Tuesday, July 04, 2006

The World of the Macabre




[The Macabre World] The word Macabre can mean many things; to me it is simply a word with a world attached to it, within itself, a chilly one at that. Let me take this opportunity to share a little of my dark side with you, the Macabre and my Grandfather; first the Macabre.

One can only guess why the supernatural is so hard to define, too fearsome to experience, but so attractive to pursue. Perhaps it is a safe thrill, death without dying, a ghost without seeing. It can and has and does promote fear and nightmares. It can be considered a primal source of literature.

It is like a fire, why do we all go to watch the house burn down, or…worse!-? Or why do we look down the dark alley and wish we could run through it, but it’s safer to just walk on by—and so we do. We laugh at crumbled jokes; perhaps to ignore our problems. I am not immune to the shock of the macabre, far from it. Or the ghoulish suggestible. I even wrote a whole book of macabre poems. Why? It seemed I had an empty room someplace hidden and I needed to fill it and so I did.

I seem to be able to connect somewhat happily with the supernatural—me, being a mere man, I cannot stay in this profoundly incredulous world too long though. Having said this, now let’s go into my Grandfather’s world for a moment, his name was Tony.

[Grandpa’s world] “Come into my world,” my grandfather once told me, “…then you’d believe.“ Believe what, I said to myself when he made this statement-question. Some folks said he was seeing things; he was 83-years old, when he died, and he made that statement six months before he died. He was an Old Russian, who came to America in l917, and went into the US Army, and back overseas to fight in WWI; hard working, indeed he was. Didn’t smile a lot—somewhat of a flat shape to his smile when he tried, yet he had a personality. Yes, a man of few words, lest he waste them, and he never had time for that. But when he did talk, for some reason, you listened. The words I just quoted from him were really the last words I can remember him saying barer he may have mumbled something, as often he did, and I didn’t pay any attention to him most of the time, it was a habit of his.

Henceforward with this scenario: He was seeing demons tunneling their way through the ground to his basement—from down the street (lets say several hundred feet) for him, to get him, to take him: where? He didn’t say. But surely you and I know where such creatures take people, should they have such an opportunity: and it is not to heaven. Be it fiction or nonfiction. He Knew his time was short, we all know this when we get past fifty, and surely at 83. Thus, this day, a day I was over at the house visiting him, and he made this statement to me, he leaned against the stove, him to my left side. I didn’t know quite what to say after he said that to me. I guess I must have been bewildered somewhat, thoughts pondering on his strange behavior, his world. We all know this day will come, this day when we have to put the bare facts on the table and sort things out; facts or no facts we have to put them down even the bits and pieces we don’t think are facts. So was there someone digging into the basement. “Absurd,” you say. It all depends were you’ve been, and how old you are. He said to me, if I didn’t believe him, “Come into my world, then you’ll see.” But of course, at 27-years old, back in l974, how could I step into his world, I could hardly manage the real physical world I was in, and here, here stepping into a fantasy world, a fantasy world that belonged to an old man, was beyond me: and even demon infested at that.

It would be ten years to the date that I would enter into his world, the visionary world, the world where if you do not have control, you can get lost in it, and perhaps never find the doorway out. Unless you been there, it is hard to grab a hold of; I mean really been there. You can tell me night and day, this world my grandfather glimpsed at is not real, but seven months in l983-84, I glimpsed it, and you cannot convince me it doesn’t exist anymore.

In l985, my mother and I lived together, and she had this peculiar visitor, peering through the window, and I could never see him. But remember I would believe her because I had experienced some fifty visions amongst other this. So I told her I could not see him, but I believed he was there. She cried one night; he was not a handsome brute when she drew a picture of him for me. To make a short story shorter, she wanted me to help her get rid of this ghoul of sorts, and thus, I had to find out his hiding place. And it was in a turned off lamp. I took it, and put it in the hallway cabinet, and that is perhaps where he still is.

A friend of mine came to me once and said (a year later): “I have a ghost or demon, imp or something in my house, come over and see, get rid of him for me.” I didn’t want to, to tell you the truth, but out of friendship I did. When I entered his livingroom, it was cold, and it was 90-degrees out side, it was summer in Minnesota, and his apartment was even warmer; I walked about the house, every time I got closer to this one picture on the wall, my skin started to get goose bumps. I told him to remove the picture; the ghoul was in the tiger of the picture. That was it, he never had a problem again, and he also put it in a hallway cabinet.

Anyhow, this was just something I thought you might like to hear before you go to bed tonight, so say your prayers.

1 Comments:

Blogger Federico Perazzoni said...

Interesting....

:-)

5:57 PM  

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