Puppet Passage of the Day...

[G. S. Carnivals]

"In the twilight the face was surprisingly plain to see. It was barely human. Primate, perhaps, although I couldn't be sure it was even that. But as I looked at it, I felt a sense of shock; human or not, it was an expressive face, and never had I seen a face with so much sadness in it or so much resignation to the sadness. It was no fancy carving. The face, in fact, was crude, it had been simply hacked out of a block of wood. The whole thing had about it the look of a primitive corncob doll. But the knowing hands that had carved the face, driven by God knows what sadness of their own, had caught within its planes a misery of existence that wrenched one's heart to see."

Clifford D. Simak - Destiny Doll

[Bleak&Icy]

"...I can explain the anatomy to you: this is simply an obvious matter of workmanship. This is the arm of an Android of my making, animated for the first time by this vital, surprising agent that we call Electricity, which gives it, as you see, all the soft and melting qualities, all the illusion of Life!"

"An Android?"

"An Imitation Human Being, if you prefer. The mistake to be avoided, now, is that the facsimile may physically surpass the original. Do you recall, my lord, those artisans of former days who tried to create artificial human beings? Ha, ha, ha, ha!"

Edison laughed like one of the Cabiri in the forges of Eleusis.

"Poor fellows, for lack of the proper technical skills, they produced nothing but ridiculous monsters. Albertus Magnus, Vaucanson, Maelzel, Horner, and all that crowd were barely competent makers of scarecrows. Their automata deserved to be exhibited in the most hideous wax museums; they are disgusting objects from which proceeds a rank smell of wood, rancid oil, and gutta-percha. Degraded works of that sort give man no sense of power; instead they only force him to bow his head before the great god, Chaos. Just call to mind that succession of jerky, extravagant movements, reminiscent of Nuremberg dolls! The absurdity of their shapes and colors! Their animation, as of wigmakers' dummies! That noise of the key in the mechanism! The sensation of vacancy! In a word, everything in these abominable masquerades produces in us a sense of horror and shame. Contempt and disgust join together in a grotesque ceremony. They look like the idols of the Australian archipelago, fetishes from the jungles of equatorial Africa; these mannequins are nothing but an outrageous caricature of our species. Yes, such were the first sketches of Androids."

As he spoke, Edison's face sharpened and hardened. His eyes seemed to be probing imaginary shadows; his voice became curt, cold, didactic.

"But today," he resumed, "that period is past. Science has multiplied her discoveries; metaphysical conceptions have been refined. The techniques of reproduction, of identification have been rendered more precise and perfect, so that the resources available to man for new ventures of this sort are now different--oh, completely different--than they used to be. Henceforth, we shall be able to realize--that is, to MAKE REAL--potent phantoms, mysterious presences of a mixed nature, such as pioneers in the field could never have conceived, and at the thought of which they would have smiled sadly and cried, 'Impossible!' [...] And yet, I assure you, she is nothing but an uncut diamond so far. She is the skeleton of a shade waiting for the SHADE to exist! The sensation you just had from touching one of the arms of a female Android didn't seem to you remotely like what you would have had from touching the arm of an automaton--am I right? Try something else: would you like to shake this hand? Who knows! Perhaps it will respond."

-- The Future Eve by Villiers de l'Isle Adam

[yellowish haze]

"Would you like to read a tale of Hoffmann now? Look down there, to the right of the fore-stage; see the beautiful Madame G--. Take note of those eyes, with their irises of crystal, and that gleaming tint of porcelain! Her hair is silken, her teeth authentically pearly, like those of dolls. She is enamelled, one presumes, to the navel, so that her ballgowns may be cut as low as fashion requires. Thanks to the articulated springs in her bodice she can say 'Papa', 'Mama', and 'Bonjour, excellency'. Produced for export, she is bound for America. She knows how to handle a fan, to curtsey deeply, to flutter her eyelashes and to appear to breath like a real person. Vaucanson* is surpassed. Is that not the Olympia of Doctor Coppelius? And if a mechanism does not actually animate that mannequin on parade, what sort of vague and intermediary soul could possibly inhabit that breast?To hold between one's arms that rotating Sidonie, to run into those lips, as cold as lips of wax: does the idea not make you shudder?"

*Jacques de Vaucanson (1709-1782) was a prolific constructor of automata whose famous humanoid figure was "The Flute Player" (1738). He was the forefather of modern robotics and, for the matter, computing (he invented the punch-card programming system used in the Jacquard loom and subsequently appropriated by Ada Lovelance for potential use with Charles Babbage's ill-fated difference engine)

--Magic Lantern by Jean Lorrain (translated by Brian Stableford)

[G. S. Carnivals]

"An army of still white figures paraded in arrested processional against the dingy walls - an army of stiffly-staring corpses - an army of mummified, embalmed, petrified, ossified... he ran out of descriptive terminology, and realized guiltily that his words were pitifully inadequate to describe the impressiveness of these silent wax figures. They held an attitude of arrested motion which in turn captured a peculiar feeling of ominous waiting. They seemed to have just died; or rather to have been frozen in some airy, invisible ice that was about to melt and release them once again in any moment."

Robert Bloch - "Waxworks"

[yellowish haze]

"Vrieslander was still carving away at the puppet-head, I could hear the rasp of the blade against the wood. The sound of it was almost painful, and I looked over to see if it was soon going to be finished. The way the head moved to and fro in the painter's hand made it look as if it were alive and were peering into every corner of the room. Then the eyes stayed fixed on me for a long time, satisfied that they had finally found me. I could not turn my eyes away and stared, as if hypnotised, at the wooden face. For a while Vrieslander's knife seemed to hesitate, unsure of itself, then it scored a firm, decisive line and the wooden features suddenly took on a frightening life of their own."

-- The Golem by Gustav Meyrink (Translated by Mike Mitchell)

[yellowish haze]

[h2]The Harlot's House[/h2]
Oscar Wilde

We caught the tread of dancing feet,
We loitered down the moonlit street,
And stopped beneath the harlot's house.
Inside, above the din and fray,
We heard the loud musicians play
The 'Treues Liebes Herz' of Strauss.
Like strange mechanical grotesques,
Making fantastic arabesques,
The shadows raced across the blind.
We watched the ghostly dancers spin
To sound of horn and violin,
Like black leaves wheeling in the wind.
Like wire-pulled automatons,
Slim silhouetted skeletons
Went sidling through the slow quadrille,
Then took each other by the hand,
And danced a stately saraband;
Their laughter echoed thin and shrill.
Sometimes a clockwork puppet pressed
A phantom lover to her breast,
Sometimes they seemed to try to sing.
Sometimes a horrible marionette
Came out, and smoked its cigarette
Upon the steps like a live thing.
Then, turning to my love, I said,
'The dead are dancing with the dead,
The dust is whirling with the dust.'
But she--she heard the violin,
And left my side, and entered in:
Love passed into the house of lust.
Then suddenly the tune went false,
The dancers wearied of the waltz,
The shadows ceased to wheel and whirl.
And down the long and silent street,
The dawn, with silver-sandalled feet,
Crept like a frightened girl.

[yellowish haze]

"Taking example from a dream he once saw, he knelt before the rude cross and mumbled inanities under his breath. The rest followed suit, where they were able. Some relinquished their crutches, others had already fallen off their stilts, yet others cut their own strings.

The chapel's roof had not been conducive to the puppet-master's continued vigilance, the strings having been stretched at right angles under the door, others slipping through the gaps in the makeshift roof, yet others tangling up in games of blind cats' cradle.

He turned to face the flock. Some had fallen flat on their faces, others belly up, yet others hanging from the creaking rafters like flesh-coloured spiders.

He prayed deeply that he would be alive by morning."

--Yet Others by DF Lewis

[yellowish haze]

"He neither forbade her nor invited her, but after a while, when she picked up one part of a puppet that was lying on the bench, he straightened up and watched her as she examined it. She handled the thing with a queer, timid care now, as she would have held some small animal in her hands. It was the torso of one of the puppets—Jennifer's—and it was almost finished; the hair was fixed, though un-trimmed yet, and the features were carved. The body seemed to lack only painting, but towards the left side, below the breast there had been drilled a round hole half-way through the body, of a diameter such that a large pea would have entered. Clare put her finger on the mouth of the hole, touching it wonderingly, concerned, as if it were a wound. He smiled."

-- The Doll Maker by Sarban

[yellowish haze]

YouTube - the girl with many eyes

[Neurospaston]

YouTube - Blood Tea And Red String trailer