Green Vincentine @greenvincentine - Tumblr Blog

Posts

Come all you Virginia gals and listen to my noise, Don’t go with these West Virginia boys. If you do, your fortune will be Corn bread and bacon, you will see.

When they come a’courtin’ they’ll bring along a chair. First thing they say: “Pappy killed a deer!“ Next thing they say when you sit down, "Honey can you bake your Johnny cakes brown?”

When they go to meetin’ I’ll tell you what they wear: Long-tail coat, just about to tear, Pair of old boots, top turned down, Pair of cotton socks that they wear year round.

“West Virginia Gals” traditional

image: from LIFE photographer Bill Ray’s unpublished shots of the San Berdoo chapter of the Hell’s Angels, 1965

#self actualization #freedom #the sixties

At noon in the desert a panting lizard waited for history, its elbows tense, watching the curve of a particular road as if something might happen.

It was looking at something farther off than people could see, an important scene acted in stone for little selves at the flute end of consequences.

There was just a continent without much on it under a sky that never cared less. Ready for a change, the elbows waited. The hands gripped hard on the desert.

"At the Bomb Testing Site" William Stafford

#national poetry month

“Guys at the gas station insisted that the woman was almost always seen in one of the upper windows. Said she can be seen only if you don’t look at her, which doesn’t make sense to me. Kids around here call the old store ‘the beehive.’ That sound never stops. The township committee has closed and boarded it now.

The vibrations are harmless to most animals, according to a flyer at the post office. I didn't read all of it. Another guy told me that the overwhelming aroma of fermenting apples, along with the perpetual droning sound, can give you a headache and nausea.

The townspeople still have some kind of meeting late at night in the street nearby each month. This was posted on another flyer. I really don’t know what they do.”

Interview with unnamed subject, as part of report from Institut Métapsychique International for their first U.S. and Canada field study.

Image: Kevin Oliver

Do you feel unsteady? Do you feel dizzy? Do your hands feel peculiar? Do you tremble inside? Do things seem too far away? Are shapes and colors altered in any way? Do you sense time slowing down or moving faster? Do you feel as if in a dream? Do you see yourself or someone else in the mirror?

from Table 4: Questions discriminating between zero and 50 micrograms LSD Investigator’s Brochure: Lysergic Acid Diethylamide

#self actualization #therapy

LYDIA Did you get the windows in the attic, Mitch? MITCH I got them all, Mother. LYDIA When do you think they’ll come? MITCH I don’t know. LYDIA If there are larger birds, Mitch… they’ll get into the house. MITCH That’s a chance we have to take. LYDIA Maybe we ought to leave. MITCH Not now. Not while they’re massing out there. LYDIA When? MITCH I don’t know when. We’ll see what… LYDIA Where will we go? MITCH I don’t know yet. I think we’ll be safe here. Let’s bring that wood in. LYDIA What happens when we run out of wood?

excerpt from Evan Hunter’s screenplay for The Birds, based on the novel The Birds by Daphne Du Maurier, final draft, 2nd revision March 2, 1962 image: Otto Hunter

#the signs and wonders

"The third phase of the program is dissemination of information concerning UFO sightings, evaluations, and statistics. This is accomplished by the Secretary of the Air Force, Office of Information. The Air Force defines an unidentified flying object as any aerial object which the observer is unable to identify."

From Project Blue Book, February 1966

image: Barbara McKenzie

You say the sallow and the birch deceived me: But I know well that I beheld today The ancient gods, unheralded, majestic, Upon their way.

from "The Ancient Gods" Mary Webb

image: Shirley Baker

#folk horror #the signs and wonders #what is in the water?

On occasion of the 45th anniversary of Closer.

#joy division #post punk #closer #ian curtis

“Nothing is sweeter to funereal hearts On whom the frost of ages has been laid… than the eternal sight of your pale shade.”

Charles Baudelaire, “Mists and Rains” (translation)

Look and they Can't be found, Playing their Presence down. Listen they make No sound, Look and they go To ground. You may wake To find Your coffee cup Is empty, And the tray You left Is not bedside The door. You are sure you Had another Hidden carton When you look For it, it's not there Anymore. Inky bloaters! They're a Consequence of Never being sure, Look and they Can't be found...

"Inky Bloaters" Dannielle Dax

#the signs and wonders #folk horror #the eternal return

These towns were all the same.

The corner in Chattanooga did not strike her as any different from a downtown curb in Charlotte, just as the holiday decorations seemed not to distinguish Albany’s sidewalks from those in the various cities of, say, Ohio or Pennsylvania. And she’d seen a few, because sidewalks in various cities are what you see when you can’t stop moving.

It was the same with friends, lovers, the last husband, and even a couple of distant cousins; all of them offered identical disappointments, cruelties, and neglect. Because of this, she went through people the way a five year-old goes through a box of animal crackers. The moment she heard the single word—or spotted the one gesture—that had previously signaled that this cousin or that neighbor might injure her in a small or large way, she packed a bag and unfolded a map.

She was never wrong about people. That girl at the cosmetics counter near the bottom of the escalator was like ice, and so it was child’s play to correctly guess that the department store worker who greeted her at the top of the escalator would be just as aloof. Those three women walking together past display windows might be her girlfriends for a year or longer, should she choose to stay in this town. Then the day would arrive when they were not her friends. Arrival and departure.

She could take a bus the rest of the way. She knew precisely where each one was headed, long before the destination sign came within view. All buses have the same destination. They were all the same.

#attention shoppers

Faye Tully, my new massage therapist and also my "regular" therapist, makes house calls. And she practices alternative healing.

Yesterday afternoon she popped by for tea and stayed until just after midnight; tells me these non-professional social visits are "part of the process." I'm all for it, now that my lower lumbar is worrying me again.

Faye made herself at home with a book of ghost stories and some vintage pulp magazines I keep on hand for October evenings on my back porch. After a long silence (roughly an hour) I mentioned that, re: alternative healing, at the hospital where I work there's an emphasis on evidence-based medicine. Empirical science and whatnot.

"Do the experts at your medical center understand that appointments with specialists always being four to six months out is essentially 'no' medicine, evidence or not?" she fired back.

Yep, Faye is one tough cookie. And she's not whistling Dixie when she uses the term "alternative."

Has a little bag of carved jade runes in her briefcase. Tarot. Planchette. Keeps miniature black candles in an old Altoids tin. Her notes are written in hieroglyphics with a quill.

Among other keepsakes in that briefcase was a crumpled photo of a man "somewhere in Yugoslavia, 1945" whom she swears is her grandfather and fought the fascists; he's got a beat-up Enfield slung over his shoulder and wears a partisan scarf, so maybe so. That photo and her Eastern Bloc accent make Faye's claim to be born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, seem slightly off bubble.

But I do love that she carries in a tiny wicker basket her treasured pet hedgehog, Mr. Brush. He's a well behaved and endlessly curious little gnome, so I let him have the run of my porch during the visit.

Faye lit one of those candles, which, after three hours, was still not a quarter-inch shorter than when match met wick. I told Faye that her perpetual candle was one of the most amazing devices I'd ever seen.

"Infinity is a constant illusion," she sighed. "But we can always dream about forever."

"I see what you did with that sentence construction," I replied." "Constant with infinity. Always with forever. Is your incantation redundant, tautological, or just magical?"

"Look at you catching the subtle clues, inspector," she said. "But I'm not the local witch, even in October."

"Well you kind of are," I said, then scooped up Mr. Brush and rubbed his belly. "You have the cutest little familiar in town."

The greenhouse clock stuck midnight. Mr. Brush made a happy clucking sound. Faye pinched out the candle.

"You should give that a rest, Dave. Especially in October."

She calls me Dave. Did I mention that she's gorgeous?

#october #the signs and wonders #this is the dark age of love

This time of year, circa way back when, finding this and similar gems in any library had me set for the season.

I've been hooked since 4th grade, after reading a story by H.P. Lovecraft, the gist of which I grasped maybe 50%. Maybe.

But I stayed with this kind of stuff, reinforced by Rod Serling's "Night Gallery," which often presented TV versions of stories by some of the authors I loved.

By 8th grade at least two of my teachers sightly feared me, and if that's not a testament to the value of books, what is?

#national book month #horror literature

“How many Magick days each month can our district expect in 2025?

Majick Days are made from rune days and circle days. We will cast runes on the third day of each month; our community shall gather as one on circle days.

There will be 17 Magick days in 2025. We know this because these days are determined each October (the Month of Months) on the measure day. A full moon marks the measure day, which for this year will be October 17. Taking 12 rune days from 17 Majick days leaves five circle days.

Therefore we shall form our circle five times in 2025. The date of each circle day is, as usual, unknowable in advance.”

Minutes from Circle Day Advisory panel, Oxbourne-Welling Town Council, 13 September, 2024

#folk horror #the signs and wonders #english pastoral

“While dreaming, we are out of touch with our bodies and consequently liberated from the physical constraints imposed by waking perception…The part of us that ‘leaves the body’ travels in mental, not physical space. Consequently, it would seem reasonable to suppose that we never “leave our bodies” because we are never in them. The mind is not merely its own place, the mind is its only place.”

from “Dreaming, Illusion, and Reality” Stephen LaBerge

Image: "Coney Island Fortune Teller," 1951, Martin Elkort

“The astral light is projected by glance, by voice, and by the thumb and palm of the hand. Music is a potent auxiliary of the voice, and hence comes the word 'enchantment.'”

from Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual Alphonse Louis Constant

#music is magic #etymology

Susan can see the stones changing. Susan can see the sky changing.

What changes can you see? Do you think Susan will change too?

Science for Modern Living: 1 Along the Way Victor C. Smith and Katherine Clarke

#the signs and wonders #summer solstice #folk horror

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

Green Vincentine