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Show Acting Alone Page 102 been intended as a gesture to please good Councillor Ezra. Ever since being forced to read him by the pound in grammar school, Councillor Ezra had suffered a severe animosity toward Edgar Allan Poe, whom he referred to as "that laudanum-soaked necrophiliac pederast, to whose work can be traced every unwholesome tendency and strain in the mythopoesy of the contemporary Western world." Councillor Ezra was of the opinion that, if all of Poe's scribblings could have only been magically expunged from the surface of the earth before that satanic sodomite Frenchman had taken the opportunity to turn them loose like cholera to infect everything, the church would not now be plagued by the unreasonable attrition rates among its youth membership that were forcing the adoption of progressively more brutal indoctrination methods with each passing year. "Some trace the modern hell back to Luther," the good Councillor would say. "But Poe is the culprit, in my view." Of course, no mere mortal could expunge the author of "Ulalume" from the racial memory as long as Vincent Price lived in flesh or on celluloid. But Elder Cicerone could make this small gesture, acknowledging that he had sounded the depths of Councillor Ezra's strange animadversion, and that he, the Elder, appreciated this fully, simply human emotion - a mere pet peeve, really, as even the Councillor would admit in certain moods, something to be facetiously strident about when the pressures of the life of power demanded a little comic relief - something totally unexpected, a near-weakness, a touching bit of petulance from a man who, so much of the time, seemed, in his appearance as well as his behavior; to transcend mere humanness and to soar to a godlike stature. |