Blind Read Through: H.P. Lovecraft; Celephais, and The Silver Key

“I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars.” – Walt Whitman

“If youth knew, if age could.” – Sigmund Freud

“Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty.  Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”

Ah the origin story.  The tales where we uncover the history of the characters we follow, and find out what makes them tick; why they are the way they are.  Here we have the dreamlands.  What brings King Kuranes and Randolph Carter to the dreamlands?  What made King Kuranes a king??

Welcome back to another blind read!  Sorry for the limited blogs, but I’ve been extremely busy with writing and vacations (hey!  Vacations are work too!).  To make up for my truancy, I’ll be covering two short stories this week.  Celephais and The Silver Key.  But first, a brief synopsis:

Celephais:  Kuranes creates the city of Celephais while being a child dreamer.  Then as he grows old, he goes to the dreamlands and becomes a King over the city that he created (keeping it simple, but this is pretty much it!)

The Silver Key:  Randolph Carter used to dream all the time as a child.  He would travel constantly, but as the story begins Carter is 30 and has been unable to get to the dreams that he once had.  That is until he meets a man at Miskatonic University (there is a brief description of the events of “The Statement of Randolph Carter” [ Blind Read Through: H.P. Lovecraft; The Statement of Randolph Carter ]) which opens his eyes to the world that he once knew.  He starts to dream again and has a dream about his grandfather who tells him to go back to his childhood home, and look for a box in the attic.  He goes and finds a box with arabesque designs.  When he opens it he finds a parchment with symbols reminiscent to what he saw in the Necronomicon, and inside of the parchment is the eponymous key.  His dreams become more vivid and more reminiscent to what they once were.  He goes to the place of his childhood, and there he goes into a crevice, holding the key.  He then enters a dream state.  The story ends how Carter, beginning at the age of ten, when he found the crevice, knew glimpses of the future that he could not possibly know.  We also find that a narrator has been telling us this story, a narrator who is a king of a city that he hopes to see Carter in one day.

So there you have it!  The origin stories of Kuranes and Carter!  Celephais seems more like a fragment from “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”, than an actual story, just a little more illumination of Kuranes, whereas The Silver Key seems much more like a full story, not to mention, it looks like it’s continued on in the next story of the book “Through the Gates of the Silver Key”, even though that’s a collaboration.

There are some major links between these two stories, that both seem to link with Lovecraft’s personal life and ideals, and to the evolving dreamlands.  Take youth for example.  There is a romanticizing of what it means to be young in both of these stories.  The innocence, the ignorance.  It reminds me of all those horror stories back in the eighties (yes I know they continue on now, but that’s because it’s a trope.  I would be interested in researching this and finding out where it actually stems from), where the child could see or interact with the supernatural element, but the parent could not.  Seemingly because of the lost innocence, and lost open mindedness.  The stories deal with this in two different ways:

Celephais is a lamentation of the innocence.  Kuranes moves forward with his life, but regrets his decisions, and thus in “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” he reverts Celephais to a version of Cornwall, so that he may re-live his past experiences.

The Silver Key is an effort to spurn the vagaries of everyday life and get back the mystical nature of youth.  In fact Carter actually goes back in time and becomes himself as a 10 year old, to re-establish those experiences and memories.

This seems allegorical to Lovecraft himself (There is even a portion of “The Silver Key” where the narrator tells us that writing helps get back the mystery, through opening of one’s mind).  Both of these stories show that at some point, there was belief in wonder, belief in the mystical, that came from Lovecraft’s youth.  But then, like with many of us, life happens.  You grow up.  You have responsibilities that take away time and energy from the mysteries of life, making it easy to become bitter, hardened, or ignorant of the fantasy that can be apparent in life. I really felt as though Lovecraft was saying in these two stories that writing saved his life.  He was getting bogged down with the stresses of everyday life, bills, housing, love and intimacy, but when he was able to sneak away into the worlds that he created he no longer feared about these mundane issues.  He freed his mind in his fantastic worlds, just like Kuranes and Carter did in their dreaming.

Another interesting factor is drugs.  There is a finite stigma against all drugs, but there is a certain amount of research that proves that in controlled environments that drugs can be helpful.  For example LSD, and marijuana (or Hashish in Kuranes’ case).  In modern medicine, these drugs are used as a better alternative for treating things like PTSD and anxiety disorders, and at the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, they would be far more prevalent if Big Pharma didn’t get their hands into government pockets and stymie their progression.  In Lovecraft there is countless mentions of drugs helping dreamers get back to their “dream state”, of characters opening their eyes to the actual world that is around them, instead of believing and trusting in the veil.  I think this subject is probably better suited for an entire post later on, but I think it very worth noting here, because of the content of these stories and the stigma of drugs.  Is it considered juvenile?  Irresponsible, to take these drugs to try and open up your consciousness?  Is it ignoring your responsibilities or reverting, to try and recover youth?  Or is there in fact a veil, that needs to be punctured, and we must attempt this in any way possible?

What do you think?

Join me next time for a blind read of “Through the Gates of the Silver Key”!