Fresh from my larval stage, I came to Goth through literature. And not Gothic lit, either.
No, this baby bat cut his teeth on the English Romantics and the French Decadents. Totally badass!
Typically, Lord Byron was the man. And Manfred was the text. And I wanted to be the Byronic hero I found in my mom's English textbook:
'[The Byronic hero] is a man greater than others in emotion, capability, and suffering. Only among wild and vast forms of nature--the ocean, the precipes and glaciers of the Alps--can he find a counterpart to his own titanic passions. Driven by a demon within, he is fatal to himself and others; for no one can resist his hypnotic fascination and authority. He has committed a sin that itself expresses his superiority: lesser men could not even conceive a like transgression. Against his own suffering he brings to bear a superhuman pride and fortitude. Indeed, without the horror of his fate there could not be the splendor of self-assertion and self-mastery in which he experiences a strange joy and triumph (Perkins, David, ed. English Romantic Writers. Harcourt, Brace and World: New York, 1967. 782).'
Oh if only...if only...Oh, if only I had a dark secret. Oh, if only I had to go into exile. Oh, if only I was 'mad, bad, and dangerous to know.'
And from Byron I naturally went to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Who doesn't shiver everytime she hears the opening lines of 'Kubla Khan'?
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
It's like a horror movie running up and down my spine! Shudder. Shudder.
But Coleridge just gets better. You start with 'Kubla Khan' because it's short and you're a teenager. After you're hooked, then you go onto the big stuff: 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'. Here you get some really good chills:
Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her skin was white as leprosy,
The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she,
Who thicks man's blood with cold.
Yummie! I'm rigid and frigid. Kind of like Michelle Bachman makes me feel. I know. I've said too much.
Byron and Coleridge rock but if you thought the Romantics were the shit, then just wait until you meet the Decadents. Baudelaire and Huysmans make Byron and Coleridge look like priests...ok, I'll go with that. Interpret that simile however you will.
In 'The Metamorphoses of the Vampire,' Charles Baudelaire masters doom and gloom:
Twisting and writhing like a snake on fiery sands,
Kneading her breast against her corset's metal bands,
The woman, meanwhile, from her mouth of strawberry [de sa bouche de fraise]
Let flow these fragrant words of musky mystery:
--'I have the moistest lip, and well I know the skill
Within a bed's soft heart, to lose the moral will.
I dry up all your tears on my triumphant bust
And make the old ones laugh like children, in their lust.
I take the place for those who see my naked arts
Of moon and of the sun and all the other stars.
I am, my dear savant, so studied in my charms
That when I stifle men within my ardent arms
Or when I give my breast to their excited bites,
Shy or unrestrained, of passionate delight,
On all those mattresses that swoon in ecstasy
Even the helpless angels damn themselves for me!'
Whew. You be the judge. Is it better for a boi to get his sex ed from Playboy or Baudelaire?
And if Baudelaire is a lesson in perversion, then J.-K. Huysmans is its perfection. Against Nature is the ultimate decadent tale about Duc Jean des Esseintes. A noble scion, world-weary, dreary and a little eerie, decides to go into self-exile by designing his own private utopia totally cut off from the rest of the world. Here he engages in lavish experiments and explores his every whim, taste and desire. Who wouldn't want to be Des Esseintes? Drinking exotic liqueurs, gazing at the prints and paintings of Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon, reading Baudelaire and Barbey d'Aurevilly...Now that is ultraGoth!
From that batty apprenticeship I matured into full Goth-hood. First the reading, then the music, the style, the scene. . Since I've been a teenager, I've moved in and out of the scene but the dark and decadent sensibility endures and evolves. And I always come back. I can't resist...
Don't just look Goth. Be Goth, my dark comrades.
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