As of late I've been reading the works of Horror/Fantasy writer HP Lovecraft.
To those unfamiliar, Lovecraft wrote a series of "weird" stories as they were called, mixing elements of fantasy and horror, for pulp fiction magazines back in the day. His use of the Eastern Seaboard locations, extensive first person narration with little dialogue, and suspense-driven stories makes him very much the sucessor to Edgar Allen Poe in the gallery of American writers.
The most unique feature of Lovecraft's work is his Cthulhu Mythos. Several of his stories revisit a set of shared references to a pantheon of creatures called "The Old Ones," not quite gods, but awful entities that seem unrestricted by the limitations of the human mind. For Lovecraft, our reality teaters on a vast unknown, and from whence true horror arises.
Feeling inspired, I attempted to write my own story:
Beast Uprising
By Brendan Jones O'Connor
The greatest misdoing of the human mind is its overwhelming conceit in believing that it every can come within the boundaries of understanding the order and workings of the universe. That which we collective as a society accept as being a supposedly “true” grasp of reality on a cosmic scale is laughable to the ones that exist beyond us.
I hailed from the Milwaukee suburb of Okosh Grove. In the said town, Old Money were those whose wealth extended past your own generation. As a jocular friend of mine stated firmly in a fit of jest, “I think this is the Irish part of Town, because I'm seeing so many McMansions.” It was here I gained my first love of chemistry. In the amorphous shape of my subdivision, amongst the three-car garages and streets that curved solely for an aesthetic design, I first recognized the strength of the utility for the material science. Science did the curtsey of bringing the water through the meticulously planted pipes under the streets. This same subject fertilized the advanced crops in my pantry. This subject made sense, and like the efficient and calculated aesthetic of my subdivision, I could make a well outcome with the rules of logic and observation.
My pretenses wrapped me into a distinct path, that vision which already was approved by a set of experts, who in turn had their credibility confirmed by a set of experts, who accordingly held their titles' esteem as the result of the judgments of another set of experts, ad nauseum. As a hard science major, chemistry, that particular sentiment sometimes earns me the ire of my peers. In fact, I myself used to think that way, until the nightmares started.
Dreams have always interested me. The classic philosophical point regarding dreams is the argument that because dreams seem real to us while dreaming, what is to say that the current moment is not a dream? I never liked that argument, because dreams seem to possesses qualities radically different from consensus reality. Foremost in my observations, if that term can even be applied for dreaming, in a dream I have no concept of Free Will, there is no decision-making process, and I am totally at the mercy of outside events and an uncontrollable urge to do certain actions. My dreams are often filled with desires to do a particular task, but seem to be incapable of even going about doing it, as if my body were merely an avatar for some foreign manipulator.
I would awake with a tremendous relief that what I had just experienced did not actually occur. I could not recall the events, but I knew that those were not the cause of my malaise, but the conditions of my dreams. The sadistic and bizarre rules of my dreams were such that I accepted them without thought. At some point, I would begin to question the reality of the situation, then the dream would end. Thus, it made no sense to me that one could be unaware of living in a dream world, because the ability to question if one's reality is a dream was enough brunt to end the dream.
I do not remember the dream that morning, but I do know that a pervasive sense of dread continued well afterward. My thoughts scattered by the unsettling haze remaining after awaking from the dream, I recalled that I had scheduled a meeting with my zoology professor, Dr. Klopparberg. The matter of our intended encounter held minimal relevance, just an issue about a mis-graded paper, probably a symptom of her extensive and unrelenting work load as a recent adjunct at the university. I am uncertain if she could ever gain tenure status here at the prestigious University of Wisconsin, her youth, combine with a distinct New Age style of appearance, the tussled hair, the lack of makeup, the hand-knit clothes, as well as a method of lecture that emphasized a holistic application of the material. She clearly lacked the discrete professionalism of almost every other teacher I have had. On almost every day prior, I held little opinion of her beside general indifference or annoyance at her drawn-out explanations for extraneous material, especially for a class I am confident the majority of us took only to fulfill a basic requirement. Today I felt a little different, and welcomed the opportunity to speak to somebody a little different, hoping maybe her happy-go-lucky cheer might ease my buffeted mind.
I found the door of Dr. Klopparberg's temporary office after an inordinate amount spent searching the top floor. It turned out the mailbox address was slightly off, but I doubted she had that much spite invested in whether or not students made their appointments within the five minute interval of the scheduled time. I knocked, and she left me in to a tiny office cluttered with more book, posters, and forms of media than I thought were possible without taxing the concentration of any sane person (but then again, it was Dr. Klopparberg I am speaking of.)
We spoke briefly over the fate of my document and the potential for its re-evaluation. She almost immediately confessed to the mistakes made in grading, a behavior I would not mind other professors emulating. I noticed after we came to a conclusion an unlikely looking small, white-marble statue tucked in the back of her office, amid a stack of books with long and uninspiring names. The figure possessed a head resembling a Cuttlefish, but its body looked scaly, powerful, and endowed with enormous wings.
“I am a little intrigued by that figure you have up there.” I said, bending my arm at the elbow in order to point to the strangely-bodied creature.
Unprompted by me, she arose to puck the statue from its prior place. “This is a beast in the water, a special being.” she said. I was taken aback by the intricacy of the statues detail; the skin's design had almost an Arabesque level of intertwined unity. How could human hands make such an object? Its eyes, half-moon in their shape, protruded slightly from the head, drawing in my attention, while at the same time, sending a shape wave of repulsion through me.
“I am unfamiliar.” I did not intend for this to be a lie, my mouth moved before I could make a better command. In fact, my whole walk to Dr. Klopparberg's office kept feeling as if I were merely an observer of an outer phenomenon that I am incapable of controlling.
“I had an experience with one. It is the very event that made me want to become a zoologist in the first place. It is a bit of a story, and I may have added on pieces to it, you know, how stories change over time, but this actually happened.”
I nodded my head. My focus of vision narrowed to include almost solely her head.
“I went to a festival in the wilderness, far away from any city or distraction. Actually, there were plenty of distractions, but they were natural distractions, so they were perfectly welcome. This festival came once a year, every summer. I wanted to go to it every year, and I finally got to go to it after I graduated from high school. I went with a friend, a friend who was very beautiful. Very beautiful.”
She stared directly at me. Her eyes stopped blinking.
“On the second day of this wonderful festival, I knew my vision quest began because my mind lost all of its limitations. I was free to fall into the lake. By my back.”
Her head tilted.
“Water always scared me, but that day it didn't. The light above me in the sky reminded me that the water surrounded me, but the light died. Still I could see everything. The lake at this point didn't have a limit, just as how I didn't have a limit. It blended perfectly, no seam at all, into what the oxygen air used to be. Maybe those two perfectly blended, because I could breath in this new place. Two eels and a cuttlefish crawled out of the darkness. The two eels looked like were connected to the cuttlefish, making up a body along with a black body. It had arms with sharp claws, but I wasn't afraid. It went away quickly, and I got lost in the water land when it came back out of nowhere. It said its name was something strange, but it didn't say it like how I'm talking to you right now, it just let me know it in its own language. That whole moment was such a precious moment. I loved all the rolling things in the world, those that inhabited the land, the air, the sea, and those other places, like this creature, who lives in the land between the salt sea and the sand shore. One day I will find this again. I couldn't cry because I wasn't afraid. But I how could I laugh if it wasn't funny? But I laughed anyway because I like to laugh. It did not matter. The beast overcame me and my limitations. My limitations included my life, my thoughts at what a life could be, or would be, or had been. Those didn't matter any more.”
She stopped talking without any gesture or further indication that she found closure in her thoughts; her lips dangled slightly open, and her eyes reminded ajar, as if her remaining thoughts trailed just behind my head. I waited for about ten seconds, hoping that she would continue, or at least dismiss me from her cloister. To my dismay, it was me who had to end this uncomfortable encounter.
“Well, yes, I think I ought to be going now.” I said, drawing in more air through my teeth than I had hoped. But she could not tell, the only difference after I announced my exodus was that her lips formed a close pucker before fully pursing.
Creeping pangs overcame me, and I left. Instead of directing myself to my apartment to work on an unruly swath of homework, the result of the past week spent with a greater emphasis on socialization than scholastic effort, I went on a walk to the Terrace overlooking Monona lake. I dangled my head over the edge of the Terrace. A conversation I had with a friend the night prior came to mind.
“Something always bothered me about the concept of God. Many people, especially around this state, seem to believe that a supreme being created and regulates all ethics in the universe. But this doesn't make any sense, because what if God was evil?” He said.
“I suppose if God were evil, then he would have made us human beings into thinking that good was bad and bad was good. Our standards would just be different.” I replied, largely indifferent, but obligated to support logic at all times, even if only out of principle.
“But that doesn't address the point that God could exist in spite of us. Maybe God could simply not care about human life. Think about it, if you had all the cosmos in your grasp, would you really think that there's a difference between the molecules in a rock or the molecules in a person? I know I wouldn't even bother. I'm God! I have better things to do!”
My friend's logic, had one of the Religious Studies professors overheard, would probably have incited a series of objections for his crude analogy, but it made me think.
A sudden, powerful effect came over me with little precedent, either in my mood and thoughts that day, or my entire set of recollections of my prior experiences. The flame of my imagination caught fire and a fantasy overtook me; that of an angel. More precisely, a phantasmagorical figure that presented a clear verbal message. Hume said that all objects are nothing but a collection of physical properties, and that may be true, but this angel, did not occur to me as a full visual essence, but more as a figure with out a form. It was as if the overactive imagination of my whimsical youth got hijacked by a mysterious subconscious agent.
“Come... Tonight...” the whispering agent told me. It faltered into a greater nothingness, and I found myself walking away.
The rest of that God-forsaken day was spent in uncharacteristic focus on the research on hand. The pace and precision that I managed to maintain unsettled my mind at some points enough to irk me into recognizing my absurdly centered efforts. My common desires for things like food or mental breaks faded away until I no longer questioned their absence. My homework for the weekend lay motionless, I accomplished all task by the setting of the autumnal sun. I redirected my vision to outside my window. I felt two rapid feelings, one of great discomfort at the realization that the sun had already receded hours ago without me seeming to notice, and the second to excuse myself from the room that I had been planted in for such a long time that day. I arose and departed quickly, securing a thin windbreaker for myself and exited my apartment. My course for that walk mattered very little to me, I deliberately left the path for my feet to decide. A few minutes of passing through the clear night of surprisingly no distraction from any other person or car, I approached the Monona Terrace again, remembering my odd visualization of my intuition earlier that day. The water transfixed my vision for a full minute's time, its idiosyncratic lake flow, a strong character for a town such as this. What I then saw broke me from my blindness. The water formed in ways water is utterly unknown to do so, and the beast arose from it.
Horror, yes, that primitive feeling, the same emotion binds all of humans in all of time together in its struggle against the cruelness of existence, overwhelmed me. No method of escape existed; this being, a being beyond any sort of limitations we humans have attempted to impose on the universe, held the fate of my life. Its immense form of dark green flesh defied every notion of biology: its cuttlefish face extended and contracted, increased and decreased in girth by the second; its bestial claws twisted and angled in awful ways. The eyes, oh how I fail deeply to explain soul-emptying void of its two glowing, but still darkened eyes. The absolute Hell of staring at this beast eyes resembled a cruel paradox of drowning while burning to death. All life forces within me drained from my body, and in the vacuum a wretched, all-consuming pain erupted through every part of me. The beast caught my very consciousness.
The Bible says so little about Hell I'm surprised anybody ever invested that much time thinking about the worst of all things to come. Jesus did say there would be “weeping and gnashing” of teeth. Christ's economy of words may be the only sign in our miserable human language to attempt to capture this great other. At that precise moment, I entered that which cannot be understood as a hallucination or a dream, or any part of reality I or anybody else can ever know. Just as George Barkley theorized that we all live in the mind of God, I lived in the mind of this beast.
What I must characterize as a room, but really lacking the physical boundaries accustom to people in our tangible world, bound me in total restraint: I had no body. My consciousness, removed of my corporal exterior, shifted independently of my will, however, my awareness was not limited by my usual plane of vision, but grasped all of what was around this mind-space. I could not escape. Non-Euclidean geometries of off-colored materials knit in complete uniformity. With my conscious self now trapped, a humanoid form spun into figure.
“You shall be overcome.”
I realized my body alongside a bridge by a bike trail.
The nightmares did not die, instead they intensified. On an accursed night when these horrid visions come to me, my body convulses, and I often ejaculate a scream that awakens those around me. As much as these people inquire into the cause of my night terror, I can never quite form words to express the horror that makes me quake with total release. Common peoples' bad dreams do not in any conceivable way compare to the form of my torture. While a standard nightmare, the sort popular amongst children or those with a stressful experience in their past day, the images do not fade upon awakening; rather, the narrative, if I may even give it the honor of calling it that, does not leave my memory. Every motion, every sound, every pace, every color, every unnerving step indelibly imbues my mind. Worse, my perception of pain, fear, and sickness do not seem to deviate from that of the real world. In every sense, the world of weeping and gnashing of teeth overtakes me, with no introduction and certainly no conclusion. All this to the point I question my own sanity.
But above all is my reaction to the bestial giggling, the low, pulsating bass sounds that effect me physically as well as mentally. I will not ever wish that sound on any human being; its call reaches beyond barrier to intercept my ears and control my body. I cannot outrun it. Whenever I hear it, I freeze and quiver just make sure my body is still alive. The sound that reminds me my conscious existence lies completely in the power of the great ones that I do not, and cannot understand; it is the sound of the forces that we cannot speak of.
Some religious folk live with this obfuscating delusion: Armageddon is just around the corner, the armies of the Good Lord will battle the forces of darkness, and God wins. Those who were on God's side the whole time are the ultimate winners, because they were specially absorbed from Earth to Heaven in one fateful moment, while the rest of the world will suffer accordingly to their lack of faith in the real God.
If I have come to embrace skepticism to those who insist on a tidy rational explanation for the natural science of the world, I too reject a concise Westminster Catechism approach for our warped reality. For all we know, life after death may just be Hell, in fact, I sincerely suspect it.
