From “The Colour Out of Space” by H. P. Lovecraft in H. P. Lovecraft: The Classic Horror Stories, edited by Roger Luckhurst:
“It happened in June, about the anniversary of the meteor’s fall, and the poor woman screamed about things in the air which she could not describe. In her raving there was not a single specific noun, but only verbs and pronouns. Things moved and changed and fluttered, and ears tingled to impulses which were not wholly sounds…. Nahum did not send her to the county asylum but let her wander about the house as long as she was harmless to herself and others. Even when her expression changed he did nothing. But when the boys grew afraid of her, and Thaddeus nearly fainted at the way she made faces at him, he decided to keep her locked in the attic. By July she had ceased to speak and crawled on all fours, and before that month was over Nahum got the mad notion that she was slightly luminous in the dark, as he now clearly saw was the case with the nearby vegetation.
“It was a little before this that the horses had stampeded. Something had aroused them in the night, and their neighing and kicking in their stalls had been terrible. There seemed virtually nothing to do to calm them, and when Nahum opened the stable door they all bolted out like frightened woodland deer. It took a week to track all four, and when found they were seen to be quite useless and unmanageable.
“Something had snapped in their brains, and each one had to be shot for its own good. Nahum borrowed a horse from Ammi for his haying, but found it would not approach the barn. It shied, balked, and whinnied, and in the end he could do nothing but drive it into the yard….
“And all the while the vegetation was turning grey and brittle. Even the flowers whose hues had been so strange were greying now, and the fruit was coming out grey and dwarfed and tasteless…..
“The asters and golden-rod bloomed grey and distorted, and the roses and zinnias and hollyhocks in the front yard were such blasphemous-looking things that Nahum’s oldest boy Zenas cut them down. The strangely puffed insects died about that time, even the bees that had left their hives and taken to the woods….”
From “Spider Compared to Star” in Kudzu and Other Poems New and Selected by Dorothy Donnelly:
…In June a golden garden-spider floating
slowly across a sky of irises,
neither aimless nor idle, her net nailed
to rafters of roses, shakes with her foot
the diamond outline specked with a black and gold
enamel of gnats,
impassive moves in the midst of a meteor shower of bees
and comet wasps stinging the air with fiery whips.
In autumn when dahlias light their ruby lamps
and the gilt grape-leaf hangs, worn to a web by
waves of weather,
the spiders stir among the yellow zinnias
and tall chrysanthemums, cinnamon-colored and curved
petal by petal inwardly to solid globes,
moving from point to point in their orbits, sure-footed
over chasms
like the high stars across invisible bridges….
Hello!
This is the third of three posts with new photographs of Zinnias from Oakland Cemetery. The first two posts are Revisiting Zinnias (1 of 3) and Revisiting Zinnias (2 of 3).
Since I’m publishing the last post in the series on Halloween, I decided to see if I could find a couple of excerpts to top it off that were appropriately Halloweenish while mentioning Zinnias. The “Spider Compared to Star” excerpt from the long, spidery poem by Dorothy Donnelly was just edgy enough to tip into arachnophobia by combining it with fantasy. The short story “The Color Out of Space” by H. P. Lovecraft blends “body horror” and science fiction, as it unwinds the tale of a meteorite landing on Earth causing malignant physical and psychological changes to the story’s characters while terraforming the landscape. That this influential story contained themes around “impossible colors” — colors that are theoretically conceivable but our eyes can’t see — resonated with The Photographer, who has written many times here about colors like magenta that are outside the visible spectrum but we still think we recognize them. In Lovecraft’s story, the color in the landscape mutates away, creating “blasphemous-looking things” that the characters destroy.
The full story — from an H. P. Lovecraft Archive site — is available here, and the story of the story (which got its own Wikipedia article) is here. I found the poem excerpt with its zinnia references a couple of weeks ago, and found the Lovecraft story just yesterday, so it seemed like an eerie coincidence that the two excerpts describe plants I photograph this time of year — and both excerpts start in June and end in the waning light of autumn….
Spooky! Spooky!
Happy Halloween!
