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diseases of the head
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DISEASES
OF THE
HEAD
ESSAYS ON THE HORRORS
OF SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY
Edited by Matt Rosen
 Contents

Introduction: On the Diseases of the Head ◆ 13

Matt Rosen

◆◆◆
Outgrown Purpose, Outlived Use: On Parasitic Teleology ◆ 43
Ben Woodard

Death of Horror ◆ 71
Amanda Beech

Those Who Aren’t Counted ◆ 113

Matt Rosen

Horror of the Real: H.P. Lovecraft’s Old Ones

and Contemporary Speculative Philosophy ◆ 163
David Peak

Triangulorum ◆ 181
Sara Rich

Race and Its Far-Reaching Contemporary Ontological and

Epistemological Implications ◆ 197
Marina Gržinić and Jovita Pristovšek

ix
 Absolute Xenogenesis: Speculations on
an Unnatural History of Life ◆ 237
Eckardt Lindner

Survival Strategies for Weird Times ◆ 277

Helen Marshall

Matrix Pavoris: Material Dislocation in House of Leaves ◆ 315

Luka Bekavac

Encountering Weird Objects: Lovecraft, LARP,

and Speculative Philosophy ◆ 361
Chloé Germaine Buckley

Sublime Horror in the Tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann ◆ 395

Hamad Al-Rayes

When the Monstrous Object Becomes a Tremendous Non-

Event: Rudolf Otto’s Monster-Gods, H.P. Lovecraft’s
Cthulhu, and Graham Harman’s Theory of Everything ◆ 439
Eric Wilson

Reproducing It: Speculative Horror and

the Limits of the Inhuman ◆ 483
John Cunningham

Horror Vacui (“That Nothing Is What There Is”)◆ 499

Julia Hölzl

◆◆◆
Contributors ◆ 513

x
 Acknowledgments

Any anthology contains a little infinity: of work and labor, of

time and energy, and of thanks. I’m well aware that I can’t hope
to convey, in just a few words, appreciation adequate to the debt
owed to all those who’ve helped me while this book came to-
gether. But I hope that those to whom I’m so very grateful can
take these acknowledgements as a gesture toward an indebted-
ness that runs deeper than words.
First of all, to the contributors who worked tirelessly to see
this volume come into being: Hamad Al-Rayes, Amanda Beech,
Luka Bekavac, Chloé Germaine Buckley, John Cunningham,
Marina Gržinić, Julia Hölzl, Eckardt Lindner, Helen Marshall,
David Peak, Jovita Pristovšek, Sara Rich, Eric Wilson, and Ben
Woodard. Each of you has lent this collection something singu-
lar, a distinct take on the philosophy to come; and each of you
kindly tolerated my many questions and suggestions. It has been
such a pleasure to work with you. To Vincent W.J. van Gerven
Oei, our vigilant and ever encouraging editor. To Eileen A. Joy,
for providing us with a very bright light. To Lily Brewer, for your
careful attention, without which this book would be consider-
ably harder to read. And to everyone at punctum books, for
your effort and support during the inevitably protracted process
through which a book comes to be.
Second, to the faculty and students of the philosophy de-
partment at Colorado College. You have given me the gift of a
place where it’s possible to ask how we ought to live and what

xi
we should make of the world with straightforward sincerity, a
place where such questions seem always urgent. In particular, I
owe much to Marion Hourdequin, who has taught me from the
start that philosophical inquiry and compassion are mixed up
with each other. To Jonathan Lee, for your Socratic lucidity and
generosity. And to John Riker, for many profound insights. I am
also indebted to others who, in discussion or correspondence,
have helped me to think about some of the questions raised by
this book: Taylor Adkins, Max Chiaramonte, Tom Crowther,
Rick Furtak, Graham Harman, Michael Kim, Chet Lisiecki, An-
ton Rieselbach, and Natalie TeSelle.
Third, to those who have endured countless hours of my re-
lentless conversation, who have shared with me joy and hardship
and everything in between. To Anna Gaw, for your indomitable
kindness and unflinching integrity. To Greg Shea, for so many
memories that are now good stories. To Bibi Powers-McCor-
mack, for your quiet brilliance and comradeship. To Heather
Rolph, for your wit and unalloyed humanity. To Piper Boudart,
for your graciousness and much shared laughter. To Allie Kreit-
man, for the luminosity of your intellect and company.
And fourth, to my family, who have often been for me a
source of wisdom and a foundation. To my grandparents, for
teaching me that stories have a real power. To my professori-
al uncle, for lighting a path. To my sister, who bore with me
throughout our shared youth and whose joy is my joy. And to
my parents, who emboldened me to keep going.

xii
 Introduction:
On the Diseases of the Head
Matt Rosen

A theory of everything can no longer carry the day. Our age is

perhaps the first in which it seems definitive that a theory aim-
ing to count the whole of what is, to catalogue every existent and
experience and exception, no longer seems viable, or even very
interesting.
There are several reasons for this. For one thing, there is
too much information for which to properly and carefully ac-
count. The accumulation of technical and scientific detail means
greater specification and specialization. The sheer number of
philosophical positions to be argued against, articulated, and
defended continues to grow, as per the nature of any historical
development. And in social and cultural terms, there are fewer
and fewer regions of permissible ignorance, especially in light
of globalization; the encounter between European and Chinese
philosophy indicates just one particularly present example of
this.1 Yet there is a way in which it is easier than ever before to
be ignorant of so much.

1 An interesting account of this can be found in Yuk Hui, The Question

Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics (Falmouth:
Urbanomic, 2016).

13
DISEASES OF THE HEAD

Second, our age is one of a proliferation of things.2 In the

twentieth century — to paint with a very broad brush — phi-
losophy largely aimed to take stock of our access to things, to
get clear about the epistemic conditions under which humans
might come into contact with things and come to know them.
The twenty-first century, however, demands that we grapple with
the things themselves, whether or not they can be accessed un-
der ideal epistemic conditions.3 Processes of commodification
and capitalization, and the correlated production of all manner
of things, continue to accelerate; the idea that we could get a
grip on each thing by means of some comprehensive theory has
begun to look less and less believable. A theory that would seek
a totalizing account no longer strikes us as able to be sufficient,
or as more than a kind of fiction. Such a theory seems to do a
certain violence to things; it looks recklessly assimilative, as if it
would sweep everything up and miss each thing in its particu-
larity in so doing.
This is not to mention that there seem to be events for which
any theory of everything is unable to give reason. Political in-
surrections at an apparently escalating rate and scale; the event

2 “Our time is perhaps the time of an epidemic of things.” Tristan Garcia,

Form and Object: A Treatise on Things, trans. Mark Allan Ohm and Jon
Cogburn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 1.
3 A “return to the things themselves” was one of the primary ambitions
of Husserl’s phenomenology. However, the things to which I refer are
unlike Husserl’s in this sense: they are, whether or not they’re thought as
such. These things aren’t noemata tied inexorably to a subject’s noesis.
They aren’t necessarily correlated with someone’s experience of them. As
given, they’re indifferent to their own givenness; or they’re given without
givenness. That isn’t to say that speculation is opposed in principle to
the expositions of concrete life made possible by phenomenology. So far
as experience goes, the analyses of phenomenology may well stand. But
speculation can’t accept, as its starting point, the limitations of thematiza-
tion by a subject. The essays in this collection are united by a refusal to
accept the supposed limits of thought, a willingness to think first about
things themselves. See Edmund Husserl, Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology
and Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book: General Introduction to Pure
Phenomenology, trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2014),
35.

14
 INTRODUCTION

of global climate change, which is evidently ongoing; and tech-

nological advancements that make the impossibly horrific per-
secutions of the last century seem too easily repeatable: All of
these look like subtractions from what a theory of everything
might be (“the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the on-
set of dusk”4), and yet each one of these events is still some thing.
So what’s left for us? In lieu of a theory of everything, we can
offer a picture of some thing. Indeed, we can offer many pic-
tures, each of some thing.
What is some thing? It is not nothing, but it is not everything.
It is just a thing: some thing. A picture of some thing would be
a theory, a philosophy, which shows a way or lights a path. But
it would recognize that the determination of whether to follow
that path is never made while on it, that the decision to dwell in
a theory is always made from beyond its enclosure. It would be a
picture that acknowledges that, in so being, it leaves something
out. It would be a picture that does not, when it comes across
an anomaly, seek straightaway to incorporate it, or else to hide
it from view.
Each essay in this collection presents a theory of some thing,
not everything and not nothing. Each essay gestures toward or
sketches a singular path of thinking; but the decision to follow
it rests always with the one who might decide from beyond it.
This collection might best be bracketed by what it does
not contain, by what it isn’t and doesn’t wish to be, by what it
refuses. In offering theories of some things, it will not offer a
theory of nothing, of pure criticism or negation, nor a theory
of everything, of pure accounting or affirmation. This anthol-
ogy’s moment is not one of negativity, not even of a dialectical
negativity that might, in some speculative sublation, be lifted
into a more tolerable positivity. Likewise, this anthology is not
a progress toward an idea that can only be fully glimpsed from
the other side; it is not an attempt at totality, capture, synthesis,
gathering, counting, or hegemony. And it is not the result of a

4 G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood,

trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 23.

15
DISEASES OF THE HEAD

compulsion to repeat the critical philosophy, a critique of what

came before such that a rigorous boundary might be set in place
between philosophy’s past and its future. It is only a non-total
assortment, an assemblage without limit, of some pictures of
some things.
Refusing both total negation (dialectical or otherwise) and
absolute affirmation, refusing to deny everything or attempt to
account for everything, this collection of essays aims at the ex-
position of themes, the construction of partial vantage points,
the creation of limited wholes, and the analysis of fictions and
metaphors. It desires to fight for some thing — but not for eve-
rything, and not for nothing. Most of all, it desires to speak from
a position of insufficiency, to make known its own partiality or
under-determinacy, which we take to be indicative of the prac-
tice of thinking, a sign of speculation.
Diseases of the Head is an anthology of essays from contem-
porary philosophers, artists, theorists, and writers working,
broadly speaking, at the crossroads of speculative philosophy
and speculative horror. Before turning to synopses of the in-
cluded essays, I want to sketch the terrain of this crossroads in
order to bring out the sorts of questions this collection intends
to pose.
For our purposes, speculative philosophy is a particular kind
of thinking which seeks to offer a theory of some thing, but
which does not hang on criticism or totalization. It does not pri-
marily seek the limits of thought so as to set the philosophical
enterprise in place. It isn’t after a perimeter, but rather endeav-
ors to find out what thought can do on its own terms. Instead
of trying to pin down the conditions of thinking or our access
to things, instead of extending thought to include all of what is
or retracting it such that thoughts about reality can be declared
in some way empty or impossible, speculative philosophy seeks
to say some things about some things, and not more or less
than this.5 It finds a certain epistemic humility in rejecting ideas

5 In this sense, I would situate speculation between “moralizing empiricism

and dogmatic theology,” where Badiou situates philosophy. It’s true, of

16
 INTRODUCTION

of finitude that would bar us from getting a handle on things

themselves.
The paradigmatic case of the will to limit speculation, to put
its apparently perpetual restraints on display and make this ex-
hibition the distinctive task of the philosopher, is Kant’s criti-
cal program. Kant’s “Essay on the Maladies of the Head,” which
sets out to classify and taxonomize various instances of subpar
thinking, is a good example of a kind of pervasive legalism, a
desire to name the boundaries that thought cannot or must not
surpass.6 Matthé Scholten writes of the Kantian contention that
“the unifying feature of the symptoms” of those disorders that
come under the head of schizophrenia “is the patient’s inability
to enter into an exchange of reasons with others.”7 Sanity can be
bracketed by means of a criterion: the capacity to engage in in-
tersubjective projects, to come to consensus and follow certain
conventions, to register disagreement within parameters pur-
portedly fixed by reason itself. In this way, sanity can be distin-
guished from skepticism, which is how anxiety comes to expres-
sion in philosophy, and dogmatism, which is how rigidity and
small-mindedness (or repressed anxiety) come to philosophical
expression. And if, for whatever reason, one isn’t able to engage
in the “exchange of reasons with others,” or doesn’t wish to do
so, then one can justifiably be said to think poorly; hence, one is
unfit to undertake certain tasks.8

course, that there are some contemporary “speculative” philosophers who

engage in a sort of totalization, even if not in the sense of Kantian critique.
But I also think we might say that, inasmuch as they engage in projects
that seek to come to terms with the whole of what is (and negation can
sometimes be totalizing), they are thereby less speculative. Alain Badiou,
Second Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Louise Burchill (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 2011), 42.
6 Immanuel Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, eds. Günter Zöller
and Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 71.
7 Matthé Scholten, “Schizophrenia and Moral Responsibility: A Kantian
Essay,” Philosophia 44, no. 1 (March 2016): 205.
8 Certain critiques of Habermas might seem quite apropos here with respect
to Kant’s position.

17
DISEASES OF THE HEAD

Speculation, a practice of thinking catalogued by Kant as a

malady of the head because of its failure to respect the limits
set in place by the critical philosophy, is typified for Kant by
the somewhat exaggerated model of Emanuel Swedenborg, who
was a Swedish Lutheran theologian, philosopher, and mystic. In
the highly polemical Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, published in 1766,
Kant rescinds many of his previously laudatory remarks about
Swedenborg, engaging in a blistering criticism of his specula-
tions. Swedenborg is called a “spook-hunter” with a penchant
for “ceaseless questioning,” and to Kant’s dismay he has no
“official office or occupation.”9 In Kant’s terms, Swedenborg
is guilty of being a Schwärmerei, a fanatic or quixotic vision-
ary who doesn’t respect the proper bounds of reason. Rather,
he employs thought beyond its permissible scope. This caustic
epithet — Schwärmerei — dates back to Luther’s critique of the
more radical elements of the Reformation, indicating a form of
thinking, often mystically theological, that is illicit or forbidden
under a given set of conditions taken to pick out what qualifies
as acceptable reasoning. This set of conditions — in Kant’s case,
laid out by the critical philosophy — is identified by a modality
of thought (namely, critique) taken to be superior to the osten-
sible ravings of the Schwärmerei.
For Kant, speculation that fails to be critical, a thought of
some thing that doesn’t seek to subsume it under the categories
of understanding with immediacy, a thought that doesn’t ask
primarily about our access to things, is declared to be one of the
many diseases of the head. It is a malady to be avoided by the
sane and the upright. As should be clear, this collection does not
side with Kant. For, as Alain Badiou has it,

Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Ev-
erything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism — al-

9 See Immanuel Kant, Theoretical philosophy, 1755–1770, ed. and trans. Da-
vid Walford, in collaboration with Ralf Meerbote (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992), 305. See also Ernst Benz, Emanuel Swedenborg:
Visionary Savant in the Age of Reason, trans. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke
(West Chester: Swedenborg Foundation, 2002).

18
 INTRODUCTION

ways asking Quid juris? or “Haven’t you crossed the limit?”

The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned
philosophy […] I am persuaded that the whole of the critical
enterprise is set up to shield against the tempting symptom
represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against “diseases of
the head,” as Kant puts it.10

There’s no doubt a long history within philosophy of self-limi-

tation. But there is also a noteworthy lineage that aims to push
back against the will to limit, rejecting the desire to catalogue all
of the diseases of the head the better to avoid them. This line-
age has speculated regardless, offering theories of some things
without attention to the putative primacy of critique.
For Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, the superlative
taxonomizer is perhaps Freud rather than Kant, but the senti-
ment is pretty much the same. They write: “For we must not
delude ourselves: Freud doesn’t like schizophrenics. He doesn’t
like their resistance to being oedipalized, and tends to treat
them more or less as animals. They mistake words for things,
he says […] they resemble philosophers.”11 Or — in a place
where we might note the relationship between speculation and
political emancipation — “schizophrenia is the exterior limit
of capitalism itself or the conclusion of its deepest tendency,
but […] capitalism only functions on condition that it inhibit
this tendency […]. Hence schizophrenia is not the identity of
capitalism, but on the contrary its difference, its divergence, its
death.”12 The point is this: the urge to catalogue the diseases of
the head so as to avoid them has a long and august history in
philosophy; but the celebration of these diseases, the idea that
perhaps in their partiality, audacity, and impertinence they rep-

10 Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II, trans. Alberto Toscano
(London: Continuum, 2009), 535–36.
11 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizo-
phrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1983), 23.
12 Ibid., 246.

19
DISEASES OF THE HEAD

resent thinking authentically, also has a history. It is within this

latter lineage that this book locates itself.
For my philosophical project, as for many of those antholo-
gized herein, the limits set in place by Kant prove problematic. If
the classical manner of thinking moves from ontology to ethics,
I have sought something like the inversion of this. For the clas-
sical movement, from what is to how to live, ethical imperatives
are supposed to follow from ontological grounds. For instance,
in Kant we see that morality supposedly follows from the nature
of a rational being. For the movement I seek, beginning in eth-
ics, ontological claims would be to some extent defensible on
moral grounds. This may sound strange at first, but I think it
rests on a rather simple observation: any ontology, it seems to
me, is only really taken up when it is deemed inhabitable, when
it seems to offer a picture of things within which we can make
reasonably decent lives. So we would do well, on my view, to
see that inhabitability matters when it comes to weighing the
virtues and costs of any ontology. For Kant, the categorical im-
perative declares, as it were, that I should treat another as if my
action could become a universal law. I should act toward oth-
ers as if they are ends in themselves, and not only means. Now
this imperative follows from an ontological program, a legalistic
system, in which it seems to me there can be no other. For all
that’s given to me is subsumed right away under the categories
of understanding, and thus rendered self-same to me, of me, or
different only in degree from the norm that I am. The categori-
cal imperative in this way strikes me as unattractively centered
on the self, since it concerns the other whom I am to treat “as if ”
they are another — and only “as if.” By the time the moment of
ethics is reached, it is always already too late; ontology has had
its day. I can think that the other is not only a means — that is,
that there must be some other-in-itself lurking behind the oth-
er-for-me — but I can never hope to know the other except as a
means. To my mind, the ontological limit that prohibits specu-
lation is, from this vantage point, morally untenable. Critique
rests on a picture of things we shouldn’t wish to inhabit.

20
 INTRODUCTION

This is just one example of the many supposed limits that

are called into question in this collection, set aside in a turn to-
ward speculation — a turn toward a thought that isn’t primarily
concerned with its own justifiable extents, conditions, or limits.
This “speculative turn” is best situated in the discourse that
has followed the 2007 conference, “Speculative Realism,” held
at Goldsmiths College, University of London.13 At that confer-
ence, four philosophers with rather divergent views — Quentin
Meillassoux, Ray Brassier, Graham Harman, and Iain Hamil-
ton Grant — came together to address a common enemy. This
enemy was named “correlationism” by Meillassoux in his 2006
book, After Finitude. As Meillassoux put it, correlationism is
“the idea according to which we only ever have access to the
correlation between thinking and being, and never to either
term considered apart from the other.”14 After the twentieth cen-
tury, dominated in the Anglo-American world by the project of
analysis and in Continental Europe by phenomenology, the phi-
losophies of Meillassoux, Brassier, Harman, and Grant each in
their own way seemed to herald a new day for thought. Badiou,
setting high expectations, called the attempt to undermine cor-
relationism “a new path in the history of philosophy.”15
The “speculative realists” — a term that better indicates a
common enemy, correlationism, than any shared program — op-
posed what they considered to be the safety and consolation of
humanism (Brassier); the idea of a subject who is not an object
(Harman); and those philosophies that proclaim that there’s
nothing beyond thought, or that there’s no possible access to
what transcends subjectivity (Meillassoux).

13 For relevant papers, see Robin Mackay, ed., Collapse II: Speculative Realism
(Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2007). For the transcript of this conference, see
Ray Brassier et al., “Speculative Realism,” in Collapse III: Unknown Deleuze
and Symposium on Speculative Realism, ed. Robin Mackay (Falmouth:
Urbanomic, 2007), 306–449.
14 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contin-
gency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 5.
15 Alain Badiou, “Preface,” in ibid., vii.

21
DISEASES OF THE HEAD

In the twentieth century, various philosophies held that eve-

rything that exists is simply the correlation of thinking and be-
ing; or language and bodies (and maybe truths); or appearances
and objects of consciousness; or the noematic and noetic poles
of consciousness; or Being and beings; or fluxes, processes, and
becomings; or the text; or matter; or the Idea; or God; or the
subject, whatever is correlated to it, and whatever interpellates
it such that it is what it is; or structures, systems, and states; or
power and its articulations; and so on. The turn toward specula-
tion, which began in some significant way with the 2007 Gold-
smiths conference, meant the refusal of these architectonics,
these attempts to lay out what everything consists in. It meant
the denial of a kind of philosophical self-sufficiency or indul-
gence by way of the renewal of a thought of the outside.16 In a
way, the turn to speculative philosophy signified the end of au-
thoritative proclamations about the nature of everything (or our
access to it), a willingness to rest contented with saying some-
thing about some things.
Speculation is not a thought of everything, as was attempted
in the previous century — the summae of which attest to these
attempts. Nor is it a purely negative thought, intending only the
critique of the aforementioned totalizations, merely illustrating
the insufficiency of correlationism. It rather puts forward some
pictures of some things, and neither more nor less than this.
This collection isn’t an introduction to what has been termed
“speculative realism” or to associated theoretical endeavors.
Several introductions of this sort have already been written or
edited by those much more capable than I am.17 While many

16 “For it could be that contemporary philosophers have lost the great out-
doors, the absolute outside of pre-critical thinkers: that outside which was
not relative to us, and which was given as indifferent to its own givenness
to be what it is, existing in itself regardless of whether we are thinking it or
not; that outside which thought could explore with the legitimate feeling
of being on foreign territory — of being entirely elsewhere.” Meillassoux,
After Finitude, 7.
17 For such an introduction, see Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham
Harman, eds., The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism
(Melbourne: re.press, 2011). See also Katerina Kolozova and Eileen A.

22
 INTRODUCTION

of the essays in this collection draw their inspiration or parts

of their theoretical apparatuses from the four philosophers who
spoke at the Goldsmiths conference, Diseases of the Head aims
specifically to explore the intersection of speculative philosophy,
broadly construed in the above sense, and speculative horror.
Speculative or “concept” horror is a genre, in literature and
other forms of art, that addresses a particular set of themes:
anonymity, otherness, the alien, the monstrous, the Gothic, ex-
tinction and the world without human beings, the end times,
the apocalypse, the archaic and the world before human beings,
the uncanny or unheimlich, and other similar motifs. In this
collection, a number of speculative authors who discuss such
themes are considered: H.P. Lovecraft, Maurice Blanchot, Ru-
dolf Otto, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Mark Z. Danielewski, among
others. And the works considered include House of Leaves, the
Alien franchise, The Call of Cthulhu, The Infinite Conversation,
and many more.
This anthology is situated at the crossroads of speculative
philosophy and speculative horror, in the terrain in which the
diseases of the head encounter the aforementioned themes.
Kant’s critical philosophy and the tradition that follows from
it — serving as a defense against the speculative maladies of the
head, against the madness and horror of speculation — are being
called into question by those aiming to think being apart from
thought, the absolute at the expense of subjectivity, the macabre
at sanity’s peril, the exception at the price of the stability of the
situation, and the alien at the cost of a certain discourse of nor-
mativity. Speculative horror is a fertile place of development for
those philosophies that seek to repudiate the Kantian injunction
to avoid the diseases of the head in endeavoring to speculate
anew. Conversely, speculative philosophy is a site of inspiration
and theoretical articulation for writers, artists, and theorists of
horror who want to explore novel aesthetic and inaesthetic pos-
sibilities in relation to the uncanny and inhuman, the beyond-

Joy, eds., After the “Speculative Turn”: Realism, Philosophy, and Feminism
(Earth: punctum books, 2016).

23
DISEASES OF THE HEAD

human, extra-human, sans-human, post-human, and even at

times the anti-human.18 This anthology thus aspires to engage
the place of development at which speculative horror and spec-
ulative philosophy meet through as many distinct voices — as
many theories of some thing — as possible. From philosophers
working on horrific themes, to horror writers influenced by the
new speculative philosophy, to artists engaged in projects that
address alienation and monstrosity, the contributors to Diseases
of the Head pose the questions:

— Where do horror and philosophy come together? What’s

found there?
— In what sense might philosophy be fictional? In what sense
might fiction be philosophical? What is the relationship be-
tween theory, story, and practice?
— What does it mean to speculate? How is speculation lived?
— If we set aside philosophy’s self-limitation, what kind of hor-
ror might result? What are the maladies of the head? What
happens if we say that thought can in some way access real-
ity?
— What can philosophers learn from horror writers and artists,
and vice versa?
— What must be considered in regard to the extinction of
thought and the exigencies of the Anthropocene?
— What does philosophy have to say about the end of the world?
— What use can the genre of horror make of speculation, and
what use can speculation make of horror?
— Can horror possibly be contained in an identifiable genre?
— And, what sort of future developments await us in philoso-
phy and horror after the resurgence of speculation?

This anthology seeks to articulate the cutting-edge, as contem-

porary philosophers, artists, theorists, and writers present their
thoughts — at times fragmentary, at times aphoristic, at times

18 See Robin Mackay, ed., Collapse IV: Concept-Horror (Falmouth: Urba-

nomic, 2008).

24
 INTRODUCTION

audacious — on the preceding questions; each chapter offers

some theory of some thing found at the intersection of specula-
tive philosophy and speculative horror. To put it another way,
there’s a sense in which this collection aims at nothing less, after
the long twentieth century, than a speculative coup d’état.
Before we turn to summaries of the included essays, there
are a few points that the reader should bear in mind. First, as
I have mentioned, any speculative investigation is by its nature
rough and unfinished; we don’t think that this is a fault needing
acknowledgement, but rather a virtue. This collection intends
to speak from a posture of being in progress. It speaks from the
position of an inquiry. It is not a treatise. We consider this a
matter of sincerity. The limits of this text aren’t the limits of its
world. Speculation does not end with the final pages; perhaps it
only begins there.
Second, this anthology disregards the limits of disciplines
and academic departmentalization. We are not concerned to
draw neat distinctions between, say, philosophy and literature,
or theory and practice, in order to set each thing so distin-
guished in its proper place. I believe that Alex Dubilet put it well
when he wrote that

[s]uch axiomatic distinctions have been repeatedly asserted

and maintained in different guises, circulating with varying
normative judgements and levels of complexity to the pres-
ent day. It is almost as if there has been a persistent, although
often unacknowledged, collusion [between disciplines] that
has led to theoretical partitions and purifications […]. It is
as though each disciplinary tribe has its own axiomatic axis
mundi around which it is fated to remain in orbit. […] Per-
haps this should come as no surprise, since distinct boundar-
ies allow for the persistence and legitimation of disciplinary
identities and for the resulting, almost nationalistic in their
intensity, rallying cries in defense of disciplinary territories.19

19 Alex Dubilet, The Self-Emptying Subject: Kenosis and Immanence, Medieval

to Modern (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 5.

25
DISEASES OF THE HEAD

Suffice it to say: the essays included in Diseases of the Head reject

“disciplinary identities” and refuse “disciplinary territories.” We
have no interest in planting flags, here or anywhere. We don’t
want to mark the regions of our explorations like conquistadors
of the mind. We are after investigations, open sketches, piece-
meal inquiries, not systems or inert methods. So far as we are
concerned, all thoughts are equally thoughts of some thing,
each of which can be criticized or taken up, each of which has
something to offer us — a reason to accept the thought, a reason
to deny it. Each of the included essays sets out a singular path, a
particular thought of some thing where speculative philosophy
and speculative horror collide. We therefore seek to suspend
the distinctions between disciplines — to ignore, at least for a
moment, socio-cultural partitions and formulaic or balkanized
ways of thinking — in pursuit of speculation itself.
Third, this collection isn’t a polemic. It was Kant, after all, who
once said that metaphysics is a battlefield. On this battlefield,
there is a certain sense in which the speculative philosopher is,
or could be, a guerrilla combatant.20 But combat isn’t our aim.
The critical philosophy, in strictly limiting thinking by means
of its own “reasonable” conditions, in setting aside dogmatic
metaphysics, endeavors to bring about an age of philosophical
“perpetual peace.”21 But this peace is the other side of polemos,
only the moment between battles; it is a peace that declares war
against so much of what thought can do. The speculative resur-
gence, then, isn’t the renewal of the battlefield but the suspension
of the whole war-and-peace dialectic. From a perspective that is
perhaps naïve, from the posture of that youthful “idealism” that
is the only true realism, we seek to speculate without regard to
the declared war or peace of Kant’s metaphysical battlefield. We
wish to think otherwise. We won’t offer a thought that aims to
vanquish or conquer another by claiming to account for every-

20 Cf. Graham Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Car-

pentry of Things (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 2005).
21 I refer to Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, trans. Ted
Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983).

26
 INTRODUCTION

thing, or to negate all else. The goal is not to write an anti-Kant,

a treatise of resistance to the critical philosophy. Nor do we want
to surrender to its stipulations. The objective is to make another
use of thought after Kant.
In other words, we seek to suspend the vicious circularity of
critique and systematic construction — instead putting forward
a picture, or many pictures, of some things, for there are many
diseases of the head.

Overview of Essays to Follow

This anthology opens with Ben Woodard’s “Outgrown Purpose,

Outlived Use: On Parasitic Teleology.” Woodard wants to make
sense of the history of vitalism alongside the development of
biology as a discrete, autonomous science. He argues that the
emergence of vitalism, and its invocation throughout the eight-
eenth and nineteenth centuries, was in some sense a response
to the introduction of order and codification into the apparent
disarray of the study of living systems, which mixed notions of
purpose, teleology, mechanism, form, function, and transfor-
mation. Woodard writes that the view on which life is merely
a force, system, or substance neglects a significant part of the
picture of organic life and its historical development. After ana-
lyzing the historical cartography of vitalism, Woodard turns to
how it interacts with the question of teleology’s nature or foun-
dation. In order to explicate the “cross-contamination” of vital-
ism and teleology, Woodard examines the Alien franchise of
films. These films, he believes, can be seen as emphasizing what’s
at stake for vitalism: “an extended battle over the teleological
status of evolutionary theory and the stubbornness of the ideals
of intentional (whether divine or merely sapient) creation.” In
discussing the order in which the Alien films might be viewed,
Woodard notes that, if they are viewed in the order in which
they were created, it looks as if “creation begs to be justified by
teleology.” But if they are viewed according to authorial intent,
the films instead “unfold vitalism from a teleological obsession.”
Woodard argues that the Alien films signify and magnify the

27
DISEASES OF THE HEAD

adoption of conceptions of teleology by various sorts of vitalism

that would typically disavow them. He tells us that critical vital-
ism’s refusal of any real foundations or conditions of biological
life leaves open a door for teleology, while the so-called “naïve”
forms of vitalism think of their concepts as placeholders in
the venture to explain nature’s generative capacity. These latter
forms of vitalism thereby refrain from closing their productions
back into the “circle of meaning.”
Amanda Beech, in her essay “Death of Horror,” argues that
the cultural phenomenon of horror speaks to notions of human
limitation, which are projected as the horizons of what we can
know in the “impossible navigation between the real and our
lived reality.” The limitations to which horror endeavors to give
voice are established when we fail — as we must — to take seri-
ously the images representative of negativity and the concepts
we might employ to think it. Beech notes that, in seeking theo-
retical explanations and in ordinary life, we often either oppose
the real and lived reality as if they are adversaries or instead
suppose that they are equivalent “in the name of the real itself.”
Speaking of the “infinite and cloying space of contemporary
global capital,” Beech claims that horror is no longer able to en-
gender genuine terror with any thought of “the outside.” In lieu
of that, it has been forced to put forward another sort of ter-
ror: that of “repetition, entrapment, and the destiny of the same
that persists with force.” Beech thus argues that horror’s post-
modern condition has rendered its potential as a “vector” of the
dynamic between the real and reality dispensable for politics,
aesthetics, and the question of how epistemology can offer “new
directions for both language and the future.” Beech wants to put
these questions before us: Can horror allow for a view of lan-
guage that isn’t pessimistic, maintaining a “project of realism”?
Can language express a reality independent of subjectivity and
thereby explicate “the conditions of horror vacui”? Can it do this
without eating away at the view that language has some funda-
mental “equality or inequality with the real”? In order to move
toward answers to these questions, Beech investigates populist
film. She looks to the resources of philosophical reflection and

28
 INTRODUCTION

non-philosophical invention to theorize the limit of horror as

the “representational expression of nothingness.” She seeks a
novel understanding of the relationship between representation
and the thought of nothingness. That way, we might just “rescue
the operations of language after postmodernity.”
In my essay, “Those Who Aren’t Counted,” I propose a dis-
tinction between two concepts: affliction and atrocity. I argue
that an ethical position with respect to history’s horrors can be
understood as a practice of refusing to permit affliction to be
seen as atrocity. This is a practice of resisting the urge to quantify
or qualify affliction in subjecting it to a count of bodies, which
would be taken to totalize all the suffering in a given situation.
We should, I contend, resist thinking that affliction qualified as
atrocity, subject to a count of bodies or the like, captures afflic-
tion itself. I start with an analysis of the massacre that occurred
at Sétif and Guelma, which was one of the conflicts that pre-
cipitated the violence of the Algerian War. I focus particularly
on the dissensus with regard to the number of people who were
killed there. I argue that atrocity is the result of a conversion in
which affliction is subject to an operation of counting, trapped
within a kind of numerical prism. Through this prism, atrocity
is imagined to be adequate to the actual suffering in question. I
ask about how we can think the affliction of those who perished
at Sétif and Guelma without regard to the atrocity under which
they have been subsumed, within which they have been nu-
merically crystallized as the 1,020 (the body count according to
the French colonial government) or the 45,000 (the body count
according to Radio Cairo). This inquiry leads to a discussion of
various ethical “topologies,” and then to a study of an especially
salient instance of affliction: the crucifixion of Christ. Here, I
distinguish between two visions of Christ. The first, which I call
“Christ-in-Christianity,” sees the crucifixion as an atrocity. The
second, which I call “Christ-without-Christianity,” sees it as an
affliction. I sketch a picture of what I term a “generic ethic” in
order to theorize in alliance with the Christ of the crucifixion,
whose affliction is, I argue, foreclosed to those who would think
it as atrocity. I conclude by applying the distinction between af-

29
DISEASES OF THE HEAD

fliction and atrocity to the biblical story of Exodus, making a

case that it is ethically imperative that we recollect the abnega-
tion of the self to those who aren’t counted, those who cannot be
counted because they are afflicted without atrocity.
David Peak, in “Horror of the Real: H.P. Lovecraft’s Old
Ones and Contemporary Speculative Philosophy,” analyzes the
enduring relevance of the Cthulhu Mythos of H.P. Lovecraft.
Peak puts forward a way in which Lovecraft’s “Old Ones” can
be given a new meaning in light of contemporary developments
in speculative philosophy. At the same time, he provides a nar-
rative structure in and by which those developments might be
elucidated. Peak begins his essay by discussing the history and
literary merit of Lovecraft’s mythology; he writes of its value
as a work of fiction, and as a site that offers ample theoretical
resources for those thinking about horrific themes. Consider-
ing what makes Lovecraft’s vision “so profound,” Peak seeks to
advance a connection between recent developments in philoso-
phy — especially those of Graham Harman and Quentin Meil-
lassoux — and Lovecraft’s “notions of horror.” Peak tells us that
the Cthulhu Mythos does a fine job of representing Harman’s
conception of “weird realism,” and he looks to the theoretical
tools of speculative philosophy to see if they might allow us
to “move past the inherent limitations of Lovecraft’s dogmatic
materialism,” which Peak thinks is at odds with Lovecraft’s own
fiction. For Peak, speculative horror can expand — and impor-
tantly, concretize — the often abstract and abstruse philosophi-
cal maneuvers of the new speculation. It is Lovecraft after all,
Peak reminds us, who was audacious enough to have “dared us
to gaze into such magnificent vistas of ultimate chaos.”
In “Triangulorum,” Sara Rich weaves the tale of a tragic,
ill-fated journey to Hispaniola. Written in an epistolary form,
Rich’s narrative asks, what if those Kant thought to be sickened
by the diseases of the head aren’t “dreamers in waking” or fanati-
cal visionaries but rather, as she puts it, “those whose sensations
become, through weird chance, inextricably bound to chimeri-
cal overlaps of space-time that render chaos from perceptions
of order?” In a style at once evocative and experimental, theory

30
 INTRODUCTION

and fiction, Rich tells us that perhaps this post-Enlightenment

age, an “era of life in the Rational Experiment gone haywire,” is
one in which anything but reversibility in fact seems possible.
In their chapter, “Race and Its Far-Reaching Contemporary
Ontological and Epistemological Implications,” Marina Gržinić
and Jovita Pristovšek argue that the primary intersection of hor-
ror and philosophy is found “when, and if, we speak about the
historical construct of race and its far-reaching, contemporary,
ontological, and epistemological implications.”
In the first part of their chapter, entitled “Politics of Death in
Europe,” Gržinić starts off by considering the concept of “nec-
ropolitics,” rooted in the work of Achille Mbembe and Giorgio
Agamben. She defines necropolitics, in contradistinction to Fou-
cault’s biopolitics, as a politics conceived in line with the slogan
“let live and make die.” Arguing that the notion of necropolitics
opens up a “critical space for discussing a land of dead, violated,
and ultimately disposed bodies,” Gržinić analyzes a number of
films made after the Second World War, which center on death
and history. In this way, she aims to think about death and dying
“in the form of an enduring process of a systematic violent act.”
In each of the films under examination, Gržinić points out that
the three main elements of necropolitics can be seen: “enmity,
impunity, and the right to kill.” In these films, she tells us, these
elements are instantiated as “abandonment, reification, and dis-
posability.” Gržinić discusses the structures of various forms
of polities and states, and she concludes the first section of the
chapter by arguing that it is essential to rescue the films under
discussion “from oblivion and the terror they bring” — thereby,
we can rescue the lives of those in these films who, “though ter-
rified, oppose death.”
In the second part of their chapter, entitled “We remember
carrying the word in mouth. Race. Chewing,” Pristovšek speaks
of the “figure of the ‘Black,’ a racialized, colonized, ungendered,
and dehumanized” being; this being is constructed as a kind of
metaxy amidst a world of subjects and objects, who/which is
both between these categories and excluded by them. Pristovšek
tells us that we ought to assert clearly that the idea of race is

31
DISEASES OF THE HEAD

something horrific for philosophy. In arguing that race and

racism are relegated by philosophy to the unrepresentable and
unthinkable, Pristovšek sets up the question of how we are to
think about race as the “grey zone” between horror and philos-
ophy. She thereby gives consideration to the “ontological and
epistemological implications” of race and how it is constructed,
articulated, elaborated, and employed. Meditating on the grav-
ity of injustices both historical and present-day — including
the effects of “European provincialism,” commodity fetishism,
and “neoliberal, global, financial capitalism” — Pristovšek un-
dertakes a detailed assessment of the philosophical movement
often termed “speculative realism.” She pays particular attention
to its aesthetic and political ramifications; she thinks these are
in a sense the same, or at least have a close relationship. Seeking
neither to defend Kant nor to defend speculative realism from
Kant, Pristovšek worries that all parties are avoiding think-
ing about what actually lies between horror and philosophy:
namely, the “racial flesh.” What we desperately need, Pristovšek
claims, is a way to “think anew the ‘human,’” a way to unfold
and develop, as Foucault has it, “a space in which it is once more
possible to think.”
Eckardt Lindner, in “Absolute Xenogenesis: Speculations
on an Unnatural History of Life,” lights a path through the
terrain of philosophy’s entanglement with artificial life, dis-
covering questions about madness, opacity, and impersonality
along the way. He begins with an analysis of Kant’s Dreams of
a Spirit-Seer. Lindner tells us that Kant resists attributing the
spirit-seer’s speculative claims to any physiological malfunc-
tion, since “the whole of philosophical thought is in danger of
becoming a sickness of the mind.” In view of our incapacity to
absolve ourselves of at least the hypothesis of our own insan-
ity, there doesn’t appear to be anything in experience that could
act as a guarantor of its correspondence with reality. Lindner
emphasizes Kant’s move toward a discourse of experience that
is intersubjectively verifiable, a discourse in which the notion
of life takes on the sense of whatever has the quality of being
“lively” or “vital.” In arguing that Kant’s reconceptualization

32
 INTRODUCTION

of life reflects something found in various attempts to cre-

ate artificial life in the eighteenth century, Linder writes of the
“anatomical-phenomenological approach” to thinking about
life, which “simulates a body” and aims to represent or mirror
life. For this approach, success as adequation to life is “meas-
ured by the (often visceral) reaction of an onlooker.” The horror
invoked here comes to light in an analogical structure bridg-
ing an excessive or transcendent object and a finite subject by
means of a “mediating representation.” Linder then turns to the
“anti-aesthetics” of speculative philosophy; he argues that, de-
spite the promises of the fashionable “speculative realism,” its
“anti-vitalist rationalism” is unfortunately “trapped within the
coordinates of the Kantian critique.” Linder thus proposes that
we center our inquiry on the “indifferent speculative wasteland”
through which thought about life must wander. In this connec-
tion, he discusses Deleuze’s conception of life as a formidable
alternative to the thinking of life — latent and manifest — in Ray
Brassier and Quentin Meillassoux. He also discusses alchemical
thinking about artificial life. Lindner argues that the alchemical
tradition of thinking about life has been stigmatized as heresy,
which points to a recurrent fear of a “nature ultimately neither
controlled nor limited by any external force.” This fear singles
out a “horror based on the univocity of all individuated beings
via an impersonal genesis” — which is what Lindner calls “ab-
solute xenogenesis.” He claims that this reveals that the nature
of life is in fact unnatural, setting up an original dividing line
between the “anatomical lineage,” which limits life to the phe-
nomena of organic life, and the “alchemical lineage,” which isn’t
constrained by nature as it actually is but “introduces a differ-
ence into it, supplementing it.” This latter lineage, Lindner tells
us, opens up many possible “future histories of life” beyond the
organic, beyond our cognition, and indeed, beyond us.
In “Survival Strategies for Weird Times,” we have reprinted
Helen Marshall’s story, entitled “Survival Strategies” and origi-
nally published in Black Static 58 (2017). This is followed by a
commentary published for the first time in this collection.
“Survival Strategies” is a semi-fictionalized account of a young

33
DISEASES OF THE HEAD

academic, a scholar of medieval studies, who is on a research

trip to New York in order to interview the editor of Barron St.
John, a bestselling author. Set against the backdrop of Donald
Trump’s presidency, this story employs autobiographical ele-
ments to complicate any attempt to distinguish fiction from
reality. Refusing any rigorous demarcation of one from the
other, it asks: where do “true horror” and “speculative hor-
ror” intersect, and to what extent can our situatedness in the
present moment prove to be a source of the uncanny? Follow-
ing “Survival Strategies,” the reader will find an accompanying
commentary, “Survival Strategies for Weird Times,” which elu-
cidates the aforementioned themes in a more explicit fashion.
Marshall argues that the mode of weird fiction proposed by Jeff
and Ann VanderMeer, M. John Harrison, China Miéville, and
Roger Luckhurst, among others, plausibly evokes the “feeling of
living in the twenty-first century: an age thus far characterized
by political crises, fake news, and environmental catastrophe.”
She draws upon the work of H.P. Lovecraft and constructs paral-
lels with Timothy Morton’s work on hyperobjects, that is, “real
things with discernible impacts which cannot be apprehended
in their entirety.” Marshall’s commentary articulates several
ways in which the “weird mode” of fiction coincides with the
uncanny and destabilizing effects of Morton’s hyperobjects, be-
fore concluding by considering the role of fiction in “attempting
to represent the ‘weird’ times of the world in which we live.”
The next essay is Luka Bekavac’s “Matrix Pavoris: Material
Dislocation in House of Leaves.” This is an ambitious analysis
of Danielewski’s far from conventional novel, House of Leaves.
Bekavac pays particular attention to what he considers that
work’s main invention: the “small, featureless spatial dilatation”
which manifests itself in an “otherwise ordinary family home.”
Bekavac tells us that this baffling space, “as abstract and benign
as it might initially seem,” is bizarre enough — “scandalous
enough” — to lend energy to a great number of critical reac-
tions, interpretations, and theories. He employs this invention
in order to grapple with the problem of “text as a graphic em-
bodiment of the cognitive inaccessibility of space.” Bekavac con-

34
 INTRODUCTION

siders the unorthodox typography exhibited in House of Leaves,

as well as novel ideas of textuality, the distribution of texts, and
procedures of writing; he argues that “the common thread run-
ning through all of this, as obscure as it might sometimes seem,
is actually the strictly materialistic understanding of text, a firm
conviction that, in parallel with all of their powers of handling
content and reflecting or anticipating a certain “reality,” texts are
things, objects with physical qualities, defined by their link to
matter and resistance to easy and complete transfer into com-
prehension, idea, or pure thought.” This leads Bekavac to a co-
gent engagement with Derrida’s work on writing, typography,
and language broadly construed. Examining writing and textu-
ality in relation to temporality and spatiality, Bekavac contends
that writing’s distinctive time is in the end a sort of atemporality.
In other words, writing’s time is space. This leads Bekavac to a
discussion of dwelling in Heidegger, Plato, and Derrida, which
yields the startling thought that “if we are to encounter […] un-
intelligible materiality in any way, it will have to present itself
in a more ambiguous guise, it will have to open like a book, it
might even resemble a house.” By way of thinking about archi-
tecture, Bekavac constructs a vision of materials, such as books
and houses, as transitional objects, and he concludes that deal-
ing with writing means trying to find a “perpetually provisional
and volatile foothold within it.” For the “only other option is
not to read at all, to go back into ourselves, try and forget, or to
simply move on.”
Chloé Germaine Buckley’s “Encountering Weird Objects:
Lovecraft, LARP, and Speculative Philosophy,” poses a strik-
ing question to those of us who might be all too satisfied with
merely writing about the nature of reality. How can we actually
“make contact with objects such that both the anthropocentrism
of Western philosophy and the […] ‘common-sense’ realism it
engenders might be disrupted?” To put it another way: what
would it mean to work toward an encounter with the weirdness
of reality, an encounter that might allow humans to be “jolted
out of the ‘hubris’” in which the question of matter is always
indistinguishable from questions of utility and instrumental

35
DISEASES OF THE HEAD

value? Buckley argues that there is “at least one human activity
alert to the vibrant, strange, and elusive nature of objects: game-
playing.” Focusing on live-action roleplaying (LARP), “a niche
gaming activity distinct from table-top roleplaying games and
video games,” Buckley tells us that this sort of play makes pos-
sible the disruption of “players’ deeply embedded ontologies”;
it allows for a break with the common-sense that operates in
ordinary life. Through an analysis of ludic theory, an engage-
ment with the Gothic literary tradition, and a discussion of
object-oriented materialisms and ontologies, Buckley makes
the persuasive argument that “LARP monsters are almost always
material-human hybrids.” The philosophical potential of game-
playing — and LARP especially — emerges as the production of
“embodied and affective experiences” that might bring to life, so
to speak, the “rhetoric” of speculative realism and new material-
ism. Since LARP makes otherwise “allusive” processes concrete,
since it aims to produce “an embodied and affective encounter
with strange and vibrant materiality” of which humans are a
part, but which humans cannot master, Buckley claims that this
sort of play provides us with vital, subversive ethical resources.
The player must account for the nature of reality as inhuman,
and so it becomes exigent that we “consider that fact that it is the
world that makes us,” not the other way round.
In “Sublime Horror in the Tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann,” Hamad
Al-Rayes defends the view that E.T.A. Hoffmann wasn’t only a
pioneering writer of horror fiction who pushed it beyond what
had previously been considered its limits but also a “theoreti-
cian of the highest caliber.” Of the attention that Hoffmann’s
contributions to philosophical inquiry have received, most
has been concentrated on how he sought to make sense of the
distinction between classicism and romanticism. But Al-Rayes
proposes to expand this attention dramatically. He reads Hoff-
mann’s endeavor as the “carving out” of a “wild and oft-over-
looked territory in the history of aesthetics, one which fuses the
beautiful and the horrific.” Al-Rayes wants both to shed light on
Hoffmann’s own aesthetic commitments and also to provide an
“illuminating angle” from which to get a handle on Hoffmann’s

36
 INTRODUCTION

artistic practice. Arguing that the aesthetic underpinning the

work of a storyteller cannot be as neatly demarcated from that
which underpins the work of a philosopher as has elsewhere
been theorized, Al-Rayes tells us that Hoffmann is on the one
hand interested in retrieving some of the elements of Burke’s
views about aesthetics which had been repudiated by Kant,
while he on the other hand seeks to fuse horror and “artistic
beauty itself,” putting his project at cross purposes with Burke’s.
In the end, Al-Rayes presents a vision of Hoffmann’s oeuvre,
drawing on his seminal work on Beethoven and a number of
other critical essays, that leads us toward a novel synthesis of
beauty and horror as a neglected route to aesthetic experience
in the wake of post-Kantian philosophy.
In “When the Monstrous Object Becomes a Tremendous
Non-Event: Rudolf Otto’s Monster-Gods, H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthul-
hu, and Graham Harman’s Theory of Everything,” Eric Wilson
starts off with a discussion of Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy
(1917). Here, Wilson further develops a thesis set forward in an
earlier monograph, according to which Otto’s work served as
the direct, though unacknowledged, source for H.P. Lovecraft’s
“Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927). Wilson is particular-
ly interested in Otto’s “subjectivist reconstruction” of the experi-
ence of the holy as the “mysterium tremendum,” which he sees
as occupying a privileged place in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.
In the second part of his essay, Wilson undertakes to evaluate
anew the aesthetic of Otto and Lovecraft in terms of Graham
Harman’s object-oriented ontology; he focuses especially on
Harman’s The Quadruple Object to do this. Wilson concludes
by drawing a comparison between Harman and Meillassoux.
He argues in no uncertain terms that the former, and not the
latter, offers the resources that allow for a “preferred interpreta-
tion” of twentieth-century horror fiction. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu,
Wilson writes, is nothing other than a precise, though perhaps
metaphorical, rendering of Harman’s concept of the quadruple
object.
John Cunningham, in “Reproducing It: Speculative Horror
and the Limits of the Inhuman,” investigates speculative phi-

37
DISEASES OF THE HEAD

losophy’s seeming attachment to the notion of “the it.” Seeking

not to question the insight that there’s an “it” that “reveals the
hubris and illusion of humanity,” but rather to build on that
premise through an immanent critique, Cunningham wants
to bring the dread he makes out in the supposedly irreducible
gap between thinking and being “abruptly down to earth.” In a
style that is at once fragmentary and polemical, Cunningham
writes of grounding the relationship between horror and specu-
lation on “questions of reproduction and non-reproduction,” on
the way in which capitalism is “systemically inhuman,” and on
the “negativity of the inhuman” — which he views as produc-
tive, “virulently active.” By reading the concept of the inhuman
through the “abstract horrors” of today’s capitalism, Cunning-
ham argues that much current theorizing of horror neglects the
“ruin of […] ‘dread glimpses’” and mistakenly turns instead to
the “architecture of the concept.” Employing a “constellation of
fragmentary concepts and images that attempt to sketch […]
[the] possibilities and contradictions […] of the aesthetics of
horror and speculative thought,” he tells us that the horror of
the “it” opens “up a vista of hopelessness and dread.” This hor-
ror seems, Cunningham says, best conceived of as epistemic: “an
opening up of the gap between human knowledge and the “real”
of the inhuman.” Speculative horror, we are told, can be found
in the “affective, aesthetic, and conceptual possibilities” fore-
grounded by this gap; this is made evident in the “cosmic ter-
rors of Lovecraft, the eerie mannequins of Thomas Ligotti, the
more corporeal terror of apocalyptic zombie cinema.” Drawing
out images that would “freeze thought and by extension freeze
speculation,” indeed at times setting speculation against itself,
“[w]earing a zombie mask while citing Kant,” Cunningham
criticizes, by means of “conceptual images,” what he sees as a
speculative wish to conceptualize above all else. If he is right,
this could be a problem for those who desire to think the object
beyond its objectivation, the thing without its subsumption un-
der the logic of the concept. In this vein, Cunningham claims
that Graham Harman’s ontology is in the last analysis one of
“formless mass,” and that we ought to prefer that the conceptual

38
 INTRODUCTION

images of “it” which emerge in speculative horror remain in a

certain sense formless. This is perhaps because horror is a sort of
“filter through which the inhuman is allowed to take shape as a
conceptual image.” While he thinks that the “negative sublime”
can limit the apprehension of particular aspects of inhumanity,
it is in thinking the human as a “waste object” — as excess or the
leftover of an event — that it becomes possible to think and ex-
perience the “world-not-for-us.” This strange world “expresses
the gap […] between much of humanity and the reproduction
of the world” for the sake of capitalist ends; as such, it is some-
thing like a “broken mirror” in which “other shapes” — of life, of
society, of thought — might be descried.
The final essay in this collection is Julia Hölzl’s “Horror Vacui
(‘That Nothing Is What There Is’).” Hölzl begins with a disclaim-
er, which I think prefaces her writing just as well as it prefaces
the refusal of this collection to come to any lasting or sufficient
conclusion: “The following remains a draft […] does not pro-
vide answers, nor questions. It is a mere opening toward some-
where else. It is the elsewhere that is of interest here.” Consider-
ing themes of dismay, abandonment, and openness to wonder,
Hölzl intends to think the relations, or lack thereof, among be-
ing, time, absence, and emptiness. To do this, she discusses, in
an original way, Maurice Blanchot’s “primal scene” as it is set
forward in The Writing of the Disaster. Blanchot tells us that
the term “scene” is in some way inadequate or inappropriate,
since it seems to name or mark something unrepresentable. The
“scene,” for Blanchot, must be spoken of not as some event tak-
ing place at a specifiable time, but rather as “a shadow, a faint
gleam, an ‘almost.’” In her analysis, Hölzl proposes to try to
think this “almost,” to “think this elsewhere,” indeed to “be (in)
this there,” by thinking that “nothing is what there is, and first
of all nothing beyond.” While discussing the Heideggerian no-
tion of “profound boredom,” Hölzl tells us that we can “touch”
the “that nothing is what there is,” that we can bear the affliction
and terror of our own emptiness, since there’s a way in which
it’s already here. Hölzl concludes in a style that is experimental
and attentive to the philosopher’s limitations; in this way, she

39
DISEASES OF THE HEAD

finds a certain kind of hope: we might be able to encounter the

“empty intimacy of time” of which Blanchot writes, first of all by
encountering the “nothing beyond.”

40
 INTRODUCTION

Bibliography

Badiou, Alain. Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II. Translated

by Alberto Toscano. London: Continuum, 2009.
———. Second Manifesto for Philosophy. Translated by Louise
Burchill. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011.
Benz, Ernst. Emanuel Swedenborg: Visionary Savant in the Age
of Reason. Translated by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. West
Chester: Swedenborg Foundation, 2002.
Brassier, Ray, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, Quentin
Meillassoux. “Speculative Realism.” In Collapse III:
Unknown Deleuze and Symposium on Speculative Realism,
ed. Robin Mackay, 306–449. Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2007.
Bryant, Levi, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, eds. The
Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism.
Melbourne: re.press, 2011.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism
and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
Dubilet, Alex. The Self-Emptying Subject: Kenosis and
Immanence, Medieval to Modern. New York: Fordham
University Press, 2018.
Garcia, Tristan. Form and Object: A Treatise on Things.
Translated by Mark Allan Ohm and Jon Cogburn.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014.
Harman, Graham. Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and
the Carpentry of Things. Chicago: Open Court Publishing
Company, 2005.
Hegel, G.W.F. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Edited by
Allen W. Wood. Translated by H.B. Nisbet. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Hui, Yuk. The Question Concerning Technology in China: An
Essay in Cosmotechnics. Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2016.
Husserl, Edmund. Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and
Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book: General
Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Translated by Daniel
O. Dahlstrom. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2014.

41
DISEASES OF THE HEAD

Kant, Immanuel. Anthropology, History, and Education. Edited

by Günter Zöller and Robert B. Louden. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007.
———. Perpetual Peace and Other Essays. Translated by Ted
Humphrey. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983.
———. Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770. Edited and
translated by David Walford, in collaboration with Ralf
Meerbote. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Kolozova, Katerina, and Eileen A. Joy, eds. After the
“Speculative Turn”: Realism, Philosophy, and Feminism.
Earth: punctum books, 2016.
Mackay, Robin, ed. Collapse II: Speculative Realism. Falmouth:
Urbanomic, 2007.
———, ed. Collapse IV: Concept-Horror. Falmouth:
Urbanomic, 2008.
Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity
of Contingency. Translated by Ray Brassier. London:
Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
Scholten, Matthé. “Schizophrenia and Moral Responsibility: A
Kantian Essay,” Philosophia 44, no. 1 (March 2016): 205–25.
DOI: 10.1007/s11406-015-9685-4.

42
 1

Outgrown Purpose, Outlived Use:

On Parasitic Teleology
Ben Woodard

1. Life as Problem

Every beginning to a discussion of the beginning of life betrays

the central problematic of itself — namely a tension between the
miraculous and the arbitrary (where to start the discussion of
the start of living things). Satisfactory explanations of life are
measured against the apparent limitless complexity and variety
of its forms. Of course, to claim life exceeds explanation is itself a
form of explanation since no one who would make such a claim
would in turn argue that life can be intuitively understood, de-
spite the fact it can be accidentally made. In other words, how
would one backup the statement “I do not know what life is, but
I know you cannot explain it”? In the following I will attempt to
outline the conceptual investments in theories of life that are not
so often concerned with explaining life, as much as they are con-
cerned with placing the role of life in an (often all too human)
conceptual framework. First, I will begin by examining the field
of early biology, circa 1800.
John Zammito’s recent opus The Gestation of German Biology
explores the problem of life as it emerged in the vitalist and the
romantic sciences’ early attempts to generate a unified biological

43
DISEASES OF THE HEAD

theory as well as order those earlier disciplines which functioned

as its tributaries: physiology, medicine, zoology, and botany, to
name a few. Biology, as it developed under its proper name in
1800, bares traces of not only the shifting concerns and meth-
ods of all of these sciences brought together but also of debates
and shifts from the physical sciences and philosophy regarding
where to place the human capacities of thought and free will as
well as the natural or theological status of the soul. Two of the
most important problems which brought these various concepts
together were the capacity of animation or animal movement
and the emergence of form, especially in embryology. Thus, how
one could explain the development and movement of humans
and animals and whether and, on what grounds, the human/
animal distinction could even be maintained, occupied much
of the early attempts to form biology and establish or extract its
philosophical, scientific, and theological debts. Built upon these
issues is the relationship of sensibility and irritability to cogni-
tion — as the medical form of the animation problem — and the
question of speciation and form — as the geological and paleon-
tological problem of transformation.1 Or put colloquially, “why
does a heart removed still beat” in regards to the former, and
why do fossils portray species we can only assume are complete-
ly extinct in regards to the latter.
As we will see, there is little in common between those la-
beled vitalists other than a shared concern that mechanistic
physics and science more generally appeared insufficient to ex-
plain how life came to be and how it maintains its existence.
Rather than collapse these debates into an opposition of the sci-
entific and the theological, or the vitalistic and the mechanical,
it is more helpful to construct a schema of the guiding concepts
of the various attempts to construct biology — or proto-biolog-
ical theories of life — in terms of function, morphology, teleol-
ogy, and self-organization. The cluster below have agents which
should not be read as really existing things but as explanatory

1 John Zammito, The Gestation of German Biology: Philosophy and Physiol-

ogy from Stahl to Schelling (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

44
 OUTGROWN PURPOSE, OUTLIVED USE

devices which may or may not be able to be cashed out in mate-

rial terms. Furthermore, each theory has a temporal dimension
which is central given how closely each theory is connected with
geology and the question of the history of the human species,
whether natural or unnatural — i.e., normative history. Lastly,
the names listed are obviously not exhaustive, and furthermore
this is not to suggest total or deep agreement between them but
only that they agree upon the active agent while they may disa-
gree on the correct theoretical reading of this agent as well as its
temporal dimensions.
There are at least four clusters of concepts that have some
connection to vitalism, or again, more broadly, non-mechanis-
tic theories of life:

Agent: Function Agent: Morphology

Theory: Degeneration/Trans- Theory: Metamorphosis/Arche-
formation types
Temporal Dimension: Catas- Temporal Dimension: Uniformity
trophe (Goethe, Buffon)
(Stahl, Cuvier, Bichat)
Agent: Teleomechanism Agent: Self-Organization
Theory: Epigenesis/Preforma- Theory: Life force/Vital matter
tion Temporal Dimension: History of
Temporal Dimension: Natural Nature
History (Herder, Kielmeyer, Schelling)
(Blumenbach, Kant)

These conceptual clusters can be allied with their respective

thinkers as well as the natural philosophical disciplines con-
nected to them. The first cluster can be aligned with the work
of Georg Ernst Stahl and with the practice of medicine more
broadly. This makes a certain amount of intuitive sense as
physiology, especially through the lens of medical science, is
ultimately concerned with how and whether a given body is
healthy, that is, functioning properly according to its capacities
and its environment.

45
DISEASES OF THE HEAD

As Zammito portrays it, Stahl can only be called a vitalist

insofar as he believed that living matter was organized in such
a way that mechanism could not account for its capacities. But
function for Stahl does not go any deeper in that it does not
necessarily apply to the matter of life or life forces. The “special-
ness” of life for Stahl remains at the level of description in part
because, for Stahl, his commitment to Pietist Christianity did
not require any appeal to force or special matter to explain the
animating spark of life.2
Function is also emphasized by Georges Cuvier, but it is rel-
evant in terms of life as being connected to species-wide fitness
more so than health, as having formed in such a way to operate
in the right environment. Because Cuvier is concerned with life
viewed at a broader scale — at the level of species — his empha-
sis on function indexes the problem of extinction and the fitness
of an entire species failing.
Morphology is linked most notably to Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe and perhaps emerges first in relation to botany and zo-
ology. The operative tension being between metamorphosis and
archetype, between different types of internal development and
change, is central to the question in terms of whether the shapes
possible in development are already present or otherwise guid-
ed by external conditions or idealities, such as archetypes taken
in an almost Platonic sense.
Karl Fink’s Goethe’s History of Science explains how Goethe
entertained the notion of a botanical archetype through the ex-
ample of the proliferous rose and its sub-archetype of the leaf.3
Fink highlights how Goethe was well aware that morphology
was a powerful but also dangerous gift.4 The epistemological
and ontological tension in the question of an internal model has
been well debated. In terms of Goethe’s primal plant, it has been

2 Pietism was a movement within Lutheranism that emphasized pragmatic

and personal aspects of the faith in an attempt to return to the initial spirit
of Luther’s teachings.
3 Karl Fink, Goethe’s History of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991), 27.
4 Ibid., 40.

46
 OUTGROWN PURPOSE, OUTLIVED USE

argued that it has no ontological stake (Goethe was not really

looking for the primal plant in nature) but is rather a research
fiction, a mental model to guide his botanical researches.5
Such ambiguity applies either way to uniformity — arche-
types can manifest in any matter or force and in turn suggests
that there is a general uniformity across nature; that is, certain
shapes can emerge in different animal species or even across liv-
ing and non-living entities. Yet this often begs the question as
to the status of space — that is, if a certain collusion of forces
causes particular shapes to emerge, why do they happen where
they do? Space itself, particularly under the self-organizational
model, becomes an intuition regarding the deployment of forces
rather than a container for them.
Teleomechanism is associated with Immanuel Kant and Jo-
hann Friedrich Blumenbach. Kant was taken by Blumenbach’s
notion of Bildungstrieb, or formative drive or force. Both Kant
and Blumenbach saw the formative drive as an organizational
principle without an ontological or metaphysical wager attached
to it. Yet as Jennifer Mensch has pointed out, following Robert
Richards and Timothy Lenoir, Blumenbach’s Bildungstrieb was
not a creative vital principle but simply highlighted an organi-
zational principle already at work in the inorganic but only ap-
parent in the organic.
Kant can be seen as only slightly sympathetic to vitalism in
part because of his agnosticism about biology and his utilization
of purposiveness as a “light” or rational form of teleology. As
Kant argues, we must treat life as if it has a purpose following
its behavior, but it cannot be articulated as precisely as physical
phenomena can be: there will never be a “Newton for a blade
of grass.”
Even more complicated is the relation between theories of
development in Kant which are of course connected to the tele-
ological treatment of life. Preformationism, dating at least as far

5 Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philoso-

phy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002),
394–95.

47
DISEASES OF THE HEAD

back as Aristotle, extends mechanism, or at least mechanistic

explanation, to the biological, especially in terms of embryol-
ogy. Regarding teleology, preformationism can be taken as
the validation of formal cause, the biological blueprint being
always-already present. Preformationists, of both the spermist
and ovist variety, view the plan of biological life as tightly folded
up inside of the generative matter — i.e., the sperm or the egg.
Preformationist theory gained a second life with the devel-
opment of microscopy especially in the Netherlands of the 16th
century. Doubts about how generative matter could “fit” the
complex plans and parts seemed assuaged by finding ever more
fine layers of detail complexity under microscopic magnifica-
tion. Jennifer Mensch argues that Kant was sympathetic to pre-
formationism in that he treated it as a biological heuristic,6 and
Zammito likewise suggests that Kant was committed to a more
“generic form” of preformationism.7
But as many have highlighted, Kant was also sympathetic to
the concept of epigenesis: namely, that the environment had an
altering effect on the development of the organism. But again,
whether this occurs in a material manner or at the level of ex-
planation remains somewhat unclear. Mensch along with Mala-
bou claim that epigenesis applies to knowledge, that there is an
epigenesis of reason and that this is a transcendental and not a
natural phenomenon.8
Lastly, self-organization at least in the sense of vital material-
ism and vital forces (Lebenskraft) has to do with a metaphysical
thesis that claims that living matter — or perhaps all matter, as
in the case of Schelling — complexifies itself and is the result of

6 Jennifer Mensch, Kant’s Organicism: Epigenesis and the Development of

Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 8. See also
Amanda Jo Goldstein’s Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New
Logics of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 79.
7 Zammito, Gestation of German Biology, 232.
8 Mensch, Kant’s Organicism, 8, 124. Andrew Cooper critiques such a read-
ing and Tarizzo seems to read Kant’s use of epigenesis as metaphysical and
closer in line to Blumenbach. Andrew Cooper, “Two Directions for Teleol-
ogy: Naturalism and Idealism,” Synthese 195, no. 8 (2018): 3097–119.

48
 OUTGROWN PURPOSE, OUTLIVED USE

underlying powers or forces building off of Spinoza and Epicu-

rean thought.
Following Lenoir and Zammito, vital materialism was the
result of the combination of French materialism and German
Romanticism. Zammito emphasizes how the different uptakes
of Newton in Germany and France in the 1700s affected the ges-
tation of vital materialism. For one, Zammito argues that the
reception of Newton can be divided into its experimental and
mathematical aspects. The experimental aspect was connected
to the deployment of forces in nature — to identify and under-
stand the very meaning of force. This is bound to understanding
nature as having a history that is as something changing struc-
turally over time as opposed to a semi-stable, teleomechanical,
goal-oriented nature that can only be classified and cataloged.
That is, if nature is force or power “at bottom,” then the listing
of what exists now is insufficient to understand what nature is,
what it has been, and what it will be.
One important consequence of the activity of the Lebenskraft
or of the vital matter is the softening of the boundary between
sensibility and cognition. This was the essential disagreement
between Johann Gottfried Herder and Blumenbach. Herder
modified and extended theories of irritability — applying to
muscle fibers — and sensibility — applying to the nerve fib-
ers — taken from Albrecht von Haller and complicated by an
active material nature. Herder’s difference from von Haller in
part marks the difference between those that would have vital
forces issuing from vital matters (von Haller) or vital matters
being the result of vital forces (Herder, Schelling).

2. Teleology as Problem

This is a wide range of concepts that each on their own could fill
volumes. For the following, I wish to focus on how each of these
approaches deals with the question of teleology. While Kant and
Blumenbach’s teleomechanical approach addresses teleology

49
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Helle ei enää milloinkaan elämässään unohtanut sitä parahdusta,

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— Hirvittää, — virkkoi hän vain, — hirvittää. Mutta äiti kävi

kiihkoihinsa ja kääntyi häneen hehkuvin silmin:

— Mikä sinua hirvittää, poika? — kuiski hän. — Hänkö, joka osoitti

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äänellään:

— Ei Helleä enää hirvitä.

Vihdoin hän pani pullean kätensä setä Fransin käteen, mutta

hätkähti, tuntiessaan, kuinka kylmä se on.
 Kaija ei huomannut häntä ensinkään. Hän oli painanut päänsä
vainajan rintaa vasten, kuullakseen sydämen tykytystä, mutta
turhaan.

Hänestä tuntui kuin olisi hän koko ajan huutanut kovalla äänellä,
mutta todellisuudessa olivat huulet lujasti puristuneet yhteen. Ei
äännähdystäkään niistä.

— Äiti! — virkkoi poika, vetäen häntä hameesta. — Kutsu isää!

Mutta silloin äiti rupesi nauramaan niin kovaa ja rajusti, että

poikanen kauhistuneena juoksi ovelle, ja emäntä tuli ulkoa, kaikki
säikähtäneet lapset perässään.

— Herra siunatkoon! — huudahti emäntä, tehden ehdottomastikin

ristinmerkin. — Lyhyet oli hää-ilot!

Raskaita, määränperäisiä askeleita kuului samassa ulkoa.

Kalastajat ne siellä palasivat takaisin. Emäntä juoksi avonaiseen
akkunaan ja viittasi heille:

— Tulkaa, hyvät ihmiset, auttamaan!

Miehet tulivat verkalleen ja pysähtyivät ääneti ovelle. Salavihkaa

he pyyhkäisivät kyyneleet, joita tipahteli alas ruskeille, päivettyneille
poskille… Kaksi heistä nosti sitten ruumiin varovasti ylös, niin
keveästi kuin olisi ollut lapsen ruumis vain. Kolmas nosti Kaijan ja
kantoi hänet hellästi makuuhuoneesen, laskien hänet vainajan
viereen. Ääneti he sitten jälleen hiipivät pois. Ei tehnyt heidän mieli
puhua.

Emäntä, joka seisoi Helle sylissään, yritti varotellen

huomauttamaan: eiköhän rouva ottaisi poikaa viereensä, tämä kun
on niin kovin suruissaan. Mutta Kaija ei kuullut hänen sanojaan.

Tällä hetkellä ei pojassa ollut hänelle lohdutusta…, syytöstä

pikemminkin: olihan hän kerran ennenkin uhrannut setä Fransin
hänen tähtensä! Olihan hän huutanut silloin Herran tykö: Pelasta
poika! Pelasta hänet, maksoi minkä maksoi!… Ehdottomastikin hän
käänsi nyt silmänsä pojasta pois joka kerta kuin tämä läheni. Vihdoin
vei emäntä Hellen omalle puolelleen, ja puolen tunnin perästä poika
kuului jo telmivän siellä muitten lasten kanssa.

Kaija istui kyyrysillään vuoteessa koko päivän, yhä tuijottaen

noihin hienopiirteisiin, kalpeihin kasvoihin vieressään. Hän näki,
kuinka juonteet kangistumistaan kangistuvat… kuinka iho pingoittuu
ja kellastuu… huulet käyvät sinisiksi.

Hän kietoeli sormensa ympärille pehmeätä hivuskihermää, joka oli

pudonnut vainajan ohimolle, ja uudestaan, yhä uudestaan hän painoi
suunsa noita kylmiä huulia vastaan, jotka hän eilen oli suudellut niin
lämpöisiksi.

Hän vietti nyt surun juhlahetkeä… keskellä kuoleman kamalan

hiljaista ylevyyttä… kaikki muu maailmassa tuntui hänestä nyt niin
pieneltä. Itse Hellekin, joka hamaan tähän päivään asti oli
rajattomasti hänen olemuksensa täyttänyt ja ollut kuin osa häntä
itseänsä, — Hellekin oli hänen mielestään nyt niin pieni, niin
kaukainen.

Tuntui kuin ei hänellä enää olisi mitään tekemistä Hellen kanssa,

istuessaan tuossa ja katsellessaan lempeänsä kadonnutta.

On aikoja naisen elämässä, jolloin lapset ovat hänelle pääasia…

hän on kärsinyt tuskia heidän tähtensä… he ovat tarvinneet häntä…
he ovat tyydyttäneet hänen rakkautensa janon, hänen
pyrkimyksensä saada osoittaa hellyyttä ja uhrautuvaisuutta… mutta
kun kuoleman suuri hetki lyö, silloin mies ja vaimo jäävät jälleen
kahden kesken, ovat yhtä kuin ennenkin… kaikki muu jää syrjään…
ja silloin nainen huomaa, kenenkä omana hänen sydämensä on ollut.

Jotain tällaista lienee Kaija tuntenut, vaivalloisesti noustessaan

ylös ja lukitessaan kummatkin ovet, sekä arkihuoneen että
eteisenkin, jott'ei kenkään, ei edes Hellekään, pääsisi sisään.

Hän ei tiennyt itsekään, mikä kalvava katumuksen tunne hänen

sisimpiänsä jäyti, hänen istuessaan tuossa, vainajata katsellen ja
tajuttomasti huojutellen ruumistansa. Mutta äkkiä hän huomasi, mitä
se on, ja silloin hän parkuen heittäysi hänen päällensä.

— Minähän olen sinut surmannut! Minä olen sinut surmannut! —

vaikeroi hän. — Ensin minä kavalsin sinut toisen miehen tähden, ja
kun minun sitten oli valittava sinun ja pojan välillä, minä valitsin
pojan! Nyt on Jumala rangaissut minua!

Ja tuo ajatus hirvitti häntä niin, että hän istui kokonaisen tunnin,
kyyneltäkään vuodattamatta, kädet polvensa ympärillä, eteensä
tuijottaen.

Äkkiä hän tunsi ruumiissaan vilunväreitä ja tietämättänsäkin nousi

ylös kävelemään lattiata edestakaisin.

— Äiti! Äiti! Päästä sisään! — kuului hento ääni ulkoa, ja hän avasi
hiljaa oven, mutta sulki sen jälleen heti, kun poika oli tullut sisään.

Helle kulki ääneti lattian poikki. Hänellä oli pieni esiliina täynnä
kevään kukkasia.
 — Isän kukkasia! — virkkoi hän, ojentaen tuoksuavaa tukkua äitiä
kohti. Kaija sieppasi ne joutuisasti ja pisti vainajan pääpuoleen.

— Huomenna poimitaan lisää, — virkkoi hän, — joka päivä me

poimimme näin paljon. Sun leposijanasi on oleva kokonainen meri
kevättä täynnä.

Mutta kukkain tuoksu se jo yksistään valtasi hänet: hän kätki

kasvonsa vainajan kylmiin käsiin ja hyrähti itkuun.

Helle hiipi hiljalleen hänen viereensä. Ensin hän arkaillen katseli

isää. Mutta hymyn huomattuansa, hän rohkaisi mielensä.
Hyvilläänhän isä on tuossa, koskapa noin hymyilee. Ja
ymmärtäväisesti nyökäytti poikanen päätään hänelle… kerran ja
toisenkin… Ja sitten hän nykäisi äitiä hihasta… hieman hän pelkäili
äitiä tänään, mutta koetti olla miestä ja nykäisi vielä kerran, niin että
äiti vihdoin kohotti päätään.

— Katsos, — sanoi poikanen, — isä hymyilee!

Äiti loi silmänsä hänen katseensa suuntaan, ja nyt hänkin huomasi

sen. Hän näki, kuinka hymy täyttää koko kasvot. Hän näki, kuinka se
heiastaa kangistuneilta huulilta, ikäänkuin vastalauseena kuoleman
kammolle, kuni suojana kuolon kylmyydeltä… hän näki sen loistavan
valona keskellä pimeyttä.

— Jumalan kiitos, sinä kuolit iloisena! — kuiskasi hän, —

näkemättä, mikä tuleva oli, sillä nyt sinä tuskin olisit jaksanut sitä
kestää, vai olisitko? Et olisi jaksanut kestää sitä, tietäissäsi, että ero
sinusta on palasiksi repivä minun sydämeni… repivä verkalleen,
mutta varmaan.
 Hänen äänessään oli jotain niin epätoivoista, että Helleltä mieli
masentui.

Miks'ei isä vastaa mitään?

Hän hiipi pääpuoleen ja nousi varpaisilleen, paremmin nähdäkseen

isää.

Hänestä tuntui niin omituiselta, hänen teki mieli kuulla isän ääntä.
"Isän pitää leikkiä Hellen kanssa!" puhui hän vakuuttavasti, tarttuen
isän kankeaan käteen, joka oli hervahtanut alas sängystä. Mutta pian
hän päästi sen jälleen irti.

— Isän pitää leikkiä Hellen kanssa, — toisti hän itku kurkussa.

Mutta Kaija sysäsi hänet kiivaasti pois. Puukkoina pojan sanat

häntä vihloivat.

— Turha on isää huudella, — virkkoi hän; — ei isä voi kuulla sinua.

Silloin alkoi suuria, pyöreitä kyynelkarpaloita vieriä Hellen poskille:

niin kauas kuin hänen muistonsa ulottui taaksepäin, ei koskaan ollut
sitä hetkeä eikä sitä paikkaa, ett'ei isä olisi voinut häntä kuulla… ja
nyt äiti tuossa sanoo, ett'ei maksa huudellakaan.

— Isä ei voi kuulla Helleä! — niin hän vaikeroitsi pienessä

sydämessään, ja itki niin, että olisi luullut sen pakahtuvan.

Mutta silloin hän äkkiä tunsi äidin ottavan hänet syliinsä ja

puristavan häntä lämmintä rintaansa vastaan.

— Voi Helle, Helle! — haasteli hän hiljaa lapselleen! — Emme me

kyllin sittenkään saa itkeneeksi häntä, joka tuossa on.
 Ja poikanen tunsi kuumia kyyneleitä myötäänsä putoilevan hänen
kiharaiseen päähänsä… tuntui kuin polttaisivat oikein…

Ei Helle tiennyt, mitä kuolema on, ei ollut hänellä aavistustakaan

siitä, kuinka armottomasti se ihmisiä toisistansa erottaa, mutta…
tuossa isä makaa niin kamalan hiljaa eikä tahdo vastata, kun häntä
kutsuu, — siksi Helle itkee.

Kaija kantoi hänet viereiseen huoneesen.

Pöydällä oli setä Fransin kello. Hän vilkaisi siihen ja hämmästyi:

kello jo oli lähemmäs seitsemän… Minnekä oli saanut koko päivä?
Oliko hän istunut tuolla sisässä vainajan luona kuusi pitkää tuntia?

Hän kutsui emännän ja nosti hänen avullaan Hellen vuoteen

arkihuoneesen. Senjälkeen hän rupesi verkalleen riisumaan poikaa.

— Miks'ei Helle saa nukkua isän luona? — kysyi Helle.

— Siks' että pitää antaa isän olla rauhassa. Kirkas hymy elähti
lapsen kasvoilla.

— Herääkö isä aamulla?

— Ei, ei… Älä kysele enää, — hän hillitsi väkivoimalla itkun, —

olehan hiljaa vain.

Emäntä seisoi hetkisen, katsellen rouvan kalpeita, rasittuneita

kasvoja. Sitten hän meni ulos, mutta palasi jälleen, tuoden
tullessaan suuren kupillisen höyryävää kahvia ja vehnäleipää.

— Rouvan pitää syödä hiukan, — virkkoi hän, — muutoin te tulette

kipeäksi.
 Kaija puisti vaan päätään, tuskin katsahtaenkaan ruokaan.

Silloin emäntä pikastui, niin että posket hehkuivat.

— Mitäs te luulisitte hänen arvelevan tästä tämmöisestä? — kysyi

hän, viitaten päällään makuuhuoneesen. — Ei ikinä hän sitä hyvänä
pitäisi, että te surette itsenne kuolijaksi, niin kauan kuin teillä on tuo
tuossa, mistä huolta pitää, — emäntä osoitti Helleä, joka seisoi
yöpaita sylissään, nyyhkien äskeisen kovan itkun jälkeen.

Kaija katsahti ylös, herättyään emännän kiivaasta äänestä. Näytti

kuin tämä ääni olisi pudistellut häntä, niin että hän toipui kuni
horroksista.

— Emäntä on oikeassa, — arveli hän itsekseen, — emäntä on

oikeassa. Vieraanpa vainenkin piti tulla sanomaan minulle, mikä
minun velvollisuuteni on.

Sanaakaan virkkamatta hän meni pöydän ääreen, otti tuon suuren

kahvikupin käsiinsä ja joi sen lämpöisen, höyryävän sisällyksen
loppuun, mutta lykkäsi sitten inholla tarittimen luotansa.

— Kiitos hyvästä tahdostanne, — sanoi hän. — Viekää loput pois;

min'en jaksa muuta.

Emäntä ymmärsi, ett'ei tässä pakottelemiset ensinkään auta. Hän

oli tyytyväinen, että oli rouvan saanut edes juomaan kahvia, ja hiipi
tyytyväisenä pois.

Kaija oli sillä välin pannut Hellen jo vuoteesen.

— Äiti laulaa Hellelle! — sanoi poika, pannen tapansa mukaan

kätensä ristiin iltarukoukseen.
 — Ei äiti voi laulaa tän'iltana, Helle. Ymmärtämisen ilme välähti
pojan kasvoilla.

— Ettäkö isä siitä herää?

— Ei, ei, mutta… — hän oli ymmällä, mihinkä kätkeytyä kaikilta

näiltä lapsen-omaisesti hellittämättömiltä kysymyksiltä, joita
myötäänsä uudistui, ja jotka armottomasti raastoivat hänen syviä
sydänhaavojansa…

Hän luki hiljaa iltarukouksen. Ennen hän oli tavallisesti laulanut

sen. Helle oli ilmeisesti tyytymätön.

— Huomenna sinun pitää laulaa, — sanoi hän.

Äiti nyökäytti myöntyvästi: hänestä tuntui hyvältä saada pitennys-

aikaa edes huomiseksi.

Hän istahti tuolille vuoteen ääreen, mutta Hellen ei tullut unta

silmiin.

— Kuka huomenna Hellen kanssa leikkii, kun ei isä voi? — kysyi

poika, nousten istuvilleen vuoteessa. — Kuka Hellen kanssa Blankkaa
köröttää? Ja kuka auttaa äitiä ja Helleä, kun ei isä enää kuule?

— Olehan hiljaa nyt! — kehoitteli äiti. — Huomenna puhutaan

siitä.

Vastenmielisesti paneusi Helle maata jälleen, mutta ajatukset ne

yhä työtänsä tekivät pienissä aivoissa.

— Helleä isä ainakin kuulee. — Noin lohdutteli poikanen itseään,

kunnes pienet, raskaat silmäluomet vihdoinkin painuivat kiinni.
 Huomattuansa pojan nukkuneen sikeästi, Kaija nousi ylös.
Samassa sattuivat hänen silmänsä säästöpankki-kirjaan pöydällä.
"Hellelle" — niin oli kanteen kirjoitettu, ja hän huomasi sen
päivätyksi juuri sinä päivänä, jolloin hän oli ensi kertaa puhunut setä
Fransille lapsesta. Hän tiesi nyt, mitä tuskaa setä Frans mahtoi silloin
tunteakaan, — Kaija tunsi sen, kuin olisi tulisilla pihdeillä hänen
omaa rintaansa revitty… Ja näitten tuskain tuloksena oli ollut neljän
vuoden taistelu toisen tähden!

Ja tuo uhri se oli kannettu setä Fransin omalla hiljaisella tavalla: ei

siinä ollut vähintäkään melun nostamista, ei rahtuakaan
hempeämielisyyttä, aina vaan hienosti huomaavaa menettelyä. Nyt
Kaija ymmärsi, miksikä setä Frans viime vuosina oli niin laihtunut,
vaikka hän näennäisesti oli iloinen ja reipas: hänhän oli niukasta
palkastaan käyttänyt vain puolen omiksi tarpeikseen.

Hänet valtasi äkillinen luulevaisuus: Oliko setä Frans rakastanut

tätä lasta, joka ei edes ollut hänen omansakaan, rakastanut
enemmän kuin omaa elämätänsä, enemmän kuin häntä? Pitihän toki
setä Fransin tietää, että katkerin suru, mikä saattaa Kaijaa kohdata,
on se, että setä Frans otettaisiin häneltä pois.

Ja päästyään tämän ajatuksen päähän, hän pysähtyi, ääneensä

vaikeroiden: "Enkös minä itse ilmoittanut hänelle, että silloin kuin
minun oli valittavana jompikumpi heistä, minä valitsin lapsen!"

Katkeria kyyneliä virtasi hänen sormiensa lomitse kirjalle… tällä

hetkellä hän ei niitäkään muuta kerjännyt kuin kuolemaa.

Silloin hän huomasi kellastuneen kirjeen pistävän esille kirjan

lehtien välitse…Omalle armaalleni, oli kirjoitettu kuorelle Frans sedän
selvällä, rohkealla käsialalla. Ja hän tarttui kirjeesen, kuni hukkuva
tarttuu laudanpalaseen.

Hän luki kirjeen ja luki sen uudestaan ja taas uudestaan, ja yhä

lievemmin ja lievemmin kyynelet vuotivat. Tuntui kuin olisi raskas
paino nostettu pois hänen rinnaltaan: setä Frans oli hänelle anteeksi
antanut! Näin luki kirjeessä:

"Oma Armaani! Jos minä sattuisin lähtemään pois ennen Sinua, ja

Sinä jälleen vaipuisit niihin raskaisin ajatuksiin, jotka Sinua ovat niin
kovasti vaivanneet aina Hellen taudin ajoilta asti, niin tahdon sanoa
Sinulle: älä anna niille milloinkaan valtaa. Jokainen äiti olisi tehnyt
samoin. Vai etkö usko minun näkevän, nyt näkevän, että Sinun
rakkautesi minua kohtaan on suurempi kuin mikään muu!. Tiedän
kyllä hetken olleen, jolloin mieleni löi pahaksi, jolloin minä joissain
määrin tunsin olevani loukattu siitä, että Sinä ikäänkuin panit Hellen
minun edelleni… mutta minä olen sen koommin oppinut
ymmärtämään, ett'ethän Sinä toisin saattanutkaan menetellä. Äläkä
koskaan luule, että se olisi ollut Sinun mahdollistakaan. Silloin et olisi
se, mikäs olet. Nyt tiedän, että nainen on suurin vaimona vasta
sitten kuin ennen kaikkea on äiti. Vai etkö luule minun tietävän, että
todellisuudessa me kaksi olemme aina yhdessä, niin korkeissa kuin
syvissäkin? Etkö luule minun tietävän, että meistä kahdesta kerran
tulee yksi, siinä merkityksessä nimittäin, että kaikki ympärillämme
käy pieneksi meidän rakkautemme voiman rinnalla, sen riemun
rinnalla, että tämä rakkaus elää, ja sen tiedon rinnalla, ett'ei se
milloinkaan kuole!"

Hiljalleen luisui kirje hänen syliinsä, hänen itsensä laskiessa

sydämensä sykintää. Ja hän ymmärsi, että ellei hän olisi saanut
lukea tätä kirjettä, lukea juuri tällä hetkellä, niin hänen mielensä olisi
käynyt sairaammaksi kuin hän olisi jaksanut kestääkään.

Setä Frans oli pelastanut hänet kaikesta pahasta —

mielensairaudestakin.

Kaija meni vainajan luokse jälleen, haluten nähdä hänen

kasvojansa. Hän laskeutui polvilleen vuoteen viereen ja painoi
päänsä hänen kylmää rintaansa vasten. Niin rakas oli setä Frans
hänelle, ett'ei hänessä ollut rahtuistakaan kuolemankammoa.

Hän kavahti pystyyn, kuullessaan kirkonkellojen soivan. Hän muisti

äkkiä, että nythän on pääsiäinen. Varpusten sirkutuksen ja
kottaraisten vihellyksen kautta raivasi maalaiskirkon kellojen kumu
tiensä Kaijan luokse, täyttäen puoli-avonaisesta akkunasta sisään.
Eilen ne soivat hääkelloina; tänään ne soivat ruumiskelloina.

Kaija katsahti hymyä Frans sedän kasvoilla, ja silloin hänen

mieleensä johtuivat nämä säkeet:

"… niin riemuista meidän on muistaa nyt,

Että taivaissa kellot soivat."

Hänestä tuntui tällä hetkellä niin luonnolliselta, että setä Frans

kuoli juuri pääsiäispäivänä. Kauan hän istui, pidellen vainajan kättä
omassaan. Sitten hän laskeutui vaatteet päällä hänen viereensä ja
vaipui syvään uneen. Vasta päivän sarastaessa hän heräsi, tuntien
painostusta, raukeutta, niinkuin ainakin suuressa surussa.

Hän nousi ylös. Silloin hän huomasi muutoksen noissa kasvoissa,

joita hän oli rakastanut enemmän kuin mitään muuta maailmassa, ja
nopeasti hän veti hurstin niitten ylitse. Hän muisti, mitä setä Frans
itse oli sanonut, heidän seisoessaan äiti vainajan ruumiin ääressä:
"Miksipä katselisit enää? Se, mikä jäljellä on, ei ole kaunista."

Ei! hän ei tahdo nähdä häntä enää, kädestä vain häntä vielä
pitelee, tuosta suuresta, lujasta ja sittenkin pehmeästä kädestä,
johon hän niin usein oli turvallisesti omansa laskenut.

Nyt hän pani kätensä Frans sedän käteen, ilman vähintäkään

kuolonkammoa, ja niin hän jälleen vaipui uneen… Kottaraiset tuolla
ulkona heräilivät jo… varpusilla oli puuhaamista pesissään…
aamuruskon ensimmäiset säteet alkoivat pukea purppuraan
kalastajan tuvan pikkuruutuisia akkunoita.

19.

Sen on jäljissä verta,

Sydänverta, näät,
Kuin kastetta joi se…
Voi, aurinko tuo,
Jok' ois paistanut, sammui
Ja pimeän toi se.

Kolmen päivän perästä läksi vähäinen saattue verkalleen

kulkemaan Höistrupin rannasta Rödvigiä kohti. Eellimmäisenä oli
ruumisarkku, kevään kukkasten ja talvikkojen verhossa, sen jäljessä
vanhat maalaisvaunut, joissa istui nuori nainen pienen pojan kanssa.
Hiljaista käymäjalkaa ajettiin tietä myöten, ja raskasta oli kulku,
raskasta, niinkuin surun pitkät hetket, ja hidasta kuni kyynelvuo,
joka ei milloinkaan lakkaa juoksemasta.
 Nainen istui vetäyneenä vaunujen kolkkaan ja muisteli heidän
häämatkaansa.

Tätä, juuri tätä samaa pehmeähiekkaista tietä myöten he olivat

ajaneet moniahta päivä sitten, yhdessä… niin yhdessä… luvattuun
maahan! Tässä paikassa, harmaan virstanpatsaan kohdalla, setä
Frans oli syleillyt häntä ja kuiskannut: "Nyt päästiin rajan yli." Ja
tuolla metsänveräjällä hän oli kumartunut eteenpäin ja kaikkein
kirkkaimmalla hymyllään sanonut: "Luuletko, että koko avarassa
maailmassa missään on kahta niin onnellista kuin me?"

Ei, ei; tietysti ei missään.

Ja nyt hän palajaa yksin siihen kotiin, jota toinen niin suurella
huolella oli laitellut häntä varten! Ei, ei yksin… onhan hänkin
mukana… saattaahan tästä nähdä arkun, kun kallistakse vaunuista
ulos… nähdä, kuinka siellä vuokot päätään nyökyttelevät ja orvokit
sinisinä siintävät ja hyasintit päätään kohottelevat lyhyissä varsissa.
Kaija tiesi hänen lepäävän tuolla keskellä keväimen elämää ja
myhäilevän kuolemalle…

— Missä isä on? — kysyi Helle äkkiä.

Poika oli istunut koko matkan, pienet kädet kiinni äidin kädessä,
sanaakaan sanomatta. Nyt hän katsahti äitiä tutkivasti silmiin ja
kysäisi uudestaan:

— Äiti, missä isä?

— Isä läksi edeltä, — vastasi toinen, kääntyen pois.

Äiti ei tahtonut säikäyttää lapsen mielikuvitusta, selittämällä, mikä

merkitys arkulla on. Sen vuoksi ei poika ollut saanut nähdäkään sitä,
kun se tuotiin. Emäntäkin oli kielletty puhumasta siitä pojalle mitään.

Mutta Helle oli pikkuinen, uskollinen sielu… hän oli koko ajan
mielessänsä aprikoinut, että on se sentään väärin lähteä pois ja
jättää isä yksikseen tuonne tupaan. Hän ei voinut ymmärtää, että se
tapahtuu äidin tahdosta, ja vaikka niinkin olisi, niin ei Helle ainakaan
sitä tahdo, sillä eipä isäkään koskaan jättänyt Helleä yksikseen, ei
milloinkaan.

— Helle ei tahdo lähteä pois isän luota, — sanoi hän päättävästi.

— Ei sinun tarvitsekaan… isä läksi edeltä, kuulethan!

— Minne?

Tuskastuneena äiti katsahti noihin lapsenkasvoihin: eikö noista

kyselyistä viimeinkin jo tule loppua? Mutta silmät ne katsoivat
häneen niin vakavasti ja niin ehdottomasti vastausta vaativina, että
äiti huomasi mahdottomaksi kierrellä.

— Minnekö? — vastasi hän verkalleen ja ikäänkuin väkisin. — Niin,

mistä minä tiedän? Ylös tuonne kohti aurinkoa… ja kauas
maailmasta, kauas!

— Maailmasta kauas!… — toisti Helle. Tuohan kuuluu ihanalta,

aivan kuin saduissa, joita isä oli kertonut. Toistaiseksi hän tyytyi
tähän selitykseen. Mutta hetken kuluttua hän taas nykäisi äitiä
kädestä.

— Noin se isä aina teki, kun junassa kuljettiin, — sanoi poika,

vetäen henkeänsä nopeasti ja raskaasti.
 Kaija tuijotti häneen, sanaakaan sanomatta. Onko mahdollista,
että lapsi oli huomannut jotain, mitä hän itse ei ollut ensinkään
nähnyt?… Olinko minä ollut niin kokonaan hää-iloni vallassa, niin
kokonaan onneni huumauksissa, ett'en ollut nähnyt enkä käsittänyt
mitäkään muuta? Minä, joka puoli vuotta sitten tuskissani valvoin
öitä, peljäten Frans sedän kuolevan!

— Kuinka minä viime aikoina vainenkaan olin saattanut olla niin

käsittämättömän huoleton? — ajatteli Kaija.

Ei hän osannut edes aavistaakaan, ei suunnillekaan, että ihminen

saattaa kuolla onnesta! Surusta ja kaipauksesta kyllä, sen hän
saattaa käsittää, mutta — onnesta! Mahdotontahan on kuolla
onnesta.

Äkkiä johtui hänelle mieleen se pieni runo, jolla oli ollut niin
salaperäisen suuri merkitys hänen elämässään:

Ja elämä kirjan
Nyt lehdille piirrot
Veripunaiset viskoi.

Hän muisti, kuinka hän kerran oli himoinnut elämän kokemuksia…

olkoot ne sitten valoisia tai synkkiä, kunhan vaan kaikki valkoiset
lehdet tulisivat täyteen… Ja nyt ne olivat täyteen kirjoitettuja kaikki!
Hän näki ne kaikki edessään: takana oleviin oli piirretty suruja ja
pettymyksiä, toivoa ja odotusta ja hehkuvaa iloa… ja edessä oleviin
katkeraa itkua ja sanatonta tuskaa!…

Mitä arvoa onkaan hänen elämällään nyt? Eikö olisi paljoa

parempi, jos hänkin makaisi setä Fransin kanssa kirstussa, kevään
kukkain keskellä, joita hän nyt tuskin sietää ajatellakaan…
 Eikö hän kaipaa Kaijaansa niin voimallisesti, että se saisi
Jumalankin tahdon taipumaan, niin että hänenkin suotaisiin kuolla?…
Niin… Hän kuuluu kutsuvan Kaijaa.

Tiesihän Kaija ilonsa nyt kuolleen pois… miksipäs setä Frans ei

kutsuisikaan häntä?

— Isä pitää Hellestä, — virkkoi hento ääni hänen vieressään,

hitaasti ja juhlallisesti, ja Kaija säpsähti, sillä niin ihmeellisesti nämä
kolme sanaa olivat vastanneet hänen kysymykseensä.

— Niin, niin, — puheli hän. — Isä pitää Hellestä; senvuoksi hän ei

kutsukaan; hänen käy sääli Helleä, jos hän kutsuu äidin pois.

Mutta Helle katsoi äitiinsä, käsittämättä mitään. Hän oli tuossa

seurannut omaa lapsellista ajatuksenjuoksuansa ja palannut aina
takaisin siihen, että väärin oli lähteä isän luota pois.

Siitä syystä hän oli ääneen sanonut itsekseen: "Isä pitää Hellestä",
samalla ikäänkuin huomauttaakseen, kuinka uskollinen hän
tunteissansa on. Sanoista oli tullut ikäänkuin uusi lausuntamuoto
hänen omalle pienelle, intoisalle rakkaudellensa, eikä hän lainkaan
ymmärtänyt, miksikä äiti niin kiihkeästi häntä suutelee niitten
tähden. Samassa saavuttiin asemalle, ja Hellellä oli kyllä tekemistä,
katsellessaan arkkua, jota viedään rautatie-vaunuun, ja äitiä, joka
astuu jäljessä, silmät kankeina, tuijottavina.

Vaistomaisesti ja ikäänkuin jotain tuntematonta asiata aavistaen,

oli poikanen ajatuksissaan pannut nuo kukkaset yhteyteen isän
kanssa. Ja hän päätti, että kun äiti ei ole enää niin kovin
murheellisen näköinen eikä purista häntä niin lujasti kädestä, silloin
hän tiedustaa häneltä tätä seikkaa.
 Junaan tultua hän kumminkin nukkui ja makasi, monista
ajatuksistaan väsyneenä, aina siihen asti, kunnes istui
ajurinvaunuissa, jotka hiljalleen vierivät arkun perässä kappeliin.
Perille tultua Helle tahtoi hypätä maahan, mutta äiti käski hänen
pysyä paikoillaan, kunnes hän tulee takaisin, ja tämän sanoi äiti niin
päättävästi, ett'ei hän rohjennut panna vastaan ensinkään.

Äiti viipyi hänen mielestänsä peräti kauan poissa, vaikk'ei sitä

kestänyt kuin muutamia minutteja. Vihdoin hän tuli.

Ajuri käänsi päätään, kysyen, minne ajetaan.

— Niin, minne? — sävähti hänessä. Häntä puistutti, ajatellessaan,

kuinka kauhealta on tuntuva astua häätaloon ilman häntä… Mutta
samassa hän huomasi, että sehän on ainoa paikka, missä hän suojaa
saa. Oman kotinsa hän saattaa hävittää, mutta ei Frans sedän.
Siellä, missä setä Frans oli asunut kaikki nämä vuodet, — siellä,
missä kaikki pienimmätkin esineet olivat Frans sedän lempeän käden
asettamia ja nyt vaan odottelevat häntä, — siellä, missä hänestä
aina on tuntuva, että täällä setä Frans asuu, — siellä täytyy hänenkin
olla.

— Studiestraedelle! — sanoi hän joutuisasti, ja vaunut läksivät

vierimään.

— Eikö mennä kotia? — virkkoi Helle nureissaan, kun huomasi

ajettavan aivan outoja katuja.

Äiti nyökäytti päätään, mutta ei vastannut mitään.

Ajatuksissaan hän parhaillaan ajoi Frans sedän kanssa häätaloon,

sydämessä kaikki se viiltävä kipu, mikä ihmisparan rintaa milloinkaan
on raadellut hirveinä hetkinä elämässä.

Portille saavuttaessa hän huomasi, kuinka koko huoneusto on

juhlallisesti valaistuna, ja tuokion ajan hänestä tuntui kuin olisi tämä
kaikki unta vain. Mutta sitten hän muisti, että tänä iltanahan heidän
oli määrä palatakin kaupunkiin. Setä Frans oli kaiketikin lähtiessään
käskenyt emännän sytyttämään kynttilät.

— Jospa edes olisi unohtanut! — vaikeroitsi Kaija.

— Jospa edes olisivat kynttilät palaneet loppuun, meidän

tullessamme!

Mutta kynttilät loistivat akkunoissa armottoman kirkkaina.

Hän maksoi ajurin ja laahusti ylös portaita, taluttaen Helleä

kädestä.

— Onko isä tullut kotia? — riemuitsi poika, kun oli tultu tutun oven
eteen.

Äiti pudisti päätään, mutta ei voinut vastata; tuntui kuin sanat

olisivat takertuneet kulkkuun.

— Entäs avain! — iski hänen mieleensä. — Onko mulla avainta?

Mutta samassa aukeni ovi sisästäpäin, ja vanha emäntä — sama,

jonka luona setä Frans oli asunut jo kaksikymmentä vuotta — seisoi
kynnyksellä, suuri ruusuvihko kädessä.

— Terve tultua! — lausui hän ja niiasi syvään, mutta nähtyänsä

kivettyneen ilmeen Kaijan kasvoissa, hän säikähti niin, että pudotti
vihkon lattialle.
 — Jes'-siunatkoon! Missä herra? — huudahti hän.

— Vast'ikään saatoin hänet kappeliin, — vastasi Kaija niin kamalan

soinnuttomalla ja vieraalla, kumealla äänellä, että itsekin oudosteli
sitä.

— Voi sitä rakasta, nuorta herraa! Hän, joka oli niin hyvä ja
lempeä, se siunattu mies! — puheli vanha emäntä, päätään
huojutellen, kyynelten väkistenkin syöstessä ryppyisille poskille.
Silloin kietoi Kaija kätensä hänen kaulaansa ja puhkesi valtavaan
itkuun.

Vanhus sulki hiljaa ulko-oven, silitti kädellään Hellen kiharaista

päätä ja avasi oven arkihuoneesen.

— Älkää nyt, rouva kulta, suuttuko minuun, — virkkoi matami,

ikäänkuin anteeksi pyydellen ja osan-ottavasti taputellen nuoren
rouvan kättä, — mutta herrahan se itse tilasi… kukkaset… ja
kynttilät… ja sampanjat… ja kaikki.

Kaija ei vastannut mitään. Unissa-kävijän tavoin hän astui

kynnyksen yli. Juhlallinen valaistus, hieno kukkain tuoksu tuli häntä
vastaan. Siinä oli kaikkea: tunnelmaa… kukkain tuoksua! Ruusuja ja
orvokkeja… orvokkeja suurin osa, sillä niitä Kaija eniten rakasti…
niitä oli kaikkialla, minne vaan silmänsä loi… mutta hän, jonka oli
määrä tuoda hänet tähän luvattuun maahan, hän makaa kappelissa
kylmänä… hengetönnä! Ei, ei hengetönnä… koko minun sieluni
nousee tuota vastaan: hänen henkensä on täällä, näissä suojissa.

Hän vaipui tuolille vanhan, pyöreän pöydän ääreen… siinä oli suuri
vihkollinen keltaisia la reine ruusuja, orvokkeja, myrttejä ja vihkon
ympärillä varsin ohut, valkoinen silkkinauha. "Rakelille", — niin siihen
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