The Womb of Time by Brian Stableford

Author:Brian Stableford [Stableford, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction, Horror
Amazon: B00HMNP05S
Published: 2013-12-31T06:00:00+00:00

If I command him to forget all this, he probably will, Halsted thought. I could wipe the memory clean, and he would never know that he had humiliated himself before the Oxford man he put so firmly in his place while the sun shone. Oxford, of course, would never forgive me for such kindness, but hospitality has its unwritten rules…

Aloud, he said: “If you dipped into De Quincey’s essays wisely, Professor Rylands, you’ll doubtless have lingered over ‘The Palimpsest of the Human Brain’, for that’s what concerns us now. The point is to wipe the precious vellum of your mind clean of the Romantic dross that it vomited forth a few minutes ago, so that tomorrow’s experience might be inscribed on a fresh page, ready for proper illumination. We can only hide the nightmare away, rather than obliterating all trace of it forever, but that is the whole science and artistry of the human mind. That is our triumph over Nature in the raw, which renders us heir to all the terrors and panics that lurk in the darkness, on the edges of perception. The point is not that such horrors can always resurface, in response to the right trigger, but that they will not surface if we carry them gently and wisely, taking due precaution. We have the ability, and the responsibility, to repress all that is too uncomfortable for consciousness to bear: to imprison it in the unconscious mind, where it may slither and stir to its heart’s content, but where its tentacles can gain no purchase on our minds or our flesh, provided that we maintain our mental and physical health, our mens sana in corpore sana.

“The truth is, I think, Professor Rylands, that Carl Jung is right: that if consciousness arises in the world as a tabula rasa, a palimpsest, it is because our brains have been trained by evolution to repress the heritage of the flesh into a collective unconscious, where it can only trouble us obliquely, in dreams, religion and visionary art. That is our triumph, our victory over circumstance, our progress to civilization. Primitive humans—the first to warrant that latter title, by virtue of being endowed with consciousness—were not so well insulated from the fantasies of their flesh and the burdens of their evolutionary past, but they defeated them, by means of myth and symbol, and the relentless pressure of censorship. By force of the staff and the sword, the crown and the cup—which is to say, agriculture and ironwork, government and artifice—our ancestors repressed that which was too terrible to name, too horrible of which to speak…and we can do likewise, if we try.

“It is, after all, our duty as intellectuals to try harder than common men to wring sanity from confusion, just as it is the responsibility of artists to transmute the base metal of our nightmares into golden dreams, and the responsibility of apothecaries to discover instruments to soothe our pains and heal our wounds. Cthulhu can never be entirely erased, but he can be compelled to lie dormant, for centuries, millennia and eons, if not forever.

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