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THE STARRY WISDOM
EDITED BY D.M. MITCHELL
AN EBOOK
ISBN 978-1-908694-42-3
PUBLISHED BY ELEKTRON EBOOKS
COPYRIGHT 2012 ELEKTRON EBOOKS
www.elektron-ebooks.com
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a database or retrieval system, posted on any internet site, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holders. Any such copyright infringement of this publication may result in civil prosecution
INTRODUCTION
My intentions in presenting this volume were not to collect a series of escapist fantasies, nor were they in fact primarily literary. It is true that areas of this book fall within the traditional fields of sci-fi, horror and fantasy, but I stress that this is merely a side product. I do not, however, wish to deprecate the efforts of devotees who have dedicated so much work to raising the public’s awareness of H.P. Lovecraft’s abilities and achievements. At the same time, Lovecraft has suffered much at the hands of unmindful critics and even more from uninspired and talentless imitators. For my part, the preoccupation with literary talent and academic respectability is besides the point.
My aim is to dig deeper, to bypass the superficial and access the subterranean channels of archetype and inspiration with which Lovecraft was connected. The current of semi-occult symbolism and shamanic imagery inhabiting his writings did not originate in his conscious, rational mind any more than that of William Blake or Antonin Artaud. Lovecraft’s direct ancestors have been frequently acknowledged (Machen, Poe, Blackwood etc), but we can also see in retrospcct how his contemporaries were simultaneously, yet unknown to him, working with aspects of the same primal material in many diverse ways.
One need only look at Lautréamont’s Maldoror with its delirious visions of flying octopi and imbecile gods, at the lurid polytheistic systems of Aleister Crowley and Helena Blavatsky, and especially at Artaud’s stage scenario There Is No More Firmament.
I feel the man’s essential vision is being missed and devalued in favour of his lesser creations: the overtly hierarchical ‘Mythos’. It’s important to realise that this vision was received, usually involuntarily – mediumistically and shamanically, normally in dreams. While working in the field of ‘pulp’ fiction with genres which he, himself, deemed unworthy, he crafted morbid and disturbing allegories of social and biological upheaval; – cryptically prophetic and spiritually exploratory; – this latent content of his work now needs excavating.
In the cases in this book where the ‘Mythos’ has been utilised, it has been used only in passing – in the same informal way in which Lovecraft himself intended. To present “a kind of shadowy phantasmagoria which may have the same sort of vague coherence as a cycle of traditional myth or legend”.
A large part of Lovecraft’s driving force came from the frisson he experienced between the patriarchal vision of order, logic and reason to which he adhered, and the intruding chaotic, female forces from ‘outside’ – forces both disruptive and ultimately redeeming. This paradox was, for him, never resolved and I am of the opinion that his occasional misogyny and ill-considered racism both sprang from this gulf between these antagonistic sides of his personality.
At first glance, especially to ‘hard-core’ Lovecraftians, the connection between some of the pieces herein may seem tenuous. Look a little deeper and you will see the themes of myth and magick intruding into normal, mundane life. Man is seen from a universal perspective – his anthropocentricity torn to shreds. Visions of cosmic alienation, metamorphic desire, mutating sexuality – all direct or indirect descendants of his vision.
Hopefully, this book will not be seen as an attack on the efforts of messrs Joshi, Price et al, but as a complementary and parallel current leading to strange and fascinating waters.
Something that pleasantly surprised me when I embarked on this project was the fact that, independently of me, so many other people were re-evaluating Lovecraft’s work and reaching the same or similar conclusions. Alan Moore, Stephen Sennitt, Don Webb, Grant Morrison – all have intimated to me that they believe Lovecraft’s work should undergo this transformation.
The stars are right.
The Old Ones are returning.
–DM Mitchell, Editor
RECOGNITION
Alan Moore
Heat, fierce and lurid, cooks the hunched hotel-room shadows into boiling ink. Old water spits and sizzles from the radiator joints, their copper fittings thick as vertebrae and leaking dirty steam. A blind is drawn across the room's one window closing out the Boston night, adorned with faded robins, bleached vines and the memory of flowers.
Here is the ragged wheeze of sulphur-bitten lungs. Here are the woman's muffled squeals, made down her nose.
The sallow, vaguely foreign-looking manager is standing by the wardrobe, queerly still, gas-mantle stuttering on the wall behind him splashing careless light upon his back, a yellow urinary glaze upon his oiled black hair, its slick topography. His Easter Island face is lost in shadow, save there, where the gaslight catches on his glistening cheek and errant muscle twitches. By the door, the Cuban maid turns off her hearing aid and swallows hard against the parching heat. She grips the tunic of the bell-boy beside her, digging four grey nails into his sleeve while he sips hesitantly from a pale blue cocktail cigarette that's balanced in the other hand. His uniform, a threadbare Burgundy, is tainted with a sickly orange by this wan, uneven light and half unbuttoned down the front, blotched dark with gin. Stood in the juddering mantle-glow, their shadows cringe amongst the huge primeval flowers disfiguring the sweltered wallpaper. They stare towards the bed.
The Devil, red as tamarind, kneels in a rose of sweat-fogged sheets between the woman's arsenic-whitened thighs. His hairless body glistening as though freshly painted, one raw hand about each of her ankles where damp mocha hose is bunched. Her hands are bound with salmon shreds of nightgown to the condensation-beaded metal of the bed-head, fingers opening and closing like the thin limbs of albino crabs kept too long from the light. Balled up into a fist of silk her underwear is crammed into her mouth so that her cheeks bulge like an infant's. One suspender, spittle-silvered, has escaped the parted lips to trail across her chin.
He pulls her onto Him, onto His frilled crustacean shaft and her vagina steams. Convulsed by great magnetic shudders He is roaring, snorting like a murdered horse as He ejaculates, an orgasm of jewels that floods her womb with Turquoise, Jade and Chrysolite. Salt streams of Beryl and Jacinth run down between her legs, the blue-ticked mattress turned to a cathedral-glass of brilliant stains. The bell-boy clears his throat.
Up in the hotel room above, the travelling salesman, Winfield Lovecraft, kneels there with his ear pressed to the radiator pipe and hears it all. Behind clenched eyelids, luminous paretic visions swarm; provide the feverish tableaus that he cannot see. He listens while the devil and the hotel staff take turns to fuck his wife. Tears big as thunder-spots fall from his burning cheeks to splash against the flecked linoleum. This is his punishment: he'd never dreamed that Susan might be hurt.
Those long and cock-sore weeks, what was a man to do? A wife who sat there at her bedroom mirror working creams into the skin beneath her cheek-blades, face already pallid, clay-like. She refused to touch him. On the road, the women hoboes sat astride his lap for cigarettes, and farmer's daughters, just like in the jokes. One night in Marblehead that waitress with the bruised and skinny legs, not quite fifteen, had let him take her face down on a sprawling, dog-eared tumble of Judge magazines stacked underneath the stairs, exquisitely cross-hatched caricatures imprinted faintly in reverse upon her sweat-g
lazed belly, on her breasts.
Downstairs the chanted protest of the bedsprings is commenced once more and viral imagery is seething in the dark behind the salesman's eyelids, overlays of spirochetal consciousness; alien signals flickering along the raddled spine. He rises, stumbles to the window in his shirt-sleeves, pant suspenders trailing in loose intestinal loops to either side. Hooking his nicotined fingers underneath the jamb he wrenches up the heavy glass, dust-frosted on the one side, rain-smeared on the other; bows a slurred screech from the sash, its single vocal cord.
The third-floor prospect overlooks the rear of the hotel, dog-trodden yards where toppled refuse bins lay beached in typhous dunes, the tidal debris lapping all about them: bottle glass that glints up from drenched cinder like a constellation fallen on hard times; suggestive knots of rag; the emptyings of chamber-pots. The window yawns, inhales, draws sweet and septic breath into the room.
Planting his hands upon the blistered, sarcomatous paintwork of the sill he leans into the rotten night, a weather-eaten figurehead, lips barnacled with sores.
The words spill fierce and brilliant, a fan of white sparks shearing from a lathe, malarial poetry, hoarse canticles of ruin, abject glossolalia. They fucked his wife, the Devil and the bell-boy; came in spurts of coloured smoke across her poison-livid belly. It was all his fault, his punishment spelled in abandoned dresses strung along the roadside, rented cunts in rented rooms. Shaking and retching now he voids their names into the black, a gingham litany of women named for flowers, and saints, and executed queens.
Below, a window opens. Grey perfumes of broiling offal ribbon out through febrile mists above the garbage; tangle in blowfly trajectories. The pushy little wop downstairs is yelling for him to shut up, just shut the fuck up but he can't, he can't, there's so much more to tell, about his wife, her distant monologues upon their little girl until he'd had to slap her, Susan, he's a boy! A little boy! Her father, old man Whipple Phillips with his headaches, forehead purple, raging at his son-in-law when first he learned of Winfield's indiscretions. All of this the salesman bellows, out across the silent roofscape, scraps of echo snagging in the eaves.
Someone is hammering on the door, but nothing stems his pentecostal stream, chin wet from slobbered consonants. He is the monstrous father and his cheeks bulge with new syllables; a dreadful tertiary language that his son will one day echo in the loathsome coinages he picks to name his pantheon, his only children. From the open window of his hotel room, Yog Sothoth howls into the world's stink; roars and roars into the human dark.
In 1933, some thirty-five years later, Howard Lovecraft, in a letter to his friend James Morton, claims light-heartedly to be descended from his Elder deities: from Azathoth, Cthulhu and Yog Sothoth. There, four years before his end, he almost managed to decrypt the bas-reliefs raised in the R'lyeh of his sunken mind; almost exposed the Lurker at the Threshold as a travelling salesman, nothing more. Would he have screamed his father's name, like Wilbur Whately's brother, from a hilltop: College Hill, or Sentinel? Would he have recognized himself, his nature and his mannerisms captured in the frail, fore-doomed procession of his fictive victims; his narrators, driven mad or torn apart by Old Ones, things that suppurate and bellow in the sloughs of night?
“The body shrieked at me with a dead cry, And all too late I knew that it was I!”
LOVECRAFT IN HEAVEN
Grant Morrison
Lovecraft picking scabs from the mirror, tearing away flakes of sick skin and dried blood, to expose the glistening surface beneath. Raw and wet, the mirror reflects the face of a monster – hollow-cheeked, two-eyed, pale and bloodless.
The mirror is dying.
‘Cancer of the glass,' Lovecraft is told.
He reaches out to touch the thing he no longer recognises as his own reflection. Long, feminine fingers pass through the glassy membrane, causing ripples and little cries.
‘God in Heaven,’ Lovecraft sighs. ‘It’s brine.’
The mirror fluxes, alive with uncanny tides and the odours of pure creation. Sweet rotten scent of biological mystery. He stares into the depths as something stirs far below, wakens and begins to rise. Storms and rain wrack the mirror’s surface. The thing is coming up from the deep, getting bigger and bigger. It is vast and primitive and he knows its name.
Dying on a bed in an overheated room. The air is thick, like a glue drawn into the lungs. There is something at the back of his head, scrabbling there where there is no light: rats sharpening their claws on the wood-panelled walls of the Pilgrim Fathers, the hiss and crackle of cerebral lightning. A slow, drugged voice speaks of the Ritual of the Stifling Air as the way through. Lovecraft whimpers, dying. His body is devouring itself. He can feel the cancer at work, the ancient crab in his gut, self-generating, self-begetting. He can smell the fishstink of it seeping through his pores. The old starry crab there in the pit of his body. Lovecraft’s eyes roll and the room divides. Angles collide and implode. In these last days, he often wakes from delirious sleep to glimpse the room reforming itself out of nothingness, the pieces flying together out of the void, as though magnetised, to re-assemble, like an explosion in reverse. Once, this strange reconstruction of things was done in a rapid, stealthy manner, now it occurs slowly, allowing him longer and longer periods of time in which to contemplate the Ultimate Absence upon which the world is founded.
Inside him, in the dead cell, he can feel what he knows to be words, like maggots, eating at him. Words giving birth to words and more words; all the things he dared not say. (And if words are maggots, he speculates in a clear space between gusts of pain, what do these larvae become when it is time to mature and metamorphose? What will come a-hatching from his cannibalised body?) He is becoming a thing of words, a word-crab built for descent into the dark. His own stories have turned on him in the wet interior night, growing beyond his control. Blind restless mouths, zodiacal pincers and claws, the deepsea smell of his death, like her smell, the archaic scent of his wife, his lunatic mother in her chains. His death that he smelled in the marine chambers of her cunt so long ago and refused to recognise.
The room is alive, more alive than ever, with unearthly angles. It extends itself into unspeakable trans-Euclidean topographies, breathing and shivering, presenting the dying man with grotesque displays of architectural deformity. The room reverses through itself, defying reason.
Words leak from Lovecraft’s papery skin and fume in the light. The Universe is made of words, he thinks. I have built my own tomb and furnished it. He strains to understand, teetering on the edge of an ocean of limitless ink. The ink of the Void in his pen, flowing out to stain the clean world. The room remakes itself. The candleflame by his bedside dips and flutters as the room eats oxygen and the flame is bent backwards, turning black. The wings of a moth whir against the windowpane, like the buzzing voice of a spirit stuck in a bottle.
‘The Inverse Flame is the Second Gateway,’ the spirit insists. The sentence is repeated several times and then dissolves into incoherence.
‘Cthulhu fhtagn. Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.’
Lovecraft shifts his head and the room lurches. He looks into the wavering door of black flame but he cannot take the step through into the Cold Wastes. He snatches another breath from the abrasive air and falls from a terrible height back into the pillow.
‘All my life I have believed in the God of Reason, the Master Maker with his compass and dividers and his Plan. But the Gods are mad, blind horrors and all our lives are as the dust in their eyes.’
He dare not look through the tear he has made in the Veil. Lovecraft’s breath catches at the back of his throat and turns sour there. The galleries of his brain begin to flood with endorphins in a sweet opiate rush.
Stories disintegrate and fill the room like flying ash.
Ash in his head. A blizzard of atomic debris, stories tearing themselves apart, reconfiguring, creating new stories endlessly. A carrion storm of words eating him from within, desce
nding upon him from outside. His soul, at last, faces annihilation.
Ideas condense from nuclear chaos. Lovecraft stops at the top of the hill to make some notes in his black book.
He wipes his brow, inclines his head to gaze at the vibrating Providence sky and walks on. In this late afternoon light, the town seems queer and otherworldly. Rooftops proliferate and recede into smoky chiffons of drowsing air. Providence seems to slumber and breathe, its uncertain horizons giving life to ambiguous forms: melting gables and rotting bridges and half-seen windows reflecting alien suns. He imagines the town as the three-dimensional shadow of something vast and concealed and then dismisses the thought as irrational.
Briefly, he studies his left hand, with its parchment-white dry skin and knotted tracery of blue submerged highways.
He can feel his blood, circulating through the buried tributaries and unlit canals of his body. His fingers crab and contract into a fist, the nails nipping his palms. He makes a few more jottings in his book and continues.
Evening sun casts a slow, syrupy light on the old stones of the cemetery. Lovecraft wanders among the graves, gently strobed by leaf shadows. A light breeze, the exhalation of spirits, stirs the branches as Lovecraft walks, a living man haunting the houses of the dead. He pauses at the graves of his mother and father and stares at the earth. A bird begins to sing, then changes its mind. Silence descends like a mist.
And in that silence, he can hear the creak and splinter of buried wood. He closes his eyes. The tattered, flayed corpse of his father is clambering through the wet earth into his mother’s coffin, prising the lid away with broken-stick fingers, eager for her fresher flesh. Mother, with blue-bruised skin, peels back her teeth and hisses.
Father, corrupt, insane, tears through her bridal veil, puncturing her rotten flesh and mindlessly fucking the punctures. The two bodies squirm and knot in a tangle of greasy, ruined limbs. Father’s swollen cock bursts and spills maggots, spits obscene crawling words. The earth goes into spasm, vomiting up the dead, exploding them into space.
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