Edgar Allan Poe was known for constructing his stories brick by metaphorical brick, placing each word in the perfect place. He was the creator of the modern mystery narrative, which Dr. Sexson compared to Classical dramas like Oedipus--the result of written word and the need for beginnings and endings. I could spit out a bunch of sentences about how the alphabet led to this. And damn I shall: the linearity and separateness of words, if it did not create hierarchy all together, provided a catalyst for it. Writing also has the potential to completely eliminate magic. Here is what I wrote a few years ago for my Lit Crit class about Poe:
Edgar Allen Poe believes that great pieces of literature and artwork are not acts of sublime divinations and magical hocus pocus and happy rainbow bunnies and merry pixies with pixie whips and pixie sticks and pixie haircuts; no, Poe contends that instead they are composed by engineers, putting the pieces together like a mechanic installing the engine, the windshield, and the lights into a wienermobile--it's an act of great concentration, thought, and sweaty foreheads. No more is there a master magician composing music under an apple tree, notes falling from his trombone like arrows from Cupid or words from God's lips; now there is only a man or woman intricately laying out his masterpiece (or master-crap) like stones in a path. Great art is no longer about the creator's communication with some higher power, but rather his ability to link the lego blocks together to form something coherent and entertaining. He is a mason setting corner stones, measuring distances, laying plaster, and lining up bricks. He is a monkey stacking bananas to form a giant banana castle where all his monkey friends can live and be friends and be happy forever in the banana palace. He is Superman using his laser piss to carve "I f***ing hate kryptonite" into Lex Luthor's forehead. He is God, forming the universe into perfect existence, one slice at a time--light, land, sea, animals, plants, human. He is the planeteers touching their rings to bring the man-god Captain Planet into existence.
Okay, enough metaphor--let's face it, Poe's grand idea about the creation of literature and art is a bunch of horse pooey. The man was a drunk, a loner, ugly and depressed and womanless and generally shameful and disrespectful. No way was he capable of constructing a story, let alone a life, or even an IKEA chair. His idea steals the enchantment from the one magical thing left in existence: story and art. If mythos is reduced to yet another engineering science project, then we are truly left with nothing. I recall summer camp from my youth. It was a time of mystery, of adventure, of real monsters, of terrifying noises in the woods, of pirate ships, of ghosts and ghoulies, of thunderbirds and dragons, and of gnomes. The camp fire would burn-- smoke, ash, roasted hot dogs and marshmallows, stories and flashlights, sleeping bags and terror, felicity and excitement, sleeping in bundles below the awning. The universe was a place inhabited by magical creatures just waiting to be discovered, and I was an adventurer, a jedi, a villain, and a swashbuckler. However, as I grew older they stole that from me--the universe was reduced to, "an inert entity, hurtling about neverendingly, an immense machine of matter and motion blindly obeying mathematical laws" (Ramaswamy - Lemuria 9). If Poe is right and allurement is dead, then there is no reason to continue to live. Meaning is robbed from me if even the power of mythos has gone the way of the Dodo.
Though my writing style may have changed since that time, my feelings about Poe haven't. I still find his writing style dry and unentertaining. Kevin Jackson, in an article titled "The great bad writer" published in Prospect, writes, "American literature came of age in the 19th century, and quite soon produced a remarkable crop of masters… and very much the odd man out [was] Poe. [...] [but none has had] such a far-reaching and protean influence as Poe—and not just the murky waters of mass culture, but also amid the loftier, more rarefied heights of elite culture. This dual triumph is all the more improbable when you reflect that, by most standards, Poe was not a very good writer. " It was in France where Poe found himself among the truly elite of literary icons. Writers like Charles Baudelaire were infatuated with Poe, putting him on a pedestal above all and literally worshiping him. How did this happen? It makes sense. As we moved into the scientific age we placed more emphasis on well-constructed narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, where each word has its specific place for a reason. However, what it robbed from us was the sense of magic. We are JUST automatons bumping into each other; we are all going to die and that will be it. Your life truly is meaningless you sad, sad, material monkey-man. For a Post-Colonial theory class I wrote this paragraph (sorry to keep quoting myself, I know it's a no-no):
Sumathi Ramaswamy discusses this further in The Lost Land of Lemuria and asserts that this mass longing for a "unity with the homogeneous past, a desire for the closure of difference" (7) stemmed from Britain's progression into modernity. In a constantly changing world, everything is left by the wayside and nothing is constant. Ramaswamy quotes Celeste Olalquiaga saying, "Modernity is a displaced time: it wants nothing to do with the past and looks only toward a future receding on the horizon. Yet the past ... continually reappears like a littered landscape next to an indifferent highway." Olalquiaga calls this "the intoxication of modernity". Nothing matters in this world composed of chemistry, geology, physics, astronomy--we are just stumbling around like a game of Yahtzee, irrelevant, random, no better than a monkey swinging around in a tree with a yucky banana next to its gross little mug.
Ramaswamy goes on to claim that the British in the 19th Century were making it "no longer possible to live in union with the divine" because "the universe, once perceived as alive and as cognizant of its own goals and purposes, [was] now an inert entity, hurtling about neverendingly, an immense machine of matter and motion blindly obeying mathematical laws". Britain had created a way of life lacking mystery, leaving a "great void in the souls of men" and rendering their lives "impoverished, [and] reduced to an endless pragmatic and instrumental pursuit of meaningless activities". They were suffering from a crisis of belief and wishing to escape from their modern prison--logos must be balanced by mythos, and they found much of their new mythos in a rapidly shrinking place: the colonies, places still holding mystery, intrigue, and freedom from a "pragmatic reality". But what happens when the periphery is used up? Again, we must ask ourselves if the imagined absolute world of the Orient is something we really want to hold onto? (All quotes from Ramaswamy are from page 9 of TLLoL if not stated otherwise.)
Nostalgia is a topic which fascinates me and since it has to do with memory, why not discuss it here? I remember revisiting a copse of trees near my house last summer. I used to play there when I was a kid. The thing was, it was exactly the same as I had left it. I had changed!
The sky was growing darker as more clouds moved in. I was thinking of leaving soon, but I wanted to see one more spot. It was there where my friend and I had battled our Transformers, throwing our toys off the cliff wall and into the grass below. Even as children, we were violent creatures, and I am not sure how much that has changed. We have just learned to cover it up better. My feet collected mud and tracked behind me as I moved over the sandstone rocks. It was strangely quiet. I remembered birds and occasional deer, and at the very least, bugs, but this place was absent of all that. I stood on the edge of the cliff, staring down where our plastic men had fallen. I didn't spot any down there. We were always meticulous in cleaning up afterwards.
The storm in the distance was rumbling, and the air seemed to cackle with astrality, like the clouds' static were affecting reality. I turned to leave as specks of rain gave the rocks chicken spots. My stomach was churning. Something wasn't right. I touched each trunk, resisting the urge to turn around. My fingers felt different, like they were blurring with the surrounding bark. The rain was no longer splatting against me, it was going through me. Blue haze formed around the ground and the trees, unzipping like a child's jacket. Something moved behind one of the branches. It bounced up and down in a rhythmic motion, up and down, and I was transfixed. Only a man could do that to a tree right? But I had to be alone. Who's there? I shouted, but no one answered. The branch kept doing the same movement though, and it was gradually getting more violent. A wing came from it--a small, slimey wing, dripping something like red ooze. It disappeared as quickly as it came. I wanted to scream, but I couldn't. A slurping like a straw, or a buzzing, was now coming from it. It overwhelmed me as the tip of the wing appeared again, sliding from some invisible portal, getting bigger and bigger. And then it emerged, as if out of another dimension or universe--a terror which couldn't have been born of our world. My legs started moving before the rest of me did.
My mind felt like it had turned off. This couldn't be happening--I refused to be believe it. My vision began to blur to grey. My hearing had been rendered useless; there was only a loud screeching noise like a fuzzy television in my ears. My sense of balance was off as I tried to scamper up the rocks, but My feet stumbled under me, and I tripped and hit my knee. No human mind could handle this--it was too out of the mundane world we function in on a daily basis. I couldn't tell whether it was following me or not, but somehow I knew it was slipping along behind me, its arachnid-like incisors opening wide, its squidy tentacles slithering along, and its three red wings crimson in the darkening day. The sky above boomed in thunder, rain clouds moving in quickly, swallowing up the blue sky. I couldn't even scream for help. My jaws seemed to be wired shut, incapable of movement.
In front of me, trees were bending over in the wind, blowing debris around. I stepped on a cactus, but my body felt no pain on my flee from the beast. To stop and free it was death. I suddenly tripped, falling between two rocks. I thrust out my hand and felt it crunch. There was no moving. Rain drops collided with my body, and I shivered like a little kid who thought a monster was under his bed. I sat there for a long time. The creature never came for me, but I swear it was real to this day. My mind sat in a pit of sorrow and terror, and there was no leaving. I thought I was going to die. I was prepared to die. The universe made sense, in its own sublime way. I was going to leave it, all my memories of sights, sounds, tastes, and touches. It was all over now and I was okay with it. But eventually the sun came up and I dried off. I walked towards home, feeling more alive than I had ever felt before. But later, new thoughts came, thoughts which were foreign to me.
I wish nobody died, and I wish nothing went away. I don't want to miss anything, and I don't want my family to die, and I don't want to leave school. I want to feel either everything or nothing, and I want to love somebody so much it hurts. Stare into her eyes until the universe falls away, and wax philosophy late into the night when the infomercials are on and Billy Mays lives. I want to watch childhood movies until I die, and I want to play make believe in that empty field across the street. Long, dried up grass stretched forever, and the grasshoppers chirped, and Every day was an adventure, and every day I was someone new: a jedi, a transformer, a pokemon trainer, a grasshopper hunter, a podracer pilot, Link searching for the triforce, getting married at the alter, staring at the sky and imagining God was giving me signs in the clouds, collecting ants in a tin can, and believing I would never grow up. I would whisper all this, that Fern Gully terrified me, that I would cry in daycare everyday when my mom was late in picking me up, that I always dreamed of leaving this planet behind like Levon's Jesus, that the world seemed too small for me, that I would never be the person I always wanted to be and my predictions came true, that I cried myself to sleep more than one night because I knew I was growing older and it would someday all end. She would smile and tell me everything is going to be okay. Then I would smile back and tell her she is lying. I would tell her about the romantic mountains, how they represent the earth's harshness. We're not supposed to live here, I would say, on such a hostile world. Then I would tell her they are the most beautiful damn things I have ever seen, that they made the earth a romantic place and I would never do away with them. I would tell her about accounting, economics, politics, pop culture, science fiction, movies, television, books, poems, history, Say Anything, Animal Collective, Sunset Rubdown, Star Wars, and all the stupid crap that I think about that nobody else thinks about because it is stupid. And she would listen to it all and judge me like at the end of days. God, Moses, and Jesus will sit on their golden thrones, rubies sparkling in the ceiling, and they will shake their heads and call me unfit for their kingdom and be deemed inadequate. The gates will shut. But she won't do that, and I shall be set be free.
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