"“I shall be this, eighteen, for a little while, and then seventeen and sixteen a small while, and oh, Timothy, while I am this and then that age, I must find me a quick love, a swift romance, in the town below, and not let them know I come down from this hill or this House, and release myself to joy for a little while before I am fifteen and fourteen and thirteen and then the innocence of twelve before the pulses start and the blood manifests, and then eleven and ignorant but happy, and ten—even happier. And then again, Timothy, if only somewhere along the way backward, you and I could conjoin, clasp hands in friendship, clasp bodies in joy, how fine, yes?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“How old are you, Timothy?”
“Ten, I guess.”
“Ah, yes. So you don’t know what I say.”
She leaned forward suddenly and gave him such a kiss on his mouth that his eardrums fractured and the soft spot on his skull ached.
“Does that give you a small idea of what you’ll miss by not loving me?” she said.
Timothy blushed all over. His soul leaped out from his body and rushed back in in a storm.
Timothy blushed all over. His soul leaped out from his body and rushed back in in a storm.
“Almost,” he whispered."
Ray Bradbury - Make Haste to Live
_____________________________________
"And oh! of all tortures
That torture the worst
Has abated—the terrible
Torture of thirst
For the naphthaline river
Of Passion accurst"
That torture the worst
Has abated—the terrible
Torture of thirst
For the naphthaline river
Of Passion accurst"
Edgar Allan Poe - For Annie
_____________________________________
"Anything at any price
All of this for you
All the spoils of a wasted life
All of this for you"
Nine Inch Nails - The Great Below
____________________________________
Death
Life. Tell me of your life. Is there life in your body? Life is
precious. Life is good. But you are thought, not life, thought
dependent on life. Life is short, but life won’t let you think of
short. Short thoughts. Think short-life and Life in you cuts thought
short. Live life. Create new life. Procreate until you can’t
create. Make others’ lives a living hell to make your life seem
meaningful, to make your procreated life and its short life into an
eternal living with short (if any) thinking. This is your death, the
reproductive instinct. The life of the body is the death of the mind.
- by me, ca. Y2K
_____________________________________
I wonder at what age I will finally gain the ability to weep for my lost youth spent waiting for death, but for now some governor I wired into my emotions long ago holds me unworthy of such reflection. Perhaps it has something to do with a latter-month day back in the mid-'90s, in tenth grade. I was failing. After a childhood spent outscoring everyone around me, I'd begun despairing of ever finding the payoff, and so I was getting worse and worse, less and less motivated to busy myself with the inane busywork imposed on me by the submental wastes of oxygen who ran my life. But that day she had been there, in class, as offbeat creative, as insightful, as lovely or more than she had been the previous year when I'd been such an asshat to her, and still willing to smile at me and I thought... maybe for her. The thought grabbed me. The world seemed lighter. For a step, I breathed easier. To prove worthy of her I could do better.
That might be the fastest I've ever wiped a smile off my face, walking away from the foreign language classes. In an instant, the winter air regained its bite, the sunlight chilled, as I realized how hideously ghoulish this abortion of thought should sound, would sound, were its romantic context objectively pruned away to its deserved irrelevance. That a mind should find itself pre-programmed to subvert and enslave itself, its very worth and self-concept, to another. Willingly, even eagerly!
It's Halloween, a night when death reaches back at us across eternity, when we manifest our own weaknesses and worst natures, our pitfalls and taboos, as hungry masks beyond the hearth. But the most dangerous monsters are those we fail to acknowledge as such, the ravenous shibboleths chained to our home's entrance, to our communal table... and worst of all to our bed.
Her life runs at cross-current to yours. Her eternity is found at the end of your instant stolen and repurposed. The monster in your bed is consuming you, with every kiss, with every sigh, with every manipulative cry, with every thought that's not your own. Soon nothing will be left of you but a series of lines in her check-book. Much as our instincts punish us, night by lonely year, cold sheets scraping skin desperate for a single touch, for refusing the tyranny of our flesh, still no man retains himself in the grasp of those dictating our genetic imperative. Existence is individual. Devotion is negation.
Existence is unlife. To live is extinction.
No comments:
Post a Comment