“for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.” (The Call of Cthulhu, H.P. Lovecraft)
“He saw, saw a landscape, a tropical swamp under a vaporous sky, moist, luxuriant, and monstrous, a sort of primitive wilderness of islands, morass, and alluvia estuaries; ... saw the eyes of a lurking tiger between the gnarled stems of a bamboo thicket; and felt his hear pound with horror and mysterious desire.” (Tod in Venedig, Thomas Mann)
“In Death in Venice, Mann stresses one of the most disturbing findings of bacteriology, the discovery that disease-causing agents are alive. He uses terms like “the terrible vibroid bacteria” and “causative organisms,” which can be found in the press and in medical journals, but he also anthropomorphizes the comma bacillus, inviting readers to interpret it as a self-willed, avenging force: “it almost seemed as though the pestilence had been reinvigorated, as if the tenacity and fecundity of its microscopic agitators [Erreger] had been re-doubled” (DV, 54). Mann’s choice of overripe strawberries as the vehicle through the disease penetrates Aschenbach again reveals his determination to make the story work both on realistic and mythological levels. While the “blackening corpse” of “a woman who sold vegetables” makes the infection plausible based on contemporary scientific findings, the “overripe and soft” fruit, suggesting an eroticism past its prime, implies that Aschenbach dies as much from his own fermenting libido as from a foreign disease.” (Membranes, Laura Otis)
The third chapter of Michel Houllebecq’s work on Lovecraft has been ironically named Holocaust, a brilliant but not so deserving dissection of Lovecraft’s vitriolic racism, paranoia, and his consistent polytics towards absolute closure and overhealth. Houllebecq correctly links Lovecraft’s paranoia to an extraordinary immaculate (a hygiene-complex drifting out of a theo-political program set to mass-exterminate all beings, to deflects all traces of openness to inside, producing a total closure or to be, exact a fully economical openness) mode of monotheism, associates his stories to something old, forgotten and not so clean -- a ritualistic revival of the Zoroastrian germ-cell of monotheism, the already-sabotaged purity of the Aryans. [Airiia-: Ariya-: Ērān: Iran or Aryānām dahyuš, the realm of Aryans]
Hâshem-e Razi [1], the Iranian ethnographer, discusses that before the Aryans settled in what later called Iran plateau, the land was not empty; it was occupied by mysterious people -- with outlandishly complex beliefs -- who knew nothing but demons, Daivas and Druj (also Druga: The Mother of Abominations). Everything was regarded as an avatar of horror, of a radical outside; even the fertilizing forces of nature such as winds, rain, thunder, soil and growth were Daivas; the Life was Druj itself. The entire universe was soaked by horror; death and its necrocratic terrors were merely a joke, a perverse relief (more as repression than alleviation). They believed that everything is external to survival, not merely anthropomorphic survival but survival in general. The Aryans who settled in Iran plateau were exceptionally flexible to their environment; ‘flexibility’ was the central element of their circumspect politics for both survival and keeping their genetic purity intact, two most crucial objectives which lead them to migrate and spread along a long path from Asia to Europe. It was not, in fact, their desire for peace that always pushed the Aryans to be open to new people especially the original populations of the regions they occupied, but the fear of their doom, their monomania for a noble perfectionist purity, hygiene and exclusion which should be persevered by any means possible, even by inclusion of other populations. For the Aryans everything ran at the edge of ‘survival’ which should be maintained through ‘closure as an intelligently appropriated openness’, a flexible but severely restricted and economical openness whose limits are mapped by affordance: “I am open to you as long as I can afford You, and what you bring to me.”
The most effective way to survive and save the purging purity of the race -- to live unharmed -- was blending in with the crowd. This is was the stratagem of the Aryans. (Bad luck for the Aryans who settled in Iran plateau, they made themselves open to the Z-crowd.) When you open the door for someone, anyone can come in; and once they enter, they unlock doors (holey space) of their own.
Following this stratagem, Cyrus could expand the Persian Empire with no real trouble (except for northern nomads who were fiercely resisted the outbreak of this new soft domination); he conquered Babylonia (Babel) and Egypt, and many other territories one after another, attached them to this still-larval Empire whose growth was dangerously rapid, and was trying to assimilate the whole Asia, Africa and Europe by the single formula of initial conflict and then, final peace with the enemy after conquering their land by believing in their beliefs and affirming their request to be free in ‘the realm of Aryans’.
The people living in Iran Plateau before the Aryans arrive were adept sorcerers and necromancers, for them neither life was survival nor was survival identified as ‘surviving from death’. Survival was not a reactionary process to the (Un)life, out of which death’s inevitability rises and unfolds through the process of live-ing from the outset to the end; or when death does not only become a terminus-event but a propulsive and conducting power which starts to work even before one begins to live (death becomes the director of one’s life). For this sorcerous crowd, survival was not supposed to hold death back as long as possible but feeding the (Un)life; survival was a sorcerous ritual to feed the Outside, to feed what is external to ‘the so-called life as live-ing’. Living was itself a feeding project. They believed that survival feeds an unthinkable Abomination, an ultimate outsider (on which, ironically, survival tries to germinate) called Druj; the longer you endure, the more you feed the Outside (interlocking with the outside on the plane of strategy.) As adept-sorcerers, they easily grasped their unique commonality with the Aryans, an obsession with survival. The newcomers were eagerly welcomed; the Aryans’ paranoia for purity was a perfect carrier for their sorcerous experiments whose sole inclination was communicating with the Outside; the Aryans were a well-guaranteed vector for dispatching their experiments to the future, developing them unnoticed, legally, publicly and popularly. Once the Aryans developed their Zoroastrian belief systems, these sorcerous people merged with the new religion as mages, the cultists of Zoroaster, camouflaged themselves as the overenthusiastic exhorters of Zoroastrianism; with all powers they had, they started to strengthen and intensify the passion of the Aryans and their monotheistic religion for survival, aiding them to construct a more restricted closure or more precisely, a more economical openness; since while for the Aryans, openness was knitted on the political side of ‘being open to’ (I am open to you ‘as long as’ ...), for them -- or now the Z. crowd -- the radical openness happened on the plane of ‘being opened’, the polytics of ‘being lacerated, cracked and laid open’ which exploits survival as a parasitic agency, and germinates external to human subjectivity and organic machinery, yet strategically participates with them. Closure or affordance-based openness could be the most attractive prey (A Good Meal) for the butchering lines of openness which reach anthropomorphic security network from the Outside as something abominable, for they reinvent openness as ‘being laid, cracked, butchered open’, an irreversible process of opening, so radical and tenacious in its intention to open You up which should be called the butchery of the outside on anthropomorphism. Simply, you cannot be radically open to the outside for the certain subjective / organic obstacles, but you can invite (seduce) the outside to open you up.
If Lovecraft’s stories are shockingly identical to Vendidad’s [2] influential demon-paranoia (the Zoroastrian book of anti-DRUJ laws) -- the book which unleashed the polytics of the Z. crowd within the reality and practice of everyday life -- it is because they both pass an intensive line coming directly from the infested germ-cell of monotheism, diagramming the initial and ongoing sabotage running through monotheism programmed to introduce all monotheistic populations to the Outside via its butchering lines of openness which are not so pleasant for anthropomorphic ‘Survival Economy’, not so clean for human communication relied on affordance and capacity. The Z. Polytics: let’s make it attackable from the Outside.
To this extent, the question is: Does the paranoia that Lovecraft vividly diagrams in his stories have only one side, the artless side that Deleuze and Guattari show us in the most elaborated way, or it has also another edge with a dominant function for cutting itself open, reinventing itself as an ultimate polytics for communicating with the Outside -- a schizotrategic two-edged blade?
The question will be followed in the updated version of A Good Meal which will be posted here soon.
NOTES
[1] Hashem-e Razi, The Religion and Culture of Ancient Iran (pre-Zoroastrian era), Sokhan Publisher, 2003. Also: Hashem-e Razi, The Cult of Mages (A Study on Religions of Ancient Iran), Sokhan Publisher, 2002.
[2] Hashem-e Razi calls Vendidad the most horrific book humans could write and practically follow. See Vandidad (Vi.daevo.dâta) translated from Pahlavi by Hashem-e Razi, Sokhan Publisher.
Vi: anti-
Daevo: female Daiva (referring to Druj)
Dâta: from Dâtik (Law esp. divine laws)