I had this dream the other day when I had accidentally signed some contract that called for me to drill underground conduit through a graveyard. I was going to need to drill through coffins and bodies, or exhume them and reinter them.
The whole thing filled me with deep dread and horror.
The same night I had another dream where I was on a monorail, and a terrible tornado was chasing us. It destroyed the city we were traveling to, and there were fires everywhere. The dream ended with me trying to gather everyone together and develop a plan for survival.
What I think was happening is latent, deep feelings were and are becoming bold enough to express themselves. I’ve been living with horror and deep dread all my life. I just shut it away in a closed room and push that door as hard as I need to to keep it from coming out.
That of course is tiring, and it takes energy and focus that could and should be put to much better uses if and when I heal myself by diminishing that energy.
But it occurred to me to wonder, on waking, if people don’t have some latent NEED for this feeling of horror. If horror is not a spice of life, without which we cannot maintain some level of balance.
Or perhaps horror is a gateway to some larger self. Perhaps it is the feeling of being torn apart, but perhaps we all need to be torn apart at some point in our spiritual growth. Perhaps horror is what becoming a larva looks like.
Certainly horror movies have become a staple of American life, but there are analogues for example in the Tantric traditions of India and Tibet, where yogis live in cremation grounds, or where bones are scattered, in Tibet. Some will smear their bodies with the ashes of cremated people. In Tibet bone necklaces are apparently common in some sects, or were, with one story I remember from Alexandra David Neel where a teacher had a necklace with 108 polished bone spheres, each from a different skull. And drinking from skulls is of course common in Tibet, or was.
And in normal, traditional life, the feeling of horror would be felt by all who slaughter and dismember animals. That’s how you do it. You cut the head off, the limbs off, saw through the ribs and back, etc. A guy was describing in detail the process of butchering a whole deer to me the other day. He would kill it, hang it, gut it, and he had a particular way of cutting down the vertebrae. It was vaguely horrifying, but as a cook he was very enthusiastic about it.
And most of us are a bit horrified, if we think about it, about how the slaughtered animals we call “meat” get to our tables. I’ve heard many times that if you like hot dogs or sausages, you don’t want to know how they are made.
But do we NEED that, somehow? Does the presence of death and dismemberment meet some latent psychological need?
This is certainly a counterintuitive idea, but obviously I never give a fuck about getting outside the lines. In general I forget there are lines or a box. If I was coloring with markers, there would marker everywhere in my book, on my clothes, in my hair, on my face, on the table, and probably the walls of the house and the dog. It is important to be thoroughly unsystematic.
And in India in particular, they are very, very rigid in their distinction between clean and unclean. The historical elites are vegetarian, but view with horror lower castes and their “filth”. And to this very day they have people who are ritually unclean, and treated worse than black folks were in the Jim Crow South. Much worse, and in much larger numbers. They are called Dalits now, and I have talked about them.
And I did want to make a general comment on elites, that I may as well put here. When you are in power, when you have all the good stuff a society values–typically prestige, power, and wealth–you have a great deal to lose. In the Great Game of Life you are going to play not to lose, because you have already won. You will not take risks. You will spend all your time defensively, and even fearfully.
This is not a world into which innovation and emotional truth will easily enter. Only a person seen as a madman or madwoman could bring anything new.
But the folks at the bottom have little to lose. They have no reason not to try and meet their emotional needs, particularly if they can’t meet their physical ones well. And because they are under stress, they are more or less FORCED to develop methods for resisting gravity, for persisting, and for surviving.
So the so-called subalterns are where most of the most interesting things happen. In America, most of our best artistic ideas came from black folks, at least musically. Jazz, Rock, Blues, and much of Country music is all black in origin.
And as a comedian on Dave Chappelle’s show commented, “everybody wants to be black but nobody wants to be black.”
To state the obvious, those who have the least to lose have the most to gain. Ponder that just a little longer than you think you should need to.
And Merry Christmas!!! All this may be a lump of coal, but you can use coal to make light and warmth, and with the right setup, a diamond.