Full Body Chills - POE: The Raven (2021)

Episode Date: November 5, 2024

"Bereft" by Jake Weber. Adapted from the poem "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe. 2021.Intro read by Margo Seibert. Poe is an audiochuck production.Instagram: @audiochuckTwitter:  @audiochuckFacebook: /audiochuckllc

Poe is a 2021 audio chuck original made for our friends at SiriusXM. We hope you enjoy this exclusive content re-released for free on Full Body Chills. And for the best experience, we kindly recommend you listen with headphones. Few names are so feared and revered as that of Poe. His work extends time. His fiendish depictions and gloomy descriptions stalk the modern consciousness. And that is because his stories touch on our morbid fascinations, our everyday life and fears.

Love. Hate. Death. our morbid fascinations, our everyday life and fears, love, hate, death. Excuse me, there's someone I'd like you to meet. This is Lenore. She's a common raven, but you shouldn't call her that. For Lenore is friends with the Grim Reaper. Metaphorically, at least. Throughout many cultures, the Raven has been seen as an omen of death. But what does that mean? Look inside a dictionary and you'll find less lines than a crossword puzzle. Death is a mystery

beyond simplification. Yet if there's one thing we know for certain, outside the moral histories of ancient religion, no one has ever returned from death. And in this story, despite what one woman would dream to be true, that truth is painfully recalled in one word by one bird, the raven. Bereft by Jake Weber, adapted from the poem The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe, 2021. Why is the measure of love loss?

This is the opening line of a book that I'm reading. The narrator has lost a lover to someone else. And I shouldn't be reading books like this, books about the loss of someone who was beloved and who will never return. But I can't help myself. I'm not fit company. All I do is think about her. She's never coming back, but I never left. She died in a car crash. I wasn't in the car, but I could have been. She was killed by a drunk college kid who survived. He took Lenore's life. He destroyed mine and his own.

How would that kid ever forgive himself? That was three years ago. I still live in the cabin Lenore and I shared in the woods near Lake Champlain in Vermont. We lived simply. I mean, we didn't need much, only each other and Mother Nature. Lenore worked in a bakery,

and I was studying to be a botanist. We fell in love in college, the same college as the kid who killed her. We stayed in Vermont because we loved it, and we loved each other. Now I live alone here and I know I should move. All around me are things of hers and memories of us but I can't bear to leave. My parents have tried to shake me out of it. You have to leave the cabin, they tell me. You have to change your

environment. You'll never move on if you don't. And I know that they're right. One day I'll have to leave this place, but I can't tear myself away and start anew. Not just yet. I don't socialize. I'm a recluse. My career plans are on hold because I can't get motivated to study. I deliver food for money, but I don't need much. It's a small cabin, rudimentary. Basic plumbing and electricity, but I have internet. I read novels mostly. I like Patricia Highsmith and Jeanette Winterson. And I walk in the woods and talk to Lenore. There are many forests

in Vermont. It's known as the Green Mountain State. Those verdant woods are teeming with organisms, including a wide variety of mycelium, which you know as mushrooms. Mushrooms to saute or put on salads and pizza. And also little brown mushrooms that contain psilocybin, the psychedelic fruit of an underground network that was first called the flesh of the gods by the Mazatec Indians for the mystical or spiritual journey it could take you on. It's something we used to do together. Occasionally, Lenore and I would trip. There was a secret watering hole we loved, and we'd sun on the rocks and swim in that cold, clear water and kiss and

feel connected to each other and to nature and to the cosmos. We would hike there from the cabin. I hadn't eaten a psilocybe since before Lenore died, but on a walk one afternoon I saw one. I wasn't looking for it, it just called out to me. They look utterly nondescript, like any number of mycelia, and can fruit actually right next to a deadly mushroom, so you have to be careful and know exactly what you're looking for. But if you've seen one before, your eye automatically goes to it. Something called the pop-out effect. And there was another one close to the first. I plucked them both, pulled them up with a little soil and a small knot of white

mycelium. It's the sophisticated underground neural network that basically nurtures much of the ecosystem in a forest. Fungi are remarkable organisms with extraordinary medicinal properties. Penicillum was derived from a fungus. Fungi can decompose even crude oil and turn it into organic material. They use my cilia on oil spills. I dropped them in my pocket, one for me and one for Lenore, and they sat drying on the kitchen windowsill for a few days until one evening I decided to eat them in between bites of dark chocolate to cut the bitterness.

I don't know why on that moonless December night I decided to trip for the first time since Lenore died, but I did. As I waited for the psilocybin to take effect, I stared at the fire I always made on winter evenings and I watched as the ashes landed on the stone hearth. The mushrooms were starting to kick in because those ashes were becoming spectral as they left the leaping flames and landed on the stone. I lay down on the sofa to welcome in the experience I was about to have. It's important to lean into a psychedelic experience. Whatever happens, whatever the journey, one is better off accepting and not resisting.

But it was Lenore I was hoping for. People on psychedelics, whether psilocybin or LST, have found relief from grief, depression, addiction, the fear of death. I read of someone on psilocybin finding all the people who had meant something to her, who were no longer living or presently in her life, hanging like stalactites in a cave. And that experience was not horrifying as it sounds, but comforting and deeply moving. She had been partially responsible for someone's death when she was a teenager, and there was that person in a state of grace,

and the moment they shared during that psychedelic experience stayed with her for the rest of her life. I closed my eyes and waited to fully step into a hallucinogenic realm when I heard a tapping at the door so faint I could hardly make it out. I opened my eyes and watched the curtains undulate and a terror crept up in me. Was this gonna be a bad trip? To alter the trajectory of a hallucinogenic journey, if you are experiencing it alone and without a guide,

you need to change your environment or music if you have some playing, which I did not. The curtains were assuming demonic forms and my heart rate rose until it was pulsing through my body and beating a deafening drum in my ear. Dum dum, dum dum, dum dum. I could hear that tapping sound from outside the cabin, louder now, insistent. I was gripped by paranoia. No company, please, no visitors. I did not want company, not while I was tripping and on a bad one at that.

Who could be out there? I never had visitors. Everyone knew I was tripping and on a bad one at that. Who could be out there? I never had visitors. Everyone knew I was solitary. Was I in danger alone in my cabin in the woods? I had no choice but to lean into the experience, except the fear and hope it would pass through me and that I could move on to a different phase of the trip. So I went to the door and opened it to the cold Vermont winter. There was no one there. The relief

and the shock of the cold would rid me of the fear I had felt inside, I thought. The The sky was an impenetrable wall of black. No moon or stars on this overcast night. I knew I couldn't stay in the doorway for long in the cold, but I was compelled by that black sky. Behind that shield of clouds was a teeming universe, a vital, mysterious cosmos of which I was a part and of which Lenore was a part. I wanted to connect with her again. I wanted to know there was a continuum, a dimension after life, call it heaven or a soul or whatever you like, but I wanted desperately to believe Lenore

didn't just exist in memory, that in essence of her was still out there if I could only access it. And then I could say goodbye as I never got to in life. I could reconcile with my grief. There would be some respite. She had been ripped away from me. One minute my vital lover, my partner, the next an inert corpse. I was lost without her. I was bereft. I whispered her name, and

it was whispered back to me. There couldn't be an echo, not out here. I wasn't in a cave, I was in the woods. In my altered consciousness, my voice had boomeranged back to me. I called her name again, and again it came back. I was getting cold now, shivering and starting to twitch. I would have to go in. I closed the door and warned myself by the fire and tingled all over, as if an electric current were running through me, as if my entire body had pins and needles.

Then there was a wrap-wrap-wrap again at one of the window shutters. Was that the wind? That wasn't the wind. There it was again, a steady, insistent knock on the slatted wood panel. I had wanted the shutters. They kept the cabin dark and cozy. We felt safe behind them, Lenore and I. Private, insular. There it was again, a loud tapping from outside that locked up my breath in fear. Step in to the experience, I said to myself. Welcome, whatever will be.

I went to the window, drew the curtain, unfastened the latch, and threw open the shutters. unfastened the latch and threw open the shutters. Outside was a huge bird, a black raven staring in at me with blazing eyes. I staggered back and he flew inside and perched on the bookcase, his gaze fixed on me. Was he a figment of my imagination? Had I conjured him in a hallucinogenic state?

Or was he real? Either way, there he was. And if there was a large, fierce bird in my cabin, even if only in my mind, I would engage it. I asked his name, and he spoke. A human word came from his beak. He replied to me, Nevermore. Nevermore, he said. What kind of a name was Nevermore, I asked. He didn't answer, but kept eye contact, locked in on me, intense.

I was communicating in language with an animal, a bird whom I had summoned somehow. I asked the raven if he were here to stay or would he leave like others, like Lenore. And he repeated that word, nevermore. I thought to myself he could have learned that word from someone, someone as bereft as me, someone unhappy, who had repeated the words never, nevermore, had he picked it up as a parrot would. I pulled the chair up in front of the bird, so we were up close now, almost eye to eye.

The raven never fluttered, just stared back at me with fierce eyes. I asked again what he meant by never more. Then the air, the air in the cabin became thick with a scent. It was Lenore. It was the smell of her skin in the morning. The smell of her neck. Was she here? Had she come back to me?

Had the bird been sent by some higher power to bring Lenore to me so I could have a sensory experience of her one last time? Would I then be able to let her go? To say goodbye and move on with my life? I asked the Raven, and he repeated that word. Never more. My stomach dropped. The Raven has been represented, mythologized, as a symbol of death, and the bird now felt to me as a symbol of death and the bird now felt to me an ominous presence. There was a malevolent creature in my home. This was not a divine presence but its opposite. Had the devil taken this form? A devil who had taken the love of my

life? Had he come here to torment me? To taunt me. I was filled with terror again and demanded of the bird, are you the devil? Are you his emissary? But there was no response. So then I begged. I begged and answered to a single question, would I heal? Would I ever get over the loss of Lenore? And the raven answered, never more. And the raven answered, never more. So that was that? That was to be my lot in life? But what about Lenore? Was she in heaven? Was there such a place? Was she at peace, I asked. The bird replied ominously, never more.

A sound came up in me, a protest from somewhere primitive, a primordial scream, and I shouted, get out! Get out, you beast, you hateful, evil creature! Go to hell! You came here to break my heart all over again. Leave my consciousness! I dismiss you! I banish you!

Leave me be! And the raven said, never more, and didn't move a feather, just stayed perfectly still with demonic eyes boring in on mine. I was in pain and now terrified, and there was no going back. It was gonna be a long night.

I had five more hours before the psilocybin would begin to wear off and I could come back to reality. That was a lifetime. That was an eternity. How would I make it through? What kind of psychological torment would I have to endure? Would I be the same after? The light from the table lamp cast the long shadow of the raven across my cabin, a monstrous floating figure that hovered over the floor. Inside that shadow was my shattered heart, my heavy heart that would be lifted never more. I would never be reconciled with my grief. It would always be mine to bear.

There would be no respite, no relief. I would never get over Lenore, my lovely Lenore. The measure of love would always be my loss. Poe is an audio Chuck original. This episode was read to you by Ashley Flowers. So, what do you think Chuck? Do you approve? Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo