The Beach

A photo taken of Viv and I at Los Iros beach, Trinidad

The Fruit Of The Trees Of The Garden

Catching mangos (not this one) on the first evening in Trinidad

Update

Back to posting again, and work today, having returned from a two-week trip to Trinidad last Thursday, after nearly three weeks of silence. I will showcase a few significant photos, of family, and of scenery, from the trip in some upcoming posts.

Miss Marple, You Are Wonderful

"You'd probably like it if the rest of the house were like this," Mrs. Bamberger said. "Most young people feel that way. My husband and I just love the old cottage, low ceiling and all. It reminded us of Miss Marple."

Richard smiled: that was perfect. The original building needed only a thatched roof to make it an English country cottage in an Agatha Christie novel.

Peter Straub, Floating Dragon

The Ballad of Jephthah

Hamlet: O Jephthah, judge of Israel, what a treasure hadst thou!

Polonius: What a treasure had he, my lord?

Hamlet: Why--
"One fair daughter, and no more,
The which he loved passing well."

Judges 11:30-31, and 11:34-35

30 And Jephthah vowed a vow unto the Lord, and said, If thou shalt without fail deliver the children of Ammon into mine hands, 31 Then it shall be, that whatsoever cometh forth of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return in peace from the children of Ammon, shall surely be the Lord's, and I will offer it up for a burnt offering.

34 And Jephthah came to Mizpeh unto his house, and behold, his daughter came out to meet him with timbrels and with dances: and she was his only child; beside her he had neither son nor daughter. 35 And it came to pass, when he saw her, that he rent his clothes, and said, Alas, my daughter, thou hast brought me very low, and thou art one of them that trouble me: for I have opened my mouth unto the Lord, and I cannot go back.

Fearful Places

And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

Revelation 12:9

I gave in yesterday, I admit, and put down Vollmann's You Bright and Risen Angels to start reading Peter Straub's chilling Dragon Floating. My July issue of Locus magazine, the one with the sundering gaze of Peter Straub on the front cover, still lies agape in front of the computer to his full two-page interview "Fearful Places." This interview I remember fondly since Straub offers one of the most simple, if somewhat psychoanalytical stories of his own writing:

In my work, both the supernatural and more 'mainstream' forms of horror come from the same set of circumstances. In one case, these experiental sources are treated unconsciously, and they are mediated by the imagery that is open to you when you want to write what is called 'horror.' (78)

I had this massive book, the Modern Library Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, and I carried it around as though it were the Bible. It spoke to me. It presented horrific, ghastly, unnatural, moonlit events brightened by lightning bolts, with a soundtrack of crumbling castles and dying monks! It was a landscape where I felt immediately at home. (79)

Based on Dragon Floating I've noticed that Straub's writing, compared to his counterpart Stephen King's, psychologically terrorizes and explodes the reader's deeper tensions surreptitiously from deep down within the untapped unconscious. Balefully, he tricks his readers into drawing intimately close to the characters themselves based on an entirely vulnerable, and often sinister, sympathy (or fear) constructed like a Golden Calf in the author's devilish imagination. Then slowly, after he has with entirely false mortal fear lighted and discharged some neurotic transformations in the reader's mind, the most dangerous (spiritual or psychological) issue is left to fester undisturbed (allegorically) beneath the whole plot in the unquestioning reader's mind.

This 'Paranoid Vision,' as I conceive in my own mind, epitomised in horror, terrorizes the reader with imagined, sadistic supernatural or human horrors threatening the wishful, spiritual promise of catharsis in this world. The latent promise in this psychological 'quest' for readers and victims alike is a traumatic realization of our own delusional ('blind' or constructed) understanding of the world, and hopefully a faint hankering for something spiritual, or psychologically alleviating, in a world full of idols.

Supernatural Horror In Literature

Nearly a week later and I'm still reading Vollmann's You Bright and Risen Angels, with just over 200 pages left, although I've been tempted lately to set it aside in order to read two other books: Peter Straub's Floating Dragon and Ramsey Campbell's The Face That Must Die. I'm trying these days to broaden, in a somewhat out-of-joint chronological fashion, my study of reputable horror literature, and Straub (left) and Campbell (bottom right) were recognizable almost brand names. Other reputable writers of "supernatural horror" (as Lovecraft called it) I'm looking to read in the future include: Robert Bloch, Ambrose Bierce, Guy de Maupassant and Clive Barker. I managed to stretch, if not broaden my perspective slightly after discovering and reading Fritz Leiber's philosophical, yet truly Weird Our Lady of Darkness, Joe Hill's unputdownable, incisive horror short stories in 20th Century Ghosts, as well as some of the tales from Campbell's eldritch anthology Alone With The Horrors: The Great Short Fiction of Ramsey Campbell 1961-1991. Eventually this: The Complete Poetry and Translations of Clark Ashton Smith, Vol. 1, edited by David E. Schultz and S.T. Joshi, will arrive by mail in November packaged with a revised annotated edition by Donald Sidney-Fryer of Smith's stellar epic poem The Hashish-Eater, or the Apocalypse of Evil.

But all in due time. Heading to Niagara Falls for the day.