Warning – contains spoliers for Color Out of Space
There is a moment toward the end of Color Out of Space; reality is melting, warping, looping, all under the influence of a malignant hue saturating everything in the doomed Gardner farmhouse. Ward Phillips staggers through, trying to escape as alien landscape pours through the cracks, cosmic vastness threatening to consume the world as he knows it, he is thrown about and manages to take shelter in a wine cellar before it all comes down. It was a striking moment in the movie, and reminded me of the shape and even some of the feel of initiatory experience, where the boundaries of the world are shattered, and a vast and sometimes terrifying reality comes in from outside of the known. It was in that scene, from the encounter with Lavinia by the well, through to the end, that I was truly sold on this movie as the best adaptation I’ve seen of anything Lovecraft (though admittedly, this is not a high bar). It also revealed to me a different way of thinking about Lovecraft’s horror than I have in the past; as the horror of initiation.
Initiation, as I understand it, is the wholesale upending of ones view of and understanding of the world, and comes, of course, in many forms. It’s key element is a new and deep understanding – a gnosis – which cannot really be shared, it can only be lived. I think Lovecraft’s horror is a terror of initiatory experience, which his protagonists either reject outright, or else are corrupted and ultimately destroyed/dehumanized by it. The cautionary message of Lovecraft’s stories are that one must take shelter in the fragile shell of our “civilized” illusions. I suspect Lovecraft experienced this horror quite often in his life. His rejection of the vastness of the cosmos was a natural extension of his rejection of the vastness of the world, and the vastness of humanity in the form of his racism. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror expresses a desire to retreat from the vastness of the universe. It clings to the familiar, even if the familiar is a lie, even if we know it to be a lie. His horror at things like miscegenation (eg. Shadow over Innismouth), immigration (eg. Horror at Red Hook), as well as the fact that foundation of so many of his horrors come to us from cultures that were not sufficiently white, wealthy, and Victorian enough evidence the fundamental link between his cosmic horror and his racist worldview. Lovecraft is difficult to be a fan of because his writing is not just incidentally racist. His racism is central to his horror, because it is fear of and outright rejection of the alien and unfamiliar. The great threat of madness throughout much of his horror is the threat of being lost to the mores and demands of his WASP-y world.
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”
Lovecraft’s horror is more than mere racist screed, his racism has a crucial counterbalance. There is another voice present in his writing, a voice he rejects and consciously vilifies, but which explains the power of his version of cosmic horror. Just as the fear of heights is not complete unless it is accompanied by that intrusive thought “…but what if I jump,” good cosmic horror requires cosmic fascination, the desire to know, to experience, and to give oneself over to the vastness of the cosmos, even if it shatters the whole world. Both Lavinia and Nathan Gardner are eventually overcome with the beauty of the sumptuous and alien color, enthralled by it and the deeper cosmos it reveals. The great cosmic horror of Lovecraft is not just the hungry cosmos that seeks to devour us, but the beautiful cosmos that seeks to enlarge us, speaking in one polyphonic voice. Lovecraft (for the most part) consciously rejects the alluring voice as a lie, and he vilifies it across much of his work (aside from some of the dream cycle, where cosmic fascination is given freer play). In Color out of Space Lavinia and Nathan are consumed by cosmic initiation at the cost of their humanity, and they rush headlong into the gaping maw of the cosmos to be destroyed. For Lovecraft’s ethos, such are the wages of that great sin, of peeking outside our rightful boundaries.
I think that much of the enjoyment of Lovecraft by people who reject his racism is a response to this vision of a larger cosmos and the very real anxieties that can be bound up in that. The larger universe calls out to us to participate in it, at the expense of our provincialism, and perhaps at the expense of many things we currently hold dear. I suspect Lovecraft felt that pull, even as he consciously rejected it (again, less so in the dream cycle). His sensitivity to that pull makes his racism all the more of a personal failure, but that internal struggle played out in the pages of his stories makes them something better than they might have been, documenting the ultimately failed struggle to let go of the idols of convention and the familiar for the expansion of consciousness. Though he dresses them up only in horror, tragedy, and death, the allure of these perilous insights shines through in his stories and in the person of that uncanny light that pervades the Gardner farm. But this is part of the trick of reading (or viewing) Lovecraft – the horror that he ascribes to the cosmos has its source not in those things, but in us, when we are unwilling and unable to relinquish our grip on the small and comforting lies that make up the walls of our lesser worlds, and we project that terror outward. Lovecraft’s racism was an unwillingness for him to let go of the familiar, to let go of the world as he knew it, and he all but confesses in story that the response he adopts is to “flee from the deadly light into the comfort of a new dark age.” What better description for the fear inherent in racism is there than that?
In the unity of terror and fascination, we find the sublime. It has a long history in human artistic expression and spiritual endeavor. Both adoration and fear are described as appropriate human responses to both God and its Angels in the Bible, and more specifically we are warned by God: “And he said, Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live.” (Exodus 33:20). The fear of the divine is rooted in all within us that is smaller than the cosmic and which cannot endure it, which, aside perhaps from some holy spark, is all that we are (or at least, is all that we know ourselves to be). This metaphysical vastness is a threat to everything in us that is small, be it Lovecraft’s racism, more recently emerging trends of hatred like transphobia, or even less socially objectionable forms of smallness – things like selfishness, or the general tendency to sneer at and reject the “weird” or unfamiliar. These forms of smallness are all attachments to boundaries – boundaries that provide us with meaning and a basic orientation in the corner of the universe in which we find ourselves. These boundaries are not, in themselves, terrible. We are human beings, and cannot comprehend the whole vastness of the universe. They become a problem when we have encounters with those outside those boundaries and we reject them, or attack them, all to protect the smallness of our worlds. Though I’d say this is all much larger than even this – because these boundaries, too, are part of the cosmos, so there is something more complicated going on than a call to simply reject them all wholesale. The divine both creates and destroys boundaries.
Lovecraft’s stories struggle with this paradox, and, by and large present a truly terrible solution to it. But the merit of his stories is the degree in which they capture this tension, and they express the very real terror of the upending of the familiar, and the demolition of our smallness. They capture the horror of initiation alongside its allure, the allure of a truer and deeper understanding, and a more profound openness to the cosmos, come what may. We live in a time, I think, where we should think more deeply on this: to better understand even be able to communicate with those who, like Lovecraft, cling desperately to a world much to small for us to continue to survive in, while at the same time reflecting on our own attachments to the familiar, and whether we have privileged that attachment over the spark of human light in another. And yet, can we live entirely without boundaries? Dare we look upon the face of God? How do we negotiate living as small and finite beings in a vast and infinite universe? How do we prevent our finitude from turning us into monsters of the all too human variety? This is the work of life, the struggle of the human condition, at least in this day and age. Let us continue to get to it, and try not to go mad in the process.
ScholarLost 
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