I have not yet watched Lovecraft Country, but I feel like I know the landscape. The peculiar sort of horror stylings of its namesake, H.P. Lovecraft, have lingered in the shadows of my consciousness for more than three decades. It’s not exactly pleasant terrain, but it has a certain familiarity. Like coming back to that street in your home town where something went horribly, horribly wrong.
For those unfamiliar with his writings, Lovecraft was a purveyor of a certain kind of uncanny horror. I say uncanny for two reasons here. First, because the subject matter itself was less something you would encounter in a haunted house, and more what you would hear from the hebephrenic ramblings of a mental patient. Lovecraftian landscapes are the sites of inarticulate madness.
Second, and more helpful for our present discussion, Lovecraft is uncanny because the scope and style of his horror in so unlike what we are used to encountering in scary entertainment.
Take, for example, a more run of the mill horror story. If we look at a novel, it might be Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot, or is we’re looking at a recent movie, we might pick The Conjuring (or even that classic, The Exorcist). All of these will demonstrate the point. In each case, we see some kind of cosmic evil force (vampires, ghosts, or demons, respectively) that are intent on taking all of this powerful menace and making it exceedingly local. The demon picks on one little girl in The Exorcist. The ghosts pick on one family in The Conjuring. The vampires menace a small town in ’Salem’s Lot.
This is the kind of story we have come to expect. The menace seems almost personal. The forces of evil discover the things that scare us, individually and particularly, and exploit that knowledge. The audience jumps when the victims on the page or on the screen jump because we identify with them. That could be anybody. That could be us.
This is where Lovecraft, for me, is so different. The predictable path of oppression is abandoned in his stories. They are not, and I cannot stress this enough, about the local and focused oppression of a small group of persons by a menacing evil presence.
Instead, Lovecraft’s tales are careful explications of the total indifference of the cosmos, and the utter insignificance of human struggle, and even human existence, in the face of that enormity.
Lovecraft’s antagonists are a mixture of creatures that are loosely gathered under the collective title of The Ancient Ones. They are creatures of elemental nature. They are often of massive physical size, but their material presence is but a synecdoche of much larger manifestations of power. They were here long before us, and they will continue long after the plight of humanity has run its insignificant course.
In Jewish traditions, when someone dies, it is customary to say a prayer known as the Mourner’s Kaddish. Depending on the nature of one’s relationship to the deceased, the prayer is chanted each day for differing periods of time. For example, if the deceased is a child or a spouse, the expectation is that you would chant each day for thirty days. If the deceased is your parent, you continue the practice daily for eleven months.
The chanting is done in Aramaic, which is an ancient tongue quite similar to Hebrew. The translation of the prayer goes like this:
Glorified and sanctified be God’s great name throughout the world
which He has created according to His will.May He establish His kingdom in your lifetime and during your days,
and within the life of the entire House of Israel, speedily and soon;
and say, Amen.May His great name be blessed forever and to all eternity.
Blessed and praised, glorified and exalted, extolled and honored,
adored and lauded be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He,
beyond all the blessings and hymns, praises and consolations that
are ever spoken in the world; and say, Amen.May there be abundant peace from heaven, and life, for us
and for all Israel; and say, Amen.
He who creates peace in His celestial heights,
may He create peace for us and for all Israel;
and say, Amen.
What strikes me about the prayer—about all prayer, really—is this same dynamic that I see in most horror movies. A cosmic power is making itself incredibly local, and coming to be involved in the minute affairs of human beings at a moment of their extremity. The Holy One, blessed be He, has accommodated the divine majesty to interface with a narrow swath of time and space, and with a narrow band of humans.
The message, above all, is that the Divine Presence cares.
By far the most popular of Lovecraft’s characters is an ancient god named Cthulhu (spellings and pronunciations vary). In fact, the entire Lovecraftian oeuvre is often referred to as The Cthulhu Mythos. So what we say about Cthulhu is in many ways an indicator of what we would say of the entire menagerie of Lovecraft’s Ancient Ones.
And what we must say, beyond a doubt, is that Cthulhu doesn’t care.
Years ago, M.H. Abrams wrote an amazing little book called Natural Supernaturalism. It is an analysis of Romanticism, and its place in the development of contemporary philosophy as a sort of companion to the Enlightenment.
Among its many winning qualities as a scholarly work, Abrams’s book has an extended set of reflections on the question of the Sublime, and that speaks to what I am thinking of here with this Cthulhu Mythos.
Though we have lost touch with the idea in our urban bastions of the 21st century, the sublime for Abrams is that intrusion of wild immensity that overwhelms our senses, and indeed our ability to process sense data entirely. It is the storm surge that dwarfs a coastal town, or an approaching wall of wild fire that threatens to engulf everything in its path.
What is important to note about these examples of sublimity is that, from a distance, they can seem rational, and even at times beautiful. But the closer we are to them, the more they overwhelm us with their terrible grandeur.
What’s more, they proceed by their own agenda. It is not that a fire or a seventeen foot wave wishes us any ill will; rather, in its inexorable advance, it simply does not consider us at all. To speak of the “malice” of the fire or the water is to make a category error. They simply do not care.
And this, I think, is the dread of Cthulhu in Lovecraft’s stories. Rather than being a demon who has come to say “boo” to frighten us in the night, The Ancient Ones simply go about their business. Only, in doing so, cities are destroyed, and menace reigns.
We are their collateral damage.
I am told that in the Jewish traditions, when someone dies on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, they are considered to be a tzaddik, that is, a “person of great righteousness.”
I first encountered the term in a novel by Chaim Potok, called The Chosen. In the book, a leader of an ultraorthodox Chasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn decides to raise his son in complete silence, never uttering a word in his presence. The idea, so the father says, is that the immense suffering that comes from this silence will result in the son becoming a tzaddik, a soul of immense compassion and greatness. The father does this because he wants the son to become a leader, and succeed the father at the head of the community.
Instead, the son abandons the community, because that is what happens when you raise your children with indifferent silence.
This has been a hard year, and the hits just keep on coming.
I am writing this on the eve of the passing of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, on the eve of Rosh Hashanah. All through the night, I have been reading pieces that have been trying to suss out the meaning of the events at hand, and the things to come. We are trying to figure out what the future hold from this oracle.
What I keep coming back to, however, is this silent indifference.
It is difficult for me to keep rooting for, and believing in, the God of the Kaddish. It is difficult for me to sing of the “peace in the celestial heights,” when each day I see the lack of peace here on the earth. What I see, instead, is a world that has been handed over to the forces of malevolence, with wave upon wave of destruction returning upon us.
In that context, the death of Justice Ginsburg does not seem like a targeted attack from some malevolent intelligence. Instead, it just seems like another wave of an utterly indifferent universe, going about its business. Just Cthulhu taking a walk, utterly uncaring if the cities fall at his feet.
Perhaps there is hope in this: Perhaps there is a God out there, willing to “right-size” to our domestic moments, like the vampires in the horror flick. Perhaps that divine presence has immense power—power enough to intervene and stop the careening madness unfolding all around us in 2020—and simply chooses not to do so.
Perhaps this God has chosen, like the father in the Potok book, to raise us in silence, in the hopes that it will turn us into tzaddiks, and we will at last be compassionate and righteous leaders to meet the deep needs of the world.
But my fear (and the fear is growing now, as the year draws to its end) is that instead, God is simply indifferent. Like the response given to Job—when he says
Can you lead Leviathan about with a hook,
or tie down his tongue with a rope?
Can you put a ring into his nose,
or pierce through his cheek with a gaff?
Telling Job, I know you have suffered, but look—I have a huge sea monster for my rubber duckie. What are you and your troubles to me?
This is what I fear—not the God of wrath, but the God of indifference.
Yes. Thank you, David. Reading this, I wonder if Potok's father might have been based on the figure of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who revived the language of Hebrew by speaking only Hebrew to his son. That effectively meant his son could only communicate with his father, and with none of his peers. Given the choice, I choose to communicate with people. The Incarnation teaches us that, given the choice, God also chooses people.
Wow, yeah. Nice angle on the general feeling of helplessness towards all that's going on right now. Thank you.