Lovecraft

LOVECRAFT

1.
To write the alien, the language of otherness, to link the morphemes of the imaginable unknown into the barely sayable. Did Lovecraft hear his eldritch incantations, or did he compose them by typography alone, what looks weird as a token of weird sound? The graphemes of weirdness, consonant combinations not found in English, in the safe Western Languages, they look scary, Etruscan, from the crepuscular phase of language, language before it was human. He used the eye sense to convey pictorially the weirdness and nausea of the words his characters overhear. He tries by over-writing to induce nausea in the reader -- more especially the readerly reader, the sage friend he yearned for all his life. His overwriting is meant to produce the same sort of vertiginous unease, disorientation, nausea, horror that his characters are experiencing. Death by prose. It is effective, disturbing ― not least because it is so easily ridiculed by those who don’t experience the horror ― just as fugitive accounts of meetings with extraterrestrials, angels, phantoms, ghosts are greeted with derision by those to whom unhappy voyants make their incoherent confession.

2.
To write the alien,
the language of otherness,
to link the morphemes of the imaginable unknown
into the barely sayable.
Did Lovecraft hear his eldritch incantations,
or did he compose them by typography alone,
what looks weird as a token of weird sound?
The graphemes of weirdness,
consonant combinations not found in English,
in the safe Western Languages, they look scary,
Etruscan, from the crepuscular phase of language,
language before it was human.
He used the eye sense to convey pictorially
the weirdness and nausea of the words
his characters overhear.
He tries by over-writing to induce nausea
in the reader -- more especially the readerly reader,
the sage friend he yearned for all his life.
His overwriting is meant to produce
the same sort of vertiginous unease,
disorientation, nausea, horror
that his characters are experiencing.
Death by prose.
It is effective, disturbing ―
not least because it is so easily ridiculed
by those who don’t experience the horror ―
just as fugitive accounts of meetings
with extraterrestrials, angels, phantoms,
ghosts are greeted with derision
by those to whom unhappy voyants
make their incoherent confession.


Robert Kelly

Posted over on Charlotte Mandell

1. Kelly's prose poem
2. Line breaks by Glenn Buttkus