Quoted By:
>ADDITION
Okay, you can't say you have much fondness for this eyeball— it hasn't quite dawned yet, the realization of <span class="mu-i">Oh God, my organs were all outside my body,</span> but the rays of it are coming over the horizon. For now you're post-novocaine cold, numb, and possessed of the concept that nothing good has ever come from pissing off things hundreds of thousands of times larger than you are.
And as much as your top-level mind skitters along the particulars— <span class="mu-i">how</span> does one placate a thing hundreds of thousands of times larger than you are— you know within yourself the routine. Whether the red stuff has snaked back into your brain, now, or whether you're feeling the slick hollows in your memory, or whether you're being twisted in one and only one direction, your strings strained and hot with friction; it hardly matters.
When Richard spoke of the surrender-art, it was from the perspective of predator: the hunt, the kill, the battle of wills and wits for dominance, triumph, death conquered, the ego preserved. Richard, reptilian, has never been prey. Can't remember being prey. You— blunt-fingered, soft-skinned, more-flaws-than-whole <span class="mu-i">human</span>— you were born nothing but, and you can't help but wonder about a flipside. Of the surrender-art. Maybe the name's just a poor transliteration, but... shouldn't it be the victim, surrendering, ceding, fading into the evening? Is there no art in knowing when you're beat, a candle-flame to the interloper's sun? Is there no perverse knifesedge attraction in losing your control, in allowing fate to whip and eddy you about? <span class="mu-i">Stultum est timere quod vitare non potes.</span>
You are not thinking these things. <span class="mu-i">You</span> are not thinking these things, possibly. They're just burbling to your surface, like a tarpit, in lazy gasps. What did Pat say on trances— on letting the manse take you? You became as a character in a stage-play, flat, unknowing; you ceased to exist, and something acted your part. She meant to scare you with this, because she was scared. You're not so sure. A character in a play— is that such an awful thing to be? So long as it's the main character.
You are being raised in half-inches in front of the playwright. Who better to take you? To clean you and edit you? To patch your irregularities and your plot holes, to feed you new lines, to put you in very top billing— you are certainly not thinking these things. (Your Aunt Ruby did not approve of plays.) What you are doing is flexing your shoulders and your neck back, your knees up. You splay your fingers.
(1/3)
