| Someone wants to fillet Lovecraft and serve him up, someone wants his head on a platter, a weird trophy. It makes me want to read him again, like I did Dante when Gherush92 found him unsuited to the academy they wished passages excised, it sounded very painful. Post-literacy is complex, writers no longer read but they manage to seed adequate trifling books, empty things that are cut off from history, stuff that wouldn’t rise a hair on a mouse. They cannot stand offence, hair-triggers are embedded in every single text, it’ll be trigger-warnings next. Art must be vague. It must reject the psychogeography of the artist and empty itself of all meaning to suit the post literate non-reader. They’ll pastel the woods, dock the leaves, blotting the dark out. Soon there’ll be no interior maps, just the inane mufflings of some coked-out artist bought by Hollywood seeking a stage for their tired crap. Someone will have to bring Lovecraft back. The new academy is post-literate, easy to offence, they tried to swing Dante from the same root, the same diseased tree of political propriety. Their stamp is a sliding shoe shuffle, their platform, an easy media with time on their hands, the bored crowd fattened on psychopathy and too manic to move. Someone takes offence at Lovecraftian lore, makes me want to read him again. To hood myself and go to those nameless places where genetic aberration and weird alien-fucking are the norm, where mottled and dusty books wait in dank houses and the church of despair is a slimey cathedral. To read about Yibb–Tstll, Olkoth, The Nameless City. To read about the endless rot of the endless night, his dank woods. They eviscerated Plath, twisting her words out of their meaning. Whitman is too gay for school. While Houellebecq’s dark ranting has people panting for some arbitrary justice. All their songs rejected, ignored. Imagination is dark, always will be. The poet suicides who take up their places in the anti-Parthenon; their cold grip, the bird claw in your shoulder are taloned antis; anti-humour, anti-light, anti-semite (maybe). Far better indeed to stick it all in some briefcase, your tired theories, than to look, really look, at what they created from loathing, from fear. Those dark depression raptors, those death birds, yet someone is trying to kill Lovecraft, and have his head on their simple stoneware. Someone thinks hate kills hate. Someone wants Lovecraft’s Head is © C. Murray, first published in And Agamemnon Dead, an alternative collection of Irish poetry (2015). |
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Chris Murray 