“Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival... a survival of a hugely remote period when... consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity... forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds... “
-
Algernon
Blackwood
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
-
H.P. Lovecraft,
from The Call of Cthulhu (1926)
As
I’ve said in an earlier blog, I have been intrigued by the Lovecraftian mythos
for some time, now. I’d heard about
Lovecraft over the years, and took him to be – by reputation – a genius of poetry
and prose that moved the horror genre way beyond Poe and other 19th
century writers. But when I first read HPL last year, I was let down; with
the stories themselves on one level, but also with the way in which Lovecraft
limits the human mind and makes the universe out to be a forbidding place. The early stories I read seemed very
sophomoric; they were filled with gross generalizations; the prose lacking
descriptive concreteness and specificity.
The narrator seemed to assume that the reader would be frightened just
by being told that he or she should
be afraid of what was confronting the
characters in the story. “Oh, there’s
something unbelievably scary here; you’d better go insane!” Really?
Then
there is the pervasive “cosmic dread” that earmarks Lovecraft’s narratives. I have read that Lovecraft was a skeptic and
an atheist,[1] that he was
not an occultist; that he criticized occultism openly in letters and in public,
and once had an opportunity to write a book debunking the occult with Harry
Houdini. He had explored religions when
he was young, and found them all wanting.
Though some of his narrators often evince a Puritanism that strikes a
modern reader as anachronistic, this thread in HPL’s prose does not come from
any religious belief, though it may simply stem from his New England upbringing
in the early 20th century.
Lovecraft’s horror seems to me to stem not from religion but from what has
been called “cosmic dread;” that sense of terror arising from the immensity of
the Cosmos and the corresponding sense of our own smallness and insignificance.
This
dread is understandable, when you look at it in its historical context. Lovecraft lived through the early 20th
century, during which our understanding of the universe was transformed. In the late 19th century, it was
believed that the Milky Way was all there was to the universe; that our galaxy was the universe. Then, in the early decades of the 20th
century, astronomy made discoveries that pushed the horizons of the universe
much, much further out. It was then realized
that our galaxy was just one of many – perhaps millions, later billions – of
galaxies in the universe, and that the universe was actually expanding. It is understandable that people who lived
through this period might feel ‘smaller’ by comparison with the vastly extended
horizons of the universe, and that some would develop a sense of dread in the
face of what they experienced as the overwhelming immensity of the cosmos.
‘Cosmic
dread’ seems to be what fueled a lot of HPL’s nightmares that were in the
background of his stories, according to some sources. It seems that his mythos – that of Cthulhu
and his minions – may stem mainly from a fear of what might be “out there” in the
vast cosmos, not really from any fear of supernatural beings, even if his
stories often speak of demons and devils and other conventional religious
beings? According to this view, Cthulhu
is to be understood as an alien, more than as a supernatural monster; he and
his minions are only metaphorically to be allied with the traditional “infernal
forces” from “hell.” _At least this is
how various sources I’ve read have painted him.
The
problem I have with HPL’s view of things is not with the sense of
“cosmic dread” in itself, which is understandable, especially given
HPL's sociocultural context. It’s not that
the universe isn’t indifferent to us; it is.
It’s not that there aren’t things out there in the universe that are
deadly; there are. It’s not that our
existence isn’t fragile; it is—we could be wiped out by a single meteor impact
or a Gamma Ray burst from a star in our sector of the Galaxy – at any
time. Rather, it’s the overall sense I
get – from the stories I have read thus far – that rationality is inept and
that science will, by ‘piecing it all
together,’ eventually reveal something devastating to us – this is what HPL
seems to have expected, and its what disappoints me in his fictional world, as
it is not necessarily true.
The problem is that there’s
an irrationalism here; and it’s leaning heavily into obscurantism. The two quotes at the head of this blog seem
to me to sum up much of the Lovecraftian ‘cosmic dread’ that I’ve noticed in
the stories I’ve now read – the fear that the universe is not only vast and
indifferent, but necessarily populated
with things that will destroy us if
we awaken them or let them know we are here.
It’s a nightmare world; one which does not really represent the universe
as it is. It is vast and empty and
dangerous—but it’s not ‘out to get us’ (at least not intentionally). There is a fatalism in HPL that goes beyond amor fati (the ‘embrace’ or ‘love’ of
fate); there does not seem to be much ‘love of life’ in these tales. It is all dread and fear and
hopelessness. There is no way out, it
seems. Yet, from a more day-lit
perspective, we are here and our species has survived for a
couple hundred thousand years or more.
We have adapted to our environment, and without evidence of Cthulhu-like
creatures and their minions, there would seem to be no reason to fear them in such
a ‘paranoid’ way.
Having
adapted to our environment is no assurance of survival. There are many threats to our existence, but
none of them – at least on a cosmic scale – are intentional. More locally, there might be people working
on bio-weapons who intend to release them on the world; haters of humanity who
want to see our tenure on this planet ended.
Within our own environment there might
well be microbes evolving that could turn us all into zombies (lol). But until we have evidence that any of
these threats is a real and present danger, there is no reason to assume they are real or spend our nights and days in terror of their
realization. Lovecraft, if not a
supernaturalist, does seem to have lived in terror of the things that might
emerge from the dark vastness of the Universe.
Last
night, a friend and I were discussing this, and got to comparing HPL with Edgar
Allan Poe. I suggested that Poe was
actually much more of a rationalist; much more of an Enlightenment person –
than Lovecraft, who seems to have been Victorian and prudish long after those
things should have become passé (if ever they are; there certainly are too many
people today who act and think like Victorians). The things that terrified Poe were usually
rooted in some psychological reality; some subjective fault or diminishment of
person—that rendered them susceptible to hallucination, apparitions and the
operations of guilt. Some of Poe’s
stories are about terror rather than
horror (e.g., “Descent into the Maelstrom”) and there are stories where there is an actual, palpable, supernatural
element. However, on the whole, I feel I
am reading someone who is rational when I read Poe; albeit someone who is
grappling with the darker side of life, and who may have eventually succumbed
to it. With HPL’s stories, it is
different. The vague generalizations he
makes and the lack of descriptive detail in many of his stories, the
over-the-top exclamations of horror and terror without any palpable
presentation of the object of that fear (even in The Call of Cthulhu (1926), which I thought was supposed to be one
of his better tales) – all these seem
to me to be mere ravings. They do not
seem to reach a level of genuinely literary expression.
So
why am I interested in a Lovecraftian mythos?
Perhaps I like the ‘spookiness’ of the settings (as exemplified in the
game; Mansions of Madness) and – as I
take it as fiction – I’m intrigued by what it reveals to us about our
subconscious fears and existential limitations.
Perhaps I am intrigued more with his legacy, than the canon of the
writer’s works?
This
sense of the ‘fragility of life’ vs our ‘survival potential’ extends to my
interest in games, too. I like games
that play with fate and choice and the ability as well as the inability to work
our way through situations to a desirable conclusion. Life is to be lived; and sometimes we come up
against insurmountable odds—and then we fail.
On other occasions, we are able to make decisions that lead us to an
acceptable – even a desired – end state.
I like the way in which the kinds of games we are playing provide a
spectrum of experiences; some more difficult and others easier—leading to a
variety of end-states. They are all – at
their best – metaphorical of life-as-lived, and can function as meditations on
the living of life.
When
I first saw the game Mansions of Madness, what
caught my attention was the cover
pic; the detectives (as I soon learned they were) going into the old house,
carrying various tools and artifacts. It
evoked in me my love of the old haunted house story; it drew me into that genre
in which you don’t know what’s around the next corner and yet you want – or need – to find out. In the house in MofM, you are usually seeking some object or seeking to find
someone who has disappeared, but along the way you wake things up; or perhaps
you just happen to be there when the things from the other ‘dimension’ are
crossing-over into our world. And then you have to struggle to either
complete your task or, sometimes, just get out alive.
Someone
told me once that the mechanics of MofM
were set up in such a way as to prevent the detectives from ever winning, but that to me would be
loading the deck against life and hope.
I don’t know if I would play a game in which there wasn’t at least a
fighting chance of surviving, at least occasionally. I was pleased the first time I survived the
scenario we were playing, and I did it by playing all four female detectives
and leaving the gun-toting men out of it. (lol)
Well, Jenny is a gun-toting
woman_ and a good aim, but the other three have other ways of defending themselves and defeating all the zombies
and the like. It was “girl power” all
the way.
Once
again, this makes me think about the role of horror in an earthen spirituality.
Horror
– like Terror – is a way of exploring limitations, exploring our fears
(analogically or through visual representation of horrible things), and
experiencing what it would be like to be in life-threatening situations,
without actually having to be in them. I
know what it feels like to watch or read what I think are really good horror
and terror stories, and how reflective it makes me when the film or book is
over. There is a sense with horror that
– since it is about a supernatural threat – one is dealing with something
imaginary, as such things as vampires, werewolves, zombies and so forth don’t
really exist. So it is the story, the
characters and their arc through the tale that matters most and engages
me. But with terror, I am engaged more
directly with the threat that drives the plot.
Horror is a genre that has to be analogical, allegorical or at least
represent primal fears to stimulate a genuine ‘fear response.’ Terror is more ‘realistic;’
at least in the way in which the threat to our existence is presented (i.e,
war, ‘terrorism,’ kidnapping scenarios, the representation of serial killers
and their victims, etc.)—yet even in these stories there has to be good
characterization, astute plotting, and believable character development to
engage us with the action of the story in a genuine and spiritual way.
[1] One place I read about this was in Daniel
Harms article in Fortean Times, 2004—“Lovecraft as Debunker” http://www.forteantimes.com/features/profiles/153/hp_lovecraft.html]
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