Unutterable

Lyrics

(1)

This non-appliance sound
This dead durch sprung Technik - horrible (2)
This the breath of Nick (3)
On dripping post-seizure, [Venetian / finishing] floated brain of intolerable
This the rank post-urings and... posturings and insights of the unutterable (4)

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Notes

1. Zack, who is becoming a master of the summative note, remarks:

"Unutterable" was one of H.P. Lovecraft's favorite words... More of a Smith solo track than a Fall song, "Unutterable" would not have sounded out of place on MES's spoken word album The Post Nearly Man which begins with a "cover" of "The Horror in Clay," the first chapter of Lovecraft's short story "The Call of Cthulhu."

Dan submits:

Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan:
 


I stood here, and saw before me the unutterable, the unthinkable gulf that yawns profound between two worlds, the world of matter and the world of spirit...

Thop points out that priest and poet Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy's complete works were anthologised as The Unutterable Beauty in the late 1927. I assume the line comes from one of his poems or letters, but if there is any connection at all, it seems equally likely that MES just saw the title somewhere.

POE! reminds us that Poe also used the word a lot.

^

2. In German "durch" means by or through, "sprung" means leap, and "Technik" covers both technology and technique. "Vorsprung durch Technik" (advancement through technology) is the motto of the Audi automobile company.  

^

3. "Old Nick" is a cognomen for the devil (see also "2 x 4" and "Zandra"). "The breath of Nick" could mean the breath of the devil, or, more figuratively, it could just mean really bad breath.

Dan submits:



Hyoscine (Hyoscine hydrobromide, produced by the nightshade family of plants) is also known as "devil's breath."

According to Wikipedia, "It is used to treat motion sickness, postoperative nausea and vomiting, and also to reduce saliva production."

The saliva-reduction bit is interesting, given the reference to "dripping."

"Post-seizure" sounds like something to do with epilespsy, which is seems MES suffered from at least intermittently. It seems hypscine can cause convulsions in susceptible patients.

^

4. "Unutterable" is, in fact, an English word; although I thought "inutterable" was the more usual word, the OED pronounces it "now rare," whereas it doesn't comment on the frequency of "unutterable" (nor does it, however, produce an example of its use more recent than 1883).

^

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Comments (14)

dannyno
  • 1. dannyno | 04/04/2013
Vorsprung durch Technik was an advertising slogan for Audi: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorsprung_durch_Technik, of course.
bzfgt
  • 2. bzfgt | 04/04/2013
Not really "of course," or it would already have been in my notes...
Zack
  • 3. Zack (link) | 02/11/2016
"Unutterable" was one of H.P. Lovecraft's favorite words according to the website linked above.

More of a Smith solo track than a Fall song, "Unutterable" would not have sounded out of place on MES's spoken word album 'The Post Nearly Man' which begins with a "cover" of "The Horror in Clay", the first chapter of Lovecraft's short story "The Call of Cthulhu."
dannyno
  • 4. dannyno | 02/01/2018
"The Unutterable", of course, is a track from Philip Glass' soundtrack to Godfrey Reggio's 1988 documentary Powaqqatsi: Life in Transformation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powaqqatsi.

The film features the remains of a 1969 Audi 100: "This dead durch sprung Technik"?

http://www.imcdb.org/i135019.jpg

This may all be an utter coincidence. But still.
dannyno
  • 5. dannyno | 14/10/2019
Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan:


I stood here, and saw before me the unutterable, the unthinkable gulf that yawns profound between two worlds, the world of matter and the world of spirit...


(popped up on twitter the other day)
dannyno
  • 6. dannyno | 14/10/2019
"This the breath of Nick
On dripping post-seizure"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyoscine

Hyoscine (Hyoscine hydrobromide, produced by the nightshade family of plants) is also known as "devil's breath".

It is used, according to wikipedia, to treat motion sickness, postoperative nausea and vomiting, and also to reduce saliva production.

The saliva-reduction bit is interesting, given the reference to "dripping".

"Post-seizure" sounds like something to do with epilespsy, which is seems MES suffered from at least intermittently. It seems hypscine can cause convulsions in susceptible patients.

https://bnfc.nice.org.uk/drug/hyoscine-hydrobromide.html
Thop
  • 7. Thop | 27/02/2020
Just another literary use of (The) "Unutterable" to note: the first world war priest and poet Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy's complete works were first anthologised in "The Unutterable Beauty" in the late twenties. Of course he isn't a known inspiration of MES in the way that Machen and Lovecraft were, but I wonder if MES may have been familiar with the collection...
bzfgt
  • 8. bzfgt (link) | 20/03/2020
Interesting, I assume that's a line from either one of his poems or one of his letters if that's the title, but nothing comes up on a search, even if I say "-collected," but that title. I can see a whole PDF of it online, but there is not the expected epigraph with that line at the beginning, and it's not searchable....it is noteworthy though, I think...
POE!
  • 9. POE! | 06/01/2021
The word unutterable is used a lot by Poe

;Then summoning the wild courage of despair, a throng of the revellers at once threw themselves into the black apartment, and seizing the mummer whose tall figure stood erect and motionless within the shadow of the ebony clock, gasped in unutterable horror at finding the grave cerements and corpse- like mask, which they handled with so violent a rudeness, untenanted by any tangible form.'
dannyno
  • 10. dannyno | 28/02/2021
The word "unutterable" is not particularly uncommon, really, is it.
dannyno
  • 11. dannyno | 28/02/2021
It's not like it's unutterable.
bzfgt
  • 12. bzfgt (link) | 09/03/2021
Depends what you mean by "uncommon"
Martin Flanagan
  • 13. Martin Flanagan (link) | 23/01/2023
Have just noticed that a track on the Philip Glass soundtrack to the experimental film "Powaqqatsi" (film & S/T 1988) is titled 'The Unutterable', with the definite article. I don't know of any Smith declaration of liking Glass (or the film), interesting though. The track is #5 on side two.
harleyr
  • 14. harleyr | 11/12/2023
Another occurrence of the word that Smith would probably have been aware of…

On one of the plates in William Blake’s The First Book of Urizen, beneath a drawing of a tortured figure there are the phrases “I sought Pleasure and found Pain” and “Unutterable”.

You can see this as illustration 55 in the catalogue from the 2019 Tate Britain Blake exhibition.

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