The Shoals of Reality

June 21, 2017, 4:57 pm

I'm back after having been gone for four weeks. I would like to pick up again on some of what I previously wrote about in "Skilled Destroyers," from May 20, 2017. In that entry, I wrote about how the conservative genres of fantasy, weird fiction, etc., are likely to continue easily enough as time goes by, whereas the more progressive genre of science fiction may run into problems, if it hasn't already. My supposition is that conservatism--not contemporary political conservatism but an older, non-political or anti-political conservatism--is more in tune with reality than is the fantasy of progressivism. More plainly, conservatism apprehends that we are fallen in our nature, whereas progressivism holds to human perfectibility as not only a possibility but as a natural and inevitable outcome of the irresistible force of history.

In thinking more on all of that, it occurs to me that science fiction, because of its progressivism, inevitably runs into its own limits. In the 1930s, as science fiction emerged from the primordial soup of the scientific romance, things looked bright. Fans and authors of science fiction had faith in what Donald A. Wollheim called "the Infinite Future." There may have been good reason for that kind of faith in the 1930s, but by the 1980s or so, it seems to have soured. There was no longer an infinite future. Instead the future had shrunk. It had seemingly become delimited.

One of the things that has always bothered me about science fiction is its lack of human characterization--the sense that these are real human beings represented as characters and not mere mechanical parts of a plot. That lack of humanness may not be a bug of the genre, though. It may be a feature, for if science fiction is a progressive genre, and progressivism is essentially materialistic, seeing the individual as merely fodder for history and the unstoppable march of society or the State towards perfection, then the characters in a science fiction story are not especially important. They certainly don't have souls, as the human soul is an absurdity in a universe--and a genre--governed by science and reason. Science and reason are among the limits about which I write today.

No science fiction author of any recent decade is foolish or naïve enough to attempt a nakedly progressive and utopian work as Looking Backward: 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy (1888), but it seems to me that every progressivist science fiction story is likely to wreck itself upon the shoals of reality as utopianism has wherever it has been attempted, in literature or in life. Utopia is an impossibility. It is literally nowhere. The idea of progress is delusional at best (except perhaps in the Christian sense). A belief in materialism, atheism, or Scientism is, I think, extremely unlikely to lead anyone to any far frontier. Each is a dead end--a narrowing gyre leading inescapably into the bottomless black hole of the self, the despairing, self-loathing, humanity-loathing self. I think that a mind bound by science and reason is also likely to be bound in its abilities to explore questions of human nature, the human soul, and the nature of the universe. The science fiction author who subscribes to materialism, atheism, and Scientism is far more likely to come away baffled by his encounter with important questions. It seems far more likely to me that only those who believe in something outside themselves--something infinite, eternal, and non-material--will reach out of themselves and into the universe. I am reminded of a poem:

High Flight

by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

Of sun-split clouds,--and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of--wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,

I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air . . . .

Up, up the long, delirious burning blue

I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace

Where never lark, or ever eagle flew--

And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

To continue, any science fiction story with progressivism at its core seems likely to me to run into the more conservative genres if it is to have any satisfying conclusion. And I mean that in both senses of the word, meaning, to run into as in a collision and as colors run, one into another. Instead of materialism and atheism, instead of science and reason, all of which are inadequate to the task, I think, there will be, in any successful genre story, an arrival at the non-material and the supernatural, the magical, the mystical, and the irrational. I think of Gateway by Frederik Pohl (1977), a great work of the science fiction imagination (by a left-leaning author, no less) that turns on its conclusion to an implicit longing by the robot psychiatrist (literally, a materialist physician--see below) for a human soul. I think also of Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984), a science fiction novel--far less satisfying in my opinion than Gateway--best described I think as Gothic in its themes, mood, and imagery. (Neuromancer ≈ New Romancer, hence a return to the romantic origins of science fiction).

So is it the fate of every successful science fiction story to confront the reality of the human soul, of the persistence of mystery, and of the ultimate non-material nature of human existence? Does every successful science fiction story ultimately enter the realm of the more conservative form of the romance and the more conservative genres of fantasy, weird fiction, etc.? I guess that's what I'm saying. But does the evidence bear it out? Or has there been any successful and satisfying strictly materialist science fiction?

* * *

As a background to some what I have written here, I have some quotes from the book To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History by Edmund Wilson (Doubleday Anchor, 1953). I have this book from my aunt's house, from her estate which we have finally settled. The book sat on the floor of an upstairs bedroom of that Gothic house--Gothic in its atmosphere and in its decay--for years after thieves plundered it for everything of monetary value. (Thieves don't steal books.) I began reading it this week after returning here.

Early in his life, Karl Marx, that prize numbskull of the nineteenth century, wrote poetry. Edmund Wilson writes about the subjects of some of these poems:

There are doctors, damned Philistines, who think the world is a bag of bones, whose psychology is confined to the notion that our dreams are due to noodles and dumplings, whose metaphysics consists of the belief that if it were possible to locate the soul, a pill would quite easily expel it. (p. 114)

Marx's poems are a critique of medical doctors, but if doctors are materialists who believe they can treat the diseases and afflictions of the human soul with their potions, was not Marx equally a materialist? We can see the descent of the materialist physician in literature and life, from Marx's time to our own: the nihilist Bazarov in Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev (1862); the technicians in We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1924) who excise human "fancy," hence unhappiness, by performing an operation on men's brains; Doctor Stravinsky from The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1967), who reduces everything to a material explanation and joyfully goes about his work; Doctor George Hill Hodel, Jr., almost certainly a psychopath and possibly the Black Dahlia Murderer; and on and on. We are now in what is called a crisis of opioid addiction in this country. What else is the use of opioids--or any other drug for that matter--but a searching for a material solution to a non-material, i.e., spiritual, problem? Is not every person with an addiction merely a materialist physician prescribing for himself drugs in an attempt to treat his spiritual disquiet? Wouldn't it be easier to accept the non-material nature of our existence as a fact? I suppose not.

Next, in discussing Hegel, Wilson writes:

Hegel had held that society, "the State," was the realization of absolute reason, to which the individual must subordinate himself. He afterwards said that what he had meant was the perfect state . . . . (p. 120)

The emphasis is in the original, but if it hadn't been, I would have put it there, for what else is the perfect state but Utopia, the dream of progressivism in all of its forms, even today? Again, if you're looking for perfection, look for where it is rather than where it cannot be. (Is Hegel, then, the systematizer and theorizer of the leftist/socialist/statist program that has resulted in so much poverty, misery, and murder?)

Finally, Wilson mentions the French socialist Alexandre Théodore Dézamy (1808-1850) who "projected a somewhat new kind of community, based on materialism, atheism and science." (p. 145) Does that sound familiar? It does to me. We have the desire for the same kind of "community" today, perhaps in our science fiction, certainly in one of our major political parties. Subscribers to that party say conservative ideas are of no use because of their formulation (actually, discovery rather than formulation) by a bunch of dead white European men. Where do progressives think their ideas came from? A bunch of dead white European men wrote them down in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but don't they actually date from the first fall of man?

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The Supernatural in Science

June 23, 2017, 11:37 am

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≪ Previous: The Shoals of Reality

I don't want to overstate the idea that science fiction writers are progressives of the materialistic or atheistic type. To believe in earnest that human beings are nothing more than a soup of chemicals or bags of animated meat would seem to make art almost impossible, and any attempt at art by a person holding such a belief could hardly be received with any sympathy by readers. There has to be a ghost in the machine. Love, sadness, and all other human feelings must be treated as more than mere material forces if you expect anyone to read and like what you write. It seems to me that atheists must postulate the existence of a chemical soul: everything human beings feel might be real and valid at a chemical level; it simply lacks spirit. I also don't want to give the impression that writers of fantasy, weird fiction, etc., are deaf to the siren song of materialism, atheism, or Scientism. They obviously are not. But, again, how much heart can there be in the work of an author who believes in nothing? And who would read such a thing with any pleasure or hope of being uplifted or carried away, at least for a moment, from our quotidian existence?

Like I said, I'm reading To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History by Edmund Wilson (Doubleday Anchor, 1953). The book is an exploration of "the revolutionary tradition in Europe and the rise of socialism" (the blurb on the cover). Wilson expresses some admiration for Marx, specifically for the workings of his mind and Marx's written expression of his ideas. However, Wilson also points out weaknesses and flaws found therein. Here are long excerpts from a longer passage beginning on page 194:

The Dialectic then is a religious myth, disencumbered of divine personality and tied up with the history of mankind. "I hate all the gods," Marx had said in his youth; but he had also projected himself into the character of the resolute seaman who carried the authority of the gods in his breast and in one of his early Rheinische Zeitung articles on the freedom of the press, he declares that the writer must "in his way adopt the principles of the preacher of religion, adopt the principle, 'Obey God rather than man,' in relation to those human beings among whom he himself is confined by his human desires and needs." (1)

Karl Marx had identified his own will with the antithesis of the dialectical process. "The philosophers have only interpreted the world," he had written in his Theses on Feuerbach. "Our business is to change it." The will had always tended in German philosophy to play the role of a superhuman force; and this will had been salvaged by Marx and incorporated in Dialectical Materialism . . . .

For an active and purposeful man like Lenin it may be an added source of strength to have the conviction that history is with him, that he is certain of achieving his goal. The Dialectic so simplifies the whole picture: it seems to concentrate the complexities of society into an obvious protagonist and antagonist; it gives the confidence not only that the upshot of the struggle will certainly be successful, but that it will resolve all such struggles forever. . . . (2)

But conversion to the belief in a divine power does not have always an energizing effect. It was in vain that Marx tried to bar out Providence: "History does nothing," he had insisted in The Holy Family . . . . "History is nothing but the activity of man in pursuit of his ends." But as long as he keeps talking as if the proletariat were the chosen instrument of the Dialectic, as if victory were predetermined, (3) he does assume an extra-human power. . . . "History is the judge; its executioner, the proletarian" [Marx wrote]. There is then a higher tribunal for which the working class is only the hangman. There is a non-personal entity called "History" which accomplishes things on its own hook and which will make the human story come out right, no matter what you or your opponent may do. The doctrine of salvation by works, as the history of Christianity shows, is liable to pass all too readily into the doctrine of salvation by grace. All too naturally, by identifying himself with the antithesis of the Dialectic, that is, by professing a religious faith, the Marxist puts himself into the state of mind of a man going upstairs on an escalator. The Marxist Will, which once resolved to change the world, has been transformed into the invisible power which supplies the motive force to run the escalator . . . .

Karl Marx, with his rigorous morality and his international point of view, had tried to harness the primitive German Will to a movement which should lead all humanity to prosperity, happiness and freedom. But insofar as this movement involves, under the disguise of the Dialectic, a semi-divine principle of History, to which it is possible to shift the human responsibility for thinking, for deciding, for acting--and we are living at the present time [ca. 1940] in a period of decadence of Marxism--it lends itself to the repressions of the tyrant. The parent stream of the old German Will, which stayed at home and remained patriotic, became canalized as the philosophy of German imperialism and ultimately of the Nazi movement. Both the Russian and the German branches threw out all that had been good in Christianity along with all that had been bad. The demiurge of German idealism was never a God of love, nor did it recognize human imperfection: it did not recommend humility for oneself or charity towards one's fellows. Karl Marx, with his Old Testament sternness, did nothing to humanize its workings. He desired that humanity should be united and happy; but he put that off till the achievement of the synthesis, and for the present he did not believe in human brotherhood. He was closer than he could ever have imagined to that imperialistic Germany he detested. After all, the German Nazis, too--also, the agents of an historical mission--believe that humanity will be happy and united when it is all Aryan and all submissive to Hitler.

That's a lot to read, I know. The point is that even Karl Marx, a giant of materialism and a fierce atheist--"I hate all the gods," he wrote--seems to have believed in a non-material force, even a god, called "History" which guides human affairs. (We can all be readily forgiven if we profess our non-belief in this Marxist god.) And if Marx the materialist and atheist believed with a paradoxically religious intensity in a non-material force, what science fiction writer of the past or present can stand against him? I will restate my point: anyone who writes from the point of view of the strict materialist, atheist, or believer in Scientism will run up against limits. He will, in that case, have two options: first, to adhere to his faith and come away baffled by the non-material nature of human beings and human existence, or second, to give in and admit, however silently or implicitly, that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in his philosophy. The first choice is likely to result in the author's failure as an artist. The results of the second are less sure, but they may lead that author to some success as a human being.

Notes

(1) Note the arrogance: the writer--presumably Marx himself--does not live on earth as a human being. He is in fact "confined" here among human beings and is presumably a superior being of some kind or other. Wilson acknowledges as much a few pages later: "Instinctively Marx thinks of himself as being set above their [men's] world." (p. 209)

(2) This is the same language used by our most recent former president, the assertion that certain people and ideas are "on the wrong side of history"--that history is a force that cannot be directed away from inevitable and irreversible outcomes. I should point out here that Bill Maher, an outspoken atheist, recognizes that former president as one of his co-religionists. I'll trust Mr. Maher's judgment. If there's such a thing as gaydar among atheists, he is likely to possess it. I should also point out that the goal of Marxism is an ultimate and unchanging society: complete stasis where there can be no further revolution, just as in the assertion made by one of the characters in Zamyatin's We.

(3) We should remember here that Friedrich Engels, Marx's close associate and collaborator, was the son of a staunch Calvinist.

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Happy Flying Saucer Day!

June 23, 2017, 9:01 pm

≫ Next: The Listeners

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Seventy years ago today, on June 24, 1947, the first flying saucers were seen near Mount Rainier in Washington State by private pilot Kenneth Arnold. That first sighting kicked off a worldwide phenomenon that continues to this day, even if it has diminished in recent decades. The flying saucer phenomenon is only one demonstration of how science fictional ideas have passed into the real world--and be assured, flying saucers come from science fiction and not from outer space. Raymond A. Palmer, editor of Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures, an associate of Kenneth Arnold before the summer of 1947 was out, had a hand in that. In any case, I would like, on this seventieth anniversary, to wish everyone a Happy Flying Saucer Day! (And I would like to observe the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Frank Edwards, who died on June 23, 1967, in my home city of Indianapolis.)

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The Listeners

June 25, 2017, 3:00 am

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I wrote the other day that materialists and atheists are unlikely to reach out into the vast universe. That isn't entirely true. There is in fact a class of people who claim to believe in nothing and who are reaching out, if only with their minds and their ears. They are the Listeners, the people who believe with all of their hearts and with a religious intensity that we are not alone in the universe and that tomorrow . . . or the next day . . . or the day after that . . . we will hear from our space brethren. The Listeners speak of this possibility like a Muslim waiting for his Mahdi or a Christian for his Jesus. And despite all non-results--decades of non-results--they promise that it will happen soon, that we will finally hear from the stars . . . tomorrow . . . or the next day . . . or . . . They sound like the early UFO enthusiasts, men like Major Donald E. Keyhoe (a contributor to Weird Tales) who longed for, expected, and predicted that "[a]t any time, there could be a sudden development for which we are totally unprepared," namely, the arrival on earth of aliens from space. (1)

This isn't to say that all Listeners are materialists and atheists. But I suspect many are. I have called them the Listeners after the novelette "The Listeners" by James E. Gunn, originally published in Galaxy Magazine in September 1968. Mr. Gunn's story is about the crew of a radio telescope, seemingly based on the real-life facilities at Green Bank, West Virginia, or Arecibo, Puerto Rico. There is even mention of Iosif Shklovskii (sic), Carl Sagan, Frank Drake, and other figures from the early search for intelligent life in the universe. I have a couple of quotes from "The Listeners" (from Breaking Point by James Gunn, DAW Books, 1973):

And then maybe Adams was right. Maybe nobody was there. Maybe nobody was sending signals because there was nobody to send signals. Maybe man was all alone in the universe. Alone with God. Or alone with himself, whichever was worse. (p. 148)

What kind of mad dedication could sustain such perseverance? . . . Religion could. At least it once did, during the era of cathedral building in Europe, the cathedrals that took centuries to build. . . . They [the listeners of the title] were building cathedrals, most of them. Most of them had that religious mania about their mission that would sustain them through a lifetime of labors in which no progress could be seen. (pp. 164-165)

Here, then, is the religious angle, identified by a science fiction author nearly half a century ago, and a bit of evidence that science in modern times has taken the place of conventional religion, that it is more or less a new kind of religion, with radio telescopes as its cathedrals, both of which structures are designed to reach heavenward.

More to the point, though, is the idea expressed in the first quote, specifically the idea that man may be "alone in the universe. Alone with God. Or alone with himself, whichever [is] worse." I suspect that, as I have written before, that the person who fails in his belief in God is likely to loathe himself, and if not that, to loathe humanity. To be alone with ourselves would be intolerable to the man who has turned away from the reality of the non-material. But to be alone with God, it seems to me, would be infuriating to he who claims to believe in nothing. And so he looks for someone out there as evidence that man is nothing special, really only one of countless intelligent species spread across the universe, risen by an unexplained process of spontaneous generation and carried forward by a random process of evolution.

So he keeps looking . . . and listening . . . listening . . .

Note

(1) From Aliens from Space . . . The Real Story of Unidentified Flying Objects (Doubleday, 1973), Major Keyhoe's last book, published near the end of his career as an author and UFOlogist.

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Beyond the Finland Station

June 26, 2017, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Marx, Holmes, and Lovecraft

≪ Previous: The Listeners

I finished reading To the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson last night. I'm glad to be out from under the shadow of this book, not only because of its excessive length--484 pages in the Doubleday Anchor edition of 1953--and not only for the author's less than engaging prose style. More than anything, I'm glad to have the book behind me because of its subject matter and for Wilson's apparent admiration for the ideas and historical figures--Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, and so on--described therein. Socialism is, as we now know, the ideology of mass murder. It's sickening to read a chronicle of its development, moreover, to follow an otherwise intelligent man in his appreciation of it. Maybe I'm being too sensitive. Maybe Edmund Wilson was not as appreciative as I imagine. But I'm glad to have it behind me. Still, the centennial year of the Russian Revolution of 1917 continues. Still, an awareness of what that has meant is with us: 100 years and as many as 100 million dead at the hands of socialists the world over.

I wrote in yesterday's entry about the Listeners, the men and women who have dedicated themselves to the search for intelligent life in the universe. They listen and listen, certain that we will, at any moment, finally hear from our space brethren. That certainty is, it seems to me, religious in origin and intensity. It carries through many fields of endeavor, though. Even squatchers believe that we are on the verge of discovering definitive proof of the existence of Bigfoot, if not finding the hairy beast himself. As Robert Crumb might say, Keep on Squatchin'.

Anyway, following is a quote to that point from To the Finland Station. The speaker is Lenin himself. The occasion is the beginning of the first Russian Revolution, from the spring of 1917:

Not today, but tomorrow, any day, may see the general collapse of European capitalism. The Russian revolution you have accomplished has dealt it the first blow and has opened a new epoch. . . . (p. 469)

Note the similarity in expression between the breathless Marxist revolutionary and any number of fervent believers of the last century and more as they await the coming of their most hoped-for event.

A century of political murder and mass starvation, imprisonment, and torture has intervened since Lenin spoke those words. Thank God--our God, not his--that "new epoch" is reaching its end, although leftists in the West have invented and put into practice new and far more subtle and insidious permutations in the form of political correctness, etc. A second point, though: when and if we hear messages from outer space, they are not likely to be anything we hope for, expect, or predict. Imagine, for example, this bur under the blanket of the atheistic Listener: What if the people from the stars tell us that they believe in God? Better yet, what if they tell us they believe God sent to their planet a representative of Himself who died for their sins? Imagine a real-life Mr. Spock who wants us to know that everything he does is washed in the green blood of the Vulcan Jesus. The Listeners in that case are likely to become Non-Listeners and to begin asking themselves, Where can we find a cotton ball big enough to plug the Arecibo telescope?

We should know by now that predictions based on a priori reasoning and abstruse theorizing about history and human nature are practically useless. The best predictions continue to be those made by conservatives who have some understanding of these things. To that point, another quote from To the Finland Station:

Victor Adler [an Austrian socialist, though apparently more moderate than his Russian counterpart] had once shocked Trotsky by declaring that, as for him, he preferred political predictions based on the Apocalypse to those based on Dialectical Materialism. (p. 429)

Dialectical Materialism, at least in later interpretations, can be taken as an a priori system and is seemingly used by some science fiction writers either as a backdrop for their work or as a means of making predictions in their work. Contrast that with the idea of the Apocalypse, especially as applied in genre fiction. The idea of a leftist or Marxist Apocalypse would seem an affront, a self-contradiction, an impossibility. Although Utopia is his prediction, Dystopia is the Leftist's preferred future. Apocalypse, it seems to me, is more nearly a conservative idea. But, as Robert Frost wrote:

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Yes, ice--Dystopia--would suffice.

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Marx, Holmes, and Lovecraft

June 27, 2017, 3:00 am

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It's the start of a new week and time to be done with old things and begin with new. (I write this on Monday for posting on Tuesday.) This will be the last in my series referencing To the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson (Doubleday Anchor, 1953). Quotes from the book from Marx himself:

The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money . . . .

I must follow my goal through thick and thin and I shall not allow bourgeois society to turn me into a money-making machine. (p. 209)

When I read those words, I thought immediately of H.P. Lovecraft, who I believe thought of himself as an amateur (in the good sense) and who failed to do the things that a professional writer does, who wrote slowly and carefully rather than being a hack (a label placed on him by Edmund Wilson by the way), and who, like Marx, declined to work and as a consequence lived very often in dire poverty. It was this poverty in fact that killed him. If only Lovecraft had lived as long as Marx . . .

Like Marx, H.P. Lovecraft was an unsentimental materialist. Lovecraft, who came from a cold northern European culture and who left his wife and died childless, may in fact have been less sentimental than the Jewish Marx, who loved his wife and children, even if he subjected them to poverty, disease, and starvation. Unlike Marx, Lovecraft was conservative, a twentieth-century Tory. His view seems to have been not that History would be crowned by the advent of worldwide socialism--in other words, a supreme human society--but that humanity matters not and will be crushed under the big, green, slimy foot of Cthulhu. (It seems to me that atheists and materialists of today have more in common with Lovecraft than with Marx.) That is at least the conventional view--that Marx was progressive rather than conservative. I have a different view, for I believe that Marx and all of his acolytes right down to the present day were and are in fact hardened conservatives of the reactionary type in that they wish to restore the élite--of which they see themselves a part--to a position they lost with the end of feudalism. The usurpers of course were the middle class, Marx's bourgeoisie, who, in their exercise of their economic rights, reduced the power, prestige, and position of their supposed superiors to nothing, hence all the envy, hatred, and vitriol directed at them even today. Here is an illustrative quote from To the Finland Station:

From time to time, with telling effect, Marx will light up for a moment the memory of other societies which have been fired by other ideals. The disgrace of the institution of slavery on which the Greek system had been founded had at least, in debasing one set of persons, made possible the development of an aristocracy of marvelous taste and many-sided accomplishment, whereas the masses of the people in the industrial world had been enslaved to no more impressive purpose than "to transform a few vulgar and half-educated upstarts into 'eminent cotton spinners,''extensive sausage makers' and 'influential blacking dealers.'" (pp. 293-294; emphasis added)

Note the arrogance, the condescension, the contempt for the middle class. Note also the bitter resentment at the loss of position among the aristocracy. (Lovecraft also came from a fallen society and fancied himself an aristocrat.) Finally, note the phrase "a few vulgar and half-educated upstarts." Now we're at the heart of the complaint made by Marx and men like him against the middle class. It's the same complaint made against our current president, and it explains the extreme hatred of him by so many leftists, who seem to have lost their minds in contemplating his ascendancy: How did he get to where he is when we are so obviously superior to him? What kind of unjust world are we living in? And how can we set it aright? (2)

I'll just add two things: One, in the end, the leftist/socialist/statist program is conservative in the extreme, a kind of reactionary belief system that wishes to restore feudal relationships among men; the real innovation, one of the most radical ideas in history and one enshrined in our founding documents, is that human beings are and by rights free. Two, Lovecraft, a lowly American pulp writer, out-Marxed Marx in his materialism and in his consequent placement of human beings at the bottom of the ladder of history instead of at the top.

* * *

A few months ago, I went to a Sherlock Holmes event at the local library. It has been awhile since I read the Sherlock Holmes stories, so when the presenter started to talk about Holmes, his career, and his lifestyle, a lightbulb came on over my head. Again, I thought of H.P. Lovecraft, who, like Holmes (and Marx): was an avowed and enthusiastic amateur; lived by simple means, alone or in the household of a woman (or women) but who more or less eschewed the company of women (unlike Marx); entertained visitors to his apartment but seems to have been more or less a loner and one who lived mostly within his own thoughts and imagination; pursued his amateur studies in the extreme; and had specialized knowledge of obscure or esoteric subjects. (1) My next question was this: Did Lovecraft read the Sherlock Holmes stories? The answer appears to be yes. My final question was this: Did Lovecraft model himself at all on Sherlock Holmes? That's one for people who know more about Lovecraft than I do.

Notes

(1) The one woman in Holmes' life is Irene Adler. The one woman in Lovecraft's life was Sonia Greene. Both disappeared in a hurry. Sonia was a Russian-born Jew. Irene Adler is a native of New Jersey and not obviously Jewish. But what of her surname? We have already had one Adler in this series, the Austrian--and Jewish--socialist Victor Adler. There was also a famous Jewish psychologist named Alfred Adler, who, significantly in a discussion of Lovecraft and leftists, postulated the inferiority complex. Anyway, I'm not the first person to ask the question, Is Irene Adler Jewish? Look for it on the Internet.

(2) A last quote from To the Finland Station:

But with his [Lenin's] hard sense of social realities, he is quite clear about the intellectual inequalities between the intelligentsia and the masses. He quotes in What Is to Be Done? as "profoundly true and important" a statement by Karl Kautsky to the effect that the proletariat, left to itself, can never arrive at socialism; socialism must be brought to them from above: "the vehicles of science are not the proletariat, but the bourgeois intelligentsia." (pp. 393-394)

Hence the arrogance and condescension of our current leftist ruling class, all of whom have come from the middle class, all of whom enjoy a middle class lifestyle, all of whom fancy themselves intellectually superior not only to the masses but also to the vulgar, moneymaking middle class, and all of whom wish to impose from above a program in which they will attain and hold power, all, they claim, for the sake of "the people."

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Anti-Apocalypse

June 28, 2017, 3:00 am

≫ Next: It's Mad, Mad, Mad Max World

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As I write and think about the alternative futures of Dystopia and Apocalypse, it occurs to me that the picture isn't complete. It occurs to me also that I may have misinterpreted the meaning of Apocalypse. I'll go at this by first writing about Utopia and Dystopia.

Utopia came first, before Dystopia. The first Utopia to bear that name was in Sir Thomas More's work of 1516. Stories of Utopia have been a mainstay of literature since then. It was only in the nineteenth century--a century of utopian theorizing and attempts at utopian living--that Utopia met its opposite, the anti-utopia or Dystopia, which describes a perfectly awful society. In the twentieth century, stories of Dystopia overshadowed those of Utopia. That is to be expected, as people who had encountered utopian/totalitarian regimes woke up to the reality that Utopia is an impossibility and that every attempt at establishing Utopia on Earth ends in disaster.

So the dream is of Utopia and the reality is of Dystopia. Again, I don't think that any serious writer of the last fifty to one hundred years is or was foolish or naïve enough to have attempted a utopian story. (Stories of Lost Worlds may be the closest thing to it, but they are within the less serious pulp genres of science fiction, fantasy, etc.) Many, though, have written dystopian stories. Those stories have often succeeded as utopian stories once did, that is, as satires. Others have come as critiques, warnings, descriptions, or predictions. The point is that, given the fallen nature of humanity, Dystopia is a possibility, while Utopia will forever remain a pipe dream.

I wrote recently that Utopia and Apocalypse may well be impossible without the Christian notion of progress. Apocalypse, after all, is a book of the Bible and a synonym for revelation. We think of Apocalypse as a negative--a world-ending disaster. But that's our convention. In its original meaning, Apocalypse is positive, a revelation about the end of our current world and the ushering in of something better. In that sense, the word and idea of Apocalypse is more nearly analogous to Utopia than it is to Dystopia. What's missing is the Anti-Apocalypse, a thing for which there isn't any word as far as I know. Put another way, Utopia and Apocalypse are positive fantasies, while Dystopia and Anti-Apocalypse (i.e., a world-ending disaster) are closer to what could really happen on Earth, should events go a certain way. But to switch the meaning of the word apocalypse to its opposite would be confusing to say the least, and probably needless, too.

So should we then make a distinction between Apocalypse of the Christian variety, or at least as a positive story of end times (in which good finally triumphs over evil), and Anti-Apocalypse, which is what we now call Apocalypse? And if so, should we have a word for it? One of the reasons I ask is that we could make of all this a nice symmetry: Utopia and Apocalypse as positive, progressive genres (progressive in the sense that earthly progress is a possibility, at least in literature), and Dystopia and Anti-Apocalypse as negative, more nearly conservative genres (conservative in that they recognize man's fallen nature). In the positive genres, what is good in humanity would be put on display. In the negative genres, the opposite would be the case. One point to consider here is that the positive Apocalypse would be an explicitly Christian genre; the other three genres would not necessarily be so. (The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood is an example--actually a critique--of a Christian Dystopia. It suffers from the same problem utopian/dystopian literature does in general, i.e., a lack of plausibility.) Another question: Has there been any positive apocalyptic literature? I guess the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins might qualify, but I have never read any of these books. From what I know, a lot of really terrible things happen in them, but all in fulfillment of the prophecy of end times.

Anyway, I'll say it again, to make a distinction between the positive (Christian) Apocalypse and the negative (more nearly secular) Anti-Apocalypse is probably unnecessary. It would only confuse things. We're already having enough trouble trying to differentiate between Apocalypse (a world of extreme chaos) and Dystopia (a world of extreme order). I'm not sure why the distinction is so hard to understand, but people keep making the mistake. Let's keep reminding them of the difference.

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It's Mad, Mad, Mad Max World

July 2, 2017, 10:46 am

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More on Utopia/Dystopia and Apocalypse:

What we think of as apocalyptic literature is probably not apocalyptic in that it isn't Christian or biblical. In fact, it's usually entirely secular and may actually be nihilistic. That's why I have used the term Anti-Apocalypse to describe the non-Christian or non-biblical story of the end of the world, to differentiate stories of this type from their Christian or biblical counterparts, and as an analog to the term Anti-Utopia, aka Dystopia. Again, I don't think we need a different term--i.e., Anti-Apocalypse--describing a separate genre, as that would just be a needless complication, but I wanted to make a distinction anyway.

As for Utopia and Dystopia: In literature, they are different genres, or two sides of the same genre. In the real world, though, Utopia is Dystopia, for this reason: a perfect society must be made up of perfect human beings; human beings are imperfect and imperfectible; the utopian visionary will never rest in his quest for a perfect society; as a result of all that, human beings--the citizens of Utopia--must be driven ceaselessly and mercilessly even to their deaths for the sake of creating the perfect society. That's where the Dystopia within every Utopia comes from. For anyone who believes that a perfect or utopian society is possible without a perfect humanity, I pose this question: How do you propose to make something perfect out of imperfect parts? The answer of the utopian is likely to be: By perfecting society, we will make people perfect. They of course have things backward, and more than two hundred years of ruin have shown as much.

So here's my next distinction, not as needless as the first, but probably close: Isn't an apocalyptic story one about the end of the world (or the world we know), while post-apocalyptic describes a different kind of story? I'm thinking here of apocalyptic movies like Melancholia, 2012, When Worlds Collide, and War of the Worlds versus movies in which the disaster has already happened and now people are trying to pick up the pieces: The Omega Man, The Road, the Terminator movies, etc. In other words, what we too often call an apocalyptic story is actually a post-apocalyptic story. I think people have had an easier time with this distinction than they have with the distinction between Dystopia and Apocalypse.

Anyway, I watched Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) the other night. It's a post-apocalyptic story, just like the other Mad Max movies. Like them, it's packed with furious action, only more so. In fact, Mad Max: Fury Road is so over the top in places that it's more like a brilliant physical comedy (and a satire) than a serious action picture. (It could easily be retitled It's a Mad, Mad, Mad Max World.) Here's something I noticed, though: Mad Max: Fury Road is a Mad Max movie, but Max has been demoted. He is now, at most, a co-protagonist. He may actually be simply a supporting character. The lead character, or Max's co-protagonist, is now a woman, Imperator Furiosa. Further, that woman is more or less a female Mad Max. The moviemakers can't really throw Max out the window and call their picture Furiosa or Mad Maxine without putting their franchise at risk, but the effect is the same. Max is no longer the lead, and it's no longer his story.

The drift of all of this seems obvious to me: what were once stories about men are becoming stories about women, and not only about women but about women who are in charge. Men have been reduced to secondary status. I'll put up for exhibit the two most recent Star Wars movies: both have strong, courageous, and determined female protagonists. (Both are also essentially iterations of the Luke Skywalker character.) The men are simply helpmates and satisfied to be led around by the women. In comic books, Iron Man and Thor have become women. (There are probably other sex changes that I don't know about, as I don't follow comic books very well.) It may just be a matter of time before there is a female Tarzan, James Bond, Sherlock Holmes (Watson is already a woman), and so on. And I don't mean just a female version of these characters: James Bond will be a woman.

So where will the men be in all of this? I am reminded of a dystopian novel, The Republic of the Future by Anna Bowman Dodd (1887). The story is told in the words of a man writing to his friend about the United States under socialism in the year 2050:

The few men . . . whom I saw seemed to me to be allowed to exist as specimen examples of a fallen race. Of course, this view is more or less an exaggeration. But the women here do appear to possess by far the most energy, vigor, vitality and ambition. (p. 38)

and:

The longer I stay here the more I am impressed with the profound melancholy which appears to have taken possession of this people. The men, particularly, seem sunk in a torpor of dejection and settled apathy. (p. 58)

I'm not sure we'll have to wait until 2050 to see that kind of world.

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For Freedom

July 4, 2017, 6:35 am

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Today, July 4, 2017, we celebrate our independence, but we also celebrate an idea larger than mere independence. There are nations now that became independent during the twentieth century, yet have retained or created tyrannical and arbitrary governments. On this day in 1776, we declared that we would have none of that. We declared loudly and openly and in plain language an idea that is at once as old as time and as radical as nearly any in history: that we are all created equal and that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. Those rights did not come to us from a king or the State or from any person or institution: they came from God. In the two hundred and forty-one years since, there have been those against us, and they have been against us in reaction to that radical idea, against the idea that we are and by rights free, that our rights and our freedom have come to us from our Creator, that they are individual rights, and that no person or institution may justly take them from us. In 1776, as war waged in our new nation, there were among us loyalists to tyranny. We knew them and recognized them. In the interest of charity, we might excuse or forgive them today. But today, there are also loyalists to tyranny who live among us and pass among us. They enjoy the rights and freedoms and privileges that we all enjoy in this country even as they scheme to take those things away from us. Their goal is to restore tyranny--to return to Old World ways of thinking and living. They are in short unworthy of living in the New World, a radical world in which men and women are free. They might better return to the Old World, if the Old World would have them, where tyranny still lives.

So what does any of this have to do with fantasy fiction? Well, since the idea of the future was created, we have also had a literature of the future. We call it science fiction, a form of fantasy. One of the sub-genres of science fiction is utopian and dystopian literature. The strange irony is that the societies described in those sub-genres are essentially a return to the past, even as the literature is of the future. They are reactionary in the extreme in that they seek a restoration of tyranny and a repudiation of the radical idea of human freedom. We know now that the future has been approaching so rapidly that we can hear and feel its onrush--the winds of the future are as a buffeting wind in our faces. We can say today that the future--meaning, the tyrannical past--is here in the form of a powerful and overreaching State that has denied the parents of a sick infant in their right to remove that child from its control and not only from its control but from its domain. That State demands that the child, as its property, die by its prescription. The future is here. That tyrant is, as it was in 1776, ruthless and arbitrary; it claims for itself powers against human life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is also, as it was at our founding, the government of the United Kingdom. George Orwell could hardly have imagined such a thing for the country in which he set his novel 1984. (Has any writer of science fiction imagined that tyranny would creep into our lives through medicine, a field whose first command is do no harm?) I find these facts disheartening in the extreme, as we have fought with the British so well against tyranny for the last century. But tyranny lives deep within the heart of the Old World, and given a choice between the values of the tyrant and the values of the free man, those in the Old World would seem forever to choose the former. This is why, for as long as we cherish our freedom, America will be the indispensable nation and a refuge for those seeking an escape from tyranny.

Happy Independence Day to All

and

May Freedom Ring!

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Animals in the Uncanny Valley

July 6, 2017, 7:00 am

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At the end of these hot and humid days, I watch movies in the dark. The night after watching Mad Max: Fury Road, I saw Jurassic World (2015) on DVD. The movie opens with a scene showing a CGI bird of an unidentifiable species. (I think it's supposed to be a jay.) Here's something I have come to understand about moviemakers: they think we're stupid. They don't realize that moviegoers might know something about birds, or paleontology, or human behavior, or any other subject, and that we might notice when they--the moviemakers--come up with some kind of BS. Anyway, the bird is fake, made by CGI, and does not look or act like a real bird. I have also seen CGI wolves and horses. I'm sure there have been other fake animals in movies.

A few months ago, I wrote about the uncanny valley, that place where human beings recoil from something that looks human but is obviously not human. An animated Shrek is okay because he doesn't and isn't supposed to look human. An animated Peter Cushing is creepy and repulsive, however. Animals are not human, but we have affinity with animals. We know they're alive. We recognize in them some of the same experiences, sensations, and feelings we have in ourselves. We know that they suffer and feel pain, that they wish to live and thrive and enjoy life and the company of their own species. (I will never forget the sight of a group of barn swallows playing a game with a floating feather as they circled a pond on an Indiana farm.) No, they are not human, but we know them and recognize them. We also recognize things that are not animals but that are supposed to look like animals. Toy animals are okay. Animals made by conventional animation are okay. But CGI animals are not okay. They inhabit the uncanny valley, and they are wrong and creepy and disturbing. Dinosaurs and imaginary animals are different because we don't have any experience with them, but CGI animals are creepy and should not be in movies. I would ask moviemakers instead: why don't you just get the real thing?

I have other complaints about Jurassic World. I'll start with the deficient and inaccurate science in the movie. I have already talked about the bird species that doesn't exist. But what about the dinosaur that breaks out of its eggs using a talon rather than an egg tooth? Or the map showing how dinosaurs migrated or expanded their ranges, yet the map is of the modern world? I'm sure there are other problems with the science in the movie, but they're not as obvious as the problems with technology. For example, if the dinosaur handlers can implant a tracking device in each dinosaur, why can't they just insert a small, remotely controlled explosive device or at least a tranquilizer capsule for use in case of disaster? And what about the cellphone system on the island? Why doesn't everybody who works there know everything instantly by automatic message? Why do they have to call each other? Why isn't there complete, foolproof cellphone coverage across the entire island? And why does one of the characters use a cellphone that looks like it came out the 1990s? Is that some kind of radio or walkie-talkie? Why? And why do they go after the dinosaurs on foot? Haven't they ever heard of a tank or an armored vehicle?

But the worst part of the movie--the surest sign that the moviemakers think we're stupid--is the disregard shown by the screenwriters for their characters. As an example, Chris Pratt's character is smart and able. I was never even mildly convinced that he would be attracted to the stupid, shallow, annoying character played by Bryce Dallas Howard. Worse yet--really the worst part of the whole movie for me--is the use of an idiot plot device whereby Chris Pratt's character very conspicuously disarms himself not once but twice before the top dinosaur appears. His weapon has a shoulder strap. He can free his hands while still carrying it. Yet he sets it on the ground. This is an insult to the character and to us. It's a sign not only of the screenwriters' contempt for us but also of their intervening in their story by forcing their characters to do things that are out of character simply for the sake of the plot. And not only for the sake of the plot but for the sake of their not having to work harder to figure out how to make their plot work better. This happens way too often in movies and it has to stop. Maybe moviemakers should have small, remotely controlled explosive devices implanted in them for when they misbehave.

Finally, Jurassic World reminds me of Aliens. Once again, a large corporation and/or the military is the villain. That didn't bother me very much, but I'll note that Vincent D'Onofrio gets it like Paul Reiser got it in Aliens. Do moviemakers, who work for large corporations, have any sense that when they kill off corporate functionaries in their movies, they may actually be killing off representations of themselves?

In November 1930, Weird Tales published "A Million Years After" by Katherine Metcalf Roof, a story in which two burglars steal and accidentally hatch a brontosaurus egg. The great dinosaur goes on a rampage, of course, before meeting the fate of all rampaging dinosaurs. No, there is nothing new under the sun. Cover art by C.C. Senf.

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I Walked with a Zombie

July 9, 2017, 3:00 am

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Next came I Walked with a Zombie, from 1943. People of today like their mashups--an odious word. Well, I Walked with a Zombie could easily be subtitled Jane Eyre Meets the Walking Dead. It's the story of a Canadian nurse, played by Frances Dee, who goes to the Caribbean island of Saint Sebastian to care for the invalid wife of a sugar plantation owner. There, for the first time, she encounters the concept--and the apparent reality--of zombie-ism.

I Walked with a Zombie was based on a newspaper feature of the same name by Cleveland journalist Inez Wallace (1888-1966). The title is sensationalistic and confessional. The story in the movie is told in the voice of the nurse, but it's controlled, intelligent, and even in tone. I imagine much of that is attributable to Curt Siodmak (1902-2000), one of the co-screenwriters. As is the case with the best horror movies, much is left to your imagination.

I wrote about zombies a few months back, pointing out at the time that the fear of zombie-ism is the fear among black people of being returned to slavery or of being made a slave forever. It is not the fear of a capitalist exploiter as critical theorists of today would have us believe. The shadow of slavery and of life under slavery is cast across I Walked with a Zombie, even in the opening minutes as the nurse rides in a wagon with a black driver. I can't say how black people of today might react to the movie, but I think that the awareness of the slave experience, of the suffering and pain of slavery, and of the fear black people had or have of slavery are conveyed in the film at a time when portrayals of any authentic black experience were rare in movies.

I Walked with a Zombie is, I think, a very effective film. The sequence in which the nurse leads the invalid wife through the sugar cane to the Voodoo gathering is very fine. Images of Darby Jones as the zombie Carrefour are extraordinary and unforgettable, surely among the most iconic in American movies. And has any singer in movies been more menacing than Sir Lancelot as he advances upon the nurse, singing his song in deadpan, casting his lyrics upon her like a curse?

I Walked with a Zombie was innovative in some ways. It is supposed to have been the first movie with a calypso song in it. Beyond that, I'm not sure that any previous movie had attempted to show the practice of Voodoo with the same evenness or humanity as this one does. I'm also not sure that any previous movie would have used the words houngan or obeah or Damballah or would have given any credence at all to Voodoo belief or practice. One of the things I like most about I Walked with a Zombie is that the black characters are treated as real human beings and not as stereotypes. There may be divisions in the movie--it is after all about white people and the real threat of zombie-ism is against a white woman--but the white and black characters interact with each other as fellow human beings, and the suffering of black people under slavery is essentially the context in which the drama plays out.

One last thing: I Walked with a Zombie was produced by Val Lewton (1904-1951), who wrote one story for Weird Tales, "The Bagheeta," published in July 1930 and the source for Lewton's film Cat People, from 1942. Lewton was of Jewish extraction, as was Curt Siodmak. Perhaps the history of suffering and slavery among Jews gave these men sympathy for black people and their similar experiences here in the New World under a system imported from the Old.

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True Detective

July 12, 2017, 3:00 am

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I guess I'm catching up on my viewing from 2015, the HBO TV series True Detective included.

Few people remember it today, but in its first incarnation, Weird Tales had a companion magazine called Detective Tales, later Real Detective Tales, which began publication in 1922. The publishers of these two magazines got into financial trouble about a year into their venture. One of the publishers, Jacob Clark Henneberger, gave up his interest in Detective Tales and held onto Weird Tales, which has had an on-and-off career in the nine decades since. Detective Tales carried on under a different publisher and became Real Detective Tales, then, in May 1931, simply Real Detective. The similarly titled True Detective, part of Bernarr Macfadden's True series of titles, began publication in 1924 and lasted until 1995. The point of all this is that the makers of the TV series True Detective seem to have intended to evoke pulp fiction and pulp imagery in their show. I think they succeeded. I would add that, despite the title, True Detective has much--maybe more--in common with weird fiction than with detective fiction.

I heard a lot about True Detective in 2015 when it first aired, and I can say after having seen it that the show is compelling. The co-stars, Woody Harrelson as Marty Hart and Matthew McConaughey as Rustin Cohle are excellent. (Note the symbolism in their names.) Matthew McConaughey is, as always, like a chameleon in portraying seemingly real people. A lot of the supporting actors are also good. I'll single out Brad Carter as Charlie Lange, the peckerwood ex-husband of the murdered woman, for his performance.

There is some clunky, inauthentic, and overly literate dialogue in True Detective, but over all, the characters speak in ways that are true to life. Rust is often sophomoric in his pseudo-philosophical musings. Hart registers proper skepticism and disgust at what he says. (I'm not sure that any actor is as good at disgust as is Woody Harrelson.) The main title sequence is very good, and the theme song is perfect for it, one of the best theme songs I've heard in a long time. The settings and scenery are great, as is the cinematography. There are some anachronisms, I think, and places where the screenwriter's politics show through. For instance, he takes unnecessary swipes at private schools, especially parochial schools, and at school choice. In reading about the show, I find that the screenwriter, Nic Pizzolatto, was raised Catholic. A lot of us were, but so what? Get over whatever it is that got your underwear in a knot and move on. To that end, Rust character is evidently an atheist, but at the end of the show he sees the light (literally). I imagine that was a bitter disappointment for any atheists watching and enjoying the show. Significantly, his penultimate vision--the one actually shown on screen rather than the one he describes from his wheelchair--enters the otherwise flat land of Louisiana (see Flatland below) in the form of a spiral (see The King in Yellow below) and through a circular opening in the spherical roof (see The Ring andFlatlandbelow) of a decrepit building (see almost everything below).

I have to admit, the change in tone at the end of True Detective is a little jarring, but if being gored and hatcheted by the worst serial killer in history isn't enough to change your life, I don't know what is. The show also changes in its structure and viewpoint in later episodes. I'm not sure if those were good moves or not. There are also too many convenient developments (the owner of the green house is still living, still lucid, still available for questioning, and has an impeccable memory), too many things left hanging (who called the man who subsequently killed himself in his prison cell?), and too many missed opportunities on the part of the detectives (why didn't they talk to an anthropologist, a folklorist, and a botanist very early on in the case?), but over all, True Detective is a good show, I think, and well worth the viewing.

I said that True Detective seems to want to evoke pulp fiction and pulp imagery. Here are some possible sources of inspiration, or at least examples of creative minds arriving at the same points independently of each other:

From The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers (1895): Carcosa (drawn from Ambrose Bierce); the King in Yellow; the viewing of the tape in True Detective vs. the reading of the play in "The Yellow Sign" as an experience that changes people's lives or damages their sanity; the secret symbol, in True Detective, a spiral, in "The Yellow Sign," the eponymous sign.

From H.P. Lovecraft (who drew from Chambers): the decadent and inbred family; the decrepit houses and other buildings; the backwoods setting; the circle or arrangement of stones in the woods at the the site of the cultist's rites; the super-secret and far-reaching cult; the secret and profane rites of the cult; the found object (in True Detective, the videotape).

From "Sticks" by Karl Edward Wagner (1974), The Blair Witch Project (1999) (both of which drew from Lovecraft), and the art of Lee Brown Coye: the found object in the videotape; sticks and stick lattices (there are sticks and lattices everywhere in True Detective; even the Cross can be seen as a stick lattice); drawings or murals on the walls of abandoned buildings; the old, decrepit, backwoods house; the murder of children; the super-secret cult.

From Twin Peaks (1990-1991): the opening sequence in which the body of a woman is found in some backwoods place; the otherwise eccentric storytelling, setting, and characters.

From The Silence of the Lambs (1991): the demented serial killer and his extensive house of horrors (if there is such a thing as the Gothic Baroque, the house and grounds of the serial killer in True Detective is it).

From The Ring (2002): the found object in the videotape; the viewing of the tape, which changes the lives of those who see it; the lone tree in the field; the repeated imagery of the circle or ring; the main title sequence in True Detective as a video montage like the contents of the tape in The Ring; the family with evil secrets; the decaying house of that family.

From Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbot (1884): talk of multiple dimensions beyond our own; flatness, circles, spheres, and other geometric or topological concepts (is a spiral merely a track made by a one-dimensional point as it moves in a certain way through a two-dimensional area, or, alternatively, the shadow in a two-dimensional area of a gyre spinning in three-dimensional space?; also, mention is made in the show of a psychosphere; also, sphere is another word for the different levels of the heavens, as in "music from the spheres"); flatness itself in the topography of Louisiana.

and

From the true-to-life Black Dahlia murder case (1947): The murder scene as a tableau for artistic, aesthetic, or personal expression; the ritualization of murder and of the preparation of the murder victim's body; the unsolved nature of the case.

As for philosophizing of Matthew McConaughey's character: I'm not sure where that comes from except from the minds of those who have given up hope or who are angry at and disillusioned by life and the world. It's not especially deep or serious-minded thinking, and though I'm no philosopher, I don't know of any formal source for the character's ideas or words. I'm with Woody Harrelson's character, though: Shut the eff up and let this vehicle we're riding in be an area of silent reflection. (But then the show would be far less interesting.)

One more thing: there is talk among writers and artists of "subverting" this or that. Trying to subvert things is an attempt at rebellion or innovation, very often a childish attempt. I would just say that when people claim that such-and-such "subverts" conventional storytelling, what they are really describing is something far simpler: it's called a twist, and genre writers and pulp writers use twists all the time. If you have never seen a twist before, or if you mistake a twist for a "subverting" of conventions, you haven't read very many stories. Next, I'll say that everyone in art, literature, politics, and society should remember the words of Ecclesiastes: There is nothing new under the sun. Nic Pizzolatto created a very fine piece of art, and he richly deserves the praise he has received, but I can't say that it subverts anything and I can't say that it's like nothing before it. (I don't know that he made those claims, only that viewers and critics tend to be carried away by hyperbole.) True Detective is just a really good piece of storytelling.

Updates, July 12, 2017
1. I see from another website that one of the books read by Rust is the collected poems of Theodore Roethke. Roethke was known for his recurring imagery of stones, bones, blood, sticks, and other natural objects. One of his most famous poems begins: "Sticks in a drowse droop over sugary loam." See "Sticks" and The Blair Witch Project above. Also, Roethke worked in greenhouses when he was young. Does green house (in True Detective) = greenhouse?
2. I see from that same website that flowers, especially in connection with sex, are part of the symbolism of True Detective. I hadn't thought much about that, but I'll add that flower parts--sepals, petals, etc.--are in whorls, a word similar in meaning to spirals.
3. Along those same lines, much of the imagery and many of the themes in True Detective have to do with sex, especially transgressive sex: pedophilia, adultery, sodomy, homosexuality, transvestism, bondage, group sex, pornography, sexting, sexual snuff films (the videotape). Even the spiral symbol can be interpreted as being related to transgressive sex. It's worth noting that all of the sex acts depicted outside of marriage are in one way or another transgressive. If I remember right, only one scene, a loving scene between Hart and his wife, shows a man and a woman in the missionary position (vs. what might be seen as pagan or pre-Christian alternatives). In contrast, the sex scene between Hart's wife and Rust shows her from behind, like the body of the murder victim at the beginning of the show. (By having sex with Hart's wife, Rust cuckolds him, i.e., places horns upon him, also like the body of the murder victim. Hart by the way is another word for an adult male deer.) I take all of that to be symbolic of a supposed moral decay that would have taken place over the years covered by True Detective, 1995 to 2012. Remember, True Detective was written by a Catholic. Remember, too, that 1995 was before cell phones and the Internet really took off.
4. In the climactic (not related to sex) scene, the main characters are on the floor of a domed building with a circular opening at the top of the dome. The building can be seen as analogous to an eyeball--i.e., a hollow sphere with a hole, aperture, or pupil in it--gazing upwards into the heavens (or spheres). (No wonder Rust sees a black hole, i.e., a kind of star but also a kind of spiral, through the aperture.) If the building is an eyeball, then maybe the stick-lattice representation of the Yellow King is at the fovea, a place also occupied for an instant, perhaps, by Rust. Significantly, fovea is Latin for pit, which is another word for abyss (for the Yellow King and his cultists) and trap (for Rust, who says early in the series that he feels like he's in a trap; the spiral symbol can also be taken as a labyrinth or maze, another kind of trap). Remember, Rust continually looks at his own eyeball in a mirror.
5. There is a lot of pagan, pre-Christian, post-Christian, and satanic imagery in True Detective, but other websites have gone into all of that, so I'll leave the analysis to them.
6. Whew!

Copyright 2017 Terence E. Hanley

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Contact

July 15, 2017, 3:00 am

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Human knowledge is not (or does not follow) a straight line, but a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a spiral.

--V.I. Lenin, Summary of Dialectics (1914)

Without intending to, I have come full circle in this series on movies and television shows. That happened by way of my finding by chance a DVD of the movie Contact (1997)--that was on Saturday--and watching it with the idea that it would lead me somewhere I was looking to go--that was on Sunday.

The epigraph above refers to straight lines, circles, and spirals. I have been writing about these things for the last few weeks. I have included Lenin's words here less for their subject matter than for their author--I'll have more to say about him and his beliefs in the next couple of entries--but these words are fitting for the moment. The second half of the quote from Lenin is less to the point, but here it is anyway:

Any fragment, segment, section of this curve can be transformed (transformed one-sidedly) into an independent, complete, straight line, which then (if one does not see the wood for the trees) leads into the quagmire, into clerical obscurantism (where it is anchored by the class interests of the ruling classes).

Talk about mixing your metaphors. Anyway, I have written before about the idea that, in the Christian version, God's intervention in history in sending His son to earth turned history from an endless series of cycles (or circles) into an arrow flying through time. Before Christ, empires rose and fell, kings and warriors lived and died, and things were forever the same. With the advent of Christianity, however, the cycles of unchanging history were broken so that there was now a forward and a backward: the idea of progress came into the world. That idea of progress has given us much, but it has also resulted in utopian theorizing on human nature, society, and history. Utopian theories, once put into practice, have too often resulted in mass murder. We can thank Marx, moreover his little attack dog Lenin, for a good deal of that.

So Matthew McConaughey is in a film in which his character spouts his philosophical beliefs and always carries around a notebook with a strap on it. In this film, there is a skeptic and a believer. In the end, the skeptic--an orphan bereft of love and family--undergoes an extraordinary experience, in the process becoming something of a believer. No, I'm not talking about True Detective. I'm talking about the aforementioned Contact, starring Jodie Foster as Ellie Arroway, a scientist and a skeptic, and Matthew McConaughey as Palmer Joss, a halfway man of the cloth and a believer.

As in True Detective, the names mean something or might mean something. The first name (I hesitate to call it a Christian name) of the female lead is Ellie, or, if you like,

Lₑ

like a term missing from the Drake Equation. (She alludes to the Drake Equation in the movie.) Her surname, Arroway, defies Lenin's quote as well as the pre-Christian cyclic nature of history, for the way of the arrow is straight, and the arrow flies in only one direction. (Except that if you imagine an arrow flying through the universe, you will see that, just like every other thing in a relativistic universe, it doesn't follow a straight path but one curved by the effects of gravity on the space-time continuum. That's beside the point, though, no pun intended.)

The name of the male lead, or at least the semi-romantic interest, is less clearly symbolic. His first name, Palmer, can be taken negatively, as like a conman who palms a coin, a bill, or a pea in a shell game, but I like better the idea that it refers to Raymond A. Palmer, the man who invented flying saucers. The character's last name, Joss, sounds like josh, as in kid or joke, or dross, something worthless, or maybe it's a combination of those two words.

As in True Detective, there is a good deal of imagery of circles, spheres, rings, domes, bowls, and saucers. Look for the shape of the desk lamp in one scene or of the U.S. capitol in another--they look like flying saucers. Also as in True Detective, the visions experienced by the skeptic are of a spiral followed by a reunion with a departed loved one. Needless to say, these visions change her life and perhaps even her beliefs, though I wouldn't bet on the latter.

Like Rustin Cohle in True Detective, Ellie Arroway is an orphan and a materialist or atheist, possibly the latter because she is the former. And like Cohle, she sees in those who believe in something an opposition, if not an enemy. We see this in the real world, too: a sense of arrogance and superiority on the part of the atheist or materialist, a sense that these people who believe in these things are hopelessly blind, stupid, and ignorant. If only they would open their eyes, they would see that the world means nothing--that our lives mean nothing and that love is simply the firing of electro-chemical signals in our very material brains.

Anyway, characters or players act out their parts. They should do so independently of the desires of their creators, the moviemakers. The plot in a movie should act independently, as well. Too often, though, moviemakers insert themselves into their creations. (Or, like God, they intervene in their creation.) That's my complaint against Jurassic World, and that's my complaint against Contact, for Contact was written by two atheists or materialists, Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan. (They actually wrote the story, not the screenplay.) To their ends, the villains in the movie are their own personal villains, and those villains exist on a continuum (or vector, or maybe arrow-way?) of villainy. They are the usual suspects in movies now and have been for years. From least bad to most bad, they are:

<---The U.S. Military <---> Conservatives <---> People of Faith <---> Fundamentalist Christians <---> Nazis--->

Palmer Joss is a believer, but he's also a non-conformist (he left his studies in divinity before taking the plunge), plus he's young, tan, and has a great head of 1990s hair, so he's okay. He may not even be anywhere on the arrow-way above, although he's sometimes on Arroway (Ellie that is). I should add that James Woods (in real life a conservative), who plays a government functionary, is also a villain, but he exists on a part of the continuum not necessarily charted here.

The worst villain (other than Hitler) to appear in Contact is the leader of some kind of fundamentalist Christian religion or cult. He's played by Gary Busey's son, but he looks more like the offspring of Edgar Winter. The first thing I thought of when I saw him is that he resembles George Adamski's vision of the so-called Nordic alien. (Nordic as in Aryan or quasi-Nazi.) Significantly, he makes his first appearance at a flying saucer jamboree, like the gatherings at Giant Rock in the 1950s and '60s, which "Professor" Adamski no doubt attended from time to time.

This villain--his name is Joseph, you know, like the patriarch of the Holy Family--is a preposterous character, an incarnation not just of the hatreds and fears of the atheist, but also of something more, and this is where Contact is especially troubling, if only in artistic terms. In his final scene, Joseph kills himself and destroys the alien-designed mechanism (significantly, a series of interlocking rings through which Ellie will drop in her sphere like a plummet, tracing a straight line or arrow-way through space) by detonating a suicide vest. This is partly why I say preposterous, for the suicide vest is a weapon employed almost if not exclusively by Islamist terrorists. Murder and suicide are anathema to Christianity. I don't know of a single case of a supposed Christian using a suicide vest in the real world. But in movies, Christians are terrorists and if Muslims are shown at all, they are mere victims. I suppose to an atheist--who is likely also a moral relativist--Christianity and Islam are the same thing. They're both icky religions after all. And that conflation of two opposing belief system goes on wherever atheists meet and wherever they form sentences. (I use the term relativist here partly to evoke consideration of Einsteinian relativity. The historian Paul Johnson has much to say about the relationship between relativity and moral relativism in his book Modern Times: A History of the World from the 1920s to the 1980s [1983, 1999]. It's a good book and worth your time, even if it's a little bulky.)

Here is the more troubling part about Contact, I think: If a non-Jewish author or screenwriter--especially an overtly Christian writer--were to deal so coarsely in Jewish stereotypes, he would be labeled a racist, an anti-semite, or even a Nazi, perhaps rightly so. But are we to accept the work of authors who deal in coarse Christian stereotypes? And what if those authors are, like Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, Jewish? Is one offense worse than the other? Setting any political issues aside, why should authors--true artists working in earnest rather than just hacks or rank amateurs--deal in stereotypes of any kind? Is not every person complex and three-dimensional and not a stereotype? If so, why should authors reduce any of his or her characters to mere devices for the sake of the plot? Too many authors do that, and that's what Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan did here. I expected more from them and got far less. (I admit here to being an admirer and fan of Carl Sagan.) Their fears and hatreds, made manifest in the film, practically ruin it. The weak ending, with its equivocations and its attempts to satisfy both believers and atheists--a case, I guess, of Solomon's proposed splitting of the baby--hardly helps. Despite the praise heaped on it by movie critics, Contact very nearly fails as a work of art.

One last thing. In going back to the idea that what were once stories about men are becoming or will become stories about women: In Contact, a woman took the place of Frank Drake, Carl Sagan, and other real-life and fictional men (including those in "The Listeners" by James Gunn, from 1968), but this was still 1997, so she wasn't quite there yet. She was still subordinate in many ways to men, and she lost her heart to men, first to her father, then to her occasional boyfriend. (She seems to think of her father's death, and by implication his life, as mere material phenomena: he went on living because of medicine, and he died because she couldn't reach it in time. His reappearance in her vision is because the aliens have recreated him from her memories.) In a remake of today, the woman radio astronomer would be in complete command. Even the president of the United States would probably be a woman. The men would be eunuchs or at best beta males or Pajama Boys. (And real-life men would probably stay away from the movie theater in droves.) But again, this was still 1997, a time when Bill Clinton was in the White House. (He's in the movie by the way.) Women in the America under his leadership were, consequently, all crazy or bimbos or doormats or walking humidors or meant to serve him or be used for his purposes in one way or another. And people so recently wanted him back in the White House. With nothing to do.

Next: Genres, continuities, discontinuities, flying saucers, aliens, contactees, Charles Fort, Karl Marx, and V.I. Lenin, in at least two parts.

↧

The Summer of Flying Saucers

July 18, 2017, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Another Silly Season-Part One

≪ Previous: Contact

This was the summer of flying saucers. On June 24, 1947, Kenneth Arnold, a private pilot out of Boise, Idaho, saw nine bright, shining aircraft in formation near Mount Rainier, Washington. He was not able to identify the aircraft. He could see only that each was shaped something like a flying wing, that they flew at tremendous speed, and that their individual motion was like that of a saucer skipped across the water. Upon landing his Call-Air A2 at Yakima, Washington, Arnold told a number of other pilots what he had seen. The story soon got out to the press, and within days, saucer mania was sweeping the nation.

At about the same time, Mac Brazel, a New Mexico rancher, found and recovered, with his family, the wreckage of what he assumed to be a weather balloon near their home in Corona. They reported their findings to the Lincoln County sheriff. Soon men from Roswell Army Air Field were on the case. On July 8, 1947, the story went out from the airfield that the U.S. Army Air Force had recovered the remains of a "flying disk." The next day the story went bust when the "disk" turned out to be nothing more than a wrecked weather balloon, just as Brazel had originally thought. That didn't stop later theorizers from contending that the debris was actually from a flying saucer, that the U.S. government had recovered and spirited away the saucer and its occupants, and that it had covered up the whole thing. That story of conspiracy and coverup was still years in the future, however.

Sometime around July 15, Kenneth Arnold received a letter from The Venture Press of Chicago. The author of the letter wanted to know about Arnold's experience of three weeks before. After some hesitation, Arnold wrote back to him, and within a few days, the men were corresponding by mail. Then the man from Venture proposed that Arnold investigate a purported sighting of flying saucers in Tacoma, Washington. And it wasn't just a sighting. In fact, the incident at Tacoma combined the best of Kenneth Arnold's original sighting of June 24 with the supposed crashdown near Roswell, for there was supposed to be physical evidence involved. And it was supposed to have taken place on June 21, giving the incident precedence over Arnold's own sighting. Kenneth Arnold's Chicago correspondent, by the way, was Raymond A. Palmer, editor of Amazing Stories, a science fiction magazine that had lately been publishing tales of the Shaver Mystery. As the summer of 1947 went on, Palmer must have seen flying saucers as the next big thing.

The sighting in Tacoma, now called the Maury Island Incident, turned out to be a hoax, but Kenneth Arnold didn't know that at the time. He knew only feelings of unease, fear, and paranoia over the course of his investigation. Those feelings began when he found upon arriving in Tacoma that some unknown person had reserved a hotel room for him. Arnold had told no one of his trip. An unknown informant seemed to know everything that went on in his hotel room. He and another pilot searched the room for listening devices and found nothing. A house in Tacoma that he visited early in the investigation was empty on his second visit. Spider webs had been spun across the doorway. No one was around. In addition, the two men involved in the sighting, Harold A. Dahl and Fred L. Crisman, were secretive, evasive. They had misplaced important evidence and documentation. There was something amiss in their tale. They spoke of a mysterious and menacing man in black who knew everything about what they had seen and warned them against telling. Arnold never met the man. He did, however, meet two air force officers, Captain William L. Davidson and First Lieutenant Frank M. Brown, who arrived to investigate the incident. The two were killed in a plane crash on the way back to their base, and the physical evidence they had collected was presumably lost or destroyed. They were the first casualties of the flying saucer era. By the way again, Fred L. Crisman, who took part in the Maury Island Incident, had earlier written to Amazing Stories about a strange and frightening experience he supposedly had in Burma during World War II. His letter, published in the magazine in June 1946, was a warning not to pursue further investigations into the Shaver Mystery.

Kenneth Arnold departed from Tacoma on August 3, 1947. Less than two weeks later, on August 14, the first alien encounter of the new era occurred--or so the man said. His name was Rapuzzi Johannis--or so he said--and on that date, he claimed to have been searching for geological specimens in the Dolomite Mountains of Italy when he ran across two little green men and the spacecraft in which they had arrived on Earth. They shot him with a ray, paralyzing him, before fleeing in their ship. Being Italian aliens, they were stylishly dressed. Being Italian, they were probably enjoying the Ferragosto holiday when they were so rudely interrupted by an impertinent Earthman. Johannis didn't tell his story until a decade and a half had passed. In the meantime, he went to the United States, supposedly became acquainted with Raymond Palmer, and returned to his native country to write science fiction stories. Again, here was a witness claiming precedence, in this case as the first person in the flying saucer era to encounter space aliens.

Finally, to round out the summer of flying saucers, the National Security Act of 1947 went into effect on September 18, providing for the creation of the national security apparatus of the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency. The creation of the U.S. Air Force, later the official governmental investigator of the flying saucer phenomenon, was also a result of the act. The mind of the conspiracy theorist boggles at the implications of the events that began and ended the summer of 1947.

So in the course of a summer--Kenneth Arnold's original sighting took place two days after the summer solstice, and the National Security Act took effect five days before the autumnal equinox--much of the mythology for the flying saucer era was established (though most of this was done retroactively by writers and conspiracy theorists). In addition to sightings of flying saucers, there were reports--contemporaneous or not--of: crashdowns; recoveries of physical evidence, including alien bodies; the removal of alien bodies to secret government installations; encounters with live aliens; seizures and thefts of physical evidence; the involvement of government agencies in the flying saucer phenomenon; official secrecy, coverups, and conspiracies; and encounters with mysterious men in black. There were also the first official investigations; the first photographs of flying saucers; the first flying saucer hoaxes and pranks; the first flying saucer fads, crazes, merchandise, and culture; and the first flying saucer flap. Significantly, there were also the opposites of feeling when it comes to flying saucers: On one side, mystery, awe, wonder, hope, expectancy. On the other, fear, dread, anxiety, paranoia. The contactee and abductee phenomena were not fully formed in 1947, but as we'll see, those were and are late-stage developments, if not the very last stages of the flying saucer phenomenon, which has, at this late date, more or less reached its end.

↧

Another Silly Season-Part One

July 21, 2017, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Another Silly Season-Part Two

≪ Previous: The Summer of Flying Saucers

Seventy years ago this summer, the flying saucer phenomenon, a potent myth for the postwar era in America, began. For years after Kenneth Arnold's first sighting in June 1947, flying saucers were everywhere in our culture. They were a perennial favorite among newspaper reporters, magazine writers, book authors, and vast numbers of Americans who read their work. Some wrote and read only for fun, others with great interest and avidity. Some took it so seriously that it affected their psychological and physical health and threatened or ended their personal relationships. Flying saucers and their presumed occupants began showing up in movies, too, and on television, in comic books, as toys, and of course in science fiction stories, where the whole phenomenon had begun. There were new magazine titles, actually new categories of magazine titles. Some, like Fate, were devoted generally to Forteana. Others, like Flying Saucers, were focused specifically on this new phenomenon. (Both were originally under the editorship of Raymond A. Palmer of Amazing Tales and Shaver Mystery fame.) Flying saucers and the mythology of the flying saucer era are still with us, but nothing like they were then. There will never again be flaps like there were in 1950, 1952, 1956-57, 1966-1967, or 1973. Today, flying saucers and the mythology of flying saucers are mostly just holdovers from a previous and long-departed culture. In point of fact, nearly every element of the phenomenon was in place in the first half decade or so after that first summer of the flying saucer era, 1947.

There was a problem, though. In those early years, in report after report and page after page of eyewitness accounts, there was a frustrating and often depressing sameness. Someone on the ground or in an airplane saw an inexplicable light or object in the sky. The sighting lasted for a few seconds or a few minutes. The light or object made maneuvers or traveled at speeds impossible for any earthly craft to attain. Then the light or object winked out or zoomed away. Writers and journalists in the budding field of ufology dutifully chronicled these accounts in their work, devoting pages and pages--whole chapters, whole sections, whole books--to them in fullest detail. When was the UFO seen? Where? By whom? For how long? How many, what direction, what altitude, what size, what color, what shape? Full accounts, yet still empty. All of it ultimately seemed to amount to nothing and to mean nothing. There was no significance. There was nothing to take from it. Nothing to infer. Nothing to understand. Nothing to gain. Nothing that might expand our knowledge of ourselves, the earth, or the universe. Individual sightings were without any climax. The same thing could have been said about the whole flying saucer phenomenon. People interested in the phenomenon spent years waiting for some great climax or grand revelation as to its meaning and significance. They waited for it all to come together into a whole that might be clearly seen and understood. In the meantime, they made every kind of speculation and supposition based on the flimsiest of evidence, or no evidence at all, or evidence that was fabricated or simply woven from the most fervid, if not pathological, of imaginations. Some, like Major Donald E. Keyhoe, who devoted his life after 1950 to the flying saucer mystery, died still waiting.

What was needed in all of this was some excitement. Enough of the fact-heavy and ultimately empty and banal accounts of sightings of unexplained aerial phenomena. Enough of the waiting. What we needed were encounters with real aliens from space. That excitement came early in the flying saucer era, certainly by the end of the summer of 1952. By then, the first flying saucer books had been published and the first flying saucer movies had appeared on the silver screen. In the five years previous, science fiction authors (and artists) had been busy, too, making the most of ideas that had seemingly passed from their very own genres into hard reality. Few science fiction stories treated the question of the flying saucer phenomenon better than did "The Silly Season" by C.M. Kornbluth, originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in the fall of 1950. Kornbluth's story, with a large dose of very good humor, made sense of the whole seemingly senseless thing. The randomness, the inexplicability, the vast array of strange objects seen. All of those meaningless sightings suddenly meant something. Unfortunately, meaning and understanding came too late for Kornbluth's people of earth. But it wasn't too late for us. In some ways the flying saucer era was still getting started. In the early 1950s, the flying saucer occupants began showing their very alien faces.

Kornbluth's title, "The Silly Season," refers to a journalistic convention, an observation made by reporters across cultures, that summertime, being a slow time for news, tends towards the telling of silly stories. The sightings and supposed crash downs of 1947 fit neatly into the silly season of June through September. Though the sightings continued and though new parts were added to the mythology of flying saucers in the five years following that first summer, the events of 1952 went towards filling out the whole thing. There wasn't much that was new after that, certainly nothing new after the early-1970s.

Again, as in the events of 1947, some of what happened in 1952 is visible only in retrospect. Some of it was made retroactive by writers at later dates. But it was a full year, one of the most remarkable of the flying saucer era. I'll write more about it in part two of this series. By the way, "The Silly Season" was reprinted in hardback for the first time in 1952, in Tomorrow, the Stars, published by Doubleday and edited (ostensibly) by Robert A. Heinlein. By the way, too, Keyhoe and Heinlein contributed to Weird Tales, and though Kornbluth did not, his widow did, in 1973, the year in which flying saucers may very well have had their last gasp, if they hadn't already died five years before.

To be continued . . .

↧

Another Silly Season-Part Two

July 24, 2017, 6:53 pm

≫ Next: Barker and Bender on the Case-Part One

≪ Previous: Another Silly Season-Part One

In 1952, now sixty-five years in the past, came another silly season, or if you like, another summer of flying saucers. That summer began with an event that is meaningful only in retrospect, for on July 1, 1952, Otto Struve, a prominent Russian-born astronomer, was appointed first head of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, based at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Although the observatory was without any sizable resources at the time, eight years later, with the construction of a radio telescope at Green Bank, West Virginia, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory began what became known as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) under Frank Drake. Carl Sagan, who later co-wrote the story on which the movie Contact (1997) was based, was of course involved for years in SETI. He also testified in 1968 before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science and Astronautics in their hearings on UFOs. That was near the end of the flying saucer era and many years after the season under consideration here. In other words, I've gotten ahead of myself.

Eleven days after the appointment of Otto Struve to his new position, flying saucers began their invasion of Washington, D.C. The invasion lasted a couple of weeks, from July 12 through July 29, 1952. Unlike the previous invasion, in 1814, there were no bombs bursting in air and no rockets either, while most of the glare was confined to the radar screens at Washington National Airport and Andrews Air Force Base. The invasion otherwise came to naught. There were more sightings, more photographs, more pranks, and more books and magazine articles on the saucers in 1952, but the high point of the summer--and one of the high points of the flying saucer era--came near the end of that season with the first encounter people of Earth had with a being from another planet.

The encounter took place on September 12, 1952. It began when some boys playing football on the school playground in Flatwoods, West Virginia, looked up to see an object streak across the sky, apparently to come to earth on a hilltop above town. The boys set off to have a look, recruiting some others to go with them, including Mrs. Kathleen May, a local hairdresser and the mother of two of the boys. Night was falling when the group reached the hilltop. In the gloom and mist, some saw a glowing object on the ground. That was on their right. On their left was the edge of a patch of woods. There was a hissing sound from that direction. Then Gene Lemon, a seventeen-year-old national guardsman, shined his flashlight on the round and blood-red face of a terrifying creature. Ten feet tall or more, wearing a hood like the ace of spades and a green, skirt-like garment or encasement, the creature came towards them from next to a large oak tree. The creature didn't walk, though. It floated or hovered above the ground. And that was more than enough for the expedition from Flatwoods. Mrs. May and the boys fled in terror down the hill and to their homes. One or two were so sick with fright that they vomited repeatedly through the night. Mrs. May described what she had seen--a creature that became known variously as the Flatwoods Monster, the Green Monster, the Braxton County Monster, and the Phantom of Flatwoods--as "worse than Frankenstein," adding, "It couldn't have been human."

I have a book called The Field Guide to Extraterrestrials (FGtE) by Patrick Huyghe, published in 1996 by Avon Books. It's not comprehensive, but I think you can call it a good representative sample of the sightings and encounters of the flying saucer era. There are forty-nine types of aliens shown in FGtE, from 1896 to 1993. Aside from the sighting from 1896--which took place during the first UFO flap in America--there are five accounts that supposedly preceded the encounter with the Flatwoods Monster, from the alien bodies recovered at Roswell, New Mexico, in the summer of 1947 to an encounter with a frog-like alien in Orland Park, Illinois, on September 24, 1951. Unfortunately for those witnesses (or investigators) who have claimed precedence, all five of those claims from 1947 to 1951 were made retroactively. Only the encounter with the Flatwoods Monster was reported contemporaneously to the actual event. The reports went out to the entire country within days. Kathleen May was even on television just weeks after receiving the fright of her life. That was more than any of the others did in those years 1947-1952. Rapuzzi Johannis may have wanted to be first with his retroactive report of an encounter in Italy in August 1947. Maybe Silas Newton and Dr. Gee, perpetrators of a hoax and subject of Frank Scully's book Behind the Flying Saucers (1950), wanted to be first, too. Even decades later, the conspiracy theorists who claimed that alien bodies were recovered at Roswell may have wanted some claim to precedence. But there was really only one first, and that was the encounter reported by Kathleen May, her boys, and their friends with the Flatwoods Monster of West Virginia.

Although the summer of 1952 came to an end, the flying saucer era was only beginning, and for the first time, there were reports of alien beings from outer space. (1) That brings up one of the curious things about the study of UFOs in the 1950s, namely that there were at least two camps of believers. In one camp were those who wanted to talk about UFOs only as purely aerial--and presumably purely material--phenomena. These ufologists would not countenance the word, let alone the idea, of "occupants." The other camp was made up of those who let their imaginations wander farther afield, into realms of other worlds, other dimensions, and even into realms of the spirit. (2) As the decade went on, though, the whole flying saucer phenomenon became more complex and yet more inexplicable. The kinds of flying saucers seen by witnesses proliferated. So, too, did the kinds of aliens that flew them. No amount of data collection,analysis, synthesis, or hypothesizing seemed to be enough to solve the mystery or even come close to solving it. Scientific explanations seemed to be up against limits in fact. That left purveyors of non-scientific and pseudoscientific explanations room to work, and work they did, as they already had done for years. You might say the flying saucer era was reaching its decadent phase.

To be continued . . .

Notes
(1) Author Frank Scully had previously reported on the supposed recovery of alien bodies from three flying saucer landings in the United States in 1949. That reporting was debunked by J.P. Cahn in True magazine in--you might have guessed it--September 1952.
(2) You might say that the aerial or material phenomena hypothesis is analogous to hard science fiction, while the broader hypotheses are analogous to other forms of fantasy. You might want to hold onto that idea of a discontinuity between science fiction and all other genres of fantasy fiction.

Copyright 2017 Terence E. Hanley

↧

Barker and Bender on the Case-Part One

July 27, 2017, 8:00 am

≫ Next: 11/22/63 and the Conspiracies of History

≪ Previous: Another Silly Season-Part Two

On Friday, September 19, 1952, a week after the sighting of the Flatwoods Monster, a twenty-seven-year-old movie theater booker left his office in Clarksburg, West Virginia, for Flatwoods with a journalistic assignment in hand. It was a short trip for him, one he had made many times before, for in heading out for Braxton County, Gray Barker was going home.

Barker arrived in Flatwoods that evening but not too late to begin asking questions and interviewing witnesses to the sighting. He would have to make his investigations quick, though. Having previously sent a query by telegram to Fate magazine, Barker had received a rapid reply: 3,000 words, three or four "pics," and a rigorous, fact-based investigation for his story. Deadline: Monday.

As an admitted "frustrated writer," Gray Barker couldn't have asked for a better turn of events. A big, national news story had come right out of his native county, located just down the road from his office. He knew the country and the people. He had the weekend in which to work. And he had a perfect market in Fate, a magazine founded in 1948 by Raymond A. Palmer and Curtis B. Fuller for the expressed purpose of publishing stories of this kind.

As it turns out, Gray Barker wasn't the only investigator in Flatwoods that weekend. Ivan T. Sanderson, renowned as an author, explorer, zoologist, and television personality, was also on the trail of the Flatwoods Monster. At the time, he was less well known as an investigator of strange events, but like Gray Barker, Ivan T. Sanderson would make a name for himself as one of the giants of Forteana of the 1950s and beyond.

Barker and Sanderson ran into each other and even carried out part of their investigations together in that last weekend of the summer of 1952. Gray Barker met his deadline. His article, entitled "The Monster and the Saucer," was published in Fate in January 1953. Sanderson got a story out of it, too. The earliest version I have found is "Scientist Questions Observers of West Virginia 'Saucer'," located on the front page of the Baltimore Sun for Tuesday, September 23, 1952. So Gray Barker had his start. He had also caught the attention of another investigator out of Bridgeport, Connecticut. And then the real strangeness began.

To be continued . . .

Copyright 2017 Terence E. Hanley

↧

11/22/63 and the Conspiracies of History

November 12, 2017, 8:56 am

≫ Next: The Pantry on the Edge of Forever

≪ Previous: Barker and Bender on the Case-Part One

I was in the middle of something when I last wrote, and I'm planning to pick up again where I left off. I would like to write about something simple before I get back to writing about something more complicated, though. The something simple is the time-travel, alternate-history, crime-drama, dystopian novel 11/22/63 by Stephen King, from 2011-2012. (I know, it doesn't sound simple, but it is.) I have read this book since I last wrote, and I have some thoughts on it. I would like to share them with you in this month of anniversaries. One of course is the anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the subject of Mr. King's book. The other is of the onset of the disease of Marxism-Leninism. Contrary to what you might think, these two anniversaries are linked. I think Stephen King knows that, but I'm not sure that he knows it all the way.

The novel 11/22/63 is about a man who travels back in time to try to prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It's a really intriguing concept, and in the first third of the novel, I was following right along and didn't want to put it down. You might be daunted by 849 pages of novel, but King is no Thomas Wolfe, and his book reads pretty easily. Too easily, I would say, and that's my first complaint. I have never been a big fan of Stephen King. That's not because I don't like his books but because I don't read his books. I'm generally not attracted to extremely thick popular novels. (I have never read Clive Cussler and only one book by Tom Clancy.) That's one of the reasons why I read Mr. King's mystery/crime novel The Colorado Kid, from 2005. It's short and to the point. It's also part of the Hard Case Crime line, which has a good reputation, despite its publication of books like Baby Moll by John Farris. (Please do not read this book. It's boring beyond belief.) Anyway, before I read 11/22/63, the only book by Stephen King I had ever read was The Colorado Kid. I enjoyed it, and I like the fact that it leaves the mystery unsolved, for the essential mystery is of the human heart and all of its drives and desires. All are ultimately unsolvable. I found out later, too, that The Colorado Kid might offer some insight into the author himself and the life of his family, for Mr. King's father left them when Mr. King was a child and never came back, just as the title character of the book left his family and never went back.

I enjoyed 11/22/63, but like I said, there are some things that bother me about it. One is the obvious shallowness of the narrator. I suppose there are people this shallow in the world, people who lack inner depths to probe and so do no probing. I'm skeptical of that idea, though, and I especially hope that an English teacher and author would not be so shallow. (In my first incarnation, I was, like more than one character on A Prairie Home Companion, an English major.) I can suspend my disbelief that a man can travel back in time and alter history. I'm less willing to suspend my disbelief that a man who was not so obsessed before would become obsessed with his five-year mission to prevent an assassination--that he would never flag, never doubt, never want to throw in the towel, never ask why he should do this thing or that he should do this thing, never question his mission, least of all, that he should wish to go on even when he meets and falls in love with a woman with whom he can live out a normal life in a normal place, if only he would surrender to love and to that life.

That shallowness may have something to do with the narrator's apparent skepticism or agnosticism or outright non-belief in anything beyond the material, natural, scientific, or, perhaps most significantly, the historical. That mindset may or may not reflect Mr. King's. (Probably not.) But if a man loves and sees the person whom he loves as not just his biological partner in the perpetuation of his selfish genes, then how can he go on being a materialist or a skeptic? I'm not sure. I will leave that question to the materialist or skeptic. Anyway, mark that up as another bothersome thing about 11/22/63: a not very sympathetic narrator.

Stephen King has contributed to Weird Tales (in 1984). So did John D. MacDonald (in 1949), a writer to whom the narrator of 11/22/63 refers more than once. That is significant, too, for Mr. King is, I think, a known admirer of John D. MacDonald, and in this book, Mr. King writes something along the lines of the man he admires. You might call the whole thing a salvage operation: something was taken from America and the world when President Kennedy was assassinated. The man who sends the narrator on his mission wants to get it back. And because the narrator is friends with the sender--his name is Al--he goes about his work. The problem is that there was only one John D. MacDonald and only one Travis McGee. I could never quite believe that the narrator of 11/22/63 was up to the task.

If you have not read 11/22/63 and still want to, you should probably stop reading here.

So just as in a case taken by Travis McGee, the salvage operation proves successful, but the woman is lost, in this case killed. The narrator prevents the assassination, but in order to prevent the death of his beloved, he has to return to the present in order to start all over again. The novel takes a strange turn then, and very nearly loses it. What starts out as a time-travel/alternate-history story and becomes in the middle a kind of crime drama turns out in the end to be a science fiction story of a dystopian future in which the portals of time are guarded by unknown people of--when? where? Because the narrator has prevented the assassination of the president, he has set the world spinning away into a different timeline, and in that timeline, all kinds of terrible things have happened. (I get the sense that the narrator and the author behind him think of the election of George Wallace as president to be the worst of these things, never mind the earthquakes that have killed untold thousands.) In fact, the whole earth is threatened with destruction. In other words, John F. Kennedy had to die in order for the world not to be destroyed. In other words, the narrator, who discovers that there was no conspiracy to kill the president, has come back to the present to find that there was after all a conspiracy. He doesn't recognize it, though, and neither, by appearances, does Stephen King. Put another way, neither believes in conspiracies carried out by assassins or agencies or governments, but both, especially Mr. King, seem to believe in the conspiracies of history, that is, history has to go a certain way and no other. History decided that John F. Kennedy had to die. And that's History with a capital "H," a curiously Marxist notion from a narrator and an author who want John F. Kennedy not to have been assassinated by the Marxist Lee Harvey Oswald and who have done everything they can to prevent it.

That brings me to the second anniversary in this month of anniversaries. One hundred years ago this month, in November 1917 (October by the old calendar), the Bolsheviks under V.I. Lenin overthrew the provisional government in Petrograd and instituted a murderous replacement based on the ideas of Karl Marx. Tens of millions of people died under that system in the ensuing century. In the eyes of any thoroughgoing Marxist, the killing of John F. Kennedy by a Marxist assassin must surely be one of the high points of a century of political murder and terror. Kennedy was, after all, opposed to Marxism and was one of the most fervent of cold warriors among all of our postwar presidents. He was also president of a nation that represented the greatest foe and threat to communism. By Marxist rhetoric, Kennedy must have been a reactionary and a defender of the bourgeoisie. History commands that such people be overthrown, overthrown being a euphemism for murdered.

In this anniversary year and month, apologists for and supporters of Marxism, communism, and other forms of socialism have celebrated the coming of the Bolsheviks. To them, it was a necessity--a historical necessity--that countless millions be ground under the iron heels of socialism. Today there are people among us who wish the same thing to happen again. One of them recently ran for president. Another is in control of the opposition in Great Britain. Tens of thousands more teach, study, and demonstrate on our college campuses. I don't know what Stephen King's politics might be beyond the Easterner's natural inclination towards the left, but maybe he revealed something when he made Hillary Clinton president in his alternate history in 11/22/63. Believe what you want, but I would call that Dystopia.

(November 2017 makes another anniversary in that a year ago this month, We the People kept the most corrupt and mendacious candidate in American history away from the presidency. We should all get down on our knees and say a prayer of thanks every day for that, even the atheists among us. And maybe even atheists might rethink their position considering that sending her back to where she came from seems to have come about in part by divine intervention.)

So, finally, another thing that bothered me about 11/22/63: In his coda, tacked on in 2012 to a novel published in 2011, Stephen King has his narrator meet the woman he loved in the past but knows him not in the unaltered present. She has lived a life of accomplishment, but it is the accomplishment of a certain kind, what you might call the accomplishment of the materialist, the activist, the collectivist, even the social-justice warrior. It is also accomplishment as defined by the current generation vs. that by Stephen King's generation or by people before him. (If I understand things correctly, the coda was suggested by Mr. King's son.) Unlike Stephen King, the woman from the past did not marry or have children. There was nothing interior, nothing directed towards a family. There was only the exterior and a turning away from family and towards this thing people call "society." In other words, her greatest love was directed not towards her family but towards "society," another curiously Marxist or leftist notion in a book that is ostensibly about the love men and women feel for each other. That orientation towards "society" may fulfill some people, but it strikes me as a kind of emptiness, an emptiness that concludes a book of essential emptiness. A good story, well told, with intrigue and sensation, but in the end, like so much popular entertainment, empty.

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The Pantry on the Edge of Forever

November 15, 2017, 8:31 am

≫ Next: A Little (or a Lot) on Algernon Blackwood

≪ Previous: 11/22/63 and the Conspiracies of History

I feel like Columbo . . .

"Just one more thing . . ."

After writing the other day about 11/22/63, I realized how much it has in common with "The City on the Edge of Forever," an episode from the first season of Star Trek, first broadcast in April 1967. The original teleplay for "The City on the Edge of Forever" was written by Harlan Ellison, then adapted, rewritten, and/or revised by at least one other writer on the production team for the show. I have the Bantam Fotonovel adaptation here beside me. Mr. Ellison doesn't get any credit on the cover, but there is an interview with him on the inside. I'll come back to that in a minute.

In 11/22/63, a man travels through a time-portal (located in the pantry of a diner in the ruins of his hometown) in an attempt to alter the past. He is successful in his mission, but the woman whom he loves in the past is killed, and the future is altered: the earth and everything he knew is threatened with destruction because of his meddling. He must then correct all of that. In his so doing, John F. Kennedy dies but the woman he loves lives on into the unaltered present.

In "The City on the Edge of Forever," a man travels through a time-portal (located in the ruins of a city on a faraway planet) and unwittingly alters the past, thus altering the future: nothing that he knew came to be and his fellow space-travelers are stranded in time and space. Two other men follow him in an attempt to un-alter the past. One of those men, Captain Kirk, falls in love with a woman from the past, Edith Keeler. Like the love interest in 11/22/63 (at least in the unaltered present), Edith is a social activist or reformer. Like Stephen King's female lead, she remains unmarried and turns her efforts at making the world a better place outward into the world rather than inward towards a family.

So Captain Kirk sets the past (and present) aright but loses the woman he loves, to death and to the tragedies of history. It is necessary that she die so that history can proceed along its necessary path. The mission is not to alter the past but to prevent the alteration of the past. Stephen King's protagonist, on the other hand, sets out to alter the past and to send history off in another direction. In so doing, he loses the woman he loves, but he also succeeds in his mission. The past, thus also the present, is altered. The problem is that the alteration, as in "The City on the Edge of Forever," results in disaster. In order to undo the disaster, the protagonist in Mr. King's novel decides to undo what he has done, but in the process, John F. Kennedy (one-half of the past's beloved) must die, just as Edith Keeler (all of the past's beloved) must die. The female lead in 11/22/63 (the other half, perhaps the lesser half, of the past's beloved) gets to live, although the protagonist still loses her to history. Clear as mud.

Although 11/22/63 is original in many ways and a great work of the imagination, it is also a kind of inversion of "The City on the Edge of Forever." There is something a little lacking in 11/22/63, though. I'll let Harlan Ellison himself point out just what that is. (He didn't know he was pointing it out, of course.) From "Encounter with Ellison," an interview conducted by Sandra Cawson and published in Star Trek Fotonovel #1, City on the Edge of Forever (Bantam, 1977):

Sandra: Harlan. Why is "The City on the Edge of Forever" as well-loved as it seems to be by fans and critics alike?

Harlan: Because it's a story about people. The underlying philosophical theme carries the plot forward, but essentially it's a very simple love story. A story of choice. The kind of story that is identified traditionally as "tragedy" in the grand sense. I don't mean that to sound pompous or even to suggest that it's literature--because after all, what we're talking about is still just a television segment--but it's the essence of human relationships that snares the viewer. It's what Faulkner intended when he spoke of the only thing really worth writing about being "the human heart in conflict with itself." I think those who like the show identify with that.

That's what I was getting at the other day when I wrote, for I think 11/22/63 lacks something of heart. (The protagonist himself admits that he is not a man who cries.) That's my opinion, of course; many reviewers and readers liked or even loved this book. Maybe to people of previous generations, losing John F. Kennedy to death was like losing a lover to the same spectre. To those of us born afterwards, however, his death, though tragic, is a piece of history. Setting that aside, the loss of the love interest in 11/22/63, either to death or to the unaltered past, is not very affecting, to me at least--nothing like the loss of Edith Keeler. But maybe that's just another kind of nostalgia speaking in me. Who, though, has ever forgotten the scene in which Edith Keeler is killed, in which Doctor McCoy exclaims to an already grieving Captain Kirk, "Do you know what you just did? I could have saved her!", and in which Mister Spock replies, with very human sympathy and understanding, "He knows, Doctor. He knows."

One more thing . . .

The friend in 11/22/63--the friend who sends the protagonist on his mission--is named Al Templeton. I will now stretch his name beyond the breaking point: Al can easily become AI: artificial intelligence--a computer--a robot brain. Templeton is, literally, town of the temple. And what is the Guardian of Forever in "The City on the Edge of Forever" but an artificial (possibly) intelligence residing in a ruined city, with its columns, lintels, and pediments like a Greek temple? So is Al Templeton's name an homage to or evocation of the Guardian in his city on the edge of forever?

Just one more thing . . .

According to Wikipedia, the ultimate authority on all things:

When a Star Trek film was being developed in the late 1970s, one of the ideas proposed by Roddenberry was to have the crew travel back to the 1960s and prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy. This idea was based on "The City on the Edge of Forever," due to the episode's popularity among fans by that time. [Original source: Gene Roddenberry: The Myth and the Man Behind Star Trek by Joel Engel (New York: Hyperion, 1994).]

And that's really all for now.

Star Trek Fotonovel #1, City on the Edge of Forever, by Harlan Ellison, even if he doesn't get any credit on the cover. Note the broadside for a boxing match in the background: in 11/22/63 by Stephen King, there is a fictional boxing match between a real and a made-up boxer. A note to everyone who scans and places images on the Internet: be sure to select "descreen" when scanning so as to avoid moiré effects in your images.

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A Little (or a Lot) on Algernon Blackwood

December 3, 2017, 10:30 am

≫ Next: Barker and Bender on the Case-Part Two

≪ Previous: The Pantry on the Edge of Forever

About once a month, I meet with a weird fiction book club to discuss some short works by a given author. In our past two meetings, we have talked about the works of Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951). For our first meeting on Blackwood, we read "The Willows" and "The Wendigo." In our second, we talked about the short stories "Smith: An Episode in a Lodging-House,""May Day Eve," and "The Listener." A theme runs through all of these stories, namely, an encounter with the invisible or previously unseen, usually by way of a kind of crossing over into or contact with worlds beyond on our own.

Algernon Blackwood was a mystic and an occultist. Again and again in his stories, he wrote of encounters with the non-material. I hesitate to use the word supernatural, as the weird forces and entities he described in his stories seem less supernatural than simply not of our world: they may obey laws of nature, but those laws are not necessarily the same laws that govern us in our earthly realm. Supernatural also suggests a hierarchy of some kind, with some things in nature and others above it. In Blackwood's stories, there seems to be a unity among all things. He was interested in Buddhism. His stories seem to reach towards an Oriental oneness, of body and spirit, of the material, physical, or earthly realm with the non-material or spiritual realms that actually lie all about us and perhaps also within us.

H.P. Lovecraft was or claimed to be a hard materialist. Here is a quote, admittedly from an unknown source:

I am, indeed, an absolute materialist so far as actual belief goes; with not a shred of credence in any form of supernaturalism--religion, spiritualism, transcendentalism, metempsychosis, or immortality.

Algernon Blackwood was obviously not a materialist. He seems to have believed wholeheartedly in the spiritual or non-material. In reading his stories, I am reminded of the title of a wholly unrelated book, Wonders of the Invisible World by Cotton Mather, for Blackwood seems to have been an explorer of the invisible worlds that adjoin our own or that are, to use a Lovecraftian word, coterminous with it. If only we could expand our consciousness or awareness, we might commune with these worlds. That reaching towards greater consciousness or awareness seems to have been Blackwood's purpose in his stories.

Lovecraft admired Blackwood. In a letter to Vincent Starrett, from 1927, he wrote: "Aside from Poe, I think Algernon Blackwood touches me most closely . . . ." He considered "The Willows""the finest weird story" he had ever read. This admiration came "in spite of the oceans of unrelieved puerility which he [Blackwood] so frequently pours forth." (1) I can't say what exactly was Lovecraft's objection to Blackwood's writing. (2, 3) I assume his accusation of "puerility" to have been directed at Blackwood's mysticism or non-materialism, perhaps more specifically at Blackwood's occultism.

Blackwood is supposed to have had a less kindly opinion of Lovecraft's work. In a search of the Internet, I found only a reference to Blackwood's claim that he found "spiritual terror" lacking in stories by his younger admirer. And that brings up another difference between Blackwood and Lovecraft, namely, that Lovecraft was more direct and the threats about which he wrote are more physical than in Blackwood's work. Cthulhu is a monster with height, breadth, and depth. He is a certain color, has a certain anatomical structure, and so on. Yes, he has come to earth from deep space. He has lived countless eons and will go on living for countless more. And he affects the dreams of sensitive people. But he is still a physical being. His body can be cloven by the prow of a fast-moving ship, thus sending him back to slumber in his submarine city. Blackwood's monsters, on the other hand, can't be seen clearly or directly. For example, the entities haunting the willows in the story of the same name are indistinct; they are not clearly defined or delineated. (4) They may leave footprints (or hoof prints) in the sand, they may leave their mark on the poor Hungarian peasant, but they are nonetheless non-material, or at most only partly material. Peter Penzoldt said it best when, in The Supernatural in Fiction (1965), he described Algernon Blackwood's entities as "apparitions." In any case, Blackwood, being a non-materialist, was not bound by the mere physical. The terrors he described extend into the spiritual realm. Lovecraft, more or less his opposite, may have been bound by his materialism, thus his terrors are, on their face at least, only physical. That might be a narrow reading of Lovecraft, though. He may have believed more than he let on.

* * *

I began writing today with a few notes in mind on the stories of Algernon Blackwood. The first has to do with materialism vs. non-materialism. It's clear from reading Blackwood where he stood. But rather than come from the direction of the non-materialist in his attempts to sway the materialist, Blackwood tried the opposite strategy. His narrators in "Smith: An Episode in a Lodging-House" and "May Day Eve" are materialists. More specifically, they are medical doctors. And, boy, do they get their comeuppance. In fact, the narrator in "May Day Eve" has a conversion like that of Saul on the road to Damascus. Whole new worlds open up to him because of his experiences on the night of May 1 in some long-ago year. I would like to quote from "Smith: An Episode in a Lodging-House," though, because it gets at something I have written about before, i.e., the arrogance and sense of superiority of the medical doctor, feelings that often border on or cross over into the country of the murderer and psychopath:

"I was at the time, moreover, in the heavy, unquestioning state of materialism which is common to medical students when they begin to understand something of the human anatomy and nervous system, and jump at once to the conclusion that they control the universe and hold in their forceps the last word of life and death. I 'knew it all,' and regarded a belief in anything beyond matter as the wanderings of weak, or at best, untrained minds."

Rest assured that the narrator is relieved pretty quickly of those feelings in his encounters with things from beyond.

My second note concerns a passage from near the end of "May Day Eve." The narrator has undergone an extraordinary experience on the path to the country house of his friend, a folklorist to whom he had planned to present what he considered powerful evidence in favor of materialism. First the folklorist speaks. He is then questioned by the narrator:

"I meant [. . .] that you were a very brave man to walk to-night over the enchanted hills, because this is May Day eve, and on May Day eve, you know, They have power over the minds of men, and can put glamour upon the imagination--"

"Who--'they'? What do you mean?"

[. . .]

"The elemental beings you have always scoffed at, of course; they who operate ceaselessly behind the screen of appearances, and who fashion and mould the moods of the mind. And an extremist like you--for extremes are always dangerously weak--is their legitimate prey."

I would like to emphasize those words: Extremes are always dangerously weak. Extremists themselves recognize that fact and always seek to recruit into their ranks their fellow extremists, knowing the weakness and vulnerability of the person who has extremist views and is driven by them. Eric Hoffer recognized it, too, in his book The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951). From Section 61:

The fanatic cannot be weaned away from his cause by an appeal to his reason or moral sense. He fears compromise and cannot be persuaded to qualify the certitude and righteousness of his holy cause. But he finds no difficulty in swinging suddenly and wildly from one holy cause to another. He cannot be convinced but only converted.

And from Section 62:

Though they seem at opposite poles, fanatics of all kinds are actually crowded together at one end. It is the fanatic and the moderate who are poles apart and never meet. The fanatics of various hues eye each other with suspicion and are ready to fly at each other's throats. But they are neighbors and almost of one family. They hate each other with the hatred of brothers. They are as far apart and as close together as Saul and Paul. And it is easier for a fanatic Communist to be converted to fascism, chauvinism or Catholicism than to become a sober liberal. (5)

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist [. . . .] The atheist is a religious person. He believes in atheism as though it were a new religion. He is an atheist with devoutness and unction.

I have that sense, too, that an atheist is a person who very desperately wants to believe in something yet can't bring himself to believe simply in God. In getting back to "May Day Eve," a believer in God would not be so disturbed by his experiences as is the narrator--the believer is already aware of and is in touch with the invisible world. On the other hand, a materialist like the narrator of "May Day Eve" has his whole worldview shaken in any encounter with the spiritual, invisible, or non-material.

My third note is in the story type used in "Smith: An Episode in a Lodging-House." It is, in its opening paragraphs, clearly a club story, that is, one told in a club setting, usually by a narrator in repose. Tales from the White Hart by Arthur C. Clarke is an example of a series of club stories. I like the club-story type and have written one myself, set in the far future and on another planet. "Smith: An Episode in a Lodging-House" is another type of story, too, though, one I have never heard described before. So maybe I will be first, at least in my own mind, for inside Blackwood's club story is a rooming-house story. The rooming-house story is one in which someone who lives in a rooming house (or apartment house) encounters another, stranger denizen of the same place. In Blackwood's story, it is the narrator who meets Smith, a strange man up to something behind closed doors. Other examples include:

"The Music of Erich Zann" by H.P. Lovecraft (1922)

"The Dreams of Albert Moreland" by Fritz Leiber, Jr. (1945)

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

Rear Window (1954)

Even stories like Dangling Man by Saul Bellow (1944) and "Mr. Tripp and Skobol" by Jack Matthews (Chicago Review, Autumn 1959) can be considered rooming-house stories. I am also reminded of Tom Waits' spoken-word recording "What's He Building?" from 1999. I welcome other additions to this list.

I'll close by saying that a few years back I wrote a rooming-house story, before I even realized there was such a thing. I encourage everyone to try your hands at the club story and the rooming-house story, and failing that, to write stories of every kind.

Notes

(1) Quotes are from that same letter to Vincent Starrett.

(2) In another letter to Willis Conover, from 1937, Lovecraft called Blackwood's prose style "poor." This comes from a writer who too often alternated between self-conscious faux-archaism and the purplest and pulpiest of prose. I find problems with Blackwood's prose, too, but I think Lovecraft's objection was about something far more serious, to him, than style. See the following note.

(3) In a letter to Farnsworth Wright, from July 5, 1927, H.P. Lovecraft wrote:

Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form--and the local human passions and conditions and standards--are depicted as native to other worlds or other universes. To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all. Only the human scenes and characters must have human qualities. These must be handled with unsparing realism, (not catch-penny romanticism) but when we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown--the shadow-haunted Outside--we must remember to leave our humanity--and terrestrialism at the threshold. [Emphasis added.]

Note the use of the word puerility again. Did Lovecraft consider belief, faith, feeling, love, emotion--in short anything at all that is at once human and spiritual--to be unacceptably sentimental? Was that his complaint against Algernon Blackwood?

(4) Lovecraft may have admired "The Willows" so much because it is so close to his own conception of beings from beyond time and space that are attempting to break into our own world. The difference is in their nature and motivation, which aren't made entirely clear in "The Willows." Although Blackwood's story isn't quite science fiction, I think it is an early example of science fantasy, a sub-genre in which Lovecraft worked pretty easily. (I would consider "The Call of Cthulhu" science fantasy, although it can be described more easily--and with less precision--as weird fiction. Alternatively, "The Call of Cthulhu" can be considered a story that crosses genres or even defies categorization by genre.) "The Willows" has, without a doubt, an air of the mythological, folkloric, and supernatural. At first glance, it is a fantasy and about things of the past. But I think "The Willows" is more remarkable for its suggestion of contact between different physical dimensions, a scientific idea, an idea of the future, and one for science fiction writers to treat. I feel certain that Blackwood read and understood at some level Edwin A. Abbott's novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, first published in 1884. But did he also know of Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity, postulated in book form in 1905, only two years before "The Willows" was published? Or did he simply have an intuition that allowed him to envision the existence of other dimensions beyond our own? (We have seen the artist's intuition at work before in Eleanor Cameron's books about the Mushroom Planet.) Setting all of that aside, there have been, more recently, theorists of a so-called genre or sub-genre "dark fantasy." Academic Gary Hoppenstand believes that dark fantasy was invented by Francis Stevens. I have a different opinion. If there is such a thing as dark fantasy--a big if--then it seems more likely to me that H.P. Lovecraft was a pioneer in that genre or sub-genre. But I think "The Willows" may push the origins of dark fantasy back even farther, at least to 1907. More likely still, dark fantasy grew out of fantasy, folklore, mythology, and organized religion, all much older forms.

(5) Don't be confused by Hoffer's use of the word liberal. He meant liberal in the classical sense, i.e., a person who believes and understands that human beings are and by rights free. In current usage, liberal usually means the opposite, i.e., a progressive, leftist, socialist, or statist who wants to grind humanity and human freedom under his boot.

Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951)

Put a mustache on Blackwood and he could have passed for Commander McBragg, that animated raconteur who told club stories in a time-honored way. In actuality, Commander McBragg was based on C. Aubrey Smith (1863-1948), a countryman and near contemporary of Algernon Blackwood.

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