The Voice before the Void: Arcana, Story, Poetry

Lovecraft begins his particular version of a haunted house story with description of architecture; the description is precise, and real, and lulls us for what is to come…

⁓The Voice before the Void

The Shunned House

H.P. Lovecraft

part 1

From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent. Some times it enters directly into the composition of the events, while sometimes it relates only to their fortuitous position among persons and places. The latter sort is splendidly exemplified by a case in the ancient city of Providence, where in the late forties Edgar Allan Poe used to sojourn often during his unsuccessful wooing of the gifted poetess, Mrs. Whitman. Poe generally stopped at the Mansion House in Benefit Street – the renamed Golden Ball Inn whose roof has sheltered Washington, Jefferson, and Lafayette – and his favourite walk led northward along the same street to Mrs. Whitman’s home and the neighbouring hillside churchyard of St. John’s whose hidden expanse of eighteenth-century gravestones had for him a peculiar fascination.

Now the irony is this. In this walk, so many times repeated, the world’s greatest master of the terrible and the bizarre was obliged to pass a particular house on the eastern side of the street; a dingy, antiquated structure perched on the abruptly rising side hill, with a great unkept yard dating from a time when the region was partly open country. It does not appear that he ever wrote or spoke of it, nor is there any evidence that he even noticed it. And yet that house, to the two persons in possession of certain information, equals or outranks in horror the wildest phantasy of the genius who so often passed it unknowingly, and stands starkly leering as a symbol of all that is unutterably hideous.

The house was – and for that matter still is – of a kind to attract the attention of the curious. Originally a farm or semi-farm building, it followed the average New England colonial lines of the middle eighteenth century – the prosperous peaked-roof sort, with two stories and dormerless attic, and with the Georgian doorway and interior paneling dictated by the progress of taste at that time. It faced south, with one gable and buried to the lower windows in the eastward rising hill, and the other exposed to the foundations toward the street. Its construction, over a century and a half ago, had followed the grading and straightening of the road in that especial vicinity; for Benefit Street – at first called Back Street – was laid out as a lane winding amongst the graveyards of the first settlers, and straightened only when the removal of the bodies to the North Burial Ground made it decently possible to cut through the old family plots.

At the start, the western wall had lain some twenty feet up a precipitous lawn from the roadway; but a widening of the street at about the time of the Revolution sheared off most of the intervening space, exposing the foundations so that a brick basement wall had to be made, giving the deep cellar a street frontage with the door and two windows above ground, close to the new line of public travel. When the sidewalk was laid out a century ago the last of the intervening space was removed; and Poe in his walks must have seen only a sheer ascent of dull grey brick flush with the sidewalk and surmounted at a height of ten feet by the antique shingled bulk of the house proper.

The farm-like grounds extended back very deeply up the hill, almost to Wheaton Street. The space south of the house, abutting on Benefit Street, was of course greatly above the existing sidewalk level, forming a terrace bounded by a high bank wall of damp, mossy stone pierced by a steep flight of narrow steps which led inward between canyon-like surfaces to the upper region of mangy lawn, rheumy brick walls, and neglected gardens whose dismantled cement urns,

An original poem.

⁓The Voice before the Void

“What Manner of Cataclysm? How Much Terror?”

The Voice before the Void

What manner of cataclysm will render

Moot our thoughts, our moods, our lives?

How much terror will we suffer in our deaths?

How much…

Will we be buried in hot ash, baked alive?

Will we drown in foreign seas flooding what once were our home lands?

Will the leaders round us up and butcher us? Will the masses set upon us and behead us?

Will we clutch our chests and collapse to the pavement?

Will we be crushed as fast metal crunches around us?

Or, will we know the quiet catastrophe:

In bed, in sickness, love gathered round,

Hoping they don’t see in our eyes reflected what we see?

What manner of cataclysm? How much terror?

 

(It is these thoughts on death that keep me awake all night, walking the town, staring at the river, standing in the cemetery, climbing back-stairs, talking to friends. And when the friends, less possessed by death than I, can stay awake no longer, I talk to the ghosts who blow across the North Dakota plain.)

All of our wisdom…

⁓The Voice before the Void

“The Wise Dog”

Kahlil Gibran

One day there passed by a company of cats a wise dog.

And as he came near and saw that they were very intent and heeded him not, he stopped.

Then there arose in the midst of the company a large, grave cat and looked upon them and said, “Brethren, pray ye; and when ye have prayed again and yet again, nothing doubting, verily then it shall rain mice.”

And when the dog heard this he laughed in his heart and turned from them saying, “O blind and foolish cats, has it not been written and have I not known and my fathers before me, that that which raineth for prayer and faith and supplication is not mice but bones.”

“I wrote that, thinking over your messages… I know it’s not perfectly factual; I understand you’re based in southern Turkey to oversee the programs in northern Syria; et cetera. I came to think of it as fiction, with a character ‘Lisa’ based on you and a narrator based on me.”

Mother, daughter.

⁓The Voice before the Void

“The Sleep-Walkers”

Kahlil Gibran

In the town where I was born lived a woman and her daughter, who walked in their sleep.

One night, while silence enfolded the world, the woman and her daughter, walking, yet asleep, met in their mist-veiled garden.

And the mother spoke, and she said: “At last, at last, my enemy! You by whom my youth was destroyed—who have built up your life upon the ruins of mine! Would I could kill you!”

And the daughter spoke, and she said: “O hateful woman, selfish and old! Who stand between my freer self and me! Who would have my life an echo of your own faded life! Would you were dead!”

At that moment a cock crew, and both women awoke. The mother said gently, “Is that you, darling?” And the daughter answered gently, “Yes, dear.”

Not merely lovelorn, but existentially melancholic.

⁓The Voice before the Void

“Alone”

Celia Thaxter

The lilies clustered fair and tall;

I stood outside the garden wall;

I saw her light robe glimmering through

The fragrant evening’s dusk and dew.

She stopped above the lilies pale;

Up the clear east the moon did sail;

I saw her bend her lovely head

O’er her rich roses blushing red.

Her slender hand the flowers caressed,

Her touch the unconscious blossoms blessed;

The rose against her perfumed palm

Leaned its soft cheek in blissful calm.

I would have given my soul to be

That rose she touched so tenderly!

I stood alone, outside the gate,

And knew that life was desolate.

Glory in boldness and liberty seized.

⁓The Voice before the Void

“Canción of the Pirate”

José de Espronceda

translated from the Spanish by James Kennedy

The breeze fair aft, all sails on high,

Ten guns on each side mounted seen,

She does not cut the sea, but fly,

A swiftly sailing brigantine;

A pirate bark, the “Dreaded” named,

For her surpassing boldness famed,

On every sea well-known and shore,

From side to side their boundaries o’er.

The moon in streaks the waves illumes

Hoarse groans the wind the rigging through;

In gentle motion raised assumes

The sea a silvery shade with blue;

Whilst singing gaily on the poop

The pirate Captain, in a group,

Sees Europe here, there Asia lies,

And Stamboul in the front arise.

“Sail on, my swift one! nothing fear;

Nor calm, nor storm, nor foeman’s force,

Shall make thee yield in thy career

Or turn thee from thy course.

Despite the English cruisers fleet

We have full twenty prizes made;

And see their flags beneath my feet

A hundred nations laid.

My treasure is my gallant bark,

My only God is liberty;

My law is might, the wind my mark,

My country is the sea.

“There blindly kings fierce wars maintain,

For palms of land, when here I hold

As mine, whose power no laws restrain,

Whate’er the seas infold.

Nor is there shore around whate’er,

Or banner proud, but of my might

Is taught the valorous proofs to bear,

And made to feel my right.

My treasure is my gallant bark,

My only God is liberty;

My law is might, the wind my mark,

My country is the sea.

“Look when a ship our signals ring,

Full sail to fly how quick she’s veered!

For of the sea I am king,

My fury’s to be feared;

But equally with all I share

Whate’er the wealth we take supplies;

I only seek the matchless fair,

My portion of the prize.

My treasure is my gallant bark,

My only God is liberty;

My law is might, the wind my mark,

My country is the sea.

“I am condemned to die!—I laugh;

For, if my fates are kindly sped,

My doomer from his own ship’s staff

Perhaps I’ll hang instead.

And if I fall, why what is life?

For lost I gave it then as due,

When from slavery’s yoke in strife

A rover! I withdrew.

My treasure is my gallant bark;

My only God is liberty;

My law is might, the wind my mark,

My country is the sea.

“My music is the Northwind’s roar;

The noise when round the cable runs,

The bellowings of the Black Sea’s shore,

And rolling of my guns.

And as the thunders loudly sound,

And furious the tempests rave,

I calmly rest in sleep profound,

So rocked upon the wave.

My treasure is my gallant bark,

My only God is liberty;

My law is might, the wind my mark,

My country is the sea.”

Ever onward in our quest for knowledge.

⁓The Voice before the Void

“Bathos”

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bathos (Greek βάθος, meaning “depth”) is an abrupt transition in style from the exalted to the commonplace, producing a ludicrous effect. While often unintended, bathos may also be used deliberately to produce a humorous effect. If bathos is overt, it may be described as Burlesque or mock-heroic. It should not be confused with pathos, a mode of persuasion within the discipline of rhetoric, intended to arouse emotions of sympathy and pity.

Examples

The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

–Jennifer Hart, Arlington, Virginia, entry in The Style Invitational humor contest in The Washington Post, 1999 March 14

They had but one last remaining night together, so they embraced each other as tightly as that two-flavor entwined string cheese that is orange and yellowish-white, the orange probably being a bland Cheddar and the white . . . Mozzarella, although it could possibly be Provolone or just plain American, as it really doesn’t taste distinctly dissimilar from the orange, yet they would have you believe it does by coloring it differently.

–Mariann Simms, Wetumpka, Alabama, winning entry in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, 2003

The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.

–Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 1978

Masterfully leveraging one visceral motif through a story of high suspense, London imparts a beautiful meditation upon a great and awful truth.

⁓The Voice before the Void

“A Piece of Steak”

Jack London

With the last morsel of bread Tom King wiped his plate clean of the last particle of flour gravy and chewed the resulting mouthful in a slow and meditative way. When he arose from the table, he was oppressed by the feeling that he was distinctly hungry. Yet he alone had eaten. The two children in the other room had been sent early to bed in order that in sleep they might forget they had gone supperless. His wife had touched nothing, and had sat silently and watched him with solicitous eyes. She was a thin, worn woman of the working-class, though signs of an earlier prettiness were not wanting in her face. The flour for the gravy she had borrowed from the neighbour across the hall. The last two ha’pennies had gone to buy the bread.

He sat down by the window on a rickety chair that protested under his weight, and quite mechanically he put his pipe in his mouth and dipped into the side pocket of his coat. The absence of any tobacco made him aware of his action, and, with a scowl for his forgetfulness, he put the pipe away. His movements were slow, almost hulking, as though he were burdened by the heavy weight of his muscles. He was a solid-bodied, stolid-looking man, and his appearance did not suffer from being overprepossessing. His rough clothes were old and slouchy. The uppers of his shoes were too weak to carry the heavy re-soling that was itself of no recent date. And his cotton shirt, a cheap, two shilling affair, showed a frayed collar and ineradicable paint stains.

But it was Tom King’s face that advertised him unmistakably for what he was. It was the face of a typical prize-fighter; of one who had put in long years of service in the squared ring and, by that means, developed and emphasized all the marks of the fighting beast. It was distinctly a lowering countenance, and, that no feature of it might escape notice, it was clean-shaven. The lips were shapeless and constituted a mouth harsh to excess, that was like a gash in his face. The jaw was aggressive, brutal, heavy. The eyes, slow of movement and heavy-lidded, were almost expressionless under the shaggy, indrawn brows. Sheer animal that he was, the eyes were the most animal-like feature about him. They were sleepy, lion-like–the eyes of a fighting animal. The forehead slanted quickly back to the hair, which, clipped close, showed every bump of a villainous-looking head. A nose twice broken and moulded variously by countless blows, and a cauliflower ear, permanently swollen and distorted to twice its size, completed his adornment, while the beard, fresh-shaven as it was, sprouted in the skin and gave the face a blue-black stain.

Altogether, it was the face of a man to be afraid of in a dark alley or lonely place. And yet Tom King was not a criminal, nor had he ever done anything criminal. Outside of brawls, common to his walk in life, he had harmed no one. Nor had he ever been known to pick a quarrel. He was a professional, and all the fighting brutishness of him was reserved for his professional appearances. Outside the ring he was slow-going, easy-natured, and, in his younger days, when money was flush, too open-handed for his own good. He bore no grudges and had few enemies. Fighting was a business with him. In the ring he struck to hurt, struck to maim, struck to destroy; but there was no animus in it. It was a plain business proposition. Audiences assembled and paid for the spectacle of men knocking each other out. The winner took the big end of the purse. When Tom King faced the Woolloomoolloo Gouger, twenty years before, he knew that the Gouger’s jaw was only four months healed after having been broken in a Newcastle bout. And he had played for that jaw and broken it again in t...

An original poem.

⁓The Voice before the Void

“It Doesn’t”

The Voice before the Void

Tell me again that it doesn’t matter

Tell me again that I might believe

And relieve

My mind

Of the weight

Of the worry

That has so wearied me

Caress me

Caress me like I have longed

Like I have lived a life

Waiting

For a moment

Of touch

Until one day before death

Forgive me

Though I deserve to burn

Consider me gone

Consider me gone long before the stolen hour

By horror’s holy hand

Remember me

As if a memory had substance

As if I could breathe in your thoughts

And whisper in your dreams

Tell me again that it doesn’t matter