classes ::: H_P_Lovecraft, Fiction, Horror, chapter,
children :::
branches :::
see also :::

Instances - Classes - See Also - Object in Names
Definitions - Quotes - Chapters


object:1f.lovecraft - The Unnamable
author class:H P Lovecraft
subject class:Fiction
genre class:Horror
class:chapter


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
theologypreferably 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 Englands 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
didnt 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 enemys 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
shapesor absences of shapeswhich 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 didnt 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 mysticthat 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 peoples 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 couldnt 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 ancestors 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 thingno wonder sensitive students shudder at
the Puritan age in Massachusetts. So little is known of what went on
beneath the surfaceso 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 mens crushed
brains, but even that is a trifle. There was no beauty; no freedomwe
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 manthe thing with the blemished eyeand 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 tellthere 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.
It is all in that ancestral diary I found; all the hushed innuendoes
and furtive tales of things with a blemished eye seen at windows in the
night or in deserted meadows near the woods. Something had caught my
ancestor on a dark valley road, leaving him with marks of horns on his
chest and of ape-like claws on his back; and when they looked for
prints in the trampled dust they found the mixed marks of split hooves
and vaguely anthropoid paws. Once a post-rider said he saw an old man
chasing and calling to a frightful loping, nameless thing on Meadow
Hill in the thinly moonlit hours before dawn, and many believed him.
Certainly, there was strange talk one night in 1710 when the childless,
broken old man was buried in the crypt behind his own house in sight of
the blank slate slab. They never unlocked that attic door, but left the
whole house as it was, dreaded and deserted. When noises came from it,
they whispered and shivered; and hoped that the lock on that attic door
was strong. Then they stopped hoping when the horror occurred at the
parsonage, leaving not a soul alive or in one piece. With the years the
legends take on a spectral characterI suppose the thing, if it was a
living thing, must have died. The memory had lingered hideouslyall the
more hideous because it was so secret.
During this narration my friend Manton had become very silent, and I
saw that my words had impressed him. He did not laugh as I paused, but
asked quite seriously about the boy who went mad in 1793, and who had
presumably been the hero of my fiction. I told him why the boy had gone
to that shunned, deserted house, and remarked that he ought to be
interested, since he believed that windows retained latent images of
those who had sat at them. The boy had gone to look at the windows of
that horrible attic, because of tales of things seen behind them, and
had come back screaming maniacally.
Manton remained thoughtful as I said this, but gradually reverted to
his analytical mood. He granted for the sake of argument that some
unnatural monster had really existed, but reminded me that even the
most morbid perversion of Nature need not be unnamable or
scientifically indescribable. I admired his clearness and persistence,
and added some further revelations I had collected among the old
people. Those later spectral legends, I made plain, related to
monstrous apparitions more frightful than anything organic could be;
apparitions of gigantic bestial forms sometimes visible and sometimes
only tangible, which floated about on moonless nights and haunted the
old house, the crypt behind it, and the grave where a sapling had
sprouted beside an illegible slab. Whether or not such apparitions had
ever gored or smothered people to death, as told in uncorroborated
traditions, they had produced a strong and consistent impression; and
were yet darkly feared by very aged natives, though largely forgotten
by the last two generationsperhaps dying for lack of being thought
about. Moreover, so far as aesthetic theory was involved, if the
psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what
coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and
infamous a nebulosity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion,
itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature? Moulded by the dead brain of
a hybrid nightmare, would not such a vaporous terror constitute in all
loathsome truth the exquisitely, the shriekingly unnamable?
The hour must now have grown very late. A singularly noiseless bat
brushed by me, and I believe it touched Manton also, for although I
could not see him I felt him raise his arm. Presently he spoke.
But is that house with the attic window still standing and deserted?
Yes, I answered. I have seen it.
And did you find anything therein the attic or anywhere else?
There were some bones up under the eaves. They may have been what that
boy sawif he was sensitive he wouldnt have needed anything in the
window-glass to unhinge him. If they all came from the same object it
must have been an hysterical, delirious monstrosity. It would have been
blasphemous to leave such bones in the world, so I went back with a
sack and took them to the tomb behind the house. There was an opening
where I could dump them in. Dont think I was a foolyou ought to have
seen that skull. It had four-inch horns, but a face and jaw something
like yours and mine.
At last I could feel a real shiver run through Manton, who had moved
very near. But his curiosity was undeterred.
And what about the window-panes?
They were all gone. One window had lost its entire frame, and in the
other there was not a trace of glass in the little diamond apertures.
They were that kindthe old lattice windows that went out of use before
1700. I dont believe theyve had any glass for an hundred years or
moremaybe the boy broke em if he got that far; the legend doesnt
say.
Manton was reflecting again.
Id like to see that house, Carter. Where is it? Glass or no glass, I
must explore it a little. And the tomb where you put those bones, and
the other grave without an inscriptionthe whole thing must be a bit
terrible.
You did see ituntil it got dark.
My friend was more wrought upon than I had suspected, for at this touch
of harmless theatricalism he started neurotically away from me and
actually cried out with a sort of gulping gasp which released a strain
of previous repression. It was an odd cry, and all the more terrible
because it was answered. For as it was still echoing, I heard a
creaking sound through the pitchy blackness, and knew that a lattice
window was opening in that accursed old house beside us. And because
all the other frames were long since fallen, I knew that it was the
grisly glassless frame of that daemoniac attic window.
Then came a noxious rush of noisome, frigid air from that same dreaded
direction, followed by a piercing shriek just beside me on that
shocking rifted tomb of man and monster. In another instant I was
knocked from my gruesome bench by the devilish threshing of some unseen
entity of titanic size but undetermined nature; knocked sprawling on
the root-clutched mould of that abhorrent graveyard, while from the
tomb came such a stifled uproar of gasping and whirring that my fancy
peopled the rayless gloom with Miltonic legions of the misshapen
damned. There was a vortex of withering, ice-cold wind, and then the
rattle of loose bricks and plaster; but I had mercifully fainted before
I could learn what it meant.
Manton, though smaller than I, is more resilient; for we opened our
eyes at almost the same instant, despite his greater injuries. Our
couches were side by side, and we knew in a few seconds that we were in
St. Marys Hospital. Attendants were grouped about in tense curiosity,
eager to aid our memory by telling us how we came there, and we soon
heard of the farmer who had found us at noon in a lonely field beyond
Meadow Hill, a mile from the old burying-ground, on a spot where an
ancient slaughterhouse is reputed to have stood. Manton had two
malignant wounds in the chest, and some less severe cuts or gougings in
the back. I was not so seriously hurt, but was covered with welts and
contusions of the most bewildering character, including the print of a
split hoof. It was plain that Manton knew more than I, but he told
nothing to the puzzled and interested physicians till he had learned
what our injuries were. Then he said we were the victims of a vicious
bullthough the animal was a difficult thing to place and account for.
After the doctors and nurses had left, I whispered an awestruck
question:
Good God, Manton, but what was it? Those scarswas it like that?
And I was too dazed to exult when he whispered back a thing I had half
expected
Noit wasnt that way at all. It was everywherea gelatina slimeyet
it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory. There
were eyesand a blemish. It was the pitthe maelstromthe ultimate
abomination. Carter, it was the unnamable!
Return to The Unnamable


questions, comments, suggestions/feedback, take-down requests, contribute, etc
contact me @ integralyogin@gmail.com or via the comments below
or join the integral discord server (chatrooms)
if the page you visited was empty, it may be noted and I will try to fill it out. cheers



--- OBJECT INSTANCES [0]


--- PRIMARY CLASS


chapter

--- SEE ALSO


--- SIMILAR TITLES [0]


1f.lovecraft - The Unnamable
select ::: Being, God, injunctions, media, place, powers, subjects,
favorite ::: cwsa, everyday, grade, mcw, memcards (table), project, project 0001, Savitri, the Temple of Sages, three js, whiteboard,
temp ::: consecration, experiments, knowledge, meditation, psychometrics, remember, responsibility, temp, the Bad, the God object, the Good, the most important, the Ring, the source of inspirations, the Stack, the Tarot, the Word, top priority, whiteboard,

--- DICTIONARIES (in Dictionaries, in Quotes, in Chapters)



--- QUOTES [0 / 0 - 0 / 0] (in Dictionaries, in Quotes, in Chapters)



KEYS (10k)


NEW FULL DB (2.4M)


*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***


--- IN CHAPTERS (in Dictionaries, in Quotes, in Chapters)



0

   1 Fiction






change font "color":
change "background-color":
change "font-family":
change "padding": 108926 site hits