From the Vault
So, about three years ago I wrote a little Lovecraftian prose-poem and handed it in as an application essay to Bennington College two months late. (Despite this, I got in anyway.) Since that time it's just been sitting on my external hard drive gathering electronic dust. Given the rate at which said device seems to get dropped, I've been fearing for the safety of the file, so it's going up here.
For those who care, it was written in response to Bennington's challenge to "turn an image into a piece of writing."
I chose H.R. Giger's Landscape XX:
Anyway, here's the story. It's called The Oubliette: The Oubliette
IF CHILDREN WERE BROUGHT INTO THE WORLD BY AN ACT OF PURE REASON ALONE, WOULD THE HUMAN RACE CONTINUE TO EXIST? WOULD NOT A MAN RATHER HAVE SO MUCH SYMPATHY WITH THE COMING GENERATION AS TO SPARE IT THE BURDEN OF EXISTENCE? OR AT ANY RATE NOT TAKE IT UPON HIM TO IMPOSE THAT BURDEN UPON IT IN COLD BLOOD. I SHALL BE TOLD, I SUPPOSE, THAT MY PHILOSOPHY IS COMFORTLESS-BECAUSE I SPEAK THE TRUTH; AND PEOPLE PREFER TO BE ASSURED THAT EVERYTHING THE LORD HAS MADE IS GOOD. GO TO THE PRIESTS, THEN, AND LEAVE PHILOSOPHERS IN PEACE! AT ANY RATE. DO NOT ASK US TO ACCOMMODATE OUR DOCTRINES TO THE LESSONS YOU HAVE BEEN TAUGHT. THAT IS WHAT THOSE RASCALS OF SHAM PHILOSOPHERS WILL DO FOR YOU. ASK THEM FOR ANY DOCTRINE YOU PLEASE, AND YOU WILL GET IT. YOUR UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS ARE BOUND TO PREACH OPTIMISM; AND IT IS AN EASY AND AGREEABLE TASK TO UPSET THEIR THEORIES.
-ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
Under our skulls and under the earth, there lie the progenitors, content to sleep for eternity in a pallid protean mass of sinister symmetry.
I know precisely when it was-when I first caught that terrifying glimpse into my own soul and beheld the gaping chasm that lies therein and in the heart of every man. For that is where they dwell in a grotesque array of lascivious lattices, gnawing at the minds of men and driving them to do unspeakable things. Except in rare cases, like my own, the knowledge of them remains nothing more than a vague, half-forgotten ancestral memory: a dim reminder of our dismal origins and inevitable destiny. But once in a while our feeble mental defenses fail in the face of overwhelming evidence of the vanity of existence, and the progenitors are revealed once more.
It was at a celebration held by the community in honor of a visiting guest of certain elevated class and distinction. I was invited, I am certain, solely on the basis of the capricious recognition and accolades I had recently received for my discoveries in biomathematics. I did not expect to attend. I had of late begun to shun social encounters; especially those large, boisterous gatherings in which all potential for earnest discourse upon such honest matters as science or industry is forsaken in favor of empty, noisome gossiping and puerile bantering. It was, furthermore, becoming difficult to resist the nagging sensation of falseness that pervaded every facet of my perception at such events. Something in the movements of my companions' eyes or in the timbre of their voices at odd moments bespoke of something insidious beneath the surface of their speech, a lurking lie that they struggled always to conceal.
Confronted with these intangible feelings of omnipresent deception, my mind drew curious links betwixt them and my studies. For in constructing mathematical models of human behavior, I could not understand why they emerged as formulas of fluid dynamic viscosity, nor infer the meanings of the implications thereof. And as I struggled to relate this abnormality to what I sensed by intuition, I found myself utterly consumed by a profound sense of dread, as if some evil insight wished to make itself known to me against the wishes of my sanity.
And is it truly any wonder? For the study of memetics has revealed ideas and concepts to be analogous to viruses, which nest in the neural fiber of our consciousness. Most children are early on infected with exaggerated notions of mankind's inherent nobility and grandeur, and instilled with a sense of blind faith in its infallible righteousness. It should not be surprising, then, if such an idyllic and comforting thought resists vehemently against evidence disagreeable in its coldly contrasting simplicity.
And so it was on a barren plain beneath an impenetrable sky of pitch that I felt myself poised at the threshold of that yawning gorge whose illimitable depths offer nothing but knowledge unfurled, unfettered, unfiltered. I could not discern the walls or the bottom of that rift, but of the stench of sewage and faintly sloshing sounds my imagination made much. Lest that abysmal pit swallow me whole to be prey for what I feared lurked beneath in stagnant seas of protoplasm, I craved the company of my fellow man for a light and a buffer against the darkness.
This desire won out against my earlier reluctance, and so it was in flight of the oubliette and its shadow shrouded inhabitants that I attended the festivities that evening. At first, the company and conversation were of great comfort to me, and I nearly forgot my earlier troubles amidst a tide of bacchanalian revelry. Gradually the assembly grew larger, and at one point one of the hosts motioned for silence so that the guest of honor could be introduced. The host took a copious amount of time to speak flatteringly of the guest's achievements and to gibber respectful courtesies. At last, he took the kind advice of the crowd, and helped himself to a seat. Finally, the guest of honor rose to the podium and proceeded to lecture. Ripe with the maturity of age, he spoke with moral authority of man's ethical responsibility and his overriding capacity to reason. He expounded on our elevated status over the rest of the animals and of our freedom from primal urges and desires. His words seemed to quell any remaining doubt within me, so that I became assured at the soundness of his arguments and laughed at my earlier childish cynicism.
But then, as if stumbling upon it by chance, my faculties seized with a start upon the lips and hands of the speaker as they perpetrated an incongruous word and an ill-timed gesture. The resulting cognitive dissonance shocked me out of my placid complacence, but the crowd seemed not to notice, chuckling at the speaker's wit and nodding at his wisdom. Then, to my horror, as I gazed upon the faces of my companions, the façade began to crumble and shatter. The disguise of the flesh fell away, the glorious deception scattering in ruin upon the ground leaving only the starkly glaring frame of the hideous truth. My companions' motives were revealed to me, man's base nature stood exposed before me and I became filled with a deep and utter loathing for all of mankind.
And as I watched the speaker descend from the stand to be surrounded by the sycophantic swarm, his eyes chanced to flick in my direction and lock with mine for an instant. My last vestige of hope was extinguished then, for I as I looked into his eyes I knew that his words were spoken not to persuade the crowd, who were ignorant enough to need no persuading, but rather to convince himself. Possessed of an urge to flee the scene at once, I moved from room to room of the estate in search of contradicting evidence of that which I must, for the sake of the preservation of my very sensibility, refute. But as I observed the casual insults and the hollow posturing, and saw my companions caught up in dollish dances of courtship, I saw them as they truly are: castrated slaves to the reproductive imperative, that sickly cycle of pointless perpetuity.
Deprived even of the final shelter of denial and delusion, their mucous laughter is all that I hear now as I am pulled across the subliminal fleshold, extracted and collected like sludge through a strainer. Past the viscous veneer and the odorous ordure, down through lakes of primordial protoplasm, where inside our skulls and inside the earth, there still lie the progenitors. Nothing can disturb their supraliminal slumber, not even my tortured shrieks as they echo from the walls of the cavern where they dwell in disgraceful embrace; a biological blasphemy in a reposeful decay of interlocking infernality.
I chose H.R. Giger's Landscape XX:
Anyway, here's the story. It's called The Oubliette: The Oubliette
IF CHILDREN WERE BROUGHT INTO THE WORLD BY AN ACT OF PURE REASON ALONE, WOULD THE HUMAN RACE CONTINUE TO EXIST? WOULD NOT A MAN RATHER HAVE SO MUCH SYMPATHY WITH THE COMING GENERATION AS TO SPARE IT THE BURDEN OF EXISTENCE? OR AT ANY RATE NOT TAKE IT UPON HIM TO IMPOSE THAT BURDEN UPON IT IN COLD BLOOD. I SHALL BE TOLD, I SUPPOSE, THAT MY PHILOSOPHY IS COMFORTLESS-BECAUSE I SPEAK THE TRUTH; AND PEOPLE PREFER TO BE ASSURED THAT EVERYTHING THE LORD HAS MADE IS GOOD. GO TO THE PRIESTS, THEN, AND LEAVE PHILOSOPHERS IN PEACE! AT ANY RATE. DO NOT ASK US TO ACCOMMODATE OUR DOCTRINES TO THE LESSONS YOU HAVE BEEN TAUGHT. THAT IS WHAT THOSE RASCALS OF SHAM PHILOSOPHERS WILL DO FOR YOU. ASK THEM FOR ANY DOCTRINE YOU PLEASE, AND YOU WILL GET IT. YOUR UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS ARE BOUND TO PREACH OPTIMISM; AND IT IS AN EASY AND AGREEABLE TASK TO UPSET THEIR THEORIES.
-ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
Under our skulls and under the earth, there lie the progenitors, content to sleep for eternity in a pallid protean mass of sinister symmetry.
I know precisely when it was-when I first caught that terrifying glimpse into my own soul and beheld the gaping chasm that lies therein and in the heart of every man. For that is where they dwell in a grotesque array of lascivious lattices, gnawing at the minds of men and driving them to do unspeakable things. Except in rare cases, like my own, the knowledge of them remains nothing more than a vague, half-forgotten ancestral memory: a dim reminder of our dismal origins and inevitable destiny. But once in a while our feeble mental defenses fail in the face of overwhelming evidence of the vanity of existence, and the progenitors are revealed once more.
It was at a celebration held by the community in honor of a visiting guest of certain elevated class and distinction. I was invited, I am certain, solely on the basis of the capricious recognition and accolades I had recently received for my discoveries in biomathematics. I did not expect to attend. I had of late begun to shun social encounters; especially those large, boisterous gatherings in which all potential for earnest discourse upon such honest matters as science or industry is forsaken in favor of empty, noisome gossiping and puerile bantering. It was, furthermore, becoming difficult to resist the nagging sensation of falseness that pervaded every facet of my perception at such events. Something in the movements of my companions' eyes or in the timbre of their voices at odd moments bespoke of something insidious beneath the surface of their speech, a lurking lie that they struggled always to conceal.
Confronted with these intangible feelings of omnipresent deception, my mind drew curious links betwixt them and my studies. For in constructing mathematical models of human behavior, I could not understand why they emerged as formulas of fluid dynamic viscosity, nor infer the meanings of the implications thereof. And as I struggled to relate this abnormality to what I sensed by intuition, I found myself utterly consumed by a profound sense of dread, as if some evil insight wished to make itself known to me against the wishes of my sanity.
And is it truly any wonder? For the study of memetics has revealed ideas and concepts to be analogous to viruses, which nest in the neural fiber of our consciousness. Most children are early on infected with exaggerated notions of mankind's inherent nobility and grandeur, and instilled with a sense of blind faith in its infallible righteousness. It should not be surprising, then, if such an idyllic and comforting thought resists vehemently against evidence disagreeable in its coldly contrasting simplicity.
And so it was on a barren plain beneath an impenetrable sky of pitch that I felt myself poised at the threshold of that yawning gorge whose illimitable depths offer nothing but knowledge unfurled, unfettered, unfiltered. I could not discern the walls or the bottom of that rift, but of the stench of sewage and faintly sloshing sounds my imagination made much. Lest that abysmal pit swallow me whole to be prey for what I feared lurked beneath in stagnant seas of protoplasm, I craved the company of my fellow man for a light and a buffer against the darkness.
This desire won out against my earlier reluctance, and so it was in flight of the oubliette and its shadow shrouded inhabitants that I attended the festivities that evening. At first, the company and conversation were of great comfort to me, and I nearly forgot my earlier troubles amidst a tide of bacchanalian revelry. Gradually the assembly grew larger, and at one point one of the hosts motioned for silence so that the guest of honor could be introduced. The host took a copious amount of time to speak flatteringly of the guest's achievements and to gibber respectful courtesies. At last, he took the kind advice of the crowd, and helped himself to a seat. Finally, the guest of honor rose to the podium and proceeded to lecture. Ripe with the maturity of age, he spoke with moral authority of man's ethical responsibility and his overriding capacity to reason. He expounded on our elevated status over the rest of the animals and of our freedom from primal urges and desires. His words seemed to quell any remaining doubt within me, so that I became assured at the soundness of his arguments and laughed at my earlier childish cynicism.
But then, as if stumbling upon it by chance, my faculties seized with a start upon the lips and hands of the speaker as they perpetrated an incongruous word and an ill-timed gesture. The resulting cognitive dissonance shocked me out of my placid complacence, but the crowd seemed not to notice, chuckling at the speaker's wit and nodding at his wisdom. Then, to my horror, as I gazed upon the faces of my companions, the façade began to crumble and shatter. The disguise of the flesh fell away, the glorious deception scattering in ruin upon the ground leaving only the starkly glaring frame of the hideous truth. My companions' motives were revealed to me, man's base nature stood exposed before me and I became filled with a deep and utter loathing for all of mankind.
And as I watched the speaker descend from the stand to be surrounded by the sycophantic swarm, his eyes chanced to flick in my direction and lock with mine for an instant. My last vestige of hope was extinguished then, for I as I looked into his eyes I knew that his words were spoken not to persuade the crowd, who were ignorant enough to need no persuading, but rather to convince himself. Possessed of an urge to flee the scene at once, I moved from room to room of the estate in search of contradicting evidence of that which I must, for the sake of the preservation of my very sensibility, refute. But as I observed the casual insults and the hollow posturing, and saw my companions caught up in dollish dances of courtship, I saw them as they truly are: castrated slaves to the reproductive imperative, that sickly cycle of pointless perpetuity.
Deprived even of the final shelter of denial and delusion, their mucous laughter is all that I hear now as I am pulled across the subliminal fleshold, extracted and collected like sludge through a strainer. Past the viscous veneer and the odorous ordure, down through lakes of primordial protoplasm, where inside our skulls and inside the earth, there still lie the progenitors. Nothing can disturb their supraliminal slumber, not even my tortured shrieks as they echo from the walls of the cavern where they dwell in disgraceful embrace; a biological blasphemy in a reposeful decay of interlocking infernality.