From The Dream Quest of the Unknown Kadath by H.P. Lovecraft
Randolph Carter leaped shoutingly awake within his Boston room. Birds sang in hidden gardens and the perfume of trellised vines came wistful from arbours his grandfather had reared. Beauty and light glowed from classic mantel and carven cornice and walls grotesquely figured, while a sleek black cat rose yawning from hearthside sleep that his master’s start and shriek had disturbed.
And vast infinities away, past the Gate of Deeper Slumber and the enchanted wood and the garden lands and the Cerenarian Sea and the twilight reaches of Inquanok, the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep strode brooding into the onyx castle atop unknown Kadath in the cold waste, and taunted insolently the mild gods of earth whom he had snatched abruptly from their scented revels in the marvellous sunset city.
This was sourced from this webpage so I’m grateful for the blogger pointing it out.
I haven’t read the story for some time, but it’s pure poetry, don’t you think, and goes some way to explaining the fascination with The Crawling Chaos, not just the name.
Our existence in this world can be likened to a dream. The issue of the greatest importance and eternal relevance is how we face death, the inescapable destiny of all living beings. For in the face of death, external factors such as social status or position in the organization count for naught. Everything depends on...
Hi! Im Mark of High Density & Id like to thank Crawling Chaos for providing such a fantastic website. I have been listening to Crawling Chaos for a while now & they have provided me with much inspiration in my solo project. Although it is not directly influenced, I have learnt that doing something completley...
Our existence in this world can be likened to a dream.
The issue of the greatest importance and eternal relevance is how we face death, the inescapable destiny of all living beings.
For in the face of death, external factors such as social status or position in the organization count for naught. Everything depends on one’s faith, one’s state of life.
- Daisaku Ikeda
Ikeda is getting on now (he’s 80), but I’ve absolute certainty that he lives by these words. Despite the fact that death can come in an instant for any one of us, it’s a fact of life that as we get older, we become more and more aware of the day of reckoning. (If anyone disagrees with that then they are either kidding themselves or are wholly non-sentient or past caring.) I’ve no doubt that Ikeda thinks these thoughts frequently.
Pondering the nature of our existence as an independent being, untrammelled by the whims of religions tied to destiny, punishment or higher forces, is at the very heart of Buddhism, I think.
The Sword of Damocles does not hang over our heads, punishingly dropping on some Judgement Day when we are dead.
Nirvana is here and now, not when you die. You will not be forgiven for any possible sin you may have done. You will not be praised as a heroic martyr for mass-murder. Redemption is in the present, and we must try to live the very best lives we can.
Introduction Many years ago when I was living in France and during a prolonged period of French atomic weapon testing on the Moruroa atoll, the Greenpeace ship, Rainbow Warrior, was blown up in a New Zealand harbour. Initially, it was thought to be an accident. Now, as soon as this happened, I thought “who has...
Crikey! I Never Realised! Maybe certain days have relevance above their station and mere numerical nomenclature? Who knows. So read on. See what happened today! 622 AD – The Hijra of Muhammad Muhammad runs away from Mecca to escape persecution. From this point forward, huge swathes of the globe took up Islam, Islamic empires spread...
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H P Lovecraft smiling
It’s a website utterly bereft of (normal) content except it’s chocka bloc full of MP3 files that are audio books. It’s all public domain, so I’ve uploaded a reading of Crawling Chaos, written by H. P. Lovecraft, locally.
Even stranger, if that is possible, I’ve found a picture of Howard Phillips Lovecraft smiling. There appear to be some gambrel rooves in the background…
And just like when reading the story, I can feel myself dropping off in this audio book as well ….
I’ve put a live version on the Crawling Chaos site of Yoni Suchon. This is quite a powerful sound with some small differences to the version on the Waqqaz release. It’s just Jeff & me pinning back everyone’s lugholes to the back wall. It seemed to have quite a favourable reception – well it would,...
Last night I had a bit of a technical splurge on the Crawling Chaos website. It’s got a new theme and stripped out a lot of extraneous plugin widgetty things. I also redid the pages menus in a (hopefully) more logical construct. I re-jigged page dependencies and set up some 301 redirects in .htacccess to...
It’s important to realise the impact that this funny, eclectic, multi-talented, poor, skinny man has had on the world. The whole genre of science fiction and fantasy and whole industries that hang off the backs of people like Tolkien, are also standing on the shoulders of people like H.P. Lovecraft.
Lost Worlds
Lovecraft, in particular, owed a lot to Clark Ashton Smith. The two corresponded and inspired each other for decades until the former’s early death.
Without the inspiration, what is an artist?
I particularly like the titles of the collections “Out of Space and Time” and “Lost Worlds”. Because that’s what real stuff is – it transcends time and space and is meritorious because of it.
Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith
It has influence both backwards and forwards in time, perfectly fitting in with the Buddhist concept of “the inter-connectedness of all things” and the modern physics dichotomy of entanglement and relativity.
Beneath his sad yet sunny wizened Californian exterior, Smith created whole vistas and civilisations, reminiscent of ancient classic tales, Earth-like yet not necessarily on Earth. The point is, it doesn’t matter where the stories are set, because like Buddhists, we only choose to live on this Earth, this time.
Our heart is with us always.
Lost Worlds
The step-like synchronicity of:
his publications,
then Tolkien’s books,
the success of Tolkien yet comparative failure of Smith,
the huge upsurge with the Panther editions and their immaculate cover art,
then the massive success of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy of films
….is no co-incidence.
Check the cover art of the Panther books and then realise how the whole “Rings” thing is those covers, encapsulated as a film …
This is an example of the interconnectedness of all things stretching backwards and forwards through time and space.
Are the stories like the covers? - Sort of. Does it matter?
The band Crawling Chaos’ name comes from Lovecraft. In retrospect, there are a host of Smith’s tales that I could have chosen for the band name and would have more befitted my admiration for the man. Whether, collectively, a name could have been chosen and agreed upon is another matter, of course. It’s all a question of time and space…
Recommended Tales:
Check out the website “The Eldritch Dark” for shed-loads of CAS stuff.
The Coming of the White Worm: (Chapter IX of the Book of Eibon) – Rendered from the Old French manuscript of Gaspard du Nord.
The Black Abbot of Puthuum:
Let the grape yield for us its purple flame,
And rosy love put off its maidenhood:
By blackening moons, in lands without a name,
We slew the Incubus and all his brood.
– Song of King Hoaraph’s Bowmen
I’ve discovered a letter from one of my heroes, Clark Ashton Smith, where he decries the way that artists are appreciated more after their end than during their existence which is strangely reminiscent of The Crawling Chaos’s relationship to the world at large. But wasn’t it ever so…...
Hell I agree with Leo Laporte that “MySpace is the new hell”. It’s just crap. 100 million people struggling for stuff just out of reach that’s never gonna happen. (see See http://www.twit.tv/natn28) Hieronymus Bosch‘s version is close but the Buddhist concept of “The Hell of Incessant Suffering” is better. Quote: It is because people are...
Any campaign from this Government which claims to support disabled people should be viewed with suspicion and the latest offering from the DWP is no exception. The department yesterday put out a press release boasting: “Celebrities have joined forces with … Continue reading → […]
Another of Iain Duncan Smith’s flagship welfare reforms is to face a court challenge it has been reported this week. Four families are to bring a judicial review against the cap on benefits at £500 a week which was recently … Continue reading → […]
