Zombies

Zombies (It takes me a bit but I get to them)

Being an ardent acolyte of the poet’s art, and overcome by a prideful joy celebrating the similarity in nomenclature between one of its most gifted masters and my own poor appellation, I have always felt a certain connection to the words of Lord Byron.

Recently, my mind came to consider the singular circumstances that surrounded his authoring of the poem “Darkness”. Its first lines read as follows:

 

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.

The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars

Did wander darkling in the eternal space, 


Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth 


Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air; 


Morn came and went--and came, and brought no day, 


And men forgot their passions in the dread 


Of this their desolation

-Lord Byron from “Darkness”

Byron was writing during a time of personal turmoil, social unrest, and actual physical darkness. For reasons then unknown to Europe and North America, the summer of 1816 was full of coldness, darkness, and uncertainty. A combination of volcanic events half a world away, sunspots, and other natural shifts in climate dramatically impacted the day-to-day weather in the western world.  Lacking our modern instruments, they were left without reasonable explanations, and the citizens and scientists of the day stooped to nearly unrestrained speculation. 

In his poem, Byron crystalizes these nebulous hysterics by imagining a world forever lost to the great lights of heaven, abandoned to the darkness that brooded over the face of the waters before God spake into the formless void on the First Day.

Men burn everything in the world that can be burned in a desperate battle for survival. When all of the forests and cities of the earth are consumed, even the most precious things are valued only as fuel for a fire of subsistence. Any that have survived waste away without food, or hope, until at last all is gone and the Earth grows utterly quiet. There is no wind, no waves, no clouds, and no movement at all. Darkness does not only blind the world, but in the end it binds it absolutely.

What then does this rather melancholy poem have to do with Zombies? After all Rick Grimes and Will Smith battled the brainless hosts of undead in world still filled with the light of the sun. My point is that our fears can be a very useful way of understanding ourselves. I don’t mean in the shallow sense of finding out our fears for the sole cause of “facing” them in a grand spectacle of will. Instead, I mean that if one fails to sit back and consider the genesis of one’s preoccupations, one fails to fully grasp the world. To us, the somber poem of Byron seems explainable and logical. We can see why the poet and his readers feared so passionately a world overcome by night thanks to the knowledge that comes with our modern perspective. To me, there is little doubt that thoughtful students will draw similarly obvious conclusions concerning the fascinations of our own day in 200 years as we do of Byron. Conclusions that will be benefit from the wide lens of history. And yet, I cannot help but see similarities in our situation and his.

We can learn a great deal about ourselves as a people when we look at what we fear and talk about. Why Zombies of all things? Why are they so popular, especially with young people? Could it be because young people are in a deep struggle for identity? Could it be some gut instinct that rebels against a lifestyle that robs us of the essential experience of survival? Could it be that we fear that our lives are being lost in the abstraction and specialization of modern society? We want to be strong enough to survive independently. We don’t want to depend on a system that can, and perhaps one day will, fail. Perhaps some part of us tires of being parasitic as young people; in the end quite unable to succeed without succor. We spend the strength of our youth in schools, and the whole time we do, most of us depend on our parents, on the government, or on charity to supply us with the means of a reasonable living. While we may work our way through school, our lives do not seem complete. We put off living as we otherwise might wish with the reasonable expectation that our investment in time and effort will be rewarded. But within some dark crevice of our unconsciousness, we fear that it might not. That the postulations of a civil and ordered society are in the end unsure.

There is also a connection with most zombie narratives and biogenetic research gone horribly wrong. As our good friend the chaos mathematician Malcolm from Jurassic Park taught us, genetic power is the most formidable force in nature, and life finds a way. Specifically, it finds a way out of human control. I think that is another of the great attractions of these stories. As a society, we are still absorbing the implications of our now formidable grasp of genetics. Soon, we might not even need “Dino-DNA” to build a Jurassic Park. I may well live to see the day when we can design living creatures to order from scratch. This kind of power is wonderful, and terrible. It is little wonder then that it should be such a strong, recurrent theme in our dystopian visions.  We must also consider that our generation has not yet had to face the terrors of a disease modern science could not contain. For almost all our lives the triple cocktail of antiretrovirals has held in check the only serious specter of unstoppable sickness that our parents faced in HIV/AIDS.  While there is still very real danger from AIDS individually, the chances of an uncontrolled pandemic in the DEVELOPED world are now rather slim. We feel instead have to feel this fear of sickness, this, momento mori, vicariously. 

Finally, (at least for tonight), I think one of the most reasonable explanations for the recurrent success of the zombie phenomenon is a deep-seated need for real community and connection. So much of our daily interactions with our fellow beings can be shallow. It may be that many who watch zombie films and shows feel as though they are the only person REALY alive that they know. Perhaps they have some small group that they can connect with, but the sea of faces around them is filled not with people, but corpses. Our lives are compartmentalized, our experiences unmingled with the common thread of humanity. It may be that young people can feel terribly lost in a world where they are not heard, only hungered after. Where they are the consumable fodder of the gray masses.

I don’t think that most of these somber thoughts are conscious. But I think that they exist on some level. I also think that my small examination has been if anything, overly simple. There is a great deal of nuance here, that speaks to the enduring concerns, AND hopes of the people drawn to these new stories of survival. They are also filled with self discovery and independent endurance. They show us a world where people can adapt to nearly unbelievable trial.  By better understanding why these stories filled with darkness matter to us we come to a better understanding of the darkness within ourselves. With this knowledge, we are better able to allow the light of our Celestial Sovereign to divide the day from the night in an act of personal recreation.