Lovecraft

[spoke]

So. 'The Rats in The Walls.' omg so freaked out. And I'm not sure exactly where in there lies the urge to burn those pages/wish I had never read the story, but it was that bad after first reading it.

And I will probably never read it again, because it's one thing to sit down and force my self to re-read certain passages and try to figure out what was doing this to me - and another, having done so, to turn around and keep sticking my hand into a fire. It's somewhere in the cannibalism, because the next story in the book I'm reading now is 'The Picture in the House' and that... was bad, but not as much so.

Somewhere in this mix of insanities is the idea that there are certain Outside Forces humanity is all but incapable of fighting, and they all thus far have been Terribly Evils. There is this... surrender to and sinking into fear, here, that makes me wonder about his mental state? Then there's Randolph Carter. Whom I only reached a couple of days after Rats, and I could cry that there isn't more of him in this book. I know there isn't, because I cheated and checked - The Silver Key made such a wonderful balm, after the first two. Even though the rest of them aren't as bad, I needed that.

But the thing is, even with the freaked-out induced by Rats, I couldn't just.. stop. For one thing, if I hadn't done something I'd have had nightmares. I still did, but I got myself calmed down enough that it was... strange, and titled off-center. Less a nightmare than a dream that thought it should be one. Those damned caverns where there, and there were people in them, but they were more ghosts than anything, and somehow - the crew of DS9 was in there, getting out those people who were sill able to escape? Which included a younger set of themselves. It amused me that young Cisco kept wanting to talk to his older self and find out what was going on. Dax was pulling him back, though...

So. For one thing, there's something I remember reading once that I took to heart, though I cannot remember where I read it. I can't even remember the exact wording, just that you should read things you don't like as well as those you do, and explore in a literary sense to expand yourself as a writer? So after the initial 'oh my God why did I read that? ;_;' I stopped and thought, 'Okay clearly there is something I need to deal with here.'

I don't like the idea of surrendering to this sort of nightmarish evil. Which is essentially what seemed to me happened to the guy in Rats. I don't like cannibalism. I don't like the way everything Outside at first seems to be a horror, to Lovecraft - as if his mind did not admit of the possibility of a non-human sentience that is not Evil, or barring that, repellant to humanity due to not being human.

But part of what drew me into this, aside from liking the Call of Cthulhu and the beauty of the way he puts words together, is that certain muses reacted to that and I felt like... here was something I should pursue, if I wanted to do better writing them. In this, I was not disappointed.

Gerald Tarrant - It's just about impossible to speak of Gerald without Damien being involved. Part of that is that it's... the only parallel I can think of is DiR. The way you see Bran mostly through Will, you see Gerald mostly through Damien. Only, there are Issues that Damien brings into it from the beginning of the story, and things that go almost unspoken because they are so obvious to the characters involved. Like Gerald's species-ism, which has a lot in common with Lovecraft's fears. And it had not really meant anything to me, until this - nor had it occurred to me that he was scared of those things he defined as other. Which folds into why I have always thought the man is insane, albeit a very controlled and disguised insanity - by any definition of Other that can be applied to that planet? He is Other, or a precursor of what humanity could become under the conditions of their colony world.

Then there's Bakura Ryou. And I wondered, what could such a gentle, dreamer-type person want with this? 'Bakura', this being the only name I can apply to the Spirit of the Ring (and a lot easier than typing that out all the time) him I could see. He has a thing about blood, and can be supinely casually violent... it's not so much that he's focused on violence, as that he seems to see it as a tool... but Ryou?

Then I read the Silver Key. There is an easy and immediate parallel there, Randolph and the Key/Ryou and the Ring. Only. It makes me wonder exactly what the boy thinks the Ring is, you know. Further speculation there will have to wait until I can find more of Randolph Carter.

In the meantime, I shall take refuge in the prosaic reality of a history-book about tea that I picked up on my latest library run.

Comments

slight ramblage...

[lrodell.livejournal.com]

oddly, that makes me want to find The Tao of Tea, which leads sideways to wanting The Tao of Pooh, which daisy-chains me over to Edgar Allan Poe and "The Fall of the House of Usher"--which is what Ryou makes me think of. Just a bit. HPL's brain worked in very interesting ways^^
...tch, think I'll read the Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos now instead of after these other ones...or simultaneously, because the first cluster's due on the 16th =p
(love that the DS9 crew got mixed up in that!)

[shusu.livejournal.com]

I dunno... maybe it's just me, but I react well to things like madness and bloodlust and nightmare. In fact I get rather bored with it. I'm more enthralled by suspense -- the darkness which doesn't reveal its horrors all at once -- than some terrible thing which you must see and can't escape. I'm not real sure if that makes me jaded or detached or maybe just because I've seen and heard real horrors in my life, even if I wasn't participating as more than an observer. It's the secret of the Other; it's only horrifying, IMO, if you don't know its name. It's the pre-birth horror, the world that hasn't happened yet because you haven't entered it.

I guess the key is that I've always been the Other. Even if I didn't consciously exclude myself, I was doing it to myself, stepping back in my 'role' as observer. Watcher. I could never watch carefully enough if I was involved. I honestly never in my life have defined myself with anything bigger than myself. Everything's labels that peel off rather easily. My duties, responsibilities, and capacities, perhaps -- but not my own *self*. And from that perspective? Being the Other is not so bad. It gives you a freedom that's both scary and unlimited.

So I guess... a lot of the things that intrigue, beguile, terrify you -- I find to be expected if not normal. Normal is just when something happens a lot. It doesn't necessarily link, in my head, as the subset of things that are possible. In that sense you have an edge on me, as I can't easily replicate that wonder of finding the Other, when I'm sitting here in its territory and eating its food.

What does it leave? The stories I love the most are the ones that reveal what was always there. Seeking out the Other is such a fraught and violent business. How pointless to me, when we are all the Other.

[spoke.livejournal.com]

Madness, okay - that's not so bad. In some case, good even. It's fun to dissect things and try to figure out why he is insane. It bothered me that I couldn't figure out what was wrong with Gerald, because he comes off very controlled and disciplined and maybe just a little high-strung for his own good? But I knew there was something there I had no words, like being able to sense a fault-line, understanding it's there, without knowing anything about geology. All you can say is you know there's something wrong with the ground at a certain point.

Bloodlust clearly has it's iffy points for me... and nightmare, I don't know... I think the underlying thing that bothers me is the helplessness, and it wouldn't matter what form that came in so long as I could buy the person not being able to get out. Rats communicated that very well, and I use communicated as in a disease. >.< Everything happened so fast, it was like the central guy was just caught in a rip-tide and pulled without ever quite being aware of what had happened to him. *shudder*

Something else I've noticed bothers me, is just heat. I remember talking with you about the Masho and their armors, and you calling Rajura a 'dark summer' and it threw me. Like, I had such a set notion of summer as being heat/sweat/pain/decay/bad that it hadn't really occured to me that other people might not see it that way? ^^; Oh, and nevermind his Spiderness and there are more of those in summer too - and the way heat makes me sooo freaking sleepy all the time and just >.<

I have never been that afraid of Others, though - of Monsters, yes, and here I think I define more as a being or person so lacking in some as-yet-undefined thing that I cannot empathize with them? At all? Worst one I've ever read was in Tad Williams' Otherland books - and there I could see where it ought to be possible to empathize with him, but no. If I'd met him in real life I would shoot him, no question of it. And there, while he scared the crud out of me? It wasn't on the same visercal level as with Rats, I suppose because there are heroes in Otherland. A collection of heroes that have been scattered rather like certain Digimon crews, but they were there, they eventually learned he existed, my biggest fear for them was not that they couldn't stop him so much as they weren't going to be able to reach him in time to do anything. XD It's funny, dealing with Otherness in various guises is one of the underlying themes in the book, but That Bastard was the only one who freaked me at all.

I think, if I were to choose an archtype - I would have to be a Seeker. A rather cautious one, maybe, but that was my thing as a little kid - that song of Bilbo and Frodo's in Tolkein, about going out traveling? That, I wanted - or for a path to Someplace Else to magically appear in my yard. That would've been nice.

Possibly another part of what gave me such a bad turn with that was the protagnonist (I cannot call him a hero - the ancestor who left the Accursed Ancestral Dwelling after killing all his Evil Kin, he would qualify. Sortof. But not this guy)the guy finds or is called by an Other that is defintely a Monster - so far as I've yet seen, all Lovecraft's Others are. But then the humans for the most part are just as bad - the nasty inbred backwater humans. Chiefly. I have a feeling I haven't gotten far enough to meet any intellectual badguys? Although there is always the fact of the Necronomicron, which did not write itself. <<

Will have to come back to all of this, shower calls! ^^

[lrodell.livejournal.com]

hmm, that might be why I'm a bit strange, then? I *loved* Poe and Hawthorne and such as a kid? And ghost stories, fairytales, mythology (mostly Greek, a little Roman, I notice in retrospect) and 'factual' demon/possession/vampire/etc. stuff, to the point that the parentages worried a bit? I'm pretty sure I remember reading The Odyssey and The Illiad for fun, and being surprised and pleased to run into them again in high school? read encyclopedias for fun, too^^