People have long used fear as a tool to entertain.
Tales of monsters have been with us since the dawn of time. They are part of every people’s traditions and folklore, whether told around a prehistoric campfire or projected on a wide screen with digital sound for 21st-century audiences.
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| BRITISH MUSEUM / ART RESOURCE |
| The Epic of Gilgamesh, shown here in part of the 11th tablet, mentions several types of monsters, and an older Sumerian tale says Gilgamesh's father was a Lillu, or blood-sucking demon. |
In all the stories, the monsters take their shapes from our fears of the unknown—be it apprehensions about nocturnal noises from a forest, or worries over the ominous intentions of races in far-off lands described by returning sailors. Evidently, some monsters that first materialize on a remote continent find ways to migrate to one’s own land and take up residence in a nearby wilderness or wasteland.
In the Middle Ages, Europeans believed that most monsters originated on other continents, and they often illustrated their maps and sea charts with images of the fantastic creatures in these half-legendary lands. The 13th-century Hereford mappa mundi (world map) is an outstanding example: Pictures of fabulous races and animals are distributed all over the globe,with India and Ethiopia displaying the main share. In India live the single-legged beings called sciapodes; the pygmies and the giants; the mouthless people; the manticore, or man-lion; and the unicorn. North of India, in Scythia and bordering countries and islands, there are horse-hoofed men, people with long ears and grotesque cannibals called Anthropophagi; in the Arctic are giant Hyperboreans; and in the Carpathian foothills are the one-eyed Arimaspians, who were said to fight with the griffins. Ethiopia is inhabited by satyrs and fauns; by people with long lips and others with their heads in their chests; and by basilisks and gold-digging ants.
In the 21st-century entertainment world, we relish our own menagerie of monstrosity, from alien invaders to dinosaurs, dragons, ghosts, giants and robots running amok. Some, like Egypt’s mummies, Arabian Nights genies and their cousins, the ghouls, clearly originate in the Middle East, which is fitting, given that it’s the home of some of the earliest human civilizations.
But what about three of the most enduring and currently popular world-class monsters: the vampire, the werewolf and the zombie? These three particularly continue to terrify, thrill and intrigue us like no others. All three, it turns out, have traveled great distances to be with us. But in their modern forms, none has obvious family ties to the Middle East. The driven, blood-craving vampires and the vicious, shape-shifting werewolves originate in the folklore of Hungary, Romania and Greece—or so we are told. Zombies, classically viewed as resurrected corpses or “the undead,” derive from New World Voodoo traditions—or so we are told.
There is evidence, however, that all three in fact arose from the most ancient tales from the Middle East. As we shall also see, the closer we investigate, the more the Arabian ghul keeps leaping out from the shadows of history to drag us into its mythical lair.
The vampire is usually a revived corpse or quasi-living being that maintains its existence by drinking human blood. Some experts assert that the vampire originated in ancient Egypt or India, but those connections are tenuous. The first creatures that actually fit the modern description of vampires appear in the surviving writings from the Fertile Crescent, in texts from Assyria in the north and the Akkadian and Babylonian empires in the south, as well as in documents of the earliest known Mesopotamian civilization, Sumeria.
Assyria, on the upper Tigris River, in what is now northern Iraq and parts of Syria, endured from about 2400 to 600 bce and was ruled from Assur (or Ashur). The Assyrians adopted beliefs from their Sumerian predecessors, including belief in two classes of demons with vampire-like tendencies: the ekimmu and the utukku. Theekimmu were the angry spirits of persons dead but unburied, prowling the earth until they found rest beneath the ground—a characteristic phase of the traditional vampire.
An utukku was sometimes hard to distinguish from the ekimmu, but generally it was the spirit of a deceased person who had been buried but forgotten, not honored with offerings at its tomb by family or loved ones. As a result, the utukku returns from the underworld to haunt whomever it encounters, seeking sustenance from its victims. Like the vampire of Eastern Europe, this creature is a persistent haunter that is very difficult to dislodge. Sometimes the utukku are blood-drinkers, while at other times they are said to imbibe the human life-force. While they are most often malevolent, on occasion they can be allies, and such an utukku appears as Ea-Bani, friend of Gilgamesh.
A particularly vivid description of a group of thoroughly evil, vampire-like utukkuknown as the Seven Spirits appears in a 3000-year-old Assyrian cuneiform incantation:
Seven are they!
Knowing no care,
They grind the land like corn;
Knowing no mercy,
They rage against mankind;
They spill their blood like rain,
Devouring their flesh [and] sucking their veins....
They are demons full of violence,
Ceaselessly devouring blood.
Translator R. Campbell Thompson, in his authoritative Semitic Magic, says the Seven Spirits’“predilection for human blood … is in keeping with all the traditions of the grisly mediaeval Vampires.” Thompson notes that these Seven Spirits reappear later in both Palestinian and Syriac magic spells. A Syriac charm from Christian times quotes the Seven as saying: “We go on our hands, so that we may eat flesh, and we crawl along upon our hands, so that we may drink blood.” But the Assyrian incantations and their successors make it clear that vampirism was but one characteristic of these demons that also traveled with storms, like wind demons, and that ate flesh, like Arabian ghouls.
Earlier than the Seven Spirits were the blood-sucking vampire-demons of Sumeria. A manuscript recording the kings and dynasties of Sumer, dating from about 2400 bce, asserts that the father of the Sumerian hero Gilgamesh was in fact a Lillu-demon. This Lillu was one of four demons in a class of vampires: The other three were Lilitu (manifested in later Hebrew tradition as Lilith), the female version of the vampire demon; Ardat Lilli (or Lilitu’s handmaid), who visited men at night and bore them ghostly children; and Irdu Lilli (Ardat Lilli’s male counterpart), who would visit women at night and make them pregnant. Lilitu was believed to be a beautiful, promiscuous vampire, similar to some 21st-century literary versions, partial to the blood of children, infants and young men. From Sumer, Babylonians and eventually Hebrews adopted versions of these legends, and similar traditions developed in northern Mesopotamia.
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Many of the traditions in early Hebrew literature, including monster folklore, derived similarly from the beliefs of Mesopotamia. Although some scholars have claimed that there is no trace of vampires in early Jewish literature, this is not accurate. The book of Proverbs (30:15) refers to a “horse leech” or bloodsucker (Hebrew ‘alukah): “The horse-leech hath two daughters, crying: Give, give.” Old Testament scholar T. Witton Davies says this creature is not a common leech but instead “probably a vampire or blood-sucking demon,” and he notes that several other prominent scholars support this interpretation. One biblical translation, the Revised Version, offers a marginal note for “horseleech” that states, “Or, vampire.” The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia agrees that something similar to a vampire is intended in light of the similarity between the Hebrew word ‘alukah and the Arabic ‘aluqah, which means female ghoul. Indeed, the Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906 declares that the ‘alukah is “none other than the flesh-devouring ghoul of the Arabs…. She has been rendered in Jewish mythology as the demon of the nether world … and the names of her two daughters have in all probability, as familiar names of dreaded diseases, been dropped.”
Another popular vampire-demon of the Hebrews—borrowed, as we have seen, from the Mesopotamians—is Lilith. Early Jewish legends say Lilith was the first wife of the first human, Adam, created from clay rather than from Adam’s rib, as Eve later was. According to some accounts, Lilith refused to be subservient to Adam, and she abandoned him along the Red Sea coast, where she consorted with demons and bore vast numbers of demon (or jinn) children. She herself evolved into a night demon with an abiding hatred for human children, and she would come in the night to suck the blood of infants. She was also sometimes portrayed as a bird, often an owl.
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| BRITISH MUSEUM / ART RESOURCE |
| A woodcut portrait dated 1491 shows Transylvanian Prince Vlad Tepes iii, whose cruelty in fighting the Ottomans earned him the sobriquet “the impaler.” He was neither a count nor did he drink blood: “Count Dracula” was created in 1897 by Irish author Bram Stoker. |
Are these early Middle Eastern vampire creatures related to the more human-like European vampire, the folkloric creature popularized in 1897 by Bram Stoker’s novelDracula? Could such beliefs have found their way into Eastern Europe? If we consider that ancient Greece may have been the gateway for the migration of a wealth of Mesopotamian ideas and legends, it may be so. There is growing evidence that Greece experienced a rich infusion of mythology and folklore from the Middle East between the 12th and ninth centuries bce. Charles Penglase, author ofGreek Myths and Mesopotamia, argues that the Homeric hymns and the poems of Hesiod, written in the seventh century bce, show influences from the myths and religious beliefs of ancient Mesopotamia: “Mesopotamian religious and mythological material could have reached Greece at earlier periods, but the influence apparent in these works seems to be a result of contacts in the period of intensive interaction in the first millennium bce, beginning in the middle of the ninth centurybce. The late Mycenaean time before the end of the twelfth century bce has also been suggested by some as a time of influence, owing to the extensive contacts between Mycenaean Greece and the Near East at this time.”
The Greeks developed their own version of the Mesopotamian vampire-demon Lilitu, which they called the lamia. Named for a demon born in Libya who terrorized Europe, the lamia had the face and upper body of a woman and the tail of a serpent. Lamias could disguise themselves as human women. They devoured children and sapped the life-force from men. Lamias became a staple of Greek folklore and spread to other European lands, including France, where a lamia named Melusine magically concealed her blue-and-white serpent’s tail, married a French nobleman and, repurposed as a “water fairy,” became part of Europe’s colorful legendary tradition.
Romania has some of the richest vampire lore in Eastern Europe. Its scenic central region, Transylvania, bounded by the Carpathian Mountains in the east and south, was the setting for Stoker’s Dracula. Count Dracula, played in the 1931 movie version by Bela Lugosi, was Stoker’s vampirized rendition of an actual person: Vladiii Dracula of Transylvania, who lived from 1431 to 1476. A Wallachian noble who waged war against the Ottoman Turks, he became known as “Vlad the Impaler” for his reputed execution, many by impalement, of 20,000 or more Turkish soldiers—but no one has ever suggested he drank blood.
Romania may have absorbed some of its vampire traditions from Greco-Roman sources, which in turn had taken them from the Middle East. Romania and its heartland, Transylvania, were part of the Greek-influenced Thracian kingdom of Dacia from 86 bce and then part of the Roman Empire from 106 to 271 ce.
It makes sense that the Romanian name for vampire is strigoi, derived from strix, the Roman and Greek word for “owl.” In Greek and Roman folklore, the strix was an evil bird, capable of shape-shifting, that fed on human flesh and drank human blood. Its exact nature remained something of a mystery, even to natural history experts like Pliny the Elder, but it appears to be another example of Mesopotamian influence, given that Lilitu-Lilith was a vampire and at times portrayed as an owl. In the British Museum, on a bas-relief known as the Burney Relief, an image of Lilitu from ancient Babylon appears, often dubbed “The Queen of the Night”: a human female figure with feathered bird wings and bird claws for feet.
Some vampire lore may also have entered Eastern Europe through the Turks. In Hungary, for example, the belief in vampires is said to date back to accounts from the 12th century that cite a demon called izcacus, or blood drinker. This word’s origin dates back before the Hungarians’ arrival in Europe from Central Asia in 895. Turkic culture expert Wilhelm Radloff says the word has its roots in ancient Turkish, which the Hungarians encountered during the late eighth century in regions between Asia and Europe. Migrating Turkic tribes may have acquired vampire lore from settled populations in western and Central Asia that had been influenced by the Assyrians and their successors.
The earliest known literary account of a human transformed into a wolf appears in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, probably the oldest written story on Earth, dating back more than four millennia. Originally written in cuneiform script on 12 clay tablets, it is the story of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk in what is now Iraq. In the tale, Gilgamesh is courted by the goddess Ishtar, but he rejects her and reminds her of the tragic fate of her previous lovers:
You loved the Shepherd, the Master Herder,
Who continually presented you
with bread baked in embers,
And who daily slaughtered for you a kid.
Yet you struck him, and turned him into a wolf,
So his own shepherds now chase him
And his own dogs snap at his shins.
Assyriologist Julius Oppert asserts that belief in the werewolf was a part of the ancient Assyrian worldview. Later, widespread belief in werewolves may have contributed to a psychiatric disorder in King Nebuchadnezzar ii, who ruled from about 605 to 562bce, in which time he destroyed Jerusalem’s First Temple and built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the original “seven wonders of the world.” It also appears, from the Biblical Book of Daniel, that Nebuchadnezzar suffered from what psychiatric experts Harvey Rosenstock, md, and Kenneth R. Vincent, ed.d., have described as “depression that deteriorated over a seven-year period into a frank psychosis, at which time he imagined himself a wolf.”
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This is more broadly known as lycanthropy (“wolfman-ism”), or delusions of being a wild animal (usually a wolf), and it is a disorder that has been recorded since antiquity. Among the earliest medical descriptions of it is one from the Byzantine Greek Paul of Aegina, a highly regarded physician of the late seventh century, who describes it with reference to the Greek myth in which Zeus turned King Lycaon of Arcadia into a raging wolf.
Like the vampire, the werewolf appears to be a migrant from the Middle East to Greece, where it surfaced in this legend. According to the most popular version, repeated by Ovid and other Greco-Roman authors, Zeus visited Arcadia in human form and dined with King Lycaon. The king doubted his visitor was Zeus and tried to test his divinity by serving him a dinner of human flesh. Zeus punished Lycaon by transforming him into a wolf.
Pliny, in his Natural History, relates another old Greek story about a man of the family of Antaeus, who was selected by lot and brought to a lake in Arcadia. There, he hung his clothing on a tree and swam across. When he reached the other side, he was transformed into a wolf, and he wandered in this shape for nine years, living with wolf packs. After the nine years had elapsed, if he had attacked no human being, he was free to swim back and resume his human shape. Set in Arcadia as it is, this tale may contain echoes of the Lycaon story.
Herodotus wrote of werewolf legends in his Histories, telling about such a tradition among the Neuri, a possibly Slavic people northeast of Scythia who had adopted Scythian customs. “It appears that these people practice magic,” he wrote, “for there is a story current amongst the Scythians and the Greeks that once a year every Neurian turns into a wolf for a few days, and then turns back into a man again.” Herodotus comments: “I do not believe this tale; but all the same, they tell it, and even swear to the truth of it.”
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| TATE GALLERY / ART RESOURCE |
| King Nebuchadnezzar ii of Babylon may have suffered from a psychiatric disorder known as lycanthropy—the belief that one is a wild animal, most commonly a wolf. English artist and poet William Blake immortalized the king’s agony around 1805. |
This too may have roots to the east. The 18th-century Swedish historian Olof von Dalin wrote that the Neuri were a composite of Scythians, Greeks and Hebrews who accompanied the Budiner or “Shepherd Scythians” to the Swedish islands around 400 bce, in an exodus said to have been driven by the Macedonians.
By the Middle Ages, werewolves became no less accepted in the European worldview. They were seen as a threat to established order, and they were often described as sorcerers and heretics. “An accursed college,” Swedish Catholic ecclesiastic Olaus Magnus called them in the 16th century, “desirous of innovations contrary to the divine law.”
Werewolves, it turns out, have ancient kinship with vampires, and sometimes the legends overlap. In medieval Eastern Europe, particularly during the “plague centuries” (1300–1700), the bodies of persons executed for being werewolves were often cremated to prevent them from returning as vampires. In Hungary, Slovenia, Serbia and Bulgaria, the vampire has been linked to the werewolf, and in Serbia, the werewolf and vampire are known collectively as a single creature, the vukodlak.
Victorian folklorist Sabine Baring-Gould highlights this close relationship, too, and in so doing leads us toward more ancient ghouls. Baring-Gould describes a French historian’s account: “Marcassus relates that after a long war in Syria, during the night, troops of lamias, female evil spirits, appeared upon the field of battle, unearthing the hastily buried bodies of the soldiers, and devouring the flesh off their bones. They were pursued and fired upon, and some young men succeeded in killing a considerable number; but during the day they had all of them the forms of wolves or hyenas.” Baring-Gould felt there was “a foundation of truth in these horrible stories.” The devouring of human flesh is a particularly ghoul-like characteristic, as we shall soon see.
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| ALFREDO DAGLI ORTI / ART ARCHIVE / ART RESOURCE |
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INTERFOTO / ALAMY |
| A history of Scandinavia dated 1555 depicts a “metamorphosis of men into wolves,” left, and an inset from the Hereford mappa mundi in the 13th century, right, shows dog-headed men. |
The Arabs, too, have a werewolf in their folklore: the qutrub. The word is a corruption of the Greek lykanthropos, or wolf-man. Edward Lane, a translator of theOne Thousand and One Nights, says the male ghoul is called by this name. In popular belief, the qutrub is either a man or a woman who is transformed into a wolf-like beast by night and who feeds upon corpses, but it is not a wolf per se.
Qutrub was furthermore the Arabic term for lycanthropy. In the early 10th century, in his classic medical encyclopedia Liber Continens (Al-Hawi al-Kabir, often called The Virtuous Life in English), physician Abu Bakr Muhammad Al-Razi followed the tradition of Paul of Aegina and other classical authors, describing lycanthropy as a brain disorder or a psychosis rather than a physical transformation. He saw it as a kind of madness that compels a person to behave like a wolf. To treat the ailment, he prescribed opium to induce sleep, and baths and topicals to “humidify” the brain.
The classic zombie is a corpse revived by a sorcerer or magician, usually in the context of Haitian, Louisianan or West African Voodoo. The zombie then becomes entirely subject to the power of its master. In literature, zombies have been known to guard treasure, terrorize neighborhoods and, more generally, commit murder. The term “zombie” was popularized in the United States in 1929 in The Magic Island, a book about Haitian Voodoo by reporter and occultist William Seabrook.
In the 1980’s, Harvard ethnobotanist Wade Davis asserted a pharmacological basis for the Voodoo-based zombie of Haiti. He claimed that if two toxic substances entered the bloodstream simultaneously—pufferfish powder and a dissociative drug like datura—the effect could be a deathlike state in which the victim’s will would be subject to that of the Voodoo sorcerer. Other scientists, however, called this “overly credulous.”
It is important to note at this point that the classic Voodoo zombie is not one able to turn others into zombies, nor is it an eater of human flesh.
The modern articulation of the zombie, so popular today in tv shows, movies and video games, is thus quite a different creature. This new zombie, popularized in director George A. Romero’s 1968 cult-classic movie, “Night of the Living Dead,” is a revived corpse that relishes human flesh and, of that, the brain most especially. This zombie’s condition is caused originally by an outside agent—a virus from space, atomic radiation, mutagenic gas or other uniquely 20th-century malady—and from there it can usually be transmitted to living humans with a simple chomp of the fangs. In zombie tales of the early 21st century—film, video, print or computer game—the undead contagion spreads virally worldwide, bringing on a “zombie apocalypse.” Yet all is not lost, because to overcome today’s zombie, beheading or violent destruction of its brain usually suffices.
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This new zombie is proving vastly more popular—and lucrative to its entertainment-media sorcerers—than even its most monstrous rivals. A recent Google search showed the word “zombie” garnering 318 million Web pages, while “vampire” collected a mere 80 million, with “werewolf” loping in third at 44.5 million.
The zombiemania has reached the point where even a serious institution such as theus Centers for Disease Control (cdc) has taken advantage of the pop-culture phenomenon to promote emergency preparedness. The cdc’s Atlanta headquarters plays a role in the first season of the tv series “The Walking Dead,” and last year, thecdc posted a real article on its blog called “Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse” that told readers how to prepare for a fictional zombie invasion and, in the process, “maybe … even learn a thing or two about how to prepare for a real emergency.”
Curiously, when he filmed “Night of the Living Dead,” George Romero says he did not have zombies in mind at all. His creatures were envisioned as ghouls, he has recalled in interviews, the flesh-eating creatures of Arabian lore. His undead attackers are even called that in the film. But somehow the word “zombie” was the one that caught on, and before long, Romero himself was using it, including in the dialogue of his 1978 sequel “Dawn of the Dead.” (He went on to make four more zombie movies. Controversial in its day, in part for its graphic violence, “Night of the Living Dead” was recently selected by the us Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry as a work of “cultural, historical or aesthetic significance”—lest it die an untimely death.
It is this ghoul-zombie that has the long history, and, like the werewolf, it goes back to the Epic of Gilgamesh and the king’s tensions with the goddess Ishtar, who thus describes her passage down to the underworld:
If thou openest not the gate to let me enter,
I will break the door, I will wrench the lock,
I will smash the door-posts, I will force the doors.
I will bring up the dead to eat the living.
And the dead will outnumber the living.
Horror novelist Jonathan Maberry has pointed out that, in “Dawn of the Dead,” Romero in fact echoed Ishtar with the line: “When there is no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the earth.”
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| INTERFOTO / ALAMY; MOVIESTORE COLLECTION LTD / ALAMY (DETAIL) |
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| Top: Though not risen from the dead, cannibals appear in the Hereford mappa mundi. Above: In 1979, a movie poster entices viewers with a distant echo of the portentous words Ishtar spoke to Gilgamesh. |
Ghouls of the Arabian tradition—distinct from those Ishtar describes—are normally neither revenants or revived corpses, but rather an extreme form of another living species: the jinn, which in English became “genie.” The jinn, shape-shifters with various extra-human powers, are often associated with magic and sorcery. But Arabian belief includes both good and bad jinn. Ghouls are obviously the bad sort, and though most times they view people as menu items, they occasionally prove allies—hardly a trait we expect in any modern movie zombie.
Many ghouls are portrayed in Arab lore as lurking in caves in remote deserts, waiting to snare and devour innocent travelers who may be passing by. The female ghoul, orghulah, is very popular in folktales; she sometimes shape-shifts into a beautiful woman who marries an unsuspecting man and has children by him.
Matthias de Giraldo and M. Fornari, in their 1846 Histoire des Sorciers (History of Sorcerers), tell of a legend about a ghoul in 15th-century Iraq: A Baghdad merchant’s son married a beautiful young woman against the advice of his father. The young man soon discovered his bride was making mysterious nocturnal visits to a nearby cemetery. One night, he secretly followed her into a mausoleum, where he found to his horror a party of ghouls assembled with the spoils of graves they had violated, feasting on the flesh of long-buried corpses. Among them was his own wife, and this explained why, at home, she never touched her supper. The next day, the husband confronted her and, vampire-like, she tried to open his jugular vein to drink his blood, but he succeeded in throwing her down and, with a single blow, killing her. She was buried next day, but three days later, at midnight, she reappeared, attacked her husband again and once more attempted to suck his blood. This time he fled, and the following day he found her in her tomb, where he cremated her body, cast the ashes into the Tigris River and was free of her.
Such imaginative tales and romances from and about the Middle East, dating back to the Middle Ages and beyond, have often featured ghouls as grave-violators. Says Baring-Gould:
Of a moonlight night weird forms are seen stealing among the tombs, and burrowing into them with their long nails, desiring to reach the bodies of the dead ere the first streak of dawn compels them to retire. These ghouls, as they are called, are supposed generally to require the flesh of the dead for incantations or magical compositions, but very often they are actuated by the sole desire of rending the sleeping corpse, and disturbing its repose.
Not all ghouls disguise their hideous countenance. Palestinian–American folklorist Inea Bushnaq describes ghouls as the wildest and most repulsive-looking of the jinn, hairy, filthy and long of tooth with a sharp nose for the scent of human flesh. Unlike most of the eerily mute modern zombies, these ghouls talk: In the tales, they have a set entrance speech, which comes as the human hero stammers his “salamu alaikum” (“peace be with you”):
Lawla salaamak
Sabaq kalaamak
Had not your greeting
Come first before your speaking,
I would have torn your muscles each from each
And used your bones to pick my teeth.
Here is another vivid ghoul, this time from a Yemeni folk epic about sixth-century Himyarite King Sayf ben Dhi Yazan. Most unregally, he is treed by approaching ghouls. The monsters are closing in:
And as he gazed, he saw an old man approaching … hideous of countenance, his face round as a shield, his jaws and nose as great as a buffalo’s, with fangs jutting out like pincers, and his ears as large as catapults; he had nails like daggers, the hair on his body was like the spines of the porcupine, and his eyes were like slits of red flame. Hideous and evil-smelling he was, his face smoldering with evil….
This is not exactly the shambling, blood-smeared, undead corpse of the modern zombie movie, but the effect is close enough. Interestingly, as the story unfolds, the no-less-hideous Queen of the Ghouls arrives, but she displays a rare sympathy and helps the king escape an impending ghoul apocalypse caused by her own people.
So we see that, throughout the imaginative visions of vampires, werewolves and zombies that haunt western pop and literary culture, there are deep echoes that reverberate all the way back to the earliest Mesopotamian civilizations. Up they came through those ages, into Arabia, Greece and Europe, vampires blending and morphing into werewolves, werewolves into zombies and so on in endless combinations—yet all three hark back no less to the oldest Arabian ghouls. While they have walked among the nightmares of far too many lands to claim purity in their Middle Eastern origins, it’s nice—and perhaps prudent—to better know their lineage. Facts can be handy defenses, armor for the mind, when next sitting in a dark theater, gripping the armrests, about to be horrified.
Correspondence with a Nephew
CORRESPONDENCE WITH A NEPHEW
By Lewis and Steven Turco
Steven Turco wrote (on 11/07/09):
Dear Uncle Lew,
I read La Famiglia1 over the last week on my work trip to Denmark (coincidentally, I surmised from your book that I am approximately 1/8 Danish). I must say I was quite enlightened by the amount of detail it gave me about my family history, especially my grandparents and obviously you. I've often wondered how Grandpa Luigi from Sicily found his way to be a Baptist minister in the U.S. He had quite a life, rich with experience, and overwhelming passion for his beliefs. I'm glad he had the opportunity to see the birth of a grandson and, although I don't remember him, the time we spent together in that first year apparently brought him great joy; knowing that will always live within me.
Grandma Turco was very special to me. Dad and I and in later years Scott too would visit her almost every Friday evening. She'd greet me with kisses all over my face and have a plate of spaghetti waiting on the table. After dinner she'd always do her favorite trick for me and take out her dentures and put them in a cup of water. Obviously as a young child that scared the hell out of me but fascinated me at the same time.
Her house was a mysterious adventure land for me, especially the attic, and I loved to explore it every time I visited. The old rooms, books, clothes, knick knacks everywhere stimulated my imagination to a degree that I will never forget.
And then there was the typewriter. I'd spend endless hours typing away at stories I'd made up about friends, school and adventures that took me to all ends of the earth. I taught myself to type on that typewriter, one finger at a time, which is how I still type today, although I'm pretty fast at it. What I never really thought about and what struck me when reading your book was that typewriter was probably the same one that Grandpa Luigi used to write his weekly sermons. Thinking back now, I remember how Grandma would love to see me at that typewriter. She'd bring me cookies and help me if I had a question but never interrupted me as I "banged out" another story. Maybe it was just the sound of the typewriter that brought a sense of familiarity back into her household and gave her peace in a time of loneliness in her life. I sure hope it did.
One of the things I've always regretted was not spending more time reading your books. I always thought it was the coolest thing as a child to see your name on a book or better yet go to the library and look up one of your books and show one of my friends. On many occasions I would open the book and begin to read but very quickly become lost and/or confused and eventually just put it down. The poems that were sent at Christmas always struck me as "dark" and "non-joyous."
I've never regarded myself as a "reader," but I've always as a child and an adult enjoyed reading for both enjoyment and educational purposes, though I could never seem to connect with your books. After reading La Famiglia, though, I not only have a better understanding of my family, its roots and fascinating history (on both sides), but of you, your experiences and the many reasons why you write what you do.
I learned a great deal from this book, not only of who we are as a family but the trials, tribulations and hope and inspirations that affected many in our past and present and, more important, how it will positively influence the generations to come. I am extremely pleased that this book is dedicated to the future of the Turco clan and especially to my boys, who are the joy of my life.
I attempted to write a book like this utilizing my past experiences and recollections, as I used to have a photographic memory, it just never fully developed.
Steve Turco
Dear Steve,
I'm puzzled by several things you say in your letter. One of them is, "I used to have a photographic memory...." How can you "used to have" one of those? Short of a stroke, I would think it would be impossible to lose such a thing. It's just the way one's mind works. You seem to use that as an excuse for not writing the memoirs you planned to write. My memory is far from "photographic," but I remember enough things from my past to write memoirs. I'm sure everybody does. Take a look again at the memoir in La Famiglia that was written by my cousin Ann Badach.2 She was never a writer, and that's the first thing she's ever published. The stuff she remembers is amazing and compelling.
You also say, " I've never regarded myself as a 'reader' but I've always as a child and an adult enjoyed reading for both enjoyment and educational purposes." Isn't that the definition of a reader?
You say, too, "I'd spend endless hours typing away at stories I'd made up about friends, school and adventures that took me to all ends of the earth." So did I, but I never quit. I used to walk to school making up stories for my friends as we walked. How does one manage to lose interest in telling stories? It's baffling to me. What happened to you anyway?
"I taught myself to type on that typewriter, one finger at a time...." So did I. The Navy taught me to touch-type, but when in high school I worked at the Meriden newspaper, most of the journalists used the hunt-and-peck method, just as you and I and your grandfather did.
Finally, you write that the Xmas cards I sent every year "always struck me as 'dark' and 'non-joyous.'" Where did you get the idea that writers are supposed to write stuff that's "joyous"? The world is a dark place, Steven, and that's what I often write about. Just this past week: people gunned down at Fort Hood; the D.C. sniper executed; more soldiers killed in Afghanistan, etc., etc. Have you ever read Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," the most popular poem in English literature? T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," perhaps the greatest poem of the 20th century? Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn"? Shelley's "Ozymandias," Poe's "The Raven," just to name a few exceedingly popular ones? Even the "joyous" poet Walt Whitman wrote "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" and "A Noiseless, Patient Spider."
I'm attaching a book review titled "Happy Days" that appeared in the New York Times Book Review last Sunday.
Love, Uncle Lew
HAPPY DAYS
By Hanna Rosin
(New York Times, November 5, 2009)
BRIGHT-SIDED: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, By Barbara Ehrenreich, 235 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company, 2009. I must confess, I have waited my whole life for someone to write a book like “Bright-Sided.” When I was a young child, my family moved to the United States from Israel, where churlishness is a point of pride. As I walked around wearing what I considered a neutral expression, strangers would often shout, “What’s the matter, honey? Smile!” as if visible cheerfulness were some kind of requirement for citizenship. I must confess, I have waited my whole life for someone to write a book like “Bright-Sided.”
Now, in Barbara Ehrenreich’s deeply satisfying book, I finally have a moral defense for my apparent scowl. All the background noise of America — motivational speakers, positive prayer, the new Journal of Happiness Studies — these are not the markers of happy, well-adjusted psyches uncorrupted by irony, as I have always been led to believe. Instead, Ehrenreich argues convincingly that they are the symptoms of a noxious virus infecting all corners of American life that goes by the name “positive thinking.”
What started as a 19th-century response to dour Calvinism has, over the years, turned equally oppressive, Ehrenreich writes. Stacks of best sellers equate corporate success with a positive attitude. Flimsy medical research claims that cheerfulness can improve the immune system. In a growing number of American churches, confessions of poverty or distress amount to heresy. America’s can-do optimism has hardened into a suffocating culture of positivity that bears little relation to genuine hope or happiness.
Ehrenreich is the author of several excellent books about class — “Nickel and Dimed” is the best known. In this book she also reaches for a conspiratorial, top-down explanation. “Positive thinking,” she maintains, is just another way for the conservative, corporate culture to wring the most out of its workers. I don’t exactly buy this part of her argument, but the book doesn’t suffer much for the overreaching. I was so warmed by encountering a fellow crank that I forgave the agenda.
Ehrenreich’s inspiration for “Bright-Sided” came from her year of dealing with breast cancer. From her first waiting room experience in 2000 she was choking on pink ribbons and other “bits of cuteness and sentimentality” — teddy bears, goofy top-10 lists, cheesy poetry accented with pink roses. The sticky cheerfulness extended to support groups, where expressions of dread or outrage were treated as emotional blocks. “The appropriate attitude,” she quickly realized, was “upbeat and even eagerly acquisitive.” The word “victim” was taboo. Lance Armstrong was quoted as saying that “cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me,” while another survivor described the disease as “your connection to the divine.” As a test, Ehrenreich herself posted a message on a cancer support site under the title “Angry,” complaining about the effects of chemotherapy, “recalcitrant insurance companies” and “sappy pink ribbons.” “Suzy” wrote in to take issue with her “bad attitude” and warned that “it’s not going to help you in the least.” “Kitty” urged her to “run, not walk, to some counseling.”
The experience led her to seek out other arenas in American life where an insistence on positive thinking had taken its toll. One of the more interesting chapters concerns American business culture. Since the publication of Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” in 1936, motivational speaking has become so ubiquitous that we’ve forgotten a world without it. In seminars, employees are led in mass chants that would make Chairman Mao proud: “I feel healthy, I feel happy, I feel terrific!” Corporate managers transformed from coolheaded professionals into mystical gurus and quasi celebrities “enamored of intuition, snap judgments and hunches.” Corporate America began to look like one giant ashram, with “vision quests,” “tribal storytelling” and “deep listening” all now common staples of corporate retreats.
This mystical positivity seeped into the American megachurches, as celebrity pastors became motivational speakers in robes. In one of the great untold stories of American religion, the proto-Calvinist Christian right — with its emphasis on sin and self-discipline — has lately been replaced by a stitched-together faith known as “prosperity gospel,” which holds that God wants believers to be rich. In my favorite scene of the book, Ehrenreich pays a visit to Joel and Victoria Osteen’s Lakewood Church in Houston, now the nation’s largest church. She arrives a week after a court has dismissed charges against Victoria, accused of assaulting a flight attendant who failed to deal promptly with a stain on her first-class airplane seat on the way to Vail. One would think, Ehrenreich suggests, that the largely working-class, multiracial crowd might sympathize with the working stiff on the plane who happened to be African-American. But no, Joel is shown dabbing his eyes on the video screen, and Victoria crows about the “banner of victory over my head” as the crowd cheers.
“Where is the Christianity in all of this?” Ehrenreich asks. “Where is the demand for humility and sacrificial love for others? Where in particular is the Jesus who said, ‘If a man sue you at law and take your coat, let him have your cloak also?’ ” Ehrenreich is right, of course, in her theological critique. But she misses a chance to dig deeper. I have spent some time in prosperity churches, and as Milmon F. Harrison points out in “Righteous Riches,” his study of one such church, this brand of faith cannot be explained away as manipulation by greedy, thieving preachers. Millions of Americans — not just C.E.O.’s and megapastors but middle-class and even poor people — feel truly empowered by the notion that through the strength of their own minds alone they can change their circumstances. This may be delusional and infuriating. But it is also a kind of radical self-reliance that is deeply and unchangeably American.
Hanna Rosin is a co-editor of Slate’s women’s Web site, DoubleX, and a contributing editor at The Atlantic.
Thanks for the response, Uncle Lew. The "photographic memory" line was just a jab at humor, a pun (not fully developed), I didn't mean it literally. I do read a fair amount of books so I guess I would be considered a reader, but my point was more that even if I do consider myself to be a reader I don't currently have the passion to make it more of a priority in my life. Maybe someday that will change, but for now I feel satisfied with the balance I choose between my home life, work life and how I fit my reading into both.
I never lost interest in telling stories, I love to tell stories, I just chose to do it verbally, it saves time.
The world is what it is. It's as bright as it is dark. For every horror story that happens on a daily basis there is a story of love and kindness as well. Life is short, I choose to focus on the things in this world that make me smile, laugh and bring me happiness. I know the ugliness is out there, but why would I want to bring that into my life? I've chosen early on in my life to be a decent person with a positive outlook. To do that I choose to surround myself with people, books, art, places that bring me "joy" rather than listening or reading about the depressing horrors of our society. Fortunately I've never had any severe hardships in my life that would turn me to the "dark" side like some of the authors you mentioned (Gray had an abusive father, Eliot had a nervous disorder) but if I did, I believe that it is still my nature to turn them into positive aspects (as Lance Armstrong did with his cancer) and continue to see the good in life. And although some of these authors that you mentioned may be highly regarded academic poets, they were certainly not people I would want to emulate my life after (Shelley abandoned his pregnant wife and child to run off with a 16 year girl and Poe was an alcoholic drug user.)
I agree with Barbara Ehrenreich 100%. There is a lot of "positive thinking" bullshit out there that can cloud peoples' minds and affect their judgment, especially in corporate America. I see it every day. I don't think that just because I have a "positive outlook" on life that good things are going to come to me, or I'm going to become wealthy or not get sick, those things are going to come to me because I work hard and take care of myself. I'm a realist, I always have been, but I see no reason why I can't be a realist with a positive attitude.
Love.
Steve
Ah, Steve,
Nobody ever asked you to be anything but "a decent person with a positive outlook." I've always known you to be that, and it's one of the reasons I'm so fond of you. You're a lot like your dad, who is the same sort of person. He's a very decent guy and I've always been very fond of him, too. But I don't understand why you would condemn people like Gray and Poe and whoever for being who they are and writing out of their experience and their humanity. I've always thought I am a decent person too, who likes to surround himself with art, music, and all the things you mention, as well. That doesn't prevent me from seeing that the "balance" you mention doesn't seem to me to be a balance unless I'm able to observe and write about the rest of life. I can sing a happy song, but I can also sing a sad song, and the only thing I demand of any song is that it tell me the truth and be beautiful.
Case in point: One of my colleagues at Oswego was a German Jewish economist named Richard Heiss. He was married to another native German called Jo Heiss. He came to SUNY Oswego in 1961, four years before I arrived, and he was active in the Oswego Opera Society for which Jean and I sang in the chorus most years. Jo was a ceramicist and a member of the Oswego Art Society like my Xmas card partner George O'Connor. While we were in Oswego last month I thought about them, wondered if they were still alive at ages 89 and 87 respectively. I thought about them while we were on our daily walk in Breitbeck Park at the bottom of the hill where we live on West 8th Street because we used to run into Dick and Jo sometimes when they walked there as well.
On Monday last, while we were driving back to Dresden, Dick and Jo Heiss each took massive amounts of prescription narcotics, but before she died Dick shot Jo in the back of the head with a pistol. People found their bodies a couple of days later. The police determined that no third party was involved. Dick and Jo were also decent people, usually with positive outlooks. They did volunteer work and had many friends, but they had no children, no other known family in the U. S. Why would a good old couple die by murder-suicide at a great age? They must have hurt a great deal — why else would they have so many narcotics on hand? — and it was known that they were ill.
Here's the question: What should I think about them? Should I dismiss them for their unforgivable actions? Maybe they were somehow psychically injured by having grown up in Nazi Germany. Maybe a husband should never be forgiven for killing his wife, no matter what the reason. But I understand how Dick and Jo could have done this to themselves (they injured no one else), because I'm getting old, too. Should I reject the idea of writing a poem for them? Because that's been revolving in my mind for a couple of days now as I read the developing story on-line in the Oswego Palladium-Times and hear from other colleagues via e-mail. Or should I just dismiss them from my memory as being unworthy subjects for an elegy? Because if I write it and do it well, I will show the few people who read it how human Dick and Jo Heiss were, and how sad their passing is.
Lew
Uncle Lew,
I guess it comes down to what "balance" means in each individual's life. For me, I tend to balance out the good stuff with the great stuff and shield out the bad stuff. You take it all in and go from there. I guess that's what makes the world what it is.
Sorry to hear about your friends. I'm sure whatever you write will be honest and lasting.
Steve
_____
1La Famiglia: The Family, Memoirs, by Lewis Turco, New York, NY: www.BordigheraPress.org, VIA Folios 57, 2009, 196 pp., ISBN 978-1-59954-006-1, trade paperback.
2Ibid., “A Letter to My Cousin,” by Ann Badach, pp 185-189.
April 04, 2018 in Americana, Books, Commentary, Correspondence, Criticism, Essays, Family, Italian-Americana, Literature, Nonfiction, Poetry, Reminiscences | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: dark, light, poetry