Poe's Ligeia. Thoughts on Opium. A Raccoon Ate My Headphones But First He Beat Me On the Head With Them.

First off, sorry, lately most of my posts have been on stuff I've been reading... I'll be doing celebrity posts soon... Beckham coming to the US, oh my! Let's all grovel, or shoot ourselves in the head, whichever you feel is more appropriate...

So, I finally got to read a bit today, and I'm totally digging this Poe story, Ligeia. Why? Yeah, it's a great story, but what I love the most is the idea of will. Will. The will to live, that's what the story is about for me. And love too. Love is cool. Can help bring you back from the dead.

See, Ligeia is this really fine woman that the narrator loves, and she loves him, with total passion. But she gets sick, and although she has a crazy desire and will to live, and this man she loves and wants to be with... well, in spite of these things she can't beat her illness. Ligeia dies.

But the thing is, this lady has such a burning passion to live, to come back, to return from death... Well, in the end, she does come back from the dead! Her spirit was so strong, her will was so determined, she was able to overcome the laws of reality... Something like that I guess.

I also dug how wind was mentioned in the story. This invisible, great force, wind, acting like a channel for Ligeia's spirit, a channel for her to come back to physical reality. Coolness.

There is only one little problem to this whole story. The narrator is always smoking opium, so he's not totally trustworthy. Ok, that is a little more major than I first let on. Damnit, the freakin' loon might just be imagining the whole damned thing! Dude, he doesn't even remember how he met Ligeia, kinda makes me wonder if Ligeia is even a real person or just a figment of his tripped out mind. It's ok though, because it's cool, that's his reality, even if it's not real.

When all is said and done, I really don't know what to think. I've learned nothing. The story is a mystery. The narrator is an opium smoking lunatic. Is opium that great by the way? Cuz, uh, this narrator guy kinda got me curious... wasn't Poe way into the drugs... didn't Poe end up in a gutter... would that make for a good anti-drug commercial?... or would people think taking drugs makes them do cool things like Poe, no not the ending up in a gutter thing, but the writing cool stories part. Yeah, it'd be a mixed message... I'd probably pass on using Poe in any anti-drug advertisements.

Since you mentioned opium... I wonder what kinda visions I'd have if I tried it, I wonder if I'd have cool visions... like seeing a crazy raccoon materialize out of nowhere, who would promptly attack all the objects in my room with a fierce and psychotic vengeance. Haha, that'd be great. But, Rambo's already beaten him to the punch, so it wouldn't be all that novel.

By the way, there's a couple stories in my Poe book that precede the story Ligeia, Berenice and Eleonora, really great, hghly recommend those stories too. To balance it out, the stories I don't recommend: I'm not fond of Poe's investigation/detective stories, I'd say they suck, but that's unduly harsh, they're just not my thing.