Tuesday 3.39: Hip to be scared

I’ve been exhausted for the last couple of weeks. I had a pretty good schedule going for awhile: up at 6 am, do some kind of exercise, shower/coffee, work, etc., in bed by 10 pm. But for the past 14 days or so, that’s all gone to hell. I’m not sleeping well, and I wake up late and tired. I started feeling some tightness in a problematic area of my knee, so I dialed runs back, and last week I only managed one slow, uncomfortable, three-mile jaunt. I’ve managed three so far this week, but it’s been cold, and I still don’t feel so quick.

One of the first things to go when I get tired like this is my ability to read. I can’t go more than a few pages without falling asleep, and that sleep usually sucks. It happens, I think, to a lot of people.

So in an effort to break out of this funk, I put down Capital (an ambitious project I’m just not ready for yet) and started re-reading two new things: Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Stephen King’s IT.

I finished the former this past Sunday, and felt relatively energized. After I was done I went to Home Depot, bought some garden stuff, and planted two small saplings I bought myself as an ill-advised birthday present (there isn’t really anything you should be planting in January; please pray for my trees).

Something about scary stories helps pull me out of funks like this. The first book I remember really loving was a collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories. They’re comforting, although not in a way that’s traditionally comfortable. A couple of times last week, the more frightening passages in Hill House left me nearly too scared to walk to the bathroom late at night. I always think IT is too absurd to have that effect (it’s just clear as day how much cocaine King was on when he wrote that book), but let’s see if I’m still holding to that line in a few days.

I think the comfort I find in these types of stories is twofold:

First, they’re very easy to read. Jackson can be a nuanced, complex writer, but you don’t have to dig too hard or too deep to expose her psychological roots. With King, you just kick away a few dead leaves. It’s just like watching trash TV, but at least for me, it feels less destructive.

Second, my ability to identify with the position of the characters often gives me healthy perspective. Whatever is keeping me up at night, sapping my energy, is multi-faceted. I’m bored both simply and dangerously, just as the structure which bores me is both superficial in its innocence and sinister in its depth and complexity.

Eleanor, the main character in Hill House arrives adrift, having escaped (she literally steals her sister’s car) her mundane, suffocating life following the death of her mother, an event the supernatural forces in the book will clearly exploit.

As the story plays out, it becomes clear that the evil in the book—whether it’s innate in the house or a manifestation of the characters within the house doesn’t really matter—is concerned primarily with separation, isolation, and alienation. Though four (sometimes five and and eventually seven) characters in the house realize this and make it a point to stay together, the house plays tricks to keep them apart, or they just plain forget and wander off alone in search of a corkscrew.

King more overtly blends the sinister with the mundane. Whatever the evil that lives beneath Derry, Maine, actually is, it manifests as something familiar, whether it’s luring someone or devouring them. There’s probably a Kantian (noumenon/ phenomenon) or a Marxist (dialectical value) or a Cartesian (“I think,” &c.) analysis that sheds more light on just what the evil is all about, but in the case of IT, I think that’s ultimately limiting. King definitely loses the thread here and there in service of just being scary, because that’s ultimately what he aims to do. And again, he was on a tremendous amount of cocaine when he wrote that book, which is at many points just about an evil clown who lives in the sewer.

This is the kind of horror that has always helped me come to terms with what I cannot control in my life. I’m prone to depression, both in its simple, relatively innocuous everyday realities and its more concerning, depthless abstractions. Horror reminds us that there’s always some darkness beneath us, or in us, unknowable, unrealized, unconscious, and at the same time real, absurd, superficial, and familiar. The parts we think are the most dangerous are often not the scariest. It’s all mixed together, and it’s never really the best thing you’ve ever read. This frame is, I suppose, a big part of the comfort.

Movies are another thing altogether. I loathe being frightened by a film. I find it traumatic. So, go figure.

I’ve been away for a few weeks working on some other writing, but I’d like to try to make it up to you. Keep an eye out for a few shorter, simpler, hopefully fun posts next week.