Thursday, July 18, 2019

Essay: The Proximity of Horror, and its therapeutic effect


There is a strange memory I have, the sort of memory that is so dreamlike in nature, yet so real in feeling, that I am not sure, after the intervening years, whether it actually happened or not. It's not uncommon to have these sort of things in our childhood, these memories that are likely either dreams, or so wildly distorted by mist of memory as to have taken on the tenor of a dream. But this event happened when I was eighteen, and I recollect it so well that I am almost positive that it happened.

This happened on a trip to Europe (at this point I was alone, so unfortunately I have no one to corroborate with). I was staying in a hostel in a suburb just west of Munich. The hostel was billed as being ‘built in a castle’ but in reality the hostel itself was just sort of a gimmick, built to look like a castle but really no more than ten or twenty years old and just particle board and plaster. I spent the night in the hostel bar, learning about Wit beers from the friendly bartender. There was a school group there and I was surprised to see kids no older than me drinking together with their teacher. I ended up getting pretty drunk and went up, late, to my room.

The next day, fairly hung over, I decided to walk around the little suburb, probably what had been a village separate from Munich only a hundred years prior. I remember that it was situated at the edge of a ravine or cliff and that at the edge of the village the earth just abruptly dropped off into… What? I don’t remember. Probably a stream or something.

I set out, looking for some breakfast. There was this bakery at the end of a street, just before where the cliff dropped off to whatever was below. The bakery was a little place, and seemed nice enough. I went inside and, as all of these foreign occasions go, nodded slightly and tried my best ‘Guten Tag’. The woman working there (of which I remember nothing, perhaps it was a man) seemed sheepish but nodded at me all the same. I looked in the case at the doughnuts and exotic German pastries for which we likely do not have names in English and saw, to a shock so profound that I was unable to recognize it fully, that the case was filled with yellow jackets. They were swarming along the front bubble window - anyways those that were still alive - as there were dead yellowjackets, and parts of dead yellowjackets, strewn about inside, piled on the butcher paper below and stuck to the pools of syrup that gathered here and there. Neither I nor the woman working there pointed out or mentioned any of this. Perhaps it was a sort of mutual fear of the outsider, the feeling that ‘Well if this is normal for you, then I'll pretend that it is normal for me.’ The yellowjackets were clearly crawling all over many of the pastries, and dead ones were stuck in the sticky coatings and fillings of others. I picked one or two pastries, pointed them out awkwardly and the woman removed these from the case. I can’t remember whether I took great care to choose those that were free from (or at least away from) the main, crawling mass of yellow jackets. I seem to remember the woman wiping the pastry off with the tongs, maybe dislodging a few stragglers, bagging them and handing them to me. I paid, neither of us commented further on the event, and I left.

Did this really happen? Could a bakery in, of all places the bureaucratic hothouse and hygenic paragon of contemporary Germany really offer up something as horrific and grotesque as this? Wouldn’t a reasonable store simply close for a day or two, fumigate, then reopen? Was this some sort of alcohol related hallucination, a sort of minor delirium tremens, the woman’s slight awkwardness the result of my hesitancy and own awkwardness. Or did this really happen? Did I slip, for a few moments into a side-world of horror. A place where bug-ridden pastries are just sort of par for the course, not even worth mentioning. Where customer and employee are bound by an oath of silence to never, never, NEVER speak about the insects that are crawling over the sugar soaked pastries? It seems, to the searching eye, to be almost allegorical. A heavy handed, Lynchian image for the blatant, hideous rot that underlies the otherwise pleasant suburban environment. Having said that, the image is still fresh in my mind. The rest of my time in that town was pleasant enough and the hostess at the hostel recommended that I visit (in perfect English, of course) her home country, Slovenia, which ended up being one of my favorite stops on the trip.

I think this instance illustrates well the allure of horror to those of us for whom horror holds allure: its utter inexplicability, its total immanence, its utter reality. Rarely do we feel as if we are living in what could be a sci-fi story, and fantasy of course is at heart an utter escape from the mundane reality in which we find ourselves. But the world of horror? Stumble down the wrong alleyways, come across an image from a certain angle, step into the wrong bakery on the wrong day and one is dropped suddenly and unaccountable into a/the world of horror. The stories that we read and write are not escapes, not projections, not even speculations so much as they are trips down the doors that we have seen opened in this world, continuations down the halls into which we ourselves, for only a second or two, have apparently set foot. Horror is an accounting for these branches of the world, a processing of what we know is there, and which we have seen with our own eyes. Horror is not an escape from reality, but an approach toward it; not a looking away, but a looking in; not a flight from that which frightens us, but a dive deeper into it.

I have friends who ‘do not get horror’ who ‘don’t see the point’. I won’t argue with them, I accept their position. Different dispositions are geared toward different entertainment and different work. But the approach I hear so often (or sense, maybe) is that the purpose of horror fiction and cinema is to ‘generate fear’. This could not be further from the truth. Perhaps cheap, gratuitous, genre fiction (not to disparage the love of so many) is meant to do this, but well made, intelligent horror fiction and cinema is, in fact, built to do the opposite: its works best when addressing fear, when processing it, when diminishing or solving its negative aspects.

I, like many of us, hated being scare as children, and associated horror books and movies with the feeling of being scared. Now, as an adult, well made and thoughful horror does not make me feel afraid as much as it generates a sort of quiet and still feeling within me, a feeling of mystery and fullness. Those strange parts of life that the mind cannot process no longer engender a restless thrashing, but rather the sort of quiet appreciation, hope even, that there is something else, something just beyond. That any fear that I feel is not for life and limb, but an acknowledgement of the frailty of the mundane, a recognition of the thinness of the veil.

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