capri0mni | Why I **HEART** monsters with ALL the HEARTS

Crossposts: http://capriuni.livejournal.com/663951.html

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Why I HEART monsters with ALL the HEARTS

I've always loved monsters, for nearly as long as I can remember.

Actually, I should qualify that: I'm not fond, at all, of the "Hollywood monsters," such as zombies, or "The Thing from the Black Lagoon" or "The Blob" -- which are, imnsho, blatant representations of abject fear-without-thought, and show up in stories to justify unjustifiable bigotry. But I've always loved the heraldic monsters:

Unicorns (Note Well: they are not just sparkly ponies with a horn. And they do not poop rainbows), Dragons, &hearts Gryphons &hearts, Greenmen, and of course, the monster of my Astrological Sun-sign: Sea-goats

For most of that time, I just thought they were nifty because they were -- "fancy" (?), and they represent the "magical impossible," and are manifestations of the imagination, and creativity... All good stuff. But I never gave them much more thought beyond: "Nifty, Neat-O! Keen!"

Then, a few years ago, for

naarmamo, I was overcome with a desire to draw new monsters of my own invention, several days in a row... like some sort of biological urge, or something.

And the geeky part of my brain thought: "WTF is up?! What is a monster, anyway? What, after all, is the basic definition?" And that's when I found the etymology, of "monster" being a "creature, human or livestock, with birth defects, and seen as a bad omen, and sign that the gods were angry."

And from that point on, monsters became a political statement for me, representing Disability Pride, Culture, and History, and the fight against Ableism/Disablism -- on top of being a manifestation of creativity and imagination. ... And here, I could mount an argument that creativity and the use of the imagination is an essential part of Disability Culture, because when Society makes a concerted effort to deny you access (because it views you as a monster) you have to be creative, to make a way of living for yourself where none is given to you.

(but really, that's for another post).

Then, the other day, when I posted the newest image of my newest monster,*

pebblerocker commented that she loved the "joins" -- where feather meets fur and fur meets scales. And there was the "ding-ding-ding!" of realization, and third leg in the three-legged stool of my monster-love popped into place.

Back in my first years of my college education, I took a literary survey course called "Comedy, Wit, and Humor" (it was awesome; it was once a week, three hours long, and we got to watch Richard Pryor videos and tell dirty jokes in class). And the one thing from that class which has stuck with me over the last 30 years is this:

The punchlines of jokes work because the human mind can only follow one line of logic at a time. The main "body" of the joke tells a story along a certain line of logic, and in standard narrative fashion, the emotional tension builds to a climax. Then, the "punch" line comes in, from a completely different logical direction and knocks that emotional tension "ass-over-teakettle," revealing all our fears and worries to be nonsensical. And in that release of tension, we laugh. (And that may be why so many people say a compatible sense of humor is the most important trait in life partners -- your sense of humor reveals how you are likely to respond to life's ambiguities. Personally, I will never trust anyone whose humor tends toward causing pain or belittling another's intelligence).

The joke that was given as a model of this formula:

Once, a bishop and a lay woman fell madly in love, and started to have an affair. One day, the two of them were having sex in the woman's bed when the husband came home early from work. The two of them were scrambling to get out of bed and dressed as the husband came up the stairs. But they were too slow.

The husband comes into the bedroom, looks over the scene, and, without a word, goes over to the window and starts making the sign of the cross over the neighborhood.

The bishop and the wife were utterly perplexed; the wife stops her excuse midstream and says: "Ahem -- Dear? What are you doing?"

To which the husband replies: "Well, if he's going to do my job, I figure I'd better do his."

--

And puns and conundrums do the same thing with single words and phrases -- highlighting conflicting meanings in homophones.

Anyway,

pebblerocker's comment flicked on the light bulb that monsters do this, too. The point where the goat's front half grows from the fish's back half, or the Green Man's beard grows as foliage instead of hair, is like the punchline of a joke: the moment when the logic of the world-as-we-know-it gets turned on its head.

This can be the moment of terror (especially if you are the Archbishop of Seville, and all the comfort and power in your life is built on the world-as-we-know-it), but it can also be the moment of laughter (which Jim Henson, in his genius, understood instinctively, if not intellectually).

And that's why I Heart Monsters: In one package, they represent:

1) The sublime reaches of Human Creativity
2) Righteous Anger against human cruelty
3) The ultimate life-saving power of the Absurd

*

A ballpoint pen sketch of a monster with a vaguely (hairy) human torso, arms, and legs, a bird's head, and dragon's tail.

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1. Word
2. Word
3. Word

\o/

A triple "Word" score! I love it when I get one of those. ;-)

Groan & perfect!

^_^

Once again, you've made plot-idea wheels start spinning in my head.

Your insight illuminates the reason why certain animals, like the platypus, are commonly found funny just for existing. "Fantastic" is a superlative because things of fantasy surprise and delight... as long as those things are modeled on the standard ideas of beauty. What is beautiful by cultural standards changes over time and by culture, so a monster of one time (animal examples: whales and wolves) becomes a beautiful creature at a later time, once the fear has been removed. Just what you have been writing about all along!

. . . And "terrific" comes from the word "terror;" "awful" and "awesome" were once near-synonyms...

I'm reminded of a time back in the 1980s (Somewhere in there) when televangelists were big culture-wide icons, there were a series of TV ads that ran in the New York City Metro area warning how our culture was falling apart, and the tagline was: "It's the End of the World as We Know It!!" with all the appropriate tones of doom.

And every time it came on, I had the urge to say back: "Yeah? Well, Good! 'Cause the 'world as we know it' could stand some improvement..."

And monsters deMONSTRate, just by showing up, that the "as we know it" clause is a little too narrowly focused.

I found all of this post fascinating. I can tell that monsters make you happy, because your pictures of monsters make ME happy :o)

your pictures of monsters make ME happy

\o/ :D

My interest in medieval church architecture means I see a lot of mixed-up creatures. The main difference between those and yours is that they have more fear and you have more laughter, and when they are laughing then the joke is often scatological in addition to absurd. Anyway, I saw this medieval koala-bird last night and thought of your creation above... apart from the scatological green man conjoined twin, heh:

http://www.gloucestercathedral.org.uk/uploads/images/Gallery/StainedGlass/grotesque.jpg

Well, considering the political, social, religious, and scientific philosophies at the time, challenges to the known order were occasions for terror... And as for the scatological humor... well, when "Sewage treatment" amounted to dumping your chamber pots out the window, that was probably an element of the absurd that was on everyone's mind.

In the meantime, that little "grotesque" is quite adorable... I love his wee burdock-leaf poncho. And though he looks like a koala to us, I doubt that was the animal the artist had in mind... Rabbit, maybe? Or Squirrel? That Greenman's pompadour has a rather squirrel-tail silhouette to it...

The greenman is verdantly abundant and jolly, isn't he? They knew where their human-manure went, and how much of it they ended up eating, in those days, heh. I doubt the critter was based on a red squirrel though (we didn't have grey squirrels back then) as the colour, ears, and toes, are all wrong, and only the thighs are close. It could be an unfamiliar-to-the-artist rabbit but I think dog or possibly cat are more likely. Lions seem to be favourite mash-up beasties in many contexts (but rarely grey) which, considering their strong associations with royalty/nobility is between cheeky and daring.

Reminds me of a song by Lee Hayes of the Weavers, in the latter years of his life:

"If I die before I wake
All my bones and sinew take
Put me on the compost pile
To decompose me for a while --

Sun, worms, water will have their way
Returning me to common clay.
When radishes and corn you munch,
You may be having me for lunch...

And then, excrete me with a grin --
Chortling: "There goes Lee -- Again!"

Meanwhile, "cat" has a certain poetic symmetry to it: Cat eats bird... starts turning into a bird. Bird eats fruit (with seed); Seed sprouts prematurely out the other end... creating an odd -- if cute -- if gross -- "Push-me-Pull-you" creature.

Lends a bit more credence to the notion that the monster's destructiveness is really "Deconstructiveness."

I like the song, hee!

I also like your interpretation and will choose to think of that grotesque as a curlew-cat.

Lends a bit more credence to the notion that the monster's destructiveness is really "Deconstructiveness."

And that humorous "grotesques" were the only images/stories in churches that were open to individual interpretation by the viewer without supposedly imperilling their souls.

Isn't it wonderful, then, that the grotesques are all over the place, in the churches...

Do you know the answer to this question:

Were the humorous "Grotesques" designed by some master artist, in the design and building of the church? Or were they the impromptu inventions of individual artists/artisans who did the actual building (a bit like a doodled "Kilroy was here!" but in stone) stuck in an odd corner or two?

I couldn't give you a definitive answer because like most history it'll vary from time to time and place to place so the answer would be either "Dunno" or "Both" depending on which more specific question was being asked. The manufacturers of particular pieces of ecclesiastical glass, even the earliest, are fairly well recorded (although individual designers aren't so well documented) but masonry tends to be either the stomemasons of/from X OR George Gilbert Scott. [/ecclesiastical architecture in-joke]. I'd guess the answer would also depend on the visual prominence of a grotesque in its original setting, which is not necessarily the context its seen in now.

Interestingly, the earliest creatures I recall seeing in ecclesiastical contexts in England (i.e. Anglo-Saxon rather than Roman) have ALL been realistic depictions of wolves OR dragons (i.e. the pre-Christian Ang-Sax animals associated with destructive forces). Also, the most human-visaged and terrifying angel I recall was Anglo-Saxon. It was a true (don't) Blink angel. ::shiver::

*nod*

I figured the answer was somewhere between "no way to know (without a time machine)" and "it depends." I was just wondering if the person long ago came up with the curlew-cat by a similar method of make-it-up as I do when I come up with something like my gryphon snail, or my Long Bird monster...

Also, the thought occurred to me this morning that cat-curlew's magical green "friend" is so verdant and jolly, that he's almost in the same category of "magical scat" goody-goody happiness as unicorns pooping rainbows...

Not to mention unicorn poop cookies (or biscuits, if you prefer) to feed your children.

Photographic evidence (and recipe) here: http://makingmemorieswithyourkids.blogspot.com/2012/03/unicorn-poop-cookies.html

So who are we to judge Medieval humor sensibilities (at least in art -- I reserve all right to get judgmental when it comes to kicking the resident dwarf for laughs)?

Ooo... knowing how the designers of cheery grotesques arrived at their designs (not the scatological ones cos I think I can guess...) would be fascinating.

So who are we to judge Medieval humor sensibilities

Oh, scatology is still a staple of British humour (alas the dwarf-kicking &c is also still current although it's more often treated as a hate-crime these days).

Well, at least it is categorized as a hate-crime, these days, instead of, you know:

"Respectable party game, and what all the fashionable noble-folk are doing, to show off their good taste and excellent breeding."

I really do think civilization is heading in the right direction (even though our pace of travel would make a snail bang its head against a wall, in frustration).

And in case you haven't found the slightly spurious "grotesque" = foliage connection yet:

The word grotesque comes from the same Latin root as "Grotto", meaning a small cave or hollow. The original meaning was restricted to an extravagant style of Ancient Roman decorative art rediscovered and then copied in Rome at the end of the 15th century. The "caves" were in fact rooms and corridors of the Domus Aurea, the unfinished palace complex started by Nero after the Great Fire of Rome in AD 64, which had become overgrown and buried, until they were broken into again, mostly from above. Spreading from Italian to the other European languages, the term was long used largely interchangeably with arabesque and moresque for types of decorative patterns using curving foliage elements.

Since at least the 18th century (in French and German as well as English) grotesque has come to be used as a general adjective for the strange, fantastic, ugly, incongruous, unpleasant, or disgusting, and thus is often used to describe weird shapes and distorted forms such as Halloween masks. In art, performance, and literature, grotesque, however, may also refer to something that simultaneously invokes in an audience a feeling of uncomfortable bizarreness as well as empathic pity. More specifically, the grotesque forms on Gothic buildings, when not used as drain-spouts, should not be called gargoyles, but rather referred to simply as grotesques, or chimeras.[citation needed]

Rémi Astruc has recently argued that although there is an immense variety of motifs and figures, the three main tropes of the grotesque are doubleness, hybridity and metamorphosis.[1] Beyond the current understanding of the grotesque as an aesthetic category, he demonstrated how the grotesque functions as a fundamental existential experience. Moreover, Astruc identifies the grotesque as a crucial, and potentially universal, anthropological device that the societies have used to conceptualize alterity and change.[not verified in body]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grotesque

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=grotesque

And, while we're on the subject, this also springs to mind:

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=antic&allowed_in_frame=0

Ooh, I knew "grotesque" <<-- "grotto," but I did not know that that link referred back to a specific instance of the "Green People" rightfully reclaiming the territory which had been stolen from them.

(as you can probably tell from that comment, I've always loved seeing, when riding in the car, old abandoned houses by the side of the road, with trees growing up through the chimney, and ivy curling out the window).

Oh, and the beak's probably a curlew from the backs of the River Severn near the cathedral.

*Nod*

The image did ring a faint "curlew" bell.

Ah, yes, "The curlew tolls the knell of parting day [...]" probably by tapping its beak against the metal. ;-)

That reminds me of the frustrations Father would have with the Flickers (a bird in the woodpecker family) during mating season.

Normally, the males hammer their territory-marking signal on the trunks of hollow trees. Except, one year, one flicker discovered that the cast iron, domed, cover of the BBQ grill made him sound like such a larger and more fearsome bird...

Father's problem was: the flicker's hammering signal, transferred to the new instrument, sounded exactly (in both pitch and duration/rhythm) like the ringing of the telephone on his bedside table...

Your dad needed the services of Blanch Heriot:

http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/934236

;-)

So the moment I looked at your icon, even before I read your post, I thought "OH. Maybe this desire to draw monster women has something to do with starting to go outside in my new wheelchair more lately and suddenly becoming visibly disabled" HMMM.

Consciously I was using it to explore the inherent monstrousness of being the Wrong Sort Of Woman, and right now exploring visible disability through art is a bit new and scary. But you've got me thinking.

\o/ New Wheelchair! Shiny Wheelchair! Whee!

Sometime ago, somewhere on this journal, I wrote a really angry, pointed, entry, about the moment when the "Society views the Disabled as monsters! So that's why I keep getting the stink-eye when I go out in public!" light bulb flicked on in my head ... But I can't remember when I wrote it, and can't find it, now.

But here's the tamer version I posted to my Blogger Blog (Plato's Nightmare / Aesop's Dream): Monsters: a key motif, and symbol of Disability

And you might also be interested in this one, specifically about "wrong sorts of women": The 'False-Parted Woman in 'comic' ballads

As for the difficulty in depicting disability, even as (even though) we are disabled, I slowly came to realize that when I "Wrote what I knew" I was mostly basing my characters not on myself, but on the people I saw around me -- and growing up, going to school, etc. I was usually the only person in the room who used crutches or a wheelchair. And it's only recently, after I've started looking for images of disability in the old stories I've taken for granted, has it become easier for me to get my head around the idea of writing a disabled protagonist....

That's why the stories we tell are important...

Edited (fixed a clickie) 2012-07-15 20:50 (UTC)

Oh those were very interesting thankyou!

My experience is quite different as someone who acquired a physical disability as an adult: I actually wrote a few stories about disabled characters when I first became disabled (and had been thinking about it even as a moderately ill able bodied person), I think to explore how what had been Them was quickly becoming Us. It's only as I've really started thinking of myself as disabled that I've found it harder to jump into such topics so blithely, so I end up writing about aliens in environment suits and AIs in faulty human shells instead. I find it even harder figuring out how to approach the Anxiety I've recently been diagnosed as having had my whole life, and I approach it even more circuitously.

Anyway, yes, the stories we tell are indeed very important :)

Hm. Never having been someone without a disability, I know I'm making a wild stab here, but:

Maybe it's that when you first became disabled, it was a case of: "ooh, new perspective I can use as a metaphor!"

Then, when you more fully identified as disabled, it turned into: "ooh, this is too complicated to be a metaphor... um. ...?"

And for me, who's identified as a writer and as disabled all her life (practically -- I knew storytelling was my "thing" from about two years old), I actively resisted writing disabled characters, because so many of the people around me would assume that's the only thing I could write... And after 40 years, I'm finally beginning to change my mind on that.

I think it was more that I found it easier to write about ableism etc when it didn't hit so close to home. Like women who find it easier to write about men because of the distance from their own experiences. I know that when I started identifying as queer I felt suddenly self conscious about writing femslash.

Yeah... That makes total sense. Writing about something too close to my own experience can really send me into an emotional spiral that pulls my focus, like a vortex, away from the act of writing itself.

I know a lot of writers, when starting, write autobiographical fiction... That's something I don't think I could manage.

BTW, I found that angrier and specifically political version of that piece on the Motif of Monsters: On monsters: Stigma, Shame, and the Medical Model of Disability (I thought I'd tagged it with "disability" or "disability rights," but I just had the one tag of "ableism")

Hell there. I am was linked to your posts through

sqbr and I am like what you have to say. May I ask to link it to my blog

the_school_of_philosophy?

Edited 2012-07-22 21:17 (UTC)

Certainly!

*reads

the_school_of's info page*

Speaking of non-White philosophers, did you know that (according to legends/myths/biographies of him)* Aesop was an African ("Aesop" being a Greek pronunciation of "the Ethiopian")? And that he was also a PWD?

*because much of his biography (that got passed down from Ancient Greece through the European Renaissance) is history and geographically impossible, modern scholars tend to treat his whole persona as mythic/fictional... But I tend to doubt most arguments that are founded on: "These people are just more superstitious and foolish than we are."

I love monsters too, for these and others reasons ...

* They show nature's variety.

* They remind us to think outside the box.

* They challenge social preconceptions.

* They present a powerful image of the disempowered: the bestial, the female, the deformed, the alien, etc.

I still love this medieval bestiary of decompensation.

And of course, all this stuff is why I so often write monsters as sympathetic, or seemingly normal/beautiful people as monstrous inside. I really enjoy exploring what it means to be a monster, and for me, the evil aspects are less about appearance and more about action.

Edited 2015-07-26 02:03 (UTC)

[...]for me, the evil aspects are less about appearance and more about action.

Now, see, for me, I don't think monsters were ever about evil ... At least, not directly. For me, they've always been about prejudice and accusations of evil, as illustrated by this very early memory that wrote into a sonnet last year. And then, there was a classmate in my kindergarten class (1969), who was absent from class several times a month because of illness; the explanation we were given (or that we whispered among ourselves) was that he had developed an allergy to yet another food. And I worried about what would happen if he ran out of safe things to eat -- would he just starve to death? ...Later on, in grade school, around Halloween, I was introduced to the idea of vampires, and my first response was empathy, rather than fear, out of solidarity with that boy.

My conscious decision to take on the monster identity as a political/social statement is much more recent. But it's really been there my entire life.

>> Now, see, for me, I don't think monsters were ever about evil ... At least, not directly. For me, they've always been about prejudice and accusations of evil <<

Point. Far more of them are accused of being evil, but either it doesn't fit their actions at all, or their actions are primarily self-defense.

>> And then, there was a classmate in my kindergarten class (1969), who was absent from class several times a month because of illness; the explanation we were given (or that we whispered among ourselves) was that he had developed an allergy to yet another food. And I worried about what would happen if he ran out of safe things to eat -- would he just starve to death? <<

Wow, that's really early to see something like that. When I was growing up in the 1970s, I was the only person we knew who had dietary issues, aside from some older people whose bodies were breaking down. Nobody had any familiarity with it, or much tolerance.

And you've neatly highlighted the subjective side of "food intolerance" which is that people keep nagging you to eat things that make you sick in some way, while you're freaking out over whether you can find enough things that are safe to eat so you can survive. 0_o

>>...Later on, in grade school, around Halloween, I was introduced to the idea of vampires, and my first response was empathy, rather than fear, out of solidarity with that boy.<<

Good for you.

I've drawn on some similar experience for writing Howl in Polychrome Heroics, whose super-senses come with sensory processing disorder and allergies. Feel free to prompt for that if it interests you.

>> My conscious decision to take on the monster identity as a political/social statement is much more recent. But it's really been there my entire life. <<

Sooth.

>>When I was growing up in the 1970s, I was the only person we knew who had dietary issues, aside from some older people whose bodies were breaking down.<<

You know, when I see discussions and ponderings about the "sudden prevalence" of childhood allergies, which are generally along the lines of: Why are our children falling apart today, when they weren't in the past? I think to myself that the evidence for childhood allergies was there all along, but the adults weren't noting the symptoms in individual kids, or paying attention to the patterns in populations.

I mean, in every class throughout grade school (average about 25 students), there tended to be one or two kids who would raise their hands about 20 minutes after lunch period, and ask to go see the nurse because their stomachs hurt....

I think it's getting worse. Sure, I saw other kids who wouldn't or couldn't eat one thing. I was the only one with a persistent problem of throwing up or having other food issues serious enough to impair everyday life. And now it's ubiquitous. I think that prevalence, severity, and awareness have all gone up -- probably in that order.

Okay. You have more experience with this than I.

Part of my thinking on this issue (a large part) is tn reaction to complaints about our new allergy awareness -- how it's ridiculous, and we're just "coddling" kids, and creating their allergies, etc., 'cause it never happened, back in the day...

m'Yeah. No, it happened.

>> Part of my thinking on this issue (a large part) is tn reaction to complaints about our new allergy awareness -- how it's ridiculous, and we're just "coddling" kids, and creating their allergies, etc., 'cause it never happened, back in the day... <<

That's a serious problem. I am particularly concerned by the level of abuse in "treatment" for disordered eating in children. Forcing children to eat food that makes them vomit is completely unacceptable.

>> m'Yeah. No, it happened. <<

Agreed.

::shudder::

Here via ysabetwordsmith.

I personally always liked monsters not just because of the disability angle, but the gender angle too. Monsters get to do pull sorts of gender stuff that humans are rarely allowed. My personal favorites are the constructs--golems, robots, and so on, for their metaphorical relevance to me as "human, maybe even passably so, but still not QUITE."

Here via ysabetwordsmith.

Hello!

I personally always liked monsters not just because of the disability angle, but the gender angle too.

*Nod*

"Hermaphrodites" were considered one class of monsters in the middle ages, along with classes like "Giants," "Dwarfs," "People with horns," "Women who give birth to animals," etc..

...Basically, any being who can't be made to fit in the box people want to put them in, no matter how they're folded, cut, or stapled.

That's what inspired this monster image of mine:

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Why I **HEART** monsters with ALL the HEARTS

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The beauty of monsters

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Yes...

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Why I HEART monsters with ALL the HEARTS