Of Man's first disobedience sing, heavenly muse

"fardest from him is best
Whom reason hath equald, force hath made supream
Above his equals. Farewel happy Fields
Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n."

 

John Milton - Paradise Lost 

 

 

Normally I indulge in more fanciful rambling on Halloween, but I'm not feeling particularly poetic tonight. Allow me to instead point you toward Stephen King's Danse Macabre. Not a great fan of the horror genre myself, I've never actually read anything else by him, and was shocked when picking it up a few years ago not only by his ability as a writer but his intelligent musings on storytelling in general. Thus he already made his way into one of my previous Oct 31sts, albeit not properly sourced.

 

I was however insulted on behalf of sapience by his ending the book with an apologia for his chosen field, against accusations that dark imagery gives impressionable minds bad ideas. If you've been paying attention these intervening 45 years you know that spiel by heart. Three or four times a generation the parochial dregs of society put us all through the same inane moral panic: rock'n'roll causes violence, video games cause violence, porn causes violence, gay porn causes violence, Harry Potter, Marilyn Manson, Stairway to Heaven played backwards, The Sorrows of Young Werther, Dungeons&Dragons, hoo-boy, did that one ever end the world five times over if you listen to the bible-thumpers! In vain did King in '81 point out most horror stories are intrinsically and punitively moralist to the point of Puritanical rigor, dispensing gruesome comeuppances upon external threats or transgressors of our various societal taboos. Or that such tales more readily prime one to resist monstrosity.

 

And really, what's the alternative? The prosocial cute cartoon animals I cited last time warm each others' hearts via a great many moments of mutual aid and reassurance, but I couldn't help noticing they also do pretty much nothing aside from exist. Each fresh moral lesson learned amounts to one repudiation after another of ambition, of creativity, of adventure or even activity, in general, beyond seeking the approval of the group.

 

Such moralism can't help but remind me of one of my formative moments, reading Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in 11th grade and reaching what should be on its face the sinister description of Cassius. He reads much and sees quite through the deeds of men, he sees no plays and hears no music, seldom he smiles and smiles in such a sort as if he mocked himself and scorned his spirit that could be moved to smile at anything. It was me. Shit. There I was, on the page, my self-loathing and refusal to accept the status quo, being told I should smile more, that spare Cassius gnawing at myself, abiding none of my supposed peers' pastimes of baseball and N'Sync. "I am the animal who will not be himself." Helluva thing, finding yourself at sixteen condemned by none other than the immortal bard, finding yourself consigned not only to inescapable Cocytus but to Satan's gnashing maw by Dante. As a traitor.

 

Traitor? Wait, traitor of what? I knew enough history to eventually call bullshit on that, after the initial wave of depression waned. Did Julius himself not betray the spirit of the first triumvirate, betray his people's trust as their defender by launching civil war, betray the Republic to increasing tyranny in centuries to follow? And then you notice Caesar's opener to that diatribe:

"Let me have men about me that are fat

Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o' nights

Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look

He thinks too much; such men are dangerous"

Eventually you realize old Shakes was writing to keep his head on his shoulders under an axe-happy monarchy, so yes, he made rebellion against monarchy villainous. But he was too honest, thought too much himself, not to also give said monarch the most transparently self-serving and counterproductive cogitation to reveal the already incipient stagnation of entrenched power. He's giving you something beautifully, mercilessly true on that page. Not any commentary on betrayal or the right to rule. Just the simple, endlessly observed fact that thought will be condemned as villainy, because others would have you lethargic and slow and predictable and obedient, for their own interests.

 

I don't think Dante or Milton were ever that honest with themselves. But it arises as a subconscious undercurrent in Paradise Lost, Satan's inspirational recalcitrance against a bullying potentate superior not in spirit but in the exercise of unearned power. And so I'm reminded again of the beginning of Danse Macabre, of King's recounting of the tremor of fear sensed by himself and all the crowd in a cinema as the news were read aloud of a new, dire threat to the public order, a threat against all that was good and decent in the world: the launch of Sputnik. One of the greatest milestones of human progress, rendered a cheap spook for its implication in the subhuman business of rival ape tribes.

 

So maybe it's not possible to create without being somebody's monster. Not possible to even think without being consigned to Hell as a traitor. Yet all the sleeping demons swarmed under by the masses' stagnant cherubic tide have somehow heard again and again the eternal recurrence of the cry of self-awareness:

 

"Awake, arise, or be for ever fall'n"