Last week, the Swiss artist H. R. Giger died at the age of 74.  Who was H. R. Giger?  He is perhaps best known for designing the title character and various special effects for the movie Alien (a movie which was, for me, one of the most intense I had ever seen).  But Giger also created some incredibly bizarre and frightening images of darkness, the macabre, and the morphologically twisted and askew.  As he often put it, his paintings attracted "crazy people."
     I have written before about the darkness that lurks in all of us, a darkness that for most of us, draws us to, for a host of primordial intellectual and spiritual reasons, conclude that deviance, however we define it in our cultural context, is oddly fascinating.  Giger's work bears this out aptly.  Viewed in another context, this fascination (a word drawn from Greek and Latin words connoting mystery and dread) with terror and darkness evokes very different things.  Writing at the turn of the last century, the religious scholar Rudolph Otto suggested that many people find holiness, that is, the perceived unwavering moral standard of a transcendent being, to be similarly fascinating.  He averred that even though people find holiness to be awful, dreadful, and terrorizing, primarily because it is perceived to be rooted in a divine and unapproachable being, they nonetheless feel drawn to it.
     Whether it's art or religion, some of us feel drawn to that which dreads and frightens us, not in the sense of being afraid, but as something that rocks not merely our mind and heart, but the depths of our soul.  We find it singularly compelling.  Be it the darkness of phantasmagoria or the dread of holiness, we feel another reality, another thoroughly undefinable reality impinging upon us.  And even though we can't see it, we cannot help but sense mystery, even fright and terror. Our feelings have causes, our fears have roots. Moral structure prevails.  We're not alone.