There is an old medieval Christian concept called “hellmouth,” for which one can still find graphic illustrations in old prints, stained-glass windows of European cathedrals, and the like. The great novelist Norman Rush describes it thus:
“…[it] was the opening up of the mouth of hell right in front of you, without warning, through no fault of your own. It was the mad gunman shooting you at lunch and it was the cab jumping the curb and crushing you. It was Aids and it was the grandmother, the daughter, the granddaughter tumbling through the air, blown out of the airplane by a bomb, the three generations falling and seeing one another fall, down, down, onto the Argolid mountains.”
An attack like the murder yesterday—or like that of the young woman on the train in Charlotte, or the insurance executive in New York, or the female real estate investor who wasn’t even the intended target of her deranged killer—feels like hellmouth, and I can only imagine how it could feel to the bereaved in such cases. In the end, it is not possible to conceive of a world where such events are completely absent. It is too big, there are too many variables, and like the man said, time and chance happen to all.
I had not ever heard of this, and wondered why such a striking metaphor hadn’t become general-use in popular culture for sudden, senseless disasters. The Lady of the House informs me that most people probably know of it through Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where Sunnydale High literally sits on a “Hellmouth,” a gateway that attracts evil. Ah. Well, yes, it’s probably too franchise-specific at this point, then. What a shame.
Nonetheless, what came instantly to my mind was a brief aside in Daniel Kalder’s book Strange Telescopes:
It was in the summer of 1998 that the depths began eating the city. The process started slowly at first—a small section in the suburbs gave way and swallowed a man as he was walking home with his dog one night. That’s how it happened—one minute he was walking along the surface and next he wasn’t; he was below, boiling to death in an upsurge of water, his dog’s yelps mixing with his screams as they both became broth.
This has stuck with me more than anything else in the book (which I don’t mean as a criticism). Whatever it may say about me, I’m more inured to the horrible results of human intention. But something about the simple ordinariness of this is disheartening to contemplate. It’s not the banality of evil; more like the banality of disaster. “Normal accidents,” as Charles Perrow called them — catastrophes baked into highly complex systems. Atrocities, being choices, invite counter-choices: blame, trial, resolve, political energy, even the cheap solace of calling a death “not in vain.” Accident offers no such handles. No villain to defeat, no moral to extract — only a hole in the ordinary day where a person used to be. Theodicy falls silent before scenes like this. It’s the insult of gratuitous cruelty added to the injury of life in an amoral universe. Like Ivan Karamazov, I refuse the apologist’s alchemy that transmutes contingency into necessity.