Tag Archives: Death

Tales of Despair: Werewolves in Suburbia

This is a tale of depression, misanthropy and suicide. Of coming of age, and of dying. It speaks of the banality of modern society, and the terrible havoc of a demon from long ago.

In a basement, two sisters live. In the dim light, they dream of their escape, by flight or by death. In the waking world, they are disliked by all; in the dungeon of their home, their dislike is only for themselves, and for life. Though their parents live above them, they have little contact with them, and the disconnect between their lives is total.

And then, the eldest sister is mauled by the beast. They know not what the beast is, nor its provenance, but the girl’s transformation becomes slowly unmistakable. The physical is preceded by the mental and the emotional, and she turns upon her own sister, ostracizing her in favor of encounters that satisfy her newfound and ravenous sexuality, and her equally ravenous and terrible appetite.

Refusing to leave her sister to her fate, the younger girl pursues her, even as she starts down an irreversible path of death and destruction, beginning with the devouring of pets, and leading to the murder of a local girl. In a rare lucid state, the elder sister helps her sister bury the dead girl, but the realization comes to the younger one’s mind that her sister is not the person she once knew: she would eat the dead girl, given the chance.

Desperate to redeem her sister, her only soulmate, the younger sister discovers a possible cure – but it is too late. Despite barring her in their shared bathroom, her transformation has become too great, and she escapes, leading her to their school. Frantic, the younger sister follows her, encounters her as she seduces a boy, the only one who believes the truth of her transformation. In pain and torment, they subdue her, and drag her to their home, where the last dregs of their cure remains. But it is too late – her transformation is complete. Now a beast herself, the boy is murdered before her eyes, yet her devotion to her sister, terror through she now is, is resolute: she will cure her, or release her from her pain.

And in the end, of course, the cure is forsaken, and the girl, weeping, is left with no choice, and plunges the knife deep into her sister’s heart, listening to the beast’s slow and ragged breathing until, finally, it ceases.

Go watch Ginger Snaps.

Music I Love: “War Requiem”, Britten (1962)

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976), though a life-long pacifist (he remained a conscientious objector throughout World War II), was nonetheless touched by that war, as were almost all others who lived through that time. Two of his closest friends were killed in combat, and a third, Piers Dunkerley, having survived the storming of the Normandy beaches, killed himself fifteen years later, two months before he was due to be wed. It was with these thoughts, among others, that Britten took to the composing of his War Requiem, which is undoubtedly the crowning achievement of his musical career.

The War Requiem was commissioned for the reconsecration of Coventry Cathedral, a fourteenth-century church destroyed by German bombs in 1940. Given no other brief, Britten was allowed the freedom to tell such a story as he wished through his music, and the result was a monumental, moving and epic ode to the dead and the fallen in war. Britten paired the traditional Latin Mass for the Dead, sung by choir and soprano, with the heart-wrenching poetry of Wilfred Owen, performed by tenor and baritone.

The Requiem begins with the discord of the tritone – the two most musically distant notes in Western music – whispered in by the main orchestra and choir. This is a musical theme that forms the foundation of the entire work, its dissonance and subsequent resolution a parallel for the horror of war and the final peace of death. In the opening Requiem Aeternam, the full orchestra and choir, along with the second orchestra and soloists, and the organ and boys’ choir, are juxtaposed against each other, but never sound together. In fact, the separation of these elements within the Requiem persists until the closing of the whole work, with the entirety of the massive orchestral body coming together for the In Paradisum, before dissolving into a final Requiem Aeternam, and Britten’s own touch – the final words of the Requiem, sung to the same terrible discord as the opening, and resolving only to a perfect chord on the last note, are Requiescant in Pace – Rest in Peace.

Throughout the work, we are taken on a trip of sadness, horror, rage and joy, with the monumental climax of the Libera Me shuddering the very foundations of the church in which it was first performed. Yet by far the most chilling, shivering and touching aspect of the War Requiem is the poetry of Wilfred Owen, interspersed between the major sections of the Requiem and accompanied by the sparseness of a chamber orchestra:

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;

Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, –

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?

Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes

Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.

The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;

Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Anthem for Doomed Youth – Wilfred Owen, 1917

Tales of Despair: Standing on the Edge, and Daring to Jump

There is a game I played on my iPhone. It’s called One Single Life and I didn’t play it again. The game’s concept is very simple: you run, you jump, and you land on the next building. There is just one catch: if you die, you die. You do not get a second chance. This is one of the most thrilling games I have ever played; the knowledge that my quarter-inch avatar is about to leap quite possibly to his tiny death sends tremors to my fingers. My heart beats fast, and my palms are as dry as dust. I am terrified.

I know this sensation well, and it is the pause before the leap. In my youth, I spent a great deal of my time rock climbing, mostly at indoor rock gyms since the weather was usually bad. Some of the long routes were scary; one curved wholly over the ceiling of the gym, some sixty or seventy feet off the ground. Still, there was always a sense of safety, of a second life: the floor was cushioned, you were roped in, your climbing buddy had you.

But there was a time when a friend and I went walking in the Swiss Alps. I say walking, but we were young and foolish, and couldn’t resist the temptation to race each other up small cliffs here or there, quite proud of our budding climbing skills. This naturally delayed us, and we found ourselves quite late in the day still on a glacier, not even close to where we needed to be, and so decided quite wisely to take a shortcut over a low peak to the north. The peak had looked innocent enough on the map, but when we arrived at its base, we realized we were faced with a hundred-foot cliff face that was not quite vertical…and of course we just had to climb it. After all, it would surely be faster than going around.

I won’t speak of the abandoned Swiss military base at the top of this mountain – that is for another time – but it was halfway up this ridiculously foolish ascent that I first truly realized that I could die. Despite my confidence, the rock was loose, and in grasping for a handhold, the stone simply came free in my hand. For a single, endless moment, I wheeled slowly, sickeningly away from the cliff, releasing the rock and knowing it might hit my friend below me, and all the while grasping in utter desperation at the cliff with the two remaining fingers that attached me to it. Somehow – I have no memory of it to this day – I did not release my grip from the wall. I believe I was in tears when we finally arrived at the top.

The free fall in the stomach, the dryness of hands, the hypersensitivity to every touch and sound, are the hallmarks of standing on the edge of death. Sadly, my experience in the Alps was not the only time this sensation came over me. Countless times since then, I have found myself on that edge, often with a blade to my wrist. I have lived with people who have stood on that edge with me, and we would stare into the darkness together. The sensation, as the steel bites into your skin, or the rope rubs roughly on your neck, is not of pain, or of comfort, or even of anguish: it is the dusty, gliding feeling of standing right on that edge, toes over the abyss, and deciding to leap.

In the end, I never leapt. Some I know did, but were caught, and survived. Some leapt and we never saw them again. I could never overcome the sensation, the thrill of death that had saved me that day in the Alps, and fell back from the edge each time. I was crushed, dismayed, guilty and furious, and all this would collapse into the deadness that I was doomed to live for yet another day; but I was nonetheless alive.

This was all some time ago, and though I still see the edge each day, I keep my distance. I wouldn’t want to fall off by mistake. I can’t convincingly say that the fear of the leap has taught me anything, but I am glad of it, for had I jumped I would not know my wife, and I would not know our son, and the world would have been a darker place.

Still, I wonder at the thoughts of those others, at the moment they chose to make the leap. I imagine it was release – the final decision they would ever need to make was done, and there was no need to look back.