Egads, a post
Aug. 22nd, 2007 02:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koilungfish5/7/07 - 750 words editing
6/7/07 - 12/7/07 - Ill
14/7/07 - 22/7/07 - Holiday
23/7/07 - 29/7/07 - Ill
30/7/07 - 1109 words on Taste of Empires
31/7/07 - 18/8/07 - Ill
19/8/07 - 718 words on Sticky Green Treats
20/8/07 - 508 words on Sticky Green Treats
21/8/07 - 638 words on Sticky Green Treats
22/8/07 - A Nightmare
Listen. I am going to tell you something that is absolutely true.
One night - I believe it was Thursday - I dreamt I was awake. Turning over in my bed, I looked down at the floor and saw a book. On picking it up, I found the book to be quite old, printed perhaps twenty or thirty years ago. It was a paperback, and it had not been well cared-for. The pages were very yellow, and spotted with damp, and the glue had cracked so that the pages were half-loose inside the cover. The cover itself was dark, a murky grey-green background against which the darkly dressed figure of Hitler, his face pale and his armband brightly red, stood out vividly. My immediate response was a sensation of nausea, as is normal upon seeing a picture of Hitler, and an urge to drop the book.
Instead, I opened the book. As normal with history books, I flipped through the pages, here noting the spotting and the fading of the paper, and taking in odd words as they glanced past. I caught sight of mention of Nazi ritual magic, of a secret order existing within the higher echelons of the Third Reich. This is hardly surprising, as I had recently finished reading the Illuminatus! trilogy.
Here I came to the photographs. Their heavier, slicker paper had not aged nearly so badly, so that the pictures stood out with all the grainy starkness of a black-and-white photograph. There were perhaps twelve pages of photographs, with two pictures to each page. I looked through them all, but one fixed in my mind, so that without seeming to have turned the pages back I was once against staring at it, staring so intently I could not see the picture below it.
It was a photograph of a low chamber, more a tunnel than a room. The walls were of rough brick, thinly mortared, and the roof was arched. The chamber was very long, and curving slightly, so that the back of the room turned away into blackness. The room had no lighting, no windows, no doors - it was a cellar, perhaps, or a railway tunnel for trains with a maximum clearance of three and a half feet.
The room was full of people.
I say people, but ... they were people before. What they were now, I'm not certain of. The floor of the chamber was of concrete, either very rough or very dusty, the photograph wasn't clear enough to show which. I thought at first that these people were buried up to their hips in the concrete, but then I saw that I was wrong. Their legs had been amputated at the hip joints, so that they sat upon the bases of their torsos. I cannot say that they sat on their backsides, because they were so emaciated, so gaunt - the utter gauntness that anyone who has seen pictures of the victims of the concentration camps cannot fail to remember - that there was no flesh to them, just sunken skin over thin bones. They balanced somehow. I do not know how.
I thought that they wore straightjackets, because their arms were folded around their torsos, but I saw I was wrong there also. Their genitals had been amputated also, so that their skin was taut and featureless. Their arms had been wrapped around their bodies, hands folded under their arms, and then sewn to their torsos. The stitches were invisible, but the placement of the stitches was visible from the pulling and the puckering of the skin.
Their heads were shaven completely bald, which was probably the least of the violations that had been performed.
Over each face was a mask of metal strips, interwoven like a mesh or grid. One strip went over each side of the brow, meeting in the middle with a strip that covered the nose. I do not want to think about why their noses were so truncated. Other strips ran under the eyes, across the cheekbones, up the forehead, back across the ears, around the back of the head. A vertical grill of strips covered the mouth. The strips above and below the eyes protruded up and down so far that nothing could be seen of the eyes, just a dark curving slit. The photograph was too dark to see if there were lips or teeth between the bars over the mouths. Their features were completely obscured, nothing remaining of the flesh of the face but the torn points of the ears, sticking out like little rags above the bars.
All the strips were held on with bolts driven straight into the bone.
These figures - these tortured bodies, maimed and twisted and masked - the caption beneath their picture read "Jewish victims of ritual mutilation".
As I stared at this picture, it became less of a photograph and more of a reality. I saw these unfortunates become real, become living beings - still in black and white, but moving, alive - I saw them breathe and shiver, saw how they twitched and quivered. They moved without consciousness, with the blind idiot vigour of mushrooms.
I saw - or knew, or read - that this chamber was sixty feet below the foundations of Auschwitz Birkenau, and that it had been sealed up in 1944. I saw, or read, or knew, that it had not been opened again until 1979. I saw, or felt, or was the unhappy journalist who lifted the sledgehammer that tore through the wet brick in the low dark corridor. I saw, or held the camera whose flash lit the chamber, of this place, thirty-five years after it was sealed. I knew then, or was told then, or had been told before but only now understood, that this place - these tortured bodies - were like batteries, or living voodoo dolls suffering in the place of some other person.
I awoke, an unknown voice in my mind hissing, "The death signets are still alive!"
6/7/07 - 12/7/07 - Ill
14/7/07 - 22/7/07 - Holiday
23/7/07 - 29/7/07 - Ill
30/7/07 - 1109 words on Taste of Empires
31/7/07 - 18/8/07 - Ill
19/8/07 - 718 words on Sticky Green Treats
20/8/07 - 508 words on Sticky Green Treats
21/8/07 - 638 words on Sticky Green Treats
22/8/07 - A Nightmare
Listen. I am going to tell you something that is absolutely true.
One night - I believe it was Thursday - I dreamt I was awake. Turning over in my bed, I looked down at the floor and saw a book. On picking it up, I found the book to be quite old, printed perhaps twenty or thirty years ago. It was a paperback, and it had not been well cared-for. The pages were very yellow, and spotted with damp, and the glue had cracked so that the pages were half-loose inside the cover. The cover itself was dark, a murky grey-green background against which the darkly dressed figure of Hitler, his face pale and his armband brightly red, stood out vividly. My immediate response was a sensation of nausea, as is normal upon seeing a picture of Hitler, and an urge to drop the book.
Instead, I opened the book. As normal with history books, I flipped through the pages, here noting the spotting and the fading of the paper, and taking in odd words as they glanced past. I caught sight of mention of Nazi ritual magic, of a secret order existing within the higher echelons of the Third Reich. This is hardly surprising, as I had recently finished reading the Illuminatus! trilogy.
Here I came to the photographs. Their heavier, slicker paper had not aged nearly so badly, so that the pictures stood out with all the grainy starkness of a black-and-white photograph. There were perhaps twelve pages of photographs, with two pictures to each page. I looked through them all, but one fixed in my mind, so that without seeming to have turned the pages back I was once against staring at it, staring so intently I could not see the picture below it.
It was a photograph of a low chamber, more a tunnel than a room. The walls were of rough brick, thinly mortared, and the roof was arched. The chamber was very long, and curving slightly, so that the back of the room turned away into blackness. The room had no lighting, no windows, no doors - it was a cellar, perhaps, or a railway tunnel for trains with a maximum clearance of three and a half feet.
The room was full of people.
I say people, but ... they were people before. What they were now, I'm not certain of. The floor of the chamber was of concrete, either very rough or very dusty, the photograph wasn't clear enough to show which. I thought at first that these people were buried up to their hips in the concrete, but then I saw that I was wrong. Their legs had been amputated at the hip joints, so that they sat upon the bases of their torsos. I cannot say that they sat on their backsides, because they were so emaciated, so gaunt - the utter gauntness that anyone who has seen pictures of the victims of the concentration camps cannot fail to remember - that there was no flesh to them, just sunken skin over thin bones. They balanced somehow. I do not know how.
I thought that they wore straightjackets, because their arms were folded around their torsos, but I saw I was wrong there also. Their genitals had been amputated also, so that their skin was taut and featureless. Their arms had been wrapped around their bodies, hands folded under their arms, and then sewn to their torsos. The stitches were invisible, but the placement of the stitches was visible from the pulling and the puckering of the skin.
Their heads were shaven completely bald, which was probably the least of the violations that had been performed.
Over each face was a mask of metal strips, interwoven like a mesh or grid. One strip went over each side of the brow, meeting in the middle with a strip that covered the nose. I do not want to think about why their noses were so truncated. Other strips ran under the eyes, across the cheekbones, up the forehead, back across the ears, around the back of the head. A vertical grill of strips covered the mouth. The strips above and below the eyes protruded up and down so far that nothing could be seen of the eyes, just a dark curving slit. The photograph was too dark to see if there were lips or teeth between the bars over the mouths. Their features were completely obscured, nothing remaining of the flesh of the face but the torn points of the ears, sticking out like little rags above the bars.
All the strips were held on with bolts driven straight into the bone.
These figures - these tortured bodies, maimed and twisted and masked - the caption beneath their picture read "Jewish victims of ritual mutilation".
As I stared at this picture, it became less of a photograph and more of a reality. I saw these unfortunates become real, become living beings - still in black and white, but moving, alive - I saw them breathe and shiver, saw how they twitched and quivered. They moved without consciousness, with the blind idiot vigour of mushrooms.
I saw - or knew, or read - that this chamber was sixty feet below the foundations of Auschwitz Birkenau, and that it had been sealed up in 1944. I saw, or read, or knew, that it had not been opened again until 1979. I saw, or felt, or was the unhappy journalist who lifted the sledgehammer that tore through the wet brick in the low dark corridor. I saw, or held the camera whose flash lit the chamber, of this place, thirty-five years after it was sealed. I knew then, or was told then, or had been told before but only now understood, that this place - these tortured bodies - were like batteries, or living voodoo dolls suffering in the place of some other person.
I awoke, an unknown voice in my mind hissing, "The death signets are still alive!"
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-08-22 01:52 pm (UTC)Having said that - typos.
the roof was an arched. The chamber were very long,
Two there.
I say people, but ... there were people before.
"they were"?
the least worst thing
I would usually call bad grammar for this, but in this extremity of context, I'm not sure whether it's wrong or whether you know something I don't. ??????
no subject
Date: 2007-08-22 02:49 pm (UTC)It was worse at 5 am. Now I have a little perspective, which improves matters greatly.
I didn't want to put any texture on the prose, since it is simply a repetition of something that actually happened [viz, the dream I had]. It doesn't need atmospheric adjectives, it's bad enough on its own!
Which era? I just wrote it down as it was/is/I remember it. Perhaps I think in old-fashioned words? ;)
no subject
Date: 2007-08-22 03:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-22 03:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-22 01:56 pm (UTC)Change "least worst" to "least (awful, foul, terrible, atrocious, etc)," but apart from that, fucking phenomenal. I feel sick.
I'm not the only one who's had stories like this pass through my head, though. That's good to know.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-22 02:51 pm (UTC)I have changed the 'least worst'.
T'wasn't a story. This is, as it says, absolutely true. Written from life, if after a few days' gap.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-22 02:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-22 02:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-22 08:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-22 02:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-22 02:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-22 02:15 pm (UTC)An arched what?
I say people, but ... there were people before. What they were now, I'm not certain of.
Sure you don't mean, 'they were people before'?
Creepity! (Which is not a word.)
no subject
Date: 2007-08-22 02:42 pm (UTC)Yes, bloody creepy. Brrr.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-22 04:58 pm (UTC)Looks like others cleaned out all the typos before me.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-22 08:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-22 08:09 pm (UTC)My only complaint is that the last line seems almost overdramatic, somehow. It doesn't seem to completely connect to the surrealness of the rest of it, perhaps because it's immediately naming the...things and making them just a little less disturbing.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-22 08:40 pm (UTC)The last phrase was the last thing I heard as I woke up. As said, this is true. This is what I dreamt. It is as it is.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-22 08:44 pm (UTC)Well, what's a death signet then?
no subject
Date: 2007-08-22 08:49 pm (UTC)A death signet is ... well, I'm not sure. Sort of, as said, like a voodoo doll, only partly-alive and in reverse. I think.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-22 08:57 pm (UTC)Ah. Cool but utterly utterly creepy.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-22 09:17 pm (UTC)Creepy? I woke up questioning my status as a human being ...
no subject
Date: 2007-08-22 09:21 pm (UTC)Kind of like masking tape.
Humans are capable of freaky thoughts. At least you didn't do it.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-22 10:14 pm (UTC)I believe the question of whether to think of a deed is equal to having done the deed is one that ethiologists discuss quite a bit.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-22 10:16 pm (UTC)A person can think of everything. I can think of feeding the world, doesn't mean I can do it.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-23 08:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-23 09:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-23 07:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-23 08:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-24 11:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-24 12:22 pm (UTC)