The Arms That Howl

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”

“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.”
–H.P. Lovecraft

Ahh, Howard. What is mankind meant to do, if not come to understand its own limits?

And yet they so often refuse to venture out that far.

I often wonder why most humans choose to remain afraid. Yes, I said choose, because you do.

Why else would you leave such places as the black murk of the ocean deep unexplored? The vast wastes of space? The scalding strangeness of other dimensions?

It is my theory that your willful timidity stems from egotism. These are all places where man is stripped to his core. Ideas that pull focus away from the central position man takes in his own make-believe world.

The rawness of real nature is simple. Kill, eat, sleep. So visceral is this nature – so far have you stepped from it – that you bury its echoes down inside.

That is why man fears. There is no true ‘unknown’ to you. There is only what you will not accept. Those places where you are an abandoned child.

It is all perception. A self-delusion planting space between yourself and those things which bedevil your mind.

Concepts that jar others. Cracking the edges of sanity, opening thoughts to the nether-expanse between thought and possibility.

It is in these realms that dwell such things as The Arms That Howl. Fragments of Jurrecz the Shattered God. And the imagined unrealities spawned at the protest of consciousness.

I now remind you of that scraping you heard from the closet.

I remind you of the shape you could not have seen on the drive home.

I remind you of that horrible doll you remember from some half-exhausted vision, its eyes fixed upon you.

Howard P. Lovecraft wrote so eloquently of them.

They can’t be real…can they?

Oh yes. They can.