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.


View Larger Map
[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.