not done

Traces of Poe: A meditation on two particular tales

For as long as I can remember, my thoughts of Poe have always stretched to include young cousin-wife Virginia Clemm. Such gossip-centric details do not color and cloak the reputations of similar figures with equal force or consistency; I’ve no comprehension of Melville’s personal life for instance. This inability to separate the Personal Poe from Professional is not unique: Poe’s romantic life has long been a point of fascination to even the most general audience. Why should this be? Though unconventional by today’s standards, first cousin pairings were not uncommon at the time (the age difference does stand out however). I believe the cause for persistent prying transcends a tendency towards sensationalism, the glossy tabloid-esque obsessions of today. These glimpses of a marriage, the circumstances of Clemm’s life and death offer us rare insight into Poe’s inner emotional life when taken in conjunction with his writing. This makes her essential to gaining a greater understanding of Poe’s work as well as his mental state. Two short stories in particular stand out in this regard.

While preparing for What Remains: Traces of Poe (an art installation I mounted in conjunction with a colleague), I listened to audio books of Poe’s work in order to fully saturate my artistic focus with Poe-ness. As luck would have it, audio renditions of Berenice and Eleanora appeared almost side by side. When taken in close succession, these tales create an interesting juxtaposition. While Eleanora and Berenice involve a somewhat similar set of circumstances each is executed in a completely different key. Our respective narrators’ romantic lives hold certain traits in common (as does Poe): all three fall in love with his respective first cousin(s) all three cousin-lovers fall deathly ill. It is here where the similarities end and these stories diverge.

While Berenice is easily pegged as a classic gothic tale (to this untrained critic), full of madness, obsession, horror, and a bit of premature burial for good measure, Eleanora is not so easily classified. Though the narrator claims madness, the tale is no dark and broody slog through the dim corners of one’s mind. It reads as a bittersweet song dedicated to love, loss, and moving on. Yes, there are trappings of the supernatural as well as some cyclical thinking from a deeply devoted narrator, but these bits are not pervasive. Where Berenice is dark and claustrophobic, Eleanora is fresh and free moving (aerated and unbound) much of the action takes place outdoors in the idyllic “Valley of the Many-Colored Grass.” Where Berenice’s Egaeus’ obsession sends him spiraling further downward into the muck and mire of madness (towards a grotesque end), Eleanora’s unnamed narrator (UN) is able to let go and move on with seeming success. Egaeus is fixed in his despair.

Berenice involves cousins unalike in temperament, Egaeus (our narrator) is “ill of health and buried in gloom,” while his cousin is “agile, graceful, and overflowing with energy.”

“Hers, the ramble on the hillside/mine the studies of the cloister.”

Though UN alludes to similar leanings in his love (“artless and innocent as the brief life she led among the flowers”), he is not separated from her as Egaeus is from his Berenice; he joins Eleanora on her romps through the valley. Their love is realized amongst trees and flowers, star shaped blooms burst forth as if answer to their passion. When Eleanora passes seasons change to note the loss. Egaeus’ love is stifled, trapped behind closed doors from beginning to end. When Berenice is forced inside by illness; she deteriorates, unable to survive in Egaeus’ preferred habitat. As her health recedes, Egaeus becomes distraught and takes refuge in the once was. He proposes marriage though he can hardly stand Berenice’s state of diminishment. “Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies which are have their origins in the ecstasies which might have been.” A debilitating fascination with past-tense perfection bubbles up forcing him to execute monstrous deeds. In a trancelike state, he moves to possess her last remaining attribute. His obsession is total.

UN’s devotion does not move beyond the verbal (he is not consumed as Egaeus). Despite his vow to “[Eleanora] and to Heaven, that I would never bind myself in marriage to any daughter on Earth,” upon moving to the city he meets Ermengarde. “What was my passion for the young girl of the valley in comparison for the forever and the delirium and the spirit lifting ecstasy of adoration with which poured out of my whole soul in tears at the feet of the ethereal Ermengarde?” Though he’d sealed his vows with an invocation of damnation from the Alimighty (should he renege), our man marries Ermengarde all the same. This new love overpowers any fears of this self-administered curse; it is just that strong. What fate should befall this impetuous lover? Utter torment? Ghostly harassment and all matter of punishment from a slithery nether realms? No, no--freedom is his fate. “Soft sighs in the silence of night,” bring word of his destiny from on high: “sleep in peace. For the spirit of Love reigneth and ruleth, and, in taking thy passionate heart her who is Ermengarde, thou art absolved, for reasons which shall remain known to thee in heaven, of they vows to Eleanora.” With these stories laid side by side, it would seem acceptance is to be rewarded while stubborn stagnation is worthy of punishment.

These stories appear to have been concocted in conjunction with key points in Poe’s own romantic life. Berenice was written the year Poe was married (1835), Eleanora the year Virginia fell ill (1842). While it would (most likely) not be accurate to take the relationships depicted in Berenice and Eleanora (respectively) as direct representations of Poe’s own life and marriage, they do offer a window into Poe’s stance on love. It stands to reason these feelings could easily be applied to Poe’s own romantic life.

Egaeus worships his cousin’s vitality, so too did Poe worship Virginia’s youthful blush. After consumption hit, Poe wrote in a letter to a friend (according to Wikipedia): “...each time I felt all the agonies of her death- and at each accession of the disorder I loved her more deeply and clung to her life with more deliberate pertinacity.” Just as Egaeus became lost as illness struck, so too did Poe: “But I am constitutionally sensitive--nervous in a very unusual degree. I became insane with long intervals of horrible sanity.” Written seven years before Virginia’s own sickness, Berenice seems a bit portentous in a way, though Poe’s own “insanity” could not contend with the addled mind of Egaeus. In all his grief, Egaeus took to his pliers while pen and paper served to channel Poe’s passion. In fact his construction of Eleanora in 1842 reads as a sad but phenomenally healthy act of meditation, a lesson in letting go. Though UN devotes himself to the dead in a fit of passion and grief, time and experience allow him the chance to reconsider. In the end, he chooses life (and Ermengarde). Poe himself made some efforts in this regard: he had taken up a few extramarital correspondences of an intimate nature during Virginia’s illness, supposedly with her encouragement and blessing according to one such pen pal.

When he passed away in 1849, Poe had been engaged to remarry. Were she to be his Ermengarde, we may never know. Definitive answers are rarely available where both death and art are concerned. After passing some time with these stories, mulling and milling about at easel and keyboard respectively, I feel as though I’ve struck flesh, bone, and perhaps just a snippet of understanding. Caricature is rendered corporeal and the pedestal has given way to personhood. As a maker of things, things to be viewed and consumed beyond my grasp and life span (possibly)--those feelings of connection and understanding that bubble up from the artistic ether feel all the more valuable. It gives me hope for my own creations. To be understood (even just a little) can be magic.




AC: You don’t have any goals
JB: Oh but I do.
AC: Yeah:
JB: I wanna be just like you. I figure all I need is a lobotomy and some tights.
BJ: You wear tights?
AC: No I don’t wear tights. I wear the required uniform.
BJ: Tights.
AC: Shut up. --The Breakfast Club, 1986


With all pun-based kidding aside, wrestling is a hard sport to pin down. Oscillating between theatrical ridiculousness and skillful seriousness, the physical prowess of each player may garner respect but execution/performance often eliminates any trace of said gravitas. A visit to Mark Havens’ Monster Factory presents for our viewing pleasure the world of Amateur-Pro Wrestling, and the tumult between amusement and appreciation found therein.

An initial spin around Havens’ presentation of Monster Factory at Gravy Studios (a Philadelphia-based photography collective/studio), produced a range of immediate reactions and emotions, from pitying sadness to a scoffing elitism (shamefully) onward to pure craft-based appreciation. Fashioned using government grade printing techniques (with the aid of a defense contractor in the Midwest), a more trophy-like surface had been Havens' original vision but the medium proved difficult and ultimately too kitschy to favor over optimal image quality. This sacrifice of foot-noteworthy relevance has done Monster Factory a great service; each anodized gold aluminum plate carries the stark and smudgy with equal capacity. The tactile teeth of the coarse arena rope stands in fine relief against the softened bronze bodies in motion, eliciting an almost emphatic tangibility: one can almost feel the rope cutting into his/her own skin.

It is Havens’ sensibility and this choice of materials that allows Monster Factory to ascend beyond the sort of voyeurism which often accompanies both still and moving images of this variety. When a window into a new world is forged, the attention and awareness created by this opportunity is not always gilt-edged and golden; judgment creeps in through the cracks. I have often found minor league sport clubs a bit sad, dank arenas full of dreams half realized. So and so wanted to be a Major Leaguer but only made it to the Minors (if that); so and so must settle for a small scale audience and the mere chance to play the game. Perhaps it is this [dual] need for and lack of an audience that is especially disheartening; in this case a semi-ridiculous sport is made that much more ridiculous by an absence of audience. It would be easy for my mind to continue to wander down the self-fabricated paths of the supposed let-downs of these anonymous athletes if not for Havens’ own method of approach. The ever shifting greenish, gold, and grey metallic tones of Havens’ prints are downright poetic; these sparkling hues are able to drag even this far too judge-y mind out of the trash filled Fishtown gutters.

It is difficult to pinpoint the exact essence affecting this transformation. Monster Factory bears some tonal similarities to the tintypes and daguerreotypes of old; images which often extract feelings of somber reverence. However, content and composition break this connection; these are not the stiff postured portraits of old. One image centers upon two grappling wrestlers; a light skinned torso bends backward to the left side of the composition, met by a darker torso on right. Elbows point out and upward toward the left hand corner of the plate. These angled arms and bodies create diagonal lines, mirrored movements softly stretching as if in dance. Two fists cluster amidst the corporeal press, their white knuckle grip a reminder of the true nature of the activity on display. In a small space between wrist and bicep, we are able to glimpse a small portion of the left hand figure's profile. Lips and nose meet this handhold, effectively softening the action once more. Slightly parted, the lips are not ridged in a grimace of determination. They are soft, relaxed, and practically inviting. A hand belonging to the figure on the right appears at the base of the frame, grasping the neck of its opponent. Due to the angle of the bodies, the purpose of their pairing oscillates between gladiatorial athleticism and impassioned intimacy. There is both softness and strength to the action unfolding.

In another frame what appears to be the same two figures are parted, each occupying the same corners of the composition. Now the left-hand figure (LF) is hanging onto the rope with one arm and holding his chest with the other while the other man (RF) stands in the background, visible from the neck down. His fingers are splayed and reach towards LF almost tentatively. While a good portion of RF's frame is blocked out by the other man's bowed head, a stippled belly hangs over the band his lycra briefs. LF's mouth hangs open, perhaps he's been