Run Mousey Run

How dare they? How dare they take the magick away, to steal it from us like cats stealing the breath from babies? Dark thieves that come to us and civilize us, closing doors, choosing for us, severing us from the magickal kingdom, the vibrant corridors. I know there are doors. I know they are there, even if they have been hidden from my view, blinded as I am by the words for things, the words that decide which things are and which thing aren’t, which experiences are real, which are imagined. How dare they to tell me how I should be. How dare they to cripple me, stripping from me true sight with the way of the word.
They do it because it was done to them and it was done to those who did it to them, and so they perpetuate it. They make the human being a prison, a dark cell cut off from the magick and wonder of the universe. The word is the dark magick that holds us spellbound within our cold bleak cell. How dare they to be such cowards, accessories to the crime if not the perpetuators of the great lie.
I could cry sun black tears leaving purple stains on my cheeks. I am filled with rage and sorrow that I have been taken into their ranks, into the ranks of the dark army. They recruit us when we are children. Now I have been both recruit and recruiter, and my sorrow is all the deeper for that fact.
The things that we have done without knowing what we were doing. Because it was tradition, because it was part of our culture. It was our parents’ way, and their parents before them. Because we come from a long line of slaves. So when will we stand up and break the chains that bind us up and hold us as separate from the strange leaky wet universe without.
We are holed up in here because we are afraid of what lies without. We are afraid of what lies beyond those doors which we have been trained not to see. Like rats running through a maze, we run for the reward, for the cheese, and the cheese makes us want more cheese, and we grow tamer and more and more accustomed to the usual route, so that we do not even notice the passages that lead in other directions, passages that do not lead to the cheese which we are accustomed to, passages that lead away from the familiar, the known.
Run, run on those little legs, run away from the great snake winding its away around the pedestal upon which the world is founded. Run little mouse lest ye be swallowed by the serpent. Let the white coats poke you with their needles, cage you in your cell, and set you in your maze to run for the cheese.
The cheese is good. The cheese is the best thing that you have in this world. And you do not know what the worlds beyond this one would be like. Perhaps there is nothing better than the cheese. Perhaps the other worlds are worse than this. Perhaps. Or perhaps you have been domesticated. Your likes, your dislikes, they have been cultivated in the lab. Wild things don’t like cheese. They run through dark corridors that lead out into the wild wood where the wind blows and the winter comes and the fox and the snake and the peregrine look for you.
Something else happens to the wild, something that cannot be told. Something that can never be understood by or communicated to domestic animals. The wild are possessed by a dark strange something that makes them tingle. The wild are alive, and the domestic are dead, and the domestic fear the life that courses through the wild.
I am domestic and I am wild and the two make war within me, one host of voices screaming for freedom, the other host begging for safety and me in the middle, scarcely able to move in a consistent direction, torn as I am between the many, many voices that cry out in every moment.
But the fact remains. There are doors. There is one right now, waiting for you to acknowledge it, to extend your hand and turn its key and step into the beyond, if only for a moment you can master your habit of running, of running for the cheese and from the wild wood.
Yes, everything that you think you are, you think with the mind they made for you, made for you with the shape of their maze, with their rewards and their punishments. Your parents, your teachers, your politicians and preachers, your friends, your siblings, your neighbors, your lovers, your reporters, your doctors, your favorite movies, TV, and radio shows; the white coats with their needles. Everything that you think is founded on the omission of certain subtle realities. Everything you strive for is a quest suggested to you by the appropriate stimulus.
What are you mousey? Are you a mousey at all? Or are you a string of chemical instructions? Are you a body of habits?
A body of habits.
A body of habits.
A collection of conditioned responses. The bell rings. I am hungry. I am hungry and I run and you run and we run blind down the dark alleys of the world, and the white coats are there, but we do not see them either. We do not see them or the doors. We see nothing and we hope only for cheese. As if filling ourselves with it would somehow make us feel better. But there is no way to feel better when you are dead. No way to pursue true happiness when you are domestic. Why do you pursue those things that the others are doing, that the others have always done, falling in line with tradition? Why preserve their culture, the culture of death? The culture of cowardice and gluttony?
There will never be enough cheese to fill you and you will meet the hunter one day. Maybe not in the shape of a serpent, but in some shape you two will meet.
So why run? Why run at all?
Why not open a door, step out, feel the wind ruffle your fur and meet that other with it’s gleaming yellow eye. How good can cheese be if you are its slave, the slave of the maze and its makers?