robert bloch--shadow from the steeple

" the doctor proceeded down the hall to the rear exit and emerged upon the moonlit splendour of the garden behind the house on benefit street.
the radiant vista was walled off from the world, utterly deserted. the dark man stood in the moonlight, and its glow mingled with his own aura.
at this moment two silken shadows leaped over the wall. they crouched in the coolness of the garden, then slithered forward toward dr. dexter. they made panting sounds.
in the moonlight he recognized the shapes of two black panthers.
immobile, he waited as they advanced, padding purposefully toward him, eyes aglow, jaws slavering and agape.
dr. dexter turned away. his face was turned in mockery to the moon as the beasts fawned before him and licked his hands."

the shadow from the steeple, robert bloch

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travels in dreamland

 

''sometime in the 1960s i was cruising at night off some point of arabia. in the interior not far away was the ruined castle of orbutum. there were stories that somewhere along this coast were the lost mines of king solomon. mysterious lights shone in the sky above the castle, ... i persuaded the captain that we should search in the ruins.''

graham greene, a world of my own.

 

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preface to stellification

 

"the climax? what plain tale of science can boast of such a rhetorical effect? i have merely set down certain things appealing to me as facts, allowing you to construe them as you will. ...lest you think me a biased witness, another pen must add this final testimony, which may perhaps supply the climax you expect. i will quote the following account of the star nova persei verbatim from the pages of that eminent astronomical authority, professor garrett p. serviss: ..."

h.p.lovecraft, beyond the wall of sleep.

 

''the lectures gave me an opportunity to explore a feature of renaissance literature which has probably struck every serious student as puzzling at one time or another: namely, the extraordinary prominence of astronomical imagery. that the stars were important astrologically is at best a partial explanation, i am more concerned here with the impact of astronomical discoveries--particularly their implications for stellification, or translation to the stars.

''renaissance astronomical imagery is often seen as no more than a literary repercussion of copernicus, just as stellification is dismissed as hyperbolic flattery. but for some time i have felt sure that other factors were involved. in the renaissance, purely objective science hardly existed. ... seventeenth century culture was both religious and materialistic. far from science replacing religion, the literature of the period seems to show a great variety of negotiated reconciliations of the two. ... meanwhile, an urge to survive materially after death is squared with new scientific information, there are extreme swings of opinion, strange temporary solutions.''

alastair fowler, times purpled masquers.

 

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barbara hambly--apology for lovecraft

''i wish i could write like h.p. lovecraft. lovecraft was a man with a vision of the world: astonishing macabre, intricate as a giger drawing. his sense of cosmoses opening out of cosmoses, of dark abysses concealing in their hearts the entrances to further gulfs, infuses nearly everything he wrote with an atmosphere, not of horror, but of wonder. his worlds have an air of completeness.

''the things that can be said about howard phillips lovecraft don't sum up, or even come close to summing up, what his writing is. on the downside, his writing is racist and sexist and wildly open to parody because it is so original, so idiosyncratic. every year or so I go on a lovecraft binge, devouring story after story the way a glutton sits in a corner devouring cookies. then I associate with those persons of more elevated tastes and feel a little ashamed of myself. but then I meet the eyes of other lovecraft addicts, and we smile.

''reading lovecraft's writing, one has the impression of a man so caught up in his vision that he is struggling to find language with which to share what he sees. bizarre and elaborate words, piled atop one another in baroque cacophony, seem the only outlet he can find to convey the fulgent richness of his dream, to explain what is, at heart, inexplicable or at least incomprehensible: to name the nightmare. to those of a certain temperament, that legion of my fellow addicts, h.p. lovecraft's tales are enormous fun.

''in many of the lesser-known stories we find themes or images that recur in later or better-known works, stories played out from other angles but returning again and again to the same core nightmares. ... the takeover of ones body by some entity of the past ... "bad blood" or evil or alien ancestry, forgotten for a time, that returns to destroy an innocent scion of the family. ... men ( at the moment I cannot think of a single lovecraft story in which a woman was the linchpin of the plot's evil--even asenath Waite was actually a man ) who delved for forbidden knowledge, acquired forbidden knowledge, and surrendered their humanity in the process. ... his thesis that humanity is but a blundering set of Johnny-come-lately peasants stumbling amid the terrible secrets of unknown ancients opens the door to endless narrative possibilities. ...

'' i'm still not sure that any of this explains the fascination of lovecraft, the power that his images and themes exert over so much of the literature of horror and the fantastic, ... maybe it's just that lovecraft takes such obvious pleasure in what he writes. enthusiasm is contagious. he was clearly a man who loved his craft.''

barbara hambly; the man who loved his craft.

go not too often among ruins

''Arrived at the city of Hems, on the border of the Orontes, and being in the neighborhood of Palmyra of the desert, I resolved to visit its celebrated ruins. After three days journeying through arid deserts, having traversed the Valley of Caves and Sepulchres, on issuing into the plain, I was suddenly struck with a scene of the most stupendous ruins—a countless multitude of superb columns, stretching in avenues beyond the reach of sight. Among them were magnificent edifices, some entire, others in ruins; the earth every where strewed with fragments of cornices, capitals, shafts, entablatures, pilasters, all of white marble, and of the most exquisite workmanship. After a walk of three-quarters of an hour along these ruins, I entered the enclosure of a vast edifice, formerly a temple dedicated to the Sun; and accepting the hospitality of some poor Arabian peasants, who had built their hovels on the area of the temple, I determined to devote some days to contemplate at leisure the beauty of these stupendous ruins.

''Daily I visited the monuments which covered the plain; and one evening, absorbed in reflection, I had advanced to the Valley of Sepulchres. I ascended the heights which surround it from whence the eye commands the whole group of ruins and the immensity of the desert. The sun had sunk below the horizon: a red border of light still marked his track behind the distant mountains of Syria; the full-orbed moon was rising in the east, on a blue ground, over the plains of the Euphrates; the sky was clear, the air calm and serene; the dying lamp of day still softened the horrors of approaching darkness; the refreshing night breezes attempered the sultry emanations from the heated earth; the herdsmen had given their camels to repose, the eye perceived no motion on the dusky and uniform plain; profound silence rested on the desert; the howlings only of the jackal,* and the solemn notes of the bird of night, were heard at distant intervals. Darkness now increased, and through the dusk could only be discerned the pale phantasms of columns and walls. The solitude of the place, the tranquillity of the hour, the majesty of the scene, impressed on my mind a religious pensiveness. The aspect of a great city deserted, the memory of times past, compared with its present state, all elevated my mind to high contemplations. I sat on the shaft of a column, my elbow reposing on my knee, and head reclining on my hand, my eyes fixed, sometimes on the desert, sometimes on the ruins, and fell into a profound reverie.''

constantin francois de volney; the ruins. complete text at project gutenberg.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

body of mythos

'' trembling in waves that golden whisps of nebula made weirdly visable, 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, dream quest of unknown kadath.

'' 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 good mussulmans fancied that they heard the sullen hum of those nocturnal insects which presage evil, and importuned vathek to beware how he ventured his sacred person. '' william beckford, vathek.

'' 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.

ye that see in darkness ...

'' 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.

i: complete poem at the eldritch dark.
ii: bob moss sings nyctalops. a "charles schneider film" at youtube.

the face

''steadily i neared the great building. then all at once, something came round one of the huge buttresses of the house, and so into full view. it was a gigantic thing, and moved with a curious lope, going almost upright, after the manner of a man. it was quite unclothed, and had a remarkable, luminous appearance. yet it was the face that attracted and frightened me the most. it was the face of a swine.''

william hope hodgson, the house on the borderland.

wish you were here...

'' along the shore the cloud waves break, the twin suns sink behind the lake, the shadows lengthen in carcosa.

'' strange is the night where black stars rise, and strange moons circle through the skies but stranger still is lost carcosa.

'' songs that the hyades shall sing, where flap the tatters of the king, must die unheard in dim carcosa.

'' song of my soul, my voice is dead; die thou, unsung, as tears unshed shall dry and die in lost carcosa. ''

r.w.chambers, the king in yellow.