The Here, the Now, and the Eternal

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Paintings and illustrations are, of course, visual modes, whereas fiction is a narrative form. A painting or an illustration may suggest a story, but fiction must tell a tale. In the process, it will suggest images, through description. However, in doing so, its purpose will be ever the same: to tell a story. Paintings and illustrations are under no such obligation; they may or may not tell a story, as their creators please. For visual artists, the picture is the point; for writers, pictures are means, not ends, and the end that they do serve is to contribute to the tale’s overall effect and theme.

In “The Premature Burial,” Edgar Allan Poe describes, from the point of view of one who has suffered the fate suggested by his story’s title, what it would feel like to be buried alive. In doing so, Poe puts his reader alongside his living corpse, as it were, heightening the horror and the terror of the protagonist’s situation. Before reading his story, one may have dimly understood the horror and the terror of such a situation, but Poe ensures that his reader shall comprehend, in full, the emotional and even the visceral significance of such a situation. The author makes the reader live, as it were, inside the coffin for much of the duration of his story.

The tale is horrific, and its great fear deepens as one returns to the tale when he or she has advanced in years and the story’s potential threat looms larger--or closer. The victim’s struggle inside the coffin seems to suggest the ordinary person’s fear that life may be ultimately without meaning or value, that eternity reduces a life lived in time to insignificance. (Art, as represented by “The Premature Burial” itself, it may be argued, transcends time and, thereby, may give value and significance to temporal human existence.)

A visual artist might depict the living corpse’s situation, as, for example, Buffy Summers’ having been buried alive is depicted in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in which, having died, she is brought back to life by a spell cast by her friend, the witch named Willow Rosenberg: the viewer sees Buffy’s somewhat skeletal remains take on flesh, as it were, as her corpse reverts to life, and her eyes, having reformed, snap wide in abject terror.

It’s a disturbing scene, to be sure, but it’s over almost as soon as it begins, Buffy’s reversion to life taking but a few seconds, and, thereafter, we only hear of her sustaining lacerations and bruises to her hands (and, presumably, a few broken nails) as she clawed her way out of her premature grave. In a couple of later episodes, Buffy performs in a mechanical fashion, merely going through the motions of living, before finally confiding to the vampire Spike that Willow’s spell had snatched her out of heaven, returning her to this world, which seems, by contrast to the bliss she’d experienced, rather like hell to her. Nice touches, but they are far removed from her plight as one who has been, as it were, buried alive. Poe keeps the pressure on his reader by focusing his entire story on the trauma that his story’s victim experiences as one who has been buried alive.

A story, as Aristotle taught us, long ago, is a sequence of causally-related incidents which comprise a single, unified action theoretically divisible into a beginning, a middle, and an end. It has a destination, in other words; having started somewhere, it goes somewhere, that it might, as it were, arrive somewhere. It moves (as do our eyes, from left to right, as we track the text down the page). A painting or an illustration may suggests a sort of narrative flow, but, of course, it is not going anywhere; it is, even if it does draw and move the eye, a static picture, a snapshot of life, eternally memorializing a moment rather than an experience.

The significance of the painting or the illustration is the moment which it captures in paint or ink. The significance, in fiction, is not in the momentary image, but in the relationships among a series of such images and the incidents which give rise to these images. It is as if the visual artist is saying, “Behold the moment; in it is the meaning of life,” whereas the author is proclaiming, “Behold the experience; in it, is the meaning of life.” One artist is seized by the particular moment; the other, by the relationships among a series of moments in which he or she discerns a cause-and effect or a logical sequence.

For the visual artist, meaning is fragmented and brief, here one moment, in this or that instance, and gone the next. Life is a transitory and temporal affair. For the literary artist, meaning is whole and long-lasting, if not permanent. Life is enduring and eternal. One artistic form is not necessarily better than the other, for painters and illustrators remind us that the here and the now are important, that much of life is lived in the instant, and that what happens today shall happen just this once and, therefore, should be appreciated and, where possible, enjoyed and prized, and writers remind us that it is important to understand relationships among the momentary and fleeting parade of sensations and perceptions, to interpret them together, whenever possible, and to take away from our experience an understanding that transcends the moment and can be recalled again, in some sense, independent of the moments themselves, out of which the understanding arose.

Visual art immerses us in the moment; narrative art lifts us above the present. To remain immersed forever in the present would cause one to tire of the assault of impressions upon his or her flooded senses, but to remain, as it were, on the dock, looking out to sea, would be never to bathe one’s soul in the refreshing ebb and flow of life and to be as much alive as one of the stationary planks or posts of which the pier is built.


In horror fiction, a series of seemingly unrelated incidents of a bizarre and horrific nature occur, and the protagonist seeks to understand the reason or the cause of these incidents. In other words, he or she seeks to fathom their meaning, their significance, their importance. When something--even something horrible--can be understood in such terms, it may remain horrible, but it also becomes consequential; its importance recognized, it becomes known and familiar, and it may also be understood to have some benefit, despite the pain and suffering it causes in the moment, in the here and now. An early narrative of such a theme is the story of Job, who learns, as a result of the horrific and undeserved suffering he undergoes, that “the just shall live by faith.”

But let’s have an example from the horror genre. In The Exorcist, the protagonist, Father Damien Karras, has come to doubt his faith because of the suffering that his dying mother endured before her death. Since, in Christianity, an unbeliever goes to hell after dying, the priest is in danger of losing his immortal soul. According to William Peter Blatty, the author of the novel, it is in the hope of bringing about the priest’s damnation that the demon possesses the soul of young Regan MacNeil.

In doing so, the demon sets up the occasion of the exorcism which involves Father Karras and so now has the opportunity to tempt the priest to renounce his faith by showing him the work of the devil, up close and personal, so to speak, as the demon torments the innocent girl whom it has possessed. Father Karras’ suffering now has meaning. It has importance beyond itself. It has value, for it has become the means by which, in the exercise of his own free will, he will retain or lose his faith and, thereby, his soul.

Other horror stories depict sets of circumstances or series of incidents which also find meaning and value by pointing beyond themselves, to the eternal realm of value, of reason, of faith, of beauty, and, in doing so, point the way to something like the possibility of Platonic forms or (less abstractly) the enduring value of life, or, for the religious reader, the reality of God. (“The just shall live by faith,” as both Job and Father Karras learn.) Along the way, such stories often also criticize many of the fallacies and idols, philosophical, theological, personal, cultural, and otherwise, that we hold in false esteem or false reverence.

The good life, horror fiction suggests, lies not in misery, madness, mayhem, suffering, and sin, but in the significance that such experiences may have beyond themselves, as stories, so to speak, that lead one from the temporal to the eternal. Without the hope of meaning within and beyond the moment, we would be mired only in sensual and perceptual experience; we would be lost among the phenomena of subjective experience, forever an image among images in a painting or a drawing of the here and now.

As Buffy’s Watcher, Rupert Giles, once quipped, concerning his protégé, “Buffy lives very much in the now.” Her philosophy, as Buffy herself tells Willow, is carpe diem, or seize the day--that is, live for the moment--because life is short. The series itself, however, rises above the discrete incidents of pain and suffering, of beauty and joy, that make up the protagonist’s day-to-day existence to show the series’ viewer that the meaning of life lies (as it is understood in the context of the series as a whole) in the acceptance of responsibility and the answer of the call of duty, even when doing so requires the sacrifice of oneself. Life may be short, but the consequences of one’s behavior can have lasting effects on others, including those generations which are yet to come.

Demons Old and New

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

In the old days, demons were personifications of destructive natural forces. Later, these evil external spirits became inner demons. After the cosmos filled up with demons, many of whom entered Christian thought, for example, as deposed gods and goddesses from other religions, theologians sought to classify and catalogue them, and the science, as it were, of demonology arose. Demons, some such cataloguers believed, formed a hierarchical social structure that essentially parodied that of the angelic order.

According to one such system--that of Sebastian Michaelis--there are three hierarchies. The highest, or first, hierarchy consists of Beelzebub (arrogance), Leviathan (heresy), Asmodai (lust), Berith (murder and blasphemy), Astaroth (laziness and vanity), Verrin (impatience), Gressil (impurity, uncleanness, and malice), and Sonneillon (hatred). The second tier is composed of Lilith (Adam’s first wife and a succubus) and Azazel, the angel of death. Three demons make up the third hierarchy: Belial (arrogance and adversity), Olivier (fierceness, greediness, and envy), and Jouvart (sexuality).

There are additional demonologies, including those of The Testament of Solomon, of Michael Psellus, of Alfonso de Spina, of Peter Binsfeld, of Francesco Maria Guazzo, of Francis Barrett, and others. Some give to their demons such worldly titles as great marshal, knight, president, great president, earl, great earl, duke, great duke, and the like, up to emperor. Those who do not warrant inclusion among the demonic nobility make up the peasantry, as it were, which divides into numerous legions. The ranking demons typically rule over one or more emotional or attitudinal element or elements.

Many demons come from pagan religions, but others are supplied by Jewish folklore, Gnosticism, and various mythologies. Most have specific adversaries against whom fight continuing cosmic battles.

Frequently, demons are depicted as monstrous entities, with eyes instead of nipples in their breasts, with bats’ wings on their backs, with mouths in their bellies, with horns growing from their skulls, and so forth. The imagination is free to run wild in its conception of these evil spirits, and artists give full vent to their most outrageous fancies in giving form to these demonic beings, as the following gallery suggests.

Aamon

Astaroth

Baal

Baphomet

Beelzebub

Buer

Dagon

Incubus

Lilith

Moloch

Satan

Times have changed since the ancient and medieval demonologies were compiled, and the demonic has gained new forms to supplement the largely bestial and insect shapes that demons previously often took. Many of these new forms are hybrids of men (or women) and machines, reflecting the dehumanization of today’s people in terms not so much bestial as mechanical. To be demonic is seen, increasingly, as not so much a matter of being animalistic as it is of being artificial. The demonic is the perfunctory and the robotic, the mechanized and the programmed, the automatic rather than the autonomous. Painters such as biomechanical artists H. R. Giger, fantasy artists such as Frank Frazetta and Julie Bell, and filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg and Joss Whedon depict the contemporary demon, just as, in previous terms, such artists as Hieronymus Bosch, Gustave Dore, and others depicted the demon as he, she, and it was understood in their days.

Birth Machine by H. R. Giger

Whether insect-like, animalistic, or mechanical, the demon always depicts the worst aspects of the human personality, for it is the demonic which leads human beings downward, toward the carnal and the sensual or the otherwise blasphemous and idolatrous, and only God can lead them upward, toward self-transcendence and the sacred realm of the transpersonal divine. No doubt, as something replaces the machine, the mechanical demon will be joined by new expressions of evil.

Jar Jar Binks

Perhaps, as with the demon Moloch the Corruptor, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s “I Robot, You Jane,” the latest transformation is already underway, for, in this episode’s contribution to demonic lore, before the demon appears as a robot, it is simply a spirit that escapes from a book as it is scanned into a computer’s memory, whereupon it gains unfettered access to cyberspace. The electronic demon, it seems, has already arrived. In this episode of Buffy, it symbolizes the dangers to teens of Internet chat rooms.

New demons should represent new threats, not old, for, otherwise, what need have we of new ones? The mechanical--and biomechanical--as well as the electronic demons that have begun to emerge from artists’ exercise of their imaginations seem to represent such menaces as the dehumanizing effects of rampant industrialism and the near-omnipresence of surveillance and control mechanisms that the Internet provides or seems to provide the government, the depraved, the faceless stalker, and other menaces especially representative of our time and day.

Note: All illustrations are from Wikipedia, which takes most of them from Creative Commons.

Imagining Hell

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

The Christian Hell is named for the Norse goddess who ruled the Aesir’s underworld, Hel. The ancient Israelites did not have a hell in the sense that their underworld, Sheol, was a place of eternal punishment. Sheol was much more like the ancient Greeks’ Hades or, for that matter, the Norsemen’s Hel, a place of shadowy existence wherein ghostly “shades” went about the business of postmortem existence. Dante imagined his own hell, in The Inferno, and, for the atheistic French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, hell was “other people.” Perhaps the closest place to hell in the modern world is prison--or, possibly, Detroit, Michigan. (Michael Moore would have us think hell on earth is neighboring Flint.)

Hell is the garbage dump of eternity. It’s a cosmic prison. It’s the place of “wailing” and the “gnashing of teeth,” wherein the “fire is not quenched” and the “worm dieth not.” It’s the place that Mark Twain would go for “company,” preferring heaven for its “scenery.” For some, hell is a state of mind or a state of the soul, the opposite of the “kingdom of heaven,” which Jesus said “is within you.”

If anyone should be able to imagine hell, it is the writer of horror fiction. How to begin such a--well, hellish--task? Picture the condemned, which is to say, the types of individuals whose lifestyles or behaviors seem to warrant condemnation, banishment, and/or punishment, not just for a day, but for all eternity. Characterize them. What are the attributes of their personalities? What attitudes do they express? What do they believe? What do they imagine? What do they fear? What hopes, if any, do they have? What do they love, better than God or mankind--in other words, what idol do they worship? What is their besetting sin, and what lesser, but related, sins are associated with it, and why? What do they do all day?

Having imagined the denizens of your hell, picture the lay of the land, or “scenery,” that would be appropriate for such residents. Are there mountains and valleys, molten seas, volcanoes in endless eruption, frozen wastelands, deserts, underworlds within--or below--underworlds? Is your hell multileveled like Dante’s Inferno? Perhaps your hell is unlike anything familiar to mortal men and women, something like, but unlike, the mystical worlds of Marvel Comics’ Dr. Strange?

When you’ve finished peopling and landscaping your inferno, ask yourself what symbolic significance the landscape’s features have. In doing so, you might ask yourself what the images of the Christian hell represent figuratively. What is the symbolic significance of the “fire [that] is not quenched” and the “worm [that] dieth not”? Apply the same process of analysis and interpretation to the images of your own hell.

Remember this, too: now that you’ve gone to all the time and trouble of imagining a hell of your own, your stories may sometimes take place in this infernal abode, or its residents may occasionally escape and visit the world of humanity. Angels, by definition, are, after all, messengers of God, and, in the Bible, even “fallen angels,“ or demons, do sometimes visit--and afflict--ordinary men and women and, if The Exorcist is any guide to infernal behavior, children, too. Their chief, Satan, had the audacity to tempt even Christ! What “message” might one of your accursed bring to one or more of your story’s characters?

In another application of your hell, the residents may be seen as “inner,” rather than as outer demons--as psychological defects and disorders, or diseased elements of the soul, with lives of their own, so to speak, along the lines of BTK’s “Factor X” or Ted Bundy’s “entity.” Of course, they may also be both inner and outer demons, as any particular story’s plot dictates. By imagining a hell of your own, you will be more apt to put your own spin on the action you narrate, making an original contribution, perhaps, to the iconography of the damned and offer a few new insights into the hellish behavior of the demonic soul.

For those who are interested in more information about hell, “Hell in the Old Testament” offers quite a bit.

Green Graves

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

The greening of America promises to alter the appearance of future cemeteries. Tomorrow’s burial grounds won’t be anything like the ones which feature the crypts and graves that were popular in many of yesterday’s horror books and films, nor will they look much like the park-like cemeteries, with their flat headstones, which, in recent years, have replaced the more traditional necropolises. Instead, they will look much like young forests. Footpaths will lead through stands of trees, and the markers of those who are buried therein will be set among vegetation indigenous to the region.

Here is the cemetery of tomorrow, as described by Earth Artist Cemetery and Planning’s website:

One of the most dramatic changes in cemetery design is the growing trend of “Green Burial.” These modern cemeteries use native plants over the grave, with footpaths connecting memorial structures located within the emerging forest. Green Burial Grounds help establish and protect natural habitat while providing a spiritually fulfilling burial ritual.

Likewise, the markers will undergo, if not a sea change, a significant transformation as well, according to the same site:

Small intimate memorial areas located throughout the developing forest facilitate outdoor funeral ceremonies and provide a quiet respectful place to visit.

Based upon the photographs and illustrations that accompany these articles, the headstone of the future will resemble wall plaques in which the decedent’s name and the dates of his or her birth and death are carved, in rustic letters befitting the “emergent forest” in which he or she is to find eternal repose, and decorated with acorns, vines, and other images appropriate to the natural, woodland surroundings.

Horror writers need to keep up with such changes. A reader’s willing suspension of disbelief can stretch only so far, after all, and a writer who persists, too long into the green revolution, in depicting the types of graveyards in which there are—well, graves—and tombs—is one who will be called, if the reader is feeling charitable, “old-fashioned” or, if the reader is not, simply out of touch.

Meanwhile, perhaps the makers of markers can create, for the cremated, receptacles which resemble benches rather than urns, that they may be placed at intervals along the footpath that leads through the “emerging forest” that the cemetery has become, as all that walking through the woods and searching among the underbrush for the final resting place of one’s dearly departed could be rather tiring after a mile or two.

They also better start thinking about how they can make such cemeteries seem scary, both on film and on the page. It seems unlikely that a little artificial fog and spooky music will be enough, not when, at any moment, Bambi or Thumper might step out from behind a majestic oak or pine to graze upon the “native plants over the grave” of one’s Aunty Em or Uncle Henry.