Well Bottom Blues

The gods were always monstrous.  Ovid told us so.  The Hebrew Bible is a nightmare for the less elect. The Great Men of history were always clay, hollow idols filled with iniquity. As the old gods drifted out of focus we raised up new idols on mythic screens with headline testaments. We hymned the chosen but also revelled in a new metamorphosis: not the maiden tree or shepherd flower, but the god themselves transformed by their acts into a steaming pile. The victims signed NDAs and so gave their names to no bloom or constellation.

Imagination is a dangerous occupation. “There is no crime of which I do not deem myself capable” is attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. A damaged and withdrawn child retreats into their fantasies, and sometimes great creative beauty is born of that focus. Neil Gaiman is the current focus but the list is long. We see it again and again. And sometimes that same child, when grown, lashes out at the world they were driven out of, which made them, preying on the weak as they were taught. Goethe’s dangerous imagination (which I share) breaks out into the physical world.

My brother took his own life when he was caught a second time sexually abusing a second stepdaughter of a second wife. I am certai  we were abused but there are many blank and missing pages in my childhood, a lack of details to understand what happened. How was I introduced to physical sex with other boys before age 12? (Others, not my brother. Our paths diverged but I expect they came from the same root.) Abuse at some point but I genuinely don’t know the details. I have my suspicions.

In the end only one of us became monstrous. I want to know how and why one and not the other.

All the old texts warn us that we are as vengeful as the gods we raised, and just as prone to that as Gilgamesh or Gaiman were to demand their droit de seigneur, demand a right to damage the world which damaged then and raise up a pleasing world atop the bodies. We all wish to blind the cyclops and push the old woman into her own oven.  The world is full of monsters, but is there Nuremberg enough for all of them? The modern project of the last 70 years has been to contain them, but that order is falling apart.

I share the anarchist inclination to “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” but the world has always been rich in monsters. There are many chains we need to break to free ourselves: not only those of master and servant but also those that bind master to victim and lead in an endless chain of victim to master to victim. So much of what is wrong with society needs to be addressed like a public health crisis, like a village intervention. Punishment (revenge) does not make crime go away.

We are not born in original sin. Small children are proof of this.  We are made monstrous by society since the first warrior fathers and priests. There comes a point when we need to stop just pulling people out of the river and go upstream to find out why they’re falling in, a quote usually attributed to Desmond Tutu.  By all means burn your American Gods and shred your Sandman. Anger needs an outlet. I am not partial to erasure; better to strike out the bad with a note or something new, to try to understand how we got here, and how to make it stop.  Perhaps I will reread what I already own of Gaimen‘s work (most of it) looking for clues, for the warnings missed, for a way out of the cycle, to get to the bottom of the ocean at the end of the lane and remember.

In the end remember: his books are not grimoire. They are not cursed. They are the stories that chose a broken man for the telling.