[I]t was dark

“[I]t was dark—all dark—the intense and utter raylessness of the Night that endureth for evermore.”

—Edgar Allen Poe, from The Premature Burial, 1844.

A spiral scratch

“Unlike CDs and other digital playback formats, the record is an object that perfectly symbolises and embodies its morbid role in the preservation and transmission of sonic culture. A spiral scratch, its gleaming dark circle is the black hole into which memories are poured, only to emerge again as ghost voices, life preserved beyond death.”

—David Toop, from Haunted Weather: Music, Silence and Memory, 2004.

My Star

All I know
Of a certain star
Is, it can throw
(Like the angled spar)
Now a dart of red,
Now a dart of blue;
Till my friends have said
They would fain see, too,
My star that dartles the red and the blue!
Then it stops like a bird; like a flower, hangs furled:
They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it.
What matter to me if their star is a world?
Mine has opened its soul to me; therefore I love it.

—Robert Browning (1812-89).

the celebrated Phaenomena of Colours

“I procured me a Triangular glass-Prisme to try therewith the celebrated Phaenomena of Colours. And in order thereto having darkened my chamber, and made a small hole in my window-shuts, to let in a convenient quantity of the Sun’s light, I placed my Prisme at his entrance, that it might be thereby refracted to the opposite wall. It was at first a very pleasing divertisement, to view the vivid and intense colours produced thereby; but after a while applying my self to consider them more circumspectly, I became surprised to see them in an oblong form; which, according to the received laws of Refraction, I expected should have been circular.

And I saw . . . that the light, tending to [one] end of the Image did suffer a Refraction considerably greater then the light tending to the other. And so the true cause of the length of that Image was detected to be no other, then the Light consists of Rays differently refrangible, which, without any respect to a difference in their incidence, were, according to their degrees of refrangibility, transmitted towards divers parts of the wall.

Then I placed another Prisme . . . so that the light . . . might pass through that also, and be again refacted before it arrived at the wall. This done, I took the first Prisme in my hand and turned it to and fro slowly about its Axis, so much as to make the several parts of the Image . . . successively pass through . . . that I might observe to what places on the wall the second Prisme would refract them.

When any one sort of Rays hath been parted from those of other kinds, it hath afterwards obstinately retained its colour, notwithstanding my utmost endeavours to change it.”

—Sir Isaac Newton, from Optics, written during the plague years of 1665-66, first published in 1704.

you “hear” the color and you “see” the sound

“Some scientists (especially physicists) [and] some artists (especially musicians) . . . noticed long ago that a musical sound, for example, provokes an association of a precise color. . . . Stated otherwise, you “hear” the color and you “see” the sound. . . .

YELLOW . . . possesses the special capacity to “ascend” higher and higher and to attain heights unbearable to the eye and the spirit; the sound of trumpet played higher and higher becoming more and more “pointed,” giving pain to the ear and to the spirit. BLUE, with the completely opposite power to “descend” into infinite depths, develops the sounds of the flute (when it is light blue), of the cello (when it has descended farther), of the double bass with its magnificent deep sounds; and in the depths of the organ you “see” the depths of blue. GREEN is well balanced and corresponds to the medium and the attenuated sounds of the violin. When skillfully applied, RED (vermillion) can give the impression of strong drum beats, etc.”

—Wassily Kandinsky, from Concrete Art, 1938.

intensely iridescent

“How is it possible still to see the human face pink, now that our life, redoubled by noctambulism, has multiplied our perceptions as colorists’ The human face is yellow, red, green, blue, violet. The pallor of a woman gazing in a jeweller’s window is more intensely iridescent that the prismatic fires of the jewels that fascinate her like a lark.”

—F.T. Marinetti, from his Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto, 1910.

The Deep Blue Of The Firmament

“I should lie out in the garden in a hammock, and read sentimental novels with a melancholy ending, until the book would fall from my listless hand, and I should recline there, dreamily gazing into the deep blue of the firmament, watching the fleecy clouds, floating like white-sailed ships, across its depths, and listening to the joyous song of the birds, and the low rustling of the trees.”

—Jerome K. Jerome, On Being Idle, 1889.

that white heaven

“Nowhere did I find a really clear space for sketching until this occasion when I prolonged beyond the proper limit the process of lying on my back in bed. Then the light of that white heaven broke upon my vision, that breadth of mere white which is indeed almost the definition of Paradise, since it means purity and also means freedom. But alas! like all heavens, now that it is seen it is found to be unattainable: it looks more austere and more distant than the blue sky outside the window. For my proposal to paint on it with the bristly end of a broom has been discouraged—never mind by whom . . . —and even my proposal to put the other end of the broom into the kitchen fire and turn it into a charcoal has not been conceded.”

—G.K. Chesterton, On Lying in Bed, 1926.

Yankee Doodly Dum

“Once in khaki suits
Gee, we looked swell
Full of that Yankee Doodly Dum.
Half a million boots went sloggin’ thru Hell,
I was the kid with the drum.”

—Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?, music by Jay Gorney, words by E.Y. Harburg, 1932; quoted by Norman Mailer in The Naked and the Dead, 1948.

a sensual isle

“The sunset was magnificent with the intensity and brilliance that can be found only in the tropics. . . .

It was a sensual isle, a Biblical land of ruby wines and golden sands and indigo trees. The men stared and stared. The island hovered before them like an Oriental monarch’s conception of heaven, and they responded to it with an acute and terrible longing. It was a vision of all the beauty for which they had ever yearned, all the ecstasy they had ever sought. . . .

It could not last. Slowly, inevitably, the beach began to dissolve in the encompassing night. The golden sands grew faint, became gray-green, and darkened. The island sank into the water, and the tide of night washed over the rose and lavender hills. After a little while, there was only the gray-black ocean, the darkened sky, and the evil churning of the gray-white wake. Bits of phosphorescence swirled in the foam. The black dead ocean looked like a mirror of the the night; it was cold, implicit with dread and death. The men felt it absorb them in a silent pervasive terror. They turned back to their cots, settled down for the night, and shuddered for a long while in their blankets.”

—Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead, 1948.