LIFE, DEATH, AND SOMETHING IN BETWEEN
Tales of Mystery and Imagination – Edgar Allan Poe
“In generations to come, people will be grateful that you wrote this blog.”
So claimed my boyfriend upon news that I’d created (drumroll, please) a Dropbox folder in which to store said blog posts… some hours into dedicating the day to writing. And, upon checking my diary, I see this development comes some 20 days after announcing the start of my project to read all the hypnosis-related books gracing our shelves.
For this unprecedented procrastinating I blame Edgar Allan Poe. Which is really rather impressive when you consider there’s a global pandemic going on, providing plentiful reasons for a writer and creative such as myself to procrastinate. How can I possibly pursue freelance opportunities or start a new business when I have a spice-rack to reorganise?!
But, despite my hectic schedule of curating Ocado orders, growing cress and contemplating global apocalypse, I figured I could muster an amusing blog reflecting on our weird and wonderful collection of books. Alas, I made a mistake in picking Poe first…
Well, I say ‘first’. Tales of Mystery and Imagination is, in fact, the second book I read on the auspicious day of this project’s birth. I’d just finished re-reading – and proofing – a book my partner is penning when he came down to inspect my final polish. We then bickered about commas and tracked-changes etiquette, culminating in me having a MASSIVE cry.
(I blamed PMT and the pandemic and my current unemployed status, yada yada. But, really, I am just that passionate about serial commas…)
Anyway, we kissed and made up, and – just before he headed back upstairs for a work call – I blurted out that I was starting this blog. So as to, um, be seen to be, er, doing something productive whilst newly unemployed… When, really, all I’d wanted to do was waste a couple of hours in a good book. Plagues! Pfft!
I picked Poe because I have a special interest in writers-cum-amateur-Mesmerists: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, George du Maurier, etc – aka ‘The Victorian Head-Hacking Posse’. Poe popped up in Alison Winter’s superb book, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (which I’ll write about soon); his 1845 short story – ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ – was mistaken for fact and caused a sensation. “Legend!”, I concluded.
I’ve never read Poe before, but he’s been on my to-read list since and I’m happily in possession of an old junk-shop copy bought years ago. So, I settled on the sofa, feeling productive and smug, expecting short, spooky Dickens. Instead, I got dreary and wordy and pages and pages and PAGES where I honestly couldn’t tell you what I’d read. Ugh... I’m gonna go get a painkiller and eat an apple or I’ll never get this blog project started!
Mercifully, ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ is one of the first stories in my junk-shop collection of Poe’s tales. The Mesmerist narrator places a dying man into a mesmeric trance in his final moments. The subject, Valdemar, remains suspended between life and death for seven months, after which the Mesmerist awakens and questions him. Between trance and wakefulness, Valdemar cries “Dead! Dead!” and begs to be released. With a few mesmeric passes, Valdemar’s body instantly rots away into a pile of putrid goop. (Which should really put fears of worst-possible-hypno-outcomes into perspective.)
Written in the style of a (then-)scientific report and published in newspapers as fact, Poe fooled the public. Many people wrote to him concerned that Mesmerism had the power to blur the lines between life and death; he toyed with the furore before confessing it was fiction. It’s a story that’s certainly worth 15 minutes of your time in appreciating Victorian perceptions of the power and mystery of the precursor to ‘hypnosis’.
The second story in my book to feature Mesmerism is ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountain’, first published in 1844. I really should have googled relevant Poe tales before ploughing through the whole bastard collection; this was the final tale in the book and all the blah-blah about cats, clocks and a murderous orangutan had almost caused me to quit this project.
But I rallied, dear reader, and read this last story with relish… Alas, I found it so mind-bendingly boring I can neither tell you what it was about, nor claim it’s of much interest to us beyond Mesmerism’s incidental inclusion. Have a read of the plot summary and pity me.
Poe also wrote ‘Mesmeric Revelation’, a fictional account of a Mesmeric experience published in 1844. Since it’s absent from my book, I propose saving this read for when the zombie plague hits, huh?!
That said, I am open to persuasion from any hypno-historians out there who have intel on Poe’s interest in Mesmerism..? A poke about the internet suggests he was influenced by Chauncy Hare Townshend, excellently described by Wikipedia as a “19th-century English poet, clergyman, mesmerist, collector, dilettante and hypochondriac”. Townshend was one of Britain’s foremost Mesmerists and a great chum of Charles Dickens, so is now on my ‘Persons of Interest’ list – as well as the list of expensive rare books for Kev to gift me.
Okay, so that’s the end of this first blog post. “Dead! Dead!” See you next time?!
