—David Hine, “Strange Embrace”
MANDINGOHOOD
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I vaguely remember my macabre parents—they were like characters out of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.”
Our home was in the country—a singularly dreary tract of melancholic insufferable gloom. Outside it was desolate and terrible—no wonder I hid like a recluse behind the bleak walls and rank sedges.
The gaunt vacant eye-like windows had nothing to look at—just some hideous decaying trees and a landscape of unredeemed dreariness.
I was a sickly child—an iciness, sinking, a sickening in the pit of my stomach unnerved me there in that mansion I was born & grew up in. What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me about the dark mansion that crowded in on me?
It was a mystery all to easy to solve—with my insane mother sent away to the insane asylum by my father soon after my birth. He lied to her and said I’d died at birth—but that was just an excuse to get rid of her. By then he himself was already going crazy—rotting from the waist up with incurable syphilis.
I didn’t have to grapple with the cruel facts of my birth very long—nor with the shadowy nightmares that crowed in on me without me even pondering it. I must have inherited the disease of my father from the very beginning—the powers of my sick imagination, the capacity for sorrowful expression easily traced back to my father’s doomed condition.
It was possible, I reflected, that I had been trying to rein in the dark horse of my own self-annihilation at the brink of some black pit that I had been gazing in horror down at. There was something lurid in my genealogy that had a strange embrace on me—that made me shudder yet thrilled me with remodeled and inverted images of my whitey existence.
__________________
I vaguely remember my macabre parents—they were like characters out of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.”
Our home was in the country—a singularly dreary tract of melancholic insufferable gloom. Outside it was desolate and terrible—no wonder I hid like a recluse behind the bleak walls and rank sedges.
The gaunt vacant eye-like windows had nothing to look at—just some hideous decaying trees and a landscape of unredeemed dreariness.
I was a sickly child—an iciness, sinking, a sickening in the pit of my stomach unnerved me there in that mansion I was born & grew up in. What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me about the dark mansion that crowded in on me?
It was a mystery all to easy to solve—with my insane mother sent away to the insane asylum by my father soon after my birth. He lied to her and said I’d died at birth—but that was just an excuse to get rid of her. By then he himself was already going crazy—rotting from the waist up with incurable syphilis.
I didn’t have to grapple with the cruel facts of my birth very long—nor with the shadowy nightmares that crowed in on me without me even pondering it. I must have inherited the disease of my father from the very beginning—the powers of my sick imagination, the capacity for sorrowful expression easily traced back to my father’s doomed condition.
It was possible, I reflected, that I had been trying to rein in the dark horse of my own self-annihilation at the brink of some black pit that I had been gazing in horror down at. There was something lurid in my genealogy that had a strange embrace on me—that made me shudder yet thrilled me with remodeled and inverted images of my whitey existence.
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