Monsters

It sits in the folder with the rest of my folders, reproachful, unmindful and indifferent. It’s a collection of pages called “blog.” That’s it – the name of the file and the title of my reproof. But without Georg Sand’s habits of a “nightly regurgitation of 10 pages” or Jack London’s self-imposed 10, 000 words, I just haven’t dropped any ideas or impressions here in a long time. I’m not really sorry – it was a bad time to write to a public, any public. Between my mother’s illness and my fatigue and scrappiness, I was bound to hurt, inflame or sound like I was casting about for pity; none of which I wanted.
Connor, at 15 months is delightful. He mostly sleeps through the night unless that magical mysterious something that makes him cough at 3am kicks in and wakes him. He’s tall and gangly, with a sweet face and those big blue eyes. And he’s a sweet boy, a hugger of other children and a reacher for all pretty ladies. He’s also in great health and spirits, a light in a sometimes tragic world. He’s also getting a sense of humor, making funny faces and blowing raspberries because it amuses him.
So the New Yorker ran an article about some dude who wrote about the “problem of evil” as a problem of faith for him in light of the recent tragedies in Asia. Between the Cyclone in Burma and the earthquake in China, we have much to wonder about. Why would a beneficent God allow for such evil, dude ponders. I think about the horror that each mother and child, each lover who has lost somebody is facing and then multiply that by a body count times two and I start to wonder myself. What nature of a God is it that allows this. But I am too distracted by my own little drama to ponder much. I have a husband I love, a beautiful son and a mother whose health is slowly dribbling away like water poured on our wooden deck. I am currently distracted by what I have and what I’m losing. The rest of the world will have to wait.
I’m teaching a class called “Monster’s Ink” at my school. It’s being wildly successful and the students are really enjoying it. Mostly we’re looking at monsters of all sorts, including those who are actually helpful to human kind (the centaurs, the phoenix, the dragon (yes some are helpful rather than a menace why, we’re looking into) and others that aren’t (the hydra, the Cerberus, the mummy (though the first, Jane Loudon version was). So I’m finding after catching something about The Adromeda Strain that I hadn’t made room for disease, though we will probably talk about it when we hit 28 Days Later as an extension of our Zombie talk. Infectious Disease is indeed monstrous, but what about Cancer? It turns the body on itself and begins almost eating the organs. Our Xenomorphs in Aliens did something of the same, but rarely does horror fiction or monster fiction really depict this well. You need an external figure, like a vampire, to note a body that’s at war with itself, changing painfully into something else. Stephen King’s Dreamcatcher did something with an alien life that covered you with spores one of which grew into an ass-chewing larvae. That’s about as close as cancer comes to a depiction in the monstrous. It’s just too new, too quiet and takes too long to kill to have a good metaophor in our monstrous.
And in the midst of this sits my own little cupid, blowing kisses and uniting lovers, like Aphrodite’s Eros. Me, I’m just the sybil, fated to live too long and have to tell what happens next. A little knowledge may be a dangerous thing, but more isn’t necessarily better. It sometimes just gives you better names for the monsters that hide in your dark.