On monsters and morals
Are most people good? Or are most people more prone to inertia than focused good? We are so capable of imagination. We can imagine ourselves good or bad or in-between. We can cast others in our story. We can see Jesus in a piece of toast. A smile in knots in wood. A frog in a cloud. Ghosts in a slight chill in the air, neck hair perking up. We like to assign meaning in things. More so, we like to see people in things. We like to breathe a soul into everyday objects, sights and sounds. Pareidolia: seeing a face on the moon. Apophenia: seeing connections in everything, even when they are not there.
We can know things to be true, we can understand the logic behind the function, but pure logic does not replace our lived experiences. Our imagination is not merely something we consciously do, like inventing a story or imagining a future. It is constantly operating underneath our awareness, interpreting the world before our conscious brain does. We know our minds yearns for patterns, pick out faces that are not there to detect predators. When a tragic event happens we try to take meaning from it, because we yearn for meaning, we desperately want to believe that life matters, our lives and our loved ones’ and strangers’ and all life on earth. And we want to think things happen for a reason, and if we can understand that reason, we can avoid that outcome in the future.
And yet. Horrible things happen to good, or fine, people every single day. So we look to the supernatural to find meaning. To me, the supernatural has always been inherently bad. Scary and spooky and out to get you. Fingers of shadow, reaching out, grasping, snatching you. Running up the stairs after you, faster than light. At 25, I am only marginally braver than I was at age 15, or even age five. At five, I was horrified by the Bucksport boot, scared a witch would come up and haunt me, had put a curse on us for visiting the grave of her killer. At 25, I am less scared of witches and more scared of men, but still. Monsters in the lake and ocean. Doctor Who monsters that prey on you only from the corner of your eye. Flashes in the dead of night. My first instinct is often to detect danger.
But perhaps monsters are evolutionarily useful too. Just as it is useful to see a face where there is none 99 times so that one time you will see an actual face hiding from you, monsters are useful to explain away our unease, our secret terrors. A monster gives form to fear. Fear is, for me at least, not a fun emotion. But giving it form, a body and place and meaning, gives it somewhere to go — and an avenue for you to avoid it. Give it claws, a hand from under the bed, and you can escape it, or tame it, at least situationally.
We all like to turn randomness into narrative. It is in fact our life’s work to make meaning. It’s the first thing we teach our children, for language is a method of making meaning. We spend most of our childhoods learning and creating stories that will follow us until we die, stories about our gender, our race, our sense of self. Our values. Morals. Good and Bad and Evil. What we owe to people and what they owe to us.
So often there is not a satisfying explanation behind something good or bad or mundane. Being smart, paranoid, imaginative creatures, that can be very hard to accept. That is why these exercises in making meaning are so persistent and omnipresent. They take uncertainty, the unknown, and quantify it. Where is my wallet? A ghost took it. We want the creaking floorboard to mean something. We want the strange feeling in the room to be a warning. We want the dream to contain a message. We want the coincidence to be more than coincidence. We want the dead to leave something behind. We want the universe to be speaking, even if what it is saying frightens us.
