by Kate Caraway and Philip Monte Verde

Kate:

For a demon, he is beautiful. Framed by unnaturally large flowers at a golden dawn or dusk, he looks wistful. Perhaps mournful. Does he have a flower in his hair? In spite of his clearly delineated muscles, his sitting position is not a powerful one. He looks as if he has been bested by something; is he regrouping, resting? Plotting? Or does he have nothing left to do?

The green tint of his skin, his thick neck, and his long, steep jawbone seem to be suggestions of otherworldliness. But the emotion on his face is human. The beauty of his form is a human beauty. Nothing about him, neither himself nor his environment, hints at evil. He is not a jarring presence in the landscape; the color of his skin and the color of the sky are combined in the big flowers. He's a part of the world we see him in. It is a colorful, vibrant, living world. A warm wind blows his hair back, perhaps shifting the flowers beside him. But he is still.

He's the most precisely-painted thing in a collage-like setting, as if he's a real person sitting in front of a mosaic. The light on his body is painted smoothly, showing the specifics right down to the joints of his fingers. Different from the flowers that look assembled from scraps of paper, and different from the pixellated blur of the sky. Care has been taken with this demon, and he is weighted with cares himself. He seems elevated, sitting on a mountaintop, and yet there is a heaviness to him, an indelicacy to the scene, that is anything but carefree.

-

Philip:

It was only after encountering Seated Demon and feeling inspired to write about its artist, the Russian Mikhail Vrubel, that I made a personal connection. This whole time I have been writing about similar themes: abyss, lifeless voids, monsters we can’t quite understand. The pattern was not deliberate, rather just me writing what was on my mind. The analysis of that I will save for my therapist. The sudden tracking of this pattern, however, helped me empathize with Vrubel. 

For a decade this demon seemed to be all the artist could think about. He sketched the demon, he sculpted it, and he painted it. In his masterpiece, at the apex of his obsession, he shows the demon sitting in the sunset contemplating ultimate loss.

There is something so attractive about Russian culture. The country itself is one of Western familiarity and Siberian forest mystery. European culture laps up on St. Petersburg’s boggy edges in the west of the country. Its influence pushes in from the shores, as it does now on every continent of this earth. But as it advances it meets a different force coming from the east. It is a certain mentality that emerges from the dark woods, where dense pine canopies blot out the sun. No matter how much an outsider studies Russian history, this mentality can’t be fully comprehended; can’t be made tangible. At least I have had no luck in the pursuit.

Spend an hour reading a Tolstoy novel and you will encounter a character saying “ah, but what is to be done?” In the West, in the United States, this would be a call to action. “Ok, what’s our plan?” In Russia it is a rhetorical question. It is a phrase of acceptance. It says “yes, that is how it is, to be sure, but we can’t change that, so let’s move on.”

The demon that so obsessed Mikhail Vrubel’s mind is an illustration of the 1842 poem Demon by Mikhail Lermontov. Lermontov’s demon is an immortal being who wanders the Caucasus Mountains. He is a brutal tyrant, for immortality brings with it strength, but it also brings a curse to be alone. Heretofore unknown emotion stirs in him when he sees the beautiful Princess Tamara dancing at her wedding. Force being the only tool in the demon’s belt, he destroys the husband. Tamara (apparently forgiving him for that) falls for the demon, and sees in him not the Devil, but a tortured soul. She holds a belief that there is a human being beneath his rough exterior that just needs to be brought out. She’s right, and for a second she sees that human man. But for only a second. For this is Russia, land of few happy endings. The demon’s kiss is fire and it kills her.​

by Philip Monte Verde

​The man Laura is singing to doesn’t quite get it, and how could he? We live our lives independently, cut off irrevocably from one another since the day they snipped the umbilical cord. The most empathetic of us still don’t know one percent of what is going on in our closest loved one’s head. This is the defining struggle of human relations.

("The Beast" by Laura Marling - Spotify link, YouTube link)

What Laura has been exposed to, as we arrive on the scene, is something he does not yet understand. Something foreign to him. Flashes of it in the mirror that he thinks are just tricks of the eye. Because he has not lived through what she has, he can not comprehend the change that has come over her. His context is not her inner reality, it is his daily, normal life. The changes confound him. What comes next he is wholly unprepared for.

To be fair, she tried to prevent this. For hours in anticipation of this moment, she has been scouring her insides for something different. She has rifled through her DNA for a certain power, for the strength of her ancestors. She tried to call on the might of the goddess who predates measured time. She sunk a line for her, in hope, but that baited hook plunged so deep didn’t pull up what she was looking for. It pulled up what she got instead.

She got the Beast. She is no longer the angler in control of the situation. Laura is the one bound by the nylon string, and it is the monster that pulls her in.

by Philip Monte Verde

Picture yourself in a one seat submarine, with a lone beam shining out on the deepest ocean floor. It is 3.8 billion years ago and you, dear time traveller, are staring at a hydrothermal vent gushing out piping hot water. Miles of skull-crushing water above you an Earth you wouldn’t recognize is being peppered with meteorites and bursting with volcanoes. Neither above or below is a place to find love or hope or connection.

Absolute silence; the silence of the unliving.

Reach your right hand over and press the light green button on your submarine control panel. The one that places the magnifying lens atop your viewing window. Pivot your camera just to the upper left of the vent opening. Consistent lines of hydrogen sulfide wave blurrily past the screen. They’re dotted here and there by copper and zinc atoms.

Patiently hold your gaze on that spot and await your reward. There it is, suddenly in your vision: Life. After millennia of streaming out without result, the right combination of a dozen different chemicals connected in the right order and a cell was created. She is Eve, and she is the great, great, great times infinity grandmother of you and I. She is the matriarch of the trees in the forest and the fish in the sea. She is the mother of the disease and of the cure. Hello mama.

For a little while she just sits there, being present. In front of you is all of life. Everyone who has ever been and who will ever be were united and contained in a squishy little bit invisible to the naked eye. Everyone in Canada, in Cancun, in Calcutta, in your city and in mine. Every bone in every graveyard packed in like sardines. Packed in with every sardine. We were once one.

And then, tragically, Eve split in two. She begat Adam who begat Abel who begat Yasmin who begat Sophia who begat Joe, Todd, Tyler, Ahmed, and Nicole. For there was another rider in that cell alongside all of us. Hidden deep within that first string of DNA was an urge to keep going. That urge, the essence of life, decided early on that it had worked too hard to get here to exit the universe’s stage with the expiration of Eve’s flimsy body.

Earthly life has since gone out in an incalculable number of directions. It has risen out of the deep dark sea and crawled onto land, where it grips into the soil or pushes off into the air. Soon it will begin conquering other planets. It will go and it will go and it may never stop.

But an interesting thing happened not too long after the birth, life, and death of Eve. The cells had gone on splitting for many generations. They ventured further and further from the birth vent and banged against one another without thinking anything of it. Until one day a particular cell collided with another and instead of bouncing or bursting, they connected. This connection, two bodies becoming one, was as vital to our development as that moment when one body became two.

And it goes to illustrate a fundamental conflict in our hearts, our souls, our personal essences. As you sit there in your submarine, gazing at Eve, you surely can feel it. You have a deep, deep affinity for her, as you may for your own mother, your dog, your daughter, or the oak tree in your yard. You, we, desire connection. We go crazy without it. We will connect with a sexual partner in an urge to replicate that moment when we were united in Eve. But in doing so we make the same tragic mistake that pulled us so far away from original unity: we create a new life.

​

Published originally in six parts on the Tumblr

“And if thou gaze long into an abyss,
the abyss will also gaze into thee.”

Sometimes you’ll get lost in each other’s eyes. There you might stay for a week to ten days, like the common cold, or a honeymoon.

The abyss isn’t a movie, it isn’t a brand, nor a tar-pit-tourist-attraction. It is like a cave, or a hole in the ground, but not entirely. It is not by safety rope that you descend into the abyss, but in the head over heels tumble that follows a hard shove. Spinning and twisting is how you enter the darkness.

-

We all get shoved. Life, in all its survival of the fittest, can be seen as one constant shoving match. The minutiae or gargantua of anxieties, the sudden trauma, or the fearful consideration of the future all can send us spinning. Most will struggle to escape, with temporary success. What the abyss holds for them is merely put off until another day. And the abyss, now having a taste for you, will only grow hungrier and more aggressive week to month. Others believe they can control their descent, deny they are being tossed about. Folly. The abyss is pitch black, it doesn’t matter which way your toes are pointing.

​-
​

​I do not know where the abyss resides. I have seen it in my bedroom and tried to hide from it under my pillow. I have seen it while driving in my car, I have seen it while soaking in the shower. I have seen it, on occasion in the faces of others. Either side of a forced smile, it hides with the mites in wrinkles and dimples.

We humans, so spatial, so organized, have mapped out the brain. The cerebellum, the hypothalamus, and all the lobes have been assigned functions. Computers are made in our image, or perhaps our idea of ourselves are made in theirs. Every inch of grey defined; no room in the skull for the incomprehensible.

-

But I have seen the incomprehensible, perhaps you have too. The abyss exists, and sometimes it comes to you. Tentacled arms reach out menacingly, demandingly. What is it it so greedily demands? Perhaps it is material goods. You fling televisions and all-inclusive vacations at it. Cheap sugar highs and empty calories, no, it demands more. You lose time and space for others, the tentacles have grabbed control of the wheel. The abyss has transformed from black nothing into a red demon. Anything can happen now: sadness, frustration, your anger turns outward. Violence works too, red blood leaving no stain on the demon’s arms.

-

How do we deal with this abyss, before it rises out and consumes us all? If the hole in the ground can’t be avoided and you fall in, or if you walk in, or even if you dive in, what then? Well, I say explore it. It is dark in there, but there is no such thing as empty. Ignore the reputation of the abyss, make room for a second impression. For it is no alien, nor any demon inside you, those tentacles are your own. I know this is difficult. You have jobs to work, children to rear, bridal and baby showers to attend. There is little time in the Age of Busyness for self-exploration and introspection. And even less so when we believe there is no meaning. But is this so?

-
​
There is a why behind everything, I think. This seemingly senseless universe, full of scattered violence, and randomly distributed luck, it must have a why. All the atoms, molecules, protons and electrons that have gathered around you and among you must have a why. The abyss can’t be read on a CT scan, so studies of it are not peer-reviewed, they are personal. Hiding in that blackness, somewhere in your mind, are the reasons for everything you do. Etched in its walls is the story of your life. The effects of every interaction you’ve had with people and nature are grooves your fingers can touch, if you just reach out.

The abyss is not a dark hole looking to consume you. It is not a bottomless pit, it is an endless gift. And to think, it has been there all along.

by Philip Monte Verde

Today's question:

Someone I'm Facebook friends with always posts about how her husband wont let her have certain friends, he won't let her get a drivers license, or let people watch their kids that HE doesn't approve of. How do I tell her this is abuse?

Intimate partner violence is far more complex and far more common than we think. There are professionals who would be far better at addressing this topic than I would. Willow for example here in Rochester, and the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence nationally. Disclaimer stated, I've studied the subject a bit and have some thoughts. 

First, it is important to address your own expectations. You aren't going to "save" this person, especially as they may not want to be saved. Getting into a relationship is easy. Getting into a bad relationship is ABSURDLY easy. And once you're in, you're invested. I've always understood this best through an economics term (wait, don't close this tab yet!) called the sunk cost fallacy. In this scenario someone who has already invested heavily in a business will continue to do so long after the business starts to lose money. The rational thing in these situations would be to cut the losses and move on. But we're humans and not emotionless robots, so we continue to invest in the hope that things will turn around. We chase good money after bad, rather than admit that we wasted our money. In relationships we are afraid to admit that we wasted our time, our energy, and our emotional reserves. The fear of admitting defeat and starting over are often greater than the pain we are going through. This is especially true the less overt the abuse is.

Next, let's focus on what your friend is doing. We often use Facebook as a place to vent and receive reassuring words from friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and sometimes that creepy guy who just wanted to look at your pictures. It may not be the best use of the platform, but it's a human one. Your friend may be stuck in a life that she can't get out of, and venting just may be how she handles it. It's natural to think less of your problems once you've got them off your chest. Because, well, objects weigh less on you when they aren't sitting on your chest. Temporarily free of that burden, your friend may react harshly to you criticizing her husband. Her Facebook posts may be the entirety of the bad he does, and with that subtracted she may see only the good left in him and defend him.

I know you are eager to jump on in and tell her that she is being abused. That is natural to anyone with a good heart. You may also want to suggest that she leave him, another natural impulse. But with such a sensitive topic we have to think how our words are being perceived, and how to make the best use of them. Instead of doling out one-size-fits-all advice we need to understand your friend's circumstances. This means finding out more information than comes from her Facebook posts. This means being a friend. 

​
​If there is a greater social need than to be heard and be understood I cannot name it. A genuine "how are you?" given not out of supermarket checkout line formality but with honest-to-goodness curiosity is like presenting a gift. It is also an excellent place to start with your friend, and just about the best use of Facebook Messenger. From there, using active listening skills and asking follow up questions you can build trust and rapport with your friend.

Something else you could say:
 
"I see from your posts you've been having a rough time." Simple really, note that it isn't even a question. I didn't add "are you ok?", which invites a conversation-stopping yes or no answer. Rather it is an invitation for your friend to expand on what has been troubling them. Going down this path you will hopefully find out more and more about her situation. Judging by her use of Facebook posts, she may be more than eager to share.
 
As this process continues you may face the impulse to jump in with an opinion. It's important to restrain yourself a bit. I suggest thinking about how much you enjoy when people who don't know you well tell you you are doing everything wrong and should change your lifestyle radically. Yeah, don't like that much, do you? Instead people need to come to conclusions on their own. In my personal experience this is how I've gotten the most out of therapists. I yap and yap about what is bugging me, they wait for a lull and ask a poignant question, I consider how what they've asked fits in with my line of thinking, and yap some more until I reach some breakthrough. Then I go home thinking that I solved my problem on my own and that therapy is a waste of money.

Her having a breakthrough and taking steps to regain control of her life is not going to happen immediately. Even with your best efforts it may not happen at all. But to me, a life not spent being there for others is a life wasted. So talk to your friend. Not as someone playing a Hollywood superhero, that is fiction. Nor as someone who knows what's best for everyone, that is annoying. But as a human on equal terms. You may even gain an offline friend out of it.

by Philip Monte Verde

"It is death that is spinning the globe."

Death is our common companion. The well-meaning protectors are misguided in their reasoning for removing cinematic death and violence from theater and television. They wrongly seek to preserve innocent minds as they would fine china, never letting them out into the world to acquire a few scratches. But although the rationale of the protectors is off, their ends should probably be met. For the scripted and acted deaths are miles from reality.

While I'm sure I had seen a hundred 'deaths' on television before then, those of knights, cowboys, and space-invaders, it was the deaths of my grandmothers that first exposed mortality to me. The first grandmother I saw made up artificially and surrounded by flowers in her casket. The second grandmother I saw frozen, twisted and real in her hospital bed. These are two images I will never be able to get out of my head, nor should I even try.

These are not the images we see from our living room sofas or reserved-in-advance recliner-style AMC movie theater seats. Here final words of encouragement for the living are uttered by an actor holding the wound in their chest before their head droops as if for a nap. Here the blood of the anonymous conquered is splattered upwards, and the camera pan follows to show the gnarled, dark face of the antagonist or the handsome, white-toothed face of the protagonist. The slumped actor is a minor plot point, and the death of the extra is an insignificant blink; a quickly snuffed candle. While the film crew, whether HBO or CNN, packs up to follow the fighting down the road, human beings lay moaning or silenced in open fields and shell-pocked streets. Whether they are portrayed in our fiction or our non-fiction as the good dead guys or the bad dead guys matters nil to the weeping families, the families that must mourn them if they died, or tend to their emotional and physical damage if they lived.

One would think this would be perfect material for big and small screens alike. Our most common form of storytelling is that of the redemptive hero. He, still rarely she, who has had defeat laid on him, brick by brick, but manages to miraculously find the strength to burst through the masonry to triumph, until the next episode. What a way to build sympathy for the hero it would be then to show the common soldier in the post-op ward reaching to scratch a phantom itch in the pocket of air his arm had once filled. Or show the aged grandmother, hunched over a wood table, a long curl of ash running from the cigarette she lit and forgot in her worry of what to do with the orphaned grandchildren obliviously playing tag in the kitchen. Show the sleepless nights that follow the trauma of wartime rape. Show the pitiful efforts of the surviving villagers to remove rubble to reopen the bakery.

What sympathy these scenes would build if, indeed, that were the goal. The sad truth of it all is an elephant that has been stomping about the room unacknowledged for centuries. Building sympathy for the redemptive hero is not and has never been the goal. Tug on the high-cheek boned face of the knight whose armor shines through mud and blood and you will find his tan-but-not-too-tan skin peels off under your fingers. Gasp when you look up and see the sweaty, disheveled beard, hideous scars and wild, black eyes staring at you. For your hero and your villain are the same man. They are both yours, and they are you.

For in the two hours that The Joker holds an entire city at his mercy, we ride shotgun and feel that power vicariously. While Popeye fumbles for a can of spinach, we project on Bluto the Rapist "our own repressed anger, violence, rebelliousness or lust" and revel in the evil of it all. For fifty eight minutes in a Game of Thrones episode we indulge in the slaughter of the extras, before Jon Snow sends the baddies retreating until next week. He suppresses the evil we created in the first fifty eight, and in the final two minutes we have room to repress again our inner tendencies.

He who went outside the power structure in greed and lust (the criminal), is pushed back by he that went outside the power structure for more noble aims (the vigilante). Credits roll before we have a second to ponder how we got there. The lights come back up before we can consider how the villain was created, why we tune in every week for the slaughter, or an alternative way to fight evil beyond the violent methods that evil naturally prefers.

(quotes from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and The Myth of Redemptive Violence)

by Philip Monte Verde

​"How do you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?" This quote from the ancient philosopher Meno appears on page four of "A Field Guide to Getting Lost," but for author Rebecca Solnit it may as well have been the writing prompt at the top of each blank page on her word processor. Her book is full of self-described 'maps," attempts to demonstrate how she has navigated towards that undefined "thing." It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone at this point that incessant busyness and multitasking aren't the surest way to find that thing. That thing sneaks in in overlooked places. It takes the talent of being lost, that is making the conscious choice to be fully present.

Across the yard where I write is a 6-foot wooden fence. A spider, probably of zero consequences size-wise, has zig-zagged webs across the picket tips. This would hardly be worth breaking my book-review-narrative up had the little bug-eating bugger not then had the nerve to somehow propel its tiny body five feet off the fence and three feet down to the back of a chair in the grass. I can only pray that it is now making the scaling trek back up a wood slat, only to leap and leap again to create a web the size of which no one of its species could ever dream.

The point of that, of course, is that you have to look up sometimes. In particular you have to look up at 9:45 a.m., in late June, when the sun is breaking perfectly through the maple leaves to show off the long, thin hair of that one strand of web. Just time it right.

Looking up is a start anyways. "Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark," Solnit councils. Leaving it ajar, perhaps then it is important to acknowledge the threshold exists, and proceed to walk through that opening. To truly be lost, and to find, may require getting up from the patio table, the deep sunk couch, or the ergonomically designed, highly adjustable, $949.99 Aeron desk chair by Herman Miller.

"Lose the whole world...get lost in it, and find your soul." We've been retracing the same maps. When we say 'follow in someone else's footsteps,' it is meant quite literally. It's an easy habit to get into. As an infant, we would be devoured by wolves, or their modern equivalent raccoons, if we didn't have older humans to protect us and for us to emulate. Like migrating elephants, we follow these older humans trunk to tail through the first quarter, or third, or half(!) of our lives. A midlife crisis, classically defined, can really occur at any age. It's the moment you raise your now jumbo-sized head up and see the savanna alongside the trail. To see your body has grown stronger (or weaker) and that you've made plenty of money (or not), but that your soul isn't carried on this caravan.

by Philip Monte Verde

​Ribs of mine, often I wish you would just go on holiday. Buy three tickets, and take my shirt and skin with you. Let my heart live openly.

I want my afternoons and evenings to fill with the joy of Saturday mornings. I want to write, to drive, to sing, to flirt, to kiss, to cry, to yell and scream. These ribs feel more like a chain than a shield. Layers of clothing cake on like the exhaust on glass that obscures views.

Openly. Not stuck behind unasked questions or subdued feelings. Ebullient with compliments. Smile-giving, life-reinforcing acknowledgements of the humanity in others. I want to give that face-reddening praise the way a loving husband gives flowers.

Oh, to take people out of the rut. To gently tug up a chin as a 1950's leading man might, to make moment cementing eye contact, and to tell a man, woman, or child that they are beautiful. That they are charming. That they exist.

That they exist. Too often we forget that even we exist. We lose sight of the only truth: that we are part of this world.

by Philip Monte Verde

Alpha - Sometime Later (YouTube) (Spotify)
Alpha - Somewhere Not Here (YouTube) (Spotify)

There is this man, in Sometime Later by Alpha. He is a trapped man. A thoroughly ensnared man. Entangled by a net, he struggles against drowning. He is caught in the binding force of lust, of delay, of possibility, of just maybe sometime later. And it's long. The song is long, the wait is long, and the longing is an ache. The ache takes form. It becomes this ugly green pool below our rib cages. It's disgusting, it's awful, and it's perversely beautiful. 

His words, the words of this beaten man, are half-formed invocations. They are begging prayer. I suffer with him. How can I continue to listen to this man struggling for air? I rage at my inability to claw my way into ear-buds, race with knife between my teeth down the cord to find this poor, poor soul. To find him in that trawling net beside bluefin and dolphin. To hack away at the abrasive rope that pulls his swelling body across oceans. 

If I can't free him from that net, then I wish to give him words. Words of comfort, words that bring peace. Words to help express in sentences, what he seems to struggle to say in song. 

Life is such a slow drowning. A slog of a wait to expire. That is, until it isn't. For some of us there is that breaching moment when hands penetrate the sea. When a firm palm finds a limp wrist. That moment we are plucked up by mermaids or sailors. 

For others, that breach never comes.

At the end of the album (Come From Heaven) the same melody plays, and you think it's a repeat. But a smooth female voice tells us that we have moved to the beach. Tragically belated, she sings of our friend in the net. Does she know that the boat that pulls her eyes to the horizon tows him below it? Her words are a phantom life-safer. "You were safe and warm, I was in your hands." Cruel, cruel, cruel for our drowned man. This is a song of nostalgia. The separation is permanent. Perhaps sometime later they could've been together. Somewhere, but not here.

When do echoes stop?

Can old domestic disputes still be heard in the kitchen? Can the girl make out her faint infant cries on her first day of kindergarten? Do moans remain etched in bedroom walls like cave drawings long after she has left you?

Are plaster, plywood, concrete, and brick enough to contain our shouts? Do they mingle together with the whispers of the elderly lady a floor below and the cheers from the football stadium across town? Do they penetrate crust and mantle to become fossilized time-capsules for our descendants? 

Do they rocket past clouds and satellites, Saturn and Pluto, and out of the Milky Way? Do they sail on intergalactic currents, catching in the earpieces of voyeuristic aliens? Can a pleading, praying, begging, screamed entreaty for love, understanding, or forgiveness outpace the expanding universe, reach the bubbled ether of its edge, penetrate the border of existence and land in the lap of an understanding God?

And if so, is there enough fuel for the salve we need to make it back in time?