It was a fearsomely ancient place
May. 8th, 2021 12:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dreamer_easyJust started re-reading H.P. Lovecraft's "The Color Out of Space". I'm struck by his effort, in the first section, to create an atmosphere of great age. Our hero passes "ancient" farms which are partially or almost completely fallen into ruins, disappearing into the landscape. I'm not clear how old these "ancient" buildings could actually be in years, but maybe that's not the point -- the point is that human habitation here has collapsed, and nature is erasing them.
The thing is, the people who established those farms themselves erased the area's previous owners -- whichever group or groups of Native Americans were living there, "west of Arkham". They haven't been able to return to their land, despite the failure of the settlements that wrote over their world, like the data on a disk being overwritten.
This is not entirely unlike what happened to the blasted heath.
Hell, it's not entirely unlike The War of the Worlds: the colonial project that wreaks great destruction, but ultimately fails.
I'm on a new antidepressant and it's working remarkably well.
Edit: "... because they all told me to pay no attention to old Ammi Pierce's crazy tales, I sought him out the next morning...". Also "When twilight came I had vaguely wished some clouds would gather, for an odd timidity about the deep skyey voids above had crept into my soul." Skyey! That's like when Tanith Lee said "styxy" instead of "Stygian" and blew my mind. The narrator is afraid of being under the stars -- something terrible might come down, on top of him, and the land.
Edit: Finally got back to this today, 27 June, and finished it. I was struck by the contrast between Lovecraft's hysterical outbursts -- "It was a monstrous constellation of unnatural light, like a glutted swarm of corpse-fed fireflies dancing hellish sarabands over an accursed marsh" -- and his repeated insistence that the things he's talking about cannot be described: a woodchuck is "altered in a queer way impossible to describe"**, the skunk-cabbage "held strange colours that could not be put into any words". Mrs Gardner cannot describe what she's seen with adjectives or even nouns. Ultimately we imagine "realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes". It's as though the attacks of crazy are a doomed attempt to achieve those descriptions, and the extra-cosmic gulfs are the union of the two.
(It's obvious that what Lovecraft has in mind are the insidious effects of radiation, but what gives me the existential dread is the changes to the faces of animals and people. Although surely the most existentially terrifying sentence is "The way it's made an' the way it works ain't like no way o' God's world.")
* The "infinite years of decay" of the forest floor contradicts this image, but contributes to the overall sense of extreme age.
** Admittedly this is hilarious, as are the "strangely puffed insects".
The thing is, the people who established those farms themselves erased the area's previous owners -- whichever group or groups of Native Americans were living there, "west of Arkham". They haven't been able to return to their land, despite the failure of the settlements that wrote over their world, like the data on a disk being overwritten.
This is not entirely unlike what happened to the blasted heath.
Hell, it's not entirely unlike The War of the Worlds: the colonial project that wreaks great destruction, but ultimately fails.
I'm on a new antidepressant and it's working remarkably well.
Edit: "... because they all told me to pay no attention to old Ammi Pierce's crazy tales, I sought him out the next morning...". Also "When twilight came I had vaguely wished some clouds would gather, for an odd timidity about the deep skyey voids above had crept into my soul." Skyey! That's like when Tanith Lee said "styxy" instead of "Stygian" and blew my mind. The narrator is afraid of being under the stars -- something terrible might come down, on top of him, and the land.
Edit: Finally got back to this today, 27 June, and finished it. I was struck by the contrast between Lovecraft's hysterical outbursts -- "It was a monstrous constellation of unnatural light, like a glutted swarm of corpse-fed fireflies dancing hellish sarabands over an accursed marsh" -- and his repeated insistence that the things he's talking about cannot be described: a woodchuck is "altered in a queer way impossible to describe"**, the skunk-cabbage "held strange colours that could not be put into any words". Mrs Gardner cannot describe what she's seen with adjectives or even nouns. Ultimately we imagine "realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes". It's as though the attacks of crazy are a doomed attempt to achieve those descriptions, and the extra-cosmic gulfs are the union of the two.
(It's obvious that what Lovecraft has in mind are the insidious effects of radiation, but what gives me the existential dread is the changes to the faces of animals and people. Although surely the most existentially terrifying sentence is "The way it's made an' the way it works ain't like no way o' God's world.")
* The "infinite years of decay" of the forest floor contradicts this image, but contributes to the overall sense of extreme age.
** Admittedly this is hilarious, as are the "strangely puffed insects".
