eryka.ca

I fell off the wagon a while back (no, not the alcohol wagon, the work wagon) and am having a hell of a time getting back on.  Well, I guess it’s the fact that I’ve known 5 people that have died in the last 3 months and I’ve had to put down a dog and a horse that I both held very dearly.  The truth is it’s been harder on my parents than myself for the most part and it’s very hard to watch them watch their friends die off.  It’s one of those situations where you ask “well, what the hell’s the point?”  As I tend to ask myself this question all the time, and it’s rarely ever been answered on any topic, never mind life and work, this sort of debacle happens to me all the time.  I tend to blame my parents.  I was one of those kids who was always asking “Why?” and they were the type of people who always answered “Because I said so.”  Consequently, one always is running into blocks when searching for meaning in things because “I said so” is a horrible answer which makes you dig harder for the answers as you grow up (if you’re the curious type who resents stupid power plays) and some answers you might find and they will depress you and some answers you will never find and that might depress you, too.

Sigh….

But that is a topic for another post on politics.

Today, I want to respond to Caitlin Kiernan’s denial of her being a “horror” writer.  First, my credentials:  I have a degree in English and another in psych, and I took the education because I loved to learn and was interested in the subjects, not because I thought they would get me a job.  Consequently, I try to filter and analyze almost everything I come across.  It makes me kind of crazy compared to those who don’t like to think, I suppose, but I also enjoy reflection so that makes up for it.  Second: I first started reading her with either Low Red Moon or Silk or maybe it was Threshold, I forget which, but I think it was Silk.  At that time my experience with horror was still Steven King, who I enjoy somewhat though I find his characters rather repetitive.  Throw in some Clark Aston Smith, Lovecraft, classic “horror” like Frankenstein and Dracula, and a heavy dose of X Files and a few other shows and movies and you have my horror background.  I’m not really a gore horror lover.  When you’ve had to cut a dead calcified calf out of it’s living mother with piano wire or pluck a rotten infected eye out of a living cow or shoot your favourite dog or walk long trips in the dark through bear infested woods the modern blood’n'guts stuff looks rather mild and simply gratuitous.  However, if you have a really vivid imagination and a tendency to empathize with people, animals, and situations (which is why, in my books, the stupid petty people in Blair Witch Project simply could not die quick enough) horror movies are some of the last things you want to watch.  Seen my share of pain, caused some of it, have no real desire to see people or animals I like die horribly.  Not my idea of a lovely Sunday afternoon’s entertainment.  And no, I can’t understand people’s fascination with torture porn films like the Saw films.  Well, I suppose I can but I’ve read enough history that makes those sorts of depictions of violence and fear look like school boy pranks, which leave me with more questions about humanity’s need to watch other people suffer than anything else.  But I’m off topic.

So yes, I started reading Kiernan in her early days.  The first thing that struck me was her amazing ability with words.  Actually, ability isn’t the best term, “talent” is better because, well, she simply has natural talent when it comes to turning a poetic though effective phrase and she wasn’t afraid to take risks.  And when it came to being convoluted and dark beyond dark she was there in a murky “what the hell have I gotten myself into and what the hell does it mean?” kind of way.  I think I actually read about four or maybe five of her books, which for me is quite a feat because I rarely read that many books of any author unless it’s a series I really enjoy.  Heck, I still haven’t read Gaiman’s Anansi Boys and I’ve had it for years.  In these days of the “everyone’s a writer and here’s the 6 day course that will make you famous” it’s not easy finding authors that are that interesting, that really have serious underlying personal and philosophical conflicts that saturate their prose in a good way.  However, there is always a problem with being so heavy and not being able to resolve the central conflict at the heart of most of your works because, of course, stories are always about their authors, by which I mean the author’s personal issues, their points of view, their vocabulary, their thinking structure and habits, etc.   Give two different people the same poem to revise and I’ll bet you you’ll have two different revisions (thus different poems) which would bring about two different interpretations by the same person.

In my opinion, horror, true horror, is about the confrontation with the great devouring unknown which can be within or without, physical or metaphysical (preferably both), and manifests itself in numerous ways but always in terms of overwhelming power differences.  Stephen King’s Carrie, one of the great classics of horror, is really about bullying, both via peers and parents.  It’s a social commentary more than anything else born out of King’s own experience as a teacher.  He just added a little psychic ability to up the anti.  But which violation was worse, the dumping of pig’s blood on Carrie and Tommy Ross and the resulting laughter, or her loss of control and revenge?  Carrie was being emotionally devoured by conformity and apathy, those monsters that live in all of us waiting only for their function of fitting in with the crowd so we can blend in and not be isolated, which is death for such social animals as we are.  Power, right or wrong, resides in the crowd and so often then does survival.  Carrie is a reaction to that group mind: it asks the question “yeah, so what if the victim of the crowd isn’t anywhere as weak as you want her to be?”  Such dreams of the emotionally isolated perhaps would have saved many people over the years, such as the thousands of people tortured and executed for being witches, and acceptance of those who are different may have averted events such as the Columbine High School Massacre, which, if you think about it, has very similar properties to Carrie.

Bullying is even more commonplace now – because it’s easier, more available, not to mention it can follow you wherever you go-  than when I was growing up, which means I suspect it’s grown more vicious because it can breed with itself much more readily, building up mutual reinforcements and psychological impurities in societies that are not based so much on social and community bonds but marketplace values.  In a competitive marketplace you are only worth what you can buy or what you can sell, be it image, sex, or power (even, occasionally, skills) and you demonstrate these things via comparison to others, or what you can do to them.  The natural competitive instinct to ruin other people for your own gain is usually tempered in a somewhat balanced community because there will be a negative reaction from the community if your actions are considered unjust because your actions threaten not only the victim but the community as a whole.  Social norms, once violated, are often very difficult to reinstate or recover.  You have earned a reputation through your actions and cohesive communities have long memories.  In much of today’s society – divergently disconnected in moral terms while even more connected via shallow “social” mediums (read any youtube video commentary) – I would argue everything is for sale, including you and your reputation, because you will not be judged so much by your actions but by your social prestige via Twitter, Facebook, etc. and maybe your social connections.  In fact, your actions may bring about two very different social reactions depending on who your enemies are.  For example, Mr. Bieber is now where he is, whereas 15 year old Jenna Bowers-Bryanton hung herself thanks to being bullied, partially because of the reactions to her youtube songs by her enemies.  Personally, I think with a little work she could have been quite good.  Now we’ll never know.  But she is not an exception.

Horror is always set in a vast power discrepancy between the devoured and the devourer: the spider toying with the trapped fly, the Taliban and the hostage about to be beheaded, governments and truth (I mean, really, how much more horrifying an end could you ask for than the House of Representatives’ questioning of the generals and Rumsfeld at the end of The Tillman Story?).  It is that sense of helplessness when you face the unstoppable Jason, the completely alien Alien, the beautiful great white in Jaws, the unknowable gods of Lovecraft, the “logic” of Ann Coulter or Glenn Beck, etc.

Kiernan writes all sorts of stuff, from science fiction to suspense to (deviant) romance to horror to fantasy, but underneath it all there is a deep awareness of the unfairness of things, of the sense of time and circumstance and choices made without your consent or even knowledge.  This perspective seems to arise from what seems to have been a rather errr… interesting childhood and deep connection to the history of the natural world (her being a paleontologist and all).  Most people avoid looking at time and what it says about our insignificant lives.  For awhile, it was her living.  For most people, I suspect, just the philosophical introspection it would require to get your head around 300 million or so years of planetary history would be terrifying (I’m thinking here specifically of those who think our earth was created about 6 thousand years ago).  It is an abyss and like all real abysses it infects your soul and changes you, whether you like it or not.  In Kiernan’s case, it is evident in her writing, circulating like fish in a tub of lilies, always winking at you from underneath the prettiness.  I don’t think she can deny this, this dark mortality and twisting many of our conventional norms which mean nothing (other than absurdly naive and foolish human trivialities in the face of true reality) to the construction of art in the service of expanding our borders of knowledge, most of which makes conventional and fearful people want to wallow back to their peaceful little Fox News where all the answers are so pat and the world is a simple them versus us.

Sometimes I really envy that sort of world view, the happy “they’re all evil because they aren’t us… yet” belief.  It would make losing people easier I think, because it wouldn’t raise any questions about meaning, both personal and universal.  For some, not having those answers are really the horror: for me, and I think for Kiernan and many other searchers, it is just one big unsolvable mystery and there is a great deal of joy and sorrow to be derived from exploring that mystery.  And, perhaps, if we’re attentive and lucky, we might even gain some wisdom (if such a thing can be said to exist).

Until then, I leave you with something that Kiernan put up on her blog (and I subsequently stole, as per usual).  For some of you it will be a test of horror, for others it is an exploration of the meaning of love.  As with all good art, it will tell you something about yourself, whether you like it or not.

“How to Make Love to a Trans Person”

Forget the images you’ve learned to attach
To words like cock and clit,
Chest and breasts.
Break those words open
Like a paramedic cracking ribs
To pump blood through a failing heart.
Push your hands inside.
Get them messy.
Scratch new definitions on the bones.

Get rid of the old words altogether.
Make up new words.
Call it a click or a ditto.
Call it the sound he makes
When you brush your hand against it through his jeans,
When you can hear his heart knocking on the back of his teeth
And every cell in his body is breathing.
Make the arch of her back a language
Name the hollows of each of her vertebrae
When they catch pools of sweat
Like rainwater in a row of paper cups
Align your teeth with this alphabet of her spine
So every word is weighted with the salt of her.

When you peel layers of clothing from his skin
Do not act as though you are changing dressings on a trauma patient
Even though it’s highly likely that you are.
Do not ask if she’s “had the surgery.”
Do not tell him that the needlepoint bruises on his thighs look like they hurt
If you are being offered a body
That has already been laid upon an altar of surgical steel
A sacrifice to whatever gods govern bodies
That come with some assembly required
Whatever you do,
Do not say that the carefully sculpted landscape
Bordered by rocky ridges of scar tissue
Looks almost natural.

If she offers you breastbone
Aching to carve soft fruit from its branches
Though there may be more tissue in the lining of her bra
Than the flesh that rises to meet it,
Let her ripen in your hands.
Imagine if she’d lost those swells to cancer,
Diabetes,
A car accident instead of an accident of genetics
Would you think of her as less a woman then?
Then think of her as no less one now.

If he offers you a thumb-sized sprout of muscle
Reaching toward you when you kiss him
Like it wants to go deep enough inside you
To scratch his name on the bottom of your heart
Hold it as if it can-
In your hand, in your mouth
Inside the nest of your pelvic bones.
Though his skin may hardly do more than brush yours,
You will feel him deeper than you think.

Realize that bodies are only a fraction of who we are
They’re just oddly-shaped vessels for hearts
And honestly, they can barely contain us
We strain at their seams with every breath we take
We are all pulse and sweat,
Tissue and nerve ending
We are programmed to grope and fumble until we get it right.
Bodies have been learning each other forever.
It’s what bodies do.
They are grab bags of parts
And half the fun is figuring out
All the different ways we can fit them together;
All the different uses for hipbones and hands,
Tongues and teeth;
All the ways to car-crash our bodies beautiful.
But we could never forget how to use our hearts
Even if we tried.
That’s the important part.
Don’t worry about the bodies.
They’ve got this.

– Gabe Moses