The Wall of Your Own Writing (David Intro) (10/05/2019)

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This coming Monday will be the anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe's death. If you’re in Baltimore this weekend, where Poe died mysteriously 170 years ago, and a fan of Poe (or maybe just a fan of spookiness and October) you may want to check out the second annual International Edgar Allan Poe Festival and Awards. For the literary minded, commemorating Edgar Allan Poe seems like one of the best possible ways to celebrate the month of October, doesn't it? I won’t be going to the “death festival,” but I’m thinking of returning to the Philadelphia Poe House. I first went there last spring. It's a pleasant ten-minute walk from my apartment. (One of the things I have enjoyed about living in Philly over the last year is being conveniently close to history.) Although Poe lived in Philadelphia six years in total, he rented the house on 7th (which would’ve been smaller than what stands there today) from spring of 1843 into 1844. He lived there with his wife and mother-in-law. It is the only one of his Philadelphia residences still standing and it is extraordinary to visit, in part, because the rooms have been left empty and in a state of "arrested decay," for some time, and if you let your imagination do its thing, you get a real sense of standing in 1844, instead of 2019.Poe's years in Philadelphia were arguably the most seminal in his life. During this time, he published "The Pit and The Pendulum," "The Tell-Tale Heart," and "The Mask of the Red Death." While I'm not sure that it's established fact that he penned "The Black Cat" while living in the house on 7th, the story was published in the Saturday Evening Post on August 19th, 1843. He was living there on that date, and would’ve been living there several months prior. But if you need more evidence he wrote the story in the house then there’s this: in the story, the narrator entombs the body of his wife, who he has just murdered, in the wall of his cellar, where there is "a projection, caused by a false chimney, or fireplace, that had been filled up, and made to resemble the rest of the cellar." In other words, it looked an awful lot like this:When I went to Poe’s house last spring, I stood in that cellar. I touched the walls and wondered if any cell of him was still there. I thought about the awesome mythology of Poe, and how that mythology carries over to places like this cellar in an otherwise normal looking piece of real-estate on 7th Street north of Spring Garden. How the legend of the cellar now sits against the unremarkable reality of it. The musty, humid past, now present. The generations of spiders who have lived in the cobwebs in the corners. I wondered what actual things happened down here, and in the other rooms of the house. What common or uncommon guilts and shames Poe was hiding behind the wall of his own writing.Today, Poe (like many larger-than-life historical figures) is less a person and more of an idea, a caricature of the man he used to be. Being in that house brought out that discrepancy between man and idea. When I was in that house, I was forced to reconcile the caricature, my thoughts of him, with the awareness that here stood a real person. Here probably stood a man beside a bookshelf, or at a desk, who at one time had a headache, who at one time felt sadness, who at one time laughed, who at one time cried. Who at one time looked for financial backers to form a literary magazine called The Penn. As I thought about all that, it made him seem both more real and more mysterious and unknown, more impossible to ever truly know.Maybe one of the reasons this has seemed so important to me lately is that for the last year or so, I've found myself having to make this same strange reconciliation with myself. With my own thoughts of myself, my sense of place, of time, with the stories I've told myself, or written down on paper or typed onto a screen. I've begun to forge a new self here in Philadelphia and it's put me in a strange relationship to my old self and by extension, my old writing. I am at once familiar and unknown to myself. My writing is at once familiar and unknown to me. I have been searching for a self who exists outside of the personal mythologies and narratives I've told, outside the wall of my own past writing. More and more I've been trying to tear down that wall and get at something beyond. It’s often hard to get started, but usually I can begin anyway by remembering not to get lost in the idea of something, which may seem sexy in its grandness, and instead trying to ground myself in the common everyday of the thing itself. How about you? How do you move beyond the wall of your own writing?Thanks for reading. We’re glad you’re here. David OlimpioEditor-in-Chief and Publisher

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