The Horror of Humanity
Special Interest is a new series of guest-written essays that focus on the intersection of art, culture, and the self. If you would like to contribute to Special Interest, email the editors, or reach out to us on Twitter. Horror of Humanity was originally printed by Ginger Nuts of Horror.
The Horror of Humanity
by Ogden Nesmer
You are hiking. Imagine it: it is hot; you’re sweating under the scattered shade of towering redwoods. Insects buzz about in the sunlight, the tang of pollen and pine needles circulates through your lungs. Every few minutes you stop to catch your breath, squatting among ferns, or leaning against a ponderous and lichen-speckled boulder to take your pack’s weight off your shoulders. You are patient. It’s all very beautiful, but these scenes are not the prize. Somewhere in the unknown are other living things. Whether with gopher or marmot or bobcat or elk, you want contact. You stay as quiet as possible, your eyes darting about in a hopeless search.
The sight of a wild animal in the flesh would give you pause.
The perfect opportunity for ruminative hesitation, inciting your reflections on the very nature of humanity, togetherness, beauty, and fear. Fear, of course, because there’s only one possible option for the animal spotted in its wild domain: run. While you stand there holding your breath– remaining still but not predator-about-to-pounce still– the animal has already started running back through the brush. You are not surprised; you aren’t naive. What could be more threatening to an animal than a larger animal? It’s not the beast’s fault it has no understanding of your innocent, reverent intentions. The fear of animals is simple and universal. Essential to incipient actualization, the progenitor of consciousness.
The animal understands such negative stimuli– and its foil, the positive– before it understands the self. You, the human observer, are reminded by this brief encounter of the immense gray area that exists between these two categories. But, the more you reason, the gray is not so much a perfect blend, but a translucent black abyss. In your complex faculties exists far more conceptual receptors of pain, trauma, misery, and hopelessness. And the invisible structure that links all of these to each other and the mother of them all (death) is our ancestral master, fear.
Humans don’t fear predators, they fear predation; they don’t fear death, they fear dying.
Ideas only appreciable to the human mind are iterated and rediscovered without the need for stimuli: you are having an unforeseen panic attack; an infant sobbing uncontrollably sends you back to your painful childhood; two people are speaking to each other behind a panel of glass and you can’t shake the feeling that they’re commiserating over their shared hatred of you. You think about the nightmares you had as a child; rarely did they make any practical sense. An unsettling look from an imagined face or the stark absence of other people in an endless fabricated abyss could be felt on your skin, and you wake up screaming. Bugs, surgery, inverted eyelids, the smell of rust, your mother’s face when she bursts somnambulant into your bedroom an unfamiliar and accusatory expression; you are a tightly wound knot of unexplainable trauma.
Fear is woven into your flesh and blossoms into ripe, unknowable zits.
You find a surprise bruise: cancer, anemia, gangrene, necrosis, bubonic, microscopic parasites with razor sharp villi. You remember your dying grandfather’s sunken eyes, the way the hospital smelled like fresh shit and bleach, someone down the hall was blubbering, lost and scared and dying. Animals can look at their dead infant and only wonder if there’s enough meat on it for a meal. You remember seeing two cows stand next to each other, farmer kills the one on the right with a bolt pistol and the left one doesn’t even stop chewing its cud. To be so blessed, you think. To fear nothing but clear, annunciated death. Thank heaven for the predator, because nothing’s more twisted than being killed by fellow prey. At least you can see death coming.
You are now me, and we are ten years old.
We are sick; feverish, scratchy throat, dizzy. But the worst part is the dreams: every night we can manage only to sleep for about ten minutes at a time, before an explosion of terror summons us back to waking life to start puking from the pure fear convulsing down our spine. Like an overfilled sieve, terror bleeds out of our amygdala and enters our blood stream as thick as heroin. We can’t cry, our face muscles are too constricted. Our voice has long since shattered. Our pain is muted, but for the sounds of retching and vomiting. Why? What has made us this way? What happened in the dream?
We don’t remember. Four seconds awake and we can’t fully articulate what set this all off. There is something about a rocking chair, a dead fish, objects being two sizes at the same time. It’s useless to explain, we don’t understand it ourselves, plus we’re busy looking for blood in our vomit. The explanation is there is no explanation. There is no standard stimulus for fear, no one thing we can agree is the one thing we need to always run from. What could be scarier than that?
Ogden Nesmer is the author of 3 novels, including the recently released Silkworm. Follow the author on Twitter and support his work!