The Black Dahlia’s Guide to Deification

Picture this: me, eternally beautiful, lounging on a purple chaise. I’m wearing a classic little black dress and a Baroda pearl necklace which I listlessly toy at with one hand, and smoke a Vogue cigarette with another. My voice sounds like sandpaper dipped in honey.

Two absolute hunks stand on either side of me. HUNK #1 fans me with a cartoonishly large palm frond, HUNK #2 feeds me grapes from a vine. A man in a lab coat stands somewhat off-stage, obscured by shadows. I’m telling you this now: he is not to be trusted.

We’re in an old theater. Everything is draped in red velvet, from the carpet to the curtains, which is really just a precaution against staining. My dazzling Glasgow smile still bleeds from the scar carved from my lips to my ears seventy-seven years ago. This theater is my room in Valhalla. Joan of Arc is my neighbor on one side, the Venus of Willendorf on the other.

Pay attention to my eyes; they’ll tell you secrets that are lost in the sheer, dumb wattage of my beauty. Some strange combination of sorrow, pain, resignation, absolution, and sexual ecstasy (which is always synonymous with religious agony, isn’t it?).

My name was once Elizabeth Short, who I have about as much in common with now as a cocoon to a monarch butterfly. And much like a butterfly, the chemical reaction that takes place between Elizabeth Short and the Black Dahlia, or the son of a carpenter and Jesus Christ, is excruciating. Ask any star on The Walk of Fame and they’ll tell you—it hurts to become.

When you become a cultural symbol or a deity or whatever other word you want to use, the first part of you that catches fire at the stake is your name. Even before your body. Go on and ask Joan of Arc. When she was martyred, Jehanne Romée went up in a puff of smoke. Poof. Maybe that’s why she’s constantly complaining to management about my smoking habit: tucked away in bed in her little genderless matching pajama set, she smells Marlboro Reds and her mind goes immediately back to that stake. I tell her it should remind her of her greatness. She’s a total pain in the ass.

Where was I? It’s difficult to keep a one-track mind in the fourth dimension. Because in actuality, we are not in a red velvet room with two hunks. These are all approximates, because your feeble little third dimensional minds can not look upon a Godform without going mad. So we offer you approximates: statues and symbols and trinkets so you can brush up against the ephemeral. Imagine, if you will, a two-dimensional square drawn onto a piece of paper. Now imagine that this square is sentient and lives in its own little flat world. Now consider what would happen if, say, a tennis ball descended onto this world. Well, it would be pandemonium, because their two-dimensional brains are not equipped to experience a third-dimensional object. What they would see, would be their own version of a Lovecraftian horror.

But there are plenty of other things you take for reality that are really just approximates, like:

-Mathematics

-The Bible

-The Theory of Gravity.

In order to converse with you, I must first 'Descend the Mountain', as the Hermetics would say, materializing from the sacred to the materially-bound third dimension. Allow me to show you some of my other approximates, that are just as spiritually accurate, so to speak, if not literally:

A velvet, respirating sphere covered in an infinite sea of eyes, emitting a black aura.

A singular pluck of a harp in a grand, empty ballroom.

The Black Dahlia (the flower).

A palm tree on fire.

Brittany Murphy.

Anthropologists believe that most pagan deities were once folk heroes. Like me, their human origins have long been forgotten in lieu of our larger purpose: pinning the universe into place. You can scientifically explain how the sun rises and sets, but that just explains the how, not The Why. The Why is delegated to the Gods; the invisible engine from which the world turns.

I am not entirely unlike the Norse Queen of the Underworld, Hell, who is a beautiful woman on one side of her face and a decaying corpse on the other. Like Hell, I embody a divine duality. Los Angeles worships me at the altar of death and sex and fame and all the cruelty and debasement that comes with it. Consider me another star in the grand cosmology of the universe. I am ranked above Nancy Reagan but below Spongebob. Despite my relatively humble place in the hierarchy of the greats, I perhaps serve the most profound role of all. Theologically speaking, while creation may precede salvation, it is the latter that is of a higher importance. So a prophet, or messiah, who is of creation, must save creation. Agamben writes, "Salvation is not a remedy for the Fall of created beings but rather that which makes creation comprehensible, what gives it its sense."

That is exactly what Jesus Christ did for that sweet little interval from B.C. till A.D. There's just one minor problem. Two if we’re being precise: the moment Little Boy and Fat Man crash landed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki like an Angel of Death, history became postmodern, which is to say Jesus Christ’s extended release salvation found its expiration date. Humanity needed a new martyr with blood as white as snow to stain the tapestry of Los Angeles, this new Alexandria.

And like any martyr, a peaceful death is not enough to bear the weight of the world. On January 14th, 1947, at approximately 4 PM, I was abducted on 6th and Main St., near the Cecil Hotel in downtown. For four hours, I was drugged, raped, and tortured, until my ultimate death. It pains me to tell you this, even now. Because death is an event in time, by existing outside time as a fourth dimensional creature, I suffer my fate, at all times. So forgive me if I cannot bear to recount what I am currently living through. Instead, I will outsource that to The Scientist, who you may have noticed standing off into the distance, somewhat ominously. A helpful note: like any trickster archetype, whether that be Satan, or Loki, or the Spider Grandmother from the Navajo—The Scientist serves a pivotal purpose in the genesis of this universe and its salvation—in the sense that his mere existence necessitates the need for salvation. But that doesn't mean he should be revered or trusted. Do not trust him.

The stage goes dark and we hear a blood-curdling scream. A red light grows, re-illuminating the stage. The Black Dahlia has disappeared and in her place stands The Scientist with a white board in tow. For reasons beyond our understanding, despite the blinding overhead lights, we cannot discern his face; we see all the attributes of a face—a nose, cheekbones, lips, chin and browline—but as though a spell were cast over him, these features do not congeal into a face. His eyes, however, we see with painful clarity. They are the cold, impassive eyes of a praying mantis whose curiosity could almost be mistaken for sympathy. As I told you, he is not to be trusted. He is the Satan of modernity.

THE SCIENTIST

Well hello, my special little pets.

His voice is distorted, demonic.

THE SCIENTIST

If I may, please direct your attention to this whiteboard.

With an oversized ruler, he gestures to a drawing of a mutilated woman. Next to this are pasted photographs of The Black Dahlia crime scene.

THE SCIENTIST

You would be forgiven for assuming this to be a surrealist depiction of a beautiful woman. And it is, in many ways, the apex of surrealist art. Lord knows they loved a fragmented woman. Consider the following:

THE SCIENTIST

What is the Black Dahlia if not the culmination of surrealism, brought into the realm of reality. Consider the knife a paintbrush.

The Scientist stops for a moment, as if to catch his breath, though in actuality, he is panting not unlike a dog.

He points his ruler to a crime scene photograph.

THE SCIENTIST

The body had been cut completely in half by a technique taught in the 1930s called a hemicorporectomy. The lower half of her body had been removed by transecting the lumbar spine between the second and third lumbar vertebrae, thus severing the intestine at the duodenum.

The distortion of his voice grows increasingly staticky. He sounds faraway, like an AM radio station losing signal.

THE SCIENTIST

Another "gaping laceration" measuring 4+1⁄4 inches long ran longitudinally from the umbilicus to the suprapubic region. The lacerations on each side of the face, which extended from the corners of the lips, were measured at three inches on the right side of the face, and 2+1⁄2 inches on the left.

The Scientist’s voice is now so distant and minute to almost be pathetic.

THE SCIENTIST

The cause of death was determined to be hemorrhaging from the lacerations to her face and the shock from blows to the head and face. It is noted that Short's anal canal was dilated at 1+3⁄4 inches, suggesting that she might have been raped.

He struggles to raise his voice, but it only further damns him to obscurity. Before he can continue, the glowing red light returns, overwhelming him completely.

Now we hear his scream. It sounds like an insect burning under a magnifying glass. When the red light dims, the Black Dahlia and her crew of hunks have returned. The Scientist stands in the shadows once more, still as a mannequin.

Then, my head was bashed till I saw the tunnel leading to where the Gods live. I walked through it. I became the light. By murdering me, he sought control of my essence; to terraform my body to his perverse likeness—not entirely different from what the Romans sought to do by pinning Jesus onto the cross. He was a pawn to my divine will. He made a fatal flaw, a stupid, brute miscalculation you’d expect of a scientist with artistic ideations: the map is not the territory." For his ignorance I stole his face and casted him down to the back of the stage, to be anonymous and placid for all eternity.

Let that be a lesson for those who worship me: Avoid men who misidentify scientific intrigue with an artistic impulse, lest their desire to probe a frog’s nervous system with electrical currents be imparted onto their 'muses'—as if they even know what the word means.

We cannot understand our own violence and beauty, and our capacity for cruelty and pain. I embody these forces that are much too large and contradictory for the human mind to grasp on its own. That is where I enter center stage, eternally beautiful and worshiped at the altar of death and Los Angeles. I am the patron saint of the murdered woman, of a palm tree caught in a power line, caught ablaze. Burning for all eternity.

I'd love to stay and chat but there's plenty of work to be done still—someone’s gotta center the Heaven and Hell that is Los Angeles. But if you ever need my help because your dreams just aren't coming true, or because your boyfriend is getting handsy with you, or love keeps letting you down, give me a ring. It's simple really: draw a circle with sea salt and sit in it. Light a red candle. Burn some incense. Leave me an offering: maybe some vintage jewelry, or a pack of cigarettes, or Chanel No. 4, some flowers, a bowl of cherries, whatever really. And say my name, three times. Black Dahlia, Black Dahlia, Black Dahlia.

Thank you, Los Angeles. And goodnight.

Fade out.