I’m going to write down some thoughts that have come up
around things I’ve read and listened to today. Whether there is a pattern to
it, I don’t know, but there are patterns everywhere.
Liz mentioned imaginary friends as we were listening to a
podcast. I don’t think I actually had an imaginary friend, as far as I can
remember, although I obviously created stories and characters in my head.
Imagining the toys on my shelf were real as I lay in bed is probably a common
type of child imagining. Or it used to be. Thinking of imaginary friends (and a
sudden thought from Liz that these could be re-appearing lost children from the
material world) I put the words into the search engine and found this article:
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2017/nov/27/imaginary-friends-decline-ipads-blame
Which refers to a report that found that far fewer children
are having imaginary friends than before. Although it is one of those
statistical analysis things where you wonder how they actually come up with
such arbitrary numbers when they certainly haven’t spoken to every child or parent
in the world (or even the country), it doesn’t surprise me that children are
losing the inclination, and maybe the capacity, to imagine a friend.
The report cites the dominance of technology in even the
youngest children’s lives. So the child is force-fed the garish images of
television, computer games and internet and these stories and images appear to take
over the child’s mind. It seems that the dominating technological offerings are
removing the child’s ability, or desire, to create something from within their
own imagination. There has been some perceptive criticism of the ways
technology and social media is influencing us, particularly the young (for
instance, see https://hendersonlefthook.wordpress.com/2018/01/09/tech-addiction-the-illuminati-agenda/
)
I think many of us have found ourselves, even as adults,
staring mesmerised at a screen, even if there is no volume, and nothing
interesting happening. We can be so distracted by the parade of imposed images
that we may lose attention in a conversation with a person we are with, even if
that person is someone we care about and the conversation is interesting (and
the bleak fascination of the blank screen led to Charlie Brooker’s title for
his brilliant series Black Mirror).
Imagine the effect on very young minds. Or maybe I’ve got this the wrong way
round slightly – because we have been fed those images and stories from an
early age we have become conditioned to look at them.
Joseph Chilton Pearce wrote many books, including Magical Child and Evolution’s End where he talked of the way television (in the time
the book was written, the internet and computer games were not yet a factor) contributed
with other factors to disconnect the child from an empathic connection with the
world.
Listening to the Richie Allen show a few days ago, when
talking with the spiritual healer Mark Bajerski , Richie referred to the
drastic cutting of arts teaching in schools.
This is also being carried out in higher education where the
arts now receive no government funding and have suffered as a result. The
obsession with making everything conform to a corporate mind-set where it only
has value if money can be made from it, is sickeningly taking the creativity
from our education system (such as it was anyway). In universities, the
humanities are also cut back and seen as expendable. I believe this is all
deliberate because our leaders do not want creative and questioning thinkers
who may challenge the views they impose on us, and they certainly do not want people
with an empathic connection with the world and each other.
In Ian McEwan’s The
Child in Time, in a scene influenced by Pearce’s theories, it is remarked
that the ‘government did not want a magical citizenry’ (McEwan 1987, 78). The
innate creativity in a child is regarded as a threat to order and productivity.
The psychoanalyst R. D. Laing argues that, if children were truly encouraged to
be creative in our education system, to question the foundations of society,
‘there would be such creativity that society would not know where to turn’ (Laing,
R.D. 1981 (1967). The Politics of
Experience and The Bird of Paradise. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd. 60).
The child’s creativity is a challenge and makes it a force to be controlled.
And so to another thread which I picked up on: I saw a
picture during a discussion on the paranormal and was reminded about the
phenomena of ‘black-eyed children’. These unnerving entities have been seen
many times around the world, and usually take the form of one or two children with
completely black eyes who knock steadily and persistently on the door to a
house and ask to be allowed in. The people answering the door have commonly
reported experiencing terror, although the children have not made any physical
attempts to get in, and no threats of violence. The children are often wearing old-fashioned
or threadbare clothes and have pasty, white complexions.
Theories on what the children are and where they come from
(and go to – they disappear immediately after their appearances) are many, from
aliens, to ghosts, to vampires. The apparent need for the person confronted to
invite the ‘entity’ inside does recall vampire legends. Elements like this,
which resonate with mythic creatures, may lend weight to the assumption by more
conventional commentators that this is purely an ‘urban legend’ (as stated by Wikipedia),
whipped up by the internet.
However, interested to find out more, I listened to two
interviews given by the ghost hunter and ufologist David Weatherly:
While Weatherly acknowledges the part played by the internet
in circulating stories and fuelling interest in the phenomenon, he refers in
detail to several witness accounts that sound more credible than the glossed
over debunking on sites like Snopes (https://www.snopes.com/horrors/ghosts/blackeyed.asp).
The cases I heard Weatherly describe happened to people who did not seem like
the archetypal horror geeks who were trying to gain kudos in online communities
like “creepypasta”. He notes that a large number of those who have claimed to
have seen the black-eyed children are in positions of authority or
responsibility, such as law enforcement, doctors or are government officials.
Weatherly has researched the black-eyed children in detail, including
references to such figures long before the explosion of the internet.
I’d like to offer
another theory, not to make an actual claim that I know what the reality of
these ‘kids’ is: for the purposes of my argument, I am going to consider them
as the haunting, horrific return of the children that were forcefully removed
from the world. Children who were ripped from the world by person or persons
unknown, often with the permission or collusion of governments and other
organisations of authority and supposed responsibility. If they are not actual
victims of state mind control or organised abuses, and they are a product of a
communal imaginary, then that in itself can be conceived of as a re-appearance
of those forgotten, lost children who have been hidden from public view. The
return of the repressed – Freud’s original definition of the uncanny.
A similar motif re-occurs frequently in ghost and horror
stories, from the earliest of folk tales up to modern films and now internet
threads. The wronged, abused, murdered child either returns in monstrous or
spirit form to haunt and terrorise the people who tormented them, or just
humanity in general, as we are all somehow guilty of allowing the horror to
happen. And to be repeated. The repetition is at the heart of any haunting, the
trauma gets re-played multiple times, across generations.
Demonic or supernatural children are everywhere, almost in
equal measure to the numbers of missing children who are now nowhere. I wrote
in my book about the way children are so often portrayed as monstrous: Damian,
the Devil’s child, in the Omen film
series, The Bad Seed, Children of the Corn, Lost Boys. In some narratives, a child
was once an innocent victim until possessed or killed and then returns as evil.
In The Exorcist, a pubescent girl
becomes the focus for demonic possession, terrorizing her family. Such child
figures have been discussed in the books Monstrous
Children and Childish Monsters: Essays on Cinema's Holy Terrors (30 Mar
2015. Markus P.J. Bohlmann (Editor), Sean Moreland (Editor)) and Evil Children in the Popular Imagination
(2016. Karen J. Renner). The imaging of a horrifying child figure reveals
aspects of our fears, whether about the world around us or something that has
grown dark within us; the innocent contaminated.
In the 1980 film The
Changeling, a house is haunted by the ghost of a murdered child. The title
alludes to the legends and fairy tales where children’s abduction or death has
rendered them into apparitions or demons. Such representations can be seen in
the earliest recorded folk tales. Tales and legends of ‘changelings’, the
replacement of human children by elves or fairies, have persisted throughout
centuries and in many countries. This is the subject of W. B. Yeats’ poem ‘The
Stolen Child’:
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can
understand.
The poem ends with the child’s seemingly willing acceptance
of the faery’s hand, preferring an uncertain future in another realm to the
world of misery that was (is?) the reality for the majority.
Society seems to demonise children in equal measure to
regarding them as innocent. In Lionel Shriver’s novel We Need to Talk about Kevin, the mother of the boy who will become
a killer remarks on the ‘revulsion’ she perceives from people in the street
when she is pregnant. She asks why so many films
portray pregnancy as infestation, as colonization by stealth? Rosemary’s Baby was just the beginning.
In Alien, a foul extraterrestrial
claws its way out of John Hurt’s belly. In Mimic,
a woman gives birth to a two-foot maggot. Later, the X-Files turned bug-eyed aliens bursting gorily from human
midsections into a running theme. In horror and sci-fi, the host is consumed or
rent, reduced to husk or residue so that some nightmare creature may survive
its shell. (Shriver 69-70)
Of course, Rosemary’s
Baby was not the beginning but merely an adaptation of ancient legends of
succubus and changelings. This passage illustrates that childhood has been
reviled and feared at least in equal measure to, and often concurrent with,
feelings of reverence and love.
So, imagining children as evil and abhorrent is not new, not
a creation of the internet. Is the internet robbing children of their
imagination or virally sparking a surplus of imagination that damages them?
Another phenomena of internet horror stories which have
taken on ‘a life of their own’ is ‘Slenderman’, a child-snatching monster (and
think how many of those there have been through our culture, from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to Freddy
Krueger) created on the internet forum Something Awful.
Initial images, which were submitted as part of a competition to edit normal
photos to make them appear supernatural, became an ever multiplying meme as images,
stories, role-playing and videos spread through online fiction known as “creepypasta”.
The character has found its way into films:
Some researchers have noted the similarity to archaic,
orally-transmitted tales because the character and stories develop and alter
through multiple creators and voices. Also, Slenderman shares common themes
with tales about fairies, such as a forest or wild natural setting and the
abduction or murder of children (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slender_Man
).
In one of the interviews with David Weatherly, he discussed
how there has been a number of reported sightings of Slenderman since the
stories became widespread. The most logical explanation for this is either that
people have deliberately concocted these supposedly real sightings to take part
in the ongoing legend, or, possibly, that the frenzy of online creativity has
caused people to imagine they have
seen the character. The most horrific example of this was the case of two, then
12-year-old girls in Wisconsin, U.S.A., who stabbed a classmate 19 times, allegedly
to gain the approval of Slenderman. The victim survived and the two
perpetrators were diagnosed with mental illnesses but tried as adults. They
were sentenced to 25 and 40 years in a mental hospital.
Andrew Peck sees Slenderman as representing anxieties around
the digital age, such as continual connectedness to others and being observed
by an unknown third party (http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jamerfolk.128.509.0333
). The multiple, long, tentacle-like arms and the blank, featureless face of
the creature could be seen as metaphors of the way the internet pervades our
lives, surrounding and enfolding us, and how it also provides faceless powers with
the means to watch our every move.
So maybe the imaginary friends of our childhood have been stolen
away to become our virtual enemies? The Slenderman internet, or, more
accurately, the Slendermen controlling the data and content of the internet,
are robbing the imaginary and re-forming them into black-eyed kids who knock on
the door and ask to be let in.
Of course, as I have already mentioned, the repeating of
stories and images of lost children has happened across centuries and across
the world. The stories haunt us, through language bound up in a communal,
genetic memory. On one level, Black-eyed children and Slenderman appear out of
the same void of loss and fear, the same anxiety about a world that we have
little control over. The added element in these stories, I argue, is that the
imaginary creations can be seen as a comment on the media through which they
are being transmitted as well as the plight of children in our society.
The internet has become a monster that devours all of us.
There is much which is good about “it” – it has provided the means for people
to connect with others around the world and it has allowed much information
which is hidden by the mainstream to be revealed. But, it has also enabled the
hidden to observe us all like a phantom, malevolent in the ways it can use the
same social interactions and revelations of knowledge against us. And, like the
black-eyed children, it wants even more access to our homes and our minds…
The upcoming 5G network, often referred to as “the internet
of things” (which, in itself, sounds like some sort of magical, mystical phrase)
is worrying a number of people. Apart
from the fact that everything physical, all the buildings and gadgets that we
rely on, will be open to manipulation and observation by anyone with access to
the system, there is a very real concern about how the waves transmitted will
affect human and animal health. Barrie Trower, a former Royal Navy Microwave
Weapons Expert, has written and spoken extensively about what he regards as the
devastating damage the radiation from 5G will cause:
Trower goes so far as to call the proposed network a potential
“genocide” because, he argues, the radiation will cause miscarriages, and, when
children are born, they will pass genetic damage on to successive generations.
Maybe, these will become the lost children of the internet?
The vast majority of people, however, are seemingly unconcerned
about any health issues, let alone about giving the controllers of the internet
access to every physical aspect of their lives. They aren’t even waiting for
the persistent knocking on the front door, they are so desperate to let the
internet monster in that they are bursting with excitement for its arrival,
leaving the door wide open and leaving the keys on the doorstep.
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