At the moment when my proposed literature advisers helped me
make an enormous career decision, I wonder if there was an alternate reality, a
parallel universe where I would have made H. P. Lovecraft my life’s work. Would
I still be tickled by H. P. Lovecraft and his weird stories? Would I still be
both amused and sadly empathetic with the odd man from Rhode Island whose
marriage had resolved itself with the suggestion that he and his wife continue
their relationship by correspondence?
I’ve been listening to the works of Howard Phillips
Lovecraft for a few weeks lately, like revisiting letters from an old beau, one
that fate in this reality determined would drift away from the intimacy of
post-graduate study. I had found him in a treasure-trove of some strange young
man’s library gutted, no doubt, by his mother’s final disgust with his hoarding
of the outré and merely speculative fiction. I was in junior high, pawing
through the wreckage of the many libraries unloaded on the junk man in my small
town in New Mexico. I learned to look for anything with the young man’s name
written on the inside cover.
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| Tea Tarot (c) Copyright 2011 Marcia McCord |
I had wondered then if he had died. It was such a huge
collection of sci-fi and horror and I could not imagine he had given up his
books willingly. The books were cheap and I brought them home in shopping bags,
much, I think, to the junkman’s delight. There were, of course, mainstream science
fiction, if (I protest) there is such a thing: Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke and
delicious Heinlein. And then there were the odder items, Lovecraft.
My luck lay in having been moved, much to howling protest,
to eastern New Mexico, a place that was not beautiful nor lush nor friendly to
a child whose chief source of amusement at age 11 was to read every book in the
compact but fairly well-stocked public library. I had always been a bookworm
but the severe cultural and climate differences drove me to bookishness, so
much so that even my mother, bookish herself, complained that I did not “go out
and play,” whatever that meant. Was she concerned that my skin was pale like a
frog’s belly in spite of the unrelenting New Mexico sun? The summer after my
sixth grade year I read all the books in the library, just a few blocks from my
mother’s antique shop, sometimes reading as many as four books per day. I
absorbed whole Dewey Decimal sections including those covering the paranormal
and mystical in hopes of explaining my own gelling talent for “fortune telling.”
Then, in the cold weather of junior high I found Lovecraft
and the world of science fiction, horror and weird.
My brother and I had long been fans of space movies, Star
Trek and “Thee-ater X”. Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone and Night Gallery had been
our delight. Occasionally, a story was too frightening but I began to notice
that my brother was always first to turn off the scary stuff while I complained
that I was still watching. I always lost those arguments, my mother never
comfortable with anything that wasn’t based in tangible reality. It seemed
natural to me that diving deeper into the genres would happen for both my
brother and me; we squabbled over ownership of the complete works of Poe which
made its way from one bedroom to another and back again.
Even in grade school he and I discussed the pros and cons of
scary stories and television shows. I was not a “monster movie” or “big bug
movie” fan. These were popular in my childhood, evidence of the nervousness
about the long-term effects of the atomic age. Accidental resizings or
rearrangement of parts through misuse of technology struck me as carelessness
and not the least bit interesting. Godzilla and Mothra could duke it out
elsewhere as far as I was concerned. But the unintended consequences of ego,
assumption and curiosity, ah, that was always my interest. Who was to say we,
as a species, were so smart? What if, for all our moonwalking and Tang, we didn’t
actually know everything there was to know?
I was never anti-technology. No, I was more interested in
the story of Icarus, a lesson in anticipating problems and avoiding them and
what happens if we do not. I wanted to experiment as my own little inner mad
scientist but I wanted to live through the experience too.
What if? It was the next natural question after the
ever-present Why?
The message of the World in Tarot is fulfillment, arriving
at the answer, resolving all the problems, dancing within your environment,
surrounded by the energies and resources and even antipathies of life, dancing
in your place, your time. And yet, to have arrived and never moved on to start
a new cycle is more death than Death itself. Dance on your laurels but do not rest
on them; stagnation is to cease to exist.
Over the years, I have continued to love H. P. and to become
sure I am not a character in his stories, certainly not the main character. H.
P.’s main character is certainly not the same person all along, but his
protagonists have commonalities: they have assumptions about the stability of
their world only to have that removed by the discovery of something…else.
Often, his heroes protest they were never interested in anything remotely “other”;
in fact, they are almost uniformly repulsed and horrified by anything I might
consider an adventure. They are quietly racist, xenophobic, clear about what
was beautiful and what was bizarre, certain they were advanced and cultured
compared to “savages” in their world, only to realize that large, powerful, strange,
ancient and indifferent beings from “otherwhere” and “otherwhen” were
interested in the noble human for their own need to exploit resources and
survive. Lovecraft’s monsters where those who understood dimensions man could
not imagine, lived in colors and sounds man could only barely sense. They were
wise and old. And man was, in spite of his hubris, young and stupid, a weak
victim of a conspiracy beyond his ken.
In spite of Lovecraft’s often laughable overuse of
adjectives, almost a lesson in what not to do in current writing style, despite
the weight of overwrought veneer of man’s idea of his own civility and cultural
achievement, somewhere in between the “big words” and vague descriptions, he
gets down to one idea common to us all.
In our lizard brains, we know: There’s scary stuff out there
in the dark and it might eat us, considering us as nothing more important than
a potato chip. He may not realize he challenges us to ask which is true
madness? Is it expecting the indifferent powers to respect and admire human
cultural constructs and advancements? Or is it the scientific delight in
finding something new without the understanding of future consequences? And for
that his work is horror, even in spite of itself.
Ah, Howard. You can miss what you never had after all.
Best wishes!
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