yellowed polaroids

It's amazing to me that people consider horror a third-rate genre. The things people want to write about are the human things--passion, glory, honor...rage. People want stories about people doing things, changing the future, their own lives.

I don't know about anyone else but I've personally never felt particularly human. Not what people think is human, anyway. It's like everyone walks around looking forward and back and side to side and sometimes down, but never up. Cats. Cats won't look at sky. You can force their heads up but they won't move their eyes up with them. And it's impossible to ever convey in words what you really mean.

I tried to say this to my sister once, and it takes hours and days and pages of writing for her to see what I meant, that what's inside you is not something that you can put inside another person, not by force or will.

So I can't force anyone to see something they don't see. If I try to tell you where to look, you can't search for it in the place I point because you don't know how to look there, you don't even know that it's there.

Stop me, this is my usual theme. I wanted to say something about being human. It occured to me at some point during my childhood that it was really strange how seperate humans divine themselves to be from all other things. I've been trying to figure it out ever since. Usually I start to say this to people and they argue with me as though I'm saying that we're not seperate. I'm not saying that at all.

I'm saying we should at least know what it is to be seperate, to have our own human-carved world, so that we can then choose it over and over again instead of never knowing what we have.

It's like people crying and wondering why evil exists. I usually say that it's there so that we know what is good, so we know what good means, so that we can experience true good--it is in fact the only way to experience it because it is the only way to define it. The idea and thus the word good can only exist if evil does. Then people start, I think, to wonder whether it's worth it--to bear evil in order to have good.

But really I think evil doesn't exist. It something created in our minds, we call something evil because it hurts us, because it degrades us mentally, emotionally, physically, because it damages our societies and prevents happiness and well-being. And I think it is a perfectly good and sensible thing to call it--you have to know your enemy so that you may find it and destroy it. Furthermore I think it mete to try to stop evil, to kill it, not because it's possible but because it isn't. And as long as it isn't, we must ride the storm and bear ourselves through it at the expense of all other things--the universe will keep its own balance, and knowing this we must choose to wrench our own fate from it, or die.

It is selfish, it is very selfish, but to live is to be selfish. Survival is the most primal instinct, but it doesn't have to be just that--it can also be a choice, for good or ill. I think it's good not just to worry that you're sticking it to someone or something else to stay alive, but to choose it and be proud and revel in that choice. To time and space every atom is the same, so how should we know what to save and what not to? There is no ultimate truth of what is good and right and what is evil, these are things at their core which are human--we have given them human names, we have defined them! They mean nothing without us, and knowing this gives us the freedom, the ultimate freedom to decide whether life is a script written by someone else, or something that we seize for ourselves, simply because we wish it, because it gives us pleasure.

The universe will live on without us. But we will not live on without us, and who cares if good trumphs if no one is there to see it? Because without us, good is meaningless. The sky doesn't care if the earth crashes into the sun. Only we do--and for specific reasons which are only related to our well-being.

What I was saying about evil--one of the truest things I learned from my D, my onetime preacher, was that there isn't a line where good is on one side and evil is on the other side. There only two directions--keep walking in that direction to go toward good, and in the other to go toward evil. And the question you shouldn't be asking is how close can I get to the line--you should only always be running in the other direction.

And what that tells me is that evil doesn't exist, in the same way that east and west don't exist. I can say something is east or west of something else, but I can tell you what is east. All of what we know, all we can say is what is more evil or good than something else. I can say giving one dollar to a beggar is more evil than giving two.

But none of this means we shouldn't be running in the direction of good--it only tells us what it means to run.

How to bring this back to what it means to be human? I wanted to say something about this secluded human world we live in. Maybe just the fact that it exists. We look at things and see--fence, car, road, sky. We see this as what exists, what we've seen every day since we were born. But this car isn't only a car--it's metal that was hurled out of a star, dredged out the earth where it lay for millions of years holding up mountains. The car is something we have made, forced, out of a universe which we see but does not see us.

I want to look, to look at the little cracks and crannies between the universe and the human world, between life and death, to know what life lives there. That's what horror does, when it does it. It picks and nags not at what it means to be human, but what it means to be not-human and which thus defines humanity. Instead of running and facing always in the direction of humanity, it turns back and looks in the other direction, and what does that look like?

What might you see as you turned your head?