Last month, Jeff Hanneman, a guitarist for the "heavy" metal band Slayer, one of the darkest of a decidedly dark genre of rock bands, passed away from a rare flesh eating disease.  He was 49.  Interestingly enough, in an interview he gave a few years before his death, he observed that despite the very dark lyrics he penned, he really didn't believe any of them.  He merely wanted to set minds pondering.  Judging from the size of Slayer's fan base, he clearly did.
     Though we may recoil from lyrics that describe the nether and demonic, we ironically also find them fascinating.  There is something in us that embraces what we most fear.
     This also rings true in some of the artwork of the later Romantic period, when artists like Goya produced some macabre images of the most chthonic situations one might imagine, those portraying, for instance, a group of witches feasting on a live and helpless human being.  Many of Goya's era found his works perversely appealing.
     Then, and now, why?  One option is to say, as theologian and political theorist Reinhold Niebuhr suggested, that we are creatures of light and darkness who are living in a light and dark world.  True enough, but why are we and the world this way?  Did we make ourselves this way?  Did we make the world this way?  And if not, who did?
     Although we can adduce all kinds of psychological theories to explain why we are this way, we cannot do so as easily when trying to explain why the world is so.  It seems that we must accept that the nature of reality is such that in it exists a darkness that our empirical observations cannot fully explain.  It seems that we cannot understand the natural reality without agreeing that part of it eludes explanation on the basis of what we perceive it to be.  That is, we need something else, something that is not what we know, to explain what we do know.  Parody if you like the fantasies of the dark and demonic, but then ask yourself this:  if darkness is unreal, why do we experience it?