Not wanting to distract our quest for answers by providing them myself, this post concerns the mysteries embodied in the great American works by H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft's fiction focuses on exploring the deepest regions of time and space. We can discover truths about the vastnesses of reality in our dreams, as in "The Dream Quest of the Unknown Kadath", or we can go searching, such as the protagonist does in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth". Do we want to find these answers?
Howard Phillips Lovecraft wrote deeply psychological stories with an archaic atmosphere and vast sense of time and space. I always feel like I've stumbled onto some parallel, or ancient history when I read his work. His protagonists, usually younger men who are curious folks with keen minds to discover everything the planet has to offer, stumble upon remnants of our pasts. Alien archeology is often at the forefront; references to old, powerful gods lying dormant tend to fill in the background. Sometimes there will be a juxtaposition between two characters: one who reacts in horror to the new findings described above, and another who embraces the newly-discovered realities. A good example of this is in Pickman's Model. Pickman's Model concerns two art students, one of which stops attending classes and begins working in his house, becoming a sort of recluse. The other student chances to meet him on the street one day and is persuaded by Pickman to come back and look at the new art he's been creating since he stopped going to class. Pickman's horrific art isn't drawn from his imagination; he just paints portraits.
The revelation in Lovecraft's stories, by the reader and protagonist, is that there are creatures/gods of immense size and power somewhere in space, either lying dormant or just waiting for some thunderous moment, to take control of, or destroy without reason or pity, this race of beings called "humans". The comment being made is do we insist upon our dominance and fight for our right to live? Or do we embrace these new realities thereby possibly forestalling our demise? Do we even have that choice?
"as I mechanically kept stumbling ahead into the stronger light I realised that my fancy had been but feeble." (The Nameless City)
Lovecraft's The Nameless City is a fictional narrative by a man who has traveled to the middle of a forsaken section of desert in the Middle East to find the titular city and learn about its downfall. Throughout the story it is clear that the narrator assumes that people once lived here and worshiped strange gods and performed strange rites. He encounters a long deep passage, which he follows, descending into the earth. On the walls of the passage are hieroglyphics telling the story of this lost race and the city. There aren't people depicted in the carvings, but reptilian humanoid creatures which the narrator assumes are allegorical. Towards the end of the story he figures out that there is no analogy. His "fancy had been feeble", and he had not been able to entertain the idea that a separate race could exist and create this city and these carvings. As he stumbles towards an actual light given off by an abyss in the bowels of the earth, he gains a deeper understanding of the truth because more is being revealed to him.
The Nameless City is one of my favorite Lovecraft stories and it is indicative of the concept surrounding most of his works: People cannot imagine anything unless those things are relative to themselves. The fact that human beings could be a secondary race, is a thought that we aren't capable of. Lovecraft's fictions attempt to prove that, even if they can't be taken literally, seeing ourselves as one tiny speck on the edge of the abyss of time and space is a positive step towards understanding.
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