In the old world traditions, February is a month given over to purification, atonement, and fertility. All of these rites are to be seen as prerequisite to the coming fecundity of Spring. February, thus, is a month of anticipation and preparation of the way forward. According to Ovid, in one of his perhaps fanciful yet telling etymologies, he notes that
Our Roman forefathers called the means of absolution “februa” Even today much evidence attests to this meaning.
Similarly he attests to a pine bough, perhaps used to beat away sinfulness and dirt from the body as being called a “februa” when given to the flamen’s wife. It is an act similar in form to the beatings of the Lupercalia, the naked runners devoted to Pan, or in Latin Faunus, who use strips of leather to whip young women in passing, that they might become fertile in the coming year.
For the north of Europe, in a different pagan tradition we have Imbolc, which corresponds loosely with our own Groundhog’s Day. During the season of Imbolc one is required to make offerings, of course, but also to seek blessings upon fields and livestock that they might be fruitful, whilst also engaging in ritualized spring cleaning. A clearing the way for the influence of the new year to be activated by sweeping out the old. It is also noted that the festival, which by the Christian calendar is associated with the feast day of Saint Brigid, is timed to coincide with lambing season. It is perhaps notable then, that in the Lupercalia, it is with a whip of goat’s hide with which the young virgins are struck, as it is on the first of the month a sheep that is offered up to Jupiter Optimus Maximus (Ovid. Fasti: II. 444-45; & 70).
The 15th is the traditional date of the Lupercalia, which occurs on the third morning after the ides (which is not, as we can see, always on the 15th of the month) and a day after our own Valentine’s. The Lupercalia it seems is a much more rustic tradition, however, and involved crowds of naked young runners vaunting through the ancient city, armed with strips of goat hide as we have already mentioned, and beating, symbolically anyway, the fecundity back into the women of the realm. Ovid attributes the rite to an ancient prophecy where in the matrons were ordered to be mounted by a randy billy-goat, for which act the beating by the hide was substituted by the appalled citizens. (Ovid. Fasti: II. 441ff).
In another origin story Ovid tells us that the runners are given to nakedness both because it is fitting to run unbound by clothes, like the ancient Arcadians, but also because Pan harbors a grudge against them. This distaste for the obscuring properties of habiliments is said to derive from an unhappy encounter with Hercules and his wife Omphale. Having become enamored with the demi-god’s spouse the rustic forest god decided upon a strategy of rapine. Unfortunately for the Great God, when he came quietly unto their bed chamber the duo had exchanged clothes in order to worship Dionysius on the morrow, so, instead of seizing the beautiful Omphale he squoze close to dread Hercules instead. Interesting by omission is the fact that Ovid tells us nothing about the wine-god’s festival, which is left, I suppose, to be told by Greeks and not Romans. (Ovid. Fasti: II. 303ff).
Wolf head, 1-100 CE, bronze, Roman, Cleveland Museum of Art. via Wikimedia
In short, February is a month for frisky sport, and love, and preparation, a truth we all know, perhaps, without being told explicitly. Yet it is informative to see that no matter how things change, some truths remain the same from time to time, and that we still follow in some sense the ancient customs, whether it is in cozying up at home to wait out winter storms, or in cleaning out the dust from off the pantry shelves, or else prepare for warmer days, by nosing through seed catalogs and starting out young shoots in window boxes in anticipation of coming spring.
Strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; second Norton critical edition / Robert Louis Stevenson, edited by Deborah Lutz
Well, I am kind of stunned after reading this. Of course I thought I knew the story because of the way it has ingrained itself in our popular culture but there is truly so so much going on here. Just in terms of intertextuality Mr. Hyde casts a great long shadow, even just among things I have read recently. There are echos of this book in Planet of the Apes, and The Body Snatchers, both of which I read and reviewed earlier just this year. From last year other items come to mind, specifically, Altered States and The Island of Dr. Moreau. It makes me want to back track and review some of those works even before I continue here to review Stevenson’s classic itself. In short, this is no mere Treasure Island and I think that there is a lot of literary mileage as well as psychology to clean from doing a deep dive on Robert Louis Stevenson. At the very least, there are connections to be made and leads to be followed. Hopefully I don’t end up becoming Mr. Seek. Stay vigilant friends there is definitely more to follow…
…Was she an animal? Was all the mystery nothing more than that? Was she merely a sleek, golden kitten that unsheathed its claws when it had played enough and wanted solitude? But that brain was always at work, clicking away behind the eyes–no animal had such an organ; or was it the mark of a superanimal, a new species, something to be seen on earth in a few more centuries? Had nature sent out a feeling tentacle from the past, groping blindly into the present with a single specimen of what mankind was to be a thousand years hence? The brain held him; it dosed him with grains of wild joy, measured out in milligrams of words, the turn of her mouth corner, one single lustful flash from the gray eyes before the scales of secrecy came over them again.
The brain seemed always present, always hooked to his own by an invisible gold wire, thinner than spider’s silk. It sent its charges into his mind and punished him with a chilling wave of cold reproof. It would let him writhe in helpless misery and then, just before the breaking point, would send the warm current through to jerk him back to life and drag him, tumbling over and over through space, to the height of a snow mountain where he could see all the plains of the earth spread out before him, and all the power of the cities and the ways of men. All were his, could be his, would be his unless the golden thread broke and sent him roaring into the dark chasm of fear again.
Nightmare Alley, the book by William Lindsay Gresham, and recently adapted into a movie by Guillermo del Toro, is a more than satisfying read, especially if you are the type of person who is captivated by midway buskers, the tinkling of syncopated piano crackling in the background of a Tom Waits tune, or the psychological turn which infiltrated American literature during the early-middle of the last century.
The book itself really takes place in three distinct phases – though followed by a significant coda – which work together to slowly reveal that backstory for our main character and lifelong grifter, Stenton Carlisle. Each phase of the book follows Carlisle as he scams his way out of obscurity and into fame and fortune, stone stepping his way as he climbs upwards on the backs of his female companions, be they mentors, lovers, or conspirators as the case might be.
The first act is set in the depression era carnival sideshow, where we find Stenton, a young carny in training, learning the ropes on how to dupe the rubes. We don’t hear much about his backstory yet, we only see carnival life as it unfolds before him, slowly pulling him, and us, along into the orbit of the fortune teller & mentalist Zeena, and her longtime, rum-soaked partner Pete. Zeena soon takes a maternal/sexual interest in the virginal Stan, who then seeks to replace Pete, not only in Zeena’s bed but also in her mentalist act. This is a not-so-subconscious wish soon accomplished by a seemingly accidental mixup between the wood alcohol used in the show and the whisky which Zeena has hidden from Pete’s insatiable thirst, a confusion that murders the hapless Pete while Zeena and her young protégée get frantically naked in the nearby woods.
The High Priestess
If this all sounds a bit Oedipal, it should; this is one of the major themes Greshom is developing in this early psychological novel. Our author is clearly steeped in Freudian analysis ,as well as being knowledgeable about the occult, spiritualism, and probably Theosophy as well. These ‘superstitious’ world-views have been replaced by the newer ‘scientific’ approach of psychology in our author’s mental universe as a grand unified theory of human behavior. Because of this decidedly Freudian focus I can’t help but wonder what Gresham’s approach might have looked like if his therapy had been oriented towards the works of Jung or other depth-psychology traditions instead. Perhaps his outlook on humanity might have been more optimistic. Unfortunately, we are given the literature as it exists, not as we might wish for it.
In the second phase, we see Stanton’s meteoric rise to fame, first as a nightclub mentalist and then as a founder and reverend of his own spiritualist church – which he acquires after running a ‘spook act’ on loaded old ladies. This he does with the assistance of his second anima, Molly – a young refugee from the carnival, who he has seduced into following him into the con. Molly is presented throughout as a childish figure, orphaned prematurely by her father (yes she has Daddy issues), scorned and dominated by Stan, easily manipulated and unable to escape the influence of the older man. We are thus bordering again on a classic archetype of the feminine, with an older sexualized maternal woman followed by the naïef youngster. The whole set up mirrors a classical mother/daughter dualism, the whore and virgin, animating force behind a great number of mythic tales, especially that of Demeter and Persephone.
“The Rape of Proserpina” by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1621-22)
The final stage of course is – as if by design – the tragic fall, now overshadowed by a third and final feminine type, the inscrutable Dr. Lilith Ritter. She appears as the ultimate sorceress and temptress, allowing Stan to project his fevered feminine fantasies upon her. This Medea is played as an evil psychologist, encouraging Stan’s overwrought psyche to indulge in transference, the fatal embrace of the suggestive. Not good ethical practice, to be sure, but great fodder for the wicked psyche unleashed.
She uses Stan’s ever expanding dependence on her presence to drive him into his greatest and final heist which he must perpetrate with the coerced collusion and eventual prostituting of his meek mistress Molly, a vicious betrayal of her childish trust. The process is infantilizing towards the character of Molly, and falls a bit short of the psychological impact it might have had if she were a better rounded character. Nonetheless, we are given over to the suspicion that Stan is a lost cause; his psychological needs to dominate are becoming pathological.
The mark is a dangerous man, a wealthy industrialist with a dark secret Stan hopes to exploit with the aid of inside information provided by his dominating therapist. The consequences are predictably grim for all involved, but especially for Stanton, who is eventually double-crossed by his own Medea and forced to flee the evil forces of retribution which he now fears are pursuing him even in his newly won poverty, as he bums his way in flight across the depression era landscape.
Now, with Stan in his final throes, and consumed by the dame demon-liquor that once haunted his original rival Pete, the story enters into its fatalistic coda. We see Stan falling from a great height, like the figures falling from the Tower of Babel in the tarot card of the same name. Did I mention that each chapter is associated with one of the Major Arcana cards of the traditional tarot deck? Despite this push into the spectral, however, the story is firmly rooted in the Freudian world view. We come to see the whole narrative as a dramatic reenactment of Stan’s infantile desire to bed his mother and kill his father. It is a metaphor that, with the hindsight of the current psychological vogue, seems a bit too precise and literal. But, in truth, this is a relatively small complaint against a work which otherwise seems to mark and define the feminine archetypal complex, as it appears to the male psyche anyway, with some clarity. If that three faced anima image is obscured by the Freudian reading of Stan’s intentions, it is all the more impressive in the way in which it can be seen moving behind the screen of what appears to be a simpler motive, key lit in the foreground.
Stan is forced into extremis, and eventually he must kill in order to preserve what remains of his own life. But this killing is also an act of killing the self he has built up over his journey, and he is forced into disguise, subterfuge, and anonymity. It is his final encore.
The Tower
Stan comes full circle in desperation and is reunited with Zeena, who, after a warranted denunciation, helps Stan back on his feet, setting him up with a new act disguised as an Indian mind reader, and providing some cash to help him find his way back into the carnival life. This seems, actually, to be a fully formed ending to the book, one which displays forgiveness, resilience, and the potential of recovery, even after a long bout of self delusion and denial. This is not the ending the author decided to settle on, however.
The final denouement is both brilliant and contrived, in the tradition of the works of O’Henry, if I remember my Freshman Lit class well enough. The novel is carefully crafted into a perfect circuit–even though there are parts (like the penultimate chapter) when it seems to want to break free of the form and end on an upbeat note. Instead we return to the first chapter, where we saw Stan learning the meaning of the word ‘geek’ as new blood at the carnival. On his way back to reenter the life he learns that his former therapist has married his nemesis, the industrialist who Stan still fears is stalking him across the countryside with the aid of invisible road agents and informants. In his paranoia, Stan returns immediately to the bottle with the extra cash he pilfered from his benefactor Zeena. Now in his throes, he finally returns to carnival in a state of disaster.
The truth is, his addiction was never really cured by Zeena’s well intentioned intervention. His obsession with Lillith has brought him back to the nipple of booze, which is dissolving the last fragments of his nervous system. We want the novelist to reveal to us a better case, a better potential outcome, but this is not to be. The redemption promised by the return to home base, in the person of Zeena, the matriarch of the carnival, the High Priestess, fails to pan out.
It really does seem to me as if the author started out with his dark ending already in mind, and worked his way towards this pre-drawn conclusion upon which the story was based: how to make a carnival geek. The chance of Stan’s escape through the nurture and compassion of Zeena was a mere stumble and diversion on the way towards a greater freefall. That it was included at all is some indication that even the author has not yet been able to abandon the notion of a beneficent humanity.
Yet, we still see the seeds of destruction in Stan’s encounter with Zeena. She asks him, at long last, if he had anything to do with Pete’s demise, but even then, in the moment of reckoning, the moment of decision and possible confession, Stan deflects the penetrating gaze of truth with accomplished misdirection, preferring, instead of admission to guilt, to startle Zeena with knowledge of Pete’s heretofore unknown last name. This move shocks her, and the subject is changed, too quickly to my taste. In so doing Stan seals his fate, by refusing to admit to his original sin to the only person capable of providing absolution. In this way, it seems to me that this book has two endings, one unrealized, and one which was inevitable by design, but also pushed onto us by the desire to encapsulate the story in a fully fixed and round figure.
In all, this book is a great deep dive into the psychology of the con-artist as well as an unflinching look at how people can be led along by their own wishful and magical thinking. There is a strong sense of disappointment implicit in Stan’s character in his failure to find a larger spiritual answer to his disease that we seem, by nature, to thirst and even strive for. This is one reason why I wish the author had encountered some Junginan thinking, not only because it offers a synthesis between psychological thinking and the mytho-poetic tradition, unduly underrated in significance by Freud, but also I think, because it permits the promise or at least the potential of self-fulfillment as a goal of the personality, an aspect that is shrouded in the darkness of the nightmare alley which runs through this author’s haunted world.
Now are the tacit seconds laid between, the song and sing – when ghosts once locked away, stumble into forms of animals and blooms, to revel in their coruscating sheen, and marvel at the crimson creep of rays, that finger forth between the gloam and blue.
Now is the valiant hour when thoughts oblique, in hushed danger drown within the eye, or gasping at the brink of misted vision, scatter into the cracks of furtive winks.
The vibrant moment now is tolled and rung, and rings aloud in hollow chamber’s sigh, as petals, wings, or leaves – unlaced, undone – are slipped aloft on exhalation’s glide.
A gravid moon bedevils Janus drowsy, dreaming of the sun-spilt Western Lands, where feral children by the sea side rushes, crawl and caper on the bonfired sands.
Milk-faced the monk prophetic murmurs, banging keys and chords to spells melodic, spit from candied lips, barbed and poison tipped, missiles smite the impish heart, chaotic.
Dart-struck, too, and driverless, lost and broken down, Arjuna paces circles on the highway side. Wheels within mandalas, he draws on cloudless sky, and thumbs a passing star to hitch a ride.
Outside of the Dakota, fully-circled time, breaks the heart and breaks the mind and breaks apart the rhyme.
One of the projects I began working on last summer was a science fiction novel about an artist who works on stories in a Western genre. This framing device surrounds a sub plot which is an American Western retelling of the Epic of Gilgamesh. The novel is in a rough an unedited state, but the following lyrics are from that sub-story. The character of Tomahawk Sal is a version of Innana, the Sumerian goddess of erotic love and death, cum Calamity Jane of Deadwood fame. She is also something of a witch. Sal’s lovelorn complaint for the attentions of the main character echo a similar episode from the Gilgamesh epic, and is voiced as a campfire song after being transmitted into the speech of the Enkidu character, known as Hard Luck. Tomahawk Sal is also a mélange of other mythic and liminal figures, including Baba Yaga, Hecate, and Olive Oatman, a frontier woman from Illinois, who was captured and raised by Apache Indians in the 1850s.
Love me in the haylofts Above the cattle lowing, Or love me off in golden fields Before the reaper starts a-mowing.
Your love is like a winter wind, Slinking in through gaping chinks. Your hearth is cold and ashen, A chain of broken links.
Will you not love me in the corn? No, the corn is green and sour. Will you love me in the barley, then? Alas ’tis poor man’s flour
Will you love me where the wild goose flies? The cliff is perilous and steep. Then love me where the jackdaw nests? Her voice is harsh and cheap.
Love me in the bell tower While the pious mime their praying, Or under mourning willow With leaves so gently swaying.
Your love is like a lightning fire, Running o’er droughted grass. Your love is hard and stinging, Like the drover’s flashing lash.
My love is true, my hair is silky, My ankles white and dainty.
My arm is strong my wisdom keen My spirit one third saintly.
My love is true, my fingers fine, My plaints entreat thee “ruth.”
Your hair is grey your face is lined I spurn your love for sooth.
Then curses I’ll heap upon you Upon your sons and daughters: May your lands be barren wastes And brackish be your waters;
May your fence posts fall to splinters Your bullets fall meek and harmless; May your herds incline to wander And your horses flee the harness;
May dogs snap at your heel spurs And fortune always spurn you; While ravens mock your daily toils And haints be bound beside you.
January The Alchemist / Paulo Coelho Snow Crash / Neil Stephenson Chimpanzee politics: Power and sex among apes / Frans de Waal The mechanics of Ancient Egyptian magic / Robert K. Ritner, Religions of the Hellenistic-Roman Age / Antonía Tripolitis
February The Sumerians: Their history, culture, and character / Samuel Noah Kramer
March Isaac Newton / James Gleick Galactic pot-healer / Philip K. Dick Gods and robots: Myths, machines, and ancient dreams of technology / Adrienne Mayor Synchronicity / C. G. Jung Altered states / Paddy Chayefsky
April The divine invasion / Philip K. Dick On writing / Stephen King Wise blood / Flannery O’Connor Kim / Rudyard Kipling Two Essays on Analytical Psychology / C. G. Jung The transmigration of Timothy Archer / Phillip K. Dick
May Big Sur / Jack Kerouac The dead / James Joyce Fanfarlo / Charles Baudelaire The island of Doctor Moreau / H. G. Wells To walk the night / William Sloane The edge of running water / William Sloane The alteration / Kingsley Amis Bob Dylan: An intimate biography / Anthony Scaduto
June The king of elfland’s daughter / Lord Dunsany The archetypes and the collective unconscious (vol. 9.1) / C. G. Jung
July The essence of Tsongkhapa’s teachings. Three aspects of the Path / TsongKhaPa & His Holiness the Dalai Lama Rendezvous with Rama – Arthur C. Clarke Cosmic puppets – Phillip K. Dick
August Rama II / Arthur C. Clarke & Gentry Lee Dogs in Antiquity: Anubis to Cerberus, the origins of the domestic dog / Douglas Brewer, et al. Dark entries / Robert Aickman True Grit / Charles Portis The treasure of the Sierra Madre / B. Traven Inside Vasubandhu’s Yogacara: A practitioner’s guide / Ben Connelly
September Rosemary’s baby / Ira Levin The family / Ed Sanders Masters of Atlantis / Charles Portis Fuzz : When nature breaks the law / Mary Roach The ultimate evil : the search for the sons of Sam / Maury Terry Soul catcher / Frank Herbert
October Fear : Trump in the White House / Bob Woodward Bad blood : Secrets and lies in a Silicon Valley startup / John Carryrou Warlock / Oakley Hall Hell house / Richard Matheson Erebus : The story of a ship / Michael Palin Rage / Bob Woodward Peril / Bob Woodward and Robert Costa
November The Ministry for the Future / Kim Stanley Robinson Artemis / Andy Weir Against the grain ; a deep history of the earliest states / John C. Scott The last duel ; A true story of crime, scandal, and trial by combat / Eric Jager
December Annihilation / Jeff Vandermeer Authority / Jeff Vandermeer Acceptance / Jeff Vandermeer Rebirth of a nation : The making of modern America, 1877 – 1920 / Jackson Lear 1898 : The birth of the American century / David Traxel Vril :The power of the coming race / Edward Bulwer-Lytton The dawn of everything: A new history of humanity / David Graeber and David Wengrow
up, up upon the wall, of the government hall, tarantulas crawl, and the scorpions sway, it’s a game we play, ’till it lasts all day.
how we roll, roll away, roll away the day, losing time to our other side in our shadow play.
let’s sneak, sneak upon the stairs, (they travel in pairs) till we leap like hares and make our escape. when the lights come on, we can vanish as one, in the noon-day sun.
and then roll, roll it all away, roll the live-long day, passing our time to the other’s mind in our shadow play.
would you care to put on your crown, you silly clown, and be king for a day? you can wear it with pride and strut it outside ’til it’s late to hide,
then put your milky bones away, and dance waltz with Fanny fae, on the other side where we lose our minds in our shadow play.
bae, they’re coming for you, they’re following me, but they can’t see we, like I do. I, through clenched teeth, on top of the lips I’ll slip you a hiss with my cobra kiss.
and when your web is spun glinting in sun my skin’s undone and the game is won.
then may we roll roll them all away, or put them on display, leading our tribe to the other side, with our shadow plays.
Title: A Spider. Artist: Jan Vincentsz van der Vinne (Dutch, Haarlem 1663–1721 Haarlem)
Landlocked dreaming pretending to be by winter’s fire with you, gives a skipping sleepy cadence to my weighted heart, as the honey sun skirts slantwise and drowns the strand in purple shade, we cling to desperate stripes of furtive warmth marching slowly into night.
The Alienist by Caleb Carr touches on a number of my obsessions; the Gilded Age, psychology, serial murder, the frontier. There are things I like about this prestige TV series adapted historical novel and some things I am less crazy about. The point is, there is probably a review or at least some comments, criticisms, and plaudits to follow here, so stay tuned for more info.!