'this less material life is our truer life' - again, Lovecraft and spirituality

Regarding what I wrote about Lovecraft and spirituality and transcendence yesterday, observe the opening passage to his story 'Beyond the Wall of Sleep' (1919) below.  Sometimes these opening philosophical gambits are worth the price of admission alone, regardless of what Lovecraft may be able to subsequently achieve with the narration itself.  Here I think he rather clearly exhibits the sort of Dark Sehnsucht and anti-reductionism I alluded to:

I have frequently wondered if the majority of mankind ever pause to reflect upon the occasionally titanic significance of dreams, and of the obscure world to which they belong. Whilst the greater number of our nocturnal visions are perhaps no more than faint and fantastic reflections of our waking experiences—Freud to the contrary with his puerile symbolism—there are still a certain remainder whose immundane and ethereal character permits of no ordinary interpretation, and whose vaguely exciting and disquieting effect suggests possible minute glimpses into a sphere of mental existence no less important than physical life, yet separated from that life by an all but impassable barrier. From my experience I cannot doubt but that man, when lost to terrestrial consciousness, is indeed sojourning in another and uncorporeal life of far different nature from the life we know; and of which only the slightest and most indistinct memories linger after waking. From those blurred and fragmentary memories we may infer much, yet prove little. We may guess that in dreams life, matter, and vitality, as the earth knows such things, are not necessarily constant; and that time and space do not exist as our waking selves comprehend them. Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.

Sometimes I side with those who find Lovecraft's verbose 'purple prose' somewhat ponderous and amusingly porcine.  At other times I think his hefty phrases lean slightly more in the direction of Milton or Faulkner than Edward Bulwer-Lytton and achieve a certain degree of thoughtful opulence (if you're willing to also chuckle a little as you appreciate it).  This whole passage is a pretty good example of his wordiness working well, I think.  His 'immundane' is a very aptly chosen word for his subject matter and one I plan to use in the future.  His 'terraqueous globe' is just delicious - in the way monsters like Godzilla and Gamera are epic and outrageous at once.  The constant recurrence of globulous phrases like 'titanic significance' and 'uncorporeal life', couched as they are in syntactical rhythms that mirror their manatee-like eloquence, induce in the reader a flavour of the very dream state that is under review.  Matching form to theme is one crucial mark of great writing.  Today, here, Lovecraft is a great writer in my opinion.

At any rate, the content is substantial.  This is not merely a dreamy prose-poem.  Lovecraft is hungrily excavating his lifelong philosophical pursuit:  a depth-dive into ontology, a refusal to accept commonsense,  commonplace reality and a determination to dig beneath its surface.  Or, to move the metaphor from 'under' to 'over', a determination to escape the orbital pull of everyday appearances.  This supra-mundane impulse and the careful explication it engenders in Lovecraft's works are, I submit, rather clear signs of his bent toward something not at all unlike a spiritual worldview.  I know many spiritualities seek a totally 'immanent' picture of the world, without immaterial remainder, but 'a certain remainder' is exactly what Lovecraft feels in his gut here and he thinks it unwise to ignore that intuition.  And equally unwise to throw an 'ordinary interpretation' at it (such as that it was just the spicy burritos we ate, or a Freudian/Feuerbachian projectionist sort of explain-it-away theory).

To be fair, the point I cited S. T. Joshi making - that Lovecraft consciously sought a 'non-supernatural cosmic art' (in Lovecraft's own words) - was put forth by Joshi as being an arc of intellectual growth that Lovecraft underwent during his short career.  I agree that just such a development of ideas and ideology occurred in Lovecraft.  But his 'spiritual' roots are prominent in this early story and I'm not yet convinced he ever 'outgrew' them in his heart, even though he sought intentionally to do so by means of the theoretical rhetoric he adopted.  I do think his intellectual convictions had sincerely moved in the direction of materialism, but I also think that position was in tension with his heart's impulse for the 'beyond' and that even his own artistic fleshing out of materialism (the Cthulhu Mythos) was decidedly non-reductionistic.

It's fascinating really.  I think so many atheists and secularists and 'neo-pagans' are drawn to Lovecraft because he is really one of the great spiritual writers of the 20th century, a mystic for materialists I suppose.  (And I would welcome your thoughts on this if you self-identify as such.)  Lovecraft's keen sense of 'cosmic horror' seems to be in tension with his equally keen sense of Sensucht, of spiritual yearning.  And I think this is why so many 'religious believers' have enjoyed and imitated Lovecraft too, despite not sharing his atheism (in popular genre fiction one thinks of the likes of Catholics such as Gene Wolfe and Tim Powers).

Of course, Christian theology's emphasis on physical creation and bodily resurrection would, ironically, give far more substance and meaning to material, earthly life than Lovecraft intimates here (our 'vain presence' in the physical ecosphere is 'secondary' at best, he surmises).  But Lovecraft's deep-seated hunch that we are more than merely meat-machines remains hugely significant to me and I think we do him an injustice if we reduce him to merely an apostle of a grim cosmic realism comprised of particles-all-the-way-down.  His view was sincerely bleak and devoutly 'scientific' (as he understood it), but the beat of his heart's longing for Something More never stops pulsating throughout his work.  If we ignore that, at times faint, palpitation, it will, Poe-esque, grow louder and louder in our ears until we scream out our confession that we buried it beneath the floorboards.

'non-supernatural cosmic art' vs. Sensucht: H. P. Lovecraft's God-Shaped Hole

‘The time has come when the normal revolt against time, space, & matter must assume a form not overtly incompatible with what is known of reality—when it must be gratified by images forming supplements rather than contradictions of the visible & measurable universe.  And what, if not a form of non-supernatural cosmic art, is to pacify this sense of revolt—as well as gratify the cognate sense of curiosity?’

-H. P. Lovecraft to Frank Belknap Long, Selected Letters 295-6, cited in Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew, Editor, The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters (2014), Ashgate Publishing, Surrey, p. 391 in the article ‘Lovecraft, Monsters In’ by S. T. Joshi, who comments:

‘This view makes it evident that Lovecraft was seeking to go beyond traditional supernatural horror and more in the direction of the new genre of science fiction.’ (ibid.)

But such a move would still be a potently hybridised science fiction literature, one that pulls in different directions, since it is still rooted in ‘revolt’, which could be understood as the bent in humans toward anti-reductionism.  At most, this would mean Lovecraft was yearning toward a philosophically non-reductionist form of materialism in which to express his obvious mysticism.  The likes of Graham Harman’s Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (2012) help elucidate this.  But this hybridisation could also signal a fundamental tension in Lovecraft between a sort of Lewisian sense of Sensucht, a longing for the transcendent, and a principled and intuitive drive toward sheer, closed, non-divine immanentism.  Either way, though Lovecraft may have professed a desire to head in a ‘scientific’ (not to mention ‘scientistic’) and explicitly atheistic materialist direction, he was no Dawkins-esque cavalier reducer.  It seems obvious to me that mysticism ran deep in Lovecraft, a ‘spiritual’ sort of impulse that he embraced, guarded, and cultivated, even if he also sought to be as thoroughly non-supernaturalist as he could be.  And it also seems to me that this ‘spirituality’, though it follows in the footsteps of many spiritualities that seek naturalistic closure without divine remainder, couldn’t resist expressing itself through pantheons of deities, through a genuine sense of worship and outward and ‘upward’ supra-spatiotemporal projectionism of deity-manufacture.  In short, Lovecraft seems to have exhibited as well as anyone the ‘god-shaped hole’ so prevalent and prominent in human psychology and activity.

Chiliad: A Meditation - by Clive Barker

Subterranean Press 2014 Deluxe Edition, illustrations by Jon Foster; originally published 1997

I’ve been circling in on really reading Clive Barker for years now.  I’ve up to this point still only managed to read a few novellas (‘In the Hills, the Cities’, collected in The New Weird edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer, and ‘Rawhead Rex’, collected in the The Mammoth Book of Monsters edited by Stephen Jones).  I saw Chiliad, a very slim volume and with illustrations to boot, at my local library and thought I’d give it a go as well.  I’m glad I did.  

I’ve been picking up a notion here and there that Barker, like his co-master of modern horror Stephen King, is a surprisingly spiritual writer, one not afraid to tackle faith as much as monsters and who seemingly goes so far as to profess to be some kind idiosyncratic religious believer.  Yes, I’m talking about the guy who gave us the Hellraiser franchise of movies and associated publications, the guy whose fiction has graphic content that can make even the aforementioned Stephen King blush.  If you doubt me about Barker’s spirituality, Chiliad would be a good place to start testing that doubt.  In addition to containing brief moments in the story that are violently and sexually explicit, the tale is also explicitly spiritual, a search for and from faith it seems.    

            And it is a tale about doubt too and the bout between life-giving meaning and despair-dealing pointlessness, not just for individuals but for the world.  Chiliad relates gruesome and harrowing cycles of violence and vengeance that reach back to mankind’s beginning.  In so doing it faces head-on the question of whether we are utterly alone in an indifferent universe or whether the universe, even filled with gratuitous and awful evil and suffering, might yet contain some kind of credible hope in genuine metaphysical goodness. Its narrative touches on theodicy too in showing individual human responsibility for choices made to pursue paths of evil and all the collateral damage that spins out from those individual choices to do evil.  (Indeed, part one of the book is entitled ‘Men and Sin’.)

The metaphysics here is of both varieties:  the pop misnomer that has connotations of psychics and paranormal phenomena (which feature as central plot aspects in the tale) as well as the technically proper use of the term, which denotes the area of analytic philosophy that studies things like time, existence, identity and troublesome pairs of concepts like universals and particulars, substances and properties, freewill and determinism.  Barker’s little book is a genuine meditation on the nature of time as well as the nature of persons and meaning.  In fact, he adopts and adapts the well-worn trope of figuring time as a river and part two of the book is significantly titled ‘A Moment at the River’s Heart’.

            But for all this philosophical weightiness, the book is far from ‘heavy going’.  It is very much a need-to-know-what-happens-next page-turner with some good twists and turns.  And that is a feat.  To write something so overtly abstract and meditative that yet spins several engrossing yarns is some pretty kick-ass artistry and hats off to Mr. Barker for that alone.  Indeed, the book is also an overt meditation on storytellers and their craft as much as it is on finding meaning in the middle of life.  The author several times breaks the spell of the story to address the reader directly and talk about their cooperative relationship in the narration of the story.  But it all flows very smoothly and you still somehow feel like you’re in the fictional dream throughout.  The meta-fictional asides do not cloy or bore.  Barker is good.  

            Each of the two main narratives that make up the book (each about a man living by a river in England, their respective lives separated by a thousand years) is introduced by a gorgeously weird and mysterious apocalyptic vision.  The first is ingenious in creating a yearning that existence would somehow climax in true meaning and joy, but it does so obliquely and really only opens the question and incites the longing.  The vision has to do with digging old people out of graves and watching them grow backwards into infanthood.  The second vision is ingenious in setting up a scenario that shows the absurdity of a world that contains zero doubt and thus zero faith.  It describes a sort of ‘second-coming’, not of Jesus, but of every god that was ever worshipped as well as myriads that weren’t, a world where someone would actually desire to hide themselves away from all this open and crystal clear divinity so that they might experience some divine obscurity and the opportunity for spiritual longing and a wilfully given belief.  These visions are enthralling for their depth and resonance.  As I say, though, the main tales of the book are actual plots about developed characters and these are riveting.  (I finished the book in no time.)  The net effect is thus both meditative as well as entertaining.

Mr. Barker now has my full attention and I look forward to really digging into his body of work (and would welcome suggestions for which books to prioritise reading).  I’ll leave you with his own closing words to the book, which give some indication of the tone and tension in which it’s written.  The narrator has decided to commit himself at last to the ‘river’ he has been only observing:

            …I wade in.

            I cannot tell you if John of the Desert, dressed in his coat of goatskins, awaits me there, his hands spilling baptismal water; or if Christopher the Giant will come to set me on his shoulders, calling me Chylde; or if Christ may come, trout leaping at His heavy hem, eager to strew their rainbows before His pierced feet.

            Or if I will be only carried away, looking through the plain glass of my eyes, hoping to see before I drown sun, moon, and stars hanging in the same firmament.

(Inner illustration by Jon Foster)