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?

Call Me Lil

In the bottom of a crystal palace, down bellow the lowest translucent and glittering floor, there is a chamber where the weary travelers rest, but for only a moment in an apparition of relief. Then they are spat back out on the black streets to fend for themselves under the shadows of hungry sky scrapers, evading drug dealers, pimps, and whores, diabolical creatures looking to prick you with a pin and put their disease into you. There you can only hope to escape notice, only hope that your own character in this twisted narrative can survive itself.
For I am a cruel God. When I’ve no sun then my creations shall know no sun, when I am alone then so shall all of my little spoon boys suffer the agony and desperation of separation, each one paddling along the great river in their own little eggshell boat armed with discarded sewing needles with which they intend to prick anything which comes anywhere near them in order to make that unwary traveler pay for the crime of having not come along sooner to adore their master and make her into a bright and shinning Goddess of love instead of a cold and vengeful deity.
Look down under the glassy surface of this river. If you look closely you will see that the muddy bottom is lit with tiny lights here and there which give off just enough illumination for you to make out the shapes of the large creatures skimming around the river bed; see the row boat sized catfish with their whiskers as long as those of old Chinese men, trailing alongside them? Observe the water moccasins as long as the river itself, oily black and weaving themselves through the river grasses where they may hide in wait for the last of seven brothers to jump in for a swim and never come back up.
Watch closely now, and you will glimpse one of my more diabolical servants, a siren with the long olive green tale of a fish, wriggling along with webbed fingers outstretched, fanged grimace painted permanently on her slimy white face. The lights flicker on and off in turns, small blue flames immune to the wetness. They mark the places where a treasure has been lost beneath the mud of the riverbed.
Now and again some deranged or desperate seeker ventures here in a little row boat or a canoe armed with snorkel, flippers, and a shovel. A few are slightly more prepared and bring along a harpoon with which they hope to fend of the beasties. It is a strange fact that many are willing to believe in lost treasures, but are just as unwilling to believe in the dragons that guard them. They are the lot that regard the stories of such creatures and all warnings as superstition. Then they meet my children in the river and their minds are forever opened, but it unfortunately does them no good at that point, because the sirens are usually feeding on the tender gray meat wrenched from their cracked cranium.
They are fairly clever my sirens, a result of eating all those brains of drowned oarsmen and fortune seekers. I cannot say that many adventurers appreciate their singing, which is a sound something akin to that of nails being raked down a chalkboard which has been distorted and amplified. They tend to sing in chorus, like coyotes yipping first one, then two, then eight, wailing and warning each other of their proximity. My sirens do not get along well with one another, and so they alert each other as to their whereabouts so that they may all avoid violent territorial disputes, except on rare occasions when the moon is full and they band together to hunt.
There are things in this river which evade my capacity to describe. The best I can do is to say that they are like the ancient ancestors of crocodiles, with lumbering bodies and spade shaped jaws and rows of red and blue jagged plates running down their backs. They open wide their mouths and then for all the world it looks like nothing but a cave, a place to moor your boat and rest for a moment, then snap! You are locked within the beasts belly where you will be slowly digested over the course of a million years.
Rest never lasts for long, (unless you count the million years it may take to be digested) and when it does it tends to extract a heavy toll. There is no safe haven that I have made for you. None whatsoever. You are damned like a hamster to run my coarse endlessly, struggling to stay alert and energetic enough to evade the many traps that I have laid to ensnare you. I have made for you a world of enemies to keep you quick. When they catch you they will devour you, slashing you with teeth and claws like serrated knives and condemning you to absorption through the walls of their large intestines so that what was worthwhile in you can be carried by the rivers of blood to nourish the hungry cells of the beast that it may continue its life devoted to the consumption and digestion of the slow and unworthy.
You will have to be quick to out match me, quicker than tears, quicker than fatigue and rage and desperation. You will have to learn to outlast your own character, which I have only written into this story to feed and amuse my pets. Like a little white feeder mouse you will have to scurry through my maze and evade my cold blooded offspring on their quest to swallow you whole.

Maze

The Labyrinth which began as a unicursal path developed into the Maze.
In a Maze you face the challenges of a multicursal design: paths divide, there are dead ends, trap doors, and illusions designed to deceive.
Many Mazes can be navigated by keeping the right hand to the right wall, and in this way a voyager may find the center. In some cases this rule is void.
What is the secret to finding ones way through a maze?
It is often true that the path which seems correct and most direct does not in fact lead to the heart, it is a deception. In some, there is no way to go back the way you came in, having entered you must proceed forward.
The Messara Labyrinth of Crete lies beneath the surface of the earth. It took two hours to navigate through its dark design if one knew the way. But what if one did not know the way through? It was of the kind of Maze that does not allow a voyager to retrace their steps. Once inside, retreat is impossible, as irrevocable as birth or death. In darkness, unsure of the way, tormented by the certainty that something both terrible and majestic lies in wait at its heart, what manner of man would be able to proceed?

At Messara the entrance to the Labyrinth is in one world, the exit opens into another. From the heart a second journey is launched. Having confronted what waits in the center, the voyager must find their way and emerge into a new land.