Leonora Carrington didn’t so much write a memoir as vomit out an apocalypse. Down Below isn’t autobiography in the polite sense, with polite sentences arranged like cutlery for an afternoon tea. It is, rather, the table turned over, the crockery smashed, and the cutlery embedded in the wallpaper. This slim, feverish account of her psychotic … Continue reading Down Below: Leonora Carrington’s Descent into the Furnace of the Mind
Tag: misery
‘I Forgive’: A Widow at the Crossroads of Rage and Grace
There are phrases that ring through history like bells tolling in fog: ‘Et tu, Brute?’, ‘I have a dream,’ ‘Father, forgive them.’ Yesterday another such phrase was spoken - not in marble halls nor on the steps of Washington, but from a widow’s lips at her husband’s memorial service. Erika Kirk stood before the world, … Continue reading ‘I Forgive’: A Widow at the Crossroads of Rage and Grace
Dreams That Wander Too Far: From Plato to The Further
Cinema, despite its thunderous claims to originality, is in truth a great necromancer. It raises the dead more often than it invents the living, and its spirits wear borrowed costumes even when paraded as new. When James Wan and Leigh Whannell conjured Insidious, they weren’t scribbling out some pristine mythology in a Hollywood boardroom but … Continue reading Dreams That Wander Too Far: From Plato to The Further
The Kiss of Judee Sill: A Hymn to Love and Death
Some songs drift like smoke and some songs weigh like stone. Judee Sill’s The Kiss is the latter: not a melody you whistle while waiting for a bus, but a requiem whispered in the confessional, heavy with sorrow, radiant with a kind of bruised grace. Judee Sill herself was a paradox incarnate. Born in 1944, … Continue reading The Kiss of Judee Sill: A Hymn to Love and Death
The Fires That Cleanse: On Purgatory, Scripture, and the Uneasy Middle
On the back of a rotten dream and a few following unsettled nights, I dragged just about every scriptural reference book I own out, blew off the dust, and began scratching out the following. It’s heavy but it’s worth the toil. I think. The Catholic doctrine of Purgatory has always been a scandal to the … Continue reading The Fires That Cleanse: On Purgatory, Scripture, and the Uneasy Middle
Wording 