Autumn Equinox + Full Moon: Horror, media, and healing

It's Friday. Hello.

After more than a year of health struggles that may come down to a very simple problem that my primary care team has continued to mismanage and that outdated schools of rheumatology/immunology fail to acknowledge, I am now very close to receiving some treatment that may — may — help me to feel better. Combine this with some breathtaking interpersonal growth over the past few weeks and with the fact that I was recently cleared to undergo more advanced reproductive procedures, and I should be floating on an even keel.

But I received notice three days ago that my day job's annual contract, which always expires in late October, will not be renewed this year. It's a layoff, pure and simple, although it feels targeted insofar as more funding for the people in my situation could have been sought, and our contributions simply weren't deemed important enough despite everything we've actually achieved. I knew this would happen eventually because of how my team has been treated starting within the first year of when I got hired; what I have been hoping for nearly as long is that I would be able to find a new job and leave before the inevitable, and as that's been difficult the next best thing I've hoped for has been to take advantage of the current job's admittedly excellent fertility benefits and have the child I've long desired while the opportunity exists. Now, just over a decade into this squalid professional saga, none of those things I had hoped for are going to happen like that. And the news arrived right as I was securing the next procedure.

I have not been faring well. At least I've since learned that several aspects of my situation aren't as dire as I thought; I will at least get a zero-benefit extension for a few months, I have a couple of insurance (and fertility) options to choose from, and in February I'll get to collect what exists of some retirement money that was held in my name and do with it what I will. Between that and the fact that my household is in a better financial situation going in, this is not going to be the way that I experienced unemployment before I secured this current job. I am not going to let myself complain about certain things when I know just how much worse this twist of fate can become. Nonetheless, the timing is singularly terrible, the stakes are massive; and given that my existing "career path" outside of writing has (like writing) a blisteringly competitive labor market, finding new work will either involve an extraordinary stroke of luck, a disruptive shift in what my career path even is, or making several different types of work pay all at once. Depending on how some developments go over the next couple of months, my childbearing quest may still have to pause again despite my age and what's been happening with certain numbers. It's all precisely what I've been afraid of. Capitalism has never felt more cruel.

This is the ordeal I must apparently enter as my new ritual year begins on Sunday's equinox. Originally I was intending to write about horror cinema this week, knowing a while had passed since I last discussed much art here. Now I still will, but from a new angle — and it will be brief despite the holiday theme as I have a distressing amount of things to manage today.

Things fall apart

The autumn equinox, which I call Haust Blót, is a matter of violent unmaking. Last year's post for the holiday covered seasonally apt tree lore in the context of this equinox as both beginning and end, a day when all accounts are settled. Libra's scales balance.

A less cozy way of putting it would be that on this upcoming day, the dark half of the year begins and the light is slain, personified by my god as the Apollonian Oak King falling bloodily to the Dionysian Holly King. The alchemical process renews itself and thus we must re-enter the first stage of putrefaction. Fresh trauma is inflicted, or old trauma rears its head. In order to make something truly new, we must start with nothing.[1]

My emotions leading up to this moment in the year have often been a matter of slowly building anticipatory grief for the loss of something, whether through a materially impending destruction or through some more symbolic sense that my mind taps into. Crossing the equinoctial tipping point, the grief begins to encompass the actual loss. This is often how I process climate grief, annually, but I also revisit personal tragedies for new reflection, and the world seems to have a habit of dealing me bad hands (if it's going to deal bad ones) around this time. My seasonal affective disorder also reaches its peak in September and October, not during the actual darkest months.

I will rise up again from here. So far I always do. But rising up does not happen until there is a nadir to return from. Surviving horrors does not happen without first encountering them.

Watching horrors, watching ourselves

In this same upcoming season that stretches between Haust Blót and Calan Gaeaf (Samhain), many people in this society happen to keep a tradition of watching horror movies. I'm convinced that our instinct has not simply been cultivated through mass marketing around Halloween-adjacent products. It isn't that audiences seek unsettling experiences at this time because those are what's offered to them; rather, those are what's offered to them because audiences seek them. We look for grisly or frightening art as a relational language to maintain with our withering surroundings.

And seasonally or not, the horror genre is far older than the art of cinema. It has consistently functioned as a space for exploring trauma, abuse, mental illness, and systemic disenfranchisement, using visceral metaphors. Those of us who routinely live with any of those challenges may often wish to avoid exposing ourselves to fictitious versions of them — but for many of us, myself included, those unreal contexts can often make sense of the real ones.

What I do love about horror movies in particular, though, is the gift of cinema as a total or at least semi-total sensory package: the vividness, the movement, the speaking with pictures and music as much as with direct words. This has a dangerous side in terms of the camera lens potentially inflicting an othering gaze on its subjects — othering happens in all media but I think in a film it can happen the most powerfully — and so there are certain kinds of horror I truly don't feel comfortable watching. However, by using more than words and by applying kineticism to show images in four (not just two or three) dimensions, cinema has the ability to voice things that marginalized audiences cannot find words for and cannot even convey through static pictures.[2]

And in those beautiful minutes where the undescribable is simply shown, what catharsis I find, bearing witness to ordeals as if I underwent them myself. In theory, I would love to act in horror movies, or direct them[3], telling stories through my (or consenting participants) own trials. Once upon a time, I thought I didn't like horror movies very much because they never made me as fearful as I thought they were supposed to; part of this attitude came from how I hadn't seen many good, effective representatives of the genre, but in my mid-twenties I not only started to see better examples, I also determined the point wasn't to be scared unless I wanted that. And usually I wanted atmosphere, which isn't the same thing. Sometimes body horror to tickle my sadomasochistic side. Sometimes intelligent, "elevated" narratives where the metaphors are clear. Sometimes pure exploitation garbage if I'm reasonably certain everyone involved really enjoyed themselves filming it and I don't feel overly suspicious about directorial motives.

I know that among some types of horror afficionados this may now sound like a very trite, overrated example, but I consider The Babadook exceptionally well-made and I found that my first viewing changed how I understood my trauma history and mental illness. Meanwhile I love a nice, perverted Cronenberg or a cautionary social tale, whether as old as the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers or as recent as Get Out. I'm far from a stranger to the folk horror subgenre or its recent revival, with several of my absolute favorite horror works like The Wicker Man, The Witch, and Enys Men falling in those categories. I'm increasingly fascinated by giallo aesthetics. I'm more than a little obsessed with David Lynch. I love vampires and I'm being brought around to hauntings and possessions. I don't like most Wes Craven style slashers or Eli Roth style torture porn, but whatever else it is, if it's made creatively and distinctively, I might well be interested.

And this incoming time of year is when I feel most invested in watching those sorts of movies, almost to the exclusion of anything else.

31 days of Halloween

In our household, my owner and I have a cinematic ritual that doesn't begin on the autumn equinox itself, but still shortly after on October 1st. When we were growing up, television stations or networks would sometimes have a "30 days of Halloween" movie broadcast theme for the month, sometimes 31. A different horror movie played each night. We don't have TV, but we've recreated the experience for ourselves.

Each October we will watch our way through 31 horror movies, with viewings happening on as close to a nightly basis as we can manage, though for convenience we sometimes double up on certain nights instead. The movies we choose vary each year, with some staples always featuring but with nearly half the "slots" given to films we've either never seen before or to something we haven't seen in a bit.

Considering all I'm going to be coping with for the rest of this month into October and beyond, I look forward to this movie marathon more than ever before. I am in grief, and I am afraid: besides the creature comforts of curling up with a blanket, a bowl of popcorn, and some knitting, it will feel good to descend into this autumn's exceptional darkness with my painful emotions already directed toward a powerful, dynamic, artistic outlet.

In all hard times, I turn to art, whether what I make or what others have made. But this time most of all.

[1] Or as Carl Sagan put it, "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."

[2] Theatre is comparable, and despite the many distinctions between what works best on stage vs. on film, the only reason I don't consume horror (or anything) regularly through theatre is the sheer expense, at least in the United States' economy. In some places where the arts receive better public funding, I would be going to live performances of all kinds very frequently.

[3] I do have a theatre background myself.

Thank you for reading. Given the givens, unfortunately I'm sure there's now an imperative for me to return to requesting that subscribers upgrade to a paid tier whenever possible. There's still one day left for a discount on the Alchemist tier in particular; but even more $1/month Subscriber signups would be appreciated. I have some time before steady income will stop flowing in at all, and once that does happen (unless I find a new salary smoothly, which I doubt) I'll have excessive time to write here in theory, but unless I can do more than continue breaking even it will be even more important for me to spend that time filling out applications and submitting my writing to paying third parties. In earnest, if you have gained anything from this newsletter at all: please help.

That appeal aside, next Friday I'll return with a post on the therapeutic merits to be found (or not found) in kink, and the week after the kink continues with what I'll call "an anatomy of impact play."