My irregular tinyletter about language and culture is on the go again, starting up with a look at our current cultural thinking about monsters, via dot-matrix paper, David McKee, Domee Shi’s film Turning Red, and TV show Our Flag Means Death.
If monsters are the parts of ourselves we fear (including the fear of never enough and the fear of too much), this vision of a shared future seems to me the genuine bliss of wisdom. Here are our fears, laid out on the table, and we eat them. It’s not that we feed on fear, but that – seeing what our fears are – we are no longer afraid. We see our fears for what they are, warnings that come from our thwarted, complicated need to take care of ourselves when we were not taken care of. We see that the monsters that tried to eat us were trying to offer us sustenance.
