The Uncanny

SPLAB Living Room 11.1.11

and they couldn't find him anywhere. They looked high up and low down and still they couldn't see a sight of him anywhere. So then the clerk suggested to try the chapel. So then they got the keys and opened the chapel, and the clerk and Father O'Rourke and another priest that was there brought in a light for to look for him... And what do you think but there he was, sitting up by himself in the dark in his confession-box, wide-awake and laughing-like softly to himself? She stopped suddenly as if to listen. I too listened, but there was no sound in the house: and I knew that the old priest was lying still in his coffin as we had seen him, solemn and truculent in death, an idle chalice on his breast.

On the Psychology of the Uncanny (1906) Ernst Jentsch Horror is a thrill that with care and specialist knowledge can be used well to increase emotional effects in general as is the task of poetry, for instance. In storytelling, one of the most reliable artistic devices for producing uncanny effects easily is to leave the reader in uncertainty as to whether he has a human person or rather an automaton before him in the case of a particular character. from The Wasteland T.S. Eliot There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying "Stetson! You who were with me in the ships at Mylae! That corpse you planted last year in your garden, Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed? Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men, Or with his nails he'll dig it up again! You! hypocrite lecteur!mon semblable,mon frre!" from The Sisters James Joyce A silence took possession of the little room and, under cover of it, I approached the table and tasted my sherry and then returned quietly to my chair in the corner. Eliza seemed to have fallen into a deep revery. We waited respectfully for her to break the silence: and after a long pause she said slowly: It was that chalice he broke... That was the beginning of it. Of course, they say it was all right, that it contained nothing, I mean. But still... They say it was the boy's fault. But poor James was so nervous, God be merciful to him! And was that it? said my aunt. I heard something... Eliza nodded. That affected his mind, she said. After that he began to mope by himself, talking to no one and wandering about by himself. So one night he was wanted for to go on a call

Mistaken Identity Tony Hoagland I thought I saw my mother in the lesbian bar, with a salt gray crew cut, a nose stud and a tattoo of a parrot on her arm. She was sitting at a corner table, leaning forward to ignite, on someones match, one of those low-tar things she used to smoke, and she looked happy to be alive again after her long marriage to other peoples needs, her twenty-year stint as Sisyphus, struggling to push a blue Ford station wagon full of screaming kids up a mountainside of groceries. My friend Debra had brought me there to educate me on the issue of my own unnecessariness, and I stood against the wall, trying to look simultaneously nonviolent and nonchalant, watching couples slowdance in the female dark, but feeling speechless, really, as the first horse to meet the first horseless carriage on a cobbled street.

Thats when I noticed Mom, whispering into the delicate seashell ear of a brunette, running a fingertip along the shoreline of a tank top, as if death had taught her finally not to question what she wanted and not to hesitate in reaching out and taking it. I want to figure out everything right now, before I die, but I admit that in the dark (where a whole life can be mistaken) cavern of that bar it took me one, maybe two big minutes to find my footing and to aim my antiquated glance over the shoulder of that woman pretending not to be my mother, as if I were looking for someone else. Stillborn Sylvia Plath
These poems do not live: it's a sad diagnosis. They grew their toes and fingers well enough, Their little foreheads bulged with concentration. If they missed out on walking about like people It wasn't for any lack of mother-love. O I cannot explain what happened to them! They are proper in shape and number and every part. They sit so nicely in the pickling fluid! They smile and smile and smile at me. And still the lungs won't fill and the heart won't start. They are not pigs, they are not even fish, Though they have a piggy and a fishy air It would be better if they were alive, and that's what they were. But they are dead, and their mother near dead with distraction, And they stupidly stare and do not speak of her.

leaning invisibly against a rock, was suddenly transported one hundred thousand years into the past. The shadows and their dancing headlights were the cause of it. They had swept the present out of sight. That girl coming reluctantly down the pathway to the fire was removed from us in time, and subconsciously she knew it as I did. By modern standards she was not pretty, and the gingham dress she wore, if anything, defined the difference. Short, thickset, and massive, her body was still not the body of a typical peasant woman. Her head, thrust a little forward against the light, was massive-boned. Along the eye orbits at the edge of the frontal bone I could see outlined in the flames an armored protruberance that, particularly in women, had vanished before the close of the Wrmian ice. She swung her head almost like a great muzzle beneath its culrls, and I was sturck by the low bun-shaped breadth at the back. Along her exposed arms one could see a flash of golden hair. No, we are out of time, I thought quickly. We are each and every one displaced. She is the last Neanderthal, and she does not know what to do. We are those who eliminated her long ago. It is like an old scene endlessly re-enacted. The boy who dreamed of old age Scot Brannon (original) A chain gang of days scraped off the green and a scowl emerged: Youth was something visited on the young. He waited. He endured. Sometimes he stamped a foot. Absent the withered leaves of age, he hung himself round first with dessicated words like firm and grave then Anglo-Saxon poetry then whole philosophies built on fact and bile. From a man he formed a world of dust. A Man Made Out of Leaves (revision) A chain gang of days had scraped the green off the world, which staggered along on creaking femurs. As did I. Midway through my annual All Hallows walk, I found him kicking at a pile of alder leaves. You kept me waiting he said and stamped a foot. Shut up. Give them to me. Those books were in a foreign language (god, always this whining!) I only found one that works: welkin. I took the word then slapped him hard. One word! I bit into it. And dry as paper. Try again, halfwit. Come back when youve caught three fresh ones. And skin them first. A wind blew through him. His face fell. He looked two decades older, nearly my age. Where he had stood, a twist of alder leaves rose up and made a man, almost, then fell into a heap.

Journal of Applied Philosophy, Vol. 22, No. 1, 2005 Amputees By Choice: Body Integrity Identity Disorder and the Ethics of Amputation Tim Bayne and Neil Lev In 1997, a Scottish surgeon by the name of Robert Smith was approached by a man with an unusual request: he wanted his apparently healthy lower left leg amputated. Although details about the case are sketchy, the would-be amputee appears to have desired the amputation on the grounds that his left foot wasnt part of him it felt alien. After consultation with psychiatrists, Smith performed the amputation. Two and a half years later, the patient reported that his life had been transformed for the better by the operation. from The Last Neanderthal Loren Eiseley The girl came slowly down the trail one evening, and it struck me suddenly how alone she looked and how, well, alien, she also appeared. Our cook was stoking up the evening fire, and as the shadows leaped and fllickered I,

compiled by Scot Brannon scot@scotbrannon.net

from Ulalume Edgar Allan Poe

And we passed to the end of the vista, But were stopped by the door of a tomb By the door of a legended tomb; And I said: "What is written, sweet sister, On the door of this legended tomb?" She replied: "Ulalume Ulalume 'Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!" Then my heart it grew ashen and sober As the leaves that were crisped and sere As the leaves that were withering and sere; And I cried: "It was surely October On this very night of last year That I journeyed I journeyed down here! That I brought a dread burden down here On this night of all nights in the year, Ah, what demon hath tempted me here? Well I know, now, this dim lake of Auber This misty mid region of Weir Well I know, now, this dank tarn of Auber, This ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir."

New York Times September 11, 2007

When a Duplicate Family Moves In

by Carol W. Berman, M.D. There was a pause. I saw her composing herself before she spoke. You have the same voice, but your nose is bigger and your face longer. She excused herself 10 minutes early. I allowed her to go, because I knew she could not stand being with me any longer. Days later, her husband called to say she was going crazy again, believing that I and, now, her parents had been replaced by duplicates. I had to hospitalize her and restart her medication. My patient suffered from a variation of Capgras syndrome, in which people are replaced by inexact duplicates. It has been considered rare, but the more I work with geriatric patients, the more I am diagnosing it. The disorder was first described in 1923 by the French psychiatrists Joseph Capgras and Jean Reboul-Lachaux. They treated a 53-year-old who believed that her husband, her children, her neighbors and even she had been replaced by exact doubles in a plot to steal her property. In Capgras, there is an uncoupling of perception and recognition that leads many investigators to theorize that there may be a neurological, organic cause that remains unknown. Psychoanalysts have seen Capgras as an unusual form of displacement in which the patient rejects the loved one whenever negative features have to be attributed. compiled by Scot Brannon scot@scotbrannon.net