dreams of alien worlds v2.6

Dreams of Alien Worlds

	I sit on the bus reading,‭ for the first time, the stories of H. P. Lovecraft. Already I've encountered the presence of loud racism. Looking up and across the way, I see a man reading a tabloid, some aggregator of conservative opinion. On the front, a headline about the dreaded Soros having clandestine dealings with a monolithic China to forestall world war.

	Beneath this, presumably in a context too far away and too fine of print for my eyes, a hand-drawn image of a Muslim cleric.

	Photographs of clergy of any kind, even radical clergy who call followers and fellows to violence, are not hard to find. They're sensational; they give a thrill to the audience targeted by these cries of hate, inspiring reciprocation and acts of violence in dubious self-defense. Yet this image is hand-drawn, so as to communicate the malice of the artist to the reader, to capture the otherness of the thus fictional alien cleric.

	We are reading for the same thing, it seems. We are reading to terrify ourselves, to give ourselves a thrill.

	"At The Mountains Of Madness" isn't so bad, but other stories I've read over the last few days are rather more interesting in this light. "The Picture in the House," written from the perspective of an urban genealogist, centers the horror and intrigue on the childish savagery of a country bumpkin who is excited by ancient accounts of African cannibalism. The fictional document they peruse is so old its artist's renderings were by one who had never seen an African native, and so all were drawn as Caucasians, explicitly making the grotesque visuals somehow the worse for their familiarity to the narrator, and clearly in Lovecraft's mind also the reader. While he's quite correct in his assumptions about my ethnicity, it's still a little breathtaking how awful this racist caricature, even through the lens of biased narrators, really is.

	And here, across from me, fictions masquerading as fact in the face of an evil-looking cleric, drawn by some sick hand to incite violence upon my fellow man.

	Lovecraft serves to remind me of the pedigree of this hate. In "Beyond the Wall of Sleep," an institutionalized hick of inbred lines, literally cited as white trash, is possessed nightly by an alien being: an alien in an alien, one mindless and drooling, the other vast and superior. In this way the alien human is emphasized as a wholly other race, a small grade of difference eclipsed by the yet more alien creature of light imprisoned in his comically feeble mind.

	In this way of thinking,‭ all are but gradients, variously inferior, of evolved life with white men at the apex, so as to draw to the reader's attention the possibility of yet more advanced and slightly fiendish creatures, the apex of another and greater evolution, in a world dimly understood only outside the rationale of waking hours.

	Yet in the pages of "At The Mountains Of Madness," we see what Lovecraft may not have realized. To terrify the reader, it is quite sufficient to describe, sometimes in great detail, one that is wholly other. This alone will cause fear and revulsion, the thrill of enmity.

	At his most creative he dwarfs the vast and depressing hate-mongering journalists of the modern economy of fear. He inspires this hatred in a fictional alien rather than in the half-imagined unfamiliar fellow who rides the same bus, who seeks citizenship, who eats foods we deign to stock in the ethnic food aisle, and who my fellow passenger (ears-deep in the pages of own thrilling and foul rhetoric) fears may mean him ill. At his worst, of course, Lovecraft is no better than a fear-mongering hack.