Inheritors of Visionary Literature

"...horror has to do with the numinous, the uncovering of the terrible truth that is there under the everyday. That is only another articulation of uncovering the transcendent truth under the everyday."

China Miéville

All literature is visionary. It is this human experience of the visionary in literature that encompasses all: writers, characters and readers alike, who participate unwittingly in this literary production of unconsciously held beliefs and assumptions. The picture of this unconscious or visionary world is not to be confused with the economic model of a human assembly or production line. It is a world of imagination that produces an extra-visionary sequence of phases that can widen and/or narrow as the perspective of each individual becomes involved in the process. Howard Philip Lovecraft offers this picture of the reader's involvement in the imaginative production of "weird" literature in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature:

The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life. Relatively few are free enough from the spell of the daily routine to respond to tappings from outside, and tales of ordinary feelings and events, or of common sentimental distortions of such feelings and events, will always take first place in the taste of the majority; rightly, perhaps, since of course these ordinary matters make up the greater part of human experience.

Here: the world envisioned by Lovecraft is a negative or contrasting image of writers, characters and readers. He is appealing to the positive or receptive reader who "sees" or experiences the actual message or prophecy envisioned which underlies his words. The visionary experience widens for those who understand the spiritual meaning behind his written words. Such a type of reader is not only an inheritor of his message, but also an active participant in the cosmos of visionary literature:

But the sensitive are always with us, and sometimes a curious streak of fancy invades an obscure corner of the very hardest head; so that no amount of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood. There is here involved a psychological pattern or tradition as real and as deeply grounded in mental experience as any other pattern or tradition of mankind; coeval with the religious feeling and closely related to many aspects of it, and too much a part of our innermost biological heritage to lose keen potency over a very important, though not numerically great, minority of our species.

The visionary experience of literature is the truest liberty: it excludes only those who are unwilling to open their eyes and see.