On Monsters
I visited Cambodia in 2010. What stood out to me immediately was the distinct absence of an older generation. Nobody seemed to be older than 45. You just knew this was a country that had been ripped apart by genocide.
There seems to be a collective consciousness that one can tap into. A visceral sense of a place that is more than just intellectual knowledge. It stays with you. It changes you. It impacts your nervous system. Perhaps we can tune into the historic trauma of a people or a place.
I remember the first time we spotted a handful of ‘neo’ Khymer Rouge members, an unwelcome remnant of a bygone age wearing their checkered black and white scarves. I felt ill. These were a very small minority, just a handful of people technically posing no real threat, especially to me. Yet my reaction was so strong, was it intellectual, or emotional?
Even today if I spot a checkered scarf I feel a surge of adrenalin move through my body.
I also remember swimming in the ocean off the Cambodian coast. I would spend hours every day snorkelling over a small coral reef on a small island. Nothing delighted me more than to become one with the myriad of colourful fish that populated the reef. I wonder how long I was holding my breath in what felt like disproportionate amounts of time spent hovering just above them. Time seemed to simply dissolve away.
One day at the bottom of the ocean I sensed something was amiss, I perceived something dreadfully ominous above me to my right. The fish suddenly scattered and hid. I looked up and saw the reason for my fears, a small Asian shark.
It was the size of my hand, swimming at least ten metres above us, so separate from the fish both in distance and character. I remember the primal fear that I experienced at that moment. I too wanted to dash and hide amongst the coral.
And then my rational human brain responded, I laughed a little as I knew Asian sharks were harmless. I could also see this was such a tiny creature after all. Yet I seemed to be tapping into the consciousness of the place or the consciousness of the fish and my emotional default response was to react with fear and shock to the arrival of a deadly predator.
These experiences of shock in the face of something that is incomprehensible to the mind but so palpable in your body are the closest I can relate to what I have experienced over the last few years. The shock that arises when seeing the mask stripped away from someone you have come to trust and allowed into your intimate space, only to find a predator looking back at you instead. Criminal Psychologist Dr Robert Hare, world-renowned expert in psychopathy, describes psychopaths as ‘interspecies predators’ and articulates our somatic response at the moment of recognition as equivalent to stumbling upon a lion in the wild.
There is no rational frame of context. The shock is tangible. The response is primal “flight” and your nervous system is indeed changed forever.
