“Our
insignificance perhaps may save us.”
The
genus Salix contains several hundred species of deciduous trees and shrubs that
thrive in the northern hemisphere, especially in wetlands and along river
banks. Commonly known as willows, these
plants are remarkably tenacious, able to sprout roots from broken branches and
twigs, and known for their tough, pliable wood.
Often they are intentionally planted along streams, because their spreading
and interlacing roots help hold the bank against erosion. The sap is watery and abundant and full of
salicylic acid, the active ingredient in aspirin. Their flowers are the familiar catkins seen
in spring, before the leaves appear.
Botanically speaking, willows are dioecious;
there are male and female willows which are differentiated—if one should care
to do so—by specific structures in their respective catkins.
Because
of their analgesic properties, willows are associated with medicine in various
cultures. Besides their role in the management
of pain, the sap has also been used as an astringent and a diuretic. However, because of their close proximity to
water, willows are also connected with magic and spiritual processes, especially
involving the moon. Willows are
considered sacred to the goddess Hecate.
In English folklore, they have an untrustworthy, evil character—suspected
of being able to uproot themselves and follow passersby, muttering to them. This makes them an unreliable addition to the
landscaping.
So it
is no accident that Algernon Blackwood featured the habits of this tree in his
classic weird story, The Willows
(1907). Of this particular work H.P.
Lovecraft makes the following comment: “Here
art and restraint in narrative reach their very highest development, and an
impression of lasting poignancy is produced without a single strained passage
or a single false note.” Elsewhere
Lovecraft praises Blackwood for his ability to describe “…the overtones of
strangeness in ordinary things and experiences, or the preternatural insight with
which he builds up detail by detail the complete sensations and perceptions
leading from reality into supernormal life or vision.”
The Willows is probably familiar to many
fans of weird fiction, and continues to appear in anthologies of weird fiction. It is mandatory
reading for anyone who would like to gain a deeper understanding of what is
possible to accomplish in this genre. Over
a century since its publication, the novella is still able to provide chills
and a sense of cosmicist awe. Aspiring
horror writers will find it worthwhile to study Blackwood’s subtle technique of
using minor details to alter perception and mood as the story progresses.
The
plot is straightforward and bare-boned:
two adventurers ride a canoe down the Danube River during flood season,
and arrive at an island where they pitch camp for a few days. But the gist of the story lies in the malevolence
of the setting—a tiny island covered with willows that is inexorably being
eroded away by the violent flood waters—and the psychological responses of the
two men to their predicament.
The
story begins in the sunny, urban areas of human habitation, just outside the
Austrian city of Vienna. But as the narrator and his friend travel downstream,
the mood darkens and grows more ominous, even as the waters become more
turbulent. Blackwood personifies the
Danube River through vivid description of its behavior in various locales along
its course, suggesting that the spirit of the water develops and matures as it
travels downstream. As the two men drift
away from civilization, Blackwood also simplifies the landscape: the river spreads out and becomes a roiling
marsh, filled with ever shifting shorelines and small islands populated only by
willows. Beginning to feel uneasy, the
narrator notes that his growing disquiet is somehow related to
“…my
realization of our utter insignificance before this unrestrained power of the
elements about me. The huge-grown river
had something to do with it too—a vague, unpleasant idea that we had somehow
trifled with these great elemental forces in whose power we lay helpless every
hour of the day and night.”
Trapped
on the island for several days, the two men experience physical, psychological
and spiritual threats to their existence.
As the river relentlessly whittles away at the edges of their landfall,
the men suffer a parallel erosion of their sanity. From the perspective of Jungian dream
psychology, the ever diminishing island, the surrounding wetlands filled with
gesticulating willows, the presence of the moon and the frequent shape-shifting
going on all around marks this setting as typical of the albedo stage of dream imagery.
Carl Jung created an alchemical metaphor to describe stages
of dream fantasy that progress as the unconscious wrestles with some problem or
frustration. Like the transmuting of
lead into gold, the unconscious refines “base material” in three stages. These are broadly speaking, dark,
intermediate and bright in quality. The nigredo is the initial point in the
cycle of dream imagery, typified by themes of decay, disintegration,
dismemberment, and gloom. Two other
phases follow. There is an albedo phase in which dream images and
change form and identity, shifting back and forth, and become lighter and more
illumined—options are being considered. The
Willows seems to
float precariously here.
In the rubedo phase,
a synthesis or solution is finally achieved, characterized by brightness, color
and energy. The cold dark base metal of
nightmare is transformed through an intermediate quicksilver stage to bright,
warm gold. The sun comes out. It is uncertain at the end of The
Willows whether
the narrator or his friend reach this stage, or ever escape from the dwindling
bit of land that sustains them during this psychic onslaught.
The interactions of
the two men are interesting. The narrator
is constantly seeking a rational explanation for the strange events, while his
pragmatic friend—referred to as “the Swede”—intuitively understands their
predicament, and its religious implications.
In some sense, they represent two halves or perspectives of the same
mind. Blackwood has accurately depicted
the psychological torments of trying to comprehend an entity that is all
powerful, unearthly and unconcerned with humanity. At one point, the narrator is trying desperately
to relieve himself of growing anxiety and panic. He is heartened by a comment his friend
makes:
“…he had so admirably expressed
my own feeling that it was a relief to have the thought out, and to have
confined it by the limitation of words from dangerous wandering to and fro in
the mind.”
In a comment earlier in the story, the narrator offers what
might be a core insight to be distilled from the men’s adventures on this weird
little island:
“By
Jove, though, was it all hallucination? Was
it merely subjective? Did not my reason
argue in the old futile way from the little standard of the known?”
In the end, when faced by the psychic horrors infesting an
island in the middle of the Danube—a place no human is supposed to be—it will
not avail one to think or talk or ponder.
Better to paddle like mad, or even swim.
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