Charles D'Ambrosio - Loitering - New and Collected Essays

And so as we wandered from room to room, every narrative ended in death, every story came to the same conclusion, until it felt as if a flawed and fallen world were finally being cleaned up and organized and made perfect. Mistakes were made, and the mistaken were efficiently condemned, leaving behind empty squalid rooms in which it was impossible to imagine a tender unseen moment or a kind word or a shared silence that wasn’t murderous. It’s perhaps needless to say, but the people in these skits lacked a living texture, were crude-minded and ugly in spirit and, in general, dismissively drawn. Hell House resembled the smutty mood of a sixties exploitation film more than religion, a spectacle of types, lewd and overblown, exaggerated to the point of pornography with its parade of stock characters. But Hell House was quite specifically somebody’s vision of others. Whoever created Hell House seemed to despise people, their freedom, the varied possibility of them. Whoever it was could imagine only concluded lives, lives summed up by a single act, in a world where most of us have agreed, not always happily, to live with ambiguity. Every fundamentalism focuses on end times, and Armageddon is, in a sense, a rhetorical trope, an emphatic and overwhelming conclusion, meant to wrap up and make tidy the mistaken wanderings of history. For a fundamentalist the end is one of the forms desire takes, a passion no different from lust or avarice, intense with longing and the need for fulfillment and relief. It’s like they’re horny for apocalypse. They get off on denouements, which partly explains why Hell House never amounted to much more than a series of murderous conclusions. It focused only on that part of a story where life finds itself fated. Inside every act a judgment was coiled. Real people, with their ragged and uncertain lives, their stumbling desires, their bleak or blessed futures, would only break into the narrative, complicating the story, dragging it on endlessly.

You would think there’d be enormous anxiety involved in desiring the end since the end doesn’t seem to actually be anything. And perhaps it’s the messed-up management of this anxiety that accounts for Hell House’s failure. Kierkegaard says anxiety “is altogether different from fear and similar concepts that refer to something definite.” He says, “anxiety is freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility.” In other words, anxiety has no object; in fact, it tries to become fear because fear has a definite object that can be faced with courage. I think it’s fair to say horror bridges some kind of gap between fear and anxiety, using objects that are present yet unreal, objects that retain a somewhat objectless character. Horror makes visible the source of our anxiety, typically arriving dressed as death. It’s nothingness in a black cloak, coming for all of us, a bequest of our bodies. But Hell House was premised on an antipathy to the suddenly helpless body, a hatred. It gutted the very thing that would make it compelling. Instead of indulging the thrills inherent to horror, it swapped out anxiety for fear and came up with morality as an answer to annihilation. The hated content of Hell House was arrived at via a bunch of rejections, a denial, a suppression of the self, which helped the creator form a superiority over the rest of us who are slogging our way — living and loving, doubting and sorrowing — toward a hole in the dirt. The Pentecostals who created Hell House converted their anxiety over the human body into persecution, and their horror set them dreaming of death.

Added up, room plus room plus room, Hell House was a holocaust. Everybody died. They died — they were killed off — because they lived the wrong way, made the wrong choices, believed and thought or felt the wrong things. The whole thing kind of sickened me. The last night I stood outside, absurdly thinking of Dante and his imagery, as the kids rehearsed their lines in the early dark before Hell House officially opened. Out on the lawn you heard a disembodied anguished call in the cold: “Where am I? What’s going on?” And the strange music of a young girl warming her voice with: “God hates you. You killed your baby. I hear babies crying.” I stood for a while in a field, listening, then went inside to inspect the Rosco fog machine that would make Heaven the ethereal stuff of visions and the Styrofoam rock where, in half an hour, a sinner would be chained for eternity. The rooms lost nothing for being empty. In the hospital the bloodstained gurney waited for what the script called “The Abortion Girl,” a name as allegorical as Bunyan’s Giant Despair. The sacks of plasma hung from their IV poles, the false charts were clamped into their clipboards, the stethoscope waited for its heart. The Abortion Girl would again scream and hemorrhage and die hideously a dozen or more times later that night, and again her nightmarish pain would be mocked, but for now an accepting silence held the room. In the Garage Scene, the paint cans, the Hefty sacks twisted at the neck, the red car, all of it was stubbornly real in a way the stilted dialogue would not be. In the Slumber Party Scene, soon enough, the raped girl would hang from her rope, the abductor would dig his hole. But the show hadn’t begun yet and there was no morality or condemnation just now. The shovel was there and so was the partially dug grave and the heap of overturned dirt smelled wet and loamy and the rope dangled, empty and waiting, as a light rain fell through the roof. It was beautiful, and a relief, mostly a relief, to feel the rain coming down and know how resistant reality was, how durable, even in a world drained of love.

1 W. Bush at the time of writing.

In a story about paradise, the complications inevitably follow, so perhaps a simple description first — Biosquat is three or four acres of scrub, a derelict tract of land in East Austin (itself a somewhat neglected section of the city) on which Dave Santos has established at least the rudiments of an eco-village. There’s a cattle gate and a mailbox out front, and a forked tote road leads partway into the property; from there footpaths wind through stands of juniper and oak and mesquite. Plants in this part of the country, baffled by the sun, seek and hide from it all at once, suffering a kind of conflicted heliotropism in which the branches of a dry fissured oak, for instance, grow up and out, turn back, go down, curl and twist, writhing so much that, even still, they seem in motion, snaking like the hair of a Gorgon. The heat in August is oppressive, and the umbrage these stunted trees provide is spotty, more shadow than shade, offering little relief. Underfoot, the blanched soil at Biosquat feels like crushed brick and hardly seems arable. I saw no wildlife other than a few lizards, although I was told rats and raccoons, as well as coral snakes, live in the area. Mosquitoes were plague-plentiful, and Dave Santos suggested, rather alarmingly, that the once-numerous crows were decimated by West Nile virus. In the distance you could hear the constant hum of cars, and while Biosquat’s ambitions are somewhat Edenic, at present it still retains the mood and look of a vacant lot; it has a spurned and forgotten quality, as if the world had, without warning or explanation, fallen in love with someone else.

Once inside the gate, along the paths, you find the first improvements, the nets and tents and bamboo beds, the solar panels and the cistern and the terraced gardens, a limestone megalith surrounded by rickety scaffolds and a series of unfinished structures, the ceilings of which are fabricated from bike rims and a cladding of placards and signs left behind by old political campaigns. There’s a pale green trailer and a toilet mounted on a tricycle and a trellis of unripe tomatoes hanging, again, from bike rims. There’s welding equipment, there’s rebar and conduit, there’s an anvil on a stump and a primitive garden hoe cleverly forged from a piece of pipe and a chain ring. The visual impact of the place is surreal and collagist, although, sprawling with junk, it also comes quite close in character to the sort of illegal dump site every city has, those wooded hillsides that mysteriously fill with unwanted mattresses and shopping carts and washing machines. Over the couple of hot August days I spent at Biosquat, Santos often spoke of “trash worship,” an idea meant to elevate debris into an aesthetic and invigorate refuse with a rarefied sense of social mission — something more high-minded and messianic than recycling, at any rate — and perhaps that’s what he’s up to, perhaps the bikes and the rebar and the bamboo aren’t haphazard, aren’t just old crap nobody else wants, but are instead the base materials for building the small, resonant civilization he imagines.