Shock or Silence

Humour can add to the force of a horror tale, but only if used with precision.

Ambrose Bierce, able to frighten me in ways that few others can match, offers good advice on this topic. Early in "The Damned Thing," during an inquest, a reporter on the stand says to the coroner:

"He seemed a good model for a character in fiction. I sometimes write stories."

"I sometimes read them."

"Thank you."

"Stories in general -- not yours."

"Some of the jurors laughed. Against a sombre background humor shows high lights. Soldiers in the intervals of battle laugh easily, and a jest in the death chamber conquers by surprise."

[THE COLLECTED WORKS OF AMBROSE BIERCE, VOLUME III -- CAN SUCH THINGS BE? The Neale Publishing Company, New York, 1909.]

The key phrase, here, is "in the intervals of battle." I would go further, and say, "before the battle." When faced with a build-up of anxiety, people often joke amongst themselves to break the mood, but when the crisis explodes, it demands their full attention. We see this frequently in Bierce, in L. P. Hartley, and in Elizabeth Bowen's "The Cat Jumps."

This dramatic device goes beyond horror stories. As a teenager, I noticed its power in 1981, when I saw the Peter Weir film GALLIPOLI several times in a cinema, and watched the audience respond to its humour.

Early in the film, when the characters laughed at their circumstances, the audience joined in the laughter. During the middle sequences, the characters, unaware of what lay in store for them, continued to joke and laugh, but the audience had stopped laughing: they could see all too clearly what was going to happen. During the final half hour, nobody laughed; there was nothing to laugh about.

In a horror story, mood and tone count for everything. As the tension builds, we can expect people to behave like people, to laugh at their own intimidating sense of unease, but there comes a point when both readers and characters must feel the weight of dread. When the worst has come to pass, the shock wave of that event should remain ringing in the air for a long while afterwards, or else the fear will be too quickly dissipated.

For an example of dissipation that kills the mood, I always think of the lousy script for ALIEN RESURRECTION. At one point in the film, Ripley stumbles onto her fellow clones, all of them so hideously deformed, so clearly in pain, that out of self-loathing and compassion, she burns them all. An idiot side-kick then stares in disbelief at the bodies, and mumbles, "What's the big deal, man? Must be a chick thing." And so the film dies.

Sometimes, in a story like "Wailing Well," by M. R. James, or "The Travelling Grave," by L. P. Hartley, the initial humour seems to acknowledge the absurdity of a concept, but even here, when things fall apart for the characters, the writers treat their fates with appropriate sobriety. "It's okay to laugh," they seem to tell us, "but stick around, and watch how we develop these ridiculous ideas into something creepy."

So yes, humour does add to horror, but only until the horror strikes. Afterwards, the best response is either shock or silence.

Live Well Before We Die

One of the more savage ironies of our impending extinction is that it could be prevented, and this prevention would bring to us more gains than losses. Yet we seem paralyzed by loss.

What would be lost, and what would be missed? I doubt that most people would miss fossil fuels. More would miss the personal car, for not even electric vehicles could justify the waste of metals and energy in their manufacture; high-speed rail has more justification. People would also miss -- for a while -- the consumer economy, the creation and illusory satisfaction of artificial needs. Finally, a few people would miss, intensely, capitalism: an economic system founded on perpetual expansion, perpetual assimilation, with no concern for human values, communities, or ecosystems. Any sustainable future will have to move beyond capitalism.


I suspect that most people would adapt well to economic systems that do not set wage labour and artificially-induced consumption above the ordinary needs of human beings. I suspect, as well, that personal transportation will not be missed for long in a world of trains and high-speed telecommunications.

For many, the most immediate gains would be a world of less pollution, of air, water, and soil that support the needs of life instead of the corporate need for passing the costs of production onto someone else.

Beyond these tangible gains, the biggest gain of all would be something absent in our modern world: hope and purpose.

Modern secular societies have passed the burden of meaning from churches and state institutions onto atomized human beings. For a few of us, this transition has meant greater personal freedom; for others, it has brought a crisis of meaning, a sense of emptiness and futility that we have tried to reduce with distractions of the pharmaceutical industry and of the corporate media. Living, as well, in a world on the brink of man-made destruction is a daily torture, with a psychological burden that would have horrified our ancestors.

Doing what we can to prevent mass extinction and to preserve human civilization would give us lives of meaning and of possibility, lives actually worth living. Even if our bravest, most visionary efforts failed us, we could at least live well before we died.

Two Perspectives on Beddoes

Consider Thomas Lovell Beddoes: a mediocre poet who began to write a few plays that were outmoded pastiches of Jacobean drama. With no feeling for human personality, no sense for dramatic structure, and no capacity for finishing what he had started, Beddoes would seem an unlikely candidate for greatness.


...Until you read the plays, to discover line after line of brilliant iambic pentameter, in speeches of astonishing power and beauty that can easily rival the best work of his generation.

Viewed from one perspective, Beddoes was a failed writer. Viewed from another, Beddoes was a writer of unique genius.

Both perspectives are true.

Music Never Heard

Given the circumstances of our looming extinction, I've been paralyzed by a sense of irresponsibility. What right do I have, to waste anyone's time with my little horror stories, with my puny verses, when people should be focused on the survival of the human species?

I felt this way back in the 1980s and in the first decade of the new century. It was clear that neoliberalism was going to cripple our democracies, and to warn the public, I worked with anyone who would take me on: Greenpeace, The Council of Canadians, the New Democratic Party (back in the days before it rolled over and played dead), the Canadian Union of Public Employees, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers. For 24 years I protested in the streets, canvassed from door to door, packed boxes full of pamphlets, took part in conferences, did everything I could to make a difference. And the result was no difference at all. Here we are, looking back at what we have lost, staring in shock at what we have become.


In a few years, I will be dead. The young would never listen to someone like me; they will have to find their own ways to protest, their own ways to transform society, or die.

To repeat myself: what right do I have to claim anyone's time or attention? As much right as no one, as much right as anyone. People will ignore me, as they always have, no matter what I say or do. While I play the lyre as Rome burns, no one will hear my music, and so I might as well play to the best of my ability, with whatever skill and passion I can draw from this fading husk.

Music never heard will distract no one. Let me play.

Nutritional Advice From Beyond The Stars!

HUMdingerCAT -- Ufo Incident #454654464.

July 1, 2016. Flatness, Ontario (3,427 km from downtown Toronto).

Mr & Mrs Confidential (their actual names) observed a machine that resembled two pie plates glued together. "It looked very much like a saucer, but it was flying."

The pie plates landed, and a green being in a NASA-type moon suit emerged, to lecture the couple on the importance of Vitamin D supplements for older men.

When the pie plate object flew away, the couple realized that three hours had passed. Fearing lost time, they sought a hypnotherapist, only to learn that nothing had happened, they had merely fallen asleep from sheer boredom.

Clark Ashton Smith: The Pleasure of Consonants and Vowels

Click on jpeg for a larger image.

A composer might study musical scores, a painter might study textures and the strokes of a brush, but a scribbler of my type will study poems.

For example, in this Petrachan sonnet by Clark Ashton Smith, we can hear a careful use of assonance, a play with sonorous vowels, the high sound of the long letter I, and a modulated use of alliteration. (In the jpeg, I've used the phrase "No M" to show lines where Smith has provided contrast to this alliteration by avoiding the letter M.)

Smith wrote by his own aesthetic principles, and I am not here to criticize the choices he made. What I have called an end-rhyme conflict is labelled that way only because I do my best to avoid such things. Smith would have had his own priorities.

On Facebook, someone told me that my analysis was "excrement," and -- as far as I could tell from his comments -- apparently rejected any need to look at poetry in terms of sound and rhythm. I replied:

"It should never surprise you that many of us read with passion, that we take a visceral pleasure in the sounds and rhythms of language, and that we love to share this pleasure by pointing out the ways in which consonants and vowels clash and harmonize in a poem. I would never call appreciation 'excrement,' but then again, I love to read."

Unlike a dissected animal, a poem, when taken apart, remains a living, joyous thing. The more we study it, the more lively it becomes.

From Steady Monotony Into Music

Click on image for larger view.

One of the great strengths of traditional metrical forms is that they can be used by poets to surprise a reader.

To explain this, I could always fall back on the words of Robert Frost:

"All I ask is iambic. I undertake to furnish the variety in the relation of my tones to it. The crossed swords are always the same. The sword dancer varies his position between them."

[From a letter to John Freeman, circa 1925. Quoted in Robert Frost on Writing, by Elain Barry. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1973.]

Where Frost mentions dance, I think of music. For a skilled poet, metre becomes an implied bass line in a melody that plays with, and against, the metre, in the same way that a melody by Sibelius can shift and flex above a chugging ostinato.

Metrical analysis can show how this works, but anyone who can feel a metre as a swimmer feels a tide will have no need for the specialized terms of analysis. By reciting aloud with full attention, a good reader might catch the play of rhythms by ear alone.

One of my favourite examples of a poem that plays with and against the metre is "Lucifer in Starlight," by George Meredith.

On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose.
Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend
Above the rolling ball in cloud part screened,
Where sinners hugged their spectre of repose.
Poor prey to his hot fit of pride were those.
And now upon his western wing he leaned,
Now his huge bulk o'er Afric's sands careened,
Now the black planet shadowed Arctic snows.
Soaring through wider zones that pricked his scars
With memory of the old revolt from Awe,
He reached a middle height, and at the stars,
Which are the brain of heaven, he looked, and sank.
Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank,
The army of unalterable law.

[From Poems Vol. II, by George Meredith. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1910.]

As a Petrarchan sonnet, this poem features lines of pure iambic pentameter as a reader would expect: five sets of two syllables, with an accent upon each final syllable.

"And NOW / upON / his WEST/ern WING / he LEANED"

Meredith, however, wants to surprise the reader with an unexpected melody. He pulls this tune from the iambic pentameter by replacing iambs with trochees that invert the beat, from da-DUM to DA-dum:

"TIRED of"

"SOARing"

He also breaks the rhythm by setting two equal stresses beside each other, by using spondees:

"POOR PREY / to his / HOT FIT"

"Above / the rol/ling ball / in cloud / PART SCREENED"

"Now the / BLACK PLA/net"

And by using pyrrhics, two unaccented syllables beside each other, he can make sets of words almost inaudible in the flow of the verse:

"On a / STARRED NIGHT"

"Where SIN/ners HUGGED / their SPECT / tre of / repOSE"


"Which are / the BRAIN"


By combining these methods, Meredith is able to create daring melodies that catch the readers off-guard:


"With MEM/ory of / the OLD / reVOLT / from AWE"


"The AR/my of / unAL/tera/ble LAW"


All of these methods work to surprise because the reader expects a pattern. When this pattern is broken, a line can be transformed from steady monotony into music, and from dullness into poetry.

Dead

"Whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad."

Not quite, Henry Wadsworth. Whom the Gods would destroy they first give a sense of aesthetic appreciation, and then deny aesthetic skill.