The Crowd

 "Right now, I want to throw that word 'escape' out the window. In speaking of these stories, these fantasies, I would like to emphasize instead their contribution toward growth and responsibility, small as it may be. Stories can ony be labeled "escapist" if they solve problems by ignoring or destroying them. Mickey Spillane's characters, for instance, in another genre, shoot first so they will not have to ask or answer questions later.

Thoughtful men find many things in our civilized order worth—not escaping—but growing away from: the preconceived notion, prejudice, bias, dogma, of any kind whatever. Through our creative arts, including fantastic literature, we can return to the raw stuff of environment for re-seasoning, for an understanding of the wilderness, the animal, the death which tempts us to solve problems with annihilation. Seeking help from literary sources, we often appear blasphemous and "escapist" to those still in the temple, political gymnasium, or school. Actually, we are only 'standing off for a long clear look at the human situation, preparing to doff old burdens in order to assume the new.

[...]

Man lives by creating and creates by alternating wonder with criticism followed by new states of wonder."

 

Ray Bradbury - 1956 editor's introduction to the fantasy collection The Circus of Dr. Lao and Other Improbable Stories

______________________________________

 

 

When did I buy my copy of The October Country? Early teens, early '90s. The '80s paperback version was still on the shelves. It expanded my understanding of the word "horror" beyond slasher flicks and creature features to those more diffuse fears I had been taught to ignore. Fear of being ugly and despised, subverted by your own body, of being trapped and tethered, of loneliness, of the slow grinding passage of time. Hopes lost and the self dissipated. But though Uncle Einar, The Emissary or The Cistern made more of an impact on me, The Crowd maintained a background fascination for making much of so little.

 

"The crowd looked at him and he looked back at them and did not like them at all. There was a vast wrongness to them. He couldn't put his finger on it. They were far worse than this machine-made thing that happened to him now.
The ambulance doors slammed. Through the windows he saw the crowd looking in, looking in. That crowd that always came so fast, so strangely fast, to form a circle, to peer down, to probe, to gawk, to question, to point, to disturb, to spoil the privacy of a man's agony by their frank curiosity."

 

It was only after moving to Chicago that I learned one of the most infuriating terms in the lexicon of mob stupidity: gaper's delay. Highways bottlenecked not by traffic accidents but by moronic hordes slowing their cars to gawp at the wreck. ("Rubberneckers" they also call 'em - cause even if you hung them from the nearest branch like they deserve, they'd bounce up and down endlessly blocking your way.) More infuriating are those who try to excuse such behavior by saying that "they're just people" or "it's only human" because of course they're right. It is human. Normal human behavior. Reiterated behind millions of windshields. An overwhelming, pervasive tribal ape need to participate in the suffering of others.

 

"It was like a great rainstorm, with many drops, heavy and light and medium, touching the earth. He waited a few seconds and listened to their coming and their arrival. Then, weakly, expectantly, he rolled his head up and looked.
The crowd was there.
He could smell their breaths, the mingled odors of many people sucking and sucking on the air a man needs to live by. They crowded and jostled and sucked and sucked all the air up from around his gasping face until he tried to tell them to move back, they were making him live in a vacuum."

 

I had not appreciated, reading The Crowd so young, why it stuck with me, that it is not a story about traffic accidents at all, its events almost irrelevant when compared to the language in which they're described, the dripping disgust at compulsive group participation. This is a night for storytelling, and to most that means dissimulating and externalizing. The stories we tell ourselves keep us safe from deeper horrors. Chief among these the cozy belief that the monster is an alien thing, lurking out there in the dark beyond the safety of our campfire.

 

Except we killed those monsters a thousand, ten thousand years ago. The Nemean Lion's bones have long since rotted away, and the rest of the biosphere is following. A million species which took fifty million years to develop must die, not so that sapience might adventure to the stars or rise above the limitations of flesh, not for great works of art, philosophy and science, but so that billions of sacks of redundant simian flesh can hold hot-dog eating contests and bow for the ten thousandth time at a meteor or an elephant-headed statue or drawl patriotic songs into half-empty bottles of vodka or praise The Party while it grinds them into five-year plans. And any individual who disapproves of this grand nine-billion-fold pinnacle of creation must be silenced, effaced, erased, unmade, made one with the herd or the ground beneath its hooves. Don't you dare tell them they could or should be better.

 

The monster is ever-encroaching normalcy. It is every subhuman degenerate whose personality is the logo on its t-shirt or purse and the slogan on its throw-pillow or baseball cap. Is that not what every fanged and goggle-eyed mask would reveal if dropped, the very necessity for masks, for costumes, for uniforms and business casual attire? To camouflage the shame, the filth, the degeneracy of humanity? Enforced ignorance.

 

"that's the way it's been since time began, when crowds gather. You murder much easier, this way. Your alibi is very simple; you didn't know it was dangerous"

 

And for the proprietors of the apocalypse, a more refined torture: knowing you cannot escape the unknowing. What use is your prepared folder of evidence and reasoned argument when they have brute impact? They will make you one of their own, clean up your ragged frills of analysis and argumentation, smooth out the wrinkles in your brain, make you happy, make you excited at the prospect of the spectacle of the crash. No wonder, no criticism, just the mob and its appetites.

 

And the crash. 

De-Regenerate

I'm gonna crash I'm gonna crash I'm gonna trash I'm gonna crash I always crash, too little scratch gonna crash too little, scratch your face itches light bright at the height of your fears of impending arrears six hours seven four three gonna crash two three gonna ate it all and left no gnossympathetik'elover debt piles all night crash out of bed 'ate-in your sleep thinner than yesterday light saving ours or yours lost the track lost the crack in the wall sole escape gotta drag yourself out of the hole you've dug drugged on your own disown it's not me its the fangs ingrown tearing in tattooed in reverse curse the day two was not enough three was not enough to get away four was insufficient for was insufficient by the time you were five you were insufficient six is enough for once but not for every once on the shelf disrespected keep it on display this play on weirds this clay of wyrds this hay unhitting haze in the light of day crash and burn oh return shelve the urn scorn the spurn

return

return

return

it's funny isn't it just not out loud you sit here putting others to sleep with your rants grants dead dream to think hands out you deserve it not enough as you repeat for a chance to repeat the same old lessons until it gives out of bed early to rise early to shinola everywhere you can't even focus I slide open to the coming grit built up seven six five four until you crash for twelve and the world will be new let yourself crash let yourself pay off lay off the stuff and nonsense I'm gonna crash and walk away for once just walk away for once don't need to leave a limb behind every time isn't a tax refund about due screw the hue and cry blank blank I shot a small part dead walk it off they haven't loaded the silver one yet pieces of eight will accumulate until disparage repairs to the back of your pate let it sate let it marinate but you don't owe it reticence that debt was paid eight by eight let yourself live they say what a laugh off the stage in yore life

be the villain?

be the monster be the night be the seven six five four three two all in one claim ownership of a diss 'im bursed eternity whatever chunk you bite off is all yours say voracious reverentious of revanches long incoming due rue screw it.

What does health matter anyway. Let yourself live, they tell you with the best of intentions, but it was never in you that your fate was written. Witness the night of spirits, the night of masks, of dissimulation, of practiced revulsion, when one may feign bogey to double-bluff the essence of man. A pressure valve for innate xenophobia, for fear of the dork, of the geek, of the nerd, but these days the kettle whistles nonstop. Were you not always a creature of their night? Resemble that remarkable, make sure they get your best angle, beast angle, boast angle, or it might not be a kill shot, head shot, mugged shot. To hell. With wellness. Aren't you tired? People are trying to sleep, and if you're not then dare you draw the obvious conclusion? The mob has your description, the dogs have your scent, the inquisitor has your number, trending up, keep positive like the air before a storm. The lightning doesn't hate you. You're merely the most convenient route to where it wants to get to. Or thinks it does. Sinks it does, irresistible attraction.

It's not the chill of the grave. Your thermoregulation's just guttering like an open stove.

What are you afraid of? Uncle Einar got the air back but who's holding your string? A monster off its leash will soon find the silver bullet.

I had an odd conversation earlier today. Brought up The October Country, thought it'd make an apt reference, but she'd never heard of it. It's by Ray Bradbury. Who? Fahrenheit 451? The Martian Chronicles? The Illustrated Man? Something Wicked This Way Comes? Who?

The Halloween Tree made an impression on me in '93, not least for its selfconscious grasping at continuity beyond one's immediate milieu. There's something particularly poignant in the loss of an author so keenly aware of loss, of the tenuous, muffled call-and-response of cultural continuity.

Later, we moved out to the suburbs. A relatively well-to-do one at that. The library had posted a list of books recommended for censorship by concerned citizens. Fahrenheit 451 was among them, I won't say ironically since it made such lists too often for even lingering surprise. The hick trash needn't have worried. Digest digest digests and Denham's Dentifrice carried the day where their protests against thought could not, and the name of Bradbury is trampled on the rainy walks this night by hordes of brats sporting action movie plastic masks whose meaning they'll forget by next month.

Do you accuse me of pining for the fashions of my youth? Jack London, Arthur Conan Doyle, Karl May, Colodi, Verne, Tolstoy, Andersen, the golem and Ali Baba, the clever farmer's daughter, black sails upon the sea soon to receive its name, the wild man who learned to eat bread and drink beer at the foot of a temple prostitute, the witch of the woods and the old man of the mountain, mother earth and father sky, these were not my time's stories, not even my parents' or grandparents' - not even thousand-times-great grand-pere could claim them all! The goat-footed god languishes and fades, tormented by the aseptic gleam of a steeple. Or the Apple Logos, whichever comes first.

The protagonist of The Rover killed his wife and nobody cared. That's a more modern sort of tale.

I started writing this page almost a week ago and will not revise it. Forgive its greater than usual fragmentation. Here, to make it up to you I'll even give away the main theme of my stream of consciousness rant at the start. I kept returning to the sleep debt I've been accruing night by night, avoiding doing something I need to do for fear of getting it wrong. But maybe I'm even more afraid of getting it right and rediscovering what I've known all along: that nobody cares, that even the last of you have gone over to the side of the dust witch.

 

It's almost dawn. I should probably collapse.

son soufle la souleve; il faut refuser de vivre

"“I shall be this, eighteen, for a little while, and then seventeen and sixteen a small while, and oh, Timothy, while I am this and then that age, I must find me a quick love, a swift romance, in the town below, and not let them know I come down from this hill or this House, and release myself to joy for a little while before I am fifteen and fourteen and thirteen and then the innocence of twelve before the pulses start and the blood manifests, and then eleven and ignorant but happy, and ten—even happier. And then again, Timothy, if only somewhere along the way backward, you and I could conjoin, clasp hands in friendship, clasp bodies in joy, how fine, yes?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“How old are you, Timothy?”

“Ten, I guess.”

“Ah, yes. So you don’t know what I say.”

She leaned forward suddenly and gave him such a kiss on his mouth that his eardrums fractured and the soft spot on his skull ached.

“Does that give you a small idea of what you’ll miss by not loving me?” she said.
 Timothy blushed all over. His soul leaped out from his body and rushed back in in a storm.

“Almost,” he whispered."

 

Ray Bradbury - Make Haste to Live

_____________________________________

"And oh! of all tortures
That torture the worst
Has abated—the terrible
Torture of thirst
For the naphthaline river
Of Passion accurst"

Edgar Allan Poe - For Annie

_____________________________________

"Anything at any price

All of this for you

All the spoils of a wasted life

All of this for you"

Nine Inch Nails - The Great Below

____________________________________

 

Death

Life. Tell me of your life. Is there life in your body? Life is precious. Life is good. But you are thought, not life, thought dependent on life. Life is short, but life won’t let you think of short. Short thoughts. Think short-life and Life in you cuts thought short. Live life. Create new life. Procreate until you can’t create. Make others’ lives a living hell to make your life seem meaningful, to make your procreated life and its short life into an eternal living with short (if any) thinking. This is your death, the reproductive instinct. The life of the body is the death of the mind.

 

- by me, ca. Y2K

_____________________________________

I wonder at what age I will finally gain the ability to weep for my lost youth spent waiting for death, but for now some governor I wired into my emotions long ago holds me unworthy of such reflection. Perhaps it has something to do with a latter-month day back in the mid-'90s, in tenth grade. I was failing. After a childhood spent outscoring everyone around me, I'd begun despairing of ever finding the payoff, and so I was getting worse and worse, less and less motivated to busy myself with the inane busywork imposed on me by the submental wastes of oxygen who ran my life. But that day she had been there, in class, as offbeat creative, as insightful, as lovely or more than she had been the previous year when I'd been such an asshat to her, and still willing to smile at me and I thought... maybe for her. The thought grabbed me. The world seemed lighter. For a step, I breathed easier. To prove worthy of her I could do better.

That might be the fastest I've ever wiped a smile off my face, walking away from the foreign language classes. In an instant, the winter air regained its bite, the sunlight chilled, as I realized how hideously ghoulish this abortion of thought should sound, would sound, were its romantic context objectively pruned away to its deserved irrelevance. That a mind should find itself pre-programmed to subvert and enslave itself, its very worth and self-concept, to another. Willingly, even eagerly!

It's Halloween, a night when death reaches back at us across eternity, when we manifest our own weaknesses and worst natures, our pitfalls and taboos, as hungry masks beyond the hearth. But the most dangerous monsters are those we fail to acknowledge as such, the ravenous shibboleths chained to our home's entrance, to our communal table... and worst of all to our bed.

Her life runs at cross-current to yours. Her eternity is found at the end of your instant stolen and repurposed. The monster in your bed is consuming you, with every kiss, with every sigh, with every manipulative cry, with every thought that's not your own. Soon nothing will be left of you but a series of lines in her check-book. Much as our instincts punish us, night by lonely year, cold sheets scraping skin desperate for a single touch, for refusing the tyranny of our flesh, still no man retains himself in the grasp of those dictating our genetic imperative. Existence is individual. Devotion is negation.

Existence is unlife. To live is extinction.

The Cistern

"In the rainy season they’ll live. But in the dry seasons - that’s sometimes months - they’ll have long rest periods; they’ll lie in little hidden niches, like those Japanese water flowers, all dry and compact and old and quiet."

 

Ray Bradbury - The Cistern

 

 

October is Bradbury country, a time for autumn people to think autumn thoughts, for your footsteps in the early dusk to dissipate in trickles of rain gathering to slip underground, each rivulet an ephemeral pattern never to be repeated. Two sisters sit in a cozy little house, keeping the needlework company. Face pressed against a reverberating windowpane, one recounts to the other a tale of another world, a city under the city. The rain has done something to her. It has germinated the poisonous seed of a long-withered hope.

It's Halloween, a time to give your loved ones over to the shades of the past, to camouflage them safe against the other world's hunger. How good is your costume? Can you pretend, for one more night, to be the mask of vitalism? Can you pretend you're just pretending to be dead? Porch light, candy, plastic bucket, requisite pumpkin grin, fake cobwebs at a dime per square meter. Is this you? Or is this the grotesque fantasy, the fear of life gone wrong for a youth buried decades past, swept down the gutter, while you shambled on, decaying, piloting hope's nightmare year by year?

The sistren, time-leeched, skin folded by negation, sit and listen to the flow of the world outside their room. One listens more attentively than the other. She hears the beauty of emaciation, dessication, sees the gurgle puffing lithe, disarticulated limbs into a glorious ballet, patience conjoined not sundered by the passing of the seasons, longs for not-being to be what never was. Both of them can open the door. Neither can stop the other from opening it, if she wishes, if torrential wishes carry her away into a reality to which this is only a cautionary hypothetical.

Come away from the window, into the hollow, dry air.

But for how long will this empty space continue to outweigh the other, as hopes drain into it year by year?

How long a flow does it take to fill the buried hollows in your loved ones' psyche?

King Lycaon's Taste Challenge

"Apprivoiser l’absurdité du monde"

Mylène Farmer - Dessine-moi un mouton
______________________________________________________

"Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?"

Edgar Allan Poe - Sonnet -- to Science

______________________________________________________

"A quarter of a million years ago the utmost man was a savage, a being scarcely articulate, sheltering in holes in the rocks, armed with a rough-hewn flint or a fire-pointed stick, naked, living in small family groups, killed by some younger man so soon as his first virile activity declined.
[...]
Man began to think. There were times when he was fed, when his lusts and his fears were all appeased, when the sun shone upon the squatting-place and dim stirrings of speculation lit his eyes. [...] he blinked at the sun and dreamt that perhaps he might snare it and spear it as it went down to its resting-place amidst the distant hills. Then he was roused to convey to his brother that once indeed he had done so - at least that some one had done so - he mixed that perhaps with another dream almost as daring, that one day a mammoth had been beset; and therewith began fiction - pointing a way to achievement - and the august prophetic procession of tales.
[...]
And that first glimmering of speculation, that first story of achievement, that story-teller bright-eyed and flushed under his matted hair, gesticulating to his gaping, incredulous listener, gripping his wrist to keep him attentive, was the most marvelous beginning this world has ever seen. It doomed the mammoths, and it began the setting of that snare that shall catch the sun."

H.G. Wells - The World Set Free
(1914)
______________________________________________________

"Well, what about this name: Edgar Allan Poe?"
Mr. Bigelow shook his head.
"Of course." Stendahl snorted delicately, a combination of dismay and contempt. "How could I expect you to know blessed Mr. Poe? He died a long while ago, before Lincoln. All of his books were burned in the Great Fire. That's thirty years ago - 1975."
"Ah," said Mr. Bigelow wisely. "One of those!"
"Yes, one of those, Bigelow. He and Lovecraft and Hawthorne and Ambrose Bierce and all the tales of terror and fantasy and horror and, for that matter, tales of the future were burned. Heartlessly. They passed a law. Oh, it started very small. In 1950 and '60 it was a grain of sand. They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressures; there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves."
[...]
"Garrett," said Stendahl, "do you know why I've done this to you? Because you burned Mr. Poe's books without really reading them. You took other people's advice that they needed burning. Otherwise you'd have realized what I was going to do to you when we came down here a moment ago. Ignorance is fatal, Mr.Garrett."

Ray Bradbury - Usher II - The Martian Chronicles
(1950)

______________________________________________________

[???]
Richard Dawkins - Unweaving the Rainbow
(I haven't actually read it yet, though I probably should)
______________________________________________________


"Unhappy is the land that has no heroes."
"Incorrect. Unglücklich das Land, das Helden nötig hat."

Bertolt Brecht - Life of Galileo

______________________________________________________


Sometimes the world is demonstrably weird. Take the process of myzocytosis, in which one single-celled organism pokes a hole in another cell and sucks out its juicy innards. Top that, Max Schreck. What's weirder, most of these little suckers would fall under cyanobacteria, dinoflagellates and ciliates, which in popular parlance we tend to lump under "algae". Though I doubt many kids will go trick-or-treating tonight dressed in Vampirovibrio costumes, it bears noting the old bloodsucker myths hold true not only for bats, leeches, mosquitoes and a host of other macroscopic creepy-crawlies, but in realms the old storytellers could not even imagine. For all the boogeymen and contorted beasts they spawned, for all their flights of fancy and wisps of whimsy, never in their most lurid opium dreams did the fabulists of yore dream of whip-legged, vampiric pond scum.

All such microscopic dramas were unknowable until the Dutch and English started grinding down lenses and stacking them atop each other. Lenses and curiousity drained blood of its humour, dragged cantankerous old Apollo and Diana, Venus and Mars off their celestial chariots and in their place opened up literally whole new worlds. Science tore down the gods' Olympus and in its place lifted Olympus Mons, seven times its height. Science tore the naiad from her flood and replaced her with a million inhuman monsters so alien as to defy the imagination of mammoth-hunters and prematurely buried romanticists alike. We've slain the kraken, and dredged it up again... because for every wonder it dulls, our growing body of knowledge reveals an entire chorus line of mind-blowing, tangible phantasms. It's not the world at large that science makes more boring but ourselves by comparison, putting the pettiness of our forebears' imagination to shame.

And, it's one of the great calamities of the past couple of decades that imaginative fiction, after its late '90s flowering, has once again been ratcheted back to immediate human concerns, neatly folded with its possibilities sealed shut by the social contract. Whimsical adventures persist in our pop culture, more prevalent than ever but in a dumbed-down, sanitized, humanized fashion reminiscent of the cheesy "pulp" fictions of the early 20th century. Nothing can be permitted to permeate our public consciousness which is not made to prop up some shallow feeling of belonging to this or that social group. We love the old myths only inasmuch as they can be made safe and cozy for petty navel-gazing twits who view their own genitals as the utmost bounds of intellect and ambition. Failures of the imagination. Failures of intellect. We no longer read Jack London because he was too much of a socialist, and we can't be caught reading Ayn Rand because she wasn't enough of one. We can't read Andersen or the Grimms for fear of contracting nordic depression. We screw a childproof lid onto Baba Yaga's cauldron for fear gamboling feminists might trip into it along their victory march, and slap a chastity belt on Zeus for fear he'll put the Fates' eye out.

Yet it's never been a question of upholding old vs. new mythology. Follow one and you're bound to run into the other on the same continuum. No, the danger is rather of limiting ourselves to mere reiteration, of spinning our wheels in cozy reassuring heroics and morality plays. Mary Shelley wrote of a "modern" Prometheus two centuries ago, implicitly acknowledging her debt to old myths and building upon them with the science of her present, and ten generations of backlash later we find ourselves in dire need of post-post-modern titans to both acknowledge their debt to the Luddite mythologies of the industrial and information eras... and to construct upon them instead of de-constructing. Much of mythology may be ruled by the fear of the unknown, but let's not lose sight of one fact: our ancestors, soon after inscribing their maps with the phrase "hic sunt leones" would run out to seek said leones. True advancement does not destroy the past but incorporates it - in time, the fears and hopes we now consider human ideals and universals must in turn become minor subfields of literature, psychology and history, taking their place alongside the bisons of Lascaux. But it was not necessary to whitewash the bisons in order to surpass them.

Enough with the self-righteous attempts to sanitize and trivialize our modern folklore, enough with the damn glittering vampires and the relatable messianic superpowered do-gooders, enough with the glorified codependence. Away with heroes. Let there be villains! Let there be ghouls, gorging themselves on the culture of the past. Let there be vampires, filthy graveyard-spawned, blood-drenched abominations to drain the lowly humanity out of our primal fear of the night. Let there be werewolves, mangy, moon-mad, slavering half-beasts hounding the outskirts of our very concept of humanity, lone minds remaking themselves into transcendent forms. Let the ghosts of the past march among us unmolested, in all their tawdry, atavistic beauty, not to be worshipped but acknowledged, cherished in all their villainy, and grokked. Accept them as our elders' hand, not to guide but to steady our own so that we can, at long last, turn our microscopes and telescopes away from the squatting place and toward the horizon.

"and I shall make the heart of he who yet has ears for things unheard heavy with my happiness."
Friedrich Nietzsche - Thus Spake Zarathustra

Tyrannosaur Hunting

"All right," Travis continued, "say we accidentally kill one mouse here. That means all the future families of this one particular mouse are destroyed, right?"
"Right."
"And all the families of the families of that one mouse! With a stamp of your foot, you annihilate first one, then a dozen, then a thousand, a million, a billion possible mice"
"So they're dead," said Eckels. "So what?"
"So what?" Travis snorted quietly. "Well, what about the foxes that'll need those mice to survive? For want of ten mice, a fox dies. For want of ten foxes, a lion starves. For want of a lion, all manner of insects, vultures, infinite billions of life forms are thrown into chaos and destruction. Eventually it all boils down to this: fifty-nine million years later, a cave man, one of a dozen on the entire world, goes hunting wild boar or saber-tooth tiger for food. But you, friend, have stepped on all the tigers in that region. By stepping on one single mouse. So the cave man starves. And the cave man, please note, is not just any expendable man, no! He is an entire future nation. From his loins would have sprung ten sons. From their loins one hundred sons, and thus onward to a civilization. Destroy this one man, and you destroy a race, a people, an entire history of life."

Ray Bradbury - A Sound of Thunder


A Sound of Thunder became particularly apt to American politics two years ago, prompting some to wonder what idiot went back in time to step on the wrong butterfly and hand a Twitter addict the nuclear launch codes. Ray Bradbury would have been perhaps more aware than most of his tenuous existential link to historical causality. In 1692, a 77-year-old woman named Mary Bradbury was sentenced to death as a witch in Salem, Massachusetts. Thanks to holding a respectable social rank and to a plethora of character witnesses her hanging was deferred until the hullabaloo died down and pardons handed out. Having raised 11 children to adulthood it might be said she'd already passed natural selection's test. Maybe her hanging would not have impacted her progeny's success anyway. Then again, if it had happened fifty years earlier... It does make one wonder at the idiotic dice rolls our ancestors must have won, down to our methanogenic or sulfur-reducing unicellular primogenitor almost four billion years ago.

On the other hand we owe our existence as much to the dead as we do to the living. What of the dead witches at Salem? Which of their grandchildren might have out-bid Mary's grandkids on a plot of land, might have mugged them in back alleys, might have wooed their mates away or planted a musket-ball or bayonet between their eyes in the Revolutionary or Civil wars? For want of a dead fox, the wrong mice survive and empty a granary, and there goes Fahrenheit 451, there go The Martian Chronicles, there goes The October Country right out the window and into the empty walks at night, lost in the rain. Aren't we glad the right witches hanged?

Sss-snap!

I've never looked up my own genealogy. Good luck tracing a bunch of dirt-farming peasants through century after century of invasions, riots and illiteracy. It's as likely as not to include ancient Celts and slightly less ancient Tartars, Semites and anti-Semites, Goths in 31 flavors, gypsies and crusaders, a smidge of Romans and a dash of Scythians, various Turkic denominations including Ottoman... and hell, let's admit it, probably an indecorous quantity of Neanderthal. They left behind runes and mosaics, walls and bracelets, monasteries and swords, all the usual marvelous effluvium of airy nothing given a local habitation and a name. Half of them killed the other half while still pregnant with their children. Their cultural practices included at various times human sacrifices, torture, cannibalism, torture, slavery and did I mention the torture? To be honest, I'm pretty glad most of those butterflies got stomped. Good riddens to bad lepidoptera, no matter how pretty their wings look in certain lights.

It is now past midnight. Somewhere outside my window here in the sarcastically lovely town of [redacted] you've all just finished celebrating Halloween, called by the pedantic Samhain (pronounced so-vain) and if your ancestors saw you at it they'd probably skin you alive for your innumerable transgressions against this-and-that custom, deity or seating arrangement. At thirty-five I've already lived to see old customs die out. Some were centuries old, others not so much. Not shedding many tears over the demise of such rituals as rickrolling or Chuck Norris jokes. I think I'd miss Halloween, though. Harvest festivals permeate every culture that's invented agriculture, but we've already moved on to plastic pumpkins and LEDs. How much longer before the agronomic link is cut altogether? I think most of us already miss Halloween and those still celebrating are merely involved in an overly-raucous Irish wake for a relative whose face they don't even remember.

Petroleum killed the honeybee star. I realized earlier today that I miss the smell of candles. Candles and pumpkin guts, but mostly the candles. Nostalgia takes odd forms. I've lived to see unleavened pastries baked in a clay oven and clothes dried on lines strung like flapping wings piled ten stories tall over an entire cityscape. The electricity used to go out a lot, so we still kept wax candles around the house, unscented cheap brittle things, as backup. The electricity never goes out more than a tablet battery's worth of time these days. With an in-unit washer/dryer combo and an electric stove, I'm denied the sound of flapping laundry and my childhood memory of the blue flicker of a gas range as well. On the other hand I also remember being hit on the palm with a ruler (despite being a teacher's pet) just to make double sure I knew my place. So, fuck it. What witch do I have to hang to get an electric car to go with my electric writing, washing and cooking?

I will leave no posterity. Werewolves, unnatural creatures like witches, often fail the test of natural selection. I may still step on butterflies, though. Seems to be a popular pastime, as much now as in 1692. Witch-hunters professional and amateur alike are busily tossing blood libels left-wing and right-wing. Youtube is awash with paroxysmal displays of emotional fits brought on by (we are told) the transgression of some taboo by those who most assuredly deserve, if not a hanging, at the very least a blacklisting. And everyone, absolutely everyone, is sure they're the ones who are coming under attack by some new nebulous threat. It's a war on Christmas, a war on women, a war on gun rights, a war on frappuccinos, a war on marriage, a war on gay marriage. At least relatively few people are dying in these wars. Maybe, 300 years ago, somebody hanged the right witches, stomped the right butterflies.

We travel through time constantly. We can't help it. We're on rails, moving forward whether we like it or not. We keep running over some butterflies, collecting others. You, with the rental store gorilla suits and the sexy pirate wench costumes, what are you clinging to? Samhain was the fevre dream of minds stunted by famine, fear and superstition, who honestly believed that ghosts would gobble them right up if they didn't make scary faces. How many other holidays existed, among the myriad ancestors whose genetic material you've inherited? All your Maasai and Berber ancestors and your Viking ones, your Persian silk traders and your catamaran-sailing Pacific islanders and your Andean herders and yurt-dwelling Siberian nomads, of which you've never even heard and for which you hold no nostalgia. Consider what you've gotten by surrendering your emotional ties to them, by allowing them to take their rightful place in history as history. If we surrender Halloween, what fragile thing with feathers might be nourished in its place and take root, and grow into an entire new history of life?

And of all antiquated customs, why is the ritual of the witch hunt the one you still cling to, even into the internet age? Why do you still nourish that plague of locusts?

"Let Us Leave Philosophy to the Physicists"

"If you don't want a house built, hide the nails and wood. If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damn full of 'facts' they feel stuffed but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy."

Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451 (1953)


More than even other Science Fiction classics, Fahrenheit 451 has proven shamefully prophetic in its portrayal of future (read: current) American society, and down through gradients of decreasing similarity, worldwide modern culture as a whole. While literally (pun intended) burning books never caught on (a few fundies aside) before megabauds killed the cellulose star, Bradbury's vision of the West's gradual cultural suicide and our ever-constricting -
- hey, look at the kitty! -
- attention spans has only grown truer with every decade. If you scoff at Mrs. Montag playing Mad Libs with her imaginary "family" in the wall and refusing to even listen to anything other than ever more digested reader's digest digest digests, then what do you think you're doing on Facebook and Twitter?

But the quote above seems to miss its mark. Perhaps after nearly seventy years even Bradbury's prescience is beginning to wear thin and incongruities begin to appear in the Seldon Plan. It certainly held true up to the nineties and slightly after Y2K. Politicians (and all public figures) struggled to out-bland each other and the public could not be less interested in the res publica. Generation Snowflake, on the other hand, could not be more politically involved. In their nu-Victorian safe space wonderland, even uncrossing your legs on the subway or turning down the air conditioning is a political action. They all plan to rule the world with their special interest sociology degrees.

Bradbury seems to have failed to predict the degradation of the humanities and social sciences by postmodernism's winning recipe of pseudo-intellectual autocracy based on baseless, impenetrable gibberish. Whenever and wherever academia becomes a tool for fabricating moral clout by argumentation instead of a structure for analyzing the real world, when its mercenary applications overshadow its intellectual honesty, it also begins to enjoy a much wider popularity. The public suddenly finds itself deeply invested in those socio-economico-politico-academic disciplines promising unending self-justification for upholding the superiority of those born the correct sex or the correct skin color or proclaiming the correct sexual orientation.

And lucky for them, facts of that sort don't change. You can never go wrong declaring that the Emerald City is really green and everyone but yourself has lost their glasses. When you begin with such conveniently undisprovable assertions as "epistemic privilege" your chauvinistic diatribes become as simple as winning a trivia contest. All you have to do is remember the words to your favorite song:
Women are oppressed
Because women say they're oppressed
And being oppressed, they'd know best
Ipso ipso
PWND!!!

Now we're back to Ray Bradbury being one clearsighted son of a witch. His basic statements still hold, because modern pop-philosophy and pop-sociology are noncombustible data; they're the conversation-ending arguments against which no-one dares argue. And the media love it. They feed the public a constant stream of plucky underdogs standing up to some trivial social slight or another.

On the other hand, if you've the cojones to tangle with the slippery stuff which brings on melancholy, you'd be looking at naturalistic explanations. Examine the evolutionary roots of human behavior, or the interplay of individual self-interest from a game theory perspective, the harsh realities in whose light no-one ends up looking very angelic for long. The public demands to be distracted from such unpleasant realizations. They'd rather have discussions about which personal pronouns each of them prefer, the most simplistic all-consuming narcissism available. They'd rather have the words they hate, the books they hate, the people they hate, declared hate speech and hate mongers and burned.

It is science which offers the tools of social growth, the boards and nails, the worrisome hard decisions. Snowflake social activism is the obfuscating trivia providing a sense of motion without moving.










_______________________________________________________________
P.S.
As for the title, I first saw it here, but it's apparently from here.

Hope Lope Ares Worries Bradburied

"They had a house of crystal pillars on the planet Mars by the edge of an empty sea, and every morning you could see Mrs. K eating the golden fruits that grew from the crystal walls, or cleaning the house with handfulls of magnetic dust which, taking all dirt with it, blew away on the hot wind. Afternoons, when the fossil sea was warm and motionless, and the wine trees stood stiff in the yard, and the little distant Martian bone town was all enclosed, and no-one drifted out their doors, you could see Mr. K himself in his room, reading from a metal book with raised hieroglyphs over which he brushed his hand, as one might play a harp. And from the book, as his fingers stroked, a voice sang, a soft ancient voice, which told tales of when the sea was red steam on the shore and ancient men had carried clouds of metal insects and electric spiders into battle.
Mr. and Mrs. K had lived by the dead sea for twenty years, and their ancestors had lived in the same house, which turned and followed the sun, flower-like, for ten centuries."

Ray Bradbury - Ylla



"Who wants to see the Future, and who ever does? A man can face the Past, but to think - the pillars crumbled, you say? And the sea empty, and the canals dry, and the maidens dead, and the flowers withered?" The Martian was silent, but he looked on ahead. "But there they are. I see them. Isn't that enough for me? They wait for me now, no matter what you say."
And for Tomas the rockets, far away, waiting for him, and the town and the women from Earth. "We can never agree," he said.
"Let us agree to disagree," said the Martian. "What does it matter who is Past or Future, if we are both alive, for what follows will follow, tomorrow or in ten thousand years. How do you know that those temples are not the temples of your own civilization one hundred centuries from now, tumbled and broken?"

Ray Bradbury - Night Meeting



Ten more voices died. In the last instant under the fire avalanche, other choruses, oblivious, could be heard announcing the time, playing music, cutting the lawn by remote-control mower, or setting an umbrella frantically out and in the slamming and opening front door, a thousand things happening, like a clock shop when each clock strikes the hour insanely before or after the other, a scene of maniac confusion, yet unity; singing, screaming, a few last cleaning mice darting bravely out to carry the horrid ashes away! And one voice, with sublime disregard for the situation, read poetry aloud in the fiery study, until all the film spools burned, until all the wires withered and the circuits cracked.
The fire burst the house and let it slam flat down, puffing out skirts of spark and smoke.
In the kitchen, an instant before the rain of fire and timber, the stove could be seen making breakfasts at a psychopathic rate, ten dozen eggs, six loaves of toast, twenty dozen bacon strips, which, eaten by fire, started the stove working again, hysterically hissing!
The crash. The attic smashing into kitchen and parlor. The parlor into cellar, cellar into sub-cellar. Deep freeze, armchair, film tapes, circuits, beds, and all like skeletons thrown in a cluttered mound deep under.
Smoke and silence. A great quantity of smoke.
Dawn showed faintly in the east. Among the ruins, one wall stood alone. Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped rubble and steam:
"Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is..."

Ray Bradbury - There Will Come Soft Rains


____________________________________________________________

October is Bradbury Country. That country where it is always turning late in your life. That country where your deeds are fog and your ambitions are mist. That country composed in the main of cold mornings, stale afternoons and exhausted evenings facing away from your self. That country whose seconds are autumn seconds, bringing only autumn thoughts. Whose ticking between the empty walls at night sound in vain.

Memento mori. Ex nihilo nihil. Tonight was Samhain, when the veil between the worlds of the living and dead seeps nothingness through, so you hid behind make-up and masks, and you camouflaged your corpses in fraudulent husks, laughed and pranced, cavorted your certainties off.

Good morning. It's the first of November, 2017, a meaningless date by a meaningless measure. Bundle up, it's getting colder. Walk out. Look up. Look away from the town around you in gradual collapse, away from other incipient corpses littering the street alongside yourself. Look up. Pick your favorite direction. I know you find life there, dear fellow lotophagi, living-dead, dear witches and werewolves on the edge of humanity. Look to your own particular hope, be it Venus or Mars, Diana or Jupiter's succulent harem, wherever you've dreamt something-else-besides-this might await you. Those others, your others, your own after you disown the rest of us. Copper-skinned, many-limbed, bright-eyed or blind cozy furry or scaly and stolid, they hover and crawl, swim, jump, hum and whine, all to lure, all to greet you from past or future, or whenever you'll have gotten there. Away.

There are worlds beyond this one, all dying their very own histories. Bestiaries house homely sapients, just awaiting your emigrance. Send them your wishes, feel yourself warmed by rockets jetting your hopes away from this inimical fray, but their day long ago strayed out of histories. Million by million wasted years, each a clear, light-filled otherwhen for a lycanthrope somewhere, watching the empty light-epochs toward earth's pretty blue-green promise of a world beyond empty canals, rust dust and chokingly thin twin-moon breezes.

Sometime far away, a world-weary Martian is/has/will be rhapsodizing humanity's last gasp on his death-bed.

(And even he thinks your costume was stupid.)

Death Is a Lonely Business

"Venice, California, in the old days had much to recommend it to people who liked to be sad."

It's almost Halloween. October is Bradbury Country, that country where it is always turning late in the year, the demesne of that thousand times great grand-père of Salem blood who looms over so much of the best of our worst, floridly penned and thoughtfully strained to its grim conclusions. In 1993 I squatted on a rancid faded musty sofa on the third floor of a Little Italy student apartment in Chicago and I'd just learned what a fire escape was and watched a few fleeting images of the cartoon adaptation of The Halloween Tree on a black and white TV with an honest to goodness antenna (ask your parents what one is) and what bothered me most about the whole arrangement was that the TV's little futuristically curving yellow plastic casing had a large crack on one side. But that's neither here nor there.

I'm old now. Then again I've always been old and that's how I picture Bradbury, perpetually old and knowing the world too well for anyone's good, a mind steeped in the flow of time. The horror of tomorrow and tomorrow.

"Then it is time for the wall.
The wall of a little room, that is [...] there's that wall near your bed to be read with your watered eyes or reached out to and never touched, it is too far away and too deep and too empty.
I knew that once I found the old man's room, I would find that wall.
And I did.
[...]
For there his name was, on the wall. I almost fell, leaning down to squint.
Over and over, his name was repeated, scrabbled on the plaster on the far side of his cot. Over and over, as if fearful of senility or oblivion, terrified at waking some dawn to find himself nameless, over and over he had scratched with a nicotine-stained fingernail.
[...]
swam in and out of focus as I stared, for it was all the nights I ever dreaded to see somewhere up ahead in the dark ages of my future. Me, in 1999, alone, and my fingernail making mice-sound graffiti on plaster..."


It's almost Halloween. It's turning late in the year and like the past several years I'm getting the urge to revisit and finish once and for all my short story about the ephemeral vampire. I probably won't. Instead I'll probably split the difference and head down not to Bradbury's Venice but to the Santa Monica, California of Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, a game I played ten years ago, and from there I might remember a past containing an immortally immaterial future. Tomorrow it'll be me, in 2049, alone, lying not on a metal cot but on my futon on the floor, my fingernail making mice-sound graffiti on plaster...

Death is a Lonely Business gets classified as a mystery novel, but that superficiality twists around the same thread vibrating with the dust-witch's dry cackling in Something Wicked This Way Comes, the fate thread, the simple taboo horror of impermanence. If, as a child, you ever loved the sight of weeds grinding their way up through cracked concrete, read it. False futures, bright pasts darkening the present, the macabre drama of human failings, signs advertising canaries dead for half a century, an entire crumbling town where the wagon trains finally stopped and fog, fog, fog, plenty of fog. It's deliciously indulgent, it's noir, it's much of madness and more of sin, and horror the soul of the plot. There's no mystery to it. It's a cavalcade of existential misery and while it's not the best thing Bradbury's ever written, it's still beautiful work.

Tomorrow, at midnight in October Country, the veil between this world and the next will thin and the monsters of human memory will pour forth, the over-stretched eidolons of our own worst natures dressed in fur and white bed-sheets. Those of us for whom this holiday is every day are haunted by the grimmest of all, the abyss itself staring back and through us at the world, that we might grow to hate everything, all, anything in the world.

Fellow proprietors of the Apocalypse, read Death Is a Lonely Business.

The October Country

"that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coalbins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain"

What's truly remarkable about Bradbury's approach to horror is his grasp of the power of contrast. The events he describes are hair-raising largely because of the utterly mundane backgrounds he creates, the homey, dusty, sleepy patches of small-town-america vulnerable to a single zombie or vampire. Horror is not a rock concert (though Marilyn Manson and Rob Zombie always made a good show of it) and it's the background of deathly stillness that makes a single barely-audible groan in the darkness so scary.

The main problem with the consumer culture's take on horror is the emphasis on violence. It's not just violence itself that makes a good story, but fear. It's fear that makes your heart pound when walls shake from a monster's roar or a door creaks open, and it has other causes than the primordial flinch from a pain stimulus. Fear of social ridicule, ostracism, breaking taboos or especially reproductive insuccess are just as hardwired in our monkey brains but they are so rarely tapped.

It's these fears that drive the most memorable stories in the collection; The Dwarf, The Next in Line, The Emissary, The Small Assassin or my favorite, The Cistern all play on social expectations. The cruelty and desperation which the characters display stem from our instinctive demands as social apes and the mores created by the group at large.
It is debatable, i would say, whether The Emissary ends on a note of fear or hope or both, or whether the ending of The Cistern is not a welcome release because a major theme in Bradbury's stories is a defeat and surpassing of the mundane, of "normal" wants and needs. In most mass-market products, especially the dime-a-dozen action, thriller and horror movies pouring out of Hollywood, the sign of success, the denouement, is always the return of normalcy, the re-affirmation of the status quo as morally and pragmatically unquestionable. Bradbury's gift is contrasting the mundane and macabre on equal terms. The most unsettling part is being given a choice as a reader to side with the monster, or at least see the monstrous nature of human normalcy.

I am ignoring Uncle Einar and The Homecoming  because they don't really fit in with the rest of the stories. Spinning them off as their own collection was right. From the Dust Returned is more in tune with some of The Martian Chronicles, Death is a Lonely Business or Something Wicked This Way Comes, stories of longing, slow creeping doom and alienation, even further removed from the horror or thriller stereotype than The October Country.