Something About Maps

Not everything I ever published was poetry.  When I first began to work for Waldenbooks after our return from Europe, I managed a store in Norwalk CT.  There I worked with Sam Gafford, a devoted fan of H.P. Lovecraft.  Sam and a few of his friends published books - pamphlets really, under the sign of Hobgoblin Press.  Sam asked me to write something for one of their publications, "a guide to the WORLDS OF H.P. LOVECRAFT" and I am sharing that with you today.  You have to remember that in 1983, there were no word processors, no computers, no scanners or printers, no Photoshop.  So this 12 page book of maps related to the writings of H. P. Lovecraft was more of an effort than readers now can imagine.  And Sam was generous enough to share two of those pages to my little essay on maps and Lovecraft.  Sam is still around, living in his (well, Lovecraft's) beloved Rhode Island and a published author.  (I friended him on Facebook, naturally.)  Kudos to him for keeping interest in the weird fiction genre alive and here is my small contribution.  See if you can find the references to two other authors I was reading at the same time -  Jorge Luis Borges and Carlos Castaneda .  By the way, I have 2 of 25 copies of this super rare book, so if there are any Lovecraft fans out there . . . . .


Something about Maps

To journey over all the universe in a map, without expense and fatigue of traveling, without suffering the inconviences of heat, cold, hunger , and thirst . . . "   Miguel de Cervantes; Don Quixote

Ah maps! I am a great lover of maps like Conrad, who related the story of poring over a map of Africa and pointing to the blank sections marked 'unexplored' declaring, I want to go there!  Maps provide portals of visualization through which we readers may pass into the interior realms of dream, mythos and tale.  They form a vantage point from which to orient ourselves in the labyrinth of prose.  H.P. Lovecraft had a keen interest in geography, as we learn from correspondence and his stories themselves. He, of course, also had a precises prose style that readily lends itself to the cartographic.

Lovecraft mentions maps explicitly in several places in his writings including the famous sketch of Innsmouth made by the grocery clerk and used by the narrator for; firstly, his daytime circumambulations, secondly in his escape during the hellish night when the denizens of the decayed city and off-lying reef come searching for him.

"Warning me that many of the street signs were down, the youth drew for my benefit a rough but ample and painstaking sketch map of the town's salient features.  After a moment's study I felt sure that it would be of great help, and pocketed it with profuse thanks"  Shadow Over Innsmouth

Lovecraft's sense of place, however, is implicit throughout his writings - from the elegant, decaying streets of his kindred city of Providence to the hardscrabble, Mi-Go haunted mountains of Vermont -  Lovecraft clearly had a sense of the glacier-worn, ancient, early settled and still haunted nature of New England.  His writings about such "real" cities as Providence and Boston, as well as his "unreal" hamlets, towns and lonely burgs - Innsmouth, Arkham, and Dunwich to name a few - infuse even the familiar cartography of New England with haunting mystery and sinister foreboding.

"West of Arkham the hills rise wild and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut.  There are dark narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the glint of sunlight." The Colour Out of Space

But Lovecraft's works do more than colour our sense of the actual place, they also pitch us headlong into fantastic worlds that have few parallels in modern literature.  The 'Dream-World' map included here is one.  Constructed over dozens of stories, Lovecraft slowly, meticulously, brilliantly created a world of dreams.  In some places it is mentioned only in passing - a reference of place: "It is said that in Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Shai, no man may kill a cat . . . " while in other places it is the central component in the tale telling: " Out of the South it was that the White Ship used to come when the moon was full and high in the heavens . . . One night I espied upon the deck a man . . . Many times afterward I saw him under the full moon, and ever did he beckon me."  Beckon us indeed!  And of course, I need only mention Lovecraft'  tremendous Dream Quest of the Unknown Kadath which begins auspiciously enough with a dream of a place far away - "three times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvelous city . . ."

The quote that heads these notes alludes to the ease with which one may travel via a map.  And Yuggoth, which is included herein, is an excellent example.  For as Henry Akeley warns us . . .

"To visit Yuggoth would drive any weak man mad - yet I am going there.  The black rivers of pitch that flow under those mysterious cyclopean bridges - things built by some elder race extinct and forgotten before the beings came to Yuggoth from the ultimate voids - ought to be enough to make any man a Dante or a Poe if he can keep sane long enough to tell what he has seen.  Whisperer In Darkness

But are we truly so safe in our cozy studys poring over our Arkham House texts, our 'Lovecraft Studies", our dream - and tale - inspired sketch and maps such as these?  As these maps and other examples which abound around us - both good and bad - demonstrate, we readers can never fully come away from the text unmoved.  We ingest the master's text and become, each in our own way, magician's apprentices.  That ultimately is the glory of the written text over other more 'passive' forms of media (thinking of TV and motion pictures primarily). Reading causes each of us to retell ourselves the story in our own lexicon of images, memories and myths.  the Lovecrafts may make the perilous trip to Yuggoths and 'return to tell what he has seen' for us but we readers take our own risks in dreaming, sketching, studying, and yes, even mapping what we hear and read.

"To journey over all the Universe in a map" may not entail hunger, thirst, heat and cold, but there are dangers there as well as we experience new images in our dreams, new 'memories' in our observations, new ways of understanding the common ordinary world and the world that lies beyond it.  This is the great risk and reward of human creativity, of which Lovecraft's opera is one facet and this little selection of maps is a smaller facet still.  But as each of the smallest facets of a gem reflects the entire stone, so these maps reflect the whole.  And what a dream-drenched, star-veiled, frighteningly beautiful, infinite-boundering whole it is!