The weird and the Eerie (maps and networks)

 

This book was recommended to me by Jeremiah and it seemed really interesting. I read through the introduction whilst taking notes.

The weird and the Eerie by Mark Fisher read through

INTRODUCTION The Weird and the Eerie (Beyond the Unheimlich)

He begins by noting that the weird and the eerie are not necessarily scary, although it is often associated with horror. It is also the first thing that I thought of when thinking about the weird and the eerie.

What the weird and the eerie have in common is a preoccupation with the strange. The strange — not the horrific. The allure that the weird and the eerie possess is not captured by the idea that we “enjoy what scares us”. It has, rather, to do with a fascination for the outside, for that which lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience. This fascination usually involves a certain apprehension, perhaps even dread — but it would be wrong to say that the weird and the eerie are necessarily terrifying

Unheimlich: Freud uses this word to describe the uncanny or better yet the Unhomely.

Freud’s unheimlich is about the strange within the familiar, the strangely familiar, the familiar as strange — about the way in which the domestic world does not coincide with itself. All of the ambivalences of Freud’s psychoanalysis are caught up in this concept

The weird and the eerie are both on the outside.

The weird and the eerie make the opposite move: they allow us to see the inside from the perspective of the outside. As we shall see, the weird is that which does not belong. The weird brings to the familiar something which ordinarily lies beyond it, and which cannot be reconciled with the “homely” (even as its negation). The form that is perhaps most appropriate to the weird is montage — the conjoining of two or more things which do not belong together.

like the weird, the eerie is also fundamentally to do with the outside, and here we can understand the outside in a straightforwardly empirical as well as a more abstract transcendental sense. A sense of the eerie seldom clings to enclosed and inhabited domestic spaces; we find the eerie more readily in landscapes partially emptied of the human. What happened to produce these ruins, this disappearance? What kind of entity was involved? What kind of thing was it that emitted such an eerie cry? As we can see from these examples, the eerie is fundamentally tied up with questions of agency.

This leads me to the conclusion that what I am trying to create is eeriness. The absence of the natural land and the presence of the dead.

The eerie concerns the most fundamental metaphysical questions one could pose, questions to do with existence and non-existence: Why is there something here when there should be nothing? Why is there nothing here when there should be something? The unseeing eyes of the dead; the bewildered eyes of an amnesiac — these provoke a sense of the eerie, just as surely as an abandoned village or a stone circle do.

The abandoned land asks the question; what exactly happened here? Why? How did the life here die? And the ghosts still haunting the place: Why? What do they want? Are they aware their land has been destroyed? I think they would want to make us feel guilty.

 So far, we are still left with the impression that the weird and the eerie have primarily to do with what is distressing or terrifying. So let us end these preliminary remarks by pointing to examples of the weird and the eerie that produce a different set of affects. Modernist and experimental work often strikes us as weird when we first encounter it. The sense of wrongness associated with the weird — the conviction that this does not belong — is often a sign that we are in the presence of the new.

Strange work of art is not usually scary. It can sometimes be something we enjoy, seeing, perhaps something familiar changed into something unfamiliar. I´m not trying to create anything scary, at least I don´t think. I only want it to seem not right. To say it shouldn’t be like this.

The eerie also entails a disengagement from our current attachments. But, with the eerie, this disengagement does not usually have the quality of shock that is typically a feature of the weird. The serenity that is often associated with the eerie — think of the phrase eerie calm — has to do with detachment from the urgencies of the everyday.

My mind immediately jumped to the cover of this book; the lake looks so eerily calm. I think I would want my animals to look calm, as if they hadnt even noticed the destruction, or that they are dead.

The perspective of the eerie can give us access to the forces which govern mundane reality but which are ordinarily obscured, just as it can give us access to spaces beyond mundane reality altogether. It is this release from the mundane, this escape from the confines of what is ordinarily taken for reality, which goes some way to account for the peculiar appeal that the eerie possesses.

 

The next chapters I did not have time to read (just skim through) I just wanted to make a note on them so I can go back and read on them. These were the chapters that really interested me:

Simulations and Unworlding: Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Philip K. Dick

Curtains and Holes: David Lynch

Mullholland drive trailer 

 After skim reading this chapter I really want to watch Th Mullholland drive, which was used as an example. It seems really interesting.

Approaching the Eerie

Something Where There Should Be Nothing: Nothing Where There Should Be Something: Daphne du Maurier and Christopher Priest

I also want to watch the Birds as it also was used as an example of the eerie

I had no idea the movie was based on a book by Daphne du Maurier. I loved Rebecca by her so I definitely want to read this, especially if it counts as research. I immediately bought the book onto my kindle so I will get to it ASAP. I am excited for the reading experience.

On Vanishing Land: M.R. James and Eno

Inside Out: Outside In: Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Glazer

Alien Traces: Stanley Kubrick, Andrei Tarkovsky, Christopher Nolan

eerie love idea