Anselm Hook’s Blog

I’m so looking forward to seeing ‘Where The Wild Things Are’ - a movie adaptation of a well known children’s book.

It sounds obvious and blithe but the protagonist, a kid, has a comfort with otherwise big scary monsters.  Yes I’m a sucker for a good metaphor and this marketing campaign is appealing - it suggests we could dress up our monsters in pony tails and tie ribbons in their hair. There’s a quality of reckless letting go that is so appealing.  It isn’t necessarily the escape from the everyday, from ritual, from obligation, from structure - but rather the embracing of something unnameable, and personal.  It’s something we all do every day and calling it out is endearing.

Recently I’ve been helping Paige with her thesis paper. In it she talks about the space of intimacy, how our social fabric is built like fine spiderweb out of strands of trust. In a sense we have this intimacy with people we trust, we let them closer to us than we would otherwise. I find this even with my neighbors. I trust them when my child is at their house. I trust them to not steal my stuff. In her work she notes that since humans are so very creative, and such makers, that we tend to externalize our relationships with each other perhaps more so than other beasts. We don’t just leave marks on trees, or make howling sounds, but we also make gifts of extraordinary complexity, gifts that remain with friends and act as agents of our will in a sense, being perpetual ambassadors of our feelings at the time, a constant reminder, almost as if the gift itself was the spontaneous child of emotion.

At a talk last night from 7pm: Mark Lakeman of City Repair and Communitecture at SeaGallery Mark talked about how kids in a tribe he visited put their feet in a circle during class to discuss the idea of a circle. It was a gesture that evidenced an intimacy, evidenced a pattern of solidarity. Something best if shared. An interesting way to play with the idea of how nature has hit on a certain utility at the very least. There’s an idea about an inside and an outside - what is known - what is not known - what the web of trust is.

There’s a whole awareness of the space of intimacy, of knowing what is safe and what is potentially a risk that I’ve almost in a sense just suddenly become aware of. Yes I’ve always understood; but I haven’t really respected - the idea of knowing who to trust, why to trust, who is near, what shared risks we are protecting against.  Maybe we live in communities that are insulated from risk.

Certainly one of my biggest monsters is automobiles - I find them scary - I fear for my children and children around me. I am scared of guns - I don’t like having them around - I’m not used to them - and they seem to be a cowards weapon. To a smaller degree strangers might be scary somewhat but I haven’t had much problem with that; but for my small child of course I worry and I keep a constant eye on him.  These are fears that can make one dysfunctional, and a community is needed to help spread the load; otherwise one would spend all of one’s time watching ones child instead of actually being functional. Oddly I fear the backwoods much less; I am less afraid of bears and cliffs and ice bridges than I am of some of the aspects of urban civilization. Probably fear is healthy - we probably need to be exposed to it to be inoculated against risks.

I’ve also recently become more aware of how brands and marketers try to walk our delicate networks with their heavy messages.  I see them trying to project themselves as one of us, as trying to be intimate, sentimental, to make the small enough noise and message that it can drift across our networks.

All of this makes me more self conscious; more aware of the reasonable level of expectation I can have of people around me, what I can ask for, what I can do. How to use the social space in appropriate ways.

Recently we had a project called ‘iraqdeaths’ where we logged the names of people who had been killed in Iraq. We stopped this project because a lot of haters joined the list - they relished hearing about the deaths. But it was disappointing to have to stop the service because at least here the monsters were named - we could see the names of the haters. I strongly prefer to see my monsters rather than fear the unknown - in fact I think if we are trying to understand people, this very point is a huge dividing line between kinds of people. The problem here however was that we were not just naming monsters we may have been fueling them. It is the perpetual question of sunshine versus darkness. Monsters grow in darkness. We’ve always feared that they might even walk in light. The whole of christianity and catholicism in particular has evidenced this tension. And to some degree we suffer as a result of that even with our current prohibitions.  But this isn’t so much about these big monsters as it is about the simple smaller things in our lives that cause us to be reactive rather than anticipatory, that cause us to stray from the unique diversity of where our life course wants us to go.

Our quests make us epic. Perhaps that is part of what I like about the small stories of small lives. The struggle versus a very strange and very bizarre world.

What monsters are there in your lives? What things are you afraid of? How can those monsters be made to face the light of day - what closet doors can you open - and what things can you remove from being afraid of?

Tags: joy, monsters, philosophy, scary, thoughts