If These Walls Could Talk - Part II

Part I looked at the character of architecture in Lovecraft’s fiction and briefly explored the author’s consistent and irrational abhorrence of dwelling-places, notable beyond what should be expected of a horror writer. This installment will aim to deepen the discussion by relying on a contrasting work from a very different author and psychological interpreter of houses.

I was assigned a single chapter of Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, published in 1958, in a philosophy class, and was so impressed by it that I bought the book and read the rest of it on my own. Bachelard’s focus on houses and the like takes place in the context of his phenomenological investigations, inquiries which examine the psychological qualities of lived space to draw out universal truths about human consciousness (human unconsciousness, more accurately) and the primal, primitive ways in which we experience spaces. The content discussed in this post is drawn from the first chapter of The Poetics of Space.

Much of Bachelard’s philosophy with regard to how we inhabit can be encapsulated in the saying, “We bring our lares with us,” meaning that our experiencing of our homes is greatly influenced by the architecture of our minds. How we experience a house is dictated only in part by the house itself; the rest is decided by what we bring into it.

This framework can be put to good use in analyzing Lovecraft’s fictional architecture, and its sources in his mind. He was a reclusive, sickly and nervous, and later depressed, child, and his father became psychotic and died early in Lovecraft’s life from paresis, a neuropsychiatric disorder. His mother grew increasingly mentally unstable as the family’s financial problems intensified. When she died later in his life, Lovecraft apparently greatly mourned her loss, even though, as Psycho author and Lovecraft penpal Robert Bloch writes, the woman “inculcated” in the young Lovecraft “a belief in his ‘ugliness.’”

These circumstances are instructive when trying to interpret the undeniable emotional baggage (or, his lares) Lovecraft brings to all of his fictional shelters. There are the unknown terrors lurking in deep, shadowy corners, the claustrophobic and space-negating confusion of up and down confounding the idea of escape and even sane orientation, and the imagined recondite, ancient doings that imbue strange places with stranger essences.

For Bachelard, memories have an engraved geographical component, and the memory and its location act upon each other synergistically in the creation and storage of images, images that serve to document a moment in its internal and external aspects: “Memories are motionless, and the more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are.”

Contrast Lovecraft’s places with Bachelard’s brighter conception of early life in the home: “Life begins well, it begins enclosed, protected, all warm in the bosom of the house.” The quintessence of the home is a mixture of strength, solitude and intimacy for Bachelard. He writes, “There does not exist a real intimacy that is repellent. All the spaces of intimacy are designated by an attraction.” Seen through this lens, are we compelled to posit that Lovecraft’s reaction to dwelling-places stem from the lack of a sense of true intimacy in his childhood home? Which would equal, what, alienation? Or is there in fact, contrary to what Bachelard claims, a “bad intimacy”? The sickening familiarity of something loathsome, as in a close connection, by necessity, between an unstable mother and an otherwise alone son?

Furthermore, true intimacy (with a space, with one’s self) requires solitude. The repulsion inspired by Lovecraft’s fictional loci is triggered by the presence of unknown lurkers. Truly empty space seems to be rare in his universe; there are always unseen dwellers, and watchers; antagonistic consciousnesses of whatever kind, whether from a nameless creature from some abyss or merely a not-understood and unknowable relative (or mother).

In Part I, I mentioned some more specific structures employed in Lovecraft’s fiction such as the windows of a distant house, and towers, and cellars. A contrasting look at Bachelard’s treatment of these things might be useful in analyzing Lovecraft’s spaces.

Whereas Lovecraft passionately details his disgust at the visages of ancient, isolated, disheveled little houses in “The Picture in the House,” Bachelard has a different take on these places. Lovecraft personifies his creepy rural houses, relating the windows to eyes, as does Bachelard: “Through its light alone, the house becomes human. It sees like a man. It is an eye open to night.” But for Bachelard, the sight of such places, “hermit’s huts,” hints not at unknown nefarious lurkers, but instead bestows a deeply primal and gloriously “hypnotizing” solitude on the observer. In describing this effect, he references a letter by poet Rainer Maria Rilke:

In the Fragments from an intimate diary that precede a French collection of Rilke’s letters, we find the following scene: one very dark night, Rilke and two friends perceive “the lighted casement of a distant hut, the hut that stands quite alone on the horizon before one comes to fields and marshlands.” This image of solitude symbolized by a single light moves the poet’s heart in so personal a way that it isolates him from his companions. Speaking of this group of three friends, Rilke adds: “Despite the fact that we were very close to one another, we remained three isolated individuals, seeing night for the first time.”

Interestingly, Lovecraft’s peculiar houses “stare shockingly, as if blinking through a lethal stupor which wards off madness by dulling the memory of unutterable things.” They stare blankly, almost blindly, and through a “lethal stupor,” as if traumatized. Contrarily, Bachelard’s distant houses stand guard in the night, friendly and vigilant:

By means of the light in that far-off house, the house sees, keeps vigil, vigilantly waits. When I let myself drift into the intoxication of inverting daydreams and reality, that faraway house with its light becomes for me, before me, a house that is looking out—its turn now!—through the keyhole. Yes, there is someone in that house who is keeping watch, a man is working there while I dream away.

I remember this moving description of the searing poignancy of a lit window acres away across unfamiliar terrain at dusk, seen from a car driving through, affecting me so strongly that I noted it to a few friends at the time; I was met with the blank looks and bland responses of non-understanding.

Relevant to Lovecraft’s towers and their unnatural tendency to be descended into, and cellars that are ascended into, Bachelard reinforces the peculiarity of such conceptions:

Then there are the stairways… We always go down the one that leads to the cellar, and it is this going down that we remember…Lastly, we always go up the attic stairs, which are steeper and more primitive. For they bear the mark of ascension to a more tranquil solitude. When I return to dream in the attics of yester-year, I never go down again.

As for towers more specifically, recall that one of Lovecraft’s towers I wrote about in Part I was surprisingly dark, and unlived in except by something lurking in an unknown space above the ceiling. Bachelard, again, helps illuminate by distinction Lovecraft’s idiosyncratic thought-processes. Bachelard is summarizing and interpreting a character’s exploration of a house author Henri Bosco created, or dreamt, in one of Lovecraft’s favorite novels by that writer, L’Antiquaire:

“A very narrow, steep stairway, which spiraled as it went higher, had been carved in the rock. I started up it” (p. 155). By means of this gimlet, the dreamer succeeds in getting out of the depths of the earth and begins his adventures in the heights. In fact, at the very end of countless tortuous, narrow passages, the reader emerges into a tower. This is the ideal tower that haunts all dreams of old houses: it is “perfectly round” and there is “brief light” from “a narrow window.” It also has a vaulted ceiling, which is a great principle of the dream of intimacy. For it constantly reflects intimacy at its center. No one will be surprised to learn that the tower room is the abode of a gentle young girl and that she is haunted by memories of an ardent ancestress. The round, vaulted room stands high and alone, keeping watch over the past in the same way that it dominates space.

Note that Lovecraft’s tower lacks this vaulted ceiling.

For whatever reasons, the princess in Lovecraft’s tower became something threatening and grotesque.

Things Fall Apart

This post could be called The Icebox Blues, too. But anyway. I don’t really consider myself a pessimist generally, but something I try to keep in mind is that things fall apart. In science’s quest to find an equation that describes the entire universe, wouldn’t Things Fall Apart constitute a significant portion of that equation?

That’s how things seem to go, to me anyway. And not just in the sense that what goes up must come down, etc. Some things seem to fall apart a lot more reliably than others. At least for me.

For most of my life, I didn’t have the confidence or comfort in my own skin to make a convincing case to myself, let alone the fairer sex, of my merits, my worth. Now that I do feel reasonably at home in my skin and in my world, I find myself with access to more doors but, still, none of those I choose to take leads anywhere worth being. Moreover, none of them even takes me past a shallow, fairly empty vestibule. Do I consistently choose the wrong door, and if so, why? Or do I choose the right door but lack the keys required for passage to anything real?

Why do I always seem to end up involved (yet only very superficially, remember) with clones of Lil’ Miss Frostybox? It’s starting to get monotonous. Boy meets girl, boy wows girl, things approach significance, girl erects frost wall around herself. I mean, things fall apart before they’re even really put together. These preemptive collapses can get disparaging.

Things fall apart, I remind myself, and in this way I manage to stay pretty unsurprised when the expected occurs. A side-benefit is the relative absence of drama. Which is good, I think. I sneer at those people who have drama addictions. You know, the people who “break up” with their significant other every other week and still somehow manage to be surprised each time. Or maybe just act surprised. I guess I can at least be thankful that I’m not so desperate to feel alive and real that I need constant, regular injections of melodrama. What a charade.

So anyway, I try to be the opposite of those people. And it pretty much works. At the same time, I think I’m not so risk-averse as to need my own ice walls and to be unwilling to stick my neck out there a bit. Surprisingly, though, I’m rarely the one who beats the hasty retreat first. No, I feel downright emo compared to most of these ladies with whom I end up lightly entangled and from whom I subsequently become quickly banished.

Why? I’m not sure. The best answer I can contrive is that they’re unhappy with themselves, for whatever reason, and all the attendant problems with intimacy come into play. Now believe me, I’m not oblivious to the “she’s just not that into you” factor, and realize that this is the first possibility that jumps into my calculus. But that’s just not it.

So how come the chicas I find myself pursuing seem to me to be the rarest jewels, mentally, personally, even physically, and yet they also harbor such cold hearts? Did they achieve their current luster only by way of significant past trauma? Trauma that scrubbed them shiny, that forged them as they are today but at the same time indelibly marred them?

Or is this ghost in them something visible to most but invisible to me because I suffer from a similar condition? I must admit I aspire to stoicism. The tree that weathers decades of fierce winds grows the strongest roots, right? Get uprooted and start over, but endure the weather and gain strength as you survive. That’s what I shoot for. Does this philosophy engender coldness?

A couple months ago I visited the National Arboretum; they were featuring a bonsai exhibit. I’m no veggie-lover, but there were some impressive little trees in that windowless, fluorescent-lit exhibit room. Trees over a hundred years old with tough, gnarled roots, but that hadn’t grown taller than a foot. Some were clutching triumphantly to a small rocky precipice, victorious and aloof. Or is that battered and alone? Regardless, they were certainly stunted: alive for a century and still barely a shrub. Are they monuments to strength or merely abandoned, twisted, shrunken oddities……

I think it could reasonably be concluded that I might have the ghost too. What happens when two black holes drift into each other’s influence? But I think I have the ghost subdued. I thought I had it subdued.

Naiads

Why do I crush so hard on the lifeguards at my pool? Crush is perhaps a charitably pure term to use here. I was just at the pool, getting my L&L on (lounge & lust), when Poseidon sensed the nature of my thoughts and had Aeolus chase me off with a plague of rain clouds.

Is it because these blue-clad naiads have an authority over the pool area and thus are imbued with a type of natural belonging, a fish-in-water comfort that gives them a connection with and makes them an embodiment of the water and sun and breeze that enchant the lounger’s senses? Is it the authority itself; do subtle submissive undercurrents flow among my somewhat misogynist leanings? (Nah, I don’t think that’s it.) Do I just love a woman in uniform? And these charming denizens of the deep delight in rolling down their bikini bottoms to leave only a thin rope connecting the front and back, as they flop bewitchingly to and fro, ascending and descending their pedestal. I think their awareness that there’s probably always at least one pair of eyes on them adds to their allure, even if only in my mind. You coy, flirty girl.

Perhaps it’s just that a job requiring so much bare skin naturally attracts those who are the most comfortable with that level of exposure, a comfort derived from well-cultivated physical self-esteem stemming from years of positive feedback. Because, am I wrong that the hottie concentration among lifeguards is much higher than in the general population? I think not!

This is indeed a depraved post.

What's that you say? Why yes, yes I could use a girlfriend. How... How could you have known that?

Downer

The “downer cattle” travesty (the practice of abusing sick cows to force them to stand and thus be deemed healthy enough for human consumption by inspectors) has jumped species. These ill cattle, after a rotten life spent penned up among hundreds of others, fed crap to fatten them up until they can barely stand, and pumped full of steroids and antibiotics and god knows what else, are left obese, catatonic and half-dead by the time they’re due for slaughter; next stop: your digestive tract:

…the Humane Society of the United States released an undercover video that showed plant workers using forklifts to roll cows unable to walk and poking them with electric prods, allegedly to move them to the slaughter box.

It’s unclear which species first exhibited the traits characterizing downer cattle: cows or humans (homo americanus, especially).

Humans are also fed crap, whether via fast food slop-troughs or genetically modified “food” that can lack labeling and is subjected to less rigorous testing, if it’s tested at all. GM food prevalence is on the rise.

Humans are drinking low concentrations of poison every day. Chlorine and fluoride, common additives to municipal drinking water, have been linked to health effects ranging from brain defects to bone cancer.

Humans are regularly injected with viruses and chemicals of dubious safety. Vaccines and the use of mercury-containing thimerosol as a preservative for vaccines have been convincingly linked to autism and other conditions.

Humans are deluged daily by a sea of electro-magnetic waves from cell phones and cell phone towers, the possible side-effects of which studies are just beginning to explore.

What inspired me to write this was my noticing of the ever-intensifying marketing of energy drinks and supplements, after even ubiquitous Starbucks began to prove insufficient to keep the herd ambulatory enough. Next it was Red Bull, then Rockstar and a glut of similar drinks. Now we have 5-Hour Energy, for when you need your energy in a more concentrated form than an 8 ounce can. Militaries are experimenting with ways to keep soldiers awake for days at a time; I pray to Dog that they don’t find something that can later be sold to the public.

Longer hours, greater productivity and less pay has been the trend of the last few decades, and this trend continues apace. The average homo americanus wakes up in the dark and lies down in the dark. Endless hours wedged in a crate, pardon me, a cubicle, staring at a screen. Hooked into the company system to pour out code and data like cattle pump out milk. As this routine becomes more rigorous and less sustainable, outside substances become more necessary just to keep the animal functioning. And functioning why? To produce for those higher up the food chain and hopefully at the same time scratch together enough to live. Sick and tired of being sick and tired, humans seek more pharmaceuticals in an attempt to reverse the process. They have to: humans are in great supply and cubicles are becoming ever fewer.

If These Walls Could Talk, They'd Sound Like Me - Part I

I’m reading a collection of short horror stories by Lovecraft. I find one of Lovecraft’s more amusing peculiarities to be his unmatched ability to fear and abhor simple architectural structures; structures that wouldn’t warrant so much as a second glance from an average person. (Semi-spoilers sprinkled throughout.)

H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) is best known as one of the twentieth century’s most influential horror writers. Some go so far as to proclaim him Poe’s rightful heir. I’m not nearly qualified to comment, let alone rank any writer in such sweeping terms.

At any rate, ancient wells, shacks, houses, mansions, palaces, cathedrals regularly serve as the environs for high weirdness in his stories. Through these structures Lovecraft summons his nameless horrors from distant, howling abysses, whether residing in outer space or innermost earth; both realms seem to hold similar potential for terror for the writer. What does he picture dwelling in these damnable places? He doesn’t know, and that’s a big part of what scares him, as he admits: “…the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” Unknown spaces, dimensions, misdeeds, intelligences, gods, epochs.

These unknown monstrosities, and some more easily known and terrestrial but still somewhat ghastly, have a way of infecting the architecture in Lovecraft’s crooked universe. Ancient architecture, naturally. And it’s the way he identifies these vile entities in the tilt of a roof or the darkness of a hallway that strikes me as so unexpectedly, ridiculously, severe. That these are horror stories does not, in my opinion, begin to justify the extraordinary repulsion for these structures the reader senses in these pages.

For example, here’s how a protagonist describes the diminutive, isolated old houses he encounters in an out of the way part of New England (where Lovecraft stayed put for almost all of his life) in “The Picture in the House”:

But the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.

Decrepit houses representing the “perfection of the hideous”? I’ve seen some ugly, some sad, some scary houses, but certainly none that wither my soul the way they do to Lovecraft’s characters, and not just the character in this one story, but just about all (if not all) of those I’ve come across share the same almost comical aversion to dwelling-places. Again, yes, these are horror stories, but the care taken to express the revolting nature of these places is impossible to ignore. Unreasonable (unstable?) contempt seeps through the text.

Lovecraft has his tourist in this same story pay special attention to the exterior windows of the funny rural homes:

[These houses] are almost hidden now in lawless luxuriances of green and guardian shrouds of shadow; but the small-paned windows still stare shockingly, as if blinking through a lethal stupor which wards off madness by dulling the memory of unutterable things.

(The prominence of blindness and idiocy in Lovecraft’s evil forces and gods proposes a new (to me) picture of the essence of the (anti-)divine, supernatural forces that may or may not populate the cosmos. What kind of universe is this, that is lorded over by drooling, senseless abominations? Take for example Lovecraft’s god-creation Nyarlathotep, “the mad faceless god,” who “howls blindly in the darkness to the piping of two amorphous idiot flute-players” [“The Rats in the Walls”]. I’ll resist the temptation to link discordant music with distorted architecture, and idiot gods with psychopathic heads of state, for now.)

For some variety, anyone still reading this can consider another, specific architectural construct; and one that couldn’t be further from these lowly, squatting country houses: the tower. Towers, turrets and spires are of course not the most common architectural features found in daily life, but I’d argue they possess a certain psychological potency due to their prevalence in fairy tales, fantasies, myths, and perhaps some deeper innate psychological grounds (not to be explored further here!).

Towers are high, they’re bold, they’re… romantic? So does Lovecraft take a more generous view of them for these or other reasons? Resoundingly, no. “The Haunter in the Dark” recounts a poet’s obsession with a foreboding old church avoided by all who live near it. As in other stories, the cursed building central to this story presents a grotesque sight for the protagonist, and part (though only part) of its vileness is due to an unknown being from elsewhere for which the church provides a portal into our world. If an average person were ever to find himself exploring a disused demonic church, I assume that the last place he’d want to be is in the basement or crypt or catacomb or whatever the lowest part of the building might be. Where does Lovecraft’s infernal haunter lurk in this instance?

In the steeple: in the highest part of the structure, far away from the caves, the graves, and the pit of hell itself, relatively speaking. The protagonist finds the ascent to the tower to be “a choking experience, for dust lay thick, while the spiders had done their worst in this constricted place.” Arriving in the dark tower chamber, the poet surveys some ominous objects, and eventually is driven to takes flight to escape the disconcerting noises emanating from the unexplored attic room over his head, reachable only by a ladder ending at a trap door. Before he leaves, an object in the room provokes in him a vision of faraway regions, which in part feature “towers and walls in knighted depths under the sea,” an interesting juxtaposition of height and depth, to be sure.

One last tower example from another story, “The Outsider.” In brief, the bulk of this story follows our obscure protagonist, alone in an unknown, ever-shadowed world, until he decides he needs to see the sky at last, which means venturing above the thick canopy of trees that completely block out the sun and stars. The only way up, and out, is to climb the abandoned and perilously dilapidated tower extending from atop the sole, mausoleum-like palace in which the character has lived alone for as long as he can remember.

As he ascends, instead of being greeted by progressively intensifying light, the protagonist is plunged into stark blackness, blindly groping his way to what he conceives to be unfathomable heights:

Ghastly and terrible was that dead, stairless cylinder of rock; black, ruined, and deserted, and sinister with startled bats whose wings made no noise.

There is no feeling of an impending triumphal escape derived from the scaling of the tower, which is, like the last story’s steeple, dark inside, despite its prodigious putative height. At the end of his ascent, the climber is confronted not with panoramic views from vast heights; rather, the revelations are mostly within him, and terrible. What he learns shifts his entire world around the tower as if it were an axis:

Nothing I had before undergone could compare in terror with what I now saw; with the bizarre marvels that sight implied. The sight itself was as simple as it was stupefying, for it was merely this: instead of a dizzying prospect of treetops seen from a lofty eminence, there stretched around me on the level through the grating nothing less than the solid ground…

This tower is a passage to damning revelations, not the freedom and perspective one might expect. The story indicates elsewhere that the protagonist had made this same journey sometime in the foggy past in his half-remembered early life, but in reverse. Like the previous steeple, this one of Lovecraft’s towers is not only a place into which things might ascend, but also a space into which things might descend. Consider the odd backwardness of the idea of descending into a tower.

In yet another story, “The Rats in the Walls,” the central mansion’s old stone cellar is found to contain a hidden trap door in the floor. As the reader is ushered down into the dark, crude stone set of stairs leading up to the basement from some mysterious sub-region, we are shown from the carving and scraping by which the tunnel was created that the tunnel was forged from below. To descend into a tower, to ascend into a cellar; conceptions of place and space are twisted violently.

There’s a claustrophobic quality to Lovecraft’s challenging of assumed notions of architectural space (if up is down and vice versa, how can we orient ourselves, and more importantly, how can we escape?). Touching on the idea of escape for a moment, perhaps a significant contributor to the archetypal fear of both attics and cellars is this impossibility of escape; there’s no other way out. Lovecraft takes this a step further by offering the possibility of a way out, but is this way out actually a way in, and do you really want to find out?

* * * *

Part II will offer a drastically different and possibly more conventional interpretation of architecture’s psychological aspects by glancing at a relevant work from another, very different author… and will hopefully be shorter.