Ecotheology and Love by Bahar Davary

Author:Bahar Davary
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2022-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Gates of Awakening

In some of his poems, Sepehri speaks of his childhood fears, perhaps associated with the horror stories he read or those narrated to him by adults.20 In spite of the apparent association between his description of fears and the works of writers like H. P. Lovecraft, there is no basis to claim that he had read H. P. Lovecraft’s (1890–1937) cosmic horror stories, particularly his dream cycle work, “The Silver Key” (1929) and its sequel, “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” (1932).21 Regardless of whether or not he had read Lovecraft, it is striking that he, like the protagonist of Lovecraft’s story, was in search of a “Silver Key” to the Gate of Dreams and remained uninspired by scientific learnings that took the “magic” out of life.

In Lovecraft’s stories, the magical “Silver Key” transported the protagonist from manhood to boyhood, taking him from the Snake-Den, where he stayed as a small boy, to a place outside of time, imbued with the fear of the unknown. Chris Pak describes this fear: “like Promethean fear, [it] fundamentally encodes an awareness of the asymmetric relationship between the human and non-human.”22 Nature, for Lovecraft, is “the other,” a source of existential horror.23 In contrast, Sepehri is so at home with nature that he hears “the heartbeat of the garden, and the sound of darkness, as it pours off a leaf. . . . The sneeze of water from each tiny pore of rock.”24 It is in nature that Sepehri locates God, as we see in the poem quoted in the beginning of this chapter, where Sepehri asks the God of the Plain of the Far Away Valleys and the God of the Plain of Nenuphar about the whereabouts of the Silver Key to the Gates of Awakening:

The gates of awakening were opened.

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