Quoth Phogg:
Quote:
|
The showing, if you pay close attention to the mythos, could not be done. What makes the elder gods and unmentionable horrors cause madness is the concept that their existence stretches into more dimensions of reality than our normal reality even has, and that in proximity to them humans develop an ability to percieve them . . . but do not develop brains that can process the added dimensions of reality. . . . This was truly a novel concept in Lovecraft's day, and it is an integral part of the overall mythos not re-explained in every story.
|
Actually, this is a key idea of Hinduism and occurs in the cornerstone texts of the religion: The
Upanishads,
Srimad Bhagavatam and, most famously, the
Bhagavad Gita, in the scene in which Arjuna begs Lord Krishna to show him His true face and is horrified when Krishna does: All of the incomprehensibly vast levels of scale and duration and duality come rushing at Arjuna until he stands on the precipice of madness. At which point Lord Krishna returns to His human form and explains to Arjuna that human perception is incapable of registering what He actually
is, and that He assumes various familiar forms so that human beings who perceive Him will not go completely mad.
This is one of the reasons I've always found certain Hindu paintings far more frightening than Lovecraft or any other horror writer: The dwarfing sense of time and space, in which we become motes within motes in universes the size of motes, and even the ethics seem vertigo-inducingly alien in terms of the viciousness of huge cycles of creation and destruction. Hinduism wishes to reconcile all of the opposites and variables by allowing them to spin out, and the effect is like a musical piece in which every numeric value for every aspect -- phrasing, harmonic rhythm, melodic rhythm, hemiolas, canonic intervals, timbre, etc., etc. -- is so wide, and takes so long to repeat, that waiting for all the parts to coincide on the same beat would take eons. Being suddenly forced to hold that in your head might feel like falling out of a plane above several decillion heavens, in the incomprehensibly large forehead of a creature that is made of nothing but infinite space, infinite melody and infinite blood.