Mooning over you: every day we descend a step further toward Hell

Well, my dear readers (all three of you!), I'm tired of listening to myself think. I'd like to hear from you.

What are your thoughts?

On life? the uncanny? zombies? Freud's predilection for cigars, coke & hysterical women? Soundgarden's new album? silent movies? tonight's harvest moon?

not tonight's harvest moon, but spectacular nonetheless

Full moons, especially the big, fat, low-hanging ones like the harvest moon, were once thought to be uncanny.

The Moon Illusion, as it is now called, is an optical illusion that causes the moon to appear larger when it is closer to the horizon & smaller when it is higher up in the sky. I was going to post a picture, but nothing was loading. You're over the moon about it, I'm sure.

And I, I have nothing to say.

So, tell ME something.

Anything.

...


To the Reader
Charles Baudelaire
trans. William Aggeler

Folly, error, sin, avarice
Occupy our minds and labor our bodies,
And we feed our pleasant remorse
As beggars nourish their vermin.

Our sins are obstinate, our repentance is faint;
We exact a high price for our confessions,
And we gaily return to the miry path,
Believing that base tears wash away all our stains.

On the pillow of evil Satan, Trismegist,
Incessantly lulls our enchanted minds,
And the noble metal of our will
Is wholly vaporized by this wise alchemist.

The Devil holds the strings which move us!
In repugnant things we discover charms;
Every day we descend a step further toward Hell,
Without horror, through gloom that stinks.

Like a penniless rake who with kisses and bites
Tortures the breast of an old prostitute,
We steal as we pass by a clandestine pleasure
That we squeeze very hard like a dried up orange.

Serried, swarming, like a million maggots,
A legion of Demons carouses in our brains,
And when we breathe, Death, that unseen river,
Descends into our lungs with muffled wails.

If rape, poison, daggers, arson
Have not yet embroidered with their pleasing designs
The banal canvas of our pitiable lives,
It is because our souls have not enough boldness.

But among the jackals, the panthers, the bitch hounds,
The apes, the scorpions, the vultures, the serpents,
The yelping, howling, growling, crawling monsters,
In the filthy menagerie of our vices,

There is one more ugly, more wicked, more filthy!
Although he makes neither great gestures nor great cries,
He would willingly make of the earth a shambles
And, in a yawn, swallow the world;

He is Ennui! — His eye watery as though with tears,
He dreams of scaffolds as he smokes his hookah pipe.
You know him reader, that refined monster,
— Hypocritish reader, — my fellow, — my brother!

...

(b)rain(s)! Pt. 2

This poem found me today:

The Door (I)

Robert Creeley 

        for Robert Duncan 

It is hard going to the door

cut so small in the wall where

the vision which echoes loneliness   

brings a scent of wild flowers in a wood.

What I understood, I understand.

My mind is sometime torment,   

sometimes good and filled with livelihood,   

and feels the ground.

But I see the door,

and knew the wall, and wanted the wood,   

and would get there if I could

with my feet and hands and mind.

Lady, do not banish me   

for digressions. My nature   

is a quagmire of unresolved   

confessions. Lady, I follow.

I walked away from myself,

I left the room, I found the garden,

I knew the woman

in it, together we lay down.

Dead night remembers. In December   

we change, not multiplied but dispersed,   

sneaked out of childhood,

the ritual of dismemberment.

Mighty magic is a mother,

in her there is another issue

of fixture, repeated form, the race renewal,   

the charge of the command.

The garden echoes across the room.   

It is fixed in the wall like a mirror   

that faces a window behind you   

and reflects the shadows.

May I go now?

Am I allowed to bow myself down

in the ridiculous posture of renewal,

of the insistence of which I am the virtue?

Nothing for You is untoward.   

Inside You would also be tall,   

more tall, more beautiful.

Come toward me from the wall, I want to be with You.

So I screamed to You,

who hears as the wind, and changes   

multiply, invariably,

changes in the mind. 

 

Running to the door, I ran down

as a clock runs down. Walked backwards,   

stumbled, sat down

hard on the floor near the wall.

Where were You.

How absurd, how vicious.

There is nothing to do but get up.

My knees were iron, I rusted in worship, of You.

For that one sings, one

writes the spring poem, one goes on walking.   

The Lady has always moved to the next town   

and you stumble on after Her.

The door in the wall leads to the garden   

where in the sunlight sit

the Graces in long Victorian dresses,   

of which my grandmother had spoken.

History sings in their faces.

They are young, they are obtainable,   

and you follow after them also

in the service of God and Truth. 

 

But the Lady is indefinable,   

she will be the door in the wall   

to the garden in sunlight.   

I will go on talking forever.

I will never get there.

Oh Lady, remember me

who in Your service grows older   

not wiser, no more than before.

How can I die alone.

Where will I be then who am now alone,   

what groans so pathetically

in this room where I am alone?

I will go to the garden.

I will be a romantic. I will sell   

myself in hell,

in heaven also I will be.

In my mind I see the door,

I see the sunlight before me across the floor   

beckon to me, as the Lady’s skirt

moves small beyond it.

 

...

Since I don't really have very many regular readers (a handful if I'm lucky), I thought I'd do a little experiment. Experiments are fun! And they tell you really interesting things about the human mind. And they require PARTICIPATION.

Richard Wiseman did a version of this experiment on his blog  a while ago. He blogs about the quirks of the brain & it's pretty neat (& a hundred times better than mine). Check it out if you want: http://richardwiseman.wordpress.com/. I'm interested to see if my results will be the same as his.

...

Let's play a game!

That's right, word association!

Today is Sigmund Freud's birthday (how uncanny), so to honour the twisted & depraved man himself, let's play a word association game. I'm going to give you a word & you will tell me the first word that comes to mind when you read it. And since I'm not a mind-reader (that you know of), in the comments section, write your word (I JUST realized you had to sign in with OpenID to comment on the blog, but I've since fixed that little problem) So it's easy. Ok? Go!

BLACK


...

Quiet, you'll wake the dead

das Unheimliche. Astounding, bizarre, creepy, devilish, extraordinary, fantastic, ghoulish, horrifying, incredible ... I could go on and on with the abc's of synonyms for this German word, but none really satisfactorily convey its "different shades of meaning." It is strange, familiarly unfamiliar, & frightening. Uncanny is the closest word to it in the English language.

Freud said "the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar." Waxwork figures, dolls, monsters, the re-animated dead, disembodied limbs, ghosts, dopplegängers, sideshow performers, haunted houses, seemingly non-random repetitions/coincidences (of numbers, dates, etc.), magic tricks, optical illusions, even epilepsy & mental illness, are all examples of things that can induce feelings of the uncanny.

However ambiguous the term may be, one almost always recognizes the uncanny when one sees it (or to be more accurate, feels it). This blog is dedicated to unearthing the uncanny in our contemporary world, where the laws of physics (especially Einstein's theory of relativity), Darwin's theories of evoloution, & probability theories in mathematics, have made it increasingly difficult to identify things that are truly uncanny.

To celebrate my first blog post, a poem. By a master of the uncanny, Edgar Allan Poe (who, uncannily enough, died Oct. 7th, the day I was born). Why? Because I love poetry. And because I love Poe.

Sonnet: To Science

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

1829

According to the young Poe (a budding Romantic if I ever saw one!), science removes the mysteries from the world, particularly for the poet. Science is a "vulture, whose wings are dull realities." I don't share Poe's sentiments about science. In fact, I think in opposite terms; science reveals the true mysteries (and beauty) of the world. What I do share with Poe is a certain kind of Romanticism--a good, old-fashioned gothic love for the macabre. For Poe, or the speaker at least, scientific knowledge occludes "the summer dream beneath the tamarind tree," which seems to me the equivalent of being unable to suspend disbelief during a horror movie. When the makeup is removed, when the sets & special effects are exposed, when the smoke and mirrors vanish, when the dream is revealed to be just that--a dream--we are left, like Poe's speaker, with a near inability to experience anything like the uncanny.

But it is possible.

What better example to begin with than a photo I took of my 'self' recently:

Is this me? A ghost? Or some malicious doppelgänger? What happens when the ghost in the photo turns out to be a simple trick of light or a slip of the hand? The truth is, despite knowing it is the result of an unsteady hand, I find this photo of myself quite frightening. It IS me, or rather a creepy, unpretty, ghostlike version of me. It makes me think of what I might look like dead. Of what it might feel like to be dead. That part of me would like to be dead. That I am already dead.

And that folks, is pretty damn uncanny!