Steppin' to the bad side, ooh, ooh, ooh
Gonna take a mean ride, ooh, ooh, ooh
The smile I had has gone away
Those that steal are gonna pay
Steppin' to the bad side today
I tell ya now, its got to end
No more trustin' them, my friends
We're gonna change our style, change our tone
Steppin' to the bad side, surrendering to the darkness...is every mind truly prone to madness?
This is the question pondered throughout the class session this week.
As we know, every mind is prone to addiction of some kind. Oftentimes this addiction overcomes our free will and we can no longer be accountable for our own actions; we'd do anything for a fix, to silence our all consuming monomania. With addiction we are controlled by our bad choices. Again, our free will is overcome. I think the nature of addiction varies from person to person…but regardless, their free will is always in contention and their choices are always at least partly from the addiction source. Like how one of my grandmother’s relatives recently stole her jewelry while she was sleeping in order to go buy drugs. This raises a new question. Is free will outside the realm of reason?
In The Black Cat by Edgar Allen Poe, the narrator makes us question the relationship between addiction and freewill. For not only does the narrator take the eye of his "beloved" cat, Pluto, but he later goes on to hang Pluto, kill his wife, and wall her corpse up in the wall. What drove this sociopath to kill? Was it addiction such as his alcoholism? Or was it some more sinister, deeper issue? Stephen Asma, the visiting author to our school, once said that "we always look for the catalyst behind every wrong-doing." He's right. We truly cannot begin to fathom why someone would do such horrible things for no reason, we don't want to. Why? Because we don't want to start to see that everyone could potentially commit these acts, that we all could have this potential within ourselves. No one wants to admit that they sometimes have bad thoughts, perverse thoughts. This is what makes humans so complex for they have depth of personality. Everyone just simply chooses to see and accept only the personality traits that are lit up with white light; and they choose to shun and condemn those traits that are enshrouded in the depths of the shadows. Poe is a mastermind with how he shows the depth and complexity of human nature. Why? Because he is not afraid to explore what truly lies in the deep waters of our minds. In The Black Cat, Poe explores the nature of perversity and madness within his narrator. The depth of the narrator's perversity is most clearly illustrated on page 232, but also is where the narrator himself ponders this same issue of everyone having perversity within them.
Gonna take a mean ride, ooh, ooh, ooh
The smile I had has gone away
Those that steal are gonna pay
Steppin' to the bad side today
I tell ya now, its got to end
No more trustin' them, my friends
We're gonna change our style, change our tone
Steppin' to the bad side, surrendering to the darkness...is every mind truly prone to madness?
This is the question pondered throughout the class session this week.
As we know, every mind is prone to addiction of some kind. Oftentimes this addiction overcomes our free will and we can no longer be accountable for our own actions; we'd do anything for a fix, to silence our all consuming monomania. With addiction we are controlled by our bad choices. Again, our free will is overcome. I think the nature of addiction varies from person to person…but regardless, their free will is always in contention and their choices are always at least partly from the addiction source. Like how one of my grandmother’s relatives recently stole her jewelry while she was sleeping in order to go buy drugs. This raises a new question. Is free will outside the realm of reason?
In The Black Cat by Edgar Allen Poe, the narrator makes us question the relationship between addiction and freewill. For not only does the narrator take the eye of his "beloved" cat, Pluto, but he later goes on to hang Pluto, kill his wife, and wall her corpse up in the wall. What drove this sociopath to kill? Was it addiction such as his alcoholism? Or was it some more sinister, deeper issue? Stephen Asma, the visiting author to our school, once said that "we always look for the catalyst behind every wrong-doing." He's right. We truly cannot begin to fathom why someone would do such horrible things for no reason, we don't want to. Why? Because we don't want to start to see that everyone could potentially commit these acts, that we all could have this potential within ourselves. No one wants to admit that they sometimes have bad thoughts, perverse thoughts. This is what makes humans so complex for they have depth of personality. Everyone just simply chooses to see and accept only the personality traits that are lit up with white light; and they choose to shun and condemn those traits that are enshrouded in the depths of the shadows. Poe is a mastermind with how he shows the depth and complexity of human nature. Why? Because he is not afraid to explore what truly lies in the deep waters of our minds. In The Black Cat, Poe explores the nature of perversity and madness within his narrator. The depth of the narrator's perversity is most clearly illustrated on page 232, but also is where the narrator himself ponders this same issue of everyone having perversity within them.
And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of PERVERSENESS. Of this spirit philosophy takes no account. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart--one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such? This spirit of perverseness, I say, came to my final overthrow. It was this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself--to offer violence to its own nature--to do wrong for the wrong's sake only---that urged me to continue and finally to consummate the injury I had inflicted upon the unoffending brute, (Poe 232).
The narrator then goes on to kill his wife and wall up her corpse, as I previously stated. Although, the narrator is caught by the police and will pay the consequences of this murder because of "Pluto" for
"[he] had walled the monster up within the tomb," (238). I'm inclined to think that the monster he walled up within the tomb was actually his sanity, his guilt, his remorse, his conscious. This was the same thing that happened in The Tell Tale Heart. The narrator swears that he could hear the beating of the old man's heart beneath the floorboards, when in actuality it was his own imagination, it was his conscious; in The Black Cat it was "Pluto's" cry that gave the murder away, which I interpret as it being his guilt etc that called out to him and overtook him, not the real "Pluto."
"[he] had walled the monster up within the tomb," (238). I'm inclined to think that the monster he walled up within the tomb was actually his sanity, his guilt, his remorse, his conscious. This was the same thing that happened in The Tell Tale Heart. The narrator swears that he could hear the beating of the old man's heart beneath the floorboards, when in actuality it was his own imagination, it was his conscious; in The Black Cat it was "Pluto's" cry that gave the murder away, which I interpret as it being his guilt etc that called out to him and overtook him, not the real "Pluto."
Bonus: A visual of a one-eyed cat. AKA my cat: Calcifer Winks.
You forgot that he's a behemoth lol
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