it’s a fun one that I can’t pass up, so pass into it I will.
Finally, please note that some of the material will be available for free while some will only be available to paying subscribers. This is not my natural instinct, but these stories will not be “blog posts” or “newsletters,” but mythic works.
That is, I am placing more personal value onto this labor of love. And I hope it in turn gives you back even more. As ever, thank you for your support.
- T.Q. Kelley
*The name Aphantasia comes from the term for the inability to conjure mental images, i.e. the opposite of imagination. Currently, five chapters of the Aphantasia Trilogy are drafted but will continue to evolve, as short stories are also written to help fill in the history and edges of the world. The plan so far is to do a trilogy titled Where No Thoughts Go, with three titled volumes:
Low Owl
Cry, Banshee
Gamma Wolf
I won’t share more at this point about its themes and flavor than what I have above. Suffice to say, that while it is not a pure allegory — for those who know their Tolkien, that is my way of saying that I don’t think masking reality or history with fantasy works well as a one-to-one association game — it will most certainly be a fairy tale. That is, it is most certainly concerned with the fantastical, and the metaphorical, the imagined, and the real. And, it is at its heart, spiritual.
Now, that’s a word that was tiring to hear in the 1990s, when it seemed to me that every earnest new age traveller, West Coast intellectual, and indeed internet do-gooder, was in search of the “spiritual,” or thought of themselves as not religious but “spiritual,” and thus the last 30 years of technological progress, and its resultant techno babble and psychic chaos, are anything but.
Which is simply to say, that it seems to me that we’re in need of mythologies that can speak to the unrest; and that our deeply confusing and fractured civilization can use to help rethink, reground, and even re-enchant our sense of faith in the present. We live in a time when the line between magic and the machine is blurring beyond recognition. Fantasy and science fiction are one. But the juxtaposition of the two is less important than the spirit behind them.