Mary Ruefle, "On Fear," in Madness, Rack, and Honey
I suppose, as a poet, among my fears can be counted the deep-seated uneasiness surrounding the possibility that one day it will be revealed that I consecrated my life to an imbecility. Part of what I mean — what I think I mean — by "imbecility" is something intrinsically unnecessary and superfluous and thereby unintentionally cruel.
[...]
I asked the poet Tony Hoagland what he thought about fear. He said fear was the ghost of an experience: we fear the reoccurrence of a pain we once felt, and in this way fear is like a hangover. The memory of our pain is a pain unto itself, and thus feeds our fear like a foyer with mirrors on both sides. And then he quoted Auden:
"And ghosts must do again / What gives them pain."
It is interesting to note that this idea — fear's being the ghost of pain, or imaginary pain — figures in psychological torture by the CIA; in fact, their experiments with pain found that imaginary pain was more effective than physical pain — poets, take note — and thus psychological torture more effective that physical torture. Here is an excerpt from their Exploitation Training Manual, written in 1983: "The threat of coercion usually weakens or destroys resistance more effectively than coercion itself. For example, the threat to inflict pain can trigger fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain."
Although I have never been bitten by a dog, I am scared to death of them, as I am of all living creatures, including myself and my own fragmentation in the long hall of mirrors.
James Ward, future British psychologist, broke with religion as a young man in 1872, but found himself a bundle of reflexes over which he had no choice and no control. He said: "I have no dread of God, no fear of the Devil, no fear of man, but my head swims as I write it — I fear myself."
What do I means by fear? Why I mean that thing which drives you to write, but let us step out of the foyer, and back onto the street, back down the road, and make our approach somewhat more slowly.
[...]
Dread. I like it better than the word fear because fear, like the unconscious emotion which is one of its forms, has only the word ear inside of it, telling an animal to listen, while dread has the word read inside of it, telling us to read carefully and find the dead, who are also there. But I have not used the word dread in what follows. I have used the word fear. And fear is an older word —