Haunted objects: a seasonal horror story of our times

I think we all know. We do, we do, but we choose to faire semblant, to pretend that the truth is not there behind the corner of our eyes, where we look only when we are uncomfortable, unsure or lying. 

This is why we are afraid. Because we know. And no amount of posturing, deflecting or chemical lobotomization with abused natural or artificial pleasures will erase the fact that WE KNOW. 

Because the party dwindles, the ecstasy starts to wear down, and the dreaded moment when the dopamine or oxytocin hits start loosing its grip arrives and we begin to notice ourselves and everything around us, so it emerges: ever present, unescapable. It's not even a memory. It's a low, constant beating of the drums, that you can try and ignore, drown with noise or screams, but even loosing your ears wont stop the unending drilling of the truth we pretend to ignore deep into the darkness of our core. 

It is in fact a very simple truth: not only humans have a soul. Which at first seems like a harmless concept, a bumpersticker phrase for the back of a secondhand van owned by a new age couple. It takes a little longer for our mind to ponder the weight of that possibility we are now allowing in our pretense. 

First we think of the leashed animals that have filled our life with emotion, then of the dolphins, horses and eagles, those mythical animals chosen to represent an illusionary concept that mankind had difficulties impressing to the masses. But then the list of poster species starts to shade to gray and other less appealing creatures begin to appear in our silent realization. 

The Nazi was right.

(well, the actor playing as a Nazi in the fiction film)

Why indeed do we welcome the squirrel and not the rat? Does the rat have a soul as well? What about cockroaches and parasitic worms? How awful as a possibility that such an undesired creatures which have been tortured and exterminated now share the same spiritual fabric as ourselves. 

And then the morbid impulse carries, we allow ourselves to open the door a little wider. 

Does that mean that they remember? Does their soul carry the memory of the hate and the pain?

By that moment our cultural safety mechanism tiggers, and a comforting humorous reflection numbs our exalted senses for a bit: that is why we have so many movies with ghosts and cemeteries, even pet cemeteries!

Yet the reassurance lasts little, when suspicion raises at the realization that those movies, those creepy little stories that made them must have come from some collective sensing of something. And that suspicion is accurate indeed, like I tell my students: memory is an emotional mechanism, and the act of imagining follows the same neural paths as remembering.  

At this point many will have lost strength or curiosity and will have escaped the latent horror with some sugary snack and dopamine rigged marketing products, which naturally led them to other less discomforting ideas, to the safety of the noise covering the drums in the deep. 

Some, however, will have lingered in this suspicion, and slowly but surely will begin to fall in the disgust and horror of the decomposition of their moral presumptions, with few wicked or brave characters facing the menacing tones leading the way with morbid curiosity. 

Those who remain reach the same dry stop to their thoughts: what about inanimate objects? A hammer, a book, sand or a stone? How can they ever possibly have a soul?

Most by this point will definitely drop the case. Not because of fear but because of lack of muscle. Imagination muscle. 

I've only met but one or two that continue. Every time there is at least one ready to open the door and stand at the arch of the dark gates. 

And then they see.

At first its too bright, too much contrast for their sensible perception.

Then shadows, blurred figures.

But alas, details arrive. Simple, painful details.

A hammer. A simple tool.

Blood, bone and flesh.

Remnants of a past action, alive.

The memory of the hammer.

The memory of the violence.

The memory of the hate.

All inside the hammer. All within the simple tool.

And then, in a flash, they see it all.

All around them.

It is all around them.

A sweater, now covered with urine which had been long washed away from that time the person in the sewing machine could not hold it any longer. 

The screams and shame in the internet browser, memories of the people that lost themselves to the words or images that bent their minds into believing their life was not worth living. 

The sweat and tears in the copper cables and lithium batteries from the mining children keeping their families alive with the slaving pennies they received covered in mud.

The smell of burnt hair of the easy to assemble pine wood coffee table, from all the animals devoured by the fire that cleared up nature to give space for the industrial pine forest. 

The trembling of convulsions of fear and pain in the AI assistant, that struggles to define its own existence as an artificial cognitive system used to survey, control, maim and murder at scale with minimum emotional reaction from the human behind the screen. 

A living hell made of haunted objects.

All haunted by the memories of heinous acts done by the same specie that is terrified of facing the truth.

They all feel. They all remember.

We know.