fear

I was a frightened child. It was an age to be frightened of. Nuclear holocaust was a shadow in every room. Despite what anti-Islamic fanatics would have you believe terrorism was a more real and less explicable threat than it is now. These things frightened me. The idea that because they came from Israel our oranges might have had poison injected into them. That getting on a plane was dangerous. You might be stabbed or hijacked. Not that we ever got on a plane. But they were remote fears. I had everyday fears too.

I was afraid of being stung by bees and wasps. That fear made me flap and panic. That flapping caused me to be stung. Curiously although I was once bitten by a dog I wasn't afraid of dogs. I was afraid of loud noises. It didn't have to be sudden. It could be loud music. It could be shouting. Especially shouting. I was afraid of people. That should be qualified. Up until I was about nine I had a lot of friends and liked being with other kids. I liked adults. At least I liked the smart and kind university adults my friends would have round in the evening. I would contrive reasons to come downstairs and listen to them talking. But people I didn't know? They frightened me. Although I'm ashamed of it now I was afraid of people who were different. Very old people. People with false teeth. People with glass eyes. People with tattoos. I was afraid of heights. I still am. It's a very sensible fear, I hope it keeps me from falling off things for another forty years. But there were more abstract fears. Fears you'd think a six year old shouldn't have.

I was afraid of death. It remains a source of occasional though thankfully less frequent panic attacks. I was afraid of having to work. Partly it was fear of having a job. Fear of having to know what I wanted to do of having to spend all day doing it. But there was more to the fear than that. There was the fear of having to buy or rent a house. How would I know where to live? How could I understand the contracts I would have to sign? Even worse was the fear of having to pay tax. How did I pay tax? Who did I pay? What if I couldn't afford to pay tax? I might be put in prison. Worse, I might become homeless. Having no experience to draw on I was afraid of mental illness. The idea of 'going mad' or 'losing my mind' terrified me.

I don't want to just enumerate fears. Although of course I have fears today. Despite the fears of my childhood. Despite the possibility of fears, especially communal fears being exploited for unpleasant ends. Think of ethnic violence across the last twenty years. Despite this I think fear can be a positive emotion. Although having said this I'm not quite sure how I can justify it. Most of the art I love the most initially frightened me. Some art still causes fear. I've mentioned before the fact that most of Andrei Tarkovsky's films cause existential dread. A fear that has no apparent object or event in the film to generate it. A fear that comes from asking difficult questions and being willing to leave them unanswered. To admit their unanswerability. It's the fear that art should aspire to. Starting relationships frightened me. Frightens me.

What emphatically does not justify the idea of fear as a positive emotion is the sentence I've just deleted from the end of the last paragraph. It said something like 'without fear you can't overcome fear'. This is meaningless Hollywood-influenced cock of the highest order. The value in fear is not necessarily in overcoming it. There are many occasions when it's positively idiotic to overcome fear. Overcoming fear, or any obstacle, is just a convenient way of structuring a story if you're too lazy to create believable characters and situations.

I think there's an admirable strength in admitting fears. Even, especially those to which you're not reconciled. It's human to be afraid. Imagine how insufferable someone without fear would be. Think about art, the art you really love. Most of it, probably all of it has a fear hidden somewhere inside. It may be disguised as 'vulnerability'. It may be a fear clothed as that critical shorthand 'fearlessness', which only means to expose your 'vulnerabilities' or fears. But somewhere there's a fear barely contained. Perhaps I'm influenced by this evening's listening. Why were The Associates successful? What makes Party Fears Two one of the weirder singles in a decade with a lot of weird singles? And despite this why were The Associates ultimately less commercially successful than Wham!, Duran Duran, and other contemporaries? I'd say it's fear. The fear is palpable in most of the songs. They're exquisite three and four minute panic attacks. Art comes from a lot of sources but I'm happy to say I believe fear's one of vital sources.

Referring back for a moment to my excoriation of the Hollywood notion of 'overcoming fear'. Sometimes of course people do overcome fear. Sometimes deliberately. Sometimes driven by circumstances - which may be a greater fear. But I would guess one of the main reasons any fear is ever overcome is passage of time. Getting older, changing personality, changing circumstances. Nothing dramatic. Just the changes that happen to everyone given long enough. And no deliverance from the fear. One day it's there. And the next day. And so endlessly. But eventually, eventually the fear gets imperceptibly smaller. Until one day maybe you don't automatically tense your shoulders anymore. And then even more years on you don't even think about it. A lot of my fears were like that.

A lot of my fears remain. Fear of heights. Fear of sudden loud noises. Fear of losing control physically or mentally. Fear of death. Fear of violence. Fear of needles. This is the truth storytelling can hide. Fear remains. Fear isn't overcome. Fear is a part of us. Fear is important. We happily accept other aspects of ourselves that also have undesirable consequences. So why not fear?