BEAUTIFUL SCIENCE

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"Gilman's dreams consisted largely in plunges through limitless abysses of inexplicably coloured twilight and baffingly disordered sound; abysses whose material and gravitational properties, and whose relation to his own entity, he could not even begin to explain. The abysses were by no means vacant, being crowded with indescribably angled masses of alien-hued substance, some of which seemed organic while others seemed inorganic. In the later dreams he began to distinguish separate categories into which the organic objects appeared to be divided, and which seemed to involve in each case a radically different species of conduct-pattern and basic motivation. All the objects - organic and inorganic alike - were totally beyond description or even comprehension. Gilman sometimes compared the inorganic masses to prisms, labyrinths, clusters of cubes and planes, and Cyclopean buildings; and the organic things struck him variously as groups of bubbles, octopi, centipedes, living Hindoo idols, and intricate Arabesques roused into a kind of ophidian animation. The shrieking , roaring confusion of sound which permeated the abysses was past all analysis as to pitch, timbre, or rhythm; but seemed to be synchronous with vague visual changes in all the indefinite objects, organic and inorganic alike."

H.P. Lovecraft - "The Dreams in the Witch House".

Suddenly I was struck by the - to me! - obvious correlation between H.P. Lovecraft's stories and Ernst Haeckel's drawings.

It was in the summer of 2004 that I first saw Haeckel's master piece "Kunst und natur" in my friend Karoline's wonderful, sunny, Berlin flat on Boxhagener Allé. The book was lying on the enormous vintage light table, a former shop sign, that is her desk.
  His pictures were detailed, precise, unpleasant and beautiful, the shapes familiar yet outerwordly. The objects seemed to once have contained life and that they could at any moment spring to life again. I got the same nauseous feeling as I get when I read Lovecraft's accounts accounts of realms you can only reach by witchcraft.

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