Ice Voices: Interview with Felix Blackwell

To use the self-introduction I was given: Felix Blackwell emerged from the bowels of reddit during a botched summoning ritual. He writes in the horror and thriller genres, and is best known for the 2017 novel Stolen Tongues.

K.L.: Welcome to my modest Ice Voices Interviews with my favorite authors! As a horror writer, you deal in the gaps and thin places of the world as we know it and the world of ambiguities and nightmares. Is there at least a tiny part of you that believes in the supernatural or the unexplainable? 

 

F.B.: Just like the character Angela in Stolen Tongues, I refer to myself sometimes as a “daytime atheist.” As a child, I was particularly concerned about paranormal threats to my safety - especially ghosts and extraterrestrial kidnappers. As I grew up and the world shrunk around me, those fears retreated to the dark and distant places we adults rarely go anymore. More banal fears have replaced my anxieties about the supernatural (worries about money and family and health, etc). But when I’m deep in the mountains on a trail I’ve never been, or sleeping in a place purported to be haunted, or when I’m touring a site overwhelmingly populated by the dead (like the Hohenzollern Crypt), I sometimes feel those old fears arise. I suppose I can say I believe “enough” in the supernatural that I wouldn’t tempt an encounter with it by spending the night alone in an abandoned insane asylum!

 

K.L.: That makes sense and that’s probably why so many horror novels are written from a child’s perspective. I think in your scenario, if I were to spend the night in an abandoned insane asylum, the one thing I would be truly afraid of for sure is my own mind. Would you mind telling me about the genesis of Stolen Tongues? What underlying fears were you tapping into in your reader’s psyche or subconscious?

 

F.B.: One of my favorite horror films is Grave Encounters. If you haven’t seen it, you might like it. It’s about a group of paranormal investigators who become trapped in an abandoned asylum, and they begin losing their minds. There are some very clever scenes, and it’s quite a fun film.

 

Stolen Tongues wasn’t planned at all, but at the time I did think of it as an exercise in trying to frighten a modern audience that had been overexposed to gore and shock for decades. So I dialed the violence way back and started with the idea of “aural horror.” The characters are isolated in a remote cabin, and they keep hearing terrifying and unexplainable things outside: the screams of animals, the babble of people, and the cries of their deceased loved ones. They can’t see anything, so the reader has to just imagine what’s really going on out there. The monster itself was inspired by my partner’s tendency to talk in her sleep. I suddenly imagined she was talking to someone - or something - standing just outside the window in the dark.

 

K.L.: I’ll check it out! One of my favorites movies in that setting is Session 9. I live in the weak and the wounded... Doc. To start, I want to say that your book opens with an electrifying scene—reminiscent of the prequel, which I’d like to discuss later. McCammon’s Swan Song also has a striking beginning, though few others come to mind. According to Freud, stillness, darkness, and uncertainty form the triad that evokes the uncanny, and your book masterfully ventures into that liminal space, especially in depicting the disquiet of sleep-talking. I recall once falling ill, and my husband told me that during the night, I delivered a monologue in Russian, seemingly fully awake. I remember nothing of it, and the idea felt unsettling, almost violating, as if I had been someone else entirely.

You also tap into another profound fear—the eerie senselessness that comes from repeating a single word until it dissolves into meaningless noise, a sort of gibberish barely held together by social constructs. It’s a deeply disorienting feeling, a vertigo that shakes to the core.

On a different note, I love your term “aural horror.” I’ve often thought about what I'd call “sprawling” or “lavishly written” horror. Take Kill Creek, for instance. In that story, the human killer strikes me as far more terrifying than any screeching, writhing monster. It’s fascinating how such visceral horror contrasts with the more minimalist, “aural” horror—closer to what I write myself.

What’s your take on splatterpunk? Do you have any personal favorites? And, more broadly, do you think the extremity and brutality in that genre holds merit? Or does it risk losing something essential in pushing boundaries?

 

F.B.: Oh yes, I love Session 9 as well. That was such a hidden gem. 

 

I think opening chapters are my strength, opposite of ending the book, which is a weakness in Stolen Tongues. In a world where people are so oversaturated with horrific and gory media, I think less is more, and thus darkness and uncertainty can be a lot more frightening than a big monster. I try to lean into that a lot in my works, knowing it’s more and more difficult to frighten audiences these days.

 

It might surprise some readers to know that I have a pretty weak stomach and am unable to read splatterpunk or any extreme horror. I’m particularly sensitive to torture, or violence toward animals, so I have to avoid the more brutal authors and their works altogether. I don’t have much of a philosophical position on it; I think there is absolutely a (small but dedicated) market for extreme horror and I see no reason why authors shouldn’t be able to do it if they please. I guess maybe my personal limit would be if they glorify child or animal abuse or something like that. I’d bet Nick Roberts has a much more developed opinion on these matters of artistic creativity and indecency.

 

K.L.: Yes, I have to say, I am militantly against animal cruelty in horror literature and cinema. It feels to me like an unfortunate gimmick in the sense that it is usually used as a harbinger/catalyst for worse things to come. I also really like this atmospheric dread that you are working with. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger, if I remember correctly, distinguished between fear and anxiety, such that the former has a specific object, whereas the latter does not have an object that you can point to. Would you like to tell me more about the prequel? What was your driving force in writing it? I saw that quite  a few readers online didn't find it as scary as Stolen Tongues. I am actually of the opposite opinion. I don't know if this was a conscious influence on your part, but there seemed to be something very Lovecraftian to the horror in this book. But what I found the most effective and original is that the horror here was almost tactile, meaning that it was palpable, like it had a variety of textures and scents to it, sort of like moist clay and decaying autumn leaves, dancing in the wind like mountains. Darkness and the earthen space itself, of incomprehensible geometry, appeared to be the site of horror, which is so remarkable. I also absolutely loved that the most loveable and badass character in the book was an old lady. As someone disabled, this is something I think about a lot and it is incredibly rare, if not unheard of, that strength would come from a disabled or otherwise incapacitated character. What are your thoughts on this?

 

F.B.: Stolen Tongues was a really scary book with flat, undeveloped characters. This time around, I tried to write the prequel for the critics (which is something most authors shouldn’t do), so I ended up focusing on deeply textured characters with interesting arcs. In order to do this, I had to elbow out some of the pure horror to make room for a better story. The Church Beneath the Roots is longer and a lot more complex, but it’s got some of my favorite characters I’ve ever written, and the answers to a lot of questions left in Stolen Tongues’ wake. It was deeply influenced by Lovecraftian horror, and I read nothing but books in that genre during the development process of TCBTR.

Moya is the old lady character you’re referring to, and I love her too. She embodies the rage of her people, the bitterness of an unfair life on a harsh mountain, and the despair of having lost her child. But she’s also a very tender and warm person, in her own way. In Stolen Tongues I conflated the “strength” of a strong female protagonist with “masculinity,” as at the time I hadn’t had much experience writing women (or any) characters. In TCBTR, Moya was my effort to write a strong female protagonist whose strength is derived from her tenacity, her loyalty to her people, and her wisdom. I felt like those qualities would be emphasized by placing them into a character whose body was brittle and ragged with age.

 

K.L.: Speaking of brittle bodies, years ago a friend of mine and I attempted to come with a female superhero character (I am a major geek when it comes to Buffy Summers) who’d be disabled. We had an idea we sort of liked, but nothing came of it. Of course, in horror, survival is the name of the game, but do you think creating a viable character with disabilities (viable in the sense that they wouldn’t be killed off in the first few pages) has potential? What would you envision, even in the most preliminary sense? (I reread Stephen King’s Misery this summer, which is just so brilliant, and in a way, it’s as close as we get to having a protagonist who is temporarily disabled and confined to one room.)

 

F.B.: You know, the horror genre has changed in its presentation of danger, and therefore it has also changed in its presentation of protagonists’ ability/disability. It was in the late 2000s that we saw a shift into deeper, more psychological horror and away from the ruthless physical-pursuer antagonists like Michael Meyers. In many horror novels and films today, the protagonist can’t just run away from the monster, and therefore we can sometimes showcase characters who cannot run at all. Many of my works are inspired by dreams, and whose plots are about dreams, so I’m imagining a character with physical disabilities who has to navigate danger using her subconscious mind and her mental acuity. You could also go in the opposite direction and write an antagonist who preys on a person with disabilities in the physical world, but then encounters a victim who is able to overcome him through cunning, persuasion, guilt, etc. I think I would avoid writing a character whose disabilities are alleviated through magic or something, because in my opinion, the point of writing a disabled character would be to show how they discover how to resist horrific oppression in their own unique way – as opposed to resisting it by becoming able-bodied.

 

I will say from personal experience (with respect to another underrepresented community), any author who is not disabled who tries to write characters with disabilities is going to experience some degree of blowback from the reading community, because inclusivity and representation mean different things to different readers. 

 

K.L.: I definitely agree on all counts. I’ve had this passing fantasy that if I were captured by a serial killer, as a disabled individual, I might actually stand a chance precisely because of my “hyper ability” to read the moods of my caregivers, to use cunning and to bide my time.

 

But I take it you’re referring to the Indigenous community? Would you like to elaborate?

 

F.B.: I would say “Indigenous communities” since there are more than one - just like how there is more than one community of disabled people - and they have disparate and sometimes opposing views on topics from politics to writing. Some of them have praised my efforts to include them in my horror novels, while others have been critical of it. The Church Beneath the Roots was largely written as an attempt to include them in ways suggested to me by those critical of Stolen Tongues. 

 

K.L.: So there are horror books that make us (well, some of us) keep the lights on at night or feel uneasy in an empty apartment. However, there are books that cut deep and maybe even break something a little inside us. These are the books that haunt us. Are there books that do that for you?

 

F.B.: Definitely. Gone to See the River Man (Kristopher Triana) and Left To You (Daniel Volpe) are modern works that moved something inside of me that had never moved before. They’re brutal in a lot of ways, and not just in the graphic sense. I’m particularly moved by writings on the Holocaust due to my academic interest in it during my undergraduate years. But the horror novel that has affected me the most throughout my life has got to be Shelley’s Frankenstein. I remember being blown away by it as a Senior in high school, and having a greater capacity for empathy ever since.

 

K.L.: Do you already know what your next project is going to be? If so, could you share a little bit?

 

F.B.: I have sort of “retired” from writing for the public due to health and family issues. But I have still been writing for my own personal enjoyment. Maybe someday I will release it to the world, but for now it’s just for me. If I ever return to writing for a wider audience, I’ll be wrapping up a novel I drafted years ago on a father whose twelve-year-old son dies mysteriously, and another novel on some of the most frightening dreams I’ve ever had. I have a lot of those, unfortunately!

 

K.L.: I truly hope you do continue to write, but I understand the weight of bare survival only too well.

 

On this note, thank you so much for doing the interview. It's been a real privilege! One last question since horror cinema has already come up: what are your three favorite horror movies? 

 

F.B.: There’s no way I can choose only three! But I will say Event Horizon, Alien, and The Thing (1982) came to mind first. But then there’s The Others, The Witch, The Ring, The Orphanage, The Autopsy of Jane Doe… More recently, The Night House struck me as an amazingly well-written and clever psychological horror/thriller. And Nosferatu was great. I can’t pick three. No way.

Please check out Felix Blackwell's books here, peeps!

 

 

Mercy’s Abyss: Living as the Wrong Object (Horror and the Disabled Psyche)

they wear their hunger and their haunt

In horror, I often see myself reflected in its characters—stripped of agency, reduced to an object, something to be pursued, tormented, humiliated, and ultimately crushed. It feels hauntingly familiar. Because this is not just fiction for me—it’s a shadow cast by my own reality. Living with a severe physical disability means being utterly dependent on others for basic survival. Let me tell you what that dependence feels like: it is being carried, dressed, handled, fed, given water, having my nose scratched—not because I choose to, but because I physically cannot do these things for myself. It is living as operated—my body folded and unfolded like an existential origami (the origami unicorn?), my limbs occasionally rearranged, my chin dabbed with a napkin while I eat, my teeth brushed, and so on. Devoid of the ability to move, I wait patiently. I started learning patience very early on, like other kids learn how to ride a bike or sew. I must be moved and engineered. This is the definition and the mundane reality of an object.  

Thus, to be an object is to exist in a state where every movement, every necessity of life, hinges on someone else. Most days, this is a quiet, uneasy balance—a social contract of care that holds my world together. But that contract, that fragile assurance of care, is not invincible. So when it falters, when mercy can no longer be counted on to survive, the terror becomes real. No, I need to qualify that. To be an object is to live in anticipatory terror

It is a simple, yet inconvenient truth that a person may be good, decent, and... a person, until you radically subtract their ability to move, to take care of themselves. Then they become an objects. Surely, some objects are culturally prized, if we think of terms like arm candy or trophy wives, as demeaning as that may be. But I am talking about something a lot more literal and some objects are to be discarded in the blink of an eye.

Maybe the original plea, to borrow from Emmanuel Levinas, was not a cry for analgesia—relief from pain, but rather a simple whisper, "Don’t hurt me." But perhaps it was always more complex, always darkened by an understanding that a girl gets hurt either way. 

There’s a particular horror in knowing that my survival depends not on my own will or strength but on the mercy of others. Mercy—a word that is supposed to carry so much weight, yet is so precariously dependent on the goodwill, the ethical resolve of caregivers, of society itself. But what happens if mercy runs out?

This isn’t a distant, theoretical fear; it’s a visceral reality I live with. The thought that my life could be extinguished at another’s whim, with no power to resist, is a chilling truth, indelible. It’s the same helplessness I see in horror films—the protagonist under assault, defenseless, due to a force they cannot control, understand, or contain. 

My very physicality alludes to what Andrea Cavarero describes as "a human essence that, deformed in its very being, contemplates the unprecedented act of its own dehumanization." In my own form, shaped by needs I cannot meet, I bear witness to a kind of horror that transcends fiction: the horror of being voiceless, moveless.

The terror doesn’t stop at extreme physical incapacitation. It digs deeper into the mind—the knowledge that no plea, no possible resistance, can alter the course once someone’s intent is set. How would I convey to the one who would do me harm me the necessity of necessity, the necessity of me, how do I possibly convince anyone that I have the right to go on being me? That stark, primal fear is one I carry daily and one that waits for me at night, a darkness within a darkness. And it’s a fear that lingers, one that horror films capture in their most brutal moments of objectification and dependency. For me, it’s not just a movie—it’s a black mirror.

I was born in a provincial town in Russia. At the age of two, I was diagnosed with a life-threatening form of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. Within the next few years, I lost the ability to walk. I lost the ability to hold a spoon. I lost the ability to lift a glass of water to my lips.

Thus began my social death—a death that would endure for a very long time. Abandonment is a scandal only when it is the living you leave behind. The dead do not count. The dead try to comprehend why suffering is so vast, but they do not count.

My mom, a very attractive, petite, and fiercely proud woman, taught me to hold my head high, even as the local kids hurled their worst insults at me whenever I dared to venture outside.

I was being killed by oblivion, by abandonment, by the prison of my apartment. The bright, wide-eyed disabled girl did not exist because she was unthinkable. I was unthinkable in my defiance, my intellect, and, worst of all, my sensuality. My life was forever determined by the many flights of stairs I could not climb, the elevators that were never built, the ramps leading to nowhere. I was immobilized, a walk of atonement in reverse.

This is where my fascination with the horror genre begins. As we read in the lush and terrific House of Psychotic Women by Kier-La Janisse, “horror as a genre provides the most welcoming platform for... crippling paranoia, desperate loneliness, masochistic death-wishes, dangerous obsessiveness, apocalyptic hysteria.”

Disabled people are often seen as something that shouldn’t be, as objects whose impossible silent stare you instinctively avoid. There’s something about the presence of the disabled that unsettles—a feeling that we belong to a different plane of existence, one of muted suffering, of shamed visibility. I am an object, not a person, and the abject.

Discussing the giallo film Don’t Torture a Duckling, Alison Rumfitt writes, “[I]n that scene, as the witch is beaten, I saw myself. I felt more kinship with her than I ever had with a trans character, even one played by a trans actor. If we seek representation in art, are we seeking literal representation—people who look, talk, and feel like us—or something more elusive? I can’t speak for anyone else, and I know I’d adore more transgender roles on screen, but when I actually feel represented, it’s often by the female leads in particular horror films. Laura Palmer and Laura Dern in Inland Empire, women in trouble…”

I don’t like seeing women in distress. I am a woman in distress. I’ve been through phases where I was frightened of myself, of the fractured possibilities within my own mind. But who am I kidding? I am still frightened, every day, as those fractured pieces coil inside me like obsidianly dark vines. That experience is uncannily like the women in psychological horror films—their minds and the darkest recesses of their hearts forever under siege.

This is the most brutally honest explanation of why horror calls to me. Why Laura Palmer, for example, in the Questions In A World of Blue scene, resonates so deeply with me. She mourns herself, ever so furtively and briefly, because she already knows, “Tonight is the night that I die.” She allows herself that moment of grief before slipping back into her constructed identity, her power play, and she is so unbearably like me. More me than the rare disabled characters mainstream media half-heartedly attempts to portray. (The Netflix show Sex Education tried, but their disabled character sadly embodied nearly every stereotype.)

Why her? Why Twin Peaks? Laura’s story, after all, has nothing to do with severe physical disability or chronic pain. And yet, I can’t help feeling she understands what it is to be shamed, trapped, and absolutely, out-of-her-mind terrified. (More elusive representations are more interesting, after all.) Her self-loathing echoes my own. We all killed her! We all knew Laura was in trouble and we did nothing, screams Bobby at Laura's funeral. “She’s a living, breathing girl, and a complex, brutally honest character. For the first time [in Fire Walk With Me] we glimpse her strengths alongside her weaknesses—her loyalty and bravery even as years of abuse twist her into something she knows is wrong, corrupt.” The sheer horror of Laura’s situation is never sanitized. Her coldness, her self-serving actions, her promiscuity, her eventual suicidal despair—all are laid bare. And we are with her every step, drawn into her nightmare, sharing her fear, her desperation, her need to dominate and drag others down to her level. We understand her, even when she cannot understand herself.

Human rights are glorious, but only when you’re seen as human. I recognize that glint of contempt in Laura’s eyes, for those who fail to see her suffering, for those who simply don’t look hard enough. Because her story ends with death. (Or with a soul-crushing scream, that forever-jolt of terror, "the howl of howls," which is the only moral response to the violence and defilement she had endured) Laura was described as headstrong, impatient to live. And sometimes I feel too strong for most people, possessing a strength they find unnatural, unsettling. Once you’re seen as possessing unnatural strength, there’s no use fighting this perception. I endure and have been enduring more than human beings are supposed to. O Black Miracle, go home—wherever that is. O Miracle, leave us, because you make us feel weak, inadequate. You make everything worse. O Black Miracle, go out of this world, we’ve had enough of your goodness and the chill of your contempt.

Horror films are about a psyche under assault—the violence of trembling, of madness creeping from within: the sensory oversaturation of Suspiria by Dario Argento, the grief and terrible reversals in Don’t Look Now by Nicolas Roeg, the strange, Nordic gentleness of Lars von Trier's Medea and the wildness of Takashi Miike's Audition.

It is the liminal space between and the fatal ambiguity of agony and smile in Argento's Bird With the Crystal Plumage, the space between a mirror, a surreal painting, and the killer's face, all overlapping in a nightmarish moment in his terrific Deep Red.

Those who strip Twin Peaks: The Return of its historical context miss the point. Cooper’s final question, “What year is this?” speaks volumes. Laura’s very presence and the rift in the spatio-temporal fabric caused by nuclear weapons are inextricably connected. Lynch’s surrealism and nonlinear temporality often obscure this. The psyche, fractured into chunks of foreign matter, engaged in a relentless, if only imagined and mostly one-sided, dialogue between oppressor and oppressed, self-hate and hatred of others (expressed so powerfully in Rumfitt's horror novel Tell Me I'm Worthless)—this is historical, embodied, situated. I am the fluids and drippings, I am inferior, and I’ll prove it. 

The spasm and shuddering of existence are my reality, more real than anything else I’ve encountered in cinema or literature. Adjani’s disconsoling, feral breakdown in Possession (1982)—that subway scene—isn’t just a moment of cinema. It’s a hinge of my existence. Except I am never leaving the subway or the Black Lodge.

I often think of Freud’s notion of the uncanny. It rings so true. The ending of Don’t Look Now is a perfect fusion of the uncanny and the horrific. It is the point of no return when you realize that mercy alone isn't enough to endure. It never has been. That final figure—“a non-child, an anti-cherub of mortality”—grinning as she slashes the throat, lingers like the recurring melody in Lacoue-Labarthe’s Typography. The opposite of the shattering stained glass and collapsing body in Suspiria—one a whisper of decay, the other a scream and a fall.

Is that what I am to the “normals”? A cipher of black miracles, something that shouldn’t exist, that unsettles with her endurance? The shattering and lacerations (I am thinking of Frantz Fanon here, as the Black man is cut, again and again, with the blade in a black-gloved hand, when he first meets the gaze of the White man) of being dismissed as a mistake, an embodied anti-matter, impossible to relate to or understand.

(Of course, it’s harder to justify indifference when people realize how painfully relatable I actually am.)

“She saw me as a sickness, so I became one,” says Ganja in the haunting Ganja & Hess (1973). There’s something mesmerizing in her defiance, her refusal to seek forgiveness. Her self-preservation is ancient, tribal. She wouldn’t end her life on the cross, wouldn’t beg for divine mercy. Seen as disease, she chose to become disease.

Every psyche on the verge of collapse is a shattered mirror, a thousand fragmented eyes staring back at me. The swirling gazes of revulsion, curiosity, incomprehension, and fear—they trap me in their perverse amber.

Horror, for me, isn’t about goosebumps or lost sleep. It’s about watching someone unravel, knowing you’ve unraveled too, knowing the difference between damaged and broken, and inhabiting the liminal dusk in-between. It’s about feeling less alone.

The thing is, though, the cracks in the floor of the mind are perfectly capable of taking a life of their own. The traumatized are unpredictable because we know we can survive. I am unpredictable, which means an object of persecution and torment can sometimes morph into an object of fear.

Once, a friend took a picture of me. I was in my sturdy, black power wheelchair, with heavy leather wings, dark and geometric, shooting upward from my body/wheelchair. The wings were just part of the interior design inside a shopping mall. But once I stood beside them, the optical illusion of a delicate figure—etched feminine and true, rising proud and strong with her silver-studded leather wings—was complete. Inscrutable were my eyes, and merciless were my wings. The inside and the outside finally came together.

Do you hear the beating of the heavy wings in the air?

Well, do you?

Exposed: Sunflowers and Wings

Art: Unknown 

The ceramic blossom twinkled in the shop window next to a poster reproduction of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. In the picture the flowers strained, menacing and desperate, against the confines of the space. The little sunflower beside seemed to us liberated, its yellow petals at rest in the illuminated display. Kristina said that it felt like a sign. Her voice always surprises me. It is hushed, yet stronger than her frail body suggests; her Russian accent is dark and robust. “I am surrounded by death,” she continued, “but this to me is life-affirming.” At a café she considered purchasing the flower pin. I placed a series of pills in her mouth, which she washed down with her hot chocolate through a straw. Pain, anxiety, inflammation, infection, more pain. I could see her crunching the numbers in her head. There was hardly any money; I knew that. I wiped her lips and she smiled, “Fuck it.” Her wheelchair whirred as we retraced our steps and made the purchase.

Life and death collided within the shimmering sunflower I now wear around my neck. The light and the dark, the warrior and the beggar queen, all animating the pendant that rarely goes unnoticed with its petals of matte yet oily yellow.

 
In Tobin Siebers’s words, the lone girl in a wheelchair fails to part the sea of human beings in a crowded hallway. She comes to a halt, showing infinite patience with the people around her, yet she has little chance of being seen and addressed as a human being.


When my husband and I went to the Lincoln Park Zoo, an elderly couple casually asked him, “How old is she?” to his dismay. “Did they think you were an object?” he asked me later. In so many words, yes, I am an object that needs to be transferred from the wheelchair to the car, from the sofa to the toilet seat. In the eyes of others, I am the echo of a human being frozen into inanimate matter.


People see someone quiet and humble, grateful for any crumb of attention. I am either chaste or asexual. I am infinitely patient. I know my place. I am the object and the abject.


My wedding day was a few months ago. In my vows, I said that when I imagined love before I met my fiancé, I thought that if I even ever get a chance to love and to be loved, it would be thanks to the feat of looking past my illness, possibly because I have a gentle heart. But I do not have a gentle heart and my husband doesn’t love me despite the appearance of my body. He loves all of me.


As people get closer to me, the optics change. Not a lot of them choose to. A lot of them get only as close as to get trapped in the space between knowing me and imagining that they do. But some do risk proximity.


The crucial dissonance between what people expect to see and what they actually see comes primarily from the fact of my strength, my fierceness, my unapologetic pride. I’ve survived a lot of what was barely possible and some of what wasn’t.


My body is small and broken, but the grain within me is almost non-human at this point. The price I’ve paid for it is the price no one should ever pay. It’s like the universe chuckled and said to me, “You wanna be a hero? A warrior? Sure. Let me first put your mother in the hospital with skull fractures, let me kill your first love and husband-to-be, let me take away your mind, and let me murder you.” My mom was in a car accident, the man I was engaged to passed away due to late-stage cancer, I was later hospitalized when I disappeared into an inexplicable delirium, unable to recognize my own family, and, as I was promised, one night I was found unresponsive due to an accidental overdose.


The same winter I bought the sunflower pin, a friend took a picture of me. I was in my sturdy, black power wheelchair, with heavy leather wings, dark and geometric, shooting upward from my body/wheelchair. The wings were just part of the interior design inside a shopping mall. Once I stood beside them, the optical illusion of a delicate figure, etched feminine and true, rising proud and strong with her silver-studded leather wings, was complete. Inscrutable were my eyes and merciless were my wings. The inside and the outside finally came together.

 
My wedding cake was obsidian black, with a golden dragon coiling around it. “A dragon is not a slave.” It doesn’t matter how much the world tries to mutilate my mind and my body, I explained to our guests. I will never be a slave to my circumstances. It means that some will repeatedly demonize me, yoking together the deformed and the sinister, to expel me from the comfort of normalcy, the normalcy without heroes and without villains, the normalcy where you cannot lose your honor because you never had it to begin with.


This is the price I am willing to pay for standing up for myself, for turning my mind into the sword, for protecting my loved ones, dark-gazed and barbaric.
 

Do you hear the beating of the heavy wings in the air?


So I want you to look at me.
 

Really look at me.
 

Remember my eyes.


For I am the wound.

 

I am the salt.


I am the object to shatter all objects.

 

Doorway

                                                             Doorway

Artwork: HBO

In the heart of a thick, sunless forest, where the trees twisted and gnarled like the thoughts of those who had come before her, a girl journeyed with a single purpose. Her cloak, once vibrant, now tattered from the unforgiving embrace of the forest, swayed with each cautious step. She clutched an iron coin, its weight a heavy reminder of her lineage, passed down through generations like an heirloom of sorrow.

The girl had come to find the witch known as Silver Toad of the Oak, whispered of in half-forgotten tales and haunted dreams. The witch lived in a cave beneath the roots of a colossal tree, a place where the world above met the unseen mysteries below. As she approached, the tree loomed large, its roots like serpents coiling around the entrance to the witch's lair.

Taking a deep breath, the girl entered the cave. The air was thick with the sickly sweet, almost narcotic smoke. In the dim light, she saw the witch, her yellow eyes gleaming like a disease in the dancing shadows.

“I come seeking answers,” the girl said, her voice trembling but resolute.

The witch’s smile was a slow, deliberate thing, a ripple across the still waters of her face. “Show me the coin, child.” Her face seemed to be rearranging itself, as if the segments of it were about to slough off.

The girl extended the iron coin. The witch’s fingers, cold and gnarled, closed around it. “You may ask three questions,” Silver Toad said, “and you shall receive three answers.”

She steadied herself. “Will I see my parents again?”

The witch’s eyes glinted with blade-sharp knowing. “When the crow speaks to the silent stone, then shall the past and present entwine.”

The girl swallowed, her mind racing to unravel the meaning. She asked her second question, her voice a fragile whisper. “Is there justice in the world?”

The witch’s chuckle was raw and ancient. “Justice is the shiver between the wound and the salt.” 

Desperation edged into the girl’s voice as she posed her final question. “Will I ever find joy?”

“Black wears the bride, gorging on grief-songs,” the witch replied, her tone dripping like the long summer night.

The girl stood in the silence that threatened to entomb her, her heart beating fast with the riddles she had been given. The witch’s voice cut through her thoughts, sharp and unexpected, yet nauseatingly cloying, like honey and rot. “You forgot to ask the most important question, bloodchild. What happens to those who find me?”

A chill ran down the girl’s spine. She had not considered this. “What happens?” she whispered, her words barely more than a breath.

The witch leaned closer, her eyes like twin abysses. “Those who seek me find the answers they dread, and with each revelation, a piece of their soul is claimed by the shadows. The questions are a doorway, child, and not all who enter return.”

The girl turned to leave, her steps echoing hollowly against the cave walls. As she emerged from the dark mouth of the cave, the forest seemed denser, the roots whispering the mortal gibberish of the lost and the forsaken.

With each step away from the witch’s lair, the girl felt an eerie heaviness settle over her. The vibrant green of the forest grew colorless, and the songs of the birds turned to mournful dirges. Once bright with determination, her eyes began to lose their light, growing dull and vacant.

She wandered through the forest, her mind a labyrinth of corpse-dreams and shadow-whispers, the witch’s words echoing endlessly. She saw visions of her parents, their faces etched with loss, she saw the crow and the frost, the bloom and the joy, forever dissolving into the gloaming.

The girl’s journey ended where it began, at the edge of the forest. But as she crossed the threshold into the world she once knew, it was clear she was no longer the same. Her eyes, now dead and blank, reflected the doorway she had passed through—a gateway to knowledge that had claimed her soul piece by piece, leaving her hollow.

The villagers whispered of the girl who ventured into the heart of the old forest and returned with eyes that saw nothing but darkness. They spoke of a witch who lived beneath the roots of a giant tree, who answered questions with riddles and claimed the souls of the curious. To seek her counsel, one needed an iron coin—a relic so rare that it was almost mythical. These coins, typically held by the nobles, were coveted by many. A great many were willing to maim and kill for one of these enchanted pieces of iron. In the silence of the night, the trees whispered the girl’s true name and the doorway stood open, waiting for the next soul to wander through, and be claimed by the haunting, unending darkness.

In the thick of the night, the trees whispered the girl’s true name and the doorway stood open, waiting for the next soul to wander through.

Each day is a falling tower (XVI): Dogville, Lars von Trier, 2003

 

Art: Tarot embroidery (artist unknown)

“The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out and descend into it.”

In Lars von Trier’s Dogville, the stark mise-en-scène strips away the refuge of physical settings, leaving only the raw skeleton of a town marked by mere chalk outlines on the ground. Buildings without walls and trees drawn in chalk create a ghostly openness, where the secret lives of characters are laid bare, an audacious theatrical gimmick that magnifies the moral emptiness they embody. The film pivots on Grace's struggle, played with poignant fragility by Nicole Kidman, who confronts a town cloaked in pretense and illuminated intermittently by the metaphorical light of truth and deception.

Grace's arrival in Dogville sets a stage of mutual need and seeming innocence, but the village's initial embrace warps into exploitation and moral decay, a transformation starkly depicted through lighting: from soft luminescence to harsh, exposing floodlights. This visual metaphor underscores the central ethical quandary Grace faces—whether to forgive those who see her as nothing more than an object to be used and discarded. Her decision, stark and final, brings into focus the contemplation of judgment and responsibility, echoing Hannah Arendt’s observation on the paralysis in moral judgment. Arendt writes, “There exists in our society a widespread fear of judging... For behind the unwillingness to judge lurks the suspicion that no one is a free agent, and hence the doubt that anyone is responsible or could be expected to answer for what he has done.”

Grace's initial reception in Dogville is one of cautious welcome. The townspeople, led by Tom Edison Jr., agree to hide her from the mob searching for her, initially demanding nothing in return. As time passes, however, their demands on Grace increase insidiously. She begins with small tasks, but these quickly escalate. The supposedly kind-hearted townsfolk exploit her vulnerability, subjecting her to increasingly dehumanizing labor and eventually, physical and sexual abuse. What started as a community willing to help a stranger morphs into a collective force of oppression.

The deceit of Dogville’s residents is gradual but relentless. Each character, under the guise of kindness, reveals their true, selfish nature. The Hanson family exploits her labor; Chuck sexually assaults her; and even the children partake in her degradation, reflecting the complete moral collapse of the community. This degradation happens under the guise of necessity and fairness, as the town convinces itself that Grace’s suffering is a reasonable price for their protection.

Grace, a fugitive running from a dangerous past, initially presents as being at fate's mercy. She is escaping from her father, a powerful gangster, embodying the harsh justice and merciless control she fled from. Her father’s influence looms over her, and she believes Dogville to be her sanctuary. Yet, it is not fate’s mercy she encounters, but the mercilessness of Dogville’s residents. They hold her life in their hands and show no compassion, gradually revealing the darkness hidden behind their facade of niceness.

In a pivotal conversation with her father, Grace’s moral struggle is laid bare. “So I’m arrogant if I forgive people?” she asks, to which her father retorts, “Can’t you hear how arrogant that sounds? You have this preconceived notion that no one–no one–can possibly live up to your moral standards. So you exonerate. …Doesn’t every human being deserve to be accountable for their actions? But you wouldn’t even give them that chance! I love you, I love you to death, but you’re the most arrogant person I’ve ever met!” This exchange crystallizes the film’s core dilemma: the balance between mercy and justice, and the arrogance that can accompany unconditional forgiveness.

As the townsfolk hide behind their collective guilt, Grace wrestles with a solitary truth: if she cannot forgive herself for the consequences of her choices, how can she absolve those who exploited her trust and vulnerability? Wouldn’t she act like them if she were in their place? The light, previously merciful, suddenly became the glint of a blade exposing every evil in the buildings and the people. And all of a sudden, she knew the answer to her question all too well: if she had acted like them, she couldn’t be able to defend any of her actions. It was as if her sorrow and pain finally assumed their rightful place. The light is, remarkably, a silent protagonist, playing the role of the mediator between the viewer and the play-like film, subtly reminiscent of the chorus in a Greek tragedy. It also marks the beginning of Grace's mental clarity. The most terrible thing in the world can be a lucid moment.

Grace's decision to reject forgiveness echoes the disconsoling reflections of Jean Améry on resentment and the refusal to forgive. Améry, a Holocaust survivor, grapples with the persistent and agonizing resentments that arise from his experiences. He argues that forgiving the atrocities committed against him would be a betrayal of his moral integrity. Améry writes,

"I am not at all concerned with a justice that in this particular historical instance could only be hypothetical anyway. What matters to me is the description of the subjective state of the victim. What I can contribute is the analysis of the resentments, gained from introspection. My personal task is to justify a psychic condition that has been condemned by moralists and psychologists alike. The former regard it as a taint, the latter as a kind of sickness. I must acknowledge it, bear the social taint, and first accept the sickness as an integrating part of my personality and then legitimize it"​​​​​​​​. (Jean Améry, “Resentments”)

Améry's stance against forgiveness is a powerful testament to the enduring pain of the victim, a refusal to allow the passage of time to dilute the moral significance of past atrocities. Similarly, Grace's ultimate rejection of Dogville's inhabitants is a repudiation of their deeds and a refusal to give her suffering meaning, to weave it into the greater order of things, by an unearned absolution.

Grace chooses to be her father’s daughter and massacres the town. The moral depth and truth of Grace’s choice cannot be overstated. The culturally ingrained Biblical imperative to forgive fails to ask the single most important question: Would we forgive ourselves for the actions we wish to forgive others for? If the answer is no, are we not then positing that we are morally superior to those we claim we forgive?

As someone severely disabled, I have endured every form of ostracism and neglect. But what makes it worse is the constant sermons from my family to be grateful even for the crumbs of attention that I happen to get. I am forever expected to forgive and forget, to wear my scars as badges of undeserved grace. The commonplace, ordinary nature of ableism makes it even more insidious. Because the disabled are often already invisible, it becomes easy to mistreat them even further when it happens outside the societal gaze. This mistreatment is cloaked in the guise of normalcy, making the wounds it inflicts all the more profound and haunting. I choose not to forgive, much like Grace. I would not forgive myself for neglecting the suffering other, the weaker one. The world demands gratitude for the bare minimum, yet denies us the acknowledgment of our pain and the injustices we endure. In this invisible space, cruelty festers and grows, unchallenged and unremarked upon. Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil comes to mind, where evil and cruelty become normalized due to indifference and a desire for conformity. This insidious nature of evil, masked by the ordinariness of daily life, echoes in the treatment of the disabled, who dwell, ever so acutely, unnoticed in the shadows, tending to the words in the fire till they turn blood-red, and they burn, and they brand.

Surely, the intellectual and personal trajectories of Amery, Arendt, and Grace, are undeniably different, yet all can be traced back to the irrevocable source of all judgment, i.e., the wound. All these figures, however, display what Theodor W. Adorno calls “thought’s resistance to what merely exists [the “surplus of thought” over brute facticity], the violent freedom of the human subject.”

Through Trier’s lens, Dogville is not merely a town but a study of cruelty born from fear and smallness or thoughtlessness. It asks of us, starkly, to consider the weight of judgment, the scales of justice, and the cost or necessity of mercy and condemnation. Grace’s final act, far from an act of mere retribution, attests to the impossibility and, in fact, the insult of genuine forgiveness in the face of irrevocable betrayal and an array of evils inflicted upon her.

Yet, the film resists such simple half-truths that everyone, deep down, is capable of something terrible. Everyone is. Crafting an idea like that would be nothing short of banal and a woeful waste of creative energy. Kicking and kicking and kicking the one who’s already down, however, is a category of evil, while standing up to one’s oppressors and refusing to explain away their actions in terms of circumstance and heredity is a category of morality. Therein lies its brilliance.

Perhaps the wish-for answer to the violence against the weaker one could be, and this is closer to Amery's disconsoling vision, is to transform the actions of the perpetrator into moral events, as opposed to natural, physical occurrences, to get them to experience their actions from the standpoint of morality. At some point, however, even if this were possible, it is simply too late. The condition of the victim and the condition of the torturer are radically different and never the twain shall meet.

The fact that Grace saves the life of the dog Moses indicates to me that her choice was never about blind violence in and of itself. It was about making sure that the betrayal of the suffering other by the residents of Dogville was going to be the last betrayal. She is not guided by anger or wrath, even of the Biblical kind, but rather by contempt, going hand in hand with the realization that the evils committed by the people of Dogville will continue to happen. There are no moral lessons for them, no hope that they would glimpse the truth of the victim's condition and genuinely desire to undo what had happened. Except it did not simply happen, did it? They chose it.

We do not say an indiscriminate Yes to life in and of itself, the way Nietzsche would have it, regrettably. To turn suffering into an unavoidable part of the human condition is to commit a crime of thought or worse. Forgiving and forgetting neither add nor subtract from an act of evil. To echo Adorno in Lectures on Negative Dialectics, we have to be critical of what we choose to affirm. Blind affirmation of what is and the fatalism that goes with it serves only to maintain the existing order of evil where suffering is both naturalized and normalized. Hobbes was certainly on his game when he asserted that men heap together the mistakes of their lives and call the resulting monster destiny.

After all, some monsters are necessary to keep worse monsters in check.

Each day is a falling tower (XVI), as Grace now knows only too well.