The Voice before the Void: Arcana, Story, Poetry

Autumn Special:

Jackson asserts that people want to have sex with each other in the autumn even more than they do in the summertime.

⁓The Voice before the Void

“October’s Bright Blue Weather”

Helen Hunt Jackson

O suns and skies and clouds of June,

And flowers of June together,

Ye cannot rival for one hour

October’s bright blue weather;

When loud the bumble-bee makes haste,

Belated, thriftless vagrant,

And Golden-Rod is dying fast,

And lanes with grapes are fragrant;

When Gentians roll their fringes tight

To save them for the morning,

And chestnuts fall from satin burrs

Without a sound of warning;

When on the ground red apples lie

In piles like jewels shining,

And redder still on old stone walls

Are leaves of woodbine twining;

When all the lovely wayside things

Their white-winged seeds are sowing,

And in the fields, still green and fair,

Late aftermaths are growing;

When springs run low, and on the brooks,

In idle golden freighting,

Bright leaves sink noiseless in the hush

Of woods, for winter waiting;

When comrades seek sweet country haunts,

By twos and twos together,

And count like misers, hour by hour,

October’s bright blue weather.

O suns and skies and flowers of June,

Count all your boasts together,

Love loveth best of all the year

October’s bright blue weather.

Fyodor Shcherbatskoy’s Birthday Special:

The reason you have ever heard of “nirvana.”

⁓The Voice before the Void

“Fyodor Shcherbatskoy”

Wikipedia

Fyodor Ippolitovich Shcherbatskoy (Фёдор Ипполи́тович Щербатско́й) (1866 October 1 – 1942 March 18), often referred to in the literature as Stcherbatsky, was a Russian Indologist who, in large part, was responsible for laying the foundations in the Western world for the scholarly study of Buddhism and Buddhist philosophy. He was born in the Russian Empire in what is today Poland, and died at the Borovoye Resort in northern Kazakhstan.

Shcherbatskoy studied in the famous Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum and later in the Historico-Philological Faculty of Saint Petersburg University, where his teachers were Ivan Minayeff and Serge Oldenburg. Subsequently sent abroad, Shcherbatskoy studied Indian poetry with Georg Bühler in Vienna and Buddhist philosophy with Hermann Jacobi in Bonn. In 1897, with Oldenburg, Shcherbatskoy inaugurated the Bibliotheca Buddhica, a library of rare Buddhist texts.

Returning from a trip to India and Mongolia, Shcherbatskoy published in 1903, in Russian, the first volume of Theory of Knowledge and Logic of the Doctrine of Later Buddhists. In 1928, he established the Institute of Buddhist Culture in Leningrad. Shcherbatskoy’s The Conception of Buddhist Nirvana, written in English and published in 1927, caused a sensation in the West. That was followed by Shcherbatskoy’s main work in English, Buddhist Logic, published in two volumes in 1930 and 1932, which has exerted an immense influence on Buddhology.

Although Shcherbatskoy remained less well-known in his own country, his extraordinary fluency in the Sanskrit and Tibetan languages won him the admiration of Jawaharlal Nehru and Rabindranath Tagore. According to Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, “Shcherbatskoy did help us – the Indians – to discover our own past and to restore the right perspective of our own philosophical heritage.” The 2004 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica acclaimed Shcherbatskoy as “the foremost Western authority on Buddhist philosophy.”

Wishek was an accomplished poet.

⁓The Voice before the Void

“Desire”

Nina Farley Wishek

I longed to sail a gallant ship,

Swinging across the sea–

But well I know, no phantom bark

Will ever sail for me.

I hoped to sing a lilting song,

Melodious, full and free–

But lagging pen may never write

That golden song for me.

And I would paint the morning sky,

The sun-kissed shrub and tree–

But futile fingers may not catch

That sylvan artistry.

No ship, no sail, no lovely song,

No surging, shining sea–

For I must walk the worn, old road

That others paved for me.

Science boldly marching.

⁓The Voice before the Void

“Masters and Johnson”

Wikipedia

The Masters and Johnson research team, composed of William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson, pioneered research into the nature of human sexual response and the diagnosis and treatment of sexual disorders and dysfunctions from 1957 until the 1990s.

The work of Masters and Johnson began in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Washington University in St. Louis and was continued at the independent not-for-profit research institution they founded in St. Louis in 1964, originally called the Reproductive Biology Research Foundation and renamed the Masters and Johnson Institute in 1978.

In the initial phase of Masters and Johnson’s studies, from 1957 until 1965, they recorded some of the first laboratory data on the anatomy and physiology of human sexual response based on direct observation of 382 women and 312 men in what they conservatively estimated to be “10,000 complete cycles of sexual response.” Their findings, particularly on the nature of female sexual arousal (for example, describing the mechanisms of vaginal lubrication and debunking the earlier widely held notion that vaginal lubrication originated from the cervix) and orgasm (showing that the physiology of orgasmic response was identical whether stimulation was clitoral or vaginal, and proving that some women were capable of being multiorgasmic), dispelled many long-standing misconceptions.

They jointly wrote two classic texts in the field, Human Sexual Response and Human Sexual Inadequacy, published in 1966 and 1970, respectively. Both of these books were best-sellers and were translated into more than thirty languages.

1. Research work

Masters and Johnson met in 1957 when William Masters hired Virginia Johnson as a research assistant to undertake a comprehensive study of human sexuality. (Masters divorced his first wife to marry Johnson in 1971. They divorced in 1992.) Previously, the study of human sexuality (sexology) had been a largely neglected area of study due to the restrictive social conventions of the time, with prostitution as a notable exception.

Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues at Indiana University had previously published two volumes on sexual behavior in the human male and female (known as the Kinsey Reports), in 1948 and 1953, respectively, both of which had been revolutionary and controversial in their time. Kinsey’s work however, had mainly investigated the frequency with which certain behaviors occurred in the population and was based on personal interviews, not on laboratory observation. In contrast, Masters and Johnson set about to study the structure, psychology, and physiology of sexual behavior, through observing and measuring masturbation and sexual intercourse in the laboratory.

Initially, participants used in their experiments were prostitutes. Masters and Johnson explained that they were a socially isolated group of people, they were knowledgeable about sex, and that they were willing to cooperate with the study. Of the 145 prostitutes that participated, only a select few were further evaluated for their genital anatomy and their physiological responses. In later studies, however, Masters and Johnson recruited 382 women and 312 men from the community. The vast majority of participants were white, they had higher education levels, and most participants were married couples.

As well as recording some of the first physiological data from the human body and sex organs during sexual excitation, they also framed their findings and conclusions in language that espoused sex as a healthy and natural activity that could be enjoyed as a source of pleasure and intimacy.

The era in which their research was conducted permitted the use of methods that had not been attempted before, and that have not been attempted since: “[M]en and women we...

Battle of Chickamauga Anniversary Special:

There are no accounts of battle like Bierce’s accounts of battle.

⁓The Voice before the Void

“A Little of Chickamauga”

Ambrose Bierce

The history of that awful struggle is well known—I have not the intention to record it here, but only to relate some part of what I saw of it; my purpose not instruction, but entertainment.

I was an officer of the staff of a Federal brigade. Chickamauga was not my first battle by many, for although hardly more than a boy in years, I had served at the front from the beginning of the trouble, and had seen enough of war to give me a fair understanding of it. We knew well enough that there was to be a fight: the fact that we did not want one would have told us that, for Bragg always retired when we wanted to fight and fought when we most desired peace. We had maneuvered him out of Chattanooga, but had not maneuvered our entire army into it, and he fell back so sullenly that those of us who followed, keeping him actually in sight, were a good deal more concerned about effecting a junction with the rest of our army than to push the pursuit. By the time that Rosecrans had got his three scattered corps together we were a long way from Chattanooga, with our line of communication with it so exposed that Bragg turned to seize it. Chickamauga was a fight for possession of a road.

Back along this road raced Crittenden’s corps, with those of Thomas and McCook, which had not before traversed it. The whole army was moving by its left.

There was sharp fighting all along and all day, for the forest was so dense that the hostile lines came almost into contact before fighting was possible. One instance was particularly horrible. After some hours of close engagement my brigade, with foul pieces and exhausted cartridge boxes, was relieved and withdrawn to the road to protect several batteries of artillery—probably two dozen pieces—which commanded an open field in the rear of our line. Before our weary and virtually disarmed men had actually reached the guns the line in front gave way, fell back behind the guns and went on, the Lord knows whither. A moment later the field was gray with Confederates in pursuit. Then the guns opened fire with grape and canister and for perhaps five minutes—it seemed an hour—nothing could be heard but the infernal din of their discharge and nothing seen through the smoke but a great ascension of dust from the smitten soil. When all was over, and the dust cloud had lifted, the spectacle was too dreadful to describe. The Confederates were still there—all of them, it seemed—some almost under the muzzles of the guns. But not a man of all these brave fellows was on his feet, and so thickly were all covered with dust that they looked as if they had been reclothed in yellow.

“We bury our dead,” said a gunner, grimly, though doubtless all were afterward dug out, for some were partly alive.

To a “day of danger” succeeded a “night of waking.” The enemy, everywhere held back from the road, continued to stretch his line northward in the hope to overlap us and put himself between us and Chattanooga. We neither saw nor heard his movement, but any man with half a head would have known that he was making it, and we met by a parallel movement to our left. By morning we had edged along a good way and thrown up rude intrenchments at a little distance from the road, on the threatened side. The day was not very far advanced when we were attacked furiously all along the line, beginning at the left. When repulsed, the enemy came again and again—his persistence was dispiriting. He seemed to be using against us the law of probabilities: for so many efforts one would eventually succeed.

One did, and it was my luck to see it win. I had been sent by my chief, General Hazen, to order up some artillery ammunition and rode away to the right and rear in search of it.

Tremendousness by a young student.

⁓The Voice before the Void

“Deep in the”

Maria Williams

Deep in the

pit of

my

soul

lies a small

dead sparrow

singing

at the grave

of my dog.

Sparrows aren’t forever

neither was my dog

neither am I.

Weird fun fiction.

⁓The Voice before the Void

“SCP-427”

The SCP Foundation

Item #: SCP-427

Object Class: Safe (Note: See containment procedures.)

Special Containment Procedures: SCP-427 displays no means of self-locomotion or malicious intent at this time, and requires only minimal containment. Due to SCP-427’s adverse effects, only medical staff of Class 3 or above may handle or utilize it.

All personnel using SCP-427 must record their total time using it in order to avoid unwanted mutations.

Note: Instances of SCP-427-1 (colloquially referred to as “Flesh Beasts”) created by SCP-427 must be killed immediately as it is impossible to communicate with or experiment on them safely. For this reason, instances of SCP-427-1 are classified as Keter level.

Description: SCP-427 is a small, spherical, ornately carved locket made of a polished silver material. The ornate carvings do not seem to serve any function; it is unknown whether SCP-427’s outer casing was crafted by sentients or not. Its circumference at its widest point is roughly 3 cm.

SCP-427 was created after placing a pill of SCP-500 in the Input booth of SCP-914 and using the Fine setting. It displays no unusual activity when closed. When opened, a small glowing orb is visible at the center. The orb emits no radiation or energy aside from the visible spectrum.

When SCP-427 is opened and exposed to biological tissue, it rapidly regenerates cellular damage and somehow is able to purge invading compounds or infections. As a standard of measure, the Common Cold takes 3 to 10 days to be worked through the human immune system and eventually removed. In the presence of an opened SCP-427, this time is reduced to 2 to 4 minutes. Its healing abilities are directional, so anything not in line of sight with the central orb experiences no effects.

However, long-term exposure produces a significant health hazard. As the locket heals damage, it optimizes the body’s natural systems. Resistance to disease and toxins is increased by 500% compared to accepted LD50 or death-rate values after a total of 10 minutes of exposure, and 1000% after 15 minutes of exposure. Beyond 15 minutes of exposure, muscular systems begin optimizing, increasing strength and pain tolerance by 200-300%. All other systems continue to optimize. Class-D personnel exposed to the device for over an hour total began mutating into a shapeless mass of tissue. The conversion time accelerates with continued exposure to SCP-427.

The “Flesh Beasts” (so named due to their appearance) created by SCP-427 are incredibly aggressive, attacking any and all personnel on sight with lethal results. They are highly resistant to most known weaponry, but can be disabled with sufficient shock trauma or heat in excess of 1100 degrees Celsius. Intelligence cannot be accurately gauged, but mapping of biological enhancement of the brain as a direct relationship with optimization of other systems suggests intelligence could exceed levels measured in humans when fully transformed.

SCP-427 is currently being used as a partial replacement for SCP-500 pills, as it can cure most anything SCP-500 is able to cure. All “optimizations” imparted by SCP-427 are cumulative. Oversight has deemed the side effects an “acceptable risk,” but users must carefully record their total exposure time as sufficient mutations are grounds for termination.

An old poem by a pioneer woman of Dakota Territory.

⁓The Voice before the Void

“Well, I’m back in North Dakota”

Nina Farley Wishek

Well, I’m back in North Dakota

Where the prairie is broad and flat–

Strange, how could I have forgotten

That it looks like that.

Years ago in times primeval,

It did not then look like that–

I suppose it took a million ages

To roll it out so flat.

But, I like its level vastness,

Its herds of cattle, sleek and fat–

And its miles and miles of grainfields,

Stretching, waving, far and flat.

Yes, I’m back from California,

And to its grandeur, I lift my hat–

To its climate, mountains, sunshine,

And to its ocean, wide and flat.

But, oh, you dusty, wind-swept prairie,

With your sun-kissed spaces flat–

Never could I, would I, change you,

For I like you, just like that.

H.P. Lovecraft’s Birthday Special:

A great, dark poem.

⁓The Voice before the Void

“Nemesis”

H.P. Lovecraft

Through the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,

Past the wan-mooned abysses of night,

I have lived o’er my lives without number,

I have sounded all things with my sight;

And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.

I have whirled with the earth at the dawning,

When the sky was a vaporous flame;

I have seen the dark universe yawning

Where the black planets roll without aim,

Where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name.

I had drifted o’er seas without ending,

Under sinister grey-clouded skies,

That the many-forked lightning is rending,

That resound with hysterical cries;

With the moans of invisible daemons, that out of the green waters rise.

I have plunged like a deer through the arches

Of the hoary primordial grove,

Where the oaks feel the presence that marches,

And stalks on where no spirit dares rove,

And I flee from a thing that surrounds me, and leers through dead branches above.

I have stumbled by cave-ridden mountains

That rise barren and bleak from the plain,

I have drunk of the fog-foetid fountains

That ooze down to the marsh and the main;

And in hot cursed tarns I have seen things, I care not to gaze on again.

I have scanned the vast ivy-clad palace,

I have trod its untenanted hall,

Where the moon rising up from the valleys

Shows the tapestried things on the wall;

Strange figures discordantly woven, that I cannot endure to recall.

I have peered from the casements in wonder

At the mouldering meadows around,

At the many-roofed village laid under

The curse of a grave-girdled ground;

And from rows of white urn-carven marble, I listen intently for sound.

I have haunted the tombs of the ages,

I have flown on the pinions of fear,

Where the smoke-belching Erebus rages;

Where the jokulls loom snow-clad and drear:

And in realms where the sun of the desert consumes what it never can cheer.

I was old when the pharaohs first mounted

The jewel-decked throne by the Nile;

I was old in those epochs uncounted

When I, and I only, was vile;

And Man, yet untainted and happy, dwelt in bliss on the far Arctic isle.

Oh, great was the sin of my spirit,

And great is the reach of its doom;

Not the pity of Heaven can cheer it,

Nor can respite be found in the tomb:

Down the infinite aeons come beating the wings of unmerciful gloom.

Through the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,

Past the wan-mooned abysses of night,

I have lived o’er my lives without number,

I have sounded all things with my sight;

And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.

A view of the end.

⁓The Voice before the Void

“Bothon”

Henry S. Whitehead with H.P. Lovecraft

part 5

“We depart straight this night, for the great mountains of A-Wah-Ii,” answered Bothon, “if so be the four great forces allow us possession of a war chariot. And, to that end, your ring, my beloved.”

The Lady Ledda nodded again, understandingly, and removed from the middle finger of her right hand the ring of the two suns and the eight-pointed star which, as a member of the Royal Family, she was entitled to wear. Bothon received it, and slipped it upon the little finger of his right hand.

The sentinel on guard before the barracks of the officer commanding the military enclosure of the Aluvian supply-barracks, saluted the commanding looking Elton of the Legion of the Hawk who stepped down from the ornamented litter. The Elton addressed him in formal military phrases.

“Report at once to the Ka-Kalbo Netro, the arrival of the Elton Barko of the Legion of the Hawk, conveying a member of the Imperial household into exile. I am requisitioning one battle-chariot of capacity for two persons, and officer’s rations sufficient for fourteen days, together with the medicinal supply for a full kit-va of men. My authority, the Imperial Signet. Behold!”

The sentinel saluted the sun-and-star ring of the Emperor, repeated his orders like an efficient automaton, saluted the Elton of the Hawk Legion, and departed at the double to fetch the commandant, the Ka-Kalbo Netro.

The Ka-Kalbo arrived promptly in answer to this summons. He saluted the Imperial Signet, and, as a Ka-Kalbo outranked an Elton by one full grade, was punctiliously saluted according to military usage by the Elton Barko of the Legion of the Hawk, an officer whose personal acquaintance he had not previously made.

Within ten minutes, the Netvissa Ledda had been ceremoniously carried to and placed upon her seat in the commandeered battle-chariot, and the Elton Barko had taken his place beside her. Then, the dozen sweating mechanicians who had carried out their commandant’s orders in record time standing in a stiff, saluting row, the battle-chariot started off at a stiff gallop, the driver standing and plying his long thong with loud, snapping reports over the horses’ backs, while at the great chariot’s rear the spare-horse leader whistled continuously to the four relay animals which galloped behind.

The heights of A-Wah-Ii, to the northwest, gave some promise, in Bothon’s opinion, of security from the anciently predicted submersion of the continent. Those towering mountains would, at least, be among the last sections to sink, should the gas belts, hypothecated by the scientists of the mother continent, explode, and remove the underseas support of this great land of the globe’s most ancient and noble civilization.

Shortly after daybreak, and accurately, according to the map and careful explanations of the painstaking Ka-Kalbo Netro, the chariot paused in the centre of a great level table-land one quarter of the way to its destination. The country was utterly uninhabited. They were relatively safe here in a region only lightly visited by the earthquakes, and not at all by fire. The roar of the north wind troubled the Netvissa Ledda severely. Bothon barely noticed it. He was now convinced that he was losing his sense of hearing.

They ate and slept and resumed their journey at noon after a readjustment of the provisions and a change of the now rested animals.

Their four days’ journey steadily northwest was uneventful. The charioteer drove onward steadily. On the fourth day, as the coppery ball which was the smoking sun reached and touched a flat horizon, they caught their first view of the lofty summits of the A-Wah-Ii region, a goal of a possible immunity.

Dr. Cowlington, an anxious look on his face, was standing beside Meredith’s bed when he awakened in mid-morning.