I've been wresting with this essay for a bit. It is one of those personal ones that gnaws at your ability to sleep at nights. Usually, once I start writing, the words flow onto the page. I may take a day or two to capture the core of what I am trying to say, but once I do everything just happens.
This essay was the opposite. I picked it up and put it down for weeks. It fought me. Hopefully I won.
The first dream I remember is a nightmare. Figures shambled through our house hunting me. Some awful combination of Boris Karloff as the Monster and the zombies from Night of the Living Dead. Each had a cross carved into their forehead.
It was a fever dream. I know that much. One of those childhood illnesses that sits with you forever at the edge of your memory. The kind that haunts you.
It was the first time I remember being afraid of monsters....
I remember reading Edith Hamilton's book, Mythology. I got a copy from the book fair in grade school. I must have read it a hundred times, roaming through the myths in random patterns.
It ruined Ray Harryhausen' s wonderful movies for a long time for me. I still remember that feeling. The second guessing of myself as I watched Clash of the Titans. Are these stories always the same or not?
It was the first time I remember wondering if it mattered if they were true...
I am the oldest of my generation in my family, and so got to see the family that existed before me. I also got told all the stories by my grandparents about people who died before I could know them well.
Stories about Great Uncle Fritz who worked in the coffin factory at night with my great grandfather and made bathtub gin during prohibition. The tale about cousin Mike, who worked with the Outfit and was shot dead on the front stoop.
Only, later I discovered he moved to California and lived a mundane life...
I know a really smart guy named Joshua Newman. He once said, or wrote... I don't remember which. Does it matter?
He once pronounced that science fiction is "the exploration of the problems of today through the lens of technology in the future." Or something like that.
Or maybe that was someone else, but I like to think it was him...
Grant Morrison once wrote about how he struggled to find an angle on the Batman, a character who had 70 years of stories written about him. His answer was to assume everything published was true and try to answer the question, "What is the psychological toll on one man who lived such a life?"
I think a more interesting question is, "What is the psychological toll on the reader, the listener when we force stories into bricks like Legos?"
I have a lot of unanswerable questions like that rattling around my head...
Did Christopher Tolkien do us a disservice? Did Brian Herbert? Jim Shooter? Did their efforts to make it all make sense ruin us?
At some point, comics became about canon. Books became about endless volumes of minutia. Game fiction became about making sense. Movies and TV became an endless series of prequels and sequels and spin offs.
A whole cottage industry has sprung up around trying to make the Lovercraft mythos coherent. To package it together in a neat box something never meant to be packaged. To make all the monsters make sense.
Creativity has become an orgy of authoritarianism. Little Mussolinis ensuring the wiki is up to date. Angrily calling out continuity errors as loudly as possible on {insert social media here}.
Clear cutting a forest so that there is an orderly row of trees...
What happens to us when we care more about "does this fit" than we do about "does this make me feel something?"
Is it capitalism that drives this behavior to destroy our own stories in service of structure? Is it that we know too much or have too much knowledge at our fingertips? Is it our collective rejection of organized religion that led to us throwing out the baby with the bathwater?
Why do we hate to let our gods be many, contradictory things? Why must our monsters all fall into orderly categories?
I am convinced that the introduction of genre classifications damaged us..
I hate what we have done to ourselves. I hate that we must make everything make sense. I hate that we killed the wonder that comes with just telling a story. I hate that we murder our myths and cage our monsters.
I hate that I am as guilty of this sin as anyone else...
I got lucky when I wrote Testament. I didn't have a plan. I didn't think about an endgame. I didn't think about the product. How to package it. How to sell it. How to make it make sense.
I like to imagine that mythology evolves in the same way this work evolved. You keep moving forward, embracing the feeling, but ignoring the details. Stay true to the message without caring about if A happened before B.
I wrote prose. I carved blocks and made prints. Then rewrote prose as poetry. Then I painted without order. I wrote more. Then I drew little illustrations. Then I rewrote even more.
Always moving forward. Never going back to try and make it all fit together like orderly bricks. Tell the stories I want to tell. Need to tell. That is what's important.
A god doesn't care about the last story. A monster doesn't care about the next one. They are the vessels we pour ourselves into. Animated avatars we must wrestle with now. Today.
Mythology is the tarnished mirror we stare at. Right now. In this moment. No matter the evil it shows us. We have to look.
Because that evil is us and we have to face it. Canon won't save us from it. The illusion of an orderly world isn't an answer when facing our messy, messy humanity.
I have to ask myself, why do I care about this? Why does it matter?
Because while a good story can move our hearts. Can lift us up and bring us down, a myth...
Well, a myth can do all of that and shake the world. Shake the world because it shakes us to see our flaws.
So maybe, I wrote Testament because we made ourselves vulnerable. We killed our gods and monsters because it is easier to face an orderly web of lies. Because it is easier to look towards an imagined future or a past that never was.
It is comfortable catharsis to explore humanity at a remove. From a great distance.
Like I said, I am just as guilty of this sin as anyone, but this time I realized it. I wanted to wrestle with the here. The now. I just didn't have anything to pour myself into because we killed our gods and monsters.
So I had to make my own.
