Let us talk about fear. we will be calm, we will be rational, and we will not scream. As your constant narrator, it is time for yet another personal confession. I am afraid of the dark. There, it's out. It has become more episodic than in years past, but there are times that I look out into the darkness of the basement, and shiver.
I don't want to come across as a name dropper, especially after the last essay. However, another famous author has come out of the closet as being afraid of the dark. You should know who I mean.
He also has his own answer why the darkness should hold such terrors. The fear of the darkness is the fear of the unknown. He likens our brain to a 747, and the darkness represents sensory deprivation and sensory distortion for our input-hungry brains. Imagination does the rest.
Then again, the question is open; who say we have nothing to fear? Modern psychology looks upon the monsters that inhabit our nightmares as projections of a deeper fear, primordial tectonic plates throwing up vapors that become bogums under our bed. All nice neat and logical. It is an id on the loose, rather than a hostile life form.
The problem is that humans are not logical. We build great edifices of logic, on how things are supposed to happen. Then the law of unintended consequences comes in, and urinates all over our blueprints.
There's an old axiom, life is what happens between our grandiose plans. Nor are our cherished illusions prevented from becoming chimeral. Part of this is an unwillingness to face the full implications of an idea. Some are not foreseeable, and can be excused. Others are uncomfortable, and ignored.
What if they're wrong? What if there are creatures beyond our logical understanding that are capable of doing us harm? As the Bard once observed,
"There is more under heaven and earth, Horatio,There is more that was and is full of more things than we can know about.
than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Then, there is the realm the more enlightened have dubbed superstition. This is where terror lives. In his most natural state, he seeks to take airs upon himself. We want to be the creator, the mainspring that runs the universe. The idea that there are things beyond or control or understanding do not sit well with us. Yet a single unpleasant fact is enough to destroy the grand theoretical edifices of science.
Those watching the tussle over Intelligent Design seem unaware that a generation or two ago the Big Bang was very controversial because science thought it was close to religion. So where does this leave us? Let's look at the fear of the dark again. We have two propositions before us. Fear of the dark is the fear of the unknown, and in its most natural state, the human heart wishes to exalt itself.
What do these have to do with fear? Taken together, they help explain why we are so eager to live in our nice, neat structures of logic, free of vulgar superstition. If we accept a spiritual world that cannot be measured, constrained, or controlled, then we are in a bind. We are left with the cold existential horror of our logical system, that we are mere motes of dust in a vast cosmos. We may mouth the words, but our natural egoism keeps us from taking it to heart.
Another thing to consider is that the modern relativism is the flip side of the medieval coin. We draw devils with red suits and pitchforks, and use this to laugh the idea to scorn. In an era when the ideas of Heaven and Hell had a much stronger grip on the public imagination, religious symbols were dragooned for magic talismans.
In both instances, there is an attempt to manipulate the spiritual world. In the former instance by ignoring it, and the latter by manipulating it. Neither one will meet with much success. The power of evil isn't controlled that easy.
Even more frightening, there is a part of us that wants to participate in our own destruction. The greatest danger is not in the great acts of evil but the little ones we want to dismiss as 'harmless'. They have a cumulative, corrosive effect. Bit by bit, they strip us of what we want to be, and turn us into something much nastier.
The gradual unraveling and degradation of a person is one theme of horror fiction. The more traditional form would be the sudden unraveling of the fabric of normalcy. Or the incident could be the catalyst to the degeneracy and destruction of a character. All of this rests on an outside force beginning the process. It is difficult to build fiction on evens that flow out of everyday normalcy. It can be done, but it is difficult.
The essence of fear is when the unexpected happens and we are left unsure of what to do. Our nice, neat mechanistic universe crumbles around us, and we are cast into the whirling chaos. The closest analogue would be a disaster, either natural or man-made. The complacent veil of normalcy is ripped away, and everyone is left to face some force gone mad.
In times like that, it becomes hard to deny that such forces are too great to control. We are forced to confront something larger than ourselves. Once again, I return to the dark. What makes us fear it is the membrane of uncertainty. Once again, our neat certitudes no longer seem so pat. The dark beast of superstition roars in the back of our mind, reminding us how thin a strand logic really is.
The bogeyman in the closet and the thing under the bed no longer seem so laughable. The movie monsters that haunt our nightmares no longer seem so far away. The dark is a malevolent force, breathing hate against us.
It is easy to slide into magical, talismanic thinking. Once the blankets are over me, I am armored against all attacks against me. I know it is superstition of the rankest sort. Two pieces of cloth are no shield against anything except cold. And once I am under the covers, the bogeyman can't get me. Not that I particularly believe in vampires, ghosts, or other creatures of the night. I don't believe, but I don't disbelieve either.
Let's turn to these denizens of the dark a moment. What's the worst thing they could do to us? We betray our mechanistic universe again by saying that they kill us, an either consume the corpse, or make us one of them.
However, if you accept the idea of a spiritual as well as physical component of humanity, it is hardly the worst thing that can happen to you. Once the physical body is buried, it has no more worries. Whether it is buried, cremated, or left to rot doesn't matter to it.
In fact, if you stop to think about it, the body is little more than a container for our spiritual essence. Our souls, if you will. I think a far worse fate would be one who could destroy the soul. C. S. Lewis described the idea in The Screwtape Letters as the soul being consumed, and spend eternity outraged in being subsumed within another. The ultimate totalitarian slavery.
The idea of this being the animating force of darkness, something that can destroy body and soul, is something to be feared. In this light, monsters that come to devour our flesh are to be pitied. They are mere puppets, with no outside existence of their own. Their only function is to be a convenient bogeyman, to provide a cheap thrill at our whim.
The problem is that isn't how things work. Evil is like fire. As Dustin Hoffman said in Backdraft about the latter, "…It eats, it breathes, and it hates." Evil feeds too, not on our bodies, but on our souls. It eats at us, like a cancer, warping us into ugly caricatures of ourselves, then destroys us.
To make it even more insidious, it thrives on relativism. If it came to us in black robes, smelling of corruption, and showing its full ugliness, it would be easy to turn away in disgust. Of course, evil is far more clever than that, coming to us in seductive garb. It's form is beautiful, and it whispers that it can fulfill our every dream and desire.
That is why the smaller evils are so dangerous. It seems so harmless at first, but it demands more and more to get the same thrill. It becomes a drug, chewing at our entrails, driving us to seek the bigger kick. Furthermore, it will lay two traps, so that a person seeking to avoid one will fall into the other.
So when the fabric of normalcy unravels, and our protagonist is cast into the screaming void of chaos, this is what they are up against. Sometimes, it comes as a bolt out of the blue. Other times, it comes with creeping slowness, and the character might not realize it until they are chest-deep and sinking further. Some characters are able to rise to the challenge, while others are destroyed.
The greatest threat though is their own heart of darkness. The new inward focus on the mentally aberrant and the criminally depraved has had the salutary effect of making this more apparent, but at the cost of pushing us further to the brink of nihilism.
The cult of the antihero is just as strong as ever, and this fascination with the dark side of humanity is alarming. Friedrich Nietzsche once observed,
"One who fights monsters should see that he doesn't become one, and one who looks into the abyss, the abyss looks back into him."
It must never be forgotten that fear is a powerful emotion. However, fiction allows the reader, and the writer, to look at it from a safe remove. However, one who would wield the sword of fear must have a care when doing so. It is a two-sided blade, and it doesn't care what it cuts. Even psychological horror carries its own dangers. Too deep an interest in darkness risks consumption.
so what is the overarching point of all this? Just look behind the mask of pop-psychology complacency. The darkness does conceal real dangers, and the most dangerous is the darkness in the human heart. So, when the lights go out, I say, be afraid, be very afraid. The twilight is falling, and I must flee for the safety of the blankets, before the monsters come out. As I bid you adieu, just let me add good night, and pleasant nightmares!
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