In H.P. Lovecraft’s short story, “The Colour Out of Space,” his narrator describes a place once visited by a strange alien presence from space as a “blasted heath.” Here, he tells us, the terror of this place “is not because of anything that can be seen or handled, but because of something that is imagined.” Later, when recounting the experience of the only family who had lived in this blasted heath at the time of the alien visitation, he tells us, “Something was creeping and creeping and waiting to be seen and heard.” For Lovecraft, then, the blasted heath is an uncanny, haunted place. To go there is to feel a presence that can’t be understood. It is a place where you are not alone even when you’re by yourself.

Three centuries before Lovecraft’s story, a “blasted heath” is where Shakespeare’s Macbeth encounters the three witches. After hearing them prophesy his rise to the throne, Macbeth demands, “Say from whence / You owe this strange intelligence, or why / Upon this blasted heath you stop our way / With such prophetic greeting” (Mac 1.3.76-79). Here, the blasted heath is a battlefield, a site of physical and psychological trauma. Like Lovecraft’s blasted heath, the terror of Macbeth’s also lies in what is imagined. For here, in this space, the mind is infected with an idea, an idea that breeds and grows and consumes.

Less than a century after Shakespeare, Milton conjures the image of a blasted heath to describe the army of fallen angels spread out before Satan as he prepares to deliver his first major speech: “As when heaven’s fire / Hath scathed the forest oaks or mountain pines, / With singèd top their stately growth though bare / Stands on the blasted heath” (PL 1.612-615). This image of a burnt forest, smoke still drifting off of charred trees, is infused with both despair and grandiosity, defeat and power, death and rebirth. Milton’s blasted heath, then, is a place where old allegiances and purposes have been stripped away and new ones are to be formed. It is an apocalyptic space, where the earthly intersects with the divine.

A blasted heath, then, is not strictly a post-apocalyptic wasteland or a ruined environment. Instead, it is a site of magic and madness, a space in which the supernatural invades the natural, a place where everything we thought we knew about reality is suddenly and irretrievably lost. In a blasted heath, the empirical, the teleological, is transformed into the purely, incoherently ontological. A blasted heath is not simply about loss, though. It is also where new life, new expanses, new ways of knowing, new identities are able to form. Out of the rubble of abandoned assumptions about the world emerge transformative thoughts and products.

In this sense, the blasted heath is also a metaphor for the writing process, where confrontations between prior knowledge and the unknown produce new ways of seeing and understanding the world. Though I used to understand the writing process as a procession toward an objective goal, I have come to understand it as something far more persistent and recursive than that: a means to a means, rather than a means to an end. Like the chapter in Winnie the Pooh, “In Which Christopher Robin Leads an Expotition (sic) to the North Pole,” I have learned to think of the writer’s destination as something to be discovered rather than something to be arrived at. You don’t need to know where you’re going before you start, but you do need to be willing to leave where you’re at. This willingness to embark on journeys into the uncanny is the seed of perpetual transformation. And the more comfortable you become with the discomfort of not knowing, the less terrifying the writing space can become.