Poetic Reflections: gothic

Oh yes, I am treading there. Creeping down the woebegone highways and byways of gothic-style horror this Halloween. What could be more appropriate, methinks, than to honor that dark and dismal genre with some chicken-scratches of my own? It isn’t all black lipstick and fingernails, you know. Its origins were far more refined and exquisitely wrought by masterful scribes such as Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Henry James, Robert Browning, Thomas Hardy . . . I love the grim beauty of “The Highwayman” by Alfred Noyes.

One has to applaud those who carry the torch, preserving the tradition. Whether through attire and patronage or by artistic expression. I love to wear black myself but I dabble in a panoply of genres, flitting from flowery berserk prose to florid bizarre verse — from flaunted concoction to fantastic anomaly (and fantasmic abomaly) like a vampire bee with a rumbling belly. I go where my imaginings take me. This month I’ve alighted upon the auteurish vaulted archness and pallid complexionless contrives of the grave Gothick morbids, the rebellious Romantics and moody Victorians I have long admired. I plan to bask in their shadows and ruinous intrigues.

Let us stumble therefore with the candle blown out along the glumly-lit corridor of Time to the age when people had few manners, the world was going to end, and bickering was a popular sport. Wait a second, that was a few minutes ago! Farther back . . . when it was only polite to spit into a receptacle, proper etiquette was polished like silverware, and it was fashionable to be straitlaced. The post-facto era of brooding manses, elegant diction, and stylishly insane characters. How I miss those days.

I don’t think Society has ever quite gotten it right. Yet perhaps we were closest then. And then again, perhaps not. Every period so far has lapsed in some vast regards. Gothic Literature portrays the murderous impulses, the macabre fascinations, the drabbest depths of inhuman nature hidden within us. I guess it does not depict a very pleasant or peaceful climate. There was a definite lack of respect in other ways. Equality, for example. Yet I prefer some of its qualities to the crass in-your-face vulgarities and decadence of the modern world. That’s all I’m saying.

We still have murder, still have depraved acts. And this may be interesting on paper — in horror tales and murder mysteries, as well as on the stage and screen — if tastefully rendered; given an elevated purpose. Fictional horror without significance, without substance, is like screaming for the heck of it. No passion or sense. Just luridly “sensational”. And in real life’s glaring news headlines, it is much less palatable.

Wouldn’t it be nice to confine such horrid deeds to fiction?

Or do Fiction and Nonfiction go hand in hand? Might one create the other, or vice versa? Is it our responsibility to be responsible?

Now I’m just confusing myself.

Rhyme, however, can be inordinately (even inutterably) pointless. As I have proven again and again! So perhaps there is a place for vapid entertainment. On with the rhyme and reason, or rhyme for no reason, or reason that doesn’t rhyme. Whatever it is, for the love of peat and moss, I simply must get on with it before we submerge into the boggy aftercurrent of my underthoughts!

Whoops, too late. Quick, read some dark poems while you’re sinking! It won’t help your plight and you probably won’t feel any better. But you’ll have gotten it out of the way.