The Other, Ourselves

At a certain point in history, after the first creature had crawled out of the ocean but before the creation of the iPhone, a tribe of our ancestors sat gathered around a fire. They stared into the flickering light and the shadows it cast and gave those shadows names and form; they named the darkness “Other,” for the night was cold and full of danger. Though the Other was the enemy, it was also their child, for it had come out from their dreams and nightmares. It was a dark Athena birthed from the primal fears of humanity. Our fathers then stared at the stars and spoke of the gods who lived above, of how those gods protected them from the Other and were Other themselves. The story had begun, and continues to this day. The dreams of our ancestors were great and terrible. Their stories are our stories, and the “Other” has always been our child.

Why does this image disquiet us? What about how it appears makes us classify it as Other? To many, images like this are the stuff of dreams and nightmares,  birthed when asleep.  It is the shadow that looks like a man, the trick of the light, the dread without reason. It is the Monster, the Lamia, Satan, and Death. Yet, where does this Other come from?

The artist H.R. Giger who created this work is certainly a man, a mere human. If a man created a work such as this, then in a sense what is seen in the painting has lived within the man and within us, from thoughts, from our minds and dreams. So can it truly be Other, when its life cycle begins and ends within ourselves?  It is a peculiar thing that we call dreams our own.  For though dreams take place within our minds, we are but passengers.  

“There is no phenomenon in nature less understood, and about which greater nonsense is written than dreaming. It is a strange thing. For my part I do not understand it, nor have I any desire to do so; and I firmly believe that no philosopher that ever wrote knows a particle more about it than I do, however elaborate and subtle the theories he may advance concerning it.”      -James Hogg

In Hogg’s Expedition to Hell, what began as an exploration of dreams becomes a tale of the inability to escape those dreams. What began within the mind consumes the man himself. This fear goes far beyond simple horror and echoes the universal fear of the loss of sanity, and so we label the insane Other. Their behavior seems foreign and frightens us, but we also recognize that, in our dreams if nowhere else, we see a kernel of that selfsame insanity. For either we admit that the monsters live within man, or else face the even darker possibility that they exist outside of man.  Though we might wish to draw a line between those given to madness and ourselves, it is a line drawn in sand on a windy day. We know this truth because of our dreams. Dreams are not rational. Dreams are not within our control, and Hogg expresses our fear that our dreams will spill into our waking life and consume us. If insanity was fully Other, then we would have no need to fear insanity. 

It is a fear that we seek to push from ourselves, this curious phenomena, of “hallucinations of supernatural beings such as ghosts, gods, angels, and aliens are perceived as real entities; out of body and near death experiences are processed as external events” (Shermer 129).  Within us, yet foreign to our senses, the Other is given voice by writers and madmen, and so we shackle the Other with form and story. We attempt to tame it through naming. We call it a ghost, or a spirit, or a vision, or a faerie. We seek to limit the creations of our mind by shaping them with our words.

“And all that winter, when at night
The wind blew from the mountain-peak,
’Twas worth your while, though in the dark,
The churchyard path to seek:
For many a time and oft were heard
Cries coming from the mountain head:
Some plainly living voices were;
And others, I’ve heard many swear,
Were voices of the dead:
I cannot think, whate’er they say,
They had to do with Martha Ray.

What do these words tell us? The Thorn describes an encounter with the Other, and how we endeavor to constrain it. Noises heard on a mountain. Sounds that seek to speak with human voice. There is the compulsion to give these whispers form. Thus a story is told, and Martha Ray’s tragedy becomes the face we give the Other.

We as a species are given to pattern recognition.  This phenomena defines us. It is hardwired into us. As Oxford Professor Brian Ripley says, “It is something which we humans are particularly good at; we receive data from our senses and are often able, immediately and without conscious effort, to identify the source of the data” (Ripley, 1). 

Look closely at this picture. What do you see? Can you see the face of God? A dragon? If I were to say that there is a monster in this image, could you see it?

The reason our proclivity for pattern recognition exists is that the consequences of missing a pattern are normally much more serious than falsely seeing one. Failing to see a threat, for instance, is more serious than seeing a threat that is not there. This has helped us as a species survive, but it also is an intrinsic part of our connection to the Other. We look at a hill, and we don’t see just moss, a thorn, a pond, a rock. We see these things and create myth and legend and horror because we cannot help but see patterns.  But what of the stars? Our dreams bring more than madness. They bring inspiration. Just as the Other is seen in the darkest shadow, so it is seen in the brightest star.

The shadow of the dome of pleasure

Floated midway on the waves;

Where was heard the mingled measure

From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,

A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

-Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

We spoke in class about the nature of Kubla Khan, and the consequences of it being an unfinished poem. The fact that it came to Coleridge in a dream shows the power of the human imagination. Coleridge dreams of something grander than himself. His dream connects him to the Universe, the birthing “sunless seas” and “caves of ice.”  It is the curious nature of dreams, that they can foster both longing and terror within the waking mind. We can be haunted by visions of heaven, and thoughts of hell.

The Other is our child, born of our dreams and given form through pattern recognition and our stories. We call it the supernatural; we name it vampire, ghost, demon, and devil.  Some would seek to tame this aspect of ourselves, to impose the gift of rationality on our capacity for imagination. But the Other resists attempts at being shackled. The romantic age saw the dawning of the “rational” age. Science sought to replace superstition. Natural phenomena replaced the fae, as we named the very air, and called it Oxygen.  However, this was not the end of monsters. Rather, it was the birth of new ones. We may call the dreams of our past “fantasy,” but the dreams of our future are “science-fiction.” And the shadow is given a terrible new form. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein we see that the Other can be given shape through science, and become doubly our child in the form of the Monster.  What drove the creation of the Monster?

It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn; and whether it was the outward substance of things or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of man that occupied me, still my inquiries were directed to the metaphysical, or in its highest sense, the physical secrets of the world.”

-Mary Shelley Frankenstein

Science can fuel the Other just as well as superstition has. Mary Shelley has written an Other wherein the science that “liberated” mankind from superstition becomes itself the method by which the Other is given life. But this Other is more than the Monster. Indeed, it is Victor Frankenstein himself. The insanity of dreams infects his waking world as he pushes science into the realm of Other-ness and makes of it monstrous things. The Other, born within ourselves, adapts itself to its surroundings. We fear science pushed to a point that lies past our comprehension, just as once we feared the night. We create artificial light to banish the darkness and its Other, not realizing that rather than dispelling it, we have driven it farther within ourselves. Though it is the Monster which says, “It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another,” his words apply to us all.  As author Neil Gaiman commented, “Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds... Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe” (Gaiman).

And so, the Other is inside each of us, both terrible and beautiful. Sometimes our thoughts soar to heaven, or lead us in an expedition of hell. The Other causes us to cut ourselves off from the world either because we fear the Other we can see in it, or we feel the Other in ourselves is what separates us. Yet the Other also unites us. Sometimes we are the mob; sometimes we are mad scientists; sometimes we are angels; sometimes we are devils. But the Other is always, has always been, ourselves. 

“Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.”

― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 3: Dream Country

Bibliography

Gaiman, Neil, Shawn McManus, Todd Klein, Danny Vozzo, Dave McKean, and Samuel R. Delany. The Sandman: A Game of You. New York, NY: DC Comics, 1993. Print.

Ripley, Brian D. Pattern Recognition and Neural Networks. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Print.

Shermer, Michael. The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies--how We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths. New York: Times, 2011. Print.