I have during the last week tried to write a reply, but it gets too involved, and I therefore cannot post it. I suggest instead that the discussion about Smith's protagonists and cosmic perspective continues, and perhaps someone else meets Dale's argument above.

Knygatin Wrote:
---------------------------------------
> I hear what you said Dale, I understand your
> Christian perspective, so you need not repeat it.
> It is the antithesis from what people on this
> site, readers of Clark Ashton smith, are really
> interested in.

Kyngatin: That is an utterly ridiculous generalization. So, for the purpose of staying on point here (IOW, your comfort zone), I suppose we should consider that Smith's imagination, on a psychological level, rebelled against moral concerns and ethical thinking, like HPL's. How liberating! Perhaps his interest in questions of cosmological, biological, and anthropological origins (the three big bangs) did little to stir his amoral genius. Although, he did say he believed in the probability of a metaphysical basis for evil. Why, btw, should I care what "people on this site...are really interested in"? After all, I agree with Dale's points even though they were not Christocentric in substance. No less imaginative an author than Walter de la Mare would have instantly dismissed your inference that the imaginative faculties of humans in general and artists in particular gain intensity, by a process similar to osmosis, when divorced from any sense of human significance. No doubt that explains why Henry S. Whitehead's weird fiction isn't cosmic. Or is it?

jkh

I'd like to add that on top of CAS' interest (and supposed belief) in demons and a metaphysical basis for evil, he also seemed a bit moralistic when compared to H. P. Lovecraft, M. R. James, W. H. Hodgson, and other famous weird writers, in that his stories often reward arrogance, greed, and cruelty with unambiguously terrible fates. Just ask Avoosl, Ralibar, Nathaire, Namirha, etc. Not that his stories don't have that cosmic perspective I described earlier, and Sawfish made a good point that his tales are more cautionary than moralizing, but there's no denying that the fate of Avoosl was presented as justly deserved, whereas the people of Lovecraft's Sarnath only went extinct many ages after their ancestors' long-forgotten crime.

I do think some of CAS' fiction and poetry can feel tedious in their misanthropy, but he certainly wasn't disinterested in the human experience, given his many friendships, visits with fans, and a successful marriage. Not to mention his personal collection of books, which was mostly realistic, romantic, and non-fictional rather than weird or cosmic.

I might have rambled a bit, but my point is that CAS wasn't the detached and isolated alien he might have presented himself as, and plenty of unique literature is derived from the mundane world of human interests, including weird literature, such as Whitehead's realistic Voodoo stuff and the highly romantic King in Yellow. Right now I'm reading Haruki Murakami's Norweigian Wood, a novel that offers many imaginative thoughts while exploring political, dramatic, and psychological interests.



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 20 Oct 21 | 12:43AM by Hespire.

Quote:

Hespire
Right now I'm reading Haruki Murakami's Norweigian Wood, a novel that offers many imaginative thoughts while exploring political, dramatic, and psychological interests.

Regrettably, I'm going to diverge here a bit. If anyone wants further discussion on this point of departure, I'm certainly willing to transfer it to another OT thread. Or stay here; it doesn't matter to me.

I've read some Murakami a few years ago. What little I can remember is that he injects his own ideas about the motivations for various events in his narrative, bringing what I see as useful insights into the human condition--how/why people act as they do in varied circumstances.

And he seems to bridge the differences between Japanese and mainstream western thought on occasion, bringing yet further food for thought.

So his stories are vehicles for an intelligent observer of human nature to make sense of events. In this way they are potentially instructive--presenting the reader with new ideas to consider and to accept or reject--rather than simply entertaining.

It struck me that two modern western writers, Michel Houellebeq and Hunter S. Thompson, do the same. Both see the world as highly irrational and at present socially diseased. In Houellebeq's case, he sits above it, to give himself a refuge--it's irony.

Thompson was I believe, a deeply idealistic person driven to excesses, knowingly as a mode of escape from the same basic reality that Houellebeq sees. Instead of irony, it's excess.

Two individualistic thinkers seeing the same things, but finding different ways to attempt to live with them.

--Sawfish

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