While many objects, concepts, people, and places scare me, the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, Nico’s album The Marble Index, and large sculptures scare me more than just about anything. This is, I recognize, an odd triptych. However, I believe that all of us, if we do enough soul-searching, will find that our deepest tangible fears may seem odd in the eyes of others.
The notion of rational and irrational fears no longer seems right to me. All fears are irrational, and yet, all are rational. Your chances of dying on an airplane are low, and yet you are flying in the sky, held together by a metal bird controlled by a human as flawed as yourself. The chances of being killed by a spider are slim, and yet they walk with writhing limbs and their eyes and mouths evoke images of horrors found in the most frightening of cosmic fiction. It makes no sense to actually be afraid of these things, and yet, it makes perfect sense.
I am afraid of the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840). His Romantic paintings are often noted for being “Sublime,” a controversial word that, for the sake of simplicity, I’ll say means “something beautiful and terrifying all at once.” Generally, I agree with that meaning, but I will also add that something of “awe” and “horror” is needed. Friedrich’s paintings are, in their way, proto-Lovecraftian. They evoke in us the feeling that there is something larger and more profound than humanity; but that “larger thing” is not some benevolent Deity smiling down from Heaven. It is something totally inscrutable, beautiful, powerful, menacing, and, deep down, a part of us as much as it is a separate entity. “God, or Nature,” as Spinoza says. Perhaps. But when I look at a painting like “Monastery Graveyard in the Snow” I also see what appears to be a scene from Dark Souls or Elden Ring. Some decrepit place of worship long since dead.
The paintings of Friedrich are also, in their way, post-apocalyptic. How is “Abbey Among Oak Trees” a real place? What horror landscape makes up “Rocky Ravine,” or as I think of it, “Landscape of the Rocky Dicks?” There is something slightly off about Friedrich’s portrayals of reality. An uncanny valley phenomenon, for sure. And yet, the uncanny valley makes you squirm, but not feel overwhelming dread. Friedrich’s paintings are some twisted vision of things-as-they-are, and this incredible artistic venture paves the way for modernist painting, especially abstract expressionism; Friedrich has no interest in showing us the world, he is showing us himself. I feel a strange affinity with how he sees things, and this is what makes me afraid.
The case is similar with Nico’s album The Marble Index. Nico, the famous model, singer, and actor, released The Marble Index in 1968. An overwhelmingly avant-garde record, the album is best described as a sound-collage, droney, medieval-inspired folk album; but even that doesn’t do it justice.
It is an utterly unique record, and that inherent strangeness is perhaps part of what makes it so unnerving. Without any safe categories to put it in, the album meanders along a strange and demented path, blending themes of innocence lost, myth, history, and nervous breakdowns neatly into one terrifying package. When I first listened to this album with a nice pair of headphones I began to see into the visionary nature of Nico’s project. This is an album dedicated to delving deep into the depravity and madness of humanity. While her earlier, more famous song “These Days” contains melancholic lyrics that anticipate twee, the lyrics of “No One is There” (“Across from behind my window screen / Demon is dancing down the scene / In a crucial parody / Demon is dancing down the scene”) anticipate ritualistic doom metal or something.
But it is the instrumentation that makes me so unnerved. The harmonium sounds like a children’s toy out of tune, while scattered creaks and moans evoke the classic images of a haunted house. The purposefully atonal interplay of the instruments also adds a sense of unease. And all in all, when I listen to this album, I feel like I’m having a nervous breakdown alongside Nico; and given that going insane is perhaps my ultimate worry, this album functions as an exercise in radical exposure therapy.
Now, my third biggest fear is perhaps the most difficult to write about because it is, in the old scheme of talking about things, the most irrational. I am afraid of large sculptures. Terrified, really. Specifically, large sculptures that feature people. There are some massive Buddhas scattered across Asia that terrify me in particular (Ushiku Daibutsu, Great Buddha of Thailand). Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro also scares the shit out of me. And yet, the most terrifying sculptures to me are those that are both huge and antique. The Leshan Giant Buddha, while incredible, terrifies me. Upon reflection, I think these statues are supposed to terrify you; but the capitalistic nature of tourism has altered our perception of many of these things into mere spectacles. Yet, could you imagine being some pilgrim, traveling for weeks to Leshan and seeing that bizarre big-ass Buddha? You’ve maybe seen like, three giant things in your entire life, and here is one of the biggest, and it's a representation of the center of your cosmology.
I need to take a moment to highlight what may be the single most terrifying sculpture, or collection of sculptures, that I know of. A great deal of courage is required for me to even Google The Salt Cathedral of Zipaquirá. This underground chapel in a Colombian mining cave should not terrify (at least, not in a horror sense), and yet it does. It is a chapel, with your standard sculptures of crosses and angels, and yet when they are removed from the sunlight of a church’s stained glass and are moved into the dark depths of a mine, they become menacing. The angels of love and peace become angels of judgment, and Christ’s death is returned to its original image of despair rather than hope. Couple the terrifying nature of the lighting with the fact that it is in a cave and I get nauseous thinking about it. Even now I do not know what the intended feelings were for this chapel; perhaps it was meant to just be a place miners could go to church. Yet this chapel, like all great chapels, likely seeks to provoke awe and wonder, only this one takes a decidedly darker (by necessity) tone towards that project.
Analyzing the things that scare you eventually leads to an anatomy of your fears. It appears that all my fears are subsets of an older meaning of fear, “A mingled feeling of dread and reverence,” and yet something is missing in this definition. I am afraid of the unknown and the grandiose, that’s true, but I am also afraid of something else within myself. Friedrich, Nico, and those large sculptures all tell me something about myself that I don’t want to accept. Maybe it's that my perspective on the world is subjective, always to be devoid of any objective Truth. Or perhaps, like Nico, my Self is a being capable of change at any moment and any time, and I can be a Chelsea Girl one moment and a manic-depressive the next. And those sculptures teach me a lesson I’ve a hard time accepting; something that mystics are keen to express: that it can’t be expressed. We can only represent the grand and awe-inspiring so well, and at some point, they are only shadows of something even more intangible and terrifying.
