The Hound

IN MY TORTURED EARS THERE SOUNDS AN UNCEASING NIGHTMARE…

Whirring and flapping fill the darkness, and beyond them comes a faint, distant baying, as of some gigantic hound.

It is not a dream, nor is it, I fear,

even madness, for too much has already happened to allow such merciful explanations,

and memory refuses to loosen its grip

St.

John is a mangled corpse, and I alone know the reason,

a knowledge so terrible that it poisons every waking thought and denies me the comfort of ignorance

What befell him does not feel finished, as though something still follows the thread he dropped.

Wearied with the commonplaces of a prosaic world, where even romance and adventure soon grow stale,

St. John and I began to seek escape wherever it promised intensity rather than peace.

We followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement that claimed to offer relief from our growing ennui,

believing that refinement itself might save us from boredom

The enigmas of the Symbolists delighted us for a time,

and the ecstasies of the pre-Raphaelites followed, rich and beautiful, yet each revelation faded sooner than the last.

Nothing endured, and each new passion was drained quickly of its novelty,

until the pursuit itself became more important than what was pursued

It was no longer beauty we sought, but sensation

Only the sombre philosophy of the Decadents held us longer,

and even that demanded ever deeper descent, for what once disturbed us soon became familiar.

Baudelaire was exhausted, then Huysmans, and after them every idea that had once seemed daring now felt tame and insufficient.

Each step downward required another, darker still, as though moderation itself had become impossible

We required stronger stimuli, more direct and less symbolic

ONLY THE UNNATURAL REMAINED

We turned at last to personal experience,

to adventures that could not be contained in books or theories, and whose effects were felt immediately and without translation

What began as curiosity hardened into hunger,

a frightful emotional need that pressed upon us with increasing insistence and left no room for retreat

At that point, choice had already become illusion

THUS WE CAME TO GRAVE ROBBING

Even now, I name it with shame and timidity,

that hideous extremity of human outrage which once seemed to us merely the next logical step

For we had already wandered too far into forbidden territory to pretend that innocence was still within reach

And what awaited us beyond that threshold, we did not yet imagine