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Bad World
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by Warren Ellis
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| BAD
LOVE Before World War Two, James Shelby Downard had a lover whom he refers to now only as "The Great Whore." Fringe journalist Adam Parfrey writes of seeing photos of her, kept still by Downard, and implies that she was a very beautiful woman. Something went wrong. How wrong? How wrong does it have to go for a man to today believe that the probable great love of his life was electronically wired for nymphomania and used to dope him so she could freely run around humping the rich and famous in a distinctly occult manner? "One day I found [a wire] sticking out of her ass. I pulled it out. It's a long, thin wire, and connected to the end of it is some microelectronic contraption. This was to get her in a constant state of sexual excitation." "They implanted me, too," he said in 1994, at the age of eighty-five, living with a sister who plainly took him in after years of his wandering America in an Airstream. A sister whom he almost immediately claims,to a visiting Parfrey, was adopted and doesn't know it. "The Great Whore" spiked him with amnesiac drugs and performed "sex rites" with the American elite. Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen say of Downard, "As far as Downard's concerned, the era when science was indistinguishable from sorcery never ended," and he speaks like a man who's survived a succubus and looked down into Hell with an erection. Or perhaps Hell reached up for him. These are Downard's own words: "The United States which has long been called a melting pot, should more descriptively be called a witches' cauldron wherein the 'Hierarchy of the Grand Architect of the Universe' arranges for ritualistic crimes and psychopolitical psychodramas to be performed in accordance with a Master plan." Downard is – if he's still alive – one of the great berserk visionaries of American writing, a conspiracist of astonishing range, passion and strangeness. He has constructed a massive web of secret and lie and spell and betrayal in which the world hangs. In which Downard's world has probably hung since he lost the love of a beautiful woman more than half a century ago. James Shelby Downard suggests that Marilyn Monroe's death was Freemasonically inspired, because "when she was mortal she was subjected to sexual debauchery, as the innocent are in sorcery rites." Bad love. Warren Ellis Southend, England May 29, 2000 |