Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown

---

the course of HP Lovecraft's life was altered by an unfortunate madness

in April of 1893, his father

a commercial traveler from the vicinity of Boston

was on business in Chicago

it was there that Winfield Scott Lovecraft

experienced the general paralysis of the insane

Winfield's violent hallucinations

were soon placed him in Butler Hospital

his troubled wife, Susan Phillips Lovecraft

was forced to return home to her family in Providence, Rhode Island

with Susie was her two-year-old son,

Howard Phillips Lovecraft

today, the man readers of weirdfiction known as HP Lovecraft

is ranked alongside America's best writers

He defined the themes and obsessions of 20th century horror

and as we chug on into the 21st century, he doesn't seem to be going away

he let drop away all the trappings of what is called "horror"

and he moved into some narrative peculiar to himself, invented his own genre really

Lovecraft tells you about the scale of man in the cosmos

and also he is really the most articulate about saying, there isn't any indifference from the ancient gods to man

Lovecraft takes that optical empty to the cosmos

If you could think of a kind of supernatural horror fiction

it's almost certain that at some point in his career

Lovecraft applied himself to it

and when he got it right that he often did, nobody could beat him

these are the unspeakable names of the Old Ones

the very heart of Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos

a loosely connected canon, which has gone on

to became one of literature's most influential creations

I don't know that Lovecraft ever set down initially and went: "I'm going to grow a grand mythos"

I think that, yes it begins

and then everything else sort of fits in it

it's a very complex sort of inbreeding of mythologies and what

essentially the pitch would be what, things much older than mankind

things much older than earth are gazing upon on us

with indifference and cruelty

those Old Ones were gone now hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world

until the time when the great priest Cthulhu

from his dark house in the mighty city of R'lyeh under the waters, should rise

and bring the earth again beneath his sway

these kind of being are you know that demons coming from hell

there are these wired tentacle creatures coming from other worlds into ours

and that they have been banished and that they will return someday and regain what was once theirs

the Old Ones of the universe, the Old ones of the Cosmos

so that's force beyond us that we are incapable of controlling and that force

there is the universe that is vaster than we could ever comprehend

prior to Lovecraft, if you read horror, if you read ghost stories

you'll always have a vision of a world which is fundamentally hospitable:

"god is looking after you"god is looking after the good people"

good people will probably survive horror stories or ghost stories or whatever

Lovecraft redefined things

He took it away from the ghost story away, from the gothic and into this vision

of a malign world, this place surrounded by

evil mad horrible monstrous things always trying to get in

who frankly don't really care about us

But what lied in an old world xenophobic gentleman

to write these tales of unknown abominations and cosmic gods

where bay and tranquil river blend

and leafy hillsides rise

the spires of Providence ascend against the ancient skies

and in the narrow winding ways that climb o'er slope and crest

the magic of forgotten days may still be found to rest

I AM PROVIDENCE:

the Phillips' house at 454 Angell Street

was a vast-stage of old American values

Lovecraft's family was very well to do

and I believe they consider themselves to be of the Providence aristocracy

the Phillips line goes back very far in Providence history all the way

as early as the late 17th century

the Lovecraft side originates in England, and you could trace that all the way back to about the 15th century

there were Lovecrafts or Lovecrofts in Devon

he was a truly, almost a "Mayflower"specimen

preserved in the formaldehyde of New England you know

and he was an Anglophile that definitely did not get laid much you know

and the guy that was an alien amongst us, in the sense that he was not a very masculine child

after Winfield's death from syphilis on July 19th 1898

young Howard was all Suzie Lovecraft had left

she mothered her child incessantly

so much so, that she was known to make friends stoop when walking hand-in-hand with her son

for fear his arm would be pull from its socket

despite her over attention

Suzie Lovecraft's near puritanical views restrained any physical affections toward her son

Lovecraft would later admit to his only wife

that this form of mothering was a devastating to him

his grandfather Whipple Phillips, was a very impressive industrialist

Lovecraft remembers Whipple telling him oral ghost stories

at the age of 4 or 5

he tutored him in a number of other ways, trying to take an interest into his education

in the attic was an immense library presumably collected by his grandfather

and Lovecraft went up there as a boy with a candle secretly and started reading these old books

and fell in love with the 18th century

Lovecraft is more than a product of his time

he is a product of a couple of centuries earlier, so he was born out of time

one of the important things for the 18th century was the code of a gentleman

to live as a gentleman with dignity and honesty and integrity

he read the literature of the 18th century and the early 19th century and said

"I want to be like those people I want to be like Alexander Pope"

who wrote poetry just for the love of it"

I've always had this subconscious feeling

that, everything since the 18th century is unreal or illusory

a sort of grotesque nightmare or a caricature"

Lovecraft learned a lot in his grandfather's house

in fact that all the learning that he had I think came from there

his schooling was intermittent at best apparently he had various of

nervous melody that had kept him out of school

this was a time before education was mandatory

you didn't have to send your child to school if you didn't want to

at the age of 8 he would became filled with burning love of chemistry

shortly there after that he discovered astronomy, which I think was an even more important influence he says

it was through astronomy that he gained a sense of the boundlessness of the universe

and the insignificance of humanity within the cosmos

there's a phrase that generally I only encountered it when talking when reading or talking with people like paleontologist or geologist

the kinds of "Deep Time" which is pretty alien to most people, most people tend to

think of history and terms ofyears

"Deep Time" is that time before, before the comprehension of man

the geological time

is a way of thinking about it where you are working on a time scale where you talk about things like mountains are pushed up in row, continent shift

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes