Discuss: The Great God Pan

Content Warning:  Wacky Fictionalization of Mental Illness.
I recently had occasion to read a short story from the late 19th century, which has an air of legend among horror heads.  Stephen King called it, “one of the best horror stories ever written.  Maybe the best in the English language.”  The Great God Pan, by Arthur Machen, is about a scary lady with connection to Something Man Was Not Meant to Know.  It leans heavily on implication and suffers a bit for having been written serially, but is still an interesting read.  I didn’t find this thing for myself.  As usual, it was my husband that brought it to my attention.
Beast from Seattle, where did you find out about this story?
drawing of the Beast from Seattle, a blue devilBfS:  I’m not sure which story we had been reading before, but I found it in the wikipedia page as being similar, a way I’ve found a lot of great stories.  Thanks wiki editors!
GAS:  That is pretty cool of them. What initially intrigued you about it?
BfS:  The concept was interesting, and the superlatives by folks like Steve up there were enticing.  I think we might have been reading Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows, and it was mentioned as being in that sort of eco-horror meets cosmic-horror type vein.
GAS:  Trewly it is.  In the setup these Victorian dudes are enthusiasts of the occult, one of them being a physician as well, with big Dr. Pretorius energy.  He develops a brain operation to allow a person a larger view of reality, which to him is personified by the pagan god Pan.  He does this surgery on a street urchin that he groomed for the purpose, and hijinks ensue.  So there’s the rustic horror of pagan goatboyism and the cosmic horror of awareness.
BfS:  It is funny that the ‘Pan’ in the story doesn’t seem to be a faun creature, like you would imagine.  The focus is on seeing ‘another world’ and then having a Lovecraftian breakdown into madness™.  I liked the idea of the ‘Pan’ in question being ‘everything’ as the word would imply.  The people are seeing some vision of everything all at once, that is too much to bear.  If anything was going to get you gibbering, I think it would be an extreme overload of information.  Really putting the pan in panic.
GAS:  At the same time, the “Everything” is personified as masculine, or masculine within the feminine, in the course of the story. It’s not as queer as I imagined with all the hype, but it’s queer enough one could run with that interpretation.  I originally wrote a juvenile joke here but had to delete it because too spoilery.
BfS:  That seemed to be a big source of all the shock and horror.  Sexual ambiguity as a real yikes for victorians.  I really wish the story went into more depth, but I suppose if they couldn’t even handle this much…
GAS:  That gets into a problem we had in a previous book club meeting with some other folks, while reading Turn of the Screw.  A story from a different time leaning on implication so hard you could, as a modern reader, feel like it was an endless tease, or too obscure to get.
BfS:  I didn’t get that impression as much with James, as just by its length and continuity, I could effectively get into the world.  This story is a bit more scattered with its timeline and hopping about so it was maybe harder to get into that mind state.  I believe he wrote the first chapter and third chapters as standalone stories, then tied them together with only a few more chapters between, which couldn’t have been easy.
GAS:  I actually love looking at literary classics and seeing their flaws, because as a creator it makes me feel more like I could write something that ranks well with the greats.  There are flawless stories, like the works of Kafka we’ve read, but even some really strong ones have issues.  This story is real cool, but weaker than most of the classics we’ve read, and probably for that exact reason.
BfS:  One thing I appreciated is that it actually gets more into the emotions of the characters feeling the cosmic terror.  Many of Lovecraft’s stories, even if I like them a lot, use the ‘and then I went crazy’ moment as a thought-terminating cliché.  Likewise with the ‘indescribable’ horrors.  Yeah, it’s real bad, but couldn’t you get into it a little more?  This still didn’t get as into it as I would like, but I felt going cuckoo was a little more justified.
GAS:  I wouldn’t have thought of that, but it’s true.  The emotions of those who get the Bad Knowledge are not well described in most stories with that subject.  But what is the Bad Knowledge here?  The lack of description reached a hilarious peak when a guy is reading an account of the forbidden experience, and he gives up, can’t go on any longer, sweating and freaking out.  Sounds dry here…  I guess my enjoyment was this: It’s the moment which comes closest to saying what is going on -the thing so horrible- but it can’t.  The story itself is falling on the fainting couch.
BfS:  It sounded like he read one sentence of people enjoying a sexytime and lost his shit.
GAS:  Unintended humor for us, but… this implication was enough to inspire a very outsized public reaction.  You told me about this…
BfS:  Yeah there’s a very amusingly overblown freakout from some lame critic you can find on the wiki.
GAS:  Lemme see…  “Why should he be allowed, for the sake of a few miserable pounds, to cast into our midst these monstrous creations of his diseased brain? … If the Press was so disposed it could stamp out such art and fiction in a few months: And that disposition must be acquired, must even be enforced.”  That reaction, once you’ve read the story, seems wild as hell.
And also from the wiki, one publisher declined to print it because it was “a clever story that … shrink[s] …from the central idea.”  So even at the time, some readers found the self-censorship over the top, while more conservative ones thought it didn’t go far enough.
BfS:  Something funny there, even the critic who hated this story so much was willing to call it ‘art’.
GAS:  Maybe dismissing art you don’t like as “not actually art” was more popular in the 20th century.  OK.  What did you find strong about it?  To the extent you can say without spoilers.  What moved your imagination?
BfS:  The premise is very strong, probably why so many people have done interpretations and offshoots.  Makes you want to see more done with it.  The author is said to have been inspired by a real life ruin he visited, and was trying to get at the feeling it gave him.  I think that’s a good thing to aspire toward, the sense of awe and mystery you can get, even if it’s better done in stories like the Willows.
GAS:  Agreed.  I think about eyeshine, about animals in the dark.  Not something he mentioned but it’s an image I come back to in my imagination of the world before electricity.  There is something looking at you, aware of you but beyond your understanding, supremely indifferent, possibly malevolent, and powerful because it has all the darkness of the universe behind it.  Appealing.
BfS:  There’s a great description of the look of one of the cursed dudes in that story that got spooked before his untimely demise.  “I could never have supposed that such an infernal medley of passions could have glared out of any human eyes; I almost fainted as I looked.  I knew I had looked into the eyes of a lost soul, Austin, the man’s outward form remained, but all hell was within it.  Furious lust, and hate that was like fire, and the loss of all hope and horror that seemed to shriek aloud to the night, though his teeth were shut; and the utter blackness of despair.”
GAS:  That’s why I was thinking of eyeshine, that part.  I remember now.  Good shit.  I had a thought that this story has something in common with the song Gloomy Sunday.  That song was about suicide, which was and is very taboo.  Back when it came out, it was credited with causing many suicides.  I have no doubt it was quoted by the suicidal, but causative?  No.  And it’s pretty tame.  The song ends with “I was only dreaming.”  Looks quaint to modern eyes, doesn’t live up to its infamy.  So with The Great God Pan.  I can’t imagine it corrupting the masses with its sexy ways, but the idea was there.
BfS:  Yeah in terms of horror, it was very tame compared to what Poe was doing decades earlier, or contemporary French writers.  The French were doing much sexier things as well, but I suppose that’s not too surprising.
GAS:  Sexy sexy sexy.  I’m into it.  The Great God Pan everybody, check it out.
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Addendum:  One observation about The Notorious GGP that I forgot to mention here, but I noticed as I read.  It was clearly a direct inspiration to Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, so much so that I feel his book was intended both as a sequel and as an exploration and expansion of the things in the original which were left unsaid.  The movie adaptation of Ghost Story ignored and changed the true nature of the monster from the novel, which was more similar to Pan.
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Satire is Dead

Seriously, what is anybody going to joke about now?  It’s over.  I cannot imagine ever laughing at anything related to politics ever again, not that I was laughing much in the year leading up to the end.  The cackle of demonic glee I might get from seeing one of the new clowns get brutally murdered?  Doesn’t count.  Mirthless.  The second the SNL people put on their wigs and get to doing impressions again, it will just be a demonstration of the fact.  Is Colbert cracking wise?  I wouldn’t look it up to find out.  All of the court jesters should just go home and call in sick for the rest of their lives.

We are all the joke now, and the only people laughing are the worst people in the goddamn world.

I gotta stop thinking about motherfucking politics like right the fuck now.  Woof.

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Memes are Dead

I remember before it was general knowledge that literal neo-nazis were the chief purveyors of pepe memes, when we’d pass them around on tumblr like fucken clowns.  Anyway, the Department Of Government Efficiency is absofuckinglutely named after the same meme as elron’s crypto rugpull “dogecoin.”  It is.  It is a massive “fuck you” to all the innocent summer children of internet foolery past, that hey, look, you helped this happen.  This is always what it was about.  Soft-pedaling the death of democracy.

The thought had crossed my mind the first time I saw a news article about it, but like so many things in the era of Fascist Deathclown AmeriKKKa, I didn’t even know whether to believe the article was real, or a joke.  So it took a few days to sink in, days during which I may have posted a meme or two.  Like earlier this week.  I think, no more.  Gonna figure out a different way to be on the internet, in my remaining time here.

No more memes.  The nazis dug up that cheezburger cat and crucified him on the whitehouse lawn.  Matt Furie’s frog ripped his skin off and sunk his carcass in a peat bog.  Somebody once told me the shrek theme guys headlined a superspreader event in the heart of the pandemic.  The doge is a government entity devoted to killing poor people through “austerity” policies.  Any hope for gradual change to a better USA and a better world is triple fucking dead right now, and irony is the weapon that killed it.

Memes served a purpose for those of us who aren’t soulless nazi fucks, and not sure what we’ll replace them with.  Well, I’m probably the only person in the world that is going to hew to this policy, so I’m not sure what I’ll replace them with.  I’ll figure it out.

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Gaslight Ghetto

I’ve had the strange experience a few times in recent years of mentioning my childhood poverty to another person and their response making me feel gaslit, like what am I remembering wrong?  For example, mentioning I have lived in a few housing projects and homeless shelters, and them asking which ones, and then…  I don’t remember the names, barely remember the locations.  I wasn’t living in them for long enough to identify with them, to see that as my “hood,” get to know the other kids there.  We’d be kicked out or otherwise shuffled along to our next flophouse before that could happen.  My father helped me fill in a few of these details, but he didn’t remember all of it either.

So to gird myself for this situation in the future, I’m trying to remember everything about my childhood that wouldn’t be too creepy to tell.  Maybe some of those things too, with appropriate content warnings?  Here we go…

Content Warnings:  Violence Against Animals, Animal Death, Description of Poverty, Mention of Parasites and Pests, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Child Injury, Children in the Context of Sexual Things (but no CSA mentioned in this one), Racial Tension, Drug and Alcohol Abuse, Marital Infidelity, Teen Pregnancy, Vomiting, Terminal Illness, A Man Dying Young, Mental Illness, Generational Abuse.

This will take more than one post and include details that don’t have to do with the poverty itself, just me trying to remember what I can before it slips any further into the void.  For this post, I’ll lay out what I can recall of the chain of places I’ve lived. [Read more…]

Thanksgiving

As the divisions within this country deepen, some middle-of-the-road seem to have given up and said “sigh, guess we’re all nazis now,” and trudge dutifully through their lives.  But will they feel motivated to go to thanksgiving, with gloating cheerful white-haired fascists carving up the bird?  And of those who had been tolerating it thus far, how many of them will find it now fully unbearable to look into the eyes of the heartless fucking pieces of shit in their families who are making this hellworld possible?

I’m just sayin’.  Thanksgiving and subsequently xmas, they might be a little more lonely this year for you nasty fuckers.  Taste it.

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Tradescantia

Tradescantia is a genus of “flowering herbaceous” viney things that include a number of popular houseplants.  Because they creep around your room if you let them, and probably some medieval nonsense, it was called “wandering jew” for a very long time.  But have you heard the new hotness?  People are calling it “wandering dude,” and it’s taking over!  You can see the new name all over tha plant web now.  That’s progress, babes.

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Give More of Yourself

I don’t know if this has always been true but people, in general, are very stingy with themselves.  Attention, interest, affection, sympathy, friendship, assistance… Anything positive we can do for each other, we tend to give less than we can.  I would like to take pains here to be very clear that the people most likely to read this and think, “oh no, it’s me!  i suck!” are probably not the people I’m talking about.  The people that are like this – most of us – are inattentive or ungenerous in ways that we don’t notice.

My last two jobs have involved helping people, which aroused a sense in me that this is what I have to do.  One can work at walmart and put in the bare minimum effort, and honestly, you probably should.  They don’t fucken pay you enough.  But you are in a position where sometimes a desperate sad-ass person will want something that you can actually provide, or at least do enough to take the edge off the situation.  The sense of reward isn’t some rad dopamine hit or smug warmth that filleth thy cup.  It’s more like, you saw somebody bleeding and slapped a band-aid on them, and now, at least until the band-aid wears out, there’s less bleeding in the environment.

It’s not nothing, and it is necessary.  People that can do things for other people should do things for other people.  It’s how this social species is supposed to work.  If you got nothin’, ok, disregard.  But if the thought hasn’t crossed your mind, and on reflection, you think maybe you could be doing more?  Do more.  Let this be your permission.

You do not have to go out of your way for it.  Opportunities to help people will find you.  This sounds like I’m talking about helping the needy, and that’s part of it, but there’s a much bigger one that is in front of most of us everyday, all the time.  That’s just being sociable.

You aren’t obliged to be friendliness champion of the world, not obliged to do anything weird.  What I’ve noticed is that the most basic niceties of conversation and companionship are egregiously lacking from our interactions.  Like, somebody says “I watched a movie this weekend,” and you don’t say, “What movie was it?,” you just leave them hanging in that weird space.

If they’re immune to noticing insult, they might carry on, but if they’re not, it’s “Well fuck me” on the inside.  You don’t have to give a shit what movie they watched to just do the bit with them.  And who knows?  You might find out something funny or diverting.  At least, you will not have made a person feel like they don’t or shouldn’t exist.

I got a few half-assed friends, and I don’t want to tell them to fuck off, but they don’t have anything for me unless I have something for them.  Like, they literally don’t want to hang out with me unless we’re doing the one specific thing they want to do with me.  Don’t wanna play a video game, don’t wanna watch a movie, don’t even want to chit-chat about the weather.  What’s up with that?

Humans are like pokemons that say their name, “pika pika.”  We start conversations to assert our presence in a space, like, look fellow humans, I am a human here as well.  When people don’t reciprocate adequately, it feels kinda shit.  This is part of our “loneliness epidemic.”  Nobody wants to take half a fuckin second to say, “tell me about it, bob.”

I’m not even talking about the little old guy that’ll yard your ear off.  We won’t even do this for more than a few seconds with our peers, right in front of us.  It’s kinda weird.  Some amount of this may be social anxiety.  Social anxiety, on the other hand, may be a result sometimes of never learning how to do this, or falling out of practice with it.  Socialization, they call it, when talking about puppies and kittens.  We need that too.  We need to learn how to not go through life alienating ourselves from everybody, wondering why we’re alone at the end of the day.

When we’re better able to look at other people as full humans with all the feelings and importance that we ourselves possess, we’ll be better able to make mutual aid happen, make durable social institutions that can succeed where liberal “democracy” has failed.  Figure out how to stop spinning alone in your hamster wheel and squeak with each other.  It’s time.

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Western WA Birders Help…

There’s this stretch of 320th Street in Federal Way, a bit east of I-5, just business parks trees and gas stations.  Probably just a bit out of sight is water – tiny plots of wetland maintained by the city, maybe a little lake?  I don’t know the neighborhood that well, but I pass through it a lot.

Anyway, for the second time I have seen these birds I cannot identify.  It’s hard to get a good look at them when driving past, even from my spot in the passenger seat.  I see them flying over the street or near it, thirty to sixty feet up, in a tight formation of several birds.  Colorwise and regionwise, I would assume glaucous-winged gull.  After all, just west of the highway at the mall, they’re so numerous that I imagine they’re nesting.  These are very white birds.  I feel like a glimpsed just a little streak of black from the coverts or the body.

But their wings are too short, their wingbeats too fast.  Not waterfowl fast, but close.  Maybe they fly more like big gulls when they get to higher altitude.  Still, they have me so flummoxed I looked up all the waterfowl with white bodies.  My views of them have been so fleeting I think it’s possible I missed a dark head or legs.  But all the significantly white ducks have too much black on their wings, couldn’t be them.

I’ve even thought, a flock of white pigeons?  They are smaller than glaucous-winged gulls, but I think still too large to be pigeons.  After all that, I am thinking they are one of the smaller gull species, like ring-billed.  I can’t rule out tern, but again, don’t most terns have very long wings?

The reason I was so specific with the location is that if, by chance, an expert birder remembers driving through that spot, and what they saw there, this might be an easy answer.  If I can’t work it out, I’m just going to have to commit a day of my life to camping out at the side of a busy road with the hobos, and watching the sky.

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You Had the Surgery? Paper Doll Edition

I had a consciousness-raising experience about transgender people shortly after age thirty.  I don’t think I was a complete shit before that, but did have a few embarrassing missteps along the path.  I’ve always watched people around me more than I should, and during that time I started noticing whenever a person was androgynous or trans, and wondering, what’s that person got in their pants*?  Classic wildly offensive goof, which mostly had the self-awareness to stay unspoken.

But this instinct was reawakened in me by an image set on tumblr, from an anime called Oniisama E…, or Dear Brother….  For some reason, there are girls in that show drawn with the proportions of androgenized bods.  Broad shoulders, narrow hips, tall faces that make a forehead look short, strong chin, no visible breasts most of the time…  These are the idolized glamorous older girls too, not shunned weirdos.  And in the haze of this creepy terfesque genital obsession, I asked these paper dolls if they’d had, you know, the surgery..?

The answer is no, near as I can tell without watching the whole series and translating Japanese fan wikis.  One of them gets breast cancer in high school (u got spoiled!  as if you care lol).  They’re cis-girls, in that universe.  If somebody felt like watching the whole thing with the assumption they are trans in mind and doing the queer critical lens thing, that might be a diverting experiment.

I asked chat j’ai pété about it, and it said the original manga writer was inspired by the Takarazuka Revue, which seemed the opposite of what I’d expect to be the reason.  Also, the drawings from the original comic did not seem as fully masculine as the ones in the animated adaptation.  So, a hallucination, it seems.

Do any of you know if there’s a cultural reason why these anime cis girls look so non-passingly trans?  I don’t get the impression my comment section is bubbling with otaku energies, but I might as well crowd-source my curiosity.  This article isn’t the best showcase for it, but the cartoon looks very beautiful, which may be why it gripped me.  One of the less manly girls looks like Sean Young in Bladerunner, but they’re all very cute.  Never dubbed or subbed in English, so it slips away.

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*I think the vast majority of trans people will never, very seldom, or only situationally pass as cis, so the idea of passing as the singular goal of transition – the only fix for dysphoria – is harmful, even if it’s understandable that many of us are obsessed with it.

But still, even pretty hip people can be fooled hard by human androgyny.  I had a high school teacher with no breasts, an adam’s apple, and a deep cleft chin – who got pregnant and carried that baby to term.  Intersex but still functional, or just nature flexing on us?  I dunno.  Likewise, during my creepy shifty-eyed time, I had taken a skinny lady with an angular face as probably trans, and a few years later saw the same lady pregnant.

Most of the time you aren’t going to get a big tell like that, so you gotta learn to quell that curiosity when it arises.  I did it; you can too.