So, I confess. I love Tim Tebow! I've been one of his staunch supporters from the get-go, since last year when we first got to see him play. I've consistently ignored the critics dogging him left and right. I was uber ticked that the Broncos didn't let him play more last year simply because he's so fun to watch. Plus, I love his work ethic, the fact that he sets a good example for kids, and that he doesn't engage in the petty trash-talk so prevalent in the world of sports. A lot of people hate him for his outspoken religious beliefs, but kudos to him for it. I'd rather see an athlete kneeling on the sidelines praying than some douche-nozzle doing the chicken dance in the end zone. Even Bill Cosby has given him a ringing endorsement!
But, love for Tebow aside, I don't hate Kyle Orton either. It made me feel bad when Denver fans booed him off the field. He's a good guy, and although he just didn't do well with us, I hope when his hand heals he has better success in Kansas City. Sort of. Give me a break, people, KC is one of our division rivals! But I hope he has the chance to be an awesome quarterback on par with Peyton Manning and Tom Brady. He deserves it. Still, here's something funny that a local Colorado Springs man put together:
Thursday, December 8, 2011
Monday, December 5, 2011
'Tis The Season to be a Douchebag
So, the Christmas season is officially in full swing, and already I want to hide under my bed until New Year's. Mainly, I've noticed that the commercialism and consumerism of the holidays have this uncanny ability to turn people into douchebags. It starts on Black Friday, and doesn't end until January 1st.
Let me backtrack a bit. Last week, I went to Wal-mart, not to participate in the piranha feeding frenzy that is Black Friday, but to buy food. Groceries. You know, the stuff you eat to survive because you actually need it? There, I was jostled and pushed without so much as an "excuse me," "pardon me," etc. People descended on the goodies for sale like a swarm of locusts devouring a crop. They were hateful towards each other, especially if someone encroached on "their" territory. I swear, anthropologists would have a field day studying this phenomenon because it was Darwinism at its finest. People had reverted to an animal state. It boggled my mind!
So I made my way to Layaway, and there, the poor cashier was frazzled. She's a nice lady. I know this because I've gone through her check-out lane before, and she's always friendly and sociable. But that day, she looked like she had just survived a week in a Lord of the Flies boot-camp. Having worked in the shoe department at Sears once upon a time, and after seeing the madness in the rest of the store, I understood her pain. So, I was friendly to her. You should always be friendly to people, even to people who work in jobs that you think are beneath you, because they have to deal with your obnoxious ass, okay? Anyway, I was friendly to her and over the course of our conversation, she tells me that Black Friday wouldn't be so bad if customers weren't such jerks. But, she said to me, she had been there for nearly twelve hours, and in all that time nobody told her thank you, nobody said please, and it was just gimme, gimme, gimme all day long. People treated her like dung beneath their shoes. Remembering my time working Black Friday, I knew she was telling the truth. People are complete and utter assholes on Black Friday.
I had never considered it before, but one of my friends pointed out that this step backwards in human evolution takes place the day after Thanksgiving. Think about that. The day after we supposedly give thanks for all that we have, we find ourselves pepper spraying people in the face just to buy tons of crap that we don't have. And if you enjoy participating in this insanity, you can't possibly convince me that you're having fun. I saw the looks on peoples' faces. That wasn't a look of enjoyment. That was a look of someone intent on their mission. It was like they were the soldiers caught in downtown Mogadishu right after the chopper crashes in Black Hawk Down, okay? For Christ's sake, literally, Christmas shopping should not be a blood sport!
I might not be inclined to gripe so much if this were confined to Black Friday, but the truth of the matter is, this insanity continues until December 31st. I was at Sam's Club today, and the cashier there had a similar story. Rude douche nozzles had run her ragged from the moment she clocked in. Someone even tried to say they gave her more money than they really did because they didn't want to pay for their entire grocery bill. But eavesdropping on the fellow shoppers, I realized people don't just treat strangers with so much hatred. They treat family that way too. "No, I said two!" a woman screeched at her husband, who was grabbing a 4-pack of butter.
What the hell is wrong with you people?
Do you all even remember what this time of the year is supposed to be about? Christmas. Okay, let me spell it out for you. The birth of Christ. Our Lord and Savior. The guy who preached peace. The guy who preached that we should love our neighbor. I can only imagine the look of staunch horror on his face when he sees the animal savagery that ensues every year, and in his name!
This is the time of the year, now more than the rest of the year, I would argue, that we're supposed to be kind to each other and remember life's blessings. We should be drinking hot cocoa, playing board games, watching cheesy feel-good Christmas movies as a family. We should be giving money or time to those who are less fortunate. We should smile and ask a weary cashier at Wal-mart how their day is going. Scoff if you wish, but a little ounce of kindness and compassion can really make a difference in someone's life. Even if they're a stranger. I think that, more than anything, embodies the things Jesus stood for. It sure as hell wasn't clotheslining a person for an iPad 2. So, here's a reminder about what Christmas is really about:
Let me backtrack a bit. Last week, I went to Wal-mart, not to participate in the piranha feeding frenzy that is Black Friday, but to buy food. Groceries. You know, the stuff you eat to survive because you actually need it? There, I was jostled and pushed without so much as an "excuse me," "pardon me," etc. People descended on the goodies for sale like a swarm of locusts devouring a crop. They were hateful towards each other, especially if someone encroached on "their" territory. I swear, anthropologists would have a field day studying this phenomenon because it was Darwinism at its finest. People had reverted to an animal state. It boggled my mind!
So I made my way to Layaway, and there, the poor cashier was frazzled. She's a nice lady. I know this because I've gone through her check-out lane before, and she's always friendly and sociable. But that day, she looked like she had just survived a week in a Lord of the Flies boot-camp. Having worked in the shoe department at Sears once upon a time, and after seeing the madness in the rest of the store, I understood her pain. So, I was friendly to her. You should always be friendly to people, even to people who work in jobs that you think are beneath you, because they have to deal with your obnoxious ass, okay? Anyway, I was friendly to her and over the course of our conversation, she tells me that Black Friday wouldn't be so bad if customers weren't such jerks. But, she said to me, she had been there for nearly twelve hours, and in all that time nobody told her thank you, nobody said please, and it was just gimme, gimme, gimme all day long. People treated her like dung beneath their shoes. Remembering my time working Black Friday, I knew she was telling the truth. People are complete and utter assholes on Black Friday.
I had never considered it before, but one of my friends pointed out that this step backwards in human evolution takes place the day after Thanksgiving. Think about that. The day after we supposedly give thanks for all that we have, we find ourselves pepper spraying people in the face just to buy tons of crap that we don't have. And if you enjoy participating in this insanity, you can't possibly convince me that you're having fun. I saw the looks on peoples' faces. That wasn't a look of enjoyment. That was a look of someone intent on their mission. It was like they were the soldiers caught in downtown Mogadishu right after the chopper crashes in Black Hawk Down, okay? For Christ's sake, literally, Christmas shopping should not be a blood sport!
I might not be inclined to gripe so much if this were confined to Black Friday, but the truth of the matter is, this insanity continues until December 31st. I was at Sam's Club today, and the cashier there had a similar story. Rude douche nozzles had run her ragged from the moment she clocked in. Someone even tried to say they gave her more money than they really did because they didn't want to pay for their entire grocery bill. But eavesdropping on the fellow shoppers, I realized people don't just treat strangers with so much hatred. They treat family that way too. "No, I said two!" a woman screeched at her husband, who was grabbing a 4-pack of butter.
What the hell is wrong with you people?
Do you all even remember what this time of the year is supposed to be about? Christmas. Okay, let me spell it out for you. The birth of Christ. Our Lord and Savior. The guy who preached peace. The guy who preached that we should love our neighbor. I can only imagine the look of staunch horror on his face when he sees the animal savagery that ensues every year, and in his name!
This is the time of the year, now more than the rest of the year, I would argue, that we're supposed to be kind to each other and remember life's blessings. We should be drinking hot cocoa, playing board games, watching cheesy feel-good Christmas movies as a family. We should be giving money or time to those who are less fortunate. We should smile and ask a weary cashier at Wal-mart how their day is going. Scoff if you wish, but a little ounce of kindness and compassion can really make a difference in someone's life. Even if they're a stranger. I think that, more than anything, embodies the things Jesus stood for. It sure as hell wasn't clotheslining a person for an iPad 2. So, here's a reminder about what Christmas is really about:
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Lightning
June 6
When I told Dr. Thurzo I was grudgingly starting this journal, he smiled and encouraged me.
“That’s a great idea, Elizabeth,” he said. “Journals can help you work things out. I’m glad you finally see it my way.”
Lord knows he’s right and I need all the help I can get. My memory’s shot. It’s all jumbled in my brain and is difficult to pry out. Most days, I can’t even remember breakfast! Not that I’d want to remember bland, scrambled Egg-Beaters and soggy toast. But I’d like to get out of this dump if at all possible, and the only way to do that is play ball with Dr. Thurzo.
I was struck by lightning once, the day after my father disappeared. He was the first of a long string of disappearances. My rich and powerful suitors seemed to vanish as well. But Daddy was the first.
I don’t remember much of what came before.
The tremendous surge of energy through the body short circuits the brain, and most never fully recover from the trauma of being struck. Sometimes it causes mental illness.
My mother said once, before she died of cancer, that you have a better chance of winning the lottery than being struck by lightning, and if you are struck, God is probably angry at you.
After I was struck, I researched case studies of my fellow victims. The outlook is not good. Lightning has a way of messing up people for life, creating living hell for those who survive.
God is good to punish me.
June 7
Today, after the ward’s daily thorazine shuffle, Dr. Thurzo came up to me and told me to write about Daddy.
But I can’t.
Blurred images of him melt together in my mind and confound me to distraction. I struggle to make sense of what I see, but the frenzied colors and shapes escape reason, kind of like a Picasso painting. My long term memories are better, but they are fleeting and fast, like they are mere flashes of lightning. I feel like a victim of Alzheimer’s who may never recover.
June 9
Dr. Thurzo’s on my ass to write about Daddy again, and he said if I don’t try harder this time, he’s gonna force me to stay in my room for a week, and I won’t even be allowed out for group therapy.
So here it goes.
Daddy went missing the day before I was struck. I remember that pretty well, but it’s the only thing. It seems to me that the whole world flipped out because he was gone. I guess that makes sense. When the owner and CEO of Bathory Inc. – the same Bathory Inc. that makes most of your common household items like soap, bathroom and kitchen cleaners, aspirin, etc. – drops off the face of the earth, all of Wall Street flips out and stock values plummet.
How can one man be so important?
Daddy had a few friends, and a lot of enemies, but none so threatening as me.
He made sure that I’d be his worst enemy when Mother died. His midnight invasions of my room saw to that. He had a way of taking what didn’t belong to him.
The night he vanished, he snuck into my room during an ominous thunderstorm. The world felt like it was ending. In retrospect, maybe it was beginning.
Anyway, the next morning, he was gone and I was in the field above Bathory Manor, covered in mud.
Most of my memories about him bleed together and only a few things stand out. Dr. Thurzo insists this is normal and that I should be more patient with myself. After all, it’s been seventeen years since I was struck and he disappeared.
Easy for him to say. His success in this cluster-fucked hospital doesn’t depend on his powers of recollection.
When I try to think of Daddy in the days before he vanished, I see nothing but him creeping towards me, the lightning outside wild and angry.
June 10
A man came to see me during Activities Hour. He reminded me of Matthias, that self-important son-of-a-bitch. Out of the blue, he sat down at my chess game and ran his hands delicately over the black pawns. Matthias liked to do things like that. He liked to touch all my pictures, my knick-knacks, my books. He had no sense of boundaries.
This guy even looked like him, with those slanted coyote eyes taking in everything and missing nothing.
When he identified himself as Matthias, I almost lunged at him, but Dr. Thurzo was watching, so I behaved. But I knew he was lying. Matthias didn’t have gray hair.
He wanted to see how I was doing, as if he knew me. His condescension annoyed me, so I banished him from me.
Matthias or no, I wouldn’t suffer another would-be suitor who thought he actually knew me. And if he did know me, he would know I drew my line in the sand against all men seventeen years ago!
Moron.
And just who the hell do I talk to about this lax visitation policy?
June 11
That guy’s visit yesterday got me thinking of Matthias again. He started coming around Bathory Manor the day after Daddy vanished. He was always poking around the place, looking at my family’s stuff like he was gonna get it all someday. All my suitors were like that. Only interested in money. Or power. Or sex. Or any perverse combination thereof.
Matthias was especially fascinated by my family pictures. He would pick up a frame and stare intently at it for several minutes, as if he was trying to solve a puzzle.
He asked a lot of questions, feigning interest in my life. Damn man always insisted on acting like a bloodhound on the hunt.
I wouldn’t even have let him come around, but some part of me kind of liked his routine visits. I saw lightning in his eyes and heard thunder in his words.
I wanted to play with him the way Daddy played with me. I still do.
Matthias never realized that I’m a lot like my daddy. If he saw something he wanted – land, political support, women – he’d reach out and take it. He’d squash out any competition and wipe out any adversity. I am no different.
I lost track of how many times he snuck into my room at night and forced me to submit to his will while the servants pretended like they didn’t know.
I fought, like a wildcat he used to say, but he always won. Daddy was just too strong. He was just a better conqueror.
But if nothing else, I am his child.
June 12
There was a nasty thunderstorm today, and I thought of the day I was hit by lightning. I remember how they found me in the vast field behind Bathory Manor. I’ve been told I was caked with reddish mud and laying half-conscious in the long yellow grass sporting unusual burns on my fingers, with white residue singeing the edges, the skin melted like candle wax.
My senses, all five, were in and out, drifting, like the ocean tides.
But I remember the bolt clearly, how it entered uninvited and coursed through me, probing every vein and organ, caressing me in the rain, conquering me, holding me paralyzed in its jagged clutches before it finally exploded out of my feet.
I blinked once, and I vaguely saw Matthias standing over me. My eyes had trouble focusing, and his voice was garbled, like I was underwater.
I struggled to speak, but at last I croaked: “Call 911.” Blink. Now a slew of paramedics crowded around me, hooking me up to EKG monitors and blood pressure cuffs and several other gizmos I couldn’t identify if I tried. I remember my skin the most, how delicate it was, how it burned to the touch like I had the worst sunburn of my life.
June 14
Today I sat at my bedroom window and stared through the meshed wire embedded in the glass at another raging thunderstorm. The lightning entranced me. I traced its path down the sky using the photo-negative burn it left on my retinas.
Last night, I watched a show on the Discovery Channel about lightning. Scientists used slow motion cameras to capture the birth of a lightning bolt, and found it puts tentative feelers, faint preludes to the real bolt, down before it strikes. The feelers look for a streamer on the ground to connect with, and when it makes a connection, the bolt races in all its glory to the earth. Survivors of lightning strikes are human streamers, not victims of God’s wrath like Mother had said.
I long to be a streamer again.
June 17
Nurse Ratchet – her real name’s Denise but she’s a bitch so I call her Nurse Ratchet – almost took away my journal because I screamed that I didn’t want to take my meds today.
I hate her. She hates me. She really hates that I call her Nurse Ratchet, which is almost funny because I thought she was too stupid to get my inference.
Someday, I’m gonna show her the white light I’m made of.
Anna, my live-in nurse back in the days after I was first struck, was like a mother to me who nurtured me back to health. She certainly wasn’t the domineering cow I have to put up with now.
Once, a long time ago, she was scrubbing the master bathroom adjacent to my bedroom. It got terribly dirty fast, and she was always perplexed by my ability to muck it up. It did seem to
be smeared with reddish mud a lot. But that couldn’t be helped. I was constantly trekking around the northern field where only weeds grow, toting heavy shovels around, and my shoes and clothes always got caked in sludge. It’s difficult digging holes to plant things.
Anna had emerged from the bathroom holding up a bar of purple and white striped soap.
“Can you explain to me why this is half brown?” she had asked and I shrugged at her.
“Probably mud.”
“I don’t think so,” she argued with me. “It’s awfully red. It looks like rust.”
“How many rusty things do I come in contact with in a day?” I had asked.
Now she shrugged. “Matthias is very interested in you,” she said.
“And?” “Well, it’s just that one of my friends had to deal with him, and she says he’s like the Energizer Bunny because he never quits.”
I didn’t answer her.
She was right. He was persistent.
But streamers reach out of the ground like electrical arms to grab for the bolt. I was a streamer. If Matthias was the Energizer Bunny, I was energy itself.
June 19
All those years ago, I found a taser in my toolbox of all places, and it didn’t belong to me. At least, I don’t remember it belonging to me. And what a strange tool it was. It made controlled lightning. It was like a streamer, or at least it was capable of making me a streamer. I liked wielding all that power.
June 20
I started my period today, and Nurse Ratchet, huffing and puffing in her usual blow-hard fashion, made it abundantly clear how inconvenienced she was by me.
It was like the time Anna, who had been gathering up my laundry from the hamper in the bathroom, came out clutching my jeans. Her face was terse, like she was somewhere between annoyed and angry.
“For God’s sake, Elizabeth! I understand that a woman’s period can come unexpectedly sometimes. But at least soak your clothes in cold water so they don’t stain! Or at least tell me and I’ll pre-treat them. It’s going to be a miracle if I can get this all out.”
I sighed. “I’m sorry, Anna.”
“Look at all this blood,” she muttered. “I think I should make an appointment with the doctor for you because I don’t think that’s normal.”
She stormed out, clutching my muddy, bloody jeans, grumbling about pre-treating them.
June 25
When there’s a thunderstorm during my sleep, I have nightmares. I know the lightning causes them because that’s the only time I dream. And I always dream of Daddy.
The smell of the storm somehow mingles with my brain and triggers thoughts of him. The fresh, electrical scent of ozone smells like his aftershave.
Then I see him, opening my door in the dead of night when everyone else is sleeping and creeping in uninvited. He did that the night before he disappeared, and I begged God to make him go away. But he creeps to my bed anyway and rips down my covers like a serial killer. I scream.
Then I wake up, drenched in sweat and unable to go back to sleep.
June 26
I remember I fell asleep at night. It was one of the few times. And the sky stormed so obnoxiously that it woke me up. Confused, I wandered around my big, drafty house and made my way to the basement. There, on my workbench, I made a troublesome discovery: used syringes stained with blood.
They were long, thick needles, the most diabolical needles man ever invented for giving shots. They had to be used for something sinister, something like shooting heroin.
I banished Matthias from my house permanently. I knew he had to be the one who brought the needles in. Besides Anna and me, he was the only one who’d visited Bathory Manor since Daddy vanished, and I trusted Anna.
He raised an eyebrow at me and left without argument, but I knew he’d be back, men always come back, just like Daddy.
June 28
There was a thunderstorm today. The monsoon season must be here at last. I took my usual spot by the window, the wire-meshed glass obstructing my view, and stared out as always.
There, I saw my father; as the blinding lightning crashed violently into the earth, over and over, I thought I saw him caged behind the jagged streaks. It wasn’t immediately apparent, and I only caught him out of the corner of my eye. But the brilliant light burned my retinas, and as the world faded from a photo-negative back to normal, I could have sworn his intimidating body bloomed behind the lightning bolts and faded as quickly as a ghost.
June 30
Dr. Thurzo wants to know about the day I came to the hospital.
He already knows this story, and has certainly reminded me enough to prove it, but I think he wants to take my mind off the approaching thunderstorm outside by forcing me to do mindless busywork.
I was sitting in the antique rocking chair by my window, watching a storm. Movement on the grounds outside my house caught my eye. Below a man dashed through the rain. It was Matthias wearing a black windbreaker with yellow words, I couldn’t make out what they said from the second story, printed on his back. He had a dog, some sort of a bloodhound. And other men ran across the yard, also wearing black jackets with yellow letters. They all clutched pistols in their hands.
He had rounded up a gang to come get me! He was gonna take me, take my secrets, take everything!
I stumbled out of my chair and shoved Anna, who was standing beside me. She crashed against the wall as a flash of lightning illuminated my room. The clap of thunder that followed was deafening. I screamed as I bolted from my room.
I soon found myself in the basement, and I locked the door behind me. I was safe there.
A few seconds after I reached my fortress, Anna was there too, pounding furiously on the door, begging me to open it up.
I ignored her and looked around at the room. A large woodstove stood in the distant corner, slightly warm. I had used it the night before. I used it every night I snuck down here to play conqueror. If Matthias wanted to play games with me, I would be prepared. I quickly built a fire in it with blood-spattered logs.
“Elizabeth!” a new voice bellowed as I worked. “This is Detective Matthias! I have a warrant. Open up!”
I noticed a lot of stuff scattered on the carpenter’s workbench. I saw my tools – muddy shovels, needles loaded with Rohypnol, the taser, some fireplace pokers, a few scalpels, a bone saw, and a rib cage spreader – carelessly left out. There was the large drum of lye from one of Daddy’s factories. It was amazing how the skin bubbles and disintegrates when lye is sprinkled on it. It melts, like candle wax.
“Elizabeth! Detectives are searching the property with a cadaver dog. Open up!” I remember his yelling sounded like thunder.
I frantically threw all my tools in the fire, and I can vaguely remember the men, my would-be suitors, they were used on.
Senator Daly’s son…he was a party-hard playboy until the spreader snapped his ribs open with a wet crack.
The lawyer whined like a little girl as the pokers stabbed him in sensitive areas.
And the doctor…he was stunned when he was gutted like a fish with his own scalpel! Someone should’ve taken a picture of the look on his face!
Ah, yes. The pictures! I was sad to see those go. They were like art.
I destroyed them. I had rushed to the wall beside the door where there was a loose brick, and I slid it out. Inside was a small box filled with Polaroid pictures. The Energizer Bunny wasn’t gonna run his hands all over these pictures. These memories were mine! I flung them into the fire a handful at a time.
Matthias tried to kick the door open, but the trusty oak wood withstood the attack. My house was built back when houses were built right.
I came to the last picture at the end of the pile. It was Daddy, bound and gagged, completely at my mercy. The date on the picture was from the day before I was hit with lightning. God must’ve approved of my work, and sent me proof when he struck me with lightning.
I threw the picture in the fire just as Matthias busted down the door. I lunged at him with my taser. My lightning vanished into his body and his muscles contorted, stunned, like all my victims were when I struck them. I watched with pleasure as it ventured through him, probing him, violating him, and dragging him down to the floor. His eyes, full of electricity, gazed at me in horror. I threw back my head and laughed.
It was just how Daddy looked when I killed him all those years ago.
It’s time to put away my journal now. Dr. Thurzo just walked by and told me to go get my meds from Nurse Ratchet before therapy. It should be a very interesting group session today. I just began to see flashes of lightning in the distance.
When I told Dr. Thurzo I was grudgingly starting this journal, he smiled and encouraged me.
“That’s a great idea, Elizabeth,” he said. “Journals can help you work things out. I’m glad you finally see it my way.”
Lord knows he’s right and I need all the help I can get. My memory’s shot. It’s all jumbled in my brain and is difficult to pry out. Most days, I can’t even remember breakfast! Not that I’d want to remember bland, scrambled Egg-Beaters and soggy toast. But I’d like to get out of this dump if at all possible, and the only way to do that is play ball with Dr. Thurzo.
I was struck by lightning once, the day after my father disappeared. He was the first of a long string of disappearances. My rich and powerful suitors seemed to vanish as well. But Daddy was the first.
I don’t remember much of what came before.
The tremendous surge of energy through the body short circuits the brain, and most never fully recover from the trauma of being struck. Sometimes it causes mental illness.
My mother said once, before she died of cancer, that you have a better chance of winning the lottery than being struck by lightning, and if you are struck, God is probably angry at you.
After I was struck, I researched case studies of my fellow victims. The outlook is not good. Lightning has a way of messing up people for life, creating living hell for those who survive.
God is good to punish me.
June 7
Today, after the ward’s daily thorazine shuffle, Dr. Thurzo came up to me and told me to write about Daddy.
But I can’t.
Blurred images of him melt together in my mind and confound me to distraction. I struggle to make sense of what I see, but the frenzied colors and shapes escape reason, kind of like a Picasso painting. My long term memories are better, but they are fleeting and fast, like they are mere flashes of lightning. I feel like a victim of Alzheimer’s who may never recover.
June 9
Dr. Thurzo’s on my ass to write about Daddy again, and he said if I don’t try harder this time, he’s gonna force me to stay in my room for a week, and I won’t even be allowed out for group therapy.
So here it goes.
Daddy went missing the day before I was struck. I remember that pretty well, but it’s the only thing. It seems to me that the whole world flipped out because he was gone. I guess that makes sense. When the owner and CEO of Bathory Inc. – the same Bathory Inc. that makes most of your common household items like soap, bathroom and kitchen cleaners, aspirin, etc. – drops off the face of the earth, all of Wall Street flips out and stock values plummet.
How can one man be so important?
Daddy had a few friends, and a lot of enemies, but none so threatening as me.
He made sure that I’d be his worst enemy when Mother died. His midnight invasions of my room saw to that. He had a way of taking what didn’t belong to him.
The night he vanished, he snuck into my room during an ominous thunderstorm. The world felt like it was ending. In retrospect, maybe it was beginning.
Anyway, the next morning, he was gone and I was in the field above Bathory Manor, covered in mud.
Most of my memories about him bleed together and only a few things stand out. Dr. Thurzo insists this is normal and that I should be more patient with myself. After all, it’s been seventeen years since I was struck and he disappeared.
Easy for him to say. His success in this cluster-fucked hospital doesn’t depend on his powers of recollection.
When I try to think of Daddy in the days before he vanished, I see nothing but him creeping towards me, the lightning outside wild and angry.
June 10
A man came to see me during Activities Hour. He reminded me of Matthias, that self-important son-of-a-bitch. Out of the blue, he sat down at my chess game and ran his hands delicately over the black pawns. Matthias liked to do things like that. He liked to touch all my pictures, my knick-knacks, my books. He had no sense of boundaries.
This guy even looked like him, with those slanted coyote eyes taking in everything and missing nothing.
When he identified himself as Matthias, I almost lunged at him, but Dr. Thurzo was watching, so I behaved. But I knew he was lying. Matthias didn’t have gray hair.
He wanted to see how I was doing, as if he knew me. His condescension annoyed me, so I banished him from me.
Matthias or no, I wouldn’t suffer another would-be suitor who thought he actually knew me. And if he did know me, he would know I drew my line in the sand against all men seventeen years ago!
Moron.
And just who the hell do I talk to about this lax visitation policy?
June 11
That guy’s visit yesterday got me thinking of Matthias again. He started coming around Bathory Manor the day after Daddy vanished. He was always poking around the place, looking at my family’s stuff like he was gonna get it all someday. All my suitors were like that. Only interested in money. Or power. Or sex. Or any perverse combination thereof.
Matthias was especially fascinated by my family pictures. He would pick up a frame and stare intently at it for several minutes, as if he was trying to solve a puzzle.
He asked a lot of questions, feigning interest in my life. Damn man always insisted on acting like a bloodhound on the hunt.
I wouldn’t even have let him come around, but some part of me kind of liked his routine visits. I saw lightning in his eyes and heard thunder in his words.
I wanted to play with him the way Daddy played with me. I still do.
Matthias never realized that I’m a lot like my daddy. If he saw something he wanted – land, political support, women – he’d reach out and take it. He’d squash out any competition and wipe out any adversity. I am no different.
I lost track of how many times he snuck into my room at night and forced me to submit to his will while the servants pretended like they didn’t know.
I fought, like a wildcat he used to say, but he always won. Daddy was just too strong. He was just a better conqueror.
But if nothing else, I am his child.
June 12
There was a nasty thunderstorm today, and I thought of the day I was hit by lightning. I remember how they found me in the vast field behind Bathory Manor. I’ve been told I was caked with reddish mud and laying half-conscious in the long yellow grass sporting unusual burns on my fingers, with white residue singeing the edges, the skin melted like candle wax.
My senses, all five, were in and out, drifting, like the ocean tides.
But I remember the bolt clearly, how it entered uninvited and coursed through me, probing every vein and organ, caressing me in the rain, conquering me, holding me paralyzed in its jagged clutches before it finally exploded out of my feet.
I blinked once, and I vaguely saw Matthias standing over me. My eyes had trouble focusing, and his voice was garbled, like I was underwater.
I struggled to speak, but at last I croaked: “Call 911.” Blink. Now a slew of paramedics crowded around me, hooking me up to EKG monitors and blood pressure cuffs and several other gizmos I couldn’t identify if I tried. I remember my skin the most, how delicate it was, how it burned to the touch like I had the worst sunburn of my life.
June 14
Today I sat at my bedroom window and stared through the meshed wire embedded in the glass at another raging thunderstorm. The lightning entranced me. I traced its path down the sky using the photo-negative burn it left on my retinas.
Last night, I watched a show on the Discovery Channel about lightning. Scientists used slow motion cameras to capture the birth of a lightning bolt, and found it puts tentative feelers, faint preludes to the real bolt, down before it strikes. The feelers look for a streamer on the ground to connect with, and when it makes a connection, the bolt races in all its glory to the earth. Survivors of lightning strikes are human streamers, not victims of God’s wrath like Mother had said.
I long to be a streamer again.
June 17
Nurse Ratchet – her real name’s Denise but she’s a bitch so I call her Nurse Ratchet – almost took away my journal because I screamed that I didn’t want to take my meds today.
I hate her. She hates me. She really hates that I call her Nurse Ratchet, which is almost funny because I thought she was too stupid to get my inference.
Someday, I’m gonna show her the white light I’m made of.
Anna, my live-in nurse back in the days after I was first struck, was like a mother to me who nurtured me back to health. She certainly wasn’t the domineering cow I have to put up with now.
Once, a long time ago, she was scrubbing the master bathroom adjacent to my bedroom. It got terribly dirty fast, and she was always perplexed by my ability to muck it up. It did seem to
be smeared with reddish mud a lot. But that couldn’t be helped. I was constantly trekking around the northern field where only weeds grow, toting heavy shovels around, and my shoes and clothes always got caked in sludge. It’s difficult digging holes to plant things.
Anna had emerged from the bathroom holding up a bar of purple and white striped soap.
“Can you explain to me why this is half brown?” she had asked and I shrugged at her.
“Probably mud.”
“I don’t think so,” she argued with me. “It’s awfully red. It looks like rust.”
“How many rusty things do I come in contact with in a day?” I had asked.
Now she shrugged. “Matthias is very interested in you,” she said.
“And?” “Well, it’s just that one of my friends had to deal with him, and she says he’s like the Energizer Bunny because he never quits.”
I didn’t answer her.
She was right. He was persistent.
But streamers reach out of the ground like electrical arms to grab for the bolt. I was a streamer. If Matthias was the Energizer Bunny, I was energy itself.
June 19
All those years ago, I found a taser in my toolbox of all places, and it didn’t belong to me. At least, I don’t remember it belonging to me. And what a strange tool it was. It made controlled lightning. It was like a streamer, or at least it was capable of making me a streamer. I liked wielding all that power.
June 20
I started my period today, and Nurse Ratchet, huffing and puffing in her usual blow-hard fashion, made it abundantly clear how inconvenienced she was by me.
It was like the time Anna, who had been gathering up my laundry from the hamper in the bathroom, came out clutching my jeans. Her face was terse, like she was somewhere between annoyed and angry.
“For God’s sake, Elizabeth! I understand that a woman’s period can come unexpectedly sometimes. But at least soak your clothes in cold water so they don’t stain! Or at least tell me and I’ll pre-treat them. It’s going to be a miracle if I can get this all out.”
I sighed. “I’m sorry, Anna.”
“Look at all this blood,” she muttered. “I think I should make an appointment with the doctor for you because I don’t think that’s normal.”
She stormed out, clutching my muddy, bloody jeans, grumbling about pre-treating them.
June 25
When there’s a thunderstorm during my sleep, I have nightmares. I know the lightning causes them because that’s the only time I dream. And I always dream of Daddy.
The smell of the storm somehow mingles with my brain and triggers thoughts of him. The fresh, electrical scent of ozone smells like his aftershave.
Then I see him, opening my door in the dead of night when everyone else is sleeping and creeping in uninvited. He did that the night before he disappeared, and I begged God to make him go away. But he creeps to my bed anyway and rips down my covers like a serial killer. I scream.
Then I wake up, drenched in sweat and unable to go back to sleep.
June 26
I remember I fell asleep at night. It was one of the few times. And the sky stormed so obnoxiously that it woke me up. Confused, I wandered around my big, drafty house and made my way to the basement. There, on my workbench, I made a troublesome discovery: used syringes stained with blood.
They were long, thick needles, the most diabolical needles man ever invented for giving shots. They had to be used for something sinister, something like shooting heroin.
I banished Matthias from my house permanently. I knew he had to be the one who brought the needles in. Besides Anna and me, he was the only one who’d visited Bathory Manor since Daddy vanished, and I trusted Anna.
He raised an eyebrow at me and left without argument, but I knew he’d be back, men always come back, just like Daddy.
June 28
There was a thunderstorm today. The monsoon season must be here at last. I took my usual spot by the window, the wire-meshed glass obstructing my view, and stared out as always.
There, I saw my father; as the blinding lightning crashed violently into the earth, over and over, I thought I saw him caged behind the jagged streaks. It wasn’t immediately apparent, and I only caught him out of the corner of my eye. But the brilliant light burned my retinas, and as the world faded from a photo-negative back to normal, I could have sworn his intimidating body bloomed behind the lightning bolts and faded as quickly as a ghost.
June 30
Dr. Thurzo wants to know about the day I came to the hospital.
He already knows this story, and has certainly reminded me enough to prove it, but I think he wants to take my mind off the approaching thunderstorm outside by forcing me to do mindless busywork.
I was sitting in the antique rocking chair by my window, watching a storm. Movement on the grounds outside my house caught my eye. Below a man dashed through the rain. It was Matthias wearing a black windbreaker with yellow words, I couldn’t make out what they said from the second story, printed on his back. He had a dog, some sort of a bloodhound. And other men ran across the yard, also wearing black jackets with yellow letters. They all clutched pistols in their hands.
He had rounded up a gang to come get me! He was gonna take me, take my secrets, take everything!
I stumbled out of my chair and shoved Anna, who was standing beside me. She crashed against the wall as a flash of lightning illuminated my room. The clap of thunder that followed was deafening. I screamed as I bolted from my room.
I soon found myself in the basement, and I locked the door behind me. I was safe there.
A few seconds after I reached my fortress, Anna was there too, pounding furiously on the door, begging me to open it up.
I ignored her and looked around at the room. A large woodstove stood in the distant corner, slightly warm. I had used it the night before. I used it every night I snuck down here to play conqueror. If Matthias wanted to play games with me, I would be prepared. I quickly built a fire in it with blood-spattered logs.
“Elizabeth!” a new voice bellowed as I worked. “This is Detective Matthias! I have a warrant. Open up!”
I noticed a lot of stuff scattered on the carpenter’s workbench. I saw my tools – muddy shovels, needles loaded with Rohypnol, the taser, some fireplace pokers, a few scalpels, a bone saw, and a rib cage spreader – carelessly left out. There was the large drum of lye from one of Daddy’s factories. It was amazing how the skin bubbles and disintegrates when lye is sprinkled on it. It melts, like candle wax.
“Elizabeth! Detectives are searching the property with a cadaver dog. Open up!” I remember his yelling sounded like thunder.
I frantically threw all my tools in the fire, and I can vaguely remember the men, my would-be suitors, they were used on.
Senator Daly’s son…he was a party-hard playboy until the spreader snapped his ribs open with a wet crack.
The lawyer whined like a little girl as the pokers stabbed him in sensitive areas.
And the doctor…he was stunned when he was gutted like a fish with his own scalpel! Someone should’ve taken a picture of the look on his face!
Ah, yes. The pictures! I was sad to see those go. They were like art.
I destroyed them. I had rushed to the wall beside the door where there was a loose brick, and I slid it out. Inside was a small box filled with Polaroid pictures. The Energizer Bunny wasn’t gonna run his hands all over these pictures. These memories were mine! I flung them into the fire a handful at a time.
Matthias tried to kick the door open, but the trusty oak wood withstood the attack. My house was built back when houses were built right.
I came to the last picture at the end of the pile. It was Daddy, bound and gagged, completely at my mercy. The date on the picture was from the day before I was hit with lightning. God must’ve approved of my work, and sent me proof when he struck me with lightning.
I threw the picture in the fire just as Matthias busted down the door. I lunged at him with my taser. My lightning vanished into his body and his muscles contorted, stunned, like all my victims were when I struck them. I watched with pleasure as it ventured through him, probing him, violating him, and dragging him down to the floor. His eyes, full of electricity, gazed at me in horror. I threw back my head and laughed.
It was just how Daddy looked when I killed him all those years ago.
It’s time to put away my journal now. Dr. Thurzo just walked by and told me to go get my meds from Nurse Ratchet before therapy. It should be a very interesting group session today. I just began to see flashes of lightning in the distance.
In Hora Mortis
For Edgar Allan Poe
For 12,145 days, the woman Bianca lived as all the mortals live, with no notion that every moment is one moment closer to the last. On the following day, I knew it was time to pay her a visit. You, who walk still among the living, you who fear me, should not think me heartless. I am satiated only when I devour a soul as duty prescribes; no one will argue this, I think, but I do not always take joy in my work.
Bianca was young and healthy, but she was occasionally stricken with chest pains. She reasoned that the cause was stress and nothing more. Never once did she suspect I someday would call. Never once did she contemplate my existence and what a frail thread she truly was in the grand tapestry of the universe. She, like most humans, was oblivious.
Bianca possessed a good mind for a human but also had one peculiar shortcoming: a fondness for fortune-tellers. Few mortals understand and believe in those who peddle riddles from Beyond, like the crazed Delphi Oracle who spewed out half-coherent prophecies and the unscrupulous televangelists who promise to reveal the plan of God to their followers for a fee, but Bianca both knew all the signs from studying astrology, astronomy, folklore, mythology, and religion, and she suspected she had once or twice stuck her head out of the cave and perceived the truth through those same signs. In her search for divine knowledge and for God she was sincere, and she read the likes of Plato and St. Thomas Aquinas to learn. And yet, though she studied the religious texts fervently, I still eluded her every thought. Life and afterlife dominated her mind, but she always overlooked me. Intrigued, I watched her for years due to my peculiar shortcoming, a fondness for humans who try to rise above the rest of the miserable lot, and I resolved to reveal something of the truth to her as well.
It was nearly ten o’clock on Halloween evening when I encountered Bianca at a traveling carnival. I stood by a large sandwich board with silver letters painted on it that read Tarot Readings: $20. Wearing a long black hood, feathered mask, and dress, I yelled for merrymakers to come and learn their fate. As I expected, most passed me by with not so much as a look. Those that did look saw a haggard and harmless old woman, undoubtedly a scam artist, trying to rope fools into spending more money at an already expensive carnival. They gazed at me with contempt before they moved along. Bianca, however, found me while she waited for some friends, and, slightly drunk on beer, begged for a reading. She, like me, was dressed in accordance with the holiday. In a white gown, with white makeup on her face and powder in her hair, she resembled a ghost. She gripped my hand and shook it hard.
“My dear Bianca,” I said after she enthusiastically introduced herself, “this is a good night for a reading. The spirits are in a frenzy.”
“For twenty dollars, I hope so,” she replied.
“On Halloween, the living is terribly close to the dead.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she replied impatiently. “I know all about Halloween. So where’s your booth?”
“I have a trailer, actually,” I explained. “But I am not sure you really want me to do your reading.”
“Why not?”
“Because I am not confident you will be satisfied with the outcome.”
“Is that your way of telling me you’re a scam artist?”
“No. But, I warn you, not all endings are happy.”
“But you haven’t even done my reading yet.”
“I see far.”
“Oh, please,” she begged. “There’s a ton of stuff I want to ask. I’ll pay you double.”
“I could not possibly take your money.”
“No, I wouldn’t have it any other way,” she argued. “So, it’s settled.”
“Very well. This way,” I replied, pointing towards the west.
Bianca beamed and took my hand once more, and pulling my hood further over my head, I let her lead me towards my trailer on the outskirts of the carnival. Arm in arm, we waded through the happy, jostling crowd of reapers, devils, angels, and ghosts with the brilliant lights from the Ferris wheel illuminating our path. Bianca, amidst these laughing strangers, suspected no malice from me.
“What do you know of Halloween?” I asked.
“Well, it used to be a Celtic harvest celebration. Samhain. It was thought to be the day the dead could cross over and converse with the living.”
“Yes, the dead were able to cross over, and so was the thing itself.”
“What other thing?”
“Death.”
“Oh.”
“ The Celts welcomed them all with open arms, and they even set places of honor for them at their dinner tables. Death was treated like a king.”
“I suppose so.”
“Does that bother you, Bianca?”
She shrugged. “I don’t really believe that people sat around having dinner with ghosts, let alone the Grim Reaper. But it is fascinating how superstitious the Celts were.”
“Perhaps they knew something we did not.”
“Every religion thinks they know best.”
“Every religion has at least one correct idea.”
“How could you possibly know that?”
“I am much older than I look,” I stated firmly. “The Celts, for example, accepted Death but did not fear it, and they gave it a place of honor in their society. To them, it was the beginning and the end of things. Samhain roughly means ‘the end of summer’ in Gaelic. But is it not interesting that it was also the beginning of the Celtic year? Life is not linear, but cyclical. An end is also a beginning. The Celts understood that better than anyone.”
She said nothing in reply and walked in silence thereon. As the crowd thinned out at the edge of the fair, Bianca stumbled on the frayed edges of her costume, the effects of the beer she drank earlier affecting her gait. With a loud thud she hit her face on a dirty curb, groaning and clutching it with both hands. A stream of blood oozed between her fingers and dripped carelessly on her white costume. I did not have to see it to know she had a bloody nose.
“Ow,” she muttered as she slowly drew her hands away. Her warm blood trickled down her lips and she dabbed at her nostrils with her pale fingertips.
“Oh, dear, you are bleeding,” I said. “I will help you to the first-aid tent.”
“No,” she snapped. “It’s just a bloody nose. I won’t die from it.”
“I suppose not,” I agreed. “But we really must go to the first-aid tent,” I insisted. “I would not feel right if the paramedics did not at least see you.”
Bianca looked at me in annoyance. “That’s ridiculous!” she muttered. “That’s the problem with everyone anymore. They get so worked up over every little thing. It’s just a bloody nose.”
“If you do not have your health, you do not have anything.”
“Can we move on? Please? The bleeding has already stopped.”
I sighed reluctantly. I wanted her to take the way out. I would rather kill the willfully blind than those who try to know the unknowable. But in the end, my victims have their free-will to guide them to whatever fate they choose. “Are you sure you want to continue on?” I asked.
“I’m sure. Let the paramedics in the first-aid tent worry about real injuries.”
“Very well.” I offered my hand to her, and after lifting her up, we continued. She was relaxed by my side. Maybe on some level, she had contemplated her fate, and she was unafraid. Although Halloween lost its religious implications in this commercialized world many years ago, it still had the power to stir morbid revelation in the most perceptive individuals’ hearts. Then again, perhaps it was the beer stealing her inhibition.
The carnival was large and the trailer, seemingly a permanent part of the traveling troupe, was nearly a mile from where I first met her. Nestled in the trees of some deciduous forest teeming with gnarled oaks and elms, it was surrounded by an abundance of birds. Somewhere in the distance, a crow cawed over the raucous merrymaking behind us.
“Is that a crow?” she asked. “They make me nervous.”
“That crow must be saying the same thing about those of us here at this carnival,” I replied. “Many ancients believed crows carried dead souls to the afterlife. I believe it is an animal to be respected.”
“Let’s pray that it takes whoever’s soul it’s here for to Heaven,” she said and I nodded.
We arrived at the trailer a few moments later and found the offending crow from earlier perched on the wooden stair rail leading up to my door. It seemed to blend perfectly with the Halloween decorations; paper skeletons dangled in every window and candlelit skulls sat on every stair up to the door. On the door itself, a rusty old sickle was mounted. Its handle was short and the leather grip was worn with much use.
“I like your Halloween decorations,” Bianca commented. “And that –“ she pointed to the sickle – “is so realistic looking.”
“That is my favorite one,” I said as I stroked the crow’s head before I squeezed past it.
“Where did you get it?”
I looked at Bianca and chuckled. In many ways she was so innocent. “The truth be told, my dear, I do not quite remember where I got it. It seems like I have always had it.”
“Wow,” she said.
“Hurry in,” I said as I opened the door. She gazed at the crow apprehensively before she shuffled past and over the threshold. I closed it behind her. “Please, sit down,” I told her as I pointed towards a small table with two chairs around it, and she obeyed. “Would you like a glass of wine while I do your reading? I make my own. It’s almost like De Grave, but not as sweet.”
“Sure, why not?”
I nodded grimly as I produced two deep rounded wine glasses from a cupboard and poured them half full. As I placed them on the table, I slid a pack of tarot cards from my dress sleeve into Bianca’s hand. Having done this before, she automatically shuffled the deck and returned them, at which point I fanned them out so she could not see them. I instructed her to choose three. She did so almost nonchalantly while she took a long drink.
“That is pretty bitter,” she remarked. “Good, but bitter. How do you make this?”
“That, my dear, is a secret.”
“I promise to take the secret to the grave,” she vowed, holding up her right hand in an oath.
“Of this, I have no doubt. But do not worry about that. Lay down your cards.” She did, and I announced each one: “The Fool in reverse: you have ceased to operate in the real world. The Tower: you are experiencing a great upheaval and change in your life, and your plans will be disrupted. Judgment: you must let go of something that you have been hanging on to.”
“But none of that applies to me,” she argued.
“I beg to differ. This is your fortune, Bianca, your future. The future is sometimes closer than you may realize.”
“Listen, you’re doing this all wrong-”
I looked up at Bianca and saw a film glaze her shocked eyes as she clutched her chest, unable to breathe, and a moment later, convulsions gripped her and threw her to the floor. Her wine glass broke beside her. “Help me!” she weakly choked. She lay on her back, helplessly clawing at her chest and struggling to breathe. Beads of sweat formed on her forehead.
“My dear Bianca,” I began, “you do not look so well.” I placed my chair beside her, sat down, and gazed upon her. “Would you like to go to the first-aid tent? Would you like to speak to the paramedics? No? I did not think you would.” I sipped my glass of wine.
“What…what did you do to me?”
“You should be thankful, Bianca. Not everyone gets to experience me the way you have tonight. I am not always this nice.” I set my glass on the table and stood.
“Who are you?” she asked, tears streaming down her face and taking the film from her eyes, but I refused to answer. She started to cry harder. The white paint on her face streaked. “Please,” she begged. “Why are you doing this?’
“Were you aware you had a hole in your heart?” I asked, knowing she was not, as I opened the trailer door and retrieved my sickle.
“I’m sorry,” she whined, ignoring my question. “If I offended you somehow, I didn’t mean to.”
“Usually, that kind of hole goes unnoticed by the poor soul it afflicts,” I continued. “It seldom amounts to anything. But your hole, my dear Bianca, is another story entirely. Over the years, I have become adept at guessing what will kill someone. Yes, my dear, death is a mystery to me at times as well. God keeps me in the dark too. He has made me its master as well as its student. But experience has put probability on my side. I am occasionally surprised, however. Not with you. I knew about the hole in your heart from the day you were born, and I knew that it would someday bring me to you.”
I took another sip of wine, and Bianca’s face suddenly raged with fiery anger. “God damn you! You won’t get away with this.” She bawled harder.
“Would you like to hear a secret?” She did not answer so I continued. “Sometimes, I disobey my duty and spare a worthy soul.”
She writhed on the floor and clawed at her heart as if she could wrench it out of her chest entirely. Soon, the spasm passed though, and she croaked out, “I’ll give you everything I have.”
I sighed. “I am very disappointed in you. Everyone offers me money. It makes me feel decidedly unmerciful. I expected more from you.”
“Don’t hurt me. I swear I’ll give you everything you want,” she sobbed as she rolled onto her belly.
I knelt down beside her and petted her powdery brown mane; it was damp with cold sweat. “But Bianca, do you not know yet that the only thing I want is your soul?” Her blue eyes widened in realization and she closed her mouth. Drool dribbled down her chin as she struggled to look at me. I met her stare and nodded. “Yes, now it is all becoming clear,” I whispered. “Now you know who I am, do you not?” A resigned expression crossed her face then and for a moment, her chest pains stopped completely. I smiled and raised my sickle over her. A small shriek escaped her when she saw the rusty blade poised over her. Panic and pain set in once more. “Oh, God!” she screeched.
“Bianca,” I began. “God is not here right now. He prefers that I do my work in solitude.”
And with that, I let down my hood and threw off my mask. In her eyes I saw that one moment of illumination, the moment she stepped into the sun and it was too painful for her to behold. Tears streamed down her face, and she gasped, not out of fear but out of surprise at my radiance.
“The light,” she muttered. “Oh, God, the light.”
“Yes,” I whispered. “I am the light. And the darkness. I am the balance.”
She watched me then as I slashed through her heart with my sickle and induced a heart attack. A moment of shock seized her and she arched her back as the agony coursed through her. Her skin and lips turned white, a genuine paleness that had nothing to do with makeup. She choked and gasped for air while cold sweat streamed down her face. Her iridescent soul swirled anxiously inside her chest.
“The real fortune-teller will find you soon, Bianca,” I explained. “But as for me, I must be leaving you now. You may take care of your defective heart now and live. It is my gift to a gifted soul. But I warn you, the next time we meet, I will not disobey again.”
“Why bother to let me live?” she struggled to speak as she clutched her arm so hard her finger nails cut little crescent moons through her costume and into her skin. Bloody semi-circles stained the cloth.
“Because the world would be a far less interesting place without you. Fortunately for you, I have free-will too.”
She gazed at me with a hopeful expression in her pained eyes as I bowed my head benevolently at her. Then I hid my sickle in the folds of my cloak and stepped out of the trailer without another word. The crow still sat on the rail and cawed unhappily at me. “Leave this one in peace,” I commanded. “It is not her time to go.”
For 12,145 days, the woman Bianca lived as all the mortals live, with no notion that every moment is one moment closer to the last. On the following day, I knew it was time to pay her a visit. You, who walk still among the living, you who fear me, should not think me heartless. I am satiated only when I devour a soul as duty prescribes; no one will argue this, I think, but I do not always take joy in my work.
Bianca was young and healthy, but she was occasionally stricken with chest pains. She reasoned that the cause was stress and nothing more. Never once did she suspect I someday would call. Never once did she contemplate my existence and what a frail thread she truly was in the grand tapestry of the universe. She, like most humans, was oblivious.
Bianca possessed a good mind for a human but also had one peculiar shortcoming: a fondness for fortune-tellers. Few mortals understand and believe in those who peddle riddles from Beyond, like the crazed Delphi Oracle who spewed out half-coherent prophecies and the unscrupulous televangelists who promise to reveal the plan of God to their followers for a fee, but Bianca both knew all the signs from studying astrology, astronomy, folklore, mythology, and religion, and she suspected she had once or twice stuck her head out of the cave and perceived the truth through those same signs. In her search for divine knowledge and for God she was sincere, and she read the likes of Plato and St. Thomas Aquinas to learn. And yet, though she studied the religious texts fervently, I still eluded her every thought. Life and afterlife dominated her mind, but she always overlooked me. Intrigued, I watched her for years due to my peculiar shortcoming, a fondness for humans who try to rise above the rest of the miserable lot, and I resolved to reveal something of the truth to her as well.
It was nearly ten o’clock on Halloween evening when I encountered Bianca at a traveling carnival. I stood by a large sandwich board with silver letters painted on it that read Tarot Readings: $20. Wearing a long black hood, feathered mask, and dress, I yelled for merrymakers to come and learn their fate. As I expected, most passed me by with not so much as a look. Those that did look saw a haggard and harmless old woman, undoubtedly a scam artist, trying to rope fools into spending more money at an already expensive carnival. They gazed at me with contempt before they moved along. Bianca, however, found me while she waited for some friends, and, slightly drunk on beer, begged for a reading. She, like me, was dressed in accordance with the holiday. In a white gown, with white makeup on her face and powder in her hair, she resembled a ghost. She gripped my hand and shook it hard.
“My dear Bianca,” I said after she enthusiastically introduced herself, “this is a good night for a reading. The spirits are in a frenzy.”
“For twenty dollars, I hope so,” she replied.
“On Halloween, the living is terribly close to the dead.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she replied impatiently. “I know all about Halloween. So where’s your booth?”
“I have a trailer, actually,” I explained. “But I am not sure you really want me to do your reading.”
“Why not?”
“Because I am not confident you will be satisfied with the outcome.”
“Is that your way of telling me you’re a scam artist?”
“No. But, I warn you, not all endings are happy.”
“But you haven’t even done my reading yet.”
“I see far.”
“Oh, please,” she begged. “There’s a ton of stuff I want to ask. I’ll pay you double.”
“I could not possibly take your money.”
“No, I wouldn’t have it any other way,” she argued. “So, it’s settled.”
“Very well. This way,” I replied, pointing towards the west.
Bianca beamed and took my hand once more, and pulling my hood further over my head, I let her lead me towards my trailer on the outskirts of the carnival. Arm in arm, we waded through the happy, jostling crowd of reapers, devils, angels, and ghosts with the brilliant lights from the Ferris wheel illuminating our path. Bianca, amidst these laughing strangers, suspected no malice from me.
“What do you know of Halloween?” I asked.
“Well, it used to be a Celtic harvest celebration. Samhain. It was thought to be the day the dead could cross over and converse with the living.”
“Yes, the dead were able to cross over, and so was the thing itself.”
“What other thing?”
“Death.”
“Oh.”
“ The Celts welcomed them all with open arms, and they even set places of honor for them at their dinner tables. Death was treated like a king.”
“I suppose so.”
“Does that bother you, Bianca?”
She shrugged. “I don’t really believe that people sat around having dinner with ghosts, let alone the Grim Reaper. But it is fascinating how superstitious the Celts were.”
“Perhaps they knew something we did not.”
“Every religion thinks they know best.”
“Every religion has at least one correct idea.”
“How could you possibly know that?”
“I am much older than I look,” I stated firmly. “The Celts, for example, accepted Death but did not fear it, and they gave it a place of honor in their society. To them, it was the beginning and the end of things. Samhain roughly means ‘the end of summer’ in Gaelic. But is it not interesting that it was also the beginning of the Celtic year? Life is not linear, but cyclical. An end is also a beginning. The Celts understood that better than anyone.”
She said nothing in reply and walked in silence thereon. As the crowd thinned out at the edge of the fair, Bianca stumbled on the frayed edges of her costume, the effects of the beer she drank earlier affecting her gait. With a loud thud she hit her face on a dirty curb, groaning and clutching it with both hands. A stream of blood oozed between her fingers and dripped carelessly on her white costume. I did not have to see it to know she had a bloody nose.
“Ow,” she muttered as she slowly drew her hands away. Her warm blood trickled down her lips and she dabbed at her nostrils with her pale fingertips.
“Oh, dear, you are bleeding,” I said. “I will help you to the first-aid tent.”
“No,” she snapped. “It’s just a bloody nose. I won’t die from it.”
“I suppose not,” I agreed. “But we really must go to the first-aid tent,” I insisted. “I would not feel right if the paramedics did not at least see you.”
Bianca looked at me in annoyance. “That’s ridiculous!” she muttered. “That’s the problem with everyone anymore. They get so worked up over every little thing. It’s just a bloody nose.”
“If you do not have your health, you do not have anything.”
“Can we move on? Please? The bleeding has already stopped.”
I sighed reluctantly. I wanted her to take the way out. I would rather kill the willfully blind than those who try to know the unknowable. But in the end, my victims have their free-will to guide them to whatever fate they choose. “Are you sure you want to continue on?” I asked.
“I’m sure. Let the paramedics in the first-aid tent worry about real injuries.”
“Very well.” I offered my hand to her, and after lifting her up, we continued. She was relaxed by my side. Maybe on some level, she had contemplated her fate, and she was unafraid. Although Halloween lost its religious implications in this commercialized world many years ago, it still had the power to stir morbid revelation in the most perceptive individuals’ hearts. Then again, perhaps it was the beer stealing her inhibition.
The carnival was large and the trailer, seemingly a permanent part of the traveling troupe, was nearly a mile from where I first met her. Nestled in the trees of some deciduous forest teeming with gnarled oaks and elms, it was surrounded by an abundance of birds. Somewhere in the distance, a crow cawed over the raucous merrymaking behind us.
“Is that a crow?” she asked. “They make me nervous.”
“That crow must be saying the same thing about those of us here at this carnival,” I replied. “Many ancients believed crows carried dead souls to the afterlife. I believe it is an animal to be respected.”
“Let’s pray that it takes whoever’s soul it’s here for to Heaven,” she said and I nodded.
We arrived at the trailer a few moments later and found the offending crow from earlier perched on the wooden stair rail leading up to my door. It seemed to blend perfectly with the Halloween decorations; paper skeletons dangled in every window and candlelit skulls sat on every stair up to the door. On the door itself, a rusty old sickle was mounted. Its handle was short and the leather grip was worn with much use.
“I like your Halloween decorations,” Bianca commented. “And that –“ she pointed to the sickle – “is so realistic looking.”
“That is my favorite one,” I said as I stroked the crow’s head before I squeezed past it.
“Where did you get it?”
I looked at Bianca and chuckled. In many ways she was so innocent. “The truth be told, my dear, I do not quite remember where I got it. It seems like I have always had it.”
“Wow,” she said.
“Hurry in,” I said as I opened the door. She gazed at the crow apprehensively before she shuffled past and over the threshold. I closed it behind her. “Please, sit down,” I told her as I pointed towards a small table with two chairs around it, and she obeyed. “Would you like a glass of wine while I do your reading? I make my own. It’s almost like De Grave, but not as sweet.”
“Sure, why not?”
I nodded grimly as I produced two deep rounded wine glasses from a cupboard and poured them half full. As I placed them on the table, I slid a pack of tarot cards from my dress sleeve into Bianca’s hand. Having done this before, she automatically shuffled the deck and returned them, at which point I fanned them out so she could not see them. I instructed her to choose three. She did so almost nonchalantly while she took a long drink.
“That is pretty bitter,” she remarked. “Good, but bitter. How do you make this?”
“That, my dear, is a secret.”
“I promise to take the secret to the grave,” she vowed, holding up her right hand in an oath.
“Of this, I have no doubt. But do not worry about that. Lay down your cards.” She did, and I announced each one: “The Fool in reverse: you have ceased to operate in the real world. The Tower: you are experiencing a great upheaval and change in your life, and your plans will be disrupted. Judgment: you must let go of something that you have been hanging on to.”
“But none of that applies to me,” she argued.
“I beg to differ. This is your fortune, Bianca, your future. The future is sometimes closer than you may realize.”
“Listen, you’re doing this all wrong-”
I looked up at Bianca and saw a film glaze her shocked eyes as she clutched her chest, unable to breathe, and a moment later, convulsions gripped her and threw her to the floor. Her wine glass broke beside her. “Help me!” she weakly choked. She lay on her back, helplessly clawing at her chest and struggling to breathe. Beads of sweat formed on her forehead.
“My dear Bianca,” I began, “you do not look so well.” I placed my chair beside her, sat down, and gazed upon her. “Would you like to go to the first-aid tent? Would you like to speak to the paramedics? No? I did not think you would.” I sipped my glass of wine.
“What…what did you do to me?”
“You should be thankful, Bianca. Not everyone gets to experience me the way you have tonight. I am not always this nice.” I set my glass on the table and stood.
“Who are you?” she asked, tears streaming down her face and taking the film from her eyes, but I refused to answer. She started to cry harder. The white paint on her face streaked. “Please,” she begged. “Why are you doing this?’
“Were you aware you had a hole in your heart?” I asked, knowing she was not, as I opened the trailer door and retrieved my sickle.
“I’m sorry,” she whined, ignoring my question. “If I offended you somehow, I didn’t mean to.”
“Usually, that kind of hole goes unnoticed by the poor soul it afflicts,” I continued. “It seldom amounts to anything. But your hole, my dear Bianca, is another story entirely. Over the years, I have become adept at guessing what will kill someone. Yes, my dear, death is a mystery to me at times as well. God keeps me in the dark too. He has made me its master as well as its student. But experience has put probability on my side. I am occasionally surprised, however. Not with you. I knew about the hole in your heart from the day you were born, and I knew that it would someday bring me to you.”
I took another sip of wine, and Bianca’s face suddenly raged with fiery anger. “God damn you! You won’t get away with this.” She bawled harder.
“Would you like to hear a secret?” She did not answer so I continued. “Sometimes, I disobey my duty and spare a worthy soul.”
She writhed on the floor and clawed at her heart as if she could wrench it out of her chest entirely. Soon, the spasm passed though, and she croaked out, “I’ll give you everything I have.”
I sighed. “I am very disappointed in you. Everyone offers me money. It makes me feel decidedly unmerciful. I expected more from you.”
“Don’t hurt me. I swear I’ll give you everything you want,” she sobbed as she rolled onto her belly.
I knelt down beside her and petted her powdery brown mane; it was damp with cold sweat. “But Bianca, do you not know yet that the only thing I want is your soul?” Her blue eyes widened in realization and she closed her mouth. Drool dribbled down her chin as she struggled to look at me. I met her stare and nodded. “Yes, now it is all becoming clear,” I whispered. “Now you know who I am, do you not?” A resigned expression crossed her face then and for a moment, her chest pains stopped completely. I smiled and raised my sickle over her. A small shriek escaped her when she saw the rusty blade poised over her. Panic and pain set in once more. “Oh, God!” she screeched.
“Bianca,” I began. “God is not here right now. He prefers that I do my work in solitude.”
And with that, I let down my hood and threw off my mask. In her eyes I saw that one moment of illumination, the moment she stepped into the sun and it was too painful for her to behold. Tears streamed down her face, and she gasped, not out of fear but out of surprise at my radiance.
“The light,” she muttered. “Oh, God, the light.”
“Yes,” I whispered. “I am the light. And the darkness. I am the balance.”
She watched me then as I slashed through her heart with my sickle and induced a heart attack. A moment of shock seized her and she arched her back as the agony coursed through her. Her skin and lips turned white, a genuine paleness that had nothing to do with makeup. She choked and gasped for air while cold sweat streamed down her face. Her iridescent soul swirled anxiously inside her chest.
“The real fortune-teller will find you soon, Bianca,” I explained. “But as for me, I must be leaving you now. You may take care of your defective heart now and live. It is my gift to a gifted soul. But I warn you, the next time we meet, I will not disobey again.”
“Why bother to let me live?” she struggled to speak as she clutched her arm so hard her finger nails cut little crescent moons through her costume and into her skin. Bloody semi-circles stained the cloth.
“Because the world would be a far less interesting place without you. Fortunately for you, I have free-will too.”
She gazed at me with a hopeful expression in her pained eyes as I bowed my head benevolently at her. Then I hid my sickle in the folds of my cloak and stepped out of the trailer without another word. The crow still sat on the rail and cawed unhappily at me. “Leave this one in peace,” I commanded. “It is not her time to go.”
Thursday, November 24, 2011
On Writing
The Anglo-Irish songwriter and novelist, Samuel Lover, once said, "when once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen." For as long as I can remember, this notion has held true for my life. I learned to read at a very young age, when I was three, and from that point on the possibilities were endless; my love for books was deeply and forever entrenched in my blood. Soon after, the need to tell my own stories consumed me. It built up pressure inside me, far past the red line of tolerable parameters, so much so that it was like I would explode, and the only release valve for my state was writing. Looking back, it was obvious that this was the path I was destined to follow. Being a writer, specifically a freelance writer, is not necessarily a stable occupation as most writers must take on other jobs in order to support themselves. But I did not choose this career for the money. I chose to become a writer because of my love for telling stories, true, but also because I wanted to leave an indelible mark on the world, and because through writing, I can connect with people in ways not possible through any other medium.
Admittedly, writing is not necessarily a lucrative profession unless you happen to be lucky enough to be Stephen King or J.K. Rowling. The hours tend to be lousy because, according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, writers are "paid per assignment; therefore, they work any number of hours necessary to meet a deadline. As a result, writers must be willing to work evenings, nights, or weekends to produce a piece acceptable to an editor or client by the deadline ("Authors" 2). Additionally, the median salary of a freelance writer is $53,070 per year ("Authors" 2). Although it is not required, those who wish to write tend to earn degrees in English, journalism, or mass communications. This more realistic portrait of the writer is a far cry from the romantic idea of writers going to work in their pajamas and earning money hand over fist.
But I love to write because I am the god of my own universe. Like Athena, the goddess of the arts and crafts, I hang the tapestry of a story on my loom and carefully weave it together with my shuttle and picking stick until I have created a masterpiece for all to admire. With my creative power, I plunge deep into my daydreams, return with grand adventures and sorrowful tales, and thrust them onto paper for all to see. People in my stories live and die at my command. I am the master of Fate. In a world that oftentimes feels so out of control, it is a comfort to know that at least in my little corner of creation, I am not helpless.
For me, writing also is the only way I can leave an indelible mark on the world. I want my life to mean something, and I want to effect change somehow. I think of Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, know that it inadvertently started the Civil War because it raised awareness to the cruelty of slavery, and hope that someday, I can write something so important. People have a deep-seated need to be remembered by future generations. Perhaps this is due to a fear that beyond this life, there is nothing. I know that for me, this is true. But beyond my own selfish fears, I want my life to mean something. And if I can positively affect the world, why wouldn't I? Writing is the only way I know to leave my mark. I will never be a captain of industry, rocket scientist, or politician. But perhaps, through my writing, I can do something special in service to the greater good of the world.
But perhaps I am doing a greater good. Writing allows me to connect with people in a way not possible through the spoken word, art, or even music. It has led me to teach young people everything it has to offer. My written words show the inexperienced writer, or the student with a strong aversion to the craft, the power they have inside of them through their own creative voice. The joy I feel when I pick up a pen is transmitted to them, and hopefully my enthusiasm rubs off on them. I have always said that writing is the most important subject to learn because it gives a voice to all the others, so therefore I chose to become a writer to teach others how to find that voice. This, I feel, is the most important reason I am a writer.
Though it is not the romantic profession many people assume it is, writing is a deeply rewarding trade to pursue if, like me, the itch for it is in your blood. I love it because it allows me to play God from time to time in a chaotic world spinning out of control. But additionally, because it allows me to connect with people by teaching them how to do it, it is the means by which I leave my mark on the world. So, to paraphrase the English playwright Somerset Maugham, I do not write because I want to. I write because I have to.
Admittedly, writing is not necessarily a lucrative profession unless you happen to be lucky enough to be Stephen King or J.K. Rowling. The hours tend to be lousy because, according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, writers are "paid per assignment; therefore, they work any number of hours necessary to meet a deadline. As a result, writers must be willing to work evenings, nights, or weekends to produce a piece acceptable to an editor or client by the deadline ("Authors" 2). Additionally, the median salary of a freelance writer is $53,070 per year ("Authors" 2). Although it is not required, those who wish to write tend to earn degrees in English, journalism, or mass communications. This more realistic portrait of the writer is a far cry from the romantic idea of writers going to work in their pajamas and earning money hand over fist.
But I love to write because I am the god of my own universe. Like Athena, the goddess of the arts and crafts, I hang the tapestry of a story on my loom and carefully weave it together with my shuttle and picking stick until I have created a masterpiece for all to admire. With my creative power, I plunge deep into my daydreams, return with grand adventures and sorrowful tales, and thrust them onto paper for all to see. People in my stories live and die at my command. I am the master of Fate. In a world that oftentimes feels so out of control, it is a comfort to know that at least in my little corner of creation, I am not helpless.
For me, writing also is the only way I can leave an indelible mark on the world. I want my life to mean something, and I want to effect change somehow. I think of Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, know that it inadvertently started the Civil War because it raised awareness to the cruelty of slavery, and hope that someday, I can write something so important. People have a deep-seated need to be remembered by future generations. Perhaps this is due to a fear that beyond this life, there is nothing. I know that for me, this is true. But beyond my own selfish fears, I want my life to mean something. And if I can positively affect the world, why wouldn't I? Writing is the only way I know to leave my mark. I will never be a captain of industry, rocket scientist, or politician. But perhaps, through my writing, I can do something special in service to the greater good of the world.
But perhaps I am doing a greater good. Writing allows me to connect with people in a way not possible through the spoken word, art, or even music. It has led me to teach young people everything it has to offer. My written words show the inexperienced writer, or the student with a strong aversion to the craft, the power they have inside of them through their own creative voice. The joy I feel when I pick up a pen is transmitted to them, and hopefully my enthusiasm rubs off on them. I have always said that writing is the most important subject to learn because it gives a voice to all the others, so therefore I chose to become a writer to teach others how to find that voice. This, I feel, is the most important reason I am a writer.
Though it is not the romantic profession many people assume it is, writing is a deeply rewarding trade to pursue if, like me, the itch for it is in your blood. I love it because it allows me to play God from time to time in a chaotic world spinning out of control. But additionally, because it allows me to connect with people by teaching them how to do it, it is the means by which I leave my mark on the world. So, to paraphrase the English playwright Somerset Maugham, I do not write because I want to. I write because I have to.
Why I'm a Terrible English Major
Recently, there was a big controversy about the Oxford serial comma. The rule used to be that when making a list, your list should look like this: x, y, and z (notice the comma after the letter y). But now, the Oxford elite have changed the rule. Your list should now look like this: x, y and z (notice the absence of the comma after the letter y). This ticked me off because I envisioned the best and brightest men and women in the English discipline gathered as a committee (because you just know it was a committee) discussing the fate of one, stupid little comma instead of worrying about real problems. Right now, we’re in the midst of a war, there are people starving all over the world, our economy is in shambles, but we’re worrying about a comma. Things like this make it hard for me at times to justify my discipline to people. I am a terrible English major because I believe that much of what we do is silly.
As an undergraduate, I both loved and hated my literature classes. On the one hand, my teachers exposed me to many great, classic writers like Flannery O’Connor and Nathaniel Hawthorne. But on the other hand, literature classes seemed like glorified book clubs. All we did was sit around talking about the stuff we’ve read for the week. People in other academic disciplines, in business for example, were learning how to change the world. Meanwhile, we were stuck in the classroom talking about dead white guys who wrote interesting things, but were ultimately irrelevant to the present and future of humanity. It was silly to sit around being passive observers to history rather than makers of it.
When I was a student in Jason Saphara’s American Lit class I wrote a paper on the poem “After Apple-Picking” by Robert Frost, and I got a B on it. Jason told me the analysis was sound, but because I didn’t use enough outside resources, he had docked my grade. This leads me to my next point of why I’m a bad English major. Every class demanded at least three major essays in place of exams, and I resisted using outside research for my papers. This was not because I was lazy or didn’t know how, but because I firmly believed a writer should be inventing new ideas about a work, and not regurgitating what someone else had already said on the subject. It’s silly not to use our honed critical thinking skills to rely almost solely on our own ideas.
The English department is full of biases, and two of those biases are that if you’re a serious student of literature, you must hate Stephen King no matter what, and you must also worship at the altar of Shakespeare. It’s silly that we, as English majors, can’t simply like what we want, that we must conform to the “canon.” But Stephen King, I would argue, is so culturally entrenched that even if a person doesn’t like his writing, it can’t be denied that he is a significant writer worth studying. On the flip side, Shakespeare is like the Steven Spielberg of his time. Yes, he is culturally significant, but I’m not sure he’s worth all the forced adoration. It is ridiculous that our own personal interests are sources of such heated disagreements in our community.
English is the silliest subject to study in college, yet it is the most important to me. For all the things I find fault with – the armchair scholarship, the outside sources, the biases that rule us – there are ten more positive things that sprout in their place such as the joy of writing and being exposed to writers and ideas I never would have otherwise. I just have to square myself with the fact that I’m not cut out to be an armchair scholar like most in my field. My destiny as an English major is to be a literary bad-girl for having beliefs that live outside the box. In that spirit, you can take your Oxford serial comma, and stick it where the sun doesn’t shine!
As an undergraduate, I both loved and hated my literature classes. On the one hand, my teachers exposed me to many great, classic writers like Flannery O’Connor and Nathaniel Hawthorne. But on the other hand, literature classes seemed like glorified book clubs. All we did was sit around talking about the stuff we’ve read for the week. People in other academic disciplines, in business for example, were learning how to change the world. Meanwhile, we were stuck in the classroom talking about dead white guys who wrote interesting things, but were ultimately irrelevant to the present and future of humanity. It was silly to sit around being passive observers to history rather than makers of it.
When I was a student in Jason Saphara’s American Lit class I wrote a paper on the poem “After Apple-Picking” by Robert Frost, and I got a B on it. Jason told me the analysis was sound, but because I didn’t use enough outside resources, he had docked my grade. This leads me to my next point of why I’m a bad English major. Every class demanded at least three major essays in place of exams, and I resisted using outside research for my papers. This was not because I was lazy or didn’t know how, but because I firmly believed a writer should be inventing new ideas about a work, and not regurgitating what someone else had already said on the subject. It’s silly not to use our honed critical thinking skills to rely almost solely on our own ideas.
The English department is full of biases, and two of those biases are that if you’re a serious student of literature, you must hate Stephen King no matter what, and you must also worship at the altar of Shakespeare. It’s silly that we, as English majors, can’t simply like what we want, that we must conform to the “canon.” But Stephen King, I would argue, is so culturally entrenched that even if a person doesn’t like his writing, it can’t be denied that he is a significant writer worth studying. On the flip side, Shakespeare is like the Steven Spielberg of his time. Yes, he is culturally significant, but I’m not sure he’s worth all the forced adoration. It is ridiculous that our own personal interests are sources of such heated disagreements in our community.
English is the silliest subject to study in college, yet it is the most important to me. For all the things I find fault with – the armchair scholarship, the outside sources, the biases that rule us – there are ten more positive things that sprout in their place such as the joy of writing and being exposed to writers and ideas I never would have otherwise. I just have to square myself with the fact that I’m not cut out to be an armchair scholar like most in my field. My destiny as an English major is to be a literary bad-girl for having beliefs that live outside the box. In that spirit, you can take your Oxford serial comma, and stick it where the sun doesn’t shine!
Sacred Writing
Imagine that you've just been granted the power to do whatever you want on Thanksgiving, and your family has to obey you. Are there any traditions you would get rid of? Are there any foods you would cross off the menu? Describe what Thanksgiving would be like if you were completely in charge of it.
Honestly, I think my family's Thanksgiving is pretty good the way it is. We don't make any food that everyone secretly hates, and we spend the day playing and watching football on T.V. Some years, we even put up our Christmas tree.
The only thing I would change is the times we gather with my dad's family for Thanksgiving. I would forbid my cousin Melanie from cooking anything! Blech. What God-awful food! She's never heard of salt or spices of any kind. She's married to a chef, which makes her inability all the more puzzling. One year, he made this amazing stuffing with dried cranberries and shredded carrots, and it was OH-MY-GOD good! Paired with his amazingly moist and tender turkey, it was like eating Heaven. I wonder why he hasn't taught her anything about cooking. So that's all I'd change. I'd ban her from the kitchen, and make him take the helm every year!
Honestly, I think my family's Thanksgiving is pretty good the way it is. We don't make any food that everyone secretly hates, and we spend the day playing and watching football on T.V. Some years, we even put up our Christmas tree.
The only thing I would change is the times we gather with my dad's family for Thanksgiving. I would forbid my cousin Melanie from cooking anything! Blech. What God-awful food! She's never heard of salt or spices of any kind. She's married to a chef, which makes her inability all the more puzzling. One year, he made this amazing stuffing with dried cranberries and shredded carrots, and it was OH-MY-GOD good! Paired with his amazingly moist and tender turkey, it was like eating Heaven. I wonder why he hasn't taught her anything about cooking. So that's all I'd change. I'd ban her from the kitchen, and make him take the helm every year!
Sacred Writing
When (if ever) is it okay to cheat?
The teacher and representative of CSU-P in me says it's never never never never never okay to cheat.
But the daughter of an uber-competitive man says it's okay to cheat when you're playing Yahtzee with him and he gets up to get a drink, so you casually turn over a die or two so you get a large straight. That's the only time it's okay.
The teacher and representative of CSU-P in me says it's never never never never never okay to cheat.
But the daughter of an uber-competitive man says it's okay to cheat when you're playing Yahtzee with him and he gets up to get a drink, so you casually turn over a die or two so you get a large straight. That's the only time it's okay.
Sacred Writing
The year is nearly over. Describe some things you'd like to do before 2012 begins.
I'd like to finish my fan-fic story that I'm writing for the Novel Writing Challenge. It's so not serious compared to the work I usually do, and that was its big draw. I'd also like to fix up my house, as in remodel and renovate it, but that's going to depend largely on whether or not I get my settlement check, and how much I get at that! I want to spend a week doing nothing but watch TV and play the Xbox. Of course, that doesn't look like it's gonna happen. Oh, and for my anniversary, I want to do something really fun and out of the ordinary, something like hunting ghosts up at the Stanley Hotel.
I'd like to finish my fan-fic story that I'm writing for the Novel Writing Challenge. It's so not serious compared to the work I usually do, and that was its big draw. I'd also like to fix up my house, as in remodel and renovate it, but that's going to depend largely on whether or not I get my settlement check, and how much I get at that! I want to spend a week doing nothing but watch TV and play the Xbox. Of course, that doesn't look like it's gonna happen. Oh, and for my anniversary, I want to do something really fun and out of the ordinary, something like hunting ghosts up at the Stanley Hotel.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
My Picks
So, doing my research for my MK fan-fic, I stumbled across a bunch of various lists people made stating what actors they feel should play the characters in the upcoming movie. So, for giggles, here are my picks:
1. Liu Kang = James Kyson Lee (Heroes)
2. Johnny Cage = Josh Hartnett (Pearl Harbor)
3. Sonya Blade = Katee Sackhoff (Battlestar Galactica)
4. Jackson "Jax" Briggs = Michael Jai White (The Dark Knight)
5. Scorpion = Ian Anthony Dale (Mortal Kombat: Legacy)
6. Sub-Zero = Hayden Christensen (Star Wars)
7. Noob Saibot = Karl Urban (The Lord of the Rings)
8. Quan Chi = Vin Diesel (The Chronicles of Riddick)
9. Raiden = Paul Bettany (Priest)
10. Kung Lao = Steven Yeun (The Walking Dead)
11. Kano = Russell Crowe (Gladiator)
13. Reptile = Channing Tatum (The Eagle)
14. Shang Tsung = Daniel Dae Kim (Lost)
15. Baraka = Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson (The Scorpion King)
16. Jade = Maggie Q (Nikita)
17. Shao Kahn = Jason Statham (The Transporter)
18. Kitana = Olivia Wilde (Tron: Legacy)
19. Mileena = Megan Fox (Transformers)
20. Smoke (Human) = Chris Hemsworth (Thor)
21. Cyrax (Human) = Columbus Short (Stomp the Yard)
22. Sektor (Human) = Taylor Lautner (Twilight)
23. Kabal = Ryan Gosling (The Notebook)
24. Nightwolf = Adam Beach (Windtalkers)
25. Sindel = Kate Beckinsale (Underworld)
27. Stryker = Garrett Hedlund (Tron: Legacy)
28. Ermac = Oded Fehr (The Mummy)
29. Rain = Eric Bana (Troy)
30. Kenshi = John Cho (Star Trek)
Yeah, yeah, there's still plenty of characters I didn't list, but give me a break. Isn't 30 enough? These are the best characters anyway...
1. Liu Kang = James Kyson Lee (Heroes)
2. Johnny Cage = Josh Hartnett (Pearl Harbor)
3. Sonya Blade = Katee Sackhoff (Battlestar Galactica)
4. Jackson "Jax" Briggs = Michael Jai White (The Dark Knight)
5. Scorpion = Ian Anthony Dale (Mortal Kombat: Legacy)
6. Sub-Zero = Hayden Christensen (Star Wars)
7. Noob Saibot = Karl Urban (The Lord of the Rings)
8. Quan Chi = Vin Diesel (The Chronicles of Riddick)
9. Raiden = Paul Bettany (Priest)
10. Kung Lao = Steven Yeun (The Walking Dead)
11. Kano = Russell Crowe (Gladiator)
13. Reptile = Channing Tatum (The Eagle)
14. Shang Tsung = Daniel Dae Kim (Lost)
15. Baraka = Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson (The Scorpion King)
16. Jade = Maggie Q (Nikita)
17. Shao Kahn = Jason Statham (The Transporter)
18. Kitana = Olivia Wilde (Tron: Legacy)
19. Mileena = Megan Fox (Transformers)
20. Smoke (Human) = Chris Hemsworth (Thor)
21. Cyrax (Human) = Columbus Short (Stomp the Yard)
22. Sektor (Human) = Taylor Lautner (Twilight)
23. Kabal = Ryan Gosling (The Notebook)
24. Nightwolf = Adam Beach (Windtalkers)
25. Sindel = Kate Beckinsale (Underworld)
27. Stryker = Garrett Hedlund (Tron: Legacy)
28. Ermac = Oded Fehr (The Mummy)
29. Rain = Eric Bana (Troy)
30. Kenshi = John Cho (Star Trek)
Yeah, yeah, there's still plenty of characters I didn't list, but give me a break. Isn't 30 enough? These are the best characters anyway...
Sunday, November 13, 2011
The Purifying Fire
Previously, our class has discussed the nature of water in the Bible, and I have argued that it is a positive force that God uses to cleanse the world. In this sense, I am being quite literal; water is used to purge earthly filth from the world and soul. But fire, water’s natural opposite, is not a physical element in the same sense. It shows up repeatedly in the Bible as a spiritual essence when a person’s righteousness is in question. But like its counterpart, water, fire is also a purifying agent that purges spiritual filth from the human soul.
In the Book of Daniel, for example, Shadrach, Meschach, and Abednego are condemned to death in a white-hot furnace because they refuse to worship King Nebuchadnezzar’s statue. In her article, “The Fiery Furnace in the Book of Daniel and the Ancient Near East,” Tawny L. Holm argues that death by fire is not uncommon in ancient Babylon, but death by fire in a furnace is extremely rare. She cites one theory as to why the author chose to use a furnace: “…the author of Dan. 3 is taking literally the metaphorical use of burning in a furnace for purification or refining, as found in the biblical psalms or in other biblical descriptions of Israel’s suffering in the exodus or exile” (86). But Holm does not buy into that explanation completely. Tracing the ancient Middle Eastern diaspora, she observes that the pagan religions in the region believed that fire was proof of divine justice. If the condemned, specifically blasphemers, burned to death during execution, they believed it was the gods who had spoken and carried out punishment. If the condemned did not burn, this was evidence that the gods found no fault with in their hearts and had spared them because they were pure.
Holm argues that the author of Daniel would have known about this and several other customs pertaining to fire, and used them as inspiration. Certainly, the story of the furnace mirrors what I have just described. The condemned did not burn because God found no fault in their hearts; they chose to remain faithful to him rather than sacrifice their beliefs and worship Nebuchadnezzar’s false idol. Furthermore, in the furnace, they offered heartfelt prayers to God not to save them, but to do his will as he would: “Let them know that you alone are the Lord God, glorious over the whole world” (Daniel 3:45, New American Bible). When they emerged unscathed, Nebuchadnezzar obviously saw that the gods, or in this case God, had proven that their hearts were pure.
Later in the Bible, in the New Testament gospels, John the Baptist uses water to cleanse the physical filth from the souls of the candidates, but he foretells how Jesus will come to purge their spiritual filth:
I am baptizing you with water, but one mightier than I is coming. I am not worthy to loosen the thongs of his sandals. He will baptize you with the holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fan is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn with an unquenchable fire (Luke 3:16, New American Bible).
John’s words echo the story of Daniel. If Jesus, God the Son, finds the sinners’ souls to be pure, he will shower them with his grace and spare them a terrible fate. If his cleansing Spirit and fire fails to purify, he will punish sinners by letting them burn, presumably in Hell.
This is obviously not a comprehensive list of how fire is used to purify or to prove the purity of a person’s soul in the Bible, but these are two of the most significant examples. Eternally opposites but similar in function, water and fire are agents used to clean impurity from the human soul, one in an earthly sense and the other in a spiritual sense. But both are positive forces that God uses to prove his might over his people.
In the Book of Daniel, for example, Shadrach, Meschach, and Abednego are condemned to death in a white-hot furnace because they refuse to worship King Nebuchadnezzar’s statue. In her article, “The Fiery Furnace in the Book of Daniel and the Ancient Near East,” Tawny L. Holm argues that death by fire is not uncommon in ancient Babylon, but death by fire in a furnace is extremely rare. She cites one theory as to why the author chose to use a furnace: “…the author of Dan. 3 is taking literally the metaphorical use of burning in a furnace for purification or refining, as found in the biblical psalms or in other biblical descriptions of Israel’s suffering in the exodus or exile” (86). But Holm does not buy into that explanation completely. Tracing the ancient Middle Eastern diaspora, she observes that the pagan religions in the region believed that fire was proof of divine justice. If the condemned, specifically blasphemers, burned to death during execution, they believed it was the gods who had spoken and carried out punishment. If the condemned did not burn, this was evidence that the gods found no fault with in their hearts and had spared them because they were pure.
Holm argues that the author of Daniel would have known about this and several other customs pertaining to fire, and used them as inspiration. Certainly, the story of the furnace mirrors what I have just described. The condemned did not burn because God found no fault in their hearts; they chose to remain faithful to him rather than sacrifice their beliefs and worship Nebuchadnezzar’s false idol. Furthermore, in the furnace, they offered heartfelt prayers to God not to save them, but to do his will as he would: “Let them know that you alone are the Lord God, glorious over the whole world” (Daniel 3:45, New American Bible). When they emerged unscathed, Nebuchadnezzar obviously saw that the gods, or in this case God, had proven that their hearts were pure.
Later in the Bible, in the New Testament gospels, John the Baptist uses water to cleanse the physical filth from the souls of the candidates, but he foretells how Jesus will come to purge their spiritual filth:
I am baptizing you with water, but one mightier than I is coming. I am not worthy to loosen the thongs of his sandals. He will baptize you with the holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fan is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn with an unquenchable fire (Luke 3:16, New American Bible).
John’s words echo the story of Daniel. If Jesus, God the Son, finds the sinners’ souls to be pure, he will shower them with his grace and spare them a terrible fate. If his cleansing Spirit and fire fails to purify, he will punish sinners by letting them burn, presumably in Hell.
This is obviously not a comprehensive list of how fire is used to purify or to prove the purity of a person’s soul in the Bible, but these are two of the most significant examples. Eternally opposites but similar in function, water and fire are agents used to clean impurity from the human soul, one in an earthly sense and the other in a spiritual sense. But both are positive forces that God uses to prove his might over his people.
The Dark Knight as a Re-telling of the Book of Job
I'm taking Bible as Literature right now, and we've been assigned the task of writing a 15-20 page critical essay that somehow relates to what we've studied in class. I was lost for a topic, but when I was researching The Dark Knight for my thesis research about Tricksters, I noticed quite by accident that this movie is, in fact, a re-telling of the Book of Job. I love it when life offers a subject to write about on a silver platter!
So follow me here: The Joker is Satan, Batman is God, and Gotham City is Job. And for some New Testament zest, you could interpret Harvey Dent as Jesus Christ. If you don't believe me, watch it again. You'll see!
Here's the thing though. Being a creative writer, it's really easy for me to hammer out 20 pages of a story. I was kind of dabbling with my fan-fic tonight, not even seriously, and squeezed out 10 pages. But critical essays have this unnerving power to turn me into Rainman. I don't know what it is about them that makes me short-bus special, but they do.
I developed a strong, rhetorical outline and improved my thesis, so the work is coming a little bit easier. Even still, I think what's hindering me is knowing my audience. My teacher has high expectations, so even before I put pen to paper, I can hear her criticizing me. Of course, this is mostly my own neurosis - we're our own worst critics - but even still that fear of failure stifles me. Furthermore, it doesn't help that my subject ventures into uncharted territory. It's not like there's a thousand scholarly sources about The Dark Knight as the Book of Job to inform my research. The closest scholarly essay I got to was how the movie depicts evil.
On that note, it's been fun writing about the Joker. I've addressed him in a couple of different essays from different angles, and he never fails to offer me material. The hard part, at least where this particular essay is concerned, is being as excited to talk about Batman as God and Gotham as Job. Don't get me wrong, I have plenty of material for them both, but they're just not as fun to write about!
So, my goal is to finish my rough draft tomorrow. Wish me luck!
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Mortal Kombat, Round 2
So, for kicks, I decided to write those Mortal Kombat fan-fic stories I talked about in an earlier post, and I started constructing my Sub-Zero one as carefully as I would a piece of serious literature.
I promise you, I'm trying to write this like I'm Shakespeare. I say this because I perused some internet fan-fic to see what kinds of trends were going on.
Jesus effin Christ!
The writers of some of this drivel shouldn't be allowed to own a computer, much less operate one and post stuff to the internet. Who the hell taught these people how to write?
There were so many problems with their fan-fic that I really don't know where to begin bitching about it. The biggest problem is that 99% of them were so anxious to see their favorite Mortal Kombat character in a story that they didn't take the time to actually develop a story. Good lord, I hate Stephenie Meyer's work, but at least she actually took the time to hammer out how necrophilia was going to play a pivotal role in her novels. Mileena's naughty slumber party may sound like fun if you're a teenage boy, but did you forget about her Tarkatan mouth full of razor sharp teeth, and how she's a biter? Trust me, boys, you don't want that chick anywhere near your zipper.
And I'm not even going to address the spelling and grammar issues that arose...
Reading their overly emotive-but-not-well-thought-out crap, I kept replaying that scene in my mind from The Dark Knight, the part where the Joker says, "This town deserves a better class of criminal." I could say the same thing about fan-fic: The internet deserves a better class of fan fiction. And I'm going to give it to them.
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Richard Glenn Hall
Richard Glenn Hall, 85, Pueblo, passed away at his home on November 3, 2011. He was surrounded by his loving family. Richard was preceded in death by Jennie "Rae" Rachel, his wife of 30 years. He is survived by his children, Charlie (Delene) Hall and Tammy (Mark) Johnson; five grandchildren, Charlie Jr. (Jessica), Nick (Pam), Chris, Katie (Larry) Rice and Jeremy (Kristi) Johnson; and nine great-grandchildren, Michael, Gabrielle, Dominick, Adam, Deion, Bradley, Kiah, Nyka and Colton.
Richard retired and closed his business of 60 years, Frigid Equipment, in 1998. He served in the Army Air Corp in World War II as a Flying Crew Chief on B-17 bombers, earned the nickname "Putt-Putt Hall", and was honorably discharged in 1946. Flying was in his blood by then, and in 1947 he earned his private pilot's license. In 1948, he joined the Civil Air Patrol, and for over 25 years flew missions for Search and Rescue, attaining the rank of Captain, Major, and eventually Commander for the Pueblo Chapter. His pride and joys were his planes, his BT13 military trainer and his Supercub. Richard loved telling stories from his days as a pilot, and it was obvious that his times in the sky were the best of his life. He loved to putter around with mechanical equipment and engines, and he was fond of telling stories of his various (mis)adventures to anyone who'd listen. He encouraged people to learn at least one new thing every day.
Eternally young at heart, Richard didn't want people to dwell on their loss or grief, so he requested that he not be given a funeral. However, his family will be holding a small reception at his home in Pueblo West at 5 pm, November 5, 2011, to celebrate his life. He will be cremated and his ashes will be spread with his wife's. Together once again, their souls will fly off into the wild, blue yonder, climbing high into the sun. Online condolences, www.georgemccarthyfuneralhome.com.
Sacred Writing
What is the best news you could get right now?
Last year, a crazy old lady caused me and my entire family to get in a terrible wreck, and because of the outstanding bills incurred from it, we got a lawyer and sued her. Well, it's taken over a year for the lawyer to get all the ducks in a row, but several painful procedures and a couple of surgeries later, we got the news that he finally put in the demands to the insurance company. Supposedly, they usually settle within 30 days after that, so the best news I could get is that the lawyer has a check for us!
Last year, a crazy old lady caused me and my entire family to get in a terrible wreck, and because of the outstanding bills incurred from it, we got a lawyer and sued her. Well, it's taken over a year for the lawyer to get all the ducks in a row, but several painful procedures and a couple of surgeries later, we got the news that he finally put in the demands to the insurance company. Supposedly, they usually settle within 30 days after that, so the best news I could get is that the lawyer has a check for us!
Sacred Writing
Make a list of movies you think everyone should see at least once.
1. The Prophecy
2. The Green Mile
3. The Shawshank Redemption
4. What Dreams May Come
5. Casablanca
6. The Lion King
7. The Nightmare Before Christmas
8. Scrooged
9. Ghostbusters
10. Paranormal Activity
11. The Exorcist
12. Pirates of the Caribbean
13. Flatliners
14. Michael
15. Edward Scissorhands
16. Batman Begins
17. The Dark Knight
18. Thor
19. X-men
20. The Lord of the Rings
21. Huck Finn (with Elijah Wood)
22. The Road
23. Charade
24. American Psycho
25. McClintock
26. Titanic
27. What's Eating Gilbert Grape
28. City of Angels
29. Angels and Demons
30. Harry Potter
1. The Prophecy
2. The Green Mile
3. The Shawshank Redemption
4. What Dreams May Come
5. Casablanca
6. The Lion King
7. The Nightmare Before Christmas
8. Scrooged
9. Ghostbusters
10. Paranormal Activity
11. The Exorcist
12. Pirates of the Caribbean
13. Flatliners
14. Michael
15. Edward Scissorhands
16. Batman Begins
17. The Dark Knight
18. Thor
19. X-men
20. The Lord of the Rings
21. Huck Finn (with Elijah Wood)
22. The Road
23. Charade
24. American Psycho
25. McClintock
26. Titanic
27. What's Eating Gilbert Grape
28. City of Angels
29. Angels and Demons
30. Harry Potter
Sacred Writing
What albums did you listen to most while growing up?
My mom was a huge fan of the band, Pink Floyd, and she was morbidly depressed throughout most of my childhood, so I listened to The Wall at least ten times a day. There was a point that if I heard the song "Comfortably Numb" one more time, I was going to scream! Can you imagine being six years old and wanting to kill yourself, but not knowing why? Okay, I'm exaggerating about that last part, but I was still pretty sick of Pink Floyd when I was a kid. The ironic thing is that now, they're my all time favorite band!
I also listened to the various albums by artists from the 70s. My parents were teenagers in the 70s, so that's mostly why. I grew up on the Moody Blues and Alan Parson's Project, my dad's favorites.
My mom was a huge fan of the band, Pink Floyd, and she was morbidly depressed throughout most of my childhood, so I listened to The Wall at least ten times a day. There was a point that if I heard the song "Comfortably Numb" one more time, I was going to scream! Can you imagine being six years old and wanting to kill yourself, but not knowing why? Okay, I'm exaggerating about that last part, but I was still pretty sick of Pink Floyd when I was a kid. The ironic thing is that now, they're my all time favorite band!
I also listened to the various albums by artists from the 70s. My parents were teenagers in the 70s, so that's mostly why. I grew up on the Moody Blues and Alan Parson's Project, my dad's favorites.
Friday, October 14, 2011
Sacred Writing
In the spirit of Halloween, I have to ask: do you believe in ghosts? Why or why not?
I do believe in ghosts, and for reasons I've already talked about in my last post. I've had too many experiences to count. How can I not believe in ghosts, especially as a Christian? Our ancestors clear to our cavemen days believed in them, and in some ways I think they knew more than modern men do. It's only been since the Age of Enlightenment that people have really stopped believing in them.
But science is currently proving the existence of things previously thought impossible, dark matter and the Big Bang Theory for example. Who's to say that just because the current technology to prove the existence of ghosts doesn't exist yet, that it won't tomorrow? Furthermore, what if ghosts are really just beings who inhabit another dimension where the things we call monsters live? Who's to say that we won't ever have the tools and technology to discover and chart such dimensions? If there's so much that science is finding now, why is it taboo to say there's still a lot left to "discover?"
I do believe in ghosts, and for reasons I've already talked about in my last post. I've had too many experiences to count. How can I not believe in ghosts, especially as a Christian? Our ancestors clear to our cavemen days believed in them, and in some ways I think they knew more than modern men do. It's only been since the Age of Enlightenment that people have really stopped believing in them.
But science is currently proving the existence of things previously thought impossible, dark matter and the Big Bang Theory for example. Who's to say that just because the current technology to prove the existence of ghosts doesn't exist yet, that it won't tomorrow? Furthermore, what if ghosts are really just beings who inhabit another dimension where the things we call monsters live? Who's to say that we won't ever have the tools and technology to discover and chart such dimensions? If there's so much that science is finding now, why is it taboo to say there's still a lot left to "discover?"
Sacred Writing
What is the scariest movie you've ever seen, and why do you think it's so frightening?
I've seen tons of scary movies. Some of them, mostly the slasher movies, are lame. But I think the scariest one I've ever seen is Paranormal Activity. Now, I know a lot of you might be saying that should be considered a lame movie, but hear me out. I came to the conclusion, after listening to others' criticisms of it, that if you've never had anything like that happen to you, it won't be a scary movie. But on the other hand, if you have had anything like that happen to you, that movie will scare the crap out of you. Unfortunately, I fall into the latter camp.
My whole childhood was like that. Not the demon possession part, but the crazy poltergeist activity part. My mom even had a priest come bless our house to combat the disturbances. Life was especially awful for me because it was almost as if the entity, whatever it was, was connected to me. After the priest blessed the house, things got better for a while, but then they started right back up, twice as bad as before. So when I saw Paranormal Activity, it was like a war flashback for me, okay? I couldn't sleep for a week, and I had to have the light on at all times.
I've seen tons of scary movies. Some of them, mostly the slasher movies, are lame. But I think the scariest one I've ever seen is Paranormal Activity. Now, I know a lot of you might be saying that should be considered a lame movie, but hear me out. I came to the conclusion, after listening to others' criticisms of it, that if you've never had anything like that happen to you, it won't be a scary movie. But on the other hand, if you have had anything like that happen to you, that movie will scare the crap out of you. Unfortunately, I fall into the latter camp.
My whole childhood was like that. Not the demon possession part, but the crazy poltergeist activity part. My mom even had a priest come bless our house to combat the disturbances. Life was especially awful for me because it was almost as if the entity, whatever it was, was connected to me. After the priest blessed the house, things got better for a while, but then they started right back up, twice as bad as before. So when I saw Paranormal Activity, it was like a war flashback for me, okay? I couldn't sleep for a week, and I had to have the light on at all times.
Monday, October 10, 2011
Mortal Kombat
I kind of thought that since my work as of late is so academic and stuffy, it might be nice to write something silly and fun for a change. I entertained the idea of writing a Mortal Kombat fan-fic series that uses everything I've learned thus far about creative writing. There's a YouTube web series called Mortal Kombat: Legacy that traces the main characters' origins in ten minute episodes. It's an interesting show, but my biggest criticism is that ten minutes isn't really enough time to develop these characters adequately. So for the Novel of the Month project, I thought it might be fun to better develop those characters in fiction.
So I started drafting a story about Sub-Zero, who is my favorite character in the Mortal Kombat universe. Spare me your declarations of love for Scorpion; believe me, I've heard it from plenty of people already! Yes, he's cool, but I love Sub-Zero more. Either way, I'll try to write a Scorpion origins story as well for this project. And then I'll try to muster the courage to post said stories to my blog!
Original Prankster: The Prince of Darkness Turned Trickster
The publication of Paradise Lost by John Milton in 1667 made Lucifer, previously a flat and uninteresting figure in western literature, a well-developed character full of depth and substance. This essay investigates a small, but by no means comprehensive, cross-section of his place in American literature through the lens of the powerful Trickster archetype. Unlike the medieval depictions of Lucifer that are rooted in Greek mythology, American authors portray him as a drifter who wanders into protagonists’ lives to overturn their perceptions about the nature of God and the universe. When Lucifer appears, he is the giver of revelations in the face of tragedy and terror.
Lewis Hyde has argued in Trickster Makes This World: “The origins, liveliness, and durability of cultures requires that there be space for figures whose function is to uncover and disrupt the very things that culture is based on” (9). In literature and folklore, these figures emerge as Tricksters, those archetypal entities that, through their misadventures, create a balance between chaotic anarchy and oppressive fascism. When Tricksters appear, they force people around them to analyze the sacredness of their values, and in so doing, make them reject them or embrace them to the benefit of the community that shares them. Through this lens, there is no greater Trickster in American literature than Lucifer, Creation’s first wolf-in-sheepskin antagonist who unexpectedly shows up to overturn the protagonists’ misconceptions about the world.
The following essay stems from a puzzling question: is Lucifer really a Trickster? Many critics caution against confusing him with a Trickster because in terms of conventional religion, particularly Christianity, he is morally aligned with evil while traditionally, Trickster is morally indifferent. Hyde argues:
The Devil and the Trickster are not the same thing, though they have regularly been confused…The Devil is an agent of evil, but trickster is amoral, not immoral…One doesn’t usually hear said of the Christian Devil what the anthropologist Paul Radin says of the Native American trickster:
Trickster is at one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who dupes others and who is always duped himself…He knows neither good nor evil yet he is responsible for both. He possesses no values, moral or social…yet through his actions all values come into being (10).
He should be considered a Trickster, but is not by most theorists because, as William Doty and William Hynes observe, “Despite Augustine’s dictum that good can come from evil, we are taught to reject almost automatically the suggestion that a deceitful figure – by the definitions of our society, morally bad – can bring about good” as Tricksters tend to do (“Historical” 28). But if we examine him solely from Hyde’s point of view, Lucifer, particularly in American literature, is the portrait of Radin’s Trickster. Not the warped version of the god Pan carrying a banner that blatantly proclaims I’m evil!, Lucifer is an ambiguous wanderer who creates uncertainty and terror, who easily destroys people’s most sacred beliefs in the blink of an eye. He manifests the strongest traits of Trickster folklore and Christian dogma, and the resulting hybrid is a figure whose comedy is deeply sinister and dark, and whose tricks paradoxically lead to the salvation-through-damnation of human souls.
The depictions of Lucifer in the works I examine rely heavily on religious tradition, but also on folklore and mythology. Therefore, examining the intersection of Lucifer’s history with the Trickster’s will better help to illuminate his role in American literature.
Trickster
The Trickster is a powerful, archetypal character who emerges in every world culture since the dawn of mankind. In their essay, “Introducing the Fascinating and Perplexing Trickster Figure,” Doty and Hynes argue that “For centuries, perhaps millennia, and in the widest variety of cultural and religious belief systems, humans have told and retold tales of tricksters, figures who are usually comical, yet serve to highlight important social values. They cause laughter, to be sure, as they profane nearly every central belief, but at the same time they focus attention precisely on the nature of such beliefs” (1). They are some of the oldest characters in literature, dating back to mankind’s earliest days when pictures of them were scratched or painted onto cave walls. In the United States, we are most familiar with Coyote and Brer Rabbit, but elsewhere in the world is Robin Hood, Ananse, and Loki just to cite a few examples. In literature, there are Tricksters such as Robin Goodfellow from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn from Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In popular culture, Tricksters are still relevant figures because while they continue
to have a home in printed literature, they have also found a new home in movies and television. Bart Simpson, Bugs Bunny, Captain Jack Sparrow, and the Joker are all significant cinematic Tricksters because they are that element of comic relief flying straight into the face of all that is serious and sacred.
No matter what era of Earth’s history Trickster emerges from, and no matter what civilization produces him, he shares remarkably similar traits from culture to culture. Hynes identifies six traits universally common to Trickster: he is ambiguous and anomalous, a deceiver and trick-player, a shape-shifter, situation-inverter, lewd-bricoleur, and messenger and imitator of the gods (“Mapping” 34). Trickster’s biggest appeal is that he is the ultimate underdog; almost always portrayed as physically weaker than his opponents, he is forced to rely on his own cunning to overcome sticky situations, so he plays clever tricks to win something from those who exercise power over him. A true anti-authoritarian, Trickster ridicules status, hierarchy, and power, and thus he frequently uses his wits and his pranks to overturn traditional social conventions. Lucifer fits well into this archetype because he is Creation’s first rule-breaker who never stops challenging the authority of the foremost power in the universe: God.
In addition to these universal traits, Melita Schaum argues in “Erasing Angel” that “one of the predominant characteristics of Trickster is his restless, wandering nature. Like Br’er Rabbit or Br’er Fox – or like Hermes, god of roadways – we continually meet him ‘coming down the road’ as the tale begins. As a traveler, he is an emblem of indeterminacy, a figure ‘at the crossroads’ or in the liminal space between communities, ever ‘on the open road’” (4). Lucifer’s association with crossroads pacts, supernatural contracts in which some human sells his/her soul in exchange for money, fame, or talent further associate him with conventional Tricksters, as does his wandering nature: “And the Lord said to Satan, ‘Whence do you come from?’ Then Satan answered the Lord and said, ‘From roaming the earth and patrolling it’” (New American Bible, Job 1:7).
Lucifer
Lucifer – also known as the Light-Bearer or Morning Star – has an ambiguous history in western civilization; his exact origins are unclear as he is never mentioned by name in the canonical Bible, but an ancient Jewish myth that associates the planet Venus with fallen angels, as well as the apocryphal books The Life of Adam and Eve and The Second Book of Enoch provide some clues. In these stories, he is an archangel loved above all others who plots to take the throne of God, and after a terrible war that divides Heaven, he is cast out and doomed to spend eternity flying over the abyss. A biblical passage that refers to the Babylonian king, Helel, may also have inspired conventional ideas about him:
How have you fallen from the heavens, O morning star, son of the dawn! How are you cut down to the ground, you who mowed down the nations! You said in your heart: ‘I will scale the heavens; above the stars of God I will set up my throne; I will take my seat on the Mount of Assembly, in the recesses of the North. I will ascend above the tops of the clouds; I will be like the Most High!’ Yet down to the nether world you go to the recesses of the pit! When they see you they will stare, pondering over you: ‘Is this the man who made the earth tremble, and kingdoms quake? Who made the world a desert, razed its cities, and gave his captives no release? All the kings of the nations lie in glory, each in his own tomb; but you are cast forth without burial, loathsome and corrupt, clothed as those slain at sword-point, a trampled corpse. Going down to the pavement of the pit, you will never be one with them in the grave.’ For you have ruined your land, you have slain your people! Let him not be named forever, that scion of an evil race! Make ready to slaughter his sons for the guilt of their fathers; lest they rise and possess the earth, and fill the breadth of the world with tyrants (New American Bible, Isaiah 14:12-21).
Though Lucifer’s origins are mysterious, he is well known as the Father of Lies, the one who tricked Eve in the Garden of Eden and subsequently introduced death into the world. In pre-Christian books such as the Talmud and Apocrypha, he evolves from a weak angel to the fearsome adversary who is the ultimate embodiment of evil, the nemesis of both God and of Man, and the entity who openly seeks the ruination of souls. This view of Lucifer has changed very little over the years, and has been reinforced by religious affirmation and popular opinion.
By the Middle Ages he also becomes known as an evil prankster. There are stories that tell how, to torment someone, he would lie on their feet every night to keep them from sleeping. Others attributed odd happenings to him, such as candlesticks mysteriously tipping over or bedspreads being violently ripped off beds in the night. Many European stories hold that he has constructed various bridges, so people must tread cautiously when crossing lest he appears to push them off. In Ireland, where he is sometimes called Pucca, he is thought to lure night travelers over cliffs to their deaths. The fear of his tricks becomes so prevalent that European cultures develop numerous charms, prayers, and spells to ward him off. For example, the early Halloween custom of lighting a lantern, an old version of the contemporary jack-o-lantern, was originally a means for people to ward off evil and mischievous spirits like him.
Lucifer as Trickster in American Fiction
Melita Schaum argues that in Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, her “Trickster poses as a spiritual confidence man – liar, thief, smooth operator, the injector of disorder and bankruptor of souls – yet he is himself as often as not comically evil, snared by his own devices, and unwittingly conscripted into the service of divine good. Moreover, by breaking the rigid and sterile orders of misplaced human pride, righteousness, egoism, or appetitive greed, he becomes the disruptive force that paradoxically makes possible social and spiritual renewal” (3). Though Schaum refers solely to Flannery O’Connor’s work, her view is applicable to other American Tricksters as well. In American literature, Lucifer-Tricksters are not so much the arbitrary bringers of chaos from folklore as they are accidental redeemers of the human spirit who just happen to arrive on the scene when individuals or societies have become inflexible with their beliefs. Unfortunately for their victims, this redemption almost always comes only moments before a real or symbolic death because, as the Joker notes in The Dark Knight, “in their last moments, people show you who they really are.”
Hulga from Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People” is the epitome of this sort of inflexibility. Having earned a degree in philosophy, as well as being an ardent student of science, she is a staunch atheist who has no patience for anyone who still believes that a man in the sky rules the world. Not wanting to be associated with beauty, she centers her whole personality around the theme of ugliness. She is ugly to her mother, she is ugly to the country people she loathes, and she is even ugly to complete strangers. Ironically, she changes her name from Joy to Hulga because it is the ugliest name she can think of, yet she gets angry when people call her by this new name. She is the sort of woman with an answer for everything, and looks down her superior nose at anyone who has a different point of view.
Enter Manly Pointer, the enigmatic Bible salesman who arrives at Mrs. Hopewell’s farm and introduces himself as someone who is “not even from a place, just from near a place,” which automatically calls attention to his ambiguity (7). Depicted as a “tall gaunt hatless youth” with “prominent face bones and a streak of sticky looking brown hair falling across his forehead,” and barely able to lift the heavy suitcase he’s lugging with him, Manly comes across as big a weakling as his brothers in traditional Trickster folklore (O’Connor 6). When Mrs. Hopewell tries to send this man she views as a simpleton away, he immediately plays towards her prejudices about “good country people” in order to invert the situation and to earn an invitation into her home:
He didn’t get up. He began to twist his hands and looking down at them, he said softly, “Well lady, I’ll tell you the truth – not many people want to buy one [a Bible] nowadays and besides, I know I’m real simple. I don’t know how to say a thing but to say it. I’m just a country boy.” He glanced up into her unfriendly face. “People like you don’t like to fool with country people like me!”
“Why!” she cried, “good country people are the salt of the earth! Besides, we all have different ways of doing, it takes all kinds to make the world go ‘round. That’s life!” (O’Connor 7).
His manipulative words resonate so profoundly with Mrs. Hopewell that she invites him to supper, which calls to mind an old superstition that holds how people must actively invite unholy entities into their houses before they can enter and cause chaos. At dinner, Manly winds up inviting the obnoxious Hulga on a casual date, and the next evening, Manly leads her into the countryside and away from her home, farther from her comfort zone and farther from the “known” world where she has all the answers, first to the barn on the edge of the property, and then to the loft where he pretends to seduce her. Ironically, up to this point she has imagined seducing him, a daydream that tricks her into thinking she’s got the upper hand over him. Using her vanity in her own superior knowledge to his advantage, Manly lures her across the physical and symbolic boundaries that separate the things she is certain she knows from the unfamiliar territory she finds herself in.
He shows an unusual interest in her wooden leg, and it unnerves her because she has come to view it as her defining quality after her education, and therefore she possessively guards it, never letting anyone see it. However, this type of attitude without any faith in God leads to her downfall because once Manly talks her into removing it, she puts herself at his mercy. Further destabilizing the situation and her security, he takes Hulga’s glasses, leaving her virtually blind to the world around her. This, of course, is obvious symbolism for the blindness she creates inside of herself through her stubborn pride in her own beliefs. In this way she overshadows Manly’s deception; she has been deceiving herself for much longer. Now that she’s practically helpless, he inverts the situation even more when he reveals to her the contents of his Bible suitcase – whiskey, condoms, naked lady playing cards conveniently hidden in a hollow Bible – proving once and for all that he is not, in fact, “good country people.”
Vulnerable and confused, she asks “aren’t you just good country people?” as if he couldn’t have been clever enough to pull one over on her. He replies “Yeah…but it ain’t held me back none. I’m as good as you any day of the week” (18). Then he triumphantly steals her leg. Before he runs off to resume his wandering and to let her contemplate her own stupidity, he states: “And you needn’t to think you’ll catch me because Pointer ain’t really my name. I use a different name at every house I call at and don’t stay nowhere long. And I’ll tell you another thing, Hulga…you ain’t so smart. I been believing in nothing since I was born (18).” If we are to believe Manly about his shifting identity, he, like Lucifer, goes by many different names. Hulga is left to reflect on how the world isn’t everything she believes it to be, and how if there is a Devil, there must be a God as well. Unfortunately for her, in spite of her superior education, she cannot recognize evil until it is too late.
In Joyce Carol Oates’ story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been,” the teenage protagonist Connie paradoxically mirrors O’Connor’s Hulga, but whereas Hulga goes out of her way to make herself appear uglier in order to exalt her superior intellect, Connie goes out of her way to make herself more beautiful. Anxious to become an adult, she rejects the role of the “nice” girl to cultivate her sexual persona, which flourishes only when she is away from her home and family. However, Arnold Friend’s unexpected arrival at her house forces her to stop talking the talk and start walking the walk, and the reader sees her struggle between staying an innocent child or running headlong into adulthood. She is reluctant to leave her family and home forever, but we can see that she is also curious to know what this trip with Arnold will mean for her. The two sides merge violently. At the crossroads, the only boundary separating Connie’s childhood from her adulthood is a screen door.
Arnold Friend, with his suggestive name that hints at “Arch Fiend,” is an ambiguous stranger who makes a grand entrance at Connie’s house in his gold convertible, and he looks bizarre enough to suggest that he is otherworldly. He wears mirrored sunglasses, has translucent skin, and has hair that is so wild that it looks like a wig. When he walks, he wobbles as though his shoes don’t fit properly, which possibly suggests that his feet are actually hooves, a throwback to the idea of Satan as a Pan-like satyr, but also a depiction reminiscent of Native American animal tricksters. When he claims to know things about her family and neighbors that he couldn’t possibly know, he further calls the humanness of his character into question. He is a malevolent character who initially tries to charm Connie into coming to him, and therefore could be seen as a symbol of temptation.
His trickery is more subtle in this story than in others. Rather than pull an outright prank such as Manly Pointer stealing Hulga’s fake leg, he tricks her using terroristic tactics. Cutting her off from outside help and refusing to leave, he threatens to harm her family if she refuses to come to him. The fact that he can’t seem to enter without invitation also calls into mind the superstition I discussed above about unholy supernatural creatures needing an invitation to cross a house’s threshold. Whatever the case may be, he disrupts her sense of security and certainty, and uses threats and intimidation to trick her into leaving the safety of her house:
She rushed forward and tried to lock the door. Her fingers were shaking. "But why lock it," Arnold Friend said gently, talking right into her face. "It's just a screen door. It's just nothing." One of his boots was at a strange angle, as if his foot wasn't in it. It pointed out to the left, bent at the ankle. "I mean, anybody can break through a screen door and glass and wood and iron or anything else if he needs to, anybody at all, and specially Arnold Friend. If the place got lit up with a fire, honey, you'd come runnin' out into my arms, right into my arms an' safe at home—like you knew I was your lover and'd stopped fooling around. I don't mind a nice shy girl but I don't like no fooling around." Part of those words were spoken with a slight rhythmic lilt, and Connie somehow recognized them—the echo of a song from last year, about a girl rushing into her boy friend's arms and coming home again—
It is important to note that painted on Arnold Friend’s car are the numbers 33, 19, and 17. If one counts backwards from the end of the Bible, which is another possible allusion to Lucifer who does everything opposite of God, it is obvious that Oates is referencing the Book of Judges, the thirty-third book of the Bible: “When he noticed the traveler in the public square of the city, the old man asked where he was going, and whence he had come” (New American Bible, Judges 19:17). Looking at the verse in its entire context, the passage it belongs to echoes the story of Lot at Sodom and Gomorrah; the corrupt people of Gibeah demand that a man hand over his guest, his son-in-law, to be sodomized at their leisure. Instead of handing over his guest, the old man throws his daughter, his son-in-law’s concubine, to these corrupt men, who violently rape her the whole night and leave her dead on the man’s doorstep. Here, “corrupt” literally translates from “the sons of Belial,” Belial being one of Lucifer’s many other names (New American Bible, Judges 19:22).
If one simply adds all the numbers together, the sum is 69, the name of a sexual act that could allude to Connie’s attempts to sexualize herself. But if playing a very specific ancient Jewish number-letter game, “Genesis” is the only biblical book title that adds up to 33; this could refer to God’s warning against overindulgence in the Genesis story of Lot, especially given the similarities between the stories. But playing this same game, “Connie” adds up to 33, “loves” adds up to 19, and “God” adds up to 17 (“33 19 17”). In light of all the demonic evidence generated by this highly symbolic and complex sequence of numbers, it is obvious that Arnold Friend is Lucifer incarnate and one of American literature’s more blatant Trickster-Devils, and he is the catalyst that changes Connie from a child to an adult — albeit through drastic, violent means.
Contemporary horror writer Stephen King is also not above employing Lucifer as Trickster in his works. In his novel, Needful Things, the mysterious proprietor, Leland Gaunt, is a charming elderly gentleman who opens a shop called “Needful Things” in the middle of Castle Rock, Maine. The store intrigues his customers because he always seems to have an item in stock that is perfectly suited to everyone. The merchandise Gaunt peddles, things like a rare Sandy Koufax baseball card, a carnival glass lampshade, and a fragment of wood believed to be from Noah’s Ark, are extraordinarily rare but also have some special, sentimental value to each of his customers that make them particularly priceless. Unbeknownst to the people of Castle Rock, though, his merchandise is utterly worthless in reality, but somehow he tricks his customers by making everything appear as if it’s something it’s not. For these curios, Gaunt asks for very little in terms of money, but to make up the difference, he expects each customer to also play a little prank on someone else in Castle Rock.
In the prologue, the first-person narrator describes the town of Castle Rock:
It’s the same here as where you grew up, most likely. People getting het up over religion, people carryin torches, people carryin secrets, people carryin grudges…and even a spooky story every now and then, like what might or might not have happened on the day Pop died in his junk shop, to liven up the occasional dull day. Castle Rock is still a pretty nice place to live and grow, as the sign you see when you come into town says…The Rock has always been one of the good places, and when people get scratchy, you know what we say? We say He’ll get over it or She’ll get over it (King 9).
Yet as the story unfolds, we see they won’t get over it. This newcomer Gaunt somehow knows about the long-standing feuds between the various townspeople, and the pranks he persuades others to pull are his means of creating madness and violence. Every prank pulled deepens blood feuds as well as paranoia about keeping their precious items safe. The needful things that Gaunt peddles consume their entire personality; the citizens of Castle Rock are so faithless and hollow inside that even their most prized possessions cannot fill the void. Somehow, they’ve created a Hell inside themselves that begs for a master to rule them, the wise Gaunt, and it is in this scenario that they turn to him to eagerly buy up the weapons he inevitably offers for sale and to happily trade away their souls. Their inner Hell becomes a very physical one when neighbor ruthlessly kills neighbor, friend turns against friend, and the body count quickly rises.
Finally, the one incorruptible soul, Sheriff Alan Pangborn, faces off against Gaunt by employing an explosive magic trick that distracts him; Alan uses this brief moment to steal a valise that contains the souls of all Gaunt's customers, and he manages to convince Gaunt that he's lost this battle. Gaunt departs, leaving the survivors to pick up the pieces. Although many of the townspeople are dead, their souls have been saved; Gaunt has moved on, defeated this time, but ready to play his eternal game wherever there are other "buyers" to prey upon.
In the biblical Book of Job, Lucifer seems to serve God as a persecutor of mankind rather than as a demon terrorizing it. He accuses Job of faithlessness; he believes that Job is a pious man because God has given him everything he could ever want in life. But he wagers that if God took everything away from him, he’d quickly turn his back on God and on his faith. God accepts his challenge and allows Lucifer to torture him in the form of “tests” to prove his faithfulness and loyalty, but his wicked plan backfires when Job stays as strong as ever and therefore passes. To reward Job, God restores everything he’s lost and gives him even more than he had to begin with.
It is with this biblical story in mind that I include the movie, The Dark Knight, in this essay, a movie in the Batman mythology that retells Job’s story in contemporary Gotham City, with the arch-villain Joker stepping into Lucifer’s shoes. Gotham’s mob families, driven to their knees by Batman’s vigilante justice, find themselves at the Joker’s mercy when he promises to execute Batman, but only if they agree to pay him half of their combined fortunes. Money, however, is not his real ambition; the Joker is out to prove a point, that deep inside, mankind is truly evil, and it will lose its moral compass when chaos is introduced to it. He tells Batman in an interrogation scene that deeply parallels Satan’s challenge of God:
You see, their morals, their code…it’s a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. I’ll show you. When the chips are down, these ‘civilized’ people...they’ll eat each other. See, I’m not a monster. I’m just ahead of the curve.
Batman and Joker’s argument continues throughout the movie; at the end, Joker initiates a game with two ferries trying to escape Gotham City, something he calls a “social experiment.” He has rigged both ferries, one carrying prisoners and one carrying innocent civilians, with enough gasoline and C4 explosives to destroy each one several times over, and gives each of them the other ferry’s remote detonator. The catch is that one ferry must destroy the other by midnight, and if neither obeys him, he promises to destroy them both. After Joker’s horrific series of tests against Gotham City in which numerous people have already been killed, the people on both ferries knows he’s serious about his threat. Even still, the occupants on both ferries can’t bring themselves to destroy the other, thus proving their faithfulness in the face of catastrophe. Batman, smug about this little victory, says, “This city just showed you that it’s full of people ready to believe in good.” Joker quickly and sinisterly replies, “Until their spirit breaks completely…” which suggests he will never stop trying to prove their inherent wickedness.
The Joker’s origins are ambiguous because no one knows who he is or where he came from. After finally arresting him, Gordon tells the mayor in frustration just exactly how much an enigma he really is: “Nothing. No matches on prints, DNA, dental. Clothing is custom, no labels. Nothing in his pockets but knives and lint. No name. No other alias.”
As is the case in the other stories I’ve discussed, he too has a strong connection with roads. When we first see him in the film, he is standing on a corner at an intersection, the crossroads. The most important scenes – important because they lay the groundwork for his most significant tricks – of the movie take place on highways or streets where he unabashedly terrorizes the cops and civilians alike.
Additionally, he is a shape-shifter in that he employs many different disguises during the movie such as a robber and a police officer, and he even “changes” gender in typical Trickster fashion when he masquerades as a female nurse in order to see the well-guarded Harvey Dent, Gotham’s “White Knight” district attorney, in the hospital. But for him, it’s not enough that he shape-shifts; he forces his hostages to shape-shift their identities as well. Insane asylum inmates become cops and reporters and doctors become clown henchmen.
But the Joker’s most prominent Trickster characteristic is that he is a situation-inverter. He seems to allow Batman, the police, and the mob to fortify their defenses against him only to shock them by gleefully tearing these walls down from the inside. They are left debased and humiliated when they learn how the Joker’s been ten steps ahead of them the whole time, and that everything up to that point has been a carefully calculated trick designed to lull them into complacency. As an indifferent Trickster, he tells Harvey, in the midst of his reign of terror on Gotham City, that everything he does is random:
Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it. You know? I just do things. The mob has plans. The cops have plans. Gordon’s got plans. You know, they’re schemers. Schemers trying to control their little worlds. I’m not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are. It’s the schemers that put you where you are. You were a schemer, you had plans, and look where that got you. I just did what I do best. I took your little plan and I turned it on itself. Look what I did to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets. Hmm? You know what I noticed? Nobody panics when things go ‘according to plan.’ Even if the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I tell the press that, like, a gangbanger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blowing up, nobody panics. Because it’s all part of the plan. But when I say that one little old mayor will die…well, then everyone loses their minds! Introduce a little anarchy – upset the established order – and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos. Oh, and you know the thing about chaos? It’s fair.
In spite of his claims to the contrary, he does in fact have a plan, a diabolical one that hints that he is Lucifer in a clown’s clothing. He aims to turn Harvey Dent into an agent of chaos like him in order to corrupt Gotham City’s faith in goodness and justice. The whole movie, we find out, is an elaborate ruse to that end, and he succeeds. Hanging inverted from a steel beam, he asks Batman: “You didn’t think I’d risk losing the battle for Gotham’s soul in a fistfight with you? No…I took Gotham’s White Knight and I brought him down to our level. It wasn’t hard. See, madness, as you know, is like gravity. All it takes is a little push!” Later, after Dent dies the monster Joker made him to be, Commissioner Gordon muses that “the Joker took the best of us and tore him down.” The fact that Joker has been fighting all along, not just for the soul of one man but for the soul of the entire city, suggests he is Lucifer prowling the world seeking the ruination of men’s souls.
Like all cultural symbols in America, the fictional character Lucifer is a product of cultural history and rhetorical strategy in a society that always embodies the very essence of the Trickster, that of social change. He displays to his audience the spiritual and social rewards that might accrue to damning yet redemptive behavior. The authors who wrote about him constructed an old, dramatically powerful archetype, the Trickster, coming down the road to meet us head-on, in an effort to both entertain us and to make us question our own values. In their professional need to write stories having audience appeal, however, they delineated the attractive and cunning Lucifer, always the wolf in sheepskin with a dark sense of humor who has something important to teach those around him. As a Trickster, his morally bad behavior can bring about good in the lives he touches if they rise to the challenge and face their fall from grace with dignity and humility. Only then will they find salvation through the damnation of their soul.
Works Cited
Hyde, Lewis. Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art. New York: Ferrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1998. Print.
Hynes, William J. “Mapping the Characteristics of Mythic Tricksters: A Heuristic Guide.” Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms. Eds. William J. Hynes and William G. Doty. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1997. 33-45.
Print.
Hynes, William J. and William G. Doty. “Historical Overview of Theoretical Issues: The Problem of the Trickster.” Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and
Criticisms. Eds. William J. Hynes and William G. Doty. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1997. 1-12. Print.
----------. “Introducing the Fascinating and Perplexing Trickster Figure.” Mythical Trickster
Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms. Eds. William J. Hynes and William G.
Doty. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1997. 1-12. Print.
King, Stephen. Needful Things. New York: Penguin Books, 1992. Print.
Oates, Joyce Carol. “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Celestial Timepiece:
The Joyce Carol Oates Homepage. University of San Francisco. Web. 29 Sept. 2011.
O’Connor, Flannery. “Good Country People.” Weber University. 4 August 2003. Web. 28 Sept.
2011.
Schaum, Melita. “‘Erasing Angel’: The Lucifer-Trickster Figure in Flannery O’Connor’s Short Fiction. The Southern Literary Journal 33.1 (2000): 1-26. Print.
The Dark Knight. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Perf. Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart. Warner Bros., 2008. Film.
The New American Bible: St. Joseph Edition. Ed. Daniel E. Pilarczyk. New York: Catholic Book Publishing Company, 1992. Print.
Williams, Zoe. “33 19 17.” Native Saints. Blogger.com, 7 Dec. 2009. Blog. 29 Sept. 2011.
Lewis Hyde has argued in Trickster Makes This World: “The origins, liveliness, and durability of cultures requires that there be space for figures whose function is to uncover and disrupt the very things that culture is based on” (9). In literature and folklore, these figures emerge as Tricksters, those archetypal entities that, through their misadventures, create a balance between chaotic anarchy and oppressive fascism. When Tricksters appear, they force people around them to analyze the sacredness of their values, and in so doing, make them reject them or embrace them to the benefit of the community that shares them. Through this lens, there is no greater Trickster in American literature than Lucifer, Creation’s first wolf-in-sheepskin antagonist who unexpectedly shows up to overturn the protagonists’ misconceptions about the world.
The following essay stems from a puzzling question: is Lucifer really a Trickster? Many critics caution against confusing him with a Trickster because in terms of conventional religion, particularly Christianity, he is morally aligned with evil while traditionally, Trickster is morally indifferent. Hyde argues:
The Devil and the Trickster are not the same thing, though they have regularly been confused…The Devil is an agent of evil, but trickster is amoral, not immoral…One doesn’t usually hear said of the Christian Devil what the anthropologist Paul Radin says of the Native American trickster:
Trickster is at one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who dupes others and who is always duped himself…He knows neither good nor evil yet he is responsible for both. He possesses no values, moral or social…yet through his actions all values come into being (10).
He should be considered a Trickster, but is not by most theorists because, as William Doty and William Hynes observe, “Despite Augustine’s dictum that good can come from evil, we are taught to reject almost automatically the suggestion that a deceitful figure – by the definitions of our society, morally bad – can bring about good” as Tricksters tend to do (“Historical” 28). But if we examine him solely from Hyde’s point of view, Lucifer, particularly in American literature, is the portrait of Radin’s Trickster. Not the warped version of the god Pan carrying a banner that blatantly proclaims I’m evil!, Lucifer is an ambiguous wanderer who creates uncertainty and terror, who easily destroys people’s most sacred beliefs in the blink of an eye. He manifests the strongest traits of Trickster folklore and Christian dogma, and the resulting hybrid is a figure whose comedy is deeply sinister and dark, and whose tricks paradoxically lead to the salvation-through-damnation of human souls.
The depictions of Lucifer in the works I examine rely heavily on religious tradition, but also on folklore and mythology. Therefore, examining the intersection of Lucifer’s history with the Trickster’s will better help to illuminate his role in American literature.
Trickster
The Trickster is a powerful, archetypal character who emerges in every world culture since the dawn of mankind. In their essay, “Introducing the Fascinating and Perplexing Trickster Figure,” Doty and Hynes argue that “For centuries, perhaps millennia, and in the widest variety of cultural and religious belief systems, humans have told and retold tales of tricksters, figures who are usually comical, yet serve to highlight important social values. They cause laughter, to be sure, as they profane nearly every central belief, but at the same time they focus attention precisely on the nature of such beliefs” (1). They are some of the oldest characters in literature, dating back to mankind’s earliest days when pictures of them were scratched or painted onto cave walls. In the United States, we are most familiar with Coyote and Brer Rabbit, but elsewhere in the world is Robin Hood, Ananse, and Loki just to cite a few examples. In literature, there are Tricksters such as Robin Goodfellow from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn from Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In popular culture, Tricksters are still relevant figures because while they continue
to have a home in printed literature, they have also found a new home in movies and television. Bart Simpson, Bugs Bunny, Captain Jack Sparrow, and the Joker are all significant cinematic Tricksters because they are that element of comic relief flying straight into the face of all that is serious and sacred.
No matter what era of Earth’s history Trickster emerges from, and no matter what civilization produces him, he shares remarkably similar traits from culture to culture. Hynes identifies six traits universally common to Trickster: he is ambiguous and anomalous, a deceiver and trick-player, a shape-shifter, situation-inverter, lewd-bricoleur, and messenger and imitator of the gods (“Mapping” 34). Trickster’s biggest appeal is that he is the ultimate underdog; almost always portrayed as physically weaker than his opponents, he is forced to rely on his own cunning to overcome sticky situations, so he plays clever tricks to win something from those who exercise power over him. A true anti-authoritarian, Trickster ridicules status, hierarchy, and power, and thus he frequently uses his wits and his pranks to overturn traditional social conventions. Lucifer fits well into this archetype because he is Creation’s first rule-breaker who never stops challenging the authority of the foremost power in the universe: God.
In addition to these universal traits, Melita Schaum argues in “Erasing Angel” that “one of the predominant characteristics of Trickster is his restless, wandering nature. Like Br’er Rabbit or Br’er Fox – or like Hermes, god of roadways – we continually meet him ‘coming down the road’ as the tale begins. As a traveler, he is an emblem of indeterminacy, a figure ‘at the crossroads’ or in the liminal space between communities, ever ‘on the open road’” (4). Lucifer’s association with crossroads pacts, supernatural contracts in which some human sells his/her soul in exchange for money, fame, or talent further associate him with conventional Tricksters, as does his wandering nature: “And the Lord said to Satan, ‘Whence do you come from?’ Then Satan answered the Lord and said, ‘From roaming the earth and patrolling it’” (New American Bible, Job 1:7).
Lucifer
Lucifer – also known as the Light-Bearer or Morning Star – has an ambiguous history in western civilization; his exact origins are unclear as he is never mentioned by name in the canonical Bible, but an ancient Jewish myth that associates the planet Venus with fallen angels, as well as the apocryphal books The Life of Adam and Eve and The Second Book of Enoch provide some clues. In these stories, he is an archangel loved above all others who plots to take the throne of God, and after a terrible war that divides Heaven, he is cast out and doomed to spend eternity flying over the abyss. A biblical passage that refers to the Babylonian king, Helel, may also have inspired conventional ideas about him:
How have you fallen from the heavens, O morning star, son of the dawn! How are you cut down to the ground, you who mowed down the nations! You said in your heart: ‘I will scale the heavens; above the stars of God I will set up my throne; I will take my seat on the Mount of Assembly, in the recesses of the North. I will ascend above the tops of the clouds; I will be like the Most High!’ Yet down to the nether world you go to the recesses of the pit! When they see you they will stare, pondering over you: ‘Is this the man who made the earth tremble, and kingdoms quake? Who made the world a desert, razed its cities, and gave his captives no release? All the kings of the nations lie in glory, each in his own tomb; but you are cast forth without burial, loathsome and corrupt, clothed as those slain at sword-point, a trampled corpse. Going down to the pavement of the pit, you will never be one with them in the grave.’ For you have ruined your land, you have slain your people! Let him not be named forever, that scion of an evil race! Make ready to slaughter his sons for the guilt of their fathers; lest they rise and possess the earth, and fill the breadth of the world with tyrants (New American Bible, Isaiah 14:12-21).
Though Lucifer’s origins are mysterious, he is well known as the Father of Lies, the one who tricked Eve in the Garden of Eden and subsequently introduced death into the world. In pre-Christian books such as the Talmud and Apocrypha, he evolves from a weak angel to the fearsome adversary who is the ultimate embodiment of evil, the nemesis of both God and of Man, and the entity who openly seeks the ruination of souls. This view of Lucifer has changed very little over the years, and has been reinforced by religious affirmation and popular opinion.
By the Middle Ages he also becomes known as an evil prankster. There are stories that tell how, to torment someone, he would lie on their feet every night to keep them from sleeping. Others attributed odd happenings to him, such as candlesticks mysteriously tipping over or bedspreads being violently ripped off beds in the night. Many European stories hold that he has constructed various bridges, so people must tread cautiously when crossing lest he appears to push them off. In Ireland, where he is sometimes called Pucca, he is thought to lure night travelers over cliffs to their deaths. The fear of his tricks becomes so prevalent that European cultures develop numerous charms, prayers, and spells to ward him off. For example, the early Halloween custom of lighting a lantern, an old version of the contemporary jack-o-lantern, was originally a means for people to ward off evil and mischievous spirits like him.
Lucifer as Trickster in American Fiction
Melita Schaum argues that in Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, her “Trickster poses as a spiritual confidence man – liar, thief, smooth operator, the injector of disorder and bankruptor of souls – yet he is himself as often as not comically evil, snared by his own devices, and unwittingly conscripted into the service of divine good. Moreover, by breaking the rigid and sterile orders of misplaced human pride, righteousness, egoism, or appetitive greed, he becomes the disruptive force that paradoxically makes possible social and spiritual renewal” (3). Though Schaum refers solely to Flannery O’Connor’s work, her view is applicable to other American Tricksters as well. In American literature, Lucifer-Tricksters are not so much the arbitrary bringers of chaos from folklore as they are accidental redeemers of the human spirit who just happen to arrive on the scene when individuals or societies have become inflexible with their beliefs. Unfortunately for their victims, this redemption almost always comes only moments before a real or symbolic death because, as the Joker notes in The Dark Knight, “in their last moments, people show you who they really are.”
Hulga from Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People” is the epitome of this sort of inflexibility. Having earned a degree in philosophy, as well as being an ardent student of science, she is a staunch atheist who has no patience for anyone who still believes that a man in the sky rules the world. Not wanting to be associated with beauty, she centers her whole personality around the theme of ugliness. She is ugly to her mother, she is ugly to the country people she loathes, and she is even ugly to complete strangers. Ironically, she changes her name from Joy to Hulga because it is the ugliest name she can think of, yet she gets angry when people call her by this new name. She is the sort of woman with an answer for everything, and looks down her superior nose at anyone who has a different point of view.
Enter Manly Pointer, the enigmatic Bible salesman who arrives at Mrs. Hopewell’s farm and introduces himself as someone who is “not even from a place, just from near a place,” which automatically calls attention to his ambiguity (7). Depicted as a “tall gaunt hatless youth” with “prominent face bones and a streak of sticky looking brown hair falling across his forehead,” and barely able to lift the heavy suitcase he’s lugging with him, Manly comes across as big a weakling as his brothers in traditional Trickster folklore (O’Connor 6). When Mrs. Hopewell tries to send this man she views as a simpleton away, he immediately plays towards her prejudices about “good country people” in order to invert the situation and to earn an invitation into her home:
He didn’t get up. He began to twist his hands and looking down at them, he said softly, “Well lady, I’ll tell you the truth – not many people want to buy one [a Bible] nowadays and besides, I know I’m real simple. I don’t know how to say a thing but to say it. I’m just a country boy.” He glanced up into her unfriendly face. “People like you don’t like to fool with country people like me!”
“Why!” she cried, “good country people are the salt of the earth! Besides, we all have different ways of doing, it takes all kinds to make the world go ‘round. That’s life!” (O’Connor 7).
His manipulative words resonate so profoundly with Mrs. Hopewell that she invites him to supper, which calls to mind an old superstition that holds how people must actively invite unholy entities into their houses before they can enter and cause chaos. At dinner, Manly winds up inviting the obnoxious Hulga on a casual date, and the next evening, Manly leads her into the countryside and away from her home, farther from her comfort zone and farther from the “known” world where she has all the answers, first to the barn on the edge of the property, and then to the loft where he pretends to seduce her. Ironically, up to this point she has imagined seducing him, a daydream that tricks her into thinking she’s got the upper hand over him. Using her vanity in her own superior knowledge to his advantage, Manly lures her across the physical and symbolic boundaries that separate the things she is certain she knows from the unfamiliar territory she finds herself in.
He shows an unusual interest in her wooden leg, and it unnerves her because she has come to view it as her defining quality after her education, and therefore she possessively guards it, never letting anyone see it. However, this type of attitude without any faith in God leads to her downfall because once Manly talks her into removing it, she puts herself at his mercy. Further destabilizing the situation and her security, he takes Hulga’s glasses, leaving her virtually blind to the world around her. This, of course, is obvious symbolism for the blindness she creates inside of herself through her stubborn pride in her own beliefs. In this way she overshadows Manly’s deception; she has been deceiving herself for much longer. Now that she’s practically helpless, he inverts the situation even more when he reveals to her the contents of his Bible suitcase – whiskey, condoms, naked lady playing cards conveniently hidden in a hollow Bible – proving once and for all that he is not, in fact, “good country people.”
Vulnerable and confused, she asks “aren’t you just good country people?” as if he couldn’t have been clever enough to pull one over on her. He replies “Yeah…but it ain’t held me back none. I’m as good as you any day of the week” (18). Then he triumphantly steals her leg. Before he runs off to resume his wandering and to let her contemplate her own stupidity, he states: “And you needn’t to think you’ll catch me because Pointer ain’t really my name. I use a different name at every house I call at and don’t stay nowhere long. And I’ll tell you another thing, Hulga…you ain’t so smart. I been believing in nothing since I was born (18).” If we are to believe Manly about his shifting identity, he, like Lucifer, goes by many different names. Hulga is left to reflect on how the world isn’t everything she believes it to be, and how if there is a Devil, there must be a God as well. Unfortunately for her, in spite of her superior education, she cannot recognize evil until it is too late.
In Joyce Carol Oates’ story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been,” the teenage protagonist Connie paradoxically mirrors O’Connor’s Hulga, but whereas Hulga goes out of her way to make herself appear uglier in order to exalt her superior intellect, Connie goes out of her way to make herself more beautiful. Anxious to become an adult, she rejects the role of the “nice” girl to cultivate her sexual persona, which flourishes only when she is away from her home and family. However, Arnold Friend’s unexpected arrival at her house forces her to stop talking the talk and start walking the walk, and the reader sees her struggle between staying an innocent child or running headlong into adulthood. She is reluctant to leave her family and home forever, but we can see that she is also curious to know what this trip with Arnold will mean for her. The two sides merge violently. At the crossroads, the only boundary separating Connie’s childhood from her adulthood is a screen door.
Arnold Friend, with his suggestive name that hints at “Arch Fiend,” is an ambiguous stranger who makes a grand entrance at Connie’s house in his gold convertible, and he looks bizarre enough to suggest that he is otherworldly. He wears mirrored sunglasses, has translucent skin, and has hair that is so wild that it looks like a wig. When he walks, he wobbles as though his shoes don’t fit properly, which possibly suggests that his feet are actually hooves, a throwback to the idea of Satan as a Pan-like satyr, but also a depiction reminiscent of Native American animal tricksters. When he claims to know things about her family and neighbors that he couldn’t possibly know, he further calls the humanness of his character into question. He is a malevolent character who initially tries to charm Connie into coming to him, and therefore could be seen as a symbol of temptation.
His trickery is more subtle in this story than in others. Rather than pull an outright prank such as Manly Pointer stealing Hulga’s fake leg, he tricks her using terroristic tactics. Cutting her off from outside help and refusing to leave, he threatens to harm her family if she refuses to come to him. The fact that he can’t seem to enter without invitation also calls into mind the superstition I discussed above about unholy supernatural creatures needing an invitation to cross a house’s threshold. Whatever the case may be, he disrupts her sense of security and certainty, and uses threats and intimidation to trick her into leaving the safety of her house:
She rushed forward and tried to lock the door. Her fingers were shaking. "But why lock it," Arnold Friend said gently, talking right into her face. "It's just a screen door. It's just nothing." One of his boots was at a strange angle, as if his foot wasn't in it. It pointed out to the left, bent at the ankle. "I mean, anybody can break through a screen door and glass and wood and iron or anything else if he needs to, anybody at all, and specially Arnold Friend. If the place got lit up with a fire, honey, you'd come runnin' out into my arms, right into my arms an' safe at home—like you knew I was your lover and'd stopped fooling around. I don't mind a nice shy girl but I don't like no fooling around." Part of those words were spoken with a slight rhythmic lilt, and Connie somehow recognized them—the echo of a song from last year, about a girl rushing into her boy friend's arms and coming home again—
It is important to note that painted on Arnold Friend’s car are the numbers 33, 19, and 17. If one counts backwards from the end of the Bible, which is another possible allusion to Lucifer who does everything opposite of God, it is obvious that Oates is referencing the Book of Judges, the thirty-third book of the Bible: “When he noticed the traveler in the public square of the city, the old man asked where he was going, and whence he had come” (New American Bible, Judges 19:17). Looking at the verse in its entire context, the passage it belongs to echoes the story of Lot at Sodom and Gomorrah; the corrupt people of Gibeah demand that a man hand over his guest, his son-in-law, to be sodomized at their leisure. Instead of handing over his guest, the old man throws his daughter, his son-in-law’s concubine, to these corrupt men, who violently rape her the whole night and leave her dead on the man’s doorstep. Here, “corrupt” literally translates from “the sons of Belial,” Belial being one of Lucifer’s many other names (New American Bible, Judges 19:22).
If one simply adds all the numbers together, the sum is 69, the name of a sexual act that could allude to Connie’s attempts to sexualize herself. But if playing a very specific ancient Jewish number-letter game, “Genesis” is the only biblical book title that adds up to 33; this could refer to God’s warning against overindulgence in the Genesis story of Lot, especially given the similarities between the stories. But playing this same game, “Connie” adds up to 33, “loves” adds up to 19, and “God” adds up to 17 (“33 19 17”). In light of all the demonic evidence generated by this highly symbolic and complex sequence of numbers, it is obvious that Arnold Friend is Lucifer incarnate and one of American literature’s more blatant Trickster-Devils, and he is the catalyst that changes Connie from a child to an adult — albeit through drastic, violent means.
Contemporary horror writer Stephen King is also not above employing Lucifer as Trickster in his works. In his novel, Needful Things, the mysterious proprietor, Leland Gaunt, is a charming elderly gentleman who opens a shop called “Needful Things” in the middle of Castle Rock, Maine. The store intrigues his customers because he always seems to have an item in stock that is perfectly suited to everyone. The merchandise Gaunt peddles, things like a rare Sandy Koufax baseball card, a carnival glass lampshade, and a fragment of wood believed to be from Noah’s Ark, are extraordinarily rare but also have some special, sentimental value to each of his customers that make them particularly priceless. Unbeknownst to the people of Castle Rock, though, his merchandise is utterly worthless in reality, but somehow he tricks his customers by making everything appear as if it’s something it’s not. For these curios, Gaunt asks for very little in terms of money, but to make up the difference, he expects each customer to also play a little prank on someone else in Castle Rock.
In the prologue, the first-person narrator describes the town of Castle Rock:
It’s the same here as where you grew up, most likely. People getting het up over religion, people carryin torches, people carryin secrets, people carryin grudges…and even a spooky story every now and then, like what might or might not have happened on the day Pop died in his junk shop, to liven up the occasional dull day. Castle Rock is still a pretty nice place to live and grow, as the sign you see when you come into town says…The Rock has always been one of the good places, and when people get scratchy, you know what we say? We say He’ll get over it or She’ll get over it (King 9).
Yet as the story unfolds, we see they won’t get over it. This newcomer Gaunt somehow knows about the long-standing feuds between the various townspeople, and the pranks he persuades others to pull are his means of creating madness and violence. Every prank pulled deepens blood feuds as well as paranoia about keeping their precious items safe. The needful things that Gaunt peddles consume their entire personality; the citizens of Castle Rock are so faithless and hollow inside that even their most prized possessions cannot fill the void. Somehow, they’ve created a Hell inside themselves that begs for a master to rule them, the wise Gaunt, and it is in this scenario that they turn to him to eagerly buy up the weapons he inevitably offers for sale and to happily trade away their souls. Their inner Hell becomes a very physical one when neighbor ruthlessly kills neighbor, friend turns against friend, and the body count quickly rises.
Finally, the one incorruptible soul, Sheriff Alan Pangborn, faces off against Gaunt by employing an explosive magic trick that distracts him; Alan uses this brief moment to steal a valise that contains the souls of all Gaunt's customers, and he manages to convince Gaunt that he's lost this battle. Gaunt departs, leaving the survivors to pick up the pieces. Although many of the townspeople are dead, their souls have been saved; Gaunt has moved on, defeated this time, but ready to play his eternal game wherever there are other "buyers" to prey upon.
In the biblical Book of Job, Lucifer seems to serve God as a persecutor of mankind rather than as a demon terrorizing it. He accuses Job of faithlessness; he believes that Job is a pious man because God has given him everything he could ever want in life. But he wagers that if God took everything away from him, he’d quickly turn his back on God and on his faith. God accepts his challenge and allows Lucifer to torture him in the form of “tests” to prove his faithfulness and loyalty, but his wicked plan backfires when Job stays as strong as ever and therefore passes. To reward Job, God restores everything he’s lost and gives him even more than he had to begin with.
It is with this biblical story in mind that I include the movie, The Dark Knight, in this essay, a movie in the Batman mythology that retells Job’s story in contemporary Gotham City, with the arch-villain Joker stepping into Lucifer’s shoes. Gotham’s mob families, driven to their knees by Batman’s vigilante justice, find themselves at the Joker’s mercy when he promises to execute Batman, but only if they agree to pay him half of their combined fortunes. Money, however, is not his real ambition; the Joker is out to prove a point, that deep inside, mankind is truly evil, and it will lose its moral compass when chaos is introduced to it. He tells Batman in an interrogation scene that deeply parallels Satan’s challenge of God:
You see, their morals, their code…it’s a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. I’ll show you. When the chips are down, these ‘civilized’ people...they’ll eat each other. See, I’m not a monster. I’m just ahead of the curve.
Batman and Joker’s argument continues throughout the movie; at the end, Joker initiates a game with two ferries trying to escape Gotham City, something he calls a “social experiment.” He has rigged both ferries, one carrying prisoners and one carrying innocent civilians, with enough gasoline and C4 explosives to destroy each one several times over, and gives each of them the other ferry’s remote detonator. The catch is that one ferry must destroy the other by midnight, and if neither obeys him, he promises to destroy them both. After Joker’s horrific series of tests against Gotham City in which numerous people have already been killed, the people on both ferries knows he’s serious about his threat. Even still, the occupants on both ferries can’t bring themselves to destroy the other, thus proving their faithfulness in the face of catastrophe. Batman, smug about this little victory, says, “This city just showed you that it’s full of people ready to believe in good.” Joker quickly and sinisterly replies, “Until their spirit breaks completely…” which suggests he will never stop trying to prove their inherent wickedness.
The Joker’s origins are ambiguous because no one knows who he is or where he came from. After finally arresting him, Gordon tells the mayor in frustration just exactly how much an enigma he really is: “Nothing. No matches on prints, DNA, dental. Clothing is custom, no labels. Nothing in his pockets but knives and lint. No name. No other alias.”
As is the case in the other stories I’ve discussed, he too has a strong connection with roads. When we first see him in the film, he is standing on a corner at an intersection, the crossroads. The most important scenes – important because they lay the groundwork for his most significant tricks – of the movie take place on highways or streets where he unabashedly terrorizes the cops and civilians alike.
Additionally, he is a shape-shifter in that he employs many different disguises during the movie such as a robber and a police officer, and he even “changes” gender in typical Trickster fashion when he masquerades as a female nurse in order to see the well-guarded Harvey Dent, Gotham’s “White Knight” district attorney, in the hospital. But for him, it’s not enough that he shape-shifts; he forces his hostages to shape-shift their identities as well. Insane asylum inmates become cops and reporters and doctors become clown henchmen.
But the Joker’s most prominent Trickster characteristic is that he is a situation-inverter. He seems to allow Batman, the police, and the mob to fortify their defenses against him only to shock them by gleefully tearing these walls down from the inside. They are left debased and humiliated when they learn how the Joker’s been ten steps ahead of them the whole time, and that everything up to that point has been a carefully calculated trick designed to lull them into complacency. As an indifferent Trickster, he tells Harvey, in the midst of his reign of terror on Gotham City, that everything he does is random:
Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it. You know? I just do things. The mob has plans. The cops have plans. Gordon’s got plans. You know, they’re schemers. Schemers trying to control their little worlds. I’m not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are. It’s the schemers that put you where you are. You were a schemer, you had plans, and look where that got you. I just did what I do best. I took your little plan and I turned it on itself. Look what I did to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets. Hmm? You know what I noticed? Nobody panics when things go ‘according to plan.’ Even if the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I tell the press that, like, a gangbanger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blowing up, nobody panics. Because it’s all part of the plan. But when I say that one little old mayor will die…well, then everyone loses their minds! Introduce a little anarchy – upset the established order – and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos. Oh, and you know the thing about chaos? It’s fair.
In spite of his claims to the contrary, he does in fact have a plan, a diabolical one that hints that he is Lucifer in a clown’s clothing. He aims to turn Harvey Dent into an agent of chaos like him in order to corrupt Gotham City’s faith in goodness and justice. The whole movie, we find out, is an elaborate ruse to that end, and he succeeds. Hanging inverted from a steel beam, he asks Batman: “You didn’t think I’d risk losing the battle for Gotham’s soul in a fistfight with you? No…I took Gotham’s White Knight and I brought him down to our level. It wasn’t hard. See, madness, as you know, is like gravity. All it takes is a little push!” Later, after Dent dies the monster Joker made him to be, Commissioner Gordon muses that “the Joker took the best of us and tore him down.” The fact that Joker has been fighting all along, not just for the soul of one man but for the soul of the entire city, suggests he is Lucifer prowling the world seeking the ruination of men’s souls.
Like all cultural symbols in America, the fictional character Lucifer is a product of cultural history and rhetorical strategy in a society that always embodies the very essence of the Trickster, that of social change. He displays to his audience the spiritual and social rewards that might accrue to damning yet redemptive behavior. The authors who wrote about him constructed an old, dramatically powerful archetype, the Trickster, coming down the road to meet us head-on, in an effort to both entertain us and to make us question our own values. In their professional need to write stories having audience appeal, however, they delineated the attractive and cunning Lucifer, always the wolf in sheepskin with a dark sense of humor who has something important to teach those around him. As a Trickster, his morally bad behavior can bring about good in the lives he touches if they rise to the challenge and face their fall from grace with dignity and humility. Only then will they find salvation through the damnation of their soul.
Works Cited
Hyde, Lewis. Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art. New York: Ferrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1998. Print.
Hynes, William J. “Mapping the Characteristics of Mythic Tricksters: A Heuristic Guide.” Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms. Eds. William J. Hynes and William G. Doty. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1997. 33-45.
Print.
Hynes, William J. and William G. Doty. “Historical Overview of Theoretical Issues: The Problem of the Trickster.” Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and
Criticisms. Eds. William J. Hynes and William G. Doty. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1997. 1-12. Print.
----------. “Introducing the Fascinating and Perplexing Trickster Figure.” Mythical Trickster
Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms. Eds. William J. Hynes and William G.
Doty. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1997. 1-12. Print.
King, Stephen. Needful Things. New York: Penguin Books, 1992. Print.
Oates, Joyce Carol. “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Celestial Timepiece:
The Joyce Carol Oates Homepage. University of San Francisco. Web. 29 Sept. 2011.
O’Connor, Flannery. “Good Country People.” Weber University. 4 August 2003. Web. 28 Sept.
2011.
Schaum, Melita. “‘Erasing Angel’: The Lucifer-Trickster Figure in Flannery O’Connor’s Short Fiction. The Southern Literary Journal 33.1 (2000): 1-26. Print.
The Dark Knight. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Perf. Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart. Warner Bros., 2008. Film.
The New American Bible: St. Joseph Edition. Ed. Daniel E. Pilarczyk. New York: Catholic Book Publishing Company, 1992. Print.
Williams, Zoe. “33 19 17.” Native Saints. Blogger.com, 7 Dec. 2009. Blog. 29 Sept. 2011.
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