{"id":14373,"date":"2015-02-15T09:59:55","date_gmt":"2015-02-15T06:59:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tentaclii.wordpress.com\/?p=14373"},"modified":"2015-02-15T09:59:55","modified_gmt":"2015-02-15T06:59:55","slug":"the-audient-void","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/2015\/02\/15\/the-audient-void\/","title":{"rendered":"The audient void"},"content":{"rendered":"

A new long blog article from the London Sound Survey: “Arthur Machen: the sounds from beyond the veil”<\/a>…<\/p>\n

“Part of H.P. Lovecraft\u2019s acknowledged debt to Machen also lies in hearing without seeing. Well before Lovecraft\u2019s half-human ululations emanated from somewhere below ground [Machen was using similar approaches]…”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Lovecraft first discovered Machen\u2019s work in the summer of 1923 (S.T. Joshi, I Am Providence<\/em>, p.454). Prior to that time he had already written many stories that featured “hearing without seeing” and “ululations … from somewhere below ground”, and had amply established the auditory as a key site for his horror. A minute’s selection of a few examples suffices to refute the idea that Lovecraft was inspired by Machen in his focus on the auditory…<\/p>\n

“In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping, and a faint distant baying as of some gigantic hound.” (“The Hound”, 1922)<\/p>\n

“And now I also heard; heard and shivered and without knowing why. Deep, deep, below me was a sound — a rhythm … To seek to describe it was useless — for it was such that no description is possible. Perhaps it was like the pulsing of the engines far down in a great liner, as sensed from the deck, yet it was not so mechanical; not so devoid of the element of the life and consciousness. Of all its qualities, remoteness in the earth most impressed me.” (“Transition of Juan Romero”, 1919)<\/p>\n

The “thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time” (“Nyarlathotep”, 1920)<\/p>\n

“All at once my feverishly sensitive ears seemed to detect a new and wholly distinct component in the soft medley of drug-magnified sounds — a low and damnably insistent whine from very far away; droning, clamoring, mocking, calling, from the northeast.” (“Hypnos”, 1922).<\/p>\n

“What I did succeed in doing was to overhear the nocturnal playing of the dumb old man. … I often heard sounds which filled me with an indefinable dread — the dread of vague wonder and brooding mystery. It was not that the sounds were hideous, for they were not; but that they held vibrations suggesting nothing on this globe of earth” (“The Music of Erich Zann”, 1921)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new long blog article from the London Sound Survey: “Arthur Machen: the sounds from beyond the veil”… “Part of …<\/p>\n

Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-odd-scratchings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14373"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14373\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}