Storytellersunplugged

Where Words Meet

Are We Not Crazy?

I was going to write about Vision, but I changed my mind again. Though the following babble is at least connected to the topic….

I attended Necon 26 this past July and went to the guests of honor interview, where Steve Spruill finished his smooth, relaxed and so sophisticated questioning of the three authors with a quick sanity test: how is a tree the same as a fly? (Maybe not those exact words, but that was the idea.)

Most of us in the audience, I think, were as stunned and confused as the panelists. First off, this happened on the third day of the convention. People were fried (obviously not taking my advice from the last column - and why should they, damn it! I certainly didn’t.). The collective brain power in the audience could not have lit a candle.

The panelists were in even bigger trouble, however - they were on the spot. Two just couldn’t make any connection at all and surrendered, while a third valiantly came up with comparing moving tree limbs with wings (can’t recall the exact words, of course, being numb of mind….).

I immediately wished I’d thought of that, though my brain had been lumbering in that direction – I couldn’t get past the leaves. Maybe in a year or two, I could have come up with the same thing. Maybe.

To my horror, Steve said that was a borderline answer, close to failing the test.

What? Was this the Skipp questionnaire all over again? Was I not only an android, but an insane one on top of that?

Steve noted another famous author at the con had answered with: they both burn good. Which to my mind was the kind of answer you’d want a horror writer to come up with. But then he said the real answer was that both were alive, which made me feel kind of ashamed, to tell you the truth, because that was so obvious and true and stunningly normal. And the answer that pointed to schizophrenia said something like one has wings and the other has leaves.

Which, you know, I could see, too.

Now being a member of the helping professions, myself, I realize that not all of my peers are wrapped tightly around the sanity stick. There are a great many loose and frayed, even tattered personalities drawn to psychology and psychiatry. Hell, I’ve had psychiatrists as patients. I tend to hold out hope for myself, though - I had very clear reasons for pursuing counseling as a livelihood, and none of them had to do with “healing” myself through others. Mostly, I seemed to be empathic, a good listener, had an eye for details and a pretty well tuned radar for troubled personalities, and I thought counseling was something that was easily within my nature to do that would give me a way to earn a living, help others, and improve my writing.

So while I’m not by any stretch of the imagination “normal,” I feel I have enough basic skills and strengths to get along in the real world without too much trouble. I feel pretty sane. Hardly anyone complains (of course, I keep to myself a lot, but hey –). In fact, I think I’m cemented into reality so deeply that I can hardly stand to turn on the news and hear about yet another mind-bending decision made by wealthy, elitist and apparently highly educated leaders which has absolutely no foundation in the plain and ordinary facts of daily existence. I often feel the world is led mostly by psychotics.

Perhaps this feeling is a problem…..

Nonetheless, I just never thought I was really, down deep, seriously cracked, as Steve’s test seemed to indicate.

And then I thought about it, and had a little discussion with Tom Monteleone, who had encouraged Steve to ask that question from the audience.

And I thought about the nature of creativity, the madness of imagination. Sometime during the weekend, a panelist noted that in the horror field, writers tended to be nice folks, perfectly normal, while in his experience a lot of science fiction writers had difficulty relating to others. I don’t know how true that is, but it certainly seems horror folks are a gregarious lot, judging by the message boards and events like NeCon.

We appear normal. We often act normal (well, except for maybe conventions). Yet we write about the most terrible things that can happen to people.

Are we crazy?

I don’t think so. But we are in touch with the madness in ourselves. Or we should be, if we plan to be any good at this horror thing. We have to be, to provoke fear in others.

The sanity question isn’t fair to a horror writer.

Because the horror is in making the connection between trees and insects. That connection is scary, mostly because it breaks the rules, even if we can’t quite articulate the rule that is being broken. Horror is by its nature an act/the art of transgression.

Quiet horror, with its focus on melancholy, subtle oddness, the past, ghosts and all the psychological wounds they represent, breaks the barrier between sanity and madness by undermining the physical and emotional underpinnings of reality. The shadow is more than a shadow. The voices, not always your own, not necessarily from the living.

Extreme horror, roaring with rage and grand guignol theatrics, is a frontal assault on the rational, overwhelming reality’s certainties with the blunt, raw power of gore and violence.

All of horror’s flavors, from the surreal to the psychological to the weird, set out to dismantle the expected. From premise to imagery, horror works only when the reader is made to see exactly how a tree and a fly are the same.

The dead come back to haunt us, sometimes to kill.

The world is threatened by entities beyond our understanding.

People hide their true natures, revealing them only in the presence of profound vulnerability.

Horror is in the recognition of previously unseen commonality between things that should not be together.

So is wonder.

Now I’m not saying this the wisest path to commercial viability. The more extreme the juxtapositions, the more disturbing it is to the audience, the smaller the audience. Also, the fuel that feeds the horror is not the funky smushing of unlikely combinations - mustard and sweet tarts - but the human heart. Characters, and their struggle to cope with these kinds of perceptions, is what connects the terrible images of horror to the readers.

But the path of horror takes all creators some part of the way through their personal madness.

As corroboration, just read David Wilson and Richard Steinberg from a few days ago.

Some added notes:

Jay Lake said in his Locus, June 2006 interview: “All authors are reasonably controlled schizophrenics (some are uncontrolled schizophrenics). We listen to the voices in our heads and write down what they say.”

And…..

While I walked with Gahan Wilson to the NeCon panels one day, a mini front loader “roared” toward us. Any reasonable person assessing the situation could see there was very little threat in the situation. Nervous types might have frozen in their tracks, perhaps even backed away. I’m from NYC. Please. West Side yuppie mommies and their baby carriages pose more serious threats. But all of that is reality. Gahan, however, is a horror genius and lives in another world, and through the blind good fortune of walking alongside him for a brief time I was transported by his incredible riff to a land where creatures with great maws growled and rumbled and stalked mere humans. Face contorting into sneers, Gahan snarled and muttered with great vehemence that the creature was not going to get us, and he proceeded to do his best to scare and intimidate the terrible beast off with his fierce wrath, a shaking a fist and good deal of glowering. And it worked. The front-loader veered off. Gahan Wilson saved my life.

Afterwards, we spoke briefly about the certainty of things getting us in the end, no matter how careful we might be or much we fought against the inevitable, but we soldiered bravely on to auditorium where it turned out later that evening that Gahan was right, because he turned out to be the subject of the Necon surprise roast and was decisively (and in good fun) “gotten.”

But what was crazy? Acknowledging reality, or living a Gahan Wilson cartoon? And if the cartoon adventure was crazy, wasn’t the trip worth the madness?

Besides, that front loader’s headlights did look a little shady to me…..

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