"You're Perpetuating Evil By Writing About It."

So, do we burn the Greeks, the Romans, fine art, music, or the bible to the ground?

Credit: https://madridacademyofart.com/goyas-darkest-masterpieces-a-look-at-his-famous-black-paintings/

I’m most comfortable in the not quite dark. It’s the shades pulled down low, the covers over the head, the door left open barely a slip, a crack. Light exists but it’s soft around the edges, it’s close but not blaring. The first movie I remember seeing in a theater was The Shining when I was five. I’ve seen more bodies in bags and on sidewalks before I was ten than the whole of my lifetime. I’ve sat in the same room with needles and burnt pipes. I’ve cowered in another room while my mother’s head was smashed into coffee tables until her face took on the carvings in the wood.

I’m a light sleeper. I sleep on top of sheets, never between them. One foot off the bed, ready to run.

I read a study once where people who have been exposed to trauma at a young age take comfort in horror movies and the macabre because it’s familiar. The screams are background noise, a dull tinning in one’s ear. The blood is the sauce on a pot coming to a boil. The bodies are a kind of peace, of quiet. I can’t sleep in silence. I can’t sleep in big houses with too many windows and doors. Romantic comedies terrify me because the tidiness of them is violent, unfamiliar.

I write to make sense of the world. I write as a means of psychological exorcism. I write because it binds me to others so we feel less alone. It’s easy for me to write about death, loss, hurt because it’s what I know. We write that which is familiar, and I know the terrain of darkness well. I’m well acquainted with its territories, its rules of engagement.

I’m skeptical of unmitigated joy, unconditional love. My mother once told me happiness is earned, not given, and I would spend a lifetime untangling the words from one another. Trying to splice them, vivisect them so they never have to co-exist in the same sentence again.

This is not a call for sympathy—oh, you poor thing, you. Let me draw you close. Let me hold you. Let me tell you about my easy life and how I could never imagine sitting comfortably in the dark as you do. Rather, this is a means of understanding how and why people create the art they do. Since antiquity we’ve read about bodies slain, women ravaged, wars waged. Heads on spikes and all that. The stories are monstrous. The paintings profane. But what elevates them is the depth of human experience they seek to capture. Evil isn’t simple and clean cut. Once you think you’ve mastered it, it changes form. It mutates and demands a lifetime of study. The dark exists as contrast. It’s the reality of what lies in most human hearts.

We sit on our thrones and type on your keyboards that we’d never do this, do that. We’d never sin. We’d never wreck and ruin. But I’m of the belief (and history has shown this to be true time and time again) that in a specific set of circumstances, we are capable of anything, including acts of evil. No one is absolved of it or protected from its borders.

This is perhaps why we like our Jeffrey Dahmers and Ted Bundys because their actions are so heinous, so unimaginable that we take comfort in the fact that we would never be them. And while most humans don’t exercise this extreme level of depravity, it’s as if we’re leaning on the binary of an extreme to absolve ourselves of cruelty.

While we may not be mass-murderers, we are cruel in insidious ways and to varying degrees.

I write about broken people because their complexity interests me. What drives someone to the edge of reason, of doom? Why do we hurt the ones we love privately but are told we “light up a room” by friends, coworkers, acquaintances publicly? Why do we have hate in our hearts for strangers because they look, believe, or are a certain way? Why do we harm others, ourselves?

Our ugliest selves make for great art because isn’t our job as humans is to constantly evolve, to understand why we are the way we are?

I wrote my second book about a banal, meek woman who’s a serial killer not for shock value but because I wanted to examine how intergenerational trauma and abuse can shape one person’s perspective. This weekend, I revisited Taxi Driver and loved it all over again because it’s a simple depiction of loneliness and isolation—one that resonates today in our culture of high tech, social media, and a surveillance state. What drives Travis to madness while at the same time striving to save a 12-year-old prostitute? We may not all be Travis Bickle, but many of us can relate to his feelings of despair. While we may not all be serial killers, we can understand abuse and trauma impact people in a multitude of ways. Some are loving, contributing members of society, others…not so much.

Last week, someone left a comment on an essay I wrote about the difference forms of art, news, and culture that impacted the writing of my second book. They mocked me, noting that writing about evil to perpetuate evil is a whole new low. I was shocked not by the comment but by the simpleminded nature of it. Should artists only write about love that doesn’t fade or alter? Should our stories be filled only with light and laughter?

No, because light exists in contrast of the dark. One does not experience one without understanding the other. Do we burn the works of the Greeks, the Romans? Do we destroy the canvases of Byzantine artists? Do we shy away from Goya’s Black Paintings? Do we commit Taxi Driver to a dumpster? Do we ban all music that is profane?

I’ve often said art often comes down to taste and preference. Some folks avoid horror films while others roll their eyes at love stories with neat resolutions. But the same folks who shy away from horror might watch a true crime show or…gasp, the news where waking horror is on display 24/7. We alone determine our threshold for how much dark or light we let in, but that preference shouldn’t dictate what kind of art is created and how it’s consumed.

My writing about a serial killer alone isn’t going to inspire someone to be a serial killer. We’d love for life to be that simple, but it’s not. Showing evil in art doesn’t beget evil, it helps us understand the depth and reach of human experience.