Storyturgy, the Second Installment

While we tech I’m going to post some of Caitlin’s magnificent dramaturgy for MOUSE. Enjoy !

Storyturgy 2 – Cosmic Horror and the Unopened Door.

1. So, ST#1 was fairy tales, beginnings:

Today we grapple with endings. The light snuffed out. Horror. Not any horror. This is not a ghost story. No vampires, werewolves, zombies (well…not literal). No science or technology run amuck. Only threat, facelessness, fate. Only what lies behind the closed door. It’s the horror that relies on an audience. It requires an observer, one whose imagination takes hints, sounds, shadows, and explodes them into something far worse than anything we could ever write, show, or perform.

It’s the fear we keep secret.

2. As I was going up the stair

I met a man who wasn’t there

He wasn’t there again today

Oh, how I wish he’d go away

3. I taught storytelling and literacy to K-3rd grade for a year. It’s an awful job. The good days I count on one hand. The best was one afternoon spent with the third graders and the above poem (Antigonish – Hughes Mearns, 1899). I wrote those four lines on the chalkboard and a room of eight year olds told me what they thought the meaning was, what the poem’s story was. Not a ghostly encounter, as one might assume from the surface. The third graders of Jordan Community School informed me that ‘the man who wasn’t there’ was the narrator’s shadow, his darker impulses. That’s the true horror. What we see in ourselves and never mention, hoping only that it will go away.

4. HP Lovecraft was nine when that poem was written. Who’s HP Lovecraft?

A New Englander, like Martyna, now, like Edgar Allen Poe, before him (his hero), like Shirley Jackson afterward.

His parents were mad.

He married a hatmaker from the Ukraine. She was sick and left him.

He was poor. He died young. A combination of malnutrition and stomach cancer (there was always a gnawing in him, like a rat, trapped).

He is arguably the most influential horror writer of the twentieth century.

Creeping, lurking, dreaming, screaming. Forbidden knowledge, non-human influences on humanity, inherited guilt, fate.

Without him there’s no Stephen King, no Hitchcock.

But first, Lovecraft had a hard-on for Poe. Poe’s stories usually ended with the monster revealed, a trick Lovecraft would upend. However, in Poe’s most famous poem, the monster is the narrator’s unaccountable fear, the shadow on his soul, not the titular bird.

“The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe http://www.eapoe.org/works/poems/ravena.htm

5. Lovecraft’s big contribution was the term and concept of “Cosmic Horror.” So, what’s that universe like?

There is no recognizable divine presence.

Humanity is unquestionably insignificant.

“The human race will disappear. Other races will appear and disappear in turn. The sky will become icy and void, pierced by the feeble light of half dead stars. Which will also disappear. Everything will disappear.”

The cause of terror is not the absence of meaning, it’s that our protagonists have absolutely no power to affect any change in the vast, indifferent, and ultimately incomprehensible universe that surrounds them.

The “big bad” (to borrow a phrase from ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer”) is rarely seen or shown. It’s worse than we can imagine, and it would drive us mad.

The universe is a black hole.

There is no light.

We are all in the basement, while foul, immense, unknowable gods swirl above us, beyond the door.

“The Street” by HP Lovecraft http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/thestreet.htm

6. And what of those who open the door to darkness, evil, omnipotence? Those who dabble with divinity? Those who willingly climb what Lovecraft called “the mountains of madness? The people who open the door?

They change.

Poor Daga.

“The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/thecaseofcharlesdexterward.htm

What if you discovered that the vast, indifferent, and ultimately incomprehensible universe rested in your brain? Your gnawing gut?

Poor Daga.

And another thing. Those people don’t just change. They join.

from “The Haunting of Hill House” by Shirley Jackson:

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

7. If you ask a child, most children, “What are you afraid of?” they will say “the dark.”

Him is faceless.

Fip did…something.

Daga cuts, is cut, in the dark.

We never see Zosia again.

Ma speaks a language that isn’t language.

The center does not hold.

Daga?

Boots, boots, boot. A brick and a bottle breaking. A thud. And silence. Fip and Ma watch the door. Red seeps in from under the door. Fip and Ma wait. And wait. And wait. Boots. And the shadow of a person. Ma reaches for Fip’s hand and they wait.

The door knob jerks.

This is a horror story. We all end together. In the dark.