July 15, 2007
The Circus, Plague & Twins
Weeks and weeks I’ve been thinking of journaling. Instead, I’ve settled for playing both doctor and patient in the never-ending dialogue that rolls around in my head (not unlike the marble in the stuffed “purring” kitties). The time has not been available. I haven’t made it so. Work always comes first, and after 10 hours at my laptop, I hardly want to stay there for more cramp-inducing typing. Why am I explaining this?
Here are the things that set my heart ablaze as of late. Well, They’re far from new interests, but they’re sinking their teeth into my flesh and refusing to let go now. I semi-recently watched all 2 seasons of Carnivale in a very short period of time. Two weeks? We couldn’t get enough. The pacing of the main plot was slow enough to induce groaning every episode, but the sub-plots and characters were more than enough to keep our interest.
The God-damned Dustbowl era. I don’t think I gave it much thought, but what an absolutely… just… surreal and soul crushing time that must have been. Black lung: people died from accumulated DUST in their lungs! People were still dying from the flu- in large numbers- entire families were homeless and living in their shitty cars on the side of the road or in makeshift camps, looking for ANY work. 24 hours of having the picture burned into my memory won’t soon be forgotten. So everything that transpires within Carnivale doesn’t just do so in a 1930’s Depression-era “mud show” traveling circus (ahem, carnival), but in the dustbowl that is the southern United States; that alone still boggles my mind.
There’s more. Like the opening strains of Jeff Buckley’s “New Year’s Prayer” in The Dead Zone, Carnivale captured me at Sampson’s opening monologue. “…to each generation was born a creature of light and a creature of darkness… There was magic then, nobility, and unimaginable cruelty. And so it was until the day that a false sun exploded over Trinity, and man forever traded away wonder for reason…”. In the ignorance and posturing of my teen years, I shied away from that which intellectuals would scorn as simple or instinctual. I would have laughed then, at the thought of stories based on good versus evil, of humans searching for the divine. Now I devour them. They can engross me so completely, that for weeks my dreams and waking hours are dominated by those tales. Carnivale was such a tale.
My childhood dreams were varied, and included far ends of the spectrum. Among these dreams was a long standing desire to “run away with the circus” and be a trapese artist. It blossomed and faded through the years like an annual flower, but never truly died. Ray Bradbury probably deserves much credit for that. With my viewing of Carnivale, many old feelings were rekindled. Chief among them was the interest in traveling circuses and carnivals. My next stop, of course, was to immerse myself in every scrap of documentary and drama that exists about them. Like all my passions, movies and books on the topic were few and far between, most of them created decades before and moldering in antiquity. I quite literally had to go to the main branch of the San Diego public library and request a couple books from storage! Well worth the little extra effort…
I began with American Sideshow: An Encyclopedia of History’s Most Wondrous And Curiously Strange Performers, and was scarcely able to put it down until I reached the final chapter on the modern age of circus freaks. (Boy, are they boring. Wow, you’re covered in tattoos and eat bugs. Unh huh.) Not too much earlier I had read Half Life, which sparked a new train of thoughts regarding genetic “freaks”. Carnivale further goaded these thoughts, and American Sideshow and Geek Love brought them to completion. For all the implications, at this point I find myself in reverence of these flourishes of genetic artistry; dwarves, giants, siamese and parasitic twins, extra, missing, or otherwise oriented limbs and bodies, albinos, those with “disorders” like hypertrichosis, ichthyosis, and Erlers-Danlos syndrome… they’ve all been chosen to be so unique. Unlike their status now, I find them as the circuses and crowds of old did: amazing, awesome, and even lucky. If it weren’t such a damn trite bother, I’d love to ask any one of them a million questions. Thank goodness for books.
Next up, I mostly looked at The Circus moves by Rail, an old hardcover that documents the circus’ transition from road to rail. There are scores of old photos and posters that illustrate the advances that circus travel experienced over about 100 years: costs and time, technology, the falling in and out of popularity, competition, comfort. It’s a thick book with a lot of figures and there’s more text than I will read, but even what I’ve covered so far has given me new respect for this most important aspect of the circus’ evolution. I think what entrances me most though, is the thought of how quickly they travel. At times, just one night in one city. All that magic, boxed up in a long line and transported from one state to another in just one day. It makes the Internet look like a damn telegraph system.
Although fictional, I think Geek Love has given the most humanity to “freaks”. Sweet Olympia Binewski, loving her black-hearted be-flippered brother. When asked if she ever wanted to be “normal” in lieu of a hunchback albino dwarf, she replied “never”. That claim pierced my heart. Even though I’ve turned to the knife once, I can’t imagine undoing my own DNA either. Slight changes in the surface- a dye job here, years of physical discipline there- I sometimes amble towards. But now I think I’ll always remember Oly’s assertion that to be “normal” would be lamentable. I’ve read of so many characters lately who feel pity for singletons, and poster children for clean genes, that I suppose it’s become my mantra. Years of disliking aspects of my physical self have melted away in the face of this mentality. Like a snowflake within a snowflake, I want to hold onto my personal “deformities” like trophies. Freckles in unlikely places, an oddly protruding bone, asymmetrical everything, scars lining so much of my skin… these are mine. These are me.
But above this new acceptance, Geek Love has done more for me. It’s cruelty is hard to stomach in the face of so much current personal tragedy, but its insular community of people just completely uninterested in the “norms” way of life… it draws me further into the desert, the fields, the mountains, the oceans depths… How I dream of working on projects of import, rather than spending a lifetime just getting others to stop making faces at how I choose to look or live. I still showcase a hirsute’s locks, a third-hand wardrobe of children’s and grandma’s clothes, and not a scrap of makeup or jewelry, but I do tire of the looks, the stares, and especially the few glares. They’re getting easier, though.
You know what else really intrigues me? Plague: incurable, wildfire quick, and grueseomly violent. Like the Depression, the Black Plague was a horror I can scarcely imagine, even after learning so much about it. Return of the Black Death: The World’s Greatest Serial Killer is the first book on the topic that I am reading, and it claims to be different with the inclusion of so many personal accounts. I can’t confirm or deny that uniqueness so early in my expedition, but it’s amazing and gut wrenching to read. Red boils of hemorrhaging covered their bodies, an unquenchable thirst, a raging fever and madness, the liquification and hacking out of organs, and finally, merciful death in about 3 short days. It was so contagious that most people were, at first sign of sickness, abandoned to die alone. Time and again, the book recounted how spouses, parents, even priests and other holy men turned their backs on the sick. There were mass graves, piled so deep that dogs pulled corpses out to snack on. To appease God, many bequeathed their much-needed land to the church, which was also quickly filled with plague victims. The death tolls were estimated from about %30-%90! For about 300 years, starting in 1347, the plague swept through Europe and even Antarctica and was responsible for more deaths than ANYTHING else in the history of mans existence. (Some debate that claim, but the book makes it clear that it truly was the most decorated serial killer in history.)
After a search of IMDb for “plague”, I find a strange pattern. I’ve already, unconsciously, sought out nearly every one of those movies, and savored them for their depictions of viral horror. What does it mean that I enjoy dwelling on death horrible and inescapable? It’s the same lure that draws me to zombies, to be sure. I remember feeling terror about such things in my youth, and now… I’m drawn to it. While I’d prefer a quick and painless death for everyone (myself included), I’m totally unafraid of the opposite. When Return of the Black Death spoke of a few brave souls who attending the dying, and falling ill themselves, I immediately thought “that would be me”. I want to go out bravely, and for something. Liquified lungs be damned. (Well, if the book is right, we could see a reappearance of the plague… any moment now. I’ll be watching.)
One final note, as it is my other desperate fixation. Twins have always seemed like a bit of magic that no one else recognized as such, and still I am entranced by their existence. In Indivisible By Two: Lives Of Extraordinary Twins, as well as Half Life, the twins raised together pitied the singletons. Well, it took Nora Olney the whole of the book to accept her siamese twin, but she/they were metaphors for self rather than individual twins. (Not that the conception of self isn’t dependent upon our interaction with others, especially family. Just sayin’.) Even as a child I concocted fantasy lives wherein my “real mother” had to give me up for adoption, and that someday she would return for me, and rescue me from my shitty “adoptive family”. In this dream, the glaringly missing puzzle piece of myself was filled with a twin sister, also separated from our real mum. There is a Native American creation myth wherein humans were split in two by lightning, and fated to spend their existence searching for their mirror halves. Before I knew of these kinds of tales, I felt an emptiness that I thought could only be filled by a twin. As an adult, I still feel that identical twins are the luckiest of all, for their mirror half is already there. If they’re born fast enough, they’re even astrological twins. The ceaseless need to be understood is part of the human condition, and in Indivisible By Two the case can be made that it ends when you have an identical twin. (Not always, but more likely than not.)
I still hold out hope for finding my cosmic twin. Someone who will say “I know”, and mean it. You’re out there, right?
In summary, I am an unabashed book nerd escapist who will probably fuck off to live with her fellow freaks someday. Care to join me?
And this concludes The Longest Online Journal Entry I am Apt to Write. This felt so good. These are the things that I long to talk about: books and the passions contained therein. I miss passion.
Pee-Ess: I dreamt about zombies and Stella and Justin & Iris Crowe last night. It was beautiful, even though we all made it out alive.