I rage against time, money, love, happiness, my child, the cat, the douche who almost ran me over with his monster truck, people who talk to me when I am clearly ON THE TELEPHONE, jujubes & jellybeans (ew!), gum on the bottom of my shoe, puppies & kittens, babies (yeah, I said it), world hunger, illiteracy, semi-literacy, and 'the machine.' I rage against bad grammar, bad manners, bad lovers, bad liars & bad livers. And I rage against the world, my life, my mind, and as Dylan Thomas wrote, 'against the dying of the light."
Sometimes I rage against nothing in particular. The most uncontrollable, irrational rage you can imagine. The kind of rage that makes me want to smash things and bite people's faces off. And laugh. And spit in their earholes. And vomit on them. And kick them in the back. And loose red ants upon them. And pluck out every one of the rotting hairs on their bodies one at a time. And ...
All because they cut me off with their grocery cart or squeezed the toothpaste tube from the top instead of the bottom.
The truth is I rage against everything. And most of the time it is in check. But there are those times my rage is as dark & red & cold & bright as 'the dying of the light.
Today was one of those times.
...
Thankfully, I began writing this just before the sun set.
And what a beautiful sunset it was! It helped lift my spirits tremendously.
Thank goodness it didn't literally take my breath away. Otherwise ...
I think I'll make a pretty corpse
...
You may already know this one.
Do not go gentle into that good night
Dylan Thomas
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
*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.
Someone I love very drearily celebrated his 30th birthday just two days ago! Having passed that milestone myself a few years back, I take great pleasure in his misfortune. Ha ha ha.
Just imagine being THIS guy:
Tagline: It'll be a killer party!
The best thing about birthdays isn't the eating, the drinking, nor is it even being scary (or merry if you prefer that), it's the trivial coincidences. You know, like who else was born (or died) on the same day. Now that's fun!
My lovely friend shares his day of birth, August 6th, with numerous (in)famous folks: Alfred Lord Tennyson (& he died the day before MY birthday!), Edith Roosevelt, Dutch Shultz (American gangster & bootlegger), Andy Warhol, Vinnie Vincent, Elliott Smith, Geri (Ginger Spice) Halliwell, JonBenét Ramsay, a whole slew of sporty folks (particularly cricket players) & Punky Brewster (Soleil Moon Frye)!
And, I'll bet you didn't know, four Pope's died on August 6th, as did Ben Johnson, Shakespeare's wife, Anne Hathaway, Diego Velasquez, Rick James, & John Hughes.
Pretty uncanny, right?
Nope.
Blame it on the Birthday Paradox.
What's that you say? Well, it's got a lot to do with Probability Theory. The Birthday Paradox states that you only need a group of 23 people for there to be a 50% chance that at least one random pair of said people will share the same birthday. I'm a bit lost when it comes to the actual mathematics behind the Birthday Paradox, but I do understand the implications.
We are often surprised to learn that we share our birth day with someone else (particularly when that person is a complete stranger we have just met), yet there is actually a pretty good chance that it can happen. A much better chance than we intuit. By the time you reach about 57 people or so, the chances are 99%! Holy coincidence! For further reading, this guy puts it nicely (and with comic flair & only a smidgen of math): http://www.damninteresting.com/the-birthday-paradox
There is nothing supernatural (uncanny) about sharing your birthday with someone else. It's completely probable & predictable.
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All Things Will Die
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Clearly the blue river chimes in its flowing
Under my eye;
Warmly and broadly the south winds are blowing
Over the sky.
One after another the white clouds are fleeting;
Every heart this May morning in joyance is beating
Full merrily;
Yet all things must die.
The stream will cease to flow;
The wind will cease to blow;
The clouds will cease to fleet;
The heart will cease to beat;
For all things must die.
All things must die.
Spring will come never more.
O, vanity!
Death waits at the door.
See! our friends are all forsaking
The wine and the merrymaking.
We are call’d–we must go.
Laid low, very low,
In the dark we must lie.
The merry glees are still;
The voice of the bird
Shall no more be heard,
Nor the wind on the hill.
O, misery!
Hark! death is calling
While I speak to ye,
The jaw is falling,
The red cheek paling,
The strong limbs failing;
Ice with the warm blood mixing;
The eyeballs fixing.
Nine times goes the passing bell:
Ye merry souls, farewell.
The old earth
Had a birth,
As all men know,
Long ago.
And the old earth must die.
So let the warm winds range,
And the blue wave beat the shore;
For even and morn
Ye will never see
Thro’ eternity.
All things were born.
Ye will come never more,
For all things must die.
...
Happy Birthday, Devin. You may be OLD, but at least you're not dead!
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.
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?
It began: My friend Meaghan knows this story. It involves a green scarf.
Like this one:
The green scarf I found on a sidewalk not far from my apartment. The green scarf I picked up, took home & washed & hung across my window.
It's a very pretty scarf.
Like I said, I had an entire story planned out.
But it's one of those stories that seems almost too fate-driven. You know, the kind of story that ends with the realization that the scarf once belonged to Meaghan long before we met. She last wore it to a party. When she woke up the next day, it was gone. I found the scarf lying on the sidewalk around the corner from her friend's house. And you say, yeah, yeah, I've heard that one before. Or maybe you are amazed. Or?
This is Meaghan's green scarf:
It's very pretty, isn't it?
So is Meaghan.
So is the glockenspiel I originally mistook for a xylophone. I won't make that mistake again!
...
Meaghan is leaving today. She stopped by with Alex on her way out of town. We performed some goodbye rituals: laughing smoking hugging & I gave her a gift.
A green scarf.
...
Vancouver Lights
Earle Birney
From: Fall by Fury. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1977. With permission of the Estate of Earle Birney.
About me the night moonless wimples the mountains
wraps ocean land air and mounting
sucks at the stars The city throbbing below
webs the sable peninsula The golden
strands overleap the seajet by bridge and buoy
vault the shears of the inlet climb the woods
toward me falter and halt Across to the firefly
haze of a ship on the gulps erased horizon
roll the lambent spokes of a lighthouse
Through the feckless years we have come to the time
when to look on this quilt of lamps is a troubling delight
Welling from Europe's bog through Africa flowing
and Asia drowning the lonely lumes on the oceans
tiding up over Halifax now to this winking
outpost comes flooding the primal ink
On this mountain's brutish forehead with terror of space
I stir of the changeless night and the stark ranges
of nothing pulsing down from beyond and between
the fragile planets We are a spark beleaguered
by darkness this twinkle we make in a corner of emptiness
how shall we utter our fear that the black Experimentress
will never in the range of her microscope find it? Our Phoebus
himself is a bubble that dries on Her slide while the Nubian
wears for an evening's whim a necklace of nebulae
Yet we must speak we the unique glowworms
Out of the waters and rocks of our little world
we conjured these flames hooped these sparks
by our will From blankness and cold we fashioned stars
to our size and signalled Aldebaran
This must we say whoever may be to hear us
if murk devour and none weave again in gossamer:
These rays were ours
we made and unmade them Not the shudder of continents
doused us the moon's passion nor crash of comets
In the fathomless heat of our dwarfdom our dream's combustion
we contrived the power the blast that snuffed us
No one bound Prometheus Himself he chained
and consumed his own bright liver O stranger
Plutonian descendant or beast in the stretching night--
there was light
