culture / philosophy / Reblogged / TBT

TBT: Monsters

The Portly Politico32 Comments

As the days grow shorter and cooler, with a full moon overhead, that old Halloween spirit has me excited for mischief and fun to come.  Shirts for this year’s Spooktacular have come in, and I’m ready to play more spooky tunes from my front porch!

I’ve already reblogged one of my favorite posts, “On Ghost Stories,” and it’s a bit early to throwback to past Halloween posts, so it seemed like a good time to consider another post pertaining to the so-called “spooky season.”  This post, “Monsters,” is very much in the same vein as “Things That Go Bump in the Night,” but from the angle of cryptids—think “Bigfoot“—rather than strictly supernatural creatures.

I don’t know if I believe in Bigfoot or not—I want to believe in it, at least—but I’m very much open to the possibility that there is far more to God’s Creation than we can even hope to comprehend.  As such, it seems self-limiting to outright deny the existence of certain creatures.  There might be plenty of evidence against the existence of Bigfoot, Mothman, etc., but such was the case—as I point out in this post—with the adorably weird duck-billed platypus.

But I digress.  Whether these monsters exist or not, there are still plenty around us.  With that, here is 21 October 2020’s “Monsters“:

Back in May I stumbled upon an online culture journal, The Hedgehog Review, a publication of the Institute for the Advanced Studies of Culture.  I don’t know much about either the publication or the IASC, other than they’re based out of the University of Virginia, so I can’t speak to their degree of implicit Leftist infiltration, but my default position is that any organization in 2020 that isn’t explicitly conservative is probably Left-leaning.

It’s sad that I even have to make that disclaimer, because some part of me still clings to the old ideal of a broad, humanistic approach to knowledge—that we should examine ideas on their own merits, not on the politics of the entities espousing them.  I still believe that ideal is worth pursuing; I just also believe it is currently dead, or at least on life-support.

But I digress.  The then-current issue of The Hedgehog Review was dedicated entirely to the theme of “Monsters.”  It being the Halloween season, the time seemed ripe to revisit those pieces, and the idea of “monsters.”

The two pieces I bookmarked five months ago are now hopelessly lost behind a paywall, and as I’m in the business of selling subscriptions, not paying for them, I’m just going to wing my analysis based on their opening paragraphs.

The first, “Monstering,” starts with a relatively self-indulgent, overwrought introduction all about the author being a criminal defense attorney and an artist.  Sure, I’m self-indulgent, but this is a blog, not a serious academic journal.  Ms. Vanessa Place, the authoress of this piece, does not come across as particularly serious, either, with her needlessly complicated opening paragraph, in which she literally states she has nothing to add to the topic of monsters!

Thank goodness the rest is behind a paywall.  The painting of “The Cyclops” by Odilon Redon drew me in, but Ms. Place repulsed me where the ostensible monster attracted.

The second article, “Desperately Seeking Mothman,” seems more promising.  It’s about cryptids, cryptozoological animals for which anecdotal evidence exists, but formal zoology does not accept as real.  The author, Tara Isabella Burton, makes an interesting point in one of the two paragraphs cheapskates like me can read:

The field of cryptozoology—the occult-tinged study of as yet unbeheld creatures—from the bloodthirsty chupacabra of Mexico to the ponderous Bigfoot of the Pacific Northwest—has often been dismissed (fairly) by the academic world as a pseudoscience. But spotters of Mothman (a red-eyed, winged humanoid first glimpsed in West Virginia in the 1960s), the dinosaur-like Mokele-mbembe, or the Loch Ness monster aren’t doing science so much as practicing a kind of acute antiscience: resisting the notion that the world, with all its inchoate wonders, can fit neatly into any one taxonomy. Cryptids, as practitioners in the “field” call them, aren’t just “undiscovered” animals, but category-crossing ones: creatures whose bizarre juxtapositions render them icons of a world more complex than empirical science alone can explain.

That notion that certain things can’t be neatly fit into the traditional categories of science—really, of the Enlightenment—is one worth exploring.  Indeed, I think it’s one worth embracing.  One needn’t believe in Bigfoot (as my good blogger friend Audre Myers of Nebraska Energy Observer 98% does) to understand the vastness of Creation, of our still-limited capacity to understand it.  Even the humble duck-billed platypus defies our attempts at neat classification—and it was considered a fake once, too!

There is so much more to this world than we can understand—or even perceive.  But there are plenty of real monsters out there.

32 thoughts on “TBT: Monsters”

  1. Bigfoot – you’re in Audre’s backyard, mate. She carries, you know! 🙂

    I love the above picture. It reminds me of those old movies where the driver and passenger are having lengthy conversations and not one iota of attention is spent on the road ahead. LOOK AT THE ROAD, YOU’RE GONNA CRASH! WHAT ARE YOU DOING, TAKING PICTURES OF YOUR DOG, WATCH THE ROAD! 🙂 🙂 🙂

    I know you’d stopped but I did notice that Murphy is not wearing his seat belt. Tut tut! 🙂

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  2. Define ‘monster’. We are already aware of species that are ‘monsterously big’ – think elephants, whales, walruses. Now go to your browser and key in ‘new species found in —-‘ – pick any year you’d care to. New species are found every year and some species thought to be extinct have been found as well.

    Mothman vs bigfoot. A long time ago now, I’d read about mothman (come to think of it, it was probably around this time of year, lol) and did a little research. I don’t believe in mothman, let’s get that straight right off the bat. There’s virtually nothing there to inspire belief. But to double check myself, I just searched ‘recent mothman sightings’ and evidently there have been twelve. You do the research and come to your own conclusion. Bigfoot is another thing entirely (pardon the pun). Ancient tribes in America have paintings of large hairy bipedal creatures. Today, our Native America tribes still carry the oral traditions of the ancestors as well as adding their own sighting stories to the rich fabric of their history. Add to that the plethora of information from around the world in regard to bigfoot and you have to ask yourself if this can be all hoax and no context. Yowie in Australia, almas in Russia, yeti in the Himalayas, just to name a few places – there are more; again, do your own homework.

    I often suggest to people that it’s not intelligent to simply say bigfoots don’t exist. Until recently, we didn’t know about the odd creatures almost defying description that have been found in the deep oceanic waters – creatures that provide their own light as they live in deep darkness, fish that have a protuberance that resembles a fishing pole that is part of their head and is positioned over their mouths. The God that created such things can have created a being bigger than us, stronger than us, and completely disinterested in us. I don’t think that idea is farfetched at all. I do, however, take exception to the ilk that sees bigfoots as being able to move interdimensionally, able to ‘cloak’ themselves like some kind of living Romulan warship (Star Trek), or able to embed messages is peoples’ minds telepathically. Geez, louise, people. That’s three bridges too far.

    That 2%, my skepticism, is, I’m afraid, going to be part of me until we capture one, find one dead, or, heaven forbid, killed by hunters. Show me the body.

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    • This excerpt from your comment is key, and is the idea I was clumsily attempting to convey in my post:

      “I often suggest to people that it’s not intelligent to simply say bigfoots don’t exist. Until recently, we didn’t know about the odd creatures almost defying description that have been found in the deep oceanic waters – creatures that provide their own light as they live in deep darkness, fish that have a protuberance that resembles a fishing pole that is part of their head and is positioned over their mouths. The God that created such things can have created a being bigger than us, stronger than us, and completely disinterested in us. I don’t think that idea is farfetched at all.”

      As for interdimensional, invisible, telepathic Bigfoots, yes, that’s stretching credulity. Those embellishments are great for literary purposes, but undermine the potential legitimacy of Bigfoot.

      Still, that _Missing 411_ documentary was pretty compelling. But that entity—whatever it may be—doesn’t have to be Bigfoot.

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    • Apologies for getting all philosophical but monster can be defined as the unfamiliar or, to use a phrase Tina used in her dissertation piece, Unheimlich (Unhomelike). Humans being a fickle creature, we tend to be nervous or cautious around things we don’t know or can’t understand and thus, clumsily label.

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