OCTOBERFEAST – Poe
[OCTOBERFEAST is the greatest celebration of the year, a revelry dedicated to pop-culture’s most nutritious Halloween detritus. Plastic screams and artificial sweeteners have never been more bountiful. In the old country, villagers refer to the extended party as Satan’s Snacktime]
Edgar Allan Poe – writer extraordinaire or drug-addled lunatic?
Both.
On the one hand, Poe is worthy of OCTOBERFEAST veneration for his body of work. The author used ghastly scenarios to depict the more debased and horrifying aspects of the human experience. Take, for instance, The Masque of the Red Death – attempting to avoid a terrible pestilence that’s wreaking havoc on the country, Prince Prospero secludes himself and his subjects within his court. Once there, however, he decides to throw a rockin’ masquerade. However, an uninvited guest makes his way across the seven compartments and fuggs up the entire party. The lesson? There’s no escaping death, bitch, even if you’re in the midst of a sick dance-off.
Or how about everyone’s favorite dark poem, The Raven? The narrator recounts a spooky night in which he had planned on sitting around, reading some stories, and trying to forget about the loss of his babe Lenore (it’s safe to say that she’s worm-food). Of course, this isn’t quite gloomy enough, so a damn raven pops into the room. The narrator, freaked out by a rapping noise and his own thoughts, begins to ask questions of the bird – the only response he ever gets being “Nevermore.”
Which is a sick response if you ask the question, “When is it going to sting when I pee?” But when the questions are about being reunited with a lost love or liberating one’s own soul, Nevermore is a bit of a disappointment. However, the reader is never given a true insight to the questions the poem raises. Is the raven actually sentient? Is it some sort of supernatural force? Is the narrator slipping into madness, purposely asking questions whose answers will only perpetuate the downward spiral?
It’s harrowing.
While his writing is certainly horrifying, Poe has cemented his entry into the OCTOBERFEAST because his life was even more demented. Shortly after he was born in Boston (woo!), Poe’s mom died and his father abandoned him. Ouch. Later, he tried to go to college but couldn’t afford it, so he joined the military; he eventually failed out of West Point. After he began writing, Edgar ended up getting married…to his thirteen-year-old cousin. But don’t worry if that skeeves you out, because she ended up dying of tuberculosis.
Poe used drugs and alcohol to smash the barriers of his mind and raid his imagination. Unfortunately, these creative lubricants are also the (probable) cause of his death. On his last day of life, the writer was found in Baltimore rambling incoherently, calling out the name “Reynolds,” and wearing someone else’s clothes. At forty years of age, Poe died mysteriously – the best guesses attributing his demise to alcohol withdrawal, epilepsy, heart disease, syphilis, meningitis, or rabies.
In this time of ghouls and ghosts, it’s easy to get caught up in all of the prepackaged bullshit. The plastic representations. The nervous laughter that we use to avoid the truth.
The human psyche is full of terrors.
Edgar Allan Poe didn’t just write about them. He lived through them. And died with them.