On the northeastern borders of Vidyapith, close by the dairy complex where the iron gates opened into the Gurupalli section, there was a long two-storeyed building nestled between the campus groves. Like all Vidyapith buildings, it too had a name – they called it Sarada Sadan. It used to house the higher secondary students of class 11 and 12, and back in the autumn of 2008, I was one of the boys who lived there.
Sarada Sadan was different from the other hostels of Vidyapith. It was situated on the very edge of the students’ stamping grounds, perched on the Vidyapith boundary wall, adjacent to the haystacks of the dairy-poultry farm, a stone’s throw from the Monk’s Quarters and the work education sheds – the oldest buildings of Vidyapith, built over the remains of forgotten army camps from the War. Whereas the other hostel buildings – even Matri Sadan – afforded a view of the Vidyapith mainland, Sarada Sadan looked without; the eastern windows opened to the hazy horizon beyond the rail lines, and to our north in the distance were the old trees of Gurupalli.
At some point in 2008, I happened to own a copy of John Gribbin’s In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat, a book that introduces the reader to the world of quantum reality. Reading the book was a watershed event in my life. Back then, our physics and chemistry lessons had begun to discuss the atom and what lay within it – to the extent that is possible for school students to understand. The odd mysteries of the subatomic world had a fascinating quality – even for those of us who were not particularly good students. It was at this crucial time that I read In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat, and it sent shivers down my mind.
The way we grow up in the mundane world does not prepare us to accept or even comprehend the twisted shadow-dance that blinks in and out of existence at the subatomic recesses of the universe. John Gribbin’s book, in discussing quantum physics, said a few words also about the relativistic view of the world – the one envisioned by Albert Einstein. Gribbin tried to explain how the quantum approach and the relativity approach are apparently non-compatible, and how the quantum approach has been used to explain the science of the very small, i.e, atoms and their parts, whereas the relativity approach has been used to explain the science of the very large, i.e. stars and other astronomical objects.
To the hungry mind of a sixteen-year-old, all this was phantasmic food steeped in wonder and unimaginable ethereality. I did not kid myself that I was grasping it all; in fact, it was precisely because my mind reeled at the unnaturality of it that I was somewhat confident of not misunderstanding it. One thing I understood is that the rules of the universe are more slippery than they seem. Reality plays out in smoke and mirrors, like a game of hide and seek between dimensions and probabilities, is and is-not, and what is beyond sight may well be beyond existence. Consciousness was not a detached factor but an integral element in the process being observed. We were all parts in our own experiments.
Reading Gribbin’s book changed my worldview forever. It left me with a strong sense of the infinitesimal place of humankind in the universe, an understanding of how nanoscopically small we were in the cosmic scheme of things. I remember that I spent days – perhaps over a week – in a psychological haze, walking in step with the implications that unfolded in my mind. But one night something happened that was out of concord with this spirit of wonderment. What happened that night, I can only name as fear.
It was late, almost about midnight. I was returning to my room from someplace else, I do not exactly remember the place – perhaps it was the study hall below. On my right, the corridor looked out at Matri Sadan across the garden, and the crowns of dark trees loomed beyond, under the quiet, starry sky. The hostel was asleep, silent. I love watching the sky, so I stopped to gaze up for a few moments. It has to be borne in mind that I am not afraid of the dark, or the night, or of ghosts. I prefer the dark; it was not different back then, I regularly used to frequent dark roads in the campus for recreation. Being unnerved by simply ‘the night’ is not what happened now.
As I looked at the sky, something passed over my mind and I was suddenly taken over by a hollow feeling of being small and alone, and the night sky seemed to loom overhead with an overpowering presence. It felt like the dark entirety of space pressed down on earth with unthinkable vastness, with immense stars hanging light-years away, gleaming across cold, hoary miles, black space encircling on all sides with harrowing omnipresence. I felt as if the hostel corridor hung over some ghostly precipice at the edge of sanity and the universe, the building and garden mere footsteps away from crumbling into some dark ravine of oblivion. It is difficult to put into language the heady sensation that came over me in that surreal moment – strings of words only try to explain, and probably fail. I was surprised at my own fear – I’d never been afraid of the dark, and who has heard of people being scared by the sky? But there it was. I did not feel comfortable standing out in the open – in sight of the sky – any longer; my room was close; I hurried inside.
In 2020, I am reading H. P. Lovecraft, and the experience reminded me of this old happening from years ago. Lovecraft is legendary in horror writing, especially renowned for his myth-making and world-building, and distinctive language and atmosphere of his tales. Now I understand the reason his admirers are practically a cult. Having read a few of his most acclaimed stories, Lovecraft strikes me as both unique and important. I expected him to be dated, but he turns out to be very immediate indeed.
For one thing, the power of his tales don’t derive from creatures or monsters. Lovecraft does his business by questioning the very validity of our plane of reality. It is possible to suspect if he was at all writing with the goal of telling stories, or giving expression to thoughts and doubts that lurked in his mind about our place in the universe. In the 1920s and 30s, decades before popular science books were mainstream, Lovecraft was groping among concepts like relativity, quantum mechanics, non-Euclidean geometry, higher dimensions of space, and the concept which future generations would nickname ‘wormholes’; all this, while writing horror stories for pulp magazines.
Lovecraftian descriptions are difficult to visualize for the same reason concepts like hyperspace are difficult to visualize – because they do not deal with earthly dimensions at all. Impossible shapes abound in his tales, and the narrator struggles to explain the impossibility of what he is seeing, using inexact, amorphous language continuously. It must have been bewildering to the casual reader of the 30s – someone unfamiliar with shapes like the Penrose triangle, or topological manifolds belonging to the realm of higher mathematics. History loves its happenstances, it seems, for it is around the same time that another man started creating artwork of the un-natural, impossible drawings that are iconic today. M. C. Escher was only eight years younger than Lovecraft, though he outlived the older man by thirty-five years. Escher’s famous works on tessellation and ‘impossible’ geometric shapes fit right in Lovecraft’s untellable descriptions. We can only wonder what a meeting between the two might have resulted in; but Lovecraft died in 1937, undiscovered and unhallowed, the same year Escher produced his Metamorphosis I.
Lovecraft lived in eventful times. It was a time when the age of geographical discoveries was ending, and a new age of scientific findings was opening up unthinkable horizons. These circumstances echo around Lovecraft’s stories, lending them their characteristic resonance. But the echoes are only apparent to a modern reader – the readership of the mid-19th century seems to have missed the connection. Other giants were walking the literary landscape, even if we discount academicised figures like Joyce, Eliot or Hemingway. J. R. R. Tolkien published The Hobbit in the same year as Lovecraft’s death. In America, Agatha Christie wrote Death on the Nile, and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men was published. Just the year after, in 1938, we had C S Lewis publish Out of the Silent Planet. 1938 also saw the memorable radio dramatisation of The War of the Worlds, which is said to have caused real panic among people who thought the Martian invasion to be real. – In this landscape of literary upheavals, Lovecraft’s abstruse genius went practically unnoticed.
Einstein published his theories of relativity in 1916 and 1917. Ten years later, the Fifth Solvay Conference saw the newborn field of quantum physics gaining major traction among the leading physicists of the day. Bohr, Heisenberg and Schrödinger rapidly laid the foundations of what would become the concept of wave-particle duality, and soon, questions and speculations about the role of the ‘observer’ were raised by scientists. Issues like the Measurement Problem, addressed by stalwarts like John von Neumann and Eugene Wigner, brought the element of consciousness into the quantum mix. It is in this light that we need to place Lovecraft, and look at his writings with new attention.
Lovecraft was no physicist, nor was he a prominent literary figure of the age. He was stricken by constant poverty, writing for pulp magazines and barely making enough money to subsist, supplementing these efforts by ghostwriting for other people. Yet, his stories are replete with passages that show an uncanny familiarity with the latest scientific buzz of the day. Take The Whisperer in Darkness (1930), where we hear ideas such as nothing being able to move faster than the speed of light (a direct corollary of the theory of relativity), or the ‘Einsteinian space-time continuum’. When a character talks about why certain alien creatures are not visible in photos, he explains – “… the type is composed of a form of matter totally alien to our part of space – with electrons having a wholly different vibration-rate. That is why the beings cannot be photographed on the ordinary camera films…”
A most obvious amalgamation of contemporary science and imagined fiction is found in The Dreams in the Witch House (1932). Walter Gilman is a student at the Miskatonic, a fictional university invented by Lovecraft for his stories. The narration runs – “Non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension. (…) Gilman had some terrible hints (…) to correlate with his abstract formulae on the properties of space and the linkage of dimensions known and unknown.” Gilman finds himself at the centre of paranormal activities that originate from an unearthly geometrical angle formed by a wall and the ceiling of his room; the language makes it very clear that it is not a regular, tellurian angle we are hearing about – the description reminds one of passages from Michio Kaku’s Hyperspace. Living in this otherworldly room leaves a mark on Gilman – “He was getting an intuitive knack for solving Riemannian equations, and astonished Professor Upham by his comprehension of fourth-dimensional and other problems which had floored all the rest of the class. One afternoon there was a discussion of possible freakish curvatures in space, and of theoretical points of approach or even contact between our part of the cosmos and various other regions as distant as the farthest stars or the trans-galactic gulfs themselves—or even as fabulously remote as the tentatively conceivable cosmic units beyond the whole Einsteinian space-time continuum.” And then follows something that we are all too familiar with today – “his sober theory that a man might—given mathematical knowledge admittedly beyond all likelihood of human acquirement—step deliberately from the earth to any other celestial body which might lie at one of an infinity of specific points in the cosmic pattern. (…) Such a step, he said, would require only two stages; first, a passage out of the three-dimensional sphere we know, and second, a passage back to the three-dimensional sphere at another point, perhaps one of infinite remoteness.”
If the above lines make you think of mind-bending concepts like Einstein-Rosen bridge or Minkowski space, ideas that stretch our imagination far beyond the comfortable reaches of 3D-thinking that we are used to, – you might be onto something. Although the term ‘wormhole’ was officially coined by John Wheeler, the concept itself is older – go deep and you will be hacking through dense jungles of geometry and topology, encountering things like spacetime intervals and Galilean transformations.
Many roads meet at the Lovecraftian crossways. The great illusionist Harry Houdini was a client and admirer, and had he not passed away in 1926, Lovecraft might have seen better days. It is tempting to imagine an older Lovecraft living through the fifties and sixties, witnessing milestones like The Twilight Zone (1959) and Psycho (1960), – maybe even writing for a film or two. He would have had a field day with science as well. In 1958, Erwin Schrödinger published Mind and Matter, where he explores if there is one real world external to our perceptions, and if indeed the query itself is misdirected. 1961 saw Wigner devise the Friend Experiment as the latest iteration of the famous double-slit experiment, and he concluded that conscious experience played a big role in generating wave-function collapse (which is something like a dozen out-of-sight phantom-realities collapsing into a single within-sight concrete-reality). If Lovecraft had been there to read about Wigner’s conclusions, he could have delved deeper into his lore, exploring how the dark dimensions of Cthulhu and Azathoth may be dependent, in a way, on the very minds they plague and haunt from the shadows. It is easy to mix up fact and fantasy in this strange mire, and while that is dangerous for scientists, it is a feast for an author who mixes his writing with myth, musing and mystery.
“The most merciful thing in the world,” wrote Lovecraft, “I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.” Einstein meant something similar when he said – “As a human being, one has been endowed with just enough intelligence to be able to see clearly how utterly inadequate that intelligence is when confronted with what exists.” The weight of these statements makes one think long and deep as we head into the third decade of the twenty-first century. We have clearly failed to handle whatever knowledge we have managed to glean out of nature. From apes with sticks and stones, we have developed into apes with nuclear reactors and gene splicers, – but there has hardly been any evolution of the deep instincts of selfishness and violence. God is long dead. We seem to be dancing towards an intoxicated end, like truculent Yadavas wiping themselves out near the waters of the Prabhas sea. Lovecraft gave us a vision of earth as a dwindling speck of sanity in a sea of pan-galactic chaos. But the black waters are closing in. It has been a long time since that freakish night on the lonely corridors of Sarada Sadan, and now I lull another fear within me. “For then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy.”