Salacious Angel
Member
- Joined
- Oct 5, 2006
- Messages
- 5
Hallucinations are great fuel for that proverbial literary fire.
Here are a couple of vignettes I wrote under the influence of psychosis. I'm not sure whether they're allegorical or actually taken from literal hallucinatory experiences; I'll leave that up to you.
#1
I recall, once in my childhood when I was sleeping, a man came to me in a dream and told me my name. But it was not my name, or so I thought, and when I told him so he said “That is because you do not know your own name. I have come to tell you, so listen good.” And he spoke for hours, long into the night, the morning, and the scorching afternoon. When I awoke, I had forgotten all that he had spoken, and I often wonder if perhaps I should have listened more attentively…
#2
It is black, forbidding, regal, majestic… a grand architectural triumph of gothic splendour. Birds circle its heights and worms tunnel its depths. Thunder bellows about its peaks like an angry spirit of the wind. Its halls are quiet, empty of all but the lingering phantasms of a dozen forgotten promises. Tapestries of vistas once fertile line walls thick with caked filth and scrawled nonsense.
A lord lived here, once. A man so fair as to make devils sing, so proud as to make angels cringe. But it is said that a broken heart cast him into a dark melancholy, and in his sorrow he went deep into the bowels of his abode to sit, to weep, and to rot. A hundred times a thousand years he dwelled in that place, and soon even his bones were but dust.
Now, it is mine. I sit upon his ancient throne, elegiac and worrisome as the man who passed before me, and the silence of its grandeur is a welcome sound.
#3
Halfway between fantasy and reality, somewhere upon that alien plain where wishful thinking scrambles and campers amidst chrysanthemums and crystalline pools of trembling neurosis, beneath a sky red like the hearts of angels and a sun afire with yellows and greens, struck through with bolts of cobalt, there is a peculiar stone.
It is of no remarkable appearance – like all the others upon that plain it is smooth, dirt laden and grey, and it rests, sleeping, unassuming. But it is a stone with a memory, of forgotten passions and lost devotions, filled with the tears and troubles of a hundred-thousand recollections. It is laden and heavy, more so than a stone its size should be, and were one to listen closely, clutching it in their hand, they might hear it weeping.
Once upon a time, millennia ago – or maybe moments, it is often hard to tell – a man, who was truly no more than a boy in his own mind, came trembling and troubled to this place and sat amongst a field of thorny roses. They cut and tore and bled his flesh, like angry men seeking vindication in murder, but he did not stir.
Days passed, and still he sat, sleeping, perhaps, or thinking, and his head was aflood with tiresome dilemmas uncountable. Then, as the world turned and the moon rose on the fifth day, a crow came and sat upon his shoulder. It did not speak; it did not even look at him. But it stood there, perched upon that silent, worried, wearied man, and it sang.
When it rained, it sang a song of floods and crashing deluges that drowned the world entirely; when the sun was high and scorching, it sang a song of fiery ruin; when a chill wind blew, it sang a song of the world’s icy end. Then, when a year and a day had passed, it struck the air once with its beak and took to the skies, then was gone.
By then the man too had gone. He had not stirred from his place amongst the thorns, but with the passing of the untold hours, with the roasting of the flames and the cleansing of the floods, he had withered, wasted, faded, and was no more.
There, upon that plain of troubles, dreams, and terrors, there is a stone. It is a memory of a man who was, but is no more, and sometimes, if you listen quietly and closely, you can hear it weeping.
Here are a couple of vignettes I wrote under the influence of psychosis. I'm not sure whether they're allegorical or actually taken from literal hallucinatory experiences; I'll leave that up to you.
#1
I recall, once in my childhood when I was sleeping, a man came to me in a dream and told me my name. But it was not my name, or so I thought, and when I told him so he said “That is because you do not know your own name. I have come to tell you, so listen good.” And he spoke for hours, long into the night, the morning, and the scorching afternoon. When I awoke, I had forgotten all that he had spoken, and I often wonder if perhaps I should have listened more attentively…
#2
It is black, forbidding, regal, majestic… a grand architectural triumph of gothic splendour. Birds circle its heights and worms tunnel its depths. Thunder bellows about its peaks like an angry spirit of the wind. Its halls are quiet, empty of all but the lingering phantasms of a dozen forgotten promises. Tapestries of vistas once fertile line walls thick with caked filth and scrawled nonsense.
A lord lived here, once. A man so fair as to make devils sing, so proud as to make angels cringe. But it is said that a broken heart cast him into a dark melancholy, and in his sorrow he went deep into the bowels of his abode to sit, to weep, and to rot. A hundred times a thousand years he dwelled in that place, and soon even his bones were but dust.
Now, it is mine. I sit upon his ancient throne, elegiac and worrisome as the man who passed before me, and the silence of its grandeur is a welcome sound.
#3
Halfway between fantasy and reality, somewhere upon that alien plain where wishful thinking scrambles and campers amidst chrysanthemums and crystalline pools of trembling neurosis, beneath a sky red like the hearts of angels and a sun afire with yellows and greens, struck through with bolts of cobalt, there is a peculiar stone.
It is of no remarkable appearance – like all the others upon that plain it is smooth, dirt laden and grey, and it rests, sleeping, unassuming. But it is a stone with a memory, of forgotten passions and lost devotions, filled with the tears and troubles of a hundred-thousand recollections. It is laden and heavy, more so than a stone its size should be, and were one to listen closely, clutching it in their hand, they might hear it weeping.
Once upon a time, millennia ago – or maybe moments, it is often hard to tell – a man, who was truly no more than a boy in his own mind, came trembling and troubled to this place and sat amongst a field of thorny roses. They cut and tore and bled his flesh, like angry men seeking vindication in murder, but he did not stir.
Days passed, and still he sat, sleeping, perhaps, or thinking, and his head was aflood with tiresome dilemmas uncountable. Then, as the world turned and the moon rose on the fifth day, a crow came and sat upon his shoulder. It did not speak; it did not even look at him. But it stood there, perched upon that silent, worried, wearied man, and it sang.
When it rained, it sang a song of floods and crashing deluges that drowned the world entirely; when the sun was high and scorching, it sang a song of fiery ruin; when a chill wind blew, it sang a song of the world’s icy end. Then, when a year and a day had passed, it struck the air once with its beak and took to the skies, then was gone.
By then the man too had gone. He had not stirred from his place amongst the thorns, but with the passing of the untold hours, with the roasting of the flames and the cleansing of the floods, he had withered, wasted, faded, and was no more.
_____
There, upon that plain of troubles, dreams, and terrors, there is a stone. It is a memory of a man who was, but is no more, and sometimes, if you listen quietly and closely, you can hear it weeping.
