Lovecraft and Cosmic Dread (2 August 2013)

“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 consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity...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 19^th 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? 

Horror, Evolution and Spirituality (30 July 2013)

“He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.”

- Bill Denbrough, IT (1985)

I know this line from Stephen King’s novel IT, but recently I found it referenced in King’s book Danse Macabre (1981) as being from a story called Donovan’s Brain, where the main character resists the power of Donovan’s will (emanating from his brain in a vat) by reciting the line that Bill D later recites to resist the horror of his own childhood memories as they return to him in force after the reemergence of their nemesis Pennywise in Derry.  It was a very effective line in his own novel, and I was pleased to find it was a reference to an earlier story by another author.  King’s work is filled with such references, if you read carefully.

Lovecraft and Spiritual Horror (5 July 2013)

"Serious weird stories are either made realistically intense by close consistency and perfect fidelity to Nature except in the one supernatural direction which the author allows himself, or else cast altogether in the realm of phantasy, with atmosphere cunningly adapted to the visualization of a delicately exotic world of unreality beyond space and time, in which almost anything may happen if it but happen in true accord with certain types of imagination and illusion normal to the sensitive human brain.” (87)

-          H. P. Lovecraft  Supernatural Horror in Literature  
(1973; 1945)

I’ve always loved a good horror story.  I read widely in the genre when I was younger, and have continued seeking out interesting stories that manifest the gothic and spooky quality that has always fascinated me.  Looking back, I think that perhaps horror tales and ghost stories were my first taste of the ‘mystical’ dimension of reality; that quality of the mysterious that embraces, thrills and often awakens us to deeper dimensions of the ‘real.’  Though tainted with the veneer_ if not the substance_ of supernaturalism, horror tales and ghost stories invoke a sense of wonder that may help jumpstart a more genuine mysticism as one matures and grows into an awareness of Earth & Cosmos and one’s place in it.