The Art and Science of Eidolatry

At midnight the cry rang out: "Here's the bridegroom! Come out to meet him!"

"Mother wept at servant Ib with face a swarming moon, in spidery hand a shoal of shiny keys." – Doublekill, Cosmogony XXX.3

“A restive spirit is the trial of ones who simulate as they explore.”[1] Ideas do not have people; people are among the ideas foisted onto mandrakes. The sunrise is a USB drive pressing ineffectually against your cheek, and fear is not the knocking on the door; it is the willingness to pock your flat with ZOSI 4(+) × 1080p wireless security cameras that the Hatter might accept the sacrifice and show his teeth.[2]

     Weird fiction (we shall not be calling it “the Weird”) has a basic (if tenuous) structure: (i) a character encounters information that cannot be reconciled with his various models of how reality functions; (ii) those models cannot subsequently be adjusted to accommodate this new information; thus, whatever takes the place of his cosmology bears only a parodic resemblance to whatever came before—he goes insane, or else acclimatises to life in a bottle.

     The reader is compelled by the possibility of  egress;[3] the “Horror” label is as inadequate to the content of weird fiction as the erotic pastel drawings that festooned the covers of Weird Tales magazine throughout the 1930s, and through which I’ve been poking eyeholes since December 2020. Such romances are augmented by these bridgeless slits between piano keys.[4] Once, I dreamt of a peculiar plant;[5] I left it alone on a canal barge and returned from The Horseman to discover that its shoots had infiltrated every object in the cabin (a mirror, a chessboard, a saltpear cabinet…). The shoots continued to proliferate in parabolic threads—slowly, and with obvious intelligence. εἴδωλα bond, Lamiae unravel like mixed-declension adjectives, and honey brings the wormwood to your lips.[6]

     The writer, for his part, kneels before the second surface of the sea and calls a swirl of ink a mermaid and the yellow powd’ring petals of a church, a swirl of ink. We might call his pleasure Sagittarian; send an arrow between slender willows and work backwards from the scream.

     So where was I?

     My impatience precludes me from engendering a membrane to be punctured by the Lament Configuration or the Horror in Clay. (This is a sentence with the purpose and consistency of agar (the audience is whispering)). Bridlingly conscious of the colours, shapes, and personalities of words, I am bidden to plot conspiracies of powers in orientation, pixelating sequences from top-down dungeon crawlers. The challenge, for me, is to introduce the alien into this menagerie. If it can be done, there will be something within my experience that orients itself towards an Exit. Contemplate the denizens of your imagination; which of them does not belong? Through the bights of my spinal cord Lips marches like a nutcracker t’wards a rodent spring. He doesn’t spy me; he imagines what it might be like to spy me.[7]

     The structure outlined above has a metatextual application. It is one thing to dramatise an encounter with the abcanny;[8] it is another to induct the reader into dim Carcosa and have him breathlessly narrate his plight as pink-skinned demoiselles are plucked like minutes from the beach. Language, and intelligence before it, already jostles with the alien—the wooden boy who leads the infant in a dance. The Stoic analysis of language understands the utterance as an expression of divine cognition—as music from flutes born of the olive tree, from which we ascribe knowledge of flute-playing to the bark.[9] In the best of all possible autopoietic worlds, the mind is impressed in relation to λεκτά (to sayables), not by them,[10] and the sentence, in its intention and coherence, imitates the air that binds the substance of existence. To speak is to say something of the Contrivance, proceeding cyclically towards the dissolution of its parts; to write is to extol the empty page.[11] The inhabitants of Providence have naught to fear from language, as all fictions will tend towards the same isonomy of powers; this is easily observed in fantasy, where plot follows the course of one’s immune response to an invading agent. But we need only entertain a restive entelechy—one flexuous and choleric as the wasp screwed through the soul by Aristotle’s coin—to understand the tendency of sentences to follow, from bottle-green to wine-dark water, lily-white Morgana’s kicking feet. In this restless nymphaeum, our worm-wrought hearth, Eurynome is a lubricious muse, the word an ever-opening flower.

     In Providence, Alan Moore’s Kubrickian analysis of Lovecraft, magic, and the twentieth century, the Cthulhu Mythos is itself an unmasterable irruption, a gas leak in a basement tenanted by Einstein, Bohr, and Jack the Ripper. Disintegration is a favourite theme of Moore, whose Providence, Promethea, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and What We Can Know About Thurderman—each, in its way, a work of epidemiology—interrogate an ailing culture riddled by its cartoons and its gods (pressing, hideously, against the basement door). Jacen Burrows, the artist, gives us Hitchcock adapting Dennis Wheatley and flamboyantly ignores Margaret Brundage; this is not the witchery that smears the lover and the vampire’s kiss[12] but the dull diabolism of a country that pencils its state boundaries with a ruler. It works by establishing a contrast; something this deliberate invites us to delight in its necrotic bloom.

     S. T. Joshi wrote of Lovecraft that his project, from the thin, monotonous piping at its imbecile heart,[13] was an aesthetic one;[14] the author offers us a rare cosmology that breaks from the cycles of traditional myth while attaining to a certain plausibility (at least, before fashion and the Cockatrice condensed the world into a CPU). Lovecraft’s talent as a writer is too-frequently dismissed by academics, authors, and occultists alike: for the former pair, the author demonstrates no ear for language, undermines the force of his protagonists’ encounter with the Other by bestowing upon every twig a leathery noctilucence, and coagulates his prose with adjectives; for the latter, he assembled his cosmology from embroidered morsels of Lemuro-Atlantean history cribbed from Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine (1888) and its various epitomes, or else his pen was the inelegant recipient of sorcerous presences and emanations[15]—perhaps those same golden builders who impressed on Edward Kelley the milk-glass alphabet for Dee’s Angelic Keys and introduced Crowley to the demon of dispersion.[16] But the text itself is a deliberate affront; the sentences are gnarled and peculiar because to Lovecraft’s mind, they are unequal to the patterns and presences that caper and proliferate in their green-litten ink. It is only by analogy that the colour out of space is called a colour, as it is only by analogy with gods that we identify the icecap’s prison whisper, the pneuma of an orgy or a barnacled computer, and dreams girt with a serpent or a Rope. Lovecraft’s style reflects his fidelity to “the spirit of the thing”—something over and above the chimerical assemblage of analogies to which the writer (speaking generically) is too-frequently reduced, and comparable, ideasthestically, to the colours, textures, and disentombed geometries produced by such bundles of letters as CTHULHU, YOG-SOTHOTH, NYARLATHOTEP, and AZATHOTH—within the structure of his object-oriented ontology (his OOO);[17] in a Lovecraft sentence, the narrator—the book-fenced avatar of an unfocused erudition—is apparent in the gaps between his adumbrations and the objects of his memory, situated as they are (and as he is) within the pathless jungle of uncurated space, and from his pen forever-disentwine bizarreries straining in our vast aggregations of night-black masonry.

     A comparison with Lovecraft’s more successful literary progeny—those who do more than play with Lovecraft, Smith, and Howard’s planet-dust-corroded toys—might clarify something of Grandpa Theobald’s artistic project. Thomas Ligotti (who is to Steve Aylett as Beltane Carom is to Prancer Diago)[18] replaces Lovecraft’s shoggoths, Elder Things, Cthulhu cults, and cyclopean catacombs with marionettes, clowns, supervisor meetings, and the Crimson Cabaret. Passages from his Conspiracy Against the Human Race (cheerfully plagiarised by True Detective writer, Nic Pizzolatto)[19] wherein he picks away at the intuitive distinction between puppets and their masters, mannequins and mannequin dressers, lacquer the grammatical subject (and his protagonists are often joined by the suspicion that they’re players in somebody else’s railway-girdled drama), but the title of the work betrays the author’s fascination with the subject in the (intrinsically unsporting) subject–object dichotomy, with the eponymous “human race” a 240p synecdoche of Professor Nobody’s gum-coloured soul.

     Ligotti’s nemesis is consciousness, “the parent of all horrors,” the presence of which in his writing occupies the same ontological superposition as his own memorably anointed gods (NETHESCURIAL, CYNOTHOGLYS…), which are better understood as mystified processes or hyperobjects[20] (the cosmos, decomposition, violence…) than objects discernible as such (CTHULHU, TSATHOGGUA, YIG…) in any given survey of the board. An object so immense as to transcend spatiotemporal confinement is no triffid of a teeming mind—Ligotti’s pandemonism is not Alan Moore’s—but it is reconceived subjectively in the violent act of apotheosis. The inclusions of the idols of CYNOTHOGLYS in “The Prodigy of Dreams” and of NETHESCURIAL in the eponymous story—two of Ligotti’s clearest homages to the Lovecraftian form—explore a tantalising point confusion in the early pages of “The Call of the Cthulhu” wherein a distinction is drawn between a monster represented in clay and a symbol representing a monster, wrought in clay. The Kraken is the end made flesh, a slumbering green arrowhead where mountain paths converge; an instance of a kraken pulling down a ship is an instance of a technical drawing impinging on the function it describes. Ligotti’s idols do not depict monsters; they allude to the machinery behind the scenes (the only Thing-in-the-world),[21] and the parent of all horrors is the beast within the skull, who recognises in the gaudy fungus on a pylon-shaded trunk the crayon-fingered hand of its progenitor, and calls it the Showman.

     The underlying nature of the yellow in the brain throughout Ligotti’s fiction is unclear, just as the underlying nature of the “Great Chemists” importuned by their voluble ecclesiast—i.e., whether they are anything over and above a gaudy metaphor for the covariant cause of lush elaborations of form, frothing from the lips of a scientist for whom the human body is at once a chalice and a vial—is unclear. But the perfect world to which the author aspires, “one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego,”[22] assumes a surplus that ought to be burnt away like bracken. And with this surplus comes an appetite for more. An oft (if only ever partially)-quoted passage from Ligotti’s “Vastarien” (his masterwork) speaks of “that wretched sect of souls who believe that the only value of this world lies in its power—at certain times—to suggest another.” It is the plight of Victor Keirion, inductee of that wretched sect, to peruse the brittle pages of sensational grimoires in search of verses that float freely from an earthly metaphysics. Impinging on the innermost sanctum of the farthest annex of an underground bookstore, he discovers in the pages of a greyish volume—sickly as his own confinement-redolent complexion—the melliferous surplus of that restive entelechy, a treatise coextensive with its subject, only then to have his book-begotten dreams (or else his dreams-begotten book) devoured by a carrion bird, a plethoraphage prancing on the walls of a great maze, who drains the quiddity from Vasterien’s choice-prolific streets with borrowed eyes. It is this caducean fascination, this addiction to the sui generis coupled with a vipery protectiveness of one’s infrequent access to the world beneath the second surface of the sea, that Ligotti shares with Steve Aylett, his hen-familiar.

    Such concupiscence is nowhere seen in Lovecraft, for whom the surplus is that which is withdrawn from human access, glimpsed only in mistral swirls of particles and light. To write is to spill ink on an invisible assailant; to write well is to escape its notice. Where Lovecraft’s hidden object is whatever binds the greyhound and the crooked tree, Ligotti’s demon is Preston Penn, unstrictured infant (lunar phases/looney faces!),[23] and the new gods for whom he would prepare the world (and Aylett’s is the pest in the corpuscle). That one cannot picture Lovecraft writing something so vituperative as “My Work Is Not Yet Done”[24]—an offering to black-winged Aphrodite crowned with kettle steam and mercifully unspoiled by apologia—speaks further to Ligotti’s macabre subjectivism; one can follow Ariadne’s thread from mundane acts of evil to the Great Black Swine, an ἐκπύρωσις foretold by a constellation of dark stars but isomorphic, nonetheless, with Zeno of Citium’s Contrivance.[25]

     The other disciple of note Caitlín R. Kiernan, poet laureate of shells and someone else’s cigarettes, but as I’m poised between the train track and the wide, carnivorous sky,[26] I’m reminded of a dream that started in the terracotta sea and ended in the Μουσεῖον of Evil, a grotto hung with framed newspaper clippings of sandy expeditions (and a chessboard with white queens and a black bishop engraved into the squares).[27] Kiernan’s reading of Lovecraft foregrounds what geologists call “deep time,” a concept developed by the plutonist, James Hutton (1726–1797),[28] who posited that the Earth’s crust was shaped by uniformitarian processes that dwarfed Biblical timescales.[29] Lovecraft populates the younger Earth with half-polypous bioengineers, machine-tending worms, and conical librarians, extending the past borne by the naked branches of the Gallows into the Precambrian maw, and making of the somniferous tracks of Gothic horror the muddied hem of a diaphanous gown. For Kiernan, palaeontologist and fiction writer both, whose work upholds a scientistic Lovecraftian cosmism—i.e., scientists tend in the direction of haruspices and voorish sigil carvers in their exploration of a fathomlessly rich but in-principle-accessible cosmoecology that looks back, periodically, through the contrivances of ancient mud—over the playpen of the Showman sive natura, the Anthropocene’s a crushed can at the foot of a Black Apple, a fleeting moment in the course of geological history when someone was around to liken rain to piss. Her early novel, Threshold (questionably marketed to girls with lower-back tattoos), in which a trio of early-twenty-somethings break into the Garden of Proserpina (a waterworks tunnel in Red Mountain, Alabama) and (to varying degrees) forget what befell them, encapsulates a mode of storytelling wherein angels and devils, gods, monsters, and ghosts, through the layering of various disjunctions—damaged memory, unsound witnesses, paradigms constructed of specific texts (i.e., Beowulf (the children of Cain, etc.)), and solutions assembled from contradictory world-systems—become so estranged from entities properly ensconced in myth as to make of the word “seraph,” “priest,” or “hatter” a flamboyant cloak (or cloud of ink and mucus). This is philosophical realism; nothing can be said without remainder.

     Emerging sparsely from the mesoglea are beads of corundum (quasi-progenitive subjects). Kiernan’s epistolary novel, The Red Tree (questionably marketed to girls who pre-echo with thorn thickets and time-whitened figurines), is set within one such Ruby Aspict. Sarah Crowe, Kiernan’s self-caricature, haunted by her lover’s recent suicide, retreats to a remote Rhode Island farmhouse to procrastinate on her contracted novel. Her periodic seizures and alcoholism, along, again, with her writerly proclivities for intertextuality, world-building, and auto-voyeurism, invite us to question the unfolding narrative[30]—a series of digressive journal entries punctuated with excepts from an unfinished parapsychological treatise excavated from the intermundia—concerning a hairpin needle pressed into a painting, and she imprints upon her fellow lodger (an artist, thirteen years her junior) various attributes belonging to the aforementioned lover (a composite photographer, thirteen years her junior) (or else, whatever coils or perches on the branches of the oak communicates through a more supple simulacrum of the already-pseudonymised Amanda). But when the operations of the flower moon resolve themselves in clay earth pigments, we’ve scarce cause to wonder if Crowe’s journal is the mere product of a blossoming ψυχή; rather, we encounter an anomalous object via Crowe’s affections, whatever imbalance of humors moves a person to photograph what cannot be photographed, to steal bustling honey from the matrices of an emaciated doll.

     The story finds a second telling in her short work, “One Tree Hill (The World as Cataclysm),” this time from a masculine perspective; a science journalist investigates a lighting-stricken tree (a skeleton; once, an oak). The shaft fell on St. Crispin’s day, a cloudless night. The unfolding of the narrator’s obsession (a mechanical, resigned affair) is interspersed with conversations with the one-tree hilltop’s sentry: a dryad, demoness, or nymph, the first-obscuring inverse of a muse. Their interactions culminate in the narrator’s rape, following a nightmare that conferred on him, as dreams will do, a meidelant vision of Sin (of singing roses, stony blossom…). This is where the faery tale, for all our masks, passphrases, and cliques, departs from the authentically Other; here, we write of Good and Evil,[31] orbs and shadows. Everything begins with seduction, either of ourselves or those whose fantasies we would seek to inhabit (had we not been cuckolded by ink-weeping anchorites or fungus-mottled ghouls). Evil is whatever makes us useful.

     Beneath a bridge over the nearby canal, ten minutes from where I write, there is a crude mural of a grinning tree (one bridge further than the doe). It smiles serenely and maliciously, as if it were neither inured to nor aroused by my disquiet but tranquilised, gifting rheumy prophesies of panic sans epiphany, mere knocking on the door. When I last passed him (before writing that sentence about clay earth equations on the flower moon), he’d been defaced with apple-red Slender Man-erisms: BELL-HEELED, THE DEVIL FROLICKED THROUGH FAERIE; WELCOME, MY SQUIRREL. Nobody is frightened by horror, really; everybody notices the rails.

     An aesthetic is a game in which the player, presented with a lock, must extrapolate the nature of the key. Another dream: moon-carved Andromeda, the horseman’s dewy rose, is fastened to a sheer cliff above the wyrm-torn sea. The Black Dog in the ocean blossoms underneath the surface, orchid scrolls of antlers, eyes, and protrusions of bone, and from its beak unfurl five fingers, ivory, bloody with rings. The hand beneath the glove squeezes my shoulder. By the door, a shepherd’s crook.

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[1] Panoply, Grammar

[2][2][2] Since uprooting from Swansea to the joyless environs of a well-known English city (Manchester), I’ve found the area beyond a nearby railway bridge to vibrate with a tangy, subterranean affection: goblins share their substance with the curtains; sleep-paralysed Green Men fret between the bins. The desire line of my bi-nightly run steers me beyond the texture map. From vinegar-scented streets, I glimpse office-litten livingrooms and kitchens plastered with demented children’s drawings. Occasionally, εἴδωλα follow me back to my flat, menacingly loom, and then recede—always by the door, despite arriving by the same system of ladders used by angels (and more furtively by ghosts). The most unpleasant-looking is the Hatter; you already know the sort: a mickeymouse glove, a rubberhose limb—the glove pfluds from a dark, rain-speckled coat to be retracted like a hoover cord. My neighbours on the safe side of the bridge are in the habit of aiming little cameras out their windows, and since I noticed this pattern, the adverts between YouTube videos have conspired to nudge me into step. These textures (Hatter, camera) overlapped into a struwwelpeter regarded vacantly from cell-dividing CCTV angles, and the spectre relates to these fluttering full stops as do cherubim to their eyeball-studded wheels. The sentence whence this footnote dangles is a lustral cant.

[3] The territory beyond the railway bridge assumes the role played by the Bristol channel in my other life; beyond the bridge, I must understand myself, pataphysically, as being in the sea.

[4] A chapter in Steve Aylett’s Heart of the Original, entitled “The Third Clown,” addresses this phenomenon.

[5] In truth, more than once have I dreamt of a peculiar plant: maybe sixteen months into sobriety, when dreams had swung from candlewax and ultraviolence back to broken pieces of the day, I was, while attending a renewal of vows, confronted by a creature like a crooked tree. The amaranthine warble emitted from its limbs transformed the visuals from oneiric to psychedelic, comparable in quality to mounds of psilocybin but for the speed, the motif of synthetic fibre, and the kitchen-tile glisten. On waking, I convinced myself I’d seen the unburnt bush (or else the Lusca), and I scrawled the words “laboratory jelly” on p.85 of Long & Sedley’s The Hellenistic Philosophers, Vol. 1 (1987).

[6] Lucretius, DRN, I.936-950, IV.11-25..

[7] Panoply, Lips 0.1.

[8] A word I liberate from China Miéville.

[9] Cicero, Natura deorum  II.22; cf. Sextus Empiricus, M IX.101.

[10] Sextus Empiricus M VIII.409.

[11] Cf. Negarestani, Cyclonopedia, p.18.

[12] Cf. Smith, “Zothique.”

[13] I paraphrase.

[14]  Joshi, Miscellaneous Writings (1995) p.165–166.

[15] Peter Levenda’s The Dark Lord: H. P. Lovecraft, Kenneth Grant, and the Typhonian Tradition in Magic (2013) explores the territory first mapped by the titular Grant. Levenda’s other achievements include pseudonymously writing the Simon Necronomicon (2003), a work of Lovecraftian, Thelemite, and ancient-mythological (Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian…) syncretism disguised as the mad Arab Abdul Al-hazred’s terrible grimoire, which Lavenda cites extensively throughout The Dark Lord as if it were a historical text; in doing so, he participates in the Lovecraft–Poe (etc.) tradition of constructing a weird tale as if constructing a hoax. He also wrote the non-fiction entries in the Sekret Machines psychological operation, chaperoned by wood-carven Tom DeLonge, whom Wikipedia notes for his nasal singing voice.

[16] Choronzon, or Frank Baum’s Deadly Desert (Baum, Ozma of Oz (1907); Murch, Return to Oz (1985)).

[17] See Harman, Weird Realism and Lovecraft (2012), which makes use of Lovecraft’s under-read “Some Notes on Interplanetary Fiction” (1935).

[18] The reader interested in untangling this reference is encouraged to read Steve Aylett’s Accomplice stories (Only an Alligator, The Velocity Gospel, Dummyland, and Karloff’s Circus), Shamanspace, and The Inflatable Volunteer, and then to familiarise him/herself with all of Thomas Ligotti’s writing (fiction, non-, and interview transcripts). The reader who is uninterested in untangling this reference may return to the main body of the text.

[19] See the interview with Jon Padgett for Lovecraftzine.com, and likely the sequel to this essay, “The Court of the Squirrel,” should it be written.

[20] See Morton, The Ecological Thought (2012); Hyperobjects (2013) (probably).

[21] Ligotti, “My Work is Not Yet Done.”

[22] See Matt Cardin’s interview of Thomas Ligotti at teemingbrain.com.

[23] Ligotti, “Alice’s last adventure.”

[24] A story, incidentally, of reality contorted by a singular perspective (cf. Jerome Bixby’s “It’s a Good Life” (1953)), but none so minute as to be contained within a singular man.

[25] Cf. Alexander Lycopolis 19.2–4 (LS 46 I).

[26] A phrase stolen from Kiernan by the unmemorable John Langan.

[27] f5.

[28] Hutton, Theory of the Earth (1788, 1795), though the term would not be coined until 1981 with the publication of John McPhee’s Basin and Range.

[29] Himself being a deist who argued for the presence of humans throughout infinite geological cycles of sedimentation and erosion—call this the anti-Lovecraftian conception of deep time.

[30] Indeed, Crowe frequently draws attention to inconsistencies in her own account, to embellished dreams and twice-had epiphanies.

[31] Respectively, (i) all the colours of an emerald grove without nature’s administration; (ii) the sun eclipsed by alchemical apparatus as remembered by AI.

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