During this ever-darkening month of September, Ray Bradbury’s 1962 novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes, has been much on my mind. It’s about a small Midwestern community where nothing much happens until the day a demonic carnival comes to town. What looks like much needed entertainment—fortunetellers, clowns, freaks, a hall of mirrors, and a merry-go-round—are really ways of stealing human souls.
Mr. Dark, the tattooed carnival owner, uses the shadowy desires of the townspeople to bring them under his control. He promises them what they want most—as much of it as they want, and then some—and their own desires make them monstrous. Then their souls slip from their bodies, and are quickly trapped in the tattooed illustrations that cover Mr. Dark’s body. Those tattoos become portraits of agony.
Mr. Dark is not a nice guy, but in his defense, he’s only trying to give people what they, in their hearts, really want. It’s not his fault if they don’t know when to stop.
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What my heart wants right now is some clear blue sky. We have now had ten straight days—at least—of haze and smoke. We can see the shape of Mt. Heyburn if we peer hard at it, but it shifts in and out of focus. Clouds of dark gray air move slowly through the trees across the river. It seems only a matter of time before the air itself grows brittle and falls to the ground as dust.
The sun has turned into a red dwarf. It’s been below freezing in the mornings, which is a good thing, because not all of the smoke in our valley is from out of state. A forest fire is burning ten miles out Highway 21 from Stanley. Thus far it’s burned about 500 acres. The prevailing wind has blown the flames away from town, and the smoke-lowered temperatures knock the fire down every night.
If the fire had started in the same place two weeks earlier, when the temperature was in the 90s and the wind was blowing from the northwest at 40 mph, Julie and I would have been packing suitcases and loading the pickup with photo albums, hard drives, and camping gear. We’d be getting ready to be homeless, which is still better than being dead.
The asterisk that comes with this statement is that to get to us, the fire would have had to come through Stanley Lake campgrounds, and the Iron Creek and Valley Creek subdivisions, and Stanley, and the Redfish Lake Lodge and campgrounds. If it had come that far, we would not just lack a home, we’d be overwhelmed by the tragedy of others. I don’t know if I’m yet at the age where if I lost my home, I’d lose my mind to grief, but I’m definitely at the age where I might lose my mind to other people’s grief.
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I loaned out my copy of Something Wicked a decade ago, and probably told whomever I loaned it to not to give it back. I had realized I could never live long enough to read all the books left in my library, even the ones I needed to read for self-improvement.
I am aware of the implications of that statement. My capacity for self-improvement falls short of my need for self-improvement. I’ll die a work-in-progress and be condemned to a few thousand less happy incarnations, a cautionary example to all good Buddhists.
Here, take this self-improvement book. It’s an as-new copy of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, published in 1911. Some of the pages haven’t even been cut. It will tell you how to act your age and behave yourself in company. You might get further along in it than I did.
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A small dark carnival came to our valley last week. Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle were at a Trump fundraising dinner at one of the new large houses in the upper valley. A place at the table cost $2800, which isn’t much for a Trump fundraiser, but I assume the invited guests found myriad ways to pad the bill.
The view wasn’t good. Visibility was down to a mile, which meant that the Sawtooths might just as well have been on Mars. Jr. and Kimberly flew by helicopter into the Smiley Creek Airport, so they didn’t go by our house. They stopped long enough to get their photo taken with the folks waiting to meet them there. A few of them were willing to wear Trump masks and carry Trump 2020 signs and mug for the cameras. One woman asked if she could pray for a Trump victory. Then they got back in the helicopter and headed for dinner.
In the photo of the airport event that appeared in the Idaho Mountain Express, Ketchum’s newspaper, Jr. is fist-bumping a toddler carrying an American flag. Kimberly is looking unhappy in a demure black dress, probably because she flew over Sun Valley but didn’t get to stay in Sun Valley.
By the time the helicopter got to the fundraising dinner, a demonstration had formed on Highway 75. Twenty-five or thirty people were out on the road with BLM and Biden signs, and drivers going by were honking in support of the demonstrators. The dinner, I understand, wasn’t as well-attended as the demonstration, but a lot of times, these things succeed or fail depending on the weather.
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In Something Wicked This Way Comes, Mr. Dark’s carnival is welcomed to town. He offers respite from the boredom of everyday life. Once his victims have wandered through his hall of mirrors, they have a vision of what life would have been like had it turned out less tedious and exhausting. Two 14-year-old boys, the narrative characters of the novel, try to tell the town that it’s all illusion, but nobody believes them. The adults would rather be told they’re not trapped in their lives, they’re not doomed to marinate in memories of old humiliations, and they don’t have to live with their mistakes.
The Ur-lie that gives rise to all these lesser lies is that actions don’t have consequences. All the middle-aged characters in the book are at an age where they’ve realized they’re going to have to live with their choices, and they don’t want to. They regret marrying the people they married and regret not marrying the people they didn’t. They’ve learned to hate the routines of their lives. They hate what they see in the bathroom mirror, and they hurry to inspect themselves in the funhouse, hoping in its distortions for something better.
Mr. Dark has no power over happy people, or even sad people who take responsibility for their actions. He gathers in the souls of the finger-pointers, the stunted, the regretful, the lazy, the evasive, the vengeful, the cowardly. That’s most of us, at the weak times in our lives. The problem is that Mr. Dark will try to weaken you further at these moments, so you’ll never recover the soul you have lost.
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I haven’t had a lot of luck convincing people they have souls. We live in a secular age, one wedded to scientific materialism, and if you tell people they’d better straighten up and start living right or their souls will get reincarnated as cockroaches, they’ll just laugh at you. If you say their money will buy them a one-way ticket to hell, where their souls will scream for eternity in a lake of fire, they’ll keep laughing. If you tell them their soul is going to end up as a grimacing tattoo on Mr. Dark’s hide, they’ll tell you they’re not afraid of Mr. Dark or his hide. “Sometimes a tattoo is just a tattoo,” they’ll say.
But I believe people have souls, and that their souls urge a more or less constant progression toward a conscious existence. I think souls are the reason you buy all those self-improvement books and all those books about the shadow side of human nature.
I think souls are present in any moment of conscience. I think they’re the reason you say, “There but for the grace of God go I,” and then try to help the person you said it about.
Also, I think souls can get pissed off and just up and leave when people indulge in their worst impulses, such as when they line up for tickets for Satan’s carnival.
That’s why there are so many soulless people running around: they pissed off their souls, their souls left them, and they’ve been floundering around in unenlightened self-interest ever since.
The advantage to not having a soul is that you’ll make more money. The disadvantage is that nothing you spend it on will satisfy you.
I don’t believe these things because I read about them in the Bible. Instead I read about them in books on theoretical physics, where I have learned that a reasonable facsimile of eternity exists, but time doesn’t. Regular Matter doesn’t really exist. Dark Matter does, and it may be the stuff of souls. Reality is looking more and more like a computer program with a perverse sensibility. New universes are created every time you open a take-out menu and choose an item you’ve never had before. Because you choose these universes into being, you are a dozen people, or a million, some with souls, some without.
We may be getting a little far into theology for an end-of-the-world blog, or too far into theoretical physics, but I don’t think so. The end of the world brings up the question of what happens if people don’t blink out like a turned-off lightbulb. That’s not a question even theoretical physics can answer. I admit that even when I threaten people with reincarnation, I have little memory of having been there and done that.
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I am certain it would be a better world if people believed they do have souls, and that those souls will spend eternity thinking about their little sins and their big ones—in other words, suffer the tortures that give rise to all of hell’s metaphors.
You don’t have to die to be tortured, either. Look at Francis Bacon’s Screaming Popes, his series of soul portraits of the outwardly confident and autocratic and very much alive Pope Innocent the Tenth. The Pope occupies the psychological equivalent of a lake of fire, and he demonstrates how people can become refugees from the human while still appearing to be human.
Pope Innocent wouldn’t have been happy had he seen any of Bacon’s 20th century portraits of him, but the 17th century Church—the 17th century, period—would have been better for it.
If we could convince Donald Trump, and Bill Barr, and Mitch McConnell that they have souls, and that those souls will be agonizing over questions of conscience long after Washington, D.C. becomes seafloor, we would all be better for it. The trouble is, it’s a hard sell.
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In case you’re wondering, I don’t think Donald J. Trump or Don Jr. is Mr. Dark. I don’t think Kimberly Guilfoyle is Lola from Damn Yankees, either, although she looks a lot like I imagine Lola looks.
I’m more or less certain that Mr. Dark is just a part of every human heart, one deeply opposed to our souls and capable of exiling or destroying them. If the Trump extended family comes across as a carnival of evil, that’s because the family has disappeared all its souls, in an effort to disappear its pain.
Now they’re all trying to pretend there’s nothing missing in their lives. But something is missing, and the only thing they have to replace it with is money. But there’s never enough. There never will be enough.
They’re freaks in the worst kind of freak show, looking out at a world of people poorer and less powerful—but infinitely more human—than themselves.
No wonder they don’t like us. No wonder they don’t have any pity for anyone but themselves. No wonder they construct a social order that punishes poverty and powerlessness with death. No wonder they work tirelessly to increase the amount of grief in the world.
It makes the absence of their souls seem not quite so bad.