[Suzerain of Sheol]

Okay... don't know how long it's been since I posted something here, but I am now, so here it goes. :p

I wrote this a few weeks ago out of sudden inspiration (a very rare occurrence for me). It's half-serious and half-satirical, poking fun at a certain... zeitgeist that I happen to at least partially inhabit.

I love comments. :)

Diegesis

I live in the dead now, one of those transcendents like love that dies the instant you speak it, that you smother when you decide to embrace it. This is the human relationship with the sublime. This is how we relate to the universe itself. Then we look up like a bewildered child from the shattered pieces, the limp corpse, and wail that it isn't fair, that it wasn't our fault. Just give us one more chance. Bring it back. Makes things the way they were, just like we remember, back in those days before we murdered the world with good intentions. Of course, the irony is, those good intentions were supposed to be good for us, but us is another one of those beautiful abstracts that we humans have a tendency to rape to death, but only while we're begging it to make everything okay, take the fear of the dark away, numb the pain with an oblivion of claustrophobic belonging. It doesn't quite work that way.

The paramedics arrived half an hour ago, announcing themselves with strobing red and blue light screaming through my window like a whirlwind of delusion and reality: people's passive expectation of blood and the ugly carmine truth when it starts spattering everywhere. Yes, blood. She was throwing it up all over. The stairs look like someone got beheaded on the top step then tumbled down. A little trail at first, then deep, hideous splashes soaking into the 30-year-old berber.

Funny how he gave up on Jesus so fast, went rushing for his cell to summon sinners as if the EMTs were earthbound angels who still remembered how to heal. And the Lord of Hosts sits there waiting in a locker at the church, rolled up in wrinkly, smoke-stained vestments, closed away in an old effaced Gospel, no use to anyone. Christ is really just a meme, an illusion every bit as convincing as money, another statement in the ether wrapping sentiment about itself and parading it as meaning. Salvation is as palpable as a billionaire's fifth mansion, the manifest of a want in a foreign moment. Which of us are supposed to be the orphans, again?

They'll have arrived at the hospital now, a procession of stately chaos bursting through the back doors. When they tell him he has to leave the room, he'll just give one of those stiff nods of his and walk out without a word, pacing on his bad leg in the waiting room, working his way through another pack in the parking lot, watching the broken bones and paper cuts come in with a desolate smugness like Cassius glimpsing the arrival of another righteous pagan. And when he burns through the last one, he'll go ask if there's been any change, if he could see her: displacement at its finest. Then, defeated, he'll limp away to go make some prayers of last resort, taking a seat with the rest of the worriers, looking at the floor like everyone else. This is how you pass hours.

* * *

Blessed are the living dead, the schizophrenic, the comatose, the catatonic. The stillborn, the demented, the suicidal sages. Every single soul that dies without hearing the name of God. Dear stranger, suffering on the frontier seas of my reality, do not ever doubt that I love you, need you in the most savage of ways. Your pathos is the fodder of my imagination, the art of your misery my constant inspiration.

And so I sit hear, dipping quill to vein, painting words upon the carnage of a spirit. This is my private perdition, my personal Stygian river. But like them all, it's a fragile perspective, a tottering existential perch capturing the still-life of the world, and it's only entropy holding it all together. I need their pain in order to define my own, to breathe life into this tundra of thought. And it is such a joy to rend apart the monochrome curtain of survival and subsistence, spewing bile and liquid strife upon the mechanical Eden. This is my word to the world, my mark upon life itself; I'll write a symphony of rapturous anguish, hoping no one will notice that it came from nowhere.

Past midnight now and still no word. How many of the others sit there wasting away so she can have the very best of mankind's contrived care? Nothing exalts like mortal agony, another irony; in our most wretched humanity, we are at our most holy. It's a conceit of ours, finding beauty in broken things. A ruined city evokes more awe than a whole one ever could. The mind is a simulacrum of God when it comes to engineering majesty, and like God, its creations have a tendency to shatter at the drop of an atom.

They've probably gotten past the pleasantries of ICU now. Maybe some enterprising nurse called CPS after an awkward conversation with the haggard old man. It wouldn't be the first time. Society likes to romanticize many things, but men in collars aren't one of them. No work of God being done here. We must be paying the Devil's price to eat his tax-granted food, sleep in these barren bedrooms. Never mind that we're all abortions with legs and breath, and sure, he isn't a nice man; not even a good man, but I've known worse. We were all born to worse, especially the murder-kids, the victim-legacies, the one whose parents actually wanted them. Someone should have spared us all the trouble. Nothing strangles so gently as an umbilical cord.

* * *

I was told I was beautiful once. I don't remember who or why. It's funny, the concept of beauty. So I laughed at them, whoever they were. My molecules buzz around in a pattern that the molecules in your eyes tell the molecules in your brain look better than some other people's molecules? Why, thank you. Who even says they're mine? How does that work? If I cut my arm off, is it still my arm, when it's lying there decomposing? At what point does it stop being mine? Why? I'm inclined to think it wasn't mine to begin with, but then, I like to think there's no “me” either. They never came close to getting the joke, just nodded awkwardly, smiled, compartmentalized and kept on talking.

My neighbors are getting restless. They're not my family because I don't believe in families, just selves cohabiting, dredging through existence in parallel. The younger ones are scared; one came knocking at my door, so I let him sit on my bed and watch me ignore my emotions.

Emotions. A divine equation, carefully measured additives of chemicals I forget the names to. Balance both sides for the desired variable and out pops a feeling that I immediately snatch up and remake myself around in the span of a thought. The real miracle is that the laboratory put itself together, even though the chemist never bothered to show up, and the experiments still go on, quaint permutations of each other, but never quite repeated.

I'm being stared at, but that's nothing unusual. It isn't me he's seeing anyway, but a possibility, a potential to trigger the comfort-response, make his tiny brain stop spazzing over perceived abandonment. Hate to break it to you, kid, but that's what life's about. So I won't. Let him think I'm just waiting for the right moment to acknowledge him and make it all better.

The phone's ringing, mine. It's him. So now it's time to pretend to care, clear my throat, answer with the proper amount of shaky foreboding, let him know we're just fine here, how worried we all are.

But I don't even get to say a word. He's sobbing, muttering, probably getting sympathetic looks from his compatriots in woe. I wait him out, wondering if I'm the first one of us he's called. That would be... amazing, in a grudging sort of way. Eventually, he manages two words before regressing into stuttering helplessness once again.

I hang up, wait a second, then turn around, look my little brother in the eyes as a realization strikes me. Judas isn't special at all. We're all being gnawed on by Satan, betrayed even as we betray ourselves again and again. A part of me wants to hug him, but it's the same part that's paralyzed with the ever-predictable human response of stunned disbelief in the face of the blisteringly obvious. So he'll have to make do with a frozen gaze as I obsess myself into a singularity over two words, bringing on the catharsis of a lifetime.

Radiation. Poisoning.

Edit: Aw, only 56.25 aurum, not even close to my record. :p

[Espy]

Just finished reading; gimme a bit because I need some time to cobble together a coherent response to it...

[DarkForbidden-Love]

Gah, that should not be as good as I think it is. I'll give you kudos for the passage evoking emotions. "Then we look up like a bewildered child from the shattered pieces, the limp corpse, and wail that it isn't fair, that it wasn't our fault." This pretty much sums up what and why.

[Suzerain of Sheol]

Love, could you explain what you mean more? I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say there.

@Espy: Looking forward to it.

[DarkForbidden-Love]

I was saying it was a good piece and that was my favorite line. I fond it to be eyecatching and rather emotional.

[Suzerain of Sheol]

Oh, well, thank you, in that case. :)

[Suzerain of Sheol]

It just occurred to me that the title to this story is spelled incorrectly. How utterly embarrassing. It's supposed to be "Diegesis" not "Diagesis".

And in case anyone's wondering, Diagesis is a the narrative of a story, divorced of the culture that produced it; contrast to Mimesis, which is all about the representation of a zeitgeist in a work of literature. The title is, like entire piece, half-satirical and half-serious.

[Espy]

I can't remember the term for it, that idea that the brain's just a bunch of chemicals working together... Was reading about it in Psychology, and this kind of struck a chord...

The first paragraph. Carpe diem to the extreme. Also reminds me of most governments today, what with being corrupt as hell.

Liking the basic denial of everything minus science...the way I phrased that seemed a bit weird but I'm bad at putting words to concepts. There're some bits that contradict each other a little, like the emotion part. Or that might just be me.

Have you read The Stranger by Camus? Anyways, reminds me of that book.

I'm trying to make sense of the thing about the Devil versus the illusion of Christ and the...uh...what you wrote about God. (Words fail me.) I think it's just me; having a bit of an issue wrapping my mind around it.

It seems to ramble a bit in general; I've a short attention span so that's a given.

Ending was a tad bit awkward in my opinion; seemed a bit unrelated to the air of things.

Uh. Ok. I said this would be coherent; I was wrong. Sorry about that.

[Suzerain of Sheol]

Yay, comments! :D

Addressing in order.

I can't remember the term for it, that idea that the brain's just a bunch of chemicals working together... Was reading about it in Psychology, and this kind of struck a chord...

I didn't know there was a specific term to describe that. As far as I know, neuroscience has pretty much confirmed that that's essentially what the brain is, just add in a little electricity. :p

The first paragraph. Carpe diem to the extreme. Also reminds me of most governments today, what with being corrupt as hell.

That's interesting. I hadn't thought about it from that angle, but I suppose it does make sense.

Liking the basic denial of everything minus science...the way I phrased that seemed a bit weird but I'm bad at putting words to concepts. There're some bits that contradict each other a little, like the emotion part. Or that might just be me.

I should probably note at some point (like, right here!) that the idea was for this piece to seem overblown and contradictory/poorly-thought-out in a lot of places, since, like I said, it functions partially as a satire of a few different kinds of writers (I know it isn't made clear, but the narrator is writing this all down in a journal of sorts on her computer as she's narrating). In a lot of places, it falls shallow while attempting to sound "deep" which is part of the parody. Like all the Inferno references that have nothing really to do with anything. :P

Have you read The Stranger by Camus? Anyways, reminds me of that book.

I have not. I'm embarrassingly poorly-read for an English major.

I'm trying to make sense of the thing about the Devil versus the illusion of Christ and the...uh...what you wrote about God. (Words fail me.) I think it's just me; having a bit of an issue wrapping my mind around it.

Again, it doesn't really hold up under scrutiny, it's just them grasping at metaphors to try and relate how they're feeling (while they end up saying more or less nothing, instead...)

It seems to ramble a bit in general; I've a short attention span so that's a given.

No, no, that's part of it, both in the satire aspect, and just stemming from the fact that it's a literal stream of consciousness flowing from the narrator into her journal.

Ending was a tad bit awkward in my opinion; seemed a bit unrelated to the air of things.

Again, intentional. It was supposed to be something tangible to shock her out of this pseudo-intellectual, sophomoric-philosophy dream-world she's living in. And in case you missed it (my cousin said he didn't make the connection until a few days after reading it) the idea was that something in their home was radioactive and the narrator is very likely going to die, making her existential insights even more abjectly worthless than they already were.

Uh. Ok. I said this would be coherent; I was wrong. Sorry about that.

Heh, don't worry. You're fine. I really appreciate you reading and commenting. :)

[Suzerain of Sheol]

Oh, Espy, I forgot to mention.

That "Christ is a meme" bit... sort of a nod/"take that" at Joseph Campbell and his Jungian theory that the hero-quest story is part of the collective human experience. And, you know, just poking a bit of fun at how hideously overwritten Campbell's book is, like most "literature". :p

[Arsis_von_Neaera]

Two positives:

1)It's not often I read things word for word. It's even less often that I read things word for word twice. I must admit that I'm somewhat smitten with your writing style. You have a powerful vocabulary that provides vivid imagery to concepts that don't normally strike me as interesting.

2)There's a good bit of philosophy in here that I find remarkably true, though jaded. Much of it's satirical and over dramatized, but for the most part, fairly accurate to some of the philosophies I'm studying. The key difference I notice is very simple, 'cup empty, cup full'. Which I'll explain later.

Other comments:

- I enjoy your character. Half-satire aside, the character is very real, which is something I've noticed some writers struggle with. You obviously didn't struggle with creating the character in this story at all. Your writing and thought processes for said character flowed quite nicely.
- I think the dramatization balances itself out towards the end. Kind of an ObZen happening. I rather like the concept of realizing your dying. It's one I don't get much opportunity to observe, even with the dying.
- I have questions. They might be too personal, but who do you feel like more; the character or the writer? The satire is making fun of yourself more than anything, at least something you once were or something you still contend with yourself over. Have you changed? Are you trying to? Was writing this a way to make that change happen by bringing light to your "plight"? My psychologist is over analyzing.

The story is fantastic. I enjoyed it, twice. Most of the best stories in the world are overly dramatized, yours is just very accurate to the character. It's not often that I get to read the mind of an angry angst ridden, sociopath goth girl.

Shmeh, just thoughts.

[Suzerain of Sheol]

*devours comments*

Appreciate the compliments. I think this is my best short story, though I haven't written many. It's the most concrete, if that's believable...

For your questions. Well, actually, rather than answer them individually, I'll say that for one, despite how it probably looks, this piece wasn't planned or premeditated. It started with the opening 3 or 4 sentences, which at the time were my own thoughts. After I'd wrote them and looked at what I wrote, I considered and thought, hey, I can make this a story. And I think it was the process of self-deflation, going from I'm so damned profound in the initial moments to get over yourself, this is pompous and self-indulgent that really gave me the inspiration to write this.

And it's not so much that I am or ever was this person, believe it or not, rather that I understand this person rather well. (Or maybe I wish I was this person when I was younger. :p I actually didn't start writing seriously until I was in my late teens/early twenties, and I didn't much thinking when I was younger, either.)

But, as I said, it certainly reflects an aspect of my personality. I personally think it's more of an ego thing, and this whole piece was an exercise in self-recrimination. But, nonetheless, I empathize with this character in some ways -- mostly the "lock self in room like lunatic and write grandiose nonsense while hating family" part (:p), even if it isn't directly me speaking. Rather, it is me speaking, but once removed from the direct narrative, if that makes sense.

And... well... honestly... *shrugs* I can't help it, I find angry, angst ridden, sociopath goth girls kind of hilarious. I have a poem that sort of goes along with this same thing, written a ways before, that I don't think I ever posted. Will do that when I get a chance.

Again, thank you for commenting, I very much appreciate your analysis.

[Arsis_von_Neaera]

I caught that this wasn't you. I was assuming that in writing this, much like I do, you were expressing an overly emphasized version of your own thoughts. Which, as you stated, you kind of were. I get it though. Though its similar, its not you. I think its a very interesting, well written perspective. I highly doubt that any teenage angry, angst ridden, sociopath goth girls could have possibly written this, though. Which is why I initially took this to be you. I know a number of goth individuals who, although clever, were never quite this well thought out. It's almost too accurate kind of deal. I suppose that's part of the satire, though I thought the comedy of this was just to be over the top. Not necessarily well written and thought out. I think the clever part is you, the rest is some nonsensical babbling diatribe you might have been "privy" to listen to at some point in life; whether that be self imposed or not.

Right, that's cyclical thinking. You wrote it so clever that its too clever to be considered clever. Which makes you look clever which is why you wrote it too clever to be considered clever... I'm totally rambling at this point, I really hope that didn't make sense.

[Suzerain of Sheol]

That's so insightful I'm almost stunned it applies to something I wrote. :p

*ahem* What I mean is I, of course, planned and plotted all of that with excruciating precision and care.

(actually a balance between those two. ;))

Also, I forgot, there's an entire other angel to it dealing with literary criticism that also sort of worked it's way in there. The title is dealing with that aspect, and yet, it ties into the overall concept that pretentious analyses and speculation as to meaning and intention of the author and so on is... wasteful, almost to the point of providing a false (and hollowing) meaning of it's own (the act of such criticism). More broadly, I think it's saying that there are more important things in life, and they don't require so many (big) words. Or something to that effect.

Or, alternatively, there are no important things in life and language itself is a semantic battle we can't help but lose. If you want to be all morbid about things. :p

[Arsis_von_Neaera]

Or, alternatively, there are no important things in life and language itself is a semantic battle we can't help but lose. If you want to be all morbid about things. :p

I like that. Not so much morbid as it is cup empty. I think it kind of helps to lighten up and open up when you start to realize that certain battles can't be won. Brings about a sort of "if you can't beat em, join em" mindset. The part that worries me is that its a cyclical downward spiral if you don't control it, which is whats happening to my generation (I don't know if your a part of that generation seeing as I haven't the slightest how old you are). It's nice to be able to relax in your writing, coming to an understanding that communication is really just a battle for control that no one really wins; it's kind of... oh, whats the word... it's like releasing... freeing...

...I can't think, but you know what I mean...

Not only that but the purpose of communication gets kind of a boost when it becomes freer and more fluid. No longer trying to win a conversation allows both parties, the listener and the speaker (writer in our case), the ability to involve themselves in the conversation wholeheartedly.

In the immortal words of "Fight Club", 'It's like people really listen to you, they aren't just waiting for their turn to talk.'

[Suzerain of Sheol]

I'm 22, almost 23. So, yeah, my generation too.

And that's a good way to approach it, I think. (Possibly the only "healthy" way) My own views on the issue are largely similar; writing things like this can often be cathartic and purging in a way. At least, I think it works, since I'm relatively stable in my outlook and sentiments.

I do think there's a general tend toward nihilism among our generation, it's troubling. Even more so because it seems mostly subconscious for the most part, almost memetic.