BRING ME THE HEAD OF YOUR GRANDMOTHER!
I often remark that I don’t write horror because ordinary life is horrifying enough, but people deny that. If they were really aware, it would flatten them. Take for example the head as metaphor for the whole person. If someone is missing limbs or organs, we still consider them a person. If they are missing their head, we do not.
“Game of Thrones” has demonstrated many times what horror about heads is like. Sean Bean’s head on the end of a pike, for example, with his daughter looking on. This practice of partial crucifixion is not so cruel, since the person is no longer feeling, but it is just as awful and maybe more so than the conventional whole-body version we hang in our homes.
This is because since the Enlightenment we have insisted that the brain is the person and if you were provided the proper nutrient bath, you could be a brain in a bucket, still functioning. In fact, that’s what happened to Einstein’s brain, in hopes that some little genius mechanism would appear. It was never considered that Einstein and all other people are processes rather than mechanisms. Once the process has been stopped, that’s the definition of death.
Anyway, the brain is only the dashboard for the body, keeping track of it its needs and recommending what to do next. In the early days of leaving the Enlightenment brain-worshippers of the UU denomination, I didn’t challenge the idea that the skull was a chalice that contained the “fire” of thought, which is a process. I didn’t grasp embodiment yet, the idea that the fuel of thought-fire is provided by the senses and the senses are everywhere in the body, some of them in single specialized cells that haven’t even become organs yet. I called my manuscript “The Flaming Chalice” and used a goblet shaped from the skull on the front. It’s a bit out-dated now.
Films feature detached heads so often that there must be a warehouse somewhere full of realistic portrait heads of various movie-stars and the bit players who modeled for found victims. Their point is emotion, which is quite different from the “scientific” study of skulls that was all the fashion in the 19th century when people figured that brains were like penises — the bigger the better. That was the time of the Latinate quasi-scientific/”spiritual-but-not-religious” ideas like phrenology, the study of head shapes. In the end the charlatans had to give way to scientists, like John Hawks and the fossil partial heads, which suggest rather than proclaim, with millennial signficance for our species.
Among the indigenous of the “New World,” MesoAmericans were fascinated by heads and hearts after they were taken out of bodies. Even today’s ball teams play with all the ceremonial significance and momentum of the ancient Mayans playing ball with the severed heads of their enemies. It’s mythic and 3,000 years old — you could look it up — and still horrible.
“Humans and the lords of the underworld battled it out by playing the game, according to the creation story the known as the Popol Vuh. In this way, the ball court was a portal to Xibalba — the Mayan underworld. … There are even some depictions of ball players playing with the heads of the losers in place of a ball.”
Another mythic version is about brother rivals: one cuts off the head of the other and uses it for a ball. Instead of bleeding, snakes come out of the neck of the decapitated one, symbolic of fertility. Sex gets into everything. Cain and Abel are lurking around every turn of culture that has polarized into hatred.
But for true, immediate, horror stories about heads one needn’t go far. The 19th century ghouls deliberately collected the heads of the indigenous. One man had a special greatcoat he wore with pockets the proper size. In the earliest days the People left bodies bundled on ridges, surrounded by their goods. Soon they were all headless.
One day in Browning in the early Sixties, a small urgent boy came into the shop to tell Bob, “Judge Scriver”, that he had to come deal with bodies at Starr School. Police or coroner wold not do. The boy hoisted himself into the back of the pickup to guide us and when we reached the end of a two-track where trash had been dumped in an evergreen grove, he pounded on the top of the cab to tell us to stop. Then he bailed out and left fast, scared.
Dead babies had been put into wooden boxes and wedged into the forks of tall trees growing there. The wind had flexed the trunks enough to dislodge the boxes and either they broke open when they fell or animals tore them open. Mummified but recognizable pieces of the babies were mixed with the tin cans, bottles, and trash. We didn’t touch anything. In those days there were no cell phones so we couldn’t get the proper authorities involved until we got back to town.
In the meantime we realized we were close to a “burial house.” When the people had been told they couldn’t just leave smallpox infected bodies on open ground, they built little houses and put the coffins of their families in them, like fragile little tombs. We looked in through the smashed-out door and saw that all the lids were gone from the coffins and all the heads were gone from the bodies.
An old jacket hung on a nail. It began to move and . . . a mouse jumped out of the pocket. We were shaken.
Soon health authorities buried all the bodies and burned the little house. Today few would know where it was, but it — in turn —it is not far from a cairn marked with small offerings, tiny pouches of sweetgrass or tobacco. One could call it an altar to Sun, Natoosi.
But that’s not the end of the horror. In earlier years Scriver had visited that burial house to show it to a young woman he was trying to impress. In those days a child was in the coffin with the body of what must have been his mother. He still had a head. The girl was overcome with tenderness for the head. She had recently given birth to a baby she gave up for adoption. That baby had died of a heart defect. Her feelings transferred to this little corpse.
She insisted on taking it home. She thought of it as an angel and wanted to comfort it. In the night it sang in a high childish voice. There was no name for what it sang. The girl had nightmares. At first light the head was returned, not that it stayed in the burial house for long.
In those days every bar had at least one skull up among the whiskey bottles on the back shelves. It’s still easy to find photos of big shots and professors with skulls on their desks or bookshelves. They think nothing of it. Least of all, who that person was. Or what song it may have once sung.
