"If you build it, they will come.” -Field of Poppies, 1939
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Transcript:
You’ve traveled such a distance to get here where you are now, the four of you. You began so far away, in the high plains of Texas, just below a river that runs the color of blood, to this strange cathedral in a fantastic place of your own design and fractured and terrifying ego. You have been separated and brought together in various discordant combinations with various outcomes. You have at turns been lost, meandering and hopeless and alone. You have been attacked and humiliated. You have been a rampaging and destructive force all your own. And in small, tranquil hours, you have even managed to find wonder, sometimes where you have least expected it. You’ve found love when you imagined you were minus a heart, or that this universe had no feeling for you.
This quartet I see before me, this ragtag group, can only find success together. Each member fulfills a vital role, a necessary part of a functioning whole. No doubt there are still more pieces of this puzzle to find, just as you have found me and I have found you now, here, in this psychic, this cosmic arena. You have somehow managed, even as fractured shards of the same mirror, occasionally reassembling only to shatter once more, to find direction through a seemingly endless maze without exit. But you have not been without reflection and this has allowed you to see yourselves what they are, no matter how horrible. At long last the minotaur within the maze finally realized it also contained the maze. The exit was simply the entrance, and vice versa, all along.
In fact, it was far less difficult to see demons instead of angels, fangs and claws in place of helping hands or a sensitive, warm heart. You were lost in a haunted forest of tormenting ghosts, stripping down trees, ripping limbs from trunks only to self-flagellate with, eating dirt and howling, injured at an unblinking, undying moon, always forgetting the light of which was at least light. You were compelled to deconstruct, disassemble and eviscerate your selves for what has seemed a terminal condition. The world need only nudge you to the precipice. You were quite willing to fling your selves over, crashing and smashing into dangerous rocks below that seemed to be forever without a floor.
You had formed your own cult of personality and ironically brought this to the material stage, barely conscious that you were exposing your own innermost desires. This is where the fractures began to form and the juggernaut you had created came apart, its shining chrome head tumbling into oblivion, eyes rolled back, teeth chattering and crumbling, chest splitting open, gloved hands crawling away like tarantulas, the light inverted and the shadow possessing the artificial flesh that remains. And that disoriented hybrid, tripping and falling and transforming into a night creature until temporarily contained when cornered in the desert. The cosmic joke laughing now for years has been the penalty for manufacturing a pretend cult is the entrapment and programming by a very real cult dominant in Simulacrum’s dissolving landscape.
How your existence has been a series of cages within cages and oh, how willing you have occupied most of them. There is a safety in confinement, an understanding. There are fewer dangers, challenges, heartbreaks, disappointments and pain. It is a numbed existence within the walls of a prison cell, but you are rarely in doubt of your next meal. There is no place for a wild creature to run. No mysteries for a detective to solve. Nothing funny for the clown to make comedy of. No life for an android to replicate and immerse itself in. Only a series of repeated actions. An empty ritual. Nothing to look forward to and plenty of time to mourn the past and its painful memories and fear a coming darkness and decay.
Perhaps, you so often choose the cage because you enjoy finding your way out of each. Moving from one to another, each one more difficult than the last, it has become a game similar to those of pre- and early Microlacrum, where an increasingly formidable boss character must be toppled to progress. If all of this has been nothing but a game, then save the passkeys for others that follow behind you, this difficult path, a third divergence in Frost’s unedited poem. Not a road traveled less, but a splintering, bloody dirt trail made only by a body having been dragged before you, through a bursting, blasting, bullet shrapnel-shredding warscape, followed without eyes and sometimes without feet, on sliced-up hands and battered knees, vomiting, dry-heaving, defecating, in piss puddles with only the scents of animal instinct to move through this jagged and anxious jungle. Your teeth and nails have sometimes served you well, though often you’ve devoured and devastated in your killing wake. Blood and dirt, pain and hurt, growling and screaming, shrieking and shaking, roaring and seething through a tsunami of your one device.
Cold calculations have come to your aid, along with a never-fading and seeking sense of wonder, and almost extra sensory perception of what is and what has always been, though with every error made. Every possible mistake made. Without the soul of comedy the despair would become a blanket of wet concrete and you would succumb. But you have been able, time enough, to remember that this has all been a dream. This has been theatre, a play, a movie, a drama, a situation comedy. Just listen for the laugh track. If you have heard it. If you hear it now, know that it is me. You have reached the final level of this game. The final plane within infinite other planes. This cosmic cage you’ve trapped yourself in while, all along, holding the key.
You are too exhausted to have any fear remaining. You’ve shot too many takes for this zealous director and are ready for the camera to pull from the frozen labyrinth, all of your difficulties frozen with a contorted face in the foreground. You have gradually realized that you’ve simply been been playing various stereotypical roles in a film noir screwball dramedy of errors, set in a haunted house with a rampaging vampire on the loose. The casting was simple.
You played every part. Most notably, as the Girl Detective who, with her little bat dog is swept up in a Texas Tornado that takes her far into the mysteries of her dreams. It is at first a beautiful kaleidoscopic and enchanted dream that becomes a nightmare as she becomes further lost and disillusioned and her fragile innocence shattered. Luckily, she meets, first a cheerful, dancing, yet bumbling clown. Then a calm, collected and coldly rational, yet obsessive-compulsive android. And finally a wild, emotional, unpredictable, impulsive nocturnal demon. It hides sparkling against the stars and first stalks the other three, swooping as vulture from dark trees to tear the robot limb from limb, shred the stuffing from the polka-dotted clown and drink the blood of the virginal innocent and are saved only by the child’s little black bat dog that hops into its path, growling. The nightmarish creature freezes before it, confused, staring into the puppy’s eyes and seeing in their translucence, itself. For the first time, the creature cries and the small dog licks the tears away. The others, first glance at one another in realization, and then join to embrace their new comrade. Though there will still be many small defeats and separations, this bond is too strong to be broken for long.
So now you are here. You are older, wiser, beaten-up and bruised, but hopeful once more. You’ve already seen through the smoke and mirrors. The artificiality of the entire production is not lost on you. You’ve long seen behind the curtain and know there was nothing there but a feeble figure there pulling levers. But that is how this movie began. That is how this adventure began. That little man was the warden of your first cage, long since escaped and abandoned. Now this curtain is yours to wear as your only costume, the fabric of your dreams and your unique mystery. This empty arena is yours to repopulate once again. Leave the phantoms in the forest. There is life beyond Simulacrum. Become the great Sorcerer now, dreams projected from your face, fully-formed, timeless, serious, smiling, warm and always full of wonder.
This road paved, with stones, bones, blood and tears has ended in a cul de sac. After all of your trials, transgressions, punishments, misadventures, pain and sorrow, there is now a great colorful balloon sea of experience that lifts you. And as you rise you realize that I am you and I you, we are speaking, I am one, a single being containing multitudes. Nothing up my sleeve, but a magician all the same.
Nowhere to go from here, but up. There’s no place like home… except some place you’ve never been before.
ee12 • Operation Fluffy Wizbang