landscape piece

''and once i walked through a golden valley that led to shadowy groves and ruins, and ended in a mighty wall green with antique vines, and pierced by a little gate of bronze. many times i walked through that valley, and longer and longer would i pause in the spectral half-light where the giant trees squirmed and twisted grotesquely, and the grey ground stretched damply from trunk to trunk, sometimes disclosing the mould-stained stones of buried temples. and always the goal of my fancies was the mighty vine-grown wall with the little gate of bronze therein. ... and as i looked upon the little gate in the mighty wall, i felt that beyond it lay a dream-country from which, once it was entered, there would be no return. so each night in sleep i strove to find the hidden latch of the gate in the ivied wall, though it was exceedingly well hidden. and i would tell myself that the realm beyond the wall was not more lasting merely, but more lovely and radiant as well.''

h.p.lovecraft, ex oblivione.

knock on ibid's skull

[image from skulladay.]

''his remains, notwithstanding the troubled state of italy, were taken to ravenna for interment ... were exhumed and ridiculed by the lombard duke of spoleto, who took his skull to king autharis ... ibid's skull was proudly handed down from king to king of the lombard line ... the skull was seized by the tottering desiderius and carried in the train of the frankish conqueror ... charlemagne took ibid's skull to his capital at aix, ... william the conqueror, finding it in an abbey niche ... did reverence to its osseous antiquity; ...

reliquary of ibid.

'' it was captured by the private soldier read-'em-and-weep hopkins, who not long after traded it to rest-in-jehovah stubbs ... stubbs, upon sending forth his son zerubbabel to seek his fortune ... gave him st.ibid's ... skull as a talisman. upon landing in salem zerrubbabel ... having become addicted to gaming, lost the skull to one epenetus dexter, ... it was in the house of dexter, in the northern part of the town near the present intersection of north main and olney streets, ... but the austere head of ibid continued on its wanderings ...

talisman of ibid.

'' petrus van schaack, secured the distinguished cranium for the modest sum of two guilders, he having recognised its value from the half-effaced inscription carved in lombardic miniscules ... from van schaack, sad to say the relic was stolen in 1683 by a french trader, jean grenier ... fired with virtuous rage at the possession of this holy relic by a protestant, crushed van schaack's head one night with an axe and escaped to the north with his booty; soon however being robbed and slain by the half-breed voyageur michael savard, who took the skull ... to add to a collection of similar but more recent material ...

holy relic of ibid.

'' his half-breed son pierre traded it among other things to some emissaries of the sacs and foxes, ... charles de langlade, founder of the trading post at green bay, ransomed it at the expense of many glass beads; later traded to jacques caboche, another settler, it was in 1850 lost in a game of chess or poker to a newcomer named hans zimmerman; ... where falling into the burrow of a prairie-dog, it passed beyond his power of discovery or recovery ...

alter of ibid.

'' so for generations did the skull ... lie hidden beneath the soil of a growing town ... at first worshipped with dark rites by the prairie-dogs, who saw in it a diety sent from the upper world, ... and at last one fateful night a titan thing occured. subtle nature, convulsed with a spiritual ectasy, ... laid low the lofty and heaved high the humble and behold! ... subterrene arcana hidden for years came at last to light. for there in the rifted roadway, lay bleached and tranquil in bland, saintly and consular pomp the dome like skull of ibid.''

h.p.lovecraft, ibid.

winter's soul

''ye winter gusts that round my casement blow and pile in drifts the palid demon snow; ye cruel frosts, that numb with poison breath a suff'ring world, and serve the will of death! grant me, ye gods , a dome of crystal glass, through whose clear surface sun and stars might blaze, ...

''here let me dwell, and in december sing midst balmy zephyrs of eternal spring! ... through mossy meads a limped stream might run, ... a floral train the rolling green might bear, ... unusual flow'rs the well plac'd urns might fill, ... here might the studious mind at ease expand, nor fear the woes that fret a wintery land. ...

''but see--alas--the pleasing picture fades--and icy field displaces the vernal shades! yet when indeed does life reward or please with truer things than visions such a these? our struggling years too little bliss could own were they confin'd to genuine joys alone! ... though changing seasons o'er the mead may roll, spring reigns perpetual in the smiling soul!''

h.p.lovecraft, a winters wish.

black cats

''between dogs and cats my degree of choice is so great that it would never occur to me to compare the two, i have no active dislike for dogs ... but for the cat i have entertained a particular respect and affection ever since the earliest days of my infancy ... naturally one's preference in the matter of cats and dogs depends wholly upon ones temperment and point of view. the dog would appear to me to be the favorite of superficial, sentimental, and emotional people ... this is not to say that the cheaper elements do not also reside in the average cat-lover's love of cats, but merely to point out that in ailurophily there exists a basis of true aestheticism which kynophily does not possess ...

''throw a stick, and the servile dog wheezes and pants and stumbles to bring it to you. do the same before a cat, and he would eye you with coolly polite and somewhat bored amusement ... the dog barks and begs and tumbles to amuse you when you crack the whip. ... the cat on the other hand, charms you into playing for its benefit when it wishes to be amused; making you rush about the room with a paper on a string when it feels like exercise, but refusing all your attempts to make it play when it is not in the humour. that is personality and individuality and self respect--the calm mastery of a being whose life is its own and not yours ...

''the cat is a realist, and no hypocrit. he takes what pleases him when he wants it, and makes no promises. he never leads you to expect more from him than he gives, and if you choose to be stupidly victorian enough to mistake his purrs and rubbings of self satisfaction for marks of transient affection toward you, that is no fault of his. he would not for a moment have you believe that he wants more of you than food and warmth and shelter and amusement--''

h.p.lovecraft, something about cats.

smithean couplet

he discerned in a dark recess the formless bulking of a couchant mass. and the mass stirred a little at his approach, and put forth with infinite slothfulness a huge and toad-shaped head. and the head opened its eyes very slightly, as if half awakened from slumber so that they were visible as two slits of oozing phospher in the black, browless face ...

he went forward till he could see the fine dark fur on the dormant body and sleepily porrected head ... there was a sluggish inclination of the toad-like head; and the eyes opened a little wider, and light flowed from them in viscous tricklings on the creased underlids.

clark ashton smith, the seven geases.

among the pleasures

text from alternate manuscript at eldritch dark.

''treasury of art, emporium of wealth, so expensive to live in that the saying ran "not everyone can go to corinth", its citadel poised so grandly on the craggy mountain above, the two blue gulfs spread below, it walls fortified with such extravagant strength--this superb city came crashing down in flames, and mummiu's soldiery hacked their way about streets, temples, rich villas, sepulchres, great warehouses stored with merchandise, galleries set with marble and bronze statues and bright paintings, smashing, looting, destroying and massacring, in philistine triumph and greed. they left behind them chaos, piled corpses, an almost razed city ...

''the dramatic contrast between the city of blackened ruins and broken stones and the magnificence that had been, stirred for a century the pity and the imagination of all who passed that way ... wrecked corinth thus lay derelict, lived in by a few, but uncleared and unbuilt, from 146 to 44 bc. then julius caesar who knew the importance of its position, set to work to rebuild it, clearing away the hundred years of ruins and building up a fine roman town. ...

''roman merchants and gentlemen came and grew rich in the once-more flourishing sea trade; they built their villas where those of rich corinthians had stood; digging about, they came on beautiful objects buried in debris; in their theatres they had gladitorial shows; they soon became licentious enough to qualify for the diatribes of st. paul; perhaps they absorbed it from the ancient site of libertinism; and such influences may be numbered among the pleasures of ruins.''

rose macaulay, pleasure of ruins.

the woods with a thousand young

''the substance of the record was quasi-ritualistic, and included one palpably human voice ... the recording phonograph and dictaphone had not worked uniformly well, and had of course been at great disadvantage because of the remote and muffled nature of the over heard ritual; so that the actual speech secured was very fragmentary, ... i will present it here in full as i remember it--and i am fairly confident that i know it correctly by heart, not only from reading the transcript, but from playing the record itself over and over again. it is not a thing which one might readily forget

''[indistinguishable sounds] [a cultivated male human voice] ... is the lord of the woods, even to ... and the gifts of the men of leng ... so from the wells of night to the gulfs of space, and from the gulfs of space to the wells of night. ever the praises of great cthulhu, of tsathoggua, and of him who is not to be named. ever their praises, and abundance to the black goat of the woods. ia! shub-niggurath! the goat with a thousand young! [a buzzing imitation of human speech] ia! shub-niggurath! the black goat of the woods with a thousand young

''such were the words for which i was to listen when i started the phonograph. it was with a trace of genuine dread and reluctance that i pressed the lever and heard the preliminary scratching of the sapphire point, and i was glad that the first faint fragmentary words were in a human voice ... and then i heard the other voice. to this hour i shudder retrospectively when i think of how it struck me, ... it swiftly followed the human voice in ritualistic response, but in my imagination it was a morbid echo winging its way across unimaginable abysses from unimaginable outer hells. it is more than two years now since i last ran off that blasphemous waxen cylinder; but at this moment, and at all other moments, i can still hear that feeble, fiendish buzzing as it reached me for the first time.

''ia! shub-niggurath! the black goat of the woods with a thousand young!''

h.p.lovecraft, the whisperer in darkness.

fragment

''naturally we cannot expect all weird tales to conform absolutely to any theoretical model. creative minds are uneven and the best of fabrics have their dull spots... moreover, much of the choicest weird work is unconscious; appearing in memorable fragments scattered through material whose massed effect may be of a very different cast... therefore we must judge a weird tale... by the emotional level which it attains at its least mundane point... if the proper sensations are excited, such a "high spot" must be admited on its own merits as weird literature,''

h.p.lovecraft, super natural horror in literature.


''every race of people scattered over the plains and mountains of the world has its legends. very jealously these racial stories are guarded, cradled as it were in the hearts and minds of the people. each contry has a different name to define various phenomena, the like of eerie, elusive lights that appear in marshlands, along mountain trails, in the lonely reaches of the bogs, and waver tauntingly among the tall grasses of plains and prairies.

''in delaware, maryland, and the twin carolinas, these lights are called marshfires. ... in the dark fastnesss of the carpathian mountains and all along the dalmation coast, the chief horror is the werewolf. the superstitious peasants wave little knots of dried garlic in front of them when they walk abroad at night. for the skittering lights they see in the fields and forest paths are werewolf-eyes, ... in cornwall, devon, and somerset, strange processions of smoky lights are seen at midnight, winding through moor and wold. druid lights the farmfolk call them. ...

''in ireland, riddled with legend, immediate and part of the daily round are the gloriously colored lights wavering in the western sky, lurking in bogs or glens. they are called the fires of beltaine.''

james reynolds, andrea palladio and the winged device.

lovecraft's townscape

mocrates my son:--
november 24, 1923

''i joyn'd my adopted son eddy on the following day [22nd november--my grandfather's birthday] for a tour of exploration of certain parts of colonial providence which i had never before seen or more than vaguely heard of. not a stone's throw from the travell'd business section, tuckt quietly in behind broad and weybosset streets, lurk the beginnings of a squalid colonial labyrinth in which i mov'd as an utter stranger, each moment wondering whether i were in truth in my native town or in some leprous distorted witch-salem of fever or nightmare.

''i had not thought my own city to be so large and vary'd ... eddy knew it, and was my guide. ... there was a fog, and out of it and into it again mov'd dark monstrous diseas'd shapes. they may have been people, or what once were, or might, have been people ... only the gods know who can inhabit this morbid maze--on through the fog we went, threading our way thro' narrow exotick streets and unbelievable courts and alleys, sometimes having antient houses almost meet above our heads, but often emerging into unwholesome little squares or grassless parks ...

''eddy inform'd me that these little squares are characteristick of the old west side of providence, but i had never heard of them, many of these places--especially a "gould's court" of black, gnawing hideousness which i called "ghoul's court" upon seeing it in the lone pallid lamplight after the sun had set--eddy tells me are famous in the annals of crime--but i do not read police reports. there must be crime where so many dead things are ... the massed dead of colonial decay ... the dead that draw shapes out of the night to feed and feast and fatten ... no i had not thought that providence held such places as this. we came out silently.''

yr. obt. servt.,
h.paget-lowe.

h.p.lovecraft, selected letters.

keypad of the spheres

''trembling in waves that golden whisps of nebula made weirdly visible, there rose a timid hint of far off melody, droning in faint chords that our own universe of stars knows not. ... it was a song, but not the song of any voice. night and the spheres sang it, and it was old when space and nyarlathotep and the other gods were born. ''

h.p.lovecraft, the dream quest of unknown kadath.

skull of zenig

[a place call'd etsy]


"you have come to see the great ones whom it is unlawful for men to see. ... when barzai the wise climbed hatheg-kla to see the greater ones dance and howl above the clouds in the moonlight he never returned. the other gods were there, and they did what was expected. zenig of aphorat sought to reach unknown kadath in the cold waste, and his skull is now set in a ring on the little finger of one whom i need not name."

h.p.lovecraft, the dream quest of unknown kadath.

the goody fowler sisters

image from h.p.lovecraft archive.

my dear little grandchildren:-
598 angell street
providence, r.i.
may 1, 1923

''arrived in salem, i stroll'd a while through the venerable streets, and finally embark'd for danvers--call'd "salem-village" in the 17th century, and forming the seat of most of the witch-craft cases of 1692. ... i beheld the tall chimney and ivy'd walls of a splendid brick house of later colonial design, and espy'd a sign which proclaim'd it open for publick inspection ... inform'd by the sign that this was the capt. samuel fowler house, built 1809, accessible for eight-pence, and the property of the society for the preservation of new-england antiquities, i loudly sounded the knocker and awaited developement, nothing develop'd, i then knock'd at the side door, but with equal futility. then i noted a door half open in a miserable "ell" at the back of the house; and believing the place tenanted, made a third trial there. ....

''my summons was answer'd simultaneously by two of the most pitiful and decrepit--looking persons imaginable--hideous old women more sinister than the witches of 1692 ... the smaller, and probably older of the two spoke first--in a hoarse rattleing voice that dimly suggested death, ... if however their weird aspect and hideous squalor were sinister; what can one say of the contrast involv'd when the guttural salutation to the speaker became intelligible? for despite the omnipresent evidence of a slatternly decadence beyond words, this ancient witch was mumbling forth a courtly and aristocratic welcome, in language and accents beyond question bespeaking the gentlest birth and proudest cultivation! ...

''yes--it was the old, old new-england story of family decay and aristocratic pauperism ... these tatter'd ancients were the misses fowler, own grand daughters of the proud seafarer and fighter who in his dashing prime had built that house for the comfort, dignity, and splendour of his descendents. ... the great-grandmother of these poor relics was that sprightly mrs. page who, at the time of the colonial tea agitation, serv'd her guests with the beverage on the roof after her husband had forbidden her to serve it under his roof.''

yr. most aff: ancestor and obt: servt: grandpa theobald.

h.p.lovecraft, selected letters.

starry tea set via notcothulhu.

fragment

''naturally we cannot expect all weird tales to conform absolutely to any theoretical model. creative minds are uneven and the best of fabrics have their dull spots... moreover, much of the choicest weird work is unconscious; appearing in memorable fragments scattered through material whose massed effect may be of a very different cast... therefore we must judge a weird tale... by the emotional level which it attains at its least mundane point... if the proper sensations are excited, such a "high spot" must be admited on its own merits as weird literature,''

h.p.lovecraft, super natural horror in literature.



''there is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. he wants to see what is reaching towards him, and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange. in the dark the fear of an unexpected touch can mount to panic.

''even clothes give insufficient security. it is easy to tear them and pierce through to the naked, smooth defenceless flesh of the victim. all the distances men create around themselves are dictated by this fear. they shut themselves in houses which no-one may enter, and only there feel some measure of security. the fear of burglers is not only the fear of being robbed, but also the fear of a sudden and unexpected clutch out of the darkness. ...

''the whole knot of shifting and intensely sensitive reactions to an alien touch--proves that we are dealing here with a human propensity as deep seated as it is alert and insidious; something which never leaves a man when he has once established the boundaries of his personality. even in sleep, when he is far more unguarded, he can all too easily be disturbed by touch.

elias canetti, crowds and power; english by carol stewart.

terrac'd landscape piece

''three times randolph carter dreamed of the marvelous city, and three times was he snatched away while still he paused on the high terrace above it. all golden and lovely it blazed in the sunset, with walls, temples, colonnades and arched bridges of veined marble, silver-basined fountains of prismatic spray in broad squares and perfumed gardens, and wide streets marching between delicate trees and blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows; while on steep northward slopes climbed tiers of red roofs and old peaked gables harbouring little lanes of grassy cobbles...

''he knew that for him its meaning must once have been supreme; though in what cycle or incarnation he had known it, or whether in dream or in waking, he could not tell. vaguely it called up glimpses of a far forgotten first youth, when wonder and pleasure lay in all the mystery of days, and dawn and dusk alike strode forth prophetic to the eager sound of lutes and song, unclosing fiery gates toward further and surprising marvels.

''but each night as he stood on that high marble terrace with the curious urns and carven rails and looked over that hushed sunset city of beauty and unearthly immanence he felt the bondage of dreams tyrannous gods; for in no wise could he leave that lofty spot, or descend the wide marmoreal flights flung endlessly down to where those streets of elder witchery lay outspread and beckoning.

''at length, sick with longing for those glittering sunset streets and cryptical hill lanes among ancient tiled roofs, nor able sleeping or waking to drive them from his mind, carter resolved to go with bold entreaty whither no man had gone before, and dare the icy deserts through the dark to where unknown kadath, veiled in cloud and crowned with unimagined stars, holds secret and nocturnal the onyx castle of the great ones.''

h.p.lovecraft, the dream quest of unknown kadath.

strange couplet

'' outside the ordered universe, where no dreams reach; that last amorphous blight of nether most confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity--the boundless daemon sultan azatoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes; ...

'' that last amorphous blight of nether-most confusion where bubbles and blasphemes at infinity's centre the mindless daemon-sultan azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud ... those inconcievable, unlighted chambers beyond time wherein azathoth gnaws shapeless and ravenous amidst the muffled, maddening beat of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes. ''

h.p.lovecraft, dream quest of unknown kadath.

which came first ...

'' whether the dreams brought on the fever or the fever brought on the dreams walter gilman did not know ... possibly gilman should not have studied so hard. non euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folk lore, ... one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension ...

'' the professors at miskatonic had urged him to slacken, and had voluntarily cut down his courses at several points. moreover they had stopped him from consulting the dubious old books on forbidden secrets that were kept under lock and key in a vault at the university library ...

'' the touch of brain fever and the dreams began in febuary ... about this period his inability to concentrate on his formal studies worried him considerably, his apprehensions about the mid-year examinations being very acute ...

'' the dreams were wholly beyond the pale of sanity, and gilman felt they must be a result, jointly, of his studies in mathematics and in folklore ... he had been thinking too much about the vague regions which his formulae told him must lie beyond the three dimensions we know, ...

'' gilmans dreams consisted largely in plunges through limitless abysses of inexplicably colored twilight ... he did not walk or climb fly, or swim, crawl or wriggle ... the abysses were by no means vacant, being crowded with indescribably angled masses of alien hued substance, some of which appeared to be organic while others appeared to be inorganic ... all the objects--organic and inorganic alike--were totally beyond description or even comprehension. ...

'' in the deeper dreams everything was likewise more distinct and gilman felt that the twilight abysses around him were those of the fourth dimension. ''

h.p.lovecraft, the dreams in the witch house.

skull of zenig

''you have come to see the great ones whom it is unlawful for men to see. ... when barzai the wise climbed hatheg-kla to see the greater ones dance and howl above the clouds in the moonlight he never returned. the other gods were there, and they did what was expected. zenig of aphorat sought to reach unknown kadath in the cold waste, and his skull is now set in a ring on the little finger of one whom i need not name."

h.p.lovecraft, the dream quest of unknown kadath.

landscape piece

james ferdinand morton
pattern of predictable precision
may 15, 1930 thursday.

''god i swoon! i swoon with the conciousness of compleat and culminant beauty! ia! shubniggurath! yogsothoth!!!! i have seen maymont!!!!!! ...

''you are no doubt sensible, from many observations of mine, that to me the quality of utter, perfect beauty assumes two supreme incarnations or adumbrations. one the sight of mystical city towers and roofs out lined against a sunset and glimps'd from a fairly distant baulstrade terrace.

''and the other, the experience of walking [or as in most of my dreams, aerially floating] thro' aethereal and enchanted gardens of exotick delicacy and opulance, with carved stone bridges, labyrinthine walks, marble fountains, terraces and staircases, strange pagodas, hillside grottoes, curious statues, termini, sundials, benches, basins, and lanthorns, lily'd pools of swans and streams with tiers of waterfalls, spreading gingko-trees and drooping, feathery willows, and sun-touched flowers of a bizarre, klarkash-tonick pattern never beheld on sea or land ...

''well, by god, sir, call me an aged lier or not--i vow i have actually found the garden of my earliest dreams--and in no other city than richmond home of my beloved poe! maymont! i shall dream of little else all the few remaining days of my long life!!--

raptorously thine--
theobaldus.

h.p.lovecraft, selected letters.

maymont estate.

fragment

''naturally we cannot expect all weird tales to conform absolutely to any theoretical model. creative minds are uneven and the best of fabrics have their dull spots... moreover, much of the choicest weird work is unconcious; appearing in memorable fragments scattered through material whose massed effect may be of a very different cast... therefore we must judge a weird tale... by the emotional level which it attains at its least mundane point... if the proper sensations are excited, such a "high spot" must be admited on its own merits as weird literature,''

h.p.lovecraft, super natural horror in literature.

''chaos--the absence of form and order--above all other words chaos haunts western man. it fills his mind with visions of seas running into rivers, men giving birth to frogs, fish flying through grassy cloud, it is the unnamed heart of every horror story--the unexpected, the unpredictable, the uncontrollable, the lawless--chaos.''

adrian savage, introduction to chaos magic.

antidemeaculumn

''i know not where i was born, save that the castle was infinitely old and infinitely horrible; full of dark passages and having high ceilings where the eye could find only cobwebs and shadow.

''nor was there any sun outdoors, since the terrible trees grew high above the topmost accessible tower. there was one black tower which reached above the trees into the unknown outer sky, but that was partly ruined and could not be ascended save by a well-nigh impossible climb up the sheer wall, stone by stone.

''once i tried to escape from the forest, but as i went farther from the castle the shade grew denser and the air more filled with brooding fear; so that i ran frantically back lest i lose my way in a labyrinth of nighted silence.

''then in the shadowy solitude my longing for the light grew so frantic that i could rest no more, and i lifted entreating hands to the single black ruined tower that reached above the forest into the unknown outer sky. and at last i resolved to scale that tower, fall though i might; ...

''in the dank twilight i climbed the worn and aged stone stairs till i reached the level where they ceased, and there after clung perilously to small footholds leading upward. ghastly and terrible was that dead stairless cylinder of rock; black, ruined, and deserted, ...

''all at once after an infinity of awesome; sightless crawling up that concave and desperate precipice, i felt my head touch a solid thing, ... and i knew that i must have gained the roof, or at least some kind of floor. in the darkness i raised my free hand and tested the barrier, finding it stone and immovable ...

''i knew that my climb was for the nonce ended; since the slab was the trap-door of an aperature leading to a level stone surface of greater circumference than the lower tower, no doubt the floor of some lofty and capacious observation chamber. i crawled through carefully, ...

''believing i was now at a prodigious height, far above the accursed branches of the wood, i dragged myself up from the floor and fumbled about for windows that i might look fo the first time upon the sky, and the moon and stars ...

''unexpectedly my hands came upon a doorway, where hung a portal of stone, rough with strange chiseling. trying it i found it locked; but with a supreme burst of strength i overcame all obstacles and dragged it open inward.

''fancying now that i had attained the very pinnacle of the castle, i commenced to rush up the few steps beyond the door; ... which i tried carefully and found unlocked, but which i did not open for fear of falling from the amazing height to which i had climbed. then the moon came out.

h.p.lovecraft, the outsider.

night of the night-gaunts

dear miss bonner:--
4th may 1936
the garden house
1, ely's court
providence plantation

''no--we are never scarred of the dark now, though we used to be prior to 1895 or'96. our grandfather cured us of the tendancy by daring us [when our years numbered approximately five] to walk through certain chains of dark rooms in the fairly capacious old home at 454 angell.

''little by little our hardihood increased--and by the time we graduated from the fully-inhabited 2nd floor to the merely servant--and--store--and--guest--room occupied 3rd floor, we were reasonably hard-boiled so far as the amorphous entities of shadow were concerned.

''actual nightmares though, were another story, we still have one or two per year--though even the worst is pallid beside the real 1896 product. i invented the name of night-gaunts for the things i dreamed of in 96 and 97.''

yr. most oblig'd and obt. servt,
h.p.lovecraft 3rd asst under-secy--k.a.t.

h.p.lovecraft, selected letters.

this decay of cities

''on one of my early travels in the libyan sahara, i nearly passed by an abandoned and nameless city which i would never have known had existed if my guide, a tuareg camel-man had not pointed it out. it was a rock-built city enclosed within a high wall buttressed with round turrets and pierced by a single gate way. ...

''i was unable to find a single clue as to who built this place, for there was nothing resembling a domestic artefact to be seen, ... my experiance in the fezzan goes to show that there are still corners of this teeming world where the modern traveler can share, if only in a modest manner, the personal thrill of those early explorers who first saw the magnificent lost cities of antiquity; ...

''whether this decay of cities and of the civilizations they represented is an inevitable law of history is, of course debatable, and it would be rash to jump to conclusions, although where there is a contemporary account of what life was like at the end of an era, we are in a better position to see the forces of change and decay at work. ...

''this book is largely the result of my travels, which have in many cases been journeys of exploration. what struck me most forcibly on the very earliest of my expeditions and what eventually led me to read the works of my predecessors was the strangeness of large and manifestly once populous cities standing in ruins in the middle of nowhere. ...

''these are questions which the thoughtful traveller, whether standing in the midst of the ruins of timgad in algeria, or of verulainium britian, is bound to ask himself; ...

''it is in this spirit of a search rather than of an archaeological tour that i have tried to describe the following ten cities, two each in the five main historic areas of the world and each typifying the rise and fall of a vanished civilization.''

james wellard, the search for lost cities.

abandoned and nameless city via dailygrail.

skull of zenig

''you have come to see the great ones whom it is unlawful for men to see. ... when barzai the wise climbed hatheg-kla to see the greater ones dance and howl above the clouds in the moonlight he never returned. the other gods were there, and they did what was expected. zenig of aphorat sought to reach unknown kadath in the cold waste, and his skull is now set in a ring on the little finger of one whom i need not name."

h.p.lovecraft, the dream quest of unknown kadath.

musical spheres

''trembling in waves that golden whisps of nebula made weirdly visible, there rose a timid hint of far off melody, droning in faint chords that our own universe of stars knows not. ... it was a song, but not the song of any voice. night and the spheres sang it, and it was old when space and nyarlathotep and the other gods were born. ''

h.p.lovecraft, the dream quest of unknown kadath.

autumn poison

''dear a.w.:--what you say of the fascination of autumn is very true--and i have always felt it despite the menace of physical discomfort it brings ... the woods, the fields, the hillside orchards laden with fruit, the fields of sheaved corn, the old stone walls overgrown with flaming vines, ... at this second i am sitting on an old new england stone wall under an ancient elm, with a squirrel chattering nearby and a lovely profusion of poison ivy [to which i am oddly immune despite a cuticular hypersensitiveness in other directions] climbing among the mossy rocks. ... it has been this way for 250 years--and may the gods keep it so [by virtue of ownership by large, conservative institutions] as many more.''


h.p.lovecraft, selected letters--iii.

fragment

''naturally we cannot expect all weird tales to conform absolutely to any theoretical model. creative minds are uneven and the best of fabrics have their dull spots... moreover, much of the choicest weird work is unconscious; appearing in memorable fragments scattered through material whose massed effect may be of a very different cast... therefore we must judge a weird tale... by the emotional level which it attains at its least mundane point... if the proper sensations are excited, such a "high spot" must be admited on its own merits as weird literature,''

h.p.lovecraft, super natural horror in literature.


''when you design a garden, it raises basic questions. what is nature, how do we fit into it, and how should we shape it where we can, both physically and visually. some of these questions are practical, others are philosophical, and the latter may not occur to us while laying out a garden, but they are implied...

''thus the garden as a microcosm of the universe as a whole is quite a familiar idea ... hence the "garden of cosmic speculation." a set of five areas which have been shaped to celebrate some aspects of what we now know about the underlying forces and forms of nature. ...

''but i start with a constant inspiration, the universe as guide and measure, because that was the idea that initiated the design. cosmic passion the desire both to know and to relate to the universe, is one of the strongest drives in sentient creatures, on a par with those which exercise novelists: sex, money, and power ...

''an art fitting to the cosmos, what i would call "cosmogenic art", does not always take nature as beneficient or beyond improvement. ... for instance, instead of measuring days and minutes by wobbly turns of the earth, time has been put on a cosmic footing and one second in is now measured at 9,192,631,770 cycles of a cesium atom. feet, inches, meters--all weights will soon go the this way, as the universe, not man [as protagoras claimed], becomes "the measure of all things!"

''recently more and more black holes have been found, and some physicists hold the uncanny idea that the universe as a whole can be conceived as one. ... swallowing, destroying, black invisible, creating like a mother? "because she brings all large bodies into being might her appropriate name, and metaphor, be not "black hole" but "invisibilia"?

''it could be invisibilia, the nourishing eater of all things, whose stream of energizing particles has been seen to shoot out into space a plasma jet some ten thousand light years long.''

charles jencks, the garden of cosmic speculations.

landscape piece

''the scene of my excavations would alone have been enough to unnerve any ordinary man. baleful primal trees of unholy size, age, and grotesqueness leered above me like the pillars of some hellish druidic temple; muffling the thunder, hushing the clawing wind, and admitting but little rain.

''beyond the scarred trunks in the background illumined by faint flashes of filtered lightning rose the damp ivied stones of the deserted mansion, while somewhat nearer was the abandoned dutch garden whose walks and beds were polluted by a white, fungous, foetid, over-nourished vegetation that never saw full daylight.

''and nearest of all was the graveyard, where deformed trees tossed insane branches as their roots displaced unhallowed slabs and sucked venom from what lay below. now and then, beneath the brown pall of leaves that rotted and festered in the antediluvian forest darkness, i could trace the sinister outlines of some of those low mounds which characterized the lightning-pierced region.''

h.p.lovecraft, the lurking fear.

demeaculumn

[john pawson]

"and i saw that all the travellers were converging ... at the top of a high hill, ... where perched a great white church ... the throng that was now slipping speechlessly into the church ... to the trap door of the vaults which yawned loathsomely open just before the pulpit ... i followed dumbly down the foot worn steps and into the dark suffocating crypt ... into a venerable tomb ... and in a moment we were all descending an ominous staircase ... a narrow spiral staircase ... that wound endlessly down into the bowels of the hill ... it was a silent shocking descent ..."

h.p.lovecraft, the festival.

not "haunted"

'' what i heard in my youth about the shunned house was merely that people died there in alarmingly great numbers. ... it was plainly unhealthy, perhaps because of the dampness and fungous growth in the cellar, the general sickish smell, the draughts of the hallways, or the quality of the well ... the general fact is, that the house was never regarded by the solid part of the community as in any real sense "haunted" ...

'' what is really beyond dispute is that a frightful proportion of persons died there; or more accurately, had died there, ... these persons were not all cut off suddenly by any one cause; rather did it seem that their vitality was insidiously sapped, ... which spoke ill for the salubriousness of the building. neighboring houses it must be added, seemed entirely free from the noxious quality. ...

'' in my childhood the shunned house was vacant, with barren, gnarled and terrible old trees, long queerly pale grass and nightmarishly misshapen weeds in the high terraced yard where birds never lingered. ... and i can still recall my youthful terror not only at the morbid strangeness of this sinister vegetation, but at the eldritch atmosphere and odour of the delapidated house, whose unlocked front door was often entered in quest of shudders ... ''

h.p.lovecraft, the shunned house.

skull of zenig

''you have come to see the great ones whom it is unlawful for men to see. ... when barzai the wise climbed hatheg-kla to see the greater ones dance and howl above the clouds in the moonlight he never returned. the other gods were there, and they did what was expected. zenig of aphorat sought to reach unknown kadath in the cold waste, and his skull is now set in a ring on the little finger of one whom i need not name."

h.p.lovecraft, the dream quest of unknown kadath

collector's neurosis

''st.john and i followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devestating ennui. it was this frightful emotional need which led us eventually to that detestable course which even in my present fear i mention with shame and timiditly--that hideous extremity of human outrage, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing.

''our museum was a blasphemous, unthinkable place, where with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had assembled an universe of terror and decay to excite our jaded sensibilities. niches here and there contained skulls of all shapes, and heads preserved in various stages of dissolution. there one might find the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and the fresh and radiantly golden heads of new-buried children.

''whilst in a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity, it is of this loot in particular that i must not speak--thank god i had the courage to destroy it long before i thought of destroying myself!

''by what malign fatality were we lured to that terrible holland churchyard? i think it was the dark rumor and legendry, the tales of one buried there for five centuries, who had himself been a ghoul in his time and had stolen a potent thing from a mighty sepulchre.

''i remember how we delved in the ghoul's grave with our spades, ... then we struck a substance harder that the damp mould, and beheld a rotting oblong box crusted with mineral deposits from the long undisturbed ground. ... much--amazingly much--was left of the object despite the lapse of five hundred years. the skeleton though crushed in places by the jaws of the thing that had killed it, held together with surprizing firmness, and we gloated over the clean white skull and its long firm teeth and its eyeless sockets that once had glowed with a charnel fever like our own.

''in the coffin lay an amulet of curious and exotic design which had apparently been worn around the sleepers neck. it was the oddly conventionalized figure of a crouching winged hound, or sphinx with a semi canine face. and was exquisitely carved in antique oriental fashion from a small piece of green jade.

the expression of its features was repellant in the extreme, savoring at once of death, bestiality, and malevolance. around the base was an inscription in characters which neither st. john nor i could identify; and on the bottom, like a makers seal was graven a grotesque and formidable skull.

''immediatly upon beholding this amulet we knew that we must posess it; that this treasure alone was our logical pelf from the centuried grave ... we recognized it as the thing hinted of in the forbidden necronomicon of the mad arab abdul alhazred; the ghastly soul-symbol of the corpse eating cult of inaccessable leng, in central asia, ...

''the jade amulet now reposed in a niche in our museum, and sometimes we burned a strangely scented candle before it. we read much in alhazred's necronomicon about its properties and about the relation of ghost's souls to the objects it symbolized; and were disturbed by what we read,. ... then the terror came ...''

h.p.lovecraft, the hound.

magah birds

''the whole air was fragant with balsam, and the magah birds sang blithely as they flashed their seven colors in the sun ... around him he wrapped another blanket, for the nights are cold in oriab; and when upon awaking once he thought he felt the wings of some insect brushing his face he covered his head altogether and slept in peace till roused by the magah birds in distant resin groves.''

magah birds at notcothulhu.

h.p.lovecraft, the dream quest of unknown kadath.

hypothetical illustrations

''he was getting an intuitive knack for solving reimannian equations, and astonished professor upham by his comprehension of fourth-dimensional and other problems which had floored the rest of the class. one afternoon there was a discussion of possible freakish curvatures in space, and of theoretical points of approach or even contact between our part of the cosmos and various other regions as distant as the farthest stars or the transgalatic gulfs themselves ...

''gilman's handling of this theme filled everyone with admiration, even though some of his hypothetical illustrations caused an increase in the always plentiful gossip about his nervous and solitary eccentricity. what made the students shake their heads was his sober theory that a man might--given mathematical knowledge admittedly beyond all likelihood of human acquirement--step deliberately from earth to any other celestial body which might lie at one of an infinity of specific points in the cosmic pattern.

''such a step he said would require only two stages; first, a passage out of three dimensional sphere we know, and second, a passage back to the three-dimensional sphere at another point, perhaps one of infinite remoteness. ... gilman could not be very clear about his reasons for this last assumption, but his haziness here was more than overbalanced by his clearness on other complex points. professor upham especially liked his demonstration of the kinship of higher mathematics to certain phases of magical lore transmitted down the ages from an ineffable antiquity--human or prehuman--whose knowledge of the cosmos and its laws was greater than ours.''

h.p.lovecraft, the dreams in the witch house.

body of mythos

''if we are to use the language of trance in our investigation, we need both a paradigm--a conceptual example coordinating our inner life with meditation--and a technique for realizing the paradigm, the necessary paradigm is called proprioception; the technique is yoga. ...

''proprioception is a physiologicaly well-defined but incompletely understood, source of internal experience. ... the proprioceptive nervous system is the neurology of bodily feeling. by means of the proprioceptive system your body is made known to your brain. a general visceral experience--a proprioception--can be sensed by any one with a minimum of concentration. proprioception is internal touch but in the expansive sense of proprioception we are adopting, the term applies to how you see, hear, smell, and taste your body as well ...''

j. n. sansonese, the body of myth.

demeaculumn--santiago: ii

''the project

''the design principles that guided the project are described below:

''to assume the openness of the process: ... as a result of the clearing of the apse, a new devotional setting was established that would be open to future definitions.

''to assume the fluid construction of circulation: ... all of them responding to processional criteria that do not admit to discontinuities or abrupt changes of direction. ...

''to assume diversity of material finishes: coarse and massive timber pieces, smooth marble and basalt, coarse travertine, fair face concrete, ...

''to subtly counteract invisibility: ... one massive timber beam becomes the only element that simultaneously belongs to the hidden crypt and the exposed nave ... massive and slightly displaced wooden lintels, which serve dual purpose as benches, are also indicative of the spaces underneath the presbytery. ...

''to emphasize scale: ... full evening sunlight that animates the altar's background space and simultaneously highlights the full scale of the nave. ...

''to participate in the buildings memory: ... the most remarkable case was the recasting of the crypts alter from old masonry stones. ...

''to combine informality, intimacy, and solemnity: ... only two devotional figures preside, both of romanesque origin; these were chosen by the client and their scale intrigued us. ...

''to emphasize the descending access: burial is about returning to the ground: its path is always downward. ... ''


rodrigo perez de arce, o'neil ford duograph: 1 chile, crypt in the cathedral of santiago de chile.

starry vision

''once i watch’d with restless yearning an alluring, aureate star; ... mystic waves of beauty blended with the gorgeous golden rays; ... there (thought i) lies scenes of pleasure, where the free and blessed dwell, ... there (i told myself) were shining worlds of happiness unknown, ... thus i mus’d, when o’er the vision crept a red delirious change; ... crimson burn’d the star of sadness as behind the beams i peer’d; ... now i know the fiendish fable that the golden glitter bore; now i shun the spangled sable that i watch’d and lov’d before; but the horror, set and stable, haunts my soul for evermore.''

complete poem.

h.p.lovecraft, astrophobos.

for starry dust thou art

''the name "blasted heath" seemed to me very odd and theatrical, and i wondered how it had come into the folklore of a puritan people. then i saw that dark westward tangle of glens and slopes for myself, and ceased to wonder at anything besides its own elder mystery.

''it must, i thought as i viewed it, be the outcome of a fire; but why had nothing new ever grown over those five acres of grey desolation that sprawled open to the sky like a great spot eaten by acid in the woods and fields? ... there was no vegetation of any kind on that broad expanse, but only a fine grey dust or ash which no wind seemed ever to blow about. ...

''in the evening i asked old people in arkham about the blasted heath, and what was meant by the phrase "strange days" which so many evasively muttered. speakers would not be exact; and because they all told me to pay no attention to old ammi pierce's crazy tales i sought him out the next morning. ...

''it all began, old ammi said, with the meteorite ... these were not haunted woods, and their fantastic dusk was never terrible till the strange days. then there had come that white noontide cloud, that string of explosions in the air, and that pillar of smoke from the valley far in the wood. and by night all arkham had heard of the great rock that fell out of the sky and bedded itself in the ground beside the well at the nahum gardner place. ...

''then fell the time of fruit and harvest. the pears and apples slowly ripened, and nahum vowed that his ordhards were prospering as never before. the fruit was growing to phenomenal size and unwonted gloss, and in such abundance that extra barrels were ordered to handle the future crop. but with the ripening came sore disappointment; for of all that gorgeous array of specious lushiousness not one single jot was fit to eat.

''into the fine flavour of the pears and apples had crept a stealthy bitterness and sickishness, so that even the smallest bites induced a lasting disgust. it was the same with the melons and tomatoes, and nahum sadly saw that his entire crop was lost. quick to connect events he declared that the meteorite had poisoned the soil, and thanked heaven that most of the other crops were in the upland lot along the road.

''people vowed that the snow melted faster around nahum's, ... and had noticed the skunk-cabbages coming up through the mud by the woods across the road. never were things of such size seen before, and they held strange colours that could not be put into any words ... the bad fruit of the fall before was freely mentioned, and it went from mouth to mouth that there was poison in nahum's ground. of course it was the meteorite; ...

''the trees budded prematurely around nahum's, and at night they swayed ominously in the wind. ... when the early saxifrage came out it had another strange colour; not quite like that of the skunk-cabbage, but plainly related and equally unknown to any one who saw it. ...

''all the orchard trees blossomed forth in strange colours, and through the stony soil of the yard and adjacent pasturage there sprang up a bizarre growth which only a botanist could connect with the proper flora of the region.

''no sane wholesome colours were anywhere to be seen except in the green grass and leafage; but everywhere those hectic and prismatic variants of some diseased underlying primary tone without a place amoung thte known tints of earth. the dutchman's breeches became a thing of sinister menace and the bloodroots grew insolant in their chromatic perversion.

''in may the insects came, and nahum's place became a night-mare of buzzing and crawling. most of the creatures seemed not quite usual in their aspects and motions, and their nocturnal habits contradicted all former experiance. ...

''not long after this the changes in grass and leaves became apparent to the eye. all the verdure was going grey, and was developing a highly singular quality of brittleness ... and all the while the vegetation was turning grey and brittle. even the flowers whose hues had been so strange were greying now, and the fruit was coming out grey and dwarfed and tasteless.

''the asters and goldenrods bloomed grey and distorted, and the roses and zinneas and hollyhocks in the front yard were such blasphemous-looking things that nahum's oldest boy zenas cut them down. the strangely puffed insects died about that time, even the bees that had left their hives and taken to the woods.''

h.p.lovecraft, the colour out of space.

fragment

''naturally we cannot expect all weird tales to conform absolutely to any theoretical model. creative minds are uneven and the best of fabrics have their dull spots... moreover, much of the choicest weird work is unconscious; appearing in memorable fragments scattered through material whose massed effect may be of a very different cast... therefore we must judge a weird tale... by the emotional level which it attains at its least mundane point... if the proper sensations are excited, such a "high spot" must be admited on its own merits as weird literature,''

h.p.lovecraft, super natural horror in literature.


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[toronto courtyard.]

''where courts of this kind are found close to each other in the city, they suggest an inward, closed world seperated from the street. one begins to get a reading of a neutral exterior urban space, left empty for the benifit of vehicles and representing some kind of stiff, formal public behavior, while behind the walls of the courts lurk all the forbidden temptations to act privately and freely...''

polyzoides stefano, etal; courtyard housing in los angeles: a typological analysis.

moule&polyzoides: architects and urbanists.

eternal ruins

how dost thou lie, o rome, neath the foot of the teuton slaves are thy men, and bent to the will of thy conqueror. whither hath gone, great city, the race that gave law to all nations, subdu'd the east and the west, and made them bow down to thy consuls, knew not defeat, but gave it to all who attack'd thee?

roma enjoy'd.

dead! and replac'd by these wretches who cower in confusion. dead! they who gave us this empire to guard and to live in, rome, thou didst fall from thy pow'r with the proud race that made thee, and we, base italians, enjoy'd what we could not have builded.

h.p.lovecraft, on the ruin of rome.

ibid theobroma

'' his remains, notwithstanding the troubled state of italy, were taken to ravenna for interment ... were exhumed and ridiculed by the lombard duke of spoleto, who took his skull to king autharis ... ibid's skull was proudly handed down from king to king of the lombard line ... the skull was seized by the tottering desiderius and carried in the train of the frankish conqueror ... charlemagne took ibid's skull to his capital at aix, ... william the conqueror, finding it in an abbey niche ... did reverence to its osseous antiquity; ...

chocolatey skull of ibid.

'' it was captured by the private soldier read-'em-and-weep hopkins, who not long after traded it to rest-in-jehovah stubbs ... stubbs, upon sending forth his son zerubbabel to seek his fortune ... gave him st.ibid's ... skull as a talisman. upon landing in salem zerrubbabel ... having become addicted to gaming, lost the skull to one epenetus dexter, ... it was in the house of dexter, in the northern part of the town near the present intersection of north main and olney streets, ... but the austere head of ibid continued on its wanderings ...

ibid's obituary.

'' petrus van schaack, secured the distinguished cranium for the modest sum of two guilders, he having recognised its value from the half-effaced inscription carved in lombardic miniscules ... from van schaack, sad to say the relic was stolen in 1683 by a french trader, jean grenier ... fired with virtuous rage at the possession of this holy relic by a protestant, crushed van schaack's head one night with an axe and escaped to the north with his booty; soon however being robbed and slain by the half-breed voyageur michael savard, who took the skull ... to add to a collection of similar but more recent material ...

st.ibid the sweet.

'' his half-breed son pierre traded it among other things to some emissaries of the sacs and foxes, ... charles de langlade, founder of the trading post at green bay, ransomed it at the expense of many glass beads; later traded to jacques caboche, another settler, it was in 1850 lost in a game of chess or poker to a newcomer named hans zimmerman; ... where falling into the burrow of a prairie-dog, it passed beyond his power of discovery or recovery ...

st.ibids day cakes.

'' so for generations did the skull ... lie hidden beneath the soil of a growing town ... at first worshipped with dark rites by the prairie-dogs, who saw in it a diety sent from the upper world, ... and at last one fateful night a titan thing occured. subtle nature, convulsed with a spiritual ectasy, ... laid low the lofty and heaved high the humble and behold! ... subterrene arcana hidden for years came at last to light. for there in the rifted roadway, lay bleached and tranquil in bland, saintly and consular pomp the dome like skull of ibid.''

h.p.lovecraft, ibid.

demeaculumn--santiago: i

''some steps down: buried space

''a crypt usually represents the initial stage in the construction of a cathedral. ... in the case of the cathedral of santiago de chile, the crypt was the latest addition, ...

''slow fabric--following a well established pattern, santiago's metropolitan cathedral was built through a succession of reconstruction until the out line of its general layout was found in the late 17th century. ...

''urban matters--only after a process of rebuilding, which followed an earthquake, was its main axes rotated ... in its first layout the church flanked santiago's main square ...

''devotion and clutter--like an old person's home, the cathedral has acquired over the years a whole range of devotional elements ...

''reciprocal layouts--downtown santiago is inscribed within a checkerboard pattern: plaza de armas, its main public place, also square in plan, is simply a missing block. ... the church is both felt and used, in certain respects, like a large covered square.

''material dimensions--but a recent process of restoration has resulted in the partial uncovering of the stone fabric, displaying finishes that range from the smoothest to the most coarse. ... the primitive and the elaborate coexist at every level. ...

''the brief--also included in the client's demands were a new main alter and a small civic crypt ... as for the quality of ambiance sought, this was defined as a serene mood, one which avoided undue insistence upon the subject of death.''


rodrigo perez de arce, o'neil ford duograph 1: chile: crypt in the cathedral of santiago chile.

beckford's footsteps

''only some two months before these lines were being written i took the opportunity of being in lisbon to make an expedition to cintra in search of relics of beckford's residence there. after some degree of search the quinta de ramalhao emerged out of the plethora of names with which the map of cintra is beset and the villa turned out to be only some few yards off the highway to lisbon.

''it is utterly deserted; there is a huge suite of rooms looking on to a garden, ... room after room led into each other, all bare of furniture save a truckle-bed, once every twenty yards, and a few miserable chairs. these rooms were bare of ornament and seemed to date from the very end of the eighteenth century, ...

''eventually six rooms were reached that could be thrown into one vast room, and at the very end of these, some hundred yards from the staircase, a locked door led into what had been beckford's dining-room, ... the walls painted all over to represent an arbour and alive with painted flowers and birds had the illusion that they suggested made complete by the huge round grotto dining table and the grotto chairs, each in its place at the bare table. ...this room brings you very near to beckford, nearer than you get at fonthill where there is practically nothing left, and you feel the whole of the quinta da ramalhao was like this before beckford took it over, ...

''a curious desolation seems to have thrived in his footsteps, ... not only his houses but the buildings that he admired have been left empty; and the grande chartreuse is as deserted, now, as were alcobaca, batalha and thomar, in the year he published his letters, ... hamilton palace, to which beckford's papers were removed after his death is as deserted now as mafra or fonthill. ... the huge palace, the mausoleum, the building in the park known as the chateau de chatelherault, all these are deserted now, ...

''this we may take as our final instance of the decay which has set in upon all the buildings with which beckford's life was concerned; and we can only hope that the dramatic doom which has overtaken these palaces and convents, and which began with the fall of the great tower at fonthill, will leave the ruins in a desolation which may draw more attention to the very live and vital remains that beckford left in that other and less material side of his life.''

sacheverell sitwell, beckford and beckfordism.

macaulay--ruin pleasure

''of all ruins, possibly the most moving are those of long deserted cities, fallen century by century into deeper decay, their forsaken streets grown over by forest and shrubs, their decadent buildings, quarried and plundered down the years, gaping ruinous, the haunt of lizards and owls.''

rose macaulay, the pleasure of ruins.

ye that see in darkness

[a charles schneider film]

'' say, what have ye found? ... --we have seen strange atoms
in worlds of otherwhere. ... we have seen the nightmares
of the succubi. ... we have seen the crystal
by black, blood-swollen meres. ... we have seen the satyrs
weighed down with evening's dew. ... we have seen the darkness
on some sidereal way. ... we have seen fair colours
pouring forth the night. ''

clark ashton smith, nyctalops.

nemesis

''thro' the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber, i have liv'd o'er my lives without number ... i have whirl'd with the earth at the dawning' i have seen the dark universe yawning ... i had drifted o'er seas without ending' under sinister grey-clouded skies ... i have plung'd like a deer thro the arches of the hoary primordial grove ... i have stumbled by cave ridden mountains, that rise barren and bleak from the plain ... i have scanned the vast ivy-clad palace, i have trod its untenanted hall ... i have peer'd from the casement in wonder, at the mouldering meadows around ... i have haunted the tombs of the ages, i have flown on the pinions of fear ... i was old when the pharaohs first mounted, the jewel deck'd throne by the nile ... oh, great was the sin of my spirit and great is the reach of its doom; ... thro' the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber i have liv'd o'er my lives without number, and i struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.''

h.p.lovecraft, nemesis.

star bright star right

'' they worshipped so they said the great old ones who lived ages before there where any man, and who came to the young world out of the sky. those old ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea ... mankind was not absolutely alone among the conscious things of earth, for shapes came out of the dark to visit the faithful few. but these were not the great old ones. no man had ever seen the old ones. ...

'' there had been aeons when other things ruled on the earth, ... they all died vast epochs of time before man came,but there were arts which could revive them when the stars come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity ... when the stars were right, they could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, they could not live. but although they no longer lived, they would never really die. they all lay in stone houses in their great city of r'lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for them. ...

'' in the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed old ones in dreams, but had then something had happened. the great stone city r'leyeh, with its monoliths and sepulchres, had sunk beneath the waves; ... but memory never died, and high-priests said that the city would rise again when the stars were right. ''

h.p.lovecraft, the call of cthulhu.

astro-star lamp at notcothulhu.

introduction to ruin

[the ruins of toronto.]

''the approach to ruins in this highly selective book will be seen to be that of a pleasurist. it is not architectural or archaeological, nor in any way expert, its aim however incoherently kept in view and inadequately achieved, is to explore the various kinds of pleasure given to various peoples at various epochs by the spectacle of ruined buildings. ...

''when did it consciously begin, this delight in decayed or wrecked buildings? very early, it seems. since down the ages men have meditated before ruins, rhapsodized before them, mourned pleasurably over their ruination, ...

''more intellectual than any of these emotions are those two learned, noble and inquisitive pleasures, archaeology and antiquarianism, which have inspired so much eager research, such stalwart, patient and prolonged investigation, such ingenious and erroneous deductions and reconstructions, and have been rewarded by those exquisite thrills of triumph and discovery which must be as exciting as finding a new land. these are no doubt the highest and purest of ruin pleasures, but are reserved for the few. ...

''whatever its complex elements, the pleasure felt by most of us in good ruins is great. ... this broken beauty is all we have of that ancient magnificence, we cherish it like the extant fragment of some lost and noble poem. ...

''this book is a random excursion into the fantastic world that the idioti [including time, their chief] have made and left, a shattered heritage, for us to deplore and to admire ... one must select for contemplation some phase in a ruins devious career, it matters little which, and consider the human reaction to this; or merely enjoy one's own. ... for out of this extremely ruinous world [in which there are, above and under the earth, far more ruined than unruined buildings], i have only had space to select a few ruinous objects, a ruin here and a ruin there, to illustrate the human attitude towards them, and the odds are against any one's finding here more than a few of their own favorite ruins. ...

''still, it may be held that this book, whatever it lacks, does not suffer from brevity, so perhaps it is for the best.''

rose macaulay, pleasure of ruins.

skull of zenig

''you have come to see the great ones whom it is unlawful for men to see. ... when barzai the wise climbed hatheg-kla to see the greater ones dance and howl above the clouds in the moonlight he never returned. the other gods were there, and they did what was expected. zenig of aphorat sought to reach unknown kadath in the cold waste, and his skull is now set in a ring on the little finger of one whom i need not name."

h.p.lovecraft, the dream quest of unknown kadath

lovecraft's townscape

''i have examined maps of the city with the greatest care, yet have never again found the rue d'auseil. ... but despite all i have done, it remains a humiliating fact that i cannot find the house, the street, or even the locality, where, during the last months of my impoverished life as a student of metaphysics at the university i heard the music ... that my memory is broken, i do not wonder, for my health, physical and mental, was gravely disturbed throughout the period of my residence in the rue d'auseil, ...

''the rue d'auseil lay across a dark river bordered by precipitous brick blear windowed warehouses and spanned by a ponderous bridge of dark stone. ... beyond the bridge were narrow cobbled streets with rails; and then came the ascent, at first gradual, but incredibly steep as the rue d'auseil was reached. ... i have never seen another street as narrow and steep as the rue d'auseil, it was almost a cliff, closed to all vehicles, consisting in several places of flights of steps and ending at the top in a lofty ivied wall. ... the houses were tall, peaked roofed, incredibly old, and crazily leaning backward, forward, and sidewise ... there were a few overhead bridges from house to house across the street ...

''i do not know how i came to live on such a street, but i was not myself when i moved there ... i had been living in many poor places, always evicted for want of money; until at last i came upon that tottering house in the rue d'auseil ... it was the third house from the top of the street, and by far the tallest of them all. my room was on the fifth story; the only inhabited room there since the house was almost empty. on the night i arrived i heard strange music from the peaked garret overhead ...

''i grew bold enough to climb the last creaking staircase to the peaked garret. there in the narrow hall, outside the bolted door with the covered keyhole, i often heard sounds which filled me with an indefinable dread--the dread of vague wonder and brooding mystery. ... it was not that the sounds were hideous, for they were not; but that they held vibrations suggesting nothing on this globe of earth, and at intervals they assumed a symphonic quality which i could hardly conceive as produced by one player ... all these are terrible impressions that linger with me, ... despite my most careful searches and investigations, i have never since been able to find the rue d'auseil. but i am not wholly sorry .''

h.p.lovecraft, the music of erich zann.

the music of stephen dickman.

comparative physiology

''they seemed to be enormous, iridescent cones about ten feet high and ten feet wide at the base, and made up of some ridgy, scaly, semi-elastic matter. from their apexes projected four flexible, cylindrical members, each a foot thick, and of a ridgy substance like that of the cones them selves. these members were sometimes contracted almost to nothing, and sometimes extended to any distance up to about ten feet.

''terminating two of them were enormous claws or nippers. on the end of a third were four red, trumpet like appendages. the fourth terminated in an irregular yellowish-globe some two feet in diameter and having three great dark eyes ranged along its central circumference. surmounting this head were four slender gray stalks bearing flower-like appendages, whilst from its nether side dangled eight greenish antennae or tentacles.

''the great base of the central cone was fringed with a rubbery, gray substance which moved the whole entity through expansion and contraction. ... the huge nippers were used in carrying books and in conversation--speech consisting of a kind of clicking. ... they commonly carried their head and its supporting members at the level of the cone top, though it was frequently raised or lowered. ... the other three great members tended to rest downward at the sides of the cone, contracted to above five feet each, when not in use. ...

''cell action was of an unique sort almost precluding fatique, and wholly eliminating the need of sleep. nourishment, assimilated through the red trumpet like appendages on one of the great flexible limbs was always semifluid and in many aspects wholly unlike the food of existing animals. the beings had but two of the senses which we recognize--sight and hearing, the latter accomplished through the flower-like appendages on the gray stalks above their heads. ...

''their three eyes were so situated as to give them a range of vision wider than the normal. their blood was a sort of deep-greenish ichor of great thickness. they had no sex, but reproduced through seeds or spores which clustered on their bases and could be developed only under water. great, shallow tanks were used for the growth of their young--which were, however, reared only in small numbers on account of the longevity of individuals--four or five thousand years being the common life span.''

h.p.lovecraft, the shadow out of space.

the filigree skull of ibid

'' his remains, notwithstanding the troubled state of italy, were taken to ravenna for interment ... were exhumed and ridiculed by the lombard duke of spoleto, who took his skull to king autharis ... ibid's skull was proudly handed down from king to king of the lombard line ... the skull was seized by the tottering desiderius and carried in the train of the frankish conqueror ... charlemagne took ibid's skull to his capital at aix, ... william the conqueror, finding it in an abbey niche ... did reverence to its osseous antiquity; ...

'' it was captured by the private soldier read-'em-and-weep hopkins, who not long after traded it to rest-in-jehovah stubbs ... stubbs, upon sending forth his son zerubbabel to seek his fortune ... gave him st.ibid's ... skull as a talisman. upon landing in salem zerrubbabel ... having become addicted to gaming, lost the skull to one epenetus dexter, ... it was in the house of dexter, in the northern part of the town near the present intersection of north main and olney streets, ... but the austere head of ibid continued on its wanderings ...

'' petrus van schaack, secured the distinguished cranium for the modest sum of two guilders, he having recognised its value from the half-effaced inscription carved in lombardic miniscules ... from van schaack, sad to say the relic was stolen in 1683 by a french trader, jean grenier ... fired with virtuous rage at the possession of this holy relic by a protestant, crushed van schaack's head one night with an axe and escaped to the north with his booty; soon however being robbed and slain by the half-breed voyageur michael savard, who took the skull ... to add to a collection of similar but more recent material ...

'' his half-breed son pierre traded it among other things to some emissaries of the sacs and foxes, ... charles de langlade, founder of the trading post at green bay, ransomed it at the expense of many glass beads; later traded to jacques caboche, another settler, it was in 1850 lost in a game of chess or poker to a newcomer named hans zimmerman; ... where falling into the burrow of a prairie-dog, it passed beyond his power of discovery or recovery ...

'' so for generations did the skull ... lie hidden beneath the soil of a growing town ... at first worshipped with dark rites by the prairie-dogs, who saw in it a diety sent from the upper world, ... and at last one fateful night a titan thing occured. subtle nature, convulsed with a spiritual ectasy, ... laid low the lofty and heaved high the humble and behold! ... subterrene arcana hidden for years came at last to light. for there in the rifted roadway, lay bleached and tranquil in bland, saintly and consular pomp the dome like skull of ibid.''

h.p.lovecraft, ibid.

filigree skull at notcothulhu

body of mythos

''trembling in waves that golden whisps of nebula made weirdly visible, there rose a timid hint of far off melody, droning in faint chords that our own universe of stars knows not. ... it was a song, but not the song of any voice. night and the spheres sang it, and it was old when space and nyarlathotep and the other gods were born. ''

h.p.lovecraft, the dream quest of unknown kadath.


''for three thousand years mystics have spoken about the "music of the spheres," a sound that transcends mundane sound, ... both the veda and maitriya upansad of the ancient hindus, who were indo europeans, tell of how the universe was created by sabda brahman, the "eternal sound" that created everything--and still inheres in everything--but is itself uncreated: "begotten, not made," ''

j. nigro sansonese, the body of myth.

fragment

''naturally we cannot expect all weird tales to conform absolutely to any theoretical model. creative minds are uneven and the best of fabrics have their dull spots... moreover, much of the choicest weird work is unconcious; appearing in memorable fragments scattered through material whose massed effect may be of a very different cast... therefore we must judge a weird tale... by the emotional level which it attains at its least mundane point... if the proper sensations are excited, such a "high spot" must be admitted on its own merits as weird literature,''

h.p.lovecraft, super natural horror in literature.


''a portrait, a painting ... paint it today. white pear trees and a wysteria... the wysteria long embedded in the under shingles of the low roof, ... the pear an english bartlett-a french cuissemadame ... yet a beautiful thing, a perfect thing is inevitably broken. the small bird, fallen from its nest was so hideous, so wormlike with a repellent gruesomeness the smooth, clean, snakelike angleworms or the flat garden grubs never had. the egg was so pretty ... the small bird was an uncanny monster. ... the child {claw like hands,} ... a bird or intermediate, of a lost reptile race, clawing its way into the pear-wysteria tangle ... a portrait? paint it yesterday, wreathed with cornflowers-paint it today ... crawling into the rabbit hutch ... scent of old straw ... crawling, crawling with the elbows scraping ... to be rewarded at the last with a vision of eight pink bodies. to be lifted one by one from the nest of tight packed straw...''.

h.d, paint it today.

landscape piece

''west of arkham the hills rise wild and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut. there are dark narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the glint of sunlight. on the the gentler slopes there are farms, ancient and rocky, with squat, moss-coated cottages brooding eternally over old new-england secrets in the lee of great ledges; but these are all vacant now, the wide chimneys crumbling and the shingled sides bulging perilously beneath low gambrel roofs. ...

''in the open spaces, mostly along the line of the old road, there were little hillside farms; sometimes with all the buildings standing, sometimes with only one or two, and sometimes with only a lone chimney or fast-filling cellar. weeds and briers reigned, and furtive wild things rustled in the undergrowth. upon everything was a haze of restlessness and oppression; a touch of the unreal, and the grotesque, as if some vital element of perspective or chiaroscuro were awry... it was too much like a landscape of salvator rosa; too much like some forbidden woodcut in a tale of horror.''

h.p.lovecraft, the colour out of space.

body of mythos

[the insect musicians: alazif of the mad new zealander graeme revell.]


'' original title al azif--azif being the word used by arabs to designate that nocturnal sound (made by insects) suppos'd to be the howling of daemons. ''

h.p.lovecraft, history of the necronomicon.


''the zen monks of china and japan, who have long practiced a form of buddhism that emphasizes meditation, ask themselves the following bizarre question: what is the sound of one hand clapping? ...

''jesus of nazareth, who might be likened to a zen master; often spoke in parables, which means a roundabout way of talking, deliberate evasion, riddles. jesus even tells us why. he speaks in parables, he says, because he does not want anyone but his disciples to understand him: "he who has ears to hear, let him hear," which happily brings us back to the sound of one hand clapping...

''yet the question remains what is the sound of one hand clapping? simply put, the sound of one hand clapping is the sound of your own ears... perhaps, if it were quiet enough, if you put down this book and listened again for the sound of one hand clapping, perhaps then you'd hear something--did already hear something--well staticky...

''you need extreme quiet to hear such things because what you are listening for is very subtle, very simple, very overlookable, "a still small voice." with practice however, it will sound as loud as you like. so go back, be still, listen...''

j. nigro sansonese, the body of myth.

a little nearer

[i]'' who knows the end? what has risen many sink, and what has sunk may rise. loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of man ... [ii] i dream of a day when they may rise above the billows ... of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium. the end is near ...''

h.p.lovecraft, [i]the call of cthulhu, [ii]dagon.

the body of mythos

''the bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch thick and about five by six inches in area; obviously of modern origin. its designs however were far from modern in atmosphere and suggestion; ... it seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster of a form which only a diseased fancy could concieve.


''if i say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human charicature, i shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing ... a pulpy tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful ... ''

h.p.lovecraft, the call of cthulhu


''not only can the yogi experiance the vagus nerve in and of itself, but by means of neurological connections to the vision area of the brain at the back of the skull, he or she can even visualize the nerve... is such a visualization a myth? and if so, what myth is it? our answer is that it is not a single myth but refers to an entire genre of myth; slaying the kraken, or, sea monster. ... it is a description of the brain and its twelve cranial nerves. the myth of the kraken, whose many tentacles reach deep into the viscera, is a description of the struggle with the vagus nerve.''

j nigro sansonese, the body of myth.

keziah mason

''in the changeless, legend haunted city of arkham, with its clustering gambrel roofs that sway and sag over attics where witches hid from the kings men in the dark ... which had likewise harbored old keziah mason, whose flight from salem gaol at the last no one was ever able to explain. ... there was much in the essex county records about keziah mason's trial, and what she had admitted under pressure to the court of oyer and terminer ... she had told judge hathorne of lines and curves that could be made to point out directions leading through the walls of space to other spaces beyond, ... then she had drawn those devices on the walls of her cell and vanished.''

h.p.lovecraft, the dreams in the witch house.

body of mythos

''suddenly, a distant tremor shook the house,and there came a faint and distant whirring buzz, that grew rapidly into a far; muffled screaming. it reminded me, in a queer, gigantic way, of the noise that a clock makes, when the catch is released, and it is allowed to run down.

''gradually, the whirring noise decreased, and there came a long silence. ... yet a constant "blurred" sound was in my ears. now that i noticed it, i was aware that it had been with me all the time. it was the world-noise.''

the house on the borderland, william hope hodgson.

leng proxima

''mythologists have placed leng in central asia; but the racial memory of man--or of his predecessors--is long, and it may well be that certain tales have come down from lands and mountains and temples of horror earlier than asia and earlier than any human world we know ... leng, wherever in space or time it might brood, was not a region i would care to be in or near ... at the moment i felt sorry that i had ever read the abhorred necronomicon, ...''

h.p.lovecraft, at the mountains of madness.

i: speculations on the location of leng.

fragment

''naturally we cannot expect all weird tales to conform absolutely to any theoretical model. creative minds are uneven and the best of fabrics have their dull spots... moreover, much of the choicest weird work is unconcious; appearing in memorable fragments scattered through material whose massed effect may be of a very different cast... therefore we must judge a weird tale... by the emotional level which it attains at its least mundane point... if the proper sensations are excited, such a "high spot" must be admited on its own merits as weird literature,''

h.p.lovecraft, super natural horror in literature.


''the house in which i live is haunted by the noise of dripping water. always day and night, sunmmer and winter, something is dripping somewhere. ... lying awake at nights, i listen with a mixture of pleasure and irritation to its curious cadences ... it is an odd sort of music. one listens to it as one lies in bed, slipping gradually into sleep, with a curious uneasy emotion. ... the music of the drops is symbol and type of the whole universe; it is forever, as it were, asymptotic to sense, infinitely close to significance, but never touching it . ...

''and growing drowsier and drowsier, i listen to the ceasless tune, the hollow soliloquy in the cistern, the sharp metallic rapping of the drops that fall from the roof upon the stones below. ... it is morning, and the water is still dripping as irritatingly and persistently as ever. ...''

''sometimes the incoherence of the drop music is too much to be borne. the listener insists that the asymptote shall somehow touch the line of sense. ... the drops obey reluctantly; they play what you desire, ... but this is an extremly dangerous method of laying the haunting ghost whose voice is the drop of water. for once you have given the drops something to sing or say, they will go on singing and saying it forever.''

aldous huxley, water music.