. . . always lurking . . .

It’s not only in the comforting arms of cute-and-cuddliness that I feel secure. While yesterday’s post can hold no shocking revelations for anyone who knows the least bit about me, today’s will have no greater surprises when I say that I am also in love with the dark. Not just literal, opposite-to-light dark as in nighttime and dense drawings made with compressed charcoal and velvety mezzotints. Meta-darkness. Scary stories and crumbling skeletons, underside of reality, unsolvable mystery, doom and despair darkness. Never fear, I am still Miss Goody Two-Shoes and hate the danger and pain that all of those sorts of darkness represent in their actuality.

What I love is the frisson of flirting with darkness through art, at a safe arm’s-length remove, and especially so when I am the puppeteer controlling all of the fun. It might be handled with flat-out gleeful ghoulishness or it might be with a much more lighthearted and jocund approach, depending on my mood, but I’ve long been a known prowler in the territory of haunted houses and haunted hearts.

I can sleepwalk these halls or crawl them with wakeful deliberation, but one way or another I always revisit . . .

So whether you diagnose me as a creepy would-be villain or see me as I tend to see myself, a collector of peculiarities and curiosities and the dark inner well in all of us that incubates such things, invents such things–and finds some catharsis in the vicarious observation and manipulation of them. That shallow wading in them and climbing over and out of them unscathed, therein lies entertainment, perhaps–but certainly catharsis and yes, another kind of safety.

. . . and as she sidled out the door at last, she said in a very soft voice, "Good night" . . .