@denungeherrholm: Why you go insane after seeing Cthulhu. #cosmichorror #dailyinkmonster #hplovecraft #darkart #horrorart #cthulhu The mature fiction of H.P. Lovecraft has a sofistication that usually gets lost in the pop culture versions of his mythos. There is no magic that drives the Lovecraftian protagonist insane. It is existential dread on a cosmic scale. The opening paragraph of The Call of Cthulhu has perhaps the most poetic statement of this. And as we're seeing society flee to the bloody peace and safety of a new dark age, it's more poignant than ever.

Chris Grant :

Im going to directly quote a tumblr post I saw years ago that I feel is applicable: “An ant doesn’t start babbling when it sees a circuit board. They find it strange, to them it is a landscape of strange angles and humming monoliths. They may be scared, but that is not madness. Madness comes when the ant, for a moment, can see as a human does. It understands those markings are words, symbols with meaning, like a pheromone but infinitely more complex. It can travel unimaginable distances, to lands unlike anything it has seen before. It knows of mirth, embarrassment, love, concepts unimaginable before this moment, and then… It’s an ant again. Echoes of things it cannot comprehend swirl around its mind. It cannot make use of this knowledge, but it still remembers. How is it supposed to return to its life? The more the ant saw the harder it is for it to forget. It needs to see it again, understand again. It will do anything to show others, to show itself, nothing else in this tiny world matters. This is madness.”

The Knight :

ZackFairGX :

that painting is INSANE.

soda :

dtmc1959 :

Actually, Cthulhu went insane when he saw me.

AldoSalty :

Witnessing incomprehensible horrors doesn't make you mad. Comprehending them does.

Mr.Dashboard :

Lovecraft was a smallminded bigot. A prolific writer of mediocre talent who was just imaginative enough to create a mythos rich enough for better writers to do interesting things with. Even that quote of his at the end is a perfect encapsulation of how terrified he was of venturing out of his little bubble.

Toastedroasted :

His racism is overstated. Yeah, he was a bit prejudiced but he wasn’t a hateful person on the whole

Salem :

a white man in 1920 will realize our existence is meaningless in the sense of the universe and make a whole mithos instead of going to therapy

Isabella Moir :

if i recall the other cosmic horror things in cthulu mythos are also less madness driving by looking horrifying but more how incomprehensible they are to mortal minds. to me I imagine it a bit like trying to comprehend shapes beyond 3d, it just hurts my head and I start to go a bit loopy trying to wrap my hear around even a 4D shape.

tachyontachyoff :

Side question: Do you sell your paintings?

oliviaemb :

so cthulhu is capitalism?

_Bennic :

You're not going insane by seeing a massive creature with tentacles in it's face. You're going insane because seeing it makes you realize that there are beings older than our planet, more powerful than our entire species, more grant than we can even observe. The realization of being nothing more than a grain of sand in an endless ocean hits your consciousness like a tsunami and is easily carried into the abyss just like such a grain.

geigerclick :

That is not how to pronounce cthulhu

hazibee :

Will the original come on sale on your site? 😊

Eirik :

RueKatoo :

wait but it doesn't matter if we have no greater cosmic significance, we matter to us and to everyone around us, that's what gives us purpose. it doesn't matter what else is out there

Emperor of Oregon :

Wasn't this prompted by hubble finding other galaxies?

AlexanderDuginDimmadome :

That's just existentialism. Like literally cosmic nihilism wasn't a new concept even in philosophy or theology

SmokeyDavePresents :

Everyone complaining about his racism, forgetting the time in which he lived. Yeah, he was distasteful in that regard, but no more than everyone else around him. He wasn't a deep thinker.

OZZ :

This is a brilliant explanation of it! I think it's more interesting to write madness less of the "laughing manic individual" and more of an individual that is shown, for just a brief moment, the truth of the universe. Only to then go back to understanding only our limited view of the world. Madness is the insatiable desire to be able to understand again, yet be unable to.