Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - CthulhuCon (Revisited)

Episode Date: November 3, 2017

A special Halloween week fall treat! We’re revisiting a segment from my old podcast Too Much Information. I’ve always wanted to share it here, but this thing I dreamed about in 2010 (Cthulucon, a gathering dedicated to the writings and memory of the writer HP Lovecraft) actually became a real con! I never wanted my dream to compete with that…  but well dreams are strong and my friend Luc Sante’s essay on Lovecraft is still one of the best things ever written about the man. ************ Click on the image for links and info***************************  

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called CthulhuCon Revisited. It's a segment from a podcast I used to do on the station WFMU called Too Much Information. It's something I made in 2010, and it's one of my favorite stories that I've ever made. And I've always wanted to share it here, but this thing I dreamed about back in 2010, CthulhuCon, a gathering dedicated to the writings and memory of the writer H.P. Lovecraft, well, it actually became a real con. Like I saw a website advertising an actual CthulhuCon a few years after I made my piece. And I just never wanted my dream to have to compete with that. But dreams are strong. And my friend Luke Sant's essay on H.P. Lovecraft is

still one of the best things ever written about the man. And so I am going to share this episode with you now, dear listener. I'm at CthulhuCon, talking to a woman sitting behind one of the many exhibition tables on the crowded convention floor. She's hawking a small handmade book called The Lovecraft Guide to Life. She says her name is Barbara, and that she's the author. She says her book contains Lovecraft's philosophy, life, death, love, pain. It's all in here, she says, touching my hand. And even though her dreadlocks have been dyed purple and made to look like octopus tentacles, an obvious homage to the great Cthulhu himself, I still find her incredibly attractive.

But before I can tell her this, or at least purchase her book, I wake up. Now I'm on a Greyhound bus, and there are two teenage girls sitting in the seat behind me, noisily arguing about something. According to my iPhone, it's a little after 8am, which means we still have two hours to go. Two hours till we arrive in Providence.

This is going to sound strange, but this dream I just told you about was the second dream I had about Cthulhu Khan. I had the first one about five hours ago. In that dream, I found a strange envelope in my mailbox. It was purple, and the handwriting on it was old-fashioned and weird. And inside this envelope was an invitation to Cthulhu Con, a celebration of the life and work of H.P. Lovecraft. It was a simple invitation, a single piece of paper, large type, exhorting me to join with other Lovecraft enthusiasts for a day of communion and shopping. I put the invitation in my pocket and started walking around my neighborhood.

The sun went down so fast I didn't even notice it get dark. But it didn't matter because this little piece of paper in my pocket was like a miniature sun. Everything now was warm and bright. I knew that CthulhuCon was going to be the event that would forever separate the old me from the new me, the failure me from the successful me, the good-for-nothing me from the indefatigable me. So you can imagine how awful it was to wake up on the floor of my cold and lonely apartment. I was so distraughtught I even went through all my

pockets just in case. But there was nothing. It really was just a dream. I opened up my laptop and googled CthulhuCon, but again, nothing. But then I was struck by a very powerful idea. What if the invitations to CthulhuCon went out via dream? I mean, it would kind of make sense, because in Lovecraft's story, The Call of Cthulhu, all of the main characters share the same vivid dream. The more and more I thought about this, the more and more I became convinced it was true. So I clicked over to the Greyhound website and bought myself a ticket for the 6am bus

to Providence, Rhode Island, the birthplace and home of H.P. Lovecraft. Then I took a quick shower, packed up my recording equipment, and jumped in a cab to Port Authority. And now, I'm on my way journey to Cthulhu Khan, but obviously I'm going to have to do a better job. I don't think you could hear what those girls sitting behind me were saying. When I stuck my shotgun microphone over the seat, they started whispering, but this is what they were talking about. Apparently, one of their friends is rich and has tons of great clothes and shoes, and sometimes she lets these two girls

borrow things. But whenever they post pictures of themselves wearing these clothes on Facebook, the rich girl always makes comments like, Hey, that's my shirt. Or, nice boots. Where did you get them? Ha ha ha. These girls are so incensed by this so-called friend of theirs, they're actually discussing how they could pay someone to mess

her up or even make her go away. The reason I'm recording is because I want to be a more reliable narrator. I just checked Twitter to see if anyone else dreamed about CthulhuCon, and believe it or not, Cthulhu is almost a trending topic. I have to say for a second, my jaw dropped, but I didn't find any mentions of CthulhuCon, just Cthulhu. It turns out Cthulhu was on South Park last night. Apparently he bit the head off Justin Bieber and destroyed Burning Man. The only non-South Park related tweet was a reference to an article on H.P. Lovecraft by my friend Luke Sont that he wrote a few years ago for the New York Review of Books.

But it's behind a paywall, so I can't access the whole thing. But I have found a few bits and pieces on the internet, so I'll read you a few of them. Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1890, the neglected, lonely child of a father who died of tertiary syphilis after years of institutional confinement, and a mother who was by all accounts confused and immature. Growing up in his maternal grandfather's house, Lovecraft was left to his own devices. The foundations of his imaginative world were laid very early. He suffered the first of many emotional crises, a near breakdown, at age eight. His formal schooling was sporadic thereafter, but he was voraciously engaged in self-teaching, particularly in astronomy. He published several hectographed journals of astronomy in his early teens, and in his later teens and twenties wrote an astronomy column for a number of Rhode Island newspapers.

He began writing stories and poems in his late twenties, publishing them initially in amateur showcases. The main thing I remembered from reading Lovecraft when I was 14 was his prodigal expenditure of a certain kind of decolleged gothic vocabulary. Noisome. Icor. Eldritch. Miasmal. Necrophagus. Eidolon.

It turns out that this sort of usage drops off significantly after the first few stories, although he never could quite shake blasphemous, unhallowed, or cyclopean. The early stories are flagrant pulp, which is to say that they are crudely executed goulashes of literary effects from all across the 19th century. That was the era when more was more, and it gave him license to unleash sentences that cannot now be read aloud straight-faced. Shall I say that the voice was deep, hollow, gelatinous, remote, unearthly, inhuman, disembodied?

Or, in that shrieking, the inmost soul of human fear and agony clawed hopelessly and insanely at the ebony gates of oblivion? Sometimes it's impossible not to imagine an accompanying illustration by Edward Gorey. Wretched is he who looks back upon lone hours in vast and dismal chambers, with brown hangings and maddening rows of antique books, or upon awed watches in twilight groves of grotesque, gigantic and vine-encumbered trees that silently wave twisted branches far aloft. Thank you. Okay, so I just got off the bus and now we are downtown Providence. And, uh, wow. Sitting over there is a man dressed up as a woman, um, with a beehive wig and a bright red lipstick. And it looks like he, she is shoving a chocolate ding dong into his, her mouth. so obviously we will have to talk to this

person excuse me how are you okay how are you i'm all right have you heard anything about cthulhu yeah what cthulhu con no no what is it a A convention, like, conference CthulhuCon It's a what? Convention center is way, way over there Yeah? Alright, we'll try this out

Okay, well, we are downtown Providence And downtown Providence has more characters Than I think even New York City has anymore. In fact, over there is a guy with a handlebar mustache and a cape. Have you heard of something called Cthulhu time? I have no idea. That the work of H.P. Lovecraft ended up in the Library of America

would have surprised Edmund Wilson whose idea of a library was. In a 1945 review he dismissed Lovecraft's stories as hack work with a sneer at the magazines for which they were written. Weird tales and amazing stories where they ought to have been left. Lovecraft had been dead for eight years by then, and although his memory was kept alive by a cult, there is no other word, that established a publishing house for the express purpose of collecting

his work, his reputation was strictly marginal and did not seem likely to expand. Since then, though, for a writer who depended entirely on the meager sustenance of the pulps, and whose brief career brought him sometimes to the brink of actual starvation, whose work did not appear in book form during his lifetime apart for two slender volumes, each of a single story published by fans, and which did not attract the attention of serious critics before his death in 1937, Lovecraft has had quite an afterlife. His influence has been far-reaching, and in the last 30 or 40 years, continually

on the increase, if often in extra-literary ways. Board games, computer games, and role-playing games have been inspired by his work. The archive at hplovecraft.com includes an apparently endless list of pop songs, not all of them death metal, that quote or refer to his tales. And there have been around 50 film and television adaptations, although hardly any of these have been more than superficially related to their sources. There's a reason for that superficiality. Lovecraft's work is essentially unfilmable, not because his special effects are

too gaudy or too expensive to translate to the screen, but because they are purely literary. Lovecraft was bookish in an extreme, almost paradistic way. He may not have worn a fez or been able to afford a wing chair, but he assumed the archetype of the 19th century man of letters, with his circle of disciples, the preciously archaic language in which he expressed himself almost always using shoe in preference to show, for example, the humid cultivation of in-jokes that migrated from the correspondence to the stories and were perpetuated in stories by his disciples and the carefully tended aura, if quite self-aware, of forbidden knowledge. In other words, he was a nerd. He was a nerd on a grand scale, though. A heroic nerd. A

pallid, translucent, malarmea nerd. a nerd who suffered for his art. His art consisted exclusively of conveying horror, and in this his range was encyclopedic. As a setting for his horror he built a whole world, a whole universe with a time span measured in eons, which others could happily continue furnishing indefinitely. His horrors themselves are, with a few unhappy exceptions, described loosely and suggestively enough that in effect they present a blank screen on which the reader can project whatever visual imagery is most personally unsettling. This explains the seeming paradox of an exceedingly bookish writer enjoying a legacy that is to a very large degree extra-literary. As a supplier of instruments for the cultivation of horror, he was custom-tailored for the

suggestible 14-year-old boy, and the number of 14-year-old boys, some of them chronologically rather older, a few of them even female, is continually on the increase. Yikes. Now I'm in a bookstore. I'm going to buy these discounted Isaac the Pirate comic books and I'm going to ask the clerk about Cthulhu Con because if anyone should know

it will be the guy in the used bookstore you haven't heard of this like Lovecraft event going on this weekend called Cthulhu Con have you? no I'd like to look craft event going on this weekend called Cthulucon, have you? No. No? I can look. Hmm, ah, okay.

If you tell me how to. C-T-H-U... L-H-U, right? Yeah, con. Providence. Oh, crap. OK, it's not showing up there. So how do you spell it? C-T-H. C-T-H-U-H-L-E.

Events like that, people leave. Flying. That's why I said let's ask the bookstore. What if it's like a secret event? See, that's what I'm worried about now, that it's like a special one to keep people like me out. Maybe it's in the cemetery where he's buried. Nice cemetery. Thank you so much.

I can tell I sound like a dweeb, but like I said, I want this to sound more real, so I'm going to keep recording. Now we're in the supermarket. I'm talking to an elderly shopper and a young guy who's stocking the shelves. Cthulhu Khan. Yeah, you don't know anything about him. I know what Cthulhu is, though, because what's his name? He's from here, H.P. Lovecraft. He's like the horror writer. He's from here. shelves. It's like a secret convention. Oh, it is? Secret society? Like that, uh, what are they called?

Whoa, that's serious. Yeah, that's what I came down to record at, but I couldn't find it. Oh, the skull and bones? Do you know what time it started, or? That should be interesting, huh? I'll ask. At least if I can ask around. All right. Thanks, man. No spirits.

No, no, no spirits. Lovecraft was an authority on the tradition of horror fiction. He was apparently not much interested in anything else. He could summon up considerable book learning when it would serve to buttress a story, but he did not waste time on fripperies such as characterization, the business of daily life, or any emotions other than fear. The complete absence of even suggested sexuality in his work was much debated by fans in the Freud-shadowed mid-20th century. The proposition, rather missing the point that he might have been homosexual, sparked ferocious arguments. Although he was married briefly, and many years later his former wife was moved to state

peculiarly that he was, quote, an adequately excellent lover, it is clear from all available evidence that sexuality, procreation, and the human body itself were among the things that scared him the most. He was also frightened of invertebrates, marine life in general, temperatures below freezing, fat people, people of other races, race mixing, slums, percussion instruments, caves, cellars, old age, great expanses of time, monumental architecture, non-Euclidean geometry, deserts, oceans, rats, dogs, the New England countryside, New York City, fungi and molds, viscous substances, medical experiments, dreams, brittle textures, gelatinous textures, the color gray, plant life of diverse sorts, memory lapses, old books, heredity, mists, gases, whistling, whispering. The things that did not frighten

him would probably make a shorter list. In supernatural horror and, he'd written, The one test of the really weird is simply this. Whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread and of contact with unknown spheres and powers, a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of

outside shapes and entities on the known universe's utmost rim. Lovecraft is at his most effective when he evokes this inhuman realm, just as he is at his best when he suggests, rather than attempting to describe. The more spectral and unimaginable his subject, the more Lovecraft is at home. Where he fails utterly is in conveying lived experience, the material counterweight to his phantoms. His monsters, when exposed to the light, exhibit the pathos of creatures in poverty row horror movies. His depictions of human life on earth in his own day are the least credible elements in his work. It is, of course, unfair to expect a thistle to bring forth figs. Lovecraft only barely managed

to exist on the material plane himself, and it certainly was not his subject. His strengths, meanwhile, were unusual and idiosyncratic. He had a flair for names, for instance. The monikers he hangs on his otherworldly manifestations, Nyarlathotep, Yogg-Sothoth, Tsathogwa, are evocatively miscegenated constructions in which can be seen bits of ancient Egyptian, Arabic, Hebrew, Old Norse. The terror of Cthulhu is most vivid on the purely linguistic level. Yah, Shub-Niggurath, the black goat of the woods with a thousand young! The New England he fashions is so tangibly

haunted in its nomenclature, Arkham, the Miskatonic River, Devil's Hop Yard, Noose Neck Hill, that he would have been wise to stop there and not attempt further description. He savors the dark texture of 17th century Puritan names, Obed, Peleg, Deliverance, Elkanah, Duti. Names, real and imagined, accomplish nearly everything his strangled Fustian tries and fails to do, suggesting vast stretches of time, experience far outside the modern frame of reference, the subterranean course of genetic inheritance, the repression of dismal ancestral proclivities. I've decided I should just go to the cemetery where H.P. Lovecraft is buried. So now I'm walking back downtown to look for a cab. It's still pretty crowded. Lots of characters. Including the guy with

the handlebar mustache and the cape, who is now staring intently at me. And now he's walking towards me. Oh, I guess he wants to talk to me now. Have you seen Cthulhu? Have you missed Cthulhu from H.P. Lovecraft? Yes! CthulhuCon! So you haven't heard about this? Nope. There's, like, no signs anywhere.

No one's been talking about it. There's a lot of misinformation about Lovecraft and Cthulhu. Yeah. What do you think the main misinformation is? It's like some people, do you ever read the Necronomicon? No. Now some people,

they just dismiss the Necronomicon as something H.P. Lovecraft came up with. They don't realize that it's weak magic but it's the real thing.

You really think he didn't make that up? I know because a friend of mine, he actually used a spell on the book from the Necronomicon spell book on somebody. Yeah?

You know, there's a spell in there to make somebody go away. He used, he did that spell in 1998. The person who he did it on has been in the IMH down in Cranston since then. Really? So you really think, what makes you think that he didn't make this up and it was actually a real thing? I wanna, I wanna, you know notice it starts out with a quote from Zoroaster. I'm Zoroaster

and I noticed they took that quote out of context from Zoroaster. Really? So when you say that there's a lot of misinformation, what do you think the main problem for you is in the HB Lovecraft fame? I'm one too. Well, the problem is they treat the Necronomicon as if it's a joke.

Because people don't realize when it comes to the occult, that's something you don't play around with. I think that some people want to believe it might be real, but they're just not sure. Some people, they confuse fiction with fact, but what they don't forget is that a lot of fiction, the best fiction is based on real-life incidents. I've talked to some people in the sci-fi community.

Some of them, they just dismiss it as fairy tales. They've never had that experience that I had. here's what i'm most worried about is that this cthulhu con is like actually secret and we need like a vip pass to get in like it might be going on here this weekend but it's not like advertised so i was thinking maybe i would find someone in the know who would know where it is well the best place if you can't you think it must be like a secret thing if you need to get online you can try the library But they're a bit They're jerk stuff No it's not online

I think that's the thing I think it is going on here But you have to Meet somebody Who actually will tell you The key Just best place to check Your email right now

Is either at the library Or at the Hotel Renaissance Up the hill I think CthulhuCon Is going on right here Right now But we need to find someone Who might actually know

Like the truth Of where it is Right now my bus is about to leave Okay you gotta Don't miss your bus Like I said but we need to find someone who might actually know the truth of where it is. Right now my bus is about to leave. Okay, don't miss your bus. Just like I said, if you need to get online, best place, Hotel Renaissance in the Library. Thank you. In 1926, Lovecraft wrote The Call of Cthulhu, which was to be the first installment of his life's work,

a sort of unified field theory of horror. In the story, the figure of Cthulhu, an otherworldly being so terrible that it can never be seen directly, but is manifested by various attributes, first appears in a dream experienced by several people simultaneously during a minor earth tremor. There are suggestions of cyclopean architecture, indecipherable hieroglyphics, and a voice that was not a voice, intoning something that can only be transcribed as Cthulhu Thagn. Soon it develops that police in Louisiana, investigating reports of a voodoo cult in the swamps, had come upon an indescribable horde of human abnormality conducting a bizarre ritual around an eight-foot granite monolith. mixed-blooded and mentally a barren type, were nevertheless able to give an account of their creed which centered on the great old ones who'd come to earth

from the stars long before the appearance of humans. Cthulhu was a high priest who lived in suspended animation in the great city of R'lyeh, somewhere under the ocean waiting for the chance to rise again. After this, the mythos began to figure in nearly every story that Lovecraft wrote, and it developed ramifications in every direction. In the case of Charles Dexter Ward, a long, complex tale reaching back to 17th century Providence, it appears that the cult of Cthulhu is what actually underlies such heterogeneous matters as witchcraft, alchemy, and vampirism.

Playing a prominent part is the Necronomicon, an ancient book invented by Lovecraft in 1922, supposedly the work of one Abdul al-Hazred, a name Lovecraft had devised for himself at age five under the spell of the Arabian Nights, a sage whose career ended when he was devoured by an invisible demon in broad daylight in the marketplace in Damascus. The Necronomicon is richly invoked in nearly every story thereafter as the key to the commerce between the Great Old Ones and the human race, and it is soon joined by a shelf of other apocryphal titles such as the pre-human Pneukotic Manuscripts. It is possible to view Lovecraft's work as an expression of the mingled fascination and

revulsion he felt for his Puritan heritage. Like the Bible, the Necronomicon is an ancient work, steeped in mystery and filled with horrors, that describes the compact imposed upon human beings by enormously powerful otherworldly beings. A compact that may not be in humanity's best interests. The earthly votaries of Cthulhu, hoping for favors and dispensation, have over the centuries engaged in secret rites, ritual murder, and nameless abominations to appease their masters. Okay, so now I'm at the cemetery, standing in front of H.P. Lovecraft's grave.

I was kind of hoping that there'd be some more people out here, but it's just me. You can tell that people come here a lot because there's a lot of stuff on his tombstone. Some pens, some rocks, a few fake gems, and... What is that? I think that's a multi-sided die, like the kind you use in Dungeons and Dragons. You know, I could roll it here and see if it gives me a final sign about Cthulucon, but yeah, I'm kind of scared to touch it, and it's getting dark, and I'm really, really cold. So I guess this is it.

I'm really sad this didn't work out. I think I'm going to turn the microphone off now. this episode is called CthulhuCon Revisited I originally produced it back in 2010 for an episode of my old podcast, Too Much Information. That episode was called Keeping It Real. It was produced by myself with help from Bill Bowen, and it featured Luke Sant. You can find links to Luke's essay, as well as the actual Cthulhu con, not the one I dreamed about, at toe.prx.org. The Theory of Everything is a proud member of Radiotopia, home to some of the world's best podcasts. You can find them all at radiotopia. From PRX.