“It is official today that the whole of our solar system is moving, insensibly, towards the celestial point marked by the sixth star of the constellation of Hercules (or Zeta Herculis, according to our language). This igneous abyss—of dimensions such that the numbers which express it would somewhat confuse thought (if, for those who think, the apparent sky could have any importance)—seems, in astronomy, to be the end or the inevitable erasure, in fact, of our set of phenomena.”

Auguste Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, 1890

“When all is said and done, Desire is what counts. You have this crazy but inescapable longing, a need almost, for some work of art (a Velazquez, a Satsuma vase! or a new kind of tie), and the moment of actual possession is one of joy, of love really. A week later, nothing.”

Claude Debussy, 1893

 

“A professor of rhetoric related a dream where, in a region high above the Earth, he had seen an assembly of individuals who were very respectable by virtue of their age and the dignity of their bearing. 'Luminous filaments emerged from their eyes and mouths,' he said, 'which extended to all the continents of our world, and which formed in the minds of other people, as so many moving pictures, agitating and speaking, by means of which they found themselves in a state to anticipate, to see and know what they could not anticipate, see or know in their ordinary situation.'”

Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, 1798

 

“Forms are held together and summon one another by a mysterious bond. The universe is like a sumptuous fabric. As soon as one seizes it, it unfurls entirely, embroidered with signs in gold and crimson. You will never lift, even in moments of ecstasy, the sacred veil of Isis, but you might surprise, at any moment, a different movement of the goddess and find her present everywhere...”

Gabriel de Lautrec, 1903

 

“I think we’ll pay dearly for the right to dislike the art of Richard Strauss and Schoenberg. As for Wagner, he will retain the glory of having gathered centuries of music into a formula. That’s quite something, and only a German could have attempted it.”

Claude Debussy, 1914 

“The telechromophotophonotetroscope eliminates absence in an even more radical fashion. The telechromophotophonotetroscope is, as everyone knows, an almost synoptic succession of instantaneous photographic prints, which reproduces electrically the face, speech and gestures of an absent person with a verity equivalent to presence, and which constitutes not so much an image as an apparition, a duplication of the absent individual. This very simple apparatus consists of a chromophotograph that provides color prints, a megagraph that magnifies them, a stenophonograph that receives and transcribes the subject’s speech, aided by a microphone that amplifies it, enclosed in a telephone conjoined with a tetroscope, to propagate the image and the sound.

“You can imagine all the benefits of such an instrument and all the vitality that it lends to relationships. No more isolation or solitude; whether one likes it or not, one receives spectral visits from absent friends, provincial relatives or idle neighbors at all hours, arriving unceremoniously to spend and hour or a few days in your home. What a unification of all the inhabitants of the country, linked into a single family by threads so tight that one could not sever a limb without making the entire body cry out, nor pull out a single hair without tearing off the entire scalp!”

Le Comte Didier de Chousey, 1884

 

Across the foliated space of the twenty-seven equivalents, Faustroll conjured up into the third dimension:

From Baudelaire, E. A. Poe's Silence, taking care to retranslate Baudelaire's translation into Greek.

From Bergerac, the precious tree into which the nightingale-king and his subjects were metamorphosed, in the land of the sun.

From Bloy, the black pigs of Death, retinue of the Betrothed.

From Coleridge, the ancient mariner's crossbow and the ship's floating skeleton, which, when placed in the skiff, was sieve upon sieve.

From Kahn, one of the golden peals from the celestial goldsmiths' shops.

From Lautréamont, the scarab, beautiful as the trembling of hands in alcoholism, which vanished over the horizon.

From Maeterlinck, the lights heard by the first blind sister.

From Mallarmé, the virgin, the bright, and the beautiful today.

From Mendes, the north wind which blew upon the green sea and blended with its salt the sweat of the galley slave who rowed until he was a hundred and twenty years old.

From Péladan, the reflection, in the mirror of the shield silvered with ancestral ashes, of the sacrilegious massacre of the seven planets.

From Régnier, the sorrel plain where the modern centaur snorted.

From Rimbaud, the icicles hurled by the wind of God into the waters.

From Schwob, the scaly animals imitated by the whiteness of the leper's hands.

From Ubu Roi, the fifth letter of the first word of the first act. 

From Verlaine, voices asymptotic toward death.

From Verne, the two and a half leagues of the earth's crust.

Alfred Jarry, 1911

“Mirrors open a bizarre door to the unknown. One dare not look at them too closely when one is alone, for fear of perceiving that one is no longer alone. Astral larvae take refuge on the other side of the wall in an unreal apartment that reproduces, with a slightly satanic exactitude, since it is reversed, all the details of this one. What apprehension there is of perceiving, in the tilted light of candles, a face other than our own! How necessary it is to be attentive to taking the necessary precautions!”

Gabriel de Lautrec 1904

“I can, as Poe would have it, create revolving worlds and fiery, howling spheres, with the sound of a material dispossessed of a soul; and with this I have surpassed even Lucifer, for I can force disorganized things to blaspheme. Night and day, at my will, skins which were once alive and metals perhaps only not yet so, proclaim inanimate words; and if it is true that the voice creates universes in space, the ones I have it create are worlds which die before having lived. In my house dwells a Behemoth who bellows at the wave of my hand; I have invented a talking machine.”

Marcel Schwob, 1892

 

“We are currently living through the most extraordinary days in the history of our planet. Humanity in the 20th century is being given the opportunity to witness an incredible astronomical evolution. We can no longer speak of the Earth in the singular, but that our planet, under the effect of unknown causes, has split along a plane perpendicular to the equator, making our globe into two halves, one of which bears the Old World, the other the New World. At present, it is a split earth that gravitates in space, and its two halves, although bathed in the same atmosphere, are separated by a distance of about fifty kilometers. Will this gap widen? Will we see, during their respective revolutions, one of the two halves of our globe collide with the Moon?”

Jacques Spitz, 1935

“The first observations made had revealed the full extent of the disaster. It was confirmed—but in this case, was confirmation necessary?—that we were in the presence of an unusual cataclysm. On all coasts, a retreat of the sea was noted. The Baltic, according to German estimates, had dropped by three meters. The Mediterranean was slowly emptying; its level was dropping by two centimeters per day and the current was such in the Strait of Gibraltar that erosion, noticeable to the eye, was eating away at the ancient Pillars of Hercules. But of all the news, the strangest was the silence of America. No wireless communication had been established with her.

“It was beginning to be feared that the earthquake had assumed an even greater importance in the New World than in the Old. The story of Atlantis naturally came to mind, and all that was talked about was sunken continents. The newspaper headlines read: 

WHERE IS AMERICA? 

IS AMERICA AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA?”

Jacques Spitz, 1935

 

“The Paduan creates; he is a creator. He tears a thousand souls from out of a thousand bodies and molds them into a single soul with the flames of his speech! There they stand, children, women and men—each separate—ridiculous and pathetic creatures! And the Paduan grasps them and kneads them into a great whole, into a single strong mass in the guise of a mad and mighty beast: every individual disappearing, dissolving into the mass, melting together with millions of others.

“Suddenly overnight a young, mighty, titanic being grew into existence, das Volk.”

Hanns Heinz Ewers, 1910

 

“These last years, while I’ve felt the Austro-German miasma spreading over art, I should have liked to have more authority to cry out my disquiet, to avert the danger towards which we were running so trustingly. How could we fail to guess that these people were attempting the destruction of our art, just as they had prepared the destruction of our countries?”

Claude Debussy, 1916

 

BERLIN 

He that slept long has arisen, 

Arisen from deep vaults far below. 

He stands in the dust, huge and unknown, 

And crushes the moon to pulp in his black hand.

Georg Heym, 1910

“More and more gigantic eagles are waiting to leave the nest to circle over the last hiding places of mankind; already thousands of iron spiders are rushing tirelessly to and fro to weave shining silvery wings for them.” 

Gustav Meyrink, 1922

 

“Lunched with Richard Strauss, his son and daughter-in-law, at the Hofmannsthals’ in Rodaun. Strauss aired his quaint political views, about the need for a dictatorship, and so on, which nobody takes seriously.” 

Count Harry Kesler, 1928

THE FALL 

The black collapse of the first darkness
Is accomplished. And Satan, lover of the lights
Of punch, of impure vice and of the orgy in rut,
Fell from the top of the sky like a rough rock falls
 
He fell so long that the immense ages
Rang in turn to the bells of the madness
That God placed here and there in the boundless space.
 

Charles Cros, 1874

 

Les Quat'z'arts Magazine

'Memories Without Regrets'

Paris during the Prussian war, without bread, without potatoes. In the cafés, once bright, people lit candles. The jewellers of the Palais-Royal put on display (under a globe) BUTTER!! Twenty francs a pound, moreover.

At the Halles market, they sold—dearly—horse legs with their feet still shod. 

We had the good fortune to come across a servant as resourceful as she was honest. From time to time, she asked my mother for permission to take a half-day. She went to the outposts, provided, naturally, with the necessary money, and never returned empty-handed.

Once at the height of hostilities, she returned triumphant, bringing a beautiful piece of meat that weighed at least two pounds.

Strange thing: no skin, no trace of fat.  We were astonished; but, having declared that it smelled good and looked good, we cooked the mystery.

It could not be veal,

Nor pork,

Nor donkey,

Nor platypus,

Nor horse.

The mystery, once cooked, was declared succulent.

The next day, we had the good fortune to have Dr. Cros at lunch.  He was served the same meat.

He brought the dish back to examine it. Scrutinizing the fibrils, examining especially the sauce which, similar to goose fat, had not set:

"I know what it is," he cried triumphantly, "it's human flesh." Then, very gently, to my mother, "Madam, I'll ask you for more."

My fiancée, with her heart not yet hardened, left the table.

I confess, to my shame, that I continued to eat with much more interest.

Charles de Sivry, 1898

“Just now I have seen the sphinx fly away. He galloped off like a jackal.” 

Gustav Flaubert, 1874

 

“I might tell you that the sun will be hurled from Heaven and you would believe me. I might tell you that a worm is creeping through my brain—you would believe me—you would even see it and catch it!”

Hanns Heinz Ewers, 1910

 

“As for the song of the Sirens in the celestial concerts, very rash would be anyone who attempted to analyze it. It is one of those ineffable harmonies of which the Divinity keeps the secret, one of those luminous sounds of which mortals only grasp the shadow.

“The song of the Sirens-birds, souls of the stars, stars themselves, belongs to this class of cosmic harmonies. We can define it even less easily than we can define the voice of the speaking statue, that is to say the sound of the rising sun and the setting sun, the sound of the moon whistling its light through space, the moan of nature shivering in contact with the morning breeze, and the music of the rain falling rhythmically on the ground.”

Jean-Georges Kastner, 1858

 

“There are doubtful creatures, the Corallines, for instance, that are claimed by all the three kingdoms. They tend towards the animal, they tend towards the mineral, and, finally, are assigned to the vegetable. Perchance they form the real point at which Life obscurely and mysteriously rises from the slumber of the stone, without utterly quitting that rude starting-point, as if to remind us, so high placed and so haughty, of the right of even the humble mineral to rise into animation, and of the deep and eternal aspiration that lies buried, but busy, in the bosom of Nature.”

Jules Michelet, 1861

“When the god Pan assembled the seven pipes of his syrinx, at first he imitated only the long drawn out and melancholy note of the toad voicing his sorrows in the light of the moon. Later he turned to birdsong. It is probably from that moment that the birds enriched their repertory. These are her sacred origins of which music can well be proud and which enables her to maintain an element of mystery. In the name of all the gods let us try neither to deprive her of them, nor to seek to explain them.”

Claude Debussy, 1913

The Paradise of Flowers is the butterflies’ Inferno. 

“According to the laws of metempsychosis, the soul of a flower, after its time of proof, passes into the body of a butterfly, or some other insect—a fly or a beetle. That ought to suffice to make you understand the secret attraction than brings these various species together.” 

The Graf dared to follow up his question. “And what becomes of a butterfly’s soul?” 

“It passes into the body of a sparrow or an animal of similarly scant importance—but not alone, however, for it requires three butterfly souls to form that of a flycatcher, as it requires three flower souls to form that of a butterfly, and so on; the souls of three flycatchers or wrens form the soul of a wood-pigeon; and always three by three, always progressing in strength and intelligence, they thus climb the scale of beings, step by step, until a myriad of souls of every sort, newly purified by the breath of a god, eventually forms the soul of a human being, the only one created immortal.”

X. B. Saintine, 1864

“Let photography quickly enrich the traveler’s album, and restore to his eyes the precision his memory may lack; let it adorn the library of the naturalist, magnify microscopic insects, even strengthen, with a few facts, the hypotheses of the astronomer; let it, in short, be the secretary and record-keeper of whomsoever needs absolute material accuracy for professional reasons. 

“So far so good. 

“Let it save crumbling ruins from oblivion, books, engravings, and manuscripts, the prey of time, all those precious things, vowed to dissolution, which crave a place in the archives of our memories; in all these things, photography will deserve our thanks and applause. 

“But if once it be allowed to impinge on the sphere of the intangible and the imaginary, on anything that has value solely because man adds something to it from his soul, then woe betide us!”

Charles Baudelaire, 1859

“Paris and its inhabitants strike me as uncanny. The people seem to me to be of a different species from ourselves; I feel they are possessed of a thousand demons.”

SIgmund Freud, 1885

“The photographic lens does not see the forms. They must, therefore, be immaterial—and yet I can see them. Are they, then, the shades of the dead, as Dagerlöff appears to believe? But why should I see the dead revive because I see things 100 years in advance? I’ve only ever seen the present— or, more exactly, the fraction of the present that will endure for a long time. Let’s silence our imagination and appeal to the rationality that has never deceived me. What is it in the present that lasts the longest, and which is immaterial? Answer: ideas. After the bodies, the cadavers, the skeletons, it is the ideas of human beings that are most durable. I am therefore seeing the forms of ideas. Judging by the manner in which the majority of brains function, there’s nothing astonishing in their being a trifle vague—but why do they have faces? An idea has no face.”

Jacques Spitz, 1939

 

‘We’re almost there,’ murmured Jacques, ‘because this opening is the hollow peak of the Menelaus crater.’ And, indeed, the tunnel came to an end and they emerged near the Acherusia promontory, not far from the Plinius crater in the Sea of Serenity,

As far as the eye could see a silent, raging sea was rolling with breakers as high as cathedrals. On all sides were cataracts of congealed spume, avalanches of petrified waves, torrents of mute howling, a whole seething tempest compressed and anaesthetised in a single stroke. It extended so far that the eye, confused, lost all sense of proportion, amassing mile upon mile, regardless of the possibilities of distance and time.

J.-k. Huysmans, 1887

 

“I write solely for myself, and other people’s impatience doesn’t concern me.”

Claude Debussy, 1908

 

The plot I had written for The Dream of the Witches’ Sabbath was a simple one. After the destruction of all life on our planet, Hell was established here, where things were very suitable. The stage looks like a lunar landscape. Satan is seated on top of a Parisian building whose base rests in molten lava. The end comes when the globe itself crumbles. All the spirits are absorbed in the forces of nature, whose chorus is heard in a night crossed by flashes of lightning. The general clamor of the orchestra diminishes little by little. First one instrument, then another, becomes silent. Finally nothing is left but a chorus of harps, and one after the other they too fall silent. Then only one remains, and it fades in a pianissimo sweeter than water falling on leaves. At last these final notes also fade away, and all is silent.

As I was working at the piano that Sunday on the music for the scene of the infernal hunt, someone rang the doorbell. It was the grandmother of one of my pupils. She must have been listening to me outside. “Is it really you,” she asked, “who is responsible for that savagery I have been hearing?”

“Yes,” I answered. “It is I.” 

“I'm sure you wouldn't dare to continue those horrors in front of me,” she said. “To punish you, I want to hear the rest.” 

Because of that challenge I started The Dream of the Witches’ Sabbath over. The wild motifs made her indignant, but I kept going. 

After my grotesque imitation on the piano of the last fading notes of the last harp, the grandmother looked at me with amazement. “Poor girl,” she said. “Those monstrosities really are yours.” I didn't answer. “The most unfortunate thing about it is that there are some good parts there.” 

“If there weren't any good parts,” I said, “I wouldn't be stupid enough to work on it.” 

“You know very well,” she said, “that you have to be either rich or famous to indulge in things like that.” 

“I'm not simply indulging myself. I intend to stay on here as a teacher, and as proof I shall leave this unproducible piece just the way it is now. It really is a dream, you know, whether it is about covens or real life, and I will throw it away as I have thrown away other dreams.” 

She took my hand. Hers was cold. “Your heart,” she said. “Where will you throw it?” 

“To the Revolution,” I said.

Louise Michel, 1886

“After the blood of the Commune, Death disguised as a shepherd played his pan pipes beside the Seine, every flower a skull.” 

Jules Verne, 1872

“Music is a nocturnal art, the art of the dream.” 

Odilon Redon, 1893

“Odilon Redon made a collection of bits of rainbows, dust from stars and suns. He memorized the growth of plants, the way a petal falls, the sleep of the chrysalis. But he used this botanist’s arsenal to disclose mutations which he discovered in a light of fear and wonderment.” 

André Masson, 1962

“For several months extraordinary signs had been seen in the sky; the Virgin’s Spica had failed to respond to the Observatory’s summons; the Moon had uttered moans, as if she had been hard at work; Berenice’s hair had first appeared powdered with white and then, with a gust of wind, had become as black as crepe. All the stars seemed to be giving simultaneous signs of sadness. There was no longer the harmonious concert that the celestial spheres once enabled Scipio to hear in the abode of King Masinissa; they only rendered sounds as lugubrious as the false drone of cathedral organs, or as discordant as the howls of various animals. Finally, some people even thought they could see in the region of the stars, something reminiscent of big crocodiles, writhing with horrible contortions.” 

Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, 1798

 

“The result of this music has been to accentuate the German race-feeling, which much of Wagner’s music had already been instrumental in emphasising. Richard Strauss not only caused the Germans to feel even more sentimental about their country than had his predecessor, but, by a grandiose portrayal of battle through the medium of music, he glorified war and strife, creating thereby a thought-form, which was used by the Dark Forces to help precipitate the war itself.”

Cyril Scott, 1933

 

“The world exists for us to think it to tatters.” 

Gustav Meyrink, 1927

 

“At last I was able to catch sight of [the composer Edward] Grieg. From the front he looks like rather a pleasant family photograph. From behind, because of the way he wears his hair, he looks more like a sunflower so loved by parrots and planted in ornamental gardens at country railway stations.”

Claude Debussy, 1903

 

“Because he was a heavenly artist, Beethoven naturally aspired to Silence. That’s why he received the blessing of falling deaf—so he might better hear the song of his genius. 

“Wagner stubbornly believes that music is a combination of different noises, and his supreme ambition is what he calls ‘music-drama.’ You can’t get any more German than that. He needs Beauty that appears to the eyes in your head, which the vilest lowlife’s ears can hear—something anybody at all can fondle like a strumpet. In a word, he gives you the music of materialism and the senses—at the highest level, if you will. 

“Music-drama, good God! Well, it’s been impressively achieved—just as I felt when I heard Tannhäuser—by BOMBARDMENT. A lyric tragedy! Can’t you hear the music of the spheres?”

Leon Bloy, 1893

“The passages [in Pelleas and Melisande] I love the most are the ones without text. When Pelleas emerges from the underground vaults, there are a few lines that are truly permeated by the freshness of the sea and the scents of the roses that the breeze wafts to him. Of course, there’s nothing ‘human’ about it, but it’s exquisitely poetic.” 

Marcel Proust, 1911

 

“Is it always like this?…Nothing more? There’s nothing…No music…It doesn’t connect…It doesn’t hold together... It’s very subtle.”

Richard Strauss on Pelleas and Melisande, 1911

“Claude Debussy became the head of a new religion, and there was, in the Opera-Comique at each performance of his Pelléas and Melisande, a sanctuary atmosphere, greetings of initiates in the corridors, fingers on lips, strange handshakes hastily exchanged in the half-light of boxes, crucified expressions and faraway looks.”

Jean Lorrain, 1910

 

“When [the composer Manuel de] Falla went to Debussy’s house without forewarning him of his visit, he was told by a servant the composer was out for a walk. He had to wait in a room which was quite dark and full of Japanese and Chinese masks. One of the doors opened into the dining room. Eventually Falla heard people entering the dining room and recognised the voices of Debussy, Emma and Erik Satie. Whilst no one came to see him, he overheard talk of clarinets. ‘Debussy’s wife began to say something, but Debussy interrupted her: “You know nothing about it,” he said.’ Falla did not reveal his presence and became overcome with nerves, the masks with their gaping mouths inducing hallucinations. When it seemed dinner was over, he peeped through the door into the passage, but still no one came to see him. ‘Finally he heard footsteps. It was Debussy’s wife, who, alarmed at meeting an unexpected man, screamed.’ Apparently the servant had forgotten to tell anyone that a gentleman was waiting. Emma invited him to have some belated lunch, but all Falla wanted was to leave. He did, however, manage to explain to Debussy why he had come and Debussy agreed to orchestrate El Abaicìn by Albeniz, a task he never did carry out.”

Gillian Opstad, 2022

“I find the music of Stravinsky artificial and chimerical, rather like the house of a wizard.”

Claude Debussy, 1911

 

“The terrestrial globe is surrounded on all sides by the rustling of the mysterious Ocean, with its powerful waves, and enveloped in the undulating curves of the atmosphere. In the same way it is flooded from one pole to the other from a sea of infinitely diverse sounds, generated by nature. 

“On the eternal snows of the mountains, where the cold has long numbed all life, the icy storms roar, like the sounds of a gigantic organ. In the depths of the earth, the miner hears the rustling of underground currents, the hiss of gases, the monotonous fall of the drop formed by humidity. For thousands of years, from its dark cradle, the human race has heard the voices of creation; but how much has science been powerless until now to explain the origin and purpose of an infinity of these voices?”

Georges Kastner, 1856

 

“Grownups tend to forget that as children they were forbidden to open the insides of their dolls–a crime of high treason against the cause of mystery. Without their dolls to break open they still try to explain things, dismantle them and quite heedlessly kill all their mystery.”

Claude Debussy, 1902

 

“The cries that Doctor Colombat transcribed are of several species and systematically classified.

“There is first the cry determined by the application of fire (PI. I, series A, no. 1), a serious and deep cry running through the interval of a third, followed by the interjection 'ah!'

“There is then the cry determined by the action of a sharp instrument, a very rapid first sound and a very high of the falsetto register on which it extends.

“Nothing is more moving, more terrible than the cry produced by throbbing pain (no. 5). The voice in the high-pitched tremolo is one that the most indifferent man cannot hear without emotion.

“Twice in our life cries of distress of the most heartbreaking effect have struck our ears. The first by a man who voluntarily killed himself, a few years ago, in Versailles, by falling through a window the height of a third floor.

“We passed near the place where he had just come to fall, his fall had been horrible; his limbs were broken: he uttered in a clear and shrill voice a sinister tremolo (no. 6).”

Georges Kastner, The Voices of Paris, 1857

"I glimpsed a great light, rather pale, and in this light a magical scene: among jets of water fluttered metallic butterflies, marvelous hangings of them, and the splendor of a strange architecture, towers billowing to the sounds of a singular music sung by men and women of tall stature, whose extreme beauty surprised me."

Charles de Sivry, 1873

“Harmony is awakening for all of us. Wagner anticipated it in his enormous choirs. Soon will come sequences of notes as intimate as the breath of the wind, and others, on a larger scale; and when, after glissandos that will no longer be audible to our ears, they cover larger distances, this will be an enormous source of musical richness. We have experienced it down here when, after the quarter-tones sounded by the cyclone to the Canaques in one of our distant colonies, a frisson caused the nerves to quiver as if they were the strings of a harp.”

Louise Michel, 1887

 

“Do you wish to become acquainted with the hierarchy of Angels, the virtue of Numbers, the explanation of germs and metamorphoses?”

Gustav Flaubert, 1874

 

“Strabo speaks of the sound of the sun setting in the sea, between Spain and Africa. Apollo in Greece, like Roudra in India, is represented in the form of an archer-god, who takes his bow and launches his arrows, from which light results. Now, the bow, strongly stretched, resonates; the arrows, crossing space, whistle.

“Since Science has not, in short, yet answered our question concerning the essence of the sound phenomenon, let us open the annals of universal Knowledge, the sacred books where the thought of all humanity is condensed. There, we see the contemporary sound of the origin of Things, and all cosmogony agrees to hail it as promoter of the manifestations of the divine will.”

Edmond Bailly, 1900