Jawbone

by Mónica Ojeda

That chapter you made us read from Moby Dick, about the whiteness of the whale, was so important for both Fernanda and me. All the signs we had overlooked in the stories and novels we had read suddenly acquired new meaning: from Melville’s enormous whale to Poe’s and Lovecraft’s Antarctic explorations; the Arctic, where Shelley’s creature escapes; the man whom Chambers describes as a “plump white grave-worm”; Bram Stoker’s White Worm; Machen’s white people; the white color of ghosts and corpses … The totality and immensity of the void are condensed in that maximum light that doesn’t refract any color. Lovecraft’s mysticism has to do with the void; that’s how white horror is related to cosmic horror. What I like most about his stories is that his gods—his ancient, primordial beings, his enormous creatures more powerful than the human race can imagine—are nothing at all like the gods of the religions we know. They have no human characteristics, therefore, they are terrible, but not because they represent evil. They aren’t Beelzebub or Lucifer. They aren’t malevolent. They do not exist to tempt us or to drag us toward the darkness, like in Christian mythology in which we are the center of creation. What’s interesting about Lovecraft’s Elder Things is that they cannot be understood within that framework. When the idea of good and evil disappears, all that’s left is nature and its violence. I think if there’s only one God, I mean, one Elder Thing, an eternal, omnipotent creatur...