"When the
stars are right" is really the kind of book that really gives you some “ah-a” moments, that makes you go “I knew it had to be something like this”.
Basically
this book reveals how Lovecraft mythic figures work, how they are not just
monsters-aliens-deities, but rather some kind of archetypes (in the Carl Jung sense) or even some kind of world disclosures (in a Martin Heidegger
way), if that doesn’t sound too pedantic ^^. In the author words, it’s an “examination
of the Great Old Ones as emergent properties of certain types of consciousness”,
an empathy with the forces of chaos. And when the stars are right, they will be
freed form their conceptual prisons !
The three
main forces are :
Yog-Sothoth
: primal ground of being, bubbling life and consciousness, quantum foam
emerging from nothingness, growing and infinitely permeable, all-in-one and
one-in-all.
Shub-Niggurath
: forward thrust of being into time, fertility and fecundity, tree of life and
death, lust and hunger, swam of forms in which “the “individual” is a momentary
condensation of the shifting surface of flesh and from”.
Nyarlathotep
: the story of the being, the search of meaning in it, the transfer of
information between different levels, the madness to search patterns, the very
idea of language already concealed in the mind of a preverbal infant (that make
him figure that adults words must have a meaning).
Dagon and
Cthulhu are representations of the consciousness. Dagon is the past, it’s the innate consciousness (our oceanic origins,
the germs that allowed the promethean gifts of arts and technologies). Cthulhu is the present and the future, it’s
the acquired consciousness (human body for the rationality / dragon wings to transcend
it / cephalopod head with tentacles : problem-solving, ability to embrace
multiple realities simultaneously, 360° apprehension). Cthulhu influences
humanity by its very act of dreaming and waiting [like a kind of universal zazen
emitter].
 |
| "Dragons have no wings, you idiot" |
What’s striking is the use of these myths as “symbolic embodied concepts”.
Formerly we had to use concepts to understand how and why men invented deities
(like in Mircea Eliade studies of symbols in religions). Now we have concepts that
seem powerful enough to describe the world : physics, evolution, chaos theory, and
even the buddhist void-form… but existentially these concepts hardly make
sense. I think that “ When the stars are right » is
a proposition to use some literary archetypes to embody these concepts.
“ When the
stars are right » is a great book and I strongly recommend it. It’s
published by the canadian editor http://martianmigrainepress.com/
and is available in electronic and also in quick print-on-demand format. I was
delighted to learn that I was the first “international customer” to buy it
(from France) but I think it definitely deserves an international readership !
