Drei Romantische Stücke - I. From Beyond
for string orchestra, synthesizer, electric violin and electroacoustic score
Photo by Jean-Marie Manzoni
«[…] I felt the huge animate things brushing past me and occasionally walking or drifting through my supposedly solid body…»
A reflection – drawing on a cornerstone of H. P. Lovecraft’s poetics – on that grey area where civil society mingles with criminal mafias to offer them assistance, be it professional services or mere manual labour.
Complacent politicians, corrupt lawyers, engineers and accountants, desperate individuals with no skills or prospects who lend themselves as figureheads are the archetypal deities of this contemporary Pantheon of the Horrid.
Nothing in reality is as it appears: if even the most beautiful field of sunflowers can conceal an aquifer contaminated by toxic waste, a children’s playground rigged tenders, then it is par for the course that an accountancy firm is devoted exclusively to capital laundering schemes and an exclusive restaurant serves as a shady money-laundering operation, in a toxic amalgam that poisons every cog of society and blurs the line between lawful and unlawful. They are the new monsters who, in the name of the hypocritical ‘pecunia non olet’—an all too easy alibi—abdicate their own humanity and the dignity of their profession in a moment’s lapse, gradually creating a Lovecraftian hell in which even their children and descendants will be forced to live.
The first instalment of an ideal trilogy whose gestation has taken and will continue to take a long time: one can only expose oneself to such filth a little at a time.
The plot of Lovecraft’s short story is well known: Crawford Tillinghast, a scientist, has invented a machine capable of revealing that part of reality which our normal eyesight cannot perceive. One day, he shows the results to a friend of his who, pressed by Tillinghast, recounts his visions.
«[…] Listen to me! The waves from that thing are waking a thousand sleeping senses in us; senses which we inherit from aeons of evolution from the state of detached electrons to the state of organic humanity. I have seen truth, and I intend to shew it to you. Do you wonder how it will seem? I will tell you.»
«[…] I fancied myself in some vast and incredible temple of long-dead gods; some vague edifice of innumerable black stone columns reaching up from a floor of damp slabs to a cloudy height beyond the range of my vision. The picture was very vivid for a while, but gradually gave way to a more horrible conception; that of utter, absolute solitude in infinite, sightless, soundless space.»
«[…] At another time I felt the huge animate things brushing past me and occasionally walking or drifting through my supposedly solid body…»
«[…] Suddenly I myself became possessed of a kind of augmented sight. Over and above the luminous and shadowy chaos arose a picture which, though vague, held the elements of consistency and permanence. It was indeed somewhat familiar, for the unusual part was superimposed upon the usual terrestrial scene much as a cinema view may be thrown upon the painted curtain of a theatre. I saw the attic laboratory, the electrical machine, and the unsightly form of Tillinghast opposite me; but of all the space unoccupied by familiar material objects not one particle was vacant. Indescribable shapes both alive and otherwise were mixed in disgusting disarray, and close to every known thing were whole worlds of alien, unknown entities. It likewise seemed that all the known things entered into the composition of other unknown things, and vice versa. Foremost among the living objects were great inky, jellyish monstrosities which flabbily quivered in harmony with the vibrations from the machine. They were present in loathsome profusion, and I saw to my horror that they overlapped; that they were semi-fluid and capable of passing through one another and through what we know as solids. These things were never still, but seemed ever floating about with some malignant purpose. Sometimes they appeared to devour one another, the attacker launching itself at its victim and instantaneously obliterating the latter from sight.»
«[…] You see them? You see them? You see the things that float and flop about you and through you every moment of your life? You see the creatures that form what men call the pure air and the blue sky? Have I not succeeded in breaking down the barrier; have I not shewn you worlds that no other living men have seen?…»