In October 2004 Blog Seven was a blog about fear.
In October 2004 Blog Seven was a blog about fear.
Tom in Blog 7 • No Comments
Blog 7
31 October 2004
A Final Fright
A Final Fright
“In the shadow of the trees on the far side of the clearing something was moving. It was gliding very slowly Northward. At a first glance you might have mistaken it for smoke, for it was grey and you could see things through it. But the deathly smell was not the smell of smoke. Also, this thing kept its shape instead of billowing and curling as smoke would have done. It was roughly the shape of a man but it had the head of a bird: some bird of prey with a cruel, carved beak. It had four arms which it held high above its head, stretching them out Northward as if it wanted to snatch all Narnia in its grip; and its fingers – all twenty of them – were carved like its beak and had long, pointed, bird-like claws instead of nails. It floated on the grass instead of walking, and the grass seemed to wither beneath it.”
(Picture by Pauline Baynes, text by C S Lewis, from The Last Battle (1956). I first saw this picture at age 4 and on my many later re-readings I would generally pause and turn two pages over at once so as not to encounter it.)
Tom in Blog 7 • No Comments
FREAKY TRIGGER 25 SCARIEST THINGS
FREAKY TRIGGER 25 SCARIEST THINGS
1. Being bound to a table and experimented upon by a mad scientist
Yes, you read that right. That is, hands tied down, proven by mad science, the single scariest thing it is possible for the lobotomy enhanced human mind to contemplate. And if its a product of the methodology, then understand this: in the process of descending upon this horror, we considered all of the usual candidates, and plenty of unlikely ones, falling through circle after hellish circle of terror, as the ravages of alcohol opened a door in our minds that gave us sight of torments of doom I hope never to have to confront again, and NOTHING received the instant and vociferous unanimity that this did.
Why? Why? Dear God, why?
Perhaps because it is the Swiss Army Knife of fears: its imprisonment, its the terrible death of your beautiful self without the luxury of oblivion, its the castration of the laser advancing up between your legs, its forgetting who you are, its being fused with a spider, fed to the crocodile clips and quite possibly having a red hot poker thrust in your eye.
But its more, even more than this: its the final realisation that we are not some divinely definitive incarnation of existence, that our physical, mental and emotional selves aren’t combined into a super-corporeal being, at least, not for everyone. To this mad scientist – and he’ll look somewhere between that child in your school who wanted to see what insects did with only three of their legs, and the bullying teacher who was chained to grim misery by his own power complex – you are nothing but a biological machine that can be changed, programmed, or destroyed at whim.
Feeling hungry? That’ll be your gut he’s just emptying out. Headache? The jar your brain is being kept in might be too tight. And sorry, but your face is needed for the scientist’s daughter, who’s eyes are sans one at the moment.
But the body isn’t the most fearful part. Perhaps you’ve a shallow understanding that, although the universe is seen through your eyes you are only one of billions of organisms in it, but have you ever really been made to face this idea? Now you will: your precious memories, your sparkling personality, your glorious and intimate relationship with your fingers and toes are merely a configuration of neural connections in your head’s pulpy innards, and the person who knows this best is now standing over you with a scalpel in one hand and your scalp in the other.
A slice here, and that brilliant eloquence is forever drowned in a pool of your own saliva. An injection there, and your childhood disappears. Love, ambition, your very soul burnt away until you are the unquestioning zombie that the insane professor needs as his slave.
And you’ll do as he says, because if he does this, you will get the fear! The FEAR!
Mwah ha ha ha!
Magnus in Blog 7 • No Comments
fear of desire/fear of completion
fear of desire/fear of completion:
i was 8 or 9 when i learnt my dad was going to die: that he had parkinson’s disease, which wz incurable, and that he wz unlikely to live more than another ten years. i don’t actually remember being told, which is possibly telling in itself: it feels like something i just somehow knew. my guess is: i sat quietly, absorbing or not absorbing the news, and processed it as someone small is likely to, by putting it all inside on some emtoional-mental shelf, and not thinking about it, or rather, not thinking about what it meant. as a family, we coped: well, i think. we became expert at living in the moment, enjoying today, putting off the deadly future until it arrived – don’t live in dread; something will come up! and of course what i learnt at 8 or 9 wz wrong, at least in the specifics. my dad is going to die and so am i and so are you, but it’s now very nearly 40 years since he was diagnosed, and he’s going strong. something DID come up – l-dopa was synthesised in 1968.
as a tactic, denial paid off. as a strategy, it comes with a cost. already aged 10-11-12, i wz shy abt declaring myself: part of the lesson i think i absorbed was, no WANTING. to announce your interests and needs and aims and dreams is to banish them, to trash them: if we were keeping dad alive by just taking his presence for granted, then by logic WHAT YOU ASK FOR YOU WILL NEVER GET. And the other part, increasingly, and by my mid-30s i think nearly pathologically, was an inability to finish things: to finish things i wz reading or writing; to finish pots of jam or cartons of milk; to dot the final i and cross the final t: the way i wrote and the way i lived had become a blizzard of ways to begin the next thing before the last wz over. including a whole raft (at least in my writing) of mini-tactics of faux completion: using deadlines – the demands of others- as an excuse for triage, i have never handed in anything which didn’t contain at least one paragraph, one idea, one strand or aspect which i secretly knew i’d just abandoned in mid-flow, not worked through, not completed, not tidied up into coherence or non-contradiction. sometimes it wd be cut; sometimes left. komikal exercise for my longer-term readers: track down and identify this section, in anything and everything i’ve ever had published!
i planned to post this the moment i saw that ‘fear’ was blog seven’s theme, several weeks back: but of course i’ve left it till the final morning, and spent this last month not thinking abt what i wd write. i can actually (sort of) do it at all bcz the spell is broken – my first book is pubished next week, and my mother, very dangerously ill two months ago, is out of hospital and off the danger list. intellectually i know that – while she is still an invalid; while there’s still the possibility of dangerous relapse – this is NOT going to have been caused by my arrival at the point i first imagined setting out for the moment i wz aware that i loved reading more than anyone round me: the point, in other words, of “becoming a writer”. completing a book did NOT bring about her hospitalisation, and, come what may, whatever health dangers face her are NOT going to have been caused by finishing this paragraph and publishing this post [insert full stop here]
30 October 2004
FREAKY TRIGGER TOP 25 SCARIEST THINGS 2: Being Sober For The Rest Of Your Life
FREAKY TRIGGER TOP 25 SCARIEST THINGS
2: Being Sober For The Rest Of Your Life
Uh-oh. Check your hat in as you wander into Alcoholics Anonymous and sit in the corner watching the other boozer, losers and vodka users tell their litany of horrors. Surely the fear here is being drunk for the rest of your life, being slave to the demon drink.
I would like to say that when I first suggested this, I did not mean sobriety to be the opposite of drunkenness. Rather the more literal sense of being clear headed, unmuddled, certain, sure and dull. I would like to say that, and it may well be correct. Truth be told though alcohol is my drug of choice, and sober is the opposite of being drunk. So this probably means exactly what it sounds like. A fear of not ever being allowed to drink again. Since I fear it, perhaps it is something that might be a potential likelihood for me. Is this fear of actually being an alcoholic and then having to do something about it?
Obviously I was a bit tipsy when this list was made (wait til you see what gets to number one). We all were. The bouzey camaraderie is what I would miss, being the sober one while everyone else is getting sloshed is often less than fun. Like the fear of being alone for the last third of your life, it is about missing things which make you feel safe, loved, comfortable. Alcohol, or your drug of choice, does not do this loving for you. But it goes a long way to providing the situation where you can feel you are loved. Ironically though (I have always found it ironic) alcohol is a depressant. But then the point of mind altering drugs is to push us to experience those parts of our personality which do not always get an outing. Hmm, perhaps too much justification for a man who just wants to have a pint every now and then for the rest of his life.
At its heart this is a fear of change, a fear of this social crutch being taken away. It is coincidentally a fear of whatever would force this constant state of sobriety upon me: illness or a lack of control of ones own urges to drink. I am not a big drinker, but I do drink regularly. Could I do without it? Probably. Probably. But do I want my hand forced? No.
Pete Baran in Blog 7 • No Comments
FREAKY TRIGGER TOP 25 SCARIEST THINGS – 3. The Influence Of The Daily Mail
Three days before the US Presidential election, the day after Osama Bin Laden released a new tape aimed at the American people with potentially huge polling consequences, the front page of the Daily Mail screams ‘VILLAGES HELD TO RANSOM’. Indeed. According to the Daily Mail, “villagers are being blackmailed into paying exorbitant sums for land to keep Gipsies out”. It is hard to see quite what new evidence has come to light to force the reappearance of Ossie B off our front pages, but equally, this tells you pretty much everything you need to know about one of Britain’s most popular newspapers.
Hot on the heels of the terrifying gipsy hordes, Osama comes in at a slightly disappointing Page 2, taking up marginally less space than the coverage of Colin Montgomery’s new girlfriend and a montage of her various wealthy exes on Page 3. ‘See our photo gallery of other old charmers who attract beautiful women at www.dailymail.co.uk’, a caption, hilariously, reads. Go on ladies, calm yourselves. The message is clear – this, ladies and gentlemen, is what you should aspire to. Unlike the ‘bored sisters, 14 and 15, in race to get pregnant’ on Page 11 (“and now they’ve succeeded, they both want council houses to go with their haul of benefits”).
Onto Page 4, where ‘Blair signs away our birthright (with no mandate from the British voter)‘ – the European Constitution naturally. Despite the fact that a) he is our elected representative, like it or not, and b) we get a referendum on it anyway.
But its the double spread on Pages 6-7 that’s the real killer. ’70% say No to super-casinos’, apparently. Fair enough, the gambling bill is an important piece of legislation which needs to be debated and may have a major impact on the future character and appearance of many of our cities. The Mail, though, goes straight for the pictures of two women, horrifically battered, with the caption ‘How gambling addiction drove a thug to do this’. The gambling habits, or lack of, of Colin Montgomery and friends are not mentioned.
There’s the rub. Of all the discussion of various fears, both silly and genuine, on this blog over the past month, no one has really mentioned the exploitation of such fears. This is Daily Mail heartland – its tack is to scare middle-aged housewives round to its way of thinking. Understandable and genuine fears (violent crime and terrorist attacks, principally, but also unemployment and falling house prices) are used to engender distrust of immigrants, travelers, Europe, drugs, alcohol, big cities in general, anything the Labour government can even remotely be held responsible for. For god’s sake, just say ‘VOTE TORY’ and get it over with, will you?
Its easy to dismiss all this as mere tabloid hysteria, but the Mail’s air of outright respectability is what makes it threatening. The idea is that by appealing to the vicar’s wife (all those healthy eating and smart dressing tips), extreme opinions become acceptable (capital punishment, ffs). Whether you think it works is up to you, but I leave you with a story from about a year ago. The local community was in uproar! Someone had stolen the Blackheath donkeys which were used to give rides for children outside Greenwich Park. Pub opinion was divided over the motivation for such a crime, ranging from “I think someone just did it for a laugh”, from myself, all the way to “well, I think it was the illegal immigrants, stealing them for food”, from an otherwise intelligent and generally liberal acquaintance of mine. The fact that no one laughed in her face confuses and disturbs me to this day.
(For the record, I did actually buy a copy of the Mail today for research purposes. I solemly promise that I will give double the 70p cover price to a gay asylum-seeking single mother this very afternoon).
Matt DC in Blog 7 • No Comments
29 October 2004
FREAKY TRIGGER TOP 25 SCARIEST THINGS 4. Castration
FREAKY TRIGGER TOP 25 SCARIEST THINGS
4. Castration
Oh, bollocks.
It is probably fairly clear at this point that the fear list jury was made up mostly of men. Freud would have been proud of this entry, which perhaps deserves to be taken psychologically rather than literally (yet another instance where it’s hard to imagine a circumstance in which it might happen). You have to bear in mind though that I’m as qualified to talk about psychology as “Dr” Gillian is to talk about grape nuts. But here goes -
The fear of castration is a fear of emasculation, of powerlessness – and powerlessness is what lies behind nearly all the fears on our list. (So in a sense all male fears are castration fears). It’s a specific form of powerlessness, though – the removal of potency, not simply the state of being without power. It’s not a fear of ‘becoming female’ – it’s a fear of being reduced to a state of sexlessness. You need only look at some of the mocking, nervous, finger-pointing coverage of the ‘asexual’ movement to see that this is a deeply held dread.
My understanding is that life as a castrate wouldn’t be so bad (“it should not be confused with penectomy” says Wikipedia) – for one thing if castrated after puberty one would still be able to have sex, though not to ejaculate. In fact – again this is from Wikipedia – many harem women preferred eunuchs as lovers due to their ability to last longer. So again, this fear is about what castration represents, not about the fact of it. A final note – the Chinese (and yes, you can no doubt guess my source on this) used to use castration both as punishment and as entry to the civil service. In the era of office work and business hierarchies, it seems rather appropriate.
Tom in Blog 7 • No Comments
28 October 2004
FREAKY TRIGGER TOP 25 SCARIEST THINGS: 5. Razorblades on the Waterslide
There’s a Matt Groening cartoon called “Kids Want To Know”, reproduced by Greil Marcus in Dead Elvis, in which one of the “Life In Hell” rabbits is glumly musing upon various difficult questions. “Which would you rather do,” he asks himself, “slide naked down a 50ft razor blade or suck the snot from a dog’s nose until its head caves in?”Fairly primal fears, these, and the choice between excruciation and disgust is tricky. But no-one’s going to suck dog snot by mistake: it will never be much of a surprise. But imagine a razorblade was placed maliciously on a waterslide, and a sequence of events which might run like this:
swimming fun -> desire for greater excitement -> whooshing happily down the waterslide -> sliced lengthwise by a razorblade -> not feeling it initially -> slow but quickening sting of chlorine as you plunge into the water -> tell-tale spread of blood in the pool -> realising the blood’s yours.
It’s not just the pain, though razorblades on the waterslide are likely to be painful at best. It’s the randomness, and the helplessness, and the miserable shock in the juxtaposition between innocent fun and potentially grievous injury. Most fearful of all is the delayed realisation, arriving in the form of the sharpest of stings, and only when the damage has been done.
Tim in Blog 7 • 4 Comments
FREAKY TRIGGER TOP 25 SCARIEST THINGS 6. Being Buried Alive
FREAKY TRIGGER TOP 25 SCARIEST THINGS
6. Being Buried Alive
I am a fear faddist. Generally there’s one thing which will worry me desperately, obsessively, for a few months and then suddenly fade from my thoughts – to be quickly replaced by a new dread. The only think I can compare it to is romantic crushes – consuming, inescapable emotions which turn out to have very flimsy foundations.
After being afraid of nuclear war I was afraid of disease – ebola, Mad Cow, it varied. Then came wrongful arrest (I think I read about how some websites would encode jpegs the size of a single pixel which would then turn up on your hard drive as full on p43d0g3dd0n when Plod came to call), and more recently boring if more realistic fears of penury and bad health. In fact these fears are pretty commonplace and – unlike the bomb, ebola, and being framed for pervertalism – I can do something about them: the fear equivalent of settling down in a relationship.
Anyway in between the Mad Cow and the wrongful arrest came being buried alive. I needn’t go into detail about why being buried alive would be scary – it’s a slow and desperate death, and it has the ‘flickering hopes of escape gradually fading’ thing down to a T. The only problem with being afraid of it was working out how exactly I would end up in that situation.
Accidentally when thought dead? Too easy to get out of (mental note: must write will and include cremation). In an earthquake or some other disaster? Too many rescuers about. No, it has to be something else – being buried alive ON PURPOSE. Evil spouse like in that Roald Dahl story? Not really in her nature. Okay…GANGSTERS! How would I get involved with gangsters? A dodgy business deal? As a market researcher – hardly! Maybe it’s a case of mistaken identity?
And so on… I think on one occasion I lay sleepless at 3AM thinking about a post-apocalyptic cult burying me alive as a religious sacrifice. All of which goes to show the key lesson of fear: it makes you mental.
