Lulu Hurst

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I've been planning to write a story about Lulu Hurst for some time, ever since I first heard about this amazing woman from Ben and Aaron of Mysterious Universe. According to her autobiography, Lulu Hurst (The Georgia Wonder) Writes Her Autobiography and for the First Time Explains and Demonstrates The Great Secret of Her Marvelous Power (yes, that's the full title), Hurst was gifted at the age of 14 with an amazing ability that she refers to simply as the "Power" or (curiously enough) the "Force." A real life nineteenth-century superheroine, Hurst was able to send the "Force" through a cane or a wooden chair, and make full grown men fly around the room uncontrollably. In her stage act, she would have as many strong men as could hold the cane grab onto it with all their strength. Placing only an open palm on the cane, she would laugh (something she argues was a key to using the Force) and the men would be tossed in every direction for several long minutes.

Hurst never showed signs of exertion. Men who participated in these demonstrations often reported feeling ill and exhausted for a day or more after the event.

We are very much used, these days, to stage illusionists and special effects, and we tend to dismiss accounts like Lulu's as mere hucksterism. I'm reading my way through Lulu Hurst's account of her life and her relationship with the "Force," and I see something else at work here. She claims that she was able to move people and objects without any physical effort on her part. Indeed, at first, she really seemed to think of the "Force" as something separate from herself. Only gradually was she able to keep it under control. She was an accomplished table rapper - someone who is able to answer a stranger's deepest personal questions via knocks on a table that are delivered by an unseen hand. Once or twice, she performed hands on healings: on a politician's wife, who suffered from neuralgia, and on a freight train engine that was struggling to pull a heavy load uphill - both apparently successful.

Hurst maintained that what she could do was a product of completely natural principles, not supernatural ones. (Although there is something distinctly poltergeisty about the way her powers came about, which I won't relate here because it's a long and convoluted story. But I completely recommend that if you're at all interested, you read the book - it's available online at the link above for free, courtesy of the Digital Library of Georgia.) She held that anyone can do what she did. I haven't hit the part of the book where she explains it all, but I can't wait.

You might be thinking that Hurst had an enormous crew of tricksters and people willing to play along with her act. Such performances could be fabricated easily, and the rest of her claims could be completely fictional.

On the other hand, as an internal martial artist, I've personally experienced many of the things Hurst claimed she could do. I'm no Lulu Hurst, and neither are my friends, but I have been thrown eight feet across a room by a two-inch punch, delivered by my tai chi master. I can easily resist the muscular force of someone much bigger than me, because I know how to use the natural structure of my body to channel that force. As a reiki and shamballa practitioner, I've performed self healing and healing on others with my hands - healings that make the recipient feel heat, tingling, and sometimes lightheaded or tipsy - all symptoms Hurst reports in her "victims."

Although such demonstrations can look completely fake if you aren't used to watching them, being on the receiving end of an experienced internal martial artist's technique is like being caught in a blender. The no-effort quality of the practitioner's defenses make it look like the "attacker" is simply a bad stunt man, but in my world, this stuff is quite real. I wonder if Lulu Hurst, a 14-year-old Southern belle of the late nineteenth century, didn't simply have a wonderful natural affinity for using chi.

Stranger things have happened.

Killer

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In preparation for NaNoWriMo 2010, I read a book called The Evil That Men Do by Stephen Michaud, a study of serial rapists and killers, written in collaboration with Roy Hazelwood, a pioneer in FBI profiling. I knew that, even as she was gifted (read: cursed) with the ability to fight evil, my main character was also going to become a powerful magnet for evil. And it seemed logical that, since she was a cute young woman with a job that involved working in a semi-seedy neighbourhood, often late at night, she would become a magnet for the type of men Hazelwood spent his career profiling.

One of the things I found most fascinating about this book was the fact that until relatively recently, sex crimes like rape were almost impossible to analyze, because nobody wanted to do it. When Hazelwood started his career, anyone who was interested in trying to understand the motivations behind such crimes were considered perverts, especially by fellow law enforcement officers. So the intimate interrelationship between sex criminals and killers went long unacknowledged. And yet, many serial killers begin their careers as rapists. What begins as a desire to dominate women (and, more rarely, men) often culminates in the desire to take a life.

Hazelwood was unique in his day in noticing that not all rapists and killers are alike. He made important key distinctions between chaotic, spur-of-the-moment, opportunistic serial murderers, and those who were meticulous planners.

The discipline of serial killer profiling opened up a whole new world (or maybe dark underbelly) to writers. Killers are useful in our fiction, and may even be the focal character. Jeff Lindsay's Dexter series of books depends on playing the line between the cultural fascination with killers and fantasies of vigilante justice.   

Judgement

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In the English Renaissance, the concept of judgement was a big deal. Everyone knew that eventually, no matter who you were or what your station in life, you would eventually have to answer to one judge, or rather Judge: the Big Kahuna himself. Images of the Last Judgement flooded Renaissance society.

From Hans Holbein's Danse Macabre: more info here.

Adding to English cultural anxieties about the Last Judgement was Calvinist thought. Calvinism and its thinkalikes placed a heavy emphasis on predestination, the idea that God had already determined the course of every event that would ever happen. Traditionally, predestination creates some issues for Christian thought, given the notion that we have free will. If everything is predetermined, then how do our decisions, which are ours alone to make, actually free?

Calvinist thought placed less emphasis on the importance of free will, and more on God's omniscience and omnipotence. In this system, whether you were damned or saved - or, in the parlance of the times, reprobate or elect - was determined long before you incarnated here on earth. So your actions - what you experience as your choices - are merely symptoms of whether you're going to end up taking the down car or the up car at the end of your life. It was a neat resolution of the problem of God's omnipotence vs. human free will, but it did create some interesting side effects in the Renaissance, like the ubiquitous obsession with remembering that you will die, and the need for constant vigilance lest you fall off the straight and narrow track and end up proving that you are reprobate.

Basel's Dance of Death: The Ossuary
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One could argue that the ever-popular dramatic structure of the conflict that ends in a revelatory court trial (think Merchant of Venice) is part and parcel of this overarching interest in and anxiety over judgement. In many ways, we might owe the undying Law and Order(s) to the Renaissance and Calvinist thought.

Nowhere did this interest in judgement prove more lurid than in books for popular consumption, however. Collections of tales like the enormous Theatre of God's Judgments (originally published in 1597), gathered oceans of evidence for the eager reader that proved, again and again, that those who transgress against God are found out. Fortunately for us, this 500-page tome is freely available via Google Books. If you're interested in the pulp fiction of the past, it's worth it to sort through the idiosyncratic spelling and typesetting of the Renaissance to read some stories from this book.

The Theatre of God's Judgments might, in another context, have been called The Book of Instant Karma. In the section on disobedient children, a son who makes a face at his mother causes her to wish that he would hang on the gallows. Surprise! He's caught stealing and is hung soon after, "and being upon the ladder, was perceived to writhe his mouth in grief, after the same fashion which he had done before to his mother in derision."  Those who enjoy their drink provide much of the slapstick in the book:

one Thomas Alred...an accustomed Drunkard, being entreated by a neighbour to unpitch a load of hay, and being at that very time in drink, letting his pitch-fork slip out of his hand, and stooping to take it up again, flipped from the cart with his head down-wards, his fork standing upright with the tines, he fell directly upon them, which at once ran into his breast, and struck his heart so, that he died suddenly.

The lesson of the Theatre is simple: there is no escaping the consequences of your actions. In its super high volume of tales, it provides something much more than simple moralizing, however. The book is almost gleeful in its reporting, and many of the tales are hilarious in their slap-bang-boom execution. This is down and dirty, and quite mean-spirited entertainment.

Icarus

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In Greek mythology, Icarus was the son of Daedalus. Daedalus (contrary to the old Hercules cartoon I grew up with), was not an arch-villain, but an inventor, a genius, really. He built the maze for Minos when the king needed somewhere to hide the evidence of Queen Pasiphae's bestial transgression, the minotaur. And when Minos imprisoned Daedalus in the maze, Daedalus made wings for himself and his son so they could escape.

The legend goes that Icarus, enraptured by his ability to fly, flew too close to the sun. The heat melted the wax that held the wings together, and Icarus fell to his death.

All it takes is one good shove.

Initially, Icarus's story represented failed ambition, or the fall that inevitably follows hubris, the ancient Greek concept of arrogance so intense that one loses touch with reality. In terms of sacred iconography, according to Kristina at The World According to Kristina, Icarus represents the destruction and annihilation by fire that is necessary for spiritual rebirth. Kristina argues that the Icarus myth leaves out the renewal that follows burning by fire and immersion in water after the fall. So in warning people not to fly too high, the Icarus myth could be viewed as a technique of control: this is what happens if you try; this is what happens if you follow your inspiration. (Which in turn makes everyone too afraid to even try.)

It probably would have stayed that way if not for the rise of the individual throughout the centuries that followed - a cultural trend that meant that no one really wanted to believe that "pride goeth before the fall."

What helped the recasting of Icarus along was a totally amazing and remarkable painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, called "Landscape With the Fall of Icarus," in which the momentous event is rendered almost irrelevant against the scene of everyday normal life. This is a complete reimagining of the myth.

Where's Icarus? (Click to enlarge)
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Building on Bruegel's triumph, twentieth-century poets rendered the Icarus myth into something quite different: a celebration of the continuity surrounding this disaster. My favourite of these poems is W.H. Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts."

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

(Poem, painting, and commentary.)

Hair Shirt

The hair shirt, also called a "celice," is a garment woven of rough goat hair or horse hair. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, the celice could be a literal shirt or a loin cloth. Its purpose was to mortify the flesh. By creating physical discomfort (think itchiness and chafing - ouch!), it reminded the wearer to resist temptations of the flesh, and was a sign of the wearer's penitence. Holy men and women, members of the clergy, and lay people could own and wear hair shirts.

Years ago I attended a talk by a faculty member at my alma mater called "Holy Underwear." Among many fun facts the medievalist speaker shared was the notion that people who wanted to wear their hair shirts too frequently were considered freaks, and might be told to dial it back. You wore your hair shirt for an itchy hour, in other words, not 24 / 7.

~ Hair shirt belonging to St. Louis, 13th century ~
~ St. Louis wore this shirt every Friday during Lent ~
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I've wondered about these practices. It's easy enough to imagine that the church might have harboured the occasional zealot who wanted to go nuts with the fleshly mortification. It seems to me that there must have always been masochists among us - people who derive a sexual thrill from pain. I love the idea that hiding under the appearance of piousness was the occasional pain enthusiast who just couldn't wait for hair shirt day to arrive, and who maybe went to mass with it under his or her clothes with an extra wide grin to go with it.

Grocery List

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I've been saving this as a story prompt for a little while, partially because it seems so bizarre I don't quite know what to make of it.

Found: one grocery list, discarded in the parking lot of my local chain supermarket.

Side 1:

Side 2:

Split personality? Husband / wife team? HOOVES?

Fisticuffs

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I like to fight. When I was younger, I fought verbally. Since that gets kind of obnoxious and tends to alienate your nearest and dearest, I've learned another outlet for my bellicose desires: sparring. I train with a martial arts master several times a week. Technically, it's an internal martial arts class with a focus on tai chi, but we get to fight from time to time. (Well, generally speaking, I take shots at my teacher and he tries not to wipe the floor with me too hard...it's fun times.)

In the west, before eastern martial arts masters decided to open schools in Europe and North America, bare knuckle boxing was the most popular form of hand to hand combat. Also known as fisticuffs or pugilism, this manly art was a primary means of solving conflict between gentlemen.

The rules of boxing were formalized in the late 1800s by John Sholto Douglas, Lord Queensberry, a Scottish nobleman. Although he didn't write the rules himself, he put his name on them, which I guess makes them sort of his.

John Sholto Douglas

The "Marquess of Queensberry Rules" exclude wrestling or clinches from possible moves in the boxing ring. They also dictate how to deal with it when someone gets K.O.'d, and introduce the wearing of gloves.

With these rules, boxing became a sport, and quite a bit of the vim and vigour went out of the act of fighting, in my opinion. John Sholto Douglas was in general a big downer, though: this is the same guy who brought Oscar Wilde to trial after he found out that his son was having an affair with Wilde.

I love the idea of trying to structure a short story around one protracted fight scene.

There's a basic observation in the theatre world that all you need to establish conflict is for one character to hit another. Instant motivation, characterization, and plot, right there!

The idea of bare knuckle fisticuffs as the heart of a story really intrigues me. I've done some stage combat training, so I'm hoping I could make it interesting. The one thing I did learn in stage combat class, however, is that a fight scene shouldn't be too long. Audiences tend to perceive them as being much longer than they are. So maybe this idea is better suited to a piece of flash fiction: perfect for Story A Day in May.

I'll leave you with two alternative definitions of fisticuffs, which are just perfect and possibly timeless, courtesy of the Urban Dictionary:

Fisticuffs are a favourite pastime for the Victorian Gentleman, as well as a way to sort out minor scuffles and souffles. Unlike modern boxers, the Victorian Gentlemen were not layabouts nor lollygaggers; they required neither padding nor special equipment. Bare knuckle fighting was the order of the day, and some experts believe it was the special of the day. This mano-a-mano competition could continue for anything up to 45 days, both combatants circling each other slowly, weighing up the strengths and weakenesses of their opponent and smoking fine cigars. During fisticuffs, the jacket is always taken off, braces are unhooked from the shoulder and sleeves are rolled up. 

Victorian Gentleman 1: Right-O Charles, did you see Johnathan over there challenge the Duke of York to throw down in fisticuffs?
Victorian Gentleman 2: Dear Lord, I daresay this could turn out to be a proper flogging! That pompus French bastard needs a good lashing
Victorian Gentleman 1: Right-O Charles! Right-O!

And alternatively:

A primitive dance usually done by 2 males late at night initiated by a slur or a pretty girl. Who clench both their hands and together, and move them up and down over their face (elbows down) while jumping from side to side in front of each other. The dance rarely ends with both parties impressed with their own or their partner's performance. 

Alex: Wow that girl is hot
Joe: I done seen her first!
Alex: Let us dance in the manner of fisticuffs.
Joe: Agreed!