Oops, Here It is.

I realize I missed Friday’s post; I was busy breathing warm sunshine on the Buffalo River in Northern Arkansas in a slapdash, spontaneous escape from an icy, drowning death in Minnesota’s dreary winter cold. This blog will cause less heart-break if you accept the fact that I will break my promises. If my unreliability bothers you please send me hate-mail, I would love some hate-mail. Or friendly encouragement, that would also be nice.

 

The Balloon Hoax (1844) and Mesmeric Revelation (1849)

http://poestories.com/read/balloonhoax and http://poestories.com/read/mesmeric

 

The balloon hoax is a more believable version of The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfall. Written like a news bulletin and intentionally urgent, it’s easy to imagine this story being believed upon its publication at the time; no preceding balloon journey across the Atlantic had been successful and balloons were something people were crazy about at the time. Poe uses real names in his fake story to emphasize and convince. The published journal method is used in the same fashion as in “Unparalleled Adventure.” A fairly large number of people who read this story believed it at the time. Similar to how occasionally we will see engineering/graphic design students putting out hoax videos of self-propelled, simple flying machines. Hoaxes seem to have been a way to trick people into reading science fiction.

 

Mesmeric Revelation is an example of Poe’s interest in metaphysical phenomena and the exploration of things beyond human comprehension which, in his stories, can be unlocked through simple procedures and pseudo-scientific proceedings. Mesmerism is a form of hypnotism which utilizes an idea of magnetic energy existing in each person and the “proper” connection of that energy in one person to the energy in another can open a window into the depths of the unconscious mind, “the hive mind,” or even God. Poe opens this window by mesmerizing a dying man. The main idea behind this story is that, “there are gradations of matter of which man knows nothing; the grosser impelling the finer, the finer pervading the grosser.” This idea of halving and halving forever or infinite divisibility, or Zeno’s paradox for you nerds who already know what that is. This is the hat from which Poe, in this story, pulls God. The mind, or thought itself, is god. the housing of god in many meaty, human bodies could be viewed as a form of wealth dispersion; God still exists un-bodied in an ether wholly inaccessible to us, awaiting our deaths and reintegration. “God is in the details,” or the devil or whatever; something infinite lies in the many tiny details. The dead, er I mean dying, man speaks with certain clarity and connection to something “other” which seems to be providing him with the answers. If you haven’t read the story yet, definitely do it; it is one of my favorites so far.

*****

As promised, here’s something of mine which started as a stream of consciousness story about a boy and his unique way in which he deals with the heavy gloom of winter, was edited into a piece of flash fiction, became a long poem, and was pared down to its current form as a short poem; no longer does the plot center on a boy and his imagination…or does it?

 

Once and Again

Daily paintings; strokes laid

with light through every leaf.

Secret dances, delicate steps;

wind’s partner golden shines

a wood ablaze with falling fire.

 

Frost’s touch halted

music’s last show.

Whispered words bled

into life’s fabric,

“Death,” spoken soft.

Seek the speaker,

fear the finding.

Hope; memory,

a fleeing ghost.

Knowledge grasps at comfort

against her will, our will.

 

Life’s rasping breath rises

from beneath fetid, steaming fungus.

Void voices spring from a chasm,

shot upwards on flaming wings,

shedding ashes.

 

Legs carry joy’s greetings

to sun rising meadows,

and fields dyed pink.

Zephyrs in the wake of youth,

dance and sing

with wheat and leaf.

Truth eternal buds

in moments undiscovered.

Unparalleled Adventures

“The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfall” (1835)

http://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/unphlle.htm

The quote from the anonymously authored song from the 1600s, “Tom O’Bedlam,” sums up the exact happenings of the following story in four succinct lines: With a heart of furious fancies, / Whereof I am commander, / With a burning spear and a horse of air / to the wilderness I wander. This story may sound familiar; a protagonist grows tired of life, pestered by debt, “wishing to live, yet wearied with life,” he runs away in a parallel of suicide much more gratifying for us to read about. Driven by seething, secret hatred for debt collectors and his failing bellows repair business, obviously failing, Hans Pfall builds a hot air balloon and flies it to the moon. This model of escapism has been recreated many times and by many other authors in many other stories.

Reading this story, and many others by Poe, is a measuring exercise in vocabulary size and also an opportunity to greatly expand any sized vocabulary. His words are varied and seemingly carefully chosen to convey a deeper meaning than stories that are written specifically for a general audience or dumbed down for the literary public. The phrase, “All physics in a ferment,” used to describe the descent of the hot air balloon in the beginning of the story as one example. I greatly enjoyed the way that Poe started the story from the end of the journey and then proceeded to fill in the details via a letter and journal entries dropped from the returning balloon by its moon-person operator. Within the journal entries we find mathematical “proof” for the journey and well-crafted-but-obvious-pseudo science. Narrow, providential, and causally unrelated escapes from death and disaster cleverly plague Pfall’s journey, “had not the inconvenience of getting wet, determined me to discharge the ballast my destruction might, and probably would, have been the consequence.” The birth of the kittens was another random occurrence which is used to illustrate Pfall’s grasp of his universe’s physics and their quick dispatch at the end of their usefulness was cleanly crafted and carried out by Poe. The story crashes from reality, to the reading of the letter detailing Pfall’s journey, and back to reality for a speedy conclusion. A conclusion which leaves us with mostly questions, accompanied by no small amount of mystique.

This work begins crossing the gulf of science fiction prominently before many other authors. Jules Verne was inspired by this story (and other Poe stories such as, “The Balloon Hoax”) to write “Around the World in Eighty Days,” and “From the Earth to the Moon.” Jules Verne created similar stories in a way which exhibits precisely the concept of imitation being the sincerest form of flattery. There’s also a confirmation bias on my end to consider. I read this futuristic tale and thought, “gee, this sounds like some other stories I’ve encountered,” and that inspires me to consider that it was the first and all that came after must have followed cautiously in Poe’s footsteps. Poe may have opened the floodgates for science fiction, horror, and the macabre tale but he was much more of a catalyst than a direct ancestor to all stories that were to come after his time. This story opened the doors of the horror genre but shuts them quickly without delving into the yawning depths. Luckily for us, a certain H.P. Lovecraft comes along to discover these doors in Poe’s stories and bound across the threshold.

—–

I wrote this poem about the sea, which is kind of like space, right?

 

Swells come and go;

crests bloom bottomless,

troughs hide below.

 

You’re in a boat,

do what people in boats do

when forced to float.

 

 

Wave your goodbyes,

to things but leavings,

with intrepid eyes

on unknown moorings

and ubiquitous lives.

What Comes After

Here’s the plan: Every Friday, I am going to post a new critical analysis of an Edgar Poe story. I will attempt to find free versions of these stories online and post a link. I will be reading the stories out of the Castle Books volume, “Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales and Poems.” After dusting off and holding up to the light each piece of thought provoking, often strangely modern, fiction, I will then tack on a piece of poetry or short fiction of my own creation which can serve as a helpful reminder that anyone can attempt to climb the trouser leg of giants but not everyone can succeed in standing on the shoulders without falling off. You can be the judge of whether I concretely stand on a talented summit or am dashed to pieces at the feet of a literary hero.

Tomorrow will be the first Friday and the first post. Below is a poem I recently wrote which, I like to think, illustrates a critical piece of beginnings: courage.

 

To Rise

To sink in tempest seas is an easy thing.

To rise despite the drowning ring,

in your ears and all around,

truly that is courage crowned.