This is the way the world ends

I've recently started reading Lovecraft and suddenly wonder where he's been all my life. Lovecraft wrote what he called "Cosmic horror," a sort of mash-up of horror, sci-fi, and mythology that reads like non-fiction. He invents characters at once compelling and beyond imagining; stories that chill your bones that give you the feeling you're reading a history text.

I don't know enough about him to write a whole ton or anything, but I plan to. Today, though, I was just noticing the similarities between Lovecraft's dystopia and the work of my favorite poets, who all wrote around the same time. 

They all create this nearly apocalyptic world beyond what was once our worst imagining. Creatures more evil than we could once conceive of, never-ending bleak landscapes, and pervasive dark images like hallucinations you can't shake off.

I was thinking how maybe it's got a lot to do with The Great War. The three men wrote around the time of the great war, a time that seems almost quaint to us now. Compared to images of Hiroshima, death camps, Rwanda, even 9-11, World War One fades into the woodwork.

But imagine seeing a zeppelin for the first time. It must have been like watching demons invade from above. Imagine the pictures of mustard gas victims in the paper. Heck, just think about how horrific it would be to see a bunch of folks in those old-style gas masks. The trenches... endless weeks and years in filth and cold, people are spending the last months of their lives in a miserable, disease-ridden hole in the ground. Influenza. Poverty. All documented in vivid photos on the front page. It shows in the writing of the time.

Here. Read 'em out loud to really get the full effect.

Lovecraft:

from The Festival

The nethermost caverns are not for the fathoming of eyes that see; for their marvels are strange and terrific. Cursed the ground where dead thoughts live new and oddly bodied, and evil the mind that is held by no head. Wisely did Ibn Schacabao say, that happy is the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and happy the town at night whose wizards are all ashes. For it is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it. Great holes are digged where earth's pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.

Yeats:

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer; 

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, 

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned; 

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity. 

Surely some revelation is at hand; 

Surely the Second Coming is at hand. 

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man, 

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, 

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. 

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, 

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Eliot:

Excerpts from The Wasteland

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rats’ feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,

Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed

With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom

Remember us—if at all—not as lost

Violent souls, but only

As the hollow men

The stuffed men.

...

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams

In death’s dream kingdom

These do not appear:

There, the eyes are

Sunlight on a broken column

There, is a tree swinging

And voices are

In the wind’s singing

More distant and more solemn

Than a fading star.

...

The eyes are not here

There are no eyes here

In this valley of dying stars

In this hollow valley

This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

Sightless, unless

The eyes reappear

As the perpetual star

Multifoliate rose

Of death’s twilight kingdom

The hope only

Of empty men.

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

It's like all writing was horror there for a time.