Birthed From Poison - Not ET, But Something Possibly Just as Extraordinary

To follow up on my posting yesterday:  Those amazing little guys up above, discovered in the brine choked, ominously-named Mono Lake in the shadow of God-kissed Yosemite National Park....

... have just turned the biological world sideway, as - for the first time in scientific history - a terrestrial life form has been discovered that utilizes arsenic (read as: "FUCKING POISON") to create DNA and synthesize proteins.  Or, put simply, they turn poison into life.

This is a truly earth-shattering discovery, as the GFAJ-1 strain of extremophilic bacteria shows that life doesn't necessarily need to cleave to the Big Six building blocks essential for most known life, those being carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus.  So, if that's possible on Earth, held in the thrall of the Big Six for eons, what does that mean for the prospect of life developing in different, non-Earth-like environments spread across 11 dimensions?  Class?  Yes, that's right.  It RAISES the prospect.  It basically announces that the sky - and limitless light years beyond the sky - is truly the limit, and the possibilities endless. 

As we delve deeper into the land and sea with one hand, while reaching further into space with the other, we are going to keep finding new discoveries that challenge the status quo.  How we handle these sharp 180's will dictate how we evolve and grow as a species.  Do we roll with the New Knowledge, or shut down and pick up our pitchforks?  I think I know how it'll go down, but don't want to jinx it...

I also like the ideas of finding a "second genesis" and a "shadow biosphere" discussed in the linked NatGeo article, which was the scientific inspiration of the exploratory mission on Mono Lake.  Sounds like something out of a Lovecraftian or other "weird fiction" story.  We dig shit like that.  It serves as inspiration for what WE do.

Overall, I think this exciting discovery again reminds us that sometimes the biggest secrets are found within the smallest amongst us.  And, sometimes, we can find the alien, the bizarre, and truly otherworldly right in our own backyard, if we keep our eyes and ears open and tuned to the proper frequency.

The Weird is all around us, as we spin like madmen at 1.3 million miles an hour around our sun, around our galactic axis, around the center of the universe and all space and time, where Azathoth slumbers in his easy chair to the sounds of muzak piping.  In these strange and uncertain times, lets remember to appreciate the extraordinary and the bizarre that is close to home while still peering into the furthest abyss, and never stop searching for the truth as we can comprehend it.  It's what we do, we fragile, smart-mouthed "bags of mostly water."  Why stop now?  Why not boldly go, and see where we end up?  Why not touch the face of God?

Day Tripping to Yoh-Vombis

 
"If the doctors are correct in their prognostication, I have only a few Martian hours of life remaining to me. In those hours I shall endeavor to relate, as a warning to others who might follow in our footsteps, the singular and frightful happenings that terminated our researches among the ruins of Yoh-Vombis. Somehow, even in my extremity, I shall contrive to tell the story; since there is no one else to do it. But the telling will be toilsome and broken; and after I am done, the madness will recur, and several men will restrain me, lest I should leave the hospital and return across many desert leagues to those abominable vaults beneath the compulsion of the malignant and malevolent virus which is permeating my brain. Perhaps death will release me from that abhorrent control, which would urge me down to bottomless underworld warrens of terror for which the saner planets of the solar system can have no analogue. I say perhaps . . . for, remembering what I have seen, I am not sure that even death will end my bondage . . . ."

When I recently read this article, about NASA's plans to launch one-way missions to Mars, I immediately though of one of my favorite masters of the pen, clay and ink, Clark Ashton Smith, and his fascination with the possibly menacing nature of Mars, most famously explored in his The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis, which has come to be his second-most famous story (after the dark fantasy masterpiece The City of Singing Flame, which, in my humble opinion, rivals anything written by Smith's contemporaries, including HPL).

Smith - hereafter referred to as "CAS," as he's known to all annoying fanboys like me - completed the original version of "Yoh-Vombis" on the 12th of September, 1931, and after several frustrating re-writes at the behest of Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright, the magazine finally accepted a pared-down version of the story in late October.

"The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis" was later published by Arkham House as the 19th tale in the CAS anthology Out of Space and Time, first released in 1942 with a print run of just over 1,000 copies.

Later editions were also published by Arkham House.

In "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis," CAS describes an ancient cosmic horror that dwells under the ruined Martian city of Yoh-Vombis, discovered by a group of intrepid archeologists, after being abandoned by their two hesitant Martian guides.  I don't want to give away the plot points, but let's just say they don't discover grumpy little creatures with broom-topped green helmets and oversize sneakers.

With NASA's push to Mars, we might uncover something a bit more... "substantial" and less Warner Bros. in the dusty dark of the Red Planet that doesn't necessarily cotton to the sudden presence of biped humanity - or worse yet, decides to do something about it.

Sending squishy human beings to Mars without a return ticket could leave us at the mercy of things unimaginably strange, and potentially quite nasty.  Or, we could just find ancient, dried out waterways and lifeless rock.  We don't really now.  Yet, we MUST know.  Isn't that what drives us?  Isn't that why Eve plucked the apple (and then quickly invented biodegradable pasties)?  The constant quest to uncover the Unknown, and possibly even the Unknowable?  In the last fifty years, we've just taken the first, shaky baby step into physically exploring the cosmos.  What if don't like what we find?  Worse yet, what if we jostle something that was best left undisturbed?

It's the height of human hubris to believe that we could the only possible sentient life in this vast, immeasurable and constantly expanding universe (without taking into account dimensions and spheres beyond our reckoning, understanding, and ability to locate).

That brash arrogance will be tested very soon...

HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND!   WE ALL MIGHT DIE SOON!

Oh, and read some Clark Ashton Smith very soon.  He's old school tough, a rough hewn American badass and naturalist gentleman of the weird and wonderful.

One of the Godfathers of the Cosmic - Clark Ashton Smith

Dreamer Born...

From as far back as I can remember, I've always had "the dreams"... 

Nightmares, more precisely, on an epic scale that I never thought I'd be able to describe in any rational mode of communication, nor did I think anyone else would understand.  They were too bizarre, too alien, too unexplainably horrific...  Most of them had me standing alone on a vast, colorless plane, littered with scattered, nonsensical shapes; or at times, balancing on the top of an impossibly tall labyrinth (thanks, "Time Bandits," for lodging that image in my childhood brain), while... SOMETHING positively enormous, shapeless, and, well... totally cosmic leaked into my universe from a tear in the sky, and pressed down on me with impossible weight from all angles ...  Suffocating me, offering me no escape and no possible comprehension of What was trying to absorb me as I stood alone in the emptiness...

I had dreams like this a lot when I was a child, back when my subconscious self still held better sway over the more rational mind.  Back when I still kind of believed in magic, and had a better ear for the things that don't ever show their face to adults, only whispering and winking to children.

My wife had dreams like this, as well, and it blew my mind when she told me of similarly terrifying and unknowingly hostile dreamtime experiences.  I think Howard Phillips Lovecraft had dreams like this, too.  In fact, I know he did, and did so almost a century before me.  His stories were like a third person dream diary, documenting snatches of nightmares I held onto fiercely, as I had no way of forgetting them.  It was a revelation, and I've been hooked to the marrow every since I cracked my first Lovecraft anthology in my teens.

So, it's only natural that I relate - and, in many ways - emulate, and thereby honor, H.P. Lovecraft through this blog, and through my short stories, screenplays, and middling poetry.  So much has been written, but there is still so much to explore in the infinite folds of outer space and the inner mind, from the center of the roiling universe to the hidden Dreamlands down the 700 steps.  It's an exciting time in the horror and speculative fiction game, with new media bringing unprecedented access to content, readers, and like-minded fellowship.  Hopefully, as things speed up, they also slow down, and we find clues to our future (in)sanity while looking to the past, all the while forging ahead with a darkly squinted eye.

Another legendary writer and dream walker, Hunter S. Thompson, wrote, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."  With as weird as things have turned, I think I went pro long ago...

Join me, and let's see down what dimly lit hallways this moldering, electronic tome takes us, our quills and brushes and awakened minds leading the way into the chaotic abyss swirling at the Beginning of Everything.

You see, I don't dream like I dreamed as a child anymore.  Now, I have to create those weird and wondrous visions while awake, in "real" time, like so many have done before me. 

It ain't as easy, but it sure as hell is a living.