Acting without reason can be plain horrifying

This week my classmate gave a presentation on Edgar Allan Poe's horror stories.

For those who don't know, Poe wrote a whole lot of disturbing short stories over the course of his life.

They're pretty grotesque and gothic and, if you like that sort of thing, they're alternately both frightening and amusing.

My lecturer described Poe's stories as it being as if an incredibly intelligent 8-year-old had sat down and written the scariest thing he could think of.

People have some differing opinions on what the scariest things they can think of are.

Some people are terrified by horror and gore, which Poe happily and generously makes use of, while others are scared more by the psychological.

Personally, I'm in the latter camp and the scariest part of Poe for me is this idea that people do bad things for no real reason; that people do wrong for the sake of doing wrong.

Often Poe's characters and narrators do something terrible but, leading up to the moment, in the moment, and sometimes after the moment of this terrible act, they have managed to justify in some way shape or form what they have done.

For example, there's a man who takes out the eye of his beloved cat for no reason other than he thought the animal was avoiding him, and there is a narrator who kills the old man he lives with because he doesn't like the way the man looks at him with one of his eyes.

It's absurd and it's silly, but that's what is scary about it.

Poe's characters aren't supervillains, they're just people who wind up doing bizarre and sometimes terrible things just because these things seem to happen.

Obviously, the idea of people doing bad for the sake of it is much more complicated outside of the framework of a fictional narrative, and I'm not going to get into it.

Morality is not a minefield I want to play in. But Poe, as ridiculous as he might at times be, got me thinking about my brain.

My thoughts regarding the inner workings of my brain are only very tangentially related to what goes on in psychological horror stories, and they're going to seem a little sad and watery in comparison.

Poe makes me think about what the brain is capable of, and in turn I've started thinking about what my own brain is up to.

I wouldn't have thought about it in any depth pre-Poe, but this morning I knew I had to be somewhere early so I set three alarms to make sure I would wake up on time.

All of my alarms went off and I must have woken up for each of them, because I managed to disable the alarms.

Consequently, I finally woke up properly 10 minutes before I had to leave the house.

Why, when my conscious brain knew I had to be somewhere, would my subconscious brain act in such a way? What else don't I know about my brain?

Do I subconsciously want to be late to everything because I actually want to destroy my life?

And this is not the only thing. Sometimes I know I need to remember to take something with me and I think about it and tell myself that I can't forget.

So, before I leave, I stop and ask myself if I've got everything. As soon as I am inconveniently far from home, I remember what I've left behind.

Essentially, this is a pretty stupid parallel to draw.

My brain isn't making me do bad things for the sake of it, and it's just letting annoying things happen to me.

I know I'm really just absent-minded and disorganised, but when I realised I'd broken into my phone in a half-asleep state this morning and sabotaged myself, I did feel a little horrified.

Millie Lovelock is a Dunedin student.

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