freakazoid #2 - reflections via vandermeer and a poem
with lee beaudrot
housekeeping
My book was officially announced today! Ethical Necromancy is due out this July. It’s a collection of seven short stories all about haunting. I’m very proud of it and I’m somewhat terrified to send it out to the world, but terrified in a good way! Ack! All my thanks to the lovely folks at Winding Road Stories. More news on that soon!
Today, we have some literary musings from my dear friend (and roommate) Lee. Additionally, something I have saved as a poem, but that kind of toes the line between that and a flash fiction piece.
re: annihilation
by lee beaudrot
Jeff Vandermeer published Annihilation nearly ten years ago in 2014. I finished it about an hour ago. Once I’d closed it, I told myself I was going to take a nap before sitting down to write this essay but after about fifteen minutes of lying in the dark I realized my thoughts were not going to quiet down sufficiently. I’m giving you this information because I believe that the context in which someone reads a book is nearly as important as the content, particularly when it comes to discussing what someone takes away from that book.
For me, I read it in two days. I bought it at a Barnes & Noble outside of Jacksonville, Florida after going to dinner with my parents at the Cheesecake Factory next door. I started reading it the next day on my parents’ living room couch, read about half of it on a plane from Jacksonville back to New York, and I finished it today on my own couch with my cat curled up next to me.
To claim any one true meaning for a book is an exercise in generalization. I can analyze as much as I’d like but I’ll only really be able to tell you what the book means to me, which may or may not line up with what it could mean to you. I figure that’s probably the point of all this.
To me, Annihilation is a book concerned with expectation, alienation, and the terrifying inevitability of change. The main plot centers on a biologist picked to venture with a party of three other scientists into a region called Area X, known for its bizarre natural phenomenon and habit of disappearing or disturbing parties of scientists sent to study it. The protagonist has an additional interest in Area X because her husband was a member of the previous expedition team that explored it, and he returned as a vague facsimile of himself who died months later. What follows is a slow, creeping change in the biologist’s makeup as she immerses herself within Area X and attempts to better understand it. Her ultimate transformation into a part of the region’s ecosystem isn’t jarring. The way she describes her life in the “regular world” and her attempts to observe and catalog the environments around her suggest that there has never been anywhere she truly felt connected. Not even to her husband, describing their relationship as one where he attempted to pierce through her layers of introversion to find a person at the core who did not actually exist.
The book’s characters are set-up with carefully curated expectations and guidelines. The motivating purposes behind their expedition become blurrier as the biologist begins to recognize how radically their information about Area X has been limited in order to obtain whatever outcome their employing agency, The Southern Reach, truly desires. Because of this, Area X’s mutations are viewed as contamination. It’s something aberrant that needs to be scrubbed out of you before it festers. The party members were conditioned to see it as a threat, a “bad guy”. Yet as the biologist changes, even in her panic she feels like there’s something right about her mutation. She finally fits.
Area X is based on a wildlife preserve about thirty minutes away from Tallahassee, Florida. I lived there for four years while earning my undergraduate degree at Florida State University. Jeff Vandermeer lived there when he wrote Annihilation and he still lives there now. I never met him, though there were a few literary events I could have gone to that would have remedied that. At the time, I felt like I couldn’t because I hadn’t read Annihilation. Now I live somewhere else. I’ve found myself alternating between trying to shed Florida like an old skin and holding onto it tighter than ever. My accent has gotten “worse” (I’ve always phrased it this way) and I mention the more restrictive or religious vestiges of North Florida culture when they’re relevant in conversation. I wear it like an “I Survived” t-shirt from a theme park gift shop.
I realized on the drive back to my parents’ house from the Barnes & Noble that for the first time, I felt like I was visiting rather than returning. I suddenly, desperately wanted to be rid of that suburb in a way where I could rip it out of me by the roots.
There’s a creature in Annihilation called the Crawler. It’s a sort of nerve-center for the entirety of Area X, which functions a bit like a mycelium network. The protagonist’s change begins with inhaling spores spawned from the Crawler’s writings on a wall, colonizing her as another extension of itself. When it comes to fictional conceptions of a “next step” in evolution, I’ve noticed a pattern where the response to humans is more often than not predation. The Crawler takes a different direction that I personally find more interesting; it is able to comprehend and analyze the world around it in a way that humans simply are not capable of. Isn’t that what initially set humans apart from animals? The ability to recognize patterns, recognize their own process of thinking, far beyond any other species on Earth?
The Crawler’s presentation is nearly Lovecraftian, save for how the biologist is ultimately accepting of the prospect of sharing a universe with something she is unable to understand. That’s the heart of this book for me: the idea that change will come and it will disturb us as it pushes us further from the parts of ourselves we understand, but there is no true moral quality to the process of change. It’s natural.
I can feel myself changing. I’m changing every second of every day, a Theseus’s ship of cells. Inexorable forces acting on each other in perpetuity. The change Annihilation made to me was contextualizing that process in a way I could parse. It’s appreciated. I look forward to returning to it to see what it means to me next time.
Lee Beaudrot (he/him) is a writer and educator from Florida, now based in Harlem. His work focuses on the nuances of horror in everyday life and whatever convinces his students to finish their assignments. He has a cat named Pigeon who would eat him if given the chance.
(I’ll chime in to share an image of Pigeon, because she is excellent)
so you want to summon the writhing spirits of the dead
You need the blood of the living. Any living will do, but things will be much easier if the blood is fresh. Venous is preferable to arterial–and, frankly, it meshes better with the aesthetics of this whole ordeal. Fill a small, wooden bowl to the brim with it. Think about the dead cells inside of it.
See section six for the most optimal way of blood retrieval.
Chalk is also a must-have. You might hate the way it feels on your hands, but they’ll grow calloused without it. You will grip onto the earth and the graveand the blade alike and it will hurt no matter what. Crumble the dust over your hands and watch the flecks catch the light of the moon or sun. Note how this makes you feel.
Climbing is better than sidewalk, but it you must use sidewalk, go for a fun color, at least.
You need to have a knife. Anything works.
This one is optional, so don’t worry too much if you can’t find it: entropic dread.
Ways to incite this include: macrodosing on your hallucinogen of choice, writing a cover letter for a job you don’t want, thinking too much about the writhing spirits of the dead.
Your ritual site should be open, clear of anything that might get in the way of summoning the writhing spirits of the dead (e.g. deer, sources of drinking water, powerlines). You want an intimate setting–just you, your components, and your own flesh. Distraction helps no one. Your site should be a place of comfort for the writhing spirits of the dead—one with soil and worms and little else that could be considered to be alive.
When you sit there, hold the knife’s hilt (or equivalent thereof) in your left hand. For best results (and for the sake of consent and decency), you’ll want to draw your own blood here. While venous blood is typically your best bet, many prefer the metaphor presented by the right palm, the sternum, or the center of the neck.
If you are using someone else’s blood, simply dip the knife into the bowl. This is not worth sharing, however, as we all know the route you will take.
As you choose to strike your own hand, dig the blade into your lifeline. Despite some forum-borne disinformation campaigns, this does not decrease your own life expectancy, nor does it present a route towards ascension into terrifying and eternal lichdom. It simply offers a moment of solidarity to the writhing spirits of the dead. Dig the blade deeper.
You will know what to say. Your hand will hurt. Let it.
Drive the blace into the earth. Hungry, the earth will pull at you. Don’t put up too much of a fight; it will relent soon. Wipe sweat off of your brow. Let your stomach churn about it.
With this, you will start to see stars, and you will also begin to see the writhing spirits of the dead. Ignore the former. Watch the latter. You have achieved something great.
Taste iron and saltwater on your tongue as the spirits of the dead sureound you, still writhing. Indulge their blurry forms, their whims. Ask them how it feels to die, or the point of their writhing.
There will not be any satisfying answers to these questions. Keep asking them and hope to some invisible force that there are.
Dig the blade deeper into the earth. Your chalky hand should be half-eaten by now at least. You want it to be consumed in whole. Continue this step until that is the case. The spirits of the dead will sing to you, wanting, hungry.
You will not want this, but this has never been about what you want. It has been ahout the earth and the spirits, who desire little else.
Taste the soil’s chemical contents, and feel a pang of hurt for it.
Writhe.
a song for your week
I went to a screening of End of Evangelion with Lee, a longtime friend of ours, and a friend from my MFA cohort on Sunday. It is one of my favorite films ever made, but I’d never seen it on a screen bigger than that of my computer until just this week. Evangelion as a series is endlessly moving. It is a metanarrative masterpiece, it is a story about the depths and futility of depression, it is a cloying cry of hope. (And also, it has some of the best monster designs ever.)
All this to say: enjoy a song about the apocalypse with me.