Moai

[poliphilo]

The Moai of Easter Island are huge statues, with elongated faces, jutting chins, heavy brows and ski jump noses. They look a bit like Richard Nixon and a bit like the Frankenstein monster.

There is nothing like them anywhere else in the world. These days we know something of the culture that produced them, but back in the 1950s no-one had a clue. I decided they were supernatural. Perhaps they came alive and stomped around their island when the sun went down.

They were just about the scariest thing I knew. As scary as ghosts. As scary as the very tall half-woman half-rabbit person I once saw in a dream.

I was afraid of them turning up in my bedroom. But that was bearable. I had a strategy all worked out. Obviously they could only appear on the left hand side of the bed. If I lay on my right I wouldn't see them.

Perhaps they were already there, looming up behind me. But that was bearable because it was seeing them that would do the damage. I didn't try to imagine what would happen after. Seeing them would be enough. One glimpse of those craggy, eyeless faces and I would dissolve in terror and cease to exist.

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I think my fear had less to do with the way they looked, than with the fact that nobody- back then- could explain them. This made me see them as uncanny.

[karenkay.livejournal.com]

What do you mean by 'nobody could explain them'?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Europeans turned up at Easter Island, saw these statues and didn't know what to make of them. The locals chose to be tight-lipped. The Moai were products of an earlier phase of their culture and maybe they didn't really understand them either.

People were amazed that such huge statues could be cut and transported using stone age technology.

And then Erich Von Daniken came along and suggested that they were planted on Easter Island by spacemen.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

I have to say, Von Daniken made the world fascinating and strange until the debunkers took him down.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

There was a documentary film about him that went the round of the cinemas, playing as a second feature. I forget what the main feature was, but the Von Daniken movie hit me where I lived. I left the the cinema with my head in a cloud of what ifs.