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You know, it’s rarely my intention when reading the news, to find things that sound like something out of an H.P. Lovecraft story. But these things just seem to happen. As National Geographic reports:

“Birds of a feather usually flock together—but not in the case of a rare “white” mutant penguin, spotted Monday in a chinstrap penguin colony in Antarctica.”

I’d never heard of anything other than normal black-and-white penguins–except, of course, in the pages of At the Mountains of Madness, where the giant albino penguins serve as fodder for the Shoggoths. Coming on the heels of news about a hidden mountain range in the Antarctic makes this even more disturbing.

Okay, so I’m kidding around. These kinds of stories don’t actually worry me.* But I do think they’re both pretty cool.

*Yet. 

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Its population grew and withered, congealing and dispersing.

But still its edifices remained, even as the yellow stars leered upon it.

And its citizenry perished.

The great edifices which held them remained, dead to the universe which they seemed to mock, and which in turned condemned them to the obscurity of the infinite ether.

For the beings that had made it were gone, as decay seeped and disease encroached upon it, but it did not die. Its angles were abhorrent, and as the tides broke upon its empty port, the water flowed into the abysmal streets.

The orange sky loomed before that titan abode, which was indifferent and hostile all at once, for it had no soul, but only reflected the insecure arrogance of its bygone builders.

To us, it was insane. To the universe, it was merely an incident.

And all at once its foundations crumbled, and its materials were enveloped again into the dread Cosmic void’s simmering cruelty. Petulant and unmeaning, it sank into the vistas of unfathomable chaos, against which all unnatural bulwarks moan.


This is a prose poem I wrote a long time ago, while under the influence of Lovecraft. It’s very, very much like the end of Nyarlathotep–not as good, of course–but so much like it that it frankly verges on plagiarism. Plus, there are some other highly Lovecraftian phrases throughout it. I would feel bad posting it without making this clear, even though I don’t think it actually includes any lines from that apocalyptic and mesmerizing piece. 

Writing un-rhyming poetry does not come naturally to me at all. I think this is because what I know of poetry, I learned mostly from reading W.S. Gilbert’s verse, and consequently most of my techniques are designed for that sort of thing.

Actually, speaking of imitation, I wrote some early poetry that was flat-out mimicking Gilbert. Not that I stole from him, exactly, and in any case I never published any of it, but I would just take his general idea and try to see what I could come up with that served the same function. It always made me feel woefully inadequate. The only thing I remember fondly from these efforts was writing the beginning of a verse which I imagined being delivered by some comic-villain attempting to rationalize his evil deeds, and explain he’s “just misunderstood”:

“Take, for instance, the Mephistopheles:
People whine about how awful he’s.
Yet, if you’ll examine the pertinent facts,
You’ll find that the Devil’s one of your classier acts!”
I was so proud of those first two lines. But I never could get beyond that to make an actually funny poem. 
Back to the un-rhyming poetry, though. Nyarlathotep isn’t quite that, I suppose–it’s more like a very hypnotic short story. But for some reason, it just takes more of an effort to make myself write poems that don’t rhyme than ones that do. 

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Continuing this blog’s discussion of Art and artists…

I remember reading in a book of H.P. Lovecraft’s letters–one of the S.T. Joshi ones that I sadly no longer have, and wish I did–a letter where he stated something like “all Art is nationalistic”. He went on to describe how he thought all true Art must be influenced by a person’s feeling for home, by the soil and history of the place. (I apologize for being forced to paraphrase here–he put it much better, I’m sure.)

However, I think he was wrong. His own works go to prove him so. I suspect that when most people hear the name “Lovecraft”, they immediately think of Cthulhu. “Lovecraftian horror” is a genre of weird monsters from other dimensions, of unknown and incomprehensible beings.

Certainly, Lovecraft’s New England heritage appears in his stories, and no doubt his familiarity with the place was why he set most of his tales there. But the reason that anyone reads Lovecraft today isn’t because of his descriptions of New England towns and countryside, but because of his well-realized depictions of monsters and bizarre phenomena.

I’m fairly confident that Lovecraft never saw Cthulhu, except in his mind’s eye. I doubt very much if he went out for a walk in Providence and something about the place just made him think of the Great Race of Yith. And even if it did, many people lived in Providence, and yet only one of them ever came up with Lovecraftian horror. Now to me, that says it was the man, not the place, that made the stories what they are.

Truly, Lovecraft’s horror is very non-nationalistic because his monsters were creatures designed to be utterly alien to all human experience.  No matter where in the world you live, if Yog-Sothoth rolls into town, it’s going to be scary. That makes it a widely-accessible story.

The nature of Art and of Literature is that it addresses something fundamental about the Universe. It’s similar to the idea of the “monomyth” of Joseph Campbell. There is not only the one myth, I don’t think, but there are similar stories and concepts that resonate across time and space. Art is something that people still recognize, even when the circumstances that created it are gone.

There are always barriers to the understanding of Art–language, for an obvious one–but I believe Art represents the straining against such barriers, rather than the embrace of them.

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“[W]hat I used to respect was not really aristocracy, but a set of personal qualities which aristocracy then developed better than any other system . . . a set of qualities, however, whose merit lay only in a psychology of non-calculative, non-competitive disinterestedness, truthfulness, courage, and generosity fostered by good education, minimum economic stress, and assumed position, AND JUST AS ACHIEVABLE THROUGH SOCIALISM AS THROUGH ARISTOCRACY.”–H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to C.L. Moore. (Italics and Capitals his.)

The political journey of H.P. Lovecraft is a fascinating one. He was, as most readers know, a racist, even by the standards of the 1920s and ’30s. His economic views during the Depression were what people call “left-wing”, but which are more accurately described as simply “socialist” or perhaps even better “anti-capitalist”. Joined with his racism, this made his political outlook–and know that I don’t make this comparison lightly–basically fascistic. (You can read about his views in more detail here.)

But the central point here is that Lovecraft believed in replacing the capitalistic, market-driven society with one more like an aristocracy in which–and I’m paraphrasing and condensing a lot here–tended to value aesthetic and intellectual qualities more.

So, as I understand it, his idea was to replace the security an aristocracy provided by means of inheritance with the security socialism provided by means of a social safety net, redistributionary measures and public control of the factors of production.

Compare this with the views of Ayn Rand mentioned in my previous post. She saw control of the material market as being abhorrent, and opposed just as she opposed control of people’s minds. (Judging by the stories of her “Objectivists” group, she waived the latter opposition where she was doing the control.) but Rand favored a competitive market economy in which, she believed, the best would rise to the top.

The flaw in Rand’s concept, as I said, is that in a market economy there is little time for intellectual and artistic endeavors, and what there is, if also subjected to the market, is designed to satisfy the minds and the tastes of the “lowest common denominator”, as they say.

Lovecraft’s idea is much more consistent with the socially engineered Utopianism so popular in his time, but the irony is that, if his feelings on race are any indication, Lovecraft didn’t just want the benefits of  classical aristocracy to be achieved through socialism, he wanted an honest-to-God classical aristocracy back. Since aristocracy is usually a hierarchy based on heredity, and since racism amounts to a system of dividing into hierarchies based on heredity, a racist and socialist society would be, practically, a hereditary aristocracy, only a little more crude and obvious about it.

My point in contrasting these two philosophies is to point out the flaws they suffered from: Rand’s philosophy could not be the basis for an intelligent society because it allows all non-moneymaking pursuits to be subverted to the behavior of capital flows. Lovecraft’s vision could not because it was effectively reinventing
what had already been done, and the flaws of which were already known.

So, why should anyone care? The political ideas of two deceased writers, one of whom wrote mediocre romance novels for millionaires and the other who wrote about flying space octopi don’t seem terribly important.

Well, I care because Rand and Lovecraft–unpleasant, deluded, cruel and arrogant though they may have been–were also very intelligent people, and this is demonstrated by the fact that they successfully articulated philosophies which may be seen in action even today. That these philosophies do not appear to be capable of creating a functional society might be what is most important, but also interesting is that intelligent people thought that they could.
 

Notes

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The Empire set on the Sun
And no one there heard it fall.
O’er desolate cities and vistas
Andromeda casted a pall. 
When the heavy bombardment  
Had aught but ended
The Things of the Blackness
 From the Cosmos descended.
The shallows, now empty,
Still speak of their presence.
Their footprints, not faded,
Shall fade some millennia hence.
Past the blaze of the ritual fire,
Past the encircling rock,
Past the Gods and their wards,
They sped to the black in a random walk.
Where’er the Second Law holds sway
There the Natives will have cause to grieve.
And as they go to old, dead castles,
Will ghosts turn lights out as they leave?


So, for fun, I was attempting to do some sort of Lovecraft-like poem, in the vein of Nemesis and Nyarlathotep. I don’t think I succeeded, but the end result is interesting anyway. The last line reminds me of the Arthur C. Clarke story “The Nine Billion Names of God“.

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I’m re-reading Lovecraft’s The Shadow Out of Time and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. And I’m about to spoil parts of them, so beware!

Both books deal with men who, by supernatural means, acquire vast knowledge by speaking with people and beings from distant times. One man does so deliberately, the other accidentally, but in both cases the theme is the same.

It’s easy for me to forget that in Lovecraft’s time there was no internet, but when you think about it, the amount of knowledge opened up to us with its advent is probably nearly as overwhelming as that which is gained by the characters in these stories. Upon thinking of this, I realized that the amount of knowledge acquired by the characters in these stories must have seemed even more fantastic at the time they were written.

Overwhelming knowledge is a common theme in Lovecraft’s work. For instance, the opening passage from The Call of Cthulhu:

“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 deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

We are capable today of “correlating the contents” to an extent Lovecraft never could have dreamed of. And yet, as anyone will tell you, the internet is not being used to its full potential. J.E. Sawyer and Freddie DeBoer have both recently written fine articles on this subject.

I find the case for a technological singularity at some point in the future quite persuasive. But on the other hand, technology currently enables people to have much more knowledge than most of them actually do, which makes me wonder if the mere fact it might be possible really means it will happen.

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As I’ve written before, one problem I see in horror movies, novels and such is the tendency to over-explain everything, to try to tie up the loose ends in the story. This is a problem because it robs the horror of that most terrifying attribute mystery.

It’s understandable why this happens, though. Works in most other genres are better if you tie everything together neatly. For example, I find there is something immensely enjoyable about watching all the plot threads tie together in comic novels like the “Jeeves” books or A Confederacy of Dunces. In a good humor book, even seemingly trivial elements have a role to play in the story, and the result is to tie them all, humorously, into a funny situation. Similarly, in a mystery story, the big payoff requires Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot or whoever to explain everything at the end. Failure to tie things up neatly is a huge flaw.

But the horror genre is different. You must not have that kind of effect in horror, to preserve the uncertain elements, to preserve the sense of fear that must exist for the reader.

I was thinking of this as I was re-reading Robert W. Chambers’ “The Yellow Sign”, which along with his “The Repairer of Reputations”, makes The King in Yellow my favorite weird fiction work ever. As I read, I realized that Chambers was doing things that in most other genres would be unforgivably vague, and render his story incoherent. For example, the principal characters are explicitly noted to be Catholic, yet how this matters to the story, I can’t really say. It doesn’t really seem to be an important element. This would be a problem in most stories, but here it just adds to the wonderfully bizarre feeling of Chambers’ world.

(“The Repairer of Reputations” also has many similarly unexplained elements, perhaps even more, all of which Chambers miraculously made to “work” together.)

Perhaps all this is obvious to most people, but I had never thought of it this way before; that perhaps what is a flaw in most genres can be a good thing in others.

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The other day I happened to see about 85% of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull on TV. I missed the beginning. Although I enjoyed the first two Indiana Jones films, I hadn’t bothered to see it because I’d heard lots of negative opinions about it. (Warning: spoilers ahead!)

I was quite pleasantly surprised by it. It’s not a great film, but from what I saw it seemed quite comparable in quality to Raiders of the Lost Ark. What was especially interesting to me was the fact that, behind all the action-adventure silliness and the 1950s nostalgia George Lucas likes so much, its story, boiled down to its basic elements, is almost a Lovecraftian weird-tale.

What I mean is that there are unexplained alien beings with an unexplained agenda at the center of the plot. And, significantly, the main villain is eliminated–not exactly killed, I don’t think–by being overwhelmed by the amount of knowledge the alien consciousness imparts to her. The quote at the foot of this blog illustrates how that fits into Lovecraft’s style.

Having said that, clearly the tone of Indiana Jones is far lighter than anything Lovecraft would dream up. It’s not a “weird tale” in that there is no real suspense or horror for anyone over the age of seven that any unpleasant fate will befall any of the Good characters. This is just as it should be in an Indiana Jones film, of course.

Still, I thought it worth noting, as I have commented on the lack of Lovecraftian movies in the past.

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[NOTE: In this post, I’m going to spoil, to different degrees: the short stories The Call of Cthulhu and The Repairer of Reputations, and the film JFK.]

I like horror fiction–specifically “cosmic horror” of the sort exemplified by H.P. Lovecraft and, in some of his works, Robert W. Chambers. I have, in the past, expressed my preference for this over the grotesque type of horror that is more prevalent today, especially in film.

I also, as long-time readers know, enjoy conspiracy theories and conspiracy-related fiction. What I hadn’t realized, amazingly, until recently was how similar these two genres are. In the past, I’ve often supposed that it is simply too difficult to convey on the screen the same sense that can be conveyed on the page, but I realize now that the conspiracy genre is nearer the style a cinematic weird-tale should take.

H.P. Lovecraft’s assertion that in “the true weird tale… A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present” is also, in a way, a description of conspiracy fiction, even if the conspiracy in the story is entirely man-made.

Oliver Stone’s film JFK–a masterful film, if a poor history–evokes a sense not unlike the best sort of cosmic horror or “weird tale”. Although there is no doubt that the conspiracy is wholly man-made, it is revealed piecemeal so as to gradually build up the terror of thing. (It need hardly be said that I believe in the truth of this conspiracy about as much as I do in Cthulhu. I am treating it purely as a work of art, and ignoring its real-world political meaning, such as it is.)

I suppose the real genre I am after is what is called the “thriller” or “supernatural thriller”, but that somehow seems like a cheap term to describe the kind of thing I mean. Somehow such films always tend too much toward the conventionally grotesque for my tastes.

The movie The Omen –my favorite horror film–is not so different in its structure from JFK, bizarre though that sounds. Both gradually build up to the revelation of “outer, unknown forces”. In the The Omen, the forces are the Biblical forces of Evil, whereas in JFK the forces are the “military industrial complex”, but though we–and even most Kennedy conspiracy-theorists–know intellectually that this is a man-made institution, it nonetheless can assume almost supernatural, or rather preternatural, powers over the course of the film.

Indeed, much of the similarity in these works stems from the fact that Cthulhu/aliens, Gods and Devils, and Super-secret Spy organizations make for powerful antagonists to whom all manner of dramatic powers may be given by the writer.

Now, it’s well known that aliens and religion are often the stuff of conspiracy fiction. (The Da Vinci Code, Deus Ex) But, from what I have seen, the conspiracies which involve them seldom manage to become truly like “weird fiction” in the Lovecraftian sense, because they usually rely on high-level human involvement in the conspiracies, and either turn out to be too mundane or just too confusing. One problem with writing man-made conspiracies is that they ultimately must have some logical, human motivation, which Cthulhu and the Devil and such do not require.

To be really good, (in my opinion of course) a good conspiracy and a good horror story must not over-explain. I know I’ve said this before, but it is worth repeating. Lovecraft himself, I think, went too far into explanation in his famous The Call of Cthulhu. What I remember about that story is the piecing together, not the anti-climactic revelation of the Old One. Again, Chambers’ The King in Yellow, especially “The Repairer of Reputations” is an excellent example of how to do it, in my opinion. Chambers was a great practitioner of horror, Lovecraft a great theorist.

Or, to go back to JFK, the film is largely a big buildup to a finale in which nothing is resolved, only the nature of the conspiracy has been, to some extent, revealed. (It might–and I’m only realizing this now–be possible to interpret the film with Garrison as an unreliable narrator, much as Hildred is in Repairer of Reputations.) It’s not pushed too far, and not over-explained, but it is gives you enough to comprehend the magnitude of the danger without being too sure of the details.

The sort of horror film I would like to see would rely almost entirely upon frenzied discovery and investigation, like a good conspiracy story. It would require hardly any explicit violence–it could probably get a “PG-13” rating–and express the scope of the horror in a manner similar to JFK: through, as Lovecraft memorably put it, “the piecing together of dissociated knowledge”.

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I am always amused by conspiracy theories. Here’s a good one currently going around, as reported by The Daily Mail, that the strange on-air bouts of incoherence by various people on television are the result of secret experiments by the U.S. military.

It’s a fairly good conspiracy, but I dare any conspiracy-minded readers to peruse H.P. Lovecraft’s novel The Shadow Out of Time and not come away with an infinitely more terrifying, and slightly more plausible theory. Here is an excerpt:

“The collapse occurred about 10.20 A.M., while I was conducting a class in Political Economy VI – history and present tendencies of economics – for juniors and a few sophomores. I began to see strange shapes before my eyes, and to feel that I was in a grotesque room other than the classroom.

 My thoughts and speech wandered from my subject, and the students saw that something was gravely amiss. Then I slumped down, unconscious, in my chair, in a stupor from which no one could arouse me. “

I don’t want to give away too much. “Most merciful thing in the world” etc.