"Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic
cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents.
They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze
the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from
them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden eons which
chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it.
That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an
accidental piecing together of separated things--in this case an
old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. I hope that
no one else will accomplish this piecing out; certainly, if I live,
I shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a chain. I
think that the professor, too intented to keep silent regarding the
part he knew, and that he would have destroyed his notes had not
sudden death seized him."
Later we see that Lovecraft seems to have a knowledge of
non-Euclidean geometries. While his descriptions do not totally match
spherical or hyperbolic geometries, there are certainly hints of
them in his comments about convexity and concavity:
"Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something
very close to it when he spoke of the city; for instead of
describing any definite structure or building, he dwells only on
broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces--surfaces too
great to belong to anything right or proper for this earth, and
impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk
about angles because it suggests something Wilcox had told me of
his awful dreams. He said that the geometry of the dream-place he
saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of
spheres and dimensions apart from ours. Now an unlettered seaman
felt the same thing whilst gazing at the terrible reality.
"Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous
Acropolis, and clambered slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which
could have been no mortal staircase. The very sun of heaven seemed
distorted when viewed through the polarising miasma welling out
from this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense
lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock
where a second glance shewed concavity after the first shewed
convexity.
"Something very like fright had come over all the explorers before
anything more definite than rock and ooze and weed was seen. Each
would have fled had he not feared the scorn of the others, and it
was only half-heartedly that they searched--vainly, as it proved--for
some portable souvenir to bear away.
"It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed up the foot of the
monolith and shouted of what he had found. The rest followed him,
and looked curiously at the immense carved door with the now
familiar squid-dragon bas-relief. It was, Johansen said, like a
great barn-door; and they all felt that it was a door because of
the ornate lintel, threshold, and jambs around it, though they
could not decide whether it lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise
like an outside cellar-door. As Wilcox would have said, the
geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that
the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative position
of everything else seemed phantasmally variable.
"Briden pushed at the stone in several places without result. Then
Donovan felt over it delicately around the edge, pressing each
point separately as he went. He climbed interminably along the
grotesque stone moulding--that is, one would call it climbing if
the thing was not after all horizontal--and the men wondered how
any door in the universe could be so vast. Then, very softly and
slowly, the acre-great lintel began to give inward at the top; and
they saw that it was balanced.
"Donovan slid or somehow propelled himself down or along the jamb
and rejoined his fellows, and everyone watched the queer recession
of the monstrously carven portal. In this phantasy of prismatic
distortion it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the
rules of matter and perspective seemed upset."
I have enjoyed Klinger's annotations to Sherlock Holmes, and am
looking forward to his annotations of FRANKENSTEIN.
stories
by H. P. Lovecraft:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/31/2008]
Jorge Luis Borges once said, "Hoy trato de escribir del modo más
sencillo posible. Un español me decia la semana pasada que no
aprovecho la riqueza de la lengua española. Le dije que no quería
aprovechar ninguna riqueza, que soy un hombre modesto y quiero
expresarme de un modo lucido e inteligible. Yo creo que esa idea
de escribir con muchas palabras es un error y fué el error de
Lugones: tratar de escribir con todo el diccionario. No creo que
todo el diccionario sea apto para el manejo literario. Vamos a
tomar por ejemplo tres palabras; azulado, azulino y azuloso. Creo
que azulado puede usarse para escribir porque pertenece a nuestro
lenguaje oral. Azulino y azuloso. en cambio, son palabras que
estan en el diccionario y que no estan en ninguna boca. Entonces
es mejor no usar azulino y azuloso, estorbos para el lector y
pequeñas sorpresas que dan le presentar el escritor." (Now I try to
write as simply as possible. Last week a Spaniard said to me that
I did not make good use of the richness of the Spanish language. I
said to him that I did not want to make good use of any richness--that
I am a modest man and I want to express myself in a lucid and
intelligible manner. I believe that this idea of using a lot of
words in writing is a mistake and that this was Lugones's mistake:
to try to write with the entire dictionary. I do not believe that
the entire dictionary is fit for literary treatment. We can take
(for example) three words: "azulado", "azulino" and "azuloso", [all
meaning "bluish"]. I believe that "azulado" can be used in writing
because it is in our oral usage. "Azulino" and "azuloso". on the
other hand, are words that are in the dictionary, but not in our
mouths. Thus it is better not to use "azulino" or "azuloso",
stumbling blocks to the reader and small surprises that the writer
gives.") [pages 155-156, BORGES ANTE EL ESPEJO]
I mention this because our science fiction group just finished
reading three H. P. Lovecraft stories ("The Colour Out of Space",
"The Shadow Out of Time", and "At the Mountains of Madness"), and
Lovecraft obviously felt differently about words. The following is
a list of words appearing in one three-page descriptive passage
(about 1200 words): groinings, well-nigh, colossal, hieroglyphs,
curvilinear, chiselled, masonry, megalithic, convex-topped/convex-bottomed,
pedestals, luminous, inexplicable, vitreous, latticed,
octagonal, Cyclopean, titanic, parapet, frontage, prodigious,
dilapidation, basalt/basaltic, apertures, aeons, aura, omnipresent,
monoliths, predominated, ghastly, fungoid/fungi, pallor, spectral,
calamites, cycads, coniferous, bespeaking, horticultural, topiary,
lepidodendra, sigillaria, frondage, mottled, vexed, anomalous. Add
to this Lovecraft's predilection for choosing British spelling
("colour", "shewing", "modelled"), and it is clear he is writing
under different rules than Borges.
In case you are wondering how Lovecraft put these words together,
how is this for a description: "a half-plastic denizen of the
hollow interior of an unknown trans-Plutonian planet eighteen
million years in the future." Indeed, "The Shadow Out of Time" is
almost Stapledonian in its scope.
We picked those three stories, by the way, because they appeared in
"Amazing" and "Astounding" rather than "Weird Tales". To some
extent, this was more a function of who had space and/or could read
Lovecraft's writing, as these are probably not noticeably more
science fictional than other Lovecraft stories.
"The Whisperer in Darkness"
by H. P. Lovecraft:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/22/2016]
The book and film group read "The Whisperer in Darkness" by
H. P. Lovecraft, and watched the film of it produced by the HPL
Historical Society.
While Arkham, Massachusetts, is a fictional town, all the places
mentioned in "The Whisperer in Darkness" appear to be real. The
towns of Hardwick, Montpelier, and Lyndonville are all in the
north-central and north-eastern part of Vermont; Townshend,
Newfane, South Londonderry, and Bellows Falls are in the
southeastern. (None of them are very far from I-91.) The rivers
and counties are all real. (Mount) Wantastiquet is also real, but
"Dark Mountain" and "Round Hill" may or may not be--the names are a
bit too generic to tell.
As alluded to in the story, Massachusetts did in fact issue a
license plate with "the sacred codfish" on it in 1928, but its
history is as murky as Lovecraft's forests. The Massachusetts
Registry of Motor Vehicles says:
"It was in 1928 that a depiction of a codfish, symbol of the
Massachusetts fishing industry, was the first picture to appear on
a plate. The image, which resembled an oversized guppy more than a
codfish, sparked controversy among local fishermen. After
suffering one of the worst years in fishing history, the fishermen
blamed the RMV for representing the cod swimming away from the word
"Massachusetts" which was printed on the plates. The controversial
image was removed from passenger plates in 1929 and a more
realistic and detailed codfish shown swimming toward Massachusetts
appeared on truck plates in that same year."
But Chris Woodcock writes, "It is a great story and is even
repeated on the current Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles
web site. Unfortunately it is not at all true! The fishing was
not particularly bad in 1928. The swimming away was just
circumstance (note that starting in 1925 the year and 'MASS'
alternate sides).'
The Vermont floods mentioned also really happened, and were the
worst in Vermont's history. And there was a ninth planet; Pluto
was discovered while Lovecraft was writing "The Whisperer in
Darkness". (One wonders if the new ninth planet, now dubbed "Planet
X", will be named "Yuggoth". And shouldn't it be "Planet IX"?)
Lovecraft tried to have up-to-date science in his works, such as
including Pluto, but obviously much of it looks outdated. Nowadays
he would probably have people's consciousnesses uploaded to a
computer rather than extracting their brains and putting them in a
jar.
The description of the structures in the forest made me wonder if
Lovecraft had visited "Mystery Hill" (now named America's
Stonehenge") in Salem, New Hampshire. He did, but it is not clear
whether this was before or after he wrote "The Whisperer in
Darkness". It is often claimed that "Mystery Hill" influenced "The
Dunwich Horror", but Lovecraft visited the site to late to have
inspired the 1929 story. "The Whisperer in Darkness" was published
in 1932, so there is more chance for it to have occurred before
this storty.
What is "Mystery Hill"? It is a site of stone structures in Salem,
New Hampshire, but more small passages and cave-like structures
than the great standing stones of Stonehenge. No one is sure who
built it, or why. Well, that's not true. Quite a few people are
sure, but they tend to disagree with each other. What the site's
owners would like you to believe (and it is privately owned, rather
than a national or state site) is that all this was done by
European explorers pre-dating the Vikings. (St. Brendan's name
comes up, though others think it was the Phoenicians.) The
descriptions talk about how the bigger standing stones are aligned
with the sun on the equinoxes or other special days, but there seem
to be a lot of big standing stones *not* aligned with the sun, and
it almost seems more like they just pick which stones are important
after the fact. Also, stone quarrying and other activities took
place here in the 19th century, and many also believe that the
1930s owner may have moved stones to what he believed/claimed to be
their original positions, making their current placement
meaningless.
(I am reminded of the reconstructed stone fort in Scotland that
looked so perfect, but was completely inauthentic. While there had
been a fort there, it had collapsed or been destroyed, and in the
19th century the owner of the land just took the stones lying
around and built a fort from them with no concern about the
original placement.)
In spite of all this, the site is an interesting tie-in to
Lovecraft's work. (I should note that it is merely the best-known
of hundreds of megaliths in New England.)
"The Whisperer in Darkness" was Lovecraft's most profitable work--he
got $350 for it. The mention of the Hounds of Tindalos was
picked up by Frank Belknap Long, who wrote an entire novel based on
them. And a lot of the off-hand references here re-appear in "The
Mound".
And "The H. P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast" (Episodes 74-76 of
for "The Whisperer in Darkness")
pointed out something true of all of Lovecraft's work--he loves
hyphenated adjectives. He seems particularly fond of those ending
in "ing": "hill-climbing", "wonder-loving", "night-haunting",
"forest-traversing", "vista-opening", "ether-resisting",
"barrier-breaking", "secret-guarding", ...
Go to Evelyn Leeper's home page.
