Geology Considered as a Run-Up to Halloween
or, why the Anthropocene has always been Lovecraft country
Geology as Preface to Hallowe’en, or, Why the Anthropocene has always been Lovecraft country
[This ludicrous title, like the essay itself, calls for a prefatory explanation. My earlier essay was about the fluid boundaries between fantasy and reality, since reality is always a constructed reality based on perceptions pre-filtered by evolutionary mechanisms, and how this makes the distinction between illusory and real borderline experiences hard to parse—in spite of which, the reality of borderline experiences should not be discounted or dismissed out of hand. This one is about the origins of outright literary or painterly fantasy in aspects of reality—about my longtime puzzlement over the sources of pleasurable shudders, such as the way in which the feeling of awe mingled with disquiet at what was called “the sublime” displaces justifiable terror at the risks posed by impenetrable mountains, enormous storms, et cetera. But new realizations about the universe can also elicit fright—Blaise Pascal’s “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.” Mingled with this is the familiar pleasure of being roused to disquietude by forces that the perceiver already knows aren’t real. Interesting situations arise when genre writers know how to exploit new knowledge that their audiences know is all too real, and all too disquieting. I hadn’t been thinking about this until a science writer’s complaint about calling the Anthropocene an “epoch” instead of an “event” presented some disquieting perspectives on the history of the planet, and I certainly hadn’t intended to write 2500 words about it, but one thing led to another.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, you know whether or not you want to keep on reading. Here is the essay, with its own less didactically framed introductory paragraphs:]
A Facebook friend, and of course I cannot remember which one, recently posted the assertion that “The whole month of September should be considered Hallowe’en Eve,” or some such, and of course I did not take a screen capture so I could quote it exactly. The scheduling of Dragoncon’s costuming and cosplaying for Labor Day weekend confirms it. Other friends have posted prefaces to “the spooky season” even though the current temperature here is in the 82 to 88 degree Fahrenheit range, and that is mild compared to the hundred-degree heat wave in the Far West. But the internet posts about being more than ready for the shivers of colder air and the Hallows probably established a mental context for the literary realizations that follow.
The Florida humorist Dave Barry once wrote a description of the uses of the Internet that contained a description of what you ended up looking at five hours after going into the search wanting to know the population of North Dakota. I’ll let you imagine for yourself the pages the searcher would finally end up visiting.
The bizarre title I’ve chosen for this little essay is based on the realization to which I came after having gone to a page in the website of The Atlantic in quest of a commentary on a particular aspect of this week’s news, and then noticing the column that listed “Recommended Reading” on completely unrelated topics. One of them was “The Anthropocene Is a Joke.”
This essay by Peter Brannen proposes that the Anthropocene at best qualifies as what geologists call an “event,” perhaps the “Mid-Pleistocene Thermal Maximum,” or, as he writes, “the ‘Pleistocene Carbon Isotope Excursion,’ as we call many of the mysterious global paroxysms from the earliest era of animal life, the Paleozoic. Or maybe we’re even at the dawning of the ‘Quaternary Anoxic Event’ or, God forbid, the ‘End-Pleistocene Mass Extinction.’”
Brannen’s point is that even if our human-caused temperature spikes and sea level rises exterminate us, Deep Time will thereafter obliterate any evidence that we ever existed, much less how we affected the planet. If all we had for fossil evidence of the dinosaurs came from the eastern United States, then it is hypothetically possible that in their final 7,000 years the dinosaurs could have developed space-age technology and accidentally crashed the asteroid that extinguished them into the Earth as a side effect of their aggressive asteroid mining. This improbable fantasy is possible in this part of the country because except for a few footprints and almost as few and arbitrary skeletal fragments, there is nothing left to tell us of them or the environment they lived in. Entire segments of their 180-million year reign have fallen victim to erosion and the other vicissitudes that make the fossil record so tantalizingly fragmentary, and we have to go to regions stretching from the western United States to the Gobi Desert to piece together a more adequate fossil record. The obliteration of any evidence of human history other than a few anomalous chemical traces would be equally likely in the billions of years still awaiting the planet before the sun becomes a world-vaporizing red giant and shrinks to a blue dwarf (or whatever model of the life of stars has succeeded that one, I haven’t been paying attention lately).
This reminded me that there is a whole cottage industry on the internet of sites devoted to the investigation of pickaxes sitting embedded in rock in the middle of fossil layers, or artifacts that might be batteries found next to the remains of mammoth-bone banquets, or whatever other evidences are supposed to exist for the existence of entire civilizations that rose and were extinguished before today’s humanity found its way out of the Paleolithic caves. Whether those hypothetical civilizations left any traces that early humans made use of—that is one of the speculative trails that such websites love to follow into the depths of What-Iffery, although most of them end the speculations with summaries of what paleontologists and archaeologists regard as the real explanations for the anomalies.
That’s an internet phenomenon preceded by pulp magazines on such topics, but the sense of eerie disorientation that underpins it goes back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ earliest suspicion of “Worlds Before Adam.” (That is the title of a book by Martin J. S. Rudwick that presents the history of the geological and paleontological discoveries that caused shudders of dread in some observers. To quote from another Atlantic article, “The Concept of Deep Time Is Changing,” by David Farrier and Aeon, “[The eighteenth-century Scottish geologist James] Hutton posited that geological features were shaped by cycles of sedimentation and erosion, a process of lifting up then grinding down rocks that required timescales much grander than those of prevailing Biblical narratives. This dizzying Copernican shift threw both God and man into question. ‘The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far back into the abyss of time,’ was how John Playfair, a scientist who accompanied Hutton on several crucial expeditions, described the effect of looking over the stratified promontory of Siccar Point in Scotland.”
“The abyss of time” was something that H. P. Lovecraft seems to have comprehended on a scale comparable to the geologists cited by Brannen. Lovecraft, however, turned the whole thing into a horror show, starting by expanding Arthur Machen’s annotations of Roman temple remains in Britain into a whole depth of horrific cults of Attis and Cybele that had been discomfiting to their contemporaries for other, less geologic reasons (see the poems of Catullus, number 63). Lovecraft then invented his own mythos about the survival of still more ancient cults based on misunderstandings of a past in which early humanoids were exploited by strange-shaped extraterrestrial travelers who had, for unknown reasons, lost control of the planet they had once dominated and that they intended someday to get back for their own benefit. Constructing the Cthulhu Mythos, Lovecraft threw in the names of actual occult figures and the actual history of magic in antiquity, blending this with passages from fictional books, and accounts of fictional cultic practices engaged in by the sort of people whom Lovecraft considered degenerates. He got this from the eugenics movement so popular in his day, but Lovecraft was an equal opportunity misanthrope, hating just about everybody on earth with few exceptions that I can think of. He thought we were a pretty miserable species on an insignificant planet lost in immeasurable depths of cosmic space and time, and the only thing that separated him from more philosophical pessimists of his era was the emotion of unrestrained disgust, and the intuition that this sense of disgust and fear could be put to uses in writing weird fiction that could be sold to pulp magazines.
But why does weird fiction exist in the first place? It stands distinct from more mundane types of horror writing that really are just offshoots of the realization that, as Carolyn Forché put it so memorably in her book of poems about the wars between dictators and guerrillas in Central America, “There is nothing one man will not do to another.”
Post-punk cultural theorist Mark Fisher wrote a book titled The Weird and the Eerie that tried to get at the distinctions between the two concepts, along with a lot of other post-poststructuralist tergiversations we won’t go into. In fact, we won’t go into that book, either. I’m not sure I buy his hypotheses, but the difficulties he had describing the differences and trying to puzzle out motives and causalities illustrate why a book I mentioned in a previous essay, about “eight centuries of fantastic art,” was titled Endless Enigma. These don’t seem to be easy concepts to define, much less discern origins for, although Freud’s familiar concept of the uncanny, the Unheimlich, works pretty well if you discount the details of why people have a specific form of discomfort at the sense of being “not at home with this or that idea or experience.”
I really don’t know much about horror fiction beyond the few classics I read in my youth, but those classics often seem to combine a sense of threat or justified terror at unknown forces with a sense of the vertiginousness of deep time itself, the possibility that the actual essence of things may lie in some chain of causation so far back in prehistory that we cannot begin to imagine more than its shadowy outlines. The discomfort the Victorian English felt about the discovery of dinosaurs and the astonishing meaning of banded rock formations may have blended with the fearful suspicions that maybe the superstitions of their Celtic brethren came from some distorted memory of a real experience. And thus was born an attempt to return these emotional discomforts to the safe realms of fantasy fiction and children’s stories, even as other Victorians founded societies for the scientific study of such topics alongside all other potentially explicable phenomena.
That genre is, of course, not restricted to the English-speaking world, since such classics of world literature as Goethe’s Faust seem like first or second cousins to it (but Goethe is after bigger themes than witches and Walpurgisnachts, or even deals with the devil), and Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa was written in French by a Polish author. One could go on, if one were so minded.
And at that point of racking my brain, I remembered for the first time in half a century or so, that H. P. Lovecraft had written a long essay about “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” I didn’t read the whole thing closely, its 28,000 words being, to reuse my Eloise quote from an earlier essay, “more than I ever wanted to know about penguins,” but Lovecraft had an amazing grasp of the history and at least some of the psychology of the genre, even though his essay reeks of the confident assignment of racial characteristics that allowed folks to talk about the “innate sensibilities” of the “Celtic” and “Semitic” “races” and the intrinsic rational inclinations of the French versus the mysticism regnant in northern Europe. His analysis of the details of what makes the ghost stories of Montague Rhodes James work is better than some of the recent grapplings with the topic, even though the latter get at the psychoanalytic reasons for James’ inventions and Lovecraft doesn’t.
When I wrote “History of Religions and Cultural Fashions Revisited” in 2015, I was chiefly interested in what a hiply cynical pop culture and a theory-laden French and American nihilism had made of Lovecraft’s legacy. I had forgotten that Lovecraft crafted his too-often formulaic tales out of a close reading of a greater number of precursors than I even want to think about, much less look at. Even when he is combining literary formulas, he has reason to suppose, based on the successful juggling of effects by his predecessors, that the combination of elements will have the impact he intends.
Lovecraft ended his essay with a survey of the situation a century or so ago: “For those who relish speculation regarding the future, the tale of supernatural horror provides an interesting field. Combated by a mounting wave of plodding realism, cynical flippancy, and sophisticated disillusionment, it is yet encouraged by a parallel tide of growing mysticism, as developed both through the fatigued reaction of ‘occultists’ and religious fundamentalists against materialistic discovery and through the stimulation of wonder and fancy by such enlarged vistas and broken barriers as modern science has given us with its intra-atomic chemistry, advancing astrophysics, doctrines of relativity, and probings into biology and human thought.”
The strange upsurge of Lovecraftiana in the twenty-first century rested exactly on a combination owing more to cynical flippancy and sophisticated disillusionment than on wonder and fancy.
Anyway, that wasn’t where I was going with this, originally. I was startled, as I said, by the realization of just how the realization of the actual depth of “the depths of time” can still feel disorientingly vertiginous. We flatten out or condense earth’s history because the notion of something like a billion-year gap in the geologic record is simply incomprehensible.
What got me off on all of this was the realization that for the Victorians as well, the response to the implied sight was a shudder, and that Lovecraft realized how to incorporate that shudder into fiction where the Victorian novelists did not. What comes into the mind (my mind, anyway) on contemplating the time spans in evidence in the geological record is something like the currently fashionable online trend of posting photographs of mountain pinnacles in China with hordes of tourists climbing rickety-looking stairs up beetling cliffs to circumnavigate horrifyingly narrow wooded peaks. The comments posted under them are usually things like “Nope nope nope nope.” The sublime elicits awe and fear, and so does the lower-brow version of the sublime making its way through social media.
By the way, AI is proving alarmingly good at finding out from examples in visual culture what in architecture and landscape elicits the pleasurable shudder. Most of what is showing up is still a really bad iteration of pop-culture tropes, but some of the posts are showing real art-historical depth on the part of the people putting in the prompts to Midjourney. However, the lighting of the scene is more like Thomas Kinkade than like Caspar David Friedrich, who can be lurid or saccharine in his own right.