Stuff I Probably Made Up

This post’s soundtrack is: Call of Cthulhu.

This blog isn’t defunct.  I’ve just placed frequent updates on hiatus until I’m completely finished with my classes and can devote more of my brain to creative thinking.  A big thanks to all of you, by the way, for the intense and rigorous debates you have all been having over at the Snarkbate forum.  Is it broken on your ends?

Nevermind that.  Today we are going to engage in a little fun with H.P. Lovecraft.  And by “fun” I mean pant-crapping insanity and horror.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was a somewhat odd man.  For starters, he bore at least a passing resemblance to the science teacher from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.  His father died from general paresis of the insane, most likely caused by syphilis.  Lovecraft is also considered by modern standards to be something of a racist.  Putting all of that aside, however, the oddest aspect of the man laid within the stories he wrote.  He wrote of themes which continue in popularity even today.

One of his main themes was the concept of “That Which Should Not Be” - forbidden knowledge which lies far beyond the realm of that which the human mind can grasp.  His protagonists were often worldly folks who, for at least a brief moment, had the veil of human conceptions stripped away from ultimate reality, leaving them to observe the world “as it is”, in all its horror.  This invariably led to insanity, as a return to the comforting illusions of ignorance is nigh impossible upon confronting such knowledge.

This was coupled with another common theme in his writings, that incomprehensible alien forces exert their influence over humanity.  Direct contact with the beings behind this influence is a particularly notorious way to have one’s mind destroyed.  This is best illustrated in Lovecraft’s most well-known story, The Call of Cthulhu.

To state that Cthulhu is the worst sort of news would be on par with saying that Hitler made life slightly uncomfortable for the Jews.  In terms of size and power, he dwarves Godzilla.  There is much debate over the Internet regarding who would win in a fight between the two, but the very premise of that debate is, quite frankly, retarded.  Godzilla, while scary, has power and abilities comprehensible to the human mind.  Cthulhu, by his very nature, is incomprehensible and beyond the ability of the human mind to even slightly understand.  Human beings are to Cthulhu even less than individual ants are to us.

In addition, Cthulhu has telepathic powers and magic.  He operates on levels of existence of which human beings are unaware.  Even more chilling is the fact that he’s not even close to being the most powerful being existing in the Lovecraftian mythos.  All the same, he has a powerful worldwide cult dedicated to his awakening and the subsequent destruction of the world.

It’s easy to shrug this all off as fiction.  After all, Lovecraft’s stories were fictional, inspired by his dreams and whatnot.  It’s only incidental that another key aspect to his stories was the idea that beings such as Cthulhu communicate through the dreams of sensitive individuals, subtlety alerting humanity to their impending doom …

That line that we construct between fantasy and reality has to be more than a simple evolutionary mental safeguard to prevent us from going insane, right?

Incidentally, beings from the Cthulhu mythos are invoked in various rites performed by practicioners of chaos magick.  And Jack Chick himself,  shortly after his possible apostasy from crazed fundamentalist Christianity, may or may not have penned the following tract:

All of this, of course, is silly speculation and entirely irrelevant to anything of importance.  Its significance, however, takes new heights in light of events which occurred in 1997 - CNN: Tuning in to a deep sea monster.

Apparently, back in the summer of 1997, scientists heard a giant “bloop” sound under the ocean.  It was detected by sensors three thousand miles apart, making it a “very loud sound.”  In addition, the sound is sped up 16x in order to be audible to the human ear, indicating an enormity of size.  Scientists speculate that the sound indicates the patterns of a sound made by a living being, and that the creature in question would have to be much larger than a blue whale.  Something on the scale, perhaps, of…

It’s most likely nothing, of course.  But, just for entertainment purposes, let’s compare the estimated location of this underwater event to the location where Cthulhu supposedly resides.

Scientists indicate that the sound originated somewhere in the area of 50^oS, 100^oW.  Cthulhu resides at 47°9′ S , 103°43′ W.  Those can’t be as close to one another as they sound initially, right?

Fortunately, one would imagine that Cthulhu would be more than content to continue in his eternal slumber, barring some grand cosmic event like a galactic alignment… right?

Special thanks goes to Cracked.com and BloopWatch.org for inspiring this post.