That is not dead which can eternal lie…
Mankind was not absolutely alone among the conscious things of the earth, for shapes came out of the dark to visit the faithful few. But these were not the Great Old Ones. No man had ever seen the Old Ones. The carven idol was great Cthulhu, but none might say whether or not the others were precisely like him. No one could read the old writing now, but things were told by word of mouth. The chanted ritual was not the secret–that was never spoken aloud, only whispered. The chant meant only this: “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming. — “The Call of Cthulhu”
I maintain, as do others, that Lovecraft’s Mythos stories are as much science fiction as they are horror, and science, it seems, is now catching up with him:
There may be a state of being between life and death, suggest the authors of a new paper who argue that certain organisms, tissues and cells can survive in an in-between, limbo-like state.
“We think that viability, the middle state between life and death, can best be defined as ‘resting life,’” said Rene Severijnen, a pediatric surgeon at Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center in the Netherlands. [Read more.]
So we now know the meaning of the chant “Ph-nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn,” quoted in translation above, and of Abdul Alhazred’s couplet:
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange eons even death may die.
Cthulhu is in a state of “resting life.”
Comments
No Responses to “That is not dead which can eternal lie…”
Leave a Reply
Twitter Feed- "Never try to out stubborn a cat." -- *The Notebooks of Lazarus Long*
- My Twitter BFFs: @girlofnewmedia @sisypheantask @billiehara @digital_sextant @minute @tengrrl. Find yours @ http://twitterbffs.com
- Four separate sets of plans canceled on me this weekend. With few friends in this state, that's an epic failure.
so, since reading you is calling up Pynchon, and since i’m into film and its means of (re)animation, i have to share this, from page 760 (the last) of GR:
“The screen is a dim page spread before us, white and silent. The film has broken, or a projector bulb has burned out. It was difficult even for us, ole fans who’ve always been at the movies (haven’t we?) to tell which before the darkness swept in. The late image was too immediate for any eye to register. It may have been a human figure, dreaming of an early evening in each great capital luminous enough to tell him he will never die, coming outside to wish on the first star. But it was not a star, it was falling, a bright angel of death. And in the darkening and awful expanse of screen something has kept on, a face we all know –”
oops. that’s . . . “old fans” . . . and . . . “last image” . . .
and then there is the bit from Wernher Von Braun:
“Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death” (qtd in Pynchon 1)
guess it’s a comforting thought for such an “industrious” fellow.
(GR)
Cool. That passage from GR does juxtapose nicely with the Cthulhu myth.
Wow. Pynchon and Lovecraft. Like the chocolate and peanut butter of the paranoid ethos in literature.
That’s awesome.