Fear Of The Dark

Something just occurred to me.  A question, rather.  Humans are diurnal creatures -- we are evolved to be active by day and quiescent at night.  But throughout most the evolutionary history of our species the hours of darkness weren't just about resting and sleeping;  night was associated with the very real danger of being killed and eaten by night-prowling natural enemies, and the fear and sense of vulnerability it inspired.  As a result modern man, even though he no longer need fear being attacked by wild beasts, still feels a vague, nameless atavistic fear of darkness and of the state of helplessness engendered by the loss of visual awareness in the dark.

It then naturally follows that animals that have evolved to be active at night and are able to see well in darkness, like owls, cats and tarsiers, would lack a fear of it (outside the specific fear of predation that is, which anyway can happen in broad day as well).  So does this mean that once technology has advanced to the point where our natural vision can be augmented or entirely replaced by perfect night vision, and we can see just as well in complete darkness as in daylight, we will no longer be afraid of the dark (although, I suppose by then darkness itself, at least in the physical sense, would logically have lost its meaning;  so maybe that should be "afraid of '(supposedly)dark' places" instead), and as a result all the traditional stories of ghosts appearing at night and monsters in dark corners will have lost their power to frighten, and instead be relegated to a time in mankind's primitive past?

Like A Lost Child

Phobos And Deimos

After a long hiatus, I just randomly started drawing a face and finished it after a few minutes of scribbling (O.K., and then I worked on it some more on the computer).  As is usually the case, I started out without any particular ideas in mind as to what sort of expression it should bear, other than "big round eyes".  Now it reminds me of the preta (and also of Nosferatu, the Vampire...)

[In Buddhist cosmology the preta are the unfortunate beings who are reincarnated -- possibly from prior lives as human beings -- into a life of unrequited desire and longing, typically for nourishment (hence their other name of "hungry ghosts" and their depiction in art as having big bloated bellies and tiny thin throats through which food cannot pass), but more broadly, the objects of their desire can be anything, including such repellent things as corpses and feces]

I Once Read

in a book whose title I've long since forgotten that old-time lore passed down among lumberjacks in the logging camps of North America included tall tales of a weird creature known, rather literally, as the "Staybehind".  That's exactly what it did -- pick some logger or traveler caught out alone in the woods, get right up behind him and stay with him.  If the unfortunate fellow happened to hear its footsteps or somehow sense it and whirled around to confront it, no matter how fast he turned it was always faster than he was and managed to stay behind him always.  But even though the victim could not see it, he knew the creature was there, he could feel its presence right behind him, and could not escape it no matter how fast he ran.  Naturally, no one could tell you what it actually looked like so there was no visual depiction that I could find.  And I don't remember what else, if anything, the Staybehind did.  Could be, it simply followed a victim around in the woods without actually doing anything else by way of physical harm, but simply aroused fear and anxiety by its very presence.  But on the other hand, perhaps it whispered knowingly in his ear, too, or maybe it touched him softly -- or perhaps not so softly -- in sensitive places, until, perhaps it did perpetrate the unspeakable.  And of course, during his torment the victim, not being able to see the creature, would conjure up all kinds of horrible apparitions in his imagination.  The creature was most likely a crystallization of the vague but very real discomfort one is apt to feel when alone in the wilderness, especially in a densely wooded place with all its unseen potential dangers.

Seeing this photo in my Facebook memories reminded me of an incident from my own life from years ago.  (Here beginneth a yarn) There was a period in my past when, for quite some time, I could not shake the feeling that I was being followed and watched everywhere by someone -- or some thing.  I finally got the bright idea -- way too obvious in hindsight -- to check out my shadow.  And sure enough, to my shock -- and simultaneous good fortune -- I was able to capture my own analogue of the Staybehind in this photograph.  And... it turned out to be a giant floating amoeba.  A giant floating freaking amoeba.  Yes, I did freak when I first saw it:  God only knows where it came from or when and how it glommed on to me, but you know what, the good thing is it also turns out that once you learn the identity of your stalker they lose their power over you, to my huge relief.  The amoeba accordingly removed itself from my life instanter, and I have not been bothered by it since.  Whaddayaknow!

This memory reminded me of "The Old Man of the Sea" episode from the tales of Sinbad the Sailor.  The unrelenting, unshakable closeness of the monstrous Old Man (who glommed onto Sinbad, literally, and could not be shaken off) certainly is redolent of the nature of the Staybehind.  And I was also reminded of another monstrous being featured in a movie I saw a few years ago, titled It Follows;  it was all about a mysterious, murderous supernatural creature which was invisible to everyone but its victims, but to its chosen victim it appeared in human guise -- usually of some grotesque or scary aspect -- as it followed him/her relentlessly, tirelessly, at a steady walking pace, until it finally caught up to them and killed them.  Then it proceeded to follow the last person the victim had had sex with, and so on all way back up the chain.  The movie was clearly low-budget, but it was well made and well acted.  And there was no attempt at all to explain away the monster, which was wise;  a clumsy, made-up origin story probably would only have sounded clunky and fake.

Blooming Darkness

Two evenings ago I watched with a mixture of awe, fascination.., and yes, a little fear, as this piece of darkness in the sky grew and grew with amazing speed.  This set of images records only a couple of minutes, if even that.  It was almost like watching a living thing grow from infancy to old age, living out a very fast, volatile, gaseous life.

Beluga Cloud

A ghostly white apparition with big empty eyes in the inky darkness overhead... what's to be afraid of?

Elevators Are Scary (Even Without Bad Writing)

IT'S OPEN-AND-SHUT

Some pulp (and pulp-ish) writers of yore used to make good capital out of a low trick to create a threatening atmosphere right off the bat, whereby things would randomly and without any cause be described as 'sinister', 'weird', 'mysterious', and so on.  For example:

"So he stepped out into the HORRIFYING night.  The ELDRITCH coolness of the night breeze made him shiver with a MYSTERIOUS TERROR, terror that he could not explain.  The SINISTER new moon hung low and pallid over the OMINOUS horizon like a POISONED CROISSANT".

Hey, I like that.  I think H.P. Lovecraft might well have liked it too, since he was notorious for the practice.

On the other hand, while it's obviously true that skilled presentation can make anything seem vaguely sinister, some things, I think, really are inherently a little sinister.  At least so I find them.  Elevators, for one.

Moonstare

Sunken Sun

A FAVORITE FEAR, RE-REIFIED

As much as possible, I prefer to stay in the background and let my pictures speak for themselves.  In this instance though, I'll append a small explanation, because this post addresses something specific;  one of my oldest and most fundamental fears:  that of the darkness at the ocean bottom, made all the more frightening for being lit-up in small part -- imagine the crew of a wrecked vessel, seeing this forlorn view just outside a porthole by the weak light of a dying battery --  just so you can see how the darkness stretches forever on all sides.  To me it seems like living, creeping entropy, the absence of all cheer and expectation.  Like being buried forever.  Like being permanently suspended in the moment before winking out for the last time.

Horsehead Nebula

I am plagued by many fears.  I am afraid of real-world concerns, such as falling from a great height; being buried alive; falling victim to violence; contracting leprosy; etc.; and imaginary things and situations (I sure hope they are) like being cornered by zombies or scary-looking ghosts; a wall or railing suddenly melting away and causing me to plunge to my death (I guess this one is basically the same as the fear of falling); gravity suddenly reversing and causing me to fall up into the sky (same process as falling, but this one leads not to a crash but being lost in the black void of space).

Speaking of black voids, when I was little we had this big wardrobe in the house.  It was very beautiful and impressive, being ornamented with mother-of-pearl inlays on a ground of black lacquer.  My favorite part of it, however, was its interior.  I liked to climb in, shut the door and sit still, enjoying the quiet darkness.  Rather paradoxical for someone who developed a fear of both blackness and live burials, I suppose, but I found it comforting.  If that wardrobe were here I probably would do it again.  In fact, my dream house, if it ever were to be built, would include some cave-like structure, such as a small cell in a sub-basement, that I could crawl into and sit in the contemplative darkness and silence for a while.  Hmm, maybe I'm sounding a little weird now.

As for the scary kind of blackness, it's really two fears in one.  On the one hand, there is the fear of being permanently lost in a vast emptiness without anyone knowing what happened to me, and with no way to get back or call for help. It's utter helplessness reified (I do realize this kind of sounds like how some Christians conceive damnation to be -- not active punishment but the absence of hope;  and it can probably fit into some other kinds of spiritual belief systems as well).  Then on the other hand, there is the more concrete fear of unknown threats lurking in the darkness.  I think I was permanently traumatized when at a young age I came across in a science book some photographs of grotesque deep sea creatures, shown against the blackness of the ocean depths.  They did not look like fish, or any other living thing I had ever seen before;  they impressed me more as amorphous alien monsters, waiting to drag me down and subject me to some particularly repellent form of death.

And because celestial bodies seen against the blackness of space can remind me of those illustrations, I am often made uncomfortable by astronomical images, especially the more diffuse images of gaseous nebulae.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, I found the so-called 'Pillars of Creation' dust clouds photographed by the Hubble space telescope to be quite disturbing.

One exception is the famous Horsehead Nebula in Orion.  It had always seemed rather friendly, like a favorite hobby horse remembered from childhood; but after I read in Isaac Asimov's writings that he thought it resembled the head and shoulders of the Big Bad Wolf from the Disney short The Three Little Pigs, it became downright humorous.

Which is why I couldn't resist taking a shot of this odd little cloud formation.  Compare with the actual Horsehead Nebula below it (courtesy of the internet).

 

Custom-Made Hells

NOTE OF CAUTION: Some disturbing personal visions of hell are described below (maybe I was still thinking about the photo in the last post). They are not gory or anything, but they do contain frightening and unpleasant verbal imagery. I wrote them down only in order to exorcise them out of my head, not to afflict others with lasting, unpleasant ideas in the name of literary entertainment. If you are easily disturbed by thoughts of psychological horror, and especially if you suffer from claustrophobia, it might be best if you skipped this post.

Movies and other works of fiction that include scenes that take place in hell -- for example, Constantine; What Dreams May Come; Spawn; the Hellraiser movies; and even TV's Angel -- tend to present hell as an adventuresome place that's filled with interesting scenery and events. Those who are trapped there may be suffering and miserable, but at least their lives -- afterlives? -- are filled with excitement so they are never bored. Dante's hell certainly was chock full of drama. Usually it's heaven that's conceived as boring (although I myself attribute this cynical attitude to a failure of imagination). The only description of hell that I know of, as a, well, hellishly boring place, is in an Asimov story I read once -- it may have been 'The Last Trump', but don't quote me -- in which the dead are resurrected and at first people think the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand, but then literally everything else, including the landscape, starts to crumble away, condemning humanity to an eternity of nothing but each other, and they realize they are in hell.

But for me personally, the most truly effective -- frightening, that is -- depiction of hell is the one that comes, appropriately enough, at the end of the Michael J. Fox movie The Frighteners. I've only seen the movie once, a long time ago -- I don't recall the characters' names or even the scenes very well -- but the evil psycho couple get their just deserts when the space they are standing in metamorphoses into a giant throat and they are swallowed down into a very confining and personal hell. That scene stayed with me because being trapped in a tight space is one of my worst fears. Seeing someone buried alive in a coffin, and seeing it from their perspective, as happened with the characters played by Uma Thurman in Kill Bill 2; Jennifer Garner in an episode of Alias; and Brad Pitt in Interview With The Vampire ("Eternity in a box!") is just about the worst thing I can think of seeing in a movie. I once read of a mafioso being welded into a drum barrel, and sincerely hoped they'd at least killed the guy first. A similar scene is shown in the movie Tank Girl, in which the heroine is passed through a transparent pipe that narrows until she can hardly move or breathe.

My worst, most horrifying fantasy combines elements of those scenes with a very personal fear. In this nightmare scenario, a group of demons are digging a narrow hole in the floor of a cave. They dig it miles deep, or perhaps light-years deep. Then a victim is brought in. He is bound tightly and his eyes are held open with wire. He is forced into a steel capsule, a cylinder just wide and long enough to wedge him in tightly, with a small glass window at eye level. The demons seal the capsule tight, then turn it upside down and drop it down the hole, which is just wide enough to allow it to slide down. There is a small light inside the capsule so that the victim, unable to move and nearly choking from the cramped, upside-down position, can -- must -- see through the window the wall of earth sliding past him as he drops. When the capsule comes to a crashing stop at the bottom, the demons fill up the hole, smooth the earth over it so it cannot ever be found, and leave. Inside the capsule, the light never burns out or runs out of power, so that the victim is forced to look at the earth inches from his eyes forever, unable to even close his eyes and imagine he is somewhere else. The final flourish (not really necessary, but the movie in my head is still playing) -- the camera pulls back and back, eventually revealing that now the entire universe consists of solid rock, and the prisoner entombed in the tiny bubble of space is the only object that exists in it.

As if that weren't enough, I came up with another version of hell today (well, yesterday;  it's past 1:00 AM now -- and good God, what a masochist I am). This one is not as immediately, urgently restricting, but it's also very confining in its own way. In this scenario, you find yourself in a long, narrow corridor. It's so narrow that you have to draw your arms in to keep from grazing the walls, or stand sideways. And it's very long. In fact, it stretches on and on and on, perfectly straight and antiseptically smooth, forever. There are no windows, doorways or any features other than a continuous line of lights overhead, lighting the infinite corridor with a bright, even light. You look down the corridor and see that it really does stretch on endlessly, the walls converging toward a point that's far too distant to see clearly. You turn around and look in the opposite direction, and you can see the corridor goes on forever that way, too -- except, way off in the distance, far far away, maybe there is something there..? Curious, you start to walk toward it.

After a little while though, you realize that it seems to be closer than it should be; at the pace you're walking, it should still be far away, but it looks much bigger than it did before and now you can sort of make out some ominous features on the thing. Is it moving toward you? You stop, a little alarmed, and watch. After some moments you are certain that, yes, the thing really is coming toward you at a steady clip, and soon enough you can see exactly what it is and the fist of sudden terror claps itself around your chest as you realize that it's your worst fear made loathsome flesh. Maybe it's a rotting zombie with arms outstretched to grab, or a mutant monster with big misplaced eyes and a gaping mouth full of slimy fangs; maybe a walking, stinking skeleton trailing grave-dirt, or a man-sized mass of spiders and maggots, or even a pale Asian girl ghost with long, black disheveled hair obscuring her face, walking with an odd, jerky gait and making a garbled attempt to say your name in a choked voice. You whirl around and start running, bumping into the walls and scraping your arms raw. You run and run until you're out of breath and you have to slow to a walk, nursing your aching side. You look back to check and note with panic that while the run has increased the gap between you and the Thing, you are tired and must stop for a moment or at least slow down, while your pursuer is still coming for you at the same relentless pace. You turn and start to half-walk, half-trot, with the dismaying knowledge that you will never be able to stop.