Madam Spatchcock, the proprietor of a foul rag and bone shop, is a mistress of all trades. She is a surgeon, a purveyor of body parts, a dentist, an optometrist, and a spiritualist, among other things. She is the alter ego of an academic by the name of Zoe Martell, who teaches psychology for a living.
This blog is born out of a need to chronicle a very strange moment in time. Madam Spatchcock, the character, was conceived in 2012, and rooted somewhat in the Steampunk culture, as a part of an MFA thesis that dealt with the aesthetics of Steampunk, and the Trickster figure that emerged within the imagery that said culture embraced. She embodied, in part, a sense of foreboding that was present in 2012 — a sense that modern life could not possibly continue as it was proceeding, and that some great event would happen, in the near future, that would shake the world. She also wore shades of longing for a different present, based on fictional past that had not led the human race so far off course.
Madam Spatchcock has re-emerged and evolved over time, and continues to do so. She is an embodiment of the Trickster figure, in feminine form. She shifts and changes, and is difficult to pin down. She is a shapeshifter, who glories in illusion.
The Trickster’s time has indeed finally come. The long-awaited apocalyptic, end of life-as-we-know-it scenario, so often imagined and perhaps even longed for, has arrived at last. We are facing a pathogen so stealthy and powerful that it has already shut down large portions of the world. It is, as I write, collapsing world economies. It is turning modern civilization upside down.
At the helm in the United States, a Trickster of monumental proportions is running the show, mesmerizing and hypnotizing some, horrifying others, and distorting reality to the point of characature. He is always predictably unpredicatable, and dangerously driven by his hungers. He is the malevolent clown figure, who has risen to a position that allows him the power over life and death, truly a Trickster’s dream come true. He is truly the Trickster in the flesh.
Madam Spatchcock has emerged, yet again, as another element of the Trickster — one that is merely a shadow-side of the aforementioned Clown God. She is a mistress of illusion, a purveyor of dreams … and she wishes to use her voice to chronicle this series of events, and (with any luck) to help counter the destruction that is unfolding.
This is a journal of a plague — the great plague of 2020. The year that life changed forever.
Spatchcocking the Future 