You know how at 3 AM you get random bursts of creativity? It’s now 5 AM and I’ve written a song. This was not planned.
Inspired by Ignite to the Call by @cannibalisticapple. Probably contains minor spoilers for it? It’s one big extended metaphor, but I wasn’t trying for… subtle…
People honestly didn’t go “mad” from seeing cosmic horror things in Lovecraft very often. That’s a modern thing, and honestly feels like modified “gorgon”
Usually its stress, paranoia or ptsd from near death experience.
The true terror was not really in seeing something horrifying and alien, but understanding the implications, or not being able to fit it into an existing mental framework.
Playing this up could actually create an interesting setup in a narrative, come to think of it. Someone seems fine after dealing with cosmic horrors, so everyone assumes they were fine. Cue some days later, when everything’s settled and they’re able to process what happened, they find that they begin to have a breakdown as it all begins to fall together.
As a simple thought experiment, imagine what encountering something completely recognizable but otherwise impossible would do.
Lets say you walked into the next room, and standing on a piece of furniture was a little man, literally 18 inches tall, at most, in green clothing, clambering and climbing about. I don’t mean like what you’d imagine from a special effect or a cartoon, but a real tiny thing that looked, moved, and acted like an impossibly miniature humanlike creature, the hair wouldn’t be shrunk by proportion, there’d be fewer folicles overall, but more densely packed. You can see the faint veins under the skin, the hairs, the pores, you can smell it, it leaves scuffs, it makes sounds appropriate for its size… and when it sees you, it just looks at you, tilts its head, smiles mischieviously, and darts under the couch, vanishing. The only thing you find is a gold coin, which is real, solid, and rare, having not seen circulation in centuries.
You’ve had, in this scenario, an encounter with a leprechaun. It’s a relatively understandable phenomenon. There’s plenty of tolklore to prepare you for it, the creature is rationally built, has antatomy that makes sense, is similar to yourself enough to be very familiar. It wasn’t even hostile.
Is your life ever going to be the same?
In addition to questioning whether you actually saw what you saw, you now have to wonder why you were visited. Wil it come back? If it does can it hurt you? If it can, can you stop it? Where did it come from? Has it always just been there, out of sight? Is it here right now?
And those are just surface level questions. Now, fundamentally, the rules of reality have to be reassessed. If such a thing can exist, what does that say about our understanding of biology and evolution? Moreover, there are suddenly theological implications here, none of which are likely to be cleanly or comfortingly answered in their entirety.
You’ve just witnessed sone of the single most important encounters in human history, and anyone who hears you talk about it is going to think you’ve lost your mind. The terror and sense of lonliness from that is going to be soul crushing.
Now, replace the leprechaun with something that looks like a deep dream animation brought to life and appears to be both impossible to adequately destroy and possessed of absolute malevolence. Getting attacked by a normal everyday animal can be traumatizing, surviving an encounter with a bloodsucking octopus tree that screams in an alien language from mutiple slathering maws is certrainly beyond the ken of 1930s psychiatric medicine.
I feel like this post changed me in a way I’m not ready to confront
thats why i never understood people who belittled that entire genre of horror “oh its just fish people” yes you moron its fish people but WHAT is making people look like fish is much scarier than a person that looks like a fish
Well, this certainly explains why I adore cosmic horror.
i went to a tiny counterserve diner once and accidentally poured sugar instead of salt all over my hashbrowns and was eating them sadly anyways. the waitress took them away and started making me another one and I tried to protest, but she just snorted and said “we’re not catholic here”. now every time i’m doing something painful out of obligation i think about how that is not repenting, this body is not a catholic establishment, there is no nobility in suffering.
just saw a post that’s like “which classic lit book that you had to read in class did you actually like” but as someone who liked most classic lit we had to read in class instead I actually want to know:
which classic lit book that you had to read in school did you absolutely hate ? just real pure loathing. the worst book you ever had to read in school. your nemesis in a paperback cover.
Thinking today about how as someone with major texture issues around most fruits and vegetables, it would have helped so much if someone had come to me years ago and said
Hey:
Make it tiny
Mix it with something Good Texture that you like
“Eat healthy!” they say, and then they show you pictures of a smiling woman digging a fork into half a butternut squash or eyeing a bowl of whole blueberries like a ravening wolf and your spine wants to crawl out through your skull at the thought of that Texture in your mouth.
But you know what I can do? Cut zucchini into paper-thin slices and cook it with noodles and marinara. Chop that spinach fine and scramble it with eggs and cheese. If I’m having a day where the thought of a grape popping in my mouth makes me nauseous, I can cut it in half. My chinese takeout gets diced into tiny pieces and mixed into the rice. It doesn’t work with everything - seeds are still a Major Problem - but the number of fruits and veg and even world cuisines that I can eat has expanded SO MUCH since I discovered this. YMMV, but it’s such a stupidly simple thing to do, and nobody ever told me.
[Audio transcript: Ben Galpin voicing Jonathan Harker from Dracula by Bram Stoker. He says, “There was no lethal weapon at hand, but I seized a shovel which the workmen had been using to fill the cases, and lifting it high, struck, with the edge downward, at the hateful face,” followed by a cartoon “bonk” and the Wilhelm scream. End transcript]
“What I assume my teachers were trying to teach me”
Huck Finn is about a white Southern boy who was raised to believe that freeing slaves is a sin that would send you directly to hell who forges a familial bond with a runaway slave and chooses to free him and thereby in his mind lose his salvation because he refuses to believe that his best friend and surrogate father is less of a man just because he’s black. Yes it features what we now consider racial slurs but this is a book written only 20 years after people were literally fighting to be allowed to keep other human beings as property, we cannot expect people from the 1880s to exactly conform with the social mores of 2020, and more to the point if we ourselves had been raised during that time period there’s very little doubt that we would also hold most if not all of the prevalent views of the time because actual history isn’t like period novels written now where the heroes are perfect 21st century social justice crusaders and the villains are all as racist and sexist as humanly possible. Change happens slowly and ignoring the radical statement that we’re all human beings that Twain wrote at a time when segregation and racial tensions were still hugely prevalent just because he wrote using the language of his time period is short-sighted and foolhardy to the highest degree.
I’m really kind of alarmed at the rise in the past few years of the “and we do condemn! wholeheartedly!” discourse around historical figures. it seems like people have somehow boomeranged between “morals were different in the past, therefore nobody in the past can ever be held accountable for ANY wrongs” to “morals are universal and timeless, and anything done wrong by today’s standards in the past is ABSOLUTELY unforgiveable” so completely, because social media 2.0 is profoundly allergic to nuance
please try this on for size:
there have always been, in past times as today, a range of people in every society, some of whom were even then fighting for a more just and compassionate accord with their fellow man and some of whom let their greeds and hatreds rule them to the worst allowable excesses. the goal of classics and history education is to teach you enough context to discern between the two, not only in the past but in the present
My mind just boggles at the “There’s Racism In That Book” argument. Yes, there is racism in that book, because that book is ABOUT RACISM. The message is that it is BAD.
My high school English teacher, who was a viciously brilliant woman, used to say that when people banned Huck Finn they said it was about the language, but it was really the message they were trying to ban, the subversive deconstruction of (religious) authority and white supremacy.
Huckleberry Finn can actually be seen as a powerful case study in trying to do social justice when you have absolutely no tools for it, right down to vocabulary. And in that respect, it’s a heroic tale, because Huck—with absolutely no good examples besides Jim, who he has been taught to see as subhuman, with no guidance, with everyone telling him that doing the right thing will literally damn him, with a vocabulary that’s full of hate speech—he turns around and says, “I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to participate in this system. If that means I go to Hell, so be it. Going to Hell now.”
(I used to read a blogger who insisted that “All right, I’ll go to Hell,” from Huckleberry Finn is the most pure and perfect prayer in the canon of American literature. Meaning, as I understand it, that the decision to do the right thing in the face of eternal damnation is the most holy decision one can make, and if God Himself is not proud of the poor mixed-up kid, then God Himself is not worth much more than a “Get thee behind me,” and the rest of us should be lining up to go to Hell too. Worth noting that this person identified as an evangelical Christian, not because he was in line with what current American evangelicals believe, but because “they can change their name, I’m not changing mine.” Interesting guy. Sorry for the long parenthetical.)
Anyway, the point of Huck Finn, as far as I can tell, is that you can still choose to do good in utter darkness, with no guidance and no help and none of the right words.
And when you put it like that, it’s no wonder that a lot of people on Tumblr—people who prioritize words over every other form of social justice—find it threatening and hard to comprehend.
You know, I’ve been thinking of this post since I randomly woke up at 2:00 AM and reblogged it.
When Huck Finn was assigned to me as a sophomore in high school, I really didn’t want to read it. It just didn’t grab me from the first page, and I had the misconception that it was the kind of book that only boys would like.
If I could have used social justice language to convince myself that casting the book aside was in fact a morally righteous act of anti-racism, that would have made me so pumped about not doing my homework. It’s something to watch out for.