But Lovecraft often seems to walk on the knife's edge separating an annihilating Truth (accessible through rational scientific inquiry) and the safety of a recognizable supernatural reality (manageable through superstition and mystical belief).
Seriously, I'm both saddened and genuinely perturbed by people who feel capable and justified in casting out monsters, most especially Adam AKA Frankenstein's Creature. While the Creature's actions may be contemptible, his plea to be recognized as worthy of human compassion is so convincingly stated. We must register, here, the contradiction at the heart of … Continue reading Yes, you have to use the same rules for everyone (Monsters vs Modernism)
Monsters do not seek the shriveled empathy grown in the moral philosopher's over-weeded garden. Monsters ask to be met in the space where we are most human: where we hope against hope to be loved.
When considering the “failure of the imagination” which traps people within capitalist realism, the potential in invoking an incoherent – though not necessarily unreal – alternative mode of thought or existence is crucial to breaking out of the bind of capitalist realism. Being able to posit an incoherent alterity is the first step towards being able to move towards a coherent alternate reality. But trying to pull away from the familiar and towards a new paradigm inevitably produces an encounter with Horror.
Some people prefer to read on vacation, some prefer to do it while listening to music, some prefer silence, some prefer to do it upside down or in the bath or only between the hours of 4 and 6 in the afternoon. With physical books, we are at the mercy of the publishers and designers for the format of the book, but it is only with ebooks that we are at the mercy of international digital conglomerates about the exact manner in which we can access an object for which we have paid.
