Child of the Air

I really didn't intend this Dreamwidth account to be quite so high-traffic, especially given how few people are reading it. That said, I seem to be coming up with a lot to say at the moment. And to be finding it an effective way to distract myself from a lot of other things I should be working on.

While discussing Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker last night with the friend who originally recommended I read it, I realized that, in a sense, Stapledon and HP Lovecraft were opposites. They were contemporaries, albeit on different sides of the Atlantic, and they both approached the same topic--the place of humanity in the vast universe that science had revealed--from essentially reversed points of view.

As I discussed in my previous post, Stapledon acknowledges the vastness of time and the universe, and the unimportance of humanity, but still creates a universe nearly vibrating with purpose. Intelligence is assumed to be the most important thing in the universe, and intelligences largely differ from each other by their place on an absolute moral scale of perfection.

The entire history of the cosmos is shown as the story of the moral advancement and psychic unity of all intelligences, and a "supreme moment" in which they make contact with their Creator. If Stapledon's "Star Maker" judges Its creations as inadequate and goes on to new creation, this only emphasizes the meaningfulness of our existence as an attempt to be worthy in the Star Maker's judgement.

The underlying theology of Stapledon's universe seems to be a natural extension of Enlightenment Deism and its Christian forebearers into the universe of Darwin, Einstein, and perhaps Marx. In his universe, there is a natural, self-evident path towards spiritual enlightenment and universal brotherhood for humanity to follow.

If it is our fate to perish on Neptune a billion years hence, in the premature death of the sun, we can at least take comfort in the fact that the march of progress toward the "supreme moment of the cosmos" goes on. And if, in that moment, our universe will be found wanting, we can at least take comfort that the Star Maker will learn from our universe and improve on it in Its next creation.

The sense of purpose that pervades Stapledon's universe is completely foreign to Lovecraft's. Lovecraft's writing faces the same huge cosmos and insignificance of human scales as Stapledon's. But, while Stapledon's writing responds to this by proposing that moral advancement and progress to higher levels of civilization can overcome the vastness of time and space, Lovecraft's writing emphasizes human smallness.

Lovecraft's universe, like Stapledon's, is populated by powerful, almost godlike beings capable of bridging the gulfs of interstellar space and geological time. However, Lovecraft's powerful beings did not come upon their power by climbing a ladder of moral enlightenment to universal consciousness: instead, they simply are. They have their own agendas, incomprehensible to humans, and they don't care or notice how their actions affect us.

This is a universe without purpose, or an inherent moral order for humanity to aspire to. There is no question of us--or of the universe and its life as a whole--being judged inadequate by Azathoth, because the concept of the "blind idiot God" judging us is incoherent.

The fundamental meaninglessness of existence is, as far as I can tell, the foundation of Lovecraft's brand of cosmic horror. And yet, it seems, it is also what makes his view of the universe more appealing to me. I can't bring myself to accept the Deism of Stapledon's "Star Maker" any more than I can accept the Ontological Proof. But a universe whose sole meaning is its own existence, that is something that feels true to me.