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Articles
Adventure
Seeker: The Avatar of Horror – Part I
by
Paul Crowley
(Part II here)
Listen for a moment:
This is how two in the New York metropolitan area experienced horror:
They stand, eye-level with the carefree birds, gazing out across the great expanse of the first city of the earth, feeling the wind on their faces; at their backs, the hot breath of incineration, of choking, searing pain to come. They look down, from their Olympian vantage, they see tiny figures, slightly larger vehicles, toy-like, and they could laugh at the sight, if not for terror’s merciless hold upon their emotions. It is a beautiful day; they carry in their heads the remembered voices of just a few minutes past (the happy weather-people of modern media), chattering to them of the “gorgeous” day ahead, blue sky, pleasant temps, not a cloud in sight, the good old end-of-summer graciousness that sometimes descends, courtesy of whatever Deity or Supreme Being tends the local celestial clockwork, upon the roiling, perpetuum mobile city in which they work. And it is still a beautiful day, the view from their floor as wonderful as it ever has been, the sort of view that has stopped them, momentarily, at countless moments past, perhaps cups of coffee in their hands as they begin their working day, a testament to the beauty of the earth and the sheer, simple wonder of chance that there should be humans alive to see this sight, to possess it, once seen, forever in the mysterious realms of memory. Memory shall no longer be their province, memory shall no longer be their comfort (and sometimes, scourge), memory and all that they are, all that they have been and all that they could have become, ends today, in fact in a moment or so, ends with what will be a thousand foot plunge to the unforgiving concrete, the very concrete upon which they placed their feet so unthinkingly, so comfortably, this very morning as they walked, unknowingly, into the valley of the shadow of death.
The fire is closer now, the precious distance that has separated them from immolation has decreased to the smallest amount which will prevent their clothing from smoking, the thick smoke blows past them into the glorious New York morning, and as it flows around them to dissipate in the open and blue-skied air outside the window in which they are standing, they experience a momentary whiff, just a breath-taste, really, of what it would be like to suckle at that miasma, that dense cinder-plasma, to draw it with all the power of a carefree inspiration into their lungs, and so inhale hot death itself. The time to act is upon them, there will be no help, there will be no escape, there will be no moments of commiseration with their fellows (pitiful carbon lumps back there in the inferno), there will be no heroics (brawny men with Irish names breaking through the wall, alien in their masks and oxygen tanks but human, oh so thankfully human just the same, and strong, one wouldn’t think that a human could be so strong, as they hoist one up on slicker draped shoulders and carry one out to blessed, serene safety), there will be only certain death, and it is on this, the last morning of their lives, that they are fated to choose, not whether to live or die (almost, but not quite always, the easiest of choices), but how to die.
They have thought, as their final minutes flow and scatter into time past, of the few ways and means of death open to them: the smoke-drowning, the flesh-cooking, the dragon’s death that awaits them on the outer edges of this floor. They have resolved to cheat the dragon, to deny it the final savor of their bodies that it has already enjoyed of their fallen colleagues just a few yards away. They have resolved to jump, to fly down to death as a stone dropped from a tower, to retain the final bit of choice that is open to them in their extremity. They are two, only, two alone at the precipice, at the absolute, unthinkable precipice of human existence, when all the ties that bound them to their fellows are severed, when all the small pieces of their lives that until now stitched them seamlessly into a common quilt of being, lived from day to day, are gone, snapped by explosion and flame and the stomach-jumping smell of aviation fuel.
Having made their choice, they stare down at the toy people and vehicles, beyond the reach of even the comfort of words, so high is their aerie, beyond anything but the crazy, unimaginable certainty of their coming deaths, a scene that they have lazily imagined, in one form or another, at idle moments during an afternoon here, an early evening there, a sleepy few minutes at morning’s awakening, musing inside their heads and asking the usual idle questions (how would I feel, would I be brave, would I disgrace myself, would I save my friends, would I…). Those fantasies seem silly now, for the time they have dreaded and yet never fully believed in, the moment of death, is quick upon them, and they are discovering that there is no time for idle questions, there is no time for thinking through or planning or preparing to meet one’s Maker, there is no time for anything but the great, the unspeakable horror, the positive act that will result in oblivion, and all the time in the world has failed to give them strength, has failed to give them peace, has failed to do anything but make them half crazy with terror and fear.
This man and this woman, do they know one another intimately? Are they workplace colleagues, mere acquaintances, happenstance strangers, deeply committed lovers or spouses? We do not know, we will never know, but whatever their connection, they are bound as one in their suffering, and this may be what prompts them to do what they do next. At the moment of decision, as they step off into space, clear and sunny and end-of-summer glorious, as they take the final step of their lives, perhaps remembering (oh, that they were back in the family bosom as they recall!) the first steps of their children, or neighbor’s children, or nieces or nephews, or their own memories of their first successful, shaky, windblown bicycle rides (like the Wrights at Kitty Hawk, so unsure, so crazed with excitement and lust for accomplishment and fear of both injury and failure, then giddily triumphant after one, two, three yards, perhaps half a block or more, unbelievably, of glorious, wobbling speed), they look at each other and, without words, clasp their hands together, and we cruel observers, we numbed and jaded watchers of humanity’s great cry of pain, we weep for the greatness of it, for the sheer, stamping, overwhelming humanity of it, that in the midst of horror, final horror, two such as these have reasserted their denial of that horror, their denial of bastard death, their refusal to cast off the raiments of what makes humans redeemable despite all the outrages and despoliations of the race, and they have done this at the exact moment when hope has flared out like an exhausted ember, when they must accept that no one may ever know of their last grand gesture, when all that there is and all that there will be is gathered into a small, hard, stabbing point of pain.
They fall out and forward, and if they scream, we cannot hear them, if they shed tears dried by the furiously uprushing air, we cannot see them, if they, faced with their thousand foot fall, go mercifully insane, we cannot know it, we can only see those small, (oh so pitiably small!), hands, twisted together as their bodies tumble, loose limbed, so vulnerable, so soon to meet the earth. Do the final, whirling seconds seem like eternity to them? Do they relive their lives, their moments of sweet victory and distressful defeat, their kindnesses to and from others and their weeping hurts at others’ hands, their glimpses into God’s good light and their God-known failures of spirit and generosity, their numerous resolves and their small tastes of power, for good and for bad? Or do they, speeding toward gravity’s great lodestone, our Antaean security and our prison, suffer the end of thought and remembrance almost before they are begun? We cannot know, but their hands stay interlaced as they descend, and what an effort that must take, what a presence of mind, what an unearthly strength of character and sheer human will, to refuse to separate, to refuse to abandon each other even as the great darkness hurtles toward them with its unbendable, merciless finality.
Perhaps it is nothing, this holding of the hands, perhaps it is an accident no more significant than the countless random human contacts that occur every day, perhaps it means nothing, this joining of two tiny human extremities, when placed against the mighty backdrop of star-fusion and the endless, eternal, velvet-clad universe. Each of us must draw conclusions as we see fit, but those of us who have had surfeit of horror, who, on this terrible and tragic day, have been filled to the unbearable brim with inhumanity and dread and soul-darkness and soul-ache, those of us who have been sent collapsing to our knees at the sheer, brutal fact of what we have seen, those of us who have witnessed this very human act, this hand-joining at the exact moment of deepest fear and agony, will regard it as a great gift, an act of heroic grandeur, an affirmation of the best and noblest part of that tragic view of life handed down to us from the time of Homer and mediated through the Jewish and Christian and Muslim revolutions, an act that signifies the greatest hope and the greatest human response at the moment of the greatest human pathos, even if it is only a joining of two small hands against the raging fury of an indifferent, and so malignant, universe. We who have stared at horror and bitten into its bitter meat, who have tasted its poison, will ever regard these two, the greater tasters of horror by far, as the bearers of the greatest gift from human to human, caritas. For surely it is only that greatest of virtues, that avatar of the love residing in the Deity itself, which can defeat, not the coming of the darkness itself, no, not the fated and dreaded coming of the final grave-light which we must all face in our own times, but its cold, laughing bitter triumph, its cruel and mocking challenge to the human spirit - if only for a few wind-tossed, courageous and oh-so-human moments.
____________________
I have chosen the example of 9/11 as the introduction to this article
about The Thing (yes, yes, we will get to it, I promise) because
it seemed the surest universal event with which to examine the
various properties we all think of when confronted with the word
(and concept) “horror”, especially as it has appeared
in our public and private lives. There is no more potent symbol
of the sheer, awful meaning of that word than the attack upon,
and destruction of, the two towers that dominated the Manhattan
skyline, along with all the other terrible events of that day.
I have focused specifically on the World Trade Center, though,
because I am a New Yorker, and I witnessed the events in New York
on live television, barely straying from my set for the first thirty-six
hours except to feed cats, shower briefly, and eat some conveniently
microwaved food. In my contacts with my fellow New Yorkers since
(I am a Staten Islander) I have seen every species of response
out of neighbors and not-so-neighbors, from stoic, decent gravitas to the most outrageous and hate-filled spewings. I neither praise
nor condemn, for it is all of a piece to my way of thinking: those
who are capable, temper their bitterness with some measure of just
thinking and attempt, in the lonely nights, to overcome their darkest
thoughts and impulses; those who are not capable, who still exist
in the raw, vulcan boil of horrific emotion, are even now so lost
within their pain that they can barely think of being in any other
state.
What I have decided is that if there has ever been, in the recent consciousness of my country and my city (in which I have lived my life entire), an event that reaches that compressed and somehow squeezed state that qualifies for the word “horror”, (which we will shortly encounter in another context) then this hateful, hated, surreal and inhuman event surely meets the requirement. The great and the grand, preoccupied as they are with the vicissitudes of power, have plenty to keep their minds distracted in the aftermath – but what of the rest of us who have been affected by such history-making events that present themselves to us in all their horrible majesty and inform the daily struggles we wage against the horror lodged in our hearts (and our minds). There is a partial, distractive remedy available to us, horror-stricken as we are, and it is, paradoxically, more of the same, in fictive form, of course.
We should remember that some among us (not all) portentously announced that Americans would now turn from irony, from violent entertainments, would hunger for a mass media that filled up the sudden void at the center of our public lives, that would mend its ways and give us, at last, the uplifting and noble meditations we certainly deserved and yearned for. I think it is safe to say that as of October, 2003, the flashing lights and gunfire are back in all their glory in our cinemas, irony has but briefly bowed its head before roaring back, and the computer gaming world, far from retreating from guts and glory, has never even skipped a beat. This may be all for the best, since the actual confrontation of horror in our public and private lives might be viciously exhausting, to the point of despair and resignation, could we not but divert ourselves from time to time with simulacra, in entertainments, of the real thing. We are creatures of long memory and intense emotions, but we are also creatures who recreate, in our play and amusements, a kind of shadow image of the real defeats we have suffered, in order that we might confront them and so take a measure of temporary peace from our momentary victory over horror.
There is something of a unifying principle needed here, I believe, since the word conjures up, in its various uses as an emotion (“He was seized with a feeling of horror”); a facial expression (“There passed over his face a look of horror”); a genre of books, movies and computer games (The newest work from the master of horror”); or a description of life itself (“The horror! The horror!” – the most eloquent line from the novel The Heart Of Darkness), a variety of related, but slightly different, ideas. Part of this variety has to do with the fact that the word horror usually describes not an object, but a quality, a non-material, non-thing, non-stuff-as-we-touch-it sort of state which relies for its apprehension by humans rather on a Platonic than an Aristotelian point of view. This expression of quality as opposed to material renders the word flexible in its application. How many times have we used it to describe the lightest of nuisances (the traffic on the expressway is a horror) and the greatest of infamies (the horror of the Holocaust) on the same day, even within the same few minutes? We are a promiscuous race, not only as regards our sexual selves, but also in our careless use of such a word, which soon comes to mean all things to all people (rather like the current unfortunate state of the word masterpiece).
Now, there is no particular reason that this should be so, even given our very human propensity for sloppy talk, sloppy writing (I will gladly stand accused along with all the rest) and sloppy thinking, since the root of the word we are considering comes from a fairly specific Roman word that occurred first as a verb (horreo) and then as a noun (horror). The dominant use of the Latin word horror, to indicate fear or loathing or some such unpleasant human reaction, evolved from its root as a verb whose infinitive meaning was to bristle, to stand on end, to stand rigid, to raise (as in the instinctive “hackles” that march along one’s neck in reaction to danger). The genius of the language that evolved in the Latium region of ancient Italy was its ability to take words arising from a rather plain spoken, farming people and use them as bridges to greater, and more universal, meanings, which stood the growing Republic and later Empire in fairly good stead as they expanded both their military and linguistic domination over the Mediterranean littoral, the north and west of Europe, and the lands of the East. “To stand on end” might refer to any number of conditions, and in fact the root infinitive horrere was probably the basis of the word horreum (barn, silo, in other words, a grain storage structure that stands up, rigidly, on end, as well as any such structure standing up which could house wine, or bees, for example – I await the criticisms of classical linguists, and if I am wrong on this particular bit of word history, I will happily stand corrected). Notwithstanding this type of subsidiary word, however, which developed to describe specific technical structures, the agreed use of the Latin word horror as noun came to have little to do with anything but dread, although it was accepted that the root of the word would allow one to express such dread in various ways (by the bristling, or shivering, of the hair on a man’s head, for example, or the actual shivering of the body).
We have, of course, forgotten, in our daily use of the word, those subtleties of origin and expression that attended its birth in the plains and hills of middle Italy, as well we should (since to do otherwise would fate us to drown in seas of foaming etymological complexity every time we had the unfortunate occasion to open our mouths). English, the great trashcan and compactor of world linguistic history, has bestowed so many wonderful words and variants upon, first, the population of the British Isles, and then, that peculiar and unique republic that spawned of those Isles on the leeward side of the Atlantic, that I suppose we may be forgiven a certain imprecision in the use of our lingua franca, being, as we are, so generously endowed with a feast of verbiage which at first glance (especially from those whose native tongue is decidedly not English), seems hopelessly overabundant.
However that may be, we must, for our present purposes, choose a specific and secure berth into which to steer our somewhat rickety, but eminently seaworthy vessel named Horror (HMS or USS as your national preference indicates), and I have decided upon the primary one of genre, although we will set out once again from this initial berth as we later examine the uses and gifts of the word horror as it applies to, and is exemplified by, a story known by several names, but universally acknowledged as The Thing.
____________________
Listen for a moment:
This is how some in the New York metropolitan area confront and defeat horror:
We have gone on to the myriad other things that, of necessity during the distracting business of living, engage our attentions on a daily basis. The stately curtain of history, of time past, is already beginning to draw itself over our vision of the events of that day, allowing us some measure of, if not forgetfulness, then at least partial disengagement with the full frontal horror lodged as biochemical markers in our braincases. A particular word spoken by a stranger, a face seen in the crowd, an act of kindness or cruelty, an odor, a color, a taste, like Proust’s narrator, of a small cake, any of these or a thousand other small prompts, scattered at random throughout any particular day, may interrupt our usual course, our task-laden walk through the 24-hour round, may pierce the self-protective veil which we have thrown over our painful recollections, and then it is but a short step from this, our distracted state of half-memory, to one of complete and total recall, of the horror beyond horror of that wonderfully sunny morning, of the blood and tears and bravery beyond grandeur, of despair and hope chasing each other’s tails, of children matured in an instant and adults reduced to childlike grief, of all our wealth for nought and all our breaths caught in our chests, of blind luck and damnable misery, of incomprehension and crystal clear vision, of hope mortally wounded and charity triumphant, of life and death gripped in mortal contest, of scoundrels who perished in their attempts to save others and saints who failed but for a moment and abandoned others to die, of humanity havoc-wreaked and God-abandoned, of flesh destroyed and spirit ravaged, of hate ascendant and love at bay, and anyone who lives in or who has ever lived in New York City realizes that this wound will never completely heal, that it will revisit itself upon its owners at odd hours, the small hours of the night or a dreamy hour on the subway or a quiet hour alone in a room, that nothing we can do or say or promise to ourselves or to others will ever erase this baptism of fire from our brows, this cup of suffering from our lips, this destruction of innocents from our collective memories. Here is the fertile ground for love to wither into rage, for our strengths to be imprisoned as we allow our weaknesses full freedom, for our judgment to abscond and our emotions to run rampant, and it will be the supreme test of the humanity of the great and good people of the City of New York that they allow themselves to forget, to adjust, to remain unafraid and to accord the full measure of reflection to this inhuman act and then move on, as those of other places benedicted by tragedy have learned to do.
For the last two years, some of us have been struggling to remember we are human; it is only hard in the odd catchments of time when we are alone with our thoughts, when we face the infinite and ask, not only why, but what. We have discovered much of the what, and a good deal of the why, of this thing that has descended upon our city, (and may yet descend again, in even fiercer form), and these whats and whys have not fully explained our fate, but only deepened the mystery that each of us must face in his or her own way. It is small comfort that we have joined the rest of the world in this seeking of what and why – but it is somehow appropriate that this tragedy descended upon the foremost city in the land. Great cities, by the unforgiving logic of history, call upon themselves great suffering. New York, by virtue of its position at the eastern end of the American continent, has for the most part escaped the all too familiar ravages that have become the commonplaces of other cities around the world. It is not a good thing that this terrible event has happened – but it is surely a significant thing that we were included in what was an attack aimed at only one other city, the capital of the nation. One hopes that this is not a harbinger of the future, but the importance of New York as a symbol cannot be overestimated, and it may be our lot to bear the brunt of whatever remains in the arsenal of terror. New Yorkers may yet have things more significant to ponder than whether the expressway is a “horror” or not – but it would be nice to experience a bit of a breather before the next great event scrambles our priorities and unleashes yet another grand tale of suffering humanity upon us. Peace and succor to any and all cities which have ever been so afflicted.
____________________
So now we turn, as promised, from our memorial of a real-world horror of recent history to the somewhat milder realms of popular horror, a genre in which it must be said that we as a people are as heavily invested, by reason of our curiosity, occult sympathies and lust for ripping yarns, as in any of the devotional religions which have crossed our collective paths (leaving aside those few unfortunates who, deigning to deny themselves the delights of horror as an entertainment, have gone so far as to request the removal of such demonic helpmeets of Mefistofele as Harry Potter from the bookshelves of their innocent and sure-to-be-corrupted children, on the fervent assumption that these children, as one such stalwart of fundamentalist censorship stated, need to be “…protected from dangerous ideas”; one would weep, if it were not eminently less painful to laugh).