The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live in 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 revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.--H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.--H.P. Lovecraft, "Supernatural Horror in Literature"
There is no contradiction here. Knowledge is the necessary precursor to fear of the unknown. Correlating all the world's contents awakens the mind to the horror of an absolute unknown, because it leaves the totality itself unaccounted for, an arbitrary emanation from the nameless abyss attesting to a demonic will.
As far as I can tell, in this posting we are in the land of literature. As such it has no relevance at all to our everyday existence. The question concerns whether or not these literary things exist of themselves in some other non-everyday place. In a place separate from the everyday. Do literary things exist? Consider The Nameless Abyss, such considerations are easy. Contemplating it is easy and rather pleasant. How about the Absolute Unknown? Yes, it is There, but not here in the everyday. (Notice the capital letters.) How about the Mind, the Placid Island of Ignorance, the Black Seas of Infinity? Or Terrifying Vistas and the Totality? Are there such things as (capital letter) Contradiction, Correlation, the Precursor and FEAR? Yes, of course, but only as literary things. They exist. Separate from here. And you know, or rather, Know them instantly and intimately. These, I surmise, are the Platonic Forms. They are not real, but Real. This is not the everyday, but the Ontological. Or such is my pleasure to believe.
ReplyDeleteSo do ontological things depend on the everyday brain? Of course not. How about the other way around? No, the everyday does not depend on the Ideal Forms. The Separation is Absolute. But only if you believe. And as such, Belief is Ideal. In the land where belief and knowledge are one.
I am not writing for the everyday man. He isn't interested at all in my ontology, even though I do have exquisite proofs. I move on in stillness.
I concur. Having no relevance to our everyday existence is practically definitive of true horror. It implies of a thing that it has no place in our sense of order. It's an abomination to rational thought. That such a thing even exists can only be a matter of Fortean speculation. It exists through inexistence.
DeleteThere's a lot of good stuff in your reply, and I couldn't begin to put down all the thoughts it conjures up. The word "abomination" really stands out. It's a word with a very distinguished history. Yes, dis-order is central to its meaning. Noise, filth, and the unclean. Cleanliness/efficiency is the highest value we have. Dirty data is the horror of science. Sloppy method. The interruption of the irrelevant must be controlled. One simply cannot listen to a classical symphony while the neighbors are screaming and playing heavy metal music. I cannot write while my family is talking to me. And I hate tv chatter. As for biology, the stench of the birth canal and death is unbearable. And the evolutionists have no idea what to do with sex that does not lead to regeneration of the species. Disorder. In the classical ordering of society, to be counted and to exist one must belong to one of the classes. From the aristocrats and the priests down to the slaves and the penitents, from the Brahmans down to the untouchables one belonged somewhere in the ordering, but then there were the classless, the lumpen proletariate, the worthless scum, the sponges, the non-existent, the discarded, the miscreants. The well-ordered and the unordered. Today noise is taking over. Because that beautiful symphony in which everything is brought into harmony is recorded and made available to the multitudes and turned into capital, it soon becomes old vinyl and CDs in a second-hand shop and is just as quickly thrown away. Endless copying is turning everything into trash. We stockpile what will soon be thrown away. The noise is becoming noisome. Now we all sit at home writing out own little compositions. We are a nation of masturbaters. The real has vanished in endless ephemerality. Or so one might think if there weren't an escape.
DeleteToday I was placed on paid administrative leave from my job at the library. I don't know why. No reasons were provided. The horror of my situation is exquisite.
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