NYC Meditations, Part 1: Lovecraft vs. Rilke

Written from a steaming apartment in North Manhattan with a headache and a plan.

A writer of the fantastic (and one of the greatest), [Lovecraft] pursued racism brutally to its most profound source: fear. His own life, in this regard, makes a valuable example. A provincial gentleman convinced of the superiority of his anglo-saxon origins, he never had anything more than a passing contempt for other races. His time in the rougher areas of New York was to change everything. These strange creatures became rivals, neighbours, enemies who were probably his superiors in terms of brute-force. Thus, in a progressive delirium of masochism and of terror, came the demand that they must be destroyed.

As I set out to make my long-awaited escape from the tofu-white confines of Boulder to the Big Apple, I fully expected the shock of the melting pot to push me into the same fear-based karate stance that knocked Lovecraft into paranoid states of horror-writing. Yet if I bear any hatred towards any element of The City, it's got to be this infernal humid HEAT, so heart-stoppingly ubiquitous I'm tempted to call it The Sixth Borough. It's like smog and slog have decided to have a footrace to see who becomes Key Human Oppressor for August 2005, and smog tripped and fell, giving slog the gold. Sweating, drooling, dripping, unbearable.

On the plane today I began reading a translation of Rilke's masterful Duino Elegies; if this guy's not a magico-tantric symbolist bad-ass, then I'm a committed Baptist with a cane made of Jesus' left femur. Rilke was constantly regarding external phenomena as symbols for internal realities, so much so that a "relaxing" nature walk was to him another challenge to redefine new external objects (a tree, a waterfall, squirrels in heat) as internal processes and patterns of intuition (this how I understand it at last).

In short, Rilke couldn't merely walk through a foreign landscape -- Manhattan, for instance -- and just see scenery, new experiences, people and places, exotic locales, interesting boutiques (to say nothing of predatory threats from other ethnicities, i.e. Lovecraft). He was cursed to process every location as a stage play of something going on, or potentially going on, within his own being. Rilke:

The Spanish landscape... pushed this tendency of mine to extremes; because there the external thing itself -- tower, mountain, bridge -- already possessed the unheard of, unsurpassable intensity of those inner equivalents by means of which it might have been represented. Everywhere appearance and vision came, as it were, together in the object, in every one of them a whole inner world was exhibited...

Pity poor Rilke had he lived to see the Manhattan landscape of the 21st century, especially today with its Heat, its glittering towers, SoHo, Tribeca, the MTA, the Village, Ground Zero and all the rest. 80 years ago, it drove Lovecraft to create long works of hate-ridden horror fiction: who knows what magnificent visions the more universalizing Rilke would have dreamt.