XIII | IX | LXXV

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[G]othic fiction is the site where the edges and limits of human experience, cognition, and subjectivity are transgressed with all manner of invasions form the “outside” that threaten the homely and secure world of the rational and the normal. […] Fisher notes that the outside, as a realm of the weird and the eerie via the gothic, does not have to be a realm of horror, monsters, or abjection:

What the weird and the eerie have in common is a preoccupation with the strange. The strange – not the horrific. The allure that the weird and the eerie possess […] has, rather, to do with a fascination for the outside, for that which lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience. This fascination usually involves a certain apprehension, perhaps even dread – but it would be wrong to say that the weird and the eerie are necessarily terrifying. I am not here claiming that the outside is always beneficent. There are more than enough terrors to be found there; but such terrors are not all there is to the outside. […]

Where society is increasingly on the move, movement turns a place into a passage of space, and therefore non-place. Auge, in this respect, defines the majority of non-places as being transitional spaces, of areas of transit and temporary waiting; airports, motorways and their services stations, car parks, hotel or office lobbies, and shopping malls. […] They invoke in the individual towards consumerism and social control […], to psychologically disconnect, to drift in an aesthetically impoverished landscape and the seeming absence of   presence. […]

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[T]he eerie concerns itself with the presence or absence of something, and such places (or non-places) are often where there is an absence of humanity, or where there is something or some agency at work that is just beyond our realm of understanding;

“The eerie concerns the most fundamental metaphysical questions one could pose, questions to do with existence and non- existence.” As such, the eerie “is constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of  presence. The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or is there nothing present when there should be something.” 

This becomes evident with the use “eerie” as descriptive terms, such as there being an “eerie silence,” or an “eerie cry”; at the heart of the eerie, it talks of an absence of something, or the presence of something, but something that is unknown and outside of our normal frames of knowledge and reference.

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On a material level, the eerie is often not located in the humanistic confines and locales of the family and home.

Often, it is located in marginal spaces, in landscapes, sites, and structures where there is either a distinct lack of human presence, or there was once a human activity which has since disappeared.

Various ruins, such as the ancient sites of Stonehenge, and Easter Island, to more modern locations such as abandoned buildings and houses underline several aspects to the eerie, as the failure of presence that is the absence of humanity almost certainly leads to various forms of speculation as to the source of said absence. Fisher argues that while the certain sites often contain traces of the weird, for a place to be truly eerie, there need to be an alterity in the way that said absence or presence can’t be described or explained away. There is a circumvention that prevents understanding.

More importantly, Fisher asserts that the eerie turns on the issues of agency in the way that:

It is about the forces that govern our lives and the world […] In the case of the failure of absence, the question concerns the existence of agency as such. Is there a deliberative agent here at all? Are we being watched by an entity that has not yet revealed itself? In the case of the failure of presence, the question concerns the particular nature of the agent at work. We know that Stonehenge has been erected, so the questions of whether there was an agent behind its construction or not does not arise; what we have to reckon with are the traces of a departed agent whose purposes are unknown.

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Shrike by Hozier but you’re sitting by your open window during a thunderstorm.

(best with headphones)