The Diamond Island

When I was a young boy, one of the places I loved to browse were stores with aquarium supplies.  They always had these cool knick-knacks you could put in your aquarium, from pirate treasure chests that bubbled to giant cliff sides with lots of hiding places for fish.

One time my folks bought me one half of a shipwreck set.  The set was of a sea galley in two pieces, presumably cracked in two because of a fire, an explosion, a pirate attack, or just hitting the rocks.  It could be any or even all of those!

I wanted the complete set, but my folks didn’t have enough money.  I went for the front half, with it’s detailed but fragile anchors and broken masts.  Assuming you set it up in an aquarium, a lifeboat flipped up when bubbles from an air hose collected underneath.  The figurehead was a gold, bare-breasted upper torso of a female figure.

I can remember the time as if it were yesterday.  The aquarium shop by the seaside, near the fish market.  The greedy unwrapping of my new toy, to be set in with my group of undersea toys and prizes.  Deep sea diving was a meditation I learned young.

Years passed, and the ship began to break apart and lose pieces of detail work.  One day I pulled the superstructure apart and broke the parts into smaller pieces.  That was the end of the toy.  But I kept one small piece—the figurehead, her breasts bare and her elbows pulled back as if she were thrusting forward into the waves.  She resided in The Box, waiting.

When I was a young man, my heart was broken and the life I thought I would live turned out to be a total failure.  Broken, lost, dazed; I wandered until the movie Titanic came out.  There on the temple screen of the last days of popular movie going, I connected with an experience that spoke to me of the failure of my life.

I grieved.

Down into the depths and broken in two, a mystery unknown stored within her submerged halls for all time.  Davy Jones triumphant, and I alone carried on to tell the tale if ever I regained some modicum of wit.

Yet the dreaming, yearning hope of what nothing remained moved me on.  Marking and remarking my tread with the scent of bitter tears until the voice of the unexplainable made itself known to me.

Failure is exploration, it said.

No longer a young man, I awoke, the gold of salvation on my hands and a numbing frost melting into my lips.  With the aching hunch of a starved prisoner I shrugged off rusted chains and stood up out of a cairn of stone suitable only for the dead.

A provident vision of a broken ship in two pieces from my youngest days, but the temptation is to turn away—imagining it childishness to desire what is so easily within one’s grasp now.  And a little fear, of losing again and of falling down back into the darkness.  To believe with one’s own eyes, yet to cringe away for uncertainty in one’s own worthiness.  Still longing, I convinced myself it is enough to see; this shall sustain me.

I had work to do, and with the talent of deep sea diving did what was meant to be done, rightly so.  These responsibilities I approached and accepted despite the lack of confidence, for if not I then who?  My ears might be inadequate, yet still I hear and listen.

Again, the vision, reduced price in a different place.  With signs from the intuition speaking loud and clear.  To shake off my last hesitation and accept is like lifting a mountain, moved.

This is my soul, my life, broken in pieces yet now whole and together as a secret treasure of the deep.  Where mysteries are found and solved.  Washed up on the shores of my being for me to behold and consider.

The Titanic is razed, and raised, rebuilt as miracles of inner healing take place.  My bruises are made clear; my dirty clothes wiped clean and my cuts sealed over with the softest of care.  What was unmendable has been renewed.

K and I meditate on this strange wonder.

A while back, I reviewed a small release of music from a band led by an elf gal who goes by the alias of Solarbird.  Well the crafty and inventive songster is back with her elf posse, CRIME and the Forces of Evil, along with a full-fledged album of new improved songs to whup our behinds with a belt!

Solarbird put forward a raffle to divvy out a series of advance copies in exchange for a review. As per my usual truculent self I said, “Funk Dat” and bought the album off the Bandcamp space. I told her to keep me out of the raffle and I was going to do a review anyway, because of course—I had already made up my mind to do so!

Last time, I was curdled and mixed about the music the band put forward.  I knew I was going to give the full album a fair shot once it came out, though quite frankly I thought it would be a chore.  Save for one track, the style of that first release let my expectations down and the sound grated on me.

Okay enough yapping already! What the Hek do we have here anyway?

I was impressed and surprised.  Consider me totally floored.

First off, the title is awesome.  I’ve stated my superhero stance before, so the title of the album, Dick Tracy Must Die, is a stance I immediately understand and sympathize with.  I’m on board at the conceptual level.

I’m impressed with the Bandcamp interface—I’m all about low barriers. I got myself a high quality download and cover jpg with no-fuss and no-muss.  This really is a step forward in the ability for artists to control the horizontal and vertical.

I know the site takes its cut, but right now this format kicks the music industry in their undead nutsac.  I know that I’m giving most of my Ducats to the people I choose to support.

Musically, the tracks are outstanding.  The audio has been cleaned up.  There are lots of extras in the background for punctuation.  There’s variety in the subject matter and sound while still remaining distinctive as a style.  Having listened intently for a week now, I can’t think of any song that sounds unfinished—these birds are grown up and fly on their own.

Having let go of previous expectations, I can at least make that kind of objective statement about the material.  It holds up as good music that has been pushed through the dip to fruition.

What I wasn’t expecting was that I would actually like the stuff.

Maybe I ought not to be surprised, since what we have here is different, interesting, and independent at its core.  All stuff I really dig.  It’s hard to remain unmoved by the biting insight and subtle wit of “When You Leave”, or the sincere and reasoned tenderness of “Let Me Help.”

Solarbird’s voice has been blended with the music and now the cranky, irksome elf has been replaced with a softer and more even level that lets the lyrics deliver their potency without detracting from the energy and skill of the strings.  Nothing’s wasted here.

While I like some songs more than others, I can’t find a single one I dislike.  There’s the outrageous and knowing humor of “My Boyfriend”, the restrained buoyancy of return in “Stars”, and the sorrowful understanding of “Thought You Knew”—the territory covered is impressive.  I have yet to tire of it.

The group characterizes itself as acoustic elf-metal.  I would venture to say their sound is better described as acoustic elf-chrome—lustrous, hard, and pure.  This is the kind of punk music you would hear played in Rivendell when the elves had downed a few.

Or in the markets and fairs of Cascadia.  Played by those few diminished immortal elves who never went into the Undying Lands, yet have enough kindness and wisdom in their hearts still to sing songs of complexity and beauty.

The elves of Middle-Earth were known for crafting items of exceptional artistry, but that only explains half of what I’m hearing. I can’t help but feel there’s an edge to all this.  It’s music you’d hear played by the elves in the movie Wizards, where fantasy magic and archaic technology mix.

Solarbird has a machine gun now.  Die, Dick Tracy, die!

Okay, so a long while ago I swore I would level up on the knitting power. It’s pretty sad news that a category on this blog has been limping along at only one entry for such a long time. Can you guess my undeveloped side here?

No longer! Unpacked (again), re-learning my skill (again). I will get back in touch with this and make myself the very scarf that Kimaroo mentioned I need in this day and age of psychic blizzards.  Everybody needs an advanced tool of civilized multi-purpose function in this era of Road Mutants In Training.

But hey, sometimes the trove comes up extras on the bonus round. Lo and behold at the store, an array of potions such that K and I thought were relegated to an age of history sadly written. Just goes to show that anything can reappear when the world turns with a subtle flavor.

Behold, potions of healing goodness! K loves this beer, swears by it and has sorely missed it. We plan to stock up before those Roguesy weirdoes turn off the emergency damage repair spigot accidentally again.  For now though, it is exceedingly cool to run into an old friend of tasty character and refreshing vitality. Times are tough!

Of course, scrolls of revelation are included in the package as well. For my roleplaying game group I do maps and tokens as part of my full Game-mastering package of goodies.  Here’s a picture of one such map that I created, of the village where the characters begin their adventure.

Yes, full on detail and color of the highest order.  These things help my players imagine the scale and scope of the area they find themselves in. I was telling Kimaroo about this very thing, when I realized I ought to show her what the Hek I was talking about.

Yes, magic items are everywhere. Because we need them.

For the last few months, I’ve found myself at a high degree of stress factors with diminished creative activity. You could say all sorts of components and clusters of energy have been blazing hot and ashen. Then, the downslide into long periods of rest and dulled, zombie-like shuffling about to no particular aim. Whatever’s going on in the deep unconscious, I’m pretty much surfing it as best I can.

No doubt, this last year I’ve been processing and working out an avalanche of dislodged material from my brain connections. I’ve truly felt like this was not for the faint of heart or tender of spirit, yet I’ve managed to keep the trans-warp drive going on jury-rigged plot devices.  Work, relationships, artistry; all on the hopper alert main panel with flashing jewel studded lights.

The past returning along the elliptic, the future looming across the event horizon, and the present busting a move on the loudspeakers and display panels as fast as I can render a thought.  Still, I’ve found fun where I could and helped people along in whatever manner I could find the wisdom and strength to do so. Really, there are long periods where all you can do is hope, and wonder, and dream your way through these blizzards of the soul.

It’s time once again for a recap of the honeycomb hideout news. We got killer bees recharging their pew-pews and buzz-blares through the winter in the central stairwell. The garden is in slumber mode, while all the amazing bonus critters are street fighting it out on reserves or scavenge dice rolls.  There’s the sound of psychological sparks flying as internalized experimental processes run on bio-organic energy sources. It’s an introverted circus of exploration during a time of cold withdrawal.

After last year’s snowpocalypse, and the resultant gigantic creatures that emerged out of the space left behind when humans retreat indoors, there was a huge furnace of frightful manifestations all around the immediate area.  It gets me to wondering if people are hip to the amount of work that needs to be done just to maintain the local life support systems, let alone the scale of megalith size collectives.  Make no mistake, it’s definitely a sliding about of earth’s subterranean top.

I mean, even long term protective gear forged in the treasuries of lost youth are showing damage from the goob-a-loo resounding.  We just can’t depend on the ol’ standbys to keep on truckin’ to the remaining Stuckey’s still able to reload the chili dawg torpedoes.  I look at my Merlin-size library of tracts, tomes, potions and tablets—and I’m shlumped to the floor. The slack in the vast array of miraculous to godawful junk isn’t there.  It is closed to me, save by only the most intense of effort.

Despite the relentless pressure of deep sea diving without a hat, I’ve managed to hold it together—and keep more than a few people I know sane through their own blast furnace or stellar particle shower.  There’s a volcano of one million years BC metamorphosis scale clearing her throat in our hearts, I just hope I can dodge the boulders and screaming dinosaurs as they tumble past me into the abyss. But in the meantime, at least there’s still late night horror hosts to ease the squeeze on my brainstem!

There’s this television program I watched back in the day.  A show called The Prisoner that played on PBS (The Public Broadcasting Station). My folks and I would huddle around the television set and marvel at The Prisoner’s originality.

Ugh, the term “television” seems so dated now, even though it’s still useful in describing a dominant electronic device in use.  Who would ever have guessed television sets would end up being the precursor to the monitor, whose job it is to communicate computer activity to us?

Or that tell-a-vision would become 2-way?

The slot for The Prisoner was set at an hour, but the episode only lasted 45 minutes. Since this was PBS there were no commercials—what a novel concept!  A short program based around playing chess took up the remaining 15 minutes.

Jerky stop motion animation of a chessboard and its pieces, accompanied by a measured English voice, described the game as it unfolded. It was entertaining and engaging to my folks and I, so we stayed through to watch it.

But enough talk! The Prisoner is today’s topicality of chitchat.

What Is This Show On?

The Prisoner is about a secret agent (or perhaps he is a highly placed government official with access to sensitive information) who resigns from his job and begins packing for a trip. While he is loading up his suitcase, a group of men break into his home and fill the room he is in with knockout gas.

He awakens to find himself in a high-tech security town known as “The Village”. Everyone is called by a number instead of their real name.  His new name is “Number 6”, or just “6”. The Village is self-sufficient, cut-off from the rest of the world, and presided over by a director who is always referred to as “Number 2”. This director is almost always a new person in each episode of the show.

And those are the least weird parts of the place.

For example, The Village relies on security patrols (by foot, helicopter, and boat) to keep people from escaping.  But their primary means of recapturing escapees is a gigantic flying blob-sphere called “Rover”.

Rover paralyzes (and sometimes kills) those who go too far, bringing them back by dragging them to a pick up point.  The thing also makes really scary roaring and movement noises as it goes about its business.

The series lasts only one season, and consists of attempts by the forces of The Village, led by Number 2, to force Number 6 to answer the question, “Why did you resign?” Every kind of coercion is attempted, from outright physical torture to psychological manipulation involving hypnosis and drugs.

Number 6 tries to escape and resist as best he can. Most of the people who live in The Village are operatives for whatever political force runs the secret prison; many of them are undercover, posing as prisoners themselves.

Some inhabitants are genuine prisoners like Number 6 who usually think he’s “one of them”, or are too far broken down to be of use. Mainly it’s up to Number 6 to muster enough wits and skill to keep from being broken.

What Is This Post On About?

Okay, so if you haven’t seen this series yet then stop here and go watch it! I’m about to go into spoiler territory, so ahrooo!

The final episode of The Prisoner has provoked heated discussion over what it means. Basically Number 6 eventually turns the tables on his captors and is invited into the inner circle of power to join them as their new leader, or to depart.

In a surreal unfolding of events, Number 6 leads a machine gun attack on the inner circle and causes what looks like the destruction of The Village.  He and a few compatriots escape back to the real world, where these helpers resume their roles in society.  Number 6 drives off into the sunset.  The number on the door of his home says “1”.

What does the ending mean? How does it explain the events of The Village? Many viewers were expecting a sophisticated puzzle ending.  Here’s what’s been moving through my brain as I consider the meaning of the show for me.

The entire series represents a complex hallucination in which his captors attempt to brainwash him into a state of compliance, whereupon he can do no harm as an independent agent.  The elites of political entities really hate those independent agents.

At the end, Number 6 manages to overcome this hallucination and return to reality, symbolized by him leaving his home and driving off into the sunset, or the endless horizon of freedom.

Which can also be interpreted as a return to the cycle of the beginning of the series, but I think this only reinforces a closure of a complete experience in which Number 6 is no longer Number 1 or Number 6, but Number 0—a fool free to roam at will through any boundary or state of mind.

The last episode is a collapse of the hallucination and the return of sanity.  He has escaped his role as Number 1 (the leader of the system of coercion and repression which he served)—the mysterious butler is the part of him that “served” this system in his capacity as Number 1—and he has escaped his role as the prisoner, Number 6.

The inner circle would prefer he resume his post or be broken.  They divide his personality in an attempt to either cause his complete mental breakdown or remake him into his old role.  Perhaps they are the same thing!

However, instinct triumphs over programming. His stubborn refusal to give up his identity (“I am not a number, I am a free man!”), to cling to the zero as it were, preserves him.

Number 6 asks, “Who is Number 1?” and he is always answered, “You are Number 6.”  This is said in plain sight of the television watching audience many times.  He doesn’t catch the comma in that answer, nor does the audience!  “YOU ARE, Number 6.”

What’s That Again?

The interesting thing for me is how the conflict is always framed in terms of Number 6’s refusal to answer the question, “Why did you resign?”  The thing is, Number 6 answers this question at one point—that his conscience was bothering him about what he was doing.  Being Number 1 must have meant decisions that led to the suffering and death of not only many establishment agents, but innocent people as well.

For example, when Number 2 kills number 73 (an innocent woman), Number 6 reacts with brutal efficiency in destroying the man.  It must have been a similar incident—the death of an innocent in the performance of his duties—that led to Number 6 questioning his role. He gained back part of his soul when he felt remorse, and this in turn led to him to suddenly react against the system.

That Number 6 finally gives an answer—and this answer is ignored-—shows that his captivity isn’t about information at all.  It is about obedience.  The concern about his resignation is a pretense for removal of his identity and re-education.  Send him to the Gulag, folks!  Just make sure it is “justified” by some official reason.  That is, mask the real issue.

Number 6 tries to tell the inner circle but they shout him down.  “I, I, I!”  The magistrate looks on at Number 6’s anguished face.  He understands as Number 6 realizes, it has never been about his stand of conscience, or the fear of his going over to “the other side”—is there such a thing when the inner circle is both black and white in dress? Where the system is total and complete?

There is only one political force—ownership. They merely argue over method.

The Number 2 destroyed by Number 6 returns to initiate the last and most brutal interrogation of Number 6 before the final episode. The inner circle must have believed using this personality piece was key to breaking 6’s will. But I think by this point they had already lost the upper hand and were clutching at straws.

For this Number 2 is, in effect, a form of Number 6’s own past persona.  The part of him that initiated Number 6’s development out of the previous trauma involving the dead woman.  He has, in effect, betrayed the system by self-recreating his own conscience and therefore a person who does not fit under the typical number system.

Number 2 is “destroyed”. He is “dead”. The truth of self-captivity ended his ability to perform his duties. Number 6 is free to go.

This Number 2 is brought back to life and put on trail as an example of a “betrayer”, who bites the hand that feeds him.  But it is a futile gesture.  Nature trumps the system in the end, always. Number 6 is who our protagonist is now, and putting his old identity on a rocket to be shot into space is no use.

Not that the inner circle won’t try to place all the “bad” personalities into that rocket in hopes of being left with only a butler (Number 1).

The young man gunfighter Number 8 from the Living In Harmony episode is brought onto trial as well (as Number 48).  He is put forward as an example of youth that does not rebel in the societally accepted way. He is guilty of rebelling with no purpose, rhyme or reason—not unlike the fool.

This nemesis “kid” was used by the system to threaten others, but he had a drawback.  He was difficult to control and extremely violent.  Youth stifled and manipulated is a dangerous tool to the system.  When we allow the system to send youth out to kill those who oppose repression, we create dysfunctional individuals.

By refusing to fight, as Number 6 did in this episode, one threatens the source from which coercion draws the strength of its force.  Displaying a character who held this kind of basic stance of non-violence was the reason the episode was not allowed to be shown in the U.S. at the time.

It’s revealed that the Living In Harmony episode has been a hallucination within a hallucination in an attempt to get Number 6 to either resume his former post as gunslinger for the ownership or be a victim of his immature personality of violence and confusion, to be “destroyed” by his shadow as it were.

Number 6 “killed” Number 8.  By refusing to strap on a gun and a badge at the same time, Number 6 showed that he wished to remain independent.

Number 48 will also be going up into space on the rocket.

I, I, I!

Number 6 is sent into the rocket to meet with Number 1.  Meaning he will either end up in the tube with Number 2 and Number 48 (who are both laughing and babbling insanely) to be blasted off and disposed of, or he will emerge in a form suitable for control once more.

In the rocket, Number 6 meets a figure wearing the mask of the inner circle.  He strips the mask away only to reveal an ape’s mask underneath. He strips more masks off.  Finally he comes face to face with himself as the figure is revealed to be—himself!  The two of them struggle, the unmasked version of himself laughing maniacally and babbling like a fool.

A fool. His true self!

Number 6 attacks the guards and frees Number 2 and Number 48.  They lead a counterattack against the inner circle; launching the rocket in a surreal confrontation of energies that can only mean the fundamental construct of the hallucination can no longer be defended.

Isn’t that what the system is, after all? A shared imaginary space we participate in? But as they say in gaming circles, “system matters”. Dysfunction leads to typhoid game play and “fun, never.”

Rover is destroyed, melted to slag.  His job was to maintain the boundaries of the hallucination.  In the episode Many Happy Returns, Number 6 actually manages to escape back to the real world for a brief time.  There is no “Rover” or guards to stop him.  The purpose of letting Number 6 temporarily escape was only to fool him into thinking The Village was a literal place.  But it never was!

As the hallucination collapses, the personalities return to their appointed places in the psyche as the “world” becomes more real. We were only a short drive from London after all!  The youth, Number 48, goes off to hitchhike. Number 2 goes off to a job in the government. The butler enters the residence of Number 6. All the personalities within our fool protagonist return to their proper place in the psyche (and appropriate memories).

Number 6 gets in his car and drives off into the sunset/sunrise of consciousness. He is free to go.  At the very least he will awaken and perhaps find himself in a real captivity, but one in which he can actually physically escape from.

It is the fool who encourages us to resign, to claim our life as our own, and to reject numbers altogether. At the end of the adventure he comes around to encourage us to begin anew.

Back in the college days of yore I encountered a mighty strange phenomenon.  In the student center there was a dining area for all the students on the generic meal plan (which at the time was called SAGA, or as it was nicknamed in fun, Soviet Attempt to Gag America; ironic since it was a liberal arts college).

Basically, you’d be sitting there eating your meal (usually dinner) and someone would say, “Rat-hump.” Someone else would say a little louder, “RAT-HUMP.” Then the real contest would begin: There would be a rush to see who could say “RATT-HUUMP!” the loudest without being embarrassed.

These things happen.

Just the other day on the FaceCrook channel my colleagues in college were doing the still-alive-but-past-life analysis in order to revisit this strange irrational gift from the beyond.  Alas, like all mysteries we could not find a suitable answer.

Where did it come from? Who brought it into being? The seed of this break in so-called well-behaved discourse must have come from somewhere reasonable and rational, right?  Right?!

I talked to the “cool” people of that time period, and they refused to say.  Maybe they know too much! In any case I got nothing on that angle.

I spoke with the folks from the period before where it might have manifested. They knew nothing.

The rational minds of the crew came up with some interesting (NSFW) origins of the word, but not quite the practice:

• This blog provides general analysis.
• Google Books references placing clues in 1922.
• Democratic Underground digs up the popular culture graveyard.

My initial rant went as thus in the discussion:

***

Rat-hump is used in an escalating declarative sense to achieve a conscious recognition.

• Step 1: “There is a rat-hump, hello!”
• Step 2: “No, there’s a rat-hump, HELLO!”
• Step 3: +1 until consciousness raising achieved.

At which point someone recognizes that yes, there is a rat-hump and someone’s face is red. In other words ritual re-enactment of “shock the monkey”, in which we all participate in the recognition of “crap thru a goose” life.

So the definition is rat-hump as a state of mind in which one realizes one is rat-humped, or someone you know is rat-humped.  QED: we are alive and life is rat-hump, Gloria Et Domine or Kyrie depending on where you stand on the rat-hump wheel at that particular moment

***

Spontaneous affirmation of life through a subversive exclamation of experience? Such things are among us now, refusing to allow our mere reason or tyrannical infant-services to repress them.

THERE IS NO SANCTUARY.

I spend time now and then investigating the livejournal shoals for interesting tidbits of brain food.  There’s this writer who goes by the name Livia-Llewellyn over there that I started keepin’ an eye on, mostly because she has a certain kind of bleak attitude that I find appealing enough to listen to.

She wrote this four-part story and since I was listening I decided to read.  Must have made some kind of impression, because here I am compelled to do an exploration about it.  Spoilers are a cumin’ in, so ahroo!

Feel free to read first:

1. Sometimes There’s No Poison Like a Dream
2. I am the Stone the Builder Rejected
3. Ride easy, lover: Surrender to the land / Your heart of anger
4. I ride the wings of the morning sun, and dwell in the uttermost arms of the deep

Okay so what do we have here?  The story follows Gillian, a sculptor of tombstones, who is about to receive a promotion (or a hek of an eternal demotion, depending on how you see it) for her fine work.

She has a talent for finding and expressing evocative character in the tombstones she carves.  A talent she honed during her childhood years dowsing for coal in a mine, a job from which she escaped after a horrific mystical experience.

Basically she wants to be a good little doggie:  work a 9-5 job in the city, gain some security, and provide for her son’s future.

The world she lives in is a nightmare planet.  Otherworldly forces of unspeakable horror have bled into the world at large, expressed as rampant pollution, corruption, urban lifelessness, and environmental defilement.

Kind of like now.

Instead of a promotion, her talent brings her to the attention of a band of well-connected cultists.  They want to use her talent to summon a god-monster-entity from a large boulder they’ve found.  Just the sort of scary stuff she used to run into all the time when she worked in the mines, showing the machines where to dig.

Gillian is abducted and taken to the boulder.  She betrays the cultists by turning the boulder into a stone elemental to smash them into jelly. Unfortunately, this means giving into the after-effects of that horrific experience from her past.  She enters into the darkness of a mining tunnel in an ecstatic state of madness, experiencing it as a plunge into the depths and a spreading of monstrous wings to dark flight.

That’s all folks.

Here’s my beef:  Gillian has no agency.  In Part 1, it’s suggested that her promotion means taking on a difficult mission that will force her to confront her past.  If she chooses to accept, she will be going on a journey that is both professionally challenging and personally dangerous. The alternative means giving up her upward mobility (so to speak).  This is awesome.

The stakes are the new life she’s built for herself.  This is stuff anybody struggling to survive in a post-industrial apogee world can understand.  Debt-servitude makes for hard choices, and here’s one that promises to put her drive to escape to the test.

Once she is abducted, her choice is reduced to narrative zilchplay—there’s no tension as to what will happen.  Gillian is certain everyone is going to die.  We’re just waiting with her for the inevitable date with the boulder of destiny.

While we wait, she looks back at her life in the mines.    Gillian grew up in dark tunnels under conditions of industrial servitude.  Her special talent for locating hidden veins of coal may have led to an explosive encounter with a horrific underground entity.

At some point she decided to escape the mines by getting pregnant.  She had a sexual encounter with a person who may have been an incarnation of the god-monster-entity the cultists hope to free and get goodies from.

Gillian left the mines behind to find a job carving tombstones in the city, but it’s a farce living on borrowed time.  I get the feeling that if she ever had any major decisions to make in her life they were made back then, but it’s unclear to me what they were.

At this point it’s obvious Gillian is at best a hybrid human, may not have ever been human, and could be a simulacra cycling through various incarnations of mother and daughter in imitation of human life.

Even though the cultists suggest her son’s life is in danger should Gillian not cooperate, she is unconcerned.  Her thoughts suggest he has abilities that allow him to escape capture and make it on his own. This detail basically ensures all stakes in the story are removed.  We are on the exposition train from here on, where the character goes from one place to the next.  She isn’t allowed to matter.

Without agency, the character just goes through the motions.  Because we don’t know the details of her story in the mines—what she experienced and what it meant—the current story is just the last gasp of a person who died a long time ago.  If she was ever even alive!

The villains are your standard black hat fanatics with no agency themselves.  Led by the void-filling but unexciting and lying evil boyfriend.   They exist simply to make the colossal mistake that sends them off a cliff screaming.  Whatever!

The ending leaves us plunging into the unknown, which is an effective technique.  However, what does it mean?  Does she become a monster servant of the god-monster in the underworld?  Has she succumbed to madness in which she imagines rebuilding her daughter? Has she fulfilled her instinctual purpose and will now wander around the fiery tunnels of a coal mine until she slowly expires?

Whatever the answer, I’m left with the feeling this is the end of Gillian’s own experience.  That feels like a cop out; her monstrosity was her most human quality, the part worth exploring.

The story that matters is her previous life in the mines, but we don’t get that.  It’s already in the past.  If horror is about violation, Gillian experienced that long ago and didn’t survive.  Or rather, she survived as a ghost long enough to drag others to their destruction.  As readers, we’re robbed of an experience of her true horror.

One angle that might have been interesting would have been an approach towards the discovery that she had been made into one of those Lovecraft-based automatons one reads about.  There are stories of unfortunates who delve too deeply into the Cthulhu Mythos and are never heard from again, save as eerie doubles of their bodies.

She might have been already dead, driven by her Chtulhu-infestation of the mind into building some kind of false life on the surface.  Her “secret compulsion” would be like a locust of doom crawling overland, only to kill and then descend again into the depths to nurture a new brood of madness.  She, her father’s mother.  Leave the cultists out completely and make her boulder-job just another day at the office, as it’s originally suggested.

Then her lack of agency becomes a self-discovery as she learns not only is her new life a mask, but she never escaped to begin with.  Slavery in the mines was replaced by something unspeakably worse—a veneer of hope designed to lure victims to their doom.  I’d have left the cultists as a suggestion that they are behind the mining operations, using “canaries” like her to satisfy their simpleton understanding of their monster-god’s wishes. Profit becomes a means for maintaining the faith only.

Personally, I’d have gone the romantic adventure route.  Gillian becomes half-Byakhee and half-woman.  Something new and different, truly dangerous.  Free to live her life more fully.  Horror as violation that shows you who you really are.  Wouldn’t that be a kick in the Rumplestiltskin?

Dang though, can Livia write some mutherscrathin’ prose.  Her descriptions of the nightmare world of Obsidia are inescapably vivid.  In one scene, as Gillian moves between train cars a piece of trash smacks her on the cheek, nearly missing her eye.  I flinched when I read that, it was so visceral. This is the kind of putrid stuff that sticks in your mental craw, needing floss to pluck out.

Livia’s eye for detail and sense of place is relentless, with a charged slant toward the erotic.  Strong stuff there.   She is a master of setting, painting her world with soft and harsh touches in equal measure. The gargantuan mega-city of Obsidia as a setting ate me alive and doG bless it.

Listening, hearing.  A song from outer space experienced from the inside. The sphinx is a lion tree in which a swarm of killer bees make sweet, sweet honey.

Dark and dry the desert of the damp and misty soul, calling return to broken, sunken ships of odyssey trust.  The lantern given out of sincere anguish knits a flickering, uncertain glow.

Full moon ascending, bathed in halos of clouded night reflects back my empty new moon of scaled darkness in the deepest trenches of still water beneath the skeleton trees.

Girl instincts arise, guiding the sphinx at last to a place of rest, upon moth-woven blankets of wool from the softest silver lambs with the strength of thunder in their bones.

Dreams of peaceful accord drift among the clouds, rumblings stir the sky with the forgotten ecstasy of finding.  A silence swallows up sensation, burying it within the beyond.

These wonders, I endure.

I remember what it felt like to be alive, free of coercion and restraint, bearing a fire inside of indestructible fireflies of gemstone in every color of the rainbow, its twin, and the rainbow unseen further than the reach of human destiny.

Gone forever, sacrificed on the altar of space and time for all eternity, never to be recovered.

Out of this death burns a star in all skies throughout all nothingness and somethingness.  This light remembers all I have lost and will remind me if I forget again.  Furthermore, miraculous new life is granted me in this valley.  Song of the trees a signal of wakening to what I have always been.

A door opens in me, and I know now I will be a beekeeper.  Both in the outside world where I will raise and cultivate bees, and in the inner world where I will tend the killer bees for their honey so that others might know sweetness.

I have stuff to learn now.  Small steps to take towards helping bees go about their business.  I have the feeling that Lucerna is behind this in some way.  More psychic kung fu training.

Hanging out with the Sphinx in the valley.  Trees but no trees.  Mizzle in the desert.  Listening to the silence and the inactivity until I wonder if I can listen any more.

The skeleton trees sing to me with voices of nothingness.

They remind me that I’ve been here before many times, striving to see and understand.  Their song digs out of me buried and forgotten memories, prayers, and responses.

The Sphinx shows me there is no riddle and that I must create my own answers.

The Celtic New Year, a time of spirits and dreams of the imagination, comes to a close again.  Inside me, fresh life is being brought out of the darkest crawlways and unexplored cubbyholes of my failures and mistakes.

Lucerna’s training comes back to me; her wise and understanding influence has opened up in me a wholehearted casket of human riches. Expanding myself to fill those potentials is a lifetime of commitment and practice.

There is a UFO being built inside of me.

I see myself as I used to be, and might have been.  Surviving the outgrowing of those parts of me has been a chimerical nightmare.

I once went looking for Shiva in search of an explanation. Now I’m the one who will provide the explanation!

It’s as if I’m in the source of all Destroyed Bourns and simply recharging, rebuilding, renewing; and this time I and the universe are zero and one at the same time because I’ve passed through the temptation of unredeemed lust and released the power that does not belong to me.  I think, I feel the sun shining through me is an opening even as I close a circle to completion.

I have other promises to keep.