“If the question of Being is to have its own history made transparent, then this hardened tradition must be loosened up, and the concealments which it has brought about dissolved.”
Martin Heidegger
As the Chinese say may you be blessed to live in interesting times. This curse, like most things these days, is probably a false attribution. And yet here we are, shuddering and shaking in horror at a most interesting period in American History. All apologies to the scores of thousands who have suffered and died unobserved.
The Raft of the Medusa, 1819 by Gericault a man who died young depicting the Horror of Injustice
You just can’t understand how big this thing is until you see it. All on spec.
In the spirit of Heidegger’s linguistic disquisition I would like to look at horror. Though I am a painter, aussi une idiot en tantque peintre, and as many of you know a student of yoga which in America is not dissimilar. At one time I was though director of Ashtanga Yoga at Stanford University and these brands can alter the impression of an individual’s remarks, quite like a Sophist.
Please, any discursive attempts I make here on language and understanding are from the perspective of, what is called in the Yoga Taravalli, a jungle doctor. A jangalikayamane is an armchair physician, and I will be an armchair Sophist for that matter.
Horror from the Latin horrere to shudder or to bristle. Though, here I prefer the word bristle, and the suggestion of disgust. That horror is disgusting. Horror is the result of an act that is in itself contemptible. I hope you are still with me.
Horror, I would suggest, therefor requires the establishment of rage. To take an extreme and in itself delectable example: Jeffrey Dahmer. Jeffrey suffered a kind of holy trinity of unfortunate events.
He witnessed abuse of the mother, was subsequently ignored by her, and in addition, the final recipe for sociopathy, he had low connectivity in his amygdala, the fight or flight response in the brain. What this means is he struggled to experience the effects of serotonin. Which is to say if the serontonin receptors are inhibited, and this is almost totally the case with Sociopaths, then he will not experience love.
This epigenetic allele cocktail is how some folks become researchers on the brain as in the case of Dr. James Fallon,
and some whose genes are instead bathed in violence become actively abusive themselves. Jeffrey Epstein is another case altogether and I suspect his amoral hunger originates from the same vein.
When Dahmer encounters say a small animal and participates in its suffering he does not however participate in its horror. He does not emphathize. For those of us with a healthy amygdala when we encounter the gruesome details of the young men butchered and eaten by Jeffrey we experience that horror of the event precisely because we don’t share the cocktail of factors in his brain development. We experience instead rage. Like any child that sees abuse of a puppy or kitten experiences sorrow and anger. The child within us likewise demands, in our epic narrative, resolution.
Horror, you see, is clickbait. If you are like my grandmother, who was severely abused as a child, then you might have an appetite for Justice. (She was an avid and compulsive true crime reader.) You might, I mean, desire Horror as entertainment.
From My Friend Dahmer by Derf Backderf (a non de plume obviously)
Entertainment has an etymology of holding one’s attention and also maintaining attention. It also suggests hospitality. A house of horror, for example, wherein a young girl is slaughtered by an old man in a barn. This, an audience manipulation, which we pay dearly to enjoy.
“my favorite pornhub videos are women running in horror.”
The Great American Comedian Nikki Glazer
It is the thing that every Bay Area start up strives for. “eyes on screens.”
My wife, a Calgarian, and I went to see (spoilers) Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in the theatre. (When we could do that.) The title itself is the giveaway. It is a fantasy. Here the prestige, and the establishment of justice that Quentin Tarantino exploits, left me sobbing actually. I sobbed for the life of Sharon Tate. I knew what was to come and yet my expectations shattered I wept tears of joy. Tarantino has given the world a gift, I thought. He gave us all justification for slaughter.
Not like that Purist, that Christian, Michael Haneke, he who expands notions of time and space; whom prefers to rob us of our blood lust, and then rub our sadism in our own noses. No, Tarantino allows us to idle indulgently in our Calgon tonic lustblood bath.
Funny Games by Michael Haneke
However, before describing the climax of the film, let me first, if you would allow, take a look at the physiological sensibility of rage and why this rictus affect might be entertaining in the first place.
Here is a question. Have you ever woken up two or three minutes before the alarm? Of course you have. In hundreds of classrooms across the country and in all manner of professional development meetings with classroom teachers of all kinds I always get the same answer: a universal raising of hands. It makes one wonder why we have alarms at all? What does this? Normally we take the moment for granted and with great irritation grouse the missed opportunity for sleep, rather than take wonder at the moment altogether!
We have an important event. An event of consequence, the first day of school, a hunt, a date. Something we believe will alter our fortunes in some way. Let us look, as the neuroscientist and psychologist Dan Seigel suggested, at your fist as a kind of signal or metaphor for the brain stem.
Really.. sit there making a fist. Maybe, like me you were teased as a sissy for closing the thumb around the fingers. Yes, do that. The fingers here are to be your forehead. The wrist is your neck. This whole fist structure is your cortex. Cortex is a kind of pillow that sits on a thing. Like your adrenal cortex are two pillows that sit on the kidneys. So your prefrontal cortex is now the fingers in front. That’s your executive function, your long term planning. We call it the brow. We have an ancient bias in society towards the high brow. Must be some kind of sign of an egghead or intelligentsia.
Perhaps the low brow has taken first position in society. Expertise is sneered at today so pervasive and so persuasively. Like a T Rex, our guts make the right decisions, all evidence to the contrary.
When I was in school in Chicago there was a strange paradox at the School of the Art Institute. We were both encouraged to mine low brow forms like comics, and rock music and advertising for art sources (like Andy Wharhol, the Hairy Who, Lichenstein et al.) and also critically examine their content and meaning as an extension of post structuralist critique: Derrida’s différance. Chicago was a pretty heady town compared to out East in NY where expressionism still had not yet been dismissed as onanistic. That of course is a very limited sample size--my own gut.
At any rate, back to your bed and your fist. If you would peel back your fingers. Underneath here we discover the thumb that you so peevishly hid before. This thumb will be your limbic system. A function that mammals developed to establish long term memory. Here, we will charge and electrify our neural pathways to create memory. Your brain, in fact, remembered an extremely important event and alerted you. This is the hippocampus. It knows what time it is. The hippocampus regulates memory, appetite, and sleep. If you are disturbed by something of importance it is these functions that are disturbed as well!
As you might intuitively understand.
So.. your cortex knows something important is happening. The hippocampus tells the pituitary gland underneath the nose to release cortisol. This stress hormone bathes your amygdala—your fight or flight response and this triggers your adrenal cortex in turn. Epinephrine and adrenaline are released into the bloodstream. Its exciting, right? When these chemicals are released circulation and brain function in the pre frontal cortex speed up the wave transmitted by the brain. The brain leaves its slow Delta wave and transitions abruptly to Beta and your eyes flicker open. You are awake.
You are literally excited.
Yet, this how we awaken each and every day. And, also every time we stand up to teach or perform the same physiological process floods our body. Drawing from the work of Robert Sapolsky and Victor Carrion nuerobiologists and psychiatrists of Stanford, we know that cortisol is normal and is highest in the morning. You know, so we can run around and catch little critters and eat them before it gets too hot and we all need to lie down again in the high noon.
Cortisol should wind down through the day like a bear market. The body responds in very stressful environments, thinking that we are fighting for survival, by keeping the cortisol up through the night depleting many of these systems. Trauma informed households, poor work life balances, bingewatching Dexter, and playing Call of Duty through the early morning are all examples of very stressful environments that hippocampi cannot distinguish. The Body, as van der Kolk says, the body keeps score and the effect virtual violence has on us is indistinguishable from sensible violence. Any insane person could tell you that.
Sane is Sanus in Latin which means healthy.