Quiet, you'll wake the dead

das Unheimliche. Astounding, bizarre, creepy, devilish, extraordinary, fantastic, ghoulish, horrifying, incredible ... I could go on and on with the abc's of synonyms for this German word, but none really satisfactorily convey its "different shades of meaning." It is strange, familiarly unfamiliar, & frightening. Uncanny is the closest word to it in the English language.

Freud said "the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar." Waxwork figures, dolls, monsters, the re-animated dead, disembodied limbs, ghosts, dopplegängers, sideshow performers, haunted houses, seemingly non-random repetitions/coincidences (of numbers, dates, etc.), magic tricks, optical illusions, even epilepsy & mental illness, are all examples of things that can induce feelings of the uncanny.

However ambiguous the term may be, one almost always recognizes the uncanny when one sees it (or to be more accurate, feels it). This blog is dedicated to unearthing the uncanny in our contemporary world, where the laws of physics (especially Einstein's theory of relativity), Darwin's theories of evoloution, & probability theories in mathematics, have made it increasingly difficult to identify things that are truly uncanny.

To celebrate my first blog post, a poem. By a master of the uncanny, Edgar Allan Poe (who, uncannily enough, died Oct. 7th, the day I was born). Why? Because I love poetry. And because I love Poe.

Sonnet: To Science

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

1829

According to the young Poe (a budding Romantic if I ever saw one!), science removes the mysteries from the world, particularly for the poet. Science is a "vulture, whose wings are dull realities." I don't share Poe's sentiments about science. In fact, I think in opposite terms; science reveals the true mysteries (and beauty) of the world. What I do share with Poe is a certain kind of Romanticism--a good, old-fashioned gothic love for the macabre. For Poe, or the speaker at least, scientific knowledge occludes "the summer dream beneath the tamarind tree," which seems to me the equivalent of being unable to suspend disbelief during a horror movie. When the makeup is removed, when the sets & special effects are exposed, when the smoke and mirrors vanish, when the dream is revealed to be just that--a dream--we are left, like Poe's speaker, with a near inability to experience anything like the uncanny.

But it is possible.

What better example to begin with than a photo I took of my 'self' recently:

Is this me? A ghost? Or some malicious doppelgänger? What happens when the ghost in the photo turns out to be a simple trick of light or a slip of the hand? The truth is, despite knowing it is the result of an unsteady hand, I find this photo of myself quite frightening. It IS me, or rather a creepy, unpretty, ghostlike version of me. It makes me think of what I might look like dead. Of what it might feel like to be dead. That part of me would like to be dead. That I am already dead.

And that folks, is pretty damn uncanny!