Late last year, the final stanza of Conrad Aiken’s tale of violence and dread kept drifting into my mind. After experiencing so many horrors over so many years – the rise of authoritarianism worldwide, environmental disaster, and the fear, grief, and loss of a global pandemic – it seems that so many of us are now driven by a desire to forget, to move past this. Exhaustion and fear have worn us to the bone, and it is transforming so many of us into the ploughman, rushing to drive through flesh and bone to bury our pain and terror under mould and stone.

All night long we plough.

The Vampire could very well be a metaphor for the past year and a half.

The onset of the pandemic:
We saw her wavering to and fro,
Through dark and wind we saw her go;
Yet what her name was did not know;
And felt our spirits fail.

the isolation of lockdown:
She rose among us where we lay.
She wept, we put our work away.
She chilled our laughter, stilled our play;
And spread a silence there.

shutting our eyes against pestilence, environmental catastrophe, authoritarianism:
those of us that ignored the peril
We tried to turn away; but still
Above we heard her sorrow thrill;
And those that slept, they dreamed of ill
And dreadful things:
Of skies grown red with rending flames
And shuddering hills that cracked their frames;

we bear witness to those who have succumbed to the temptation to surrender to the horror:
And this we heard: “Who dies for me,
He shall possess me secretly,
My terrible beauty he shall see,
And slake my body’s flame…

We bear witness to the corporations and governments that are causing irreparable harm to the planet in pursuit of profit. We bear witness to those who wreak unimaginable suffering by flouting pandemic safety. We bear witness to the obliteration of civil rights by those consumed by bigotry and cruelty. There are so many that have been confronted with the terrible beauty of vile malevolence and – whether by apathy, ignorance, or cruelty- have chosen to embrace it.

And some, they said, had touched her side,
Before she fled us there;
And some had taken her to bride;
And some lain down for her and died;
Who had not touched her hair,
Ran to and fro and cursed and cried
And sought her everywhere.

They have taken her to bride, some lain down for her and died.

Fundamentally, this poem is a song about the emergence of great evils and the choices that we make when confronted by evil.

And darkness fell. And like a sea
Of stumbling deaths we followed, we
Who dared not stay behind.
There all night long beneath a cloud
We rose and fell, we struck and bowed,
We were the ploughman and the ploughed,
Our eyes were red and blind.

And here we are, our lifetimes defined by strife, still faced with the ravages of plague, environmental collapse, bigotry, and tyranny. It’s exhausting, it’s frightening, and the temptation to look away or capitulate to the horror is formidable. The challenge lies in finding the fortitude to rise up, to fight to protect our communities despite our fatigue, to recognize that there is so much work to be done by all of us in order to fend off catastrophe.

We are the ploughman and the ploughed, but we can be so much more. The horrors of the Vampire are not inevitable, and we can push back against the darkness.

We are the choices that we make, and those choices – even from the least of us – shape the world.

Proceeds from this scent series will benefit a few organizations that push back against the darkness: the ACLU, NARAL, RAICES, and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

She rose among us where we lay.
She wept, we put our work away.
She chilled our laughter, stilled our play;
And spread a silence there.
And darkness shot across the sky,
And once, and twice, we heard her cry;
And saw her lift white hands on high
And toss her troubled hair.

What shape was this who came to us,
With basilisk eyes so ominous,
With mouth so sweet, so poisonous,
And tortured hands so pale?
We saw her wavering to and fro,
Through dark and wind we saw her go;
Yet what her name was did not know;
And felt our spirits fail.

We tried to turn away; but still
Above we heard her sorrow thrill;
And those that slept, they dreamed of ill
And dreadful things:
Of skies grown red with rending flames
And shuddering hills that cracked their frames;
Of twilights foul with wings;

And skeletons dancing to a tune;
And cries of children stifled soon;
And over all a blood-red moon
A dull and nightmare size.
They woke, and sought to go their ways,
Yet everywhere they met her gaze,
Her fixed and burning eyes.

Who are you now, – we cried to her –
Spirit so strange, so sinister?
We felt dead winds above us stir;
And in the darkness heard
A voice fall, singing, cloying sweet,
Heavily dropping, though that heat,
Heavy as honeyed pulses beat,
Slow word by anguished word.

And through the night strange music went
With voice and cry so darkly blent
We could not fathom what they meant;
Save only that they seemed
To thin the blood along our veins,
Foretelling vile, delirious pains,
And clouds divulging blood-red rains
Upon a hill undreamed.

And this we heard: “Who dies for me,
He shall possess me secretly,
My terrible beauty he shall see,
And slake my body’s flame.
But who denies me cursed shall be,
And slain, and buried loathsomely,
And slimed upon with shame.”

And darkness fell. And like a sea
Of stumbling deaths we followed, we
Who dared not stay behind.
There all night long beneath a cloud
We rose and fell, we struck and bowed,
We were the ploughman and the ploughed,
Our eyes were red and blind.

And some, they said, had touched her side,
Before she fled us there;
And some had taken her to bride;
And some lain down for her and died;
Who had not touched her hair,
Ran to and fro and cursed and cried
And sought her everywhere.

“Her eyes have feasted on the dead,
And small and shapely is her head,
And dark and small her mouth,” they said,
“And beautiful to kiss;
Her mouth is sinister and red
As blood in moonlight is.”

Then poets forgot their jeweled words
And cut the sky with glittering swords;
And innocent souls turned carrion birds
To perch upon the dead.
Sweet daisy fields were drenched with death,
The air became a charnel breath,
Pale stones were splashed with red.

Green leaves were dappled bright with blood
And fruit trees murdered in the bud;
And when at length the dawn
Came green as twilight from the east,
And all that heaving horror ceased,
Silent was every bird and beast,
And that dark voice was gone.

No word was there, no song, no bell,
No furious tongue that dream to tell;
Only the dead, who rose and fell
Above the wounded men;
And whisperings and wails of pain
Blown slowly from the wounded grain,
Blown slowly from the smoking plain;
And silence fallen again.

Until at dusk, from God knows where,
Beneath dark birds that filled the air,
Like one who did not hear or care,
Under a blood-red cloud,
An aged ploughman came alone
And drove his share through flesh and bone,
And turned them under to mould and stone;
All night long he ploughed.
– Conrad Aiken