(This is gonna be a long one . . .)
Descending a steep stretch of road or trail on a bike feels like flying. The consequences of every motion intensify, and steering occurs almost invisibly, from the hips, from the toes, from the eyes: point, gentle lean, whoosh, wheeee!!!!
In my first phase of riding in the 80s and early 90s, I railed descents: Rocky Mountain National Park, Mt. Estes, elk trails off-road, tree-impinged Connecticut rural hollows down to streams.
March of 2000 at a local t-shirt ride (aka not a sanctioned race and you walk away with a t-shirt for finishing), as we turned onto highway 18 to roll out to Eula I led the bunch to this little blip of a hill. And abject terror commenced: speed wobble. The front wheel, instead of tracking with every thing else, feeds back, and the handlebars start—or feel like they are, moving on their own. There are ways to control this, none of which I knew then, so elbows flailing and and front-wheel jiggling I rocketed towards the back of the bunch. Luckily (?), it’s a short hill, so I didn’t lose the bunch . . . that time.
Of course I went through the components on the bike, all the stuff that could cause it, up to checking the spoke tension on hte front wheel. As its occurrence became selective I had to recognize that mostly I was starting it by tiny little micro-cringes that intensified into that almost but not quite way beyond control of the uncontrollable feeling . . . that used to always feel like flying. In other words, some part of me was registering a strong dissent about launching down hills, especially in big groups. Kind of a difficult personality component in a bike-racer. But a little message, waiting for decoding.
Haven’t raced since March of 2019, but living through those frights strike me as linked to my changing atittudes towards horror as an entertainment product. It’s probably also the whole Trump-era making me see other everyday experiences as horrific the horrors of which I’d been able to deny before (or, hadn’t had to recognize because I was insulated from them by cis-het white maleness). Other horrific things are still unimaginable (karaoke, for instance). As a survivor of racing cycling, a “lifestyle” that actively tries to turn something joyous and fun into a Kierkegaardian, Herzogish exercise in living out a Cormac McCarthy plot, I wonder what’s the point of making joy horrific? Ok, I really don’t. By and large, I think the mostly entitled white dudes who ride, do it so they can claim to suffer more than people who actually suffer every day. & even then, a series of 12 week training plans to raise your FTP pales in comparison to the 5 years of everyday horrors that Hester Prynne lived as symbolic punching-bag for the Puritan magistrates. Or the torture of Britney Spears. Or.
Everyday horrors desensitize us, usually. A cynic might say that all of the Scots Englightenment stuff about taste exists to teach us to deny our intuitive perception of the taste of slavery in that sugared tea and tart. And then that stuff about the sublime: about how we worship stuff that’s bigger and more powerful than us, like, say the East India Company or mountains. So many Victorian writers dance around the edges of what Lydia Maria Child made plain in “Slavery’s Pleasant Homes” or what Charlotte Bronte exposed of the horrors of basic society in Tenant of Wildfell Hall. (And Horace Binney Wallace posited an entire secret society . . . a deep state . . . in control of polite society in Stanley, from which Poe ripped off August Dupin’s method).
A paradigmatic moment of anaesthetizing failure occurs . . . in Irving’s A Tour on the Prairies, but that’s another story . . . in the first two paragraphs of “The Fall of the House of Usher.” If you haven’t read it, or don’t remember, the set-up’s a little backwards, so here’s a summary: dude gets a letter from a classmate he barely knows, but something*1 about the letter makes him go to see if he can cheer Roderick Usher outta some bad depression. Dude gets to Usher’s land, sees the house (yeah, it looks like a face) and surroundings, and feels bad. (Look it up, Poe got adjective-game).
Afficionado of landscape aesthetics that he is, the narrator decides to shift his perspective, to, y’know, turn that frown upside down. He moves. And “gazed down—but with a shudder even more thrilling than before—upon the remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.” But he goes in. And gets to hear some shoe-gaze Paganini gothic from Roderick and witness Madeleine’s back-from-the-dead revenge of all of the raping that made Usher possible. If you’re keeping score: narrator fails to cheer up Roderick, save Madeleine, or stay sane. Not exactly a vote in favor of the healing power of art and companionship. Tho’ Madeleine does tear that bad bitch down, so there is THAT.
But Usher exists nowhere, unlike House of the Seven Gables, Hill House, and House of Leaves to mention just a few, all of which get specificish locations and histories. What you do with that—and how you convert the horror-house into metaphor or symbol or paradigm or whatever floorplan you might want to use for the basic problem that, as Mr. Wiggins of Ironside and Malone argued long ago, that domestic architecture and slaughterhouses could overlap. Especially if you happen to be a young woman, responds Cassandra Morgeson. Horror—the hair-stand-on-end moments—happens when our codes and rituals can’t quite ease us past the road-kill, the useless plastic waste, and the basic oppression it takes to keep that “blood-caked on the walls and flesh flying out of the windows inconveniencing passersby” under control.
I cheated. I looked at OED. Horrible could be spelled ‘hairable.’ It’s a word dedicated to things that make your hair stand on end—and of course, at the other end of those feelings are the things that make you tingle with delight. (I remain unable to classify things like the “Party Time” song from the animated Titanic). Injury and violence is always horrific to me—when Hugh Crain sticks his hand in the fan in the Netflix adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House I have to walk away. But who cares? Our everyday world is shaped by micro-, macro-, and maga-horrors, so that we walk in constant cringe. Or should, until we have that Bug’s Life realization.
Maybe micro-joys produce the glimmers that co-exist with all those triggers just beneath the surface sheen of the cool that anesthetizes and interferes with our senses of connection and accustoms us to complicity in the big horrors. Common Sense philosophers used to say we were connected through out susceptibility to great pleasures and affections, but maybe now our common senses have been perverted through our scripted acceptance of industrial agriculture, road-kill, mass-murder in public places: how do we re-attach horror and revulsion to the responsible executives, billionaires, celebrities, and religious poser? How restore our susceptibility to act to make beauty? And regain the wisdom to recognize that almost any pitch about a technology “changing the world” is, as with Roderick and Madeleine Usher in Mike Flanagan’s adaptation/mash-up The Fall of the House of Usher, a deal with death to make lots of death? At scales beyond human compassion. Way beyond cringe.
The way you get used to it . . . is by repeating the lines of the people you’ve killed, if you’re Mike Flanagin’s Roderick. Fall moves the gothic symbolism of “house” from Poe’s insulated lack of diversity and experience to exploitation and misguided (and misdirected and kidnapped) idealism. The connection between the opioid crisis and Poe’s theory of composition is spot-on, since Poe basically argues that the only real purpose of literature is as tranquilizer. Textual xanax. A necessity in a mad world. If you believe that creating a sane world is impossible.
Flanagan’s Usher inverts that desensitization, or maybe tries to, by mixing up a horde of Victorian and post-Victorian gothic and mystery tropes to change how we respond to our own tranquilizing and normalizing media. The audience who can appreciate the payback of Rufus Griswold getting bricked into a tell-tale heart scenario (or whichever story) in a Poe storyworld is not the main audience (even less so the folks who know who the hell Marinus Willett was). But maybe we can point to how the series flips those nineteenth-century tropes and plot-patterns around to be disturbing rather than tranquilizing, challenging, rather than acquiescing.
A guy I used to race and ride with was addicted to saying that all it took to make a bike race was two guys and a road-sign somewhere, or maybe a duct-tape line across the road. That it was just as likely that those people could collaborate to get there (& which was my default setting) didn’t occur to him. Because he mistook his Teddy Roosevelt fantasies for nature.
Hawthorne had Hester imagine, when she pondered real change, “as a first step, the whole system of society is to be torn down, and built up anew. Then, the very nature of the opposite sex, or its long hereditary habit, which has become like nature, is to be essentially modified, before women can be allowed to assume what seems a fair and suitable position. Finally, all other difficulties being obviated, woman cannot take advantage of these preliminary reforms, until she herself has undergone a still mightier change;” (1, 165). Hawthorne cringes here. Everywhere else he distinguishes culturally-produced identities to mark the difference between Elizabethan and Victorian “women,” but in this crucial moment when Hester imagines the New Woman, he reverts to the essentialism he used before he met Sophia. His hesitancy betrays itself in the switch from character-centered thought-report to general narrative commentary which takes over after a semi-colon: “in which, perhaps, the ethereal essence, wherein she has her truest life, will be found to have evaporated. A woman never overcomes these problems by any exercise of thought” (1, 165-166). Hawthorne here temporarily forgets his own downplaying of thought alone in order to essentialize the very woman he imagines as exemplifying a culture-changing early American woman. His hairs probably stood on end in his writing gown.
And this is a guy raised by and always surrounded by strong women. He would have been hard-pressed to find a “normal” Victorian woman amidst Ebe Hawthorne, Elizabeth Peabody, Sophia Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, or even Lidian Emerson. But “Hester Prynne’s story” scared him into those moments of judging—even as he imagined that story involving her becoming a woman-religious and guide to the community remembered for generations. Often, the solution to speed-wobbles is simply to speed up—even if you want to slow down, sometimes it helps to speed up first, then slowly back off. Victor Frankenstein could have, possibly, tried to comfort his creation once he got the past the horror of his own imagining. John Quincy Adams did argue for the abused survivors of the Amistad incident. William Blake etched the horrors of the plantations to move people to action.
Crash-porn to accustom people to the violence of cycling—to numb people, or worse, violence for violence’s sake to addict them (like Calvin Candie [Leonardo di Caprio] or Stephen [Samuel L. Jackson] in Django Unchained works to normalize pointless suffering and injustice as ok or cool or heroic.
Reality, of course, is not the same for everyone. “The material world . . . patched together out of our ideas” (Santayana 29) will also differ according to how we felt about those ideas and the people we learned them from and with. I woke up at 3:05 am: and after putting the phone down and closing my eyes, the black blobules that swallow the blue globs of light I envision . . . well, you probably wouldn’t narrativize those phenomena as eating each other. And when they morphed into a yellow-orangish blob, odds are it wouldn’t have signalled “Yellow Submarine” to you.
Not all of us have the diagnostic terms to tease out and layer the cognitive processing that we apply to felt and perceived phenomena. How we respond to what we’ve learned to see as horrific is, sadly, sometimes bound up in that world of unfree affect that keeps us from getting to “we all live on a yellow submarine.” But tracing everything to its right place could begin to be a start of re-attaching our sense of horror to the guys (ok, there’s a Madeleine or two) sitting in the offices providing those deliverables to death.
If you made it this far. THANKS! I quoted from Scarlet Letter, “Fall of the House of Usher” and George Santayana The Life of Reason.
I also want to plug Walter Coopet Dendy’s Philosophy of Mystery and Horace Binney Wallace’s Stanley. Dendy’s book is just plain weird: it’s a trialogue in “a shallop floating on the Wye” between “two fair girls reclining” and “a young and learned bachelor sittting at the helm” (1). They discuss, among MANY other things, “Fairy Mythology,” “Moral Causes of Dreaming,” and “Premature Interment—Resurrection".” Stanley is abysmally written, but well plotted. And Horace Binney Wallace was something.
ahem. something in the mysterious package calls out to hawthorne . . .