Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Were-World

So for a week I was intensively writing... I'll get back to that shortly, soon as I get off work. It's typical paranormal fiction. Were creatures and so on. And then the last three days I watched some TV shows on amazon unbox -- three episodes of "New Amsterdam," about a soldier in the 1700s made semi-immortal by a native cure, and half a dozen episodes each last night and the night before of "Moonlight," about a young (90) vampire with O The Drama angst and his (of course) hot human sidekick. This is about ten days--well, nights and weekends--of being almost entirely obsessed with creatures that do not exist.

We assume.

It occurs to me that humans, despite that I'm one of them so I wish I were more optimistic about the lot, are unusually oblivious to the world around them. I've forgotten--and watched people forget--uncomfortable experiences within seconds. I've had experiences in full-on "3D and Dolby Sound" that I wrote off as either imagination or 'a dream' instantly because they didn't seem to fit into The World According To Consensus Reality. I've disbelieved accounts from people I would trust to tell me anything with truth, simply because I couldn't wrap my brain around it. I've watched people with lots of psychic experience be unable to accept someone else's because it was a little different. Our minds are Samsonite.

I met a man in person once who was a christian mystic. Unlike the image that brings to mind, of some gentle monk-like fellow, he was pretty different. He was as hard core metaphysical as anyone comes. I don't know how he made those puzzle pieces fit with christianity without running into contradiction in a few pretty major places, but apparently he did. He told me stories, later, of "interactions" let's just call them, with people he considered variant forms of witches and evil. Normally I would have tried not to laugh, but somehow coming from this guy, it seemed completely probable while he was telling it. He certainly had some kind of light in his eyes and intense energy. As a woman, this did little but lead me to a long list of pointedly unchristian ideas about what to do with him. Alas, he moved out of my reality too soon, leaving only the anomaly of my inability to remember his name, which was weird then and weird now.

There's a TV show I've watched on unbox called "Supernatural" which reminds me very slightly of his stories, except the show has a lot of over-violence and horror-gore by my standards; I always regret money spent on it, despite I love the actors and think the premise is good. The show is surreally missing the most important, central point of a true hunter: a relationship with God. Nobody seems to notice the guys on the TV show have the spiritual depth of Doritos. They never pray. They just go around killing people. But it's "all for the good of man" of course.

I can see why the producers would fear the spiritual angle but really, why hunt spiritual entities if you aren't spiritual? If only good and evil were always as black and white as the show makes it seem, rather than infinite shades of blended grey, like some tabby cat of the soul. Stomping out evil always seems easier when you can project it on some specific 'thing' and before you know it, 13 million people are dead allegedly "for the good of man," I suppose. And the heroes do an awful lot of selling their soul to a demon in order to save the life of someone else; as if a true belief in God would see death as so horrible, and as if any true hunter would go consorting with demons for anything at all. It promotes the mythology that they would keep their word, to start with, probably the most dangerous concept on the show.

I once met someone online who told me their father was a vampire hunter. I don't know if that's really so. He seemed a nice enough guy, a bit out there for me, but then again, I've always had the problem that my inner life is more out there than half the extremes, but my outer life is in here with logic and practicality. It looks good on the surface ("All that, yet she's still sane!"), but probably only tears me up in the middle where those opposite parts of me can't seem to mesh. But I digress. I was going to say, this leads me back to the idea I started this post with:

How much around us, do we not see?

UFOs and 'their inhabitants' have been reported since pretty much forever. From every corner of the earth. From multiple witnesses. From impeccable witnesses. Hell, one UFO sighting resulted in like a million people, over a dozen video tapes and of course much camera evidence for which we're supposed to conclude 'mass hallucination'. Because you know, camcorders hallucinate too. Despite you'd have to go into John Lilly lalaland of Vitamin K and the Stainless Steel Entities to try and make any case for that, this is apparently the conclusion of Reasonable Men(tm).

Allegedly 10% of the population is homosexual. (So to steal the joke about insanity, think of 9 friends; if it isn't them, it's you.) And yet, unless you're in California or Germany/Sweden it is highly unlikely that more than the tiniest fractional percentage of those are known to all around them in that respect. If we can't even deal with what's around us in perfectly ordinary ways like that, how do we expect to see "supernatural creatures", from the fae to the were to the undead to aliens to whatever else fiction writers hypothesize about, even if it does exist? They'd surely have strenuous measures in place to prevent and deal with exposure, and possibly talents that helped maintain the mystery.

I mean think about it. Allegedly, the reason 'werewolves' came into our cultural mythos is because they would freak out and kill people and they looked like, well, a werewolf. But if in reality they looked more like an ordinary wolf, and if management of the subculture was better so people were not being turned and freaking out daily, if they were capable of not killing, or even not turning, and of killing animals instead, and so forth -- these are the nouveau-fictions that modern writers insert to make the creatures into reasonable and sexy characters rather than monsters -- then there might not be any reason for people to notice them. Add a little mafia-style damage control, and basic human resistance to and denial of anything that frightens them anyway, and it's done.

There might be zero evidence for such things being real. I have not seen any. Ever. I've experienced things that give me opinions about a lot of other stuff, but zero about "alternative creatures", outside of the distinctly paranormal fae-type accounts (and not the kinder-gentler ones either) of a few friends. But my original "argument" with myself, that "it couldn't be real or we would know about it by now," is fundamentally flawed. That's the were variant of the "why aren't UFOs on the White House lawn" argument.

Reality itself seems a lot less... consistent and objective, the more I view and the older I get. Why do viewers I've observed task everything from known-fiction to aliens, but nobody tasks something like vampires and werewolves? I'm simply curious is all, as to why both legend and fiction are so often tasked (out of protocol obviously, for fun) but these, I've never seen done. I know it's far out--so are aliens, entities, Adam and Eve, and even "StarGate's Biggest Secret", all of which are not that unusual as targets in the field already. There's no less feedback on the worlds of fae or were than on anything else esoteric. Just fewer cultural constructs to support how people think about it.

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