THE JOURNAL OF BODLEY CLIVE by Matthew Paris

[00:00:05][music] [music] We got to hear [music] The Journal of Bodley Clive by Matthew Paris.

[00:00:44]This story was published in the 9th of a British anthology series called New Worlds in November 1975, read by Daryl T. Smith II for my channel Quazar Spectra.

[00:01:00]The journal of Bodley Clive.

[00:01:05]I am taking this trip to Arkham with no sense of purpose. I live in a world of pure method and these military faints are not my style. My editor decided it was a perfect tactic for me to take a tour of the Hinterlands. Many of my readers have compared previously such journeys favorably to the various quests in medieval romances. I feel that this trip through New England to write of La Cuisine for the town's most comprehensive newspaper will offer me a perspective on the country from the view of one of the most urban and sophisticated flurs of New York City.

[00:01:47]Certain compunctions had made me shrink from this voyage to old Greece. I am too used to tempering my style for the snobs, glutton, and orally obsessed maniacs who read my restaurant column daily to write intimately, confidingly.

[00:02:06]I need to compose a heartfelt journal.

[00:02:09]Naturally, the image I have deliberately cultivated for over 20 years of writing for anonymous admirers has cast me in a role I rather prefer. The fastidious gourmet, picking, judging, sipping its sensual pleasures with inimitable style, carving controlled elegance into tidbits, chewing indolently on the deeper textures of reality. that is the emblem of the figure I cut in society as a man. My place in history as a literary figure is a bit of deception. Strange to say, the pretenses necessary to disguising my purpose in restaurants make my real life quite different from the enameled caravan supposed by my readers.

[00:02:59]To maintain my anonymity, I have an immense variety of disheveled costumes to throw restaurant managers off the scent. I have manufactured a variety of false beards for my perpetual holiday.

[00:03:13]Only the flowery shirts are supplied to me by my newspaper. They have been supplemented yearly with some rather theatrical effects of my own devising.

[00:03:24]There is hardly a soul in the restaurant business or indeed the newspaper itself who could identify me. I mail in my column to the paper typewritten directly to the editor who nobody knows even remotely what I really look like. I have always traveled in an old duesenberg scented discreetly with orchids. I keep a bottle of rye and a pack of Egyptian cigarettes in the glove compartment. I like to be surrounded with seinal symbols of America's literary tradition.

[00:03:58]A few pungent copies of Reader Digest and Popular Mechanics on the back seat, magazines I adore for the clarity of their pros, and I am on my way. This time I reached Arkham in [clears throat] 5 hours. Naturally, I changed my disguise and my Texas license plates on the car to avoid suspicion. I arrived towards evening. Arkham, whose gabled roofs and church steeples and towers are most peacant at dusk, loomed strangely in the distance as I stopped the car at a hamburger stand for a snack. I finished the sumptuous dainties and put them in the glove compartment. I liked them lukewarm.

[00:04:43]Arkham was nearly deserted. I dropped off my bags at the town's one hotel. If I ever become a hotel columnist, I shall have a few words to say about it, and drove to Wheatley's for my evening meal.

[00:04:59]I was served the usual hotel dot by a waiter with a provincial shrug as soon as I was seated. The waiter refused to bring me the bill of fair. He said there was no menu, or the waiter, for some reason, had taken a dislike to me. I handled the situation and permitted myself an uplifted eyebrow at the Kurt manner with which he performed his work.

[00:05:24]Now I can think of meals I have eaten in Witchah, Kansas, and easily forgive this fellow. He was a bumpkin, pure and simple. I muttered the Lord's Prayer in the Vulgate translation as this dullard served the entree. I saw the cook briefly stepping out of the kitchen for a moment. He was a gangly fellow with fish-like eyes and an appearance of dorsal fins on the back of his skull. He was barefoot. The poor chural was no doubt the product of centuries of cold winters and casual inbreeding. He had thick webbing between his misshapen toes. The waiter had served me a noxious fungi stew. It was topped with a generous sprinkling of peppery herbs related to the Norwegian leak. I would guess it was ice cold and burned my gums as it passed with an oily scent towards my pallet. I swallowed a bit of the glutenous relish, a queer compost of fruits, with a delicious shiver. I have eaten homemade Korean food without an involuntary shudder, and have even toasted to election of gypsy kings with the infernal brew they call hagofen. But never have I experienced the hideous strength of this particular condiment of Arkham. I bolted my meal with a flourish and almost ran out of weights, spilling a few bills on the table as I left their dining hall.

[00:06:57]March 20th, 1967.

[00:07:01]Earlier tonight, I sat down to write my column, but found the experience beyond my powers of description, an occurrence which is not subject to lingual analysis. I can only hope and pray that this will never occur again. After all, I make my living on the strength of my ability to translate any sensory experience, notably the music of dining out must be coded into lucid and pathy phrases. For my talents, I am invited to banquetss on the lower slopes of Parnasses.

[00:07:35]Weightleys, I notice, is the only respectable restaurant in town.

[00:07:40]Otherwise, I would have gone to a more hospitable place for travelers, and would have had the neighborhood in deliver. Dare I write this? One of my secret delights, a feast of barbecue, pizza, and an orange drink. This is what an intimate journal is for. And so to bed.

[00:08:03]March 21st, 1967.

[00:08:08]This morning I had breakfast in weight lease. It was a much more satisfying experience than my horrendous meal of the night before. The ugliness of that disaster seems like a dream to me now.

[00:08:21]>> [snorts] >> to quote the waiter's curious benediction, "By the fires of Yog Stoth, we have eaten well." Afterwards, I offered the chef my compliments.

[00:08:33]Then I met him. This sirly figure of the same Aquarian physique and dreamy demeanor as my waiter, operated under conditions more primitive than any I have experienced in an American restaurant. He does not cook on a stove.

[00:08:50]There is no refrigerator visible in the place. I believe he must cook his delicacies in a series of earthnware pots. I have seen them on his shelves topped with covers of similar material.

[00:09:03]I had never seen pots of quite that color or resiliency and made a remark to that effect. He smiled and told me their history. They are made by the local artisans, [snorts] evidently a skilled bunch of tradesmen for all their inbreeding.

[00:09:22]March 22nd, 1967.

[00:09:27]This afternoon, I visited the town church.

[00:09:30]It was built in an architectural style that reminded me absurdly of hints of forbidden temples the mad Arab Abdul al-Hazred had seen and recorded in his terrible masterpiece, the Necronomicon.

[00:09:47]But I smiled at this peculiar notion. I examined the interior of this hexagonal structure with its queer angles and sineuously carved iconography.

[00:09:58]Muffled figures of saints glowed on its unlit walls. The narrow high windows, a design native to Arkham houses, were completely covered by heavy wine velvet curtains. Neither sunlight nor moonlight could enter this temple, but it was lit quite brightly with a white light from three large phosphorescent lamps high above my head. Four incense burners, one in each corner of the room, on thin elongated tripods, burnt with a vinegary fragrance that smelled not unlike formaldahhide, but was richer and more subtle. Several crude statues carved from obsidian were placed on shelves, hanging stiffly out from the ivory walls. They were wholly unlike anything I had ever seen, lacking any appendages or facial contours I have normally associated with life. Yet they were not blobs either, but idols carved in a sort of vapid geometric structure, a compound of curious angles and weird curves not usually seen in a holy place. A wild, terrible music sounding vaguely like a violin, echoed through the ivory walls of the temple, playing harmonies that were more like grunts and tired moans, culminating frequently in an unmentionable scream. On the altar, a curiously shaped polyhedrin glowed and pulsated queerly with soft violet light.

[00:11:36]It was an Eldrich trick of the sunset refracted through the garishly colored windows.

[00:11:45]March 23rd, 1967.

[00:11:50]Early this evening, I had another meal at Weightley's in which exactly the same food was served me. I was glad that the waiter had not noticed how little I had enjoyed the previous nights repasted.

[00:12:02]For some reason unknown to me, I found this food excellent and ate it with unfeigned relish. He served me a series of desserts, all of which were scrumptious. He again blessed these sophisticated dainties with those curiously provoking phrases, invoking the icy vaults of yog and archaism with its turn of diction in cotton mather time.

[00:12:29][snorts] March 24th, 1967.

[00:12:35]Sent my resignation to the editor. I placed the missive in the mail this morning and wrote a short note. It hardly explained anything, but it was in the usual code. I suggested the names of several people whom I thought might follow in my increasingly untraceable footsteps. I think back on the range of tastes I had at my disposal in those days in Eden and the poultry language with which I attempted to communicate them. I was rash enough to think I could translate my life into language. I am ashamed of my folly, a temerity which I can neither attribute to youth or rationalistic philosophy.

[00:13:18]to translate the untransatable experience all ambiance is into English like some idiot fiction jabbering out nonsensical badonage on his portable typewriter is truly insupportable for a man of etiquette I have acquired the worst of manners Lavoteep knows best I have died like an animal. I have been reborn again. With Yog Saut's help, I must retain the humility with which I started this entry.

[00:13:58]March 25th, 1967.

[00:14:02]Many things to tell, but I have not the words to tell it. As I come to the most difficult part of this tale, I begin to wonder what queer accident of character, strange quirk, or ugly streak in my lineage made me devoted to such arcane, weird researches.

[00:14:22]There are certain hideous experiences to be avoided, vertigos of nauseous abysses to be dreaded, properly shunned by any intelligent researcher into the unnatural and unearly.

[00:14:36]There are certain misty shadows that hold secrets better left unttalked about, whose unlit knowledge would drive most men to screaming unintelligible curses at the night. There are cruel gods exiled to the furthermost regions of the stars who can be called up by name, but who may not be put down so easily. The very name of these creatures, uttered in a circle of Illuminati, can invoke a heart-rening growl of terror, rising from the throat like a living thing, frightening the demon away from this planet, even pursuing its baleful shape back to its home amongst the coldest and most terrible of stars.

[00:15:22]I caution you, who read this not to publish any portion of the journal. I shall count upon your honor. Throw this journal into the fire. Burn it, every last shred of it, until this hideous record of mankind's wildest dreams may stray in the realms of nightmare and haunt us in our daily waking life no more.

[00:15:45][snorts] I am finding the act of writing difficult. Grammar seems a mere rhetoric to me. I am learning the language spoken by the people of this town. a [clears throat] dialect found only in Arkham. In more intimate conversation, it is an unreal system of clicks and glottle sounds without tenses, verbs, or normal structural pattern, apparently distantly related to certain Eskimo and Indian languages, which I would claim in my days of journalism was the raw stuff of anthropological monographs. There is a level of consciousness they are getting at that no longer escapes me.

[00:16:26]They have invited me to a banquet taking place on the first of next month. I am invited to a communal kitchen in which the ceremonial delicacies prepared for such festive occasions may be tasted. I am not a little afraid, albeit mightily curious.

[00:16:46]How can I describe this chilling revelation I have received from these extravagant meals I have ingested in Arkham?

[00:16:55]I look back over these pages and I find my previous attitudes towards the whole experience are naive. Of course, when I became aware of the deeper meaning of the banquetss and reflected on the ignorant age in which I had been born, it was an astonishment.

[00:17:14]for any creature of God to discover that his tastes, opinions, character, and ambitions are absurd. Tripe, as lover of tripe, I do not use that fragrant word lightly, was salutary.

[00:17:30]I had the temerity to publish these examples of my ignorance and folly, to trumpet my stupidity and deceit to the multitude in the most influential rag in New York City. Had I not guessed in the recesses of my heart that my public identity of gourmet was a veil between myself and the world, my whole pose as a gentleman, my elegant patrician heirs, had been nothing more than gates that stood between myself [snorts] and the terrifying end of my journey. Surely I had sensed all of this and walked away from the bath of blood and fantastic light in which I lived with my habitual hatur. While other men would simply have had recourse to some stupifying drug to engage their senses in the huge trough of light in which we all live. I had of necessity to return to the source of my woes. I am ashamed of myself. I have hawkked my folly and ignorance to every wag and carpet bagger on this earth. I am dust beneath the earth and above the sky and a moat in the womb of matter. I bet the most profound forgiveness of all created things and beings I have slighted with my pride and fear.

[00:18:59]March 26th, 1967.

[00:19:04]I am damned lucky I resigned my position when I did. The absurd and obsolescent crudities of altering my peculiar experience into the structural patterns of my race would have been intolerable for a man of my total integrity. I'm afraid language itself is made for the majority of human beings. Our race at its most mediocre. I feel I cannot continue to write this journal much longer. What I had not understood, dare I commit this vision to the ineradicable parchment of this hapless journal, in my days of pride, the most profound nature of the universe had contained me. We live in an immense stew of matter, the least of which is father, brother, and son, and no heirs or gestures of contempt can hide from our souls the nature of any material banquet. We feast on our own divinity, and those sweet meats, those tender morsels of lamb are nothing less than our own flesh.

[00:20:16]March 27th, 1967.

[00:20:21]I received a registered letter from my editor today. He had it sent to the hotel. It was brought to me here at Wadley's. It was an iate note telling me of the many excruciating evenings he had spent in restaurants following my enthusiastic hosas. He ended this missive with a few maladictions which would have been offensive to a pearl diver.

[00:20:48]Ordinarily, I would have torn up this bleedu in a blind rage, but I have learned a soup song of humility since my drive to Arkham. I merely dropped it absent-mindedly on the wooden floor of the restaurant.

[00:21:05]March 28th, 1967.

[00:21:10]Chancing upon my newspaper brought to the hotel by some traveler last night, I read the column by the insucient gargoyle who dared to follow in my footsteps.

[00:21:24]Entree noose. This dastard is a Cuban refugee exiled lately from that tropic land who previously had written quite expertly on ji alli and communism. I suppose the editorial board wanted to humiliate me, but I am astonished how little I care about these follyies. Now here at Arkham, I have attained peace of mind, proof against such errant pit paddle. I need a deeper bath in the stew of the universe. The buoya base in which I live. The gaseous caress of the atmosphere is not tactile enough to reach nerves severed by years of a world of forms, definitions, and the culde-sac of taste.

[00:22:14]How I yearn secretly for a gourmet's metaphysics.

[00:22:21]March 29th, 1967.

[00:22:26]Tomorrow is the day of the banquet. I feel like a youngster waiting for Santa Claus at Christmas Eve. [sighs] Yuggoth has been showing up strongly in my dreams, haunting them to quite an appreciable extent. I was never a strong swimmer, but I felt an irresistible urge to go skinding at Inmouth tonight. It is the coastal town and the port of Arkham.

[00:22:53]Plunging into the sea in March is too difficult a baptismal right for even the Puritans who originally inhabited this part of the country. But the sea is the home of creatures who perceive the great stew. I have noticed gills like shadows on either side of my neck and mysterious spidery webbing of my fingers and toes.

[00:23:16]I owe these organs to the weird food I had consumed at Whley's. But they are also the product of my biological reaction to my deeper sense of identity.

[00:23:28]The capping of a profound onlogical purpose formally isolated to my life.

[00:23:34]Tomorrow a meal at Weightley's by way of dutiful preparation for the repast the feast of the ocean.

[00:23:44]This right may be held at Inmouth.

[00:23:50]March 30th, 1967.

[00:23:54]I am writing this at Weightley's having left the hotel for good. My waiter has kindly prepared a cot for me in the back of kitchen. Such a disappointment. The banquet has been postponed as a result of inclement weather. I had thought it was going to be held indoors.

[00:24:13]Apparently, we are to walk down to Inmouth and hold the rights on the rocky crags and piles. I do love the Atlantic coastal regions.

[00:24:26]March 31st, 1967.

[00:24:30]I exalt, bathing in the great stew.

[00:24:34]gills keep forming, and I cannot easily hold on to this pen with my clumsy fingers webbing quickly into flipper-like claws. Of course, I am not less than terrified of these weird changes in my appearance, but fortified with the hope that my new shape will bring me into the great mystery of the sea I have dreamed of, but have not yet fathomemed in my cankered heart.

[00:25:02]I spent this last day involved in what to most New Yorkers would be a terrible and eerie right. We held a curious celebration in the church, a kind of arcane religious mystery, celebrated in their unspeakable Eldrich tongue. We chanted in an argot full of clicks, hisses, and glottle stops. I had been learning it from the waiter and chef during my extended stay at Weightley's.

[00:25:32]Their robed priest, who claimed he had once been a chaplain in the United States Army, chanted some verses in this language I barely understood. I listened to this unintelligible lingo, hints of which would have chilled my blood had I not already obtained the contemplatio mentioned by St. Augustine.

[00:25:54]I cannot possibly give the exalted tone of these ods by merely quoting excerpts from religious texts. Their sensuous purity leads to a voluuptuous aestheticism. And there are hidden keys to an undreamed of austerity of visionary orgy in this oddly accented verse. Locked within the langangerous moods, the subtle rhythms of rhyme and meter are dreams like aphrodesiacs dissolved in a bow of clear spring water.

[00:26:30]A series of gargling noises were emitted by the parishioners in the pews. I felt my body shaking uncontrollably.

[00:26:38]The choir sang hymns in a nasal whining tone. It caused my forehead to break out into profuse sweat. I am a hero. I was afraid, but I am triumphant in my fear.

[00:26:53]I am the groom at a pagan wedding. All problems are solved when all life's frustrations are passed. A more vincet omnis. As I heard these last horrendous inonations, a grizzly shape began to form slowly out of the air in the temple, I realized it had always been there in the room and was merely waiting for us to beckon it to visibility. I call it a shape. Dazed by this unutterable horror, the terrible spectacle burnt my inner vision. It had no lines, no contours, no points of departure. It was a presence of some monstrous sort. Certain words of the chance, quite harmless to the uninitiated, had struck strange color cords in its utterly alien system, which activated its psyches in our poor provincial set of dimensions.

[00:27:58]I tell you, it was hideous.

[00:28:03]April 1st, 1967.

[00:28:08]Useless to write any longer. My journal in my back pocket. I hiked to Inmouth with the throng. I am in the space-time continuum. I cannot say what happened.

[00:28:22]Not what I have just seen. It is impossible. This journal dropped in the mailbox. I shall return to the sea. I can grasp the pen. What an effort.

[00:28:35]Breathing is difficult in this gaseous air. No sense in writings beyond their anthropological value, so to speak, thanks to the banquet feast in the church. Food like a drug.

[00:28:52]At the shore, I saw another eerie vision. It was different and more terrifying, as though I had passed through veils to reach this moment by the sea. The day was blazing with foggy light from the scarlet rays of the bloody sun. The clouds coagulated above me into vast and horrific shapes seen from one end of the horizon to the other end. I stared upward at long rows of diaphous dripping meat. White ivory ribs and hollow carcasses blending to shiny fllayed torsos impaled on hooks hung in long rows against the terrific zanith of the sky.

[00:29:38]In the blur distance, sour odors, salty spores of rotting meat began to fill my nostrils with a giddy, sublime fragrance.

[00:29:50]A mooing sound floated down towards me from either side of the hideous chimas.

[00:29:57]The mooing sound became louder, insistent, holy in its fearful gissandos from dead guttural throats. It mirrored the colors of the earth. Divine carcasses dripping with fat fleg and red liquids were braaying from unseen mouths, and their voices hypnotized me in their agonies with soft durgelike corral.

[00:30:23]I shouted the names of horrors and demons at the echoing angles of the sky.

[00:30:30]But my voice seemed to join into the hysterical mooing of the boine spirits and I was deified. a moat in their desperate cries. Or a moment I had blended into the bloodscented steamy air, a nimbus hovering around singing cadaavvers, my bones crumbling in the celestial slaughterhouse, rising towards the foggy light.

[00:30:59]No more. I am gasping in this atmosphere. I must put down their journal. What shall I leave behind me as I fall away into this protective ocean?

[00:31:12]What apherism, what sick epig? I am no longer in the grammar of life or too decent for the more solid realms of reality.

[00:31:24]Am [clears throat] I in the new world?

[00:31:28]Let no poultry god or angels bring me back to earth and the whiny air. No spirits could leave my body now. What a joke. I swim in the eternal dance of the world. The pavan of my own waters. I am the eater and the eaten. I am dissolving in a dream of salt. I shall dance softly into the cadaavverous bed of the Atlantic. I am going to the emerald world of the lukewarm [clears throat] ocean. I shall be a bone in the tooth that chews the iced fire in the sun.

[00:32:16]While the waves lap against ivory beaches, I shall be an ebony nut in oyster beds, the pearl of night gleaming in the blackness. My groin and heart eaten by the hungry mirrors in the fierce bloody sea.

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[00:33:01]Thank you so much for your time and your imagination.