Maybe the Most Horrific Thing I Have Ever Written

or, A Sonnet

I had been wanting to write a sonnet to Forficula auricularia (a la writing a sonnet to Cepaea nemoralis, seen here), but so far I have no idea how to proceed. However, my eyes glancing across my room, I happened to see Pride and Prejudice and Zombies sitting, as of yet unread, on my desk. A perfectly ghoulish inversion of sonnet conventions stuck me, in which the speaker's beloved mistress spurns him until she is turned into the living dead, at which point she is more than interested in consummating their not-so-mutual interests. Needless to say, I succumbed. What lies (or rather limps, or shambles) before you is the unfortunate result.

***

Zealous you pursue me, who, when 'live,

Of your alluring self you cruelly starved;

My love for you unslaked, in wood I carved

Beloved name of you who'd me deprived.
I craved your blinking eyes, your sable mane,

Each limping joke and, more than all, your brain.

Must now you answer diff'rently than when

In blushing breast your heart still pump'd out life?

So far have I avoided your love-bites;

This time I will surrender you to other men,

Releasing them 'gainst Laz'rus-aping you as wife;

Except I know you'll come for me some hunted night.

So I must ask, Will I, when meeting you undead,
Still loving, die? Or yet remove your maidenhead?

***

1 point for each sonnet convention or early modern pun that you can find.

1 point for each allusion to a zombie movie/comic/video game/haiku that you can find.

5 points if you can find the sonnet's hidden name.

I am dreadfully sorry about writing this. But maybe not so sorry that I won't post it.

I promise that my next sonnet will be a serious one.

Wanted: Dead and Alive

This is an assignment I just had returned from an American Literature class. I did well on it--better than I expected. I thought I'd share it here. Unfortunately, you may have needed to be in the class to fully participate in it... unless you've by chance read Emily Dickenson, Whitman's Song of Myself, Spofford's "Amber Gods" and "The Circumstance," Frederick Douglas' slave narrative, Edgar Alan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and "The Man Who Was Used Up," Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative, Edwar Taylor's Meditations, Hawthorne's "The Black Veil" and "Artist of the Beautiful," Emerson's "Experience," and other seminal or not-so-seminal American Literature.

Wanted: Dead and Alive

I was born upon the sea in a land under sweltering suns:
my tongue and every atom of my blood formed from this soil
this air, the grey sky, obscured by no deathly blot.
ghostlike we glide through nature
on every visage a black veil—
wild wartunes endow the living with tears you squander on the dead.
"O graft me in this Tree of Life within,"
again gurgles the mouth of my dying general,
knocked on the head.
with her voice ceased her existence yet she could not sing.
(I had as well be killed running as die standing
—the dead thing in my bosom rising and falling—
I in perfect health begin, hoping to cease not till death.)
forsaken songs rose from that frightful aerie
weeping wailing tunes that sob from age to age,
"gone, gone, sold and gone."
from the symbol beneath which I lived,
and die with overflowing grace doth killing,
cure the sinner, and kills sin right:
we do not play on graves
because these murtherous wretches went on,
burning and destroying all before them the golden dore of glory.
is the grave too sacred for us?
I do not desire to live to forget this,
in one sense it is the elixer of immortality
(posion with the falling dews)—
it cannot be that I shall live and die
a slave as scarcely loving my life, my health.
to be alive is power—omnipotence enough:
we could not but shout to the dead for help!
no man can understand the science of the grave,
look through the eyes of the dead,
feed on the spectres in books;
nature's practices extend to necromancy and the trades,
the notion of putting spirit into machinery.
the lords of life, the lords of life:
beautiful, beautiful, is it alive?
and in the wide arc of some eternal descent she was falling.
there really is no end to the march of invention.


Poet-scholar's statement:

In looking through the course material of the semester, I caught a common theme: the middling areas of life and death. Whether narratives come from the other side of the shade—or as good as do, in the case of the strangely returned Pym—or follow individuals who oddly survive their own death, such as Lackabreath and Wakefield, there is a sense that not only does poetry acheive immortality, it preserves the very act of immortalizing itself. Alternately, the texts may dwell on death—defying it like Rowlandson, lusting for it like Taylor, or philosophizing it like Emerson—and thereby underscore their own vitality by their current survival. Most question that fundamental boundary, or the obviousness of it, using such figures as ghost ships, speaking corpses, living machines, and assembled men. Each text's complexity only tangles in comparison with the others, and any discussion of the matter must exceed strictly academic discourse.

As such, I have constructed a poem about the intersection of these two realms, using lines torn from the texts. I have been liberal with punctuation, and some of the lines might not be entirely recognizable, pieced as they are from different sources. Nonetheless, I hope to have caught some of the sense life and death play in the varied works and, in the process, defamiliarized many of the original meanings.

Yeah, as with other academic work I've posted here, there's a lot of name-dropping. Sorry about that, if you're not of a background which presents to you all of those writers.

Zombi Attack!

As promised, I will write a brief response to The Serpent and the Rainbow. At some point I'll update the little bit in my recommended books section, but for now I'll give it its own post.

The back of the book puts it like this: "Zombis...the Walking Dead...a mystery that has long baffled, horrified, and tantalized Western imagination. In April 1982, ethnobotanist Wade Davis traveled into the Haitian countryside to research strange reports of men drugged, buried alive, and ultimately resurrected from the grave. Drawn into a netherworld of bizarre rituals and wild celebrations, he came face to face with a sorcerer-priest who introduced him to the dark secrets of voodoo potions, powders, and poisons. What began as a scientific quest ended in a spiritual confrontation--a terrifying journey of discovery across the border between life and death, between good and evil."

In his book The Serpent and the Rainbow, Wade Davis explores the culture of voodoo in Haiti, attempting to track down the origins of zombis. Over the course of his investigation, he locates the pharmacological agents behind the zombi phenomenon, but also discovers that the true origins lie not in a chemical event but the spiritual worldviews that pervade the vodoun religion of the Haitian countryside. Davis also undertakes to de-sensationalize the vodoun religion, a sentiment not shared by the publishers who wrote the comments on the back of the book, or, it seems, the reviewers quoted: "Replete with bizarre details to titillate the curious...Zombis do come back from the dead, and Wade Davis knows how" (Washington Post Book World). That respectful treatment notwithstanding, the book reads much like a movie, filled with strange and melodramatic characters, visual details and well-described settings, and some anxious situations and mystical events. Davis also grounds his sometimes incredible tale with forays into history, seeking the roots of vodoun secret societies in Haitian history, and into science, examining the potency of assorted natural toxins and drugs. Together these create an elaborate and well-rounded novel that examines the phenomenon of the resurrected dead through a vantage point that is historical, scientific, anthropological, and spiritual, all in one.

Now, I must emphasize that these are not the zombies of modern fiction (or the post title), rotting corpses staggering the course of their undeath, seeking to feast on the flesh (or brains) of their more vibrant relatives. Instead, they are zombis of the traditional sense--corpses resurrected by a voodoo sorcerer to be a slave of the sorcerer. At least, this is what American scholars thought zombies were. Davis shows this as a lie and explains the true function of zombis in vodoun society--for zombis play an institutionalized role in that society.

Don't get me wrong. This is not a dry academic read that is more based on "the facts" and not on sell-value. I think this would make an excellent movie. And most of the comments on the back of the book are true, from a certain perspective at least. I just don't think that "netherworld," "bizarre," "dark secrets," or "confrontation" are the best words to describe what happens, and these leave out the roles friendship, charity, personal hardship, and trust played in the novel. The secondary characters are real and engaging (as they should be, since they were real) and help create a living portrait of Davis' venture.

So I recommend this book to anyone, and expect that you may get any of a number of things from it: a scientific adventure story into one of the most intriguing pharmaceutical phenomena ever; an anthropologist's navigation through the secret network of Haitian spirituality and undergroung politics; a story of companionship in face of cultural divides; an analysis of a cultural mindset different from our own and an examination of that mindset's advantages; a philosophical treatise on the nature of death, and our relationship to it; a mystery tale filled with nighttime rituals, deadly poisons, and powerful secret societies.

If you read this book, you will embark on Davis' journey, after a fashion, and so I leave you with this declaration, quoted from the novel and from Dr. Lehman, who addressed Davis as his backers made their proposition to him at the beginning of his tale:

"Let me relieve you of any further suspense, Mr. Davis. ...We propose to send you to the frontier of death. If what we are about to tell you is true, as we believe it is, it means that there are men and women dwelling in the continuous present, where the past is dead and the future consists of fear and impossible desires."

Update as of 2 September: James Davis of God Online tells me that there is a movie version, indeed.