Of Men and Monsters

John Snyder

When I was a little boy, I had bad dreams.  All of us do.  I dreamt of being chased by monsters, giant scaly beasts with heavy striding legs and huge teeth.  I still remember one particular vivid dream where I had hidden myself beneath my bed where I was certain the monster could not possibly know where I was.  Yet, I could feel the monster step onto the springs over me and begin to push through the mattress to devour me.

That dream, as best as I can recall, occurred when I was about six or seven, at just about the same time I was given my first Wonder Book of Dinosaurs.  Coincidentally, it was also about the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  In retrospect, I wonder why my dream should contain the image of the underside of a bunk bed.  And I think I know now.  My parents had boarded up the windows and had made for me “a little safe place” under my bed…just in case.

As a grown man, I have been recently exploring the thoughts of my childhood and I have some reflections to share with anyone with time to entertain them.  I must admit that the power of that dream remains even today.  As an expression of a pre-rational and subconscious understanding of great and terrifying things that moved mysteriously over me and around the incomprehensible world of childhood, it remains a source of astonishment to me.  It demands a respect for our understanding of things, even when they come to us by means that are not and cannot possibly be fully conscious or rational.  It seems, even now, a remarkably powerful “image” if that is what you want to call it, for a child to conjure as expression of some invisible “something” hovering over his bed, and pushing down upon him when he was certainly too young to know anything about Khrushchev or comprehend the dread meaning of communism.

Yet, there it is.  A dream that, in non-ideological essence, condensing a great world conflict into terrifying and personal reality.

And now I must tell you something else in an admission that reveals perhaps too much of myself.  I still have very similar dreams.  They have never fully departed from me.  All my life I have led a double life—one, the wakeful life in the ordinary workaday world, the other, one of incessant wars with monsters.

Like most of us, I presume, I do not give much thought to my dreams.  Yet, on those occasions when I recall them, they are almost uniformly of dreadful conflicts with unstoppable, colossal “things” that I am hiding from, running from and always at war with.  I am trying to fight with ad hoc weapons of clubs and stones monsters too big to fight, dragons I cannot possible defeat.  I have dreamt vivid dreams of enormous creatures that stand higher than ten story buildings and when I hide deep in concrete basements, their large eyes somehow see me, and they tear open buildings, rip open walls and smash the structure of everything down on me, forcing me to hid in the debris lest they eat me.  I am utterly impotent to fight the overwhelming force and power of the thing.

These monsters are not always corporeal or reptilian.  They are often presences: disembodied forces of nature, sometimes armies, pacts of animals, ghosts, sometimes even extra-terrestrials.  Some have flesh.  Others do not.  But in my subconscious mind, they are all the same kind of monster, always the same old enemy.  They are the things that seek to annihilate me.

To commend myself, I am always a soldier in my dreams.  I plan and strategize, try to sharpen sticks, spring a trap, find or fashion a weapon.  I am always running, but only to find a place where I can make a stand, to fight back, somehow, somewhere to hold on.

None of us truly knows how we will react to events that terrorize and overwhelm us.  How will we deal with powers too great to stop, with forces that reduce all resistance to impotence?  Will we be brave?  Will we freeze up?  Lose our minds in fear?  Do we run away?  Do we make a deal with an enemy we cannot defeat?  

I must tell you, if dreams are expressions of character unfiltered through the structure of consciousness and wishful thinking, I have never surrendered to a monster.  I have never given up.  I always run away with the purpose of making a stand somewhere else, to fight back when and if I get a chance.  The purpose of my life—my life as it exists in my dreams—is to find a way to organize a resistance, to make a stand some place where a defense is possible.

One dream I recall caused me to awake violently—perspiring and hyperventilating.  I recall that I sensed a presence in my home, demons, invisible creatures, something supernatural; monsters that were attempting to reach into me, and my home, and terrify me out of our safe place.  I remember two things very distinctly: terror and an intense desire to have the invisible things show themselves.  In my dream, I stood near a window, naked in the dark, shouting at the invisible entities to show themselves, cursing at them that they were cowards, pigs, animals, that they had no power over me.  I shouted my defiance in a false display of courage that was really not in me.  I wanted to scare them out of my home with threats.  But as I stood in my bedroom, they made themselves slowly visible, in the corner of my room, looming over me near the ceiling.  I remember not looking directly upon them.  For I knew I should not.  That my eyes must not make contact with theirs.  Then, not in rage, but from some reservoir of righteous contempt, I lunged up at them, and physically, physically threw them out of the window of my house!

When I awoke, I was sweating and my heart was beating wildly.  And I was, as you may imagine, rather proud of myself!  I had faced down monsters, in a dream, over which I, in my unconscious state could have had no conscious control.  I had not run away!  When I was given a chance, I fought back!

So allow me now to depart from my narrative and speak of monsters as I have seen them and fought them in my dreams and been witness to them, through the eyes of a child, a man, an historian and as a thinker. 

What is a monster?  What is a demon?  Do they exist?  When we speak of monsters, are we using metaphors and images, like that young child under the bed, feeling the springs pressing down upon him as some colossal beast pushes down with irrestible weight and tears at the thin veneer of protection above him?

And wasn’t Hitler a monster?  Surely, Stalin and Pol Pot were monsters.  Was not Mao a demon?  And what of those petrified bones that archeologist dig up from 65 million years ago?  T-rex.  Spinosaurus.  Allosaurus.  Deinonychus.  Surely, those were monsters.  Surely, the world of the Mesozoic was a nightmare kingdom in which man had no place but to flee and hide.  Nevertheless, that time was a real time.  It was a real world wherein humanity, it is hard to image, had no dominant place.  It was a world over which man held no pre-eminent dominion in the way that we now understand.  We could not multiple and thrive.  It was a world over which we could never gain mastery by naked wits and courage, and certainly could not have with only fingernails and teeth.  The oppressive urge of that antediluvian world would never have allowed us to survive by mere sticks and stones wielded by little groups of “hominids” scurrying for cover in skins and fig leaves.  Man had no power.  Savage things ruled the untamed world.  The power of an “evolving” human genius and experience was insufficient to prevent him from being devoured incunabula.

What I am getting at is this: there was an antediluvian age of monsters.  They existed.  And what I mean to assert is that monsters still exist.  I ask that you indulge my reasoning here—which is to assert that once something has existed, it follows, that that thing can exist and in some way still exists.  The idea that there “are no such things as monsters” simply cannot be true.  Furthermore, monsters are not mere aberrations in the “evolution” of earth.  They ruled for millions of years.  And before the Cretaceous, the Jurassic, and the Triassic, there was a prior age of Permian monsters.  Before that, there were monsters that ruled the sea. 

Monsters are not creatures of our unconscious minds or heated imaginations.  They once ruled the earth.  Somehow, we are aware of them even though they have physically vanished into the striations of geological time.  And yet, what if, they still exist? What if perhaps they still rule the earth, in a different kind of way?

I would assert that anything that once existed, by force of reason, cannot as a possibility, be foreclosed from still existing.  It is neither logical nor historically factual to say that monsters do not or cannot exist.  We have scientific proof that they once did exist, which demonstrates that in the realm of being, which is to say ontologically, monsters are a fact of existence.  They cannot be rationally denied.

But that is only a curious philosophical point I make on the way to where I am really going.  For even in apparent contradiction to what I have just said, I wish now to clarify with fuller explanation.  The world of the past is but a shadow of what is.  It has not fully faded away, because the nature of true existence remains even when all the accidens of existence pass away.  It is not our eyes and our physical senses that tell us this.  It is the necessary conclusion of logic.  Existence exists.  Being remains being.  

There remains and always will remain something called a monster.  As surely as the memory of Hitler remains, even once this generation passes away, the monster called Adolf Hitler remains.  Even if all generations pass away.  Hitler, despite his mortality, remains, forever, an abiding fact in the history and catalog of beings that have existed.  Even if we forget.  Even if everyone forgets.  The fact of his existence remains, not as function of memory.  But as a fact of existence. 

But something else remains, not just as a frightening possibility, but an inescapable function of necessity.  Something looms in terrifying omnipresence over us and around us as an artifact of the existence of a fallen world.  So even as  that little boy cowers beneath his bed, hiding from the presence of ineluctable evil, made manifest in a dream, over which he and his family and world have no power, even so, dinosaurs and Hitler and Mao tze Tung, and Tamerlane, even sulfurous aliens from other worlds, should they exist, none of them are or can be monsters in the real sense of what a monster is.  I am not saying this to assuage the child-like fears in all of us.  Far from it.  Rather, I say this to the discomfiture of that same child now fully grown, and to the disquiet of all grown children everywhere who pause to reflect on the recurring nightmare of monsters in human history.  For all blood lust and wickedness, as found in creatures, is but the incarnation of something deeper that moves through the pulsing currents of all flesh that takes residence in temporality but is not bound by our ordinary understanding of mortality.  All the villainy of history is but the demonic wrapped in the skin of evanescent men.  All of the enemies of the best impulses of mankind have been monster-ous.  But none of them have been the monster itself!

Through all time, the monster, the same old monster moves back and forth over the earth seeking the blood of men.

You see, there is something else—something that defies every instinct and hopeful desire of human pride and will.  Monsters exist, and will always exist, not for want of courage, or wisdom, or prudence or temperance in men.  Not for want of hope or faith or even love and all the fortitude and heroism that arise from those virtues.  Monsters exist and will always exist because monsters do not die.  They cannot be destroyed like flesh and blood.  They cannot be overcome by the heroic acts of men.  Indeed, that is the definition of a monster.  A monster is the wickedness of the world that cannot be slain by mortal hand or acts of selfless heroism.  Mortal man has no power to kill a monster.

If you can kill it—it is not a monster.  If it bleeds—it is not a monster.  If it can be reasoned with or subdued or rehabilitated, if it goes away and never returns—it is not a monster.  Monsters do not submit and monsters do not die.  They are at war with you and me and everything good and true and beautiful, now and forever.  

For the horrifying fact is that all real monsters are invincible.  A monster is not just a creature that brings carnage and terror and death.  It is worse than that.  Much worse.  He is being itself who cannot by human will or genius be defeated or overcome.  His purpose is singular, non-negotiable.  Relentless.  It is not to slaughter or to enslave, which is often our pedestrian and worldly view of his power.  His power is despair.  And in that purpose—submission to his will and not to the will and power of some other Thing, the power of Being upon which and through which the whole universe in somehow radically contingent.  That is what makes a monster a monster.  It is ineluctable annihilation, hopelessness.  It is dread—terror such that we no longer see the goodness, the truth and beauty of True Being.  Monsters are the antithesis of being.  They are anti-being.

But returning to the warfare of my dreams, they are a constant and unending contest against some unbound and ravenous entity, visible most of the time, but sometimes invisible.  I have never in my dreams defeated a monster.  I have never stood over the writhing body of the beast to watch its blood pour out, nor have I stood victorious over the grotesque as its rattles out its last breath and its heart slows to lifelessness.  I have only survived.  I have escaped.  I have repulsed and sometimes I have even evicted.  But I have never defeated a monster.  And the reason is—a monster is the thing behind the thing. 

Stalin was but a manifestation of some monster larger than himself.  For even in his death, the monster remained.  Even when his empire collapsed, the monster remains.  If this nation were someday to war with the growing might of China over the monstrous evil remaining in the legacy of Mao, and even if we should apparently defeat that monster, it will raise again.  It will reappear somewhere else, in some other guise, and it will come at us, with unstoppable power and might.  And we shall fight him again, and again and again, in other names and in other places.  But always he will reappear.  Invincible.

Nothing that can be defeated and remain defeated is a monster.  That is why the ultimate enemy of man is not flesh and blood or other men, but something else, something that gets inside our minds and our souls.  Like a dream.  And it must be fought without there being any mortal power to defeat it.  Monsters are those things in our fallen world whose existence is so much a part of fallenness that there is no mortal power in man to overcome it.  This body will pass away, but evil will exist and remain unto the ending of the world. 

All this is to say, that monsters inhabit the fabric of existence itself.  We are, therefore, eternally at war with them: demons and witches and dragons, evil emperors and the wizards of the Klan.  In every kind and manifestation they return again and again, until some power greater than man, wrestles them into submission and binds them in eternity by powers more vast and unfathomable than can be plumbed from the sloughs of human philosophy.

Indeed, that is why there is a hell.  For once a thing exists, it must always exist.  It cannot be made to un-exist.  Those who ally themselves with monsters, who become their manifestation by promises of gaining the whole world, go to the place of monsters.  And those who in this life, must face them, as they emerge here and there, returning throughout all time, sometimes appearing suddenly, more often approaching from afar off, always through all ages and all times, we must run, and flee, fight when as we can, hold out in the darkness, take courage, resist, and return again to make our stand.  All this is our part in the drama, until a Someone more powerful than monsters rescues us.  That Someone, the First and Last Hero will shake out of the fabric of fallenness all the invisible corruption of the recurring and relentless nightmare that floods over this world every night and every day, age on age.

Mankind has no ultimate power over monsters.  If we have power at all, it is merely to bind them momentarily, imprison them by laws, resist them by courage, rise like soldiers to the call and spur of a some ineffaceable abiding truth written on our hearts.  We can build moats of virtue around ourselves and walls of character.  We can hold in fellowship a last bastion and stand vigil so that others and we may escape when the ancient foe approaches in a towering shadow to despoil our country.  But do not believe that in repulsing Caesar, you defeat Rome for all time.  Do not believe that in Killing Hilter, you will kill forever the wicked appetites of genocide or empire.  The demons that we wrestle against are not flesh and blood, not because they are metaphors or images, but rather because their existence is not contingent upon the mantle of flesh.  They exist in the principalities and powers of an intrinsic corruption in being itself, as it exists in a deformed nature.  For us, there is no ultimate hope of victory over them but in some Returning King who will rescue us in our final terrifying conflict. 

In the meantime, all men of honor, whose fealty is to that returning Prince, who love truth and despise the ancient lie, who stand in the age-old heroic holding action of resistance to an invincible power, stand like Spartans in the gap, holding out for a time, never with hope of defeating, but always with the faith of buying time for those unprepared for the evils that are coming.  

And they are coming.  The monsters are coming. 

Like an unstoppable host of reptilian appetites, every night everywhere, stealing midnight marches as we sleep, they approach in new faces and in new doctrines, in new ideas and old stories, in exciting promises but always the same old monster.  While mankind slumbers in the false assurance that monsters do not exist, or if they do exist, there is safety in our homes—in the meantime, let very good man and woman stand vigil until the One True Man restoreth all anew, and reigns triumphant over this world as it was meant to be—a world without sin, sorrow or the unbounded powers and furies of monsters.

Only then shall the final alarm sound. Then will all awaken in gasping breath and sweat from the ancient, recurring battle. Then shall The Prince stand victorious over the slain monsters that would not die. And we may live the dream that is not a dream in a kingdom where all the invincible dragons and demons of our fallen world are bound and cast into eternal captivity by the invincible glory of Our Redeemer.