Creed of Core: Immortal Fiction
When I read “To Constantia Singing,” I dreamed of Constantia singing. She sang the Summer of 1816, the one they made movies of. I read the Summer of 1816, when I was sixteen, during the Summer of 1981, dreamed future reading past.
Shelley, Byron. Open collars and all that hair. Sex, drugs, guitars and “vintage” psychedelic garb a century and a half before The Beatles.
Summer, 1816 it rained and rained. Mary, Percy, Claire, George and creepy Pollidori entertained each other with horror stories they would leave for goofy posterity to bastardize on big and little screens.
Young poets alive with life. But also ugliness. Accusations. Dead and stillborn children. Claire’s womb infused with madness. Scion of the Lord.
I suppose it was a “youth movement” of sorts – certainly Piccadilly and the Haight inherited their style. But it was all just talk. Conversations in the parlor and on the lake. Julian and Maddolo. White Anglo Atheists. Percy’s pressure to perform, to walk in visions of poesy, out pace the game-legged Superstar.
The boat, the lake, harbingers of – well, one should learn to tread water if drawn to it.
Laudanum, pistols, Greek and Latin chit-chat; aristocratic irony; impassioned bookish banter.
Could they have foreseen Karloff and and American kids in flat-head masks on Halloween, before the monster was a grunting imbecile incapable of polyglot discourse?
I saw a lock of Mary’s hair encased in glass the Summer of 1990 at the New York Public Library, some ghoulish exhibit for the edification of the young. The hair was light-brown, flecked with gold. Honestly, it could have been clipped from any teenage girl “just yesterday.”
But it was old. Older, even, than the rubber mask I’ve kept since I was six.
Note: monster mask, not “Frankenstein Mask,” as the label advertised. Frankenstein was not the monster, but the Muse.
That is, before incorporated, at a later date, into the fiduciary corpus, and brought, legally, to life. Immortal fiction, walking, talking, killing, eating. Miraculous necromancy. Mobilization and manipulation of a million life-less parts. Human once — the pieces, the parts — once infants at the breast.
