The Annotated Elephant Man
The discovery as a child of the haunting, tragic life story of Jospeh Carey "John" Merrick was one of the most defining creative and spiritual apsects of my personal development. Throwing a tantrum as a child, not wanting my parents to watch the stage play starring Philip Anglim as "John Merrick, " and Kevin Conway, and later seeing that same play rebroadcast in images that haunt me, dream-like, to this day; images that seemed to have welled up from some past existence. Images of an eerie, quiet, void-like place wherein a Victorian presumed "Doctor" is unaccountably taken by the prone figure of someone we never see. Someone that a mob or crowd has captured, lifting them above their shoulders, holding them up to the light of God, outside a growing circle of musty darkened despair.
