Wow, what a thought-provoking comment, Knygatin. Here are some thoughts.
I think you're right. The stories we read are written by people, so, no, we are not going to get something "completely unique, independent, and freestanding from Earthly impressions." For me, as a Christian, this is evident even in texts that I believe are divinely inspired (which doesn't mean "dictated," btw). Thus there are accounts of visions of the greatest realities in terms of high thrones, bizarre figures like flashing lightning in their movements, great wheels ("When they went, they went in any of their four directions without turning as they went"), a valley of skeletal remains that rustle, unite, take on flesh, and other showings of Rudolf Otto's
mysterium tremendum; but the hearer or reader is not confronted with the blankly alien and unassimilable. The Lakota seer Black Elk had a comparable vision in relatively recent historical times (see Neihardt's book -- and then Steltenkamp's!). These things use the language of myth, if you like. As someone said, the reason is the organ of truth and the imagination is the organ of meaning.
Lovecraft was often content to write horror episodes, in which the bottom line is that really nasty things happen to people's bodies. What happened to the victims in Antarctica was not all that different from having a ghastly industrial accident. But I think he occasionally reached after something more profound, e.g. in "The Dreams in the Witch-House," where, as I recall, he tries to suggest alien experience by means of lights and darkness, geometrical shapes, etc. (and a frightening rat-creature).
So I ask myself -- did Lovecraft often even
want the truly alien that you asked about? As a horror story writer, he prized the provoking of an intense -- but transient? -- effect on a reader. Right? Hence the prominent place, in his work, of horror. He was, in fact, pretty explicitly aiming at provoking a
familiar kind of experience -- he said, "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." And he was quite impressed by Charles Lamb's "Witches, and Other Night-Fears," from which he took a lengthy passage for use as an epigraph.
To be sure, the "unknown" and the "alien" are related. But Lovecraft was concerned with the familiar emotion of fear, as a storyteller. The question is: Did he work with the "unknown" and even the "alien" as
means to the end of provoking literary fear; or did he concern himself primarily with the unknown, the alien, the sublime, which have the corollary of inducing fear? I think these are distinct matters, but they might not have been distinct in Lovecraft's thinking when he set about writing. But in general I think the first alternative is probably the closer of the two, to what Lovecraft was up to -- that is, evoking a sense of the unknown and the alien as
means to evoking the thrill of fear, horror, terror.
I guess that's true for Clark Ashton Smith, too, but I don't know a lot about the man.
They don't really think that the ground of reality is numinous. Lovecraft, at least, would have thought Black Elk was a superstitious young Indian, a member of an inferior and doomed race, and that his Great Vision was hallucination explicable in physiological terms. Ruled out from the get-go would be the notion that the vision was a "revelation."
Lovecraft handles myth in two ways. In his
stories, myth may suggest or disclose something about reality that is edited out of daily existence so that life can be livable. In his thinking about life, though, "myth" is pretty much to be understood in terms of casual usage, as an untrue story -- as when we refer to "the myth of the Burning Times," meaning that the idea, once cherished by modern "witches," of nine million of their forbears having been burnt at the stake in Europe is an untrue story (as it is).
But some of us would say that
myth may be the form in which something very real had to present itself to our minds; we can "unpack" it in prosaic exposition, but that unpacking is less than the myth. Furthermore, some of us would say that myth became historical fact supremely in Christ.
References
C. S. Lewis: “For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.†See, for example, his discussion of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice here:
[
judithwolfe.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk]
Charles Lamb: “Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimaeras—dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies—may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition—but they were there before. They are transcripts, types—the archetypes are in us, and eternal. How else should the recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false come to affect us at all? Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury? O, least of all! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body—or without the body, they would have been the same. . . . That the kind of fear here treated is purely spiritual—that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless on earth, that it predominates in the period of our sinless infancy—are difficulties the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence.â€
—Charles Lamb: “Witches and Other Night-Fearsâ€
Burning Times:
[
www.theatlantic.com]
[
www.mtholyoke.edu]
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 6 Mar 20 | 10:19AM by Dale Nelson.