of onyx

 

"yet who shall declare the dark theme a positive handicap? radiant with beauty, the cup of the ptolemies was carven of onyx."

h.p.lovecraft, supernatural horror in literature.

 

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reflecting on fragments

''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 spring day had started slowly as i had come to paris by train from london. the carriages had meandered through southern england, as if to give the passengers time to appreciate the picture postcard views of kent, before speeding through the featureless landscapes of northern france, impatient for the graceful architecture of paris, among which is one of the most remarkable perspectives in europe.

''from the midpoint of the arch de triomphe the line of sight along the champs elysees leads first to the obelisk at the centre of the place de la concorde and then runs the length of the tuileries gardens to the open arms of the louvre. where this line passes through the tuileries it has been used like a mirror with such draughtman's like precision the two halves of the garden are perfect reflections of one another. ...

''the entrance to the tuileries holds sinister statues of philosophers, gods, and dead frenchmen in its embrace; to your left and to your right the guardians stand in perfect symmetry. ... to every statue on one side there is a statue on the other, to every tree a tree, to every flower garden on the north side there is another planted at the same distance to the south. a water fountain sprays from the mouth of a nymph who is gazing soulfully at its clone, forever seperated by twice the distance to the centre line of the park.

''and so it went on until i saw the headless devil twenty metres down a side path. i knew that behind me, as yet unseen, would be a mirror image of this path that would lead to a correspondingly positioned plinth and fiendish statue. i half expected that this too would be broken, so preserving the symmetry of the park, but when i turned and looked i saw that its diabolic twin grinned from its plinth as it had done since the creation. in the entire garden the designer symmetry was perfect with the sole exception of the headless lucifer.''

frank close, lucifer's legacy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

fragment of atmosphere

''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.


"i have'nt read enough magic spells. last night i was captivated by the atharvaveda, the indian book of magic. uncanny things in that book--nowhere are human wishes expressed more openly. it is a completely elementary world, and if we really want to learn about human-kind, then we should look not only at myths but also at spells, which are naked."

elias canetti, notes from hampstead, english by john hargraves.

the onyx zone

''yet who shall declare the dark theme a positive handicap? radiant with beauty, the cup of the ptolemies was carven of onyx.''

i: dark onyx set in silver

h.p.lovecraft, supernatural horror in literature.

fragments of atmosphere

''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.


i: ''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.

ii: ''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.