Finding Cthulhu

Let me save you some trouble, because I spent a long time not being told this and I turned out fine, mostly, and I'd rather you skip the long way around.

You cannot find Cthulhu. Not the way this other religions promise — not by acknowledging His presence and studying the mythos and surrendering completely in five easy steps, which is the sort of thing you write when you have confused a cosmic horror with a time-share. I know the old pitch well. I believed it. I was nineteen, at Notre Dame, and I had read the stories and found the chapter and walked in fully expecting to be handed something, and I want to tell you exactly what I was handed, because it is the most important thing on this page.

Folding chairs. A sign-up sheet I was gently steered away from. A coffee urn that had been there since Nixon. Nice people who would not tell me anything, and a reading list, and the distinct sense that I had shown up to a bank expecting a heist and found a standard Wednesday.

You do not find Cthulhu. That is the first thing.

Here is the joke the old page got backwards. Your grandparents looked for a man in a striped shirt in a crowded picture, and the fun was that he was in there somewhere if you scanned long enough. Finding Cthulhu is not that. Finding Cthulhu is looking at the old picture, scanning it for years, growing quite good at scanning — and then understanding, all at once and much too late, that the thing was never in the picture. It was behind you, the whole time you were looking, being patient.

The search runs the wrong way. That is the doctrine this page exists to teach, and it is the opposite of what the word "finding" makes you expect. You do not locate Him. At most — and it is rare, and it is not owed to you, and no amount of looking earns it — something notices you back. How to tell whether that has actually happened, as opposed to a bad month and a vivid dream, is another page's job, and a good one; I am not going to repeat it. My job is smaller and more embarrassing. My job is to tell you that the looking itself does nothing, and that I did an enormous amount of it.

Most people who look find exactly what they brought with them

I was a serious young man about it. I read past the famous stories into the ugly corners. I kept a dream journal. I sat through the vigils and I stayed up on the star-watch nights and I waited to be changed, and the thing you have to understand is that nothing is exactly what a person in that state should expect, and nothing is what I got, and the cult never once pretended otherwise.

Because here is what the Assembly actually knows: a man who reads eldritch material for three nights running will have strange dreams, and they will mean he read eldritch material for three nights running. A person who is grieving will find significance in a light fixture. Fever does it. Exhaustion does it. A breakup at that age does it magnificently. The statue on the quad looks like it is watching you at 2 a.m. because it is 2 a.m. and you are nineteen and you want it to. None of that is contact. Almost none of anything is contact. The Archive has a stamp — NO RELATION — and it wears the stamp out. Ninety-eight strange stories come in and ninety-eight get stamped and filed and forgotten, and the members who do the filing are not disappointed by this, because a cult that finds a god in every flickering bulb is a dorm floor with candles. The interesting cult is the one that stamps ninety-eight and then, without any change of expression, puts the ninety-ninth in a different drawer and locks it.

I was, for twenty years, a NO RELATION. I want to be honest that this stung. I had wanted to be the ninety-ninth so badly that the wanting was the whole problem — the wanting is always the whole problem — and the older members could see it on me the way you can see a tan line, and they were kind about it, and they let me keep coming, and they did not once tell me I was special. That restraint, which felt like coldness at the time, turns out to have been the only honest thing anyone did for me.

Wilcox wasn't looking

There is a young man in the founding record — the sculptor, in the Providence account everyone cites and few read closely — and the thing about him that took me two decades to notice is that he wasn't trying. He knew nothing of any cult. He wanted nothing from the deep. He was a nervous art student who went to sleep one night and woke with a city in his head he could not have invented and a shape in his hands he could not stop making, and the whole apparatus of significance came later, and from outside him — a professor, comparing his private nightmare against reports the sculptor never saw. He did not find it. It found him, while he was asleep and busy with other things, and the finding was confirmed by people cross-checking files he had no part in.

The first famous modern person to receive the Call was not looking for it. Sit with that against the five-step program other cults sell. Every step on that ladder was a way of trying harder, and trying harder is the one thing that has never once worked, because the mechanism does not run on effort. It runs on the far side of a door you are not on.

The Assembly is useless at this, on purpose

People write to the chapter saying they have been searching for Cthulhu, searching so hard, and could someone please help them search better. I have watched the older members answer this, and the answer, stripped of its manners, is: good for you; get some sleep.

They do not congratulate seekers. They do not certify experiences. They do not sell you a rank or tell everyone who dreams of tentacles that they have been chosen. They notice things. Most of the things amount to nothing. A few people get quietly watched for a while, and most of those come to nothing too, and are never told they were watched. Very few are ever shown anything at all. The cult has categories you and I do not get to see, and the one thing the categories are emphatically not sorted by is how much you want it. Enthusiasm is not evidence. Enthusiasm is, if anything, a mild contraindication — the Archive has learned to be a little wary of the man who is trying very hard, because the man who is trying very hard is the man most likely to manufacture what he came for.

What being found actually gets you (it is not what the brochure said)

The old comic book meme promised perks. Enhanced awareness, cosmic purpose, liberation, spiritual awakening — a youth-retreat glow with tentacles on it. I have now been on the other side of the thing the brochure was describing, and I can give you the honest translation, item by item, and you should notice that every promise inverts into a cost:

• Enhanced awareness becomes less certainty, not more. The better your evidence gets, the less confidently anyone around here will interpret it. The people who have seen the most are the most careful about what they claim, and the loud certain ones are the ones who have seen nothing.
• Cosmic purpose becomes a job. The cosmos does not issue you importance; it does not notice you enough to. What you get instead is a Charge — a thing to keep, for a long time, that the cult believes matters — and the responsibility is yours and human and unglamorous, which is a separate page's subject and I will only say: He promised nothing, and the keeping is ours, and that is the arrangement.
• Liberation becomes the Severance. Seeing past the arranged surface of the ordinary world cuts you loose from a consensus that human beings genuinely need in order to stay upright, and that cut is a wound, not a graduation. The cult exists in large part to be the people who stand with you after it, so that being cut loose does not mean being cut adrift. That is the whole of what the community is for, and it is enough, and it is not what the brochure meant by liberation.
• Spiritual awakening becomes Bearing. The achievement, if there is one, is not ecstasy. It is being able to still hold a job, love your wife, sleep most nights, doubt yourself honestly, and pick your grandkids up from school after the shape of the world has quietly changed on you. Staying ordinary is the accomplishment. The people who could not stay ordinary are not trophies. They are the reason there is a "wellness coordinator."

That is the real perks list. Nobody prints it on a shirt, and they are right not to.

It found me

The old members have a dignified way of describing the moment the search reverses. The younger ones had it printed on a T-shirt, and I have come around to thinking the shirt is more honest, because it is loud and undignified and true, and it is the four words this entire page has been walking toward:

IT FOUND ME.

Mine came at forty-one, in a hotel in a city I was in for work, sixteen years after I had more or less quietly stopped believing anything ever would — a stockbroker with a mortgage and two kids and a knife collection and no expectation left in me at all. I am not going to tell you what happened in the room. I told my Reader, and I will tell you what he did, because that is the part that matters and the part I can share: he did not congratulate me. He asked when I had last slept, and whether I was eating, and how work was. And then, when I had answered all of it like the boring reliable man I am, he stopped asking, and he wrote it down, and he did not make a joke.

He had always made a joke. Twenty years of the man making a joke. He stopped, and he wrote it down, and that silence told me more than any confirmation could have, and I have never once asked him what he understood in it, because I am not sure I want the answer and I am very sure he would not give it.

Iä. Go to bed. If it's coming, it does not need your help, and if it isn't, you'll want the sleep.