Sep 8, 2014

Lovecraft's entities and... psychogeography

The new annotated H.P. Lovecraft. Introduction by Alan Moore.
Excerpt from All About Alienation: Alan Moore On Lovecraft And Providence, an interview by Nick Talbot published in August on The Quietus website

"He was doing his writing where he loved the New England landscape around him, he loved its history, he loved the way it looked, he loved everything about it. In that sense he was a very provincial person. He found his stay in New York unendurably horrific. But at the same time he was keeping up with the science of the day. And he understood the implications of that science; he understood the implications of relativity; he understood the implications of the quantum physicists; perhaps only dimly, but he understood how this decentralised our view of ourselves; it was no longer a view of the universe where we had some kind of special importance. It was this vast, unimaginably vast expanse of randomly scattered stars, in which we are the tiniest speck, in a remote corner of a relatively unimportant galaxy; one amongst hundreds of thousands, and it was that alienation that he was trying to embody in his Nyarlathoteps and his Yog-Sothoths. 

[...] the anthropocentric view of the world – he saw that that was all gone. And I think tellingly he said that his entities should not be seen as evil. He said things like 'good' 'evil' 'love' 'hate' – these are all human concepts that mean nothing to the vast infinities. But as a person he loved the world around him. And he found great meaning in it and great warmth. As an intellect he understood that that area around him was just part of a gigantic chaotic meaningless random universe. And I think that in his stories of transcoding horrors manifesting in New England settings he was trying to bridge the gap between the personal, intimate human world as we know it and the vast, inhuman cosmos as we know it. Yet that's not psychogeography but its not a million miles away from it." [Alan Moore]

No comments: