In the latest offering to the blood-fueled imaginations of contemporary horror audiences, Joss Whedon’s hate-love letter to the genre,”The Cabin in the Woods,” spins a meta-horror narrative in which four everyteens of conventional social types stay the night in a menacing yet generically-staple cabin in the woods, only to discover that they are victims in a corporate-run blood sacrifice to pacify Lovecraftian Ancient Ones, which they attempt to thwart, along the way commenting on and attempting to thwart all the conventional genre staples, only to discover that the whole movie may be an ironic joke on the audience’s boredom and blood lust.

One wonders, in these days when horror has to eat itself, not why Whedon so wholly misrepresented ritual sacrifice – meant not to pacify the gods but to empower them, for acts of extreme and primal emotion confer the belief on which such forces thrive – simply for the sake of his punchline; but why the only horror left to entertain ourselves with is the horror at our failure to tell new, truly horrifying stories?

Horror narratives have increasingly turned back on their own narrative processes since “Scream” satirized the genre in 1996, birthing endless in-joke meta-horror narratives, pastiched zombie-stories stitched with ribbons of acetate, cannibalizing the corpus rather than daring to represent the horrors that society is still not ready to admit to itself, whether they lie within – or without.

A far earlier meta-horror narrative, “The Unnameable,” a 1923 short story by one of the fathers of the genre, H.P. Lovecraft, may shed some light on the challenges of representing the terrified consciousness – and what unspeakable things the audience is willing to sit through.

Lovecraft may be most known today for his convention of the Elder Gods, particularly the intimately-depicted, squid-faced Cthulhu (which I am proud to see my spell check recognizes as a known word). Lovecraft’s truly frightening stories do so by representing the paranoid and paralyzed human psychology, constructing elaborate pseudo-historical social genealogies, and through an almost science-fiction attention to scientific plausibility in the later tales – the arctic expedition in “At the Mountains of Madness,” or quantum physics in “The Dreams in the Witch-House.”

And yet his earliest stories are often nebulous affairs, direct dream statements, sketches from which the mythos will emerge. Lovecraft doesn’t so much describe his horrors as dramatize how indescribable they are, merely referring to them as “unnameable” or “unmentionable,” which sometimes feels like a cop-out. He could weave labyrinths of suspense but audiences may have felt had by the unrepresented endings.

In “The Unnameable,” Lovecraft parodies and defends his technique. In the story, the weird writer Randolph Carter – Lovecraft’s recurring alter ego protagonist – is accused by a skeptical (yet superstitious) friend unconvinced by his fictions of being “fond of ending my stories with sights or sounds which paralysed my heroes’ faculties and left them without courage, words, or associations to tell what they had experienced.”

To defend himself, Carter discusses his latest story, the Borgesian, meta-fictional “The Attic Window,” and describes his own personal investigation and family involvement in this spooky case of monsters and murder invented from certain spurious descriptions in Cotton Mather’s “Magnalia Christi Americana,” an event which, sensationally, happens to have taken place right near the grave where the characters are conversing. The friend is gradually engrossed in the plot. And then naturally – or supernaturally – they are attacked, by the very… thing from Carter’s ghost story. Upon waking in a hospital, Carter’s friend has ironically been the one to see the creature and can only describe it as “the unnameable.”

While “The Unnameable” may be one of the few intentionally humorous of Lovecraft’s tales, it is not solely an ironic joke. The story argues that the non-representation of horrors is, in effect, what produces a horrified response in readers. Lovecraft understood and utilized this technique even through his later stories, where the (pseudo)factual scientific descriptions only serve to highlight that which lies beyond the human ability to represent. While Cthulhu may be the most popular of Lovecraft’s monsters, by the fact that the Elder God has been depicted in endless consumer goods, the author’s most terrifying deities and demons are those that defy direct description.

To return to Whedon’s “The Cabin in the Woods,” what makes the reveal at the end of the movie an ironic joke rather than a truly hair-raising horrorshow is that viewers are shown just enough of the Ancient One to be able to recognize it and give it a name: the gods demanding blood are only us, and are thus anti-Lovcraftian.

Lovecraft’s brand of horror has been termed ‘Cosmic Horror,’ the horror at what lies outside human knowledge. But is it possible today (or at all), to visually represent what can not be known? Are there monsters that we have not yet seen? Psychological abysses that we have not yet stared so long and yawning into that we can not once again be stared back into by them – by our darkest selves – terrified rather than merely titillated, stricken from the eyes to the risen short hairs, the roots of horrere? Can the medium of film even capture what lurks, alien and primeval, in the unspeakable nightmare gulfs of the imagination and all that we are prey to?

One answer to these questions and the future of the horror genre may be in the kinds of monsters that are being depicted. To understand the differences in shades of horror, we might profitably turn to a critical theory from the genre of science-fiction, where aliens are subject to varying degrees of horrifying representability. In “Self and Other in SF: Alien Encounters,” Carl D. Malmgren argues that not all aliens are reflections of humanity. Drawing on the ‘Hierarchy of Foreignness’ discussed in Orson Scott Card’s Ender Trilogy (itself drawn from distinctions in the Nordic language for types of otherness), aliens can represent the other-as-self, other-as-enemy, and other-as-other: there are aliens that look like us and with whom we can communicate and thus live in peace, those that either look like us or not but with whom no communication is possible so there can only be war, and those so wholly outside the frameworks of human knowledge and description that to understand the ineffable gods might be an easier task.

In terms of horror monsters, the same categorizations might apply. The monster-as-self includes all the current teen vampires and paranormal romantic werewolves, who are less monstrous than (anti)heroically human and no more horrifying than sulky teenagers. These are monsters with whom we sympathize and want to make love, but who no longer serve the monstrous purpose of a warning of what not to be. The monsters-as-other would include the majority of genre monsters, the evil-intentioned humanoids and hybrids, the horror as bad guy, which has been done to death, thus leading to the reversal into the heroic monster. In the third category, which has been far less explored, what monsters currently lie outside knowledge and representation? Maybe some of Lovecraft’s more eldritch Elder Gods, but what other horrors are so beyond our ken that their purpose is not to be enemies of men, rather that we may be like insects in their way, and which, like the slimes and shapeless jellies haunting the outer dimensions all around us, are so abject and unmentionable that they really could drive men mad with terror?

Once again, one of the challenges and reasons why horror films are turning back in on themselves may be that the screen has conventions and limitations, and it is easier to not attempt to represent that which can not be shown. It sells more tickets to be ironically self-referential than to dare plumb the abysses of the imagination and find new forms to depict them in, forms that don’t have ready recognition, but because we know them, no longer stir up the blood. Film, particularly Hollywood films, demand a totality of representation. But as Lovecraft suggested about his horrors, “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”

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This line is drawn from Charles Dickens’ novel Our Mutual Friend, in which the widow Betty Higden says of her adopted foundling son Sloppy, “You mightn’t think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices.” Critics often focus on Eliot wanting to “do the different voices,” suggesting that the poet’s intention in using this line was to primarily indicate that, while there are many different speakers or voices in the poem, there is only one central consciousness or narrator. This unified polyvocalism seems to have been of such importance to the meaning that Eliot wished to construct that, once the title was changed, the poet felt compelled to mention the commonality of his characters in his end-note on Tiresias, who is “the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest” through what the blind soothsayer witnesses.

While The Waste Land is often criticized by being archly ‘high-brow,’ it is clear that Eliot was also interested in and drew on various forms of ‘low-brow’ culture, such as the use of jazz in including lyrics from The Shakespearean Rag. Among these popular culture interests, Eliot expressed a keen enjoyment in a kind of mystery quite different from religious mystery cults – the mystery of detective fiction. As such, it may be possible to read the original title of the poem as indicating that Eliot also wanted to “do the police,” that is, to write what might be called a detective poem.

Eliot’s thoughts on detective fiction are primarily contained in his 1927 essay, “Wilkie Collins and Dickens,” in which Eliot examines the narrative power of melodrama prior to its distinction into ‘high-brow’ versus ‘thriller’ or ‘detective fiction.’ Here Eliot claims that Collins’ 1868 novel The Moonstone, “is the first and greatest of English detective novels,” and then explains why this is (and what he means by an English detective novel):

“We say English detective novels, because there is also the work of Poe, which has a pure detective interest.. The detective story, as created by Poe, is something as specialized and as intellectual as a chess problem; whereas the best English detective fiction has relied less on the beauty of the mathematical problem and much more on the intangible human element. In detective fiction England probably excels other countries; but in a genre invented by Collins and not by Poe. In The Moonstone the mystery is finally solved, not altogether by human ingenuity, but largely by accident. Since Collins, the best heroes of English detective fiction have been, like Sergeant Cuff, fallible; they play their part, but never the sole part, in the unravelling. Sherlock Holmes, not altogether a typical English sleuth, is a partial exception; but even Holmes exists, not solely because of his prowess, but largely because he is, in the Jonsonian sense, a humorous character, with his needle, his boxing, and his violin. But Sergeant Cuff, far more than Holmes, is the ancestor of the healthy generation of amiable, efficient, professional but fallible inspectors of fiction among whom we live to-day. And The Moonstone, a book twice the length of the ‘thrillers’ that our contemporary masters write, maintains its interest and suspense at every moment.”

This passage suggests a number of elements that Eliot hoped to find in detective stories in general, and which he may have been mulling over half a decade earlier when constructing The Waste Land: the post-puzzle game mechanics, the stakes of human emotionality, the humorous fallibility of the detective (along with other techniques of suspense for which Eliot praises Collins, namely a multi-character epistolary narrative structure, the use of coincidences to connect characters and events, a gothic and dreamlike atmosphere, and the lengthy delay of an inevitable conclusion).

Unlike the mysteries of Edgar Allen Poe, whose The Murders in the Rue Morgue is considered the first detective story with its analytical investigator C. August Dupin, Eliot dismisses the idea that mystery plots should operate like a chess problem. This is ironic, given that Poe himself dismisses the chess problem in the demonstrative introduction to his story as being representative of the analytical process of his detective, since chess is “solved” through rote memorization rather than through acute observation and inference, such as Poe claims for the game of whist. Nonetheless, Poe’s mysteries are constructed and solved through a direct chain of (albeit outré) associations, which, in the later Golden Age of British detective fiction characterized by the mysteries of Agatha Christie, came to be called a “puzzle game.”

The second section of The Waste Land, entitled ‘A Game of Chess,’ while often read as a reference to the plays of Thomas Middleton, also seems to contain an ironic reference to Eliot’s dismissal of the mystery as chess problem, in that this section does not set out an analytical mathematical problem to be solved but rather the heart of the intangible human element at stake in the poem. It is in this section that the rape and transformation of Philomela by Tiresias is first mentioned, as well as dialogues depicting the continued struggle to have meaningful, non-violent relationships in the modern world.

Like in The Moonstone, where the human relationships and emotional misunderstandings between the characters serve, intentionally according to Collins, as the driving force of the mystery, in The Waste Land we can see that love and the fallibility of love is cast as a criminal act. According to Eliot’s end-note, what Tiresias sees is the substance of the poem: in section three, ‘The Fire Sermon,’ the blind seer watches a romantic encounter that turns to assault, a kind of modernized and mechanized sexuality that, while calling to mind Tiresias’s own rape of Philomela, is done without passion, as if sterilized, with the withering neutrality of a police report.

There are various moments of criminality buried with such sterile neutrality throughout the poem: the buried body, the casual rape, the drowned merchant, the general failure of industry and relationships in the wasted land of the modern world. There are also attempts to investigate such crimes, though these often fail, or come across as perverse or misapplied to the modern urban landscape: the tarot reading that indicates but does not forestall the merchant’s death, the searching for answers in nature or in ancient, foreign traditions (what the thunders said). The different voices of the poem, however obfuscated by dreamlike memories and other languages, each attempt to give a partial account of what is wrong in their world, much the way that a detective novel like The Moonstone is written in the epistolary form through multiple points of view: each voice can not see the whole, and thus adds to the construction of the mystery without elucidating or solving it.

As in The Moonstone, though, these disparate voices and accounts can be collated. Where Poe’s detective relies solely on his own analytical prowess, great English detectives like Collins’ Sergeant Cuff solve crimes precisely by being able to find the threads that run through multiple narratives, by listening to different accounts and seeing the events whole. Ultimately, if there is a central investigator or detective in The Waste Land (though flawed, humorous), it is Tiresias: perceptive though he is blind, able to understand human relationships because he is half-man half-woman, sympathetic to the motives of crime because he committed one himself. Tiresias serves as a detective figure in that he alone is able to unify the various voices of the poem in order to see what is at stake beneath (the social cause of) the various murders and rapes depicted in The Waste Land. Tiresias allows the reader to understand that these crimes are merely symptoms of something far more heinous that has occurred to disrupt the natural and social orders of the world.

While Eliot himself regretted of “having sent so many enquirers off on a wild goose chase after Tarot cards and the Holy Grail” (a red herring if ever there was one), the clear importance with which the poet viewed his reading of Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance suggests that, while the poem isn’t simply a versification of the relationship of Grail legends to ancient mystery traditions, these myths must still serve as a central metaphor for what is actually at stake in The Waste Land:

In the various versions of the quest for the Holy Grail, the Grail seeker comes upon a land that has been afflicted with some sort of blight or sickness or drought – the wasted land, from which Eliot drew his eventual title. The seeker discovers that the king of the land, the Fisher King, has been wounded or gone ill, which is sympathetically responsible for the wasting sterility of his lands. In order to restore the king and make his lands fertile again (as well as continue on toward the Grail), the seeker must ask – as he fails to do in the majority of versions of the myth – “what ails you?”

While asking such direct questions is indicative of the investigative method, as well as implies a sympathy and human understanding lost in the world depicted in The Waste Land, the legend of the Fisher King has strong resonances with a crucial element of quality detective fiction: crime has social causes and consequences; something is fundamentally at stake. In Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, for instance (with which Eliot was familiar), crimes, especially the crime of murder, have social causes and repercussions; unsolved they threaten to throw society, laws, class structures, human relationships into chaos, and it is only through the solution, by asking “what ails you” in regards to the criminal situation, that order can be restored.

The disorder and chaos of the modern world as depicted in The Waste Land can be read in this light. Due to the crime or illness or sterility of a ‘king,’ English society has been ruptured even to the foundations of its linguistic unity. But what was that sick crime, and who is the stricken king?

Increasingly throughout his life, Eliot was deeply engaged with religious narratives, particularly those of Anglo-Catholicism, to which he converted in his forties and is evident in his longing for a poetic expression of eternity in his later poems, such as in The Four Quartets. The Waste Land, among its various readings, has often been read as a lament for the increased secularization of the modern world, a world in which traditional Christian narratives and frameworks have been displaced by scientific materialism, their hegemonic understanding of reality weakened by their sudden non-uniqueness in regard to the beliefs now understood to be held by other cultures. Part of Eliot’s obsession with Weston’s From Ritual to Romance may have been that the book, drawing on the comparative anthropology of Frazier’s The Golden Bough, implied that Christian narratives, ideals, and rituals had antecedents in ancient “pagan” ceremonies.

In this reading, Jesus is the ‘king’ who is suddenly sterilized, casting the Anglo-Christian kingdom into disorder, decadence, and rampant criminality. Eliot seems to echo the murderous Nietzschean lament that “God is dead and we have killed him,” as well as predict the sterile postmodernist ennui that, because religious narratives are untenable, there is no longer and could never be a single unified perspective through which to view our purpose and being in the world. In short, without Christ, the blind hermaphroditic Tiresias is the best that man can do in attempting to construct a unified voice for the modern times. The various crimes and social disorder in The Waste Land can be read as symptoms of this central crime, the murder of a unified cultural narrative that was once found in religion (and has not been found in any other cause since). The modern world, like the Sibyl in the jar in Eliot’s epigraph to the poem, has asked for eternal life (the religious narrative) but forgot to ask for eternal youth (continued belief in the religious narrative) and has thus grown wasted, longing now only to die. The modern world, however, can do so, and proceeds to kill itself off throughout the poem, the way, at the poem’s end, Hieronymo is declared mad for killing the murderers of his son and then himself. The Waste Land presents and is horrified by a world in which death has become bereft of meaning and is so commonplace that passing acquaintances can joke about it.

And yet the poem does not end with the charge of murder and self-murder but with the repeated cry, “Shantih shantih shantih,” the traditional ending to the Upanishads that Eliot translates as, “the peace which passeth understanding.” By ending on this note of peace, in a foreign language, from an Eastern religious text and tradition, Eliot seems to be suggesting that it is indeed possible to find a solution to the crime by shoring these fragments of world knowledge “against our ruin.” Where the traditional unifying voice of the Christian religious tradition has failed England, leading to the dissolution of modernity displayed in the text, it may be possible to find a new, global unified voice or spiritual vision that can raise society from its barbarous criminal acts.

And yet, as in most versions of the Grail legend, this solution is not spoken; or, as in Eliot’s reading of the solutions of detective fictions, it is indirect and accidental: “Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina” – then he hid himself in the fire that refines them. As a mystery, both investigative and spiritual, The Waste Land ultimately demands that the reader, the most intrepid sleuth of all, ferret out the possibility of a solution, both to the meaning of the poem as well as to the wasting criminal sickness that afflicts modernity.

Hoping this was only Miéville’s misreading of the genre, I picked up his most acclaimed work, the new weird fantasy Perdido Street Station, hoping that here the author would turn his obvious talents to the construction of truly effective characters. I was sorely disappointed.

Miéville is clearly one of the most proficient and imaginative users of language in contemporary fiction. There is no denying this. His world oozes with inventive descriptions, with vocabulary that makes most readers jealous, with color and texture that spirals vertiginously across the page. Sadly, if color and texture alone made a good story, home decor catalogs would be on the best-seller list. Vocabulary alone does not make one a good writer. Miéville spends so much time building up the environment and atmosphere of the decayed, steampunk city of New Crobuzon that I often found myself drifting off for pages at a time, growing bored with repeated details that did nothing to further the plot or tell us something significant about his world and its inhabitants. A city is its people, not its architecture. If this book was stripped of all unnecessary detail of this sort it might be only a quarter of its length. Maybe this is excusable; Miéville is the SFF world’s golden boy after all, so can he really do wrong?

The problem for me was that, because the whole world in which the story is set is described from the get-go in extreme and alien terms, I felt nothing of the horror that might have been evoked when something truly alien breaks in to threaten that world – the nightmare-eating monsters were nothing but more linguistic varnish to wade through. While the slake-moths are described in far more gruesome terms than, say, the night-guants of H.P. Lovecraft, Lovecraft is able to evoke far more horror because his descriptions are terse and evocative, and because the monsters are seen not as in a movie screen but through the dim terror of human consciousness.

The thing that frustrated me the most, though, is that in Perdido Street Station Miéville once again flounders to create the kind of solid characters that would move his stories beyond the realm of grossly amusing to truly powerful literature. Most of this problem once again, I suspect, falls to Miéville’s love of detail: he is too busy constructing the surface and externality of his world to be able to tell what goes on inside of his characters, not just in their heads and fleeting thoughts, but in their hearts, their memories, their souls. There seems to be a debate going on in the literary world as to whether interiority makes for good fiction – do characters need to be complex, have “personal problems” so to speak, in order to come off as realistic enough for the reader to sympathize with? If not, then what is to keep characters from feeling like so many flat cartoons or caricatures as they do here?

Like many contemporary attempts to construct some small form of character drama/interiority, Miéville falls back on the old trope of sexual hangups. Many contemporary writers, particularly of the McSweeney’s school, believe that everyone is a modern-day Oedipus. Fortunately Miéville doesn’t go that far, but the only real interpersonal drama that his characters have to deal with is their sex lives. In Perdido Street Station two of the main protagonists have a cross-species relationship which, at most, makes them slightly uncomfortable. While issues of race could be a crucial problematic for a world in which numerous sapient species cohabitate, it is treated like window dressing and never becomes a significant plot twist in the narrative. Even more aggravating, this is inevitably resolved simply by removing one of the characters from the equation without this having a believable emotional effect or being resolved in a manner that forces the characters to confront themselves or their world in a deeper emotional manner (and this isn’t to even mention the big reveal that, even in this world, rape is a heinous crime, but it is one that you can still walk away from committing as if it never happened).

And this is really what irritated me about the novel. Whatever problems the characters may have, they are allowed to get away with without having to confront themselves, forcing the story back into a farcical and shallow adventure tale. This is most clearly illustrated through the issue of morality. Something that is fascinating about the world of Bas-Lag in which this story is set is that everyone, from protagonists to antagonists alike, is morally chaotic-neutral. No one really tries to do good, and certainly not because they believe it is the right thing to do. No one questions the morality of their actions, and when they do it is far too late for the reader to believe that the characters are actually displaying a conscience. I was aghast at the casualness with which the scientist-protagonist of the novel tortures animals for his experiments, too wrapped up in his work to even clean their cages or display a conscious regard for other life. However, later on, the characters moan endlessly about how immoral their actions are when they have to use a human in their experiments; but what can they do? It is all for the adventure. The human they torture dies and who really cares? He was just a bum, to be forgotten five pages from now.

The thing that Chandler understood about the noir genre that Miéville lacks, which should really be central to all narrative undertakings, is that actions have consequences, that what the characters do and how they feel/act toward the world effects them intimately. You can’t just get away with murder and rapine unchanged, or, if you do, then social structures have to break down at other points. But in the perditious world of Perdido Street Station there is no moral high ground, only hellish slums of half-hearted clockwork villainy, criminal acts repeated so often that they have become atrophied and commonplace, not the eternal damnation of a moral religious worldview from which the book draws its title but the yawning amorality of its absence. In New Crobuzon, no one cares if you scream.

Well, this joke’s actually pretty ironic, given that the writers of the gospels wrote their resurrection narratives in such a manner as to actively work against this reading, at least within the albeit limited understandings of ancient medical science.

Here’s the deal. Remember Lazarus of Bethany, the man who’s claim to eternal fame was that he died, but who had family that were friends with the Lord and asked Christ if it was possible for Him to return their dead brother to life? What’s crucial about the Biblical narratives in which the dead return to life is their timing. Jesus works this miracle after Lazarus has been dead for four days. In the ancient medical world view, dead bodies do not begin to rot until this time. Consequently, since Lazarus had already been in the ground so long, his reanimated corpse had already begun to rot, part of what made this miracle so controversial.

But this is crucial for setting up the true miracle of Jesus’s return from the dead. Despite the fact that, according to all the historical records, victims of crucifixion were left on the crosses for up to a week as a warning against political rebellion (the only crime in ancient Rome that merited crucifixion), it is very crucial for the Gospel writers to get Jesus down off the cross and buried on the same day so that he can rise on the third day – before four days pass and he begins to decompose. The miracle here is that Jesus comes back from the dead whole, hence in eternal life.

Consequently, Jesus could not have been a zombie. Of course, this raises a couple of peculiar points about Christian history. One, since it was so crucial for the Gospel writers to construct the narrative in this way, it seems to suggest that ancient audiences were already willing to jump to the conclusion that Jesus was a zombie; perhaps tales of the undead are not a new cultural fascination after all. On the other hand, since Jesus brought Lazarus back after four days when he had already begun to decompose, does that mean that the figurehead and central object of worship for the world’s largest religion is a necromancer?

Let this be a warning.

It began ages ago in the un-navigable coils of time, before the written word and the linear logics of history, when ourstory was told in the mutable oral style around the campfires fending off the horrible night and all the beasts that hunted our feeble species. When, in the land known of old as Scythia, between the Black Sea and the Eurasian steppes, between the Causasus Mountains where Prometheus was bound and the Carpathian range where Vlad Tepes drank blood, there once wandered Neolithic tribes of Proto-Indo-Europeans, the first men to step from the Stone to the Bronze.

But then something unimaginable went wrong. One season around the region of what is now the city of Odessa in the Ukraine, the Black Sea rose up in a great deluge covering the land, killing all life back to desert wastelands. And from those chaotic depths rose something else, something unthinkable from which the nomads fled, fleeing through the centuries down the Fertile Crescent, along the Arab Sea to the Indus River Valley; west around the Mediterranean to the Celtic, to the Dead Sea and Red Sea and the Nile; east over the Caspian Sea toward the Yellow River; and north up the Volga to the Baltic and Barents ice. And wherever the proto-men fled, they brought with them stories of the flood and warnings of what the flood had cast up to confound human eyes and hearts and strangle them in the night with its coils.

For the sea gave birth to monsters – the oncoming storm god, with a dragon’s head and limbs whipping like coils of intestines across a hundred leagues, called Typhon by the Greeks, Set by the Egyptians, Apu by the Sumerians, Vritra by the Aryans, Humbaba by the Babylonians, Jormungand by the Norse, Leviathan by the Israelites. Or it was his consort, the maiden with the dragon’s tail, the first goddess and she-viper who held the tablets of destiny in her scaly womb, called Enchidne, Chrybdis, Api, Tiamat, Lilitu, Cthulhu. Or perhaps there was only one: a great conjoined hermaphroditic serpentine writhing – the unnamable ouroboros, the chthonic dweller surrounding the secret parts of Earth – the mother of horrors who gave birth to Cerberus, the Hydra, the Chimerae, the Sphynx, the Nemean Lion, Fenrir, the Needlehogg, Kraken, trolls, sirens, djinnis and afrits, asuras, Rakshasa, nagas, giants, basilisks, gorgons, cenocephali and other animal-headed hybrids, cyclopi, hyppogriffs, wyrms, Pazuzu, rocs, the wyverns, Grendel, and all manner of slitherers, crawlers, colossals, hybrids, possessors, and parasites – in short, every monster to haunt the nightmares of men in every age and every land in which humanity sought safe purchase.

And wherever the proto-men fled and conquered and settled to farm the land, they told their stories, demonizing the local wildlife and inhabitants with the names of the Storm and Dragon to justify the rise of their ruling warrior classes, the rise of their city states and patrilineal religions, the stories shifting now from awe and worship of the Goddess to sheer hatred and terror – with new heroes and new humanized gods to beat back and tame the matrilineal chaos of the pre-historic world, to carve up the body of the horrifying abyss and construct from her bones and blood the order of civilization. In their rage all the monsters were slain, and the heroes raised a glass in Valhalla. They thought they were so brave.

And yet the dragon maid lived on, in the desert wastes and steppes above the Black Sea, occasionally devouring livestock and babies. When Heracles rounded Geryon’s cattle across the steppes, she cast the hero into a drugged sleep and stole the herd, offering to return them only for his seed, from which she gave birth to fierce Scyth and the Scythian people who worshipped the original seven gods – but her most of all – in their cannabis-fueled cannibal sacrifices. In 320 BCE, Alexander the Conqueror chased the Persian king Darius across the Caucasus range only to be set upon by the Scythian steppe-riders, who he beat back, only to discover a land teeming with monstrosities – not just the cannibal nomads and the Amazons – the true Black Sea Amazons who bested Theseus – but also the Arimaspeans – giant one-eyed men who fought against the hyppogriffs – winged horses with sharp beaks and claws, the original nightmares carved upon the earliest Scythian tombs and pottery – so that Alexander, who had boasted of killing many a monster on his conquests, cried out, ‘In this region everything is horrible, more than can be believed!’ And he erected a towering gate so that no other man might enter by mistake – or the monsters escape until the ends of time.

But one day a fox digging beneath the walls found a way out, and, amazed, the monsters followed. Soon travelers spotted them and marked their maps, ‘here be dragons,’ bringing tales back from the ends of the earth of beings beyond the outward bound of knowledge and civilization, narratives embellished only the way men can embellish them, exaggerating what they saw and projecting bravado and audacity to cover their vulnerability and thwartedness in the face of the unknown. Historians studied bones that could only have belonged to the griffs and one-eyed men – or creatures no less horrific, what we now call mastodons and protoceratops as if that makes them less monstrous – while the first scientists debated over children born with tails, with two heads or none, disbelieving only the outlandish literary conventions of the odes in which monsters were sung, but abandoning themselves to the improbable yet empirical fact that the natural world contained things more terrifying than were imaginable in their philosophies.

And the question each man asked was what do these monsters mean? Monstrum, from the Latin monere: to warn. Each uncertain creature was a portent of natural or political ruin, was, literally, demonstrative of the limits of human knowledge and power, their liminal and hybridic forms shattering the fragile categories of the nascent scientia through which the scholar-heroes still tried, desperately, to order the chaotic world that had been cast up from the abyss. They thought they were so brave; Alexander’s tutor Aristotle claiming that monsters have no purpose, are accidents of flawed matter, mistakes of perception and memory – mere myths to be expunged by the light of reason – while monstrous desires assailed men from the inside, greed and warfare bringing the Socratic ideals of justice and social harmony to their knees. That primordial terror had laid her raging brood inside men’s hearts where no logic could pursue.

And so Alexander’s empire crumbled, Darius’s empire crumbled, Caesar’s empire crumbled, Cyrus’s empire crumbled, Constantine’s empire crumbled; reason fled screaming from the black night of ignorance and superstition and the world was cast into the Dark Ages where myths and monsters struggled with God for the souls of men.

The stories shifted now from the meaning of monsters to their necessity in the divine plan: if the Creator was all powerful and good then why did he create foul evils to plague the nightmares of men? Monstrous deformations could be the result of working with flawed matter, but if He created matter, then God must have wanted monsters. In the Bible, great beasts like Leviathan and Behemoth came to represent God’s frightening strength and unknowable sublimity, while also standing as the threatening force from outside His Kingdom, Satan’s army, a threat for men to overcome in their crusades of righteousness – Saint George slaying the dragon just as the Crusaders chased the infidel nations of Gog and Magog back through Alexander’s Gates. Monsters like the pagan giants of old and the Nephalim – the malformed children of women raped by angels – symbolized hubris and the Fall, their corruption a cautionary tale, their category-crossing hybridity a warning against the impure – whole books were written on how to avoid the connection between sin and heredity, filth and evil: monsters and foreigners were the barbaric result of unholy pagan sexual orgies, only fit to be slain in total warfare, their earth salted, for ‘if ye commit abominable acts than ye shall birth abominations.’

The battlefield became the soul; the triumph was belonging to the human fold. Like a ghost in the machine or ship’s captain navigating through the monstrous straits of Charybdis and Scylla, the soul was an active force, the agency or reason necessary to steer ourselves toward immortal life in the hereafter. If, like the dog-headed Saint Christopher, a creature displayed rationality and choice, then despite their appearance they were a human being, with the same potential as the rest of us for redemption, immortality, and legal and moral culpability. If, like the last great pagan monster slayer Beowulf, they acted from thoughtless pride and rage, then despite their human faces men would become monsters themselves, their souls stared into by the abyss, only fit to fall and die. In the Christian charity paradigm, monsters were no longer evil but merely misunderstood, needing not the sword but a hug (not that the Crusaders practiced what Christ preached).

The warnings waned, the portents waned, morality waned; the soul fled screaming as the cold light of reason vanquished the horrible night of the Middle Ages. God was no longer king, but science, laying its hierarchical grid over the still-teeming chaos of nature while rejecting the supernatural explanations. Monsters became mechanized – no longer the result of God’s glory or wrath; they were now born to man due to inconsistent or corrupt seed, injured or narrowed wombs, heredity or accidental illness, or overactive imaginations manifesting in the flesh. There were no longer real monsters but merely confusions, illusions, and the occasional freak of nature. Tales of ghosts and demons that once frightened audiences into paroxysms of uncritical belief now only produced the stale laughter of entertainment, the suspension of wonder.

And yet men still wondered at what monsters could portend. The 18th Century anatomist John Hunter, on whom Victor Frankenstein was based, cut up and reassembled malformed babies to discover that monsters vary according to their own developmental laws. Due to cell division during mitosis, for instance, there could only be two-, rather than three-headed mutations. This new science was called teratology by Isidore Saint-Hilaire, from the Greek word for monster and marvels, teratos; and was the starting point for Darwin’s work on evolution – though even Empedocles, one of the pre-Socratic philosophers – the earliest proto-scientists – in 450 BCE, wondered, could monsters be the branching point of new species? Studying cases of lycanthropy and tail-hybridity before his finches on the Galapagos led to Darwin’s discovery of man’s descent from animals and the adaptive processes of natural selection. Chuck eventually concluded that embryological mutants could not reproduce, stating: ‘What has been in the blood will remain in the blood.’ Lethal in most cases, monsters were not the cause of, but vestigial proof demonstrating species evolution. Monsters warned of us.

The stories shifted once again. With growing scientific ‘proof’ that cryptozoological anomalies never truly walked the earth, and that deformation showed only our connection to the chains of nature – we were of the created not the Creator – atheists heralded monsters as another proof against God’s existence. The battleground shifted and the real monsters continued to lurk in the hearts and minds and perceptions of men, just where the dragon laid them – wherever the primeval fear of the hostile unknown produced horrere – the bristling of the short hairs. Psychology was born to fight the horror – joining the ancient ranks of art and literature and other productions of the human imagination: Freud’s uncanny dissonance when the familiar becomes strange or the strange familiar, Lovecraft’s cosmic dread of what waits ravenously outside all knowledge to drive us mad, Heidegger’s nervous angst at the indefinite uncontrollable threats that thrust us into existential quandaries, Kant’s sublime inadequacy of the imagination in the face of sheer awesome or awful magnitude, Todorov’s fantastic hesitation and attempt to explain inexplicable events in any rational way except the supernatural, Jung’s active collective archetypal imagination.

In the dark night of the instinctual subconscious reality could still become a sinister primeval world of ill-will and death, lit only by glimmers of knowledge and safety and love. We had to be ready at any moment to defend ourselves from what beasts our brains still told us were about to pounce from the horrible night right in our own living rooms.

There had always been and still were ananke, necessary and more powerful forces than us in the world – the weather, seasons, parents, the influence of planets and politics – and monsters still retained their force as symbols of our powerless frustration at what we couldn’t control, at Fate. Slaying them was an attempt to reclaim our infantile longing for dominance over the universe. We thought we were so brave, projecting the unconquerable fears in our hearts onto everything around us, from stray animals to neighbors to entire nations. Myth was and continued to be the magical means of resolving these internal contradictions – narratives that have power to collectively change the way we think and act. The new myths of mass media continued to relieve our instinctual tensions and teach us how to interact with the world and other people. And yet people increasingly suspended their wonder and flat out disbelieved in the reality of the gods and supernatural forces – monster stories became mere entertainments. We no longer warmed to the warnings.

And so the danger of the dragon lived on, repressed in our chests and ignored in our stories until some could not bare or bury it anymore and broke out into rage and appalling, inhuman crime.

We became the monsters; able to bite off strangers’ faces and rip their chests open with our bare hands, able to march billions into ovens and gas chambers, anyone who chose to abnegate their human responsibility through lashing out or calculated planning, without or with rational motives for violence or vengeance, rage and cold hatred contending like powerful viruses in the blood. The psychopathological logic – the repressed rage, the acting out of taboo fantasies, the desire to annihilate or instill total order, the us vs. them white vs. black human vs. inhuman carving of the world into enmity, the will to seek too great power that cannot be controlled, the choice of the easy path of ends over means. Psychopathological symptoms – deceitfulness, egocentricity, grandiosity, impulsivity, manipulation, lack of conscience, and, most important, lack of empathy – for monsters cannot feel what others feel, or else how could they do such monstrous things? The causes – replication of childhood abuse, genetic heritage, repressed trauma, changes in brain biology, high-stress urban environments, the pace and general madness of the modern world. But most of all, as the ancient Stoics were aware of, the abnegation of responsibility and just not owning up to what is in your power to control – your actions, reactions, perceptions, and projections toward all the unknowns that leap out at you from the dark forests of life.

The legal definition of murder proper entails the malice to take away another’s life without provocation, which requires a malignant heart. Monstrous crimes are not construed from situation and circumstance but from inherent character flaws and the chronic decision to do harm again and again and again. Monsters are an act of choice.

And so that old Scythian horror lives on, in the malignant heart where our fears of the unknown crouch terrified, waiting for one and all of us to lash at out at her – in which case we lash out at ourselves and each other, the perfect weapon. And it is here with a fence around the malignant heart that the proto-men established the charter of civilization – long before all law codes – when they fled from the flooded cannibal wastes above the Black Sea screaming of monsters and that we’d better learn to farm than fish. And she roars and writhes her draconian coils through the night each time men rape or murder; lynch their neighbors over skin-color or sexual choices; habitually lie, cheat, and steal; torture in physical or psychological form; demonize or dehumanize the other; commit war and genocide and the capitalization of vital services; create unnecessary clashes of civilization over ideological grudges; vampirically horde or like zombies endlessly consume; technologically fetishize our experiences and mutilate the earth we live on; shift the blame from ourselves or relativize the moral center away from goodwill toward all men for our own sake; and, like the titanic corpses of old, cry out, we are too big to fall, ho, ho, ho!

No! Let this be a warning that Alexander’s Gates were not erected to keep the monster zone outside the known world but to keep us in. For in all the stories through which we map what is inhuman in ourselves onto the hideous forms we use to hide our own atrocities and potentials for such, the greatest fear is that we never wanted to heed the portents and warning signs in the coils of her intestinal limbs – that while we parade our monsters through the streets, collect them like trading cards, give them puppy dog eyes and starring roles, we can pretend that we don’t have a choice in how we act, or that by choosing irresponsibly we can be led to the promise of ever greater rewards, however perilous to attain. But though we may not always like it, we always have a right choice.

And writhing coils of wrong ones.

For be warned as well that there are still those who willingly worship the old horror, through new and more hideous forms of ritual than munching on the odd flesh-brisquette, horrors so abstracted from the flesh that they no longer feel as flesh feels and no longer want what flesh wants, and would make monsters of us all, exposing and expressing the dragon’s curse in our blood – where it lurks in our very DNA – so that they might escape their own responsibilities and atrocious crimes, saying, look around, there are no monsters here because we’re all monsters, humans are just horrible is all, even the best of us. Now give us a hug and a couple bucks while we slip our coils around your throat!

Doesn’t it just make your blood run cold?

While I’ve been enjoying revising and posting excerpts from Staring at the Sun from Underwater, my time and attention are currently being taken up by various other projects, including a new novel about monsters that are really monstrous and women who don’t like to be bitten by them.

The bigger news is that my new book of poetry, Shortcut to Infinity, is now available for sale at Amazon!

Collecting poems from the period of 2005-2011, Shortcut to Infinity includes the out-of-print chapbooks, Invisible Neighborhoods and All Tonight’s Adventures. Taking a radical, spiritual approach to the written word, the book chart a journey of ecstatic insight through the wonders of romance and the natural world to the horrors of contemporary politics and the depths of the psyche.

For those of you in the Pittsburgh area, I will be giving a release reading soon (details to come). Also, on May 20th I will be reading at the Carnegie Library’s reading series, which is pretty big and I’ve got some awesomeness planned for that!

Except all the hardcore kids just hung outside playing foursquare in the parking lot next door, and only Joey Noia and I – and that pouty-smiling punk girl I met on the Riverside – stayed inside the sweaty den to listen, singing along to songs we never had the courage to write, lyrics written against this material world drawn from African folklore and science fictions, one of the bands even sampling a line from Tron that Nim and I always quoted as children: “What we’re supposed to do is turn something into nothing and then back again,” like those ‘80s scientists only dreamt of digitizing an orange with lasers but it might as well be our brains, if we only had the internal technologies to transform this empty system back into a life-oriented existence.

Trinity’s other group performed first – her and Emma’s a cappella hip-hop act – shouting out wordy diatribes against the State between handclaps and silly singsong rapping. Between one song Emma eulogized over another protestor who was shot – and actually killed this time – at the G8 Summit in Italy last week, which I’d planned on mentioning before our anti-war number. So instead I rambled about the pointlessness of working when there’s so much else we have to do, but still caught up in the grind though, which I don’t know how much longer I can take, while setting up and tuning our equipment, finally getting the volume levels consistent.
And then we rushed into our set list: Automaton to Autonomist, Telaversion, A Cathartic, Mirage, and finally Escape, Phoebe reading some of her Patti Smith-style energy poems between songs to keep the energy flowing.

But when we got to my finale, within the first few chords I broke my low E string, which the whole song’s based around, and it came out sounding muddled and inept, though the audience still cheered along. As Flip said, coming up to congratulate us after, “It’s pretty amusing watching you jump around with your dreadlocks flailing, bending over nearly backward to sing in the mic like you’re gonna have another seizure.”

Like I’m possessed by the music and my passion for life, though I felt rather robotic through the whole routine, certain notes at certain tempos, practiced until they reside in calloused fingertips, and still unable to escape the repetitious progressions of sound though it may appear anarchic on the outside.

I was too hyped up and pissed at my broken string to pay attention to the last local band sing about iced tea (of all things), plus Phoebe’s now seeing their drummer Z.

I hadn’t gotten up the nerve to talk to the pouty punk girl and went outside for a cigarette after we’d packed our equipment in Trinity’s rented SUV, still sweaty and shaking and not looking forward to biking home because it looked like it might rain. Emma was going to ride too, and walking down the hill she said, “Thank you for being so earnest and concerned, unlike those hardcore kids for whom a band is only just playing jokes, like music actually means something to you.”

“But,” she shook her head, unlocking her bike and watching me stare after the punk girl, “you still seem too passive or reserved to make the most out of living. Remember when I told you you’d developed a soul?” And to prove her point, Emma suddenly grabbed me in a fiery embrace, swinging me into a dip to kiss me, which, since I’m a head taller than her, caused us both to topple onto the sidewalk, her lying on top laughing.

But despite my protests she leapt off and onto her bike and peddled off into the blinking stoplight and moon-lit night, while I lay there and watched, utterly flabbergasted and wordless, fairly certain she didn’t want me to take it seriously but having my heart wrenched all over the place despite myself.

Phoebe came out from behind the cigarette smoke and dark clouds, wanting to tell me my guitar had still been too loud, the full moon like an indefinite halo behind her ears, but when she saw me on the ground dreaming into the distance she only shook her head and walked away.

(previous: 1.4.2) (next: 1.4.4)

I was followed again last night – not by cops, but by someone stalking the shadows and totally creeping me out. So to further occlude my appearance I decided to start wearing a hat – a short-brimmed six-panel spitfire I’d worn back in a high school musical. Not when I was Bruno in Brave New World, but Perchick, the student revolutionary, in Russian peasant cap and stained linen, exiled to the Siberian hinterlands behind the curtains for breaking all traditions. I was only in ninth grade but still got a leading role because I was a boy, and actually willing to get up in front of an audience and sing. L’Chiam, to Life! Before the pogroms exiled all of us to the new world, without even realizing that when the run was over I’d continue to play the part of that noble and anarchic savage.

If I hadn’t been playing it since I was a child, back when Mome took us to a performance of Les Miserables, the glamorous good guys holding down the revolving barricade (“the set’s like a giant Transformer,” Nim and I joked between acts), the two of us memorizing Val Jean’s solos, locked up for stealing a piece of bread, I even reading Hugo’s unabridged epic in sixth grade while the rest of our classmates struggled through A Separate Peace or whatever tepid nonsense we were reading that year.

Not even to mention the hundreds and hundreds of times we watched Star Wars, internalizing the Rebel Alliance until it was the only obvious narrative to follow: overthrowing the Empire. No wonder I ended up an outlaw and outsider, I’ve been heroizing the rebel my whole life.

But so has the System, selling back that savage myth to us in scattered images of complacency and product, circled A t-shirts in the topical mall stores, posters of Che Guevara only the economic spectacle of an Order, backed with the demonization of truly revolutionary spirits – the Haymarket rioters, Goldman and Berkman, Sacco and Vanzetti.

There are no values left in the Bible and Constitution to hold culture together, value only in relation to a future we’ll never experience ourselves, and all that’s left is to exist, by any means necessary, in this moment (whatever it means to exist at all), creating art, not like it’s this dirty mirror I’m staring into trying to get the right rake of the cap, but a hammer like Brecht used. Caught between these myths of government and resistance, it seems likely that our story can only end on the barricades. Do you hear the people sing, singing the song of angry men?

Except all I want is a love song, which Camus thought is impossible for the revolutionary to attain, Marius cradling his Eponine in the blood-soaked rain. Even Perchik had his Hodel hot before fleeing, singing, “I had an aim in life and that was everything, but now I even have you.”

Except I don’t have anyone, so I just get up to pee and then keep reading, a book that Flip, Fred I mean, lent me to crib lyrics from: Ferlinghetti’s Love in the Days of Rage (the title already cribbed by Crimethinc, those culture vultures). Next up, yet another cute anarchist couple, one of them a banker ironically, trying to get it on during the Paris Revolution, banners crying, the more I want to make love the more I want to make revolution, and all vices reversa.

Though neither love nor revolution are happening tonight to sport my cap to, which Annie Oakley reminded me earlier was transported to America in cartoons, the pogromed child getting off the boat and suddenly forced to live as a mouse! I can relate to it, being from some Jews back in Bavaria, where I think our Father said we’re from in his new genealogical research mood, that tragic and cell-screened American Tail of lost rodent parents and more love songs, and then… total rebellion against the alley cat and Jellicle overlords! A real rumble down at the Heavenside Layer tonight, featuring this band World B that Flip’s pirate-looking neighbor Annie warned me of, in hoop earrings and also a spitfire, all these rebel characters riding about on our noggins.

“World B… Frogstar… the Hitchhiker’s Guide, of course! “But the reference doesn’t fit today’s profile,” I told her, “we’re anarchists not aliens this time.” But maybe there’s a connection… but now I have to go sleep on it in order to get to work tomorrow

(previous: 1.4.1) (next: 1.4.3)

So instead we spent the evening having a grand old time, nothing fancy, just sitting around the apartment toking up with Flip and Damien and Damien’s wolf-dog Tia (short for Larentia, the mother of Romulous and Remus, but who Damien calls Tilla after a Grateful Dead song when he’s trying to impress the hippy girls). Anyway, I’d never realized before how much simple pleasure there is in just hanging around other people, instead of feeling my usual tense alienation. “What can war do to us when we can feel this luxurious?” I asked, “And why is it so easy for the good times to fall apart?”

The other night Phoebe and I went out for Indian food at People’s, and she asked over garlic nan, “Do you view yourself in the first or third person?”

“Both, at all times,” I answered. But the more I think about it, I’m caught in a first person narration so objective and rationalized it makes think before you act seem too immediate, and a 99th person perspective a more accurate description.

It reminded me of the conversation I had with this fellow Tak the other day –who keeps interrupting my lunch breaks in front of the Coop to talk when I’m trying to read or write philosophical treaties.

I had a copy of the Romantic Manifesto open, which Tim P. and I’ve been discussing, and Tak just went off on Objectivism. “The problem with reason – like Capitalism and warfare – is that it views everything in terms of use: ideas, art, living beings, when there’s so many experiences and emotions that will never fit in a logical framework or plot structure. Reality is far too subjective to say what’s right. Take Pynchon for instance,” he said, “you’ve read Gravity’s Rainbow, right?”

I just shook my head, not willing to admit that each time I try, I shudder the tome shut when that screaming comes across the sky. I have no desire to read a war novel no matter how non-rational it might be, because war is never rational and I’m beginning to realize the purpose of existence – once collective and individual continuance have been taken care of – should be to enjoy this: to live in pleasurable harmony with ourselves and the universe.
Which despite sounding obvious is really quite a hard feat to master.

Because the violence and hatred and warfare blare at us constantly through the news and entertainment media like we’ve all got Slothrop’s erection when the bombs drop.

“What we need to do,” Flip said, “is find some other story to live in.”

I was leaning back in a dumpstered chair, petting Tia and puffing one of Flip’s fat blunts, feeling not just at ease but positively regal. Damien didn’t want to hear about my great mood, distraught over politics, zombies, and fighting with his mother (and the positive not making for a realistic narrative).

“So what about you,” I’d asked Flip, “do you live in the first or third person?”

To which he laughed, “I plead the second, I’m like a choose-your-own-adventure novel, you remember those? Each moment and option presented to me I ask myself, Flip Rogers, well now, what do you want to do?” Which explains what I find so odd and fascinating about his character – that rather than feeling trapped in someone else’s story he lives freely in his own.

He went on to explain how the Beats felt the same urge: “Not Kerouac, I’m talking Clellon-Holmes, whose book Go you need to read next, god, he was an outcast in their scene, witnessing the breakdown of Herbert Huncke, who screams fuck you six times at the climax, and that would make a pretty poignant chorus for this jazz tune I’m writing for The Moment. No no, you see, after JK’s football accident, at the end of WWII, he and Ginsburg realized they didn’t have a story for their own generation – because you can’t live by the old stories anymore – and they set out to make a new one, turning all the random encounters into fodder for their art, always asking, what now, and, and then? And then picking the most exciting alternative, so that decades later kids still emulate their frantic footprints, the whole bongos and finger snapping image thankfully faded out by now but you get the picture. The first punks did the same, they wrote their own stories in song. And that, my friends, is precisely what we have to do if we hope to be get beyond this dead end plot we’re trapped in. The best teacher is experience and not someone else’s distorted point of view. As Ursula LeGuin put it, to see that your life is a story while you’re in the middle of living it may help you live it well. Now who’s with me?”

(previous: 1.3.10) (next: 1.4.2)