Horror — like beauty, passion, and all states in extremis — confounds the habits which regulate the human mind. Before articulation — which is to say, before the experience or the witness of horror is transformed from something beyond our ken into a verbal artifact manufactured by reason or insight or prejudice or all of these things — we are alone with something unlike the materials we are able to know. When we are in shock we remain fixed before the horror without the means to investigate it, such that the time that a human mind is forced to spend with inhuman action is discomfitingly distended. A terrible alchemy preserves the horror which yields a pure, uncomplicated, and correct pain — the pain of considering horror squarely, without evasion or escape. Some acts should not be metabolized and smoothly fitted into ordinary life. But the human mind resists shock; shock must be melted like ice in the sun. What do we do with what we have witnessed? How do we alter it so that it fits inside the boxes which order our imaginations?
Blood Stains
