The world is not beautiful -- therefore it is.

Memento

Vor meinem eigenen Tod ist mir nicht bang,

nur vor dem Tode derer, die mir nah sind.

Wie soll ich leben, wenn sie nicht mehr da sind?

Allein im Nebel tast ich todentlang

und lass mich willig in das Dunkel treiben.

Das Gehen schmerzt nicht halb so wie das Bleiben.

Der weiß es wohl, dem Gleiches widerfuhr -

und die es trugen, mögen mir vergeben.

Bedenkt: Den eignen Tod, den stirbt man nur;

doch mit dem Tod der anderen muss man leben.

(Mascha Kaléko)

A.F., 6. Dec. 1991 - 4. Feb. 2005

Duct Tape Is Silver (Version 2)

As the boy comes he imagines this huge, greasy fireball disturbing the dirty grey February sky, an ephemeral grave marker in roiling red and ashy white.

Earlier that day he had sat in the ESCape Internet Café, plotting his hike, and chatting with his Texan online BDSM Daddy about God, and suicide, forgiveness, and getting a cock cage and losing the key forever. Outside the city had been drowning in that week-long summer rain, flushing tourists and locals from the streets like dog turds.

{I love you, son. Take Care.}

Yeah, right.

Ponyboy he had met one week before, on the fringe of the fringe of the fringe. The boy had only been in the pub because his partner in crime had made a little extra selling smack. The band had used the bar for a stage. When they came on, Ponyboy had already been so smashed that he had to crawl along the blackened wood, between the combat boots of his mates. Once, the boy observed, the guitarist accidentally stomped on Ponyboy’s hand hard enough to break the pinkie. Ponyboy hadn’t even noticed until long after the show.

They both know it is a good-bye fuck. They boy doesn’t say anything. The backpack and the poncho say everything for him. Ponyboy holds him from behind, one arm around the boy’s neck. Without warning he rams a bottle of vodka into the boy’s mouth, bruising and bloodying the lips, clinking the glass neck painfully against the teeth.

“Suck it like piss from my cock.”

The boy gulps frantically, but still a lot runs over his face and chest. Ponyboy makes fucking motions with the bottle.

“What if I don’t let you go?”

Ponyboy lowers the bottle. The downpour eases up. The boy is coughing. Vodka is burning in his throat. He tries to mumble around the bottleneck. “Who asked you to?” It comes out “Oo’ashk’doo’oo?”

“So you will stay with me?”

Ponyboy has resumed skullfucking and drowning him. This time he doesn’t let up for the answer. Choking and spluttering the boy shakes his head. The motion makes him dizzy.

Later, when they lie on the dirty grey crumpled sheets of the bed, Ponyboy forces a kiss on the boy. With one hand he keeps the boy’s nose pinched shut, hard enough to impress a deep purple crescent-shaped mark in the ala of the nose. His mouth seals that of the boy. They share a lot of tongue, the chemical aftertaste of the cheap vodka, the bitterness of Ponyboy’s shot, and the air from Ponyboy’s lungs. The boy is not allowed to draw any outside breath. It takes a bit of practice to synchronize their lungs, but after a while it becomes almost natural.

“I want to beat you.” Ponyboy keeps one hand clamped across the boy’s mouth and nose. “I want to beat your cock and balls.”

He has to stretch to reach his torn jeans on the offal strewn floor, to dig out the pack of fags and the lighter. The splint that keeps his taped pinkie and ring finger stiff and straight hinders him. As the air runs out the boy begins to quirm. Ponyboy puts one fag into his mouth and lights it, one handed.

“I’m not asking you, okay? Just saying.”

Ponyboy looks into the boy’s face, checks his eyes. Is it for panic or for permission? The boy is bucking now, jerking on the rope keeping his wrists behind his back, and trying to twist his face out from under the hand. Ponyboy lifts it for a moment and blows smoke into the boy’s gasping mouth before clamping it shut again.

The funeral was about the most depressing thing you could imagine. The blue-grey morning never had a chance of becoming a bright day. He had made his mum buy him a black suit and a white shirt. He had bought the tie from his own money, a cheap, plastic looking strip of black nylon, that flapped ridiculously in the cold wind. His mum only realized that he had put on the fire engine red chucks when they stepped out of the taxi in front of the cemetery gate.

“They were her favourites.” He couldn’t understand how this wouldn’t explain his decision. His mum couldn’t understand how he could think it would. But short of making him go on socks there wasn’t anything she could do. He relished every ridge of frozen ground, every pebble, and most of all the cruel frost biting him through the thin rubber soles. After all, it was the same cold ground that would eat her up now.

The rod is thin and whistles impressively in the air. Physically the pain is worse than anything the boy has experienced in his life until then. Ponyboy has rammed three socks so deep into his throat that he has to concentrate all through the beating to keep from throwing up. Because of the sweat, the vodka, the snot, and the saliva the duct tape doesn’t stick very well. A corner comes lose and flaps under his nose in rhythm with his ragged, mucus-clogged breath.

The ropes and knots hold, but at the height of his thrashing, he breaks the frame of the bookshelves Ponyboy has tied him too. As he collapses, Ponyboy stands above him, out of breath, rod in hand, and looks down onto him and all the books and the stacks and stacks of classical sheet paper that have avalanched to the floor. It is Ponyboy who looks beaten.

The boy finally loses his battle with the vodka and the gag reflex and pukes through his nose and in funny little seeping squirts past the loosening duct tape and socks. The pain in his sinuses makes him sob.

That night when he first had seen the fucked up Ponyboy crawl around on the bar, screaming slurred lyrics into a crowd that smelled of wet dog, that night, too, had ended in vomit. Ponyboy had suddenly puked all over the bar, the draft levers, and the patrons in the front row. The pub’s owner had dragged him away by the ankle and tossed him out into the rainy night like an unwieldy and smelly bin bag. The boy, tuned on beyond belief, had followed and had helped Ponyboy to his feet and brought him to his flat, while the rest of the band partied on.

When his online BDSM Daddy had attempted suicide, ten years ago, after his wife had discovered his queer, sadistic, pedophile fantasies and had left him, he had been visited by an angel.

{I took a whole bottle of sleeping pills. I actually felt my breathing come to a crawl… and then an angel appeared to me and held my hand… and I called my friend John. I still don’t know how I did it to this day. }

{Wow} was all the boy could think of typing. He didn’t believe a word.

{John came and took me to the ER.}

{A real angel?}

{Yeah.}

{What did it look like?}

{It was just a glowing figure of light. I could actually make his face out. It was shaped like a human that just glowed. It was a bright light.}

When the boy had tried to kill himself, there had been no light. Just cold and darkness.

{God must really love you. }

{Yeah, he does.}

The boy thought: I hope he is lying.

Ponyboy doesn’t remove the vomit soaked gag. He kneels down next to the boy, amidst the books and crumpled, soiled sheet music. He puts his index finger first against one, then against the other nostril of the boy, allowing him to blow the vomit from his nose. They use all natural lubricant only.

The corner of a hardcover biography of Allen Ginsberg is poking painfully into the boy’s abdomen. His limp, flogged cock burns terribly. His nasal grunts are high and short, like the squeals of a terrified but badly winded pig. Ponyboy has to laugh. The boy feels very tired. Everything begins to blur.

“Nobody knows you are here, right?”

The boy grunts and tries to nod in affirmation.

“Nobody’d know if you died here? I’d be scott free?”

The boy’s heart picks up some speed. His cock begins to stiffen again.

And then Ponyboy stops. He lifts his body up slightly, remaining on elbows and knees, his cock in the boy’s pussy. Ponyboy gently reaches onto the bed next to him and takes up the roll of duct tape. He begins wrapping it around the boys head, tight, like a mask, beginning with the chin and working himself up. Before he closes off the nose, he says:

“I’ll take if off, when I’ve come. Not before.”

The boy expect him to continue rutting, but Ponyboy remains still. The boy understands. He has to do the work. The panic is delicious. It is the first real emotion that truly fills him since being caught in Leeds. These days it seems that fear is the only thing that can still do that. Tied up as he is, the shifting drifts of books and sheet paper underneath, it is hard to get a good rocking motion. Ponyboy remains still. Only his breathing quickens a little.

“It should be you.” That was the last thing he had shouted at his father, pointing at the open grave. “It should have been you in there, not her.” They were separated afterwards, and the boy was made to sit in a small, dark room in the chapel, while they tried to recapture the illusion of dignity outside.

For a while he earnestly tries to milk Ponyboy, but the booze, and the lack of oxygen, and his burning cock, and that damned Ginsberg biography keep distracting him. He enjoys the panic for all it is worth, doubting that Ponyboy’s smack can be anywhere as good as his adrenalin, but eventually that, too, runs out.

When he had run away, he had had to promise his online Daddy that he wouldn’t do {anything stupid}. The banality of the euphemism had annoyed him.

He remembers listening to Childhood’s End together with Jonas, and the first time Hendrik had kissed him, with bloody lips. He remembers how beautiful Ponyboy had looked, on all fours, on that bar, when the vomit had hung from his chin in glistening, oatmeal-coloured strings. He thinks of the Highlands he wants to see, and of the never-ending rain. It hadn’t rained during the funeral, but later, when he had been told of the car accident, it had rained then.

It is a conscious decision when he stops bucking and jerking and frantically whipping his face across the detritus underneath to dislodge the tape. Against his instinct, his body’s screams for oxygen, he makes himself lie still. He only turns his head as far as he can, so that the duct tape pulls on the skin of his face like on an ill-fitting ski mask. Through somewhat slitted eyes he looks up at Ponyboy’s questioning expression.

Let it happen, he tries to say with his eyes.

His vision is fading, the world is being sucked away into a narrowing grey tube, but he thinks he can still see the sudden understanding flood Ponyboy’s own eyes, followed by a tidal wave of lust. Through the ringing in his ears he hears Ponyboy groan. Without moving at all, except for a slight shiver running through him, Ponyboy comes.

At once Ponyboy rips away the duct tape and pulls out the soaked socks. More vomit runs out. Ponyboy kisses him, blowing breath into his starved lungs. For a while they kiss and share the air again. Then Ponyboy drags the tied-up boy up onto the bed to spoon, and reaches around, and jerks him off. The boy’s malnourished tummy, his thighs and above all his cock are bruised and ribbed with seeping welts.

They won’t speak another word. Ponyboy will release him from his bonds, and they will both fall asleep. In the morning the boy will sneak out and head for the Highlands.

But now, as he comes, twisting like from a cramp, his semen shot with blood, he imagines the explosion, the fire and smoke made up in part of burning, shredded bits of his father. The thick rigid pillar of the bridge (reaching across a highway glassy with black ice from the sudden rain), the roiling cloud rising above it, red with flame, and white with smoke and ash, smearing the dirty, grey sheet of the empty February sky.

Duct Tape Is Silver

[Here's a rewrite. If you are going to read this story, I'd rather you tried the new version.]

As the boy comes he imagines this huge, greasy fireball disturbing the sleet grey February sky, an ephemeral grave marker in dirty red and orange, expanding and roiling back on itself.

Earlier that day he had sat in the ESCape Internet Café and chatted with his black Texan SM-Daddy about God, and suicide, forgiveness, and getting a cock cage and losing the key forever. Outside the city had been drowning in a week-long summer rain, flushing tourists and locals from the street like dog turds. His internet friends were the only thing he had taken with him when he ran way. The chat left him lonely and excited.

{I love you, son. Take Care.}

Yeah, right.

He had met Ponyboy one week before that, on the fringe of the fringe of the fringe. Ponyboy’s performance punk band had played a pub that hardly deserved the term venue. They used the bar for a stage. The boy had only been there because his partner in crime had made a little extra selling smack. When the band came on, Ponyboy, the singer, had already been so smashed he had to crawl along the blackened wood, between the combat booted feet of his friends. Once the boy observed the guitarist accidentally stomped on Ponyboy’s hand hard enough to break a pinkie. Ponyboy hadn’t even noticed until long after the show.

They both know it is a good-bye fuck. The boy doesn’t say anything, but the backpack, the poncho and the new hiking shoes explain his intentions eloquently enough. Ponyboy holds him from behind, one arm around the boy’s neck. With surprising and sudden force he jams a bottle of vodka into the boy’s mouth, bruising lips and clinking painfully against the teeth.

“Suck it. Suck it like it’s piss from my cock.”

A lot runs over the boy’s face and chest, but most goes down. Ponyboy makes fucking motions with the bottle.

“What if I don’t let you go?”

Ponyboy untilts the bottle until the downpour stops. The boy is coughing. Vodka is burning in his throat. He tries to mumble around the bottleneck “Who asked you to?” It comes out “Oo ashked oo’oo?”

“So you will stay with me?”

Ponyboy has resumed skullfucking, drowning, pickling the boy with vodka. This time he doesn’t stop for the answer. Choking and spluttering the boy shakes his head. The motion makes him dizzy.

Later, after the rimming and foot-sex, when they lie on the dirty grey, crumpled sheets of the bed, Ponyboy forces a kiss on the boy. With one hand he keeps the boy’s nose pinched shut, hard enough to impress a deep purple crescent-shaped mark in the ala of the nose, while his mouth is sealed to that of the boy. They share a lot of tongue, the chemical aftertaste of the cheap vodka, the bitter taste of Ponyboys shit, and the air from Ponyboy’s lungs. The boy is not allowed to draw any outside breath. It takes a bit of practice to synchronize their lungs, but after a while it becomes almost natural.

“I want to beat you.” Ponyboy keeps one hand clamped across the boy’s mouth and nose. “I want to beat your cock and balls.”

He has to stretch to reach his torn jeans on the offal strewn floor, to dig out the pack of fags and the lighter. He is additionally hampered by the splint keeping is pinkie and ring finger straight and taped together. The boy begins to squirm when Ponyboy puts one fag into his mouth and lights it with one hand.

“I’m not asking you, okay? Just saying.”

Ponyboy looks into the boy’s face, checks his eyes. Is it for panic or for permission? The boy doesn’t know and his depleted lungs distract him from the question. Briefly Ponyboy lifts his hand and blows smoke into the boy’s mouth before clamping it shut again.

The funeral was about the most depressing thing you could imagine. The blue-grey morning never had a chance of becoming a bright day. 10 o’clock merged into 5 in the afternoon. He had made his mum buy him a black suit and a white shirt. He had bought the tie from his own money, a cheap, plastic looking strip of black nylon that flapped ridiculously in the cold wind. This would be the only time he would ever wear either. His mum only realized that he had put on the pink chucks when they stepped out of the taxi in front of the cemetery gate.

“They were her favourites.” He couldn’t understand how this wouldn’t explain his decision. His mum couldn’t understand how he could think it would. But short of making him go on socks there wasn’t anything she could do. He relished every ridge of frozen ground, every pebble, and most of all the cruel frost biting him through the thin rubber soles. After all, it was the same cold ground that would eat her up now.

Ponyboy has rammed three socks so deep into the boy’s throat and all through the beating he has to concentrate to keep from throwing up. Because of the sweat, the vodka, the snot, and the saliva on his face the duct tape doesn’t stick very well. A corner comes lose and flaps under his nose in rhythm with his ragged, mucus-clogged breath. The rod is thin and whistles impressively in the air. Physically, the pain is worse than anything he has experienced until then in his life. The ropes and knots hold, but at the height of his thrashing, he breaks the post of the free-standing bookshelves Ponyboy has tied him to. Ponyboy is standing there, out of breath, shivering with early withdrawal, rod in hand and looking down onto the boy and the books and the stacks and stacks of classical sheet music. His rents had once made him learn the piano. It is Ponyboy who looks beaten. The boy finally loses his battle with the vodka and the gag reflex and pukes through his nose and in funny little seeping quirts past the loosening duct tape and socks.

That night when he had first seen the fucked up Ponyboy crawl around on the bar, screaming slurred lyrics into a crowded pub that smelled of wet dog, that night, too, had ended in vomit. It had been Ponyboy who had finally puked all over the bar, the draft levers, and the patrons in the front row. The pub’s owner had dragged him out by the ankle and tossed him out into the rainy night like an unwieldy bin bag. The boy had – turned on beyond belief – followed and had helped Ponyboy to his feet and brought him to his flat, while the rest of the band had partied on.

When his online SM-Daddy had attempted suicide, ten years ago, after his wife had discovered his queer, pedophile, sadistic fantasies and had left him, he had been visited by an angel.

{I took a whole bottle of sleeping pills. I actually felt my breathing come to a crawl… and then an angel appeared to me and held my hand… and I called my friend John. I still don’t know how I did it to this day. }

{Wow} was all the boy could think of typing. He didn’t believe a word.

{John came and took me to the ER.}

{A real angel?}

{Yeah.}

{What did it look like?}

{It was just a glowing figure of light. I could actually make his face out. It was shaped like a human that just glowed. It was a bright light.}

When the boy had tried to kill himself, there had been no light. Just cold and darkness.

{God must really love you. }

{Yeah, he does.}

The boy thought: I hope he is lying.

Ponyboy doesn’t remove the vomit soaked gag. He kneels down next to the boy, amidst the books and crumpled, soiled sheet music, and puts his index finger first against one, then against the other nostril, allowing the boy to blow the vomit from his nose. They are out of lubricant and Ponyboy doesn’t want to go to the shared kitchen to get cooking oil. Fresh shit works good enough.

The corner of a hardcover biography of Allen Ginsberg is poking painfully into the boy’s abdomen as Ponyboy fucks him. His nasal grunts are strangely squeaky and abrupt, like the squeaks of a pig. Ponyboy has to laugh. The boy feels very tired. Everything begins to blur.

“And nobody knows you are here, right?”

The boy grunts and tries to nod in affirmation. His limp cock burns.

“Nobody can link you back to me, right? If you died here, I’d be scott free?”

The boy grunts. His heart picks up some speed. His cock begins to stiffen again.

Ponyboy stops. He lifts his body up slightly, remaining on elbows and knees, his cock firmly rammed deep into the boy’s pussy. Ponyboy gently reaches back onto the bed behind him, takes the roll of duct tape. He begins wrapping it around the boys head, beginning with the chin and working himself up to just under the eyes. Before he closes off the nose, he sais:

“Get me off. I’ll take it off when I’ve come. Not before.”

The panic is delicious. It is the first emotion that truly fills all of him since Leeds. These days fear is the only thing that can do that. Tied up as he is, the shifting drifts of books and sheet paper underneath, it is hard work to get a good rocking motion. Ponyboy remains still. Only his breathing quickens a little bit.

“It should be you.” That was last thing he had shouted at his father, pointing at the open grave. “It should be you in there, not her.” They were separated afterwards, and the boy was made to sit in a small, dark room in the chapel, while they tried to regain some illusion of dignity outside.

For a while he tries to milk Ponyboy in earnest, but the booze, and the lack of oxygen, and his aching cock, and that damned Ginsberg biography keep distracting him. As the oxygen levels sink, his panic rises. He doubts that Ponyboy’s smack can be as good as his adrenalin. He impales himself on Ponyboy’s cock, but it’s just too hard, too tiresome.

When he had run away, he had promised his online Daddy that he wouldn’t do anything {stupid}. He had known what was meant by that, but the banality of the euphemism had annoyed him. Casual obscenity, now that was a phrase worthy of the deed.

He thinks of listening to Childhood’s End together with Jonas, and of the first time Henrik had kissed him. Of how beautiful Ponyboy had looked, on all fours on that bar, when the vomit had run from his mouth and hung in glistening, oatmeal-coloured strings from his chin. He thinks of the Highlands he wants to see when he leaves Edinburgh, and of the never-ending rain. It hadn’t rained during the funeral, but later, on the way home, when he had been told of the car accident, it had rained then.

Time is running out. It is a conscious decision when he stops bucking and jerking, tearing on the rope the binds his wrists, wipping his face across the detritus underneath in a frenzied, panicky attempt to dislodge the tape. Against his instincts and his body screaming for oxygen, he makes himself lie still. He only turns his head as far as he can, so that the duct tape pulls on the skin of his face like on an ill adjusted ski mask. Through somewhat slitted eyes he looks up at Ponyboy’s questioning expression.

Let it happen, he tries to say with his eyes.

His vision is blurring and already fading to grey, but he thinks he can still see the sudden understanding flood Ponyboy’s own eyes, followed by a tidal wave of lust. Through the ringing in his ears he hears Ponyboy groan. Without moving at all – except for a slight shiver running through him – Ponyboy comes. As always the sudden, liquid hotness begins to cool immediately.

At once Ponyboy rips away the duct tape and pulls out the soaked socks and kisses him, blowing breath into his starved lungs. For a while they kiss and share the air again, then Ponyboy drags the tied-up boy up onto the bed to spoon, reach around, and jerk him off. The boy’s malnourished tummy, his upper thighs and above all his pick are bruised and ribbed with seeping welts.

They will not speak another word. After the boy comes they will both fall asleep, and in the morning the boy will sneak out and head for the Highlands.

But now, as he comes, agony and ecstasy at once, his semen shot with blood, he imagines the explosion, the fire and smoke that in part consists of burning, shredded bits of his father. The highway pillar that the car has crashed against is a monolithic cock, the roiling black and orange cloud the bloody cum, and the spitting grey February sky is the dirty shroud of a bed-sheet.

Maybe he had been visited by an angel after all.

Seven Quotes on Belief, Truth, Knowledge, and Imagination

From: Cosmic Religion : With Other Opinions and Aphorisms

I believe in intuition and inspiration. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.

(Albert Einstein)


From: Tremendous Trifles

What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

Often paraphrased as:  "Fairy tales are more than true -- not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten."

(C.K. Chesterton)


From: American Gods

I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it. 

(Neil Gaiman)


From: One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock

His head swam with religions: the weekend was now given to the intricate patterns and language of Judaism; each week-day morning to the wood-scented, stained-glass solemnities of the Church of England; and the nights belonged to his own religion, the one he made up for himself, a strange, multicoloured pantheon in which the Lords of Chaos (Arioch, Xiombarg and the rest) rubbed shoulders with the Phantom Stranger from the DC Comics and Sam the trickster-Buddha from Zelazny’s Lord of Light, and vampires and talking cats and ogres, and all the things from the Lang coloured Fairy books: in which all mythologies existed simultaneously, in a magnificent anarchy of belief.

Richard had, however, finally given up (with, it must be admitted, a little regret), his belief in Narnia. From the age of six — for half his life — he had believed devoutly in all things Narnian; until, last year, rereading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader for perhaps the hundredth time, it had occurred to him that the transformation of the unpleasant Eustace Scrub into a dragon, and his subsequent conversion to belief in Aslan the lion, was terribly similar to the conversion of St. Paul, on the road to Damascus; if his blindness were a dragon…

This having occurred to him, Richard found correspondences everywhere, too many to be simple coincidence.

Richard put away the Narnia books, convinced, sadly, that they were allegory; that an author (whom he had trusted) had been attempting to slip something past him. He had had the same disgust with the Professor Challenger stories, when the bull-necked old professor became a convert to Spiritualism; it was not that Richard had any problems with believing in ghosts — Richard believed, with no problems or contradictions, in everything — but Conan Doyle was preaching, and it showed through the words. Richard was young, and innocent in his fashion, and believed that authors should be trusted, and that there should be nothing hidden beneath the surface of a story.

(Neil Gaiman)


From House, MD - You Don't Want To Know (Ep. 4.08)

If the wonder's gone when the truth is known, there never was any wonder.

***

HOUSE: Looks like an envelope with the results of the genetic test for Huntington's inside.
THIRTEEN: Did you look?
HOUSE: I thought it'd be fun to find out together.
THIRTEEN: I don't want to know.
HOUSE: No, you're afraid to know.
THIRTEEN: I might die. So could you, you could get hit by a bus tomorrow. The only difference is you don't have to know about it today, so why should I?
HOUSE: I don't have to know the lottery numbers, but if someone offered them to me, I'd take them.
THIRTEEN: You spend your whole life looking for answers. Because you think the next answer will change something, maybe make you a little less miserable. And you know that when you run out of questions, you don't just run out of answers, you run out of hope. You glad you know that?
Thirteen leaves. House thinks for a few seconds then drops the envelope in the bin unopened.

(Writer: Sara Hess)


From an online debate:

Knowledge is the building blocks for imagination.

(Anonymous Poster)

Words more painful than a whip

[This is a re-post from something I put on my old multiply page in November '08, brought to mind again by some posts on Mr McLachlan's brilliant Riven Skies blog.]

"Please hear what I do not say! Do not let me fool you. Do not let the face that I wear deceive you, because I wear masks, masks I fear to take off. And none of them is me. Pretending 'as if' is an art that has become second nature to me. But do not let that deceive you, I only pretend to be accessible, to be cheerful, 'as if' I did not need anyone. But do not believe me!

On the outside I may appear confident, but that is my mask. Beneath I am as I really am: Bewildered, afraid, and alone. But I hide that. I do not want anybody to see that. The mere thought of my weakness makes me panic, and I get afraid to even meet people at all. That is why I desperately invent masks I can hide behind: a carefree facade that helps to disguise me from the knowing gaze that would expose me. And yet that gaze would save me. And I know that. If it was from someone who would accept and love me.

That is the only thing that could give me the security I cannot give myself: That I really am worth something. But I do not say that. I do not dare. I am afraid of it. I am afraid that your gaze will not be accompanied by acceptance and love. I am afraid you will think ill of me and laugh about me. And your laughter would kill me. I am afraid that deep down I am nothing, not worth anything, and that you would reject me.

So I play my game, my desperate game: a confident facade on the outside and a shivering child on the inside. I talk in an easy manner, superficial blather. I tell you everything that is nothing, and nothing of that, which is real, which is screaming inside of me; because of that do not be deceived by all that I talk about out of habit. Please listen closely and try to hear what I do not say, what I want to say, but cannot.

I despise this game of hide and seek. It is a superficial, false game. I want to be real and spontaneous, just myself, but you have to help me. You have to reach out your hand, especially if it is the last thing I seem to want. Only you can call me back to life.

Every time you are friendly and good to me and encourage me, every time you make me believe that you truly are concerned about me, my heart grows wings, very small wings, fragile wings, but wings! Your intuition and the power of your understanding give me life. I want you to know that. I want you to know how important you are to me, how much you can make me the person I really am, if only you want. Please, I wish you would want to.

You alone can tear down the wall behind which I shiver. You alone can take off my mask. You alone can free me of this world of shadows, of fear and insecurity, of my loneliness. Do not overlook me. Please, do not pass me over. It will not be easy for you. The ancient conviction of being worthless creates thick walls. The closer you come the blinder I strike back. I resist that which I scream for.

But I have been told that love is stronger than any wall, and I place my hope in that."

(Tobias Brocher, About the Difficulty to Love - Benchmarks for Humanity, 1975; translation by me)

Excerpt from "The Princess Bride" by William Goldman

[I've reblogged this verbatim from www.minderella.com since that blog no longer exists. -FF]
 
The following is an excerpt from S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure, The "Good Parts" Version Abridged by William Goldman. This is included in my web page for the truth it holds, so William Goldman, if you're reading this (or anyone, for that matter, from his publishing company) please don't sue me for copywright infringement. And for everyone else, if you have not seen "The Princess Bride," rent it this week, and if you have not read the story, read it because William Goldman just did a magnificent job with this book. And for all the fantasy-filled life this story evokes, at the heart of it, the story is quite realistic, and Morgenstern (and Goldman) never loses sight of that fact. Now read:

It's one of my biggest memories of my father reading. I had pneumonia, remember, but I was a little better now, and madly caught up in the book, and one thing you know when you're ten is that, no matter what, there's gonna be a happy ending. They can sweat all they want to scare you, the authors, but back of it all you know, you just have no doubt, that in the long run justice is going to win out. And Westley and Buttercup - well, they had their troubles, sure, but they were going to get married and live happily ever after, I would have bet the family fortune if I'd found a sucker big enough to take me on.

Well, when my father got through with that sentence where the wedding was sandwiched between the ministers' meeting and the treasury whatever, I said, "You read that wrong."

My father's this little old barber - remember that too? And kind of illiterate. Well, you just don't challenge a guy who has trouble reading and say he's read something incorrectly, because that's really threatening. "I'm doing the reading," he said.

"I know that, but you got it wrong. She doesn't marry that rotten Humperdinck. She marries Westley."

"It says right here," my father began, a little huffy, and he starts going over it again.

"You must have skipped a page then. Something. Get it right, huh?"

By now he was more than a tiny bit upset. "I skipped nothing. I read the words. The words are there, I read them, good night," and off he went.

"Hey please, no," I called after him, but he's stubborn, and, next thing, my mother was in saying, "Your father says his throat is too sore; I told him not to read so much," and she tucked and fluffed me and no matter how I battled, it was over. No more story till the next day.

I spent that whole night thinking Buttercup married Humperdink. It just rocked me. How can I explain it, but the world didn't work that way. Good got attracted to good, evil you flushed down the john and that was that. But their marriage - I couldn't make it jibe. God, did I work at it. First I thought that probably Buttercup had this fantastic effect on Humperdinck and turned him into a kind of Westley, or maybe Westley and Humperdinck turned out to be long-lost brothers and Humperdinck was so happy to get his brother back he said, "Look, Westley, I didn't realize who you were when I married her so what I'll do is I'll divorce her and you marry her and that way we'll all be happy." To this day I don't think I was ever more creative.

But it didn't take. Something was wrong and I couldn't lose it. Suddenly there was this discontent gnawing away until it had a place big enough to settle in and then it curled up and stayed there and it's still inside me lurking as I write this now.

The next night, when my father went back to reading and the marriage turned out to have been Buttercup's dream, I screamed, "I knew it, all along I knew it," and my father said, "So you're happy now, it's all right now, we can please continue?" and I said, "Go," and he did.

But I wasn't happy. Oh my ears were happy, I guess, my story sense was happy, my heart too, but in my, I suppose you have to call it "soul," there was that damn discontent, shaking its dark head. All this was never explained to me till I was in my teens and there was this great woman who lived in my home town, Edith Neisser, dead now, and she wrote terrific books about how we screw up our children - "Brothers and Sisters" was one of her books, "The Eldest Child" was another. Published by Harper. Edith doesn't need the plug, seeing, like I said, as she's no longer with us, but if there are any amongst you who are worried that maybe you're not being perfect parents, pick up one of Edith's books while there's still time. I knew her 'cause her kid Ed got his haircuts from my pop, and she was this writer and by my teens I knew, secretly, that was the life for me too, except I couldn't tell anybody. It was too embarrassing - barber's sons, if they hustled, maybe got to be IBM salesmen, but writers? No way. Don't ask me how, but eventually Edith discovered my shhhhhh ambition and from then on, sometimes, we would talk. And I remember once we were having iced tea on the Neisser porch and talking and just outside the porch was their badminton court and I was watching some kids play badminton and Ed had just shellacked me, and as I left the court for the porch, he said, "Don't worry, it'll all work out, you'll get me next time" and I nodded, and then Ed said, "And if you don't, you'll beat me at something else."

I went to the porch and sipped iced tea and Edith was reading this book and she didn't put it down when she said, "That's not necessarily true, you know."

I said, "How do you mean?"

And that's when she put her book down. And looked at me. And said it: "Life isn't fair, Bill. We tell our children that it is, but it's a terrible thing to do. It's not only a lie, it's a cruel lie. Life is not fair, and it never has been, and it's never going to be." Would you believe that for me right then it was like one of those comic books where the light bulb goes on over Mandrake the Magician's head?

"It isn't!" I said, so loud I really startled her. "You're right! It's not fair." I was so happy if I'd known how to dance, I'd have started dancing. "Isn't that great, isn't it terrific?" I think along here Edith must have thought I was well on my way to being bonkers.

But it meant so much to me to have it said and out and free and flying - that was the discontent I had endured the night my father stopped reading, I realized right then. That was the reconciliation I was trying to make and couldn't.

And that's what I think this book's about. All those Columbia experts can spiel all they want about the delicious satire; they're crazy. This book says, "life's not fair" and I'm telling you, one and all, you better believe it. I got a fat spoiled son - he's not gonna nag Miss Rheingold. And he's always gonna be fat, even if he gets skinny he'll still be fat and he'll still be spoiled and life will never be enough to make him happy, and that's my fault maybe - make it all my fault, if you want - the point is, we're not created equal, for the rich they sing, life isn't fair. I got a cold wife; she's brilliant, she's stimulating, she's terrific; there's no love; that's okay too, just so long as we don't keep expecting everything to somehow even out for us before we die.

Look. (Grownups skip this paragraph.) I'm not about to tell you this book has a tragic ending. I already said in the very first line how it was my favorite in all the world. But there's a lot of bad stuff coming up, torture you've already been prepared for, but there's worse. There's death coming up, and you better understand this: Some of the wrong people die. Be ready for it. This isn't Curious George Uses the Potty. Nobody warned me and it was my own fault (you'll see what I mean in a little) and that was my mistake, so I'm not letting it happen to you. The wrong people die, some of them, and the reason is this; life is not fair. Forget all the garbage your parents put out. Remember Morgenstern. You'll be a lot happier.