Monsters Fair and Foul
It’s raining today, obviously a day for great philosophical thoughts. Or just fuzzy weird pre-coffee thoughts.
I woke up out of a chaos of dreaming. I dreamed I was on a long, winding, hilly forest road; suddenly, the steering wheel turned into a live thing against my hands, struggling wildly. There was a crash in slow motion, but I felt cushioned on air. The sense of tumbling and broken glass intensified, and I spun out of the car and rolled on the ground, which was soft as feather pillows.
When I got up, the car was a mangled hunk and I walked toward the edge of the woods. Before I knew it, I was going down rough-hewn stone stairs.
I was in a labyrinth. It was warm and I heard water running (I think it was at this point that the DHM was up and taking a shower, mixing with the rain on the roof). I kept going through tunnels with no particular sense of urgency, running my left hand along the satin curve of stone on one side of the tunnel. The light grew brighter, silvery, and at the very end of the tunnel (just how I knew it was a labyrinth I don’t know, dream-knowledge) I stepped out into an ampitheater drenched with summer sun and the smell of grass.
There were statues scattered in the ampitheater, and I began to feel drowsy horror. I looked at them and saw they had ruined stone faces, the screams of terror worn away by sun, rain, wind, time. Their eyes were all empty and their bodies contorted.
Then I had the sudden undeniable sensation that something was standing right behind me, breathing on my nape.
I woke up slowly, shaking and sweating. There are certain dreams that aren’t quite nightmares, they’re simply powerfully affecting. The dream turned over and over inside my head as I struggled up to consciousness, not afraid but certainly wanting to remember. I had the hazy sense that this was important.
Cut to an hour or so later. The Little Prince (who protested when I got out of bed, since I was warm and he likes laying in bed playing with his cars while Mummy sleeps) was summarily changed, re-dressed, and fed. I set his cereal down on the table and decided he could watch PBS for a little while (we watched a movie last night so the telly was still out.)
The television warmed up, and what did I see but Erykah Badu on Sesame Street, saying, “I didn’t see a brown baby bear or three monsters,” to three puppets of varying colorful cute grotesqueness.
Gooseflesh rose. I stared at the colorful Muppets and thought, monsters don’t have to be scary. We’ve committed the greatest trick of them all on bloody Sesame Street, making monsters accessible. Cute. Cuddly.
From Dictionary.com:
mon‧ster
–noun 1. a legendary animal combining features of animal and human form or having the forms of various animals in combination, as a centaur, griffin, or sphinx.
2. any creature so ugly or monstrous as to frighten people.
3. any animal or human grotesquely deviating from the normal shape, behavior, or character.
4. a person who excites horror by wickedness, cruelty, etc.
5. any animal or thing huge in size.
6. Biology. a. an animal or plant of abnormal form or structure, as from marked malformation or the absence of certain parts or organs.
b. a grossly anomalous fetus or infant, esp. one that is not viable.
7. anything unnatural or monstrous.
–adjective 8. huge; enormous; monstrous: a monster tree.
[Origin: 1250–1300; ME monstre < L mÅnstrum portent, unnatural event, monster, equiv. to mon(Ä“re) to warn + -strum n. suffix]
I find it interesting that the root of the word is “to warn.” Does humanity always need the ugly or abnormal as warnings? What about the beauty that can be found in even the ugliest shape, person, animal? Now, definition 4 above strikes closer to the heart of evil than anything I’ve read in a long time. All of the real-life (as opposed to dreamlike or fictional) monsters I’ve ever met were people who loved cruelty for its own sake.
But what about the monsters that teach? What about the monsters that enlighten?
What if every monster was simply a mask? In ritual play, the mask is meant to terrify and tell the story (terror producing holy ecstasy, producing Dionysian enlightenment through catharsis.)
When one writes horror and urban fantasy, the meaning of monsters is necessarily something one wonders about. The most interesting definition of monster in that context is the first–a blend of human and animal out of legend, or a combination of animal and animal. A stitched-together beastie, created out of whole cloth. The centaur, griffin, and sphinx are noble creatures, full of wisdom and danger. Monsters that teach, enlighten, and terrify.
Last Friday I spoke to three classes’ worth of middle-schoolers*, and we talked about how the unknown frightens humanity more than anything else. Once the danger is seen and quantified, it loses plenty of its fearsome power. A monster in a horror novel is only as good as its bark, for the bite is never as bad as you expect. A mask of a monster keeps the essential nature of the danger hidden, and therefore much scarier.
Monsters. We love them so much we put them on television for little kids, spin fables about them, create them in movies and books. We dream about them. We fantasize about monsters (just look at all the Goblin King fanfic from Labyrinth. Look a little deeper into that story, where the monsters are people just like everyone else.)
Which just makes me wonder, as I sip my cooling coffee and feel the trembling from my dream in my fingers…
Do monsters dream of us?
*Thanks to Reader Diane, who invited me out to her school and kindly fed me lunch as well.
