The fact that transport is often by ‘zebra-ride’ in Carter’s dream may reveal a secret yearning by HPL to ‘ride’ both main races, dark and white, not just one. Hence the ‘forgotten’ dreams, the-things-that-must-not-be-described or even mentioned, while he is captive to the dream, not Carter’s dream but the dream of writing about it. I sense that HPL’s greatest fear is himself and his ability to write of distasteful things, not fear of the things themselves. “…and the way their turbans were humped up in two points above their foreheads was in especially bad taste.”
“…the great stone bridge across the Skai, into whose central piece the masons had sealed a living human sacrifice when they built it thirteen-hundred years before.”Ī previous dreamer like Carter is today? Or just another reader like me or you who got lost crossing over from word to word and inadvertently falling into the text and getting tangled by its meaning…? “…the Zoogs do not pause near that expansive slab with its huge ring for they realise that all which is forgotten need not necessarily be dead,…” HPL is xenophobic I sense about his own writing self when that self takes over (cf the separate Proustian selves), as if the dream journey he recounts is an uncomfortably strange foreign country beyond himself, despite some of that country’s Dunsany delights and old world pastoral that he tries to absorb into it to neutralise its demons. But there also seems to be something working here that is quite beyond HPL to understand even though he is compulsively channelling it nevertheless. And who are we, if not partly god, to do what we want, the text seems to pose.
Lord Dunsany may have done the groundwork, but there is a wild abandon about HPL here, haphazard creatures of imagination alternating between control and lack of control, not dissimilar to the equivalent to the Zoogs from contemporary, Jungian-connected James Joyce who had his own goal of climbing Kadath, I guess, and an interaction between gods and us whereby the gods espouse sexual flings with the ‘daughters’ and ‘maidens’ of our own kind leading to cross-dream inbreeding.
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