Curtains Read Online Free Page A

(even if the ectoplasm, that wet, sticky, snotty manifestation of otherworldly spirits, looks like cheesecloth), and for a time, Winnipeg was known as the “ectoplasm capital of the world.” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes represented modern man’s triumph over mystery through the empirical study of physical clues, came to see Hamilton’s seances for himself (and according to one medium’s report, he returned to the city years later, or rather his spirit did, after his earthly death). Local filmmaker Guy Maddin’s first film, called
The Dead Father
, is a black, neurotic and autobiographical comedy about a man who comes back from the grave, annoyed, in plaid shorts and a golf shirt, to lie down on his dining room table as if it were his funeral bier and pester his family. Maddin has also written about Garbage Hill, a former dump and the only hill in this prairie city, where kids go tobogganing in the winter, only to be surprised by bits of trash and car parts that work their way up through the frost. He claims he once slid down the hill and was speared by a set of deer antlers his own father had thrown away decades before. Meanwhile, east of Garbage Hill, the Red River has been biting away at its banks under Elmwood cemetery, threatening to expose old graves. In 1997, the city had to move 105 caskets before they fell into the muddy water.
    And my first winter in Winnipeg, the newspapers covered the disappearance of a local deejay named Grandmasta Sanchez, who worked at the Village Cabaret nightclub in Osborne Village. Fourteen months he was missing, until they found his mummified body where they’d least expected to: jammed between two walls of the very nightclub where he’d played his last shift. It was determined he’d crawled in there by himself and suffocated (“positional asphyxiation,”police called it), and if not for a recent smoking ban that allowed long-hidden smells to surface, they might never have found him. I’d like to say I was surprised when, a few years later, at a nightclub just down the street from the Village Cabaret, another body turned up, this time wedged into the ductwork (the dead man was presumed to be a thief who hid out until patrons left but got stuck).
    In Winnipeg, the dead and the discarded come back: they refuse to stay hidden.
    Cemeteries and funerals, the way French historian Philippe Ariès sees it, are social constructs to keep nature, the hostile world of worms and decay, separate from a civilized life of flat-screen TVs and microwave chapatis. Look at it this way: we evolved, beautifully, from monkeys into type-A control freaks, with a system (government, laws, religion, organized labour and technology) designed to overcome nature. And for the most part, we pulled it off. There are only two weak spots where chaos sneaks in, wild, wet and savage, reminding us we’re doomed animals: sex and death. So we devised taboos to deal with the former, to take away its power, and ritual to weaken the chaotic impact of the latter.
    To let off communal steam, we devised orgies, bacchanalia, All Souls feasts; Ariès says that graveyard parties were so common in medieval France that by 1231, the Church councils had to ban dancing, juggling, theatre and mummery in cemeteries under threat of excommunication. Meanwhile, how the two circles of sex and death intersected was the business of poetry and porn, and the subject of apocryphal stories of men who got erections when they were hanged.
    This worked fine until the Enlightenment and later, when we “found ourselves,” pre-California-New-Age-style, and funerals wereless about confirming the collective permanence of the social order and more about me me me, which peaked with the Gothic sobfests of the nineteenth century. The Church, which used to own ritual, had to cede to the private sector, which could make up ritual as it went along. The fantasy of redemption and immortality, out of which Darwin was kicking the stuffing, gave