After reading Shirley Jackson's short story, "The Lottery", I felt the heaviness of her intentions shift the air around me. A certain hesitance in writing this story made it's theme that much more lustful and evoking. To question tradition, to play into the dark nature of it rather than neatly package it away as a decorated trophy. As a framed portrait of rules to point to and gather around beyond the dust settling and the ink fading. Why is it still hanging? Hasn't the nail been bent out of place enough? How does it still hang? Who keeps putting it up? "The Lottery" swipes at a handful of angles across the undeniable, cold, certain and final nature of keeping up with community traditions and upholding those suffocating values. A sacrifice so "symbolic", a need, an utter pillar in keeping the ties of those people alive. To question this is to question ancestry, is to question identity, is to question the walls that hold the houses together, is to question day to day life, a consequence fatal to an already dwindling town. The power behind a sacrifice so raw, the ritualistic nature of it's preparation, the sheer excitement of the participants at the communal perversion of morals, raised proudly, drawing from the broken and doomed catharsis set in place by those that came before. The promise of winning the lottery and the joy that it might imply hangs taut in the air towards the end of this story, an effect left reverberating in me, to reveal the lottery is nothing but a fate dealt by the cruel unforgiving past the town holds. The people's talk, that was held only by the weight of air ringing from one ear to the other. The people's convoluted sense of representation, control and entitlement, was standing only by the pictures they paint in their heads. Their sentiment becomes real when it takes the form of rocks to be hurled, prestigiously, to end the life of a once well placed member of their society.
Cultish traditions, heavy feelings, generational trauma and all the implications it brings is implicitly interesting to me, this mood created in "The Lottery" immediately brought Ethel Cain in to mind and The Sharp Objects series (that I was able to find out about thanks to her!). It serves as a reminder to me of something I had pondered before..how the land around us, everything around us is able to soak up a lot of pain and trauma..all the psychological hell that is kept by people is not wasted or hidden because its silenced but it marinates it seeps it slips and it takes up a very real space in the world. It seeps into the air, roots of the trees, the waves of the ocean because nature always yearns for truth and so it's easy for it to welcome that with open arms and keep a record of everything in it's own way and that nature tends to be met with resistance from humans in the shape of be it deceit, shame or guilt but it just ends up being etched into nature and that's why we can feel it. If nature could whisper anything to us it would probably say that it had enough. A similar feeling i get from Ethel Cain's music, in that southern gothic atmosphere she tries to capture. A reminder that even in sunlight there is the daunting reminder of being repeatedly banged against the walls of an internalized horror and a void of a damned psyche, playing with the harmonies of cicadas and crickets. Amidst a world you minimized as a personalized hell, you find yourself tugged by it's thread, when you hear it's call, you answer without much thought. That's how that generational trauma quicksand gets you, except it's slow, really slow and deeply paralyzing. Glistening from the outside, burning from the inside.
