By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ In response to Artem’s essay called “Death by Banana Peel”, I decided – as is my custom – to hunt for a good quote to more or less sum up my own position. So I looked up “Famous quotes about Fear”. Surely, given that fear is an emotion universally felt and dealt with in countless ways, there would be a lot of core material, observations that would evoke the essence of how people experience the terrors of life and the dread that is foretold in the death sentence we are all under.
I didn’t find anything. At least nothing that stood out or in my view was equal to the task of getting at the psychological hellishness of this shared form of torture. Most of what I came across (admittedly a cursory skim through a standard collection) read more like a self-help book than a plunge into the nature of the beast itself. I don’t go much on self-help books. Fuck knows why, but I have developed a hostility to people who are always affirming stuff. I don’t like candlelight vigils and I don’t like balloons to ‘celebrate life’ when someone is dead.
When fear strikes you alone, there is only the pure panic of any creature facing extermination. You and a cockroach could have a productive conversation about this because both of you would be on the same page. Nor can you seek safety in numbers; it doesn’t work that way. Ask anyone standing in line in front of a firing squad. Or ask the ones who slipped under the sea with the Titanic.
But fear is the companion of grief if you are cursed to watch a loved one die. If you have to look on while your child runs out in front of a speeding car or if intruders murder your family one by one before your eyes, the Fear and the Grief are one. You are not going to stand there and say to yourself, “According to the statistics, this shouldn’t be happening.” In all probability you are not sure it is happening. It must be a nightmare. At least, I’ve heard it described that way. And when the Titanic sank beneath the waves, the wives aboard the lifeboats could only watch as the sea pronounced judgment. A marriage of terror and grief as the other marriage ended. Before their very eyes.
Maybe I am wrong or anti-social or whatever to feel this way, but I sense something superficial, for example, in Hollywood movies that, after paying due diligence to whatever crisis needed to be surmounted to make the story go, almost invariably hit us over the head with some kind of virtue signalling. OK, I love life, at least I enjoy being alive (maybe that’s a better way of putting it) and I accept ‘life on life’s terms’ – no problem with that – but I don’t need a bunch of morality cheerleaders shouting ‘Rah-rah-rah’ at times when life is dark with tragedy or stabbed by terror. And I certainly don’t need anybody’s prayers or to be told that a cup of hot chocolate and a nice warm shower will help.
I read these exhortations of faith all the time from what, I suppose, are well-meaning deadbeats in the ‘Comments’ sections of the news links after some murder or plane crash: “Our prayers go with you.” For the very life of me, I don’t know why but they always strike me as shallow and banal, even if the underlying emotion is probably genuine. To me, it’s like two businessmen saying “How d’ya do” and “How d’ya do” upon meeting. It means nothing, less than nothing. When someone asks, “How are you?” – the only answer you should ever consider giving is ‘Fine’. Especially among casual acquaintances and corporate phonies. If you don’t believe me, try telling them. Say, “Well, things are BAD because….and because….and because…
Watch them scatter.
As for me, when something horrible happens, the horror of it is what I experience. That is my way of dealing with what surely had to have been the primordial terror felt by the victim(s), which had nothing to do with God or angels or any salve or balm or oil in the form of ‘prayer’ that can be tacked on afterwards. All of that boo-hoo-hooing followed by brave smiles urging ‘somehow we must go forward’ are for the living, a way of polite disengagement except for the people who are truly grieving. Those are the feckless souls for whom all the well-wishing in the world will help only until the other ‘mourners’ go home. Then the unbearable pain of real loss sets in like stone and the room is as dark as eternity and one knows (at the nub and beyond all persuasions of religion) that the separation is forever. That is the bottoming out moment when one knows both the fear of death and the gloom of remaining alive.
If we sat at the bedside and watched the loved one dissipate away, beyond further harm and beyond all help, we will, every last one of us, experience the zero moment which is at the heart of all primitive fear. For that is the instant – when the object most beloved abandons us for the faraway, windy fields of death – when we understand how alone we really are. It is only us then and the cold emptiness of a cosmos beyond comprehension. No, the terror now is not of the gun or knife, the midnight assailant or the proliferation of the cancer cells, but of infinite singularity or indeed the ‘perfect storm’ of the soul’s consciousness, its wakefulness, and the indecipherable blackness and blankness that waits patiently just beyond each breath we take.
If it is news of the plane crash or car accident we learn of (the phone call from Hell) and the annihilation of family members coming for Christmas, we are shattered by the insane unfairness of it all, and the question burning at the lips of the ever-faithful is, “Dear Lord, how could you let this happen?” But the Lord does not come; only the bad news comes, and there is no doubt in my mind that, even for the deeply devout, a moment of absolute existential truth is experienced in the most brutal and merciless way imaginable. God may show up later (although I doubt it), but the first screaming emotion is primal grief at the horror of irreplaceable loss, and the raw horror embedded in the knowing. At this point, God is of no more use than a hobo is to a speeding freight train. You feel the freight train of death in the tiniest crevices of your being, the infinitesimal cells of your anatomy, and in all the death symbols in your imagination combined – they scream at once, a pandemonium of hideous conjuring.
That is Fear beyond all self-help books that God himself could ever write. And you imagine, What were they thinking when they knew they were going to die? – and it’s the wild surmise of the almost-knowing that drives you crazy. If the loss is intense enough, the rest of your life is a matter of you and God together sweeping the dead or dying autumn leaves and lives out of your driveway.
Artem’s thesis is that we have terrible fears about stuff we need not be so afraid of or obsess about while mostly ignoring the real killers that are around us constantly: the ubiquitous banana peel which is always turning up in one form or another. Artem is a man of many statistics, and he takes great pains to tell us about the paltry number of deaths by gunshot, poisonous snakes, rapists in the night, planes flying into mountain sides compared to those caused by over-eating, stumbling over a rug or a child’s toy and smashing our heads on the bannister, using the electric shaver in the shower or, indeed, slipping on a banana peel.
Here is an especially cool paragraph that sums up Artem’s thesis:
The real killer is the mundane. It doesn’t stalk you in the dark. It lurks under your socks, at the top of the stairs, next to the bathtub, in that one drawer where you keep old prescription meds next to loose batteries and expired herbal tea. And you — clever, evolved, data-averse human that you are — will ignore it completely, because your brain is designed to notice tigers, not Tylenol.
It’s true, and it’s also funny because it gets at how trivial our lives really must be if such ‘minor’ things can put an end to them. Of course, that’s not exactly what he means, but just try to imagine a Hollywood film where the hero dies, not in the mouth of the shark or under heavy machine gun fire, not in the act of saving his lover and the human race along with it – but by slipping on the soap getting out of the bathtub or falling off a ladder. Imagine that instead of fading to his icy death gazing with infinite eyes at Kate Winslet after the Titanic springs its fatal leak, Leo di Caprio (‘Jack’ – was that his name?) chokes on a triple cheeseburger he has crammed into his gob at the canteen and splutters to death while Kate looks on an wonders What the fuck’s the matter with this dude? He was supposed to jump my bones up in the fo’castle. Now look at him!)
Ok, Artem, I get your point. But in some ways, I think you neglect the idea that lies at the heart of Fear. And that is often the pure irrationality itself. Does knowing we are born to die and the presumption (if going to Hell is not a worry) that in death there is probably the same nothingness that we ‘experienced’ in the billions of years before our birth, and that what death promises us is nothing worse than another billion or trillion years of sound sleep after the snuffing moment – give us a comfort zone in which we can anticipate and then submit to annihilation with the same calm as peeling an orange or pulling on our socks? I mean, if we know two simple facts: (1) death comes to us all and it is the one thing that everyone succeeds at; and (2) we don’t hear much screaming coming out of the grave or the crematory fire, which suggests that death is painless – why are we so agast, so tremulously terrified when Mr. Death comes with his scythe and rotting face. Indeed, why do we imagine a rotting face?
Dostoyevski examines this question by showing us a man who has a massive, lethally heavy stone hanging directly over his head which he knows will soon drop on him and crush both his skull and the rest of him as well. But he doesn’t know when it’s going to happen. Just that it most certainly will. So he is afraid, shuddering at the mere thought of his brains being turned into something like sushi run over by a two-ton rolling pin. It scares the living piss out of him. But it is hardly lost on Dostoyevski that the man’s fear is irrational because of the fact that he will feel no pain. Death will be swift and decisive. Also, because he has no control over when it will happen, worrying about it is also irrational in that it will do no good whatsoever. Might as well just enjoy the moment, right? Yet the man dissolves in terror at the thought of what will eventually happen to him; he can envision it. And that’s the problem.
If I imagine being in an airplane during a fatal free fall, I am not experiencing pain as long as I am strapped in by the seat belt. Nor will I likely feel pain when the plane explodes on contact with land or ocean. But those minutes as we plummet will be terrifying beyond words. And if I had been one of those old treasonous courtiers kneeling before the chopping block, my fear would likely have exceeded the stunning blow of the headsman’s axe (provided he was not drunk – as they sometimes were – and lurching around hacking away as if I were a rooster in a barnyard.) They don’t hang people as much as they used to, (at least not in England or the American West) yet when they do, modern methods ensure that the neck is broken instantly, causing immediate death. But who would enjoy an evening in a prison cell knowing what was in store come sun up?
So the terror is in the imagining. And, sorry Artem, but Marlboro Lights and Cheeseburgers don’t instill fear. Neither do bars of soap and a ride to the airport. The notion of a gunman suddenly entering through the Golden Arches and laying siege to everyone in the joint with an assault rifle – well you can feel the artificial meat rotting in your mouth as you chew. So you may return day after day, waiting nervously, your back to the wall and your eyes on the door, watching, watching, watching, and the madman may never come. Probably, he won’t, so that in the end you might even feel disappointed. For isn’t it true that a small part of ourselves always wants to meet the Bogeyman that the rest of our psyche stands in terror of? Isn’t that what the modern day ‘adrenaline rush’ is all about? One should always be aware that Fear, together with its other strange qualities, is also a Seducer.
For this is the truly ‘crazy’ and at times unmanageable thing about Fear. Some of it is a predictable and wholly appropriate response to danger. But at other times it seems to express something deeper, something deadly – spinning and gyrating in the wilderness of the human mind, the moaning wards of the soul and the darker ante-rooms of the spirit. It comes from a place that defies rational explanation and in this sense, appealing to ‘reason’ by means of a database of facts, figures, and that most venerated of all forms of civilized computation – the statistik – makes as much sense as asking a wolf in the steppes why it howls at the moon.
Ah, yes. Fear of tight spaces. Fear of open spaces. Fear of heights. Fear of being buried alive. Fear of failure. Fear of success. Fear of pythons, fear of dolls. After all the books have been written, analyses rendered, advice distributed, paranoid coyotes still prowl the human brain. They cry against the pouncing darkness.
People whistle in the graveyards at night, Artem. What they Never do is try to remember how many calories they consumed that day as they walk among the slabs. They’re out of luck if they do, because everybody knows that the ghosts are gathering, the zombies rising from the coffins, and the devil grinning behind a bush, eager to feast on your soul. Accountants and dieticians may not realize this, but everybody else knows it perfectly well, and so do I.
