William Bernhardt - Dark Eye

The sweat on his brow had vanished, replaced by a fevered chill. He rubbed his hands up and down his arms, trying to warm himself. Something had changed, something inside him. He didn’t know how or what exactly. But he knew he would never be the same.

It was hard to avoid the sorrowful look in the eyes of all who shook Ernie’s hand as he left the questing headquarters. Word had gotten out. They all were aware that he had been visited by the Raven, the totem of death, and they all believed that meant he would soon be dead.

But Ernie knew differently. The Raven might be the totem of death, but not his own. This visitation had a different meaning.

He returned to school, ostensibly focusing on his studies, but obsessed with the Raven’s words, trying to uncover the mysteries of his path. He graduated with honors and became a teaching assistant while pursuing his Master’s in American Literature. But although he performed his appointed tasks with excellence, his heart was no longer in them. And his soul was in another place altogether.

He had not wanted to revisit the works of Edgar Allan Poe. He remembered those stories from his childhood as dark and gruesome, obviously the product of an unstable, demented mind. But he was TA-ing an American Lit survey course, and of course he had to grade the exams, and he couldn’t do that unless he refamiliarized himself with the texts. So he sat down in his room late one evening, alone as always, with a thick volume of Poe.

He had not intended to read the entire book. A few of the major works would do, surely. He started with the poems, lovely things, sonically immaculate, if rather syrupy. But so much of it reverberated in strange and unforeseen ways.

She was a child and I was a child in that kingdom by the sea…

Such love that the winged seraphs of heaven coveted her and me…

Had Poe really written that about his lost child bride? Could anyone but Ernie himself have written that?

It was only a short while before he reread Poe’s great masterpiece, “The Raven.” Eighteen immaculately rhymed quatrains, with the Raven as the harbinger of death. Could this possibly be a coincidence?

And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting… just above my chamber door…

Ernie felt as if his brain had been opened wide. As if the sun had dawned for the first time. After the poems, he pored through the stories, over and over again. It was only after he had read them many times that he began to see beyond the superficial entertainments and realize that there was something important buried within them. The similarities, the points of correspondence, were too great to be coincidental. Just as the Raven had spoken to him, so it also must have spoken to Poe. He found a tantalizing clue in one of the worst of the tales, “Ms. Found in a Bottle”: It is evident that we are hurrying onward to some exciting knowledge-some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction. Yes! And another story-“The Premature Burial”: To conceive the horror of my sensations is, I presume, utterly impossible; yet a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these awful regions, predominates even over my despair, and will reconcile me to the most hideous aspect of death. The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?

That was what the Raven was trying to tell him. Death was not an ending but a translation, a passage from one borderland to another. But this wasn’t a Christian fantasy, a heaven up in the clouds such as they spoke about in Sunday school. This was something real. The Dream-Land Poe described in his poems existed, and his sweet Virginia must be there. The narrator in “Ligeia” brought back his love. Could Ernie not do the same? But what was the mystic formula that the prophet hinted at but never described? How was this magnificent end to be accomplished? How could he enter Dream-Land? How could he make Poe’s Golden Age a reality?

The answer came to him in the December of that year, not from his intensive studies, not from his work, but from a purely adventitious discovery in a small coastal California town. In a used-book store, he found an obscure Poe work, something that hadn’t been in any of the anthologies. It was titled Eureka.

He had seen references to this work in some of the biographies he had consumed, but they were all brief and dismissive. A failed effort, they called it. A hopeless mishmash. It seemed useless and irrelevant, and for that reason, and because it wasn’t in any of his books anyway, he had never bothered to read it.

When he did, it gave him the answers he had so long sought. The path.

Poe believed in dreams, not just sleeping dreams but waking ones, believed they were glimpses into another world, a better world, one to which we could all be translated. He limned a memorable, if enticingly vague, portrait of this world in his poem “Dream-Land”: All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

Much of Eureka was concerned with Poe’s efforts to create a new cosmology, which was rejected by contemporaries because of his lack of scientific training, and yet in retrospect, some of what Poe wrote was positively prescient. Poe solved Olbers’s paradox-why the sky is dark at night-envisioned black holes, and was the first to describe the universe as expanding, then contracting. He proposed the big bang theory, which would not be formally discovered until seventy years later, by Alexander Friedmann, a Russian mathematician who was very fond of the works of Edgar Allan Poe.

How had Poe known, long before the scientific observations had been made that could prove it?

The Raven told him, of course.

Poe believed that man was a mere extension of the Deity. He believed that as man shrinks into spatial nothingness he will regain his lost harmony and become absorbed into a perfect, mystical unity. He wrote: The pain of the consideration that we shall lose our individual identity [in death] ceases at once when we further reflect that the process, as above described, is neither more nor less than the absorption, by each individual intelligence, of all other intelligences (that is, of the Universe) into its own. That God may be all in all, each must become God.

After he read that passage, Ernie wept. He threw his hands up in the air, ecstatic, euphoric. He had wondered for so long, had needed to know. And all the while, the prophet had been trying to tell him.

These were not mere stories, mere poems. They were blueprints.

“I’m sorry, but I just don’t get this Poe stuff. I mean, I know he was great and brilliant and all, but to me, it just seems gross.”

Ernie was in his tiny TA’s office, opening his mail, trying to appear interested.

“I guess, I grew up in the suburbs, you know what I’m saying? We didn’t have guys sealing each other up in the basement or swinging big pendulums over their chests. And what was the deal with that story where the guy yanked out that woman’s teeth? I mean, this Poe guy had issues, if you ask me.”

Ernie tried to smile. She was a tiny thing, presumably eighteen, but she looked younger. She had a round face and large eyes and long, straight blond hair. He knew she had a reputation as a partyer. She wore far too much makeup. “So what, pray tell, can I do for you, Miss Swanson?”

She shifted from one side of the chair to the other, crossing her legs. “See, I know the final is supposed to be like, final, but I think I didn’t do so hot on it.”

“Why do you believe that?”

“Well… I never finished the reading. I mean, I’m sorry, but those stories were just so wrong. ”