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


...

Brains! Part 1

*these ideas are not my own, except the part about the zombies

Every idea I've ever had belonged to someone else first.
                                                    -James T. Hellcat

In his book How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker wrote, "...the mind is a naturally selected computer." I like this metaphor. For one, I'm a Darwinist/Dawkinsist, so the idea that the brain has evolved to be the crazy thinking machine it is is not so surprising/terrifying, & for another, the brain as data processor seems to me completely plausible given its nature.

What do I mean by its nature? Well, the brain has several data processing functions. It is a counting machine, a language processor, it has an expandable memory, and it is capable of crashing, to name a few. For more on the brain: http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/1997_09_naturalhistory.html

But it's the misfirings of the brain that I really want to talk about. The other day I experienced a classic blunder (in Statistics, a Type 1 error/false positive). I was sitting on my couch enjoying a visit with a friend, when I looked to my left & noticed my cat hunkered down beside the couch, no doubt stalking a fly or spider or a bit of fluff. I then looked up & saw that the cat was sprawled out on the dining table. A quick double-take back to 'the cat' next to the couch & I realized that it was actually a black bag I had earlier set on the floor. Duh!

Called pareidolia or simulacra, this 'uncanny' phenomenon occurs when the brain fills in false information & recognizes a vague image as a specific one. Sort of like the mind's auto-complete, if you will. Human self-delusion is fascinating, don't you think?! Pareidolia (not aliens, God, ghosts, etc.) is also to blame when we insist that we 'recognize' a familiar face, only to realize upon looking closer that it is not at all the person we had thought, & it is what causes us to see faces on random objects such as the moon or a slice of toast. It also makes us susceptible to the power of illusion/magic.

Traditionally (& still today?!), these misperceptions have most often been attributed to supernatural beings/occurrences. But it's just your mind playing tricks on you ... literally! So why do we insist on perpetuating these supernatural myths? Evolution, baby. Our minds have evolved to take on some pretty herculean tasks, so it makes sense that the brain would try to make things easier on itself, say perhaps by switching off/turning down consciousness when it is not directly necessary in order to accomplish the task at hand. ie. making sense of the black lump protruding from behind the couch. That black lump could have been almost anything, so in order to save time & costly cell activity, my brain made a guess based on a number of things (previous experience/memory, what I imagine it to be, & what I hope it is). So why DID I see my cat & not a dog, or a sweater, or a panther, or a black hole, or the black bag that it really was? 

I'll quote Mr. Pinker again, if only because he says things so much more learnedly & eloquently than I (he's the Psychologist, Cognitive Scientist, Linguist, & I'm the English major): "...the mind is a system of organs of computation that enabled our ancestors to survive and reproduce in the physical and social worlds in which our species spent most of its evolutionary history" (Pinker 2005).

1. Our brains are still evolving & are, therefore, not without imperfections.
2. Our social & physical worlds have evolved much faster than our brain's have.

While the costs of making a mistake in perception may be different (but not less) in the contemporary social & physical worlds, our brains are still hardwired to be on the lookout for both the things we know that are safe & the things we don't that are potential dangers. It may be nothing more than a perceptual error when we misinterpret vague images, but it pays in the long run. The brain's auto-complete function enables us to quickly locate our mates/family in a jungle of faces, locate food & shelter sources & avoid danger. Only sometimes, the brain gets it wrong (like Google?!). I am familiar with the sight of my cat (I've had her for about 6 months now), I do not own a dog, the particular shape & colour of the bag was consistent with that of my cat's (rather large) posterior, I completely forgot that I had set the bag there myself a few hours earlier, & there are no panthers or black holes (that I know of) in my home, so it makes sense that I would infer that the shape I saw was my cat, Vampira. Human perception is a subjective approximation/guesstimation rather than a fundamental, objective truth.  

Everything is a lie.

...

The other day I wrote about my brain. Specifically, how superior I think it is. You may dismiss me as an egomaniac, and to a certain extent, you'd be right. I am genetically hardwired to be selfish (or rather, my genes are). But that does not make me a selfish (and therefore, according to some, bad) human being. As intelligent as I am, as you are, as anyone can ever be (and trust me that person would be a gazillion billion times smarter than me & you put together), there is so much that we don't know, it makes what we do know seem infinitesimal. I may be gifted according to some subjective standardized test, but I am far from being a know-it-all. I am no better (or worse) than the lot of humankind.

In essence, when it comes to the human brain, degrees of intelligence are irrelevant. We're all pretty damn smart (in comparison to protozoa, say) or stupid (compared to superhuman robots, which thankfully, don't exist). Think about it. From an evolutionary perspective, we aren't that much more evolved than primitive man/woman (which explains a lot about our current disordered world!). I may be an intelligent being, but most of the time I find myself shambling about like some ravenous, slobbering zombie. 

And like I always say, I am a self-portrait of you.

...

The human brain, with all of its capabilities, its imperfections, & its limitations, truly amazes & confounds me. It is not only the source of, but quite possibly, the best example of the 'uncanny' there is.

Which brings me to zombies. The words 'uncanny' & 'zombie' are practically synonymous in my world.

I really like zombies. They are my favourite monsters, despite my theory that zombies, vampires, werewolves, Frankenstein, golem, ghosts, demons, mythological monsters such as Medusa & Hydra, succubi, human monsters--serial killers/cannibalists/necrophiliacs etc.--even the Devil himself, are all incarnations of the same thing: the inherent darkness within the human brain. Zombies aren't real, but they are useful as a metaphor for the things we don't understand/like/are afraid of about ourselves. It is much easier to create an 'other' to bear the weight of our troubles, one who is capable of acting out all of the nastiness we can imagine, than it is to accept that we ourselves ARE monsters. Lest you think I am being incontrovertibly pessimistic about humankind (and truthfully, most of the time I am), I also believe that our brains have advanced far enough for us to accept this & move on. We are not merely devils, we are angels, too.

And, although logically impossible, zombies are, nonetheless, quite frightening to anyone with a brain.

...

Welcome to the Age of the Zombie.

...mmmmm brains!

...

The Computation
John Donne

For my first twenty years, since yesterday,

I scarce believed thou couldst be gone away;
For forty more I fed on favours past, 

And forty on hopes that thou wouldst they might last;
Tears drown'd one hundred, and sighs blew out two;

A thousand, I did neither think nor do,
Or not divide, all being one thought of you;

Or in a thousand more, forgot that too.
Yet call not this long life ; but think that I
Am, by being dead, immortal; can ghosts die ? 

...

Sources


Carroll, Robert T. http://www.skepdic.com/pareidol.html
Chalmers, David. http://consc.net/zombies.html
Dennett, Daniel C. http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/unzombie.htm
Pinker, Steven. http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/papers/So_How_Does_The_Mind_Work.pdf
___________. http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/1997_09_naturalhistory.html

The Tortoise and the Hare aka A Tale of Two Devils

*the events in this story are mostly true. the people, real(ish).

Speaking of uncanny coincidences. My brother came to visit me the other day. He's later than the proverbial hare! He called weeks ago to tell me he was coming. But since he was already at my back door, I had no choice but to let him in.

This is my brother:

Sibling Revelry

And in more recent times:

Kickin' it to the side

Josh likes beer, girls & a few other things I won't mention. I have dubbed him The Hillbilly Gangsta. If you knew him, you'd think the nickname was spot on. Josh is one of my favourite people, and not just because he is my only sibling. He's the epitome of laidback, what you would call a fun-lovin' guy.

When we were kids, he was my guinea pig. Whenever there was some daredevil stunt to be performed, Josh went first. If he was successful, my turn! If not, he usually found himself in the hospital & all the fun was spoiled. Don't get me wrong, I'm no sadist (quite the opposite actually!), I'm just enterprising & clever enough to hide the evidence of my masochism. Which is why he's had far more scrapes, bruises, broken bones & stones in his face than I! (If you believe in karma, it will please you to note that I am diabetic & spend far more time than I would like in hospitals & waiting rooms).

Three other reasons I love my brother: he has J-O-S-H tatooed across his knuckles, he says "I'm just Josh'n ya" all the time (which I find pathetic & hilarious at the same time) & his laugh is infectious. Try not laughing around him. I dare you.

Anyway, back to the story.

Josh brought two friends with him when he visited. We listened to some records, drank some beer & laughed & talked about my artwork & why I'm not famous (I have a few theories) & somehow found ourselves discussing vegetarianism & I brought up the word fortified (I NEVER use the word fortified).

Josh & his friends laughed uproariously at the mention of this word. Turns out that very morning they had decided FORTIFIED was the word of the day!

Can you believe it?!

Neither could I. Considering the nature of my blog.

We had a good laugh about it & I thought about the phenomenal ability of the brain to record & store inconceivable amounts of information. And the uncanny. I think a lot about the uncanny. So much so that I'm starting to see IT everywhere. Ahhhhhh. 

Maybe it is just a necessary function of the brain to see a particular word (or number) everywhere you look after recently becoming conscious of it, but it sure is F-U-N!

And to up the uncanny factor, I later bought fortified milk & vitamins. And drank more beer!

...

In short, my friends, spontaneous visits from my brother are fortifying to the spirits & my time with him reminded me that my life is truly uncanny. Every day.

Devils for life!

...

Part 1 of A Season in Hell
Arthur Rimbaud
translated by Bertrand Mathieu

A while back, if I remember right, my life was one long party where all hearts were open wide, where all wines kept flowing.

One night, I sat Beauty down on my lap.—And I found her galling.—And I roughed her up.

I armed myself against justice.

I ran away. O witches, O misery, O hatred, my treasure's been turned over to you!

I managed to make every trace of human hope vanish from my mind. I pounced on every joy like a ferocious animal eager to strangle it.

I called for executioners so that, while dying, I could bite the butts of their rifles. I called for plagues to choke me with sand, with blood. Bad luck was my god. I stretched out in the muck. I dried myself in the air of crime. And I played tricks on insanity.

And Spring brought me the frightening laugh of the idiot.

So, just recently, when I found myself on the brink of the final squawk! it dawned on me to look again for the key to that ancient party where I might find my appetite once more.

Charity is that key.—This inspiration proves I was dreaming!

"You'll always be a hyena etc. . . ," yells the devil, who'd crowned me with such pretty poppies. "Deserve death with all your appetites, your selfishness, and all the capital sins!"

Ah! I've been through too much:-But, sweet Satan, I beg of you, a less blazing eye! and while waiting for the new little cowardly gestures yet to come, since you like an absence of descriptive or didactic skills in a writer, let me rip out these few ghastly pages from my notebook of the damned.

...

Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas

How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a spectre through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat?
                                                               -Joseph Conrad (from Lord Jim)

Today's post is inspired by death.

But everything you do is inspired by death, you say!

True. Get used to it. Life is inspired by death!

And at the heart of the uncanny is the frightening knowledge of our own mortality. Face it, folks, death gets us all. (Except Elvis, he'll still be around a hundred years from now.)

So, to celebrate death ... a little trivia. Who doesn't love trivia!?

On this day in history, not one but two of my favourite authors died. Sad isn't it? But not in the same year at the same time of day in the same city in the same bed etc. etc. That would be truly uncanny!

However, both were masters of the uncanny in their own way & they did die exactly 40 years apart.

Aug.3, 1924, Joseph "The horror" Conrad. Born on the 3rd, died on the 3rd ...

& on the same day, 1964, Queen of the grotesque, Flannery O'Connor.

I first read Heart of Darkness in highschool & it was the third book to profoundly affect me. The first two were an awesomely illustrated Bible that belonged to my Mom and Stephen King's The Tommyknockers. (I've read nearly everything the man has written & this definitely is NOT his finest, but it got me started.) It wasn't until first-year University that I read A Good Man is Hard to Find, and I felt the same way about its stories.

I promised myself this would be shortwinded & long-sighted.

The way these stories made me feel made me want to read more stories just like them.

A bouquet of books

Do I really need four copies of the same book? Does Igor need the Count?!

So I began collecting books. & reading more books. & more books.

How does one kill fear? Start with books, I suppose.

...

from Muipotmos, or The Flight of the Butterflie
Edmund Spenser

Like a grimme Lyon rushing with fierce might
Out of his den, he seized greedilie
On the resistles pray, and with fell spight,
Vnder the left wing stroke his weapon slie
Into his heart, that his deepe groning spright
In bloodie streames foorth fled into the aire,
His bodie left the spectacle of care.

...

p.s. I'm off to read Hoffmann's The Sandman.

Don't let them bury me, I'm not dead!

Today is Wes Craven's 71st birthday. And what better way to celebrate than with spiders, snakes, psychotropic drugs, Haitian voodoo, premature burial ...

& zombies?!

One of my favourites from the 80's--a sleek, subtle(r), underrated thriller courtesy of the gore-master himself--I can't even count how many times I've seen this movie:

Loosely based on ethnobotanist Wade Davis's non-fiction account of his investigations into Haitian zombification, The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) stars Bill Pullman as the ethnobotanist/anthropologist Dr. Dennis Alan, and also features Cathy Tyson, Zakes Mokae, Paul Winfield & a pre-CSI Paul Guilfoyle (he's so young & cute!).

For those of you who enjoy this sort of thing, here is the American trailer:

...

Well shot & decently acted, this movie practically screams das Unheimliche. Pullman is quite believable as the relentless doctor, however, south-afrikaner Zakes Mokae steals the show for me as creepy witch doctor/bokor Dargent Peytraud.

Just look at this face:

...

I first saw The Serpent and the Rainbow around the time it was released & not surprisingly, it still resonates with me today, some 20 odd years later! This is one of those movies that sticks with you.

The dream sequences in this heavily atmospheric & somewhat disjointed--but never too disjointed--film are quite literally nightmarish. The effects are realistic. The setting is haunting & lush. And the subject matter—zombification—well, everyone who knows me knows how I feel about zombies!

Good enough to eat ... you.

Of all the movie monsters out there--and there are so so many--the zombie is perhaps the most frightening. Why? A loaded question, but I think it stems from the fact that zombies are most like us. In fact, they are us. Only an us that is 'un'conscious, dead to the world.

While the zombies of our imagination are typically (thanks mostly to Romero) portrayed as flesh-eaters, real zombies prove to be much less opportunistic & dangerous. The zombie originated in Haitian folklore (something Craven definitely kept in mind). There have been hundreds of (mostly unsubstantiated) accounts of men & women returning from the grave after allegedly being poisoned by some kind of drug that rendered them 'lifeless,' yet years of research has only turned up a few toxic fish-based powders that mimic the effects of anaesthesia. When the powder wears off, these 'zombies' usually return to their homes to 'haunt' their families, or as is suggested in the movie, are dug up by some evil houngan's henchmen & put to work. Like Christophe (played by Conrad Roberts, who coincidentally had a part in an episode of CSI).

*Spoiler alert*

In our film, the powder is blown onto our hero's face and he soon finds himself paralyzed but completely conscious of his surroundings. Here's where things get tricky. While under the influence of this drug, he has all sorts of hallucinations, including visions of being buried alive! And the viewer has the pleasure/pain of experiencing it right alongside him through a series of clever POV shots. In this case, the shots are quite effective. (Another director who successfully uses a similar type of POV shot is Aldo Lado in La Corta Notte Delle Bambole di Vetro aka Short Night of Glass Dolls (1971)).

Forgive me for the seemingly unrelated intrusion, but if you have seen both movies you will know what I mean. And besides, it gives me the opportunity to show you the killer cover: 

Dig?

...

But now, back to the zombies.

Although they aren't dangerous in the same way modern brain-slurping gut-munching talking running thinking zombies are, traditional zombies aren't any less sinister. The ramifications of zombification are obvious: good ol' fashioned mind control. What better way to force someone to bend to your will than to remove all traces of (self)consciousness from his/her mind!

Sidebar: Governments have long used prescription drugs & alcohol to 'legally' exert mind control over their public (but that is a subject for another kind of blog!).

...

(It always comes back to mind control, doesn't it?)

If you like your zombie movies crunchy & bloody & not the least bit serious, don't bother with The Serpent and the Rainbow. Although there are plenty of scares, Craven is restrained here & so are his zombies. Which brings me to the point.

(Does there really have to be a point?)

No. But it's almost always where things start to get weird.

*Another Spoiler alert*

Dr. Alan enters a strange world when he arrives in Haiti. Everything about the place is contrary to what he knows/thinks he knows. He is arrested several times by the police, framed for murder, nearly castrated, beaten, sent home at gunpoint (but not without his prize) only to return to Haiti to be drugged & subsequently buried alive & unearthed/brought back from the dead (if only in his mind). And finally, after defeating the bad guy, our battered hero emerges from the battle triumphant. (Sounds like a story I once read ...)

...

Usually what appears to be uncanny turns out to be less than mysterious, nothing more than our minds playing tricks on us. But there are those rare instances where it turns out to be something more.

We could travel to Haiti in search of zombies, completely confident in the versimiltude of our own realities.

Like Dr. Alan.

We could be researchers looking for a specific kind of drug that creates these zombies. A drug certain companies would be very interested in acquiring.

Like Dr. Alan

We could be tourists simply looking for a tax break.

Like Dr.Alan.

And we could find nothing but civil unrest, corrupt city officials, & some hallucinogenic fish powder & the occasional strange custom.

Like Dr. Alan.

Or, we could find ourselves, like Dr. Alan, unable to wake from some terrific nightmare.

We could find ourselves

zombified.

...

From Towards Break of Day
W.B. Yeats

Was it the double of my dream
The woman that by me lay
Dreamed, or did we halve a dream
Under the first cold gleam of day?

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!