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Hoots World
Hypocrisy in Haiti
Israeli hypocrisy would be comical, if its consequences weren’t so tragic. These days, Israeli media and Israel’s powerful friends in the US media have been tomtomming about the noble help and rescue mission Israelis have undertaken in the remote, quake-hit Haiti.
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What will the football widows be doing for the next few weeks?

With the World Cup Football (Soccer) about to start, with the notable exception of North America, hundreds of millions if not billions of people will be obsessed with the sport for weeks and glued to their TVs. We all know that there will be more men than women among that number. So what will the football "widows" do? (Personally, I couldn't give two hoots about who wins the cup.)

Ermmm... Running around picking beer cans up, getting snacks ready, ordering pizza, congratulating the husband on his loudest belch yet??..lol

Watching the football too of course.

I'm going to have to justify that portentious (or just pretentious) title, and by the end of this article, I hope you'll agree, I will do just that. It's time at last to approach one of my favorite topics in weird fiction or otherwise, one of the most overarching themes in the entirety of human literature and myth: the sinister Other. The thrill, the revulsion, and the irresistable attraction of the uncanny. Just typing it gives me chills.

If there's one other topic besides literature to which I've devoted lifelong study, it would undoubtedly be mythology. A close third would be biology, especially evolution.

The observations of these three disciplines as they analyze the world have led me to the realization that they are all inextricably intertwined, and that a careful study of each one will provide critical clues in regard to the other two. In what will inevitably be a continuing series, I'll be unfurling various conclusions of my more than fifteen years of research on these topics.

The emergence of homo sapiens as a species is as good a place to start as any. While it's impossible to pinpoint the exact date of the emergence of language, it is generally accepted that sound became word around 100,000 years ago, just before (or in the early stages of) the last ice age. Instinct and (possibly ancestral) memory served that role before we spoke, and in some ways, their influence on us can be far more powerful than that of the spoken or written word.

In any case, the Pleistocene world was populated with a profusion of now-extinct mammals, such as the giant ground sloths and short-faced bears. It was also home to various species of less-classified hominids, with which we humans competed for food and territory. It is with these nonhumans that I will primarily deal.

Central to an understanding of our relationships with these other hominids are two concepts. First is the fact that these were the original denizens of the uncanny valley. An analysis of skulls of various hominids shows that many were quasi-human, but contained many features that were eerily human-like: ridged noses, non-receding jaws, and of course, eyes that burned with a sharp intelligence that was not quite aligned with ours. They were likely covered with thick hair, and at least some were carnivorous.

The second important facet of our interaction with our competitors is that of environment. For millions of years, many hominid and pre-hominid species had shared the environment of the safe, concealing forest, stratified throughout the branches and the floor. When our ancestors first began to walk across the savannah, they were forced to become comfortable with open spaces, but we never truly lost our desire to return to our original home in the woods.

It is for this reason, I believe, that in legends such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, the forest symbolizes themes like childhood, simplicity, and (not entirely unpleasant) savagery. In time, however, other species reclaimed the forest, and transformed it into a place of mortal danger for any hapless homo sapiens who might venture there.

From this confusion, incidentally, we note one of our eternal subconscious conflicts, evident from the earliest myths: the forest is peace, naturalism, naivete. But its shadowy labyrinths equally represent danger, horror, the unknown.

The inimical apes of the woods were just similar enough to us to present a significant threat, but sufficiently different to make friendly interaction impossible. Thus, even today, apes taught to walk upright unnerve us. Tales of the Yeti and his kin can chill us when whispered around a campfire, just as they sent shudders through our ancestors as they spoke them ritualistically, glancing into the shadows of the nearby trees, dreading that they should be confirmed.

Imagine the scene: an ancestor of yours, perhaps, naked but carrying a simple stone axe for defense, wanders through thick glades in search of new food. He sniffs the air; it carries a musky scent he doesn't recognize, yet which is eerily like his own. And from the brances drop a troop of squat, howling, hairy men, unarmed save for their gleaming teeth. He knows the meaning of their hoots and screeches: their hunger, unlike his own, is for flesh.

From the terrified recollections of survivors of such encounters, we derive our clandestine whispers of pixies, of boggarts, of the innumerable vicious half-men who lurk in lonely groves and misty hillsides in virtually every mythos on earth. They were uncannily like us; indeed, in the far more distant past, they were us. We were separated by just enough relational distance to place them upon one of the highest tiers of our ancestral fright. They were people, and yet they were something else entirely.

As I've said before, one might accuse me of Unweaving the Rainbow when I explain the terror of the uncanny in this way. In my opinion, these truths make the stories all the more chilling, because we can now know for certain that they represent a physical reality of our past. The sensitive among us can still feel the hairs on their neck stand up when they hear of the man of the forest, and shiver at the phrase's true implications.

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