Whitman, and the Light at the End of the Tunnel

I can’t believe that this is my final blog post!  Honestly, I’m a little sad about it because I really loved this class and all the great conversations it started.  For now, all I can do is wrap it all up and hope that next quarter I can find a class that I like as much as I liked this one.  Let’s kick this pig!

I’m of the opinion that life needs to be lived as Walt Whitman would have lived it: wildly, intellectually, self aware, fearlessly, poetically, physically, spiritually, and theatrically, just to name a few key points.  I always knew here were the ways I wanted to live my life, but had no title for them.  When people asked me what I was doing with my life, I just told them I was doing IT.  Now, I can say I’m trying to live like Whitman.  Let’s face it, who hasn’t wanted to shout a “barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world” (Whitman 85).

For me, I was a little shocked when Suzanne said that people in his time found ‘Song of Myself’ vulgar.  Yes, there are some elements that in his time period must have been daring.  But to call them vulgar?  Maybe I lack the ability to see with a closed mind.  For me, I felt that Whitman was trying to do the same thing that one of the monologues in ‘The Vagina Monologues’ was trying to do: to reclaim what’s been deemed vulgar.  For Whitman, it was being able to be comfortable with our bodies and ourselves; for ‘The Vagina Monologues’, one wanted to reclaim the word ‘cunt’.  Whitman’s very first line makes this very clear when he outright says “I celebrate myself” (Whitman 25).

I absolutely loved the story about Whitman and his intense groupie, Anne.  The entire time all I could think about was Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes.  I read somewhere that in high school; Katie had posters of Tom all over her room and told all her friends she was going to marry him.  And then she did.  Next to Ginny in Harry Potter, she’s one of the only fan-girls to ever actually get her man.

This, to me, is one of the sheer powers of fanaticism.  Fans are willing to “witness and wait” for their chosen stars to do anything, whether that be waiting in line for hours for a book signing or standing in the pit of a concert before the show starts to guarantee they’ll be closest to the stage (Whitman 28).  Fans can often take inside themselves “the peace and joy and knowledge that pass all the art and argument of the earth” for the love of their favorite band, writer, or celebrity (Whitman 29).  For a fan, fiction can become reality, and celebrities can become something they can aspire to reach so much that this obsession can become a part of their identity.  For some fans, like Anne and Katie Holmes, this enjoyment of a celebrity can go beyond appreciating and breech into the territory of love.  Take for example the 1983 Syrian Defence Minister General Musafa Tlass.  His crush on an Italian actress, Gina Lollobrigida, pushed him so far as to demand his troops not to attack Italien solilders.  He told them "Do whatever you want with the US, British and other forces, but I do not want a single tear falling from the eyes of Gina Lollobrigida" (Shaw141)*.

After reading the things we’ve read in class before this, Whitman is a breath of fresh air.  I’m not saying I liked him better than everything else (though I did like him more than certain things) but that the change of atmosphere was exhilarating and soothing.  After all, he is “the poet of the body” and “of the soul” (Whitman 44).  What’s not to love about that?  One you’ve gotten through the dark underbelly of pieces like Moby Dick, Transformations, On Witchcraft, and The Shining, your soul CRAVES something as poetic and triumphant as ‘Song of Myself’.  I needed something lovely, some sugar coating for what I’ve learned from the man who says he could “behold the picturesque giant and love him” because who doesn’t want someone like that in their life (Whitman 35).  We all want someone who can love what might be termed vulgar, because if they can, they can love anything – including the parts of ourselves we see as being ugly. 

When Whitman says he’s “the poet of the body” he wasn’t kidding (Whitman 44).  Paralleled with ‘Kinsey’, ‘Song of Myself’ seems incredibly free with its ability to discuss and find beauty in physical bodies.  Culture hasn’t, in my opinion, evolved much on this front since 1855.  Yeah, we can be vulgar about nudity and talk about that freely, but who really talks about their body or someone else’s publically with respect?  We’re still ignorant of our own bodies and remain alienated from them because our culture teaches us to live this way.  I won’t lie – I hate my body, but more than that, I don’t want to talk about it or let anyone else see it.  There’s something incredibly vulnerable in sharing your soul with someone, and for me it’s the same way with the body.  Maybe this is one of the reasons I can’t comprehend sex and never want to have it – I don’t want to share my body with anyone when even I don’t want anything to do with it.  Without getting into the finer points, here’s how I feel – I don’t ever want to have sex.  It sounds disgusting, and I don’t want to do it.  I don’t mind taking about bigger concepts or someone else’s sex life or body, but I don’t want to talk about mine.  Sex to me is “the password primeval” (Whitman 48).  It’s old as human kind, and something most people guard and keep secretive.  It’s something intimate, or at the very least can be.  Whitman hits the nail on the head for me when he says “we hurt each other as the bridegroom and the bride hurt each other” (Whitman 45).  I feel like sex is highly overrated, and yet, in situations like after a wedding where two people have intertwined their lives so intricately and want to share a deep and resounding bond, sex can be intimate.  But, that doesn’t mean it is for everyone.  I consider it to be highly intimate, because that was how I was raised to view sex.  While it’s not something I want, I see the merit of it, and what it could mean to committed couples, married or otherwise committed to one another. 

“Clear and sweet is my soul” and that’s something that needs to be embraced, also taking into account that “clear and sweet is all that is not my soul” (Whitman 27).  In this way, Whitman reminds me of a reverse image of Poe.  In Poe’s writing, the narrators in stories such as ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ and ‘The Black Cat’ show that there is horror and darkness not only in the world but in us as well, the same as other authors have this quarter such as Stephen King.  In The Shining, Jack contains darkness and angry inside of him, both because of his drinking and after he’s possessed by the house.  Transformation by Anne Sexton as a motif shows the magic of fairytales covering up the horrors of reality, such as in ‘Briar Rose’ where I took the slumber to be metaphorical as her way to cope with her Father’s torments on her body.  Emily Dickenson shows us both the beauty and pain inside love, loneliness, and longing.  Cotton Matters tries to show us the logic inside what the Puritans did, and instead shows us the horror inside over-zealous religions mobs. 

This quarter we’ve talked about a multitude of different subjects residing in the darkness of literary underbellies.  Why is it that, as a culture, we look for the darkness in things just as much if not more as we look for the light?  Think about the things we primarily talked about this quarter:  witchcraft, wilderness, monsters, conquest, revolution, survival, the undead, possession, obsession.  With the exceptions of self-reliance and liberation, we’ve focused heavily on the dark side of literature and what’s to be gained from the study of it. 

Some people, such as one of my roommates, believe that good cannot exist in the world without evil.  Is it then the same way with everything in life?  Can we have beauty and light without the ugliness or the darkness?  Does everything in life have to have a foil to counteract it?  My personal philosophy is that though light and dark can play off one another, most of the time we’re living in the in-between grey in the twilight of light and dark – and no, I don’t mean the shitty Stephanie Meyer kind.  I feel as though, even though there are lights and darks to life, no one is purely evil or purely good.  We’re all a tint of both, our very own shade of grey.  I know personally I have my good moments where I’m practically angelic (they’re very far in between, I’ll admit) and there are time (more often than not) that I’m so demonic you don’t need a pitchfork and horns to know I’ll breath fire at you.  I’m neither up nor down in reality though.  I’m a balance of good and evil, of light and dark.  I’m living in the grey area of both, just like almost everyone else.  I think Whitman understood that people have to have a balance of both, that “the tasteless water of soul” and our “true sustenance” needed to be both (Whitman 41).  Do I wish I was more one direction or that other?  Do I wish that I was totally pure and innocent like a Saint, or black as the darkest devil that ever lived?  I think Whitman said it best when he said “I exist as I am, that is enough” (Whitman 44).  I agree wholeheartedly. 

I do however believe that some people are more strongly turned towards one direction or another.  Poe’s narrators lean into the dark and embrace it with open arms, almost welcoming the perversity that they inhabit.  Jack in The Shining certainly had his good points, like how he was trying to turn things around and control his temper, but ultimately was easily seduced by the darkness inside him and embraced the hotel’s influences over him.  The Puritan townspeople in The Scarlet Letter and in On Witchcraft think they’re being righteous and pure, when in fact they’ve turned their backs on one of the best (in my opinions) things religion has to offer: repentance, acceptance, and forgiveness.  In being so harsh to the suspected witches during the hysteria in Salem and to the fictional Hester, the Puritans were turning their backs on the light and embracing a very human form of darkness by pointing fingers and ostracizing their neighbors.  Mary Rowlandson I actually see as turned towards the light with her intense faith during her ordeal.  All conquistadors seem sadistic and dark to me, to be frank.  How else can you murder an entire sect of people just for greed?  And yet, they thought they were doing God’s work, just like the Christians did with the Crusades with their Holy Wars claimed to be found for God*.  Sanford in The Coquette always embodied one of the lighter of the dark qualities I’ve seen firsthand in his inability to understand what he wants might not be best for everyone else, and that damaging a girl’s reputation isn’t worth the pleasure it brings him.  Anne Sexton’s poetry not only shows us the darkness in childhood tales but also the darkness, the duality, the “doppelganger” that might be living inside each of us waiting to break free (Sexton 17).  We all exist in a place where darkness or light can overtake us and rule our lives.  We have the free will in our lives to make the choices that lean in either direction.  I know a lot of people who talk about death and dying, of Heaven and what might happen when we die, but I try not to think about that.  Like Whitman, “I have heard what the talkers were talking… the talk of the beginning and the end/But I do not talk of the beginning or the end” (Whitman 26).  I don’t know what’s going to happen when I finally stop existing on the earthly plane, and not being religious, I’m not sure how I feel about the Heaven concept.  All I know if I don’t want to wait time talking about ‘ifs’ and ‘what could happen’ when I expire.  Until I do, I’d rather be learning and experiencing the things I can know and do for sure.  That’s all I feel anyone can really ask for out of life – a chance to really head out and live it on their own terms.

For me, one of the things that carried most heavily throughout the entire class was something we talked about towards the very beginning of the quarter: monsters.  Personally, I feel monsters can go beyond science fiction or comics, that the word can have human meaning and implications.  For example, before my senior year of high school, I attended the Kenyon Review Young Writers Summer Workshop.  For two weeks, we were broken up into groups where one of the instructors taught us about writing and gave us a wide range of exercises and prompts to write through.  Then, in the second week, we were told to pick an additional workshop class to take.  Instead of choosing poetry like I’d originally planned, I took the workshop on Monsters.  At our first meeting, our instructor asked us to make a list of monsters on the board.  You know the first thing I wrote on the board was?  Hitler.  I rest my case.

In our texts this quarter we’ve read about countless characters that could be seen as monsters for various reasons.  In On Witchcraft, I don’t so much see those accused of being a member in “a dreadful knot of Witches in the Country” as being monsters – but I certainly see their accusers that way (Mather 16).  Those that “testifi’d” in “the tryal of Bridget Bishop” and others like hers were monstrous in their accounts of the “spectre” they said haunted them (Mathers 106).  What that group of young Puritan girls did was horrible, inciting hysteria in Salem and giving false testimony thus sentencing innocent victims to death for witchcraft. Moving on to the next work we read, there’s no doubt in my mind that the Puritans in Hester Prynne’s village are monstrous in very human ways.  They treated her horribly for a very human weakness and in an equally human way treat her with a lack of compassion that seems monstrous to me.

In a similar show of apathy to the feelings or needs of others, we have Sanford in The Coquette.  Lucy said “a man of a vicious character cannot be a good member of society” and I agree with her wholeheartedly (Foster 31).  He’s just the kind of man I try and keep away from my friends – a man who’s only looking for the next conquest but nothing lasting.  The way he goes through women is monstrous, and the worst part is, Eliza lets him take advantage of her.  I know her fate wasn’t entirely her fault, but I feel as though she should have had more self respect than to let Sanford swoop in and steamroller her.  She says to Lucy at one point that she is “perplexed and embarrassed, my friend, by the assiduous attentions of This Major Sanford” (Foster 48).  And yet she continues to let him be in her presence where he continues to try and break up her affection for Boyer.  In this same way, the conquistadors were monstrous, taking everything they wanted and justifying it by saying their mission was from God. 

It might just be me, but there’s a certain level of monstrosity in the ideals of self-reliance and survival in the way that they both insist upon themselves unfalteringly.  One of the things that makes us human is our ability to reason and to think.  But in situations like the sailors of In the Heart of the Sea encounters where cannibalism becomes the only way to survive, reason seems to take a back seat roll.  Self-Reliance­ demands we be totally independent at any and all costs, a phrase which in itself has insidious connotations.  ‘Any and all costs’ can be used to justify almost anything, and can be skewed in the same ways that ‘for the greater good’ can be.

Obsession and possession narratives we’ve read this quarter all have their own brand of monsters in them.  Ahab in Moby Dick is so gung-ho in his pursuit of the white whale that he disregards the severity of his chase until it’s too late for both him and his crew.  The whale is less of a monster to me than Ahab, because Ahab seems to have lost the human quality of being able to reason both what’s right and wrong, but also what lengths count as going too far.  I feel that jeopardizing the life of his crew shows an astonishing lack of regard for human life, which can be viewed as monstrous.  Most mythical and cult monsters like Dracula and the Wolf Man show no remorse or regret in taking a human life in the same way that Ahab offers up his own and the crew’s lives in pursuit of the white whale.

This same disregard and disrespect of the sanctity of human life is also shown in Poe’s narrators in ‘The Black Cat’, ‘The House of Usher’, and ‘The Tell Tale Heart’.  All three narrators feel minimal to no grief over taking another human being’s life, and yet seem perfectly reasonable as they tell us about them.  The monstrous “disease” all these narrators have is a lack of remorse, and a madness I can only marvel at in horror (Poe 199).  In ‘Ligeia’, ‘Morella’, and ‘Berenice’ have a monstrous need to possess their women like mythical dragons were said to hoard jewels and gold in their caves.  The ability of these three narrators to try to collect their women, to be so possessive they seem them more like objects than as living and breathing souls, disgusts me to the point that I would rather be murdered by Dracula than spend five minutes in a room with them.  At least Dracula is straightforward and wouldn’t pretend to love me before destroying me.

Life is messy.  Life is painful.  Life is full of many contradictions.  After this course, I know this and much more.  I’m not saying I didn’t know these things before this course, but it did reaffirm some things for me.  This course taught me in a roundabout that even when life is full of darkness and the horrible things that live in it, there can still be light and good somewhere if you just remember to look for it.  Not everything is as it seems. 

Darkness and the horrors within it haunt each and every one of us in some fashion.  For some, it’s in trauma from past events, for others it’s in memories they’d rather forget or otherwise regret.  Whether your darkness is big or little, whether it’s full of horrors no one else can comprehend or in everyday travesties, all underbellies are equal in the fact that they show who we are.  Without our darkness, we couldn’t be who we are in the light.  Without the things that scare us, we can’t show how brave we are.  Without hopelessness, there can be no need for hope.  In this way, we all need our personal darkness as much as we need light, hope, and love.  Without one, you can’t have the other.  Personally, I’m okay with my darkness and the things inside it.  I said at the beginning of the quarter that we all have skeletons in our closets, and that still rings true.  Even when you’re trapped, for me it helps to remember that everyone feels pain at points in their lives for different reasons, whether it be an abusive relationship like Wendy in The Shining or depressions like those felt by Emily Dickinson or Anne Sexton, having to put aside your moral to survive like the sailors of the Essex within In the Heart of the Sea or being accused of things you can’t prove you didn’t do like the accused witches in On Witchcraft.  Take heart in the fact that you’re not totally alone.  I hope this can be a light for you in your darkness as it has been for me after taking this class.  Always remember, as reading Whitman at the end of class was, to look for the light at the end of the tunnel.

* Quote taken from the Qiant Bathroom Reader by Karl Shaw
**The Crusades: A Short History by Jonathan Simon Christopher Riley-Smith

A Musical Take on Love, Pain, Fairytales, and Disenchantment From Them All

WARNING!  The following blog is highly musical.  Read and click play buttons at your own risk.

When talking about someone as classic as Emily Dickinson, people usually expect you to make grand literary comparisons and DEEP connections to other writers.  Instead, I offer you Lady Gaga.  Enjoy!

Most people, when looking for a relationship, tend to want to find a good one, not a bad one.    And yet, as we talked about in class, there are advantages to relationships that sit outside the scope of normal relationships.  And if you listen to the lyrics, Lady Gaga’s persona in the song isn’t begging to be free of her man, she’s begging to keep him: You know that I want you/and you know that I need you/I want it bad/A bad romance.  With lyrics like “I want your love and/ I want your revenge” or “I want your horror/I want your design” who could say she doesn’t like or even love her relationship?  Sure, it’s not something I would want.  I mean, I’m pretty sure I don’t want someone’s horror or revenge, especially romantically.  But I can see how this might appeal to some people.

Like we talked about in class there’s a certain power relationships like this one or S&M relationships.  There is a certain power in allowing someone to have power over you.  I was the one who made the joke about a pick-up line in such a world being “I’ve got a tomahawk, do you have a side I can put it in” but that doesn’t mean I think the entire idea can be laughed off.  In a language of love where the vocabulary is all words of pain, I can certainly see advantages.  In an S&M relationship, there would have to be a level of unbreakable trust between partners that the submissive partner has the rights to say when, how, how much, and when to stop in their antics.  Do I still think that’s a little odd?  Yes, I do.  Then again, I’m not a masochist and have no desire to feel pain.  But if the language of love was pain and all I’d ever known?  Personally, I think if I’d grown up in a society that prioritized pain in love, I’m sure I wouldn’t be so afraid of getting hurt in my current romantic relationship (even if those fears are unfounded.)  Can you image being in a world where no one has to be afraid to ask someone out because love is supposed to be pain?  Would there be fear in rejection if pain was the only way you knew how to express love?  I feel that this is the same principle as ‘The Anglerfish Song’ by Vlogbrother Hank Green.  The lyrics address this theory directly:  If I feel it all the time can you really call it pain? 

Dickinson shows us glimpses of a world like this in her poetry.  At the end of one of her poems we were told in class was addressed to Sue said “So we must keep apart/you there, I here/with just the door ajar/that oceans are/and prayer/and that pale sustenance/Despair” (Dickinson 169).  That right there speaks of literally OCEANS of pain!  I feel as though a lot of her unrequited love went out to Sue, especially after she married her brother and when Emily finally made the choice not to visit their home anymore.  In a way she “stopped being theirs” and by refusing to see her own brother she let go of everything that people had “dropped upon” her and instead chose to make her way differently (Dickinson 170).  You can see her deep attachment to Sue in several of her ‘love’ poems, the way she was haunted as she wrote after their “parting” that she longed for Sue her “heaven of heavens” and the “privilege/Of one another’s eyes” (Dickinson 170).  One of the most touching poems to me was the one where Emily spoke as going to sleep with “a jewel” in her hand, but that when she awoke “the gem was gone/And now an amethyst remembrance/Is all I own” (Dickinson 184).  Unrequited love or seemingly lost love like in this case is, in my opinion, the most painful kind.  The worst part is that it’s relatable for everyone.  Whether it was a lover, a pet, a crush, a family member, a spouse, or just a friend, everyone at some point in their life has felt the loss that loving someone can inspire when they’re taken away from you in some fashion.  One of the reasons I feel Emily Dickinson’s writing is so accessible to so many people is because we all understand the language of pain, even if we don’t experience it the same way.  Pain, like love, is universal.

One of the other worlds of love we talked about on Monday’s class was a world of love in which love is shown by submission, compliance, docility, and other such means of expression.  On the one hand, I see validity in Beth’s point that with such a vocabulary, people would be more trusting and open in relationships because by using such a vocabulary they’re constantly showing their vulnerable side.  But, personally, I feel like that kind of world would be horrific.  The thought of a world where everyone in love would be bending over backwards trying to please their partner makes me want to throw things.  One of the things someone said in class about this world would be that couples would be more likes slaves to one another than lovers, and I think that’s true.  I know there are times when my boyfriend and I are a bit indecisive when it comes to things like picking out a movie to watch and going back and forth saying the other can decide, but one of us (usually me) gets fed up and just picks what they want.  In a world where subservience and subjugation is the key to a loving relationship, I feel like people would never make a decision.  They’d be just like the vultures in ‘The Jungle Book’:

In juxtaposition with these worlds Dickinson offers us, I much prefer the ideas set down in ‘Wild Nights’ and ‘I’m Nobody’.  I’d much rather throw off the shackles and labels society has given me to chart my own path or paths purely on my own authority.  Emily Dickinson had the right idea when she said “how dreary” it would be to “be somebody” (Dickinson 18).  In life, you’re going to get labeled, but that doesn’t mean you have to live by your labels, just like you don’t have to follow the path set for you in life by your parents or anyone else.  There are days I’d love to be “done with compass/done with chart” and just get on a bus headed west for no reason other than to BE somewhere else than here (Dickinson 179).  That might be the sheer flighty and restless parts of my nature poking through, but there are times I crave to take “my power in my hand” and just leave (Dickinson 36).  Inner power is something we all seem, as a society, to take for granted.  If society is on the interstate of life, I want to be skipping off alone down some dirt path over to the side towards lush, green, more mysterious ends.

Can you feel the oncoming musical connection?  Emily Dickinson, depending on her taste in music if she knew anything about our generation, would I think appreciate Green Day if only for their parallel lyrics to the themes in  some of her poems.  For the sake of this discussion, I’m using ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’.

Remember my dirt road I wanted to travel down?  I would gladly be Billy’s shadow and go with him.  Just look at the sheer poetry of his lyrics, and how they relate to Emily Dickinson’s idea of getting rid of the maps, directs, and what society wants us to do to just be what you want to be!  For example, I feel the first verse ties directly to “Wild Nights”:   I walk a lonely road/The only one that I have ever known/Don’t know where it goes/But its only me and I walk alone/ I walk this empty street/On the boulevard of broken dreams/Where the city sleeps/And I’m the only one and I walk alone.”  I love the connections both the poet and the singer make to not needing to know where you’re going, how you’re getting there, or even why you’re going in order to live your life.  The title line in the song especially to me seems to point out WHY we need to throw away everything we’re supposed to do in favor of doing what we want to do – so that OUR dreams don’t end up broken somewhere, unfulfilled and treated like garbage. 

Unfulfilled dreams, to me, are second only to nightmares.  After reading Transformations by Anne Sexton, I’m a little surprised I didn’t have any of my own!  Ironically, the poems that turned my stomach more than the others (Rapunzel and Briar Rose) were the poems I loved the most.  As we talked about in class, the horror in our favorite fairytales is often overlooked.  One of the best examples, and most realistic to real life applications, is Rumplestiltskin.  Both the original version and Anne Sexton’s show us both the horrors of being forced to perform tasks we can’t accomplish and the mother’s fear of having her child stolen from her in some way.  Both are “a monster of despair” on their own ways, one from knowing a situation is hopeless and needing a miracle to get out of it alive, the other from separation anxiety between a mother and the child she fears will be taken from her (Sexton 17). 

With the background we were given on Sexton in class on how she reportedly used to abuse her children, I can’t help but feel that she is akin to the girl in the poem.  In the poem she made the deal with the dwarf to give him her firstborn child with only a small “piffle” and no scruples about whether or not she would regret it (Sexton 20).  In real life, I can imagine Sexton making the decision to have kids without really thinking about whether or not she really wanted them or even wanted to be a mother.  As she raised them, Sexton proved by her treatment of her children that she couldn’t handle being a mother.  In the poem, this is where the character and the author take separate paths.  Whereas Sexton supposedly abused her children, which is enough for me to deem her an unfit mother if it’s true, the character in the poem strives to earn the right to call herself a good mother.  Instead of handing her child over “she offered him all the kingdom” and “cried two pails of sea water” trying to get him to reconsider taking her baby (Sexton 20).  I still feel she should have thought harder about making the deal in the first place.  Readers knew he would come to collect, so why didn’t she?

When it comes to debunked fairytales, I feel like it’s easy to become disillusioned or disenchanted to the whole idea of magic, fairy godmothers, and happy endings.  Without something to look forwards to in the world, like fairytale magic, why move forwards?  What do we have to live for?  In stories, the leads always cling to their ‘soul mates’ to weather every storm.  In real life, we cling to friends, family, and lovers for strength.  In that way, we become each other’s only hope for survival.  Did that sound like a song cue to you?  Here’s a clue:  It totally was.

In fairytales, people come through unscathed for the most part.  Like Beth, one of the things I likes best in Briar Rose was that she was scared by her experiences, that “she could not nap/or lie in sleep” without “knock-out drops” to make her sleep dreamless, or like in Hansel and Gretel they speak of “only at suppertime/while eating a chicken leg/did our children remember/the woe of the oven” (Sexton 111, 105).  In the same way, the character in the song is shaken by his remembrances: I still remember there/Covered in ash/Covered in glass/Covered in all my friends/I still think of the bombs they built.  Like Rapunzel and her prince, the maiden with no hands and her king, and Briar Rose with her prince, the character in the song relies on another person to get him “out of prison” when he says {can I be the only hope for you/because you’re the only hope for me/if we can find where be belong/we’ll have to make it on our own/face all the pain and take it on/because the only hope for me is you alone} (Sexton 110).  In this way, instead of relying on fairy godmothers or magic to save them, people rely on one another to find meaning in their lives after trauma sets in.  And, honestly, who wouldn’t need someone after all the things these fairytale broads have gone through?

One of things I loved most about them was the fact that they were more human than usual fairytales are.  The horror of the human element in the poems was still there where we could see them. This came through especially well to me in Briar Rose most explicitly the virginal vulnerability the world LOVES to take advantage of and the King’s terrifying relationship with his daughter.  Like The Shining and the works we read by Edgar Allen Poe, this is a poem that shows the family setting as the seat of true horror.  I feel as though with this story we can take the magic out of the story and go back to the theory from class that Rumplestiltskin was just another part of the damsel’s inner self and not an actual dwarf aiding her.  In the book Identical by Ellen Hopkins, the story is told from the point of views of twin sisters Kaeleigh and Raeanne who switch voices every chapter [if you plan on reading the book, the next sentence is a MASSIVE SPOILER so don’t read it!].  Towards the end, you find out that to cope with the sexual abuse her father is conducting on her, Kaeleigh splits her personality in half and at times assumes the identity of her dead twin Raeanne.

In the same way, it could be interpreted that in a real-world sense looking at Anne Sexton’s history, Briar Rose’s hundred year slumber was actually her coping mechanism, a thing she made up in her head to distance herself from the horrors that occurred to her at the hands of her father.  At the beginning we’re told she’s in “a hypnotist’s trance,” perhaps where she can pretend everything’s alright, the reference to her being “stuck in the time machine” meaning she tries to only think or live in the moments before the abuse or the years of her youth before everything started happening (Sexton 107).  The fairy who puts a curse on her could be interpreted as either being Sexton’s aunt, who it was also speculated to have had sexually abused her, or her own mother who sat by while her father abused her without aiding her.  Briar Rose, like Anne Sexton, is said “grew to be a goddess” (Sexton 109).  The last three stanzas of the poem are also told from the first person point of view, perhaps suggesting the end of the poem is spoken specifically from Sexton’s point of view to the reader.  Sexton, who wanted death for herself in her numerous suicide attempts, would lay “in her grave” if you put her there and “never call back: Hello there” but the sheer sexual quality of the poet as described by the actress’s quote in class suggests “if you kissed her on the mouth/her eyes would spring open” (Sexton 111).

All fairytales can be debunked in a way, the horrors within revealed.  In this vein, I offer you my final installment to this musical blog: ‘Brick by Boring Brick’ by Paramore.

The opening lines set up the story we’ve all heard {She lives in a fairytale/Somewhere too far for us to find} but then get the first glimpse that everything isn’t all sunshine and roses, that the smell “rank as honeysuckle” had crept in here too (Sexton 108).  Like Briar Rose who has forgotten what restful sleep is like, the girl in the song has {forgotten the taste and smell/of the world that she’s left behind}.  {The angles are all wrong now} in all of Anne Sexton’s fairytales, the dark underbelly poking through, shoving aside the lovely fantasy we shroud ourselves in to forget the horrors and black spots in the tales.  Just as we can’t image a fairytale princess {ripping wings off of butterflies} we probably couldn’t imagine a father before now in a fairytale “drunkenly bent” over his daughter’s bed upon her “like some sleeping jellyfish” (Sexton 112).  After reading Transformations I want to {bury the castle} in every story, to cause “the big blackout” that will take all the horror out of childhood stories forever and we can inject happiness and hope “with my dolls/My childhood” memories instead (Sexton 34; Dickinson 170).  One of the things I always hate about fairytales is the idea that just because {her prince finally came to save her} the princess automatically loves and marries him, like in Rapunzel the prince and Rapunzel find each other and “they lived happily ever after as you might expect” (Sexton 42).  Like in Puss in Boots where Puss lies to get his friend into the King’s carriage, {it was a trick but the clock truck twelve} like the peasant in The Little Peasant who the Miller’s wife never saw as being a threat being the parson’s downfall, characters in fairytales need to learn to tie up loose ends and {build your house brick by boring brick/or the wolf’s gonna blow it down}.  Like Briar Rose with her slumber, Anne Sexton {built up a world of magic/because your real life is tragic} to get the memories of being “passed hand to hand” out of her mind (Sexton 112). 

But is there a glimmer of hope?  For me, it came in The Maiden with No Hands.  The ending of the poem, once the King has fasted like “Mahatma Gandhi” “seven years in the woods” waiting for them to return, they did (Sexton 84).  To me, this shows love, like Emily Dickinson’s pain as a language of love poems do.  You have to really love someone to go to the woods alone for several years and not eat a thing.  Together, as a family, “they returned to the castle” (Sexton 85).  Even though there is a darker undertone to the poem, in that the King kept her as “a talisman” or as his “luck” I still hold onto the fact that at the end of the poem he keeps his wife and child, even though they aren’t damage shields for him as they’re whole beings now (Sexton 85).  For once, love appears to have conquered its opposition. 

The Dangers of Love

My head is like an ITunes jukebox full of music ready to play for any situation.  For American Lit this week, one song specifically came to mind:  ‘What is Love’.  After all our talks in class about violence and love, lyrics like ‘What is love/baby don’t hurt me/don’t hurt me no more’ just followed naturally.

Writers like Edgar Allen Poe and his ‘zombie women’ prove the dangers that can often lie dormant in a relationship where love reigns.  In the relationships the narrators in Berenice, Ligeia, and Morella not even the old adage ‘love conquers all’ could survive.  One of the questions Suzanne listed at the beginning of the class was ‘Is love rational?’ After the readings we’ve done in the last two weeks the only logical response can be a resounding no.

In my opinion, all love does some kind of damage to the people it ensnares.  At the very least, love can make people blind to the faults of the person they’re with, either for a short time while the bliss of being in a new relationship is still in bloom or throughout the entirety of their time together.  As much as I hate to say it, I can see parallels between Poe’s twisted narrators and some of the relationships I’ve been in during my lifetime, usually placing me on the same pedestal at the narrator and not the unfortunate brides.  Several of my first relationships began under dubious circumstances where I couldn’t “for my soul, remember how, or precisely where, I first became acquainted” with the boy in question (Poe 569).  Dating in through middle school and high school what I knew some of the people I dated very well, others not very well at all.  Like Wendy in The Shining I stayed with people who were emotionally, but not physically, abusive to me at times.  I put up with a “best friend” for a number of years who once kicked me in the arm hard enough to bruise just because I changed the radio station off a song he liked that I didn’t.  Like the narrator who states “a recollection flashes upon me that I have never know the paternal name of her who was my friend and betrothed” there were things I simply didn’t know about certain people I dated that I probably should have made it a point to find out before dating them such as middle names or what they were allergic to, though never anything as drastic as not knowing someone’s last name (Poe 569).  I grew bored in certain relationships as the narrator in Morella does who “longed with an earnest and consuming desire for the moment of Morella’s demise” (Poe 588).  My boyfriends no doubt painfully “conscious of my weakness or my folly” that led me to sabotage my own relationships, find faults in them that may never have even been there and leave them before they could hurt me (Poe 588).  It would be too easy to blame my fears of abandonment and commitment on my absent father and have it at that, but I know that would be partially a lie.  Almost every man in my life, be it father, friend, or boyfriend, has shown me I’m nearly impossible to want to stay with for long, that after a time they could “no longer bear” to be near me (Poe 588).  They left, one by one, two or so friends returning and standing fast since then.  Around high school I decided to stop waiting for everyone to leave and counterattack – I would leave first.  I’ve broken up with every boyfriend I’ve ever had save one.  I’ve lived my life as a pessimist with the theory that “the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies which are, have their origin in the ecstacies [sic] which might have been” (Poe 581).

The female character to which I most relate, I think, would be Ligeia.  Once upon a time I dated a boy (names with asterisks have been changed for the sake of privacy) was named Paul*.  There was nothing really that special about him except that he was a perfectly ordinary straight edge boy from our tiny high school town.  Like Ligeia, I was significantly more intelligent than my partner, which created a fair share of distance between us the longer we dated.  I couldn’t have known the crazy the lay beneath the surface of Paul’s seemingly-normal façade.  When we dated, he did everything in his power to keep me away from my other male friends because he thought I was spending too much time talking to my guy friends and he wanted me to myself.  By the time I actually managed to corner one of my guy friends to inquire why they were all avoiding me, Gabe*told me he’d threatened they to stay away from me.  As a counterattack I started spending hours a day ignoring him talking purely to my best female friends, merely hoping he would get the point and realize how crazy he was being.  Instead, he started doing the same thing to my female friends.  All in all, he wanted me to himself.  Creepy much?  Needless to say that relationship didn’t last long – although instead of emaciating myself to death like Ligeia did, I broke up with him in an elevator in Disney world.  Happiest place on Earth just got a little less shiny for me, let me tell you.

This gives me the perfect segue into my next topic:  Disney set our generation up to fail when it came to love.  In class we talked about how we’re taught to look for the perfect relationship like our favorite characters had growing up.  We were shown as little girls that once you’ve found your Prince Charming who would fight your dragons or scale your towers to save you that everything would be happily ever after.  Is it any wonder the divorce rate is so high when people have been taught that love conquers all your problems?  When things get tough, when the fairytale honeymoon period of a relationship ends and reality begins again, people can’t cope.  If the happiness and butterflies die, people don’t know what to do.  More people need to reevaluate their opinions of what love should be, and of whom they should be looking for.  We can’t all marry Prince Charming and be whisked off to rule a country.  We all want our fairytale, our happily ever after, the stuff of songs and poetry.  We all want to know if we’ll get our perfect ending, just like the girl in the song ‘Happily Ever After’ by He Is We:

Some fairytale analysts say that stories like Cinderella are bad for kids.  They say behind all the magic and hoping “you are left with a tale of wishes-come-true-regardless,” to which one analysts responded “If that were so, wouldn’t we all be married to princes” (Dundes 303)***.  Further, characters like Cinderella that most of us grew up with are perfect examples of “insipid beauties waiting for Prince Charming” which presents “the majority of American children with the wrong dream” (Dundes 303)***.  I agree – when I was a child, I didn’t dream of career success, but of a husband who may or may not have been a prince.  My views, thankful, had changed.  Waiting for a Charming Prince sounds so tiring.

 For me, I’ve changed my ideals of love so many times I don’t even know where they began and how they’re going to end.  When I came to college, the last thing I wanted was to look for a boyfriend.  Sure, I noticed a few people I thought were cute or that I might be capable of being interested in, but I’d given up the ideal I’d held all through high school – to find someone I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.  I’d reached a point where looking for the ideal partner was tiring me out and the lyrics from the song ‘Dogs Days Are Over’ by Florence + the Machine started to feel like they applied to my life: Leave all your loving, your longing behind/You can’t carry it with you if you want to survive.  Love, and the search for it, was wearing me out and killing me slowly with longing for the perfect person who would make everything that had ever been bad in my life worth the pain.  But as I entered college, I made the decision to change and let go of my Fairytale dreams, my secret Disney princess complex, in favor of being single.  If I found love, I found it, but I was done looking for love and a boyfriend. 

                In class, we talked about how people needed to give up their ideals about what love should be in order to find it: and that’s exactly what happened to me.  I gave up on ever finding the perfect man to love me and make it all better, and then found my boyfriend.  Or, more accurately, was introduced to him by one of my closest friends that I’ve made here at Otterbein.  Love, clearly, is best left to chance.  Looking for it is like looking for a rainbow when it’s not even raining – you’ll find imitations and man-made ones, but never the real deal.  I think Beth said it best when she said “Love simply is.”

Can we ignore the obvious grief the narrators in Poe’s writing go through, though?  Grief and what happens after death is something that I feel varies not only from one religion to another or one culture to the next, but from person to person.  In history, different peoples from all around the world had all manners of strange customs relating to death.  In some cultures, there is a “prohibition against uttering the name of the dead person” for mourners (Freud 54)*.  Even stranger to me, it used to be the practice that “if the name of the dead man happened to be the same as that of an animal or common object, some tribes think it necessary to give these animals or objects new names, so that the use of the former names shall not recall the dead man to memory” (Freud 55)*.  Queen Victoria had a hobby of "collecting dead flowers taken from the grraves of deceased royals" which started when she took "some that grew on her late husband Albert's last resting place and it jsut sort of took off from there" (Shaw 191).  All cultures have their own customs on how grieving should or can proceed.  For example, the Catholic side of my family holds big wakes and funerals with large dinners afterwards.  Not being Catholic myself (and I apologize to any offended family that might read this) and not being able to see anything as somber as a funeral as a social event, I don’t grieve the same way most of my extended family does, such as they did when my Nana passed this summer.  I won’t lie – I was disgusted.  Everyone seemed so excited to see each other when we were at the church waiting for the funeral to start like they were at my graduation or at birthday parties.  It took everything I had in me not to strangle someone.  Most people only act on emotions when someone dies, and sometimes people forget that this means others will react different.  While most of my family wanted to talk about their grief, I wanted let alone.  I needed to handle it on my own time, and in fact the final blog didn't come for me until I got back to college and found a picture of my Nana and me in my computer files.  Grief is something you can't force onto someone, "people find their own level of involvment and should do so voluntarily" (Kubler-Ross 93).  In the same way, the characters in Poe’s zombie bride stories all grieve their losses in different – yet disturbing if you ask me – ways.  Below I have posted a music video by Panic! At the Disco called ‘The Ballad of Mona Lisa”.  The video - which also contains a fantastic song if you ask me – is centered on a traditional Irish wake ceremony as the setting. 

        Memories, like love, are violent in the things they do to their owners.  In The Shining, Jack seems to be haunted with the memories of times he’s lost his temper, something the Overlook taps into when it leaves him the scrapbook and alcohol showing him his failings.  Through the book we learn of times he’s lost his temper which come up repetitively.  He’s haunted especially by the memory of what he did to Danny.  His son is haunted by memories that will come to be shown to him by Tony when he’s waiting for his father to get home from the job interview at the beginning of the book.  Danny is also haunted by the word divorce ingrained into his memories from his parent’s thoughts.

               One thing both The Shining and the works by Poe we’ve been reading have most in common is their commentaries on the dangers of domestic tyranny.  As the ‘head of the family’, Jack feels he has to provide for his family.  Feeling like she didn’t have anywhere else to go if she left Jack and thinking that Danny loved his father more than her, Wendy stayed with him even after he broke Danny’s arm.  When Danny and Wendy had locked Jack up, he shouts for Danny to “mind your daddy” and “open this door or I’ll bash your fucking brains in” keeping the terror he’d be wreaking on his family while the hotel possessed him alive (King 378).  In Ligeia, not only are her eyes fetish objects over which he obsesses, but his possessive love actually seems to contribute to her wasting away.  As Jacqlyn so aptly put it in class, “he was feeding off her rather than she was starving herself” then comes back to haunt him, her ‘resurrection’ a final rebellion from a repressed woman.  

               At the times we were reading these pieces for class, I was also reading Rainbow Boys by Alex Sanchez for GLBTQ book club.  In the book, Jason’s dad is a perfect example of domestic tyranny.  A drunk, foul, violent man, Jason’s father dominates over his mother who at the beginning of the book is quite meek, breaks Jason’s things like his radio, and in one scene even tries to hurt Jason.  In real life, domestic tyranny is still alive and well just like it was in Poe’s time.  Domestic violence is still a huge problem worldwide.  In high school, my best friend Daisy* was dating a boy I didn’t like.  I thought he was a dumbass, too immature, but not exactly a bad guy.  She always defended him when I spoke badly about him, so a lot of the time we didn’t discuss their relationship.  Once they broke up, she confessed he’d actually been hitting her and that she’s been so ‘in love with him’ (totally Stockholm syndrome if you ask me) she hadn’t been able to bear leaving him.  Thankfully I’ve never been in a physically abusive relationship, but I have been in some emotionally damaging relationships and verbally abusive friendships.  And yet, instead of staying, I found a way to leave these people.  I feel horrible for people like Wendy in The Shining who feel like they can’t leave.  What could be worse than being trapped by an obsessive, possessive, abusive ‘love’?

* Quote taken from Totem and Taboo by Sigmund Freud

** Quotes taken from Death: The Final Stage of Growth by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

*** Quote taken from Cinderella: A Casebook by Alan Dunges

Bloodsuckers and perversity? Sign me up!

As a culture, no one can say we aren’t attracted to the occult.  Whether its rip your throat out werewolves or hard core guts and gore blood suckers, we love creatures of the night even though if we really met one in a dark alley, rather than throw ourselves at it, we’d probably piss ourselves and cry for our Mommies.  But it’s not just these classic monsters we run towards – look at movies like ‘Saw’ or ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’.  What do these have in common, besides the fact that they both have the capacity to make us pee our pants in fear?  It all comes down to two words:  perversity and darkness.

Perversity seems to be Edgar Allen Poe’s stomping ground.  If there’s a norm to our society, Poe probably found a way to turn it on its head in a piece of fiction or a poem.  Cruelty is a facet of human existence, and yet as long as you don’t step over a certain line, we usually accept cruelty.  For example, an older brother can beat on a younger brother, but if we hurt an animal people consider that crossing a line.  I’m not saying either is acceptable, but that I find it strange we have rules on how much and what kinds of cruelty come with certain results.  For example, there’s a difference between manslaughter and attempted manslaughter.  In the first case, you were outright evil and took someone’s life, but in the second since you only attempted it but didn’t succeed, there’s a less severe punishment.  Personally, in this case, I want the punishment to be the same.  Even if you didn’t succeed, you tried to take someone’s life and that’s just unacceptable.  Poe thought everyone was capable of cruelty, and I think he’s right.  There’s a certain thrill or adrenaline rush that comes from being bad or doing something you know is wrong.  In this way human beings are perverse.  We as a society have a set of morays or laws that tell us what we can and can’t do, but we get a primal urge and pleasure out of doing wrong to others or to animals.  In The Black Cat, the narrator says he hung the cat “because I knew I was committing a deadly sin” (Poe 205).  As a general rule, human beings try not to commit such deadly sins “that would so jeopardize my immortal soul” where it would be “beyond the reach of infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God” (Poe 205).  Here, the narrator does wrong just to do wrong, because he can.  If that’s not perverse, I don’t know what is!

Now I’ll offer you up a song as a modern retelling of The Black Cat:

The first verse sets up the story just like the original version does: Close up camera one/The hero sings in this scene/The boy that gets the girl gets to go home where they get married/But stop the tape,/The sunset still looks fake to me/The hero looks like he can't breathe.  In the beginning of The Black Cat, everything looks normal and happy for the couple.  They’re married, living together in their own little world.  As we read on we realize he’s a drinker, and cruel to animals, not the perfect hero of the story we’d been hoping for – although if you looked for a hero in Poe’s writing, you’re bound to be disappointed.  The first two lines of the chorus are meant directly for Pluto: You're like a black cat with a black back pack full of fireworks/And you're gonna burn the city down right now.  The house of the narrator in the story catches fire after he hangs the cat, and the narrator suspects the cat of having some supernatural hand in everything that happened, including the “figure of a gigantic cat” burned into the wall that didn’t cave in (Poe 205).  In this way, he feels Pluto was trying to sabotage and haunt him.  Next comes the words: Oh close up camera two/ Cause the hero dies in this scene/ Your inspiration is the loss of absolutely everything/ And flashback on the girl/As we montage every memory.  Going back to the beginning of the short story, the narrator says “to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburden my soul” after which he flashes back to everything that happens to him, starting at infancy and ending with the reason he’s made to die (Poe 203).  If you ask me, Mayday Parade must have had one strong love for Edgar Allen Poe to write this song they way they did.

As a culture we submit to darkness, whether that is real or something fictional.  We often link love with violence, romance with danger, just like the narrator in The Black Cat does when he hangs the cat he professed he loved.  Creatures of the night like Dracula (including most of his retellings and reinventions) are portrayed as being suave and sexy, as well as powerful and terrifying.  We want him to bite us, to sink fangs into us and make the ecstasy we feel watching him come true.  He doesn’t even need magical or supernatural powers to draw him to us anymore – we’ve romanticized and sexualized him so much all he has to do is offer his hand and he’d have an entire room full of woman fighting to be the one he takes.  Look for a second at the film ‘Dracula 2000’ starring Gerard Butler – whom I might interject is my favorite portrayal of Dracula yet, and damn fine while he does it.  The tagline to the movie on the cover of the VHS – yes, it’s that old – says ‘The Most Seductive Evil of All Time Has Now Been Unleashed in Ours’.  And even though that should be terrifying, I have no doubt in my mind millions of women who went to see the movie were practically begging to be his next victim.

In the background of all I’ve said, the thought of free will has been floating waiting to be confronted.  Why do we as a society love what can be worst for us?  Why do we enjoy the perverse?  Because we have free will, and in doing so tend to abuse it.  Look at addictions of any kind.  We have the free will to start using heroin or meth like Nikki Sixx from Mötley Crüe did.  For now, he’ll be my example while I talk about free will, addiction, and degrees of addiction.  A while back, I read a book by Nikki Sixx called The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of Rock Star which was basically his diary from when his band was big chronicling his usage of drugs and what that did to him.  A lot of the things we talked about in class were in the book, including the degrees of addiction and how that affects how much of continued use of a drug is free will as opposed to addiction taking the choice away from you.  In the beginning of the book, Nikki talks about how he could stop using drugs if he wanted to, and that he wasn’t using the top ones like heroin because he knew they could really fuck a person up.  Yet, the longer he does drugs, the more desperate he becomes, and the worse drugs he’ll try. 

By the time he starts using heroin, he’s given up trying to say he’s in control of his addiction.  Instead of being for recreational use, he relied on the drugs just to get through the day without having to feel the pains of withdrawals.  How much of his addiction was really his fault?  While he chose to do drugs, as a celebrity he had them shoved in his face at all times, and when on tour needed to keep using so he could keep playing well for his fans rather than try to go clean on the road.  For an addict, rehab is illogical, while to the rest of us it makes sense.  For them, their lives can rely heavily on getting that next hit to get through the day, celebrity or no.  As an addict the drug becomes who you are, like a twisted identity you can’t get rid of no matter how hard you try – the drugs are in control.  It takes someone else stepping in most times for an addict to seek help of any kind, because stuck in their monomania they never realize just how bad the drugs are for them.  All they feel is the high they can’t imagine living without, hiding behind their rose colored glasses.  I’m glad Nikki Sixx got his glasses knocked off – he’s quite a great lyricist and musician if you ask me, regardless of how fucked up I think his choices were.

The ramblings of heroin addicts and other addicts seems crazy to me, and yet, crazy is yet another facet of our society we can’t escape.  How many of us have said something along the lines of “I must be going crazy” when things don’t seem to add up in our heads the way we once thought they did?  I know I’ve said that very sentence and questioned my sanity on many different occasions personally.  Just the other day I made a huge mistake, and in overreacting in the midst of a panic attack I almost lost my very best friend – if you’re reading this, which I’m sure you are, I totally love you babe J.  In a fit of emotion, I told my best friend that I was leaving him, because I thought that was what he wanted and needed me to do.  Obviously, he freaked out about it, and a very confusing few days followed.  While we managed to patch things back up with minimal hurt feelings and a lot of learning about each other between the two of us, the entire time we were talking rationally to each other about what had happened and what had been said, all I could think about was how crazy I must have been to have thought he wanted me out of his life.  Now that things are cleared up I can look back and roll my eyes at myself, but then what I had done seemed rational.  Is that the real core of insanity then – does there have to be a rational basis at the center for all the crazy to manifest itself around?  What do you think?  Have you ever been in a situation that at the time seemed rational but upon reflection didn’t anymore?

In The Tell-Tale Heart, the narrator isn’t shown to us as the other one is in The Black Cat.  Instead of trying to justify his crimes, the narrator in this tale is more preoccupied with assuring us that he was sane.  At the beginning of the tale, the narrator questions “why will you say that I am mad” like there’s a big miscommunication on our parts (Poe 199).  Maybe it’s just me, but no one that can kill a man purely because he has a glass eye can be anything but crazy.  For the rest of the story he tried to put up a good argument to make us think he’s not crazy.  For me, I saw his craziest moment to be his sudden confession.  I can’t help but wonder what this says about me as a person – that I could look passed how insane his reasons were for killing the old man and the murder itself to say that his nuttiest moment was turning himself in unexpectedly.  Maybe Poe was right when he said there was cruelty and insanity inside all of us - just a little food for thought.