The Aftermath Of Loving A Psychopath

BY CEE MARTINEZ

There’s coming out of relationships, there’s getting your heart broken, and then there’s that rare and special time you crawl out of a relationship bleeding at your knees, heart shattered, brain smashed, gut-splattered and wondering what the point of reality is. The first two are called stages in life, the last one is called surviving a relationship with a psychopath.

There is no mistaking an escape from a psychopathic relationship. After the initial heartbreak and confusion of the breakup, a pain identical to 24/7 heart attack sets in, as well as nightmares, panic attacks, pathological shyness, and a complete and total fear of all happiness and humankind. This leads to self-imposed isolation and googling search terms like “heart break”, “broken heart”, “how to survive a broken heart”. That is when you will run into an article or two that will contain the key phrase, “emotionally raped”.

And those words will light up EVERYTHING for you and perhaps smash your heart to pieces all over again.

You will see things like: 

The relationship started out as a love-bomb where they couldn’t function without constantly adoring you and worshiping you to the point where they mirrored every like and fantasy you ever had, as if you were soul-mates!

They kept you off-balance 24/7 once the relationship was in full swing, going between showering you with affection and making you jealous of exes they complain about, lied or exaggerated about every single detail of everything, blamed you for everything that ever went wrong, disappeared for days on you, and even began to take money and resources from you.

They suddenly discard you. They might just up and leave, coldly insult you to your face, or act like a relationship never even happened and promptly tell everyone you’re an obsessive stalker (just like all the exes they’ve described to you).

…and you think, “Shit! This is everything that’s happened to me!”

You find an exploding treasure chest of facts, and survival tips, anecdotes, scientific and psychological studies, and victim/survivor forums that become your new home online as you finally find yourself on the road to healing. Although finding scores of women and men online who have gone through the exact same trauma you have with a psychopathic relationship is quite scary and sad, it also brings you a sense of comfort and camaraderie. They survived it, AND SO CAN YOU!

But what if months turn into years, the psychopath in question is long gone from your life, and you’re still living on those forums and web pages, and you’re still wrecked with agony and heartbreak as strong as the first day you felt it?

You are probably stuck in a loop where you have forgotten who you were before all of this, and you only see yourself as one thing: a broken victim who needs revenge. You want them on their knees, in just as much pain as they’ve caused you, and begging your forgiveness.

You are hurting because you still think deep down inside that they’re human and that you can someday get a human reaction from them.

There is a harsh truth you need to face.

We’re talking about psychopaths here, which means we’re not even talking the same species of human as you and me! It’s impossible for them to even feel true guilt, or remorse. If you succeeded in exacting revenge they could very well “go down in flames” for one glorious moment, but then their impeccable survival skills would lead them to land on their feet, refashion themselves and continue their lives to their tastes somewhere else where you can’t annoy em. (See: That asshole in Wolf of Wall Street) Or they would even find amusement at your attempts at revenge as a parent would laugh at an angry toddler.

They might even RESPECT your attempts at revenge and feel a sense of smugness that they were the reason you’re not such a nice person anymore.

This is seriously what their brains look like. Think of this picture the next time you want to think of their face. 

Psychopaths are gluttonous and can’t live without the constant affection, attention, material resources, and the intense emotional outbursts from their victims. When these start drying up for them, they will intensify their methods of trying to prod an emotional reaction before losing interest and leaving. You probably remember this from the during and after break-up stages in your relationship with the psychopath.

They can also be like a toddler who has lost his toys. A shark smashing itself against a cage or a bear tearing down your doors.

Attractive, right?

In fact, you’d have an easier time training genuine loyalty and emotion out of a dog rather than wasting another second of yourself over a psychopath.

It’s like you’ve survived a bear attack, or a shark attack. You are just as scarred and courageous as any of those survivors. And just like survivors of those sorts of attacks, you have to pick up and move FORWARD through your life. You can’t just go marching into the forest looking to arm-wrestle a bear, or swim around punching at a shark. Once the psychopath who harmed you is gone, they are very much like a wild animal that has disappeared into the woods or ocean, they won’t be interested in you anymore or wanting to come back. If you pursue them with ideas of revenge, however, you would only attract their interest all over again, and they will always be better at harming another human being than you are. They may very well “finish the job” on you the second time around without batting an eyelash.

You can’t make this your eventual ending. You must save yourself and run the other direction.

Try finding a few hours in the day when you do not think on the creature that harmed you, even if it means walking away from the survivor forums and websites that were once your lifeline. Once they helped you but if you’re still hurting and it’s been years, then those sites and forums may be just be a constant reminder of the wound you cannot heal.

Devote your time to doing every single thing you can to please yourself. Devote your time to helping others who TRULY appreciate your kindnesses. If you like meditation, then meditate, if you like to pray, then pray! If you have a talent in a certain field or hobby, let it blossom and bask in the joy of it. Let the anger slip away from you the moment you devote some goodness to another human being who rewards you with a warm and honest, “Thank you.”

The moment your kindness and optimism returns to you is the moment the psychopath is truly defeated.

The arrogance and recklessness of a psychopath and their inability to keep track of their web of lies will always eventually wreck them against the rocks in the end. It WILL happen, and you do not need to waste another precious moment of your time hurting and fighting to see it done because quite frankly, they are NOT worth another precious moment of your time.

For detailed reading on the stages of a psychopathic relationship go here: Psychopaths & Love or Psycopathy Awareness.

*Please see a community center, doctor’s office, YWCA, psychologist or a local domestic shelter if you’re in immediate need of help. Call 911 if you believe you’re in physical danger. Never be ashamed of reaching out. You are worth more than any of this pain.

4 Classic Books That Gorgeously Explore The Subtleties & Madness of Sexuality

BY LISA MARIE BASILE

Sex writing is often a separate conversation from that of craft. I myself have taught Poetics of Sex but have always questioned the segregation of sex writing. Most successful writing is vulnerable and authentic - qualities that often seem intangible and subjective -  so why would sex somehow fall outside those confines?

Sex is part of the human experience, and if we take time to write the human experience well, sex would be like anything else: ordinary, as a cup of tea. It's the presentation of that truth that matters. Below, we compiled four incredibly honest, very human and beautifully written excerpts we loved. They may not be comfortable, but they are true to condition of wanting, lusting, desiring and even sinning. 

Anais Nin once said she was “conscious of a difference between the masculine and feminine treatment of sexual experience," which is one way of exploring sexuality  - its dynamics, its fragility, its physical differences. 

In Playboy, Nabokov explains Lolita, perhaps the most difficult of these books to digest:

“Playboy: Speaking of the very sick, you suggested in Lolita that Humbert Humbert’s appetite for nymphets is the result of an unrequited childhood love affair; in Invitation to a Beheading you wrote about a 12-year-old girl, Emmie, who is erotically interested in a man twice her age; and in Bend Sinister, your protagonist dreams that he is “surreptitiously enjoying Mariette [his maid] while she sat, wincing a little, in his lap during the rehearsal of a play in which she was supposed to be his daughter.” Some critics, in poring over your works for clues to your personality, have pointed to this recurrent theme as evidence of an unwholesome preoccupation on your part with the subject of sexual attraction between pubescent girls and middle-aged men. Do you feel that there may be some truth in this charge?

Nabokov: I think it would be more correct to say that had I not written Lolita, readers would not have started finding nymphets in my other works and in their own households. I find it very amusing when a friendly, polite person says to me—probably just in order to be friendly and polite—“Mr. Naborkov,” or “Mr. Nabahkov,” or “Mr. Nabrov” or “Mr. Nabohkov,” depending on his linguistic abilities, “I have a little daughter who is a regular Lolita.” People tend to underestimate the power of my imagination and my capacity of evolving serial selves in my writings. And then, of course, there is that special type of critic, the ferrety, human-interest fiend, the jolly vulgarian. Someone, for instance, discovered tell-tale affinities between Humbert’s boyhood romance on the Riviera and my own recollections about little Colette, with whom I built sand castles in Biarritz when I was 10. Somber Humbert was, of course, 13 and in the throes of a pretty extravagant sexual excitement, whereas my own romance with Colette had no trace of erotic desire and indeed was perfectly commonplace and normal. And, of course, at 9 and 10 years of age, in that set, in those times, we knew nothing whatsoever about the false facts of life that are imparted nowadays to infants by progressive parents.”

— Playboy

I love what Nabakov has to say because he diminishes the critic's obsession with finding the author's sin and instead says that whatever truth is within a person is going to manifest no matter what, even if the plot changes. That, to me, is letting the honesty run through the work, and I think the below excerpts showcase this duende and unbridled exploration of desire perfectly (not necessarily healthy desire or sex, per se, as Lolita is a story of both desire and non-consent or rape, to some). 

While Nabokov's novel is slightly different in that our lead is the step-father sexually objectifies his young daughter, his writing still explores those nether-realms where the true human condition, no matter how disgusting, is written about with honesty and clarity. 

---

LOLITA, VLADIMIR NABOKOV
“I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise, when after having had my fill of her –after fabulous, insane exertions that left me limp and azure-barred–I would gather her in my arms with, at last, a mute moan of human tenderness (her skin glistening in the neon light coming from the paved court through the slits in the blind, her soot-black lashes matted, her grave gray eyes more vacant than ever–for all the world a little patient still in the confusion of a drug after a major operation)–and the tenderness would deepen to shame and despair, and I would lull and rock my lone light Lolita in my marble arms, and moan in her warm hair, and caress her at random and mutely ask her blessing, and at the peak of this human agonized selfless tenderness (with my soul actually hanging around her naked body and ready to repent), all at once, ironically, horribly, lust would swell again–and 'oh, no,' Lolita would say with a sigh to heaven, and the next moment the tenderness and the azure–all would be shattered.” 

THE LOVER, MARGUERITE DURAS
Hélène Lagonelle’s body is heavy, innocent still, her skin’s as soft as that of certain fruits, you almost can’t grasp her, she’s almost illusory, it’s too much. She makes you want to kill her, she conjures up a marvelous dream of putting her to death with your own hands. Those flour-white shapes, she bears them unknowingly, and offers them for hands to knead, for lips to eat, without holding them back, without any knowledge of them and without any knowledge of their fabulous power. I’d like to eat Hélène Lagonelle’s breasts as he eats mine in the room in the Chinese town where I go every night to increase my knowledge of God. I’d like to devour and be devoured by those flour-white breasts of hers.

I am worn out with desire for Hélène Lagonelle.

I am worn out with desire.

I want to take Hélène Lagonelle with me to where every evening, my eyes shut, I have imparted to me the pleasure that makes you cry out. I’d like to give Hélène Lagonelle to the man who does that to me, so he may do it in turn to her. I want it to happen in my presence, I want her to do it as I wish, I want her to give herself where I give myself. It’s via Hélène Lagonelle’s body, through it, that the ultimate pleasure would pass from him to me.
A pleasure unto death.” 

TROPIC OF CANCER, HENRY MILLER
“When I look down into this fucked-out cunt of a whore I feel the whole world beneath me, a world tottering and crumbling, a world used up and polished like a leper's skull. If there were a man who dared to say all that he thought of this world there would not be left him a square foot of ground to stand on. When a man appears the world bears down on him and breaks his back. There are always too many rotten pillars left standing, too much festering humanity for  man to bloom. The superstructure is a lie and the foundation is a huge quaking fear. If at intervals of centuries there does appear a man with a desperate, hungry look in his eye, a man that would turn the world upside down in order to create a new race, the love that he brings to the world is turned to bile and he becomes a scourge. If now and then we encounter pages that explode, pages that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses, know that they come from a man with his back up, a man whose only defenses left are his words and his words are always stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger than all the racks and wheels which the cowardly invent to crush out the miracle of personality. If any man ever dared to translate all that is in his heart, to put down what is really his experience, what is truly his truth, I think then the world would go to smash, that it would be blown to smithereens and no god, no accident, no will could ever again assemble the pieces, the atoms, the indestructible elements that have gone to make up the world.” 

DELTA OF VENUS, ANAIS NIN
“How do I look to him?" she asked herself. She got up and brought a long mirror towards the window. She stood it on the floor against a chair. Then she sat down in front of it on the rug and, facing it, slowly opened her legs. The sight was enchanting. The skin was flawless, the vulva, roseate and full. She thought it was like the gum plant leaf with its secret milk that the pressure of the finger could bring out, the odorous moisture that came like the moisture of the sea shells. So was Venus born of the sea with this little kernel of salty honey in her, which only caresses could bring out of the hidden recesses of her body.” 

Everything You Should Know About Contacting The Ancestral Dead

BY SOPHIE MOSS

When we lose a loved one, many people believe that they are permanently gone: banished to a plane, heaven, or nothingness from where they can no longer hear us. Some people are fierce non-believers, others choose to believe in a nothingness out of fear, or grief. Since childhood, I have always believed in a gateway: a ‘tween through which the living can make contact and the dead can whisper back.

So, the curious child started to write. I would pen letters, hoping to bridge the gap between worlds. I would write notes to dead people I didn’t know, or supernatural characters from books and television shows. I was enthralled by realms that I couldn’t put my hands on and feel, obsessed with doors that wouldn’t open. With age, I learned to understand my curiosity--my spirituality. The occult--particularly witchcraft -- has played an important role in how I define myself as a human, woman, and writer.

I don’t believe that the people we love ever really leave us--not even in death. When we have a problem, we can ask for assistance. When we’re unsure, we can ask for guidance. Indeed, we can use ritual and spellcasting as a means by which to contact lost loved ones and ask them to work with our own spiritual source to demystify our path, nudge us in a certain direction, or send help. To ask them to whisper back.

I have learned a lot over the years about witchcraft, spirituality, and the afterlife from Silver Ravenwolf’s Solitary Witch, and have taken influence from the volume’s spellwork to create a Luna Luna guide to making contact with the ancestral dead through the art of letter writing.

---

Supplies: a selection of stones (minimum three); a purple candle; paper; pen; envelope; lighter.

1. Choose an outdoor space. I prefer to choose a location that carries a certain resonance, either for myself or the loved one with whom I am seeking to make contact; a place that allows me to feel close, safe, and connected. Ultimately, choose a space that feels as sacred or as neutral as it feels right to you--whether you go to the local park bench on which you and your lost love shared your first kiss, or whether you regard your own back garden as the safest and most comfortable space in which to make contact, the choice is entirely yours. Remember: it is your intent that matters most.

2. Arrange your stones. At this point, it is about doing what feels most comfortable for you--this is not about rigidity. If you prefer to follow the guidelines of Wicca, arrange three stones in the shape of a pyramid (to represent the Witches’ Pyramid), otherwise, collect enough to spell out the initials of the person you will be honouring. Again, this is not about meticulous rule-abiding, but rather honesty and intent. If something doesn’t feel right, play around with it until it does.

3. Light a purple candle. Purple corresponds with expansion of the self: expansion of spiritual power, knowledge, and consciousness. Once lit, ground yourself and focus your energy on the loved one with whom you are seeking contact. Imagine a bright light filling up your body, traveling through cells and organs and out through your fingers into the candle you are holding. At this point, you can intonate prayers for the deceased. I don’t follow a single specific religious path and instead choose to maintain focus and silence, finishing by placing my candle by the stones.

4. Write a letter to one of the people you are honouring, or have honoured in your prayer. It is in the contents of this letter that you will communicate whatever your reason for contacting. Ask for their help. Detail your problem. Thank them for all that they have done. Tell them you miss them. Whatever your reasons, write them all down. Once you have done this, place the letter in the envelope and seal with a final kiss.

5. Burn the letter. Place the envelope on top of the stones, and focus your intent once more. Take the candle and burn the letter, watching the cool ashes escape in the wind as it carries your message to its recipient. Be contented in the knowledge that your questions are being answered. Once finished, leave your stones untouched.

NB: When making the decision to contact the dead, we must take caution. While it can be helpful to ask our deceased for guidance or assistance, it is important that we do not allow them to take the place of our own spiritual source. As with everything in life, it is about maintaining a rightful balance: finding a happy medium between honouring, acknowledging and contacting lost loved ones, and affording the dead a limited place in our lives.

---

Sophie E. Moss is a dark witch & literary maven. She writes essays for LunaLuna and poetry for all the people she used to be. @Sophiedelays

Shades of Noir: The Fairy Tale Noir Aesthetics of Lana Del Rey & David Lynch

BY LEZA CANTORAL

Lana Del Rey is Noir. Her songs are dark and her attitude is Old Hollywood. The themes of glitter and glamor contrasting with harsh realities permeates her work as they do in the films of David Lynch. They are both artists who create very intense, dreamlike atmospheres with their art. Noir themes of heartbreak, betrayal, cruelty and decay course through her songs and his films like subterranean streams beneath the bright technicolor surfaces.

Mullholland Drive - 16 reasons why i love you. The song is Sixteen Reasons by Connie Stevens. MP3 available at amazon.com for .99, under Connie Stevens

David Lynch uses nostalgic and sugary sweet vintage pop music to jar the senses, in contrast to violent or emotionally unsettling scenes. Lana as well, uses her bubbly pop sound as a dramatic contrast to dark emotional content, thus creating the effect of thematic and sonic dissonance. Her driving baselines, such as in ‘Blue Jeans,’ pound steady beneath the surface harmonies. Her voice is soft, high and fluid, in perfect rhythm with the bass chords, creating a hypnotic sing song effect; like a rock n roll nursery rhyme. She mythologizes her lovers, her past, and her fantasies. She is a storyteller songwriter like Bob Dylan or Nick Cave.

“You went out every night/ And baby that’s all right/ I told you that no matter what you did I’d    be by your side/ ‘Cause imma ride or die/ Whether you fail or fly/ Well, shit, at least you tried/            But when you walked out that door/ A piece of me died/ Told you I wanted more, that’s not what       I had in mind/ Just want it like before/ We were dancing’ all night/ Then they took you away,          stole you out of my life/ You just need to remember/ I will love you till the end of time/ I would      wait a million years/ Promise to remember that you’re mine/ Baby can you see through the tears/       Love you more than those bitches before/ Say you’ll remember/ Oh, baby, who/ I will love you          till the end of time.”

New album Honeymoon out September 18th. Pre-order now: iTunes: http://lanadel.re/WrQNwc Amazon: http://lanadel.re/XiYh4J Official Store: http://lanadel.re/XWI6ZD More Lana Del Rey: http://www.lanadelrey.com http://www.facebook.com/lanadelrey http://www.twitter.com/lanadelrey http://lanadelrey.tumblr.com http://www.instagram.com/lanadelrey http://www.google.com/+lanadelrey

Pop music offers promises. It always has. What Lana does differently is that she contrasts her grand emotional gestures with less grand and often snarky, biting jabs, self-deprecation, layers of irony, and piles upon piles of pop culture references ranging from classic literature: Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita), Allen Ginsberg, Walt Whitman, to Iconic American figures that reside within the collective consciousness like Greek Gods: John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley. In ‘Body Electric’ she sings:“Elvis is my daddy/ Marilyn’s my mother/ Jesus is my bestest friend./ We don’t need nobody, cause we got each other,/ Or at least I pretend./…. Whitman is my daddy,/ Monaco’s my mother,/ Diamonds are my bestest friends./ Heaven is my baby, suicides her father,/ Opulence is the end.”

Her music is not simply memoir, it is cultural discourse. She is a trope, she is a symbol. Just as Marilyn Manson chose his name to make a statement about American culture and the type of performer/ bogeyman he was intending to channel; she does so too when she references beatnik poetry, rock stars, poets, and tragic Hollywood legends. She is saying she is a composite image.

Lana Del Rey is the product of the post-third wave feminist movement. I became addicted to her sound as well as her entire persona and her thought provoking lyrics precisely because I found her so damn refreshing. I admire her for unabashedly showing all her shades. She is the full spectrum of a real woman’s personality: vulnerable and stoic, playful and morose, sardonic and sweet. She is real and she has range. She does not try to appear perfect and I love her for that.

Something I’ve also always loved about David Lynch is his portrayal of women in his films. The many faces of woman appear throughout. There are scary crones, sexy tormented Femme Fatales and virginal good girls who have yet to be broken by life’s rough ride.

I watched Mulholland Drive after a few years of not having seen it. I was hypnotized all over again like it was yesterday. I see Mulholland Drive as David Lynch’s Alice Through the Looking Glass. Lost Highway was his Alice in Wonderland, in that it was his first foray into the atmosphere of Hollyweirdness, doubles, and dream logic. In Mullholand Drive the transitions are smoother, the language is stronger, the emotional texture is more layered and complex and the atmosphere is more dreamlike.

This is the place David Lynch and Lana Del Rey create their art; the crossroads where Wishful Fantasy meets Gritty Reality.

David Lynch’s films are a hybrid between two opposite genres: French and Spanish Surrealism and American Noir. There is grit and there are dark dealings but there is also a healthy dose of fantasy and dream logic to balance it out. This is the source of his magic. This is how he weaves his cinematic spell. Wild at Heart was Fantasy heavy with its obvious homages to The Wizard of OZ. Blue Velvet was Noir heavy with its many scenes of shadowy men lurking in shadowy alleys, doing shadowy things. Mulholland Drive achieves the perfect and seamless balance between those two styles.

Coincidentally, Mulholland Drive reminds me of the French Fairy tale, Bluebeard, first committed to print by Charles Perrault in 1697.

Bluebeard is the tale of a very rich but mysterious recluse with a big blue beard. He wants a new wife and the women in the village jump at the chance, even though they are spooked by his weird beard. He picks a lucky girl and she has everything she could possibly want. She lives in a massive castle, she has all the clothes and whatnot that she desires and one day he goes off on a business trip. He leaves her the keys to the entire palace and tells her she can roam wherever she likes but that one room only, is totally off limits. He asks her to trust him and not go in that room for her own good.

Of course, soon as he leaves she cannot resist. In the forbidden room she finds a death chamber filled with implements of torture and murder, where the corpses of all his previous wives lie strewn about. This is The Blue Room of Pain and there is nothing sexy about it. She realizes in horror that she has married a monster, but it is too late. When he returns she tries to hide her transgression, but he can tell right away and he kills her for disobeying him.

The blue box in Mullholand Drive represents the same forbidden death chamber, held in the hands of the Crone. Death is the forbidden truth that is hidden. It is also the truth behind the lie that Betty is a nice girl trying to help Rita. Once Rita opens that box the fantasy is over. She has stumbled upon her lover’s torture chamber. The truth is that Diane Selwyn had Camilla Rhodes murdered for breaking her heart.

New album Honeymoon out September 18th. Pre-order now: iTunes: http://lanadel.re/WrQNwc Amazon: http://lanadel.re/XiYh4J Official Store: http://lanadel.re/XWI6ZD More Lana Del Rey: http://www.lanadelrey.com http://www.facebook.com/lanadelrey http://www.twitter.com/lanadelrey http://lanadelrey.tumblr.com http://www.instagram.com/lanadelrey http://www.google.com/+lanadelrey

It is a Noir story after all. Love is dangerous. Love destroys and love kills.

In ‘Ultraviolence’ Lana Del Rey juxtaposes her own poisonous nature with that of her abusive lover. She shows how they are both drawn and repelled by each other, like magnets switching their poles. This love/hate view of love is quintessentially Noir. “He used to call me DN/ That stood for deadly nightshade/ ‘Cause I was filled with poison/ But blessed with beauty and rage/ Jim told me that/ He hit me and it felt like a kiss.”

Lovers are bound by need. They become a closed circuit of emotional energy being exchanged back and forth. It is like a drug. Once it is in your system it is in your blood and the detox is brutal.

When Betty finds the blue box to match the blue key, the dream is over. The secret has been exposed and the dream evaporates as if it was never there.

Diane Selwyn saw herself as full of potential, with Hollywood laying out its red carpet for her, but the truth was that she came and she failed. She failed at love and she failed at Hollywood. She is a tragedy and a criminal. Hollywood has stolen her soul and left her an empty shell of a person.

Ребекка Дель Рио исполняет а капелла композицию Llorando (испанская версия песни Crying Роя Орбисона) в театре "Силенсио". Отрывок из кинофильма "Малхолланд Драйв" (2001) Дэвида Линча. В главных ролях: Лора Хэрринг (Рита/Камилла Роудс) и Наоми Уоттс (Бетти Элмс/Дайана Сэлвин). Rebekah Del Rio singing "Llorando" (spanish version of Roy Orbison's "Crying") a cappella in Silencio theatre.

Roy Orbison’s ‘Crying,’ sung in Spanish by the beautiful and haunting Rebekah Del Rio is the dramatic pinnacle of the story. The truth emerges. This is a story about heartbreak and lost love. An already haunting song is made more haunting by being sung in a Latin language that people associate with passion and ardor. Hearing it sung in Spanish adds an aura of mystery that intensifies the eerie atmosphere of the nearly empty theater:

“I was all right for a while, I could smile for a while,/ But I saw you last night, you held my          hand so tight /As you stopped to say “Hello”/ Aw you wished me well/ You couldn’t tell/ That        I’d been crying over you/ Then you said so long/ left me standing there all alone/  Alone and crying, crying, crying/ Its hard to understand/ But the touch of your hand/ Can start me crying/ I    thought that I was over you/ But its true so true/ I love you even more than I did before/ But    darling what can I do/ For you don’t love me and Ill always be/ Crying over you, crying over      you/ Yes now you’re gone and from this moment on/ I’ll be crying, crying, crying, crying/ Yeah             crying, crying over you.”

And, of course, this is not the first time Davis Lynch has used a Roy Orbison song in a movie. He used ‘In Dreams’ to dazzling atmospheric effect in Blue Velvet. His tone suits Lynch’s style. Roy reminds us of a more innocent time in music, when feelings, rhythm and melodies mattered, when having a beautiful voice with insane range counted for something.

Roy Orbison sticks the knife in with that song. Some things you just don’t get over. This song is about irreparable damage and loss. It is about a type of pain there is no cure for. This is the terror of love. It can bring you the most unimaginable joy but it can also be deadly.

In ‘Dark Paradise,’ Lana describes the persistence of memory beyond all reason and sense:

“All my friends tell me I should move on/ I’m lying in the ocean singing your song/ Loving you forever can’t be wrong/ Even though you’re not here, won’t move on/ And there is no remedy for memory your face is/ Like a melody, it won’t leave my head/ Your soul is haunting me and telling me that everything is fine/ But I wish I was dead.”

Without love, life is not worth living. Love is the darkness and love is the light. It is the double edged knife in the water. David Lynch, despite his Noir sensibilities, is also a Romantic. To be a Romantic is to believe in the good as well as the not so good aspects of love. This is the central thematic pull between Lana and Lynch: their focus upon the awesome and terrifying power of love. Love is where fantasy and reality meet. Love is the great mystery. The man behind the curtain that you can never see. Love has no morality, because the heart wants what it wants. Love is pure.

—

Leza Cantoral is the author of Planet Mermaid and editor of Walk Hand in Hand Into Extinction: Stories Inspired by True Detective. She writes a feminist column about noir film for Luna Luna Magazine called Shades of Noir and writes about pop culture for Clash Media. Her upcoming collection of short stories, Cartoons in the Suicide Forest, will be coming out later this year through Bizarro Pulp Press. You can find her short stories at lezacantoralblog.wordpress.com and tweet her at @lezacantoral.

Image of Bluebeard by Sae Jung Choi.

Best Books of the Past 10 Years: Simone Muench's "Orange Crush"

ORANGE CRUSH
Simone Muench
ISBN-13: 978-1932511796
Sarabande Books
88 p.
Reviewed by Lisa A. Flowers

Take the landscape evoked in Randy Newman’s In Germany Before the War, the strangling scene in Strangers on a Train, a seaside scattering of rinds and corsages, and corsets and formal wear defaulting to corsets and burial wear and you come close to approaching the general soul of Simone Muench’s Orange Crush, a book where 17th century English prostitutes, murder ballads, and early Springsteenish characters fall into slasher films like cherry blossoms shaken from a vengeful o'erhanging firmament. Open Crush and a browned valentine or a phone number scrawled last week on a bar napkin (both belonging to girls since unnaturally deceased) might fall out. The book debuts in bloated summer, in Wisconsin Death Trip country, where “trouble comes,” bringing

Chalklines in bloody bedrooms
Clouds
Agitating the cows, their thick ruminant bodies
Clogging up the riverbeds ...
Children dying of oddities
The small-town doctor could not name …
 

You Were Long Days and I Was Tiger Lined seems to present another atrocity, perhaps one related to the evil of slavery, going on in the same town:

Weather me better master
Wind can carry a whip but how
Can a dead girl
Swerve into flight and miss the sky altogether

 In these lines, and throughout the book, is the panic of souls violently killed, beating their huge new wings frantically against panes like trapped insects. And Muench, whose name to the printed eye suggests the sinuous and nightmarish waterfront of that other Munch and his The Scream,  is adept at transitioning between poems with the same kind of wavy disorientation. Quite unexpectedly, we’re in the hospital undergoing cancer treatment with Count Backwards to a Future With You in it and Where Your Body Rests (the latter dedicated to “the woman who said I lacked duende while undergoing chemo and radiation”) where IV’s hematomas bloom in tandem with sexual imagery worthy of Georgia O' Keefe’s flowers:

Nothing separates us
From the sun’s luminous text,
The way words enter skin in fire spirals
Lifting the room into a red vivarium ...

At other times, some monstrous apparition, “long and shedding its scabbed horizon” will dart suddenly through the text. And Muench can shift into 1930s crime film noir with the abruptness of a gunshot. The first line of the short poem Frame 6

The Colt sang once, parting
Your pitch-dark hair.

is an image that exists in three colors: ebony, seeping crimson, and the glaring white of shattered cranial bones.

All Orange Crush’s tendrils weave from its godhead the Orange Girl Suites, dedicated to Susannah Chase. Muench can show us what it's like to be thrown into the middle of a crime, reeling in a panicked psychobabble of random, garbled last words:

When he killed her he said listen
…He said windowsill
He said stone
While alive she replied
Oilslick, doorjam…

The poems thicken with what they describe, gruel-like:

A man folds a girl up in newspaper, her wet hair a string of taffy....

In one version
She folds up
Like a fan, her songs pleated
Gills panting underwater.
In another, she fashions
The wires of her earrings
Into antennae, transmitting her story across the harbor
Her taffeta dress sliding toward the lighthouse without her...

Skin gathering the Baltic’s debris,
An intersection of earrings and quiet, wrists and rope.

These images are terrible in their calm, austere dignity. Muench has hit upon reality at its most awful and minimally articulated; drawn her body of work up to the dignity of its full height: the height of the unspeakable and its consequences, which are the “disease of a body syntactically disarranged/limbs and hair webbed with algae.”On the other hand, “no one can be reached/in this city of correct syntax/where the water deposits its marginalia” and by using words like zigzagging film editing techniques, Muench can conjecture powerhouse lines out of Japanese arthouse horror, suggesting a hundred mirrored spider eyes by which a girl dismembered in a love hotel might be

Looking out of herself
Through so many stabmarks, eye slits
So many voyeured holes
Camera flash on her mouth
Her belly, a billfold

Zoom

                                      To navel

Vortex of torso

                                   Vertigo


Suite 6 is a stunning poem that distinctly evokes Roethke’s The Song:

A girl is running, is bleeding ...
The railroad a rusted zipper
Fusing Louisiana and Arkansas ...
Moving through the woods
In a thin white suture ...
[running] through rain until she is rain

The “Orange Girl cast” (literally, the cast of the book) are Muench’s own female friends (and other poets) who are thanked/named in the appendix. They are modeled on many archetypes, including those girls “born to unzip men’s breath.” “(“You can’t fold her up inside a cocktail napkin,” Femme Fatale reminds us/chastises us,“she will not rinse.”) Later, the same Cleopatra “imprisons pharaohs in her spine”: a magnificently seductive line that recalls Anne Sexton’s “for I pray that Joy will unbend from her stone back and that the snakes will heat up her vertebrae” from O Ye Tongues. At one poem's end, a protagonist gnaws her prey idly, a lioness, while, "through the slats of her magnolia latticed teeth"… like a distracted child’s toy into the sea… "a dollhead floats free of I do."

In The Apriary, a kind of coming of age poem, two young girls lounge in a sunlit attic, reading Keats, whispering to each other through “the veils of glamorous biblical women, loaded up on blossom.”The Matryoshka is a splintered semblance of Frederic Leighton’s Flaming June in a prose-poem:

Sunlight buzzes your windows as you crack a kaleidoscope in half, searching for a photograph of your mother before disease split her face into reflection and recollection. When you slide to the floor, your dress spreads volcanic, an orange silk corona…

There is sexually-deprecating humor dotted here and there:

Dialing his large white teeth
With her tanager-tongue
She laments
“Where art my thigh..."

And little spook-stories:

Ask the strange man on adrenaline reserves-
Would a maniac roam around a cemetery
Wearing one black glove?

Muench's work winds itself into its own ribbons of brilliant reds and oranges and blues, whilst simultaneously unrolling bandages backwards into the mummy it never wanted the victims it eulogizes and empowers so beautifully to become. “I will chew your light into miniature suns/and when the time comes to bury you, I will say undo. Undone” are the lines that conclude the book. Or, to quote Kathy Acker via one of Orange Crush's epigraphs, “All of us girls have been dead for so long/But we’re not going to be anymore.”

_________________________________________________________________

Lisa A. Flowers is a poet, critic, vocalist, the founding editor of Vulgar Marsala Press, the reviews editor for Tarpaulin Sky Press, and the author of diatomhero: religious poems. Her work has appeared in The Collagist, The THEPoetry, Entropy, and other magazines and online journals. Raised in Los Angeles and Portland, OR, she now resides in the rugged terrain above Boulder, Colorado. Visit her here or here.

The Best Dark Red Lipsticks For Vamps

I love dark red lipstick. Short of wearing long black velvet dresses to creepy Edward Gorey parties, one of my favorite pastimes is trying on all of the dark red lipstick colors in my mirror or at the mall, until my lips are swollen and I looked like I just sucked a red icy or drank someone's blood. 

From the modest to the pricey, here are those luscious, wine-colored colors you dream of:

Wet N’ Wild’s Cherry Bomb ($1.89)
WHY WE LOVE IT: Velvety feel + great as an on-the-go purchase when you forget your lip color at home. 

Nyx Cosmetics’ Licorice ($5.99)
WHY WE LOVE IT: Lightweight coverage, for a layered approach. Not bad for mixing, a light lip stain or a not-so-dramatic effect.

Kiko Milani’s Pure Red (Euro, 6.90)
WHY WE LOVE IT: Luminous, chrome metallic color. Also, why isn't there a Kiko's everywhere? It's the best store, and its items are always affordable, interesting and really well-made.

MAC’s Sin ($16)
WHY WE LOVE IT: Deep blue red, long-lasting. A classic that seems to sit at the bottom of everyone's purse. 

Jefree Star's Unicorn Blood ($18)
WHY WE LOVE IT: Its matte and it looks exactly like blood. One dab will coat your lips, which means the bottle will last a year. Prepare to look gorgeously vampiric. Honestly, this is the best lip color you'll own. 

Bobbi Brown’s Red Carpet ($26)
WHY WE LOVE IT: Long-lasting, with emollients! You can actually feel your lips softening!

Nar’s Scarlet Empress ($27)
WHY WE LOVE IT: Semi-matte, with high pigmentation. This is a holy-fuck-who-just-walked-into-the-room? color.

Marc Jaobs’s Dark Velvet Berry  ($30)
WHY WE LOVE IT: Long-lasting and hydrating, with an interesting color touch. 

Kevyn Aucoin’s Bloodroses ($35)
WHY WE LOVE IT: Long-lasting, with fruit butter and exotic tree extract. This is as good as the Unicorn Blood, but not as matte.