A young girl lies in bed drawing in a notebook she has been given. She is ill and her mind is over-active. She draws a house and puts herself in one of the upper rooms. Every day she adds on a little more, rougly and crookedly drawn, a child’s first attempts. An innocent pastime. But at night the house comes back to haunt her in dreams. The house and grounds are changed into a nightmare world from which she can’t escape. The drawings she has created from a tortured imagination become objects of a terrifying propensity. The most frightening aspect of the whole situation becomes evident – she cannot escape from her own mind.
This scenario is drawn from a modem children’s book. We turn back a hundred years to Grabinski’s ‘The Area.’ The writer Wrzesmian stops writing, completely stops. His hitherto ‘original, insanely strange works’ cease to be produced. Now begins the process of withdrawal from the world, one which is a natural consequence of being a writer but one which Wrzesmian makes complete and absolute. For him, the artist’s constant struggle between solitude and living in society has been fought and decided. From now on his own mind is his only inspiration, his weird imaginings the impetus he needs for the creation of his art.
Writing, however, is no longer the ultimate aim. He craves a freedom of expression that extends beyond the written word, the limitations of language. He desires to go further than any artist has been before, to change fiction into reality, to give his thoughts and dreams an actual substance which has been hitherto denied them.
Like the girl in the story, Wrzesmian’s frustrated longings become focused on a house. This house, although situated across the street from him, is as much a product of his mind as the child’s pencil drawing. It is described in a wealth of gloomy and sensuous detail, casting a spell as if it has been sleeping for one hundred years – ‘At the end of a black double row of cypresses, their two lines containing a stone pathway, appeared a several stepped terrace where a weighty, stylized double door let. to the interior – Only two eternal fountains quietly wept, shedding water from marble basins onto clusters of rich, red roses’. The house and gardens are dormant but ominous and waiting. Like Wrzesmian’s mind, which critics and the public have dismissed as spent and prematurely depleted, they are ostensibly inactive but underneath are seething with unimaginable horror.
Only ‘unimaginable’, however, in the context of the reality which we encounter every day. The mind however contains horrors and thoughts which are rarely articulated and seldom brought to light. But, ‘From underneath the garden, treacherously concealed humidity crawled out here and there with dark oozing’ and very soon Wrzesmian begins to see the face of a man at the window which seizes him with ‘a vague dread’. The house is becoming active, given life by Wrzesmian’s own mind.
The horror of having one’s innermost imaginings turned into a form of reality becomes increasingly obvious as the drama draws to its inevitable and terrifying conclusion. Like the child, Wrzesmian discovers that it is impossible to escape the horror because this horror is within him and yet now also external. The terror which grips him is our terror at having our own worst thoughts brought to light and acting upon us. They are unstoppable because they are propelled by the force of the mind and they are intolerable because they are a product of the darkest part of ourselves.
This is perhaps the secret of popularity of horror books and films. We can explore the inner recesses of the mind and yet can walk away from it. Most recently, Clive Barker in his ‘Hellraiser’ films has also used this ‘Grabinski’ technique – just twist the box and your most dread thoughts become reality, you might think you can control them but they are now independent of your mind, the pain and torture you only vaguely imagined are now standing before you. Like Wrzesmian, the only possible end is annihilation because the self cannot be divided. The mind is now all powerful and cannot be denied -
‘We want full life! You confined us to this house, you wretch! We want to go out into the world; we want to be released from this place to live in freedom! Your blood will fortify us, your blood will give us strength! Strangle him! Strangle him!’
For Grabinski, it is the mind which is his main concern. His perception of the force and inner recesses of the mind dominates his work. The inner thoughts take substance and become the outer reality, often with horrifying consequences. It is this which makes his stories so disturbing because they are a journey into our own ‘Dark Domain’.