i'm not as much of a wanker as it seems.

i want to write stories that do nebraska justice

i think i mentioned picking up my poe collection a little while ago - found it in a second-hand bookstore (where i also bought chariots of the gods?, which is so far an absolutely amazing read and i can't wait to read more of it, really)

point is, i love it a lot

( because it looks so pretty )

also:

"Nothing exists; all is a dream. God - man - the world - the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars - a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space - and you!

...

"And you are not you - you have no body, no blood, no bones, you are but a thought. I myself have no existence; I am but a dream - your dream, creature of your imagination. In a moment you will have realized this, then you will banish me from your visions and I shall dissolve into the nothingness out of which you made me . . .

"I am perishing already - I am failing - I am passing away. In a little while you will be alone in shoreless space, to wander its limitless solitudes without friend or comrade forever - for you will remain a thought, the only existent thought, and by your nature inextinguishable, indestructible. But I, your poor servant, have revealed you to yourself and set you free. Dream other dreams, and better!

"Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago - centuries, ages, eons, ago! - for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities.

Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane - like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell - mouths mercy and invented hell - mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him! . . .

"You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks - in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present; you should have recognized them earlier.

"It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream - a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought - a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!"

life continues.

okay so. i have this habit, when i'm reading books, of marking pages by folding in the corners when i see a quote i like or something. so i figure i may as well go through my books atm and get some of them down, so i don't forget about them. good idea? good idea. let's see how far i get before i get bored.

( onwards to twitter-update-punctuating eternity )

(nb/prescript: here i am, of course, not touching upon the more direct and tangible horrors he writes. stuff like innsmouth is for another day.)

Nobody here yet? Well, then...what bugs me most about the Mythos is actually its popular depiction as sanity-blasting tentacle horrors just twitching with anticipation to wipe out mankind as soon as the stars are right. Lovecraft's actual stories paint a somewhat different picture to me: The universe at large, monsters and mindless gods and all, does not even care enough about us to specifically single us out for hostilities. It is, however, a weirder and scarier place than our 'civilized' sensibilities generally allow us to admit to ourselves, and Bad Things can happen if somebody clueless stumbles into the wrong place at the wrong time or a human villain decides to play with forces beyond the ken of his or her fellows.

see, this is the thing. when they're not being absolute idiots (point 2), tropers tend to be pretty alright. sometimes. at least, when it comes to the just bug me stuff, a lot of them do make good points.

and this is one of them. that's what's scary about the lovecraft mythos.

it's not actually that scary to think that somewhere below the ocean dread beings lie in death-sleep waiting to wake and take the earth for their own; it's no more scary than the thought that somewhere in the world there's someone who will one day murder me for a reason i'll never know. it's disconcerting, and in a way it's disquieting, but it's not scary. it's motive-based and centres on me as a person, in much the same way as the concept of great old ones who want the world to be theirs centres on earth and humans as the targets of their hostility. it's an ego-based fear that's reassuring in its own way because it relies on me/us being important enough.

it's like the stuff i posted a little while ago, about azathoth the nuclear chaos. azathoth isn't meant to be scary because one day he might think of earth and destroy us with his boundless power. azathoth is meant to be scary simply because he embodies the concept of the oblivious uncaring universe - but worse, he embodies a universe that doesn't make sense. he's chaos kept dormant by something we'll never understand.

as a fear, azathoth represents one of the most primal ones humans have: that things don't follow rules. as it is, our worldview is based on the idea that even if we're alone in the universe, even if there is no god, even if life is fleeting, shit makes sense. gravity works. the earth keeps turning. the sun keeps rising. we live in a world where everything is assumed to happen the next time because it's happened every single time before that, and there's nothing wrong with that, because it works. the universe does follow rules, and we can look at the past and make predictions about the future, and if they work then we're golden and if they don't then we know that all we have to do is look over the maths again.

the implication is that if azathoth wakes, that's it. you'll just get chaos. i think it's where a lot of the other writers who have written on the mythos have gone wrong - you get a lot more characterisation of azathoth as the supreme god, which plays on the fear, but also takes away from it. the idea of being ruled by chaos is bad, but at its heart, it's not something unknown. it confines chaos into an actual 'person' and not just a being. the epithet 'daemon sultan' doesn't really apply to what azathoth should be, because despite lovecraft having started writing of him as a caliph, that's not how he ended up. he ended up as the chaos at the centre of the universe, the threat that it could all just stop, the under-the-skin itch that the sun doesn't have to rise tomorrow. "the nuclear chaos" isn't an epithet, it's what he is.

at the same time, the great old ones, beings like cthulhu, are a more direct threat but have still been taken awkwardly. they don't so much represent chaos as history. one day, they will attack humans, and clear us off the face of the planet, but it's nothing to do with us - it's because the stars are right. the idea here is that once it was their time, and now it's ours, and then it's theirs again, and that's simply how it is. it's not that it was their time and then we took it over and they want it back; that distorts the threat into a human one of possession and revenge. where it sits now is that they're simply time. they directly affect us, but so does the weather. yes, they're more corporeal, and humans can fight against them (hello, ramming a boat into cthulhu), but they never go away, and when it's really time for them to rise, it's curtains.

that's what lovecraft's horror is for me. inevitability and irrelevance, the crushing depression of the realisation that this is how it will be and the mindnumbing thoughts that we simply do not matter - the use of gods as metaphors for a universe worse than anything we could think of on our own, and the infantile transparent comfort that it's fiction, so we can retreat to the world we know, one of laws and rules and a world where we matter.

...outside the ordered universe [is] that amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity—the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time and space amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes.



...the ancient legends of Ultimate Chaos, at whose center sprawls the blind idiot god Azathoth, Lord of All Things, encircled by his flopping horde of mindless and amorphous dancers, and lulled by the thin monotonous piping of a demonic flute held in nameless paws.



seriously. that's how you write horror.

apart from the ridiculous racism and everything, i guess.

i've been meaning to do this for a while, but i never had the need to procrastinate so badly. D: god i hate writing animal articles.

( an explanation of the bushido of the shitbag. nb: somewhat long and probably breaching copyright. )

it's that sort of book, really.

i'm in an lj mood, i guess.

this don imus thing... it sort of bothers me. yes, he fucked up. he said something. but he has a reputation for saying stuff like that. let's see... 'chest-thumping pimps', 'boner-nosed ... beanie-wearing jewboy', 'i don't know how she gets that lipstick on ... looking like a rodeo clown' (about someone with parkinson's), 'thieving jews'... the basketball team in question didn't ask for him to be fired. he apologised to them, and they accepted his apology. honestly, in that situation, that should be it. there are bigger issues in the world than someone like don imus, of all people, saying the phrase 'nappy-headed hos' -- and yet this is the one i'm putting in an lj entry about. that should tell you how much of a fuckup the situation is.

....

Arnold Schwarzenegger is the governor of California. There's a perfectly normal English sentence. And how did he get to be in that position? He got there by lifting things. Now, you and I, we avoid lifting things. It's unpleasant. Ask a child to lift something heavy, he'll say "No, I'll go and stick lego up my arse, I'm not doing that". You lift things if you have to, for example, piano falls on grandma, you lift it up, because grandma has mixed feelings about the whole situation. But he, picked up the heavy thing and put it down again, without moving it. Then he did it again, and again. And he said to people, "look how I can lift the heavy thing, aren't I wonderful?" But it was they, they who said "Yes. You're the man. You're the one we want to deal with taxes, water rates, and immigration."

....

i dunno where i was going with this. it's over forty minutes later now.

BYE.