The Lurking Fear...

Peter Szmer

Warning! Today's post is reactionary and illogical. It is fear-based, and will prompt some of my readers to wonder how I can often be rational in my behavior and yet still feed this lurking fear that has been running around in my head for the last week...

Shrieking, slithering, torrential shadows of red viscous madness chasing one another through endless, ensanguinated condors of purple fulgurous sky... formless phantasms and kalaidoscopic mutations of a ghoulish, remembered scene; forests of monstrous over-nourished oaks with serpent roots twisting and sucking unnamable juices from an earth verminous with millions of cannibal devils; mound-like tentacles groping from underground nuclei of polypous perversion... insane lightning over malignant ivied walls and demon arcades choked with fungous vegetation...
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Lurking Fear

[The Bad Beginning: "If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle." --Lemony Snicket] 

“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” --George Orwell: It's my warning again. My post today is only about questions, not answers. It is not a happy post. It is a self-indulgent "letting" of the bad humours that have been festering in me for seven days now. I have been reading the news this last week the way I usually check Facebook or the weather app on my phone. I keep button mashing on my custom feed of the NYT and WSJ. [I cannot stomach looking at Fox despite knowing it is the most watched single news source out there. I prefer NPR, even though I know those who voted for Trump did not use that as their primary source at all.] I avoid the Washington Post and CNN as much as possible, worried that they are only feeding me what our President has called fake news and alternative facts. But I am reading news like I watched TV after 9/11. How's that for reactionary for you?...

"Sometimes

Only sometimes

I question everything

And I'm the first to admit

If you catch me in a mood like this

I can be tiring" 

--Sometimes by Depeche Mode

A context of literacy: I have a liberal arts education. That means in some part I have been exposed to (and was expected to read) lots of different kinds of literature with the hopes and intention of expanding my perspectives. I confess I struggled with Thomas Hardy's Return of the Native and never finished it, nor did I ever even try the great American novel Moby Dick after hating Billy Budd. I may have used Spark's Notes on most of my Shakespeare, although I loved his work each and every time I struggled through it. But freshman year was different. I devoured everything we were assigned...

"For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.” --George Orwell

A musical setting of the mood: In 1986 Depeche Mode released Black Celebration. It was the soundtrack for my summer reading that focused on dystopian literature. I read 1984, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, and more... all while I consumed glorious volumes of Jimmy Dean breakfast sausages and quart cartons of Whoppers malt balls. It was a confusingly wonderfully melancholic summer to say the least. I was exploring my own freedoms, regularly walking to a nearby shopping plaza called the Rotunda to buy my snacks, smoke cigarettes, and think about a world larger than my own back yard. And I read...

Depeche Mode's album provided an unintentional backdrop of darkness different from the loud driving sounds of my usual punk/hardcore fare at that point. Depeche Mode was softer, and allowed me to tune it out while I read. It was also the time I watched Ridley Scott's Blade Runner which coincided with my adolescent worries that the whole world was out of control and headed for a cyberpunk era of government controls and hacker rebellion... 

It was a time that my father and I often argued about my distain for "the man" and belief in conspiracy contrasted by his rational positively focused perspectives about the world around us. I was trying on my own way of thinking and probably needed to press back against his confidence and clear thought. It's a psychological thing...

And so I was in a self-inflicted adolescent macabre (can I use an adjective as a noun?... well, I just did!) Here are a few lyrics from the first two tracks of Depeche Mode's work to help establish the scene of my reading of Orwell's and Bradbury's work back in the mid 80's:

Let's have a black celebration
Black Celebration
Tonight
To celebrate the fact
That we've seen the back
Of another black day

Death is everywhere
There are lambs for the slaughter
Waiting to die
And I can sense
The hours slipping by

"We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end.": So Orwell's 1984 made it back to the bestseller list this past week. I can hear the cries of my more rational and conservative friends asking me what I mean by all this; I can hear the arguments getting built in their heads, and I confess I am making them myself as I look closely at this fear that is lurking in the back on my brain, running around like a maniacal monkey who wants to  angrily throw his shit at my reason and logic. I do not have a good answer. I worry that my adolescence is showing and that the news world is merely feeding my worries in their conspiracy to topple their new whipping boy.... But of course I do not completely believe that. There is just too much division and tension for me to believe it is merely that. I see a flurry of executive orders that seem to divide and separate. My friend and colleague teaches a simple enduring understanding: "What you can separate you can violate." I know I am probably wrong in letting my fear lurk. I know I have faith in the law, and the glorious balance of power we have set up in America. I know that despite Orwell's line, “One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship,” we are not in a revolution, nor is our President a dictator. But I also know that the only way to make sure things work out well is to watch, be mindful, and continue to think for myself...

Next week... Something more focused and lighter. I promise!

1871 - 1918...

Puck, 1881

"Steampunk is nothing more than what happens when Goths discover brown" --Charles Stross: 

This week's post shall be short as I am grading 1st semester exams while contentedly sipping coffee and enjoying the calm of a Sunday afternoon following a pleasant sleep-in...

I have no flow in mind for today's post, save an attempt to draw my readers' attention to a gem of American history, while allowing for a little biography at the same time. The history is Puck, and the biography is my love for the aesthetic found within a thing labeled steampunk. The two are not connected other than the latter draws in part from the look of the former. I have come to realize that my interest in the history of the late 1800s and early 1900s is in part formed by my like of the aesthetic of the time more than the events or politics of that era. I love glass and steel, and wood and rivets, and gears and cogs, and mechanical systems, oh boy!...

City of Lost Children (1995)

Howl's Moving Castle (2005)

Puck is a humor/satire magazine that was in publication from 1871 to 1918; steampunk is a term that starts in my formative years, 1980s, as a sub-genre of cyberpunk, a science fiction world with the aesthetic of late 19th century, early 20th century styles of late industrialization.

LEG (1999)

Puck published cartoons from a time when illustrations often have a modern technical precision while looking antique at the same time. Steampunk seeks to embrace that time along with a "what if" way of looking at events of the past blended with alternative futures.

I love the work as it makes its way into Miyazaki's movies like Howl's Moving Castle, post-apocalyptic cinema like City of Lost Children, or graphic novels such as League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

For my semester exam I challenged my students to analyze a political cartoon from Puck in 1883. I do not wish to analyze it some much as use it's interestingness to power haps draw my readers into doing a brief google search for puck illustrations and finding they way to looking at some delightful historical pieces. Enjoy!

2016...

It was a bundle up your coat and pull down your hat, a see the wind press against your eyes; a feel hot breath under a scarf and fog up your spectacles kind of cold. You know that kind of crow call, hollow echo, clacking limbs, and silent stretches sort of morning where only upon lifting your head up from bracing against the chill do you catch the most magnificent pale rays filtering through the crispness...

It was a sit by the window, cracked to the damp, splitter splash drip kind of morning. You know the white noise sort of fine wire brush dragged lightly and zenfully across a brass ridged cymbal sort of thing. Dogwoods and daffodils open, crocuses and redbud yielding their color to the day. Moist oxygen rich dirt releasing it's winter harvest of smells and life where blends of morning showers and afternoon sun transform the world into an eden for the senses...  

It was a sit in the shade and listen to the distant laughter of children playing kind of laziness. You know that kind of low hum of a distant mower and the chirps of tree swallows intermingled with the light ticklish tussling of leaves in swaying branches. That mid summer malaise where you close you eyes against the heat and sun and watch the shadows of light and shade play about on the inside of your eyelids...

It was a pull on a sweater and pack up a sack, lace up some boots and put on a cap sort of hand holding, slow walking sort of afternoon. You know that open heart, warm soul, dry leaf, cool breeze, warm earth sort of shuffle where the darkness of fading sun is contrasted by the glorious release of color as the trees prepare for sleep. Long rays bathe horizontally as shadows play on opposite sides, and where hands hold and sweaters embrace there is only a deep contented sigh... 

"Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen"...

"My, my, my, my, my, what a sight for my poor eyes...": A friend of mine posts art to FaceBook. He posts other worthwhile things as well, and rarely offers anything that is not worth looking at (if only the rest of the world wold use FaceBook so judiciously and positively). But his most frequent posts are part of a series of hundreds upon hundreds of images of art doled out slowly for the rest of us to consume and wonder at...

"Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole...": Picasso reportedly said "The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls." My soapboxing, wise, musical, wordsmith of a friend has helped me wash off quite a lot of dust over the years, through wit, kindness, and beauty. What hallmarks of the season we are in. Christmas time, regardless of ones religious pinnings, is a special time. It provokes some stress in many (as we try to uphold that specialness we know to be the point of it all), but also seems to bring out the best in most of us. We cozy into the cold, and light our lights in the darkness. We gather in groups in the name of celebration, and strive to give more than we receive. What a time!...

"If you're fond of sand dunes and salty air, Quaint little villages here and there...": We are in the home stretch here in my household preparations for next week, but there are many miles to go before I sleep. So today, for my weekly post I offer a little art as poetry and a little poem as a painting (Leonardo DaVinci gets credit for today's title.) 

I live in a "quaint" small town in New England where "Main Street" is about a hundred yards long. I love it here. So who better to represent my daily life than Norman Rockwell and Robert Frost? Who better to help wash off the dust of daily life by showing how special that daily life is?...

Christmas Trees
By Robert Frost

(A Christmas Circular Letter)

The city had withdrawn into itself
And left at last the country to the country;
When between whirls of snow not come to lie
And whirls of foliage not yet laid, there drove
A stranger to our yard, who looked the city,
Yet did in country fashion in that there
He sat and waited till he drew us out
A-buttoning coats to ask him who he was.
He proved to be the city come again
To look for something it had left behind
And could not do without and keep its Christmas.
He asked if I would sell my Christmas trees;
My woods—the young fir balsams like a place
Where houses all are churches and have spires.
I hadn’t thought of them as Christmas Trees.
I doubt if I was tempted for a moment
To sell them off their feet to go in cars
And leave the slope behind the house all bare,
Where the sun shines now no warmer than the moon.
I’d hate to have them know it if I was.
Yet more I’d hate to hold my trees except
As others hold theirs or refuse for them,
Beyond the time of profitable growth,
The trial by market everything must come to.
I dallied so much with the thought of selling.
Then whether from mistaken courtesy
And fear of seeming short of speech, or whether
From hope of hearing good of what was mine, I said,
“There aren’t enough to be worth while.”
“I could soon tell how many they would cut,
You let me look them over.”

                              “You could look.
But don’t expect I’m going to let you have them.”
Pasture they spring in, some in clumps too close
That lop each other of boughs, but not a few
Quite solitary and having equal boughs
All round and round. The latter he nodded “Yes” to,
Or paused to say beneath some lovelier one,
With a buyer’s moderation, “That would do.”
I thought so too, but wasn’t there to say so.
We climbed the pasture on the south, crossed over,
And came down on the north. He said, “A thousand.”

“A thousand Christmas trees!—at what apiece?”

He felt some need of softening that to me:
“A thousand trees would come to thirty dollars.”

Then I was certain I had never meant
To let him have them. Never show surprise!
But thirty dollars seemed so small beside
The extent of pasture I should strip, three cents
(For that was all they figured out apiece),
Three cents so small beside the dollar friends
I should be writing to within the hour
Would pay in cities for good trees like those,
Regular vestry-trees whole Sunday Schools
Could hang enough on to pick off enough.
A thousand Christmas trees I didn’t know I had!
Worth three cents more to give away than sell,
As may be shown by a simple calculation.
Too bad I couldn’t lay one in a letter.
I can’t help wishing I could send you one,
In wishing you herewith a Merry Christmas.

"And in their desperation, they turned to a man they didn't fully understand."...

“The only thing necessary for the is for good men to do nothing.”: I am thinking about bullying, and cornering, and grasping, and squeezing, this morning. I am thinking of each of these words in the context of desperation, each in the way that causes harm, each in the way that feels how the moments before an uncontrollable and unstoppable ugliness is set into motion feels. It is not so much the motives for these things that I am contemplating this morning, so much as observing the mechanism of the cause. Regardless of why, the rise of evil leadership is not set into motion by inaction, but it is empowered and enabled by it. It is our fear of our immediate circumstances and a desire for a quick fix from the perception of doom that drives that acceptance of the wrong sorts of leaders. The desperation of the crowd pushes for machiavellian resolution without question and scrutiny. And sadly, the mob fails to respond to the ugliness stemming from their choises as a result of getting what they asked for, as if a reversal would be too much an admission of their complicity...

Defined not by the number of victims, but by the way they die: I am thinking about absolutist power, and totalitarianism, and the rise of fear as a consequence of restrictions contained within the offered promise of security. I am thinking about crime and police action and fairness. I am thinking about control and knee-jerk reaction to those things we find unsettling, or threatening, or immoral. I am thinking about my grandfather and his criticism of fascism. I am thinking about how those societies of the mid 20th century (in line with a long human history of similar conditions) turned to harsh and strong leaders and systems in their desire for change on promises made with  terrible costs hidden in the fine print. Sartre wrote "Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them."...

Desperate people do desperate things: In the second installment of Christopher Nolan's Batman series, Heath Ledger's monstrous character, the Joker, has unified the criminal element of Gotham and is spreading terror throughout the city. Bruce Wayne (Batman) expressed to his butler/guardian Alfred some wonder at a shift in Gotham's crime and the resilience of the Mob's resolve to target him (Batman). Alfred says "You squeezed them, you hammered them to the point of desperation. And in their desperation, they turned to a man they didn't fully understand." Their desperation gave them unity and power, but also allied them with a sociopath who could not be controlled nor directed to serve the interests of the mob bosses. The full text of tis conversation between Bruce and Alfred is below:

Batman/Bruce Wayne: Targeting me won't get their money back. I knew the mob wouldn't go down without a fight, but this is different. They crossed the line.

Alfred: You crossed the line first, sir. You squeezed them, you hammered them to the point of desperation. And in their desperation, they turned to a man they didn't fully understand.

Batman/Bruce Wayne: Criminals aren't complicated, Alfred. Just have to figure out what he's after.

Alfred: With respect Master Wayne, perhaps this is a man that you don't fully understand, either. A long time ago, I was in Burma. My friends and I were working for the local government. They were trying to buy the loyalty of tribal leaders by bribing them with precious stones. But their caravans were being raided in a forest north of Rangoon by a bandit. So, we went looking for the stones. But in six months, we never met anybody who traded with him. One day, I saw a child playing with a ruby the size of a tangerine. The bandit had been throwing them away.

Batman/Bruce Wayne: So why steal them?

Alfred: Well, because he thought it was good sport. Because some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

It takes time for the seeds of goodness and hope to grow and bear fruit...: I watched two movies this weekend, The Help and Race. Both dealt with prejudice in American history. Both dealt with (in my opinion) evil people in positions of power. Both dealt with whole groups of people being cornered, bullied, squeezed; and  in each, both dealt with heroes who actively worked to expose evil. Good people did something. It may not be immediately beneficial, but good always wins eventually...

“When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it--always.” --Gandhi