This was written over a dozen years ago, for an anthology that went to press without it.
Autumn Painted Red : My Little Lovers
You all know the story.
At least partial words and images thereof. Which by the very nature of their being fractal makes them rather far from impartial in direction. And direction is key, to be sure. As obscenely as any artist at work, in the bloodied Fall of 1888 Jack The Ripper was a busy boy, ripping apart the women of Whitechapel while congruously ripping apart the sensibilities of all who followed the immediate and fastly growing notoriety of the case. With Jack, directing and misdirecting and knowing full well of the audiences that awaited eagerly his every move like a junkie created anew. So in control was the man in spite of the blasphemous violence of his deeds that to this day the ultimate facts of what Whitechapel endured that particularly red Autumn remain one of the greatest of unsolved mysteries. Was he the first serial killer? The last? Of course not, but oh how was he special.
And oh, how his drama lived on.
As such, with you the readers already aware to varying degrees of the brutal deaths of the canonical five, of the six others of the time- uncredited as they arguably were- and the exceedingly real possibility of many more before and well after the period in question, of the highly publicized domestic violence wrought by this “Leather Apron” then I will not throw the known facts your way. The good Lord knows there are numerous works aplenty spouting those facts already, and especially the plenitude of lies that seem to keep company with said known facts. This article, the volume that contains it, is purposed with the desire to keep alive the legend of the history and the history of the legend. Moreso, to portray a certain feeling that arises when one delves into the merry world of Ripperology. A feeling, if you will, that has grown these one-hundred and some odd years since into a pulsating, throbbing beast unto itself, far larger than merely a few scared women cowering desperately in a few shadowy East End back alleyways (yea, inclusion of the meta-fictional by way of reality killing of Shakespeare in Manhattan notwithstanding). And as with all things larger than life itself, this is in fact a symbology incarnated.
So what then, is the bloody point? A manner of exploratory surgery, if you will. A quasi-psychological examination and commentary on the effects such cause has inflicted upon these many years since that particular Fall of that particular year. And a precursory warning at that- do not be fooled by ego, as our modern world (and with all due accentuation cast on Western culture especially) has indeed been thusly and undeniably shaped by the actions of this unknown Ripper of women.
In the early years, well after the horrific deaths of whores Nichols, Chapman, Stride, Eddowes, and Kelly, there were indeed continued killings in Whitechapel. Granted, such a place in such an era was a nest of criminal actions, as the working class citizenry were spellboundedly dumbstruck at making ends meet regardless of dictates from their Church or State. Poverty does typically breed a rather distinct variety of harshness in living. While not every local denizen was a criminal of nefarious savantry, the population was overcrowding and so clustered enough so that even the most common of men lived not a wholly peaceful existence therein. So among other cursed things, murders indeed happened. But the fact
that to this day draws the curious attentions of historians the world over is the degree of violence most brutal committed upon the fairer of sexes of London’s East end, well into the 1890’s, and beyond.
That was the world, the times. Now imagine, the effect such borderline incredulous acts had on the people of those days, those streets. They had not the levels of popular culture that the people of today so freely and so mindlessly enjoy. The media preternaturally latched on to old Jack, creating the mythos and instilling it with a larger than life narrative before the man’s drama had even played itself through to natural end. And though the identity of the man was never uncovered, the media’s obsession led to a long series of literally hundreds of arrests, fueling the authorities into action, then tearing the same authorities back down over their inability to adequately deal with such inhumanity. Simply put, nobody had seen anything like such a mess before, ever. All at once it would seem, that the duties of the police forces everywhere had their respective antes upped, such as with the apparent creation of the need for profiling suspects. And equally, drunk on its own newfound power the media was suddenly in a position to push a lot of weight about, regardless of proper aim. I daresay, that in the age of the Ripper, media sensationalism was not only suggestively given form, it was born.
And despite the Jack of a Ripper mysteriously ceasing his own crusade, the murders continued, and the media’s sickening fascination with the subject grew exponentially, strangely. Suspicions were written for all to take in, with groundless guesswork flying around like gossip streams unharnessed throughout the city, throughout the country, throughout even other far away parts of the world. From newspapers onto magazines and books, the fingers of the infamy clawed there way abroad, with the case possibly even continuing as far as to the States, and with the growing list of suspects reaching for the sake of maddening inclusion such unconnected names as even the great Lewis Carroll. Imaginations were sparked and kindled. A cult of personality was birthed, a dark trend suggestive of the darker times to come globally. And as the hype mushroomed onwards and upwards, the absurdity of this newly empowered media in action grew accordingly. Inspired by the drama of real life tragedy, and its sudden self-awareness of the ability to immediately broadcast such nightmares for the entertainment of its collective subscribers and readers under the guise of “news”, it can be argued that the media- in the shadow of Jack- made its very own pact with the devil. In light especially of the many supposed but possible copycat killers of the day, on down to the myriad of letters that flooded in for the press and the police from Lord knows whereabouts, certain troubling things were set into motion with ramifications that people today are still living with. Modern media now had an ever-increasing audience with a thirst for tragedy, and modern popular culture was seeing in itself a rather nasty taste for blood in general.
On March the first of 1932, the child of aviator ace Charles Lindbergh was abducted from his home. Two months later the child’s body was found. What followed was a two year-long investigation which in turn was followed by a six week trial. And you can bet the media had a royal field day over the celebrity drama. Noted writer H.L. Mencken referred to that whole ordeal as the biggest story since the Resurrection of Christ. And everyone in the world seemed to unabashedly follow every blessed little detail of the melee as it oh so teasingly unfolded.
As technological advances developed throughout the twentieth century, so too were accordant uses found for said advancements of marvels. With film, the media once more held the persons of the world spellbound with newsreels from the trenches of World War Two, showing the nightmares of the Nazi agenda enacted, from storming dearest Europa on to the largest mass murder in recorded history. Indeed, WW2 has itself inspired everything from countless works of fiction in the forms of novels, movies, etc, on down to the hard realities of the violent and racist skinheads and Klansmen in your own twenty-first century backyards. Imaginations continue to be captured by such monstrosity. Just as dutifully, were the media’s fervent reportage of the Vietnam War, with many a television set tuned into the then latest coverage while gathered around the family supper, to watch developing footage of bodies piled on high, of real life explosions completely leveling villages, American soldiers blasted to bits being carted around by panicked field doctors, even Buddhist monks burning themselves alive in living protest- all of these had by this point in time, become a common, almost welcome form of prime-time eye-candy. And such real-life drama being regularly played out for the casual observer was just not enough anymore, sadly so. The news media’s obsession with brutal tragedies had become too common, to the point of nullifying away the otherwise inherent shock value of such unnatural acts. Numbed down by these dark tales of mad, desperate men doing mad, desperate things, popular culture, especially in the Western hemisphere, felt the lure to expand on the nightmarish insanities of ultra violence, spawning multimedia works that freely exhibit fictional graphic obscenities at an alarmingly increasive rate. The very psyche of the typical modern moviegoer, the modern reader of books and pamphlets, the modern music enthusiast, has grown into that of a sadist. The news reports that commonly, faithfully, portray the most dire evils of mankind simply cannot quench our collective bloodlusts enough, so we implore the mad goddess Imagination to help create abominations to better fill that arcane void.
Which in turn, inspire even more gruesome acts of man like an unholy folding circle. And the media today laps it up like hungry little mongrel dogs, putting the names of monsters such as Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, Charles Whitman, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffery Dahmer, and Ted Kaczynski and so many more of their motley ilkage into the minds and lexicon of our world today. Building up their heinous deeds into something far, far more twisted than any urban legend, applying celebrity status to the unthinkable. Life imitates Art, imitates Life, imitates Art, and on and so on. But how many of the victims of these famous men can so easily be named? By all appearances we now seemingly live in an age where the
glorification of brutal whims is not only newsworthy material as well as acceptable entertainment, but top dollar summer blockbusters, platinum-selling records, and bestseller lists everywhere at that. Media sensationalism has today grown to such an extent that unbiased media simply no longer exists. But if this by default is truly, wholeheartedly our culture now, then how can we be ashamed by such travesty? How indeed?
Of course, lest we forget like meandering fools that the very act of murder itself has existed since even before written language. Yet because of this technological age of wonders wherein we concurrently find ourselves now, we do seem to be all the more informed and knowledgeable of the widespread regularity of such deeds. And we accept them as part of life. Not only do we accept them, but the very fictions we fabricate to further entertain ourselves, the popular trends that folks today go broke in pursuing like the most primal and base of eternal idolatry, involves openly twisted evils and maddened desires so much more murderously destructive than anything as predictable and stoically archetypal as a mere cloaked man in a darkened alleyway of yore, holding the bloodied knife like a child holds its mother’s hand. As though the constant maelstrom of criminal acts readily made public knowledge the world over were not enough to drive a sane man over the edge, that same sane man actually, deep down yearns for more, lusts for something even worse?
But remember fairest of fair readers, who these curious times owe this curious little psychological state of affairs to- that one and same old Jack.
I for one, should know damn well of such accursed things.
I have watched your devolution from right here in the flames of damnation for many long decades already, and oh how my lips are drawn on occasions to smile a sickly painted smile of my own, in none but the deepest of carnal satisfactions. I smiled at your Nuremberg trials. Smiled at the mandates of your FCC, of your Comics Code Authority. Smiled at the allowably inane perversions your respected major news outlets held for the likes of Lyle and Erik Menendez, of OJ Simpson, your Son of Sam and your Night Stalker and your Zodiac Killer. The court of public opinion knows bloody well what it really wants, what it needs, what gets its pulse quickened and its nipples hardened.
for now and as ever, and forever and evermore do I sign off quite quite quite literally, in this time of times-
FROM HELL.