Saved by the Obscene

I was a curious kid. My mother was a reader, my aunt was a school teacher. The two had taught me to read before kindergarten. By the time I was probably seven, I'd crushed the school library's "age appropriate" selection.  I was also an only child, so books were a near perfect companion. Going to a parent's friends house, who didn't have kids? Bring a book, let the adults do adult things, and read. On a boring car ride? Bring a book. Parents watching something boring on television? Read a book. I read a lot, I read fast and I'd read a variety of genres and topics. Books, magazines, comic books, didn't really matter that much. If it seemed even passably interesting, I read it. It wasn't until I was a teenager that my parents were less economically precarious than working poor. They didn't have an abundance of time to spend wandering the library, which was what a trip to the library with me meant. Adult readers tended to be happy to hand over a book they'd already finished to a young reader. This meant I was getting into adult books at an age younger than would generally be considered "appropriate." Neither of my parents objected. What were they going to do, discourage me from reading so much? 

One of my mom's favorite stories is being called to a meeting with my first grade teacher. Shocking my mother, the teacher said she though I might have a learning disorder because I wasn't learning to read. Having already been dealing with trying to keep me in books, and seeing me spending basically any second I wasn't riding my bicycle with my nose in a book, mom forced me to explain why I wasn't reading in class. My answer was apparently that I didn't want to make the other kids feel bad because they didn't know how to read. She then forced me to read in front of the teacher, and the problem was solved. 

At ten, I had experience with violence had left me scarred emotionally and psychologically. We talk all about trauma these days, however effectively or truthfully is another story. It wasn't a topic at all back then. Also, at the time, the only people who were going to get a diagnosis of PTSD were soldiers, so I was also walking around with a misdiagnosis, as well as undiagnosed A.D.D. Fortunately for me, Stephen King was the biggest author in the world, and since I was getting so many second hand books, I was introduced to horror proper. Between Stephen King's books, finally being able to see Stanley Kubrick's The Shining from start to finish (there's a story for another time in there) and my first viewing of John Carpenter's Halloween, my obsession with horror was born. After that, I was basically trying to consume anything horror related or adjacent I could get my dirty little hands on. 

I didn't know it then, even as I was regularly asked why I loved all this bloody, violent, terrifying fiction, but I understand now a big part of why I fell in love with horror had to do with my little brain trying to find some way of dealing with the violence I'd experienced. I think some part of it was reading about characters who survived something horrific and what making it through meant for them. Louis Creed surviving his experience with the titular Pet Sematary, still being unable to let go of his wife and giving her over to the horror of what it is, out of the need to get her back. Donna and Tad Trenton survive their terrifying experience with Cujo. As an animal lover, and through King's writing, I couldn't help but have sympathy for Cujo, even as he was the horror threatening the Trenton's. It wasn't his fault he'd gotten rabies. There was nothing evil about him. He was just sick, even though it did make him horrifically dangerous. I was a young boy, who cried for Cujo. I can't think of any book that's made me as uncomfortable or made me sob as uncontrollably as Stephen King and Peter Straub's collaboration, The Talisman. The Sunlight Gardener School was in some ways close to my own experience with violence, and followed by the death of Wolf in the book, all of it was positively overwhelming. I can pretty vividly remember putting the book down because I couldn't read through the tears and deciding I couldn't take anymore, at least that night. I'd read the book a few more times over the next decade. Clive Barker's Damnation Game and its story about greed and lust for power, the otherworldly imagery of it, expanded my imagination into a different kind of horror. His Books of Blood would be one of my first guides to the meeting place of horror and fantasy. In the Hills, the Cities enshrined in my mind an imagery equally so beautiful, grand and terrifying I can still call it from memory with a seconds notice. It's properly indelible. The story about this terrible, horrific tradition being played out, simply because it was tradition, was so vividly real, even in how utterly fantastic it was. Dread, with it's terrifying visions of brutality and psychological abuse in the selfish attempts to escape from fear, only to be undone by having made that fear flesh, wasn't only one of the most bone chilling things I've ever read, it was one of the most well drawn metaphors about how we become the architects of our own undoing when we can't face what we fear. After The Books of Blood, I was never again able to ride a train or subway in New York without thinking about The City Fathers. 

I didn't just read fiction either. As I was gulping down as much of the horror literature of the day as I could, I also ended up becoming curious about things like folklore. Being a young obsessive, I'd read Salem's Lot and I'd also read interviews with King, where he discussed the kernel of the idea that became his vampire opus was to write something which was a combination of Dracula and Peyton Place. Of course, I then read Dracula as well. Being bowled over by Dracula, of course I read about Bram Stoker and the likely inspirations for the novel. This then pointed me in the direction of the vampire folklore in Eastern Europe. I followed similar paths with witches, lycanthropy, zombies, basically all of the foundational monsters and characters in horror. I didn't quite see it, but I was also getting some history lessons. The best authors would include historical context. The witch trials across Europe and here in the US were especially interesting, and terrifying. Some part power plays by men to acquire others lands, gain themselves acclaim etc. and some part punishment for women who didn't fit the social norms of the day, they were all real life horror. The theories about both ergot poisoning and petty rivalries related to the Salem Witch trials were no less horrible. The idea that lore about werewolves in Eastern Europe was a product some combination of coincidence, the age old violence of misogyny, and cultural fear of wolves was also eye opening. To see how many other cultures had mythologies about people who could assume the form of various animals, and not all of them were assigned some kind of ill intent or ill omen was to begin to see how we can have the same dreams, but perspective alone can determine whether we understand whether we define them as dreams or as nightmares. 

At the same time, I was living in a world where The Satanic Panic was part of everyday life. One couldn't turn on a television during the day without one of the day time talk shows giving a platform to one of the usual con artists who were breathlessly describing Satanic cults and conspiracies being beneath the surface of every city and town in the country. If it wasn't the afternoon talk shows, it was the evening news or the "news magazine" programs like 60 Minutes. Of course, it was in all the newspapers and print magazines, as well. They weren't going to miss out the revenue generated by this irrational hysteria. 

All of this created something of a problem for me. Here I was, this young kid, unknowingly finding necessary solace in this genre of fiction which was coming under severe scrutiny because of a bizarre mass hysteria, while at the same time learning about how these kinds of hysteria had played out in the past. The parallels didn't escape me even though I was only a child. I can remember sitting in the library, reading about the witch trials in Europe, and feeling shocked and uneasy about how closely it all tracked to what I was hearing out of the mouths of adults. It also meant there were adults who looked at my indulgences in horror fiction and the history of past horrors with some suspicion. Even as the selection in our school library didn't have too much in relation to the folklore which gave rise to the modern versions of our monsters, I wasn't necessarily walking in and asking the librarian to help me find what was available. The same was true for the public library in the center of town, once I started riding my bike there in order to keep my reading and research habits fed. The hyper focus of ADD can have its advantages, when you're young and free from the responsibilities which demand you don't yield to it. I learned how to learn and how to teach myself how to follow ideas and threads of information through time in history, by mistake. I was also learning I needed to keep my ability to do that hidden in order not to discomfit the adults or my peers. 

Once, I was caught reading one of Clive Barker's Books of Blood in class. The teacher confiscated it because I was caught reading in class regularly. The way it usually played out was that I'd get the book back at the end of the day. This time, the teacher had read some of it before the day ended. She'd brought it to the attention of the administration. They thought it would be a good idea to call my mother, while she was at work, in order to let her know just what kind of material I was reading. Essentially, they were startled by a fifth grader reading something so obscenely bloody, violent and sexually mature, and wanted to be sure my mother was aware. They proposed they'd keep the book. My mother, on the other hand, informed them in no uncertain terms she felt comfortable I'd let her know if I encountered anything in the book I had questions about, they should give me the book back, and that unless I was in possession of something downright pornographic, not to bother her at work with something like this again. It wasn't the last time my parents would be called to deal with the more parochial insights of school administration. I can't lie though, my parents had to deal with school administration with some regularity and it wasn't always related to the parochial nature of the middle class white peoples attitudes about obscenity. 

"Why do you like all that... stuff?" If I'd had the foresight to start requiring payment of a dime every time I tried to answer that question, I'd have been independently wealthy by the time I was in my twenties. Had I been aware of just how mercenary the economics of American life are, I wouldn't have felt badly about not having an answer after taking that dime either. There were some things which were clear to me. I was genuinely awed by the creativity and artistry of some aspects of horror. The quality of the storytelling was a big part of it. I'd fallen in love with reading and storytelling even before I'd fallen in love with horror. My early love with horror films wasn't just about the stories though, but also very much about the craftsmanship of special effects in film. There was both artistic imagination and practical skill going into so many of the creations going in front of cameras. Sometimes there was chemistry, "We mixed together these three things, in order to get consistency, color and reaction we were looking for. We tried these others, but this is what finally worked and we needed to look X, but we needed it to boil/ooze/burst without being too dangerous." Sometimes they were constructed with the more advanced robotics of the day. Often, it was just plain ingenuity, "How, exactly, can we make the impossible look possible with less than a mortgage payment?" All of it was fascinating and a testament to the level of passion the creators had, and their own obsessive curiosity. It was the practical creation of nightmares, and I was fascinated with it. 

It wasn't just the awe I felt toward special effects gurus either though. The horror obsession had started before even that, and I couldn't really put into words what it was at the time. I'd trot out the explanation about special effects as an attempt to give some semblance of an answer. The reality was I didn't know. "I just like it," was the most honest answer I could give then. Now, I look back and I can see it. 

In lieu of being diagnosed with PTSD, I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety. I didn't understand what I felt. I was a child. I knew that a whole lot of the time, I felt bad. I knew a whole lot of the time, I felt worthless and I felt like there really wasn't much of a place for me in the world. All of those things do lend themselves to a depression diagnosis, so I can understand how that would be the choice in diagnosis when no one was thinking PTSD could apply outside of the military or other people exposed to violence over a long term. What I didn't know at the time, something I've only come to realize in the last few years, was that I was just terrified, all the time. Yes, that also sounds like anxiety, but it's not really anxiety proper either. It's a different beast. I didn't know that what I was doing was studying and researching fear. All the things we fear, all the conjurings of our imaginations in service of those fears. All that fiction is about the fears the writers can conjure. They're not conjuring them out of thin air though. They're conjuring them out of their own experiences, sometimes they're own fears or they're conjuring them out of observation of what it is that touches those primal fears in all of us or maybe just some of us. They're all just similes and metaphors for our very real fears. Different writers take different approaches to them, and so reading many of them gave me the opportunity to see those fears through different eyes. Fear of loss. Fear of failure. Fear of loss of self. Fear of the other. There are hundreds or thousands of them, and none of us are immune to them. We may individually be more given to experience certain fears, but we're all capable of experiencing them in ways which are unique to us, but simultaneously universal. 

I was also taking solace in a world where fear was something taken seriously. The writers took it seriously. The characters took it seriously. I was living in a world where being afraid was bad, it was weak, but it felt like the people around me in that world didn't really understand what there was to be afraid of. Especially if you were male and expressed fear, you were a "pussy." Being a victim was to have been feminized as well. I'd been visited by a kind of specter. It's a violence we live with, but that we don't really acknowledge. I know now it was a violence created in the nebulous miasma of masculinity, gender and the violent competition which accompanies those. On some level, I understood that much even then. I've responded to machismo with a sharp edge for as long as I can remember. What I didn't understand then was just how alienating it is to intimately know that violence, to be so aware of how deeply ingrained it is and how normalized it is, how absurdly insane this reality is, while everyone else wanders around acting like everything is just fine. The majority of them had never had it visit them more or less at random or they couldn't allow themselves to believe it had been visited on themselves or anyone else at random. It was always reasonable, logical, understandable and when I was growing up, it was something over there, not in some suburb with a superficial veneer of peace. For me, it was the understanding that I was just the wrong person, in the wrong place, at the wrong time which gave me understanding. That violence was going to happen to someone, at some point. It was already imprinted and ingrained on the people who visited it on me. The alchemy of the universe just happened to draw it out that day, in that place. 

I didn't have anxiety, in the standard sense. I wasn't afraid of whether or not people were going to like me or approve of me. I was constantly watching for signs of the specter of the violence I'd experienced. 

I could see that violence, that specter, lurking in different people all the time. I still can. It sets off emotional and psychological alarm bells. Something else I didn't fully understand until recently, was that part of my struggles over the last few years are directly related to the degree I see it more and more often, in more and more people.  It's overwhelmingly in men, but it's not only men either. It seems that as women have achieved something closer the equity, the cost has been to have to take on more of this specter as the price for being "allowed" in. The Marjorie Taylor Greene's and Lauren Boebert's of the world are exemplary of this phenomenon. I'm also well aware of the comparative leeway we give men where giving themselves over to this specter of violence is concerned. There's a resurgence of celebration of this specter too, the constantly coloring the edges of interactions and communication with the threat or glorification of violence. 

As a kid, horror gave me comfort in understanding others saw that specter in the world around them, and wrestled with their understanding of it. In some ways, my obsession with horror was about trying to understand. Why me? What I learned, from reading and watching all of this was that there are a thousand answers and none of them are good enough. "Why me?" and "Why not me?" are the same question, and all of the answers are the same answers in the way these two are the same question. Really, the answer is simple, "That's life," and it's true because, collectively, we will do absolutely anything and everything to prevent confrontation with that specter, so that's all there really is. The only answer is, "That's life." As obscene as that sounds, as much as there's still some part of me which wants to rebel against it because of the price I've paid, the price I know we all pay, it's the truth. It's an obscene reality. 

Later, as a teenager, I'd wrestle with that specter too. I'd want you to believe I was capable of and comfortable with violence because some part of me believed if you were afraid of it in me, I'd be safer. It never really fit with my intuitive understanding though, which had developed quickly after that first formative experience with violence. That intuitive understanding was that if you are comfortable and you feel safe, I have nothing to fear from you. It was later I'd come to understand the most dangerous people are the ones who are quickest to rationalize and justify violence are the ones who are most afraid. It was through making some headway in understanding my own fears I could see this in others. I could at least begin to see I was afraid, even if I still wasn't quite clear on what I was afraid of. 

Horror, on film and in literature, when taken as a whole, is the study of the obscene. By nature of this, it is categorization and classification of the obscene. Graphic violence of every variety. Depravity of every variety. Sometimes, it comes with a joviality and comedic cadence. Sometimes, it's draped in the most grim, disturbing, discomfiting, dread filled garb one human mind can conceive and communicate to another. Sometimes it's carried by visceral disgust. All of it is really just a study of the obscene. It's the things which are an affront to humanity, an affront to being human, even when their root is very much based in what makes us human. It's just a long history of attempting to recognize and diagnose what is obscene in us, to us and around us. We fear those obscenities. We fear the desire to give birth to them, which we call depravity. Horror as a genre is obsessed with the obscene, but it is only on the rarest of occasions truly obscene. Overwhelmingly, horror is profane, the artistic equivalent of cursing in the good company of the otherwise "respectable" creative arts. 

It's no surprise then, when the con artists and snake oil peddlers who were successful in causing the nation to go hair pulling, teeth gnashing mad over The Satanic Panic, they began to target those things they could label obscene. It's also no surprise that as we see the mainstream of the conservative movement being stirred and steered by white supremacist sentiment, a book like Maus would be targeted. It's not the kind of thing you say in the polite company of guardians of the gates of literary high art, but Maus is a horror novel which happened to be so good it transcended the genre. It's a historical horror novel, but it is a horror novel all the same. It's concerned with exposing the obscenity against humanity that was The Holocaust. 

To some degree, a book like Maus is targeted because people don't want to be confronted with the obscene. Their relationship to the obscene is through the specter of individualized male violence. They don't want to be confronted with an interrogation of the obscene because they can't acknowledge how it is woven into every part of our culture and society. Recognizing how we value it, reward it and instill it would mean questioning so many of our assumptions, beliefs, and the lessons so many of us have been taught since we were children. It's just too much. It means taking a new look at the way we structure so many aspects of life, it's terrifying if you're used to living without seeing that specter in all areas of your life. This is the least directly destructive variety of attempting to create a culture free from the exploration of obscenity. It says to everyone who is used to seeing that specter in any or all aspects of their life, they have to live that reality alone. It says they can't explore their own experience with the real obscenities of this life or express their struggle. It would have killed me. There's no way I would have survived. I know for certain this isn't something unique to me. 

There is another side to this too. The depraved.  

There's no reason to take seriously anyone who claims we're not seeing a resurgence of the kind of retrograde cultural norms which celebrate the ideas about masculinity which create that specter, this lurking violence we all live with. There's also no reason to take seriously anyone who claims this isn't related to continued stirring and steering of what was once something we referred to as a conservative movement, into something akin to a full fledged fascist and white supremacist movement. To say there is no part of the desire to target a book like Maus because removing it renders the depravity that leads to real life obscenity unrecognizable is a declaration of ones allegiance to the willfully ignorant or the depraved who want to see a 21st century equivalent of The Holocaust. They may be lesser in number than those who are willfully obtuse, but they understand how to deftly manipulate the will behind that obtuseness and turn it as a shield for their depravity. To say the last ten years of our politics and culture haven't been a study in that manipulation, is again to signal allegiance to the ignorant or the depraved. 

To erase this kind of exploration of the obscene, and by default the depravity which presages it, is to leave the willfully ignorant, and the depraved who manipulate them so expertly, to define what is obscene and depraved. It renders everyone ignorant, and whether that ignorance is willful or not has no bearing on it being the simplest and most easily accessed locus of manipulation. This is the same reason we're seeing the effort to remove anything committed to a disciplined exploration of the obscenities systemic racism has been responsible for in the United States. What you don't know can indeed hurt you and others. If you can't identify the horrors of racism, it becomes impossible to identify the depravity which leads to them. At that point, we're all implicated when the obscenities do begin and no small portion of us won't recognize them as what they are anyway. 

What others saw, and still often see as obscene saved me. It gave me a toehold as I climbed. Sometimes there were other places I could grip as I tried to ascend into adulthood, and in adulthood as I tried to ascend out of that terror, but there were no shortage of times where horror was my refuge. Confused, afraid, lost and feeling isolated, I could turn to horror and it was a place where it was clear other people had felt all of those things. They could never identify and express them so well if they hadn't. Each of their creations was evidence they were still wrestling with them too. I could walk the journey someone else had laid out as the character they wrote made their way through the madness. It wasn't real. I was never delusional, so I recognized that. It was often honest enough to give me that emotional outlet though. If I felt so angry I wanted the world to burn to the ground, I could walk that journey too, and it was honest enough to be an outlet. It was real enough to know someone had written it, and none of the authors I read happened to have been in jail for some outburst of violence. They made it through. The faced their own depravity. They never had to give in to the depravity hiding inside because they did face it, and in doing so, helped me recognize just how human it really is and why that is also what's dangerous about it. The act of creating that exploration and sharing it with the world is itself an act of hope, however selfish and however small, if only in the hope that expelling it and exposing it would be some relief of something and I recognized that too. 

This mirrors something I'm coming to realize, as well. I've lost my childhood, in many ways. Not that I outgrew it, but that it's been lost to me for a long time. It was painful, and not because I can point to something like caregiver abuse. In reality, most of my childhood was comparatively good. I was fortunate, in many ways. I was raised by a village of people who loved me. My material needs were always met. Still, it was painful, because I was struggling with this fundamental question of obscenity in a world which refuses to recognize it, and in the most recognized instances it does, it does so in a way thats oversimplification to the point of near insult. It was struggling with recognizing a reality which was only allowed to exist if it was expressed in fiction, but understanding it was reality all the same. The result has been to try to leave this past behind. To stop trying to understand it. It's not that I haven't made peace with it, because I have, but it's more that in trying to just set it aside altogether, I've also somewhat robbed myself of the good it has to give me, even into today. It still has things to teach me, and not all of them are about pain. 

It goes beyond me, though. As our fears are simultaneously personal and universal, so is that specter and the depravity it engenders. Right now, we have a movement of people throughout the nation who are trying to conjure it up and are calling all of the people who are moved by it, who celebrate it and see it as a part of who they are which should be allowed to subjugate others. That movement is calling everyone moved by that specter to join together. It's trying to call that specter out of people who haven't been moved by it before. It's no coincidence this is the same movement who will label the exploration of obscenity in the horror genre, in historical literature like Maus or the historical facts of systemic racism as being the actual obscenity. It's no different than to say a description of racism is the real racism or describing sexism is the real sexism. It's the same as the claims that the descriptive term cis gendered is in fact the real bigotry. These things, they say, are the real obscenities. In all of these instances, they're trying to erase any understanding of the depravity that leads to real world obscenities, because they are themselves depraved in their desire to commit those obscenities. 

It's not just people like me who are saved by understanding the explorations of the obscene are important and why. When we fail to understand this depravity, the specter or specters which gives rise to it, and the ease with which it becomes a real obscenity, we are essentially guaranteeing they are going to happen, because recognizing them is the first step in preventing them. When we fail to understand the cost of not exploring our depravity and our obscenities, we are gambling with lives at tables already rigged by the depraved. When we fail, we simultaneously fail to save ourselves and each other from the obscenities the future will bring. What those of us who are not willing to see the exploration of obscenity lost must remember is that it's not just the understanding of depravity that we seek to glean and to keep alive, but also the existence of hope and of the good which exists at the same time and sometimes in spite of that depravity and obscenity. It is to remember what we are fighting to keep alive is a truthful reflection of our humanity.