Horror of Horrors

No matter how many times I’ve tried, I could never sit through a horror film. No witches and ghosts for me, no creepy-crawlers and slack-jawed ghouls, no fangtooth vampires and slime-stink monsters, no werewolves in London or Paris, no walking dead with moonstone eyes, no muddy-boot psychos in hockey masks and no burn cases with knives for fingers, no killer clowns from outer space and no creatures from the black lagoon, no exploding heads and flying limbs, no geysers of blood, and please, please, no disembowelments. I hate Halloween, prefer summer to winter, and all the gold in the Federal Reserve couldn’t get me to sit through a grindhouse classic. In a universe brimming with beauty, with the ever-glowing stars in the sky, mysterious planets sparking out of recession, and a sun whose licks rim the battlements of the earth, I find it more soothing to ponder the violence of creation then to watch it unspool on reel-to-reel.

I don’t understand the fascination with violence and gore, a communal bloodlust that most Americans, or should I say, most American men, seem to share. They love to watch things explode, to see bodies ripped apart in astoundingly creative ways, with a little help from household items made by the likes of Black and Decker and whatever else you can pluck off the shelves of your local Home Depot. We home in on the gruesome, as if the bandwidth in our skulls is perpetually tuned in to blood-and-guts radio.

Does watching another human being carved and flayed arouse our hidden appetites? Does it make the truly gritty horror of life more palatable? Or is this the final satiation of our hidden bloodlust—sublimation, catharsis, call it what you will? When we’ve reached the meridian of our lives, gray-fingered and long of tooth, I doubt that we will recall the amazingly choreographed death on the big screen, the wreck of tortured metal and the wild fling of sundry body parts, the ball of fire soaring into the sky. It will more likely be the hopeful glimmer in a child’s eyes, or the first time a heart-in-throat lover purred the three magic words into your ear, or the sound that the rain makes against the windowpanes of our lonely Sunday mornings.

I live in a city with a long history of violence. City of tears, city of blood, city of red lights. A unidirectional city, much like our own lives, for we go from birth to the grave and no more. Death is the one constant in life, the one true knowable thing in a span rife with unknowing. There is no refusing it and no rebuttal, for one cannot bargain with Death, let alone play chess with it on a windswept shore. Were we exacting and monomaniacal enough, we could measure our lives through the very seconds, minutes, hours that have sheared past, fallen away and whispered into the dust, for tick-tock-time is a universal ending, and our final hour will wash over us like a midnight wave. Death is fathomable, unlike the human heart.

Many years ago, in the desert in Israel, my guide recounted a story that I remember from time to time. The sands play tricks, he told me, and the sun, which blackens the skin, also spills its taint into the mind, like the discharge of an octopus. During one of his solo explorations, lost and starved in a blistering storm, he found himself on a high sweep of furrowed sand. Up and up he climbed, hand before his face to ward off the stinging particles, bone-tired. He glided along effortlessly, as if the sand shaped steps for his ascension. Once he achieved a ridge he had to crouch, for the ceiling, which miraculously blotted the sun, lay endlessly black and starless and seemed to hang low. He felt as if he could not fit his head into the sky; it refused his star. Suddenly, the sky broke in two, bent inward at the center, and amid a shower of demonic light, stood what appeared to be a man. Only this man was eighty feet tall and climbed a glass stairway that illumined the air, glowing like the bioluminescent organs of deep-sea life forms. This gargantuan man stood and glared down upon him. At least my guide thought he was a man, for he seemed to be faceless and formless, constantly shifting shape to evoke an everyman guise, dressing and undressing by night’s whimsy. The gargantuan man shrunk down to human size, and when this man stood before the guide he knew that it was the devil. Only he found that he was glad to see him. As if he knew that the devil would fold him into his embrace and leave him all the richer for it. Because, he realized, and with great shame, he had wholeheartedly welcomed the devil.

I often think that we all harbor dark passions, as this is our primitive inheritance. But instead of merely charting the course of human violence, I believe we could seek to compass what lies within the human heart, which Faulkner declared was in conflict with itself. I know that this is the more difficult to negotiate, for how do you describe what you cannot see? Invisible map for invisible ghosts, no doubt, but well worth looking into.

Special Thanks to Edwin Rivera