Wolfbane

    When I was an undergrad, Twenty-five and more years ago, I met a man of a singular character, who I now call Wolfbane. A professor of English at a small college in a quiet mid-western town, I assumed he was at least seventy years old when I first met him, but to a twenty-year-old, everyone looks more advanced than they perhaps are. He had a shock of white hair that once must have been red. He was the opposite of good looking, but he had a very strong bearing and was remarkably healthy. In fact, his appearance changed not at all from the time I met him until late last year, the last time I ever saw him.
    What his initial interest was in me I can not say. I was his student. He had many who were more serious and more talented than myself.  I think now, that we shared a love of poetry into which most people cannot enter. Even those bright competitive students, my classmates, many of whom have today published their own works, did not apparently receive the joy of poetry in the way that he and I did. In previous centuries, people used to entertain each other with poetry. Poems are not read, they are sung. Many are the times that Wolfbane would beg me to sing from my own poems.  We were to spend many hours reciting verse and singing our favorite poems aloud to each other.  We had much in common. I would sing Poe and Coleridge. He would sing Milton and Blake. We smoked tobacco and cannabis. And sometimes Opium. We would drink port and whiskey.
    It is my particular talent to eat and drink without ceasing. And apparently the last faculty to be encumbered by drink in myself, is the verbal faculty. Even when I am beyond the place of standing or walking, I can still be found jabbering away quite coherently or even brilliantly. Like Socrates himself, I become more wise as I continue to imbibe. Wolfbane too had a moist soul like mine. Although there was never any indication of overindulgence or sloppiness in him. We simply drank and smoked and read poems, or sought other amusements. Always simply for our enjoyment. Our eternal games of poker, chess, and billiards filled those years. I never ceased to be astounded at Wolfbane’s endurance and his zest for competition. When drink gave way to hunger we would eat a huge repast in the wee hours of the morning. And this gave us burst to continue our entertainments until the crack of dawn.  Several times I was late and unprepared for his nine-thirty class. He was never late and he never gave the slightest indication that the previous evening and morning had all been spent in smoke and sport. Perhaps after that morning class he would take a brief respite, but then he was back in the afternoon class on Milton which he taught with fire and zeal.
    One of my great memories of him is when he told me, upon my graduation, that I needn’t become a scholar. I hadn’t the scholarly gifts of patience and discipline. Truly, I felt such relief at that moment. I embraced him. He was the only one who understood me. That was the most freedom I have ever felt. For what I feared most of all was a life of skullduggery or drudgery. The life of a bean counter and the life of a person who reads student writing is to me the same dull round.
    As fate would have it, I came to know him even better after graduation. I lived in Chicago for a few years as a young adult, and he often had business there, at the University of Chicago.  It was at this time that I first noticed his walking with a cane. Not that he depended upon it. It was like jewelry to him. A birch cane stained black, with a silver tip and a carved silver head in the shape of a wolf. He claimed it once was a Hollywood movie prop. It was as much a club as a cane and its heavy silver handle could deal a severe or deadly blow. He showed me once how pulling away the bottom of the cane would reveal a gruesome silver blade some ten inches long, and by tilting the handle on it’s hinge he could expose an old fashioned pistol with a single silver ball.
    This was also when Wolfbane began to expose to me certain Baroque prejudices. Certain attitudes which I thought had gone extinct centuries ago. He was right to keep his true feelings hidden while I was a student, but now that we were both adults living in the real world, he did not hide from me a darker side to his personality. His acrid judgments and incisive tongue were shocking to me. It may also be true that he was actually a heretic. He had an antinomian bent and professed his anticlerical sympathies. He was like an Englishman transported from the seventeenth century.  A ranter. A dissenter and protestor against all orthodoxy. He spoke of the 17th century as if he had been there himself, and he referred to all of his contemporaries in academics as babies or illiterates.
    “Philistines!”  He would shout in reference to the clergy. “A poor show of Christianity indeed,” was his usual retort after sitting through a mandatory mass. “Look at all these illiterates,” he would say in reference to the churchgoers. “They have not read even their Hawthorne.” I knew well enough what he meant by that. He was referencing Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown, where the same priests and ministers who run the Christian church on Sunday can be found of a Saturday engaged in their actual black religion. Of course, atheism has perhaps crept into the church in the last century, but surely priests are not engaged in witchcraft at this late date. Nevertheless, this lunatic idea was the central theme to his speech.
    “How do you know,” he said to me during one visit, “That every single priest is not a Satanic witch who has sworn fealty to Satan? How do you know every single one of them has not bled drops of blood for Satan or not committed atrocities with children?” This was the general train of his thoughts. I would try to temper his fury by injecting some reason in the conversation: “We live in a Philistine society,” I would say. “People do things for social position, personal status, or just money motivation. Ninety-nine percent of people in America are Philistines. It’s not religion, it’s just the way we are.”
    “You don’t understand what a Philistine is,” he replied. “At the ancient city of Ekron, 6000 years ago, Philistines began worshiping Baal-Zeebub, Son of Dagon. The most bloodthirsty of all gods, Baal-Zeebub taught his priests to extract blood from the adrenal gland of their humans victims at the base of the skull, and to embibe.” I could tell he was getting worked up now: “You haven’t read the works of King James I of England! If you had, you would know what Mystery Babylon is. You would understand why King James called the Catholic Church the Whore of Babylon and why every single Catholic priest is a fucking whore! How long will you go on in your stupid indolence! You fucking cow!”
    I am a person who is habitually slow to anger. I am accustomed to taking flack. It is my personal gift to be able to breath such things away. To clear the air leaving room for reason.  In this case, I told my friend he was showing signs of stress and I encouraged him to take a minute to calm himself. I went to my closet and fetched a bottle of good Mexican brandy. Good for anyone’s constitution. I grabbed two glasses and placed a single cube of ice in each and then I poured a liberal drink for myself, and one for Wolfbane.  When I handed him the glass he looked me straight in the eye and said, “The Power and the Glory.”  “The Power and the Glory,” I repeated, and we both drank.
    “And you don’t understand what religion is either,” he started in again. “Religion is all the little things we do without thinking. The unquestioned allegiance. The pop-corn prayer. The mindless ritual observed in thoughtless obedience. The superstitious fetishism of Rosary beads. The sick belief in the purity of the Bible and the respectability of money.”

The Horror of Romance

The American Horror Genre comes directly from English Romanticism (lie #1). There is always an ethical barb to a horror story. Often, horror stories depict what happens when we have distorted ethics that cause degeneration over time. The impact of such distortions are very creepy in Lovecraft when worlds under the ground are opened up, and we can see the centuries of decrepitation and the weird outcome of generations of moral and ethical decay.

Horror is in essence philosophical. Horror creeps up from the cracks in the rationalists' ethical thinking. Rationalism becomes the apologetics of human exploitation and money motivation.  The apologetics of usury. The smutty table conversation of a blighted English aristocrat with his mildewed lady--rotten people that they were. Devotion to the wrong ethic can cause grotesque distortions in a single lifetime. Extrapolate these distortions across several generations and the outcome can be monstrous. The musty inbreeding of monied interests. The weird appetites of the habitual and professional exploiters of the people. The stale cadaver of John Stuart Mill breaking free from its grave and limping perpetually from library to library over the earth.

    The Horror genre sailed like Dracula across the Atlantic transplanting it’s dank soil to a burgeoning American audience (lie #2). Edgar Allen Poe was a big fan of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and they had similar habits concerning opium use. It was common then to smoke opium on one’s tobacco. I imagine the reading experience of those days as by firelight through a blue haze of opium and tobacco smoke.  The smoldering of herbs and the power of the snuff has never been equaled to what it was in London’s late 18th century. The Apothecary’s entire cabinet was open to the paying public. Tinctures of cannabis were common. Laudanum was a popular and heavily addictive tincture of opium and Absinthe was already adding a trippy edge to the first psychedelic generation. The late 18th century was a time of tremendous experimentalism.  A fascination with spontaneous combustion and hypnotism were in vogue. The infusion of Jewish and Indian ideas into the cultural milieux made for a stew richer and older with vampires and witches.  Weird deities in Tantric sex positions. Entities older than the English language itself and older even than our ugly Roman letters.

    What are the works of English Romanticism that form the root of the horror genre? Henri Fuseli’s Nightmare. Fuseli was pal and partner of William Blake, the most violent and horrific of all Romantic poets.  Readers should research what Blake meant by what he called the Vintage of the Nations: The Goddess Enitharmon gulping down her cup of ambrosia. Pure adrenalized human blood. All of humanity pressed like grapes for our juice at the pleasure of the Gods.

Grotesque

Grotesque is a man who embraces one overarching truth and makes it his guide stone. He becomes distorted in holding onto his truth. When it passes below the horizon his truth will be upside-down and so will he be. So will he be.

Note: This is my meditation after reading Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg Ohio, which I thought was interesting enough to reread after twenty years. The idea of the Grotesque as a person who is distorted ethically, or is perhaps demented, is missing psychic components, has mental mal-nutrition, are at once pathetic and creepy. It smacked me as reminiscent of Balzac's Comedy Humane; and certainly, that seems to be where the genesis of the Grotesque lies--in the French tradition.

Then it also struck me that the timing of Anderson's American work somewhat coincides to the modern period in Russia, where Anton Chekhov was producing works of short fiction that are similar in structure and content. Of course, there is an affinity in Russian culture for the French.  Russian was once a vulgar language in St. Petersburg, where French was spoken in the court, the church, and the university as well as in polite society.  This is often depicted in classical Russian literature (Tolstoy). So, I think that the impact of Balzac's short fiction can still be felt generations after he had completed his work, in two divergent literary traditions.

Or perhaps they are a single tradition: international modern lit.--which I think would be an interesting course. Does Balzak give us a prequel into modern lit? Yes.

"Immediately the Lark mounted with a loud trill from Felphams Vale" -- W. Blake

http://ramhornd.blogspot.com/2018/06/harvest-vintage.html

The Jade Teddybear

The jade industry is a crying shame.
Mining huge slabs of British Columbian Jade
Loading it onto ships and sending it to China
Where communist slaves mill small teddybears
From the billion-year-old adamantine pillars.
The teddybears, which cost 35$ are then sold over eBay
To Philistine slaves in America for Valentine's day.

He will present this to her in lieu of a real gift
And she will be well pleased because she would rather
Have the money after he croaks anyway
Which could be any day now.
Leaving nothing but a rich beautiful fifty-year-old widow.
And she will be his gift to society at large
The outcome of his seventy hour work weeks
The sum of his ethical stupidity and spiritual inadequacy.

The saddest part is that the jade is lost to the future. Perhaps in millions of years, the Earth will turn again, and again there will be giant slabs of jade in what used to be British Columbia.

Philistines cannot have good art because they can’t tell the difference. A Philistine cannot value art differently than its monetizable value. This is the outcome of a society comprised of the ethical slaves of Philistinism: The supplier must do unethical things to meet the unethical demands of the consumer. There is a clockwork. A fatality. An if/then logic to the Satanic service of our appetites. The jade teddybear is a symbol of bourgeoise frugality and stupidity. Its a symbol of bad taste. There are millions of them—all alike. Each milled from the same lifeless stone.

Wolves at the Door

I built my cabin from logs of new spruce. At the foot of 

the mountain and the edge of the wood.  Not too far 

from a gurgling brook. I can look at it shine in the light of 

the moon.  Perched on top of the richest land I can find. 

The year is eighteen and thirty-nine. 

I came from Ohio across three states, but here in

Missouri my soul snagged its thread. It’s the Adirondike 

mountains I can’t get across. The summer gets hot but 

the winter comes quick. Build a strong warm cabin 

before the snow comes thick. 

It was the last of October when I first heard her voice. 

Like the peal of a trumpet from the top of the hill. 

I heard his reply from miles away and it gave my spine a 

chill. The she-wolf came down to give me a call.  About 

my cabin she paced round and round.

I stood in my cabin with my musket in hand and heard 

her footfalls on the ground outside. I could hear her 

snarl. I could hear her breath, but else I could not 

perceive.  “Wolf,” I said, “I’ve got no hospitality for you. 

I’ll give you nothing but a ball of my lead.”

Cause there were wolves. Wolves at the door. 

Wolves. Wolves at the door. 

Well I stuck my musket through the slot and I shot blind. 

Through the whole valley was heard the report. But when 

it echoed back her voice came through.  “In a fortnight’s 

time I’ll win you true. In these hills with me you’ll run and 

remember this place no more.”

Cause there were wolves. Wolves at the door. 

Wolves. Wolves at the door. 

Those days they came and weeks they went, and God 

can tell how they were spent.  In trepidation and in infirm 

mind the days grew short and cold.  On the fourteenth 

night the sun went down and a carpet of snow lay 

packed on the ground. 

And there were wolves. Wolves at the door. 

Wolves. Wolves at the door.

The moon was high when she led them down. I could 

see it shining in her eyes. At her full stride she came 

down the slope. She lead a pack of twenty. They made a 

circle around my cabin and they came a-caroling. A choir 

in full regalia.

And there were wolves. Wolves at the door. 

Wolves. Wolves at the door. 

They sang me a song and they sang it well. To hear them 

howl it thrilled my soul and to see their jaws a snappin’.  I 

lost my mind in fear and awe. Some fur cropped out all 

over my arms and when I reached behind, the tail I found 

was my own and I was astounded.

And there were wolves. Wolves at the door. 

Wolves. Wolves at the door.

And when their song had come to an end it raised 

the hair on the back of my neck and my skin began to crawl. 

The she-wolf said, “Boy, did you rightly doubt me? We 

came here to make you our own and we’re not going to 

leave without thee.”

And there were wolves. Wolves at the door. 

Wolves. Wolves at the door. 

There comes a time when each must say good-bye to 

his domestic comforts. The soul must run across those 

mountains under the light of the moon. It must raise its 

voice like never before and quit its habitation. I can never 

forget that She-wolf or the night she freed me. 

And there were wolves. Wolves at the door. 

Wolves. Wolves at the door. 

The Ugly Alphabet

Where can my eyeballs go to hide from these letters
This Satanic alphabet imposing its own structure
These figures aren’t lovely
My mind is troubled in the attempt
To bend them to an erotic purpose.

Unlike their facile Hebrew counterparts
That Swedenborg once found to be impenetrable
Only pulled their skirts up an inch
And still he was driven mad by their beauty
They left him raving naked through the town at midnight..