Professor Cognoscente's Caliginous Charms Carnival

Christopher Slatsky, "Professor Cognoscente's Caliginous Charms Carnival" in The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature (Grimscribe Press, 2020).

Cosmic horror often features sorcerers in possession of powerful, dangerous, cursed, and ancient texts that reveal our lives to be shams and that what we believe to be important is not really important. Those who have glimpsed the secrets discover that we live in a world of shadows, that the real world sits behind our illusions of reality. Such forbidden knowledge, such truths, often drives such a seeker to madness.

Sometimes images of stage magic, ventriloquism, and puppetry are invoked to suggest that our sense of reality is just a kind of trick. The subtext is that we live in a world of illusion. We go on with our lives, just playing a role and taking it to be all-so-important, when really it amounts to nothing—a mere shadow of what is truly real. This familiar line of thought expresses a kind of philosophical pessimism that evokes horror and cosmic dread.

But Slatsky potentially turns that on its head, and in so doing, ups the ante. By demystifying and taking the cosmic away from us, painting the cosmic itself as illusory, we are left with only the mundane. Professor Cognoscente is a stage magician with practice in the techniques of suggestion, illusion, sleight of hand, and audience misdirection. Furthermore, he is very good at his craft. He realizes that what audiences want in a magic show is a kind of escape. They want to experience awe. They want, at least for a moment during the performance, to leave their mundane day-to-day lives behind to revel in something bigger, something cosmic, something magical.

The problem is that there really isn’t anything to be awed by. Cognoscente is an illusionist; he tricks us into experiencing something bigger than ourselves. To experience awe, to experience the cosmic, this is the delusion. There is no great noumena behind what we see. Reality is mundane and mediocre. Your life really does suck; the petty things that you find important are all that there is to reality, and all that fiction about the sublime, cosmic dread, etc.—that’s the illusion.