Entry #2: From Colorful Chaos—a Novel
Seeing or decoding often requires a responsibility to let others experience the same revelation. And this is the puzzle I carry as a writer.
THE SEED IMPULSE TO BEGIN A BOOK can emerge from unlikely people, places, or things. The narrative arc for my new novel on Jeffrey Dahmer arose almost wholesale from the clash between the colors red and black.
The two colors dominate the chaotic field of Franz Marc’s 1914 abstract painting Fighting Forms. A four-foot poster of Marc’s painting completely dominated the wall of Dahmer’s tiny Milwaukee apartment at the time of his arrest in 1991.
Red conjures sexual exuberance. Black, the la petite mort (the little death) that accompanies orgasm.
Red—the essence of life. Black—the annihilative stroke of death.
Marc's painting presents the colors as impossible contraries, with neither faction relinquishing dominance. The struggle is constant—unresolved—the uncompromising madness that facilitates war.
And indeed, this was Franz Marc’s last painting before his death—just before the start of WWI. On the back of the canvas for Marc’s penultimate painting, Fate of Animals—a raucous prelude to Fighting Forms—the artist had scrawled: “And all being is flaming, suffering.”
Jeffrey Dahmer’s placidly dull outer life—his rat wheel-like cycle of habits (a dead-end job, no social life or romantic prospects, and a fierce addiction to beer, porn, and cigarettes) offered no clue as to the haywire compulsions that dominated his lethal fantasy life.
For me, Marc's painting capsulizes the entirety of Dahmer’s psychosis. And powerful art—as a conveyance of a dream or obsession—can do that.
However, seeing or decoding often requires a responsibility to let others experience the same revelation. And this is the puzzle I carry as a writer. My upcoming book on Dahmer is an assignment that’s creatively inspiring but exhausting.
As I told editor-at-large John Calendo the other day, I look forward to publishing the novel and being set free from Dahmer’s Weltenschwang.
Astrological Colors and Frequencies
Jefferey Dahmer’s horoscope is intensely florid and, despite a lack of the water element (emotional/sympathetic response to the environment), is dominated by a porous temperament easily invaded by influences from other dimensions (Neptune adjacent to the ascendant but hidden in the second house).
This Neptunian signature might have made him a driven artist (with Libra rising and the chart’s ruler, Venus, in Taurus trine Saturn in Capricorn). Or an endlessly curious scientist driven by a potent imagination. With a compelling square from Pluto, his Gemini Sun and Mercury might have forged a psychiatrist devoted to penetrating the psyche’s most regressed secrets.
More conventionally, with Jupiter and Saturn in Capricorn in the fourth house, Dahmer might have been a successful real estate agent.
In fact, the latter was a vocation he considered one day studying—but only after he’d built his dreamed-of shrine. A home-constructed symmetrically arranged ‘power center’ composed of the skulls and bones of his victims. (Yes, this is a fact.) Oddly, as a ghoulish art form, Dahmer’s shrine would have integrated many of his horoscope’s key signatures!
As I mentioned, Dahmer’s psyche was wide open to dimensions of longing that civilized humans would consider gonzo-occult and exceedingly taboo. Dionysian fever dreams run amok.
Back to Black (and Red)
Dominating Dahmer’s horoscope, like a throbbing bass note, are the colors associated with Mars and Saturn. Red and black. The aspect between the two planets—a hard square—anchors the chart into a perpetual condition of warfare. This aspect is the skeleton key to Dahmer’s character. (More on this in my next diary entry.)
So, the above astrological signifiers are the psychological beats I have decided to work with in my novel. The various traits typified in Dahmer’s birth chart will possess and entangle Dahmer and the various romances interweaving through his life.
As I mentioned in the first entry to The Dahmer Diaries, my novel is constructed as a parallel history involving fact and fantastical retoolings. But paramount for me, as the book’s ballast, is Dahmer’s pride and joy—Franz Marc’s troubling painting Fighting Forms.
When words fail, colors might emerge as inspiration to ‘paint’ a world that contains a surfeit of fantasies, horrors, and chances at liberation.
Until next time!