The Unnamable, The White Ship, Under the Pyramids
The Unnamable, The White Ship, Under the PyramidsThe UnnamableThe White ShipUnder the PyramidsCopyright
The Unnamable, The White Ship, Under the Pyramids
H. P. Lovecraft
The Unnamable
We were sitting on a dilapidated seventeenth-century tomb in the
late afternoon of an autumn day at the old burying-ground in
Arkham, and speculating about the unnamable. Looking toward the
giant willow in the centre of the cemetery, whose trunk has nearly
engulfed an ancient, illegible slab, I had made a fantastic remark
about the spectral and unmentionable nourishment which the colossal
roots must be sucking in from that hoary, charnel earth; when my
friend chided me for such nonsense and told me that since no
interments had occurred there for over a century, nothing could
possibly exist to nourish the tree in other than an ordinary
manner. Besides, he added, my constant talk about “unnamable” and
“unmentionable” things was a very puerile device, quite in keeping
with my lowly standing as an author. I was too fond of ending my
stories with sights or sounds which paralysed my heroes’ faculties
and left them without courage, words, or associations to tell what
they had experienced. We know things, he said, only through our
five senses or our religious intuitions; wherefore it is quite
impossible to refer to any object or spectacle which cannot be
clearly depicted by the solid definitions of fact or the correct
doctrines of theology—preferably those of the Congregationalists,
with whatever modifications tradition and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
may supply.With this friend, Joel Manton, I had often languidly
disputed. He was principal of the East High School, born and bred
in Boston and sharing New England’s self-satisfied deafness to the
delicate overtones of life. It was his view that only our normal,
objective experiences possess any aesthetic significance, and that
it is the province of the artist not so much to rouse strong
emotion by action, ecstasy, and astonishment, as to maintain a
placid interest and appreciation by accurate, detailed transcripts
of every-day affairs. Especially did he object to my preoccupation
with the mystical and the unexplained; for although believing in
the supernatural much more fully than I, he would not admit that it
is sufficiently commonplace for literary treatment. That a mind can
find its greatest pleasure in escapes from the daily treadmill, and
in original and dramatic recombinations of images usually thrown by
habit and fatigue into the hackneyed patterns of actual existence,
was something virtually incredible to his clear, practical, and
logical intellect. With him all things and feelings had fixed
dimensions, properties, causes, and effects; and although he
vaguely knew that the mind sometimes holds visions and sensations
of far less geometrical, classifiable, and workable nature, he
believed himself justified in drawing an arbitrary line and ruling
out of court all that cannot be experienced and understood by the
average citizen. Besides, he was almost sure that nothing can be
really “unnamable”. It didn’t sound sensible to him.Though I well realised the futility of imaginative and
metaphysical arguments against the complacency of an orthodox
sun-dweller, something in the scene of this afternoon colloquy
moved me to more than usual contentiousness. The crumbling slate
slabs, the patriarchal trees, and the centuried gambrel roofs of
the witch-haunted old town that stretched around, all combined to
rouse my spirit in defence of my work; and I was soon carrying my
thrusts into the enemy’s own country. It was not, indeed, difficult
to begin a counter-attack, for I knew that Joel Manton actually
half clung to many old-wives’ superstitions which sophisticated
people had long outgrown; beliefs in the appearance of dying
persons at distant places, and in the impressions left by old faces
on the windows through which they had gazed all their lives. To
credit these whisperings of rural grandmothers, I now insisted,
argued a faith in the existence of spectral substances on the earth
apart from and subsequent to their material counterparts. It argued
a capability of believing in phenomena beyond all normal notions;
for if a dead man can transmit his visible or tangible image half
across the world, or down the stretch of the centuries, how can it
be absurd to suppose that deserted houses are full of queer
sentient things, or that old graveyards teem with the terrible,
unbodied intelligence of generations? And since spirit, in order to
cause all the manifestations attributed to it, cannot be limited by
any of the laws of matter; why is it extravagant to imagine
psychically living dead things in shapes—or absences of
shapes—which must for human spectators be utterly and appallingly
“unnamable”? “Common sense” in reflecting on these subjects, I
assured my friend with some warmth, is merely a stupid absence of
imagination and mental flexibility.Twilight had now approached, but neither of us felt any wish
to cease speaking. Manton seemed unimpressed by my arguments, and
eager to refute them, having that confidence in his own opinions
which had doubtless caused his success as a teacher; whilst I was
too sure of my ground to fear defeat. The dusk fell, and lights
faintly gleamed in some of the distant windows, but we did not
move. Our seat on the tomb was very comfortable, and I knew that my
prosaic friend would not mind the cavernous rift in the ancient,
root-disturbed brickwork close behind us, or the utter blackness of
the spot brought by the intervention of a tottering, deserted
seventeenth-century house between us and the nearest lighted road.
There in the dark, upon that riven tomb by the deserted house, we
talked on about the “unnamable”, and after my friend had finished
his scoffing I told him of the awful evidence behind the story at
which he had scoffed the most.
My tale had been called “The Attic Window”, and appeared in the
January, 1922, issue of Whispers. In a good many places,
especially the South and the Pacific coast, they took the magazines
off the stands at the complaints of silly milksops; but New England
didn’t get the thrill and merely shrugged its shoulders at my
extravagance. The thing, it was averred, was biologically
impossible to start with; merely another of those crazy country
mutterings which Cotton Mather had been gullible enough to dump
into his chaotic Magnalia Christi Americana, and so poorly
authenticated that even he had not ventured to name the locality
where the horror occurred. And as to the way I amplified the bare
jotting of the old mystic—that was quite impossible, and
characteristic of a flighty and notional scribbler! Mather had
indeed told of the thing as being born, but nobody but a cheap
sensationalist would think of having it grow up, look into people’s
windows at night, and be hidden in the attic of a house, in flesh
and in spirit, till someone saw it at the window centuries later
and couldn’t describe what it was that turned his hair grey. All
this was flagrant trashiness, and my friend Manton was not slow to
insist on that fact. Then I told him what I had found in an old
diary kept between 1706 and 1723, unearthed among family papers not
a mile from where we were sitting; that, and the certain reality of
the scars on my ancestor’s chest and back which the diary
described. I told him, too, of the fears of others in that region,
and how they were whispered down for generations; and how no
mythical madness came to the boy who in 1793 entered an abandoned
house to examine certain traces suspected to be there.It had been an eldritch thing—no wonder sensitive students
shudder at the Puritan age in Massachusetts. So little is known of
what went on beneath the surface—so little, yet such a ghastly
festering as it bubbles up putrescently in occasional ghoulish
glimpses. The witchcraft terror is a horrible ray of light on what
was stewing in men’s crushed brains, but even that is a trifle.
There was no beauty; no freedom—we can see that from the
architectural and household remains, and the poisonous sermons of
the cramped divines. And inside that rusted iron strait-jacket
lurked gibbering hideousness, perversion, and diabolism. Here,
truly, was the apotheosis of the unnamable.Cotton Mather, in that daemoniac sixth book which no one
should read after dark, minced no words as he flung forth his
anathema. Stern as a Jewish prophet, and laconically unamazed as
none since his day could be, he told of the beast that had brought
forth what was more than beast but less than man—the thing with the
blemished eye—and of the screaming drunken wretch that they hanged
for having such an eye. This much he baldly told, yet without a
hint of what came after. Perhaps he did not know, or perhaps he
knew and did not dare to tell. Others knew, but did not dare to
tell—there is no public hint of why they whispered about the lock
on the door to the attic stairs in the house of a childless,
broken, embittered old man who had put up a blank slate slab by an
avoided grave, although one may trace enough evasive legends to
curdle the thinnest blood.