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.