102418 at the bookbinder’s, the boss, prenially grumpy, came back from breakfast unaccountably cheerful (aka chill), and gave his top tradesman a pair of dice (metal; bronze? brass?) that wen laid down with a certain combination of numbers (pips) facing upward, would play a corresponding note. The bookbinder began to experiment, but the madn said no no! you must do it in THIS order! (why? because... why?) and thus was (this world’s analog to The Magic Flute) was born. i had a whiff of an old, bad feeling last night. not sure where it came from. it was i guess what i would have to describe as “depressed.” It was a little like a rotting leaf with a sawtooth edge. it is the gnawing at the back of the soul, that makes the soul seem arbitrary, or never to have existed in the first place. it’s the feeling of being alone. not merely in quietude, but genuinely alone. it’s the feeling of futility. of ineffectiveness. of squealing out into a great dark night and never making a sound. a low, sunken, ragged line of gray, marching listlessly across a parched battlefield where there can be no glory i don’t know. i don’t know where it came from or how long it’s been since i felt it, but it has a dreamlike deja vu to it when it comes around. it just blows in like a bad calm boring noxious storm cloud, lazily, on some idle wind, and then it just sits around your heart and squeezes with its bland ugliness. was it because i got discouraged about work? about this job on which i’ve laid so much grand hope of some kind of redemption, some kind of shot at being one of “them”--the people with a normal life, the people whose outline makes an indentation in the fabric of acknowledged society? was it because i’ve had two emails from the principal asking me why such and such wasn’t done properly? because AVID class went poorly and one of my best (not best in the sense of already has everything together and doesn’t need me, but best in the sense of tries and takes risks and seems to experience some kind of revelatory delight in doing so) students typed in the chat, “May I leave?” Because I’m behind on grading, again? Because I have so much to do and I feel like a fraud? Because I have the old old old feeling of wanting to petulantly give up, and then find reasons why it’s everyone else’s fault? Well this is all stupid anyway, I should go back to being a nobody because then I can be superior and the one whom the world’s crassness wronged; the delicate artist who can’t exist in your sports-guzzling crockpot-meatball-eating small-talking world. Remember--wait, remember what it was we said: “Self-loathing presages the urge to give up,” and if you follow that vortex down, that downward spiral shittily down just a surprisingly short distance down from where you were happy just a minute ago, you see the affectless face of this hollowed-out sick mask, this empty ache, this ulcerous nothingness, that reminds you “the urge to give up presages giving up” and sinking back into the wakeless night of the harpy. the crepuscular dimness where your ears and eyes and beating heart are shrouded in a fog made of distance and vague malaise. sink back into the bosom of the all-encompassing harpy; how she takes you in, oh, she’s there for you, reliably situated at the bottom of this well of sadness that can’t ever melt on into grief; she grabs your cock and her hot breath is in your ear; sink into the anonymous flesh of her eternal embrace, where your muscles don’t work, there is no gravity, there is no up or down, her sexless smile welcomes you, come home, she says, come home to your illness and your perpetual lack of motion; you belong here, your kind, your kind is my kind, we are the leftover, the lost, the bitter, the forgotten. we will have our revenge upon the thriving, successful world; we will have our revenge by disappearing into the most magnificent obscurity, into the sadness that cannot be sadness, into the unacknowledged, the unfelt, the unseen, the torpor of the inability even to hate our oppressor; our oppressor is our self; for there is finally only our self in this wretched bed, this den of having woken from a dream into a dull remembrance that once there was some kind of dream, some kind of sweet bell of childishness and summer, some brief flash of memory of a time when time passed, when kitchen lights glowed, when we ran barefoot and got in trouble and laughed and ate and drank but now, now there is this eternal field, stretching out before us, neither cold nor wet but blank, empty, meaningless, lost, alone.... unless you do something about it. unless something happens. can the harpy be redeemed? there, your humanity is both your redemption and your gravest liability. You don’t want to leave her here. The pathos is unbearable. Can she be rehabilitated? Brought up out of this world, given a chance, given life, *healed?* And are you the one, the young, the magic, the golden one, whose childlike faith can do it? So of course you try, and then of course the harpy is bigger than your wide-eyed efforts. She recoils in violent disgust and rage. She detects that you have seen the other world! You have caught that glimpse; delighted, thrilled, you run to her in the morning and say mama look! I’ve seen this place! I’ve just felt it, “like the fluttering of a moth’s wing” and I can’t tell you why but I know it’s real! I know it’s out there; up there; come; let’s go; come with me; I know you’re great and fat and heavy with the gravity of this place, but you can do it! We can do it! Come! Let’s go! Come with me! Take me with you! Come! and tugging on her arm, practically hopping up and down, your eyes are bright, but you fool. You cannot kill the dead. She is this world. Your presence here sustains her. Before your excited words have even formed, she knows. She knows you’re leaving and the fury of hell is stirred, out of its frozen equilibrium. Her face is twisted. Where before there was only that blank smile, that perfect unruffleable acceptance, that sickly sweet embrace, now there is the lightning pinch of pure hatred. She will not survive out there. And if you leave, out there becomes in here. Fool! Don’t you understand? The worlds are juxtaposed. There is no “out there” because there is no “in here.” She is this world. That other world, that world you think you saw and think you have to go somewhere to get to; that world has been here all along. You were never supposed to see it. That’s why she’s so big. She expands to fill your vision, the scent of her suffuses your sinuses, cloaks your brain. You have been the walking dead in that other world this whole time, you idiot. You have been asleep, you have been awake, whichever it is, it’s just a phase change, a reversed polarity. There is no other world. There is no this world. There is only the harpy, and the harpy is this world. You cannot take her out of this world because she is this world. You have to understand this, and if you are unspeakably cruel and selfish, you will make your decision. You cannot take her with you because there is no place to go. You can leave. You can open your eyes. You can suddenly exist. But know that she will never go with you. Abandon her. Forsake her. Stab the dagger in between the ribs and twist. You cannot kill her but you can--just this once--you have this one chance--for this one instant, a window opens and you can maim her--for just long enough immobilize her great rotten heart long enough to get away, to *escape*--will you do it? Will you look her in the face and-- of course you will, you must, a wolf sings, you will die if you don’t, the only remaining tiny rill, little insignificant trickling stream of clear water that runs through this place; it calls you, quietly, from across vast distance. the mist parts for one second and you leap-- but you’ll be back. bleeding, she smiles.