Post by Zarni on Oct 27, 2005 17:35:38 GMT -5
Here's an odd one:
Sunset.
Note mankind’s obsession with his own darker nature. The Beast, we are told, dwells within everyone; it is intrinsic to Man’s make-up. And yet, what defines a person better than the sum of their experiences? Thus, is the whole still greater than the sum of its parts if isolated events in a person’s life are not of themselves unsavoury, but if the interpretation of the many becomes twisted by the few? Just such an individual as this is our subject, her now sour view of existence spawned from the one occurrence in her life which casts its long, black shadow over all others.
She never once talked of it; was she protecting others from the abyss into which she had stared, standing over it as a solemn guard? Or did she simply bridge it, building upon the thus shakily conceived foundations of her life in an attempt to forget that the great chasm which, in truth, undercut all else actually existed? Convincing herself falsely of the stability which would ensue, she had filled it with only the most superficial of her happy memories, unwittingly feeding the daemons who resided in the caves of her mind. Slowly they have been devouring those memories, smothering joyful recollections, replacing them with mounting despair.
A life thus built was surely condemned to suffer the fate of every situation where pressure is allowed of its own accord to build freely beneath the obstacle which prevents its free release. Still she carried on, as a village continues on astride the peak of a mountain long thought extinct but under which the magma wells still, seeping into the subterranean cavern and utilising only small vents as the sole method of warning the world above the surface of its sinister activities beneath.
She had felt the vents from her own personal hell as small, short-lived flares of inexplicable frustration, not intense enough to be worthy of the label anger, but bizarre nonetheless when juxtaposed with the countenance of one so calm in her everyday dealings. Her colleagues knew little of her past; her husband suspected nothing. Her own parents would, given the necessity, have dismissed the notion of anything abnormal about their daughter. And maybe they would have been right in doing so, as normal, being such an abstract concept, is after all a definition so fiendishly difficult to pin down.
But she had never conformed inwardly to any openly accepted definition of normality, had adhered not to society’s rigid code of conduct in her own mind, for it was a mind addled by the concealment of its true nature. The adversary had of late established its embassy, and had thus begun to provide the subliminal counsel which brought finally to the higher functions of conscious the embodiment of that which had been bubbling down below for so long. Slowly the upper echelons of thought gave way, and cracks appeared in her façade of sanity.
The sour perspective before alluded to manifests itself now as a result only of the swelling of the ground, the slight swaying of the bridge which has yet to buckle entirely, but whose time is fast approaching. Anticipating that which is to come the daemons have begun to crawl, slither and climb their insidious ways out of the pit.
The memories return as rising flood water as her long established defences against the tides start to fail, and her demeanour becomes that of a night wanderer; her head wreathed in the futility of the attempt, she tries to clear her mind. Unable to face others to whose experiences she cannot relate, and the sums of which make them such different entities to herself, she drifts, forlorn, through the now abandoned playground of her mind, reliving all events but the one that matters the most. This she confines, as ever she did, to the realm of the night, the wasteland of her dreams.
Now the pit teems. The ground strains to contain the forces which press upon it. Eruption looms.
--------------------------------------------
Meh.
Sunset.
Note mankind’s obsession with his own darker nature. The Beast, we are told, dwells within everyone; it is intrinsic to Man’s make-up. And yet, what defines a person better than the sum of their experiences? Thus, is the whole still greater than the sum of its parts if isolated events in a person’s life are not of themselves unsavoury, but if the interpretation of the many becomes twisted by the few? Just such an individual as this is our subject, her now sour view of existence spawned from the one occurrence in her life which casts its long, black shadow over all others.
She never once talked of it; was she protecting others from the abyss into which she had stared, standing over it as a solemn guard? Or did she simply bridge it, building upon the thus shakily conceived foundations of her life in an attempt to forget that the great chasm which, in truth, undercut all else actually existed? Convincing herself falsely of the stability which would ensue, she had filled it with only the most superficial of her happy memories, unwittingly feeding the daemons who resided in the caves of her mind. Slowly they have been devouring those memories, smothering joyful recollections, replacing them with mounting despair.
A life thus built was surely condemned to suffer the fate of every situation where pressure is allowed of its own accord to build freely beneath the obstacle which prevents its free release. Still she carried on, as a village continues on astride the peak of a mountain long thought extinct but under which the magma wells still, seeping into the subterranean cavern and utilising only small vents as the sole method of warning the world above the surface of its sinister activities beneath.
She had felt the vents from her own personal hell as small, short-lived flares of inexplicable frustration, not intense enough to be worthy of the label anger, but bizarre nonetheless when juxtaposed with the countenance of one so calm in her everyday dealings. Her colleagues knew little of her past; her husband suspected nothing. Her own parents would, given the necessity, have dismissed the notion of anything abnormal about their daughter. And maybe they would have been right in doing so, as normal, being such an abstract concept, is after all a definition so fiendishly difficult to pin down.
But she had never conformed inwardly to any openly accepted definition of normality, had adhered not to society’s rigid code of conduct in her own mind, for it was a mind addled by the concealment of its true nature. The adversary had of late established its embassy, and had thus begun to provide the subliminal counsel which brought finally to the higher functions of conscious the embodiment of that which had been bubbling down below for so long. Slowly the upper echelons of thought gave way, and cracks appeared in her façade of sanity.
The sour perspective before alluded to manifests itself now as a result only of the swelling of the ground, the slight swaying of the bridge which has yet to buckle entirely, but whose time is fast approaching. Anticipating that which is to come the daemons have begun to crawl, slither and climb their insidious ways out of the pit.
The memories return as rising flood water as her long established defences against the tides start to fail, and her demeanour becomes that of a night wanderer; her head wreathed in the futility of the attempt, she tries to clear her mind. Unable to face others to whose experiences she cannot relate, and the sums of which make them such different entities to herself, she drifts, forlorn, through the now abandoned playground of her mind, reliving all events but the one that matters the most. This she confines, as ever she did, to the realm of the night, the wasteland of her dreams.
Now the pit teems. The ground strains to contain the forces which press upon it. Eruption looms.
--------------------------------------------
Meh.