A chink of light in the darkness
ON HALLOWEEN, WE SUMMON THE DARK SIDE AND TELL EACH OTHER GHOST STORIES. THEY MAY CHILL THE BLOOD, BUT SUCH TALES TAP INTO OUR COLLECTIVE ANXIETIES AND HELP US TO CONFRONT OUR DEEPEST FEARS. IT WAS EVER THUS,
THE nearest most of us come to horror or terror is in our nightmares. That may not be as comforting as it sounds. In real situations of extreme danger, people often react with surprising calm and self-possession, as if our systems are wired to close down imagination and focus on doing something useful. But in nightmares we are exposed to the experience of horror in its essence, and it comes at us full-force – out of the dark.
Of course, people’s nightmares are different, tailor-made to our own sensibilities. For some, it is the cold terror of pursuit by a remorseless force; for some it is confinement or entrapment; and for others, a haunting of malign, unspeakable evil. Recent events show that clowns can be the embodiment of malignant fear.
Often, the cold sweats are produced by a more low-level distortion of everyday life – the unprepared-for exam, the disastrous interview, humiliation on social media, or the sudden death of a loved one leaving our life in ruins. Sometimes we are lost in these dreams, unable to grasp what is happening or find a way through – the kind of inexplicable loss of control that incipient dementia must bring to sufferers.
I was reminded how fertile our dark inventions can be when reading almost 300 entries for this year’s Scottish Storytelling Festival’s ghost story competition. This was inspired by a similar contest 200 years ago, on the shore of Lake Geneva, when in the grip of a storm, Mary Shelley trumped Byron and her poet husband by birthing the tale of Frankenstein. That story is one of the few modern inventions that achieved mythic status, reflected in countless adaptations and retellings.
I am not sure that this new competition has unearthed another Frankenstein, but it certainly reveals a wide range of takes on ghostly terror. There are horrors aplenty reflecting all the tropes of pursuit, confinement and extreme violence. There are also many clever variations of nastiness, including new ways in which digital technology allows us to be intimately vindictive at a safe distance – as if being able to be “a ghost in the machine” brings out a previously unexplored darkness in human nature.
Yet, granting all that, many of the ghost tales are about hauntings which are not malign or demonic. They are stories in which some kind of spiritual connection persists between the living and the dead. This may be expressed through a place or an object, and it is often consoling or informing, allowing us to understand something that was previously mysterious and troubling. In this way the ghost tale goes into a different dimension that is not dark but illuminating.
Also there is a surprising amount of humour in ghost stories. The narrators set us up for the dark
shadows but then pull the rug from under us to comic effect. Traditional storytellers, such as the Scottish traveller Stanley Robertson, were particularly fond of this device. In live storytelling, a look or tone of voice can achieve subtler yet more immediate effects than words on a page.
Traditional stories from the world over associate the power of dream or fantasy with both dark and light. A typical South American tale from the Orinoco river delta describes how a chief’s daughter woos “the keeper of the light box” in order to bring light to her people. At that time everyone lived in darkness, depending only on firelight.
The chief’s daughter is successful, bringing back the “itiriti”, the rush-woven light box. However possession of this gift brings endless and innumerable visitors to the Warao people. They want both the light by day and the dreams that the box confers by night. So her father takes the light box and hurls it into the sky, creating both the sun and the moon, through which everyone can experience daylight, and the magical half-light of night dreaming.
Because of the international reach of the Scottish Government’s Festival Expo programme, many South American storytellers are coming to this year’s Scottish Storytelling Festival to work with storytellers here, so reflecting a continent rich in imaginative dreaming.
They reveal that the power of dreams is twoedged, bringing a capacity to imagine and invent, but also a dark dread. Yet can we have one without the other? And is that why many desire to venture into the darkness?
That urge is especially strong in science fiction. “Into the dark” features in innumerable film and book titles, because the journey or adventure requires an extreme challenge. That involves going out into uncharted immensities of space where the distant light of stars offers the allure of vision, dream, discovery and renewal. Meanwhile the dark is full of phantom emanations of dread or danger, which must be faced and defeated.
Of course, this is a variation of the hero’s journey beloved of the traditional storytellers. The journey in their case may be down into the black depths of earth, or into the dark recesses of the forest, or out into the inky universe. But the mission is the same – to meet some challenge or enemy or mystery, and to return with a vital gift or discovery. But that enlightenment cannot be gained without the descent into darkness. The two belong together, as in the power of dreams.