Monsters of the human soul

[matt cardin]

Last weekend I spoke on a panel titled “Creating the Monsters of the Human Soul” at the World Fantasy Convention in New Orleans. My fellow panelists were Catriona Ward, Victor LaValle, and Nathan Ballingrud. The moderator was Brenda Carre. The panel description said, "Philosophers of the past have said the worst monsters lurk within the human soul. Most keep them restrained, but there are those who unleash their inner demons. Our panelists will explore the ways they have created such characters in their own works and share their views of other authors who do it well."

The recording of the event is available only to WFC members, but here's a transcript of my own remarks:

Monsters of the Human Soul

And an excerpt:

Quote

We each haunt ourselves. I have this long-running idea, I don’t know if you'd call it a theory, it’s just my experience of life, where it seems to me that each of us constitutes our own personal cosmos. There’s a horizon, a boundary between self and other, between your subjectivity and what appears to you as the objective world from the moment you open your eyes. There’s this mystery that puts so much beyond your ability to know. And in fact even within yourself, you have that same horizon. It’s like we as these conscious beings, these conscious presences, awarenesses, here in this very panel, there’s all this stuff outside that is not you. You know, you’re facing all these other people, this room, this microphone, all this. But sort of behind you, so to speak, within yourself, your id, your unconscious mind — I refer to the demon muse all the time as my creativity — the same thing is there, too. So, basically, this way [pointing a finger outward, at the audience] and this way [pointing a finger at myself, my face] is mystery, the whole way. Out there and in here, both are complete mystery. . . . Lovecraft of course wrote, among other things, his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, and in the opening section he famously said that the essence of supernatural horror and cosmic horror is this sense of great powers and forces existing beyond the rim of the known cosmos, and this sense of black wings beating there in the outer darkness, and claws scratching at the rim, and so on. I think every one of us has that experience every moment of every day. It’s just that some of us tend to frame it in those horrific terms. And those black wings are flapping and those claws are scratching on the inner rim of the cosmos as well, behind your conscious self. And that’s fascinating to me.