PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

On Friday afternoon, September 10th, 1976, I visited the college library for the first time.  I was amazed at the massive extent of its holdings.

The morning had been taken up with "getting to know each other" meetings.  The only person who made any impression on me, and that was negative, was a wannabe poet who seemed to need to remind us, at least once in each conversation, that he was a poet.  He was also a betrayer of friendship and a disrespector of literary precedent.  I would have to put up with his presence on campus for four years, no matter how I tried to avoid it.  (We would say our farewells on graduation day.)  He was a prefigurement of another just like him, to be met late in life.

During that afternoon, I borrowed from the library a book which would have some very profound influence on me:  Tom Cullen's magnificent monograph, When London Walked In Terror.  A very detailed study of the serial killings in the Whitechapel district of London, in 1888, it revealed aspects of the case that my limited reading and understanding had not disclosed before.  Although some of Cullen's interpretations have been overturned, the greatness of his achievement is not in any way diminished.  He was the first writer on that subject to make humane distinctions between the victims---not just "some whores," as a future scholar I knew would characterize them.  And, in doing so, Cullen introduced me to Mary Kelly---whose demise I began to study with renewed vigor.  I had promised a very special person whom I had loved that I would, someday, contribute something acceptable to the Ripper research.  I did not know then, in 1976, that, in January of 2001, I would be granted that opportunity.

That evening, early, several department open houses were held:  I visited the English and the Astronomy/Physics departments, the latter being held within a working observatory.  When I returned to the dormitory, the main common room was filled with a riotous and drunken party; and the next day, we, on my floor, would waken to find the bathroom floors strewn with vomit.  I did not want to attend the party because it would remind me of the much more pleasant way I had spent all the previous Friday nights since July 16th (and the Saturdays since July 10th).  So I put my reading lamp in position, and begin to read Cullen's marvelous account---and continued reading until dawn broke in the eastern sky.  And I knew that I wanted to find out so much more about Mary Kelly, and the several anomalies of her so-called murder that have never been positively reconciled.

Starward