I used to wake up in a blind panic in the middle of the night, nerves alight with the horror not of dying but of watching the rest of the world die, and be swept away by forces too strong and too organic, too natural, to ever withstand. When I was 13, they showed the … Continue reading Dreaming of all the endings
But Lovecraft often seems to walk on the knife's edge separating an annihilating Truth (accessible through rational scientific inquiry) and the safety of a recognizable supernatural reality (manageable through superstition and mystical belief).
Seriously, I'm both saddened and genuinely perturbed by people who feel capable and justified in casting out monsters, most especially Adam AKA Frankenstein's Creature. While the Creature's actions may be contemptible, his plea to be recognized as worthy of human compassion is so convincingly stated. We must register, here, the contradiction at the heart of … Continue reading Yes, you have to use the same rules for everyone (Monsters vs Modernism)
Monsters do not seek the shriveled empathy grown in the moral philosopher's over-weeded garden. Monsters ask to be met in the space where we are most human: where we hope against hope to be loved.
When considering the “failure of the imagination” which traps people within capitalist realism, the potential in invoking an incoherent – though not necessarily unreal – alternative mode of thought or existence is crucial to breaking out of the bind of capitalist realism. Being able to posit an incoherent alterity is the first step towards being able to move towards a coherent alternate reality. But trying to pull away from the familiar and towards a new paradigm inevitably produces an encounter with Horror.
Despina E. Durand 