Framing the Chaos: Primal Threads

The apocalyptic dark fantasy and cosmic horror! The Call of Primal Threads: history, sources, inspiration, techniques, and plot teasers. The horror! Part 1 of 3ish.

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

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Hi, everyone,

I hope you have had an excellent week full of warmth and comfort. The PNW is wet and dreary. I’m warm, yet I sense something wicked this way comes. That’s your weather forecast, now to business—Substack, right? I’m in awe of the talent and the level of motivation I find around me, and those around me are in awe that it (and a long line of other interactions with talented and motivated folks) hasn’t shown up in my work (not my wife Sarah, she gets it). Yet, I embark on a journey. A hero’s journey? Nay!—Fool triumphant. One that will likely fail. I can screw things up.

It’s 5 am, the house is silent and cold, and the morning smells like dirt within arm’s reach (from the African Zamia plant Sarah watered last night) and coffee. Yep, plain old coffee. Or is it only the dirt I smell in the Zamia pot? It is early, and the specks of grounds that escaped into my thermos from the French press are clumpy. The Zamia is pretending to be dead or asleep (dead, I hope), and I should probably (dare I say) crawl back to bed and dream of four-leaf clovers and Danger Mouse. I don’t know, something simple.

NO! He chugged his coffee dirt-water (spit out a leaf fragment), and a frog died in his throat. He slammed the thermos on his beyond-repair desk. (oh, crap, it left a mark).

Today, I’m compelled to share my true and terrible artistic intentions; a plan, a vision, yes, and an approach, so monumental in the apocalyptic dark fantasy and cosmic horror genres that it may change the world. Why? Why?!

)—This —> Anyone else feel like we’re back in a pre-World War I loop?—(

What are my true and terrible artistic intentions?

That’s where you come in. Remember what I said about my lack of talent and motivation? We have a year or two to see if I have enough to pull this off, and I need your help to keep me accountable and help me course-correct when things go wrong. (They’ll go wrong). With your encouragement, we’ll travel together, and maybe it won’t be so bad. I can promise you one thing: where we’re headed, it’s through a forgotten door. It is far away, and there are dangers. Unknown, unknowns. I discovered it when I was eight years old in the countryside in an old, converted garage that a man with a secret turned into a personal library. Even the one we shouldn’t name knows not where this door is hidden now. Where does our quest lead? Gather around the fire. . . It is dark, and my bones ache—I sense creatures are near.

Here it is—I will create the inverse of the Great Ideas of Western Thought. I call them Primal Threads. Angel becomes Demon. Art becomes Disorder. I will turn the Great Ideas on their head and cast them into the depths of hell into a silent fragmentation. They will fight for their lives to exist in what the executive editor, Robert M. Hutchins, of Britannica’s Great Books of the Western World, a 54-book collection, called “The Great Conversation of the West.” Why? Because I LOVE them to DEATH, they call some people in each generation to test them, and I have answered the call. Unfortunately, I’m not a philosopher. Not. Even. Close. I looked like a philosopher once (at least in my hometown). I sat on an old-growth stump looking like Rodin’s The Thinker with a can of cheap, watered-down beer and a PNW mullet—it’s a crew cut under a CAT Tractor hat. (Business bangs in the front, crew cut under the hat for cooling, and PartY, PartY in the back). THAT, and I’m creating this to have fun, mostly that. It’s complicated.

First, let me tell you a short (back)story—microfiction—a drabble. Two drabbles—connected!

Primal Threads #3 - People’s Rule? (With two different formats this week?) No. That one goes out this evening after dark.

The Forgotten Door

By Guy Craig

“No, stay away from those—your hands are dirty, plus you’re too young,” he said.

“They’re just old books. That one’s all torn and things,” Guy said.

Bok removed his glasses, set them on the drafting reference trolley (armored and looming to rattle like a rhomboidal tank), stepped back from behind the typewriter, and laughed. A bird slammed against the sliding glass door, fell, and flew away.

Bok grabbed a book from its case and let it hover over the table, then let it drop spine-first. It splayed open to Book III. “Here. Plato’s Republic. Some wisdom. . .

II

. . . to avoid mistakes and pain. Maybe it will work for you.”

Guy read until he cried. He shoved the book away and left apple pectin on the cloth cover. He tasted dirt on the shallow trench of his tongue. He knew why music and poetry were sometimes evil and inharmonious, and why their messages should be controlled to build a better republic.

Music began to play. Bok stepped away from the radio and returned to his mechanical typewriter to write books people wouldn’t even take as gifts.

A sweet song played—soft, playful, and lyrical.

Guy whispered, “You can’t control me!” ||

Fin

I swear. I’m not trying to bury the lead—I’m trying to become the T.S. Eliot of Horror by writing this generation’s The Wasteland. Where’s my Ezra Pound? Calling to the Void, yet I have someone in mind. Embarrassing. Guy, what are you thinking? Somewhere in the ether, cracked screams.

What the hell is The Wasteland, you query?—Only a work (a poem) of monumental importance to brevity in writing, published in 1922. (Now in the public domain). It helped him earn the 1948 Nobel Prize for Literature. It was T. S. Eliot’s call to the void. Man, was he going through it: marriage, career, faith, social proof. And that world before him—hell, in Post-World I. Ring around the rosy, esq. Ain’t that how it goes…

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to share my vision. I’m writing about ideas from old, dead white guys (I’m a living one…undead?), playing a game over 2,500 years in an aristocrat’s version of Call of Cthulhu. Canceled, Bro. It’s philosophy—boring, Bro. What are you, a fascist? NO. Are you kidding?—Please. I hate power over others as much as my agoraphobic tendencies make me hate driving, 8 to 5 jobs of “just trying to make a living” (which I’m not doing right now in that way), and my cooking. It’s bad. LOVE you, Sarah! It’s complicated. I started making money 30 years ago. My graduation plan? Retire, but I was just a middle-class kid on the edge of his sharpness. I read Your Money or Your Life in high school and spent my 30s reading Dave Ramsey and Mr. Money Mustache. This may only be a break. I’m not rich, yet 30 years (time) can do some things. So, not complicated? Ashend.*

Back to the story.

Wouldn’t it be more fun for the audience to wonder and enjoy the hellish views as this Dante/Eliot/Dickens wanna-be pulses the drabbles out like uncoagulated blood? Then I remembered how hard this is, how the storytelling constraints (framing the chaos) I’ve placed on this work limit authorial choices and techniques, how I’m NOT that good of a writer (yet), and life’s about the journey, not the destination.

Fear.

That's not all, though I wish it were so—fear, fear of someone else taking my idea and doing a better job—earning that Nobel Prize in Literature in 2100 (the year of this story’s hellscape). Dumb. I laugh (manically) at my hubris. Those awards… They’re for pioneers. I’m far from that, to my everlasting shame. I know fear, yet through my condition, I know daily courage, so forget about it—I’m sharing this lead-leaching, cracked-cauldron idea with the world. In the words of The King of Country Music, George Strait, in this horror “house. . . She said, Give it away.” Now you know, but I’ll be haunting its hallways and basement until it burns, turns to ashes and dust, and erodes the sky.

Besides, it doesn’t matter. In the big picture, most things in life don’t even come close to being as exciting as the stupid nightmares screaming through my skull, dodging and recalculating the geometry of the slash of my gaff hook. Okay, time to decompress. But not with golf. No thanks. In this weather?

Catch you in the Drift, Friday the 18th, for the next installments of Framing the Chaos (where we follow this reticulated thread + literary collage, i.e., interTEXTuality) and Primal Threads #4 - Disorder.

P.S. Oh, and that thing I said about wanting to be this generation’s T.S. Eliot—carry the torch and all, nah, I want to have a great conversation with him. We like the same old books.

I hope to see you next week. Before then, Primal Threads #3: People’s Rule weaves out after dark.

Thanks for reading this fractured scroll.

*Ashend means “over.” It’s a twisted portmanteau I dredged up.