Old Posts: Lovecraft & Houses

Posting retroactively is part of having to deal with spotty home wireless and my own laziness. Considering that few of my remarks have much to do with current events (except when I link articles), I don't really view this as a problem.

Also, I start baking at Great Harvest tomorrow morning at four a.m. If you want to congratulate me, don't call after nine p.m., I will be trying to sleep.

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From Lovecraft & the Weird (21 July)

I am in the mood to write which is, coincidentally, in conjunction with the mood to read. During my time in Minneapolis, at Magers & Quinn, I purchased a lovely tome: The Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H.P. Lovecraft, bound wonderfully in faux black leather with a rendition of dread Cthulhu on the cover in gold script. I am tempted to extrapolate upon the literature of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, with his fantastic and macabre tales of the edges of human reason as well as the far borders of the Void. His world is as full and almost more meaningful than the endless mythologies of humanity's many cultures, but seeps mystically into the conceivable, into the potential realities we hold dear. It fills me with terrible elation.

Presently, I write my own weird tales focused on a town in Louisiana named Delafourche, rich in its own mysteries and macabre tales which only slowly grow into their own. My apparent protagonist is Alexis Tournette, an educated and overly curious local with connections to some of the young people and a penchant for the potentially deleterious. Already he reminds me of John Constantine's tendency to get his friends into danger, though he draws more heavily on Lovecraft's Randolph Carter who explores the dream realms and the earthly abysses—though I am under the impression that Lovecraft does not exactly distinguish the two.

What Lovecraft's characters stumble into is a world immersed in cosmic and psychic conquests in which humans are usually negligible or temporary pawns. He hints at the Freudian fears of our ancestors, the subconscious pulls and directions that can consume us, the ultimate draw of fate and doom, as well as the undeniable richness and mystique that fills our minds and worlds. Many stories function as personal and open allegories for his own experiences or function as our own—my mother commented that the tale of The Outsider mirrors the rough conditions of Ph. D. work and completing one's doctorate—while others explore Kantian sublimity and the horror beyond the realm of reason, similar to Kierkegaard's leap of faith but suggesting the presence of alien mysteries on the far ledge—I can think of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath in which the Dreamland holds both earthly and alien horrors, the vacancy of the divine, and the strength of home.

When I write in such a style, the worlds within ourselves becomes the open field of potential; sometimes it feels playful and childish, but like all childish things it potentiates a dark and cruel side, the world in which answers come from suffering and mystic uncertainties. Indeed, it also brings to the fore notions of which I am at first unaware, notions like a terrible but immense underlying reality, the rich spiritual realms beneath and above the skin of straightforward experience. Eihei Dogen describes the spirits of air, the stone mother, the beings in water; and after my stay in India, I cannot deny that “[the] blue mountains [are] constantly walking” (from the Mountains and Waters Sutra). Lauren commented that Lovecraft's Beyond the Wall of Sleep is a description of a DMT trip, and following reading Breaking Open the Head, I am inclined to agree even though it was written before the derivation of DMT and I sincerely doubt the straightlaced New Englander ever sampled such exotic fare. Any of these sources, literary or pharmaceutical, reveals a nature of the world as richly layered and interwoven, lived in more realms than are necessarily obvious or humanly perceptible. (DMT trips usually involve “visiting” highly geometric and mathematical urban centers in which I higher, luminous, even divine logic is apparent to the tripper.)

To see my reading list these days (more Lovecraft and Dogen, finishing We Have Never Been Modern by Latour, eventually some Claude Levi-Strauss, some environmental activism, and so on) may look like an exercise in absurdity, but feels more and more like connectivity, relationality, and contextualization of the my world in the world. Ultimately, I am making sense of living and experience in a reality that continues to elude and befuddle, much in the way thay Lovecraft's protagonists are eluded and befuddled by their discoveries. Latour, Lovecraft, and Pinchbeck (writer of Breaking Open the Head) are very much involved in seeing the world for its unending and rejuvenating novelty, its perpetual newness and madness. While Latour breaks down the social, rhetorical, and philosophical paradigms that apparently pollute our perceptions; while Pinchbeck delves deep into and beyond the boundaries of his own cranium; Lovecraft searches for the far limits of episteme and perception, of metaphysics and theology, by disassembling the world we know into the terrifying world of which we were never aware that we were always in.

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A House That No One Wants (22 July)

It terrifies me that my mother, after long decades of familiarity and communication, does not know what to do with the difficulties her siblings—her sister and half-brother—present her with in the management and sale of their father's home, a man I myself never knew. In the midst of household refurbishing and renovation, she happily received a phone call that this house that no one wants has an interested party. Both of her siblings live near to this house, in the same town in fact, but are disinterested and seemingly unable to arrange the dispensing of its furniture and other goods, or checking on the condition of its water and electricity. In an uncomfortable moment of reflection, I realize that very little of this matters because the house will either become gutted or demolished for its new purpose as an additional property to a nearby church.

So far, I am blessed when it comes to the cooperation and functioning of my siblings and I. We do not often agree about issues of politics, religion, or occupational satisfaction; but when it comes to conversation, we readily resolve into consensus, conceding that what each of us wants is not necessarily likely for any other of us. This, I suppose, has evolved from our long years of torture and near bloodshed in our childhood and youth. My sister went through a period of a few years during which she emotionally tormented me by dealing with me the way one would deal with a bothersome puppy; if it has something you don't want him to have, hide it or destroy it, and if he continues to bother you, namecall and shew incessantly. This was, for the most part, preceded by a long period of mild physical abuse from my brother, though as I was always large for my age and he always small, it quickly became an even match, such as the time when we tried to drown one another in a hotel pool. I can still vividly recall a dream that must have followed the event in which I swam deeper and deeper into a pool, discovering and endless, terrible, and increasingly abyssal realm of lifeless homogeneity.

I hold none of these events against my siblings and am happy to see them when one of us visits the other. When my mother expressed her concern that we would not keep in contact with each other without her personal labor, I immediately felt the reality that Dustin will show up on Erin and subsequently my doorstep for a place to stay; perhaps stupidly, I do not in the least doubt our willingness to house him. Our care for one another is strange, built more out of sudden necessity and and a subterranean maturity for which cannot be easily accounted, it just is. Real conversations with my siblings are few, but potent illustrations of our bond, and the spaces in between the stark contrast with them that, ultimately, makes our togetherness more obvious.

My mother and I have been tearing apart the carpet in the upstairs bedrooms (I, conveniently, live in the basement) for new carpet. As my present project is to encourage recycling in the household and at some point pursue composting, I have neglected to educate my mother on the environmental consequences of carpet manufacture and waste, content in the regulatory disposal of old paint. All the same, the project has been enlightening and frustrating. It wears me out. Particles of dust, nylon, glue, foam, and so on fill the air and exhaust me; I cut and yank free chunks of carpet and foam that overfill our garbage cans; and I become increasingly confused by the functioning of space in this room that looks more forgotten than novel.

Yesterday, my brother's old bedroom felt larger without its furniture; but this morning my mother commented that without its carpet and foam, it feel smaller. I am inclined to agree and wonder at how dimensions change, how perception and reality impact the actual length, width, and depth of a space. I feel that, like the motion of time during joy or sorrow, space fluctuates depending on its context. The work and emptiness of my brother's old room now oppress me, the bare floor looks like disaster recovery, like the house is sick and in the midst of surgery. I am left grasping for energy in stale, sickly air. Now, I write in my old bedroom, dressed in my sister's old furniture, in late afternoon, debating on how best to transfer everything in one bedroom—which appears livable, even friendly—to another—which is mocking and vacant. My back aches and arms are tired, but what I feel like I lack most in that raw energy, that comfort and motivation for moving because I fear making more space that is inhospitable.

This, I suppose, is the awkward project of my mother and her siblings: making a livable space inhospitable, blank, even barren. An undressed mattress, books and clothing in bags, the contents of a desk in boxes, records stacked on a closet shelf are not the pieces of construction, at least not in comfortable construction. I recognize, even endorse destruction as part of creation, that to make is also to destroy; but perhaps it involves strange, unforeseen roots or it touches on the connections that I feel but do not understand between my own siblings and I. My sister prohibited the use of her room until she married at the close of her college career. Now, my brother's room is undergoing a similar transformation only scant weeks after his wedding. I do not know what all of it means, only that it means something.