Sans Terre(or)
From an early age my thoughts on monsters went as follows: Provided there are dangerous monsters lurking around in my bedroom/attic/closet then, by that same logic, would there not be some other force or species that keeps these creatures in check? Does not Darwin tell us of such? To put a finer point on it, does not the fact that we are not over-run with monsters speak to the reality of these non-empirical monster hunters? Oh, this has just come to me. What if the creatures that eat the monsters are not friendly to humans? What if they are just so busy mutilating monsters that they do not have time for humans. Should I then be searching out for monsters in order to solicit my aid in their war against the even greater creatures so as to secure their patronage and to save off the coming Armageddon? And what if there are other forces even stronger than both? Dear God what have I done… This line of thinking, termed “negative epistemology,” is what Arthur Machen and after him H.P. Lovecraft wrote about. Scary stuff for sure. And in the same way that their stories are only stories and have nothing to do with real life, “Gloomy Sunday,” also known as “The Hungarian Suicide Song,” is just another song and has nothing to do with anything other then background noise. Yet, unfortunately we have come to see that the Cthulhu mythos are not just stories and “Gloomy Sunday” is not just a song.
Originally composed by Hungarian pianist Rezső Seress in 1933 with the lyrics taken from the László Jávor poem “Szomorú vasárnap” in which the poet morns the untimely death of a lover and contemplates suicide, the song was banned by both the BBC and a number of radio stations in the US for purportedly being the cause, the inspiration if you will, for a wave of suicides (Seress himself committed suicide in 1968). Originally performed in 1935 by Pal Kalmar, the song has been covered by innumerable artists including Bjork, Lou Rawls, Ray Charles, Elvis Costello, Peter Wolf, Sinéad O’Connor, The Dead Milkmen, Sarah McLachlan, Serge Gainsbourg, The Unbending Trees, Billie Holiday, he Associates (the lead singer of which committed suicide) and even the famed Theistic-Satanist Anton LaVey. Its haunting presence was also featured at the start of the film Schindler’s List as well as being mentioned as “Blue Monday” in the work of Kurt Vonnegut (see “Breakfast of Champions: Goodbye Blue Monday”) and Charles Bukowski (see “Notes of a Dirty Old Man”). Scarily enough there is even an Occultist/Discordian/Chaos group in Boston that listen to a record of Billie Holiday’s recording during some of their rituals. In my opinion it is one of rabbit hole leitmotifs of negative epistemology that is best left alone. For if Nu-Japanese horror or the second Ghost-Busters movie has taught me anything it is that once we acknowledge the power of a suicide song, let alone the reality of fiction (or fiction of reality) there is no telling how far or quickly the real, or reality rather, will turn into a nightmare.
PS A Japanese film about this song has recently come to my attention. It is called “Denten Uta” which roughly translates to “Suicide Song.”
