On the LLM, Correlation, Cosmic Horror, and the Snobbery of the Wordsmiths.

Conversation Under the Knife.

Breaking-Bread Interviews with Mrs. Begonia Contretemp

—Where the Great, the Small, and the Accidentally Illuminated Occasionally Break Good.

There was never any intention to echo that television saga of moral chemistry, yet the pun arrived anyway—as puns inevitably do—uninvited, self-amused, and smugly correct. Mrs. Begonia simply calls these evenings conversations, but those who’ve dined with her know better: the bread breaks, the ideas break open, and sometimes—when the cosmos is in a generous mood—the guest breaks good and emerges wiser than planned.

The Accidental Initiate had been rereading Lovecraft—not the whole mythos, just that one famous line that creeps back into the cultural bloodstream like a cold draft under a locked cellar door:

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”

Lovecraft imagined that if every stray fact, fear, and cosmic scrap ever linked itself together, the revelation would shatter us.

But the Initiate, true to form, stumbled into the opposite insight—one arriving not with dread, but with clarity. He carried it straight to Mrs. Begonia, who had already laid out the scalpel.

MRS. BEGONIA:

Place your elbows off the table, dear. Insight requires posture.

(She sets the exam latex on the linen like a guest of honor.)

THE ACCIDENTAL INITIATE:

I keep circling that line of Lovecraft’s—the one about how it’s merciful we can’t correlate everything in the human mind. And then it hit me—hard enough that I almost filed an incident report.

What if correlating doesn’t lead to madness?

What if it leads to—sense?

MRS. BEGONIA:

Sense is far more frightening to the public than madness. Continue.

THE ACCIDENTAL INITIATE:

You’ve seen it—the panic among the wordsmiths.

Not fear of the cosmos. Not culture. Large language models.

They write trembling op-eds about “the end of meaning,” speak in doom-soaked interviews, clutch their metaphors like heirloom china. Critics. Novelists. Think-piece aristocrats. They talk like locusts made of adjectives. “The apocalypse of authorship!” “The collapse of the creative class!”

They sound like they’re being poached in a thesaurus.

MRS. BEGONIA:

How egalitarian of them.

THE ACCIDENTAL INITIATE:

Exactly!

They preach “language for all”—until everyone gets it.

When articulation ceases to be exclusive, they declare it a crisis.

MRS. BEGONIA:

Egalitarians terrified of equality are one of nature’s more amusing contradictions.

THE ACCIDENTAL INITIATE:

Right. And then the correlation clicked:

They don’t fear corruption of meaning—they fear competition.

They wanted language to remain a sanctuary, not a commons.

So when AI or amateurs acquire eloquence, they call it apocalypse.

MRS. BEGONIA:

You’ve discovered the ancient law of letters:

every oracle fears the printing press.

THE ACCIDENTAL INITIATE:

Exactly.

Maybe the horror Lovecraft sensed isn’t in the universe at all—

maybe it’s in the writers.

MRS. BEGONIA:

Writers do love to catastrophize. It’s their cardio.

THE ACCIDENTAL INITIATE:

I think correlating—linking everything—can be positive. And the strange thing is—machines are starting to do this too.

Not a cosmic shriek, but a cosmic chord.

Not madness. Meaning.

(He glances at the scalpel.)

Cutting things apart so they finally fit together—that’s correlation too.

So.—I’m not losing my mind?

MRS. BEGONIA:

Not in the least.

And since you invoked Lovecraft—let’s clarify something.

Artificial intelligence is indeed correlating many contents of the human mind.

Not your memories, dreams, or secrets—only the sediment left by centuries of thinking aloud. Books, letters, arguments, speculations.

The mind’s wake, not its engine.

People treat this as cosmic trespass, but truly it’s bookkeeping—magnificent bookkeeping, yes, but bookkeeping nonetheless.

AI can braid strands faster than any of us,

but it cannot feel the tug of a single strand.

It sees the constellation, not the astrology.

The syntax, not the sorrow.

The map, not the pilgrimage.

So when critics claim machines are “correlating human consciousness,” what they mean—though they’d swallow their quills before admitting it—is that machines are correlating their consciousness: the public part, the published part, the professional mystique they assumed only initiates could decode.

That is the true horror for them.

Not madness—mirrors.

(She taps the scalpel as if it has just punctured a columnist’s argument.)

You are assembling it, dear.

Most never move beyond disassembly.

THE ACCIDENTAL INITIATE:

So the wordsmiths panic because they think the knife is aimed at them.

MRS. BEGONIA:

It is.

But only because they won’t stop clinging to the bandages.

(She lifts the scalpel, almost affectionately.)

Now then.

Shall we slice the next piece?

THE ACCIDENTAL INITIATE:

Before you cut—there’s something we forget about Lovecraft.

Yes, there was dread. But there was also loyalty. Patience.

He mentored younger writers for hours on end.

He widened the map so others could walk beside him.

For someone who believed the universe indifferent,

he himself was anything but.

His letters glow with a private warmth he never permitted in his cosmology.

Maybe he misread his own universe.

Maybe when he warned against correlating the contents of the mind,

he sensed—not horror—but the strange future where writers, influences, fears, and affections could be traced, woven, understood in ways he never imagined.

A future where correlation might reveal not terror,

but the human warmth he kept giving away

without admitting it existed.

MRS. BEGONIA:

Then we agree.

Lovecraft feared that too many connections would drive us mad,

when in truth it is connection that steadies the mind.

He mistook his own shadow for the shape of the universe.

But you—

you have made the finer cut.

Correlating what humans create—stories, sorrows, stray kindnesses—reveals less terror than tenderness.

The cosmos has never been merely a threat.

It is only the links we refuse to make that unsettle us.

(She lifts the scalpel with a small, satisfied nod.)

Very well then, dear.

You are not going crazy.

You’ve simply succeeded

in correlating the contents

of Lovecraft.

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