John Henry Fuseli, detail of "The Nightmare" (1781)
"What can be more appalling than the thought that there is a being in human shape stealthily moving about a great city, burning with the thirst for human blood, and endowed with such diabolical astuteness, as to enable him to gratify his fiendish lust with absolute impunity?"
The past is a very strange quantity. Most of my memories of it are somewhat diluted, like mid-morning coffee. Thinking about them is like thinking about somebody else's dream, as it was told to you a while ago. But some points in the past remain as sharp as a diamond, crystalline, impervious to the normal dulling effects of time. When the dog tried and failed to swim in a riverbed, watching the snow fall when you were seven, the first time you saw a tire changed. You might remember all of these things, down to minute details — that a lawnmower could be heard, that you were eating a Flintstones Push-Pop, etcetera. But you cannot fix a date to any of these memories. You cannot place almost any of these moments between those preceding and following with any certainty.
The exception, for me, is Halloween.
I do not remember most Christmas mornings or Thanksgiving dinners with much clarity. I think I can remember almost every Halloween, and, tracing the concatenations, I can remember my younger self, at the exact time, place and date I felt most happy. John Dolan
once wrote, "The last time I'd been allowed to dress the way I actually wanted was Halloween at age ten." Some vestigial survival instinct within me agrees, my brain having the foresight to safely store those wonderful memories — a be-furred junior werewolf howling at the moon and scratching at the neighbor's tree, a snaggle-toothed Phantom of the Opera brawling with the neighborhood bully — for lean years. Like this one.
Survival instinct; there's something in those stories we read on Halloween. Rustic gloaming, dark castles, howling beasts — these aren't trifles. Why, for example, did the legend of vampires independently gestate in multiple, distinct cultures for a few centuries, before ravishing Europe at the height of modernity? I'll tell you why — because psychopaths and thieves are a human fact of life, and always will be. The good peasants of 16th century Transylvania didn't have a helpful behavioral psychologist to explain to them why Vlad, the serf two doors down, was a serial rapist and murderer. So they crafted a mythology to make some sense of the inexplicable. The Victorian prigs getting hot under the collar reading Bram Stoker recognized, in this resurrected myth, the reflection of their own criminalized sexuality. And today, in America, with its snarfing down of whatever latest dewy-eyed "Twilight" schlock is on offer, we see exposed the incredible loneliness and thirst for romance that is endemic in the richest country in the history of the planet.
Oh, things happened this week, more lives were lost, more countries totaled. I can read about them in any paper or on any website. And that is what horror stories and spooky tales are for; they can, in the words of one critic, "transform an unbearable reality into a kind of thick black dream."
I prefer the dream.
General Gandhi
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