As I drifted nearer and nearer to the black metropolis, I forced myself awake with a tremendous effort of will, and found myself drenched in cold perspiration and trembling like a frail reed in the wind. And I was screaming ...
Most horrible of all, my screams were echoed mockingly by a deep-lunged, howling ululation, but whether from the Wood or from the sky I cannot tell.
(About three paragraphs totally illegible)
... second passage from the Necronomicon, either raggedly cut or torn from Wilmarth's letter, and read as follows:
... hath the Likeness of a great Toade, black as pitch and glist'ning with foetid slime, bewing’d like ye Bat and with ye nether-limbs of ye Behemothe, splayed and clawed and Webb'd betwixt ye Tues thereof, and Face hath it naught, butte from where ye Face shouldst e'en be sprouteth a Horrid Beard of crawling tentacles. And it feasteth of the Fleshe, and Swilleth of ye Bloode of Men, but at its gluttonous Leisure, for first it is said to bear men aloft into ye Sky, and may bear them thus an hundred Leagues or more ere it will rip and tear and Feede, then dropping them to Earth far from whence it snatch'd them up.
But I can read no more. I will leave the cabin tonight, before Algol rises to peer down at me like the glaring, feral eye of some predatory beast. I will abandon everything, taking only my journal in an old briefcase. But before I leave the cabin, I intend to burn the diary of Jared Fuller ... would to God I had the time to consign to the wholesome flames those hellish old books which sane men were never meant to read.
(Four sentences illegible)
Too late—Algol almost risen. I must run for it. If I cannot catch the bus to Arkharn, I dare nor linger so close to the Deep Wood, but must try my luck on the Pike. Perhaps I can make it to Dean’s Corners before it is too late.
I wish
(Manuscript breaks off suddenly at this point.)
NOTE: As of this dare (February 15, 1983), no evidence has ever been found as to the fate or the whereabouts of Winthrop Hoag. The case remains in the "unsolved" files of the County Police.
The editor has no opinion as to the validity of the manuscript, or concerning its authorship. But one or two remarks might be useful at this juncture. It is now fairly certain that the planet Neptune has at least three moons; the existence of two such satellites has been confirmed by visual observation, and from perturbation in their orbits around their primary, the presence of a third moon is considered almost certain.
It may be of no particular consequence, but the Islamic peoples, together with certain other cultures of antiquity, held the star Algol in peculiar loathing and abhorrence. The Arabic astrologer of the VII Century, Ibrahim Al-Araq, refers to it, in those of his writings still extant, with an ambivalent phrase which scholars translate either as “the Demon Star" or “the Star from whence the Demon comes.”
HERE is one of Lin Carter’s two verse apocalypses in the Cthulhu Mythos. The other, mentioned in "The Winfield Heritance", is "Visions from Yaddith", and you may look it up in an earlier volume in this series, The Shub-Niggurath Cycle. Come to think of it, we might count his "Limericks from Yuggoth" (see Black Forbidden Things, Borgo Press) as a third. Anyway, it is clear that Lin’s model in these poetic endeavors is Lovecraft’s sonnet cycle "Fungi from Yuggoth." The "Fungi from Yuggoth” represent almost a free-associating expansion of the Commonplace Book; in it HPL was free to develop individual items of mood, particular plot germs, etc. in their own right, without trying to work them into a connected narrative context (though, reading them in another way, each poem and several two- and three-sonnet sequences can be read as mini-narratives unto themselves). Lin Carter has done the same in "Dreams from R’lych.“
I have called "Dreams from R’lych" a Mythos apocalypse, or revelation. On one level, the reason for this label is obvious: The premise of the poems is that the Lord of R’lych sends dreams to communicate with certain sensitive individuals to make his will known and to signal his soon awakening. Beyond this I intend a comparison with the apocalypses of ancient Judaism and Christianity, including, among many others, the Revelation of John, the Book of Daniel, and Second Esdras. Apocalypses are composed in poetry, though this is not obvious to some readers, partly because of old Bible typography, in which the text is printed as a series of dense paragraphs, eliminating the poetic structure. Also, biblical poetry employed rhyme but seldom, utilizing instead various stylus of parallelism. Such poetry makes up the bulk of the Old Testament prophets, the Psalms (which were hymn lyrics), the Sung of Solomon (a bowdlerized Ishtar and Tammuz liturgy), the Book of Job, and most of the sayings attributed to Jesus.
Even the derivative character of "Dreams from R’lych" reinforces its identity as an apocalypse, rather than undermining it, since by far most of the ancient apocalypses were themselves reworkings of earlier examples of the genre, or of other biblical texts. The Revelation of John, for example, is heavily based on Daniel, Zechariah, and Ezekiel, to such an extent that one can scarcely appreciate Revelation without constant comparison with its biblical sources.
This point raises the question of the literary artificiality of a stylized "apocalypse" such as Lin Carter’s. The whole thing is quite evidently a studied literary performance, as were the ancient apocalypses. Though a modicum of debate still exists on the point (see Christopher Rowland, The Open Heaven), the evidence of conscious literary composition of the ancient apocalypses seems overwhelming to me. That is, "John" (with Beniamin W. Bacon, I do not exempt the Book of Revelation from the universal rule of pseudonymity in apocalypses) and the others did not simply transcribe their visions. They may possibly have begun with some sort of dream or visionary experience as their initial inspiration, but even this hardly seems likely, given the location of the apocalypse genre in the larger category of scribal Wisdom Literature, which implicitly makes them complex puzzles (see Revelation 13:18). Apocalypses are written as if they were telegrams from heaven, but this is just a convention of the genre. No one should take it seriously any more than they would the chance that songs in operas or Broadway musicals actually represent anyone’s mode of speech.
Yet the opposition "genuine vision" vs. "literary product" reveals itself as a false alternative when we view it from the aspect of the creative process, rather than that of genre mechanics. That is, who will deny that the poetic afflatus is itself a kind of inspiration bubbling up directly from the oracular brook of the artistic subconscious?
This is true equally of any sort of creative writing. There is another dimension of poetry in particular that seems to lend it a revelatory quality, and that is its unique diction. Cleanth Brooks condemned "the heresy of paraphrase" (The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry, chapter 11), the notion that a poem is merely one more vehicle for communicating ideas or information. Rather, “a poem should not mean, but be” (Archibald McLeish, “Art Poetica”). As Gerard Genette says, poetic diction’s unique feature and power is the "intransitivity" of its language (Fiction and Diction. p. 25), an only apparently referential character that is like the false depth in the flat picture plane of a painting. In poetry, therefore, it is the form which is the content. Thus a poem cannot be paraphrased.