Till A' the Seas Gang Dry

Messrs. Lovecraft and Burns

 

I.

 

My love is like a red, red rose ... 

 

For many people - indeed, we can almost certainly say most people - this will be the line written by the 18th-century Scottish poet and lyricist Robert Burns with which they are most familiar [1].

But for fans of the 20th-century American author H. P. Lovecraft, whose fiction can best be described as a form of weird realism [2] founded upon a philosophy known as cosmicism [3], it's a later line from the same poem that most resonates: Till a' the seas gang dry.

For this line inspired (and provided a title for) one of Lovecraft's best short stories, written in collaboration with his (then teenage) friend R. H. Barlow in 1935 [4].   

 

 

II. 

 

The story consists of two parts:

 

The first describes events that took place on Earth from a few millennia to a few million years after the present day. As the global climate becomes increasingly warm, oceans and bodies of fresh water are slowly disappearing and groups of semi-barbarous people, faced with extinction, are retreating towards the poles in order to try and survive. 

 

The second part starts in a small village in the desert. There is only one man left in the village; the old woman who had been his only companion, having recently passed away. The young man, named Ull, journeys in search of other people using his knowledge of old legends. 

 

After a few days, exhausted and dehydrated, he finds a small settlement. 

 

Ull enters one of the houses, but finds nothing but a dusty old skeleton. Despondent, he starts searching for water and comes across a well that, miraculously, hasn't completely dried up. Trying to reach the rope so as to pull up the bucket, he falls into the well and dies. 

 

After his death - and it transpires that he was, in fact, the last man on Earth - all record of human presence is completely erased. Two of the final passages of the story encapsulate Lovecraft's cosmicism and are worth reproducing in full here:

 

"And now at last the Earth was dead. The final, pitiful survivor had perished. All the teeming billions; the slow aeons; the empires and civilizations of mankind were summed up in this poor twisted form - and how titanically meaningless it all had been! Now indeed had come an end and climax to all the efforts of humanity - how monstrous and incredible a climax in the eyes of those poor complacent fools of the prosperous days! Not ever again would the planet know the thunderous tramping of human millions - or even the crawling of lizards and the buzz of insects, for they, too, had gone. Now was come the reign of sapless branches and endless fields of tough grasses. Earth, like its cold, imperturbable moon, was given over to silence and blackness forever. 

      The stars whirred on; the whole careless plan would continue for infinities unknown. This trivial end of a negligible episode mattered not to distant nebulae or to suns new-born, flourishing, and dying. The race of man, too puny and momentary to have a real function or purpose, was as if it had never existed. To such a conclusion the aeons of its farcically toilsome evolution had led."

As a reader of Nietzsche, I obviously love this and it reminds me, of course, of the famous fable in which the latter "perfectly distils nihilism's most disquieting suggestion: that from the original emergence of organic sentience to the ultimate extinction of human sapience 'nothing will have happened'" [5]. 

 

Man is a clever beast - no doubt about it - but our cleverness won't save us and human knowledge remains just a passing phenomenon when considered cosmically. As Lovecraft is repeatedly at pains to stress, the vast empty universe is entirely indifferent to our existence and we are entirely at the mercy of forces that are beyond our control and full understanding.     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Robert Burns, 'A Red, Red Rose' (1794). Originally a song based on traditional sources, it is often referred to as 'My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose' and published as a poem. Click here to read on the Poetry Foundation website.

 

[2] The term weird fiction refers to a sub-genre of speculative literature originating in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, which either rejects or radically reinterprets the traditional elements of supernatural horror writing in an attempt to inspire more than merely fear. Lovecraft is closely associated with this sub-genre. 

      The object-oriented philosopher Graham Harman used the term Weird Realism for the title of his study on Lovecraft and philosophy (Zero Books, 2012). 

 

[3] Cosmicism - about which I shall say more later in the post - is a philosophy developed by Lovecraft in his fiction. In brief, it is both an antitheism and an antihumanism, promoting the idea that there is no loving divine presence in the universe and that mankind's temporary existence upon the Earth has zero significance. 

 

[4] H. P. Lovecraft and R. H. Barlow, 'Till A' the Seas', in The Californian (1935). The story can be read online at the H. P. Lovecraft Archive: click here. 

[5] Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 205.          

      Brassier, like me, refers to Nietzsche's fable in the essay 'On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense', which can be found in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale, (Humanities Press, 1979), p. 79.

On Oblivion

 

I. 

 

I was interested to hear the Chairman of the D. H. Lawrence Society, Mr Alan Wilson, claim in a recent sermon streamed live from St. Mary's Church, Greasley, on the theme of (so-called) Lawrencian Spirituality [1], that Lawrence was searching for something "beyond ultimate oblivion".

 

For although he was right to identify the importance of the term oblivion in Lawrence’s late poetry [2] - and whilst I would agree with Mark Fisher that "awareness of our own Nothingness is [...] a pre-requisite for a feeling of grace" [3] - there is no beyond oblivion; that's the tremendous challenge of the concept and why it is incompatible with the fundamental Christian belief of eternal life.  

 

In other words, if you subscribe to the idea of oblivion, you must accept the final sinking of one's soul into the magnificent dark blue gloom and the total erasure of self. To hope for life beyond oblivion, is as absurd as wishing to be remembered after one has been completely forgotten.     

 

 

II.

 

Whilst there may be some religious adherents who subscribe to the idea of oblivion [4], I tend to think of it more as a philosophical (and neuroscientific) concept, associated with those for whom death means what it says on the tin: the cessation of all consciousness (or subjective experience) and complete non-existence in any personal sense of the term. 

 

Socrates famously considered the question of oblivion when he was sentenced to death. Addressing the court, he first considers the possibility that his soul will migrate from this life and this world to the next life and next world. 

 

Although this idea appeals to him - because then he'll be able to discuss philosophy with all the great thinkers of the past - Socrates is nevertheless prepared to accept that death might, in fact, be terminal. This prospect doesn't frighten him, however, as oblivion essentially means to his mind a dreamless and uninterrupted sleep [5].  

 

Later thinkers, including the great Roman philosophers Cicero and Lucretius, basically came to a similar conclusion; i.e., that death was either a continuation of consciousness or cessation of it, and that if the former, then there is no reason to fear death; while if the latter is true, then there's also no good reason to be deeply troubled (for one will know nothing, feel nothing, be nothing).

 

As Epicurus famously put it in his Letter to Meneoceus: 'When I am, death is not; when death is, I am not.'

 

 

III.

 

Ultimately, oblivion is really just a term for a mind-independent reality; i.e., a reality which, despite the presumptions of human narcissism, "is indifferent to our existence and oblivious to the 'values' and 'meanings' which we would drape over it in order to make it more hospitable" [6].   

 

I don't know if saying that makes me a nihilist, a naturalist, or an extinctionist. But it certainly makes it difficult to subscribe to Lawrence's vitalism which makes oblivion strangely inviting; like a relaxing bath that we pop in and out of, feeling refreshed and reborn into a new body.

 

What such a cosy idea ignores is the fact that, as Ray Brassier reminds us, ultimately there will be no cosmos to be reborn into; that one day - roughly one trillion, trillion, trillion years from now - "the accelerating expansion of the universe will have disintegrated the fabric of matter itself, terminating the possibility of embodiment" [7]. 

 

Brassier continues: 

 

"Every star in the universe will have burnt out, plunging the cosmos into a state of absolute darkness and leaving behind nothing but spent husks of collapsed matter. All free matter, whether on planetary surfaces or in interstellar space, will have decayed, eradicating any remnants of life based in protons and chemistry, and erasing every vestige of sentience - irrespective of its physical basis. Finally, in a state cosmologists call 'asymptopia', the stellar corpses littering the empty universe will evaporate into a brief hailstorm of elementary particles. Atoms themselves will cease to exist. Only the implacable gravitational expansion will continue, driven by the currently inexplicable force called 'dark energy', which will keep pushing the extinguished universe deeper and deeper into an eternal and unfathomable blackness." [8]

 

In other words: oblivion über alles ...

 

I'm sure some believers will mumble about this universal annihilation all being part of God's plan, but, of course, we know that's bullshit - this is the disintegration of God's plan and the return to formless and empty chaos marks the triumph of evil.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Those with an hour and twenty minutes to spare and who are interested, can watch Wilson and two other speakers, Anthony Rice and John Patemen, discuss their understanding of Lawrentian Spirituality on the D. H. Lawrence Society YouTube channel by clicking here. The event took place on Saturday 18 November, 2023, at Greasley Church (Nottinghamshire).

 

[2] See the poems beginning with 'The Ship of Death' and ending with 'Phoenix', in 'The Last Poems Notebook', in D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 630-641. Almost every poem in this sequence contains the word oblivion. The amusing thing is that Lawrence explicitly warns that any one who attempts to ascribe attributes to oblivion is guilty of blasphemy - but that, of course, is precisely what he's doing.   

 

[3] Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, (Zero Books, 2022), p.157. 

 

[4] In Christian theology, for example, there is a notion of annihilationism which opens up the idea of oblivion. In sum, it's the belief that after the Last Judgment, all damned human souls and fallen angels - including Lucifer - will be totally destroyed and their consciousness extinguished. 

      Annihilationism thus stands in contrast to both the belief in eternal torment and the belief that everyone will ultimately be saved and given eternal life. Although the idea has come in and out of vogue throughout the history of the Church, annihilationism has tended to be a minority view. In 1995, the Church of England's Doctrine Commission declared that Hell may, in fact, be a state of total non-being (i.e., oblivion), rather than a place of eternal suffering.

 

[5] One could, if one was tempted to do so, challenge Socrates on this idea of death as a kind of sleep - just as one might challenge Lawrence's poetic descriptions of death as a plunge into darkness, or the idea that we are merely dipped in oblivion so as to be reborn on the other side. 

      In his paper 'Death, Nothingness, and Subjectivity', the naturalist philosopher Thomas W. Clark critiqued such flawed descriptions and the temptation (even amongst some atheists) to imagine that we might still - in some miraculous manner - experience or know death. By using the language of darkness, silence, and peaceful oblivion we effectively reify nothingness; i.e., make it into a positive condition or quality, into which the deceased individual can then be conveniently lodged.

      Clark's paper was originally published in 1994 as a lead article for the Humanist. It was reprinted in The Experience of Philosophy, ed. Daniel Kolak and Ray Martin, (Oxford University Press, 2005) and in The Philosophy of Death Reader, ed. Markar Melkonian, (Bloomsbury, 2019). It is also available to read on Clark's website Naturalism.Org: click here.

[6] Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. xi.

 

[7] Ibid., p. 228.

[8] Ibid.

 

 

This post is in memory of David Foster Wallace (1962-2008), whose final collection of short stories was published under the title Oblivion (Little, Brown and Company, 2004). The image at the top of this post is based on artwork by Mario J. Pulice for the cover of the first edition of this work.