My Plans For 2006, as Prefigured by the Titles of Unfinished Poems by Baudelaire

NUMBER 41, WEEK 30

Notes From My Visit to the Future

1.1 In the future, time travel is a fact of life: an unfortunate fact of life.

1.1 In the future everything is permitted, but nothing is tolerated.

1.1 In the future pain still exists, only now it is appreciated as something in itself.

1.1 In the future crying still exists, but it has come into its own: crying has supplanted all possible reasons for crying. Also: in the future there are no personal pronouns or possessives. Subjectivity has been overcome. So “we” do not cry; “I” do not cry. There is (simply): crying. This is the future.

1.1 Likewise, there is pain. Sometimes the pain is so great, it is unendurable, yet it is endured. This is one of the achievements of the future.

1.1 In the future, it is not possible to sleep.

1.1 The pain passes; into the past or the future, because tense, too has become obsolete.

1.1 By expressing (myself) to (you) in the language of the present my sentences seem paradoxical. They are not. There is a conflict between the language of the present and the concepts of the future or the concepts of the present and the language of the future which is conceptless.

1.1. All things move toward their ends; you seek the causes of calamitous events and suffering in the past; but they originate here, in the future. Your pathos is to for ever seek the myth of origins. Our pathos is to be ruled by your myths.

1.1. Therefore, we say to you: drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.

NUMBER 40, WEEK 29
NEXT BY 11 JANUARY 2006

Thanksgiving with the Master

It is when abroad that we feel notre patrie best, our common customs, our roots. How cosmopolitan and indifferent to the national feeling are we in our proud cities and how requisitely contemptuous of it in our parlours and yet how quickly the fraternal feeling comes when, after so long treading alien speech we hear our familiar accents spoken by a homesick other amidst the foreign din of the underage brothel. It was moved by exactly such a sentiment that I was drawn this past Thanksgiving to the unique and esoteric table of the Master.

The Master’s estate was legendary for its beauty before he acquired it, to the point of being a familiar trope in some occasionally anthologized verse, and a tried reference in the love songs of local troubadours: its beauty was of a feminine cast, graceful and receiving. Like all the beautiful feminine things in his possession, the Master had acquired her abruptly and unclearly, visited her with ostentatious humiliation and abuse that horrified those that loved her best, violating and using her in every possible way, until finally settling down into an apathetic neglectful stupor that led many to wonder why and how the two remained together. On my approach, I could see that much of what was said was true. Every line of the place had been vandalized, beds trampled, ponds befouled, and most terrible of all, the once great sheltering trees had become an awful spectacle of horror (indeed, when upon the drive, I entreat you to keep your gaze upon the house itself and not look up - for things, most terrible things, are caught and tangled in the now dead trees, and may have not yet rotted away). Yet, familiar with the Master’s inverse sentiments and morals, in the broken windows and torn curtains of this once beautiful place, I intuited the Master’s design, his perverse sense of beauty in his maltreatment of his estate, his Roman cruelty in so parading it before the world, the affection in his uxorious loathing.


The doors to the estate remained patrician, somehow even more so with the graffitied marks of various sigils of occult intelligence, seals and inscriptions from every corner of the world, barbaric and secret scripts, some severe, many forbidden, required only by those who would the dare to know the worst of what is generally kept silent. Fresh blood and saffron highlighted the original artful carvings. The place is a dark, close, warm scented place, with smells familiar from the temple: endless incense and stale human bodies, candles, fasting, -as well as the smell of rich but rotting food, wine, sex and the low tones of something unmentionably feculent. I am shown in by some of the Master’s initiates, most of whom are short, dark, gaunt sickly girls with a drowsy opiate manner. They are wearing the most remarkable mixture of stained bed sheets and gym socks, fine lingerie and Hanes Active wear, looking less like Pre-Raphaelites than Sophomores making their worked over way back from Greek week. If the truth be told, a lot of them are prostitutes or worse, drug addicts at the least. So I am told. I only know the Master cursorily: I am as familiar as I dare, only having his acquaintance by his passing game of chess, my predilection for the demi-monde and because we belong to the same forbidden book club. I notice a bright flicker, colored as the sun, on the bare feet of my escort as she proceeds me. I look down and I realize that it is merely dust shining the pads of her feet, dust that covers the floor everywhere in a fine sheen. A metallic dust: it is gold.


Screams are heard, but nothing serious, and soon I am given the rare honor of being ushered into the presence of the Master in the dining hall on the same day as my arrival. The Master looks ostentatiously unwell, dressed only in a shapeless robe with his head badly shaved except for a thin strip. Whichever of his acolytes shorn him knew nothing of the straight razor, and in some areas it appeared that instead of precise oblique angles, the strokes had intercepted his orb and the effect had been that the Master had at places been peeled like a wormy apple. His beard, as the papers would have it, was indeed flecked with foam, but in this case, it was just the creme of a pastry horn, which he held aloft like a conch shell, while he was engaged in spitting chewed parts of it into the mouth of disciple and largely missing, while mouthing something in barbarian Greek. The Master never hurries, but it pleased him to greet me, sliding off the riotous table, which was covered with all manner of desserts and fornications: the Master had been following his gimmick of eating dessert first, “an inversion of the normal culinary order." Around the table were the usual constellation of acolytes, followers, private school occultists, camp women, initiates, bikers, failed poets and acoustic guitar aficionados, drumming circle types gone bad, exclusive college dropouts, demimondaines, liberal elitists, genuine homosexuals, fascists, transgendered necrophiles, crossword authors, occasional tribadists, ambivalent sodomites, police informers (les doulous), Planned Parenthood board members, literary theorists, anarchists, nihilists, people who talk at PTA meetings, dog groomers, gypsies, Merovignians, Rosicrucians and Rotary Club members, circus graduates, dispossessed vaudevillians, followers of Karl Popper, Darwinians, Masonic free trade enthusiasts, New Age drug dealers, quietly depraved librarians, Sufi mystics, chess masters, various branches of this or that intelligence service, model rocketry enthusiasts, gnostic plumbers, Esperanto speakers and people ruined by Magic: The Gathering. Most of them were so enfeebled by their vices and the Master’s narcotic hospitality as to be able to do little more than pick at food or sex or conversation or vomiting, which they nonetheless did in a sort of slow murmur that almost passed for oratory in the great hall.

The Master passed among his guests and initiates on his way to greet me, passing out mouthy kisses, cruel pinches and gropes, belchy gnomic stock phrases along the way, only remounting the table once to stomp on a few creme pies and kick a defecating dog. There is a deliberate lack of care in the looseness of his robe, displaying his greenish, corpulent but smooth skin, his darker third nipple and the fact that his lousy robe came from JC Penny’s. He also has a major softie, swinging back and forth like a boom, probably also deliberately cultivated for my benefit and scandal, nursed with absent minded strokes and venomous aphrodisiacs.

He greeted me with the Handshake of the Brotherhood (which I reciprocated), the Forbidden Kiss of Bahomet (which I endured) and a little something I believed he invented, possibly on the spot, that primarily resembled someone going to town on the theme of a “wet willy” (for all his Satanic trappings, the Master might be disappointed to know that visiting him is not all that different from going to a potluck with Allen Ginsburg and The Fugs). He spoke to me in voice that was sweet with opium and sour with the trickle of vomit that still dried in his beard.


“I greet you. I thank you. In friendship. In parting. Welcome to my wedding feast. Do what thou wilt! This holiday -Thanksgiving -is a wedding feast. A marriage between the Old World and New. Innocence and Experience, that is to say a rape, A malificient rape with monstrous endless issue. A numerous as bullets! Or flies! Nam, Nam Viet-Nam -the whole world is the New World now. It began, they say, as a supreme gesture of Illumination: to prove the great circle, three ships led, appropriately enough, by a fool who did not know where he was going. Yet: the point of all circumnavigation is to return. All Movement to the South, now. The South is the West. Salute the Conquistadores: Gold, Slaves, Eternal Youth! See what is possible when your lust and cruelty, greed and ambitious appetite exceed your capacity to imagine or wonder! The Marquis understood this, at the founding of the Republic: we require that all women be submitted to our pleasure. Rape, Liberation, Republicanism, these all must advance together! This is why I write letters to Hitler. Note how the turkey’s legs are positioned upwards as horns attacking heaven.”

And indeed, upon the table was a pinkish Tom, naked as a baby. The still unerect turkey timer and the uncooked blood that pooled around it indicated to me that it was probably still quite frozen on the inside. A pair of panties was luridly stuffed in its mouth and it’s legs grotesquely splayed, posed like the last Whitechapel murder. In Hebrew on the side: The World. Otherwise, the table is quite lavish, though overtaken by a riotous confusion of vices and paraphernalia, and characteristically not very nourishing, even the cranberry sauce doctored with canthinides and -worse. The dining resembled nothing so much as out-takes from Von Stroheim’s Greed.

“To express this Black Mass properly,” the Master demurred, “I would ideally sodomize a pterodactyl.”

“Later,” he reassured me, “I will become invisible. We will become invisible. All but the gods are invisible. But my opus... I have made incredible progress. Ich weiß jetzt was kein Engel weiß. I have seen mountains. Come with me to Le Chambre Des Cauchemars . For I would...”

-And here I realized that the Master had been moving with unnatural incredible slowness (like a dancer)

“...make you immortal.”

This was the Master at his most charismatic. He would talk and talk, but the bewitching thing about him would be the three fat black hairs on his head, which seemed obscenely thick and stood up straight. Or the curious motions of his flabby skin which seemed to hang and flap in somnambulant slow motion like the skin of an elephant, or his personal smell of civet and musk, mold and ambergris, sex and excretion. Some, I told myself, some of his devout, must have begun as skeptics and did nothing more than sit in on a dinner one night, a lecture, another, here and there, until one day the Master delivers some ludicrous line, like from a Hammer movie, only on one of these confused and alternately boring and thrilling nights you have seen him assume into vapor or the shape of a bat, you have come to believe and finally find that his bite and his bed are quite real. Or so I thought, regarding two sickly girls trying to seduce the same kitten.

“Come,” announced the Master.

We began our journey into the depths of the “abbey”, the Master returning to his previous theme, reciting:

Es con voz de la Biblia, o verso de Walt Whitman,
que habría que llegar hasta ti, Cazador!
Primitivo y moderno, sencillo y complicado,
con un algo de Washington y cuatro de Nemrod.
Eres los Estados Unidos!

Eres soberbio y fuerte ejemplar de tu raza;
eres culto, eres hábil; te opones a Tolstoy.
Y domando caballos, o asesinando tigres,
eres un Alejandro-Nabucodonosor.
(Eres un profesor de energía,
como dicen los locos de hoy.)
Crees que la vida es incendio,
que el progreso es erupción;
en donde pones la bala
el porvenir pones!



Which was all the more remarkable for its fludity, for the Master had no command of other languages (other than Esperanto, which he used for the Black Mass). As we walked down the cold darkened hall of this improvised abbey, I shivered and felt suddenly sober, though I had imbibed nothing. The Master’s world was narcotic, distorting, intoxicating. I knew already what lay in the chamber: pornographic and grotesque murals designed to prepare the minds of novices and titillate tipsy hitchhikers. The Master performed some of his magical opus there, which probably meant for our visit the Master rhapsodizing still further about the Babylonians (where his ideas were debatable) or the Akkadians (where he was certainly misinformed), or the Canaanites, which meant that he would invariably digress onto their sexual practices (more of an polymorphous incest fantasy in sandals). This meant probably another confused and heated sexual advance, which some has described as preferable, for all its tiresome struggle, to having him bring out his poetry. Yet here I was following him, as obedient as a dream. As we went further on, it became clear that among the many notions the Master had freed himself of, the most prominently murdered was English hygiene: the low feculent smell was unmistakably that of human feces. The road to Enlightenment: a Calcutta street.

I paused to remove some of this material from my shoe, so casually and liberally offered in the hall, tearing a page from a discarded magazine: it was floral and glossy with naked forms: I regarded it: the publication was entitled “Cheeky”. The Master loved to tear out the pages of bright, festive, fleshy pornography and litter them over schoolyards. The lurid pink scraps looked bright and cheerful against the green grass of the yard. The Master liked to think of little girls and boys excited by the discovery, of chasing after each and every piece of prurient trash, of sharing and hoarding its secrets, staining their fingers, genitals and tongues black with their frenzied explorations: for the Master had dusted each page lightly with arsenic. And he liked the articles.

What a middling, vicious Satan was this, I wondered. Was this place anything other than another a cold dark, hebephrenic shooting gallery Gehenna and the Master anything other than another aristocratic “eccentric”, in a race between the ruin of his name or his money (money finally pulling ahead), a fat ex-mountaineer with a heroin habit who discovered flagellation and his own bisexuality late in life and called it Magic? Yet this place must seem like a heaven and a hell to its inhabitants, the floors coated with shit or gold, depending on one’s perceptions. And a sangha. A place of great work. The opus.

The Master, who had glided in the darkness with effortless silence, telepathically interjected: “It is indeed an allegory. You have left the warm world of the flesh to a cold and shit filled passage. You and I are, too, are shit-filled passages. To where?” he laughed, “When we are cold and dead our nails and hair will continue to grow. Does this make us alive? Warmth will begin in the soil we carry within us. In the ass. As above. So below.” “You know what I really enjoy?” he continued, “Is Nintendo. Gambling and masturbation look like Protestant virtues in comparison. It is Enlightening because it is the picture of Godhood. Particularly Tetris.” I felt as though the Master added this latter for my benefit, as if to demonstrate that he was not entirely out of touch. He might as well have tried to talk about the Oscars.

The Master then did a very human thing: he rubbed his head. I winced in reflexive sympathy. Where, I wondered was C________ ? She certainly knew how to handle a straight razor. I cared not at all for the rest all the Master’s camp of stragglers, save her company. Her reign, seated upon the drug addled scarlet beast by the Master, I thought something of a tasteful improvement over her predecessors. She was a dark haired little thing, smart, gamine and puckish, the sort of girl who would make a puppet out of her sweater, or her panties, seated at a bistro and make it discourse, in an accurate scholarly way, on Anaxagoras or the treatment of pruritus. She was lovely and lively, but she saw things: she had probably seen them. She became high all the time because she became terrified not to be. She didn’t prosper in the Master’s company either and lastly had taken to eating mice. Which was fine for the abbey, because there were plenty of them. Yet I wondered what happened to her. I asked the Master. He replied that she had eaten a sheet of acid. Then she became Enlightened. Then she became a kitty cat. He said no more for we had reached Le Chambre Des Cauchemars.

The paintings were indeed nightmares, especially if you had a prejudice for technique: the centerpiece was a Creator God after the drawings of William Blake in a sort of goatse’d pose, creating unmentionables in an unmentionable way, with an inscription by the Comte de Lautréamont. It was appropriately crapulent. Some of the other murals were more amusing such as Deaf Lesbians Strangling a Diabetic Ferret and Aldous Huxley Sodomized by an Armored Car. Yet amidst these juvenile obscenities (where the artist seemed torn between a desire to irritate or arouse impressionable minds) were the mysteries: hidden in a copied poise or the curled fingers of a depicted masturbating Eskimo were the icons and signs that indicated that the artist had seen and understood what the murals of Minos truly depicted, the relations of the dancers and the bull, the true path of the labyrinth and the stars. It was as in the ruins of the Temple of Hermes; the most obscene joke hid the most occult truth. I was gazing upwards trying to debate whether or not to take the molecular sephiroth seriously when I skidded on a slick of something: the Master caught me in a surprisingly firm and timely grip. It was not shit this time, but blood, blood and secretion.

He righted me in an avuncular way. He looked at me in that way that parsons do and asked: Do you want to be a critic or an artist? It was for those occasional beams of acuteness that I did not take the Master entirely lightly. I realized instantly: there was no mystery here, and, -the Master wasn’t going to hit on me. As though the object lesson was complete we quit the chamber immediately.

The Master slipped into one of the private apartments along the hall, and I followed. Here there seemed to be presented another tableau, for the room appeared to be nothing other than a pinkish and frilly girl’s bedroom, only in the place of the bed there was an enormous agricultural basin or tub, filled with dark water. The meaning of this place only became clearer as the Master turned to the darling vanity table, neatly cluttered with a profusion of mirrors, boxes and bottles and proceeded to riffle through every drawer and box in an unclear pattern, with a deliberate and theatrical slowness: now this drawer, now that. I turned to a sound behind me. Ripples dimpled and ran on the mirror of the water in the basin. Another droplet fell from the teat of the damp spot in the ceiling. The basin was perhaps one droplet short of overflowing. Finally, the Master found his object and packed it in a tiny pipe. After some rather temperate puffs he announced:

“We shall go further to the center of the circle”

I exhaled. It seemed that the first drop would never breach the brim of the basin. The miniature waves seemed to hug the edge and dance around it, never spilling over, defying gravity.

“We will travel there,” said the Master “magically.”

By “magically” the Master meant “borrowing his neighbor’s truck.” His neighbor seemed the least likely person to assort with the Master, or lend him anything, and yet he assented as though it were natural.

“You will find in the coming days -a union” said the Master pulling on his gloves, but the neighbor had already receded back into the glow of the television. “The Chinese hexagram for this is “Kuh” or forty” he said to me. To the neighbor’s dog he said: “I bind you thrice” and made the appropriate signs. The dog did indeed not move: indeed, it did not wake. He made me drive.

He did not really explain where we were going and on the way we got drunk. “I never have to pay when I am invisible” the Master said amicably, only he was really drunk and really visible so I ended up paying but rather expected this. The bartender looked like he was well inured to the sight of small beers drinking themselves at his establishment. “Though I am Poore in Rags, Sneeze and Freeze/ I rejoice I am not a Pekinese” the Master laughed. He threw a decent game of darts. He was interesting enough talking about mountaineering, dogs and tea, but an absolute fright when it came to politics. It was something of relief that he became distracted and excused himself. By now I had rendered enough of my own invisible to think that the Master was not such a terrible fellow. Raised voices from the Men’s room reminded me that he was.

I should have known well enough that his priapic signs were on the the rise when he started on the young man at the bar: “You are a ghost,” he had told him “You died when you were twenty-eight. You hung yourself.” This conversation could go no where good, but I laughed to myself because Thanksgiving dinner was tasting mainly like juniper berries. The young man was fairly good looking, well-cared for, dressed conservatively, clearly had a job, a family, a place of worship and had never been to boarding school -in short, the Master hadn’t a ghost of a chance with him. Why the man felt incensed to assert his sexual preference by punching the Master was no mystery, nor why the Master did not defend himself. Only the man’s tears stood out as odd.

I still had money and influence at least as far as this bar was concerned, so I smoothed things out -in so far as they were going to be smooth -I believe I conflated the spirit of the Thanksgiving with that of Christmas, though I think my oratory was helped by the fact that sometime during the evening’s proceedings I had taken to buying rounds of drinks and wearing an autumnal wreath as a crown -which gave me a oratorical appearance -so and we beat it out of there. I felt remarkably well. In the warming cabin of the truck the Master seemed more thoughtful than drunk. “Lost soul,” said the Master. I was going to make smart reply when I noticed a number of scratches on the Master’s face and arms. “Oh no, not from tonight,” he said “Earlier, we had to sacrifice a virgin.” I waited. “But we had to settle for a cat,” he finished. “I am hungry,” he said. Remarkably, so was I. We stopped at a drive through. With the Master in his robe and I still wearing the wreath: we looked like a Satanic interpretation of an unrepentant Ebenezer and the Ghost of Christmas Past.

We entered into a bad part of town, I presumed to refill some vice that was running low or lacking back at the abbey -though I dreaded the thought of whatever unclean indulgence the Master could not acquire at home. We pulled into a local mission, crowded with the indigent receiving a free hot meal. Knowing the Master’s sometimes prodigious appetites, I guessed that we were here to perhaps cop another hot meal, for the Master was not one to pass up anything freely given. Indeed, much of his method was to make people regret such kindnesses for the presumption. This year, the shelter housed not a few families. The little ones played, or fidgeted while their parents cut their portions. The children seemed as though they had not yet grown to hate their stay here, or feel ashamed. I had a worrisome thought and immediately looked for my companion.

I found him in the serving line, though much to my astonishment, on the serving side. He seemed to have volunteered impromptu and no one seemed to mind: it seemed it was easy enough to help where help was needed. In this moment, I could not guess at his motives, so I joined him. When the priests came, I looked away, but the Master (who never passed up an opportunity to publicly insult one) was obedient and helpful, seemingly sincere in efforts. When the nuns came I thought I had guessed his purpose, but he hardly gave them a glance. He seemed remarkably industrious and even a little familiar with the mission.

I kept to my station and found the majority to be in a clear good cheer, most more lucid than the Master’s guests. The Master conversed, but in a friendly, common way with everyone. He propounded no mysteries, he did not deny the divinity of Christ. I half expected him to insinuate himself among the dispossessed and spread murmurs of discontent, evil tracts or at least the stems of a dime bag, but no. Worst of all, there was nothing pious or Christian in his attitude; he simply acted like he was at his job, his appointed task, remarkable for a man who, to my knowledge, had never held one.

We passed the rest of the evening so engaged. He indulged in one eccentricity: he introduced himself every where as “Oliver Haddo”, which I thought at the time a pragmatic consideration. I thought of the uncooked turkey back at the Master’s abbey. I knew that he believed in little of kindness and nothing of charity or altruism. He denied “good works” He believed only in the great work, his work.

It was only later that I realized the significance of all I had seen that night, the depth of his depravity and his knowledge, his pursuit of his most unquiet science, and for the first time, truly feared him, as one would fear a father.

NUMBER 39, WEEK 28; WORD COUNT TO DATE: 32,478
NEXT BY 5 JANUARY 2006

Christmas at the House of Usher

If I had a choice, surely I would choose otherwise, but as I know he has no other family or friends, it is once more to the House of Usher I return. The place is impossible to decorate, and frankly, it always seems like things have been up from last Christmas, or possibly Halloween. On the drive in, you see a lot of torn plastic bags in the trees, shredded by the wind, desiccated, papery and crumbly to the touch. And oatmeal containers.

There is, of course, no real wreath and no real tree, for the odor of sap would drive my friend quite mad. Instead, there is a rather tacky store bought plastic cut out ornament on the door, that has been rather exactingly taped, with strips of scotch tape that are each exactly the same length. There are neither more nor fewer strips than would be necessary to keep the decoration up and their placement is absolutely precise. The drawing of the wreath itself is overwhelmingly crude: it cannot be drawn by anyone who has ever seen one. The treatment of the candle flames is particularly egregious. I think of the agony it must have been for my friend to extend each baying strip of scotch tape to put this awful decoration up. Perhaps Madeline helped -but no, that is quite impossible. I consider such diversions for the thoughtful duration my friend affords me before making it to the door.

My friend is cordial as always and looks surprisingly well for the holiday season; he even manages a little smile and a winsome look in the corner of his overbright and liquid eye that seemed to reflect the hopeless bleak desolation of the rank sedges, the dead trees, the black and lurid tarn, the sorrowful and cheerless landscape that stretches for miles around. Nonetheless, it is good to see him and I compliment him on his festive new dressing gown, before I realize it is the usual old one, just covered with a lot of dandruff. This is a hard season for my friend, so it is not too difficult to change the subject. We are headed to the parlor, but my friend is so easily distracted that we end up in the kitchen. There are a lot of plastic bags there, some from shops that no longer exist.

The holidays are a stressful time for many, even more so for this last branch of the Ushers so afflicted: Roderick suffering from a preternatural actueness of all the senses that rendered the mildest stimuli painful and poor Madeline prostrate to a settled apathy and indefatigatble wasting away; so perhaps that is why a fevered anxious note seemed to break through my friend’s usual demeanor of frenzied nervousness. I could not make out if much of his remarks applied to the past, the present, or dreadful, ineluctable events yet to come. I could but share a few confused and elliptical exchanges with my friend when it was time to dress for dinner. We took our whispered leave of one another and I began the long trying journey up the stair one step at time, knowing that my poor friend was already weeping into his earmuffs, beneath several cushions in his library at the thunderous onslaught of my tiptoed ascent.

It goes without saying that the rules of hospitality always forbid that one should notice such things, especially here, but I could not help but regard a instant too long, a minute spot, barely detectable, yet surely there, above the central archway. Over my dressing could not avoid considering it: Had the minute yet contiguous fissure, almost invisible, yet traceable zickzack, threatening to divide the house finally made it’s root to the inside? Was it a spot of the curious and pervasive fungi that seemed to grow as one enormous corporate being upon the estate, webbed like mad locks from the eaves? Was it –and this was beyond considering -Mistletoe?

I thought with some trepidation upon the demands of yuletide and hoped, impossibly, that Roderick might have forgone the implacable courtesy of getting me a present. I remember one Christmas that I had received what looked and felt like a violated clump of earth, wrapped carefully, so very carefully, in a soft dark cloth. From the fruitcake Roderick had exactingly gouged out each of the candied fruits and nuts –otherwise, he would have not been able to keep it in the house. I looked over its darkish and irregular mass, but briefly, horrified by the receiving stare of the empty orbits and sockets left by the excised sweets. It was also a little damp, for Roderick had no doubt resorted to wetting the cloth, when the stinging odor of cinnamon grew too much.

These curious gifts were even more difficult and painful to reciprocate; I had once provided my friend with the softest, mildest slippers I could procure, only to be later greeted by my friend at the door in a painful hobble, his ankles violently bruised and clipped by the fluffy ears of the lapine styled slippers he had so thoughtfully insisted on wearing to greet me. This year I had grown weary of wrapping the usual familiar cadeau of an economically bale sized portion of cotton balls (which I have to repackage, the plastic bag being trying beyond all measure for my friend) and had finally settled on the gentle novelty of a new specially designed blanket for premature newborn marsupials: it was blue in color and of a tenuous consistency, weightless and delicate as spider silk: the material floated in your hand, as spectral gossamer, not unlike the weblike hair of my distracted friend. This, and a slender volume I had found on reduction, that I thought would suit his artistic interests: Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne, an essay by the author of our much beloved Les Histoires Extraordinaires.

Roderick and I shared some considerable convivial time before dinner, in the soundless comfort of our dinner slippers, my friend recalling with some fondness (in that abrupt, weighty, unhurried, and hollow-sounding enunciation —that leaden, self-balanced, and perfectly modulated guttural utterance, which may be observed in the lost drunkard, or the irreclaimable eater of opium, during the periods of his most intense excitement, -which marked his better moods) the occurrences of our childhood, the boon my friendship represented, the kindness of my visit, and his interesting natural theory that the vegetable spirits of the miasma of the tarn were alive and conscious and the certain doom of he and his line.

So diverting was this maniacally animated and terrific conversation, that it was sometime before I noticed that some hours had passed, as indicated by the blanketed grandfather clock, and that the much beloved lady of the house had still not yet appeared. Nor had my genial host related much of her recent welfare: on this he had been quite as silent as the tomb.


“Madeline, Madeline will join us” Roderick said again, again unbidden, though less certain this time. Knowing the largo of the evenings here, I nodded and tried to stay awake amicably by doing quiet exercises, having exhausted the company of the decade of pellucid eggnog that I had been nursing, that, though omitting the traditional and disagreeable ingredients that would have made it a menace to my friend, such as eggs, nutmeg certainly, and milk -being basically an anemic and translucent porridge of bleached soggy rice, though with an extra yuletide squirt of more water, still managed a deeply phlegmatic recalcitrance to stay in the cup.


We passed some more agreeable hours together, Roderick lost in one of his monomanical states regarding the flame of a smothering candle, I flexing and stretching myself with quiet vigor in a spirited attempt to regain some small tactile feeling as will occasionally be absent in the outermost extremities in the pervasive chill that comes on in the hours after midnight. Finally, Roderick awoke from his catatonic reveries with the carefree and casual sentiment that we might begin to wake the staff again and begin dinner “before it got too cold” (though it had, in fact, reached a kind of gelid equilibrium with the rest of the dark frosty room sometime after the fire died) and gallantly proposed that perhaps Madeline would join the holiday feast in medias res as it were.

Dinner at the House of Usher is a stately, even sepulchral sort of affair, the pacing of the service and even gustation set by the need to traverse the multiple courses of the meal without the dissonance of any audible sounds or the noxious effluvia of any smells. The table, too, is dark, though lit by multiple scentless lamps with heavy leaded shades whose wan and distant crimson beams disclosed only the vaguest continental outlines of tureens and goblets, while casting the most fantasical and monstrous shadows over all. It was meal negotiated by sensitive touches and a difficult waiting posture on furniture that managed to be somehow both too soft and too rigid. I had a particularly hard time of it, having gallantly commandeered an abandoned swivel chair to sit at the table (the Ushers usally not having usually to seat for more than two -the omission of a third chair and setting being a singular and curious solecism on the part of Usher's household) not realizing, at the time, the reason for its abandonment being its singular lack of comfort and its status as being entirely broken and profitless as a chair. Indeed, though it was entirely useless for the purpose of resting one’s frame, it did still retain the capacity -I would say even the caprice -to swivel, which it did, as unpredictably as a landslide or a frightened charger, to the painful and, for my friend, agonizing screech of its corroded mechanism, which can only be compared to the despairing yawp of a train full of despised unbaptized orphans derailing into an unhallowed gorge. Still, it was no problem, so long as I remained absolutely still and vigilant throughout the meal and took some care to cantilever my weight so that it rested entirely on my feet, while maintaining the pantomime of sitting comfortably in the chair, while steadying the chair itself as best I could with my lower half to prevent its own spontaneous rotation. This I did passing well for the most part while maintaining an amicable and diverting whispered dinner conversation.

In addition to being some of the most solid and quiet hours one will ever spend, meals at the House of Usher are also one of the most highly consistent experiences one can have, being entirely composed of the aforementioned porridge, which, however, in the vivid imagination and talented hands of Roderick’s kitchen staff and gros bonnnet (and in accord with his physicians strictest prescriptions) is deployed in an splendid diversity of wildly different containers of all kinds of shapes and sizes, and nuanced with degrees of vaguest tepidity and infinitesimal sapidity that only Roderick’s preternatural palate could truly appreciate. Indeed, for this holiday feast the porridge had been given the raucous addition of faint festive greenish hue, as though lit by a willow th’wisp, almost undetectable, save in comparison to the white of the enshrouding linen or my genial host’s lips, certainly tasteless, and whose savory abstention was complimented by the distilled water quite nicely.

Having feasted on the delightful cold saturnalia set before us, I proposed to my host that we try to warm ourselves and alleviate the inevitable frosty headache and distracting bodily chills that follow such a meal with the pleasures of music, the only audible sounds whose harmony Usher found tolerable, and thus resume our vigil. If there is one unqualified pleasure in visiting the House of Usher, it is the fervid improvisations, the thrilling fantasias that my friend created in rhyme to his own nippy accompaniment, along themes suggested by the season, some of which, in their cheerful frenzy (rivaled only by an impertinent storm without), were hard to recall, exactly, but one of which featured the sonorous holiday imagery of bells prominently. The other that I can only vaguely recall:

Well, the Weather outside is Fright-fulThe Night is Black and Night-fulBut Since we’ve No Place to go
Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow!

It was, indeed, a tempestuous yet sternly beautiful night, and one wildly singular in its terror and its beauty. A whirlwind had apparently collected its force in our vicinity; for there were frequent and violent alterations in the direction of the wind; and the exceeding density of the clouds (which hung so low as to press upon the turrets of the house) did not prevent our perceiving the lifelike velocity with which they flew careering from all points against each other, without passing away into the distance. I say that even their exceeding density did not prevent our perceiving this—yet we had no glimpse of the moon or stars—nor was there any flashing forth of the lightning, nor holiday lights. But the under surfaces of the huge masses of agitated frosty vapor, as well as all terrestrial objects immediately around us, were glowing in the unnatural light of a faintly luminous and distinctly visible gaseous exhalation which hung about and enshrouded the mansion in a sort of winter wonderland.

Yet so delightful and astonishing, more than virtuoso, even diabolical, were my friend’s impromtus, as to exceed the infernal Paganini; a little steam escaped his lapels at the end of his furious pluckings, in the chill of the parlor, like a heated charger, and beneath his wet locks, his eyes regarded still some empyrean scene. I begged leave of my friend to go and get some refreshments from the kitchen (a copious sleet of sweat sleek on his brow, and a mild froth winking in the corners of his lips), though in his agitated state, he implored me not to leave him alone, on this night of all nights. Knowing well my friend’s agitated state on this eve, I reassured him that I would be right back, and yet that he might be constantly comforted by my presence, by my recitation of a favorite poem. This was something of a sad jest, for there was nothing in Moore’s plagarized rhyme to equal my friend’s sublime and elevated tastes, but it was to hand and so I proceed to recite:

Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the houseNot a creature was stirring, not even a mouseas I gently receded out of the room to the nearby kitchen.

I continued the poem as I went about lighting the feeble stove to thaw some ice, propaedeutic to making some sort of hot beverage. I then quietly rotated to gently open the icebox to regard the solid stocks of ready porridge stacked there like ingots, confirming the absence of any alternate foodstuffs and briefly bask in the mild rush of warmth provided by the electric light within. My surmises confirmed, I gently closed the heavy door of the ice box only to be greeted by the most arresting image:

It was a child’s drawing of a child or macrocephalic; a scrunched and humpbacked midget of a dwarf, done in vast smearing of brown and black silent wax crayon; the forehead was enormous and lunar, beneath which lurked a demented and diabolical crest of a brow that was furry and overwrought with satanic passions and barely tolerable animalistic lust. The eyes were worst of all, unspeakable, monstrous in sized, communicating something, some mad and terrible thing no child should know. Beneath the forks of its legs, it’s name was crudely, but affectionately sketched in a wax of a different color: rorderik. It was, as I have said, extraordinary. For who could have drawn it? It could only be from their sad and isolated childhood together, here still magnetically pinioned to the metal door. But the paper did not seem at all old.

The water having changed it’s state as much as it was wont to under the influence of the wan flame, I began to look about as best I could for some soundless cups and saucers -hoping for the convenience of some edgeless sippy cup or insulated travel mug (the Ushers having retained in all their glory many, if not all of the containers provided by fast food or convenience establishments -from some ancient phase of greater mobility -containers not intended by the establishments to be reused, but here collected, regardless of age or status) when I came across a set of tiny candles in white box. I first thought they were birthday candles, but the strange and ancient forms of the blue script on the box soon disclosed to me that they were intended for another purpose. I thought of my friend’s fine features and graceful nose in the Hebraic mold. Still, he had never alluded to any such ancestry, or spoken of such things and I realized that I had wholly left off reciting the poem during my perhaps impertinent reconnoiter of my friend’s cookery.

I raised my voice in its best melody as I reentered the salon, to cover any possible sound of the slush sliding around in the cups, placed the cups and sat, delivering this familiar holiday benediction to soothe my friend:

The children were nestled all snug in their beds,While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads;And mamma in her 'kerchief, and I in my cap,Had just settled down for a long winter's nap,
When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.

At the termination of this sentence I started, and for a moment paused; for it appeared to me (although I at once concluded that my excited fancy had deceived me)—it appeared to me that, from some very remote portion of the mansion, there came, indistinctly, to my ears what might have been, in its exact similarity of character, the echo (but a stifled and dull one certainly) of the very clatter Moore had so particularly described. It was, beyond doubt, the coincidence alone which had arrested my attention; for, amid the rattling of the sashes of the casements, and the ordinary commingled noises of the still increasing storm, the sound, in itself, had nothing, surely, which should have interested or disturbed me. I continued the poem:—

And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the roofThe prancing and pawing of each little hoof.

Here again I paused abruptly, and now with a feeling of wild amazement—for there could be no doubt whatever that, in this instance, I did actually hear (although from what direction it proceeded I found it impossible to say) a low and apparently distant, but harsh, protracted, and most unusual screaming or grating sound —the exact counterpart of what my fancy had already conjured up for the magical equipage of this eve’s mythical visitor.

Oppressed, as I certainly was, upon the occurrence of this second and most extraordinary coincidence, by a thousand conflicting sensations, in which wonder and extreme terror were predominant, yet commingled with a childhood glee of impossible anticipation, I still retained sufficient presence of mind to avoid exciting, by any observation, the sensitive nervousness of my companion. I was by no means certain that he had noticed the sounds in question; although, assuredly, a strange alteration had, during the last few minutes, taken place in his demeanor. From a position fronting my own, he had gradually brought round his chair, so as to sit with his face to the door of the chamber; and thus I could but partially perceive his features, although I saw that his lips trembled as if he were murmuring inaudibly. His head had dropped upon his breast—yet I knew that he was not asleep, from the wide and rigid opening of the eye as I caught a glance of it in profile. The motion of his body, too, was at variance with this idea—for he rocked from side to side with a gentle yet constant and uniform sway. Having rapidly taken notice of all this, I resumed the narrative of the woken Moore which proceeded:—

As I drew in my hand, and was turning around,Down the chimney St. Nicholas came with a boundA wink of his eye and a twist of his head,Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread.

No sooner had these syllables passed my lips, than—as if some nocturnal visitor had indeed, at the moment, fallen into the mouth of the fireplace to collide into the grating —I became aware of a series of distinct, hollow, metallic and clangorous, yet apparently muffled reverberations. Completely unnerved, I leaped to my feet; but the measured rocking movement of Usher was undisturbed. I rushed to the chair in which he sat. His eyes were bent fixedly before him, and throughout his whole countenance there reigned a stony rigidity. But, as I placed my hand upon his shoulder, there came a strong shudder over his whole person; a sickly smile quivered about his lips; and I saw that he spoke in a low, hurried, and gibbering murmur, as if unconscious of my presence. Bending closely over him, I at length drank in the hideous import of his words.

“Not hear it?—yes, I hear it, and have heard it. Long—long—long—many minutes, many hours, many days have I heard it—yet I dared not—oh, pity me, miserable wretch that I am!—I dared not—I dared not speak! Said I not that my senses were acute? I now tell you that I heard his first feeble movements - I heard them —many, many days ago—yet I dared not—I dared not speak! And now—to-night —Santa —ha! ha!—the clattering of the reindeer’s hooves, the prancing and pawing, the visions -ha! -of sugarplums and dancing sweets —say, rather, the rending of her coffin, and the grating of the iron hinges of her prison, and her struggles within the coppered archway of the vault! Oh, whither shall I fly? Has she not seen me when I am sleeping? Does he not know that I wake? Does she not know whether I’ve been bad or good? Have I not heard her footstep on the stair? Do I not distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of his heart? Madman!”—here he sprang furiously to his feet, and shrieked out his syllables, as if in the effort he were giving up his soul—“Madman! I tell you that she now stands without the door!”

As if in the superhuman energy of his utterance there had been found the potency of a spell—the huge antique panels to which the speaker pointed threw slowly back, upon the instant, their ponderous and ebony jaws. It was the work of the rushing gust—but then without those doors there did stand the jolly and rounded enshrouded figure of Old Saint Nick, in the furred and bearded transvestite person of the Lady Madeline of Usher. There was soot and blood upon her costume, cobbled out of a soft roseate robe, my friend’s ever ready supply of cotton balls and a poorly tucked pillow, which seemed grotesque strapped against her emaciated frame, dislodged as the evidence of some bitter sepurchal chimney struggle. For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold, clutching a ruptured garbage bag from which issued the leaves of festive torn paper and cadeaux shredded on her rough descent —then, with a low, moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the holiday terrors he had anticipated.


From that chamber, and from that mansion, I fled aghast. The storm was still abroad in all its icy wrath as I found myself crossing the old causeway. Suddenly there shot along the path a wild light, and I turned to see whence a gleam so unusual could have issued, the Ushers (for reasons now obvious) having no Christmas lights; for the vast house and its shadows were alone behind me. The radiance was that of the full, setting, and blood-red Yuletide moon, which now shone vividly through that once barely discernible fissure, of which I have before spoken as extending from the roof of the building, in a zigzag direction, to the base. While I gazed, this fissure rapidly widened—there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind—the entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight—my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder -the ground shook like a bowl full of jelly —there was a long tumultuous crashing sound like the hooves of a thousand tiny reindeer —and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the “House of Usher.”

NUMBER 38, WEEK 27; TOTAL WORD COUNT TO DATE: 28, 214
HAPPY HOLIDAYS: NEXT BY 29 DECEMBER