Today is All Saints’ Day, which has become something of a non-event ensconced as it is between Halloween and the Dia de los Muertos (All Souls’ Day).
Growing up as a Catholic in the eastern suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, I was very aware of the saints. As a reward for good behavior in class, the Dominican sisters at Saint Henry’s would hand out holy pictures. There were so many saints! One of my favorites was Saint Maurice and the Theban Legion. The whole legion was ordered to be put to death by the Emperor Maximian in the 3rd Century for not following his orders to kill Egyptian Christians. If the legion was at full strength, that means 5,000 martyrs for Holy Mother the Church at one fell swoop!
Even though it’s a Holy Day of Obligation (at least I think it still is) requiring attendance at Mass, I¹ve backslid. I’m not even entirely sold on the saints any more … especially after Fra Junípero Serra was canonized by Pope Francis in 2015. Not too many descendants of Indians who were forced to live at the California Missions would agree with his elevation to sainthood.
I wonder how many other saints were outright stinkers.
I have been reading Maxim Gorky’s Fragments from My Diary (Заметки из дневника) published in 1924. Here are two excerpts.
SUBSTITUTES FOR MONKEYS
Professor Z., the bacteriologist, once told me the following story.
‘One day, talking to General B., I happened to mention that I was anxious to obtain some monkeys for my experiments. The General immediately said, quite seriously:
‘“What about Jews—wouldn’t they do? I’ve got some Jews here, spies that are going to be hanged anyway—you’re quite welcome to them if they are of any use to you.”
‘And without waiting for an answer he sent his orderly to find out how many spieas were awaiting execution.
‘I tried to explain to His Excellency that men would not be suitable for my experiments, but he was quite unable to understand me, and opening his eyes very wide he said:
‘“Yes, but men are cleverer than monkeys, aren’t they? If you inoculate a man with poison he will be able to tell you what he feels, whereas a money won’t.”
‘Just then the orderly came in and reported that there was not a single Jew among the men arrested for spying—only Rumanians and gypsies.
‘“What a pity!” said the General. “I suppose gypsies won’t do either? … What a pity …!”’
The second is a paragraph excerpted from a fragment labelled:
ANTI-SEMITISM
I have read, thoroughly and attentively, a number of books which try to justify anti-Semitism. It is a hard and even repugnant duty to read books written with a definitely ugly and immoral design: to brand a nation, a whole nation. A remarkable task indeed! And I never found anything in those books but a moral ignorance, an angry squeal, a wild beast’s bellowing, and a grudging, envious grinding of teeth. Thus armed, there is nothing to prevent one from proving that Slavs, and all the other nations as well are also incurably depraved. And is not this the reason for the violent hatred of the Jews, that they, of all races of mixed blood, are the ones who have preserved comparatively the greatest purity of outward life as well as of the spirit? Is there not more perhaps of the ‘Man’ in the Jew than there is in the anti-Semite?
The Argentinian poet Jorge Luis Borges could not play with a cat without thinking of those other cats he saw at the Buenos Aires Zoo too large and too ferocious for play.
To a Cat
Mirrors are not more silent nor the creeping dawn more secretive; in the moonlight, you are that panther we catch sight of from afar. By the inexplicable workings of a divine law, we look for you in vain; More remote, even, than the Ganges or the setting sun, yours is the solitude, yours the secret. Your haunch allows the lingering caress of my hand. You have accepted, since that long forgotten past, the love of the distrustful hand. You belong to another time. You are lord of a place bounded like a dream.
At first, Martine and I liked visiting the Grier Musser Museum because of the of the interesting holiday related displays. We still like the displays, but in the meantime, we have become friends with the owners, Rey and Susan Tejada. Re-visiting the museum and chatting with the Tejadas has become part of the fun surrounding holidays.
Speaking of holidays, it is becoming ever clearer to me that celebrating Halloween is becoming more of a thing, and that celebrating Christmas is becoming less of a thing. Perhaps because it is so associated with guilt trips: so many things that have to be done, some many unrealized goals that remain unrealized, so much expenditure of cash and effort.
Halloween, on the other hand, is cheaper and more fun. And it is not tinged with guilt. It involves pretending that you’re a ghastly monster (no difficulty for most people), attending fun events, and eating a ton of candy.
So even if we don’t get any trick-or-treaters this year (they don’t like climbing stairs), Martine and I feel good about Halloween. Martine got her annual pumpkin pie from Marie Callender’s, we stockpiled candy in case some trick-or-treaters do ascend the stairs, and I’ve read some good scary books this month.
Of course, coming up is my least favorite holiday. I really dislike Thanksgiving. And I’m not overly fond of the traditional food items associated with it.
Fort much of my life I have been plagued with crusty eyes. When I was a little boy, my mother referred to me as a csuri madár, which meant a cute little fledgling bird with crusty eyes whose mouth was always open for food. Later on, my ophthalmologist identified my ailment as blepharitis.
Even as I am writing this post, my eyes are watering and there are small solid particles dotting the line of my eyelashes. There are four things I can do to make me feel good for a little while:
Cleanse my eyelashes with a medicated wipe
Put a warm compress on my eyes for about fifteen minutes or more
Use extra-strength Pataday eye drops once in a 24 hour period
Use artificial tears eye drops as needed
The only thing that really works is for summer to return. The blepharitis plagues me only during the fall, winter, and spring—roughly nine months out of the year.
It doesn’t keep me from reading: It just makes me feel extremely yucky most of the time. If that isn’t existential, I don’t know what is.
In this case, obscuridad is translated not as obscurity, but darkness. I toyed with the idea of calling this post “Noir Mexicana,” but I didn’t want to mix the two languages. I hope you get the general idea.
Fernanda Melchor is a very dark writer indeed. I have in the last few months read all three of her novels that have been translated into English:
This Isn’t Miami (Aqui no es Miami)
Hurricane Season (Temporada de huracanes)
Paradais
All three novels are about wasted lives in the vicinity of the author’s home state of Veracruz. Although short in length, all three are crammed with violence, superstition, and fear. In the background—or sometimes in the foreground—there are the drug cartels, with scenes such as Milton in Paradais being commanded to shoot and kill a pathetic old taxi driver who is begging for his life.
Reading Melchor is like reading Louis-Ferdinand Céline or the Jim Thompson of The Killer Inside Me. One is reminded that, in Mexico, it is easier to see the skull beneath the skin.
I’ve only been to Hungary once, back in 1977. One of my happiest times alone with my father was the two of us visiting Budapest’s Széchenyi (SAY-chen-yee) baths and chatting for hours in the thermal pools. Of course, an opportunity gained can also be an opportunity lost. During that time, my mother went back to Felcsut in the Fehérmegye countryside, where she was raised as a young girl on a farm by her grandparents. I never did get to see Felcsut.
Although I spent so little time in Hungary, I am proud to say that I still somehow bear inside of me the seed of the Magyar culture and language. When I was a little boy in Cleveland, television was just coming in; so, living in a Hungarian neighborhood, I was blissfully unaware that the English language even existed. Until I showed up for kindergarten classes at Harvey Rice Elementary School.
That set off a whole chain of events, from moving to the suburbs, even though my father always yearned to be back in the old Buckeye Road neighborhood, to my majoring in English at an Ivy League school. But that is another story.
For over a decade, I have tackled one or two works of horror literature during the month of October. In the past, most of these were collections of horror stories in the excellent collections put out by Dover Publications, but I am coming to the end of these; so I am branching out a bit.
This month, I have read two collections: Amelia B. Edwards¹s The Phantom Coach and Other Stories and Thomas Ligotti’s Noctuary. Ms Edwards (1831-1892) was not only an excellent teller of tales, but also a world traveler, journalist, and—to add a touch of the weird—an early Egyptologist of some note. I have downloaded her book A Thousand Miles Up the Nile from Amazon Kindle to read sometime next year.
Thomas Ligotti, on the other hand, is a contemporary, born in 1953. I had previously read two of his collections—Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe: His Lives and Works—and found them satisfyingly eldritch in every way. The same could be said of Noctuary, which I loved. In fact yesterday’s post on this blog site was a short short story entitled “One May Be Dreaming” from Noctuary in its entirety. Click on the link to check it out.
For Halloween, I’ve decided to excerpt as short short story in its entirety from Thomas Ligotti’s excellent collection entitled Noctuary.
One May Be Dreaming
Beyond the windows a dense fog spreads across the graveyard, and a few lights beam within hazy depths, glowing like old lamps on an empty street. Night is softly beginning.
Within the window are narrow bars, both vertical and horizontal, which divide it into several smaller windows. The intersections of these bars form crosses. Not far beyond the windowpanes, there are other crosses jutting out of the earth-hugging fog in the graveyard. To all appearances, it is a burial ground in the clouds that I contemplate through the window.
Upon the window ledge is an old pipe that seems to have been mine in another life. The pipe’s dark bowl must have brightened to a reddish-gold as I smoked and gazed beyond the window at the graveyard. When the tobacco had burned to the bottom, perhaps I gently knocked the pipe against the inside wall of the fireplace, showering the logs and stones with warm ashes. The fireplace is framed within the wall perpendicular to the window. Across the room are a large desk and a high-backed chair. The lamp positioned in the far right corner of the desk serves as illumination for the entire room, a modest supplement to those pale beacons beyond the window. Some old books, pens, and writing paper are spread across the top of the desk. In the dim depths of the room, against the fourth wall, is a towering clock that ticks quietly.
Those, then, are the main features of the room in which I find myself: window, fireplace, desk, and clock. There is no door.
I never dreamed that dying in one’s sleep would encompass dreaming itself. I often dreamed of this room and now, near the point of death, have become its prisoner. And here my bloodless form is held while my other body somewhere lies still and without hope. There can be no doubt that my present state is without reality. If nothing else, I know what it is like to dream. And although a universe of strange sensation is inspired by those lights beyond the window, by the fog and the graveyard, they are no more real than I am. I know there is nothing beyond those lights and that the obscured ground outside could never sustain my steps. Should I venture there I would fall straight into an absolute darkness, rather than approaching it by the degrees of my dying dreams.
For other dreams came before this one—dreams in which I saw lights more brilliant, a fog even more dense, and gravestones with names I could almost read from the distance of this room. But everything is dimming, dissolving, and growing dark. The next dream will be darker still, everything a little more confused, my thoughts … wandering. And objects that are now part of the scene may soon be missinfg: perhaps even my pipe—if it was ever mine—will be gone forever.
But for the moment I am safe in my dream, this dream. Beyond the window a dense fog spreads across the graveyard, and a few lights beam within hazy depths, glowing like old lamps along an empty street. Night is softly beginning.
Because Martine and I usually eat at different times, there is a pile of Lonely Planet guidebooks at my right elbow on the kitchen table. Recently I picked up the Lonely Planet guide to Thailand and have been devouring it with interest.
I have never been to Asia, mostly because of the language barrier. In Thailand, the language barrier is even more pronounced because they have their own alphabet, which resembles tightly circumscribed insect tracks. Despite the difficulty, I find their culture fascinating—not to mention their cuisine!
It’s fun to fantasize about future trips, even if one never takes them. In fact, you can call me an armchair traveler who just happens to have visited some fascinating places around the world in Europe and the Americas. Martine seems to be uninterested to joining me in any distant travel (unless it be to Hawaii and, perhaps, Canada); so I would have to go it alone.
As long as I am physically able to travel, I would be happiest if I were able to indulge in my wanderlust. Right now, the biggest problem is not health, but lack of money.
Tarnmoor 
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