Review: "City of the Singing Flame" by Clark Ashton Smith

Running a mere sixteen pages, this story, first published in 1931, devotes itself to a conceptual plot that artfully shirks definitive interpretation, yet hints at many possible explanations that only raise more questions of a nature that teases the capacity of the human imagination. The story's elements are so highly nuanced with implicit aesthetic, psychological and metaphysical depths, that the reader feels he or she has experienced something profound in the way of what may lay hidden beneath our deepest yearnings, and whither the anomalous features only half-noticed in our everyday reality may lead if properly recognized. To call this a mere trans-dimensional science fiction piece would leave out the author's special take on the whole question, which involves a creative-nihilistic nexus between different realms of shared space but variously pitched in quantum terms of how they share that space, though these spheres are imperceptible to each other. As for the nexus itself, it exudes the fine paradox of attracting the imaginative, the creative and the sensitive souls among sapient species, while at the same time destroying the ability of these to live their former lives with any satisfaction once they have tasted the music and beheld the mysterious source of the music at the center of this nexus. The other fascinating paradox lies with the native inhabitants of the nexus themselves, who may or may not have built the trans-dimensional gateways that lead to the temple complex that draws intelligent and inquisitive beings from a host of parallel worlds, but who definitely are immune to the allure of the music and that which creates it, even though they live daily in its very midst. What is more, the aliens (including human beings like us) who find their way to their dimension, raise nary an eyebrow of curiosity among these keepers of this strangely indiscriminatory nexus of supernormal attraction. For the natives, these exotic visitors are apparently as unremarkable (and apparently uninteresting to them) as the very air, and there is seemingly nothing to bed shared between them. The visitors are not there to socialize or do business with the natives, and the natives express no desire to exact any tolls on their enraptured visitors. The pilgrims who come to this city go there only for the Flame. The author of this science fantasy won renown in his time as a poet, prose poet, and writer of weird fiction, and it is in this tale that we find him negotiating a territory that combines poetic techniques of language, the imaginative intensity of a prose poem, the plot devices of a weird adventure, and the evocative style of palpable wonder from idealized scientific discovery. The story is tragic in a Neo-Romantic sense, but the mind of the reader must also marvel at its beauty as much as grieve over its ramifications. We are beings of mortal flesh with mortal imperatives, but we are also beings of spirit, with an instinctive need for spiritual release that creative forms of expression, however inspired, can never fully satisfy. And yet there is a sense in each of us, hinted at by those brief flashes of ecstasy in life, that there must exist some ultimate ecstatic release. In scientific terms, it would be a source of immaterial energy with which our very life force must share a primary origin, and to which we feel compelled to return, the closer we come to discovering it. And what if we stumbled on a gateway to this very source of our inner being? Could we resist returning into it by the sheer will to preserve our temporary mortal life and individual identity? Such is the challenge faced by the protagonist Giles Angarth, sometime writer of fantastic fiction, an obvious fictive analogue of the boundary-pushing author of this story himself. It may be most currently and affordably found in this collection: The Return Of The Sorcerer. Written by Clark Ashton Smith. Published by Wildside Press. Copyright 2008.