harbinger

Harbinger is a strange word.

Now denoting a forerunner or messenger, “harbinger” traveled into modern English from Old Saxon through medieval French. It conveys in its etymological origins the word harbor, a place of safety. A medieval harbinger was a person who provides lodging, as well as one who travels ahead in search of safe dwelling, a herald and guarantor. Force animates the word (har comes from heri, a Germanic word for troop, martial band), but so does refuge (berga, a built space of safety, a secure dwelling in a world imagined as inimical). Harbinger is danger and omen at once, refuge and seeker, force and announcement.

Long ago I wrote that the “The monster is the harbinger of category crisis.” The monster arises where categorization faulters, insufficient to its classificatory task. Monstrous irresolution demands a rethinking of boundary and normalcy because the monster refuses compartmentalization, refuses the stilled simplicity that taxonomy demands.

We are as likely to encounter the monster in the basement or bedroom of our safe residence (the film Weapons works so well because of its warped meditation on welcome, family, hospice, hospitality and home) as at the margins of the known world’s geography (the cyclops Polyphemus munching Odysseus’s men in a cave that is no shelter for them) or the very limits of space itself (the Xenomorph of the Alien franchise, a hybrid and incoherent body, a form suspended between forms that threatens to smash distinctions … and yet a creature that over time ends up captured in systems of study and resource extraction, its weird flourishing and fearful polyphony reduced into a systematized science where everything can be reduced into the known).

Forever moving between refuge and force, perilous provocation and rebuke to boundary and enclosure, the monster invites curiosity – a desire that kills far more than cats but which also elicits care. Can we be forgiven for loving the monster when it arrives as messenger, declaring that our categories were always too narrow, that binaries and bifurcations are lethal to those who cannot safely abide in the ease of either/or? Monsterization is a deadly process of forcing fellow humans into categories where they become expendable, killable, not worth a thought.

But what an impoverished fortress that leaves those humans it does not exile secure within, a precarious harbor limned by companions made strange. No wonder the remaining denizens feel endangered: the walls around the oasis are thin and built on hostility, on expulsion of kin, on a lingering knowledge that any citizen can be the next to be identified as monster within.

No wonder some from that fortress built on exclusion set off through the gates and into uncertain night, sometimes finding shelter within unexpected community. These refugees from a polity too ordered, too enamored of its imagined purity, do not always find the end of their human life (as they were warned by their once fellow citizens), but the beginnings of a more humane way of dwelling in a difficult world.

Though it can be marshalled as a tool by petty tyrants to buttress the very injustices through which monsters are formed and exiled, crisis can also offer a suspended space where better futures are imagined and more capacious collectivities affirmed. When categories prove inadequate to their task of keeping civilization immune to change, the monster is already on the move, already in flight but also waiting at another gate.