Nameless Dread
One of the things I both love and am frustrated by in Lovecraft’s work is that tendency towards ‘things too terrible to describe’. I know from my own experience that he’s right, in that the nameless dreads are always the scariest ones, but as a reader, I want to know a bit more about how dreadful it is, because I want to be entertained, not driven mad with terror.
The craziest forms of terror have so much to do with uncertainty, for me. Give me a problem, a challenge, a wound, anything, and I will endeavour to deal with it. Give me the possibility that in a week’s time I’m going to be put through something awful, and then I really suffer. In face of the uncertainty, I can imagine all kinds of terrible things, and I have a really good imagination. One really terrible thing that I actually have to go through is often less bad than all the imaginary things I am capable of doing to myself.
Name the dread and it’s not quite so scary.
Humans like to be able to name and quantify things. I think it gives us an illusion of control. Once we know what it’s called, or where it came from, a thing feels a bit more manageable. Having terrible weather events? Well, that’s climate change, isn’t it, so we’re all sorted, know what that means. Only we don’t. Calling the nameless dread in the cellar ‘Bob’ does not do much to reduce the chances that it’s going to open a portal to hell and eat your soul. But ‘Bob’ is labelled and feels like it’s under our control, and not really a nameless dread at all.
We stick little labels on the kinds of human behaviour that destroys and defiles. The labels don’t actually do anything, and only come into play after the event. Yes, it’s all well and good calling someone a psychopath after they’ve been out to play with an axe, but it doesn’t change what they’ve done. I think we’re prone to creating illusions of control and influence in this way, and it doesn’t help.
There are a lot of nameless dreads out there. The unknown, unimaginable things that might be waiting to tear your life apart. You don’t need Lovecraft’s Ancient Ones to drive yourself mad with fear. An hour or two of listening to and thinking about news broadcasting really should be sufficient.
What scares me most about people is how complacent we get. We name our nameless dreads and then we just assume they’re going to play nicely. Climate change. Global warming. Extinction. Deforestation. Pollution. They are bigger than we like to think. Nastier. Less understood, less known than we like to believe. We might be better off imagining that we have indeed unleashed a horde of ravening elder gods upon the world, at least that way we might be frightened into action rather than doing our best impression of a zombie apocalypse.
