Do we run away from what scares us, or run away from running away?
I have spent the last couple of days replaying my copy of The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. This has been partially because it is a wonderful game (and more in depth and advanced, in my opinion, than anything that has been released on that five hundred dollar paperweight, the Xbox One, so far) and partially because, on my most recent attempt at a playthrough of the first Mass Effect game, I chose the wrong squad-mate during the Virmire mission and forgot to back up my save file. Oops. There goes twenty hours with Oliver Shepard, my Adept named after Eddie Albert’s character on Green Acres, down the drain. And, as I didn’t want to spend another twenty building him anew right at that moment, I decided to kill some time by killing a few dragons—they’re not exactly endangered, after all.
During my Skyrim playtime, as always happens, the soundtrack started getting to me. Nothing makes the heart pound and blood pump like a barbarian choir chanting while you go to war with a giant, fire-breathing, flying lizard. The song played during the actual dragon battles, entitled ”The One They Fear,” is forged out of pure awesome (maybe also some magical steel) and reminds me a little bit of “The Crown and the Ring” by Manowar, which was the song I listened to when I was getting fired up for a football game in high school.
And yet, as one so does not wish to happen while he is engaging in a little recreational dragon slaying, “The One They Fear” made me feel thoughtful, troubled… even a little melancholy. Who or what, I wondered as a mud crab did what a dragon could not and reduced my character (the Iron and Wine tribute named Jesus the Mexican Bosmer) to mulch, was the one I fear?
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The first answer that springs immediately to mind is spiders. They are a thing I fear in a visceral, awful sense. I’d like to pretend that there’s some seminal moment in my early childhood that I can remember, being crawled on by one in the crib like the dude in Arachnophobia, but I simply cannot remember a time at which I was not horrified of the little boogers. Their faces seem unimaginably alien to me, and they simply have too many legs. I do remember being horrified during Rankin Bass’ animated movie, The Hobbit, while I watched the spiders of Mirkwood—giant spiders that talked with cockney accents!—prepare to eat our Dwarven heroes. I was almost as excited as I was terrified when Bilbo, using his Elvish knife Sting, laid into them ferociously… for a Hobbit, at least. I couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched by many eyes, in sets of eight, when I slept that night, though. I was easy prey, as I didn’t have a dagger forged in Gondolin (for the Goblin Wars, no less) to protect me.
I hate the thought of being misinterpreted, thought ill of, and this circumscribes my behavior to an almost ridiculous degree./span>
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That’s a low level answer, though, an unthinking answer. True fear, I think, has to be something you’re actually conscious of, something existential. In his excellent book length essay Danse Macabre,Stephen King elucidates three levels of fear. At the lowest level is “the gross-out,” a kid sticking his hand into something slimy and shuddering at it. Edward Lee and Carlton Mellick III’s fiction rarely rises above this level, although they have made it into art, after a fashion. The second level, like my fear of spiders, is horror. Something subconscious, so deep you do not understand it, punches you in the gut, leaves a gasping wreck for a few minutes or hours. The finest emotion, though, is what King calls terror. This is something that a soul can dwell on, like the horrible mesh of being and nothingness which webs behind the labyrinthine prose of an H.P. Lovecraft or Clive Barker story, tantalizing hints of an awful truth that cannot be expressed in words. This is a punch right in the brain that can ruin you for years if you’re not careful.
Terror is something that a soul can dwell on, like the horrible mesh of being and nothingness which webs behind the labyrinthine prose of an H.P. Lovecraft or Clive Barker story, tantalizing hints of an awful truth that cannot be expressed in words.
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Loneliness, maybe, would have been a big terror for me, a few years ago. I was always terrified of growing old alone, being a miserable old man who died without any body to love him. I dwelt on it, worried over it, would have done almost anything to avoid it. I learned from a series of bad relationships, though, that there were much worse things than being alone and to enjoy my own company. Ignominy is maybe one which has an undue hold of me. I hate the thought of being misinterpreted, thought ill of, and this circumscribes my behavior to an almost ridiculous degree. Rejection, too, is a thing I brood over—I think most folks do. The fear is always there of someone saying, like the woman in “Prufrock,” “That is not what I meant at all; that is not it at all,” and having one’s heart dashed against talk of Michelangelo.
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Perhaps it is the concept of fear, fearing fear itself like Roosevelt once famously mentioned in a speech, that eats me and so many others up inside. Fear that consumes us but, because the universe loves irony, doesn’t get us in the end. A man or woman doesn’t leave home because of a fear of being attacked, then dies in a fall off a chair while changing a light bulb. A man who won’t eat meat because he fears a heart attack chokes to death on a celery stalk. The kinds of darkly funny things which make the world of Emergency Medical Services so interesting.
What can I do about it? Or you? Or anyone? Do we run away from what scares us, or run away from running away? I can’t answer that, although I wonder each night while I can’t sleep and just lie there, staring at the ceiling. Maybe I’ll have the solution tomorrow, but I’ve got to try to kill this spider on the wall, before it gets me first. The thing’s big enough to carjack a semi and was probably designed as a bioweapon by terrorist… but I still think it might be vulnerable to shoes. We’ll find out in a minute.
Photo–Flickr/Vinoth Chandar