Swamp Fear
That swamp monsters are a near global phenomena of village lore is testimony to the power the swamp holds over our psyche; and that we are not able to get over or admit to. Frog perspective, even as all the frogs die off in our warming planet, is no doubt more valid and crucial than the viewpoint from any alpine vista; or any database. The noisome swamp, sucking bog, haunted moors, dead marshes, will-o-the-wisp, Jenny Greenteeth, the skunk-ape, the grindylow, the swamp-thing; our biases tend to become nightmares; from time to time the nightmare emerges from the pond to steal an actual child. Or the swamp itself is the monster: the Florida swamp, beautiful and very weird, is also lethal, filled with all manner of spiders, poisonous snakes, panthers, alligators, crocodiles and so on—the best of what Florida has to offer. Of course it’s all threatened with extinction.
Americans, who must even still drain every swamp they can find and pave a parking lot over it, are no doubt animated by old medieval fears, sent into action by the reactionary repression of anything soggy, if not a terror of “life” itself. Swamps and the digestive track are not so different, let alone the human reproductive system. For is this not also a gendered bias? Wild and disordered nature, throughout western history, is the feminine—uncontrollable by man, cursed by god; so the Christians hate the fallen earth nearly as much as they hate the unruly woman.
I find it both gross and amusing how Freud clearly enjoys using the term “mucous membrane” in reference to the human orifice; that hole in the body that must be kept swampy; the portal of the abject. Biology is scary and swamp-monster mythology is no more than a record of this terror. But isn’t the border between psyche and soma likewise haunted by strange phenomena that remain difficult to explain or ignore? In the infant’s experience the mucous membrane can produce such overwhelming sensations as to form the basic structures of the psyche. A psychic map of the body (the cutaneous universe) would show the skin-envelope protruding a huge mouth and asshole, smaller dick/vagina, followed by hands, diminishing nose, ears, the dangling extremities. So the mucous membrane rises up from out of the skin-unconscious like some terrific bog-monster; the gross bacterial mouth releasing rank vapors and contagion; the genitals unthinkable; the asshole anathema. To the waking mind these weird holes—as with any swamp—do not fully compute; there is something fundamentally alien about them. Which I guess is why we like mouthwash and toothbrushing so much?
