Falling Idols

Endnotes: Paradise Burned

“If God did not exist,” Voltaire said, “it would be necessary to invent Him.”

Except it isn’t so much that we invent Him as that we just can’t seem to stop re-inventing Him. Or Her. Or It. Or Them. See? Off we go already.

We’ve always done it, from long before Voltaire’s voice dropped, and we keep on doing it, and always will. Usually it’s the most obnoxious believers who do it most, cranking out about as many riffs on God as there are agendas for Him (or him) to endorse and petitions for him to sign.

Even the Old and New Testaments don’t much agree. The God of the New seems a mellow enough sort. But the God of the Old doesn’t even himself seem quite sure who he is, patting his tykes on the head one chapter, and the next thundering about, slamming doors and cabinets like someone in urgent need of a regulation of his dosage of medication, compounded by the nasty habit of smiting huge numbers of people for some awfully inconsistent reasons. Really. See the movie. With Charlton Heston. It’ll scare the bejeebers out of you.

Like a lot of people who hate straitjackets, I was born and raised in a faith that I no longer hold to. Which isn’t to imply that I have none, only that what works for me now isn’t nearly so confining about the arms, and is considerably looser about the crotch.

I like to think God grins down with a certain favor on that — for the wordplay, if nothing else — but then so did the lads who stacked kindling around problematic women and toasted them by the thousands, and so do those who now rig up bombs for this or that jihad, but there you go. It’s a bitch, this trying to figure out the unknowable. But I try. And try. And sometimes it ends up in print.

For one reason and another, over the years I’ve periodically been informed that I’m going to Hell. Those prone to proclaiming a thing like this in earnest usually mean well, but you know, beneath their touching concern for another’s immortal well-being you can’t help but notice a perverse glee. This is their sport. They’re the German Shorthaired Pointers of the Apocalypse, tails stiff and noses high as they point out, not pheasants, but those of us voted Most Likely To Spend Eternity With Hot Pokers Up Our Bums. They’re often very good at it, because they get a lot of practice.

So there it is, out in the open: “Hey! You! You’re going to Hell.” Really, now, how do you respond to that one? “Been there already, thanks, it sends its regards, and by the way, these are some of the souvenirs I brought back…”?

Which brings us to these stories.

Over the past few years I’ve spent some time in some perfectly dreadful places, psychologically and maybe even metaphysically speaking. (Las Vegas is another matter.) Sometimes I went deliberately. Too much Rimbaud, maybe, and not always enough perspective. Other times there was outside help, in which case, well, it’d be a shame to waste the experience. Otherwise, what’s the point? The very same question that most of us, at one time or another, ask in a broader sense, about the lives that we’ve been given. And why should it stop with us?

I recall a parable — nonbiblical, nondenominational, non-dogmatic — whose upshot is that we were given language because God loves the stories, and he loves the stories because they help him to know himself better.

Well, I’ve tried to do my part, and if those stories have sometimes taken on the inflammatory tone of “J’accuse!, impudent little prick that I am, then I invite all those self-appointed experts on flaming torments to recall that, in a faithful translation of the book that forms the scoliotic backbone of their lives, Satan wasn’t the enemy of all that was holy. He was, literally, “the Accuser,” around to serve as critic and generally keep the Big Guy honest. And just look at the thanks he gets. Horns. Silly tail. Cheesy-looking Van Dyke. Hooves. The blame for everything. In short, the worst public relations nightmare since Michael Jackson.

Makes you want to stop and pause next time you hear the Rolling Stones do “Sympathy for the Devil,” doesn’t it?

So it was a journey, this book, and each of its stories represents a step or two or several along the way. (Okay, a half-step backward for the Lovecraft desecration.) There are other steps that aren’t seen here but would belong if they weren’t for the time being committed elsewhere. It was a journey I didn’t really recognize was being taken until this phase of it was nearly over. It was a journey toward that state of being that Kahlil Gibran describes in The Prophet as being able “to bless the darkness as we have blessed the light.”

It was a journey, and the natives were strange and wonderful and terrible, and I took a lot of pictures, and here are the notes penned on the back of them:

Stick Around, It Gets Worse. Shortly before a long autumn weekend with friends in Chicago, I read a Mike Royko column about a stretch of expressway there, where wastes of ova were amusing themselves by the methods described in the story. I didn’t drive along the same route, but it was on my mind just the same, and that Sunday dusk departure along the Eisenhower Expressway was what got this story rolling as my mind wandered. A week or two after the story was written, a young mother was killed much closer to home, by a cinder block dropped through her windshield. And not long after that, when John Pelan accepted the story for his Darkside anthology, it was with a letter saying that a friend’s father had died the same way. Proving nothing, I guess, but reinforcing that odd event-clustering I’ll often notice when writing something. When writing the shamanic scene with the divination by rock, I really did go out and find one first. The resulting images in the story were exactly the things I saw in it, when putting myself in the character’s mindset. And yeah, then I put the rock back.

A Loaf of Bread, A Jug of Wine was commissioned for an anthology of stories extrapolating on the Frankenstein mythos as laid down by Mary Shelley, and written with a desire to continue the philosophical threads of the novel, which rarely seem to make it to the screen whenever anyone takes another stab at it. And while this took longer, it was during this same time that I wrote “Mostly Cloudy, Chance of Kurt,” from my previous collection, The Convulsion Factory. I can hardly imagine two more different stories. Which may be why neither interfered with the other. When the anthology came out, it was with a cover featuring the only picture of the Frankenstein monster I’ve ever seen that looks like Mick Jagger with stitches.

Blind Idiot Lovecraft. I once wrote eight short-shorts of 750 words or less for a Barnes & Noble anthology genetically engineered to hold 365 of the diminutive things. Five were accepted. Two were bounced for being too vicious, but found alternate homes. And then there was this one. All editorial personnel concerned liked it a lot, but feared the average reader wouldn’t get the Lovecraft jokes. Which I found sort of sad, although H.P. Lovecraft himself probably wouldn’t have appreciated the jokes at all. But he’s dead. So, as the holidays were approaching, I sent out a number of copies of the story enclosed with cards and letters as a kind of Yuletide lagniappe, and because my friends are without exception above average, none of them scratched their heads and said “Huh?” At least that they would admit to. But one admitted to nearly falling off the toilet in laughter. High praise.

Graphic Arts is the earliest story here, and reads like it. But it’s a pivotal piece, my first real stab at a few things that have since carried forward into a lot of subsequent (and more refined, I hope) work. I was running a few miles one fall afternoon, came across some fresh spray-painted graffiti, and began dwelling upon its raison d’etre. I recall beginning the story itself on napkins in a bar, after Doli and her best friend abandoned me there with the best friend’s husband (soon to be ex), who looked just like Malcolm McDowell doing H.G. Wells in Time After Time but was about as conversational as Steve Buscemi’s creepy partner in Fargo.

The Dripping of Sundered Wineskins. In the first volume of Poppy Z. Brite’s Love In Vein anthologies I published a very well-received novelette titled “The Alchemy of the Throat.” It was about a fellow named Julius who was older than he looked and a castrato that he bought in Sicily. In the middle of it was a series of reprehensible scenes that I took to calling “the bacchanal sequence,” featuring Julius’… peer group, let’s call them. Long before Love In Vein was published, I had the suspicion that there were other stories there, and I was most intrigued by the Sisters of the Trinity. When Love In Vein II became a reality, I had my excuse to finally figure out who the Sisters were. Students of religion who’ve read both stories may notice that by now their theological backdrop is taking on a Gnostic flavor. I still see these stories as being part of a much larger picture.

[2011 update: The Sisters, primarily Maia, later reappeared in “When The Bough Doesn’t Break,” currently to be found in my fourth collection, Picking The Bones, due for release in 2011. My short novel World Of Hurt, with no direct carryovers from any of the stories, is set in the same universe, and expands the mythology further. They come in their own time, these pieces, but they do come, and another feels like it’s on the way.]

Sensible Violence. “Whom God would destroy, He first makes mad.” Or the gods — it works either way. This came out of a fairly misanthropic period of months, when a gaggle of peskier demons had installed a revolving door in my head. Which must explain the drafts.

Cenotaph. 2011 update: This is one of those aforementioned stories that I really would’ve liked to include in the original edition. But the anthology I wrote the story for was published close to the time Falling Idols first came out, and when editors buy a new story, they rightfully expect a period of exclusivity. “Cenotaph” later went into my next collection, Lies & Ugliness, but now it’s here too, as it always should’ve been. And so, to crib from the Endnotes there…

Let’s call this one a case of divine intervention. I accepted an invitation from Tom Roche to do a story for an anthology about gargoyles that he was co-editing with Nancy Kilpatrick. When I’d said to count me in, this was with no greater insight into what I might do than the phrase “the Michelangelo of the gargoyles,” which had popped into my head. Then no more. Then I had a birthday, most of which in those days were spent in St. Louis. Doli and I passed that early October afternoon at a Scottish festival held in the wilds west of the city, on the grounds of what had once been a monastery. Under the dealers tent (really more of a big tarp), we found a ceramic Green Man pendant shaped a bit like a blunt arrowhead with a leafy, sleepy-eyed face. I had to have it. Had to. There were other Green Men, but there was just something about this particular one. [I’ve since learned that it’s a copy of a relief known as the Florentine Man, carved by … wait for it … Michelangelo.] So Doli bought it, and wore it all day, then that evening at my precise birth-minute, as we stood beside a lake, she took it off and draped it over my head as a gift, where it remains to this day. After which we laid siege to food and ale at a favorite Welsh pub, Llewellyn & Gruffydd’s. Soon after, the story really took off, and found itself finished on the evening of Samhain. So I credit the Green Man for this one. Although he didn't spare me the trouble of needing eight or ten nonfiction books to get all the facts straight. The gods are funny that way.

As Above, So Below. The Rilke quote came first, tapping me on the shoulder and telling me that it embodied an interesting dilemma. Then the title, an ancient Hermetic axiom capsulizing the principle that the here and the hereafter are mirror images of one another. And then they sat there in my head and in my notes for the longest damned time, offering no help at all about what to do with them next. But then the characters started showing up, and took over some of the work. Truth be told? Part of this was written during one of the worst periods of my life, on days when I didn’t much care if I saw the next day. Then again, part of it was written at a time that began to presage a considerable amount of change and transition. That much may be obvious on all but the most casual read-through, I don’t know. But more than anything else I’ve written, this novella stayed true to itself while at the same time serving as an in-progress, if metaphorical, reflection of … well, a hell of a lot. Carl Jung, I’m sure, would have a field day. And let’s just leave it at that.

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Thanks are due the editors/publishers who saw merit in the previously published stories and gave them their first life: John Pelan, Marty Greenberg, Stan Tal, Poppy Z. Brite, Dom Salemi, and Nancy Kilpatrick and Thomas Roche. Further thanks all over again to John and Kathy Pelan for their faith and belief in the power of stories. And to James Powell for the cover art this time around.

Thanks to Beth, Clark, D.J., Jasmine, Kurt and Amy, Monique, and Wildy (and the Bluesman) for all the conversations, real or virtual, that fed me somehow. And to Grandfather, and the Watchers. Blessed be.

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“Be mad … Be mad and tell us of the mysteries behind the veil of ‘reason.’ Life’s purpose is to bring us nearer to those mysteries; and madness is the surest and quickest steed. Be mad, and remain…”

— Kahlil Gibran, letter to a friend