Prompts: Love and Madness, Great Fodder for a Good Story or Two!

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With Valentine’s Day just passed, hopefully you have shown enough forethought to have given your loved one some heartfelt token of your esteem such that you are not now dwelling in the proverbial (and let us hope it is no more than that) doghouse. But if you happen to find yourself in that most sorrowful of canine abodes, don’t sit and mope. Use your solitary time and put those feelings of love, bitterness and utter remorse to good use. No, I don’t mean pig out on Doritos. Write about it! Some of the best stories come from emotional anguish, or disastrous circumstances. And just to get you started, here are a few ideas culled from actual news items involving just such weighty themes:

 

Valentines from Ancient Rome: Sex, Death and Lust

Hamilton College Classics Professor Barbara Gold can’t help but notice the difference between modern Valentine’s Day cards filled with sentimental sayings and ancient Romans’ wrenching expressions of love.

Today’s valentines focus on sharing, caring, love and friendship. The beloved is portrayed as gentle, sensitive, tender and compassionate, says Gold. The ancient Romans had quite a different take on love.

“Love for them was painful, like a disease,” Gold says. Roman lovers described themselves as “‘wounded, wretched, enslaved by their lovers, having their bone marrow on fire and suffering from double vision.”

For example the love poet Catullus writes to his lady love, “I hate and I love. Perhaps you ask why I do that? I don’t know but I feel it happening and I am tormented.” (Read more…)

Yes, you certainly couldn’t put that kind of sentiment in a modern day card and send it to your girlfriend. You might suddenly find all the locks on her apartment changed. As for Catallus, he was a renowned poet in ancient Rome. The subject of much of his love poetry was his girlfriend, Lesbia, a pseudonym usually identified with one Claudia Metelli Celeris. Catallus’ poetry mirrored the various phases of his relationship with Claudia, love, hate, jealousy.

Imagine if, in her review of modern love poetry, Professor Gold runs across someone atypical of our times. Perhaps it’s a poetry professor from a little known university who’s been published a few times. His verse has all the pain and torture of the classic poets. His name is Carl Tallus and after meeting him, Professor Gold realizes he bears an uncanny resemblance to the Catallus of yore. Coincidence? Perhaps.

What’s more, Carl seems fixated on a student in one of his classes, one Claudette Cedervale. The more Professor Gold reads of Carl’s poetry, the more she realizes it is directed at Claudette, the longing, the lust, the rage at love unrequited. Dark, foreboding overtones are expressed. Professor Gold decides to warn Claudette one night, but in doing so finds her engaged in an ancient ritual beseeching the goddess Venus, and Professor Gold learns the terrible truth. That Claudette is, in fact, Claudia reborn, cursed by the Roman goddess of love to go through eternity as the love object of the reincarnation of the insane Catullus. And every time the relationship is doomed to end in her death. Can Professor Gold help break the curse? Or will she only ensure Claudette’s ultimate demise as her demented true love comes calling?

 

Trees Tell Tales of Mesoamerican Megadroughts

A new, detailed record of rainfall fluctuations in ancient Mexico that spans more than 12 centuries promises to improve understanding of the role drought played in the rise and fall of pre-Hispanic civilizations.

The new, 1,238-year-long tree-ring chronology, the longest and most accurate of its kind for Mesoamerica, is the first to reconstruct the climate of pre-colonial Mexico on an annual basis for more than a millennium, pinning down four ancient megadroughts to their exact years.

One large ancient drought previously confirmed for the Southwest of the United States is shown to have extended into central Mexico (1149-1167 AD) by the new dendrochronology, or tree-ring reconstruction. There it may have devastated the local maize crops, potentially giving a fatal blow to the declining Toltec culture, said David Stahle, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.

This far-reaching rainfall chronology also provides the first independent confirmation of the so-called Terminal Classic drought, a megadrought some anthropologists relate to the collapse of the Mayan civilization. (Read more…)

So it seems that these droughts were so severe they led to the demise of entire cultures, and were repeated at regular intervals throughout history. What if our intrepid paleoclimatologist, Professor Stahle, discovers more during his research? Perhaps local folklore described ancient cults that worshipped powerful deities that could bring about these droughts, invoking them through arcane rituals.

He probably counts these as nothing more than superstition. Until his research uncovers some strange occurrences in present day New Mexico, where it looks like conditions are ripe for another once-in-a-generation drought. Taking a closer look, Professor Stahle finds a small town where the inhabitants keep to themselves and don’t talk to outsiders. That’s not surprising, but Stahle is surprised when he finds evidence of strange rites performed that match the ancient descriptions.

Now he must root out the doomsday cult before they can bring about another megadrought, and the end of another civilization.

 

Death Conquers in the New Book by Art Historian

The Dance of Death is a late medieval genre that, when incarnated as a large-scale public artwork, often combines images and text, according to art historian Elina Gertsman, who has just written a newly published book on the subject, The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages: Image, Text, Performance. One such work, painted on canvas, is by German artist Bernt Notke and among the last of such images remaining in Europe.

“These images certainly demonstrate the equalizing force of death,” said Gertsman, assistant professor in art history. “The Dance is also about medieval conceptions of dancing and their intertwinement with death, about the relationship between image and performance, about preaching and anxieties associated with 15th-century cultural, social and religious climates.”

The text accompanying the macabre images creates a dialogue between the living and Death. In the end, Death always triumphs. Dozens of images still exist, but many others from the 1400s have been destroyed, some painted over and replaced with more fashionable subject matter, said Gertsman.

“Medieval men and women died younger and death was everywhere to be seen, but seeing it encoded in this type of visual imagery that demanded interaction must have been tremendously compelling,” she said. (Read more…)

Clearly a fascinating, if dark, subject. No doubt Elina Gertsman will attract quite an avid following on the lecture circuit promoting her new book. Perhaps as she travels from city to city, staying in different hotels, Elina finds herself experiencing some rather odd dreams. Maybe she sees bits and pieces of different depictions of the Dance of Death in her sleep. No doubt this seems natural enough, given that the topic fascinates her and represents her life’s study.

But the dreams become more elaborate, more detailed. The dancers come to life, and she joins in with them, becoming a player in their intricate performance. Never has she felt so alive. Soon her dreams bleed into waking reality, as Elina begins to see snatches of the Dance of Death all around her. A face in the crowd, a half-glimpsed movement to some imagined rhythm. They cause her to shiver as she relives her nighttime revels.

Then the dancers surround her constantly, when she speaks, when she walks to her car, they are always with her, and she wants nothing more than to join them. Elise realizes she can no longer tell what is real from what is dream. Finally, she fails to appear at one of her lectures. No one can find her. Weeks go by and the police eventually give up the search, assuming she simply went off under her own power since there were no indications of foul play.

The only sign of her is found by a former student who astutely notices a puzzling figure in one of the pictures of the Dance of Death in Gertsman’s book. Dressed in 15th-century clothes, the figure bears a remarkable resemblance to Elina, and the student is all but certain that it had not been there a few weeks ago, was not even in the original painting. But how could that be? The student keeps this wild realization to himself, lest he be called crazy.

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You see? Fear not if you’re down in the dumps over some recent encounter with romance gone bad, or some other ill-fated happenstance. Such occurrences are perfect grist for the story mill, and often ideal ways to expiate your own emotional demons. So stop moping and get cracking!

-Jason Kahn
Mad Scribblings From the Edge
The Dark InSpectre

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Author Bio

A medical editor by day, Jason Kahn lives and writes in Brooklyn, NY. His stories have appeared in Baen’s Universe, Damnation Books, Something Wicked, and numerous anthologies. His hobbies include rooting for his University of Michigan Wolverines and chasing after two mischievous gnomes who claim to be his children.

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