On Robert Lovelace

I am now faced with the distasteful task of recording a definite drop in Lolita’s morals.

Regarding Samuel Richardson’s magisterial Clarissa and while paraphrasing Harold Bloom, it is Clarissa’s tragedy even if it is Lovelace’s play. Robert Lovelace is the great Satan of world literature.  However, it would be merely accurate to note his implacable, irreformable, remorseless malevolence.  Good reading services many ends, and reading Lovelace well is a supreme warning.  Fully descended from the titanic Iago, Lovelace is a monster of unsurpassable exuberance, luxuriating in the destruction he wroughts.  This is why the epistolary structure of Clarissa is so extremely important. Lovelace must, must admit. “Hey, Jack!”  The “monster” forever changes after Lovelace because the monster has been revealed to be human. Horror – at its “highness” – is the grand rebuke to the pagan satyr. We are not tilting dragons: the event horizon of the human abyss has been sung.  Lovelace is the human condition, of which natural goodness as a hedge against our darkness has been shown for what it is, the stuff of hell.  One reads Lovelace in 2026 as a mystical premonition of, among many others, Humbert Humbert, Freddy Kruger, and Hannibal Lector.  Hannibal Lector is particularly interesting, given Lovelace-Clarissa, Lector-Clarice.  The women spellbind their monsters, and the monsters control their women.  The women, these particular women, interest their monsters. The most insightful comment about Lovelace within the novel is from his best friend and too-belatedly reformed libertine Jack Belford, who remarks that Lovelace, when a child, tortured most those pets he loved best.  In his grip, you experience an equivocal falsehood called love. Out of it, an equivocal wrath.  Equivocation in all. Satan. Confession.  Anyone who has so unhappily found himself in a situation such as Clarissa’s, be it of friendship, of work, of romance, or of what you will reads with increasing terror.  He “loves Clarissa” and yet seeks her with increasing hatred until the very end. The end. Your end. He will not stop till she is dead. He will not stop until you are dead. The great Satan, indeed. This blog maintains that this world, this life under the valley of tears, is beautiful and dangerous. Temporally beautiful and eternally dangerous. Lovelace confirms and warns.  The monster changes after Robert Lovelace. 

The Raven as Lenore

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven is one of the great poetical works of Western Civilization. I’ve argued before for an esoteric reading of The Raven which has been heretofore unfortunately underdeveloped. The unnamed narrator is wearily pondering at that witching hour of midnight a “curious volume” of forgotten lore. As he nods but with no intention of sleep, there is suddenly a tapping. The Raven, published in 1845, was birthed in that tempestuous 1840’s decade in which Spiritualism – and “spirit knocking” – raged to prominence in the antebellum United States, and one need only consider as grimoire the narrator’s curious volume for a very different reading to effervesce. Poe was famously well read, and I choose to believe he knew and was influenced by Matthew Lewis’s diabolical The Monk. The Monk is, well was when formerly people read such things, criticized by the more pious for its peri-enlightenment skeptical portrayal of religion, and yet Lewis merely strips the Faust legend of saccharine poignance. The legend bit because Satan was very, very honest: “I’ll give you everything now, but I will take your soul for eternity.” It is Lewis, of all people, who asks the actually orthodox question, “why the hell would you ever trust the devil?” The monk, not exactly orthodox, is cheated through Satan’s duplicity even out of his “everything now,” and the demons writhe. The house always wins; and, in this valley of tears, it is still to some extent the Prince of this World’s house. Poe’s unnamed narrator is playing the devil’s game, no matter how casually he may thumb the spell book’s pages in that bleak December midnight. The narrator conjures with the devil his lost Lenore, and she dutifully arrives as the black and blackening Raven. “But tell me, oh, please tell me that you are in heaven?” “Nevermore!” Nevermore implies once was. Was Lenore in heaven until the narrator conjured her? Does judgment occur in heaven such that “all go to heaven” be yet another devilish trick? The narrator’s despair is that, should he go to heaven, Lenore will not be there. “Nevermore!” And if he stays with his beloved – “And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting” – he will never go to heaven. “Nevermore!” He, like the monk, makes his choice. Never play with the Devil.

House of Leaves

This is not for you. – prologue, House of Leaves

Mark Danielewski’s Y2K-era House of Leaves is the cult horror equivalent to that other literary apotheosis of Generation X, Infinite Jest. Capitalizing on the era’s early internet culture and fascination with “found footage” tropes, House of Leaves is most famous for its labyrinthine structure. Johnny Truant, a down-and-out tattoo parlor worker bee in LA (does it get more Gen X? Yes, it does. He sojourns in Seattle.), is called over frantically at 3am to the apartment of his best friend “Lude.” A la Toni Morrison, person-names are very important here. Lude’s upstairs neighbor – a mysterious blind, elderly man named Zampanò – has passed away, and Lude is compelled to enter his apartment. Once inside the apartment and upon smelling a strong odor – not bad, just “sort of human” – Johnny now falls under the spell of compulsion as he discovers in a corner a massive stack of papers and detritus that he removes from the apartment. The papers are the beginnings of a scholarly manuscript describing and critiquing a massively influential and important documentary-turned-horror film, The Navidson Record. This film, created by the famous photographer Will Navidson of National Geographic fame, took the world by storm, showing as it does an inexplicable horror such that it is unclear if the footage is real or a hoax. Navidson’s reputation strongly argues against a fake. Entire schools of thought have developed around the meaning of The Navidson Record, and Zapanò’s is to be the definitive compendium. The manuscript is thoroughly footnoted, with an extensive bibliography, with commentary by major film and literary critics, with references to university film studies centered on the documentary. Johnny cannot stop arranging the manuscript into book form – Rime of the Ancient Mariner meets The Evil Dead. And he frequently adds his own footnotes and commentary to the manuscript. So the “structure” of House of Leaves is such that Johnny is compiling Zampanò’s manuscript of Navidson’s documentary-horror film. And there are mysterious, omniscient “editors” who with mercifully rare interpolation add even further comment. However, Johnny soon discovers that there is no evidence such a film, a person named Navidson, or any of the references or commentaries have ever existed. Why would Zampanò do this? How did he do this? Regardless, Johnny himself cannot stop – he must continue the manuscript, and his continuing of something which is obviously the product of a disturbed mind leads to his own insanity.

Whatever the merits of the book, I do find it interesting to consider HoL a generation later, in which strangers on the internet routinely are similarly compelled to extensively comment and compile (screenshots are the new bibliographies) upon other strangers’ writings about things that quite possibly have never existed. And occasionally these people go insane. House of Leaves, if nothing else, inchoately prophesied in its doomed house on “Ash Tree Lane” in which the inside is larger – and infinitely so – than the outside of the house, the phenomena of doom scrolling and trolling and that the Panopticon ever expands as it ever closes in.

Que Será

The world is a vampire,
sent to drain.
Secret destroyers,
hold you up to the flames.
And what do I get
For my pain?
Betrayed desires,
and a piece of the game.

There’s an old Southern Baptist joke that the first song in the Presbyterian hymnal is “Que será, será.” (A little “5 points” jab for those not familiar). I’ve noticed a fair amount of chatter online recently regarding the extent to which demons are involved in horrific acts. As a Catholic, I’m very comfortable associating murder of the innocent with the demonic. However, there are pitfalls here. For one thing there is a trend in which, by myopically focusing on the demonic, folks advocate a total rejection of politics. Politics, we are told, is nothing but a right-here-and-right-now materialist irrelevance operating under the dominion of the Prince of this World. No, a million times, No. This will not do. (Im going to assume anyone reading here already knows I absolutely in no way equate politics with voting, supporting political parties, etc.) Politics just is bound up with the Good, and the Good casts its benevolent shade upon all. Apart from being the sole survivor on the proverbial deserted isle, one literally cannot escape politics – this is also why those who do so attempt descend into such loony larping expeditions. No, Catholics should not attempt to “avoid politics.” Catholics should boldly, manfully, advocate for good politics – first and foremost of which is a complete and unequivocal rejection of the wicked politics-as-liberty-loving liberalism. There’s a certain sense in which “Que será, será” is something like Providence if you squint the right way. (Wikipedia informs me the phrase has at least a tangential relationship to Roman Catholicism.) But what “will be” right here and right now is inextricably bound up with our politics. Placing your hand before your eyes chanting, “I’m now invisible” will not exonerate you. Catholics should not be shy proclaiming the truth that demons are real. Very, very real. However, the vampires only come out at night, and under the liberal tyranny it is always and everywhere bleakest, darkest night.

The Peripatetic Monstrous

In the Poetics Aristotle identifies two fundamentals to the plot of tragedy: peripety and discovery. Peripety – pronounced with the same syllable stressings as “discovery” – is something like a substantial change to a person, thing, or context. Discovery is, well, a discovery or finding of a substantial fact that was previously hidden within the seemingly mundane. Aristotle intriguingly argues that peripety – and thus the emotional impact of tragedy – is most powerful only when occurring upon discovery. A rebuke to juvenile post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy and the deus ex machina dream sequences of laziness or lack of talent. This obviously brings us to Fright Night. Contemporary horror gets a bad rap these days, but the problem (poorly understood and thus jumbled in a heap of bad critical jargon) is generally the “contemporary” as opposed to the “horror.” It would be like reading Fifty Shades of Gray and believing this is a prooftext against the novel simpliciter. Regarding “contemporary horror” this blog hops on a hobby horse battering nearly all things of the adjective while donning the helmet and considering with sympathy the noun properly understood. Fright Night makes a nice test case. Stylistically, FN is excellent. The vampire is immediately, inexcusably, and unapologetically evil – a sexual deviant, a murderer, a grotesquery, a liar. “A liar from the beginning…”. Upon – inadvertently, yes – discovering the vampire’s evil Charlie is ripped from the act of his own debauchery and intriguingly for the remainder of the movie loses complete interest in such sin as his knowledge of the abyss of depravity of the vampire grows. And the powers of holy water and crucifixes are quite real. The foreboding dread is excellent, as Charlie pleads with literally everyone of the mortal dangers they face. As we’ve noted before, horror pulls the scales from the eyes of Tiresias while slamming them upon everyone else. But then again this is a vampire movie of 1985 what do you expect? Unfortunately despite its truly wonderful stylizations – seriously it’s wonderful – FN fails as great art precisely along Aristotelian critique. Discovery, occurring within minutes of the opening, is divorced from a non-existent peripety. Thus jump-scare and “inevitability.” Fortunately The Lost Boys would learn from these earlier mistakes.

Back To The Future

And someday there will be a more complete machine. One’s thoughts or feelings during life-or while the machine is recording-will be like an alphabet with which the image will continue to comprehend all experience…The fact that we cannot understand anything outside of time and space may perhaps suggest that our life is not appreciably different from the survival to be obtained by this machine. – The Invention of Morel

From the Hopi Indians – terrifyingly shown in The Endless – to Nietzsche, purveyors of the “Eternal Recurrence” myth make strange bedfellows. Morel, seeking an immortality from eternity, hops right in with them. Morel has invented a machine which “films” every moment of a crew of vacationers to a deserted, dangerous island for a week. Once the filming has completed, it will then project – repeatedly – the entirety of that which has been filmed. In other words, every single second of the vacationers’ week on the island will be repeatedly projected onto the “screen” of the island over and over and…. An inverse of the much later The Matrix, Morel’s invention captures the total physical essence of those who pass within its lens. Thus and delightfully anti-Cartesian, this projected totality of physicality cannot exist without soul – and neither can those who have been filmed as their souls are ripped out of them and transmogrified into the projected images. A fugitive to the island, fleeing a life sentence behind bars, is startled when, after safely landing, the vacationers suddenly “show up.” He hides, fearing discovery; however – and not understanding any of this – he falls in love with a beautiful vacationer. He bravely reveals himself to her, and she walks away. He speaks to her, and she “ignores.” He makes her a beautiful gift. She unthinkingly walks over it. When he finally understands the horror of the eternal recurrence, he first desires to study her – repeatedly as the movie repeats every week. He learns her every move, her every word, her every decision. He can explain everything about her. But does he really know her? No. Despairing, he chooses to join them in the movie and flips on the machine to film; and his soul is slowly torn out of him as he joins the images. Of all the wonders of heaven the Holy Ghost has revealed, perhaps the most “terrifying” is that the blessed will both know and be fully known. We won’t be explained – no therapy needed in heaven. We will be known. It is only terrifying this side of purgatory. On the other side of that arduous mountain, every single thing about you will be loveable. Inconceivable.

The Gray Ghost

Work conference personal post alert. Without getting too personal I’ll say I spend most of my work-a-day in a dog-eat-dog environment. By no means is it “cut throat.”  No one is actively seeking another’s metaphorical demise in order to move higher up the ladder.  But one does learn that eventually, should he ascend high enough, he will be called upon to perform a coup de grace.  Better to decide well in advance how one will face all that. My very first boss – whom I was rather close to and worked very closely with – was a 5-2 90 pounds-wet lady we called “The Gray Ghost.”  I never heard her utter a cuss word. I never heard her raise her voice.  But she was an inexorable cold hearted, merciless wraith of a being. She would tear your throat out and be off to her evening plans as untroubled as a lark. When I read Edith Hamilton describe Atropos, I always think of the Gray Ghost. I remember very early on in our work relationship she was discussing – she wasn’t one “to complain” – a colleague she had been annoyed with.  She asked my thoughts. “Well,” naively, “if he’s been doing good work and now not, maybe he has something going on outside of work.”  She stopped. “No.  He’s never been strong. And people don’t change. The only thing you can change in a bad colleague is his employment status.”  He was gone soon enough; walked out by security. There was an urban legend she asked him at that last, fateful interview right before she calmly told him he would never work there again if he had ever “read even one of” her books.  He was unable, so the legend runs and perhaps too nervous or perhaps too defiant to the end, to come up with a title.  The Gray Ghost.