“Don’t put Arkel in the trunk! He doesn’t like it.”

Claude Debussy, 1915

 

“Music represents the maximum of vibrations in matter before it turns into light. In the perpetual effort of subtilization, which comes out of the bowels of the earth and takes on its surface the various aspects of minerals, vegetables, animals, sentiments and thoughts, music is at the summit of man's sentiment and intelligence. As matter in vibration, it masks the last limit between thought and fire. Music is the grand ardent halo of the invisible but sonorous flame that is the human will. In the hierarchy of 'densities' of matter, it represents the beginning of fire, just as the sentiment that follows sensation represents the beginning of thought.”

Riciotto Canudo 1911

 

“‘Long live the crocodile! Honor and homage to the crocodile!’

“Either because the crocodile had partisans in the audience or the magic of its words operated naturally, some of the spectators were indeed heard repeating those final words: ‘Long live the crocodile! Honor and homage to the crocodile!’ A few members of the audience were even seen to bow down, as if to worship it, and a colossal altar suddenly formed in front of it. At the same time, a head even more colossal formed at the summit.”

Louis-Claude de Saint Martin, 1798

 

“My art is my prayer.”

Richard Wagner, 1868

 

“Richard Wagner and his works represent a great sum of occult power.”

Rudolf Steiner, 1908

 

“There should be in the world a centre of scientific and philosophical research, where the most notable scholars, in possession of new ideas, could readily experiment the value of the hypotheses constructed either by themselves or by their disciples. A centre from which nothing would drive away the good will. A centre wherein a world record could be kept of the entire range of the progressive imagination of man, and where nothing usefully conceived by the human brain would be lost. A centre from which economic and practical knowledge would flow to all parts of the world. A centre and a city outside of all historical and social quarrels, of all economic and national rivalries, a centre belonging, without possible exception, to all. To the Spirit of all. To the Spirit only.”

Paul Adam, 1893

 

“Wagner was one of the masters of Symbolism; his conception of art, his philosophy, his very formula were at the origin of Symbolism. It was impossible to get to the bottom of Wagnerism without encountering Symbolism; that is to say, it was impossible to expound the Wagnerian conception without recognizing in it the doctrine, or at least one of the primordial elements, of the new poetic doctrine.”

Édouard Dujardin, 1936

 

“Remember that a picture, before being a battle horse, a nude, an anecdote or whatnot, is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.”

Claude Debussy, 1890

 

“The universe is composed of several billions of suns, separated from one another by trillions of leagues, but nevertheless sustained in the luminiferous ether by the mutual attraction of all and the movement of each. While you are traveling toward the constellation of Hercules, our beautiful star is traveling toward the Pleiades; Sirius is hastening toward Columba, and Pollux launching itself toward the Milky Way. All these colossal existences are running through the eternal void, and when you are a star, you will do likewise.”

Jane de la Vaudère, 1893

“I said to music that I gave it the vastest scope to paint whatever it wanted, but I imposed two conditions on that: the first was that the diapason would remain in my archives; the second, that the range of the voice and its instruments would be limited to the planetary scale, like nations—except that I only imposed the second condition for a time, until Herschel had discovered a new planet, which would be the bass register of a new scale, and the tonic of a new octave.”

Louis-Claude de Saint Martin, 1798

 

Metempsychosis

Long after all life

Shall have ceased upon the widowed earth,

The sorrowful shades of humankind,

The plaintive souls of humankind,

Will return to visit

The widowed earth

Where all life shall have ceased.

They will leave behind the new bodies

Which the tyrannical right hand of God

Will have assigned to their wandering fate,

Upon some distant planet,

And piously will come to visit

The widowed earth.

Then their spiritual eyes

And their immaterial ears

Will recognize the forms, the colors, and the sounds

That were the works of their diligent hands,

Through the piled-up and forgotten ages.

That were the works of their feeble hands,

Yet hands stronger still

Than the Void.

While within them throbbed the life of earth

And their mouths proclaimed

The thrice-holy name of immortal Art.

And when, come the returning dawn, another sun

Calls them back to the bodies assigned

To their wandering fate,

Upon some distant planet,

Each wandering shade, each plaintive soul

Will say: —I dreamed a wondrous dream.

And, under the lash of eternal Beauty

And of eternal Melancholy,

Humankind will once more subdue—

Upon that distant planet—

The colors, the forms, and the sounds.

Marie Krysinska, 1890

 

“It was a small consolation for Mrs. Dubonnet when Mary Garden, star of the L'Opéra-Comique, drove up in her Renault one day and bargained for the red curtain cord.”

Hanns Heinz Ewers, 1915

 

“Debussy was a very, very strange man.”

Mary Garden, 1951

“A poet has said: 'The time has come to conquer the planets and mount an assault on the stars.'

“'We have found our way,' proclaimed all the newspapers, 'the way dimly foreseen for so many centuries! Not the vanished dream of eastward or westward, northward or southward expansion! No, expansion into the skies, expansion towards the stars, where no one shall bar our route!'”

Andre Mas, 1913

 

“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

 

“Would a luminous insect imprisoned in a block of transparent amber, if it were still alive, have another vision of the universe than that of a milieu transparent and solid to infinity? The highest theogonies all revert to the story of the lion giving his gods the face of a lion. Thousands of men superior in intelligence continue to accept that puerility serenely. If the triangles of geometry books could talk and assemble in council, all of them—the right-angled, the isosceles and the countless host of scalenes—would quickly conclude, by means of irrefutable formulae, that God, if he exists, is evidently the triangle in itself, and perfect. There would be wars of religion in a such a fantastic world, with the army of curved figures, convinced that God cannot be anything other than the perfect circumference.”

Gabriel de Lautrec 1903

 

“No stupid self-respect! The important thing is to succeed. Yes, let’s get together with the other worlds. Let’s create an international and intercosmic company to destroy… to destroy!” Penkenton bit into the repeated world as if it were prey between the teeth of a tiger. “Destroy everything: worlds, suns, space itself, and time! Annihilate everything, engendering nothingness! What an achievement—greater than creating being! And what a god man will be when he has achieved that creation! But one man, one company, or one world isn’t sufficient to the task; we need for associates the 115 planets that surround us and the 38 million suns that flame at the end of our telescopes. So let’s get on with it, without wasting a moment, and reach an understanding with our allies.”

Alfred Didier Marie Mesnard, comte de Chousy, 1883

“Then I saw strange animals moving in all directions, mingling their dazzling scales, twisting their fiery coils, walking, crawling, flying and responding to one another with profound and sonorous voices like the notes of an organ. There were sphinxes shaking their bandelets and chimeras with green phosphorescent eyes spitting fire through their nostrils and striking their foreheads with long dragon’s tails. There were griffins, half lion and half vulture, clenching their red paws and stretching out their blue necks, and basilisks with violet bodies undulating in the sand. There were a thousand strange, scarcely suspected, beasts: tragelaphs, half stag and half ox, alligators with the feet of roe deer, goats with the hindquarters of donkeys, owls with serpents’ tails, gigantic chameleons, and terrifying monsters sometimes as tall as mountains and sometimes as slender as reeds. There were immense metal flowers on the legs of women, and dragonflies whose deployed wings resembled the sails of ships and whose bodies shone like steel yardarms.”

Jane de la Vaudere, 1893

“Hashish will be taken under the auspices of Moreau and Aubert-Roche. Arrive between five and six at the latest. You will have your share of a light dinner and await the hallucination.”

Fernand Broissard to Théophile Gautier, 1845

 

A small high-pitched voice caused them to turn round. “Glory to the Superman! May he favor you with an operation, Messieurs!” 

It was a legless man, posed on a silently-wheeled pedestal equipped with a deflector reminiscent of a locomotive’s cow-catcher. His torso was swathed in a kind of green leather sheath bolted to the pedestal, and that armature, hermetically sealed, only opened on the right side, to give passage to a single arm, and at the neck, to let through the head.  But what secured the originality of the face most of all was the complete absence of a lower jaw, replaced by a kind a glabrous membrane that extended to the lower lip, partly opening an entirely toothless mouth. 

“I shall proclaim it loudly forever! I’m perfectly happy, firstly because I’m Dr. Caresco’s masterpiece, and secondly because I’ve greatly diminished the chances of physical suffering and mental disappointments!”

“Would it not have been more complete, in that case, to suppress your existence totally?” said Choumaque. 

“When the Superman wishes to take me!” affirmed the half-man, with pious respect. 

André Couvreur, 1904