Blog

Imagination, synchronicity and the need for catharsis

My imagination is Baroque ... wait for it. Okay bad pun. Anyhow the fountain is flowing and I am putting pen to paper.
My imagination was Baroque … wait for it. Okay bad pun. Anyhow, it’s fixed and the fountain is flowing.

Every so often there are periods when my imagination starts to swell.

It’s when I’m not actually into my creative energy as often, so like flowing water hitting a dam, there’s going to be a time where it erodes away at that barrier or spills over.

Typically, I sate it with small bursts of poetry, and there is an outlet where I go in the city once a month — something I’ve neglected to entertain as of late.

I’d like to get back to that, but in the mean time I’ve been mulling over ideas. And taking in some television.

I’m not a big TV fan. Like George Sanders said to Marilyn Monroe in All About Eve, “That’s all television is, my dear, nothing but auditions.” But I finally sat down and watched “The Following”.

To my surprise, it references Gothic horror, namely Edgar Allan Poe. It serves up a healthy meal of the tropes I like: Anti-hero, the pursuit for justice, and literary references. The last show that had me picking out allusion was “Lost”, so I like the cerebral approach — which is extraordinarily rare on TV saturated with scripted-reality horseshit.

As I mentioned before, I’ve been reading a Penguin Book called American Supernatural Tales and I made it through the tedious Fall of the House of Usher. As much as I appreciate a lot of Poe’s works, I can understand how his overly verbose writing made him appear, well, pompous, or right in line with John Cusack’s portrayal in The Raven.

Regardless of the questionable veracity behind that movie, you can see where the writers H.P. Lovecraft got his influence, and August Derleth his. I scanned through to Robert W. Chambers, and got whiff of why he ended up writing romance pulps in his later career.

His Gothic horror didn’t really have that dread and despair. I’m not into chi-chi frou-frou, artsy-fartsy shit. Just hit hard with your horror, and don’t pussyfoot about like a meth-head faun.

Comments are closed.