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.