Excitement's Crave - a line-by-line analysis.
Apr 15, 2014 1:59:15 GMT
Drifter, Relentless, and 11 more like this
Post by Deleted on Apr 15, 2014 1:59:15 GMT
Forgive me for starting a new thread about Excitment's Crave but, to be honest, I didn't want all the work I've done (and will do) to get buried in the other thread. For those who haven't read what I've already written about the poem, please see the other Excitement's Crave thread, particularly the last 3-4 pages: link
To summarize, I took an interest in the poem because I have an MA in English and teach English literature. The more I read the poem, the more it revealed to me. I reluctantly decided to engage in a line-by-line analysis of the poem starting with the first stanza. That is what I am posting here. The work is not complete - not in the larger sense that I have only written abut the first stanza, but also in the sense that I haven't even finished this entry or had time to edit and revise it. I'm posting it because I've been working on it for almost two weeks and have to get it off my chest. I am hoping to start a dialogue with other members regarding the subtext of the poem and the details I have gleaned about the offender's life, values, mindset and worldview from such a close reading. I am not trying to pass this off as an authoritative guide to the poem and it's author. We don't know who this perp is, so we can never know the true meaning behind some of the poem's words, phrases, lines and overall meaning. Instead, I've broken the thing down piece-by-piece and found the process tiring but tremendously insightful. I hope others agree and will add to my analysis with their own observations.
Again, if you haven't read what I've already written about the poem, please see the last three pages of the original Excitement's Crave thread. In the near future I'll copy my posts (and the responses by other forum members) and paste them into here, but I'm so busy right now that it's impossible. I also intend to do some major editing and revision to this post, which could include adding or deleting sections, but as a said previously - for now, I just gotta get it out there.
****Silly Me!
Just realized in all this writing I didn't even bother to discuss the title. One more thing to add as soon as I can.
Excitement's Crave, first stanza:
All those mortal's surviving birth
Upon facing maturity,
Take inventory of their worth
To prevailing society.
Okay, here we go. I'm going to give a cursory analysis of the first stanza of 'Excitement's Crave' and provide something of an introduction to my ongoing look at the poem. I don't intend to cover everything in a single post, but just provide some first impressions and see what others think. As other posters provide their insights and I think more about each stanza, I will add to my analysis and what it says about the offender. Also, I am proceeding with this effort under the assumption that the writer is the EAR/ONS.
[note....I've removed a large section here where I discuss grammar, usage, youth conduct disorders, and emerging research about adolescent psychopaths. I need to refine this part and put some more thought into how I present the information. I'll add it to this post after I've had some time to work on revisions.]
The poem as a whole is clever and suggests that the writer is quite intelligent, but not a skillful writer. I've written previously that it seems like the writer is using certain words in an effort to be "poetic," but his word choice really seems to indicate that he does not have a good grasp of their meaning (for example, his use of the word "lore"). As a result, we have to be cautious when reading deeply into some of the curious word choices, because I doubt he had more than a vague conception of their meaning. Sometimes his word choice might be revealing (and I think "mortal's" is one of those), but other times we should probably assume that he did not fully understand what certain words meant.
His use of the word "mortal's" in the very first line is quite revealing. At first glance, you want to think of mortal as a fancy synonym for "human," but it isn't. Humans have thoughts and feelings and needs; they are capable of love and hate, of kindness and generosity, sympathy and empathy, but also anger and cruelty, aggression and duplicity. Mortals, on the other hand, are creatures who die. Mortals and humans are not the same; humans live, mortals die. Mortal can be used both as an adjective (subject to death) or a noun. In the noun form, it is kind of like a synonym for human, but stripped down of all the human qualities so that only one quality remains - our fragility and vulnerability, the fact that we will all die. Humans do not call each other mortals - it would be like a blind man mocking another blind man for his blindness. Only gods call humans mortals. Gods are the only things that do not die (and vampires, I suppose), and though we have some of the same qualities as gods, the most apparent difference is our susceptibility to death. Mortal is a term that gods of legend use in an almost disparaging way, and the writer of this poem uses it disparagingly as well - he sees everyone else as a mortal, but not himself (I've previously discussed his immortality in the other thread and will do so again when I get to stanzas four and five).
In his incarnation as EAR and ONS, the writer became a god temporarily as the fate of another person was in his hands and he alone decided if they lived or died. To him, those of us who don't have this power - the lifters of the world who toil anonymously for fixed pay - are mere mortals, and he can make that abundantly clear to those he chooses as victims. When he is in your bedroom, he is a god and you are a mortal, subject to his capricious whims. Gods sometimes rape and kill humans, but they are not subject to the morals of the human world. They get away with it and think little of it because they see us like we see insects - numerous and fleeting, barely distinguishable. The gods of legend are psychopaths - they have no empathy for humans, and use them as needed to fulfill their own needs. EAR/ONS is the same in his view of others - they are mere mortals whose sole purpose is to fulfill his needs. Whatever lives they have or personalities or goals or feelings are secondary to the needs of the offender, which are paramount. His use of the term "mortal's" might be very intentional or not, but either way it gives tremendous insight both into the way he views himself, and the way he views the rest of humanity.
What is also curious about his first line is the characterization of childbirth as something someone "survives." It is strange that in a time and place where infant mortality rates were (and are) so low, he would still see birth as something that was survived. One might expect this view from someone writing a hundred years earlier, but in California during the late 70's it is a curious way to see things. It serves to emphasize the term "mortal's" in that it reminds us of the fragility of life, but I wonder if it doesn't perhaps say something unique about the offender and his own experience. Did he lose a sibling, mother, or other relative during childbirth? Did he work in a maternity ward, where he may have witnessed babies dying during birth? This is mere speculation, but I just find it curious that he is so dramatic about such a routine event - the birth of a child. The "mortal's" thing fits with the personality of a psychopath, but his emphasis on the danger of childbirth makes one wonder if perhaps he himself almost died as an infant. We now know that congenital defects in the brain can help precipitate anti-social personality traits. Did the writer of the poem have a difficult birth? Did he have fetal-alcohol syndrome, low birth weight, or some congenital defect that made his early days touch-and-go? Was he born prematurely, perhaps to a mother who was unhealthy? Was he deprived of oxygen or otherwise physically traumatized during birth? Of course this is speculation, but I see the part about "surviving" birth as the offender potentially giving something away without meaning to. One must always remember that the profile says this offender feels extreme rage towards his parents - especially his mother. Is there some part of the puzzle concealed here in the mention of "surviving birth?"
In the poem's first line, life and death are mentioned in the same breath - we survive birth only to die, but if we do survive the struggle continues, evolves. Notice that the writer skips over childhood and goes right to maturity from childbirth. This is definitely a poem about his choice - his evolution into the man he has become. It is strange that he doesn't write even a line about childhood, where so many formative experiences occur. Again, many profilers suggest that he was abused and/or neglected as a child, so his omission could be another biographical clue about the EAR's early years. Personally, I find the jump from infancy to maturity jarring, and expect a line or two about childhood in a poem that is about this offender's growth. The fact that he glosses over this time period after a rather strange characterization of childbirth makes me wonder if he prefers not to mention childhood because his own was an unhappy one. Instead, he prefers to skip to the point where he became empowered to make choices. Again, childhood is usually a time when people consider their futures and begin to develop into the person they are going to be - the formative years. In the poem, his formative years occur later, when he reaches "maturity" and becomes a man. Read how you want into this, but I think that this blank spot on his growth chart tells us something...what exactly it is remains a mystery for now, but there is definitely room for speculation based on what we know about the EAR/ONS.
Upon reaching maturity, the writer has a task at hand which also tells us something about him and his worldview: upon facing maturity, the writer "takes inventory" of his worth using society's standards as a reference by which to measure himself. This might sound fairly normal, but when we take what we know about the rest of the poem into account and consider who the writer went on to become in "maturity," the process of taking inventory takes on a new significance. In these lines I hear the psychopath talking; the young person who knows they are different and feels the need to compare himself to the people he knows in order to understand how and why. I think most people do not consciously weigh themselves against society and determine their "worth" in such a self-conscious way when they are young. Finding out who we are is a process that begins in childhood and goes on well past maturity. Sometimes people are still figuring it out into their 50's and 60's. But this writer feels the need to take stock of his worth at a young age; to measure himself (literally and figuratively) against those he knows, and decide how he stacks up. For a budding serial rapist, maturity would also be the point when he realized he was different than everyone else in a pretty important way. Even more so for a budding rapist who possibly has a small penis.
Maturity would have been a potentially devastating time for this person, as he learned about his uncontrollable deviant sexual urges and possibly had to deal with the ramifications of having a smaller-than-average penis. All of these revelations would have definitely made him angry - angry at the world and especially angry at women. After all, it's women who are the objects of male sexual desire, and in his mind it would be women who would reject him because of his small penis. While the joking may have mostly gone on in the locker room, his ultimate concern may have been about how his first serious girlfriend would react when she realized that he had a small dick. It must have terrified him and filled him with rage. This is a person who loves control; who feeds on it. One thing he can't control is the size of his dick. If he did have an experience where a woman either rejected him or ridiculed him for s small penis, this could have easily sent him over the edge.
A lot of people have interpreted a targeting of couples as him taking out his anger on his middle class parents who probably abused him. What if that isn't the case at all? What if his anger is directed to those "normal" couples who are satisfied with each other sexually and able to function in a healthy sexual relationship. Men with small pensises generally are capable of having healthy sexual relationships, but our offender may have assumed that it would be impossible for him - not a "homosexual panic" as profilers of the time assumed, but a small penis panic brought on by a mixture of locker room joking and perhaps an episode where an intimate female partner mocked him for his small joint. As EAR, he made the women play with his penis, putting them in a position where they had to accept his penis, to acknowledge it without him having to worry about any negative remarks. At first the EAR attacked single women - the target of his anger, because it was a relationships with females that would ultimately suffer - at least in his mind - because of his anatomy. He probably imagined that all women preferred large pensises and blamed their preferences on him being able to have a healthy intimate relationship with a woman. As a result, he felt the need to force himself on them in way where he could not be rejected and where his penis size would not be a factor. He simultaneously took revenge on women for his own penis size - in his own mind, those "whores" and their big-cock predilections forced him to rape. The women he targeted might be indicative not of his family status so much as the status of the women or woman who rejected him.
Following this train of thought, when he started attacking couples, part of his desire was to emasculate the man may have been because he himself felt emasculated by his under-endowment. The couple attacks allowed him to vent his anger on all those men and women who were able to enjoy a healthy sexual relationship, because a combination of his deviant desires and his small penis convinced him that he never could have what they had. So he forced the women to accept him, and the forceful separation of his female victims from their boyfriend/husband may be an important part of his fantasy, not just because of the challenge involved, but because of tents symbolic significance. It boosts his own ego and allows him to do something he felt incapable of as an adolescent - being so attractive and alluring that women would carry on a sexual relationship with him because he was superior to their own boyfriend.
The process of "taking inventory" is not something most of us give a lot of thought to, as we are constantly comparing ourselves to the people around us and seeing how we compare. As a result of what we know about the EAR, you can read the "worth" thing in several different ways: the adolescent EAR, upon reaching maturity has no choice but to measure himself against prevailing society because he senses he is different. I've heard many serial killers remark that they knew they were different at a very young age. We don't know anything about the EAR's childhood, but we can imagine it was probably a time of confusion, as he found himself having feelings that he knew were not normal. At the same time, in taking inventory, he must have realized he was physically different from other boys who had bigger dicks. For someone who is hyper-sexual, this would be a devastating blow to his perceived desirability, and all it would have taken was rejection by a single female partner to trigger psychotic rage in an already unstable, narcissistic individual.
When the EAR takes inventory of his worth to prevailing society, it is not just as a person with skills and attributes who has something to offer the world, but also someone who perceives himself to have been unjustly deprived of a vital part of his anatomy. As a result, in comparing himself to prevailing society he would have felt both better than everyone else (as a malignant narcissist and psychopath) and simultaneously inadequate (as a hyper-sexual man who was under-endowed). This combination of conflicting feelings certainly goes some way to explaining the offender's pathological mindset and some of the bizarre behaviours he exhibited during the crimes.
....I hope to edit and revise this post in the days and weeks to come, and of course to write similar posts about the rest of the poem. Hope you have found this beast of a read worthwhile.
cityofchill
To summarize, I took an interest in the poem because I have an MA in English and teach English literature. The more I read the poem, the more it revealed to me. I reluctantly decided to engage in a line-by-line analysis of the poem starting with the first stanza. That is what I am posting here. The work is not complete - not in the larger sense that I have only written abut the first stanza, but also in the sense that I haven't even finished this entry or had time to edit and revise it. I'm posting it because I've been working on it for almost two weeks and have to get it off my chest. I am hoping to start a dialogue with other members regarding the subtext of the poem and the details I have gleaned about the offender's life, values, mindset and worldview from such a close reading. I am not trying to pass this off as an authoritative guide to the poem and it's author. We don't know who this perp is, so we can never know the true meaning behind some of the poem's words, phrases, lines and overall meaning. Instead, I've broken the thing down piece-by-piece and found the process tiring but tremendously insightful. I hope others agree and will add to my analysis with their own observations.
Again, if you haven't read what I've already written about the poem, please see the last three pages of the original Excitement's Crave thread. In the near future I'll copy my posts (and the responses by other forum members) and paste them into here, but I'm so busy right now that it's impossible. I also intend to do some major editing and revision to this post, which could include adding or deleting sections, but as a said previously - for now, I just gotta get it out there.
****Silly Me!
Just realized in all this writing I didn't even bother to discuss the title. One more thing to add as soon as I can. Excitement's Crave, first stanza:
All those mortal's surviving birth
Upon facing maturity,
Take inventory of their worth
To prevailing society.
Okay, here we go. I'm going to give a cursory analysis of the first stanza of 'Excitement's Crave' and provide something of an introduction to my ongoing look at the poem. I don't intend to cover everything in a single post, but just provide some first impressions and see what others think. As other posters provide their insights and I think more about each stanza, I will add to my analysis and what it says about the offender. Also, I am proceeding with this effort under the assumption that the writer is the EAR/ONS.
[note....I've removed a large section here where I discuss grammar, usage, youth conduct disorders, and emerging research about adolescent psychopaths. I need to refine this part and put some more thought into how I present the information. I'll add it to this post after I've had some time to work on revisions.]
The poem as a whole is clever and suggests that the writer is quite intelligent, but not a skillful writer. I've written previously that it seems like the writer is using certain words in an effort to be "poetic," but his word choice really seems to indicate that he does not have a good grasp of their meaning (for example, his use of the word "lore"). As a result, we have to be cautious when reading deeply into some of the curious word choices, because I doubt he had more than a vague conception of their meaning. Sometimes his word choice might be revealing (and I think "mortal's" is one of those), but other times we should probably assume that he did not fully understand what certain words meant.
His use of the word "mortal's" in the very first line is quite revealing. At first glance, you want to think of mortal as a fancy synonym for "human," but it isn't. Humans have thoughts and feelings and needs; they are capable of love and hate, of kindness and generosity, sympathy and empathy, but also anger and cruelty, aggression and duplicity. Mortals, on the other hand, are creatures who die. Mortals and humans are not the same; humans live, mortals die. Mortal can be used both as an adjective (subject to death) or a noun. In the noun form, it is kind of like a synonym for human, but stripped down of all the human qualities so that only one quality remains - our fragility and vulnerability, the fact that we will all die. Humans do not call each other mortals - it would be like a blind man mocking another blind man for his blindness. Only gods call humans mortals. Gods are the only things that do not die (and vampires, I suppose), and though we have some of the same qualities as gods, the most apparent difference is our susceptibility to death. Mortal is a term that gods of legend use in an almost disparaging way, and the writer of this poem uses it disparagingly as well - he sees everyone else as a mortal, but not himself (I've previously discussed his immortality in the other thread and will do so again when I get to stanzas four and five).
In his incarnation as EAR and ONS, the writer became a god temporarily as the fate of another person was in his hands and he alone decided if they lived or died. To him, those of us who don't have this power - the lifters of the world who toil anonymously for fixed pay - are mere mortals, and he can make that abundantly clear to those he chooses as victims. When he is in your bedroom, he is a god and you are a mortal, subject to his capricious whims. Gods sometimes rape and kill humans, but they are not subject to the morals of the human world. They get away with it and think little of it because they see us like we see insects - numerous and fleeting, barely distinguishable. The gods of legend are psychopaths - they have no empathy for humans, and use them as needed to fulfill their own needs. EAR/ONS is the same in his view of others - they are mere mortals whose sole purpose is to fulfill his needs. Whatever lives they have or personalities or goals or feelings are secondary to the needs of the offender, which are paramount. His use of the term "mortal's" might be very intentional or not, but either way it gives tremendous insight both into the way he views himself, and the way he views the rest of humanity.
What is also curious about his first line is the characterization of childbirth as something someone "survives." It is strange that in a time and place where infant mortality rates were (and are) so low, he would still see birth as something that was survived. One might expect this view from someone writing a hundred years earlier, but in California during the late 70's it is a curious way to see things. It serves to emphasize the term "mortal's" in that it reminds us of the fragility of life, but I wonder if it doesn't perhaps say something unique about the offender and his own experience. Did he lose a sibling, mother, or other relative during childbirth? Did he work in a maternity ward, where he may have witnessed babies dying during birth? This is mere speculation, but I just find it curious that he is so dramatic about such a routine event - the birth of a child. The "mortal's" thing fits with the personality of a psychopath, but his emphasis on the danger of childbirth makes one wonder if perhaps he himself almost died as an infant. We now know that congenital defects in the brain can help precipitate anti-social personality traits. Did the writer of the poem have a difficult birth? Did he have fetal-alcohol syndrome, low birth weight, or some congenital defect that made his early days touch-and-go? Was he born prematurely, perhaps to a mother who was unhealthy? Was he deprived of oxygen or otherwise physically traumatized during birth? Of course this is speculation, but I see the part about "surviving" birth as the offender potentially giving something away without meaning to. One must always remember that the profile says this offender feels extreme rage towards his parents - especially his mother. Is there some part of the puzzle concealed here in the mention of "surviving birth?"
In the poem's first line, life and death are mentioned in the same breath - we survive birth only to die, but if we do survive the struggle continues, evolves. Notice that the writer skips over childhood and goes right to maturity from childbirth. This is definitely a poem about his choice - his evolution into the man he has become. It is strange that he doesn't write even a line about childhood, where so many formative experiences occur. Again, many profilers suggest that he was abused and/or neglected as a child, so his omission could be another biographical clue about the EAR's early years. Personally, I find the jump from infancy to maturity jarring, and expect a line or two about childhood in a poem that is about this offender's growth. The fact that he glosses over this time period after a rather strange characterization of childbirth makes me wonder if he prefers not to mention childhood because his own was an unhappy one. Instead, he prefers to skip to the point where he became empowered to make choices. Again, childhood is usually a time when people consider their futures and begin to develop into the person they are going to be - the formative years. In the poem, his formative years occur later, when he reaches "maturity" and becomes a man. Read how you want into this, but I think that this blank spot on his growth chart tells us something...what exactly it is remains a mystery for now, but there is definitely room for speculation based on what we know about the EAR/ONS.
Upon reaching maturity, the writer has a task at hand which also tells us something about him and his worldview: upon facing maturity, the writer "takes inventory" of his worth using society's standards as a reference by which to measure himself. This might sound fairly normal, but when we take what we know about the rest of the poem into account and consider who the writer went on to become in "maturity," the process of taking inventory takes on a new significance. In these lines I hear the psychopath talking; the young person who knows they are different and feels the need to compare himself to the people he knows in order to understand how and why. I think most people do not consciously weigh themselves against society and determine their "worth" in such a self-conscious way when they are young. Finding out who we are is a process that begins in childhood and goes on well past maturity. Sometimes people are still figuring it out into their 50's and 60's. But this writer feels the need to take stock of his worth at a young age; to measure himself (literally and figuratively) against those he knows, and decide how he stacks up. For a budding serial rapist, maturity would also be the point when he realized he was different than everyone else in a pretty important way. Even more so for a budding rapist who possibly has a small penis.
Maturity would have been a potentially devastating time for this person, as he learned about his uncontrollable deviant sexual urges and possibly had to deal with the ramifications of having a smaller-than-average penis. All of these revelations would have definitely made him angry - angry at the world and especially angry at women. After all, it's women who are the objects of male sexual desire, and in his mind it would be women who would reject him because of his small penis. While the joking may have mostly gone on in the locker room, his ultimate concern may have been about how his first serious girlfriend would react when she realized that he had a small dick. It must have terrified him and filled him with rage. This is a person who loves control; who feeds on it. One thing he can't control is the size of his dick. If he did have an experience where a woman either rejected him or ridiculed him for s small penis, this could have easily sent him over the edge.
A lot of people have interpreted a targeting of couples as him taking out his anger on his middle class parents who probably abused him. What if that isn't the case at all? What if his anger is directed to those "normal" couples who are satisfied with each other sexually and able to function in a healthy sexual relationship. Men with small pensises generally are capable of having healthy sexual relationships, but our offender may have assumed that it would be impossible for him - not a "homosexual panic" as profilers of the time assumed, but a small penis panic brought on by a mixture of locker room joking and perhaps an episode where an intimate female partner mocked him for his small joint. As EAR, he made the women play with his penis, putting them in a position where they had to accept his penis, to acknowledge it without him having to worry about any negative remarks. At first the EAR attacked single women - the target of his anger, because it was a relationships with females that would ultimately suffer - at least in his mind - because of his anatomy. He probably imagined that all women preferred large pensises and blamed their preferences on him being able to have a healthy intimate relationship with a woman. As a result, he felt the need to force himself on them in way where he could not be rejected and where his penis size would not be a factor. He simultaneously took revenge on women for his own penis size - in his own mind, those "whores" and their big-cock predilections forced him to rape. The women he targeted might be indicative not of his family status so much as the status of the women or woman who rejected him.
Following this train of thought, when he started attacking couples, part of his desire was to emasculate the man may have been because he himself felt emasculated by his under-endowment. The couple attacks allowed him to vent his anger on all those men and women who were able to enjoy a healthy sexual relationship, because a combination of his deviant desires and his small penis convinced him that he never could have what they had. So he forced the women to accept him, and the forceful separation of his female victims from their boyfriend/husband may be an important part of his fantasy, not just because of the challenge involved, but because of tents symbolic significance. It boosts his own ego and allows him to do something he felt incapable of as an adolescent - being so attractive and alluring that women would carry on a sexual relationship with him because he was superior to their own boyfriend.
The process of "taking inventory" is not something most of us give a lot of thought to, as we are constantly comparing ourselves to the people around us and seeing how we compare. As a result of what we know about the EAR, you can read the "worth" thing in several different ways: the adolescent EAR, upon reaching maturity has no choice but to measure himself against prevailing society because he senses he is different. I've heard many serial killers remark that they knew they were different at a very young age. We don't know anything about the EAR's childhood, but we can imagine it was probably a time of confusion, as he found himself having feelings that he knew were not normal. At the same time, in taking inventory, he must have realized he was physically different from other boys who had bigger dicks. For someone who is hyper-sexual, this would be a devastating blow to his perceived desirability, and all it would have taken was rejection by a single female partner to trigger psychotic rage in an already unstable, narcissistic individual.
When the EAR takes inventory of his worth to prevailing society, it is not just as a person with skills and attributes who has something to offer the world, but also someone who perceives himself to have been unjustly deprived of a vital part of his anatomy. As a result, in comparing himself to prevailing society he would have felt both better than everyone else (as a malignant narcissist and psychopath) and simultaneously inadequate (as a hyper-sexual man who was under-endowed). This combination of conflicting feelings certainly goes some way to explaining the offender's pathological mindset and some of the bizarre behaviours he exhibited during the crimes.
....I hope to edit and revise this post in the days and weeks to come, and of course to write similar posts about the rest of the poem. Hope you have found this beast of a read worthwhile.
cityofchill
, gskonstracker (pg. 3) points out that EC is a double sonnet and Warren (pg. 6) finds similarities to a poem on Frederick Douglas. Do you have any other ideas of works he could be aping? 
