D/G/ATP/HPL

All the key references to Lovecraft in A Thousand Plateaus.

'Challenger, or what remained of him, slowly hurried towards the plane of consistency, following a bizarre trajectory with nothing relative about it. He tried to slip into an assemblage serving as a drum-gate, the particle Clock with its intensive clicking and conjugated rhythms hammering out the absolute: "The figure slumped oddly into a position scarcely human, and began a curious, fascinated sort of shuffle toward the coffin-shaped clock. ... The figure had now reached the abnormal clock, and the watchers saw through the dense fumes a blurred black claw fumbling with the tall, hieroglyphed door. The fumbling made a queer, clicking sound. Then the figure entered the coffin-shaped case and pulled the door shut after it ... The abnormal clicking went on, beating out the dark, cosmic rhythm which underlies all mystical gate-openings," - the Mechanosphere, or rhizosphere.'

'10, 000 BC: The Geology of Morals', 73-74 (quote from 'Through the Gates of the Silver Key')

'In one of his masterpieces, H. P. Lovecraft recounts the story of Randolph Carter, who feels his "self" reel and who experiences a fear wrose than that of annihilation: "Carters of forms both human and non-human, vertebrate and invertebrate, conscious and mindless, animal and vegetable. And more, there were Carters having nothing to do with earthly life, but moving outrageously amidst backgrounds of other planets and systems and galaxies and cosmic continua.. Merging with nothingness is peaceful oblivion; but to be aware of existence and yet to know that one is no longer a definite being distinguished from other beings," nor from all of the becomings running through us, "that is the nameless summit of horror and dread."'

'1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming Animal...', 240, quote ibid.

'The anomalous is neither an individual nor a species; it has only affects, it has neither familiar nor subjectified feelings, nor specific or significant characteristics. Human tenderness is as foreign to it as human classifications. Lovecraft applies the term "Outsider" to this thing of entity, the Thing, which arrives and passes at the edge, which is linear yet multiple, "teeming, swelling, foaming, spreading like an infectious disease, this nameless horror."'

'1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming Animal...', 245

'Lovecraft's hero encounters strange animals, but he finally reaches the ultimate regions of a Continuum inhabited by unnameable waves and unfindable particles.'

'1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming Animal...', 248

'It is in grandiose and simplified terms that Lovecraft tried to pronounce sorcery's final word: "Then the waves increased in strength and sought to improve his understanding, reconciling him to the multiform entity of which his present fragment was an infinitesimal part. They told him that every figure of space is but the result of the intersection by a plane of some corresponding figure of one or more dimension - as a square is cut from a cube, or a circle from a sphere. The cube and sphere, of three dimensions, are thus cut from corresponding forms of four dimensions, which men know only through guesses and dreams; and these in turn are cut from forms of five dimensions, and so on up to the dizzy and reachless heights of archetypal infinity." Far from reducing the multiplicities' number of dimensions to two, the plane of consistency cuts across them all, intersects them in order to bring into coexistence any number of multiplicities, with any number of dimensions. The plane of consistency is the intersection of all concrete forms. Therefore all becomings are written like sorcerers' drawings on this plane of consistency, which is the ultimate Door providing a way out for them.'

'1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming Animal...', 251, quote ibid.

Posted by mark k-p at August 2, 2004 09:07 AM