The Jade Badge of Courage

All---

It comes as no surprise, I'm sure, to learn that police, investigators, and emergency personnel all routinely encounter a sort of darkness that most of get through our day just fine without.  It's the kind of darkness that people wear close to their skin or wrap around their heart, that never sees the light of day.  Police, investigators, and emergency personnel don't work in the light of day.  (Metaphorically.)

You can reign in your crazy fantasies here, too.  I'm not even talking about serial killers and shotgun murderers, child rapists, or people with the kind of secret sexual lifestyle that inspires television crime drama.  That stuff is there, and it's plenty dark.  It can also be a bit of distraction.  There's plenty of other darkness.  There's the man who knows his smoking is killing him, and just sort of hopes every trip to the emergency room might be his last one.  There's the lady whose Alzheimer's is so advanced that she can't stop shoplifting and only giggles like a two year-old when she's caught.  There's the guy who always wondered what it would be like to smoke marijuana and happened to smoke some pretty foul grass on a foggy, icy night when he was already tired, and no one knows if it helped him into the lake or not; they just know he ended up in the lake.  There's the girl who is so bored and discontent with her life that she wanders through the park, daydreaming with her eyes closed, not paying attention to where she's walking or who else is around her.  That's all darkness, too.

What makes makes darkness a challenge for people like police, investigators, and emergency personnel is that there is in, in the end, nothing they can do about it.  Whatever they do, it's too late to stop the something from happening.  Perhaps they can stop it from happening again, but they are are the mop up crew for society's spiritual and moral waste water.  Once it's spilled, you can clean it up, but that doesn't undo the spill, not really.

Not only that, but normal human coping mechanisms are not options for these folks.  Laws, codes of conduct, oaths of service... These things bind such personnel.  The darkness they encounter, they cannot talk about.  They can't go fishing with a buddy and talk about it, even if someone wanted to hear it, even if someone could stand to hear it.

So what do they do?

They drink, a lot.

They tell cynical, tasteless jokes.  A lot.

Sometimes they stretch the boundaries of their oaths, and they talk to one another.  Sometimes they violate their codes, and they just go ahead and talk to their wives or their friends.  Sometimes they find a counselor who is qualified, willing, and distanced enough to sit back and listen and is bound by an oath of her own.

That's probably the healthiest option, but it's not always as easy as it sounds to find such a person, let alone to feel the kind of trust necessary to expose them to the private darkness the cop is carrying around.

Most often, cops wear the darkness like a sheath over the badge.  It's a sign of toughness.  It's a sign of pride.  It's a sign of shared, gasping futility.  It's a way of saying, "I take this crap into my head so that you never have to, and nothing you can ever do will thank me enough for that."

We've been talking recently in my anthropology class about cognition and perception, about meaning and expression.  The world that you know is shaped by meanings that you have internalized.  Those meanings develop (in part) as the world passes through your perception (seeing it) and then your conception (organizing it, making sense of it).  It's one thing to know that the darkness is out there.  It changes your whole world when you come face to face with the darkness.  It breaks your world when you have no way to organize and make sense of it.

.Nevets.

Making Evil Too Exciting

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Photo by Harlequeen

If you've been familiar with my blog for any length of time, you'll know I talk about evil a lot, mostly about the writer's relationship to the portrayal of evil.  If you're familiar with my stories, you'll know that my interest in exploring the nature of evil is core to what I do.  The past few days what's been niggling at me is the notion that we (writers, TV producers, movie directors, playwrights) make evil pretty exciting.  In truth, most of the time, evil is an uncomfortable sort of boring.

When I think back to my time doing forensics, it's pretty apparent that facing evil is not a hot rush of adrenaline.  It is a cold, empty ache in the belly.  It's not a thrill ride, heart pounding as you wonder what's around the next corner.  It's a dull, weepy mood as you realize that you know what's around the next corner for someone.  Maybe you.  Maybe a loved one.  Maybe a stranger.

Despite all the wild, intriguing motivations we right about -- and which occasionally do exist in reality -- most murderers are a lot more boring.  On one case we were involved with the murderer explained his motivation as, "They made me mad.  When I get mad, I shoot people."    On another case, the killer was too drunk to remember why he kicked a man's head in.  On a cold case I was part of, we identified a woman as the victim of a serial killer who himself was long dead, and it all happened as if we were sorting mail.

Is there interesting psychology and human drama in these stories?  Yes, to be sure.   Is there adrenaline?   Excitement?  Not much, at least not the kind we usually write about or portray.

I suppose this isn't news, but it's something that weighs on me sometimes as I write.  My stories are surreal and larger than life.  I want them to be exciting.  I want them to be compelling and memorable.  I think, in some ways, they are effective because of that.

Sometimes, though, I wonder if I'm doing a disservice to real evil, or injustice to the people who confront or fall victim to real evil in the world.  Their experiences aren't exciting.  They're devastating.  They're destructive.    They're dramatic.  But their lives aren't thrillers; they're just miserable.

.Nevets.

Reveling in Evil

All,

I'm mentioned it before, but I was struck again last night by a real tension within in myself when it comes to my writing. If you've read anything at all that I've written, you know that my writings tend (only tend?) toward the dark. I work with pretty extreme evils as my material. I do it pretty well, I think.

This is not an easy thing for me to come to grips with.

Real evil sickens my stomach. Often literally. I've brushed against it on the ambulance crew a few times. I spent my days engaged with it when I was doing forensic anthropology. Back then, it was always very important to me that I not sterilize myself to the horrors that I was working with, because I didn't want to minimize what the victims had gone through and their families would be going through for the rest of their lives.

And yet, I write about it. I hope to someday make my living writing about it.

That doesn't always sit well within myself. When I hear news about workplace shootings and the real loss of innocent life, it becomes harder for me to play games with fictional innocents. When I think about some of the victims in the lab who were not simply killed but so brutalized that their very humanity was hardly recognizable any longer, it becomes harder to destroy the personhood of the characters I create. When I have an ambulance run with someone who is both intoxicated and criminally insane, it becomes a challenge for me to justify creating unbalanced characters.

Any other writers out there struggle with questions like this in their writing? Crime / horror writers with similar questions? YA writers who write about teens doing things they don't want their own sons or daughters doing? Historical fiction writers who have to keep entertaining a series of events that was likely not entertaining to the individuals living through it? Anyone else?

I'd love to hear your own thoughts on how you manage it.

.Nevets.