Jeff VanderMeer is a diabolical villain and other fun things

Last month I finally went to see Ivy Ford at the North Street Cabaret.

Holy cow, can she play a mean guitar!

I'd been meaning to go to a show of hers for a few years after seeing her on a bill at the Red Rooster and other joints around town. She plays blues in an Albert Collins/B.B. King vein - more or less - with forays into something more like blues-inflected rock, perhaps a bit Hendrixy.

Great stuff.

Maybe a week ago I finished reading Absolution.

The first thing I thought upon reading the final words was "I should have re-read the first three books." I think a lot of what happens here is mentioned in the original series but I have forgotten so much as it's been years since I took them in.

Absolution has 3 parts. The first section is called "Dead Town" which describes the fate of an expedition in the Forgotten Coast some 20 years prior to the formation of Area X and serves as a prelude to the horrors to come.

"Dead Town" is as chilling and uncanny as anything in the original Southern Reach books. The carnivorous rabbits made the simple act of mastication into a nightmare and were disturbing enough on their own but then they are slaughtered with ruthless efficiency via flame throwers making for a genuinely horrific scene in which I could almost smell the burning flesh and fur. Just when I thought it was safe to take a breather, we get the scene wherein the Rogue visits the biologists and it was simply disturbing and twisted - diabolical even. I could just see Jeff VanderMeer twirling his moustache and laughing as I realized that there was no going back, that I'd been beset by an uneasiness that I would not, could not shake until days after having finished the book. When that scene was done, I had to stop and think about it. Recover, in a way. I wasn't quite sure what had happened to the expedition in it but it was all bad.

The biologists had reached the white rabbits and did not care or notice that they trampled blackened corpses and living creatures both, weapons slack at their sides like a muscle memory that was amnesia, this onrushing surge toward the Rogue behind his veil of silver. Nor did the living rabbits care if they were trampled.

...

Now the Rogue kept opening his mouth wider and wider and the words came out louder and more brutal above the downpour. Those words could not be extinguished by the rain. Those words rose and permeated and cascaded outward and around the Rogue - even as the first wave of biologists surging against that "fey weaponry" crumpled, fell to their knees, slid down on gurgling mud as if they could evade the fire "that called our names"...except it kept calling and each time the desolation within became more final and complete.

The second section, "The False Daughter", concerns Old Jim, a retired(?) Central operative who is lured back into service for one last job. He is estranged from his daughter and, quite disturbingly, Central casts a younger agent to play the role of his daughter which makes for a weird plunge into Old Jim's psyche. For his part, Old Jim has been sent to the Forgotten Coast to investigate the strange happenings there which are related the expedition from "Dead Town". He is obsessed with finding the Rogue and encounters the Tyrant, an alligator that the biologists let loose nearly 20 years prior to his mission. The Tyrant has grown quite large and seems to have become sentient. The mere potential of the gator still being alive is enough to loosen the veteran agent's grip on reality.

This section ended with a Solaris (the film) vibe for me with Old Jim seeming to return to the "normal" world of the Forgotten Coast but I wasn't convinced. The camera could have pulled back and shown Old Jim at the Village as merely some twisted diorama sitting alone amid alien corn. It reiterated what "Dead Town" revealed to us: whatever alien or intelligence or force is loose in the Forgotten Coast, we humans are unable to divine its purpose or makes sense of its methods.

The book closes with "The First and the Last" which takes place a year after the border that defines Area X has descended. We witness the first expedition into Area X from the point of view of Lowry who drops hundreds, if not thousands of f-bombs. I found his dialogue to be annoying but eventually got used to it.

We know the mission failed and here we get a glimpse of madness settling in and members dying one by one as flesh melts into hazmat suits and other dreadful and bizarre happenings befall the crew.

Absolution was a great read. VanderMeer nails the cosmic horror thing perfectly as people descend into madness before an incomprehensible presence.

Last weekend my ladyfriend and I went to see The Claudettes, Chicago's premier band who does what The Claudettes do. It was the Madison release party for their new album Garage Glamour and the show was sold out. Also there was Hannah, The Leaf Queen, who shared her photos with me. She was seated right up front while I was off to the side and so her pics are better than mine.

Liz Ele is the new drummer having replaced Michael Caskey earlier this spring.

She seemed to be more of a rock drummer and she drove the songs forward with her steady push. She added a controlled manic energy to the music.

It had been a while since I'd seen the band perform and singer Rachel Williams has settled into being the frontwoman. Her performance that night had more energy and, for lack of a better way of saying it, she put on more of a show. When I last saw the band it was shortly after she had joined and she seemed to be reacting to the music onstage then but now she is part of it, as if the beat was emanating from the movement of her lithe figure, her singing tacking a course for the melodies.

The new album really puts her range on full display. There's the pleading of "(You Are My) Whole World", the sultry seduction of "Touch You Back", and my favorite at the moment, the Zack de la Rocha-like delivery on "Don't Give It Up to the Thieves".

Johnny Iguana's piano was as bracing and melodic as ever while Zach Verdoorn effortlessly alternated between bass and electric guitar. Plus I think he sang more that night as well.

A great show.

Also thanks to Rachel for helping me clean up a spilled beer.

I have visited the planetarium a couple times recently. The first was for a screening of Beyond Our Senses: Bank Swallows.

Directed by Wisconsinite David Andrew Busse, it portrays colonies of bank swallows who migrate to the shores of Lake Michigan just south of Milwaukee. We witness males on the prowl for mates, the youngins hatching and growing quickly to become fledglings.

Busse was on hand for the screening and he talked about how the idea for the movie developed from observing the birds on walks and wanting to know more and to document what he was witnessing.

Not only was this a fascinating look at an animal that I knew nothing of until watching this, it was really neat to see the birds in action on the full dome of the planetarium. There's much more happening there than just stars in the night sky. (Which are really hoopy, don't get me wrong.)

More recently I was at the planetarium to take in a screening of Sounds of the Oceans.

It's not really a documentary and is more of an immersive experience. We are shown footage of orcas and whales and dolphins as they glide through the ocean waters. Their calls are mixed with music and the combination makes for a relaxing journey beneath the waves.

While there was definitely a New Age vibe to be had, I found it an interesting impressionistic ride. What were the animals' calls about? Were they having a chat or trading insults about the diver with the camera?

The movie ended with suggestions for how to be kinder to the oceans and their inhabitants. Is chilling out your audience to the graceful movements of some ocean life the best way to build empathy for them and to lead folks to action? I don't know. Nonetheless Sounds of the Oceans is a serene getaway from the workaday world that invites viewers to seek kinship with the life beneath the waves.

My ladyfriend and I went to see Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Comic Mystery last weekend down at the Bartell.

It was great fun and, truth be told, I was surprised at how old fashioned its comedic attitude was. I know nothing about the history of this play but it felt very old school to me. Its humor was for all ages and there was lots of Watson making faces at the audience and faux mistakes that let the audience know the characters knew they were in a play.

Fun was the watchword instead of grand themes.

Last weekend a friend and I went to the Gamma Ray to see Souled American, a pioneering alt-country band from Chicago. I heard about them briefly on Sound Opinions shortly before seeing that they'd be stopping here in Madison and figured we had to go.

Joe Adducci and Chris Grigoroff were joined by an unknown (to me) guitarist and they proceeded to play some stripped down, country-inflected balladry. 

I thought the tunes had strong Townes van Zandt vibes. (It's snowing on Elston. Ha!) They seemed to have a fatalism to them. The music may have been sparsely arranged but the bare bones aesthetic combined with gritty performances for an achingly genuine experience.

I watched Errol Morris' latest documentary, CHAOS: The Manson Murders. It was really neat for me as I knew only the barest of details of the Manson Family and their deadly exploits.

In classic Morris style, the truth behind the Manson madness and the hideous murders is called into question. Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi (who was a resident of Hibbing, MN at the same time as Bob Zimmerman) put forth the idea that Manson wanted to start a race war in his book Helter Skelter: The True Story of The Manson Murders. Here Tom O'Neill's book, which gave the movie its title, calls that into question and throws in CIA involvement along with a mind control conspiracy.

Bugliosi's hypothesis is further brought into question by former Manson follower Bobby Beausoleil who paints a more mundane picture of Manson. It's one of a scorned wanna be musician turned maniac and not a fiend bent on bringing to fruition some crazed apocalyptic vision of interracial strife.

The movie does a good job of giving the details of Manson's life and the sordid, murderous affairs he was involved in. Plus it ponders just how a crazy man who lived on the fringes of society when he wasn't in jail could command a commune and convince his followers to commit those sadistic murders in the summer of 1969.

I also appreciated the use of Manson's music. It fits into the narrative, yes, but it had been a long time coming for me. Guns N' Roses covered one of his songs on their album "The Spaghetti Incident?" and I recall well the uproar that caused. And so it was just interesting for me to finally hear Manson performing his songs at long last.

Acclimation

Despite my legs still aching from Saturday's walking and the climb up that lake wall, I returned to the Chippewa Moraine Rec Area on Sunday to hike the spooky trail, the one that the DNR has no dedicated map of - the one that runs by the serial killer's house. Last time I only hiked half the loop before wandering over to the eerily named Dark Lake and then back out the same way I came. So this time I was determined to walk the entire loop in addition to trekking once more to the lake of Stygian gloom. Mwahaha!

Before heading out I stopped at Emma Beans Drive-Thru for a cuppa joe. I think it had a better flavor than the swamp water on offer in the hotel lobby but it was somehow brewed even weaker. Disappointing but it was still something hot to drink and surely had trace amounts of caffeine. I briefly considered ordering a cup of hot water so that I could concoct some kind of homeopathic cup of coffee that was fully caffeinated but quickly discarded the thought.

The helpful and friendly DNR lady at the interpretive center had told me on Saturday that demolition of the camp buildings on the spooky trail had begun but was not yet finished. Too bad. The abandoned buildings were not only creepy but also memento mori, of a kind, reminders that life is fleeting and that Nature will prevail in the end and return you to the soil.

Just like Saturday, it was a lovely, sunny morning. A bit chilly when the breeze hit my cheeks but the remaining meteorologist at the National Weather Service forecasted a rather temperate day to come. This trail connects to the one I had walked yesterday but its trailhead is a short drive down the road from the interpretive center. Pulling into the lot mine was, quite unsurprisingly, the only car there.

Just as had happened the previous day, my mind went from enjoying the lovely surroundings to my divorce/how to shed my anger. Bird calls filled the air and they would drag my mind away from the dissolution of my marriage back to the woods. All around me life was emerging from its winter slumbers and I tried to view this as a lesson for me, something to emulate.

 

Less than a mile up the trail I once again saw the spooky recreation/meeting building or whatever it was.

While it wasn't quite as scary in broad daylight as it was on a grey autumn day, those extremely creepy Annihilation vibes remained and I fully expected some Girl Scout counselor's remains to be hanging on the wall, attached by some eldritch, though colorful, lichen that would make the R&D folks at 3M insanely jealous. Thankfully it was just my imagination running away with me.

In order to shake loose any thoughts of hideously transmogrified Girl Scout troop leaders that clung steadfastly in my overactive imagination, I went down to the shore of Hodge Lake which was just gorgeous.

I hit the trail and went deosil this time which would allow me to walk the section of trail I missed last time right away. Almost immediately I ran into a few cabins as well as the remains of others.

Needless to say, the hike was wonderful, the scenery gorgeous. I loved the melodic songs of the feathered inhabitants of the area, the moss that crept up trees, and the sight of the woods about to bloom into a verdurous wonderland.

When my thoughts strayed from my surroundings, I found that they didn't always coalesce around my divorce. My youngest stepson's predicament weighs heavily on me. We had a discussion recently and it broke my heart that he, at the age of 26, harbors no inclination to become an independent adult. It's like he even refuses to build castles in the sky. Bereft of self-respect and unable to comprehend that he is the master of his own destiny, he expects to never work a day in his life, never assume any responsibility beyond paying a couple bills and ordering groceries. Instead of beginning the process of becoming a man, he seems to desire perpetual childhood and there is nothing for me to do about it.

It is absolutely gut wrenching to hear a very smart, funny, and capable young man who is caring and blessed with a gentle bonhomie say that he's inured, not to a life of quiet desperation, but to one of barely getting by. But he is 26 and I cannot do much if he is not inclined to change his life for the better.

 

I think I came to a level of acceptance of this situation in the woods that day. In my mind, I am resigned to the fact that he is the way he is and that he is responsible for changing his life, ultimately. I'll still be there to help and encourage but I suspect that, barring a radical change in his outlook, I will just have to become accustomed to this sadness as a permanent part of my life and move forward.

Another thought that I pondered on my walk was that my family is over. When I got married I had hoped that my marriage would be durable - unlike my parents' marriage and that of other family members and those of the parents of several friends. I had hoped that my family would last, that it would one of mutual support forever, that the kids would be of some help when my wife and I attained old age. But the family has been split asunder and most of its members now see me as nothing more than a bank. My value to them is strictly pecuniary and to be found in my bank accounts.

 

It is depressing to watch your family fall apart (again) and realize that most of your life plans were built on sand. What a fool I was!

 

******** 

At one point I found myself back at the trail I had hiked the previous day so I had to backtrack. But not before spending a few minutes watching Mr. and Mrs. Wood Duck enjoying some quality time out on the lake. Wood ducks are not uncommon in Wisconsin but I've not seen one here in Madison in ages. The male has such beautiful plumage and both sexes have lovely, distinctive crests on their heads. No offense, mallards.

Not the best picture, I grant you, but standing there looking down at them making their way out of a little inlet and towards a wider section of the lake was magical in its own way. The scene was calm and quiet as the ducks cruised along hastily in the distance. My imagination conjured up visions of their webbed feet paddling away in a frenzy beneath the surface in sharp contrast to the graceful gliding on top of the water.

It wasn't long before I found the sign I had missed earlier and hopped back onto the trail I had intended to take. At one point the rustle of leaves grabbed my attention and I saw the blur of a critter scamper across the leaf covered ground towards a tree. I turned to look and saw a chipmunk staring back at me in agitation from the hollow of a tree as if saying, "Curse you human! A pox upon your house!"

Eventually I came to the path that led to Dark Lake and took it. As I was walking, I came to a small pond with a log out in the middle. While I couldn't be certain, it sure looked like there was a turtle taking in the sun on it but it could also have been the remaining stub of a branch. I zoomed in as far as I could with my camera camera which has an optical zoom and took a photograph. When I got home and was able to see the photo, it turned out I was right.

Continuing down the trail, I recalled that the last time I had walked it, I was first delighted by a gaggle of turkeys just ahead of me and then quite startled by a pair of deer who emerged from the woods and ran across the trail. Not long after recalling these sightings, I heard the rustle of leaves ahead of me and to my right. The rustling then became loud thuds as two deer tear assed out of the woods and ran across the trail a little way ahead of me. I'd swear that I could feel the ground vibrate just a tad as their hooves pounded the earth as they fled and I felt like I was in the presence of something larger than me, something that could make the ground tremble.

With the excitement over, I continued on to the lake which looked majestic. And dark. It had a rather fresh smell to it.

I dipped my hand in and found that it was chilly but not freezing cold. Brisk, you might say.

 

Recently I've been touching things more on my walks. Initially it was all about the sights and sounds. This was followed by practicing taking in the smells. And now I am trying to be more tactile, to put a hand in the water, to feel leaves and needles between my fingers, and to touch the bark of trees and let their textures become armor in my Dungeons & Dragons addled imagination. I also bend down at least once to touch the earth and feel its warmth or its chill, to send greetings to the creatures who dwell beneath our feet.

I headed back and for some odd reason I saw the cover of Chet Atkins' Travelin' in my mind's eye. On it he is walking across a bridge with a guitar slung over his shoulder. Why should that come to mind? My father had it on vinyl when I was a boy and I used to listen to it occasionally. What an odd flashback. Or, at least, oddly timed. Ere long I was back at the main trail which would take me past the serial killer's house. 

Thankfully he was not at home when I arrived. A few of the surrounding cabins were gone or mostly gone but a few remained with screens missing and their roofs covered in moss.

Presumably there will be no structures remaining the next time I am on the trail which is a shame as they add a wonderfully mysterious vibe to the scene. Being abandoned they suggest death and decay and just add a patina of weirdness to my hikes.

Just before the parking lot was a pond from which emanated a splash as I was walking by. I stood still and the turtle made a return appearance. A fine send off from the denizens of Hodge Lake.

********

On my way back to Bloomer I stopped in Cornell for a brew at Moonridge Brewing Co. I arrived just after they opened and had my pick of seats at the bar. One nice thing about Moonridge is that you can get 8oz pours and I got one of their Moonlight Pale Ale.

It was quite delicious. Light and bubbly and not IPA (a.k.a. - Hawaiian Punch) flavored. This one just really hit the spot after a nice hike.

As I relaxed, more and more people came in, including families, most of them ordering pizza in addition to liquid refreshment. One couple ordered 3 pies. It was nice to see them doing some fairly brisk business early on a Sunday afternoon. Perhaps the communion wafers and wine just didn't satisfy.

Back at the hotel I showered and again ate the Mexican joint in town. And again I left my phone in my room so no photos of the fine chow nor of the backs of the booths adorned in cacti and sombreros. I felt badly for the waiter as a group of kids in their early 20s came in shortly after I did and the "men" proceeded to be loud and obnoxious. One of them let loose a series of stentorian belches which I am sure the women found adorable. For their part, the ladies kept rather quiet as their male companions whooped it up and played bits of songs aloud on their phones and were, quite frankly, simply annoying.

I was happy to get out of that place.

Upon my return to my room, I settled down to read and before I knew it I had finished that issue of County Highway that I had begun a couple days previously. As I was nearing the end, which is always the music section as it comes just before the final page which is classifieds, it occurred to me that I felt well - mentally. A lot of the anger that I had felt when this trip began had dissipated.

Sadness largely filled the space left when the anger left me though there was some happiness in there as well. I had thought a lot about my divorce during the trip and I concluded after some marriage forensics that, for all intents & purposes, it was over in the autumn of 2022. Everything after that was epilogue. I felt stupid that it took nearly 3 more years for divorce to begin but I was content with my conclusion and simply hoped that the divorce would be final soon.

When I had finished reading County Highway, I almost immediately cracked open Absolution, the fourth book in the Southern Reach series which had begun with Annihilation.

I completely missed its release back in 2024 (shocking!) which was 10 years after the first 3 books in the series were released. The blurb on the back says it's a prequel and the weird, deconstructed alligator on the cover was intriguing in a grotesque kind of way.

While I didn't get too far in that night, I did get far enough to recognize that a wave of madness is descending upon the researchers in Dead Town and that those rabbits just can't be good. They may not portend doom - wait. No, they do portend doom. Like the previous books in the series, the first section just oozes the uncanny and this is one of the great things about the series (and the Annhilation movie too).

This should be a fun and unsettling read.

 

I need to buy those bookshelves I've been meaning to buy for months

Before the Los Lobos show last night in Stoughton I stopped in at Ink Cap Books. It's a lovely little bookstore with lots of cards and stickers and whatnot too. Despite being a small shop, they had a couple titles I've been seeking.

I just found out about Absolution within the past couple weeks. Hopefully it is as creepy as the preceding books and bursting with unheimlich goodness. I've had Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell on my to-read list for a long while. I've heard good things about Piranesi and perhaps reading it will motivate me to finally read Clarke's epic debut.

On the Eve of Self-Destruction: Annihilation

Annihilation was another winter Blu-ray purchase for me and I finally watched it recently. Released in 2018, it is based on the novel of the same name by Jeff VanderMeer which came out in 2014. I do not recall how I first heard about the novel but I immediately fell in love with it and was excited to hear that it was being adapted for the big screen by someone who had written and/or directed science fiction tales that were more cerebral than shoot 'em up.

The book is often categorized as weird fiction and, while I am less than certain what criteria are used to define that genre, Annihilation is very weird indeed. It tells a story of four women who are never named and only known by their occupations: a biologist, a psychologist, an anthropologist, and a surveyor. They go on a mission into Area X, an area free of human inhabitants and blocked off from the general public. (Very much like Tarkovsky's Stalker.) Other expeditions have preceded this one – it's the 12^th – and they have all ended disastrously. What happens in Area X stays in Area X. Those who return suffer from amnesia and virulent cancers that cut their lives short.

I think the best way to explain my affection for the book is that it appeals to my love of unheimlich, a German word that denotes, as I understand it, discomfort and fear. I don't take it to mean sheer, abject terror; more like low level dread. I was uneasy reading every page of that book. Sometimes the unease was slight while at others it had been transformed into something more like terror. Annihilation has definite Lovecraftian sensibilities. VanderMeer doesn’t gives us much certainty in his world – characters don't have names, Area X is on planet Earth but we're not sure where, we don't know the genesis of Area X, et al. So much is unknown in the story. What we do know is that humanity is dealing with a force that it does not and perhaps cannot understand much less exercise even a small degree of control over. We are at its mercy. And while it may not be malicious, it certainly poses a threat.

And, honestly, the tower scared the crap out of me. Inside a structure is a tunnel with a spiral staircase ominously leading down which the biologist calls the tower. On the walls writing consisting of a plant-like material spells out a lengthy phrase that makes me imagine what T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" would be like if he had co-written it with Lovecraft. It begins:

"Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives while from the dimlit halls of other places…"

And, down in the dark depths of the tower was the Crawler. Let us not go there.

For his film, writer/director Alex Garland took VanderMeer's novel as the basis of a story and went off in his own direction. Despite the changes he wrought, Annihilation the movie kept me uneasy almost the whole time and I descended into terror on the odd occasion as well.

There is much more clarity here as we find out at the beginning that a something from outer space crashes on Earth, more specifically, into a lighthouse. Four intrepid adventurers becomes five with the addition of a medic. And they are given names: Dr. Ventress (psychologist), Lena (biologist), Radek (physicist), Sheppard (geomorphologist), and Thorensen, the medic.

Here in the film, Lena's relationship with her husband is more fleshed out and the central motivation for her entering the Shimmer, Area X in the book. Instead Ventress, a cold, stoic face to a nameless bureaucracy is perhaps more like the novel's biologist.

Whereas VanderMeer focused on the fellowship's descent into madness and dissolution, Garland emphasizes body horror. The Shimmer is where DNA gets shoehorned where it not only just shouldn't be but where it cannot be. It's almost a Dantean journey but instead of going deeper into hell and meeting souls who committed ever more heinous crimes, we see relatively minor feats of genetic splicing and dicing become more severe until finally our protagonists destruct.

The first step is a single vine sprouting a variety of disparate flowers and this is followed by an alligator with shark-like teeth. The gator, which briefly threatens our adventurers, is almost a cheap horror movie trope. As Lena says during her debriefing/interrogation after emerging from the Shimmer, the mutations got more strange and severe the closer they got to the lighthouse and that's when things get really creepy.

For me this is because human bodily integrity is breached as categories of creatures are violated. Plants take on human shapes which leads the physicist to declare that they contain human hox genes, the genes that direct the development of an embryo into the bilaterally symmetrical, bi-pedal shapes that we humans have. Did the plants grow that way? Or are the results of some horrific human transmogrification? Then there's a bear with no flesh on its head that is able to mimic the death screams of its last victim, who just happens to be the geomorphologist. But is it mimicking or has it somehow absorbed part of Sheppard? After all, we see that her body has had its throat mangled. How do we know that it didn't appropriate her vocal cords in some grotesque manner? I have to say that watching a bear with a bare skull scream like a human being is deeply disturbing.

Even more disturbing for me was the section of the film at the Army base. They come across an abandoned Army base and discover that a previous expedition had bivouacked there. A memory card from a camcorder was left to be found and on it is footage of Lena's husband cutting open the gut of a fellow solder to reveal a worm-like parasite writing in his abdominal cavity. They find the setting of this video – in a pool – and see that the poor guy's body had been ripped apart and stuck to a side of the pool via the rainbow moss that is seemingly everywhere in the Shimmer.

In addition to enjoying the feeling of unheimlich, I had fun trying yet again to figure out the film's ending. Who is the Lena that emerged from the Shimmer? During the debriefing scenes, we see that she has a tattoo of what appears to be the symbol for infinity on her left forearm. Later we see that same tattoo in the same spot of the medic's arm. It also appears on the arm of the soldier who ends up plastered on the wall of the pool but not in the video - rather on his remains. I tried on this viewing to pinpoint when it is first seen on Lena's arm chronologically in the world of the story but failed. I'd swear we see it on her at some point as she's making her way to the lighthouse. The film makes no attempt to answer how it got there. Since tattoos aren't encoded in DNA, it seems likely that the tatted Lena is a doppelgänger just like the Kane that emerged from the Shimmer. But the scene in the lighthouse seems to show that the "real" Lena gives the phosphorous grenade to her doppelgänger.

The left forearm is the site of, not only the tattoo, but also a bruise on Lena. Plus it is where we notice plants growing out of the physicist's body. It's the place on the body where markers reside, markers indicating something is wrong. Ultimately, though, it's just a leitmotif with little inherent meaning. I suppose the tattoos themselves are much the same. There's no discernible pattern to their appearance but viewers come to understand that their presence means something is amiss. Its purpose is to induce a certain sense of unease rather than give a definitive explanation of how the Shimmer works.

Lastly, I have been thinking about the theme of self-destruction in Annihilation. The psychologist tells Lena at one point:

Almost none of us commit suicide, and almost all of us self-destruct. In some way, in some part of our lives. We drink, or we smoke, we destabilize the good job... and a happy marriage. But these aren't decisions, they're... they're impulses.

After Lena cops to not understanding, the psychologist answers:

Isn't the self-destruction coded into us? Programmed into each cell?

There are many examples of self-destruction in the film. The physicist cuts herself while the medic is an addict. We learn that the psychologist has cancer – her body is literally killing itself. And Lena has an affair which jeopardizes her marriage. Plus there's that tattoo which is the Ouroboros snake in the shape of the infinity symbol perhaps saying that self-destruction is a never-ending process.

But these are all from our viewpoint. The being behind the Shimmer seems to think otherwise.

During her debriefing, Lena's interlocutor describes the genetic mutations happening within the Shimmer as "nightmarish" but Lena retorts, "Not always. Sometimes it was beautiful." Later she says of it, "It wasn’t destroying. It was changing everything. It was making something new." I am reminded of something F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in "The Crack-Up":

A man does not recover from such jolts—he becomes a different person, and, eventually, the new person finds new things to care about.

The movie seems to argue that, at least sometimes, self-destruction is really out with the old and in with the new.

None of this is to say that I think the film is a visual disquisition on the theme of self-destruction. It's more of a meditation.

So that's why I love Annihilation. It's sublime in a more Burkean sense for me, that is, since so much is unexplained or obscure, it evokes potent and terrific feelings of confusion as well as the uncanny and I use "terrific" here in its old meaning of causing terror. There's trauma here but it transcends the mundane. It makes the horrible beautiful in its own way.