Do Not Speak Unless You Can Improve Upon The Silence.

You'll find another.' God! Banish the thought. Why don't you tell me that 'if the girl had been worth having she'd have waited for you'? No, sir, the girl really worth having won't wait for anybody.

F Scott Fitzgerald - This Side of Paradise

Discipline is Hard but Weakness is not my Game

I’ve been feeling waves of regression washing over me recently but at the same time I’ve been leaning forward. My ambitions, exuberant and overwhelming, have been leading me. And, again, I’m arrested in a state of complete antinomy: I’m satisfied and dissatisfied, hopeful and disillusioned--I feel these over the same things.

Leaping toward the shimmering notion of how I think I ought to be is what I’m trying to do, yet there’s this unbearable inertia in my life. If I say I want to write, I find I should throw away people, or care considerably less. In my constant struggle for creating something noteworthy I encounter discouragement. Well, on the heartfelt occasions. Of course I get the you’re great and the it’ll be fine but what are those supposed to mean? Not even the ones closest to me think of my writing as a tangible thing with tangible effects. For my environment it’s no more than a dream I’m sometimes having. Certainly romantic but not to be pursued to the damage of even the smallest thing.

I often wonder if the world’s as small as some people see it. Do I need a small job in order to this and that? Well, I refuse the necessity of it and always have. The start of a career or a seed-like job is a different case but I’m regularly pressured toward being practical the ordinary way and I see that as derogatory. I do encourage some folks to master base skills and unromantic professions and I am not against the concept of these, only I feel they get the wrong animal with me. I can’t do all that other people can but I have a strong conviction that I can excel, even create new frontiers, where our race seldom goes: the abstract, the grand and often vain projects that frighten so many. I crave those paths but I get the feeling that with it I frighten those, who love me.

Yet, after all, on a few days I too wake up with doubt. I despise doubt and loathe it, along with cowardice and ignorance but, much like the next person, I’m susceptible to all of those. Sometimes I read back what I’ve written and I’m disappointed. Then, of course, I get down to the part of grinding and go over it once again, until I can accept it but the next day it’s exactly the same amount of disappointment over yesterday’s promising new words. The temptation is unceasing, the beating inside me is counter-driving my soul, into disbelief and the will to abandon my work. But then it’s the universal beating of all ages and if anyone ever amounted to greatness, it’s no more than walking without letting herself be broken. We don’t need anyone for that--to break us. We are very efficient at giving terrible advice to ourselves, although it’s true that the world around us lavishes it at us without limit.

Similarly, in my emotions I’m conflicted. There are things that I want and there are people I want. My desires are sharply defined, there’s no need there, but I regret to want them. There’s no smart way around this though. Truthfully I don’t even know the objects of my desires thoroughly, yet if I were made to choose I would throw away all I have to have those. I think it would be painful but it wouldn’t take me more than a moment of having to contain whatever is trying to get out through our throats, when we feel profound loss, then I’d be immersed in the crisp breeze. I am certain I have the capacity to be like that only I know it’s wrong. It’s immoral and unwise, yet the demands of the soul of a man, who’s otherwise consciously fighting to reach his other desires, called ambitions, are hard to put away.

My desires resist and pull me. Whichever is to be attained is painful, and the ones that I denounce, will not leave me. Everything’s hard--said the poet.

“The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises. The wind blows to the south, and goes round to the north; round and round goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again. All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun.” Ecclesiastes 1,5-9

Forget the People

The news having spread quickly and having reached the last poor, unemployed soul, a miserably thin crowd came up to Mr Dis App’s door. As he walked out with his humble luggage, they overwhelmed him.

He had thought he had braced himself against the jeering and scolding and ridiculing. But the judgmental people were shouting wishes of safe passage, the cynics wailed without any comment and his loving mother said her heart was breaking for him.

Nothing too predictable but still, all acceptable from people with no fate and spirit. This would be, Dis App pondered, a gesture unconserved.

He had one backpack, one messenger bag and--what he knew no one would know is a piece of luggage to his new life--a watch.

“Where is Scott?” he asked himself.

But he knew, fate is no mirage, it would not dissipate if he blinked or looked away.

And the used car was indeed parked at the end of the street.

Cottages with unmanaged surroundings. Weeds and poppies all the way to the city limits.

Frankenstein? You Certainly Have No Idea

A while ago I wrote a similar post about Bram Stoker’s Dracula, where I explored how we’ve gradually departed from the original concept and eventually turned the whole story inside out--the way it’s usually believed to be today.

Horror and genre fiction in general are looked upon as solely entertaining literature. It is best represented by enormous fandoms around horror stories that are really the shallow water of the stream of art--yes, I’m referring to Stephen King.

Although is it not supposed to be more? Shouldn’t horror really be more than a good fright? Obviously I ventured out to write this post because I strongly believe horror can have more profound dimensions and it should. Actually, my opinion is mainly informed by Stoker’s Dracula and Shelley’s Frankenstein (and a good portion is a result of reading Poe extensively in my teen years, as it shows in the post later).

Let me begin by explaining a bit about contemporary horror’s genesis. As a branch of literature it has very little to do with books, it is only an indirect continuation to the tradition. Today’s horror comes from a set of movies, some of which were book adaptations or remotely inspired by them. Actually one name is a recurrent theme here: Bela Lugosi, a.k.a. the king of horror--much more so than anyone would have thought. His version of Dracula has proven more enduring than the written one, so the underlying themes of Stoker’s novel, which even concerned the metaphysical at times, are lost, quite tragically. Also, the popular image of Frankenstein’s monster comes from the 1939 Rowland V. Lee movie Son of Frankenstein. The shape of the creature, its mindlessness, the castle, the assistant--every bit people associate with Frankenstein is a direct result of the movie, hardly any of which actually features in the novel.

A written genre originating from a visual one is encased in the limitations of both--what could not be visually understood won’t appear, and the same applies to the written part. It is an almost unimaginable thing but originally these horror stories barely ever showed the horror. “Why, we have that today,” the ignorant reader might say but the horror of old times was not filled with the today commonplace suspense and disgust elements.

In this post I focus on the method of Shelley in Frankenstein: Her approach was what we would today call the purist. Her novel embodies horror--the dictionary’s definition of it actually. She only ever tells as much about the monster that it exists, reluctantly adding that it’s too hideous to behold and once dropping that its hand resembles that of a mummy. The main instrument of this story is a very long line of deaths but only in the purist spirit, as well.

A prolonged prologue commences with establishing the members of an extended family. They are talented, intelligent, wealthy, charitable people, who are just the dream of the era. After individually stating about every relation how enviable and admirable they are, the monster is briefly introduced. No lightning is involved here, only the statement that Victor Frankenstein, the visionary, somehow figures out how to bestow life upon things and then, once the monster is created, he instantly regrets it and falls into a state of mental breakdown over the realization of how unhallowed his work is. The monster then lives alone for a while, gradually comprehends that he is frightening to humans and feels that he is forced into a perpetual state of solitude, which he loathes more than anything--so much so that he will burn down the entire world if necessary to get himself a companion. And that’s about it. The monster asks Frankenstein to create him a mate but as he refuses he decides to avenge him as the creator of his desperation through killing everyone he holds dear. Enter the death of all characters...

The horror is how Frankenstein watches everyone he loves being killed at the unstoppable hands of his own creation. His guilt and reflections at it are horror. He is horrified. Horrified. He--along with the invested reader--is not exactly startled, nor disgusted, but profoundly horrified.

But there’s more to this story than just being the original horror. I explored that dimension only because of the framework of today’s horrible, genre-redefining novels.

As contemporary horror tries to grasp what visually equates horror, all content is lost. Shelley operates with what Poe designated as the horror-writer’s most powerful instrument: “The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.” In human relations the most extreme loss is that of one’s child but the loss of someone one loves tenderly comes in as a spectacular second, with a much more elevated pathos.

The reason this is preferred by Poe and a myriad of authors is that a parent-descendant relationship is a natural one, where choice has roughly no role, whereas in a romantic relationship, while having a powerful natural component, active choice is central. This is why a parent losing a child usually goes with the line: “A parent should not live to see their child die,” when a lover’s loss comes with: “They were taken from me.” So, while the first kind of death evokes the more profound pain, the second one is the more aesthetic. It is a better case of antagonism: what one actively binds themselves to, pledges to unite their identity to, is actively deprived from them by a second actor, thus their willing choice for whom they would value most highly in life is irrevocably undone.

The peak is then the death of a beautiful woman but it can only be a real peak if the beauty of that woman is fully realized. 

An interesting juxtaposition can be made here between the book’s model and the contemporary one. The book emphasizes multiple faculties, such as intelligence, a charitable nature, intuition and nobility of character, whereas today’s model is derived from the passions of the flesh. Contemporary theories favor a simplifying approach, which marks the core of all traits the sexual of a person. However, Frankenstein is a great example of how it used to be a valid action to discrete the sexual, the intellectual and the emotional. Today it would be called repression of the true motives (the sexual), since all the faculties associated with beauty are just expressions of the deeper, truer core of identity. Feminists of the past would have pointed out that the death of the beautiful woman symbolizes Shelley’s vision of the intelligent, competent woman’s fate, as she is determined to die, even by the principles of literature (or Poe). Today’s most progressive feminists, though, would confine this story to the literal body of women, however, not only a story but women, and all people, are much larger than bodies.

But Frankenstein is not the perfect novel. Whereas it succeeds at many things and has its outstanding merits, it does fail at anticipating what the reader can guess, as Frankenstein misinterprets a supposedly enigmatic line and prepares for his own death, when his soon-to-be wife is threatened. Sadly the target is so obvious that it’s impossible to believe what the protagonist believes to come next but, as I have stated before, this is a completely marginal element of the story and perhaps even Shelley didn’t want to make it a really elaborate twist...

All in all Frankenstein is the beacon of the lost genre of horror. But beside its literary quality it might also be a reminder to the readers that there used to be a way of thinking that thought it possible to abstract from the material.

Remember, remember the fifth of November.

V

When I was sixteen I read The Great Gatsby, and oh - Oh! I said, how it flows, how does this gorgeous iambic pentameter work its way through the valves of my arteries? ‘Within and without’ runs in my blood. Everything sounds like money to me. I wandered lonely as a cloud, only, no, old sport, I don’t wander, I plan. I lift weights like Benjamin Franklin. I gaze out, out, out, I am the poet. I am the huntsman. I lie in wait. I have for years. Sometimes I forget about The Bell Jar, but I remember The Iron Giant. Let me tell you, I’ve watched that movie every year of my life since I was seven years old, and I fell in love with the robot from a children’s story book to the big screen. I have since studied Metamorphoses and watched the hawk fly through the rain, but choking to death on my own breath? A touchy subject. What does F. Scott Fitzgerald have to say for himself when his wife’s journals lay strewn across his back catalogue? Where was Ted Hughes when Sylvia Plath collapsed in the kitchen? Boasting about his own work, or belittling hers? In 2008 The Times ranked Hughes fourth on their list of ‘The 50 greatest British writers since 1945’. Where is Sylvia Plath? Where is Zelda Fitzgerald? Where are the women? Where are the gentle hands, the voices that clink like coins, where are the dangerous curves, where is the soaring fire of our generation? Show me your nails, filed to claws. Give me your ragged hearts, give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, give me your words. I want to hear your voices, louder and more insistent than ever before. I want The Times to write a new list. I need to hear the murmurs of agreement of every lecturer in the Arts and Humanities department of each university as they turn it over in their hands. To see a split between every gender so even that no one remembers where the line is, where the line ever was. This wave’s classic writers are gone, so bare your teeth and show me your fighting stance.

we are still behind the yellow wallpaper | ishani jasmin (via ishanijasmin)

So beautiful, so complicated, so problematic...

it's a whole new level

ps: the alternate ending kicks ass

New video! EVERYTHING IS POSSUM! (took way longer to make than at first it would seem)

Things are sweeter when they're lost. I know--because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.

F Scott Fitzgerald - The Beautiful and Damned