Pound and Slams

© Edward Moore 2015

The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000.

~ Ezra Pound

Conspicuous by the absence of an entry devoted to him -- in the recent A New Literary History of America, ed. G. Marcus, W. Sollors (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2009) -- is the expatriate but still American poet and scholar Ezra Pound. One need not seek too strenuously the reasons for this exclusion. Most people with an interest in literature know of Pound's rather buffoonish but still revolting anti-Semitism (later repudiated, rather too late, in a statement to Allen Ginsberg: "the worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism"); his admiration for and support of Mussolini before and during World War II, which resulted in Pound's arrest and indictment for treason; and his unrelenting devotion to his own idiosyncratic conception of fascism (despite later lame attempts at retraction, he nevertheless gave the fascist salute upon his return to Italy in 1958). This potent cocktail of political incorrectness (to put it mildly) has been sufficient to place Pound on the outskirts of contemporary literary criticism and history. That said, I find it curious, if not hypocritical, that the editors of A New Literary History of America had no qualms about devoting a section to Malcolm X, who before his conversion to mainstream Islam preached that whites are of the devil's race, that he would welcome a race riot, and declared violence an acceptable way to deal with whitey (among other unsavory -- at least to rational persons -- "ideas"); even after his so-called conversion he still used the phrase "by any means necessary" -- which it does not take a linguist to read as a rubber stamp for violence against whites. The dubious literary quality of his "autobiography" was deemed by Marcus and Sollors sufficient reason to devote an entry to X, while relegating a vastly more important and influential literary figure to a few scattered references.

The many poetry anthologies that I have consulted either include a mere smattering of Pound's early work, such as the well-known "In a Station of the Metro" or "The Garden" -- short uncontroversial stuff, easily digestible by students -- or exclude his work altogether. Harold Bloom, in his anthology, at least displayed intellectual honesty by stating outright his disdain for Pound as a human being; but Bloom still provided a brief essay on the poet and an unrepresenstative poem from Cathay. So, if an original, difficult (but rewarding), and highly influential poet is cold-shouldered by contemporary academia for his odious political and social views, one is justified in feeling that the writer in our age -- like the writer of 150 plus years ago -- must meet certain moral and ethical expectations if he is to be honored by posterity. There is no better way for the writer to achieve this desired acceptance than by dealing with topics that speak of or to a group holding some sort of moral high ground -- for example, oppressed ethnic minorities, or wounded veterans, or victims of abuse (especially the sexual kind) or any other "marginalized" group one can discover or create. Deeply personal writing is generally ignored if it does not speak to -- or better, for -- a group whose members can identify with the writer and claim him or her as "one of us." But an introspective and deeply sensitive writer, one who is -- for better or worse -- preoccupied with his or her own attempts to impose meaning upon the litter of impressions, emotions, and responses that constitute daily life, will avoid any identification with a group, in order to maintain originality and -- most importantly -- that increasingly commodified boon of life known as individuality. For the intellectual, personal experiences are filtered through and by a tradition, captured in writing, to which he or she is heir (as T. S. Eliot explained in his famous essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent"). By reading works of the past, and seeking therein a common existential theme with which one can identify, the first step is taken in the construction and management of a personal meaning, which the conscientious writer will in turn communicate to posterity. While it is impossible to read everything, the truly creative person will choose carefully the collection of works that will serve as a standard for expressive excellence; he will not permit a group to choose these works for him. Just as every person is -- in the terms of classic personalist philosophy -- a unique, unrepeatable entity whose inner life is radically unknowable by the "other," so the collection of past works that serve to ground the writer in his or her own private tradition are equally -- in the interpretation given to them by the developing writer -- unique and unrepeatable. Writing, and all art, demands privacy and autonomy of thought -- until the moment the work is unveiled to the world.

Using his "ideogramic method," Ezra Pound selected from his vast reading material (as well as artworks, news reports, music) anything he found to be significant or germane to his concerns of the moment. He then used these occasional pieces, if you will, as ideograms, i.e., symbols to present and illuminate ideas, without extraneous comment. As Pound himself put it: "The artist seeks out the luminous detail and presents it. He does not comment." This compositional style led Pound to produce what many have felt to be works of excessive and unnecessary obscurity. As one of Pound's biographers, Humphrey Carpenter, remarked, the ideogramic method "consisted simply of selection rather than analysis. He would pick out items -- works of art, lines in a poem, pieces of music, snippets of news, whatever happened to catch his attention and seemed to relate to his current obsession -- and hold them up for attention as if their significance were self-evident" (A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound [New York: Delta 1988] p. 170). This method dominated Pound's style during the 1930s and '40s, and remained later on, as he began to struggle to impose some sort of form or over-arching theme upon the megalithic volume of Cantos that had accumulated throughout his life. Here is an example from one of the more "obscure" Cantos (53):

Then an Empress fled with Chao Kang in her belly.

Fou-hi by virtue of wood;

Chin-nong, of fire; Hoang Ti ruled by the earth,

Chan by metal.

Tchuen was lord, as is water.

CHUN, govern

YU, cultivate,

The surface is not enough,

from Chang Ti nothing is hidden.

According to Carpenter, in this Canto, as in many others, "Ezra assumes that the reader already understands the main outlines of what he is trying to convey, and gives only surface details without explanation of their significance" (A Serious Character, p. 570). To the charge of excessive obscurity, and of not giving the reader of his poems any guidance in arriving at a meaning, Pound responded that he did not aim for obscurity, but rather demanded a real investment of thought by his readers, amounting to a sort of co-creatorship. As early as 1921 he told Thomas Hardy that "I am perfectly willing to demand that the reader should read [my poems] as carefully as he would a difficult latin or greek text." As for Canto 51, it is quite clear that a pregnant empress is fleeing from some danger with the aid -- it seems to me -- of elemental forces governed by demi-gods. There is certainly mystery here, and this poem does "resist the intelligence / Almost successfully" (Wallace Stevens, "Man Carrying Thing"), yet this resistance lessens "as the audience begins," in the words of Gertrude Stein, who succinctly (though with her trademark sloppy syntax) describes the relation of writer to reader:

When you are writing before there is an audience anything written is as important as any other thing and you cherish anything and everything that you have written. After the audience begins, naturally they create something that is they create you, and so not everything is so important, something is more important than another thing ... ("What are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them")

In other words, the writer will include in his work anything and everything that he feels to be meaningful; but the reader, who has not the same emotional and intellectual attachment to the work as the writer, will exclude whatever seems superfluous, for the sake of rescuing and cultivating the parts that are -- to use Pound's term -- luminous.

Preference for the written over the spoken word led Pound to include actual Chinese ideograms in several of his Cantos, and even at one point a musical score. A slow and careful deliberation on the part of the reader was clearly intended, for the meaning that Pound packed into each piece requires readerly dedication to unpack. That this unpacking involved the reader in the creative process was Pound's intention, and his great contribution to modern poetry. A reader expecting to have his hand held as he navigates the Cantos will be disappointed, indeed, his time will be wasted. As Basil Bunting put it, in a poem likening the Cantos to the Alps:

There they are, you will have to go a long way round

if you want to avoid them.

It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps,

fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble!

("On the Fly-Lead of Pound's Cantos")

Ever impatient with academic, analytical interpretations of poetry -- indeed, of all art -- Pound did not seek to provide, along with the typical poetic tropes and symbols, what I. A. Richards called poetry's "prose sense, its plain, overt meaning" (Practical Criticism, part I). Pound, who claimed to have always struggled with prose, did not see the point in writing poetry if, after the metaphorical dust has settled, one is only left with plain meaning. Setting two poetic statements side-by-side, with no explanation, will not simply produce a third statement or idea, but rather will "suggest some fundamental relation between them" (in the words of Fenollosa, a compiler and translator of Chinese literature whose work Pound was given to edit after the former's death). As much as Pound seemed to enjoy (sometimes) reading his poems aloud, he knew that their real impact would only be achieved when the reader sat and studied the poems as one would a classical text. Very few people do that nowadays, preferring instead the immediate impact of a performance over the gradual unfolding of a work of discursive art.

I recently listened, via a popular online media site, to recordings of several of my favorite poets (Pound included) reciting their work. What struck me more than the readings themselves were the comments posted by other listeners. A well-known and admired poetic performer, Dylan Thomas, was berated as "pompous sounding," "lacking guts," while Sylvia Plath was regarded less for her work (and her reading of "Daddy" chilled me to the bone) and more for her suicide (one lout posted his opinion that Sylvia was a "whiny whore" -- such is the level of insight to which one is often treated in the pandemonium of the Internet). T. S. Eliot's rather placid reading of Prufrock (a 1943 recording) did disappoint me, and others. However, Ezra Pound, whose bombastic recitation of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley -- exaggerated brogue, excessively rolled 'r's, improperly pronounced Greek -- met with general approval, even admiration. Very strange, thought I, this approbation of a recitation of a poem that only unfolds its multifloriate effects through slow careful reading and re-reading. Apparently, it was Pound's eccentric performance, not the content of the poem, that pleased the listeners, several of whom commented at some length -- one "poster" described Pound's almost self-parodic recital as "lofty, dignified" (go figure). It was at this point that I came across a reference to something called a "poetry slam." I did the requisite search and am now somewhat familiar with this phenomenon (apparently there are "story slams" too).

A "poetry slam" is quite simple. Poets sign up at these events, which usually take place at a coffee house or some other such "artsy" place, and are given a certain amount of time to recite their poetry to the audience (all of whom, one would expect, are poets themselves, or at least consider themselves such). At the end of the event, prizes are given. One can accumulate prizes at the local, regional, and national levels, at which point one gains laureate status in that world. I assume -- having yet to attend one -- that the "winners" of these events are not necessarily the most technically polished poets, nor the ones whose work is the most aesthetically and intellectualy nuanced, but the ones who manage to establish a "stage presence" and to use successfully the age-old technique of the sophist, summed up so well in a lyric by Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull: "I may make you feel, but I can't make you think" (Thick as a Brick). Tapping into the energy of a group is not what poetry is about. A poet is not a performer or entertainer, but an artist. That distinction has been lost today, in an atmosphere of critical laxity in the face of "people coming together." When people come together and the distinction of persons is obscured, we indeed see only one giant face that grimaces or smiles in unison with the nameless particles of which it is composed. This is the sort of behavior one encounters at sporting events, or more to the point, at a professional wrestling match, from which the term "slam" is obviously taken, and intended to invoke that hokey (but admittedly fun) atmosphere. At such events the crowd behaves in predictable ways, depending upon which wrestler happens to be in the ring, a "good guy" or a "bad guy." The crowd cheers or boos on cue. The wrestlers talk trash, then bash each other which fists and chairs, and yes slam each other. The predetermined outcome of the match "hangs in the balance" as the audience, disbelief dutifully suspended, cheers and jeers the whole thing on. It's all a lot of fun, and one sees some excellent performances and comes away feeling most adequately entertained. But it is not art -- and that is OK, for it doesn't claim to be. Poetry "slams," on the other hand, claim to give "artists" a chance to "have their voices heard." This in an environment where everyone is a poet or would-be poet seeking to grab the spotlight for a moment and get that prize and the bragging rights that go with it. I wonder how an authentically critical response can occur in such an environment. It seems to me that it would be rather like a bad conversation, in which each participant is waiting for the other to finish speaking so he or she can spout in turn. No one in such sad social ping-pong matches ever pays a stick of attention to what the other is saying; the one is merely awaiting his own turn to serve.

Now as I admitted, I have never been to a "slam," nor do I have any desire to attend one, much less participate. At this point my reader will surely object that, lacking the experience of a "slam," I do not know of what I am speaking (writing). I can only reply by comparing what I have read of "slams" to what I have experienced in a very similar venue. Years ago, when I was a much younger man, I went with my folk-rock band, The Bag Snatchers, to an "open mic" night at a local coffee house, and encountered the atmosphere I described above. It was a waste, for no one actually listened to anyone else's music; all were too hyped up over their own turn to perform. No one gave any feedback; applause was uniform until a scantily clad female bassist and her hunky singer-guitarist boyfriend (I assume) took the stage. Of course, no one heard the music. The applause was deafening. As Kierkegaard put it, "the crowd is untruth."

* * * * *

Later in his life, pushing eighty, Pound (suffering from depression and other medical problems) began to reflect upon his legacy, specifically what he had intended as his magnum opus, the Cantos. In a 1966 interview with Daniel Cory he dismissed that work as "botch." Lamenting the fact that he did not read enough, nor come to know important things -- necessary, as he put it, to accomplish successfully a work like the Cantos -- Pound demonstrated his awareness of the problematical nature of the ideogramic method:

Ain't it better to know something about a few things if you're trying to do a work like the Cantos? I picked out this and that thing that interested me, and then jumbled them into a bag. But that's not the way to make ... a work of art.

Despite his own harsh judgment of his great contribution to literature, notable individualists and not a few great poets demonstrated their ability to engage in co-creatorship with Pound, and to bestow meaning upon the luminosity of the Cantos in the best and only truly artistic way possible: to write more poetry. Ginsberg, visiting Pound in 1967, told the old master that "the sequence of verbal images [in the Cantos], phrases like 'tin flash in the sun dazzle' and 'soap smooth stone posts' -- these have given me, in praxis of perception, ground to walk on." As Pound persisted in denigrating his accomplishment with phrases like "stupid" and "irrelevant," Ginsberg responded with a personal statement that expresses precisely the relation of writer to reader necessary for the emergence of meaning:

I'm a Buddhist Jew whose perceptions have been strengthened by the series of practical exact language models scattered through the Cantos like stepping stones, because, whatever your intentions, their practical effect has been to clarify my perceptions.

The clarification of perceptions through language models -- this is the genesis of poetry, of all fine writing. It sounds so simple, but we have seen how Pound, eager to capture all the luminous moments of his own aesthetic perceptions, produced a work that has inspired, yes, the elite among writers, and has caused no small difficulty for the less creative readers who have attempted the Cantos. Indeed, the Cantos were a torment to Pound himself, proving that, whatever value a reader may assign to the Cantos -- and to Pound as a person -- his authenticity as an artist should be beyond doubt. For of the Cantos he wrote, "Let those I love try to forgive / what I have made." And on a more positive note, he urges the readers of his Cantos "To be men [we would nowadays write "human beings" or "persons" or some other less gender specific noun] not destroyers." There are many ways to destroy. Allowing yourself to be absorbed into, and diluted by, the group or the crowd is perhaps the slowest but also the most effective way to destroy your most precious possession, individuality. And when that goes, creativity goes, and the artist disappears -- or rather, she becomes an entertainer.

Thus Spoke the Earth-Strider (Introduction)

This is the Introduction to my new translation of the Anglo-Saxon (Old English) poem, The Wanderer. My translation, and the original text, is available at Academia edu:

https://www.academia.edu/10434699/Thus_Spoke_the_Earth-Strider_A_New_Translation_of_the_Anglo-Saxon_poem_The_Wanderer_

Thus Spoke the Earth-Strider

Swa cwæð eardstapa

(The Wanderer, line 6a)

A New Translation of the ancient Anglo-Saxon poem, The Wanderer, including the original Anglo-Saxon text. Introduction and Translation © 2015 by Edward Moore (patristics@gmail.com)

Introduction

Literary theorists have made it abundantly clear, over the years, that every translation is an interpretation, and therefore a new text. So not only have I given my version of The Wanderer a new title (taken from line 6a of the original) -- one that might possibly have been its "tag" back in the old days of oral composition and transmission -- I have rendered it in a verse form of my choosing; one that neither attempts to reproduce the original alliterative half-line (impossible for contemporary uninflected English) nor to imitate it in some sort of hybrid concoction that would likely be an assault on the ear. Instead, I have relied upon the old faithful loose iambic -- agreeing with Robert Frost that "in our language ... there are virtually but two [meters], strict iambic and loose iambic" ("The Figure a Poem Makes") -- arranged in stanzas of five lines with one concluding half-line (more or less). This is an unabashedly modern structure, unknown in the Anglo-Saxon world, but done for the sake of art. I believe (I hope!) that I have succeeded in achieving the only purpose of meter: to make one want to read the poem aloud (as all ancient poetry was).

I have attempted nothing like a literal translation, as I feel that our contemporary English is so far removed from the prehistoric parent of our language that such a version would have been either unreadable, or only of use (if any) to students. My goal was to produce a living poem -- that is, one containing "things that are important not because a high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are useful" (Marianne Moore, "Poetry"). I feel that the passionate, heart-rending message of the eardstapa is "useful" not only because it speaks to the condition of some human beings living right now, but also because some people need to be disabused of certain anti-personalistic superstitions that still persist, fantastically, fifteen years into the twenty-first century (a grim situation given the topics and the tenor dominating our national and international "scene").

I stress some people, for despite what are clearly a few later interpolations by a pious scribe or scribes, The Wanderer is not a Christian poem, nor even a "spiritual" one (whatever that means nowadays). It is not very uplifting (the final two lines, 114b-115b, are clearly an addition by one of those pious scribes); disregarding the interpolated final lines of the poem as we now have it, the original ending (lines 110a-b; tr. stanza XXII) states, with cold disgust: eal þis eorþan gesteal / idel weorþeð! ("All this earthly realm, every inch of it, / Is idle, a waste"). This might cause some people to recoil, or avoid reading the poem altogether. Indeed, the grim secular -- though not entirely pessimistic -- attitude of this poem is already clear from line 5b: "Wyrd bið ful aræd!" which means that "fate" (wyrd), or the inescapable structure of existence, has been set in place in advance. According to the mythology (which was the religion) of the ancient Germanic peoples, wyrd cannot be altered, not even by the gods. Yet the calm acceptance of the Stoic sage was not the response of the Anglo-Saxon eorl (man of the soldierly rank), who rather sought "Fame brought by Fate" -- that is, in the throes of glorious battle -- than a calm resignation to an impersonal force. Calm resignation, of course, would have been tantamount to suicide in the warrior culture in which our wanderer-narrator lived. Michael Alexander, in his Introduction to Beowulf: A Verse Translation (1973), has described the warrior culture of that era:

[A] lord in peace and war is the 'shepherd of his people', folces hyrde (Homer's poimeen laōn). He gives them shelter, food and drink in his hall; he is their 'ring-giver' and 'gold-friend' in peace and their 'shield' and 'helmet' in war. The warriors 'earn their mead' and their armour by their courage and loyalty in war. Ideally, there is complete solidarity between a king and his people (folc).

The speaker in the poem, through some catastrophe of war -- ubiquitous in the European age of migrations -- had lost his home and family and, most importantly, his lord or chieftain, without whom a man was at the mercy not only of wyrd but of men and beast, bad weather and hunger. The only rational response to this situation was to hold to the heroic code, and put up a fight worthy of song. Perhaps one cannot change one's fate, the Anglo-Saxon warrior would say, but one can choose how to meet it. "Every earl is called to act with courage" (eorl mid elne gefremman), not to sit disconsolate and idle, however deep his sorrow: he must never "show weakness in war; / He shall feel no fear, nor have a fay mind" (ne to wac wiga / ne to forht ne to fægen).

Prayer, of course, is virtually absent from the poem, except for a few stock references to "the Almighty" and the "our father in heaven." But clear-sighted reflection upon the grim reality of the world is the theme of this most human work. In fact, at one point, God is gently upbraided -- perhaps by a monkish scribe-interpolator who still had a bit of the old wolfish Saxon in him -- for the destruction he has brought upon a city:

And so He shattered this earthly garden,

Our city -- He, the Creator of men! --

Until sounds of life no longer echoed

And the old work of giants stood empty.

(stanza XVII [lines 85a-87b])

Naive sentiments, such as "everything happens for a reason" (often spoken by people who have no idea what is happening to them, or why, and lack the intellectual capacity to investigate), are not to be found in the sayings of the Earth-Strider. This is not to say, however, that he does not find a grim comfort in contemplating the catalogue of life's miseries; indeed, he discovers that by "fastening his desires in fetters" he is able to gaze calmly at the world -- though not without a lingering sorrow -- take stock of its countless hardships and downfalls, and to conclude that "All this earthly realm, every inch of it, / Is idle, a waste."

According to Michael Alexander, The Wanderer is an elegy "affected by Christian ideas of the transitoriness of this world and its imminent end; but ... the tone is more one of sorrowful lament that these heroic glories are now past, than of confidence in the heavenly remedy." This is true, to an extent; but I see this poem as a personal lament for the narrator's loss of his lord, not as a reflection on eschatology. The lament over past catastrophes does not indicate, to me, any concern over an "imminent end"; the type of misfortunes dwelt upon were common in an age of lawlessness and almost constant warfare. These is no sense of an ultimate plan -- no divine fingers at work on a universal tapestry of which we are all necessary threads -- and there is no theodicy. But instead of quietly retiring from the world, into a monastery or a hermitage, the eorl will, like a true artist, bestow his own meaning upon his life. He will hold fast to the heroic code of his ancestors:

The wise must be calm, and curb impulsive ways;

Ne'er speak in haste, nor show weakness in war;

He shall feel no fear, nor have a fay mind;

Greed he must banish. [...]

He has a good heart who holds fast to this faith ...

(stanzas XIII and XXIII [lines 65b-66a; 112a])

H. P. Lovecraft: A Nighted World As Mad As I

© Edward Moore 2015

patristics@gmail.com

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

~ Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical.

~ Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 4.003

The study of philosophy offers many gifts, not least the ability to wax abstruse on any given topic. Exotic jargon that often sounds like (and usually is) a foreign language, and is sometimes poetical -- in a Dada-Surrealist fashion -- enables the philosophical adept to raise even the most mundane topic to the sublunar sphere, where misty daimons dwell, if not to the Ogdoad itself. At its best, philosophy offers a virtually inexhaustible mine of highly elastic tropes, which the creative thinker may use for the sake of elucidating difficult topics, or to make boring ones seem worthy of intellectual engagement. In rare instances, philosophy, or philosophical tropes, may be used to demonstrate the artistic depth of a writer working in a genre traditionally considered "low brow" or at least not up to the standard of literature (whatever that means in our age of thumb-tapping textese productions). Traditionally, horror, science fiction, and fantasy (with rare exceptions) have been ignored by academic critics and theorists, while tales of individual men and women and their often petty trials and tribulations -- works presenting the private troubles of mediocre individuals with all the gravity of world-historical significance -- are still being produced, read, and discussed. The reading of such works does not -- is not meant to -- produce disorientation or the sense of another world pressing upon the consciousness of the reader, demanding comprehension and the bestowal of meaning. Such an experience would require critical engagement with the work resulting in an interpretation (not mere commentary or "book chat," as Gore Vidal was fond of calling the superficial jawing about boilerplated volumes by M.F.A.s at cocktail parties) producing a communicable meaning that goes beyond the familiar, the accepted, the comfortable. Of course, the would-be critical reader requires works that produce that disorientation, make that demand for engagement.

Back when the French "New Novel" was new, Nathalie Sarraute, in the seminal texts Tropisms and The Age of Suspicion (English translations 1964) called for a compositional technique that would "[plunge] the reader into the stream of those subterranean dreams of which Proust only had time to obtain a rapid aerial view ... [and] would give the reader the illusion of repeating these actions himself, in a more clearly aware, more orderly, distinct and forceful manner than he can do in life." H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) went beyond any previous writer in his genre, except perhaps Poe, in achieving the type of technique described by Sarraute. (Of contemporary writers of weird fiction, only Thomas Ligotti has succeeded in enveloping us in his soft, dark, decaying, insane universe.) Talented writers of weird fiction (or "dark fantasy," as I have seen a recent volume of Lovecraft's tales labeled) compose works that lead our consciousness away from the familiar, the mundane, and place upon us the burden of meaning; of not being shown or told, but being involved in the unfolding of an idea generated by the author for the sake of those who come after: the craftsmanly readers who will work up the idea into a discursive structure extending beyond the author into the realm of perpetual creativity. Works by such authors, as Sarraute puts it, "break away from all that is prescribed, conventional and dead, to turn towards what is free, sincere and alive, [and] will necessarily, sooner or later, become ferments of emancipation and progress." The responsive reader of such works is caught up in the act of creation, of experiencing meaning privately, and then expressing this meaning publicly, through discourse -- that is, criticism and interpretation.

Theory is of little help in this endeavor (unless we approach theory as just another form of creative writing or, at its best -- as in certains works by Derrida, for example -- literature), for meaning is not discovered but bestowed; analysis of a linguistic structure will not reveal meaning, it will only display the operation of linguistic signifiers. It is only through intellectual engagement with a work of art that meaning is bestowed; and this is accomplished by the reader when he chooses the themes that inspire him emotionally and motivate him intellectually, and then give voice to the experience. According to Wittgenstein, certain inspirational or motivational themes cannot be expressed logically -- such as ethics, religion, and metaphysics -- and are therefore uncommunicable and hence "nonsensical." But these supposedly unsayable and silly things are precisely the potent themes of literature: themes that draw the reader forth, into the realm of communication and creativity, and demand what Emerson called the "power to connect ... thought with its proper symbol [and] to communicate it without loss" (Nature, chapter IV). If philosophy in our time has "suppressed its own creativity," as Lavine once remarked, and is now overly technical and largely irrelevant, disconnected from the transcendent, or at least escapist, yearnings of humankind, I believe philosophy -- or philosophical tropes -- can still be used creatively for the elucidation of literary art -- for the extension of that art into the realm of perpetual discourse (the "ongoing conversation of Western Civilization," in Rorty's memorable words) where it belongs. Art for art's sake; philosophy for art's sake.

One of my favorite tropes is found in Plato's so-called Unwritten Doctrines (teachings that he communicated in private lectures to his best students, and which were recorded only by his successors in the Academy) -- the metaphysical schema of the One and the Indefinite Dyad, and the active creative force called the Demiurge (craftsman) or World-Soul. I spent some of the best years of my life studying and interpreting the various forms of Platonic philosophy (no pun intended) from the early Academy to the Neoplatonic schools of both pagans and Christians. While the discipline of this specialization kept my mind sharp, despite my devotion to the rites of Bacchus, the only intellectual benefit I received from this recondite occupation was a fund of tropes that continue to ring in my mind like silver coins (as someone said of the poetical lines of T. S. Eliot). So I shall put some of them to use, as I discuss here one of my favorite writers of fiction, H. P. Lovecraft. Here I am, about ten years ago, giving an academic account of Plato's metaphysics, in an article on "Middle Platonism" that I wrote for the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (www.iep.utm.edu/midplato/):

Drawing upon Pythagorean mathematical theory, Plato began his metaphysical schema with a pair of opposed first principles, the One and the Indefinite Dyad. The One is the active principle which imposes limit on the indefinite or unlimited Dyad, thereby laying the ground for the orderly construction of the cosmos. Through this influence of the One upon the Dyad numbers are generated, that is, the Decad, which in turn generates all other numbers. The most important of these primordial numbers is the tetraktys, numbers one through four, the sum total of which is ten, the Decad. The tetraktys also was interpreted by Plato as generating the four mathematical dimensions, with the number one corresponding to the point, two to the line, three to the plane, and four to the solid. Between the Ideal-Numbers or Decad Plato places the World-Soul, corresponding roughly to the Demiurge of the Timaeus. The World-Soul mediates between the Ideal realm and matter, projecting the four dimensions on base matter in order to form the four elements, Fire, Air, Water, and Earth.

The Indefinite Dyad -- to get right to the trope -- is the unruly or partially formed idea that the author, or One, must bring under some type of control, for the sake of communication. The idea, once articulated through careful consideration and revision, shows itself to be not a monumental concept, but a discursive structure, quite like Plato's mathematical -- or, more precisely, geometrical -- dimensions. This structure, despite the efforts of the author, is -- due to intrusions of intertextuality and the anxiety of influence -- constantly shifting in a maddeningly elusive fashion, as related ideas and notions are brought in for clarification or accentuation; sometimes adopted, sometimes rejected; at other times (and this most interestingly) faced up to and "exorcised" in an agon with a highly influential predecessor, for the sake of the author's originality and continued development (a process that Harold Bloom has mapped out so well). If the author stays the course, and does not get frustrated, he or she will produce a unified text that is readable and interpretable, and does not wander lamely in a solipsistic sphere of endless self-referentiality; but this requires the author to acknowledge -- even agonistically -- his influential predecessors and to relinquish some meaning-generating control to the reader (the Demiurge or World-Soul).

A Platonist (or Neoplatonist) of the third century C.E., Plotinus, considered the One (author), however, to be quite the solipsist. Alone with itself, the One "overflowed" its overabundant power, and the Intellect (a sort of mediator between the mad genius of the One and its sober interpreter, the World-Soul) set about arranging the primal cosmic ideas into some type of orderly whole. Here is Yours Truly in academic mode again, in another article, on "Neoplatonism," for the same publication (www.iep.utm.edu/neoplato/):

Plotinus declares that the One is 'alone with itself' and ineffable (cf. Enneads VI.9.6 and V.2.1). The One does not act to produce a cosmos or a spiritual order, but simply generates from itself, effortlessly, a power (dunamis) which is at once the Intellect (nous) and the object of contemplation (theôria) of this Intellect. While Plotinus suggests that the One subsists by thinking itself as itself, the Intellect subsists through thinking itself as other, and therefore becomes divided within itself: this act of division within the Intellect is the production of Being, which is the very principle of expression or discursivity (Ennead V.1.7).

It is at the level of Being -- that is, the state of existence in which each existent is fully engaged in contemplating reality and acting in accordance with its predetermined end or telos -- that the World-Soul or Demiurge (or reader, to maintain the trope) goes beyond simple contemplation and enters upon the more arduous and personal task of creating. The Intellect, in Plotinus' schema, is rather like an editor, arranging material to achieve the greatest clarity possible; this involves, as Plotinus writes, thinking as an other -- that is, the author. Every fully engaged reader is both editor and critic / interpreter. In order to bestow meaning upon a literary work, we choose the themes -- expressed through dialogue, action, and occasionally direct commentary from the narrator -- that resonate most powerfully with us; and by contemplating the embedded metaphors, metonymic or synecdochal entwinings, and lurking whispering symbols, we arrive at a personal meaning, or set of meanings, which, when communicated effectively, becomes an authoritative reading -- a work of literature in its own right.

The idea that literary criticism is itself a form of literature was put forth by Geoffrey Hartman, in his quite literary scholarly study, Criticism in the Wilderness (1980), which had an immense influence upon me as an undergraduate majoring in Comparative Literature. It is now commonplace to consider every act of reading as a creative act. When one critically interprets a text, one is not only clarifying whatever meaning one has found there; one is also extending the boundaries of that text to include other related ideas and concepts -- including one's own moral, ethical, and aesthetic judgments -- and thereby producing a new text that is a work of literary art in its own right. Meaning, here, is not discovered through a careful reading of the text; rather, it is bestowed upon the text by the creative reader / critic / interpreter. The classic, or Classical, notion of interpretation, in Aristotle's sense of tekhnê hermêneutikê ("art of interpretation") does not reveal the meaning of ideas or events, but provides an understanding of how these ideas or events are formed and come to appear before us. This notion of interpretation is not creative or artistic, but scientific; and art, especially literature, is not science: a lesson we should have learned long ago when the New Critics -- "fundamentally mechanics," as Gore Vidal labeled them -- attempted to separate the author from the text, "solemnly playing with what has been invented by others for use, not analysis" (Vidal, "Novelists and Critics of the 1940s." 1953) -- in short, these "critics" reduced the text to a scientifically observable object, not a vital expression of a creative mind. As Paul Ricoeur explained, in The Conflict of Interpretations (1974), interpretation (hermeneutics) is a set of discursive statements leading to a grasp of the real through meaningful expression, not a description of impressions coming from the things themselves. Description is the task of philosophers and scientists; literary artistists -- including critic-interpreters -- engage in truth-saying, they express meaning.

We are becoming aware now, with the advent of the "digital humanities," that a scientific approach to literature can only reveal historical trends, statistics, not insight into the meaning of texts, which is always personal -- and personally creative, or demiurgic. For those with a certain critical mindset (I am being kind) in which texts are viewed as artifacts to be studied instead of works to be contemplated -- while the persons who produced these texts are relegated to the status of cultural scribes instead of prophets of their own unique vision -- the impersonal or even anti-personalistic program of "computational criticism" or the "digital humanities" will have great appeal. Indeed, in our technocratic age, where reading and writing is largely confined to text messages and "tweets," any "discipline" in which a computer -- not a thinking, feeling, desiring person -- does the "thinking" is guaranteed a wild success. In the March 2014 issue of The New Yorker, Joshua Rothman dealt critically with the guru of this new zombifying fad (at least I hope it's a fad), Professor Franco Moretti of Stanford University, who has written two predictably successful books on the subject. Rothman summarizes Moretti's "critical" attitude:

Viewed from Moretti’s statistical mountaintop, traditional literary criticism, with its idiosyncratic, personal focus on individual works, can seem self-indulgent, even frivolous. What’s the point, his graphs seem to ask, of continuing to interpret individual books -- especially books that have already been interpreted over and over? Interpreters, Moretti writes, 'have already said what they had to.' Better to focus on 'the laws of literary history' -- on explanation, rather than interpretation.

I have never read, nor have I ever produced, an interpretation of a text that was not also an explanation (apparently, artificial distinctions are not the sole property of philosophers). But of course, laws are for scientists (not for artists or politicians or police officers), and Moretti is, perhaps, a frustrated or failed scientist who disregards the humanistic tradition of private interpretation offered up for public edification in favor of a cool analytical approach that has little or nothing to do with art. The act of personal creation that is private interpretation or criticism of a text may, of course, at times be "idiosyncratic" (but that implies that there are interpretations that are idiomatic), self-indulgent, or even downright solipsistic. When, however, the interpretation or criticism -- however odd, puzzling or Unheimlich it may be -- is written down, it extends the discursive structure initiated by the authorial One, who is "beyond being," into the realm of active engagement, or "becoming," where meaning, in all its equivocal force, passes from contemplation to action -- from private thoughts to public utterance. This is a great, an invaluable aid to the author, who will gain an understanding of him or herself not in private, introspective moments, as a solitary mind, but as an agent of meaning in a world where some people, at least, seek an ever more intimate intellectual and emotional connection with their fellows. This is one of the functions art, after all, especially literature.

Gertrude Stein, in her essay "What are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them" (1935) put it quite well, in her eccentric manner:

When you are writing before there is an audience anything written is as important as any other thing and you cherish anything and everything that you have written. After the audience begins, naturally they create something that is they create you, and so not everything is so important, something is more important than another thing ...

When one hearkens to the voice of one's readers, one will become aware of the accretions that have obscured one's true form, like the sea-god Glaukos in Plato's Republic. Interpretation and / or criticism often serves the purpose of clearing away those parts of a writer's work that simply do not yield a clear conception. Many times a writer will consider the unguarded, or what T. S. Eliot called the "unconscious," moments of his text as those that are the most personal, and hence, the most valuable. To create an authentic work of art, one that inspires the various dêmiourgoi to extend the discourse, the author must not impose his private existence -- rendered in partially legible symbols -- upon the craftsmanly readers; he or she must, rather, deliberately compose a text that demonstrates a comprehension of the events being recounted, and not merely provide a description of the emotions produced by the events. "Poetry," as Eliot wrote (and I take poetry here to include all literature), "is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality." The personality he is referring to is not, of course, what I would call the authentic self, or the 'I', but the un- or partially processed (I hate that metaphor but I'll use it anyway) emotions that we readily take to be indicative of our true self merely because they are immediate, or more precisely, unmediated by that pesky intellect that so many contemporary denizens of this globe strive so assiduously to avoid. This is not to say that literature should not deal with emotions and personality; it means only that the unprocessed (there it is again, damnit) buffetings of a private psyche should be articulated in a polished style that invites response and communication. If this involves a temporary escape from one's personality for the sake of a humanistic art, so be it. "But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things" (T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent." 1919). I have always loved that rather acerbic aside.

Reasons for desiring escape are as numerous as the persons who have them. In many "semi-autobiographical" novels (a label usually indicating that the writer has written a desired meaning into his life) we as readers are asked to empathize with a character that is being shown to us for one purpose only: to edify the writer. An appeal to our escapist and voyeuristic tendencies is what causes the pages to get turned; Schadenfreude is the usual 'moral' response to those bildungsroman in which the subject-author is finally thwarted, and left to a life he never intended, or worse. In the best of these "coming of age" novels, for example Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage, and Arthur Machen's The Hill of Dreams, the moral temperament of the reader will lead him to decide whether a victory -- or at least a desired end -- was achieved at the end of the narrative. Maugham's novel has the semi-autobiographical Philip Carey proposing marriage, successfully, to a young lady he barely knows, except for a romp in the bushes at a hop field. That he proposes in an art museum is rather aesthetically pleasing and, of course, symbolic (Philip is a failed artist). (Never mind that Philip thought his lady to be pregnant; he desired both marriage and a life of adventure, and chose the latter.) Unless one shares with Philip the wanderlust that made him desire a life of world travel and exotic adventure (which marriage forced him to abandon), his winning the hand of a beautiful young lady is not exactly a tragic end. In both of these works we are asked to care about the details of rather inconsequential lives; especially in Lucian's case: the manuscripts left behind by the poor guy weren't even legible, making even posthumous recognition an impossibility. The reader will feel pity here, if he or she is but a tad sensitive. However, in Machen's tale, Lucian the failed lover and writer is shown to be a deliriously devoted and sincere lover; he is obsessed with one young lady, whom he fails to win because of his morbid attachment to a dreamscape that is ever before his eyes. His belief in the sanctifying power of beauty (or Beauty) is deeply moving. Life in the stark gray world, however, holds no place for Lucian, and he dies from an overdose of laudanum, a sacrifice to his art. This, to me, is authentic tragedy (a term, like "hero," that is so often over- and mis-used in our day as to be virtually meaningless). And we all know, along with Aristotle, that tragedy is the most satisfying of all literary escapes from our tedious narcoleptic reality. Catharsis and all that.

In the works of H. P. Lovecraft, we find only one novella, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, containing a minor autobiographical touch. The general personality, or rather characteristics, of the eponymous main character likely resembles Lovecraft, as he saw himself as a youth: a pallid young scholar, shy and reclusive, yet not easily given to embarrassment or lack of confidence in his mental powers, with an almost morbid attachment to things of the past. But that is a description of a character type not a personality, and in a work of literary art such description serves only to provide occasion and motive for the action of the narrative. The autobiographical reminiscences are confined largely to external details: recollection of his first youthful impressions of his beloved hometown of Providence, Rhode Island, and the powerful aesthetic sway it held over him; his antiquarian rambles about Stampers Hill and surrounding environs; and, of course, his redemptive return to his native ground -- and all the dreams and inspiration it harbored for him -- after his ill-starred marriage and soul-sapping two-year exile in New York City (symbolized in the story by Charles's visit to an incredibly aged necromancer in Transylvania, where Charles is initiated into dark secrets of an ancient and terrible sorcery). But the psychological import of these experiences is never explored -- indeed, how could it be; he was composing a work of "weird fiction" or "dark fantasy" (I rather prefer the latter appellation) and such a genre will only get bogged down in the sucking mud of the common day if inner experience is given too much ink. And besides, Lovecraft himself confessed to an indifference regarding human aspirations and, indeed, to the ultimate fate of our race. In a letter written in 1929, when he was approaching his fortieth year, Lovecraft wrote that the universe does not "[give] a damn one way or another about the especial wants and ultimate welfare of mosquitoes, rats, lice, dogs, men, pterodactyls, trees, fungi, dodos, or other forms of biological energy." Yet we know that he read deeply in history, science, some philosophy, and of course his beloved dark fiction, especially Poe, Lord Dunsany, Machen, and R. W. Chambers. He also traveled a bit later in life, visiting historical towns in New England and elsewhere in the States (he never went to Europe, though he did visit Quebec) that served as inspiration for many of his tales. The few friendships he maintained were mostly carried on through letters, of which he wrote volumes. At the end of the day, Lovecraft was only happy when he was alone with his fantastic thoughts. He even went so far, when he lived in New York City, to keep the lights in his apartment turned off while he read in the closet by the light of a candle, to avoid any knocks at the door. His belief in the pointlessness of human life was not a decadent affectation, it was certainly sincere. He did, however, care about advances in science and psychology, but mostly to the extent that they served as fodder for his fiction, or bolstered his own belief in the ultimate vanity of existence.

* * * * *

In his tales, mostly short stories, Lovecraft followed Poe's dictum that a story writer must strive for a single powerful effect. Poe had no patience for long, rambling, "human interest" stories; he felt that a story or poem that could not be read in a single sitting was likely to fail in its intended effect. Notoriously, Poe even went so far as to state that Paradise Lost is uneven in its effects, and reads less like a single poem and more like a collection of short powerful poems connected by less interesting material. Like Poe, Lovecraft did not attempt to make statements, in his fictional writings, about his contemporary world -- for the understandable reason that everyday life and people simply did not interest him. In an essay written early in his career, when he was thirty-one (1921), Lovecraft distanced himself from the literary naturalism of his time:

I could not write about 'ordinary people' because I am not in the least interested in them. Without interest there can be no art. Man's relations to man do not captivate my fancy. It is man's relation to the cosmos -- to the unknown -- which alone arouses in me the spark of creative imagination. The humanocentric [sic] pose is impossible to me, for I cannot acquire the primitive myopia which magnifies the earth and ignores the background.

So Lovecraft's "pose" became that of a mental voyager in the "infinite immensity of space" that so frightened Pascal; a chronicler of fantasy, dreams (especially nightmare), and the strange and malign superstitions that perhaps still linger in the darkest corners of our world. The person is a small and inconsequential thing in the "vast cosmos-at-large." Those misty daimons that trouble people in the course of their mundane existence, and cause them to ask unanswerable questions about the purpose of life; fate and predestination; the efficacy of religious faith; the progress of history; and the redemptive power of art, are of little interest to Lovecraft. Rather, the blind forces of a cosmos that knows nothing of us and therefore cares nothing for us, and yet "may impose monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain venturesome members of [the human race]," is Lovecraft's concern -- and paradoxically the locus of his escape from an intolerable existence. As One-author, Lovecraft remained alone with his thoughts (indeed, he was a recluse for most of his life) as he read widely and pondered deeply, always finding more material -- not to gather up into a scholarly work [his impressive and still useful scholarly essay Supernatural Horror in Literature is the one exception] or a realist novel, but to transform through the power of his imagination into an ever-growing discursive structure with a dark, unstable, and infinitely loathsome cosmos as its foundation.

Where does this leave his readers? Are we his creative partners, dêmiourgoi, in communicating the ineffable, as he might say? One of the reasons for reading horror, or "dark fantasy," is to gain escape from ordinary life through the thrill of fear -- from the safety of one's sitting room. This is voyeuristic and cathartic and ultimately aesthetic. But it fades, and leaves behind only emotional impressions, if even that. What raises Lovecraft's work above run-of-the-mill hack writers, and even to the level of Literature (a selection of his tales have been enshrined in a Modern Library edition, and now an annotated scholarly edition of his Complete Works is available), is the philosophical stance he takes in the best of his stories. The stance is never obtrusive, but serves to provide the reader with something intellectual to carry away, something more than just "chills and thrills." If the philosophy expressed is less than edifying, that is because the world as seen by Lovecraft offered nothing to cling to for emotional and intellectual gratification, much less growth. And so Lovecraft invited his readers to join him as "colonizers of dreams," to use Peter S. Beagle's phrase, in reference to Tolkien (a vastly different writer and thinker). Of course, these dreams are nightmares -- and that, for Lovecraft, and for many of us, is reality.

Lovecraft was an atheist, a materialist, and had little patience for religious sentiments. Yet he created a troop of "gods" whose provenance extends into the pre-human past, and whose concerns are so far beyond the life of humanity as to make the latter of little consequence -- except as unwitting tools to further the supra-cosmic schemes of these deities. The terms "gods" and "deities" are used for convenience; these beings are, in Lovecraft's fiction, "extraterrestrials from the depths of space," as prominent Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi puts it, "and their encounters with human beings are largely a product of chance." Of course, they have their human worshippers, or partners, who seem to be seeking some kind of vicarious power of their own by aiding these supremely lofty beings; the ancient witch Keziah (in "Dreams in the Witch House") and the death-defying necromancer Joseph Curwen (in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward) are two memorable examples of individuals who trafficked with Those from Outside and gained real, albeit temporary, power. Significantly, in the context of Lovecraft's art, the gods and their devotees are not merely characters in horror stories; they serve "a largely symbolic function -- they [are] metaphors for the essential unknowability of a boundless universe that human science, for all its tremendous advances, can never fully grasp" (S. T. Joshi, Introduction to H. P. Lovecraft, The Complete Cthulhu Mythos Tales, New York: Fall River Press 2013).

Of the dominant themes in Lovecraft's fiction, transference of consciousness, or "mind exchange," is the most effective, for these tales speak directly to a concern with personal identity in an increasingly de-personalized world -- a concern as urgent and troubling in Lovecraft's time as it is in our own (but, alas, ignored by our society of zombified petty technocrats who happily "tweet" their way to dusty death). In "The Thing on the Doorstep" an old wizard, Ephraim Waite, to achieve a sort of immortality, uses magical arts to transfer his consciousness to the body of his daughter, Asenath. But finding a female body unsatisfactory, Ephraim / Asenath preys upon Edward Derby, an awkward, studious youth with a brilliant mind -- and interested in all things occult. Unsuspecting Edward falls in love with the not uncomely Asenath (dark and pretty, but with rather bulging eyes), also an occultist -- but of a rather more enterprising kind -- and they eventually marry. The narrator, named Upton, who is Edward's closest and only real friend, soon becomes concerned over the strange behavior of the uxorious Edward, who seems to be under Asenath's control, in a less than salubrious manner. At first she seems simply to wear the pants in the family, but after a while it is clear that she controls, literally, Edward's very thoughts and speech, and even actions. After a series of disturbing and dangerous incidents -- including a harrowing late-night car ride from a remote region where some devilry was taking place, during which Edward is possessed by Asenath / Ephraim in mid-trip -- it becomes clear that Asenath / Ephraim is slowly taking total possession of Edward, and will soon inhabit his body completely. Due to what appears to be the behavior of a mentally disturbed person, Edward is confined to an asylum; of course, no asylum can thwart the wizard, despite the fact that Edward, in a desperate effort to save himself, had already killed Asenath -- that is, her body. Her mind, or rather the mind of Ephraim (able to remain intact, so to speak, even after the destruction of the body), manages to transfer to Edward's body, and send his (Edward's) consciousness into the dead body of Asenath, which Edward had dumped in a cellar of an abandoned house. Through an immense effort of will, Edward (in Asenath's decaying body) drags himself to his friend Upton's doorstep, where the extent of the horror is finally revealed. Upton, to rid the world of the threat of Ephraim, goes to the asylum where he "[sends] six bullets through the head of [his] best friend." Of course, it is his best friend's body with Ephraim's mind inside.

Lovecraft has been criticized for the absence of wholesome women in his tales. Indeed, the only female characters we encounter are wicked old crones, like Keziah, degenerate backwood bumpkins (hapless Lavinia, in "The Dunwich Horror"), or a female body with an evil male mind (Asenath). In an effort to account, psychologically, for the absence of desirable female flesh -- or at least intelligent, capable women -- in his tales, the details of Lovecraft's life and love have been exhaustively sifted and recorded by scholars, for those who are interested: his upbringing by coddling female relatives; relocation to New York City and a two-year marriage to an attractive, upwardly mobile woman, Sonia Haft Greene, who was, apparently, too much for the studious and retiring Howard to handle (although she did offer, in an interview given when Lovecraft had attained posthumous fame, the rather odd compliment that he was "an adequately excellent lover"); and his eventual retreat back to his beloved Providence, where he dwelt in seclusion (excepting the occasional road trip), alone with the fantastic thoughts that filled his poetic mind. It was at this point, arguably, that he produced his best work.

I do not consider a tale like "The Thing on the Doorstep" to be an expression of misogyny or a fear of powerful, confident women. Rather, I find in that story a genuine concern with personal intellectual integrity, even a fear of losing that unique cast of mind that makes one a person -- a unique, unrepeatable entity, as purveyors of personalist philosophy like to say. The experience of falling in love -- and this is an experience that Lovecraft surely had, regardless of his inability to cultivate that love -- is jarring, to say the least: we feel dislocated, albeit in a blissful way, and when we regain some power of self-reflection we find that we are changed; our focus is on the beloved and our private thoughts and desires are transformed through union with another person who, to resort to a cliché, completes us. Those of us with an artistic temperament may soon feel the burden of our attachment to this "other," and strive to re-assert our uniqueness, the solitary power of our intellect. If we feel that we are really losing something essential to our self, through an all-consuming love, a crisis occurs, and a decision must be made. The power of Lovecraft's tale, the potent symbolism, resides in Edward's inability to escape and regain his selfhood, his personhood. Unhappy marriages, where one (or both) of the spouses feels trapped and hopeless, are unfortunately a common occurrence in our society. When one succumbs to the social pressure to marry and breed children, at the expense of one's loftier desires -- to perhaps create something from the store of private ideas waiting to find a partner-demiurge to bring them into the realm of being -- one has indeed lost oneself. It is worth noting that some of Lovecraft's most claustrophobic and morbidly desperate tales, such as "He," and "The Horror at Red Hook" were products of his marriage experience.

Lovecraft worked with the general theme of transference of consciousness in several other tales such as "The Call of Cthulhu," in which a "psychically hypersensitive" youth named Wilcox (a sculptor of rare talent) succumbs to a seizure, during the aftermath of which he enters a "delirium" and experiences strange dreams of "some terrible Cyclopean vista of dark and dripping stone, with a subterrene voice ... shouting ... two sounds ... 'Cthulhu' and 'R'lyeh'." Wilcox, deliriously inspired, makes a clay bas-relief of a "monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind." He shows this bas-relief to an aged and highly respected anthropologist, Professor Angell, who studies it "with almost frantic intensity," but is slow to recognize the "hieroglyphics and pictorial design." (The good professor dies after being jostled by "a nautical-looking negro" who apparently had a connection to the ancient cult whose blasphemous intentions the good professor was on the way to exposing.) The image, of course, is of the fabulously ancient god Cthulhu, who is not dead but sleeping, and ready to rise from the depths of ocean when the stars are right. The hieroglyphs, as is later discovered, are the prophetic words: "In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming." Whatever doubts the skeptical narrator (Thurston, nephew of Professor Angell) had about the ancient -- or more properly, interstellar -- provenance of the young sculptor's obviously modern production are shaken by the discovery of an almost exact replica, of undeniable antiquity and perhaps even extraterrestrial origin, discovered by a New Orleans detective during a raid on a particularly vicious and loathsome cult (apparently the one responsible for rubbing out the nosey Professor). What's more, it is discovered that the sculptor was not alone in his delirium and visions; from March 22 to April 2 (the period of his delirium) others reported similar experiences. A laborious review of newspaper cuttings from those weeks revealed that average people reported nothing, and men of science were only slightly affected, if at all, but: "It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came." These answers corroborated the growing suspicion that some sort of intra-cosmic event had occurred, or was about to occur, that would lead to the rejuvenation of Cthulhu, and the overwhelming and domination of the earth. The transference of consciousness in this tale does not involve a malignant human being on a personal quest for immortality or ultimate magus status (as in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward); it is rather a cosmic transference, a visitation of a wholly alien consciousness upon sensitive souls capable of communicating the message of this usurping consciousness in the most effective manner possible -- hence the preference of the supra-cosmic entities for artists or other sensitive, introspective types that we find in other tales, such as "The Shadow out of Time."

"The Call of Cthulhu" ends, rather disappointingly, with the octopoid monstrosity, emerged from his deep sea tomb, assaulting a wayward Norwegian vessel and "like Polypheme cursing the fleeing ship of Odysseus ... [but] bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Cthulhu slid greasily into the water and began to pursue with vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic potency." But alas, Cthulhu, the deathless god of immemorial age, ends up getting smashed apart by the ship, when the brave captain makes a final, desperate move to escape. The prose here at the finale is as finely crafted and attuned to the action as anything Lovecraft ever wrote; but the defeat, albeit temporary, of a being so potent that it can not only never truly die, but use its mental power to influence the actions of humans through dreams, amnesia, and delirium -- the defeat of such a formidable aeon-defying entity by getting a ship rammed through it (of course, Cthulhu immediately "recombines" himself, but his prey nevertheless escapes) is too much like the ending of a cheesy contemporary horror film, and not worthy of Lovecraft. For someone who had read and deeply admired the work of Edgar Allan Poe, the phantasmal, oneiric, feverishly ecstatic closing of The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym should have been revisited for inspiration.

Another transference tale, which is quite worthy of Lovecraft -- in fact, I consider it his best work -- is the novella The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Here we encounter a young man who has spent his life reveling in the antiquities of history-drenched Providence, wandering and daydreaming up and down its precipitous streets, and in the narrow lanes and hidden courtyards, the atmospheres of which change suddenly and almost magically with the shifting of the sun, producing a mesmeric dance of shadows and light. I have been to Providence, several times -- unfortunately it is now built up into a rather cluttered and bustling business and consumer center -- and followed in Lovecraft's footsteps. I watched the sunset wash with pale gold the Christian Science dome at the top of Stamper's Hill, and felt a luxurious melancholy as the street lamps began to twinkle in the deepening dusk. The gentle trickle of the Providence River accompanied me as I traversed the little park adjacent to the magisterial State House, seeking the spot that was once Olney Court (according to the records I consulted at the Athenaeum) where the alchemist and necromancer Joseph Curwen built his first house after wisely relocating to tolerant Providence from witch-crazed Salem. There is nothing there now, except an overpass; so I wended my way along Benefit Street and up "vertical Jenckes Street," making a right onto "sleepy Congdon Street" and finally to Prospect Terrace, with its statue of Roger Williams, founder of the colony, at which point I stood at the railing as the sun began to set, and gazed out over the gently rolling country beyond Federal Hill, imagining, like Lovecraft, vistas of faery wonder and shuddering delight just beyond the edge of sight. When darkness fell, I strolled slowly up the precipitous lanes to stately Brown University, where the John Hay Library preserves the manuscripts and typescripts of our illustrious scribe of squamous blasphemies.

Yes, the atmosphere of the town is enough to stimulate poetical fancies -- and elaborate Lovecraftian diction. To know that Poe himself sat in St. John's Cemetery and composed inebriate love letters to Sarah Helen Whitman makes one -- at least it made me -- feel literary, romantic, and decadent, all at the same time. I sat in that cemetery at midnight, with a bottle of Scotch and a fine cigar, and wrote a cute little poem to my sweetheart of the moment. I can't recall what she said when I read it to her; but I am sure it contributed something to the fading of our summer. It is fitting, then, that the most subtle and disturbing transference of consciousness in Lovecraft's oeuvre should have occurred in this ancient town.

Charles Dexter Ward, we are told, had always been an antiquarian, living more in the past than in the present; he had few friends, and eschewed the sports and other boyish amusements of his fellows in favor of books and daydreams, with the result that he was often alone -- and preferred it that way. At one point during his genealogical researches, he came across the name Joseph Curwen, and discovered, quite by accident (two sheets of an old journal had been pasted together, and the pages re-numbered, to hide the record of Curwen's marriage to an ancestor on Charles's mother's side) that this man, who had died under mysterious circumstances shortly before the Revolutionary War, was great-great-plus grandfather to Charles. So, as was "natural," he began an exhaustive and rather obsessive search for more information on this elusive person, whose activities had been systematically struck from the city's records. Intoxicated by the mystery, Charles went in full force gale -- and his efforts paid off.

After discovering, in a record left accidentally intact, that Curwen had built a house in Olney Court shortly after his relocation from Salem to Providence, Charles goes to investigate that house (still standing in Lovecraft's time) and discovers that a portrait of Curwen had been executed by a famous painter of the day, on a panel above a fireplace in what had been the drawing room. Excited beyond all reason, Charles engages the help of a qualified expert to uncover and restore the portrait, which had been painted over many years ago, and discovers, to his shock and delight, that Joseph Curwen is Charles's spitting image -- indeed, it is like looking in a mirror. Charles's father is equally impressed, and pays to have the painting restored and given to Charles as a present, against the protestations of Charles's mother, whose intuition was operating at full capacity (she is the only female character in Lovecraft's oeuvre to display natural intelligence and even a bit of courage; but her part is quite small). So the entire fireplace is removed (the tenants of the house properly reimbursed) and installed in Charles's study. But wait, there's more. In a small cubby hole discovered after the removal of the fireplace, Charles finds a bundle of papers, most of them in cipher; but one notebook catches his attention, and provokes him to secrecy. The title of the little book is "To the One Who Shall Come After." This cache contains Curwen's journal, and instructions on how to utilize certain alchemical and necromantic arts for the purpose of raising the dead, specifically the long-departed Curwen.

All of this, we come to discover, has been brought about through a spell that Curwen cast before his demise; a spell that would filter through the centuries, and fasten upon the proper victim -- that is, poor Charles -- whose mind would then be turned to old things. Under the spell's influence Charles unwittingly did the bidding of Curwen; he sought out and found Curwen's grave, dug up his remains, and following the instructions in the cryptic texts discovered behind the fireplace in the house in Olney Court, resurrected the ancient necomancer. Now Curwen is back again, ready to reconnect with his two old cronies (still alive after numerous centuries, biding their time in Prague and Transylvania) and begin again their ghoulish rifling of the world's ancient tombs in a quest for supreme knowledge which will unlock secrets no mortal could possibly comprehend -- except to know that ultimate purpose of this bone-swapping bodes no good for the human race.

Whatever illusions Charles may have harbored of a glorious partnership with his undead ancestor are quickly shattered when Curwen begins vampirizing the neighborhood (apparently to get his strength up) against Charles's weak and impotent protestations; duly cowed, Charles can only sit by helplessly when Curwen digs up the grave of an old enemy, resurrects the fellow, and exacts a horrible revenge. Eventually, irritated with Charles's "squeamishness," Curwen murders the lad, stuffs him inside the cupboard of the very fireplace above which his picture once stared out at the world (it had crumbled to dust at the moment of Curwen's resurrection), and sets about posing as Charles, purchasing a bungalow in a nearby town, right above the spot where Curwen once had his farmhouse and subterranean dungeon and wizard's workshop back in the eighteenth century. (The farmhouse is, of course, long gone, but the dungeon and alchemist's workshop remain.) This attempt at subterfuge leads to problems: the handwriting is different, raising eyebrows at Charles's bank; "Charles's" memory is quite impaired, being more acute in matters of antiquarian interest than in the normal business of the contemporary world in which he suddenly found himelf. Feeble efforts by Curwen / Charles to play "catch-up," as it were, by reading contemporary newspapers and magazines, did little to prevent his removal to an asylum. Confident, and rightly so, that this removal would only be temporary, given his extraordinary intelligence, "Charles" quietly acquiesces, and is soon free again, after demonstrating normal mental function, apart from the inexplicable memory loss and altered penmanship.

Back at the bungalow, the necromantic operations resume in earnest. The climax of this tale is what S. T. Joshi refers to as a "conventional good versus evil battle" between a valiant human (Charles's physician) and the demented Curwen, intent on ... Well, intent on what? We get references to entities from "Outside," but their role is never really clear. All we know is that Curwen, and his buddies in Prague and Transylvania, are practicing a very ancient and powerful form of necromancy that involves the gathering of bones of illustrious men of old, the reduction of these bones to their "essential salts," and by some alchemical operation the resurrection, in full bodily form, of these long-dead prophets, seers, and sages of the ancient world, for the purpose of gaining -- by persuasion, gentle or otherwise -- all the knowledge that they possess. It is left to the reader to imagine what these death-defying wizards will do with all that accumulated wisdom. In any case, the physician, Dr. Willet, who unlike his colleagues still has a spark of imagination, unravels the mystery, discovers Charles's corpse stuffed inside the cupboard, and sets out to destroy Curwen.

Lovecraft's description of Dr. Willett's trek through the noisome dungeon beneath the bungalow is a droning dirge of horror, in which darksome chords of ancestral memory are relentlessly struck. The sickening, vaguely humanoid, though "incomplete," creatures imprisoned in oubliettes -- these creatures, we are told, have been shrieking and bellowing in those lightless tombs since Curwen's demise over a century ago -- inspire both nausea and pity. They are the result of experiments carried out by Curwen as he was perfecting his art; they cannot die, and they do not even need to eat -- but they want to, desperately. Curwen's cruelty shocks Dr. Willett, and drives him on to his goal. Eventually, after discovering the formulae for raising up and putting down, Willett memorizes the latter, and pays Curwen a visit at the asylum, where he is once again being held (apparently one cannot have the bones of illustrious men delivered to one's home in a quiet suburban neighborhood without attracting negative attention). We know what is going to happen. After a brief but effective upbraiding, Willett speaks the magic words, and Curwen crumbles into a fine bluish-gray dust, and is swept out the window by a refreshing breeze. The End.

My synopsis, of course, cannot do justice to the starkly realized atmosphere of this mini-masterpiece. The middle section, a flashback to the pre-Revolutionary era, tells us of Curwen's life; his efforts to hit upon the formula that would enable him to return as another, in the event of his death; and the manner in which his increasingly bold experiments in the black arts led finally to the mustering of a posse to either bring him to justice, or destroy him if necessary. Despite the efforts of the well-armed and seasoned colonists who marched on his farmhouse, it was by no human hand that Curwen was undone. He called upon, we are told, something that demanded too much of him. But the spell had been cast, and the fate of Charles Dexter Ward sealed, long before his birth. In this section, Lovecraft puts his wide reading in colonial American history -- especially that of his beloved Rhode Island -- to excellent use as he conjures the style and texture of both seventeenth and eighteenth century life in that New England colony, founded and occupied by bold dissenters -- at least some of whom might have had interests not unlike Curwen's.

While this tale does not, strictly speaking, involve a one-to-one transference of consciousness, it is a subtle and well-wrought variation on that theme. The mind of Curwen never actually enters Charles, but the influence of Curwen's spell, or, to de-mythologize the tale, his will, takes complete control of Charles's life, rendering him an unwitting slave to Curwen. The much-discussed "cosmic perspective" of many of Lovecraft's tales, particularly those in the so-called Cthulhu Mythos cycle, is barely present in this tale. The focus is on a single terrible individual; one who had managed to extend his life far beyond the natural length, and then return to continue his unholy occupation. Whatever nebulous entities outside the space-time continuum that he may have trucked with is of little concern in this tale of fascinating morbidity and curdling ghoulishness.

As a work of literature, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward succeeds precisely because its focus is not on "cosmic" terrors, but on a disruption of natural human existence in a single place, involving a small group of people. The perspective is temporal, not cosmic. Curwen's long life, which extended from the late seventeenth century well into the eighteenth -- making him nearly a century old when he finally succumbed to his own dread allies -- and the persistence of his will well into the twentieth century, is, in my opinion, a more unsettling thing to contemplate than ancient extraterrestrial "gods" sleeping beneath the sea waiting patiently for the time when they will be able to re-conquer the world. Evil that is brought about by, and centers upon, a single person is always more disturbing and worthy of moral reflection than evil wrought by un-human beings that occupy an entirely different sphere of reality than our own. Lovecraft asks, in this tale, rhetorically: What antiquarian, given the knowledge of an ancestor like Curwen, would have done anything less than embark upon an exhaustive research of that person? And we may ask, after reading this text: Possessed of Curwen's abilities and ancient knowledge, would I have done anything less than pursue my power to the utmost end? The hope and joy of a scholar is to learn as much as possible in the short time we have on this "placid island of ignorance"; and if one is an atheist who does not believe in the continuation of our life or consciousness after the shedding of this mortal coil, then the fantasy of prolonging our life through ghoulish means for the sake of boundless knowledge does not seem so dark.

* * * * *

The materialist Lovecraft did not believe in the concept of salvation, at least not in the traditional, religious sense. Yet in some of his later tales, the transference of consciousness theme is less terrifying than awe-inspiring, if unsettling; however, for those of us who desire knowledge above all else, I think we would gladly submit to the type of transference that occurs in "The Shadow out of Time," and consider it salvation, a redemption from post-literate panderers of unprocessed data and their diarrhetic devices. In this tale we encounter an extraterrestrial "Great Race," wondrously advanced beings who value knowledge and a peaceful way of life; they do not seek a dominion of chaos like Cthulhu and others of his ilk, but only the perpetuation of their race. These beings are capable of casting their minds forward and backward in time, and they have the ability to exchange minds with certain intellectually gifted beings from various epochs of our world and others, for the sake of acquiring a comprehensive knowledge of the entire life and history of the solar system. When the mind of a member of the Great Race occupies the body of a person in the past or future, the displaced mind, now occupying the conical body of his displacer, is gently pressed into service as an historian in the Race's vast archives.

From their outpost on planet earth, 150 million years in the "past" (linear time has no meaning for these achronological entities), the Great Race maintains an ever-growing library that is a scholar's wet dream, where displaced minds from numerous ages, past and present, copy out the histories of their respective ages. The narrator, Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee (Lovecraft had quite a way with names), after emerging from a five-year bout of amnesia, during which time his mind was wafted down the corridors of time to the Great Race's headquarters in the Mesozoic age, begins -- despite the mental block set in place before his return -- to have increasingly vivid dream-recollections of his stint as a scribe for the aliens. If there is such a thing as salvation for a scholarly atheist, this would be it:

In the dreams I now moved bodily among the other unknown entities, reading terrible books from the endless shelves ... There were horrible annals of other worlds and other universes, and of stirrings of formless life outside of all universes. There were records of strange orders of beings which had peopled the world in forgotten pasts, and frightful chronicles of grotesque-bodied intelligences which would people it millions of years after the death of the last human being. And I learned chapters of human history whose existence no scholar of today has ever expected.

Peaslee also has conversations with minds from stupefyingly remote epochs of our world, which one might compare with the heaven envisaged by the Neoplatonic Christian philosopher Origen of Alexandria (185-254 C.E.), in which deserving souls will be educated little by little, over the course of numerous aeons, until at last they reach God, in whose presence they will contemplate the infinite mysteries of creation (cf. Origen, On First Principles 2.11.6-7). In Lovecraft's vision, however, the education does not inspire hosannahs but rather a mute absorption of "shocking secrets and dizzying marvels."

I talked with the mind of Yiang-Li, a philosopher from the cruel empire of Tsan-Chan, which is to come in A.D. 5000; with that of a general of the great-headed brown people who held South Africa in B.C. 50,000; with that of a twelfth-century Florentine monk named Bartolomeo Corsi ... with that of Nug-Soth, a magician of the dark conquerors of A.D. 16,000 ...

And many others, including an Egyptian who told him "the hideous secret of Nyarlathotep" and later, a recollection of "a half-plastic denizen of the hollow interior of an unknown trans-Plutonian planet eighteen million years in the future." The vast gulfs of time that the Great Race are capable of traversing and, most importantly for the impact of the tale, the immense number and variety of lives and cultures and civilizations that will come into being long after our own has passed away, are to me less inspiring of fright than of awe, or what Longinus or Edmund Burke would call "the sublime." As S. T. Joshi has written of this tale, "Lovecraft has shifted his focus from horror to awe and wonder, and this is the most unequivocally science-fictional of his later narratives." That these strange, amoral, but benign beings are taking the trouble to record "the whole history, past and future, of the cosmic space-time continuum" makes them the greatest of humanists -- or perhaps we should call them "super-humanists." At this point in the tale there is nothing really frightful, apart from the growing realization that what Peaslee wishes to take for a psychological malady is, in fact, all too real. But even then, would an atheist and materialist really be shocked or frightened to discover that other, more highly developed beings exist in our immeasurable universe?

The more I contemplate this story -- and it is one of Lovecraft's most artistically polished and thought-provoking -- the more I am struck by the unreasonable fear that grips Peaslee, the narrator, who had the great fortune (in my view) to have been chosen to make the mental -- and at the end of the tale, physical -- journey to the center of learning of the Great Race. Granted, the Great Race were not alone in their Cyclopean (to use a Lovecraftian adjective) city; there were evil "Elder Things" that had been subdued, aeons ago, by the Great Race, and relegated to underground caverns -- only there were dark hints that these terrible beings would eventually break free and exact a hideous revenge. But even this rather remote danger would not, I think, be sufficient to curb the investigative enthusiasm of a genuine scholar.

During the climax of the story, when Peaslee journeys to a place in Australia where monolithic blocks have been discovered that are identical to those he has dreamed about for years -- the building blocks of the megalithic city of the Great Race -- he succumbs to an urge to descend into an underground cavern that is the ruined but still recognizable city of his dream flashbacks (the evil Elder Things apparently had their revenge). He knows every twist and turn of the place, and makes his way to the archives, where he seeks confirmation of the reality of his experience.

There, said the dreams and legends, had reposed the whole history, past and future, of the cosmic space-time continuum -- written by captive minds from every orb and every age in the solar system. Madness, of course -- but had I not now stumbled into a nighted world as mad as I?

On the way he glimpses the dark, windowless basalt towers that were associated with the feared Elder Things. He presses on and at last discovers the section of the library he was seeking. Grabbing hold of a familiar volume, bound in a metal case, he takes a look inside -- and loses control. In a frenzy, he takes off for the surface. On the way, he hears the piping voices of the terrible Elder Things, and at his back there is a wind that seems to be tugging at him, "like a noose or lasso." With great effort he makes it out of the cavern -- after losing the metal-bound volume, of course -- and staggers, half senseless, to his camp. The revelation that he finds so mind-blastingly horrible is what we had anticipated: "I saw that the queerly pigmented letters on the brittle, aeon-browned cellulose pages [of the volume in the metal case] were not indeed any nameless hieroglyphs of earth's youth. They were, instead, the letters of our own familiar alphabet, spelling out the words of the English language in my own handwriting."

Throughout this tale, we are given to understand that the Great Race, while utterly alien and in possession of powers beyond human comprehension, are not at all evil; they are scientists, artists, and rather enlightened politicians. (Lovecraft describes their form of government as "a sort of fascistic socialism," but it seems more like an oligarchy or perhaps a meritocracy with some Marxist principles thrown in. Lovecraft was, as is well documented, extremely naive in matters of politics, when he was not downright bigotted and racist.) While there is something less than ethical in their mental invasions of unsuspecting bodies, we are told that the Great Race treated displaced minds with the utmost kindness. Peaslee himself was returned safely to his own age, mental faculties unimpaired -- except, of course, for the dreams, which were only terrifying because he apparently had a rather neurotic attachment to the safety zone of his own circumscribed spatio-temporal existence. This neurosis is revealed in the following outburst, after he had emerged from the "abyss":

Had I, in full hideous fact, been drawn back to a pre-human world of a hundred and fifty million years ago in those dark, baffling days of the amnesia? Had my present body been the vehicle of a frightful alien consciousness from palaeogean gulfs of time? Had I, as the captive mind of those shambling horrors, indeed known that accursed city of stone in its primordial heyday, and wriggled down those familiar corridors in the loathsome shape of my captor? Were those tormenting dreams of more than twenty years the offspring of stark, monstrous memories? Had I once veritably talked with minds from reachless corners of time and space, learned the universe's secrets past and to come, and written the annals of my own world for the metal cases of those titan archives?

The Great Race were indeed strange, but I fail to see them as "shambling horrors." Here, perhaps, is Lovecraft's well-known xenophobia coloring a tale that is far less of horror than of a triumph of human knowledge -- or at least could have been if it had been written from a different set of assumptions. A salvation from ignorance, a redemption from the limitations of our humanity -- this is something for which all true scholars strive. As a materialist and atheist myself, I would gladly exchange (hypothetically, for we are dealing with myths -- one modern and the other originating in the Bronze Age) an eternity of singing praises to a genocidal dictator of a god for a mere afternoon in the titanic archives of the Great Race. To spend an eternity contemplating "the universe's secret past and present" ... well, I would face an army of Elder Things to achieve that salvation. And perhaps I would meet, in that library of libraries, the great humanist Origen, a Christian in spite of himself.

There is one fear, however, that would prevent me from seeking the secrets of the cosmos; and that is having my brain removed, placed in a canister, and shipped across the vast universe to the home of aliens that I do not entirely trust. Such is the theme of "The Whisperer in Darkness." This story is not, strictly speaking, a transference of consciousness, or mind swap, tale; the human who agrees to have his brain sent across illimitable gulfs of the universe, to a dark planet where promises of great revelations will somehow be fulfilled, will be entirely at the mercy of rather dubious aliens. As a literary work, intended to produce an unsettling effect, it succeeds quite admirably. The atmosphere of northern New England (specifically Vermont) is evoked with superb clarity and provides an excellent aesthetic backdrop for the real physical danger that besets both the narrator and the hapless fellow whose brain ends up in a canister.

As a writer, Lovecraft was caught between two worlds, as it were: that of the pulp magazines -- which demanded sensationalism and a goodly dose of "chills and thrills" -- in which most of his stories were published, and his private world of fantasy that was not mere capricious daydreaming but an intellectual milieu where he grappled with an ever-shifting personal philosophy that had atheistic materialism at its base. But Lovecraft also clung to notions of otherworldly beauty accessed in dreams and revealed partially in the pastoral landscapes of his beloved New England, where remnants of the colonial era could still be found in hidden courtyards and untended gardens of ancient houses.

In some ways, Lovecraft was a Romantic, despite his avowed preference for the poetry of the Augustan age, with its heroic couplets that he attempted (painfully) to imitate in his younger years. His mature prose poems, however, are worthy accomplishments, notably "Nyarlathotep," an eschatological nightmare of wreckless abandonment in a dying world, written immediately after emerging from a dream; "Ex Oblivione," an effusion of stark cosmic pessimism in the face of a bland infinity; and especially the haunting, elegiac "Azathoth," which tells of "a man who travelled out of life on a quest into the spaces whither the world's dreams had fled." Alone in his quest, in an aged world in which "wonder [had gone] out of the minds of men," the solitary seeker dwells in a sad room that looks out upon "a dim court where other windows stared in dull despair." Knowing that such a grim environment would soon drive him to madness, the lone quester begins to lean far out his window and call upon the stars by name,

And one night a mighty gulf was bridged, and the dream-haunted skies swelled down to the lonely watcher's window to merge with the close air of his room and make him part of their fabulous wonder. ... [A]nd for days not counted in men's calendars the tides of far spheres bare him gently to join the dreams for which he longed; the dreams that men have lost. And in the course of many cycles they tenderly left him sleeping on a green sunrise shore; a green shore fragrant with lotus-blossoms and starred by red camalotes.

This is fine poetry, in the Romantic mood. Note the subtle alliteration and the hint of dactyls amidst the iambs, providing a dreamy lilting quality that is prose poetry (a rare form in our day) at its best. This brief masterpiece is indeed a deeply personal elegy for the past glory of a childhood that lasted well into adulthood, as many commentators have noted (often unkindly); it is also an expression of salvific hope by a writer who wandered long in "a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime, / Out of SPACE -- out of TIME" (Poe, "Dream-Land").

Free Speech and / or Intelligent Criticism

© Edward Moore 2015

In a letter to his friend, Arnold Ruge, the young Karl Marx made a call for "a merciless criticism of everything existing, merciless in two senses: this criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions and must not shrink from a collision with the established powers." These words were shocking and subversive in 1843; they are not so now. Rather, today, criticism is accepted as a necessary component of all disciplines, including politics and religion. We in the West have gotten so used to criticism that it is taught in schools and universities, demanded in the workplace (where it is usually labeled "positive feedback," or some such euphemism), and maintains a more or less quiet presence in all areas of society. When criticism in our day collides with the establishment, it is usually in the form of popular movements, like "Occupy Wall Street," or through more coherent organizations like the Tea Party. The collision, then, is not so much a social upheaval as it is a moment in a continuing dialogue, or perhaps 'polylogue'. As for being afraid of conclusions, I believe that this applies only to the private thinker, who does not have the backing of an organization. When I hesitate, for whatever reason, to share certain ideas directly with my fellows, it is usually because I am afraid of being misunderstood or even attacked. If I should, however, by utilizing the tools of our technocratic era, discover a significant number of people who share my conclusions, I will likely communicate with them, in a more or less systematic fashion. And, in our age of digital anonymity, I need not fear any backlash should my words dismay or offend -- unless, of course, I am calling for something like violent action against ill-trained and incompetent law enforcement officers, or, need I say it, jihad. In such cases, my words are in danger of being treated as actions, and then I will be placing my hand to my lips, bidding my freedom adieu (anonymity is, of course, an ever-eroding shore). Barring such extremes, if one is sufficiently passionate about his or her views, and wishes to "make a difference," one may even start a 'movement'. As Kierkegaard pointed out, over 150 years ago, an individual with crowd-pleasing ideas, no matter how half-baked or insane, may be given the stamp of legitimacy if a significant number of people parrot him.

[T]he daily press and anonymity make our age even more insane with help from 'the public', which is really an abstraction, which makes a claim to be the court of last resort in relation to 'the truth'; for assemblies which make this claim surely do not take place. That an anonymous person, with help from the press, day in and day out can speak however he pleases (even with respect to the intellectual, the ethical, the religious), things which he perhaps did not in the least have the courage to say personally in a particular situation; every time he opens up his gullet -- one cannot call it a mouth -- he can all at once address himself to thousands upon thousands; he can get ten thousand times ten thousand to repeat after him - and no one has to answer for it ... (Kierkegaard, "The Crowd is Untruth," 1847)

Unless, of course, the line separating words from action is crossed. In the domain of words, the ideas communicated thereby maintain their hold on the minds of readers or hearers to the extent that these ideas are, if not convincing, at least compelling and worthy of serious consideration. Ethically, the assumption is held that the intention of the communication is serious; the purpose is not to sophistically incite emotion, but to philosophically engage with the intellect, for the sake of deepening understanding and, ultimately, improving the human condition. For this, an atmosphere of respect is required; brutish intimidation or, the worst, outright physical violence, has no place. Speech, of course, when it is sophistical -- that is, not meant to convince through reason but to persuade through emotion -- occupies a sort of gray area between words and action. Sophism often relies upon not-so-subtle demeaning of whatever ideas (and the people who hold them) oppose the view being promoted. Open insults of the most sophomoric kind are defended by appealing to our ideal of free speech. This is disingenuous. Insults are not "speech-acts" but invitations to extra-linguistic response. Sophists often say things from the safety of their private "electronic device" or from the podium of a university conference room that they would never say, for example, at a neighborhood bar. No one has ever gained a deeper understanding of life, or found his or her condition as a human being improved, by looking down the barrel of a gun. Nor, for that matter, has anyone ever felt compelled to engage in a self-critique of his or her deeply held beliefs after seeing those beliefs mocked or 'satirized'. Granted, verbal or visual insults are less destructive -- to individuals in particular and to the fabric of society in general -- than physical violence. Yet one betrays a sad lack of psychological insight when one fails to understand how insults can trigger violent reaction -- especially among persons who feel, rightly or wrongly, that they have been systematically degraded and marginalized.

Every intelligent thinker wants to, and strives to, be taken seriously. The time and energy spent cultivating an idea, or a critique of an idea or ideology, takes a heavy emotional and physical toll on the person so engaged. So it is only natural for such a person to become rather attached to his or her intellectual offspring, and wish to see it flourish in the world. And because this offspring is the result of slow and careful rearing -- not, as is often the case among the less mentally astute, slow and careful indoctrination -- involving numerous and sometimes painful corrections, the parent will be more inclined to make further corrections if necessary. Since the entire point of this slow development is to bring into being a communicable concept that will serve as a reference-point, an impetus, for yet further development by others, criticism by others -- even so-called negative criticism -- will not be rejected out of hand or defended against, but accepted and considered and, if warranted, adopted. This is the healthy intellectual climate in which all great ideas have grown. But this will only occur in an atmosphere of respectful discourse. This does not exclude, I hasten to add, occasional levity or jocularity. A too-serious mind will quickly burn itself out. Yet there is a great difference between humor amongst friends, or at least amongst those sharing a common discourse and culture, and humor directed at those occupying a drastically different discursive and cultural realm. In short, it is the difference between laughing with, and laughing at.

It is the height of puerility to engage in mockery of an other's deeply held beliefs and then, when the consequences are too grim to bear, to pull back and say, as so many children do, "I was just kiddin'!" There is an old saying about jokes: If one has to explain a joke, it isn't funny. The beauty of well-reasoned argument is that it is explanation, and is sufficiently open-ended to permit correction in the event of misunderstanding. A joke permits no such thing. Once it is out of the mouth, or on the page (as a cartoon, for example), there is no going back. If the butt of the joke is excessively hurt or offended, there is no way to undo the damage. While there is such a thing as neurotically sensitive people, who just "can't take a joke," we are nevertheless beholden, as rational, ethical beings, to see to it that we remain aware of that sensitivity, and refrain from exacerbating what is surely a source of continual pain for our overly sensitive fellows. This is especially important when the substance of our joking deals not with minor issues such as style of dress or mannerisms, but with major topics involving identity, purpose, and conviction, such as religion and politics. Now such self-censorship is understandable at the dinner table, but is it acceptable in an established society where the sensitivity of a minority swells into a (sometimes violent) clash of cultures?

The intelligent style of criticism I have in mind, while not unique to Western cultures, certainly has no place among adherents of what I shall call pre-Enlightenment thinking. This includes not only so-called radical Islamists, but also fundamentalist Christians, white supremacist groups, ultra-conservatives, and any other group that leaves aside logic and reason for arguments based on emotions and a heavy hand or -- worse! -- divine revelation. So perhaps it is acceptable for those of us who subscribe to Enlightenment ideas (even if we sometimes use the phrase "post-Enlightenment" or some other "post-" to denote a careful critique of Enlightenment excesses) to take a firm and sometimes adversarial stance in the face of drastically opposing ideologies. Tolerance is rather easy to maintain when the "other" is simply desirous of living peacefully at home with his or her ideas; but when the "other" is actively striving to convert others (Has anyone in our post-post-modern world ever actually used "other" as a personal pronoun?) to his or her doctrine and way of life, then tolerance, as both theory and practice, must be subjected to rigorous criticism. As Gore Vidal wrote, in a fine article on "Monotheism and its Discontents" (1992):

Ordinarily, as a descendent of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, which shaped our Republic, I would say live and let live and I would try not to 'scoff' -- to use Lincoln's verb -- at the monotheists. But I am not allowed to ignore them. They won't let me. They are too busy. They have a divine mission to take away our rights as private citizens.

"They" here are, of course, the Christian Right, who were and are attempting to establish a theocracy through political influence. Except for a rather small number of militant groups outside the mainstream, these fundamentalists, as odious as their ideas are, do not resort to physical violence -- even if they are masterful sophists (and sophism, when practiced upon the ignorant and uneducated, is a form of violence). So when Vidal called for "confrontation" with the "sky godders" (as he called adherents of the three monotheistic faiths) he was intending a confrontation of intellect, not of arms. Our contemporary violent jihadists, however, appear to have no interest in talking, so enlightened confrontation is not possible. But a clear articulation of Western ideals is possible, and if communicated to the world through rational discourse instead of propagandistic sloganeering -- or worst of all, military action -- these ideals may, perhaps, gain some respect from the "other," if not wholesale acceptance.

While material progress is still high on our list of desired goals, this has been tempered by considerations of the damage such striving does to the environment and to persons caught up in the mechanization -- and now technologization -- of human life. The idea remains among the enlightened that the development and realization of the authentically human is the highest goal, and indeed purpose, of life. This world is not a staging-ground for heaven, nor is it an opportunity to aggressively force as many people as possible into one's own thought-realm. And, I hasten to add, this applies to us liberal thinkers who often forget how aggressive we can be! As Emerson, in his essay on "Politics" (1844), put it so well, and presciently:

[W]henever I find my dominion over myself not sufficient for me, and undertake the direction of [my neighbor] also, I overstep the truth, and come into false relations to him. I may have so much more skill or strength than he that he cannot express adequately his sense of wrong, but it is a lie, and hurts like a lie both him and me. Love and nature cannot maintain the assumption: it must be executed by a practical lie, namely, by force. This undertaking for another, is the blunder which stands in colossal ugliness in the governments of the world.

To force another to follow one's own direction is not only a lie, it is an act of violence. Criticism seeks to do one of two things: persuade, or convince. The ancient Sophists used fine speech and an elastic style of argument to lead the minds of their hearers to where they wanted them to go -- this is persuasion, and it only works upon the unsuspecting, or the insufficiently educated. Socrates, Plato and his followers used logic -- dialectic -- to demonstrate the falsity of every idea that was in competition with their own, and thereby convince. In this supremely humanistic agon, the mind was the final judge; truth, as Plato insisted, is always present in the soul, and requires only a gentle reminder to be brought to the fore. In both cases, as historically divergent as they were, physical violence had no place. We know that the students of Aristotle's Lyceum occasionally ventured across town to mock their peers at Plato's Academy, and we can assume that some fist-fights broke out -- but it was surely nothing remotely close to terrorism. And this juvenile ribbing took place within a shared culture. When Plato took his unique brand of philosophy afield, however, to the court of King Dionysius of Syracuse (which was Greek in language if not in ideals), he ended up giving offense, and was sold into slavery for a time. One can only imagine how Platonism would have fared if it had been taught in the courts of the early caliphs ... Oh wait! It was, with great success. We have the early Islamic commentators and translators to thank for our knowledge of Plato and most of the Classical philosophical, literary, and scientific tradition. Hmmm ...

When discourse is logical, open-ended, constructed in a manner that admits all necessary revision, everyone benefits. Disagreements, instead of becoming fuel for adversity, simply take their place as markers in the ever-growing life of critically engaged persons and cultures (and cultures, of course, are nothing more than large numbers of persons with roughly the same world-view). It is indeed ironic that Christianity, now dominated by fundamentalists (in influence if not in numbers), spent its early centuries tangling with the merciless criticism of pagan philosophers and, after the ascension of Constantine and the legitimization of the faith, with the variety of interpretations proffered by philosophical Christian theologians who had been influenced by the pagan philosophers! Despite the fact that St. Paul himself condemned philosophy as "vain deceit" and warned against the division that comes from intellectual wrangling, early Christians philosophers engaged in remarkably subtle dialectic, especially in the articulation of the Trinity. And for this, they were helped along by the writings of the Platonists, far more than the Bible, which mentions the Trinity only in a single problematical passage (1 John 5:7, occurring in a single sixteenth-century manuscript). This little-studied period of Christian history, the so-called Byzantine era, an intellectually vibrant and even "multi-cultural" period, unfortunately gave way to a fundamentalism that led to the exile of pagan intellectuals as well as unorthodox Christian thinkers, most of whom found welcome in the courts of the caliphs. Early Islamic thinkers found much of value in the Classical writings brought by these exiles, and there was a flowering of scientific, medical, and historical inquiry that was eventually bequeathed upon a benighted Europe. It would be naive to ask, as not a few scholars have, "If then, why not now?" Contemporary fundamentalist Christians and Muslims are wilfully ignorant of history. Since God is all-in-all, the argument goes, there is no need to study history, or any other human science; the divine revelation in our Book tells us all we need to know. Critical debate with such persons is impossible. This does not, however, preclude a persistent communication of humanistic -- as opposed to theistic -- ideals, with the intention not of converting anyone away from their faith, but of encouraging a more humanistic theism, if you will.

. . . . .

In my numerous incarnations, from young Surrealist poet to post-structural theorist to scholar of Christian Neoplatonism to apologist for Orthodox Christianity to (finally) atheist lover of art for art's sake, I have had the opportunity to speak with Muslims from a wide variety of backgrounds, with views conciliatory with the West, hostile to the West, and, occasionally, intelligently critical of all aspects of the complex relationship. My views were always clearly and succinctly stated: I am pro-Western, a child of the Enlightenment and proud of it. Sometimes, especially after a martini or three, I was rather blustery (to put it mildly) in my denunciation of what Vidal memorably called "sky-god religions" -- yet I was never threatened with physical violence. Why? I have already given the answer. Because I was engaged in discourse. As passionate and out-of-hand as I had sometimes gotten, I never stooped to the level of lobbing insults. Perhaps I gave the finger (as did Christopher Hitchens [another indefatigable critic of sky-god-ism], at a memorable 92nd Street Y round table, as I recall) ... but I never mocked. I never drew a cartoon. When I was done spouting, I waited -- for a response. And I listened when it came.

Of course there are those who will remind me that "they" (the terrorists) only respond with violence; open discourse is as alien to those worshippers of a war-god as the related terms "tolerance" and "pluralism." If this were true, would it not be better for those of us privileged to live in an enlightened society to -- instead of repeating boilerplate insults and drawing cartoons -- demonstrate the efficacy of rational thought and discourse? The art of philosophy is, alas, no longer widely practiced in our society, with the result that many academics -- not to mention educated laypersons (very rare, these) -- are incapable of writing clear, open-ended essays, free of jargon, that invite discussion. Many will argue that meaningful discussion, much less authentic debate, is impossible if one of the participants locates absolute authority in a sacred text, instead of seeking authority through the exercise of human reason. This is simply not true. I consider Christian fundamentalists as equally hardy in their devotion to an ancient text as conservative Muslims and Jews. I have held meaningful discussions with conservative representatives of these three religions, on many occasions. The prerequisite for each talk, of course, was careful study of the relevant sacred texts. Admittedly, I am far more familiar with the Hebrew scriptures, and the New Testament, than I am with the Koran -- but I did considerable homework. Even though I am an atheist, I uttered the honorific "peace be upon him" each time I mentioned Mohammed; and my companions showed respect by referring to the authors of the New Testament as "Saint" so-and-so. This is a small thing, and rather meaningless in the realm of ideas, but it is a sign of courtesy, and that faint injection of benign atmosphere permitted an exchange of ideas that was more than just an earnest attempt at cultural and intellectual one-upmanship. A small thing, yes, in this age of violent jihad from the East and Islamophobia from the West, but rather preferable, I think, to juvenile ribbing calling itself satire and using our ideal of free expression to justify mockery of religion. The question, then. Should a cherished freedom -- freedom of speech -- be controlled through intelligent self-censorship? If one cares more about the ethics of intellectual life, the morality of inter-cultural co-existence, than the adolescent I'll-do-what-I-want-when-I-want code of conduct, the answer is yes.

In times of multiple competing voices, a backing-away from particularities in favor of generalities can be helpful. My intention here was only to allude to the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the backlashes in Europe and the Middle East, not to write a commentary on this latest act of violent jihadist terror and the inevitable anti-Islamic response. But a few colleagues have urged me to make some kind of direct statement. So, in closing I will simply say that I condemn all acts of violence, which includes racism, nationalism, and bigotry of all kinds. Any subordination of the person to an ideology, a nation, a political party, a religion, is violence. Cries of "God is Great" are just as offensive to me as shouts of "We are Charlie." My response to such anti-personalistic foolishness is to say, There is no god, I am Edward.