Dark Enlightenment 3: On the Zombie Apocalypse

 

'Democracy is as close to a precise negation of civilization 

as anything could be, short of instantaneous social collapse into 

murderous barbarism or zombie apocalypse (which it eventually leads to).'

 

 

I. 

 

According to Nick Land [1], it's not only popular culture that ends up eating itself, but democracy too becomes self-devouring in what he refers to as the zombie apocalypse, which is why, as we saw in an earlier post, those who can are already searching for an exit and regard flight as a matter of imperative.

 

But what, exactly, does Land mean by this phrase; one that derives from a subgenre of horror fiction in which an overwhelming plague of undead zombies results in the total breakdown of society and leaves just a small group of individuals who have been unable to flee struggling to survive. 

 

That's what we are going to discuss here ...

 

 

II. 

 

If the idea of a zombie apocalypse entered the popular imagination thanks to George A. Romero's 1968 classic movie Night of the Living Dead, it's Land who places the idea within a neoreactionary political context [2] - although, it's true of course, that many other artists and theorists have used the phrase to metaphorically express various cultural anxieties and social tensions.   

 

Land - who, as a philosopher, is kind of a cross between Thomas Hobbes, Georges Bataille, and H. P. Lovecraft - conceives the dynamics of democratisation as fundamentally degenerative; "systematically consolidating and exacerbating private vices, resentments, and deficiencies until they reach the level of collective criminality and comprehensive social corruption". 

Bound together by a circuit of reciprocal incitement, democratic governments and the people who elect them push one another further and further towards "ever more shameless extremities" including cannibalism. Idealists call this progress; neoreactionaries, however, see only voraciousness and fear that the authorities will ultimately be unable to "spare civilization from frenzied, ruinous, gluttonous debauch" - i.e., the zombie apocalypse. 

 

As the democratic virus works its way through society, says Land, then concern with the past and long-term planning into the future both die away and are replaced by "a sterile, orgiastic consumerism, financial incontinence, and a 'reality television' political circus". As we are trapped in a perpetual present at the end of history, it makes perfect sense to "eat it all now". 

 

III.

 

Finally, to help readers understand how we got where we are today, i.e., stuck in an age of relentless state expansion, spurious human rights, and mind control ensuring defence of a universalistic dogma, Land provides a convenient guide to the main sequence of modern political regimes, that I think it worth reproducing here [3]:

 

 

Regime 1: Communist Tyranny 

Typical Growth: -0% 

Voice / Exit: Low / Low 

Cultural climate: Pyschotic utopianism 

Life is … hard but ‘fair’ 

Transition mechanism: Re-discovers markets at economic degree-zero 

 

Regime 2: Authoritarian Capitalism 

Typical Growth: 5-10% 

Voice / Exit: Low / High 

Cultural climate: Flinty realism 

Life is … hard but productive 

Transition mechanism: Pressurized by the Cathedral to democratize 

 

Regime 3: Social Democracy 

Typical Growth: 0-3% 

Voice / Exit: High / High 

Cultural climate: Sanctimonious dishonesty 

Life is … soft and unsustainable 

Transition mechanism: Can-kicking runs out of road 

 

Regime 4: Zombie Apocalypse 

Typical Growth: N/A 

Voice / Exit: High (mostly useless screaming) / High (with fuel, ammo, dried food, precious metal coins) 

Cultural climate: Survivalism 

Life is … hard-to-impossible 

Transition mechanism: Unknown 

 

 

IV.

 

The question, I suppose, is: How seriously should we take Land's thoughts on these matters? 

 

Well, when I first encouraged readers of Torpedo the Ark to accept the challenge of his writings on dark enlightenment back in October 2015 - click here - I have to admit that I didn't take them as seriously as I do now. 

 

The world has changed dramatically in the last decade, however, and changed in a manner which, it seems to me, only lends credence to Land's analysis. One worries more now about the fate of the West than one worried ten years ago  and it seems to me that offensive strategies are required urgently if we are to avoid a zombie apocalypse (that defensive strategies, such as quarantine, just won't do the trick).

 

Although, if I'm honest, I suspect it's already too late and the election of Keir Starmer's Labour government with a huge majority here in the UK hardly fills me with hope for the future ...

 

Notes

 

[1] See Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment (Imperium Books, 2022). The essay, written in 2012, is also available online: click here. Note that I am quoting from the first and third parts of this online version.

 

[2] Having said that, one might recall the 1940 film The Ghost Breakers (dir. George Marshall, 1940), starring Bob Hope as Larry Lawrence who delivers a hilarious line concerning zombies and democrats: click here. 

 

[3] Note that by Voice / Exit Land refers to freedom of speech contra the far more substantial autonomy of the sovereign individual (i.e., the freedom to act without state interference and the freedom to leave when state interference in and control over one's life becomes intolerable). And note also that for all regimes, growth expectations assume moderately competent population.

 

 

Dark Enlightenment 1: On the Politics of Hate (4 July 2024): click here.  

 

Dark Enlightenment 2: On Exiting the Present (5 July 2024): click here. 

 

Dark Enlightenment 4: On Rejecting Universalism (6 July 2024): click here.

 

 

Reflections on 'The Yellow Wallpaper' (1892) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

I. 

 

The American author and feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) is perhaps best remembered today for a (semi-autobiographical) short story written after she suffered a severe bout of postpartum psychosis and first published in 1892: The Yellow Wallpaper ... [1]

 

 

 

II. 

 

The (possibly unhinged and certainly unreliable) narrator is a married woman who keeps a journal. Her husband, John, is a doctor and "practical in the extreme". 

 

By this she means: 

 

"He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures."

 

Rightly or wrongly, she resents the fact that he will not believe she's physically unwell and blames him for thereby retarding her recovery. And, to be fair, I can see how this might be troubling. 

 

For it's bad enough when one's useless GP insists there's really nothing wrong. But when one's own spouse - who just happens to also be a physician of high standing - "assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression", that must be really maddening. 

 

And when one's own brother - also a highly respected doctor - concurs that one is simply exhibiting signs of a slight hysterical tendency ... Well, it would be enough to make anyone want to scream and tear at the wallpaper (whatever the colour or pattern). 

 

It's an unfortunate fact that doctors and others working in the healthcare professions, are often not what one might expect or hope for. And experience over recent years has taught me to be wary of accepting their diagnoses and prescribed treatments. 

 

And so I'm sympathetic to the narrator of Gilman's story; even if, as I say, she may be unreliable on occasion and a little too romantic and overly sensitive to queer vibrations for my tastes (sometimes, a draught is just a draught and you really do just need to close the window).  

 

And I do see that John is a patronising and paternalistic prick; I wouldn't want to be married to him, that's for sure.     

 

As for the wallpaper:

 

"I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin. [...] The color is repellant, almost revolting; a smouldering, unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others."

 

I know a lot of people dislike wallpaper: and I know a lot of people hate the colour yellow - although I'm not among their number and have, in fact, just painted my kitchen in a lemon zesty colour full of enough sunshine to make Van Gogh proud [2].  

 

Still, she has a point: one should be happy - or, at the very least, not unhappy - in one's domestic surroundings. 

 

And it's wrong of her husband to laugh at her about the wallpaper. Just as it's wrong not to appreciate that Wilde was perfectly serious when, lying in his wretchedly furnished Paris hotel room, he declared that he and his wallpaper were fighting a duel to the death: One or the other of us has to go.

 

The fact that Wilde died shortly afterwards proves that home furnishings can have a malevolent - even fatal - influence on our lives and that aesthetics deserves to be taken very seriously as a branch of philosophy. 

III.

 

Like the narrator, I also used to lie awake as a child and extract a mixture of terror and entertainment out of the objects of my little bedroom. She remembers how kindly the knobs of a big old bureau were, whilst I remember the scary faces and figures made of leaves that appeared in the curtains - and that returns us to the yellow wallpaper:  

"This wallpaper has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then. But in the places where it isn’t faded, and where the sun is just so, I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to sulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design." 

 

Despite this, the woman grows very fond of her room; in spite of the wallpaper, or perhaps - somewhat perversely - because of the wallpaper: "It dwells in my mind so!" She spends many hours trying to follow the pointless pattern:

 

"There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will. Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day. It is always the same shape, only very numerous. And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don’t like it a bit." 

 

She particularly dislikes it at night, when the moonlight shines on the undulating wallpaper and gives her the creeps: 

 

"The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out. I got up softly and went to feel and see if the paper did move [...]" 

 

Her husband tells her to go back to sleep and not be silly. But she doesn't. Instead, she lies there in the darkness "trying to decide whether that front pattern and the back pattern really did move together or separately". 

 

If the colour of the paper is bad enough, it's the pattern - with its purely random design that seems to change depending on the light and time of day - that really tortures her mind:

 

"You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well under way in following, it turns a back somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you." 

 

In the end, she decides the female figure she sees behind the pattern is a prisoner; trapped and desperate to escape. And she determines to learn her secret, even if she still can't stomach the yellowness of the wallpaper which makes her think "of all the yellow things I ever saw; not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things". 

 

Oh, and did I mention the paper's unique smell: 

 

"I noticed it the moment we came into the room, but with so much air and sun it was not bad. Now we have had a week of fog and rain, and whether the windows are open or not, the smell is here. It creeps all over the house. I find it hovering in the dining-room, skulking in the parlor, hiding in the hall, lying in wait for me on the stairs. It gets into my hair." 

 

"Such a peculiar odor, too! I have spent hours in trying to analyze it, to find what it smelled like. It is not bad - at first, and very gentle, but quite the subtlest, most enduring odor I ever met. In this damp weather it is awful. I wake up in the night and find it hanging over me. It used to disturb me at first. I thought seriously of burning the house - to reach the smell. But now I am used to it. The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper! A yellow smell." 

 

 

IV.

 

And so, we approach the end of Gilman's remarkable tale ... and the narrator's further descent into madness. 

 

She decides, for example, that the pattern of the wallpaper really is moving; that the trapped woman is making it move as she crawls around and shakes the bars of her prison, desperate to break out. Unfortunately, "nobody could climb through that pattern - it strangles so".   

 

But, having said that: 

 

"I think that woman gets out in the daytime! [...] I’ve seen her! I can see her out of every one of my windows! It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight. [...] I see her [...] creeping along, and when a carriage comes she hides under the blackberry vines. I don't blame her a bit. It must be very humiliating to be caught creeping by daylight!" 

 

Finally, there's only one thing for it - she has to strip the paper off the walls: 

 

"As soon as it was moonlight, and that poor thing began to crawl and shake the pattern, I got up and ran to help her. I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper." 

 

The next day, when alone in the house, she attempts to finish the job, keeping a rope close by just in case the woman gets out and requires restraining. But peeling off the paper isn't easy and she grows increasingly angry and frustrated. She also now totally identifies with the woman and believes that she too has emerged out of the wallpaper:   

 

"I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night, and that is hard! It is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please! I don’t want to go outside. [...] For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow. But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way."

 

At this point, her husband John comes home and discovers her creeping around the room:

 

"'What is the matter?' he cried. 'For God's sake, what are you doing!' I kept on creeping just the same, but I looked at him over my shoulder. 'I’ve got out at last,' said I [...] And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!'" 

 

In horror and despair, her husband collapses: 

 

"Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!" 

 

Is that final line a triumphant assertion of female agency and independence - or the confession of a lunatic? 

 

Maybe both: I don't know. 

 

But I do know Gilman's work fully deserves the multiple readings from many different perspectives that it has had over the last 130 years. H. P. Lovecraft was not wrong to recognise it as a classic tale which powerfully (and cleverly) delineates the madness which can overtake any one of us (whatever the colour of our wallpaper) [3].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I am reading (and quoting) from Gilman's tale as published in eBook form by Project Gutenberg in 1999. Click here to read free online.  

 

[2] See the post 'How Beautiful Yellow Is' (1 May 2024): click here. 

 

[3] See H. P. Lovecraft, 'Supernatural Horror in Literature', a 28,000 word essay published in The Recluse (1927): click here to read on the H. P. Lovecraft Archive. 

 

Thanks to Síomón Solomon for suggesting this post.

 

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.

It's Creepy and It's Kooky, Mysterious and Spooky: Mark Fisher's The Weird and the Eerie (Part 1)

Front cover image from Mark Fisher's 

The Weird and the Eerie (Repeater Books, 2016)

 

 

I. 

 

Let me confess from the outset that one of the main problems I have with Mark Fisher's work is that I'm unfamiliar with many of the books, films, and records that he chooses as points of reference, so often feel unable to comment. Thus, I intend sticking here to his more general remarks on the weird and the eerie, about which I feel better able to discuss.

 

According to Mark Fisher, the weird and the eerie are closely related (but distinct) modes of strangeness, each with their own properties. The former draws our attention to that which does not belong and instills a sense of wrongness; the latter troubles the notion of agency (human and non-human) and makes us question existence and non-existence. 

 

Neither terrifies or deeply distresses, so much as make us feel vaguely apprehensive or uneasy.    

 

And neither has much to do with with Freud's concept of the unheimlich and should not be equated to the latter. The attempt to do so, says Fisher, is "symptomatic of a secular retreat from the outside" [a]; i.e., returning to the safety of a long familiar (if hugely influential) idea that ultimately serves to domesticate and contain the outside "in terms of a modernist family drama" [10]. 

 

 

II.

 

Perhaps not surprisingly, Fisher begins his study of the weird by turning to H. P. Lovecraft - a writer whom Graham Harman predicts will one day displace Hölderlin as the philosopher's favourite [b] and someone who intuitively grasped that nothing is weirder than reality (i.e., the natural-material cosmos).

 

As Fisher rightly says, when you really stop to think about it, a black hole is weirder than a vampire or werewolf. 

 

Lovecraft is the daddy of weird fiction; the man who long before George Michael encouraged characters and readers alike to venture outside - even if doing so "often ends in breakdown and psychosis" [16] for the former and fascination "mixed with a certain trepidation" [17] for the latter.

 

There is nothing surprising or suspensful or even truly terrible in Lovecraft's weird tales. And yet they compel our attention, even as they repel us at the same time with their inhuman quality; i.e., their insistence that "human concerns, perspectives and concepts have only a local reference" [18].    

Fisher is spot-on to insist that Lovecraft is neither a horror writer nor a fantasy author; that his weird realism is something very different from either of these genres and that his tales "depend for their power on the difference between the terrestrial-empirical and the outside" [20][c] and on their sheer originality.

 

 

III.

 

Like Lovecraft, H. G. Wells also understood something of the weird, even if his work is, in many respects, very different from the former's. 

 

One thing both writers shared is a concern with thresholds and the fatal possibility of "contact between incommensurable worlds" [28], an idea best illustrated in an episode of Seinfeld when George's independence (and sanity) are threatened by the transcendental shock of worlds colliding [d].   

 

It's probably always best (if not always possible) to keep worlds apart, although the weird, as a phenomenon, is that which unfolds in the space between them. 

 

 

IV.  

 

Moving on, Fisher introduces a notion of the grotesque, which, like the weird, "evokes something which is out of place" [32] - although unlike the latter it often evokes laughter (the only humour in Lovecraft, says Fisher, is accidental).

 

And the "confluence of the weird and the grotesque is no better exemplified than in the work of the post-punk group The Fall" [33], particularly in the period 1980-82. 

Unfortunately, my knowledge of Mark E. Smith's combo is limited. In fact, I can only name one of their songs; the 1980 single 'How I Wrote Elastic Man' (and that's only because I often heard it on John Peel, not because I went out and bought it). 

 

So I'll just have to take Fisher's word for it when he insists The Fall "are remarkabe for the way in which they draw out a cultural politics of the weird and the grotesque" [33] and produced "what could be called a popular modernist weird [...] with all the difficulties and compulsions of post-punk sound" [33] [e].

 

In the same period Fisher was getting worked up over The Fall, I was listening to Adam and the Ants and Bow Wow Wow and had more interest in post-punk piracy than the weird and grotesque; indeed, I seem to remember finding groups like The Fall too depressing (perhaps even too Northern) for my tastes; even their laughter issues "from a psychotic outside" [35] and that didn't sound very funny to me at the time.           

 

However, if what Fisher says is true, I would probably find The Fall more amusing now (although I suspect I would still find them a band more interesting to read about, than fun to listen to).   

 

 

V.

 

Is there not an intrinsically weird dimension to the time travel story? 

Mark Fisher thinks so:

 

"By its very nature, the time travel story [...] combines entities and objects that do not belong together. Here the threshold between worlds is the apparatus that allows travel between different time periods [...] and the weird effect typically manifests as a sense of achronism." [40]

 

Again, that's one of those true-but-kind-of-obvious statements that Fisher seems to specialise in. Here's another: time-paradoxes also trigger a feeling weirdness. Indeed - who would argue with that?  

 

 

VI.

 

"There is another type of weird effect that is generated by strange loops [...] not just tangles in cause and effect [...] but confusions of ontological level." [45]

 

These confusions particularly play out at the level of simulacra and simulation, putting the nature of being and reality into question - just ask Thomas (Neo) Anderson. Or Baudrillard. Is there anything weirder than living in a world one knows to be a cleverly constructed simulation but which still feels real?      

 

 

VII.

 

If it wasn't in the least surprising that Fisher should open his study of the weird with Lovecraft, it's equally unsurprising that he should close it with the director of Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, David Lynch.

 

For in many ways Fisher seems weirdly trapped in the 1980s and '90s; a man still gripped by the same philosophical ideas (and postmodern obsessions) that shaped his thinking when writing his Ph.D. on cybernetic fiction-theory [f]. Indeed, Fisher readily admits that his fascination with the weird and eerie goes back as far as he can remember. 

     

Now, whilst some might suggest he move on and find new interests, I rather admire the manner in which he has stayed true to the authors, singers, and filmmakers, he loves best. But David Lynch isn't a particular favourite of mine, I'm afraid; there are certainly films by the other two Davids - Fisher and Cronenberg - I like more than Mulholland Drive (2001), though they're perhaps not as weird in the sense that Fisher uses the term.   

 

As for Inland Empire (2006), not only have I not seen it, I've not even heard of it - how weird is that?

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, (Repeater Books, 2016), p. 10. Future page references to this work will be given directly in the main text. 

 

[b] See Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (Zero Books, 2012).

 

[c] Just to be clear: "The outside is not 'empirically' exterior; it is transcendentally exterior; i.e. it is not just a matter of something being distant in space and time, but of something which is beyond our ordinary experience and conception of space and time itself." - Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, p. 22. 

 

[d] Seinfeld, 'The Pool Guy' [S7/E8], dir. Andy Ackerman, written by David Mandel (1995). Click here to observe the devastating effect it has upon George's mental health when he experiences the colliding of worlds: George is getting upset! Nevertheless, it's interesting to note that this tale unfolds within a weirdly comic universe, rather than a weirdly tragic or melancholic one.

 

[e] Perhaps the only author who writes with such intense conviction about the pop music they love is poet and playwright Síomón Solomon; see his 2020 text Hölderlin's Poltergeists in which he celebrates that other critically-acclaimed post-punk band from Manchester, Joy Division.     

 

[f] Fisher's Ph.D. thesis was entitled: Flatline constructs: Gothic materialism and cybernetic theory-fiction. It was completed in the Philosophy Dept. at the University of Warwick and submitted in July 1999. A PDF of this work is available via the University of Warwick publications service website: click here. The first line opens with the words "Isn't it strange [...]". 

      Fisher was a founding member of the interdisciplinary collective inspired by the work of Nick Land and Sadie Plant known as the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. Although I was also in the Philosophy Dept. at Warwick at this time and initially had Land as my Graduate Progress Committee member overseeing my own doctoral research project, I never crossed paths with Fisher, which, looking back, I now rather regret.  

 

 

Part two of this post - on the eerie - can be read by clicking here. 

 

 

H. P. Lovecraft and the Sordid Topic of Coin

Isabella Rossellini as Lisle von Rhoman in the 1992 dark 

comic fantasy Death Becomes Her, dir. Robert Zemeckis

Sometimes, as Michel Houellebecq points out, it is necessary to fail in life in order that one eventually succeed in one's work as an artist or philosopher. Although, even then, failure in a worldly sense (i.e. absence of any financial reward and complete lack of recognition) doesn't necessarily guarantee results.

For sometimes, opting to remain aloof and outside of the commercial realm - displaying no interest in the sordid topic of coin, no desire to make a name for oneself and practicing as it were a policy of complete non-engagement vis-a-vis mundane realities - carries with it the risk of falling into poverty, apathy, and suicidal despair.  

The writer H. P. Lovecraft provides a good example of someone who was prepared to risk these things and hold out against them. As Houellebecq tells us in his excellent study, Against the World, Against Life, Lovecraft never quite experienced utter destitution, but he was extremely constrained financially and had to always watch every penny. He also kept a small bottle of cyanide at hand - just in case. 

For Lovecraft, it was simply not dignified for a gentleman to worry about money matters "or to express too lively an anxiety where his own interests were concerned". In any case, his writings earned him very little - not that he considered literature a particularly noble pursuit and cared nothing for building a career or readership. He wrote "for the sake of his own pleasure and that of a few friends, without worrying about the public's taste, fashionable themes, of anything else of the kind". 

Obviously, such an individual is afforded no place within the modern world; Lovecraft knew this, but always refused to sell himself. Indeed, he refused even to type his texts and would send editors soiled and crumpled manuscripts; though one might wonder whether such an act doesn't betray at last self-contempt as much as defiant anti-commercialism.  

 

Nevertheless, Lovecraft provides a role model to all of us who hate to ask for payment and prefer simply to give ideas away in the same manner as the sun shines freely to no end and without thought of preserving energy, or securing the morrow. 

And this - along with his aggressive anti-theism and virulent anti-humanism - is another reason to love him.   

Note: lines quoted are from Michel Houellebecq, H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, trans. Dorna Khazeni, (Gollancz / Orion Publishing Group, 2008), p. 92.       

Why I Love H. P. Lovecraft

H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) 

 Photo c.1934 from the Archives of 

Brown University / Associated Press

There are several good reasons to love master of weird fiction H. P. Lovecraft, many of which are presented by Michel Houellebecq in his highly recommended study entitled Against the World, Against Life (2006). 

Primarily, however, it's because of passages such as the following, written in a letter to a friend, in which Lovecraft amusingly sets out his case against religion:

"So far I have seen nothing which could possibly give me the notion that cosmic force is the manifestation of a mind and will like my own infinitely magnified; a potent and purposeful consciousness which deals individually and directly with the miserable denizens of a wretched little flyspeck ... and which singles this putrid excrescence out as the one spot where to send an onlie-begotten Son, whose mission is to redeem those accursed fly-speck inhabiting lice which we call human beings ... It is all so very childish. I cannot help taking exception to a philosophy that would force this rubbish down my throat. 'What have I against religion?' That is what I have against it!"

- H. P. Lovecraft, A Letter on Religion, written to Maurice W. Moe (1918).