The Legacy of Erich Zann and Other Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos by Brian M. Stableford (2010)
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Stableford's synthesis of Poe and Lovecraft in "The Legacy of Erich Zann" is one of the most sophisticated and successful I have read. In it, the narrator follows Auguste Dupin on an investigation into the murder of a concert violinist with possible infernal connections. This leads to connections with the earlier mysterious disappearance of Erich Zann.
(The only comparison to Stableford's work here is Reggie Oliver's novella "The Green Hour," which also follows Dupin).
Here Stableford's Dupin begins to put things together:
.... “The author of the Harmonies de l’Enfer signed himself Apollonius in honor of Apollonius of Tyana, although he added the title of Abbé as a primitive shield against accusations of heresy. Unfortunately, almost everything the modern world knows about Apollonius of Tyana is derived from a fictitious biography written by Philostratus, who tried to promote a cult by advertising the sage as a miracle-worker, in frank imitation of the manner in which early Christians represented Jesus of Nazareth. In fact, the original Apollonius was a neo-Pythagorean philosopher, who attempted to elaborate Pythagoras’ notion that a proper understanding of the nature of the universe required to be sought in terms of the hidden virtues of numbers and musical harmonies, and the parallels between them.
“In recent times, of course, the uses of mathematics in producing representations of the universe, in matters of precise measurement and the formulation of scientific laws, have proved spectacularly successful, but such endeavor has been severed from its once-intimate connection with the concept of harmony. Although musicians like Johann Sebastian Bach have continued to find mathematics useful in the understanding and composition of music, the contribution of music to the understanding of reality has been minimized, and some of the key properties of music—in particular, the ability of music to represent and communicate emotional states, appealing to aspects of mind more fundamental than consciousness itself—have long been abandoned by the majority of philosophers as unfathomable mysteries, unamenable to rational analysis.
“The Medieval Apollonius and Erich Zann were, however, among the rare exceptions to this generalization. The former took his initial inspiration from his namesake, while the latter took his from his former mentor, Giuseppe Tartini, but both men set out in search of ecstasy: a musical and spiritual path to a paradisal state of mind. Both, alas, found their initial quests betrayed and subverted as soon as they achieved their initial successes.”
“Subverted by what?” I put in. I was struggling to cope with Dupin’s discourse, as usual, but I knew from experience that inserting prompts and questions sometimes helped me to cling on to the thread of his arguments.
“Something that has been given many names by those who have sensed its presence,” Dupin said. “The Sumerians called it Tiamat, the Persians Ahriman. Christians, inevitably, have subsumed it within the concept of the Devil, but the Christian tendency to personalize the Devil, as a caricature of Pan or, more recently, as an urbane Mephistopheles, is a distraction. Of all the various conceptualizations, the one perhaps best-suited to the description of the phenomenon as it is humanly experienced is Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos.”
“I don’t know that name,” I admitted.
“It is to be found in the Harmonies de l’Enfer and various other texts that are sometimes called forbidden, in a stronger sense than merely being placed on the Roman Church’s Index. Nyarlathotep is one of the Old Ones—a company of entities that are something other than gods or demons, although they have powers and inclinations that are somewhat similar. They reside, though not completely, in the dream-dimensions: spaces that surround and are connected to the three dimensions of space experienced by humans but lie beyond the scope of the human sensorium’s mundane sustenance of consciousness. Nyarlathotep’s seat is sometimes called Kadath: a region of the dream-dimensions that is exceedingly difficult to reach, even by the utmost exertions of the unentranced human mind.
“In our scientific era, we tend to think of consciousness in terms of observation and recording, as if it were merely a device for collecting and collating data, organizing them into a coherent and meaningful image of the world—albeit a device whose efficient operation is troubled by the anarchic workings of emotion and appetite, and the sometimes-nightmarish absurdity of dreams. Ever since Plato, philosophers have routinely conceived of human being as something fundamentally divided, in which noble and orderly rationality is engaged in a constant struggle with baser animal urges and the hectic distractions of dreams—but humans are still capable of feeling whole and undivided on occasion, especially when immersed in works of art, and most especially of all when immersed in music.
“It is possible, however, to conceive of consciousness in a different way, not as a collector but as a composer, not as a dealer in atomized data building rational edifices threatened, troubled and undermined by the seismic shocks of emotion and dream, but as a seeker and synthesizer of harmonies, forever attempting to bind all experience into a whole whose nature is essentially ecstatic, or sublime, in the technical sense of either term.
“The creative process of consciousness, seen in this light, is a fundamentally hopeful one, in that it works on the assumption that ecstasy and sublimity, once fully achieved, will be blissful and paradisal: the mental and moral optimum of which the human mind is capable. Insofar as we have been able to determine the truth, however, the reality is that the final fulfillment of consciousness is not blissful or paradisal in any simple or straightforward sense, but has an emotional texture that is far more frightful and horrific.
“Within this version of spiritualist philosophy, Heaven and Hell cannot be opposites or alternatives, in such a way that one might arrive at one or the other, dependent upon the moral health of one’s soul. In the holistic way of thinking, Heaven and Hell can only be co-existent, intricately inter-twined, not merely bound together but somehow in harmony. In this way of thinking, therefore, Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, is not some external threat menacing the human mind with dissolution into madness, although it can easily take on that semblance in the rational imagination; it is something inherent within the human mind and essential to it—just as fundamental, in its own way, as the order inherent in methodical logic and mathematics.
“However we may choose to conceive of consciousness in the broadest sense, however, one truth that remains is this: in our waking lives, we are fugitives, taking refuge in a deliberately limited consciousness that strives to master and control emotion and to deny the capriciousness of dreams. When we sleep, our defenses are eroded, but we have countered that erosion by the strategic forgetfulness that dispels our dreams. There are, however, states intermediate between waking and sleep, in which that physiological strategy is far less effective. We enter one such state when we listen to, and respond to, music; we enter another when we submit to the magnetic effects that induce a somnambulistic or somniloquistic trance. We become particularly vulnerable when the two effects operate in combination: when we surrender, as players or as listeners to somnimusicality. We are uniquely well-equipped, then, to storm the heights of ecstasy and sublimity, paradise and bliss—and, by the same token, we are uniquely vulnerable to the effects of the Crawling Chaos. As the wisest of modern aesthetic philosophers, Edmund Burke, has pointed out, the sublime always contains an element of horror, and that element of horror is its truest essence, its most fundamental note.”
It was high time for another interruption. “And is that what Erich Zann achieved, by means of his spoiled Stradivarius?” I said. “He attempted to storm the heights of ecstasy and sublimity, but failed, and only opened his soul to horror: to Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos.”
“Sometimes, my friend,” Dupin said, despairingly, “I think that you are ever-intent on misunderstanding me, by oversimplifying everything I say. The whole point of what I have been saying is that Zann’s Stradivarius—Palaiseau’s Stradivarius—is not spoiled at all...."
The end is suitably operatic in its apocalyptic energy. The reincarnated Zann, an angel-voiced twelve year old boy, forces the narrator to return to Zann's old room. Dupin follows, to the rescue.
…the voice and the accompanying notes of the retuned violin began to crawl into my heart and soul, filling them with ecstasy—not the false ecstasy of human hopes and loving desires, which attempted to abandon fear and pain and sorrow and horror in search of some idyllic purification, but the true ecstasy that embraced and embodied fear and pain and sorrow and horror, and restored the wholeness of experience and perfection, mundanity and vision, reality and dream, life and death.
For a second, or perhaps two—though they seemed to stretch far beyond the confines of Earthly time—I believed that I understood the effect that the music of Erich Zann had been reaching for, of its own accord, and in defiance, in the first climax of Zann’s life, of its own composer and player. I understood how very unfortunate, and how perversely fortunate, Zann had been in having been deprived of a voice in his previous incarnation.
He was not deprived of a voice now; his music had moved beyond the confines of the Stradivarius violin, and the unfettered human imagination.
Then the monsters came in earnest, threatening to invade the human world through the window of that absurdly-perched garret, in fulfillment of the pact that Erich Zann had made. They came to bring a flood of horror into the world, with all the corollary delight implied by the fullness of the term. No human could imagine why they had to do it, but I understood that they were acting under compulsion.
At that point in a similar séance, fifteen years before, Erich Zann’s flesh had rebelled against the enormity of his own daring, and he had tried to play the violin that had been playing him. He had entered into a contest that had killed him, but he had kept the monsters at bay. He had lost the fight, and won it. The violin had continued to play him even after he was dead, but the music had been futile, unaccompanied.
This time, Zann reborn had no intention of doing any such thing, and no capacity even to attempt it. This time however, Auguste Dupin was plying the bow and pressing the strings of the Stradivarius. This time, he was the one who rebelled, and set out, heroically, to seize control of the educated, bewitched, accursed, ensouled Stradivarius.
Whether he knew it or not—and I firmly believe that he had always known it, if only on some occult but not-entirely-subconscious level—the Chevalier had been preparing for this moment for fifteen years. He had been very scrupulous in letting musical instruments alone, and extremely scrupulous in retuning his own self. The running scordatura that he attempted now was quite unprecedented, but it was utterly logical, rational and analytical, and in that sense, he had practiced it a million times before.
Apollonius of Tyana, the self-styled Abbé Apollonius and Erich Zann might have insisted that human beings were fundamentally undivided, and that the unending battle fought between reason and emotion, will and appetite, demonstrated by its very inconclusiveness that no such division could ever truly be effected, but Auguste Dupin did not admit that and would not admit it now. His somnimusicality was not ecstatic at all, but purely physiological, and he brought all of his mental and moral resources to bear on the contest in which he engaged against his would-be possessor.
Dupin launched an attack, with all his inner might, against the Stradivarius. Refusing any longer to be played, he insisted on becoming the player—the determinant not only of the notes the instrument was playing, but of the uncanny song that the reincarnate, fully articulate Erich Zann was singing.
He had no music of his own to play, but he did not need any; the point was not to play a melody but to interrupt and shatter one.
Auguste Dupin was, not merely by training but by nature, a disentangler, a man possessed of acumen. He attacked the play of the violin not as an item of music, a question of aesthetics, but as a conundrum, a puzzle to be solved. He set out to fulfill the true mission of the human mind, which was not to seek the horrific fulfillment of bliss but to analyze and separate, not by way of cultivating unwholesomeness, after the fashion of the Crawling Chaos, but to contrive a neat and orderly division. He set out, in his attack, to undo the knot that had been contrived in the weft of fate by Erich Zann’s music and Erich Zann’s reincarnation: to smooth out the boundary between the real world and the unruly dimensions of dream.
For a moment, everything hung in the balance. The snowflakes drifting outside the window seemed to stop in the course of their eldritch evolution: to stop falling; to stop shimmering; to stop sparkling.
The cold was so deeply enmeshed in my soul and my bones that I was afraid that Dupin had left it too late, that he had not solved the puzzle in time. I was terrified that the monsters had got through. It was a truly beautiful fear, a truly sublime terror; I almost contrived to experience the combination as Erich Zann yearned to experience it.
Then the boy’s divine and demonic soprano voice broke.
On one level, that was all that happened; his voice broke, as the voices of adolescents routinely do. The incredible note that he was sounding turned into an all-too-credible croak, and Erich Zann’s magical cantata abruptly turned into a farce.
The window, of its own accord, slammed shut.
The individual who no longer even seemed to be a child clutched his throat, and collapsed.
Hood leapt to his feet, and screamed.
Dupin stopped playing. He bent down, and set the violin down on the floor, as reverently as it deserved. It was, after all, a Stradivarius.
Then he turned to me, and simply said, without any preamble or particular emphasis: “Run for your life….”
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Jay
11 June 2020
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