THE HORROR OF HUMANITY: SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUT UP...

24/5/2022

There is no doubt in my mind that the act of writing these stories was a significant part of the exorcism and healing process that allowed me to survive and transcend that condition. Without it, I am equally certain that I would not be here to analyse the phenomena now with the benefit of hindsight; a fact for which I am ineffably grateful.

It's an established cliché in psychological horror; the protagonist who dances on the jagged edge of sanity, haunted by phantom voices and hallucinations of their troubled pasts, their internal worlds, clutching at their temples, screwing their eyes shut, proclaiming to the voices in their heads (not to mention us, the audience): “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

Cliche though it might be, many of us who suffer with mental health conditions understand the fundamental truth it expresses: Speaking from my own experience, it's a rare day indeed some intrusive, unwelcome voice doesn't pipe up in my thoughts, reminding me of past shames and disgraces, embarrassments and less-than-ideal encounters. In my instance, those unwelcome echoes take various forms; as well as spectral voices -which are often so clear and intrusive, they have a habit of broaching on waking reality- to visual recreations (the nature of my imagination is such that it recreates visual experiences in explicit and obsessive detail). But voices -mine, others, those of creatures, characters and entities that don't even exist- are the most common manifestations.

As an adolescent and teenager, that aspect of my mind was thrown into overdrive by the hormonal imbalances of transition into adulthood, not to mention escalating awareness of a world that -then as now- seemed more and more insane to me the more of it I encountered and explored.

Those voices and visions had a habit of becoming most active at night, the moment I turned off the light to sleep. Night time, from the age of 11 up to around 25, was a consistent horror show; a sleepless parade of ruminations, distressing stories, absurd theatres; labyrinths of thought without end or solution. I distinctly recall experiencing a strange sense of disassociation during the era; attempting to argue or reason with my own mind as though it were a separate or possessing entity intent on driving me mad:

“Look, you know we need sleep, so why won't you shut up and let me?”

Sometimes, rarely, it would acquiesce. But, for the most part, it would continue to turn and whir unabated, as though it didn't even acknowledge me, carrying me into stranger depths and dimensions, down paths of thought where atrocity, absurdity, edenic conditions and hellish dystopias, all occurred at once, where no distinction existed between demons and angels, and reality was a kaleidoscopic nightmare, apt to shatter and rearrange in the next heartbeat.

The unendurable purgatory of those nights still haunts me to this day in the form of memories; unpleasant recollections of nights deeper, darker and longer than any I've ever endured since, that seemed to stretch into eternity while I twisted in my own skin, hosted arguments that for all the world seemed parasitic, as though ghosts and demons used my skull as a furious parliament.

That species of insomnia leaves you a frayed and spectral thing in waking life. Nerves unravel, thoughts become muddled and paranoid. Everything feels jagged and hostile. The day is too bright, the world too chaotic and noisy. And yet, at the same time, everything becomes distant: you grow disinterested, dislocated; a thing apart.

Which is precisely what happened to me.

Throughout that period, I wandered half-living, half-dreaming, a thing that didn't know itself and didn't know where it was or why. On rare but extreme occasions, sleeplessness, resultant anxiety and depression conspired to make the world a demon-haunted nightmare, a place where hideous things danced at the edges of perception, where phantoms whispered all the very worst of me and the world into my mind and every moment seethed with unspoken threat. Social engagements and interactions became nigh impossible, inducing panic attacks so extreme, they often had me quivering on the ground, struggling to breathe or see through the smeared, uncertain faces of those who gathered around. University, jobs, all became sources of profound dread, the fear of my own anxiety ironically feeding that very factor, the paranoia it induced becoming self-fulfilling prophecy.

Life was not good.

It was during the latter part of this period that I began to write seriously, establishing for myself patterns, habits and routines that would evolve and endure up to this day. The first pieces to come out of that process were undoubtedly expressions -conscious or otherwise- of my own condition; a form of self-therapy that was undoubtedly essential to my survival. Had I not had that outlet, that means of expression, then I dread to think of what might have occurred (especially given that suicidal ideation was a sincere by-product of the conditions I was experiencing. A particularly insidious sub-species of the internal ghosts made it their business to make oblivion seem not only welcome, but a reasonable and rational response to a world that could do nothing but disappoint). The stories I wrote -some of which eventually became the first I ever had published- became the vessels into which I poured whatever black, metaphysical waste swilled and boiled in the alembic of my skull. They allowed me to articulate what the phantoms manifested in voice and vision, but for others, outside of my diseased, hermetic Wonderland. I don't know to what degree that experience helped to facilitate my transition out of that despairing, insomniac phase and to what degree it was an expression of it, but the chattering, insect-hive sleeplessness that bedevilled me since childhood began to recede, a slow healing process occurring in its wake.

It has taken a long, long time, a great deal of therapy, self-care and meditation on my part to get to my present state of mind, where I feel more robust and whole than I ever have. Many of those old scars and fractures still exist, and flare up from time to time, but never to the same degree or with the same self-destructive power as they did back then.

The stories that came out of that period are, perhaps unsurprisingly, all explorations of despair, dissatisfaction and diseased states of mind. Every protagonist is damaged, dislocated, divorced from themselves and the world in some fundamental way (some to such extremes that they take pains to actively break and reinvent it). Some are more direct than others, some more deliberate (for the most part, I would say that the issues they broach are subconscious, not actively occurring to me until after the fact of their writing). Perhaps the most direct and deliberate of all is the short story Brain Food, originally published in 2013 by the then Dark Moon Books. Brain Food was originally my attempt to lampoon the standard “zombie story” by conflating the condition of zombie-ism with insomnia (part of the experience for me was that sense as of being the walking dead, shuffling, mindless, unfocussed and inarticulate, vaguely resembling humanity but in the most dishevelled, disgraceful way imaginable). However, the story swelled into a more sincere confessional than I initially hoped:

Here, the insomniac protagonist not only conflates his condition with that of the living dead, he begins to succumb to his paranoia, believing that his own brain is some alien parasite slowly driving him mad with its constant chatter. In the grizzly climax, he takes kitchen knives, screwdrivers and eventually a power-drill to his skull in an effort to extirpate the parasite. What certainly surprised me at the time of writing was the conclusion: far from expiring, he wakes in his newly liberated condition to find that he was right all along: the alien parasite that he'd been conditioned to call his own brain flops feebly on the ground, while he rises to a new condition in which he is sublimely connected to the world and all humanity via systems and circuits he'd heretofore been blinded to. Before setting out on his quest to emancipate the rest of humanity, he messily devours the parasite, ensuring it can never take hold of him again (“Braaaiiins. Brrraaaaaiiiinnsss!”).

Though I didn't realise it at the time, the story served as far more than a deep dive into whatever psychological issues I was experiencing: Though it certainly stands as one of the most direct confrontations of those issues, it also expands into concerns beyond the merely personal (a fact I did not realise until the story was published and others pointed it out to me). As with most of the stories comprised within Strange Playgrounds, there is a Utopianism born of the intense despair and extreme states of mind the story explores. The protagonist -as in many of the other stories- uses the innate disassociation of their condition to draw back from society, from culture and realise that they are insufficient to his needs, his wants, his visions of today and tomorrow, and thereby transforms himself, setting out to initiate a more profound and expansive renaissance that -the story implies- will change the very definition of humanity.

In this, the story acts as an unconscious confessional; consigning to paper the concerns and unspoken preoccupations that are part and parcel of who I am and that have never dimmed or died away. That fundamental dissatisfaction with the states and conditions we are born to, with the templates of identity and destiny that tradition proscribes, is a fundamental factor in determining the shape and nature of my own state of mind, not to mention the stories that spew from it. If there is anything I intend -conscious or otherwise- through my writing, it is to initiate transformation: to alter and unpick assumptions, to initiate cataclysms across the mental topographies of my readers (and myself, during the act of writing).

Brain Food, alongside most of my other published works, evinces, at its core, a profound dissatisfaction with the state of things, that may be insolulable, as it is not only a dissatisfaction with the traditions on which society is built, but also with the fundamental states of our humanity. Almost every character in every story of Strange Playgrounds experiences some shift away from that state, for better or worse, and, whilst those transitions are often traumatic, they are also potent and celebratory, suggesting states of being and operation beyond those the characters can no longer abide. The violent self-mutilation of Brain Food's protagonist is not merely a matter of prurience or a desire to shock with its graphic nature, but an expression of the traumas and agonies that are part and parcel of such transformations; when old assumptions of who we are and what we should be are cast off. All too often, it requires trauma or catastrophe of one kind or another to facilitate those transformations, to speed them on their ways. As I did shortly before the time of writing, the protagonist reaches a depth of despair, a state of extremis, that is unendurable, in which survival in the same state becomes untenable. In that, he also encapsulates the suicidal ideation that has been part and parcel of my psychology since around the age of 8 years old. All too often, the condition is insidiously reasonable, as it is here; part of its particular virulence is that it does not make itself feel necessarily extreme or unreasonable. If anything, it takes pains to ensure it is the perfect reflection of sanity and consideration; the only sane option in an insane world.

There is no doubt in my mind that the act of writing these stories was a significant part of the exorcism and healing process that allowed me to survive and transcend that condition. Without it, I am equally certain that I would not be here to analyse the phenomena now with the benefit of hindsight; a fact for which I am ineffably grateful.

Born in Blood: Volume Two
by George Daniel Lea
Part of: Born in Blood (2 books)

The second volume of George Daniel Lea’s Born in Blood, a collection of beautiful horror stories guaranteed to burn a hole in your heart.

SOMEWHERE BETWEEN HIGH HEAVEN AND LOW HELLBorn in blood . . . the first breath and all that follow, tainted by original trauma, echoing throughout every thought, every heartbeat; blossoming into more profound pain, until breath and thought both cease . . .
What we grow accustomed to . . . what we can endure:

The days bleed into one another, as we do; hurt defining every moment.

No more. Now, all instants are one; pulsing brilliant, ecstasy and agony, rendered down; experienced in a heartbeat.

Every shame. Every sorrow. Humanity, history. This is what we are; the God we gave birth to.

Better? Yes. Yes. Now, we all suffer the same; no more division; no privilege or powerlessness. We are the same; sexless, skinless, ex sanguine.

And we celebrate, content in our disgrace.