Review: Monster 36 by Anton Pooles // Jesse Eckerlin

Whether through the endorphin-pumping shock tactics of jump scares (when will they come, if at all?), the stomach-churning fascinations of gore (how much will there be, and how graphic?), or the more cerebral frissons proffered by psychological varieties of dread, horror tantalizes us with the depths of our epistemological uncertainty. Is the apparently supernatural phenomenon manifestly alien, or is it a delusion awaiting rationalist demystification? What is a monster, and what does it want (from us)? The best horror sustains a radically ambiguous interpretive impasse right to its end, dramatizing the aporias of self-knowledge and the limits of alterity. By occasioning the visceral and intellectually productive realization that we can only know that we do not know, horror forces us to abandon the fetish of the unified field theory and to speculate from the trenches of doubt. The first poem from Anton Pooles's 2018 Anstruther Press chapbook, Monster 36, that generated such productive uncertainty for me is "The Unnamed Creature (From My Dream)." In the poem, the speaker follows a bear-like creature with "purple-black fur" and deer antlers; its eyes appear to glow in the dark. The creature is bleeding profusely, and for three days the speaker trails "the crimson path he bled out" through the prairies. "Tell me," implores the speaker, "where are you going with that red raw hole / in your chest? / You move so stubbornly forward —that way is just more prairie." Is the creature aware that he is seemingly wandering into oblivion? How is he not dead yet? Does he know that the speaker is following him? We do not receive an answer. Like a twisted version of the solitary, demented penguin who marches obstinately away from the sea in Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World, the creature is following the needle of some weird internal compass, and what appears erratic may have a disquieting logic all its own. Pooles's poems range from short lyrics to prose poems that function like isolated cinematic vignettes. At once symbolist and minimal, they feature a horror lexicon that moves through B-movies and Lovecraft to del Toro and Kurosawa. Monster 36 opens with an epigraph from del Toro, who speaks of being saved and absolved by monsters since they are "patron saints of our blissful imperfection." Honorable in principle, del Toro's effort to destigmatize the darker and taboo elements of the monstrous comes with a cost: it risks domesticating the strangeness of monsters, delimiting them to a ritualistic function, and reducing them to mere avatars of sublimated human desire. Here is Pooles's poem "Green Man":

I wish I had your lagoon eyes. Not as my own, but watching from the deep, where your green fingers grow and coil. I wish I had your fiery tongue. Not as my own, but flooding my thirsty ear.

By decoding the monstrous alterity of the green man as a representation of veiled, illicit desire, the poem risks reducing the monster to a mere fetish object. Such unilateral reduction is the enemy of horrific ambiguity which, in order to maintain its enigmatic tug, requires a kind of indivisible excess beyond allegory. Without such fearful asymmetry, the monster is always already a fake awaiting unmasking. del Toro's example proves a poor guide here, one who cuts against the more radical grain of Pooles's chapbook.In contrast, the accomplishment of Monster 36 can be seen in the poem "Kleksographien." Developed by the 19th-century Swabian poet and physician Justinus Kerner, klecksography is a proto-automatist art technique. It produces images by spilling inkblots onto paper which is then folded and left to dry. Once unfolded, an unexpected mirrored-pattern is revealed on the paper, often resembling a figure or a face. The irrational recognition of such random patterns qua meaningful images is often called apophenia. Although Kerner was in many senses a scientific rationalist—he is most famous for having provided the first clinical description of botulism—there is no indication that he dismissed the magnetic patterns produced by klecksographs as mere apophenic projections; nor could he likely have anticipated how the technique would later be adopted as a therapeutic diagnostic by Rorschach. Rorschach's iconic equation between the associative, meaning-making apophenic imagination and the disordered thinking characteristic of schizophrenia is now all but discredited; it is pseudo-scientific sublimation which reduces art to a symptom. Pooles's poem seems to grasps this psychiatric failure, and recognizes that the time is right for an aesthetic reclamation of Kerner. The mark of such a reclamation will be a fidelity to the indeterminate and the weird. Among the inventory of Kerner's "terrible, beautiful creature[s]," Pooles describes not only "an emperor moth with two sets of eyes" and "the ghost of his mother who died 40 years ago," but also the eponymous "monster on page 36." Of all of Kerner's, creatures, this monster 36 is the one that fascinates Pooles the most. "He is crying," writes Pooles, conceding: "I don't know why this is." And what is more horrific and speculatively rewarding than being drawn to that which we know that we know we do not understand?