00:00:05:18 - 00:00:09:04 Andrew Welcome to voluminous the letters of H.P. Lovecraft. 00:00:09:04 - 00:00:13:22 Andrew In addition to classic works of gothic horror fiction, HPL wrote thousands of fascinating letters. 00:00:13:24 - 00:00:17:20 Andrew In each episode, we'll read and discuss one of them. I'm Andrew Leman. 00:00:17:20 - 00:00:21:12 Sean and I'm Sean Branney. Together we run the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. 00:00:21:24 - 00:00:32:12 Andrew All right, everybody. We are back with the second part of the very long, long letter written in February of 1931 to Frank Belknap Long. 00:00:32:19 - 00:00:37:21 Sean Well, no doubt people have been waiting with bated breath since part one. So let's let them here. Part two. Okay. 00:00:37:21 - 00:01:06:12 Andrew Here it comes. Now, as for your remarks on what you call science, I can only make a Morton-like gesture of lifting my hands in despair and cursing the tendency of the mind to absorb purely conventional images and associations and confuse them with realities. Science ready-made conventional association brings up the latest book and magazine symbols in artificial and regular order. 00:01:06:14 - 00:01:38:05 Andrew Edison, Millikan, John Dewey, General Electric Company, Utility, Hydroelectric power, big business, etc. etc., etc. Gawd in Heaven. But can't the younger generation get clear of words and conventions? Just as I told you a year or two ago, we need a thorough housecleaning to slough off the accumulated traditional overtones and conventional implications of mere words-- Overtones and implications which not only purged the words of their true value, but actually transformed them to active and positive misleading agents. 00:01:38:09 - 00:02:09:07 Andrew Science. Westinghouse. Frigidaire. Machinery. Salesmanship... O Montreal!!! Listen, young man, forget all about your books and machine-made current associations. Kick the present dying parody on civilization out the back door of consciousness. Shelve the popular second-hand dishings-up of Marxian economic determinism -- a genuine force within certain limits, but without the widest ramifications ascribed to it by the fashionable New Republic and nation clique. 00:02:09:24 - 00:02:35:01 Andrew For once in your life, live up to your non contemporary ideal and do some thinking without the 1930-31 publisher's sausage-grist at your elbow. Get back to the Ionian coast, shovel away some 2500 years and tell Grandpa who it is you find in a villa at Miletus studying the properties of lodestone and amber. Predicting eclipses, explaining the moon phases, and applying to physics and astronomy 00:02:35:01 - 00:03:06:23 Andrew the principles of research he learned in Egypt. Thales -- quite a boy in his day. Ever hear of him before ? He wanted to know things. Odd taste, wasn't it? And to think, he never tried to manufacture rayon or form a joint-stock company or pipe oil from Mesopotamia or extract gold from -eawater! Funny old guy wanted to know things, yet never thought of the collectivist state... leaving this last for the unctuous windbag Plato, upon whom the moustacheletted lifted little Chestertons of a later era were to dote. 00:03:07:05 - 00:03:35:09 Andrew Bless me, but do you suppose he actually had the normal human instinct of curiosity and simply wanted knowledge to satisfy that elemental urge? Perish such an un-modern and un-Marxian thought... Yet one has dim suspicions.... And then this bozo Pythagoras. What did he want to bother with that old " What is anything" question for? And Heraclitus and Anaxagoras and Anaximander and Democritus and Leucippus and Empedocles ? Well 00:03:35:13 - 00:03:55:08 Andrew If you take the word of your precious old satyr-faced pragmatist Socrates, these ginks merely wanted to know things for the sake of knowing! According to this beloved super-Babbit of yours, who brought down philosophy from the clouds to serve among men, serve useful ends in the civically acceptable fashion; the old naturalists and Sophists were a sorry lot. 00:03:55:17 - 00:04:23:04 Andrew Your dear Plato agreed. They were not social minded or collectivist. Tut tut. They were actually selfish individualists who gratified the personal human instinct of cosmic curious for its own sake. Ugh! take them away! Moustacheletted young Platonist want nothing to do with such outlawed and unregimented pleasure-seekers. They simply couldn't have been real "scientists" ,since they didn't serve big business or have altruistic or Bolshevist motivations. 00:04:23:12 - 00:04:49:20 Andrew Practically and Marxialny speaking, there simply weren't any such people. How could there be? "Science" is (they printed it in books) the Servant of the Machine age. Since ancient Ionia had no machine age, how could there be "science"? Well, as I've often said, it's about time we got rid of this conventional word-slavery. Let's shelve the word "science", since flaming youth can't think of it apart from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 00:04:50:00 - 00:05:15:21 Andrew Let us agree that "that kind of thing" is unworthy of the notice of a gentleman. I hold this view even more strongly than you. Get it out of the way and let's see what I do respect as the highest form of human activity. Well, here you have it. The thing I respect is the selfish, independent, individualistic, instinct-gratification of Thales and Pythagoras, Leucippus and Democritus, Heraclitus and Empedocles. 00:05:16:05 - 00:05:50:00 Andrew I want my curiosity authentically gratified. Just as Clodius wants a wench and Lucullus a dinner. The process of delving into the black abyss is, to me, the keenest form of fascination, and it is my conviction that this process demands the exercise of those parts of the human organism, which represent the latest and most complex degree of evolution. I burn, I admire, I respect... and what I crave, admire and respect is the pure and abstract abyss-plunging which enthralled Anaxagoras, Anaximenes and Anaximander. 00:05:50:13 - 00:06:11:22 Andrew Dry utilitarian mechanism ? John L Sullivan's ass! don't make an old man hee-haw. I want the straight dope on the clear-cut is or isn't proposition as far as it can be pushed and the weeding out of all silly, unmotivated and gratuitous guesswork and lie-faking in the unknown gulphs beyond the present radius of the is or isn't Searchlight. 00:06:12:09 - 00:06:36:18 Andrew Why do I want this fakery mopped up? Good Gawd -- is inquiry needed? Isn't it obvious that the fakery not only represents a crudely repugnant reversal of method from that which has gained us all the real information we do possess; but forms an actual obstruction (as proved by invariable past experience) to the extension of real knowledge into the ever-decreasing dark gulph over which and asserts an arbitrary and unjustify'd sway? 00:06:36:21 - 00:06:58:12 Andrew When a man's prime concernment is a gratification of the sheer curiosity-instinct, he has not much patience to spare for a meaningless mummery which claims attention and allegiance without ever having advanced a single sane reason why it should receive any more attention or allegiance than the mumblings of a crazy parrot! If this be unduly "dogmatic" atheist, make the most of it. 00:06:58:22 - 00:07:20:24 Andrew All I want is to know things. The black gulph of the infinite is before me. Sober men like Democritus and Aristotle and Epicurus and Lucretius and Hipparchus and Eratosthenes and Copernicus and Kepler and Newton and Einstein and Jeans and Eddington and Shapley and Hubble and Mendeleef and Darwin and Haeckel and Huxley in and Quatrefages and Tyler and Freud and Watson and Keither, etc.. 00:07:21:01 - 00:07:48:06 Andrew tell me things about it in such a way that their essential statements fit together in a mutually supporting way and make certain new facts consistently and repeatedly clear to my registering apparatus by the same channels through which this apparatus apprises me of the difference betwixt hot and cold, black and white, Felis and Canis, James Ferdinand Morton and Reinhart Kleiner. At the same time a child tells me the moon is made of green cheese, (which his mother told him) 00:07:48:12 - 00:08:19:20 Andrew a parson or elderly off-duty physicist tells me there is a vertebrate poetic consciousness behind the electronic uncertainties of ultimate space, (which his carrion-eating primal forebears doped out from watching the seasons and interpreting their dreams, and handed down to him under a system of ponderous taboos and infantile emotional crippling) and a nut at the Cranston State Hospital tells me he is a denizen of Saturn's rings sent earthward to conquer the human race, (which his inner intuition suggested to him in the fashion of religious experience). 00:08:20:04 - 00:08:44:06 Andrew Well, this is the sort of light I get on the cosmos from different sources.... and does it take an especially dogmatic atheist to get an inward kick of truth registry out of source Number one, the sober scholars, which somehow he can't get out of numbers two, three and four... the kid, the cleric and the cuckoo ? Is it dogmatic to see a reason for accepting number one and not to see any reason for accepting the closely similar assertions 00:08:44:10 - 00:09:09:00 Andrew number two, three and four. True, the child may be right. The whole cosmos may be governed by a bodiless mammal intelligence, whose attributes are patently terrestrial and exactly the same as those which a primitive race must naturally invent in the course of demonstrably mystical theogony. Yes-- and the bimbo at the nut-factory may be Yabon-Gluth, the Saturnian messenger, even though he's down on the books 00:09:09:00 - 00:09:30:00 Andrew as Stanley U. Czernak, an Olneyville factory Pole with a taste for Edgar Rice Burroughs and a bullet in his frontal lobe. All these things may be -- let non-dogmatism take'em all on tentative trust if they feel like it, and weigh each one as equal factor against the verifiable data given by source number one. Okay. If one goes in for that sort of thing. 00:09:30:08 - 00:09:59:22 Andrew But I for one won't let moth-eaten savage speculations, or childhood crib-side "now I lay me's" or conventional printed hedgings of "our best people" impose on my natural faculties and emotions of discrimination. I won't cringe and fawn and lick spittle before popular idols who promulgate wild yarns with only too obvious antecedents. Yarns which outrage every sound inner instinctive horse-sense in a mind which rejected the crippling of orthodox childhood. 00:10:00:15 - 00:10:19:11 Andrew It isn't as if I were alone. When a guy has real brains like Bertrand Russell and George Santayana and Hugh Elliott and H.L. Mencken and Joseph Wood Krutch and Irving Babbitt (in this respect) and Harry Elmer Barnes ( I don't give a damn for his preferences in purely emotional fields) and Sir Arthur Keith and H.G. Wells (in part) and John Dewey 00:10:19:12 - 00:10:40:24 Andrew (who the hell cares for his social views?) and Albert Einstein (just analyze his "cosmic religion" and see if it differs a whit from my own aesthetic of impersonal but non-conscious order!!) behind him, he can god damn well thumb his nose at fakers and nuts and mystics and cobweb-curators and tell them just where to go..... and this without any undue exercise of presumption or egotism. 00:10:41:13 - 00:11:06:18 Andrew But remember that such and one's chief interest is not in envisaging a universe of any particular sort, be it Godful or godless. All He yearns to envisage is the universe as it is, whatever its form or nature may be. Just bring up anything like a scrap of real evidence that there is any reason to imagine a "personal consciousness" or "purpose" in the cosmos, and watch the apparent dogmatism drop off. 00:11:07:09 - 00:11:32:24 Andrew What we want is to know the simple is or isn't of the matter. Any other aspect of the matter strikes our emotions as essentially trivial and irrelevant. It may interest some people, but why bother us? Of our genuine basic emotions, curiosity is the strongest. That simple empirical nature... and don't make me laugh by trying to link it up with the one trivial facet of "science" which the machine age has enlisted as an ally! 00:11:33:08 - 00:11:59:17 Andrew Same old tyranny of words and conventional associations. Let's canned familiar terminology and adopt my suggestion of calling this abstract basic knowledge cognition, and the elemental instinct which motivates me, cognition-craving. Can youth handle terms and conceptions which haven't appeared in print with the hall-marks of conventional approval ? These things, believe an old man, have their clarifying merits! So get this straight-- 00:11:59:17 - 00:12:27:12 Andrew I have no use for the machine age or any of its conceptions, methods, and ideals. I have use only for abstract cognition without social or utilitarian connotations; the thing which Thales fails and Anaxagoras and Heraclitus went after, and which was clearly definable by the word philosophy until those pragmatic puff puffball Socrates and Plato threw a monkey-wrench into the works and crippled human thought for the next two millennia. 00:12:28:19 - 00:13:02:00 Andrew Now it is a matter of perfect indifference to me whether or not baser interests cluster round the search for truth and lick the molasses-drops that ooze out of the fact barrel. This apelike parasitism of the herd means nothing either for or against the abstract is or isn't quest which THales began, Democritus continued, and Einstein prolongs. If machine culture chooses to worship science, that its own business. It doesn't imply that the abstract process of cognition-craving turns about and reciprocally worships machine culture! 00:13:02:13 - 00:13:26:01 Andrew Is Buddha less of an austere or esthetic figure because he is now whined at by degraded Tibetan lamas, or Mahomet because Morocco negroes pray to him? To hell with collectivism and machine culture, conventionalism and veiled neo-marxism! Truth is truth; cognition is cognition. You don't have to be a Babbitt or a bolshevik in order to demand a purer truth than the hokum 00:13:26:01 - 00:13:57:21 Andrew fat Dago popes dish out, or the sideline tripe cooked up by bullhead-brained physicists on their mental vacations! God! if only some of these convention hounds would let a ray of genuine originality through their cut-and-dried copying once in a dog's age. Cognition, as such, is completely without social or aesthetic implications, except so far as it places certain obvious contradictions of natural laws, and certain pointless exaltation of empty trivialities, in a light so unfavorable as to encourage obsolescence. 00:13:58:08 - 00:14:34:22 Andrew It is nobody's tool or hand-maiden--it is itself alone. Practically speaking, the mind likely to worship pure cognition most sincerely, is that most of all opposed to industrialism and standardization. Cognition is that branch of human desire and celebration most antipodally removed from anything envisaged or wished by Thomas A. Edison, Henry Ford, and the late Charles P. Steinmetz. It is the enemy of urban civilization, as it is the enemy of all handicaps which cripple the free individualistic excursions of the disinterested intellect into unknown cosmic space. 00:14:35:13 - 00:14:57:21 Andrew It is the sworn ally of beauty because it is itself one of the supreme forms of beauty, the catharsis of a primal, titanic urge which links man to the uttermost gulfs of dramatic immensity. It is one with the greatest music and the loftiest poetry being perhaps a glimpse of the liberating and expanding reality which both are blindly seeking. 00:14:58:11 - 00:15:25:17 Andrew It is a quest for the prototype of that rhythm, whereof Homer and Phidias are faint, far echoes. It is the one value which is not relative and ephemera, but absolute and supreme. Nor is its status affected by those relativistic and quantum mystic discoveries which remove its farther fruits still farther from the rim of the known. It is man's only anchorage against utter lostness in limitless space. 00:15:26:03 - 00:15:52:23 Andrew The one bulwark left when all the mirages and cobwebs break down. If I had nothing more important about me than the shambling Hulk in which the few vital cells of my cerebral personality are set, I'd possibly hire out as a scarecrow or shop-window model and devote myself to the exploitation of cast-off overalls or Hart, Schaffner, and Marks Kampus Kut Clothes. As it is-- feeble, though my activities are-- 00:15:53:11 - 00:16:18:18 Andrew I feel that the distinctive features of my personality are not my long nose, ugly head, loose jointed chassis, and Hapsburg jaw, or any colored rags, brass rings, or hirsute patches that I could hang or raise on the surface of that meaningless hash of objective angles. What is Old Theobald is a mode of motion inside a very small part of that clumsy tributary fabric. 00:16:19:08 - 00:16:24:23 Andrew And if I can't hang the rags and rings on that part, I don't care to hang them at all. 00:16:26:21 - 00:16:38:16 Sean Okay. Andrew So we've heard part one now We've heard part two. Yeah. We got some ideas about what got you interested in this letter, but what kept you interested in this letter to go, let's, let's do four shows out of it. 00:16:38:23 - 00:17:10:13 Andrew Well, in part two, Lovecraft turns to science. Yes. And he is just on fire with with feeling about science. I mean, this part of the letter reads to me like a hymn to pure science, especially towards the end. We talk about it is it is itself one of the supreme forms of beauty, cognition and cognition craving. And what surprised me about it, I've always known that Lovecraft was a fan of science, but I failed to realize until I read this letter that he was thinking of a very specific kind of science. 00:17:10:13 - 00:17:22:13 Sean He sure is. He and he and like so much else, he's so scornful of anything that's not his, you know. Oh, you can't see science my way. And if you don't know, you stink, you know, like, oh, he's that hard. Okay. 00:17:23:01 - 00:17:30:23 Andrew He is clearly not talking about the science that brings us electricity and television and microwaves. 00:17:30:23 - 00:17:32:07 Sean And all that stuff. Yeah, not at all. 00:17:32:08 - 00:17:42:15 Andrew He is interested in the pure science that goes back to ancient Greece, to families and all the many, many classic Greek philosophers that he. 00:17:42:18 - 00:18:04:24 Sean That's what I found so pompous and annoying about this part of the letter to me, though, is to try and make a distinction. The distinctions in a lot of ways completely irrelevant. So Archimedes is sitting on a beach somewhere and he's got a rock and he discovers the principle of a lever and a fulcrum, and voila, Lovecraft can celebrate it as this glorious moment of science. 00:18:04:24 - 00:18:36:20 Sean You know that he's figured out that the length of the fulcrum and where it goes changes the amount of power that goes through the system. Great. And that's what Lovecraft is happy about. But it's like science also yields meaningful practical results. And Lovecraft is so dismissive over anything that's practical. Yeah. And so cherishes only the idealized part. And it's like if science had brought him better medical care late in his life, he may not have been dead when he was 47. 00:18:36:21 - 00:19:02:02 Sean He rails long for infantilisem. Boy, does he like to bandy that word about. Yeah. And yet, to me, it just seems there's almost something childish in his adoration of science. And it's only good if it's completely pure and if there's any practical benefit of it. Oh, then it's Westinghouse and yeah, Ford and all the grotesquerie of the modern world and. 00:19:02:09 - 00:19:05:19 Andrew People who foolishly made money from science. Yeah, but in the end. 00:19:06:02 - 00:19:18:12 Sean Even the even the guys like Tesla, who didn't necessarily make them money, science is what brought science to part of what brought us out of the dark ages. Science is it has practical benefits as well as purely intellectual one. 00:19:18:12 - 00:19:24:15 Andrew Sure. I think Lovecraft loved that part of science. The fact that they're bringing this out of the Dark Ages part Lovecraft was all for. 00:19:24:15 - 00:19:46:13 Sean Well, he's he's he's all for it. Unless it's too practical and it's mechanized in our society. And then he becomes really disdainful of it. But it's part partly it's the practical benefits that came out of the Renaissance from Genesis that, you know, they gave us chemistry. They gave it the whole evolution of coming out of the dark ages into the Renaissance is about practical. 00:19:46:14 - 00:19:55:16 Sean It's about both. It's about pure academic cognition. Absolutely. That's swell. But let's let people figure out how to make better shoes, you know? 00:19:55:18 - 00:20:18:06 Andrew Well, I certainly don't disagree with you, but I think that Lovecraft is Lovecraft loves the part right up until it turns into commerce. And then he jumps ship. Right. And that may be foolish of him and it may be infantile and juvenile or whatever. But I like how I like how inflamed his subject. I just found it fascinating. 00:20:18:06 - 00:20:19:02 Andrew And so 00:20:19:02 - 00:20:30:02 Sean If Love doesn't get Lovecraft's blood pumping, but science does, you know, this is this is a man in love with science. He's in love with ideas and the acquisition of knowledge. 00:20:30:02 - 00:20:44:22 Andrew Yeah, he's in love with the the is or isn't the straight dope on the is or isn't question. I like that way of him putting it you brought up Tesla for a second and I thought it was very interesting that Tesla is one of the few people who is not Namechecked in this letter. Right. 00:20:44:22 - 00:20:57:09 Sean And he clearly must have known about Tesla and his work. I mean, he's so well informed about every significant. Physicist or astronomer who's doing work during you know, from really the turn of the century up to this is 1931. 00:20:57:09 - 00:21:07:13 Andrew So which made me wonder if he admitted Tesla on purpose because he thinks Tesla is more representative of the kind of pure scientist that he admires. 00:21:07:13 - 00:21:09:01 Sean Or is he a sketchy foreigner? 00:21:09:01 - 00:21:15:07 Andrew Or perhaps it's because he's as well, but he likes, you know, Charles Steinmetz. He likes lots of sketchy foreigners. 00:21:15:12 - 00:21:25:09 Sean And the Steinmetz Steinmetz was born somewhere, I forget Prussia or wherever he was born, but he came to America. But most of these other guys are pretty darn pretty darn white bread. I don't know. 00:21:25:23 - 00:21:30:15 Andrew It is interesting to read his list of people who, in his opinion, have real brains. 00:21:30:15 - 00:21:34:20 Sean Yes, Yes, that's very true. And interesting and slightly disturbing list. Yeah. 00:21:35:09 - 00:22:01:09 Andrew It's an interesting list because there is I mean, he includes some pretty sketchy people on his list of people with real brains, but he also includes people from both sides of the ideological spectrum. You know, Bertrand Russell and George Santayana are relatively liberal. Right. And, you know, he talks about John Dewey, who was very liberal, but, you know, with them, but with the apparent physical, who the hell cares for his emotional views are his social views. 00:22:01:13 - 00:22:15:03 Andrew So what he likes about Dewey is is some parts, but he doesn't he gives Dewey a pass on being liberal because he has some good ideas otherwise. But you know, Einstein, not exactly a not exactly a conservative. 00:22:15:09 - 00:22:31:11 Sean Oh, sure. And Lovecraft, you know, Lovecraft loved a great thinker. And I think really admired people, you know, who who even if he wouldn't agree with them, go, wow, this this is serious cognition at work here in which. 00:22:31:11 - 00:22:45:11 Andrew Lovecraft was able to do with, you know, his own friends like James Ferdinand Morton, you know, even though he didn't agree with Morton's opinions about race and and any number of other topics, he still respected him and they still retain friendship. 00:22:45:11 - 00:23:19:00 Sean In that list of people who Lovecraft admired, though. Did you, by any chance, take a look at Elmer Barnes? A little bit, Yeah. Yeah. So that's and, you know, I guess it's worth seeing the places where Lovecraft kind of falls into his own trap or, you know, he admires this person is a great thinker, but really, Elmer Barnes was an anthropologist and largely blamed World War One on the allies and their unjust attack on Germany, and then went on to become a Holocaust denier. 00:23:19:00 - 00:23:27:10 Sean And one of these people trying to scientifically prove racism so they would have some basis to feel justified in their prejudice. 00:23:27:10 - 00:23:38:13 Andrew Sir Arthur Keith Who we also mentions in that same list, was a similar guy. He was a scientific racist who believed that relative inferiority and superiority of racism was just a scientific fact that could be proved. 00:23:38:13 - 00:23:44:10 Sean I wonder what his race, how it worked out on his scale. Yeah. 00:23:44:10 - 00:23:45:20 Andrew You know, he also, however fell for the Piltdown Man. 00:23:46:01 - 00:23:51:18 Sean Oh, yeah. The great the great anthropological hoaxes of the early 20th century. 00:23:51:18 - 00:24:01:07 Andrew Yeah. You know, it's always very, very easy for people who are in what they perceive to be the most superior class, to classify other people. 00:24:01:07 - 00:24:02:02 Sean Funny, that isn't. 00:24:02:02 - 00:24:20:13 Andrew It isn't. It's funny how that works out, you know, And Lovecraft is absolutely guilty of the same thing. You know, of course, it's easy for anyone who has money to belittle people who are trying to make it. And sure, it's easy for people who are in the powerful class to belittle the people who are not so fortunately placed in this part of the letter. 00:24:20:13 - 00:24:32:06 Andrew He says of our genuine basic emotions. Curiosity is the strongest, which is an apparent contradiction of his his own theory that fear is the strongest of the human emotions. 00:24:32:10 - 00:24:36:14 Sean What fear is the oldest and strongest? Yeah, well, curiosity is not that old, apparently. 00:24:36:21 - 00:24:38:13 Andrew I guess Curiosity came after you got Over being afraid. 00:24:39:12 - 00:24:43:16 Andrew Maybe some of the thing you didn't understand and you decided, Oh, maybe I should figure out what it is. 00:24:43:17 - 00:24:48:15 Sean Yeah, I don't know. Or it just doesn't work. Well, in an introduction for supernatural horror literature, that's true. 00:24:48:21 - 00:25:00:12 Andrew But clearly, curiosity is crucially important to Lovecraft, and it's interesting that he totally backs on Socrates and Plato for having set back Western thought for millennia. 00:25:00:13 - 00:25:16:08 Sean No, the only person who gets it comes out of this looking worse than August 30th is Plato. Yeah, he certainly goes off about, you know, all these Greek Greek scientist or proto scientists, and then I'm sure what you call them. I guess they're all philosophers. 00:25:16:08 - 00:25:17:19 Andrew Philosophers, natural philosophers. 00:25:17:20 - 00:25:42:05 Sean They're the guys who really started the first intentional well, they're the first guys who were documented as doing some of the first intentional manipulations of the physical world and deliberately discarding mythology as the causal force in life and instead going, Huh, let's figure out what makes X happen. And they they began the process of experimentation and really start to shape science as we know it today. 00:25:42:12 - 00:25:56:04 Andrew He says, I have no use for the machine age or any of its conceptions, methods and ideals. I have use only for abstract cognition without social or utilitarian connections. I think he's kidding himself. 00:25:56:11 - 00:26:00:20 Sean Absolutely. If he thinks I wrote Lady DA on the margin next to that. But if you. 00:26:00:21 - 00:26:06:11 Andrew If you think there's any such thing as pure cognition without social implications, you're out of your mind. 00:26:06:12 - 00:26:18:20 Sean Well, it's like we were talking about before to about science without practicality. It's like how meaningful is it that's to understand how the heavens work. Well, if there's not enough food. 00:26:18:20 - 00:26:28:22 Andrew To eat, that's how you get every mad scientist in history. It's some guy who thought he could develop nuclear power and no one would turn it into a bomb. Right? It just never happens that way. 00:26:29:07 - 00:26:40:16 Sean Reanimating the dead. There's no rules, there's no ethics, there's no social context. Because at the end of the day, this work is being carried out by human beings who have a social context and will. 00:26:40:16 - 00:26:50:16 Andrew Always act on it, no matter how lofty your principles might be. That's just how people work, Right? And including him. Including him. 00:26:50:16 - 00:26:55:03 Sean Yeah. Which makes some of these proclamations a little disingenuous in my mind. 00:26:55:05 - 00:26:57:23 Andrew He sure seems to believe them, though, man. He sure seems to believe him. 00:26:57:23 - 00:27:16:01 Sean Absolutely. He's passionate. And I think in a way he does believe it. And what he really needs and I don't know how long responded to this is I hope he pushed back and took Lovecraft to task for some of these assertions, because I think a lot of them are yes -buts, where that if you push back against that, Howard will go. 00:27:16:20 - 00:27:46:05 Sean Yes, But I still think that there's high. But I will acknowledge that other things are important and that the cognition cannot be divorced from sociological milieu in which it happens and that the science having practical benefits does not in fact actually undermine the science. You know, we're not worse off because somebody can sell light bulbs. You know, it still still means that we have we have light by pushing a button instead of lighting a fire. 00:27:46:15 - 00:28:05:12 Andrew I did get a kick out of his you know, he he believes what he believes because of, you know, there's scientific proof for it. But then his his other three potential ways, the child who says the moon is made of green cheese and the the the guy in the insane asylum who believes he's from Saturn. I just thought, you know, his whole long. 00:28:05:16 - 00:28:14:03 Andrew Yes, those things could be yes, he could be from Saturn. But I. But you can't blame me for taking the word of the scholars. 00:28:14:03 - 00:28:15:03 Sean Over the word of. 00:28:15:03 - 00:28:16:18 Andrew The child and or the. 00:28:16:18 - 00:28:17:06 Sean Lunatic. 00:28:17:06 - 00:28:41:11 Andrew I love this. The whole cosmos may be governed by a body, loose mammal intelligence, whose attributes are patently terrestrial and exactly the same as those which a primitive race must naturally invent. Yeah, that may be true. He's so. He's so outraged, right. That it's just funny to read him just going off if he. I don't know where he was. 00:28:41:17 - 00:28:50:11 Andrew I can imagine sitting at, you know, Starbucks. Just really do it do do commercial, you know. Yeah. At the automat, having cocoa or. 00:28:50:13 - 00:28:54:03 Sean I would say. But but he loves the pumpkin spice latte. So he's they're all the same. 00:28:55:15 - 00:29:14:07 Andrew One of the reasons I kept going into the section was because I stumbled across that quote, The process of delving into the black abyss is, to me, the keenest form of fascination, a quote that we've put on t shirts and that is, you know, this letter has been quoted in many other places, and that's one of the famous quotes that is often pulled from this particular letter. 00:29:14:10 - 00:29:26:22 Andrew Yeah. And it's interesting that, you know, if I had known it at the time, that sentence keeps going. And it is my conviction that this process demands the exercise of those parts of the human organism, which represent the latest and most complex degree of evolution. 00:29:27:15 - 00:29:33:07 Sean You had a good T-shirt going, and then I really wrote that you went too far. But much like this letter, but over. 00:29:35:17 - 00:29:37:17 Andrew The Gielgud T-shirt is knowing when to stop. 00:29:37:23 - 00:29:59:20 Sean The key to a great many things is knowing when to stop. But yeah, it is a great sentiment and it it does encapsulate him and his beliefs in a pretty terrific way. There was a quote, too, I wanted to just talk about for a second because I just I jotted Martin great points. He says This ape like parasitism of the herd, means nothing either for or against the abstract is or isn't. 00:29:59:20 - 00:30:31:14 Sean QUEST Which Thérese began. Democritus continued, an Einstein prolongs if machine culture chooses to worship science, that's its own business. It doesn't imply that the abstract process of cognition craving turns about and reciprocally worships machine culture. That's true. And that was that. That at least starts to deal with the relationship. But I look at machine culture sort of being the practical and beneficial sides of science and going, you know, one requires the other, but it's not necessarily a two way street. 00:30:31:17 - 00:30:34:15 Sean I thought that was an interesting way in which he articulated the point. 00:30:35:12 - 00:30:42:03 Andrew Towards the end of the letter, which is where he gets he stops complaining about things he doesn't like and starts talking about things he does like. 00:30:42:09 - 00:30:44:01 Sean I love it when people do that. 00:30:44:01 - 00:31:09:19 Andrew You know, it's he says it is the sworn ally of beauty because it is itself one of the supreme forms of beauty, the catharsis of a primal titanic urge which links man to the uttermost gulfs of dramatic immensity. It is one with the greatest music and the loftiest poetry. It is a quest for the prototype of that rhythm, where of Homer and Phidias are faint far echoes. 00:31:09:22 - 00:31:49:14 Andrew It is the one value which is not relative and ephemeral, but absolute and supreme. It is man's only anchorage against utter lost ness in limitless space. The one bulwark left when all the mirages and cobwebs break down. It's clearly Lovecraft is in love with science. This process, this natural philosophy, the the amazing ability of the human mind to have that quest, to have that curiosity, to be able to see himself in the context of this great, unfathomable universe and contemplate its mysteries. 00:31:49:14 - 00:32:01:02 Andrew And I think that's part of I think that does come through in the best of his fiction. And it's one of the things that absolutely keeps drawing me to the fiction is that the sense of wonder and amazement. 00:32:01:17 - 00:32:28:13 Sean Sure. And deep down, the more of these letters we read, the more it keeps striking me. Deep down, he wants to be a library. He he wants to be a repository of knowledge and facts to somehow that is the candle in the darkness, that is that flashlight beam against the the wall beyond which we cannot see. Yeah. You know, is that whatever he can acquire as intellectual information and science seems to be the best vehicle to do that. 00:32:28:13 - 00:32:36:18 Sean Yeah. Is the only thing that gives any kind of sense or meaning or purpose against just the vast nothing. 00:32:37:05 - 00:33:00:22 Andrew Maybe because emotions are so, you know, subjective. They are there elusive. You can't pin them down. You can pin down facts, you can know the is or isn't. And maybe that's what makes him gravitate toward it is because emotions you can't you can never pin them down. They are ever shifting. And just when you think you've got one, it vanishes and all you can do is wish you could get it back. 00:33:00:22 - 00:33:02:03 Sean Yeah, that's what makes him awesome. 00:33:02:04 - 00:33:07:20 Andrew You can't. You can't. You can't feel nostalgia over facts because they are induced, right? 00:33:07:21 - 00:33:40:14 Sean They do. They do remain forever. And I think, you know, maybe we're on to something about really beginning to grasp one of the fundamental underpinnings of his personality, which is this differentiation between how he deals with the ephemeral world and how he deals with science, which is something which is permanent and builds upon itself and isn't fleeting. And you can perhaps he could bank on it a little more than he could on those emotions, which clearly were something he was grappling with. 00:33:40:14 - 00:33:40:21 Sean Yeah. 00:33:41:09 - 00:33:44:17 Andrew Well, maybe we should leave it there for now, because in the next. 00:33:45:00 - 00:33:45:06 Sean There's more ? 00:33:45:06 - 00:33:50:21 Andrew In the next part of this letter, he's going to turn to religion. And it could get ugly. 00:33:50:21 - 00:33:52:10 Sean So I can't wait. 00:33:52:10 - 00:33:55:07 Andrew Let's let's let's rest up and get ready for that. 00:33:55:10 - 00:33:56:07 Sean There you go. Sounds good. 00:33:56:08 - 00:34:03:11 Andrew Okay. Our thanks today to Arkham House for preserving this letter from Lovecraft to Frank Belknap Long. 00:34:03:11 - 00:34:09:09 Sean You can learn more about them and the selected letters of H.P. Lovecraft over at ArkhamHouse@.com. 00:34:09:09 - 00:34:11:11 Andrew I'm your obedient servant, Andrew Leman. 00:34:11:17 - 00:34:13:16 Sean And I'm cordially and respectfully yours Sean Branney. 00:34:13:22 - 00:34:18:01 Andrew You've been listening to Voluminous the letters of H.P. Lovecraft. 00:34:18:02 - 00:34:21:13 Sean If you've enjoyed the show, we'd appreciate it. If Take a moment to post a review. 00:34:21:14 - 00:34:24:02 Andrew Tell all your friends about Voluminous brought. 00:34:24:02 - 00:34:55:23 Sean To you by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. Come check out all we have to offer at HPLHS.org