At one point in time, the world was all monsters. Legions of fantastical things existed outside of ourselves that were for the most part, unknown. Being creatures who make sense of things, we dedicated ourselves to understanding them. We categorized them, named them, and even found profound respect and admiration for them, sometimes because of their destructive capabilities instead of despite them. We challenged entropy and sorted our world. Then there were wolves and whales, yet fewer monsters.
While fear initially served as a hard wired response that enabled our survival, many of us do not live in an environment where we need to depend on that instinct to avoid danger. While we still experience fear, largely because of the relative safety we are able to enjoy in our modern lives, our relationship with it has changed. As our taxonomy and infrastructure removed many of the monsters from our world, we began to miss fear. If we weren’t fighting or flighting, how would the relationship with what has kept us alive continue?
So we invite fear in… and we pull up a chair. We tell its stories to children because we know that fear will serve us, it has gotten us this far. We tell them of a monster so undefeatable in the woods that no one can beat it so that they don’t go past a boundary because we know it keeps them safer that if we told them to be careful. We give the boogeyman a name because once he is corporeal, he is avoidable.
We seek fear as a commodity. We exchange our safely earned money to buy a ticket for it at a movie, we attend it as a spectacle at a theme park.
We allow fear to drive commodification of things we otherwise would have never thought we needed.
We trust fear.
And we should. There is a legion of things that exist inside of ourselves that are for the most part unknown.
Monsters are only stories of things we try to understand in their context and ours.
I paint monsters.