095: The Sleep of Reason
Apropos of nothing other than the title of the preceeding entry, I'm thinking of Francisco Goya this morning. The Spanish painter -- known for the manner in which his painting descended into madness -- always had a bit of darkness under the edge of his brush. If you go back to his early portraiture done for the upper class Spanish families, there is an undercurrent of terror and bruised madness in his subjects. You can see the whites of their eyes and, to this day, I remember those terrified eyes when I think of his work. These are people who, whether they admit it or not, are frightened. It may be nothing -- the world may be a perfectly sane and normal place -- but somewhere in their heads, a cancer lurks.
Goya, on his deathbed, said (and this may be entirely apocryphal): "Open the window, please. Let the darkness in."
There's a detached violence which writers have to be capable of. It's not something they like to talk about but, on some level, you have to be cognizant of the destructive impulse and be able to approach this dark cancer of the brain. You don't have to take pleasure in it, but you have to be able to approach it with a stick and scrape off a bit of the black blood that covers it in order to write about some of the evil that men do. (Or not, it all depends on your genre, really.) Goya used this vile blood in his paintings; he just vomited it up on the canvas and worked it into the spread of his oils.
Sometimes the cancer devours you. Sometimes it lurches across your brain and touches the thick stalk of blood vessels that circulate through the skull. It infects your blood, leaching its putrescence into your veins where it flows out of your brain, down your spine, and back into your heart. Your spine goes cold and the vertebrae shatter, chips of bone serating the clusters of nerves. Your heart seizes, tightening up in involuntary spasms as the vile shit pools in your aerota. The cancer spreads, the light behind your eyes goes out, and, when it spreads to your lungs, you start coughing up darkness.
I've been listening to several chapters of Objective-Subjective's 12-part soundtrack to the Alan Moore's The Watchmen. Two of the three chapters released so far are filled with the specter of Rorschach, Moore's unhinged take on the DC Comics character, The Question. Rorschach's violence is spawned by the hate and bloodshed that he sees around him -- he is the product of his society -- and his response is a coldly primal one. An eye for an eye isn't enough. And yet, in the end, Rorschach is the most uncomplicated one of the bunch. His solution is a simple one -- eat the cancer before it eats you -- and, even though he becomes irrevocably tainted by his act of sin-eating, he remains a sympathetic character because of a core precept of his altered philosophy: hurt only those who hurt others; the innocents must remain innocent.
El sueño de la razón produce monstruos. Dark birds are on the wing.
Apropos of nothing, really. Just wandering through the corners of my brain this morning, thinking about the shadows.
writing
This is a reasonably comprehensive list of my published work, both virtual and physical.
THE MISFIT LIBRARY
I am Nine of Thirteen, one of the members of the Misfit Library, a writing collective which puts out a quarterly journal of our respective work. We are scattered across the globe and determined to change the face of the planet one story at a time. The link above will take you to Misfit Central where you can acquire copies of the journal as well as read exclusive online material.
SYMBOLIC
I wrote a column for OPi8.com's Transmit blogs: journals of the new dark underground. SYMBOLIC tracked the novel I was working on, referencing the process and the research materials which mad up the backbone of the work. In addition, SYMBOLIC busied itself with ruminations and considerations on the nature of language and communication. And a wee bit of mythology. The first 100 entries of SYMBOLIC can be found here on this site as well as at OPi8.com.
LITERARY REPRESENTATION
I am represented by Scribe Agency as my literary agents. Please contact these gentleman if you have any queries about my work.