Further Reflections on a Black Cat

Gino Severini: The Black Cat (1910-11)
Oil on canvas (54.4 x 73 cm)

Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Black Cat (1843) not only influenced many other writers, but also those working within the visual arts, including, for example, the Italian Futurist Gino Severini, whose painting above was included in the first Futurist exhibition, held in Paris, in 1912. 

But perhaps the most interesting work drawing inspiration from Poe's disturbing tale of alcoholism, animal cruelty, and domestic violence, is the 1934 film, The Black Cat,* directed by Edgar G. Ulmer and starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi (the first of eight films to pair the gruesome twosome).

Actually, despite listing Poe's name in the credits, Peter Ruric's screenplay (based on Ulmer's scenario) has no resemblance to the narrative events of Poe's story and the film gets its real inspiration from the life of Aleister Crowley, particularly Karloff's character, Hjalmer Poelzig, a mad Austrian architect with a penchant for chess and black cats, who comes to a grisly end shackled to an embalming rack and skinned alive. 
 
Although it was a box office hit, the film didn't much impress the critics upon its original release, who mostly found it, in the words of one reviewer, more foolish than horrible.

However, Ulmer's movie is now recognised as a bizarre and stylish masterpiece; one that unfolds with the crazy logic of a nightmare and brilliantly develops the psychological horror genre with its creepy atmosphere, sinister soundtrack and an emphasis on the darker (more perverse) elements of the human psyche; including the propensity for incest, sacrifice, necrophilia, and devil worship.

Click here for the trailer

Notes

* Not to be confused with the 1941 film also entitled The Black Cat, dir. Albert S. Rogell and starring Basil Rathbone, which also claims to have been inspired by Poe's short story and also features Lugosi in a cameo role.  

Readers might be interested in a sister post to this one, Reflections on a Black Cat (In Memory of Pluto): click here. 

This post is for Anna, the Italian dental nurse.

Reflections on a Black Cat (In Memory of Pluto)

She is a very fine Cat; a very fine Cat indeed!  
Photo: SA / 2020

I.

Ever since she first wandered into the house and, subsequently, my affection, this beautiful black cat has brought something greater than good luck or prosperity; something that might even be described as a form of solace.

Indeed, I'm now of the view that angels have whiskers rather than wings. Or that even shape-shifting demons can bring us comfort and companionship in times of great distress, far exceeding the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere man.

II.

Of course, I'm not the first to have noticed this, or to have a particular fondness for satanic black cats. Samuel Johnson, for example, was very attached to his feline companion, Hodge, and Edgar Allan Poe also owned a sable-furred familiar, which he described as "one of the most remarkable black cats in the world - and that is saying much; for it will be remembered that black cats are all of them witches".*

Poe also wrote a very disturbing short story entitled 'The Black Cat' (1843), featuring a pussy called Pluto; "a remarkably large and beautiful animal, entirely black, and sagacious to an astonishing degree", who sadly has the misfortune of having a drunken madman for an owner ...**

One night, the latter - who is also the narrator of the tale - comes home pissed out of his head as always, and takes umbrage at the fact that the cat is avoiding him. He tries to grab hold of the terrified creature, but the latter bites him. And so the man takes out a knife and, with the kind of sadistic cruelty that shamefully characterises humanity, cuts out one of the cat's eyes:

"The fury of a demon [had] possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame [...] I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity."

From that moment on, the animal understandably flees in terror at his master's approach. At first, the man, who, prior to this incident, had been very close to his cat - "Pluto was my favorite pet and playmate. I alone fed him, and he attended me wherever I went about the house" - feels deep remorse and regrets his cruelty. But this feeling gives way to irritation and a spirit of perverseness:

"Of this spirit philosophy takes no account. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart - one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?" 
 
Thus, one day, in cold blood, he takes poor Pluto into the garden and hangs him from a tree; tears streaming from his eyes, and with the bitterest remorse eating at his heart; "because I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin - a deadly sin that would so jeopardize my immortal soul as to place it [...] even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God."

Strangely, that same night his house catches fire, forcing the man and his wife to flee. Returning the next day to examine the smoking ruins, he discovers an image of a gigantic cat with a rope around its neck imprinted on the single wall still standing.

Poe could, I think, have ended the story here. But he doesn't. Continuing the tale, the narrator tells us how, some time later, still feeling guilty and beginning to miss Pluto, he adopts a similar looking cat - it even has an eye missing. However, he soon regrets doing so, as the animal merely amplifies his feelings of guilt and bad conscience:

"I soon found a dislike to it arising within me. This was just the reverse of what I had anticipated; but - I know not how or why it was - its evident fondness for myself rather disgusted and annoyed. By slow degrees, these feelings of disgust and annoyance rose into the bitterness of hatred. I avoided the creature; a certain sense of shame, and the remembrance of my former deed of cruelty, preventing me from physically abusing it. I did not, for some weeks, strike, or otherwise violently ill use it; but gradually - very gradually - I came to look upon it with unutterable loathing, and to flee silently from its odious presence, as from the breath of a pestilence."

Then, one day, the cat gets under his feet causing him to nearly fall down the cellar stairs. Enraged, the man grabs an axe with the intention of killing Pluto 2. He is stopped from doing so by his wife - which is good for the cat, but bad for the woman, as, in vexed frustration and possessed by evil thoughts, he vents his murderous rage on her instead, burying the axe deep in her brain: "She fell dead upon the spot, without a groan."

He decides to conceal the body behind a brick wall in the cellar - "as the monks of the middle ages are recorded to have walled up their victims" -  rather than bury it in the garden, for example, and run the risk of being seen by nosy neighbours.

Unfortunately, in his haste to dispose of the body, he accidently entombs the cat and when the police come to investigate the woman's reported disappearance and search his house ... Well, you can guess what happens: a loud, inhuman wailing - "half of horror and half of triumph, such as might have arisen only out of hell" - gives the game away. Tearing down the wall, the police discover the rotting corpse of the wife and the howling black cat sitting atop the body. 

Poe's tale, then, is in part a revenge fable; the revenge of the feline object. And the narrator not only deserves his fate on the gallows, but to be denied his place in heaven which, as Robert A. Heinlein once remarked, is determined by how we behave toward cats here on earth ...


Notes

* Edgar Allan Poe, 'Instinct Versus Reason - A Black Cat', in Alexander's Weekly Messenger, vol. 4, number 5, (Jan 29, 1840), p. 2. Click here to read online.

** 'The Black Cat' was first published in the August 19, 1843, issue of The Saturday Evening Post. It can be found in vol. 2 of The Works of Edgar Allan Poe (The Raven Edition) and read online courtesy of Project Guttenberg: click here. 

For further reflections on the figure of the black cat, click here. 

Shoes Please (My Favourite Mission: Impossible Moment)

I wouldn't describe myself as a fan of Tom Cruise's Mission: Impossible film series: I wouldn't, for example, queue up at the cinema to see one. But I'd probably watch if shown on TV, in much the same way as I'd always watch a Bond movie, without ever really being interested in the stories or characters, or excited by the action sequences and stunts.

Ultimately, guns and gadgets - as well as endless car chases and large explosions - mean nothing to me. And, as much as I enjoyed Simon Pegg's performances in Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Hot Fuzz (2007), I could do without him providing comic relief as the IMF's most unlikely (and perhaps most irritating) field agent Benji Dunn.         

What I do admire about the films, however, are the high production values and, of course, the iconic theme music, based on Lalo Schifrin's original version for the TV series (1966-73). I also like those queer little moments that are more memorable than the scenes within which they're embedded.

For example, in Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015), the fifth installment in the series, there's an assassination scene set at the Vienna State Opera which ends with Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) fleeing across the rooftop accompanied by an undercover MI6 agent, Ilsa Faust, played by the sublimely beautiful Anglo-Swedish actress Rebecca Ferguson.

In order to facilitate their escape, she asks Hunt to take off her shoes. It's a simple and practical request, but it's also by far the most captivating and erotically charged moment in the entire film; one that nicely follows on from an earlier scene, set in a torture chamber, where she and Hunt meet for the first time and he compliments her on her footwear (which she has removed in anticipation of trouble).

Apparently, the idea of Ilsa removing her shoes was Cruise's. I don't know what that tells us (if anything) about him, or what he imagined the gesture might indicate to audiences in the context of the film, but, as a podophile and shoe fetishist, I'm grateful for it.*  

* Note: I suppose it's meant to indicate her trust in and sexual attraction to Hunt. As a rule, when a woman instructs you to remove her shoes and points her naked foot in your face she is inviting you to kiss her instep and admire the length of her legs. 

See: Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, (dir. Christopher McQuarrie, 2015). The 'shoes please' incident on the roof of the Vienna State Opera, with Cruise and Ferguson, can be viewed on YouTube by clicking here.

The Man at Number 6 Meets Constantine Cavafy

Cavafy by Lorenzo Mattotti 

The New Yorker (March 16, 2009)

My next-door neighbour - the man at number 6 - came from another land, across another sea. He did so, presumably, in the expectation of finding another city - a better city - in which to make a home and raise a family. 

He's ended up, however, here on Harold Hill and living in a two-up, two-down former council house; which must feel cramped when you not only have a wife and two young children, but your in-laws and a dog to accommodate. 

And so, he's decided to singlehandedly rebuild the house; extend the kitchen, convert the loft, add a front porch and a new drive, etc. This has meant two years of drilling, hammering, and cement mixing; i.e., two years of noise and dust and having to look out onto what was once a pleasantly overgrown back garden but is now a building site-cum-rubbish dump: Wherever I direct my gaze, the ruins are all I see.

I suppose, if it makes him happy to spend all his free time toiling away and aspiring towards not only a bigger and better home, but a bigger and better life, that's really up to him. Personally, I have no such desire or ambition and don't hope for elsewhere. I'm tempted to tell him that no matter what improvements he makes to the house he remains the man at number 6, with the same wife, kids, and in-laws:

'Tis the same streets in which he'll walk the dog. 
The same district in which he'll grow old;
and inside the same house he'll turn grey. 

Ultimately, if within your own small corner you can't learn to be content, then you'll never be happy anywhere in the world ...

See: C. P. Cavafy, 'The City', Collected Poems, trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, (Princeton University Press, 1975): click here. 

Obviously, I'm riffing on this poem in this post and sampling lines from it. Readers should note, however, that I relied upon a new translation of the work by Maria Thanassa (2020) and not the one to which I link here.

There Will Always Be a Moon Over Baotou

Rare-earth waste discharged into Baotou's toxic lake

ChinaFotoPress / Getty Images

I.

Inner Mongolia is a godforsaken, autonomous region of Northern China. It's rich in the kind of resources that the entire world craves; coal, natural gas, and rare-earth elements. Its largest city, Baotou, used to be famous for its deer; now it's mostly known for its steel production, its mines and, of course, its toxic lake which is so inhospitable that not even algae can grow there. 

Officially, the latter is known as the Baotou Tailings Dam and it lies about 20km outside the city. Owned by Baotou Steel, it contains the hellish waste from rare-earth refineries. In 2016, even the Chinese authorities finally had to admit that farmland in the surrounding area had been seriously contaminated, with dire health consequences for the people unfortunate enough to live there.


II.

I recalled this story when listening to someone speaking on the benefits of clean, green energy generated by wind farms. She probably also advocates for solar power with a similar degree of eco-enthusiasm, but I got the impression that her real love was for those giant, sexy steel towers with their fibre-glass blades a-whirring.

She didn't mention the birds and bats that are sliced and diced by those very same blades; nor did she mention the inconvenient truth that, despite many wealthy nations voluntarily despoiling their countryside and coastal areas by erecting monstrous turbines, wind power still makes almost zero contribution to global energy supplies (most renewable energy in fact comes from what some trendy types like to term traditional biomass, but which most of us still refer to as wood).

The problem, as Matt Ridley points out, is not that the wind turbines are inefficient machines; actually, they're marvels of engineering. But, unfortunately, there's a limit to how much power they can produce and their effectiveness is ultimately determined by the wind itself; a fluctuating stream of low-density energy that mankind gave up using long ago, for the simple reason that it's not very reliable or very good.

Oh, and she certainly didn't mention problems to do with resource consumption and environmental impacts - such as the toxic and radioactive pollution generated on a massive scale by the mining of rare-earth metals for the magnets used in the turbines. If you want to know just how filthy clean energy really is, ask the poor people of Baotou!  

Alas, that's not all - it gets worse for those who love chasing windmills:

"Wind turbines, apart from the fibreglass blades, are made mostly of steel, with concrete bases. [...] Steel is made with coal, not just to provide the heat for smelting ore, but to supply the carbon in the alloy. Cement is also often made using coal. The machinery of 'clean' renewables is the output of the fossil fuel economy, and largely the coal economy.

A two-megawatt wind turbine weighs about 250 tonnes, including the tower, nacelle, rotor and blades. Globally, it takes about half a tonne of coal to make a tonne of steel. Add another 25 tonnes of coal for making the cement and you're talking 150 tonnes of coal per turbine. Now if we are to build 350,000 wind turbines a year [...] just to keep up with increasing energy demand, that will require 50 million tonnes of coal a year. That's about half the EU's hard coal–mining output."

My aim in writing this post is not to lend support to the fracking industry or argue for the building of new nuclear power stations. I simply wish to acknowledge the futility of thinking that wind power can make a significant - and wholly innocent - contribution to world energy supply, as many environmentalists seem to believe.

Not only is this naive and mistaken, but, to quote Ridley once more, it's "counterproductive as a climate policy" and results ultimately in toxic lakes and deformed babies.

See: Matt Ridley, 'Wind turbines are neither clean nor green and they provide zero global energy', The Spectator (13 May 2017): click here. 

See also: Tim Maughan, 'The dystopian lake filled by the world's tech lust', (2 April 2015) on the BBC website: click here. 

Rise of the Xenobots

Image credit: Menno Van Dijk / Getty Images

One of the things that D. H. Lawrence disliked about machines was what he termed their iron insentience.

But such a charge becomes increasingly irrelevant in an age of artificially intelligent cyborgs, silicone sex dolls, and newly created xenobots - i.e., living machines, built by researchers in the United States, using stem cells obtained from African clawed frogs (Xenopus laevis).

Beings that, whilst not spawned in the usual manner, are nevertheless organisms composed of biological tissue and not the inanimate and imbecile devices that Lawrence knew, assembled in factories from metal and plastic and held together with nuts and bolts.

Not only are they capable of independent movement, but, when damaged, xenobots can heal their own wounds. Once they have completed their task and the energy in their cells runs out, they die and decay just like other biodegradable objects (including ourselves). Their unique properties suggest xenobots may, in the future, have numerous applications in medicine and in helping safeguard the environment.

The xenobots, which are currently less than a millimetre long, are designed by an evolutionary algorithm on a supercomputer. The program generates random three dimensional forms and then tests each design in a virtual environment. The best are then used to create further designs, so that in this way the xenobots might be said to evolve.

The scientists involved patiently waited for the 100th generation before then selecting a handful of designs to produce in the lab, using tweezers and other tiny tools to sculpt early-stage skin and cardiac cells harvested from frog embryos. The resulting xenobots were placed in dishes of water to keep them alive and where they could be observed gaily swimming about.

The plan is to eventually not only make them bigger, but more complex; to build xenobots with blood vessels and sensory cells, for example, using mammalian tissue so that they can survive on dry land. Of course, once you create new organisms who can experience pain and possess rudimentary cogntive ability (i.e., have nervous systems and tiny brains), then there are obviously ethical issues to be addressed.

Indeed, there are doubtless people reading this now who will be worrying - perhaps not unreasonably - about rapid and profound advances in bio-technology. But that's a discussion for another day. For now, it's just fascinating to consider the implications of man inventing machines that now generate new life forms, throwing the binary oppositions that are usually invoked by vitalists like Lawrence into confusion and disarray. 

See: Sam Kriegman, Douglas Blackiston, Michael Levin, and Josh Bongard, 'A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, (Jan 2020): click here.

Thanks to Thomas Bonneville for bringing this research to my attention.

Why the Case is Never Closed

Whilst it's true that an investigation can in some sense be resolved, a case - like Pandora's box - can never really be closed.

To understand why that's so, one needs to recall the etymology of the word case. It derives from the Latin casus, but that's a translation of the Greek term ptōsis, meaning fall.

Thus, case, in a sense, is another word for fate; that which befalls the individual; an innumerable series of events, some big some small, all of which are determined by other events (and not by any external agency).  

Of course, the word has taken on extended and transferred meanings over the years, but when I use it in the title of posts - as I often do - I'm not simply using it in a legal, medical, or psychoanalytic sense, but as something impersonal and fateful; something over which the individual has no control (the individual, of course, being an unfolding of events in the same way that the author is a complex effect and function of the text).     

On Not Frightening the Horses

The Frightened Horse by Nykos Furcic

As one grows older, one's appreciation for etiquette and decorum - for acting in public at all times with propriety - grows ever more pronounced. Unseemly behaviour now seems uncalled for as well as uncouth.

Indeed, I find myself moving ever-closer towards the sophisticated position adopted by the aristocracy and memorably articulated by the English stage actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell: It doesn't matter what people do so long as they don't do it in the street and frighten the horses. In other words, public appearance matters more than private behaviour.       

This isn't - as some commentators mistakenly insist - a sign of bourgeois hypocrisy. It is, rather, an affirmation of hypocrisy as a noble value and social necessity (albeit rooted in performance and pretence).   

The British aristocracy never embraced 19th-century ideals of domestic respectability and sexual morality with the same enthusiasm as the middle-classes, tending to favour libertarian permissiveness over authoritarian puritanism.   

Perhaps that's why the British working class have always loved toffs and why the latter often make such fine actors ...

The Scent of a Woman Called Gwyneth

goop.com

One of the questions that many of us have pondered in recent times is: What does Gwyneth Paltrow's vagina smell like?

Well, thanks to LA perfumer and alchemist Douglas Little - founder of the fragrance brand Heretic, that seeks to develop unique products based upon the mysterious, sensual and feral aspects of nature - now we know!

For Little, in collaboration with Miss Paltrow, has created a provocatively scented candle made with geranium, citrusy bergamot, and cedar absolutes juxtaposed with Damask rose and ambrette seed, to capture the very essence of Gwyneth's sophisticated and warmly seductive vagina.    

Not surprisingly, despite what some cheapskates might regard as a rather expensive price tag ($75), the candle has already sold out, adding a few more pennies to the pot in which Goop has already amassed an estimated 250 million dollars.

So, those critics who like to mock Miss Paltrow had better just "light that candle, breathe deep and accept the facts: this is Gwyneth's vagina. And the rest of us just live in it."*

* This amusing line is by the American journalist Hadley Freeman writing in The Guardian (13 Jan 2020): click here.

The Doll, the Joker, and the Man Who Laughs

Oh, you fools! Open your eyes! 

I am a symbol of your humanity!

As many fans of Batman will know, the appearance of the Joker owes a good deal to Conrad Veidt's astonishing portrayal of the facially mutilated figure of Gwynplaine in The Man Who Laughs (1928); a silent romantic drama-cum-horror movie directed by the German Expressionist filmmaker Paul Leni (and an adaptation of Victor Hugo's 1869 novel L'Homme qui rit).

But what many readers of Daphne du Maurier don't realise is that her description of Julio - a creepy sex doll in one of her earliest short stories - also appears to be modelled on the above* and anticipates Gotham's most notorious supervillain, right down to the cocked eyebrow:

"His face was the most evil thing I have ever seen. It was ashen pale in colour, and the mouth was a crimson gash, sensual and depraved. The nose was thin, with curved nostrils, and the eyes were cruel, gleaming and narrow, and curiously still. They seemed to stare right through one - the eyes of a hawk. The hair was sleek and dark, brushed right back from the white forehead."

Heath Ledger as the Joker in  

The Dark Knight (2008)**

Notes: 

* Unfortunately, this cannot be the case; the film was released a year after du Maurier wrote 'The Doll' (aged twenty, in 1927).

** Heath Ledger's Joker - unlike Joaquin Phoenix's more recent (equally brilliant) portrayal - makes the relationship to Veidt's Gwynplaine clear by suggesting that the crimson-mouthed smile is the result of disfigurement rather than merely an expression of underlying madness.    
 

See: Daphne du Maurier, 'The Doll', in The Doll: Short Stories, (Virago, 2011), p. 23.