Pretending fear doesn’t exist

I don’t seem to be very close to my fear. I experience it peevishly, vicariously, or sideways — as a kid, I nursed a grudge against Halloween, felt superior to horror movies (on no basis, since I never saw them), and, though I claimed to embrace “darkness,” this for me was always, actually, bleakness, i.e., sanctified modernist-tinged art in morbid philosophical or existential modes, à la Kafka or Beckett or Magritte or Talking Heads’ “Fear of Music.” For me to relate, my object was usually divested of anything visceral, revolting or goofy — which disqualified nearly everything traditionally spooky or supernatural. I liked vernacular popular art, but I didn’t like John Carpenter movies until I was in my 30s. Now, of course, I’m inclined to regard this as a sort of cognitive quarantine around everything I couldn’t even handle, and I can see in retrospect that my childhood consisted of vast submerged edifices of fear — fear of urban crime, and of my mother’s illnesses — I had to pretend didn’t exist. Yet I still get at it by inference, by working my way inside these feelings, often on behalf of a fictional character. Or through my kids. I can’t remember what I felt at Darth Vader’s mask coming off when I saw it myself, but I’ll never forget going through it with my 5-year-old.