The Land, The Cursed, The Consequences

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As you recall, in May of this year my allergies were in full swing. My sinuses erupted, causing my body to experience flu-like symptoms – body aches, coughing, sneezing, chills – forcing me to stay at home and mend.

On cue, they have struck again.

That means the fall season is upon us. Autumn is great for the ocular and gestational experiences – driving down roads surrounded by trees exploding with orange, yellow, red leaves; hiking through the woods feeling the crunching of the leaves and twigs underneath and getting better sightings of deer; sitting at the kitchen table holding coffee mugs filled to the brim with hot cocoa with marshmallows; stirring with a spoon bowls of hot oatmeal with raisins and honey.

Horrible for my body. Well, only for a little bit.

I’ve been recuperating in my room for the last few days, eating chicken noodle soup, drinking tea, sucking on cough lozenges, going through boxes of tissues as well as taking in a few horror films – one of my favorite pastimes, and now the centerpiece of my ethical analyses.

Last night I watched The Cursed on the Hulu channel. It falls in the gothic horror genre which continues to be my favorite. My fascination dates back to when I was a boy when I first read Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and then every Saturday morning watching all the old scary films on Creature Feature. With all due respect to Bela Lugosi, in my opinion Christopher Lee still stands as the world’s greatest Count Dracula.

The film takes place on a manor in 19th century France. A clan of gypsies lay claim to land owned by Seamus Lambert, a cruel land baron who has no policy for negotiation. Envisioning Lambert’s wrath, the Gypsy matriarch makes a silver cast of dentures in the form of wolf’s fangs to protect their clan.

Those fangs are scary, but really cool looking. Definitely a great Halloween accessory. I’m just saying.

After Lambert brutally massacres the entire clan, he captures the gypsy matriarch and a male gypsy, who is cut to pieces and made into a scarecrow, after which Lambert has the matriarch buried alive with a box containing the silver fangs.

This is where cruelty and ego are so blindsiding. Lambert should have known the grave injustice he committed would provoke a curse. There are always consequences to actions – cause and effect. What you do in the dark will come to the light one day, my father would say.

Soon, everyone in the village is having nightmares about the scarecrow and the silver fangs. One day a group of children enter into the field where the scarecrow hangs. One boy digs the ground below and uncovers the box. He opens it to reveal the fangs. He puts them in his mouth, and instantly transforms, quickly biting another boy at the throat. Like the werewolf, any member of the manor who is attacked by the beast transforms into one. Thus, the curse begins.

The protagonist, pathologist John McBride, whose wife and child were killed by such a beast, is summoned to the manor to investigate. He not only uncovers the nature of the beast, but the precipitator of the curse. As he confronts Lambert about his cruelty, he states that he did it for the sake of his family. Ironically, by the end of the film, the entire population of the manor, sans Lambert’s two children, are slaughtered.

Yes, it is understandable that people may tune out after a while because this theme of truth and consequences becomes so redundant that it resembles white noise, despite the fact that said people are living this out in their daily lives.

And it is also understandable that one of the reasons that people don’t go to horror movies is that unlike most Hollywood formulaic films, no one escapes unscathed. Whomever survives has their life irrevocably changed.

But, unlike Hollywood, horror films are closer to real life.

The battle for land is often brutal and costly, with the spoils of ownership only temporary, and even if more permanently, fraught with unending crisis.

We love to sing folk music hero Woody Guthrie’s lyrics, “This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land,” but if we examine human history, it is a value rarely actualized. For thousands of years, indigenous peoples throughout the world either went to war with neighboring tribes over land, or resisted barbarians, warlords or empires overtaking them. In the end, all lands have the blood soaked deep down in the soil, and in those places, they will be forever haunted.

It’s not about what we choose to believe. It is about what is.

Over and over again we shout phrases like “God don’t like ugly”, and “Vengeance is mine saith the Lord,” as if we know that those who have harmed us will get theirs in the end, even though we will not bear witness to it. We need to believe that no bad deed goes unpunished, otherwise, how can God allow this to happen to us?

So, it is not that we don’t believe in retribution; it is the source of the retribution that is the question. It is the God that we have designed, that resides in our books that serves our needs, not some dark and haunting spirits beyond our control, that may even come for us if we in turn commit injustices. We have a desperate need to control the wheels of justice even in the spiritual world.

Quid pro quo.

We also detest that “the others” may have a knowledge and intimacy with the spiritual world that can overturn whatever power we have amassed in the physical world. This is another reason indigenous people worldwide have been overrun by conquering nations, to exterminate such power.

However, this is another way in which quid pro quo works, where the aristocracy, in its many iterations from the past to the present, will go see the gypsy woman, or the witch doctor, or the voodoo priest, or the shaman, or any other spiritual influence beyond our established scope, and pay a tribute – money, precious minerals like gold and silver, even sovereignty – to heal a family member, or help them conquer and build an empire, or destroy their enemies, or curse an enemy clan, or make someone love them.

Finally, though we are filled with blessings every day, we also live in a world of curses, many of which are beyond our control. Several are cast against those who came before us as a result of their ego and greed – murdering, kidnapping, stealing, enslaving, exploiting. What we can control are our own bodies, which we can use un-limitlessly for good, and though not guaranteed, can assure that we don’t bring curses upon ourselves.

Perhaps, over time, those good deeds can serve to cleanse the bloody soil deep beneath our feet, and satisfy the haunting spirits throughout our cursed lands.