The Enemy of the Good (eideteker) wrote,
The Enemy of the Good
eideteker
  • Mood: cryptic
  • Music: movie: The Dunwich Horror

If the daylight finds me sane... you'll know why.

"I hear music, daylight disk
Three men in black said: 'Don't report this'
'Ascension,' and that's all they said
Sickness now, the hour's dread..."

I decided to watch The Dunwich Horror tonight. It's based on a story by old H.P. Lovecraft himself. H stands for Howard, and P stands for Phillips, and anyone who was a member of the Nintendo FunClub knows that Howard Phillips was president of Nintendo of America for quite a span. That coincidence always kinda creeped me out.

"All praise. He's found the awful truth, Balthazar
He's found the saucer news..."

Balthazar always takes me back to Chrono Trigger (you thought I was going to say the Bible). Aside from Balthasar Getty in The Lost Highway, his Chrono Trigger incarnation is the most salient representation of the wise man (guru, as the game puts it). All three of them have a very spirit of the earth/eternal protector role in that game, which I somehow identified with playing it as a teenager. And he was the guru of knowledge, much cooler, in my mind, than the gurus of either time or power. Gaspar, guru of time, always seemed knowledgeable, but powerless, while Melchior, guru of power, was timeless but not altogether knowledgeable (and sometimes seemed powerly, paradoxically). But Balthazar had it all. He was timeless (and almost omnipresent, through his inventions), powerful (he created a time machine! the guru of time couldn't), and, of course, knowledgeable. The saddest moment was not when our hero died (actually, I tend to rush to that part, so I can finally switch him out of the party and put a certain dark sickle-wielder in the lead) but when the Guru Balthazar passed on from his toil. And, yes, especially with the music in this game, it was possible to get emotionally attached.

"I'm in faerie rings and tower beds
'Don't report this,' three men said.
Books by many and by the dead
The King in Yellow, and the queen in red."

The King in Yellow, I always thought, was a pretty cool book. Or, at least, a pretty cool concept. Picture this: there is a play. For some reason, anyone who reads this play goes mad. Whether or not it has ever been performed, I don't know. But I do know most of the stories in this book have to do with the play, which we never get to read. It's one of those nifty little displacement thingies, like when Mary Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein told us he could not print the secret of life he used in his book, as it would be too terrible to recount. Hokey, but in a charming way. I started dreaming again after I read it. I still never completed the series of dreams it sparked initially. I had this series of dreams once where there was an old ornate hotel in New England, looking directly like something either out of the Mephisto Waltz, the Dunwich Horror, or even Rosemary's Baby. In it, there were a certain number of doors in this one hall. Each door potentially held this great horror behind it; something that would consume the universe, possibly. Every so many years, there would be born someone would could open one of the doors.I believe there were eight doors, and this happened every 25-50 years. This person would live normally until a certain point in their life, when they would be compelled, almost to the point of losing their humanity, to visit the inn and open the door. There would also be someone, usually someone near to them, who would be chosen similarly to try amd stop them. I was this person. The first and second time, I failed, but the doors when opened, only consumed the souls of the person that opened them and the lives of anyone else present. But, of course, this meant that each subsequent opening brought the catastrophic end closer. The third time, I succeeded; whether by bullets or by appealing to their humanity, I don't recall. The fourth time, I was the Chosen. I never quite got to the door; I woke up. But I've always wondered... after all, there were still at least four closed doors (others having opened them before my soul was brought into the reincarnation loop).

"Dead leaves always give up motion
And I no longer feel emotion
Where prophecy fails, the falling notion
'Don't report this, agents of fortune.'"

I owe an amount of thanks to the Blue Öyster Cult FAQ. It's hefty reading; only read the parts about Lovecraft and this song (I've hyperlinked them, or as near them as possible). They explain quite a bit about this whole Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence thing, which is not ETI like SETI but Intelligence like Military Intelligence (the saucer news); files stolen from the aliens by humans. Which is where the whole thing ties in with me watching this movie. Much of Lovecraft seems to refer to the Ones who Came Before, and popularly, this idea has been run with to the point where it's believed that aliens once walked the earth. Were these the three Gurus? Maybe something more to do with the three Men in Black. And perhaps the legendary Necronomicon is nothing more than Extra-Terrestrial documents fallen into the wrong hands, with words and concepts so alien that they twist men's minds. Lovecraft had some ideas dealing with existences in higher dimensions for his creatures; I'm reminded of the ship plans from the movie Contact. These are the things I like to think about when I think fancifully. I think I'll curl up with the book of Lovecraft short stories Joe lent me.
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