If, by chance, you walk through the wealthy neighborhood of Irvington in late October, you’re in for a visual treat. Old established trees rain red and gold leaves, historic houses, lovingly restored, sport pumpkins and colorful mums on wooden porches and Halloween decorations multiply by the minute.

Skeletons are popping out from the ground, ghouls are lurking in the hedges, witches are flying (they really should re-vamp the flight lessons, mind you.)

 

It’s all there: charm, color, creativity, and celebration of the season. The one thing missing is what’s supposedly to be conjured: the element of fear. Which brings me to today’s phrase which is really an entire poem:  Our Fear by Zbigniew Herbert.

 

The props of Gothic Tales and horror movies are such welcome distraction from the real fears, aren’t they? Those fears evoked by non-mythical events like war, displacement and injustice; diffuse threats in the air perhaps even for those who move their BMWs in tennis clothes so the hired help can get to work with the leaf blowers. But I am speculating.

What I do know is that for me there is one element that conjures up dread more successfully than any other: the element of blind chance. It started already in childhood with the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales (the real ones not the happified Disney versions.) If you look at them closely (now with an adults’s eye) they brim with coincidence that leads to catastrophe (or in some cases, as in The  Snow Queen, to rescue – but note when the kids are reunited and the boy’s heart melted, the Queen happens to be away, unpunished, with evil thus lurking out there in the wide world for time to come….)

Harold Bloom, (https://news.yale.edu/2005/03/09/harold-bloom-be-given-hans-christian-andersen-award-2005,)in some or another introduction to Andersen, that lonely queer writer born into the wrong century, wrote:“Andersen was a visionary tale-teller, but his fairy-realm was malign.” I don’t know what he meant, precisely, but certainly many of the tales’ environments were hostile and governed by chance. And that idea, applied to the real world, is frightening even to the child, never mind the adult, who sees the danger to the world determined by the chance of timing of a Comey letter, or the chance of a few re-districted vote outcomes in an antiquated voting system, or the chance of spiteful, anti-science curtailing of research funds coinciding with the rise of unknown epidemics.

Herbert’s body of work contains that very theme as well: our absolute helplessness in the face of coincidence. Worse, blind chance does not allow us the psychological comfort of its historic predecessor: fate. Acts of divine providence at least suggest a sense of control and intent, albeit by some higher power, even if we don’t like their outcome. Chance is random, any prediction futile. A terrifying thought that much of Herbert’s poetry brings to light.  (There is a terrific book that helped me understand this: A fugitive from Utopia: the poetry of Zbigniew Herbert by Stanislaw Baranczak.) Maybe I should go and dispel these lurking thoughts with tons of Halloween candy. Or hop on a free broom ride. Ignoring the history of broomstick illustrations…. https://hyperallergic.com/332222/first-known-depiction-witch-broomstick/

Happy trick or treat, everyone!