|
{defining fear through negation} darren thomas Darren Thomas darrenjamesthomas1@gmail.com There are fates worse than death. Living for forever, for example. What’s so bad about living for forever? You were already planning on it. Your whole mythology is centered around the idea. You’ve got one foot out the door to eternity. Eternity is worse than death, but only as long as the death is not equal to or greater in suffering than burning alive. Being eaten alive by nonagenarians strikes me as another alternative for which I would gladly live forever. But these are just novel ideas, philosophical hypotheticals that bear no semblance of my decisions in reality. I would only be able to hold out a few thousand years to avoid these paragons of ultimate suffering, and then I’d give in to them, eventually. Everyone thinks they know about fear. Fear of spiders, mice, heights, human contact, open spaces, commitment. That is not fear; that is a cliché anxiety you inherited from your mother that could easily be broken with two weeks of intensive therapy or a weekend retreat with a guru, Bergstein perhaps, who wrote Release Your Fears, Recapture Your Life, and The Fear Factor. Dr. Bergstein would have you write about your fear, confront your fear, take control of your fear. You would spend twenty minutes building up the nerve to touch your finger to surprisingly slime-free reptilian skin, and then you would embrace your loved ones. Did you see me back there? I’m not afraid anymore. I have a paralyzing fear of having children. And I will be the first to admit that my fear of children is no more legitimate than your fear of clowns. And while you were never actually molested by a clown, and it actually started out more as a fashion, you’ve somehow traumatized yourself with enough clown violence that the time that clown made you a balloon animal shaped like a giraffe, you puked a sickly mixture of funnel cakes and cotton candy all over his fat, ugly clown shoes, though it may also be fair to mention you’d just spent your whole week’s allowance bullying that ride called “The Spider.” My fear was not self-inflicted. I actually was molested by children. The thought of having my own, something I did once, makes me desperate. No, none of this is fear. I have only actually experienced fear on one occasion, the only way one can. I sat on the beach at night. It is important that there are no city lights. There must be nothing but inky blackness. It helps if there is no moon. I recommend a cloudy night; wind will enhance your experience. Seek out the utter blackness that is only offered by the oily curtain of night when it falls upon the shroud of the midnight sea. Even you will disappear into that blackness. This is a void that growls, that snarls with whitecaps that snap shut with the force of an iron jaw. This is the infinite, the outer darkness. There is a reason that it is impossible to duplicate these conditions in a blinding white. Think licking flames, think pikes sharpened at both ends, think nonagenarians ravaged by malnutrition. |
