#an escape from the so-called servility of his own nature

[textualviolence]

HYBRID-CYBORG DUALISM IN ONE BEING MY BELOVED

#through being made a cyborg in the aim of evolutionary progress #he becomes the very enslaved beast he's been told he was all his life #like the way the hybrid is a metaphor for the colonized subject only ever half-civilized and unevolved #closer to animal than to the colonial standards of man #and anakin all his life striving for the status of humanity. of beyond. greater than humanity. #an escape from the so-called servility of his own nature #and the way palpatine offers him that by literally mutilating him and grafting animal parts onto his body. rendering him a forever slave. #but he is indeed beyond human. more powerful. beyond the confines and limits of human strength and longevity and failibility #does he know? does he realize what he's been made into? Or is it just everyone else who can see it #but it doesn't matter what they see because now its only him and his master for the very rest of time

[true-blue-megamind]

FAN THEORY THURSDAY: Megamind’s Connections Beyond the Film

Before we get started, it’s time for the obligatory SPOILER WARNING!  

In case this hasn’t been made sufficiently obvious by the fact that this is a post about Megamind written in a fan theory series about Megamind and published on a blog dedicated solely to Megamind, please let me just assure that this article is, in fact, about Megamind.  

If you haven’t seen the film yet yet, I have to question why you’re reading this in the first place.  As well as your taste in animated movies.  I’m definitely questioning that.

Over the years I’ve heard several fan theories concerning connections between the film Megamind and various other forms of media.  Today, let’s delve into just a few.

The first one is so obvious it’s almost painful, but it has to be mentioned.  Megamind is a Superman spoof.  Metro Man is clearly based on the Man of Steel himself, with a hefty dose of Elvis Presley and a larger range of character flaws thrown in for good measure.  (He also seems to contain quite a lot of the Popular Jock archetype.)  The character of Megamind is more complex still, combining elements of Alice Cooper and a nineties Goth theater kid with several comic book supervillains. The best known of the last include alien genius Brainiac and mad inventor Lexx Luthor, but they aren’t the only ones.  Some of Megamind’s engineering and technological inventions call to mind Spiderman villain Doctor Octopus even more than Lexx Luthor, and he also shares some parallels with the mad inventor Dr. Sivana in the SHAZAM comics.

Megamind’s most notable of the latter is the similarity of attitudes toward society.  Both Megamind and Dr. Sivana started off trying to use their inventions for good—the first in the classroom and the second for the betterment of mankind—but both became bitter when people mocked and shunned them.  For Dr. Sivana, this led to a desire to conquer all of Earth while for Megamind, in a sort of microcosm, it led to a similar drive to take over Metro City.  Both Lexx Luthor and Dr. Sivana have, perhaps, the strongest connections to Megamind as share, deep down, a desire to help or protect mankind, and as Lexx Luthor, like Megamind, harbors a secret love for the reporter damsel in their respective stories.  (This desire to do good, especially in the face of corrupt officials, ties into another Megamind fan theory that I will likely discuss in more detail in a later post.)

The connection between Megamind and Alice Cooper, by the way, was extremely intentional.  The creators stated in an interview that, like Alice Cooper, Megamind’s dark, evil self is, in fact, a stage persona.  (Even their clothing, consisting largely of black leather and spikes, is similar.)  That fact is illustrated in the film as we can see that Megamind’s behaviors on- and off-camera tend to be vastly different.  Even as a villain, he is merely playing a role, although in the case of Megamind that role has begun to merge with his self-identity.

There are, however, hints within the world of DreamWorks that Megamind has other connections as well.  The first is fairly recent and intensely interesting. In the Rise of the Guardians, Jamie Bennett, a young boy who still steadfastly believes in the seemingly impossible, mentions “aliens in Michigan,” only to be scoffed at by his friends.  Because Metro City is located in Michigan, (as can be seen briefly when the Death Ray is fired from space,) many fans theorize that the “aliens in Michigan” are none other than Megamind, Minion, and, perhaps, Metro Man. 

This would indicate that the two stories take place in the same world, and that Megamind’s adventures, while well-known in Metro City itself, have been covered up and kept secret from the rest of the world.  (Imagine moving to a moderately-sized city only to discover that—surprise!—there’s an extraterrestrial supervillain in residence and, oh, by the way, if you live downtown homeowners’ insurance is ridiculous!)

The second inter-film connection is less clear, but has spawned some interesting fan theories as well.  The idea is that, like Rise of the Guardians, Monsters VS. Aliens also takes place in the same reality as Megamind.  It’s not too far fetched—after all, both films involve extraterrestrials and amazing inventions—but there is one specific theory that really ties the two together.  Consider this for a moment: Megamind is a blue alien with incredible intelligence who hails from a destroyed planet.  Does that sound like any other DreamWorks character you know?  If you’ve seen Monster VS. Aliens, the antagonist, Gallaxhar, probably springs to mind.

According to Fandom.com, Gallaxhar’s official backstory is that he “destroyed his home planet” for the implied reason that “he experienced bad childhood and unhappy marriage.”  The fan theory is that that Gallaxhar’s planet was, in fact, Megamind’s home world, and that the former created or harnessed the black hole which destroyed it.  This would explain why Megamind’s people—as well as Metro Man’s—didn’t have time to escape despite being space-faring.  You see, black holes take millions of years to develop, and even a rogue black hole would take about a million to shift and swallow an entire solar system, so if the event had occurred naturally, there should have been plenty of time to build an entire fleet of spacecraft and leave for Earth or another safe planet.  (The fact that Megamind’s parents set his escape pod’s navigation system for Earth indicates that they knew of its existence.)

Of course, despite their large heads and blue skin tones, there are quite a few physical differences between Megamind and Gallaxhar.  The first is humanoid while the second has four eyes and tentacles instead of legs.  Fan theories have explanations for that, too, however.  

There appear to be two schools of thought on the subject.  The first is that Gallaxhar was another breed of alien living on the planet, possibly a servile race different from Minions, and the second is that part of Gallaxhar’s “bad childhood” involved being experimented upon, thus giving him his bizarre appearance and his seeming obsession with experimenting on others.  (There is some disagreement in the Megamind fandom about exactly why Gallaxhar was subjected to such treatment, ranging from falling into the hands of an unscrupulous scientist to being part of an experimental medical program.  The latter fan theory suggests that Gallaxhar was both blind and paraplegic, and that his additional eyes and tentacle “legs” were meant to rectify that, but that those physical differences made him an outsider, thus leading to his unhappy life and ultimate hatred for his own planet.)

If that were true, many may wonder what, exactly, Megamind might do if he ever found out about Gallaxhar.  Well, good news!  Just like there’s an app for everything, there’s a fan theory for that, too!  I will warn you, however, that this one is, frankly, build upon pretty thin evidence.  However, it’s interesting enough to be worth relating.

There is a character in Monsters VS. Aliens named General Warren R. Monger who, on the surface, is exactly what he appears to be: a high-ranking military man.  However, there are a few things that fans point to as possible evidence that Monger isn’t what he seems.  

The first is so simple that, alone, it would be inconsequential.  Monger rose through the ranks uncommonly fast, so much so that it caused some comment among others.  The second is significantly odder; Monger claims to be ninety years old despite looking like he is in his late forties.  Now, of course, this may have simply been the character exaggerating or messing with the “monsters” under his care, but some fans say it’s more than that, and claim that Monger chose that age because he was unfamiliar with human lifespans.  Next there is the fact that Monger is so intelligent that, despite one of the beings in his containment facility. Doctor Cockroach, being a super-genius, Monger outwits every escape attempt the monsters can make.  Then, of course, there is the fact that, despite his brusque manner, Monger seems to actually sympathize with the inhuman people he is charged with containing, and even pushes for them to be given a chance to prove themselves.  There is the oddity that, although he is assigned to the secret military base at “Area Fifty-Something,” Monger seems to disappear a lot, often for days at a time.  Finally, there are a few key physical and technological attributes: Monger has some odd and incredibly energetic facial expression—including a nearly maniacal smile and a dark scowl—as well as a jet pack that he appears to have constructed himself and green eyes.

I’m still not certain I see the resemblance, but maybe there are some similarities?  What do you think?

If you’re familiar with Metro City’s resident blue alien, you can probably see where this is going.  Although it’s not a popular theory, I’ve heard it suggested in the Megamind fandom that Monger is, in fact, Megamind disguised using his holowatch.  (This is why the green eyes are significant; Megamind’s eye color is the only aspect of his appearance that the holowatch doesn’t change.  However, I feel compelled to note that the shade of green appears to be different.) Fans insist that it would have been easy for someone as incredibly brilliant as Megamind to hack government systems and forge documents such as birth certificates thoroughly enough to dupe even U.S. Military Intelligence. The two jet packs, some have contested, look different either because of the disguise or because the one featured in Monster VS. Aliens is an older model. I’ve even seen the fact that both Megamind and Monger begin with M being pointed to as possible evidence that the latter is no more than an invention of the former.

The argument is as follows: as Monsters VS. Aliens takes place in 2009, one year before events in Megamind, it’s possible that Megamind, still being a villain, created an alter-ego which he could use to help him search for and deal with other alien life.  (He is shown to be painfully lonely, and the Megamind comics reveal his desperate desire to find other survivors from his home planet.)  Upon figuring out who Gallaxhar was, and more importantly what he had done, Megamind wanted to be part of taking him down.  But he couldn’t be too open about it; he was, after all, still a “Bad Guy.”  This theory explains Monger’s frequent long absences—during those time Megamind was back in Metro City taking care of his regular business— as well as why Monger had a secret soft spot for the “monsters.”  Megamind, having always been treated like a monster himself, would naturally want to give them a chance, but wouldn’t dare behave in too overtly friendly a manner as it would have aroused suspicion.

As I said, support for that particular theory is, perhaps, a little thin, especially given the fact the Monsters VS. Aliens preceded Megamind, so character designs from the former are unlikely to have been influenced by the latter.  Nonetheless, I admit to appreciating the complexity and creativity of it.  It’s an undeniably fun theory. If they haven’t already, maybe someone will write a fan fiction about it one day.

Those are only a few of the theories out there connecting Megamind with other fandoms.  One could go on and on about the subject, but I won’t torture readers by doing that.  Nonetheless, it illustrates once again the immense love and original thought that Megamind fans put into developing their theories!  I dare say that few other animated movies have earned a following so dedicated and inventive…  But, then, any of us who love the film Megamind will tell you that it has more than earned the consideration!

#Megamind #Megamind fan theory #Megamind movie #Megamind fan theories #comic books #comic book #superheroes #supervillain #DreamWorks #DWA #Monsters vs Aliens #Rise of the Guardians #Rise Guardians #Monsters #Aliens

[moody-bloosh]

kindly ones (giorno giovanna)

content warning: yandere, emotional abuse, kidnapping, mind break

He calls it mercy and it feels strange.

He lets you bury them at the very least. Truthfully, you shouldn’t be surprised anymore. This was always the end result. You’d always clean up his mess. It was just that after all these years, you hoped you would have been able to escape him. But you should’ve known better. You had a library’s worth of words for their eulogies but in the end you wouldn’t dare to break the painful silence.

You keep at it, burying your family with dirt caked fingers and a river of tears.

You wept for the senseless loss of life, for the hole in your heart you’d have to live with for the rest of your life. Naturally, he holds you while you cry and you want nothing more than to rip his hands away from you. Sometimes it still feels like one big nightmare. You desperately hoped for all of it to be fake. Even as you walked away from their graves, even as their blood still stained your fingertips, you prayed to wake up. But the hands locked around your own were as real and painful as a blade.

You can’t wash it off.

He rests his head on your lap while you idly twirl your fingers around his locks. You thought you’d seen the last of him that afternoon. His hair no longer an inky black but now as radiant as the sun. Then, he held your hand as the sun drifted off to sleep and he told you of his dream. And the young, foolish you, drunk on the promise of love had agreed to go wherever he went. So what if death chased after you from every turn, so what if you walked the knife’s edge? You were with him and that was all that mattered to you. Because he was Giorno Giovanna, beautiful, thoughtful, and radiant.

And then you began to see him for what he really was.

You don’t know when it began perhaps that horrid day in Rome? Or were there seeds of it that you hadn’t even noticed? There was no use dwelling on it now, because you’ve sobered up to the fact that he held your strings and you couldn’t cut them off. Suddenly, he began to keep you from running missions for the gang, limiting your movements, keeping you beside him at all times. Until it turned to him having to know where you were at all times. He limited your interactions with others, and then he finally played his real hand.

One day you awoke in his quarters, with barely any recollection of the night before. He placed a sleepy kiss on your lips and when you tried to push him away, the tinkling of chains greeted you. You realized quickly, that openly defying him would only result in pointless pain, bruises and scars he would heal just so he could make new ones. And even some punishments that you feared had broken something in you that even he couldn’t fix. So you decided you would turn the tables on him. You would blindly go through the motions and keep him happy. Let him play out his demented fantasy. So what if he held your strings? You held his heart. But then you underestimated him. No matter how many times he would suffocate you with his overbearing presence, no matter how many days he kept you chained to his bed. You still- you wanted to believe that somewhere beneath the veneer of his warped love that he was still the sweet and kind boy you had grown up with.

You underestimated him.

“Please, they don’t have anything to do with this.”

“You should’ve considered the consequences to your actions better,” he says, voice even as he ties you to his chair. “You’re going to watch every second of this, you’re going to know a fraction of what I felt when you tried to get away from me.”

Your screams and pleas reverberate around his office. They fade into the walls and sink into the blood that splatters on the marble floor.

Some days, he doesn’t even have to ask you to say you love him.

These days, you are pliant and servile. Your eyes ring hollow and your words are empty. Some things, even Giorno couldn’t breathe life into. But that was alright, he could just start all over again.

#yandere #yandere x reader #yandere imagines #jjba #yandere jjba #golden wind #vento aureo #giorno giovanna #giorno x reader #jojo x reader #play #side b

[the-siren-saga]

Moirah’s Quest

The ship was quiet as it neared the unmapped subrealm of Altamir'zin. The only sound was the soft mechanical whirring and beeping of the ship's various systems, working hour after hour to keep the crew alive and moving.

"Uvall," Moirah said softly, resting her hand on her assistant's shoulder in an attempt to put the nervous man at ease. "Are we nearly there?"

"Yes, ma'am," the wiry and somewhat high-strung Dekn answered. He hated how easily he seemed to slip into his old timid, servile persona, especially with the great pains that Moirah had taken to make sure he knew it was unnecessary since he'd come into her employ.

"You can just call me Moirah, you know."

Uvall chuckled lightly, though it was more for her benefit than his own. He didn't like seeming traumatized in a way that could be seen as inconvenient. "Ha, yeah, old habits. Sorry 'bout that," he laughed, in a rather forced manner. "But, yeah, we're getting close. I used the codes Lysandra gave us to hack the IFF so the border system thinks we're a Purple Rose ship."

Moirah smiled brightly and patted her assistant on the shoulder. "You're a fucking genius, Uvall. Great work." He really had made a lot of progress since they’d started working together. Moirah was never one for mentorship, but when she met Uvall, she felt there was no other choice. So, she started teaching him her trade– security, diplomacy, information dealing, and infiltration– and found that he excelled in it.

"Hey, we're almost there," Uvall said after a while, before picking up the mic. "Purple Rose vessel 87724 requesting clearance for entry."

A muffled voice came through the other side. "Glory to the Faithful, for we shall ensure His Ascension."

Uvall looked back at Moirah, who flashed him a sympathetic, concerned look. Do I have to? he asked her through their mental link.

Yeah, Moirah replied. I'm sorry, I know it hurts.

Uvall swallowed his pride, giving the countersign. "Glory to the God-Emperor, for by His Ascension shall our faith be rewarded." To his credit, the immense revulsion he had at that phrase didn't really show in his voice.

"Welcome, my brother in service. What's your destination?" the guard asked.

Uvall cringed, but pushed forward, his resolve stronger than steel. "I have a lowly piece of heretical scum with me who requires purification by the Twenty-Second Sacrament."

"Name and division?"

Uvall had been prepared for this, and slipped a new name into the registry. "Jessamine Thallios," he answered immediately. "Of the Samael'evri encampment."

The guard laughed at this. "All the way out there? Well, shit. No wonder she was tempted to heresy so easily."

They have no idea, Moirah transmitted to her assistant. She had changed into a simple white dress and put a glamour on herself, so that to most who saw her, she would appear much younger and less threatening. "Here, dope me," she said matter-of-factly once the radio was off, handing Uvall a vial and a syringe.

"...You sure about this?"

"As sure as I've ever been of anything," Moirah answered in the same brisk tones. "Just do it before they figure out we're up to something."

Uvall performed the injection with the unflinching proficiency of a practiced medic, catching Moirah as the drug began to take effect and bringing her to rest on a gurney that they'd wheeled onto the ship for precisely this purpose. The drug in the syringe was a formula that Moirah had stolen from one of Andras's facilities a long time ago, capable of inducing what looked like a deep sleep while preserving all higher brain function and psionic abilities.

From this point until he woke her up, he would be on his own.

"87724, hang tight, we're bringing you in for processing."

Within a few minutes, Uvall had wheeled Moirah into an expansive brutalist monstrosity of a compound. Processing, as the guard had called it, was a long and grueling series of questions meant to gauge the nature and severity of "Jessamine's" crimes. After what seemed like hours, the session was, mercifully, over. "Through this door," the interrogator said, "then down that hallway until you see a blue metal door with a sign that says CR 1–25. Those are the conditioning rooms. Take her into room ten. Our Eternal Master is here at the facility today, so He will take it from there."

He's here?! Uvall thought to himself, taking refuge in Moirah's shield to avoid anyone else overhearing. "Thank you. Elucidis be praised," he said by way of greeting, bowing his head respectfully. If the interrogator returned the greeting, Uvall didn't stop to acknowledge it.

On the way to the conditioning rooms, Uvall began to get a massive, pounding headache, intercut with moments that seemed to be seen through another's eyes, and cast in a strange, purple light...

"You are a disgrace to me, Malistrade," Marchosias sneered, striking his Consort across the face. "You knew about the treachery of Lysandra Myrrine, her little ‘Random Element’ scheme, and you did nothing to prevent the HARM THAT HER ACTIONS WOULD CAUSE."

Malistrade staggered backward, gripping a table to balance himself. "Master, I… I never intended to aid her by my inaction, there were so many possible futures surrounding the Irinith child's escape that I–"

"Don't try to explain yourself. Your gift belongs to me, just like the rest of you, and you've betrayed me by keeping your visions a secret."

Uvall stopped in the middle of the hallway, nearly doubling over from how clearly he saw and felt everything in that vision. Was that retrocognition, or was Malistrade actually here? Suddenly, he felt very small. Usually, when he saw through the eyes of one of the others in his triad, he could count on Moirah to reassure and comfort him. He could count on her to be there for him until it passed and to remind him to take care of himself while it was happening.

He brushed a strand of hair out of Moirah's face as they neared CR 10. Not much longer now, he transmitted, knowing she could still hear him through the effects of the sedative.

The door to Conditioning Room 10 opened automatically as Uvall entered with Moirah, and immediately, he felt the intensely blissful presence of Marchosias Aversen. Malistrade, who was standing at attention against the back wall, locked eyes with Uvall, and an unspoken contract formed between the two. We protect each other. We have no other choice.

Marchosias, much friendlier and more affable than he'd been in Uvall's vision, stepped forward to greet him. "It's great to see you. I must admit, I don't make it out to Samael'evri very often, but it pleases me to know that even so far from me, there are those of you who keep the faith." He put one hand on Uvall's shoulder, pulling him slightly closer. "Malistrade, guard the door. I don't want anyone walking in on us."

"As you command," Malistrade answered promptly, moving to exit the room and stand guard.

"Now that we're alone– well, alone with the exception of the sedated heretic you've brought me– I think you and I should have a talk."

Uvall scanned the room for things he could use to his advantage. Marchosias's back was turned to Moirah, that was good. He slipped his hand in his pocket, and found the device that Moirah had given him– a device that, when activated, would tell the bracelet around her wrist to produce an electric shock that would wake her from her chemically induced sleep. Not yet, he thought to himself. Soon, but not yet. "Yes, my God-Emperor. Anything you wish."

Marchosias smiled wickedly and looked deep into Uvall's eyes, causing him to reflexively look down. "You know, I very rarely have problems with my Consort. I've trained him well, and his behavior is, most of the time, exemplary. But today, since you've shown up, he seems to have picked up a bit of a rebellious streak." Caressing Uvall's shoulder, he lowered his voice, slipping into a hypnotic baritone. "Now, I wonder why it is that a farm boy from Samael'evri could have that effect on him. Tell me who you are, I want the satisfaction of hearing you say it in your own voice."

"I'm… I'm Ezra Thallios. Jessamine's my sister. If you'll double check the membership manifest, you'll see both our names listed…"

He could feel himself succumbing. The power was too strong– if he kept fighting it, he'd end up like Shanna, with no more strength to resist.

"Nonsense. There is no Jessamine and Ezra Thallios. You are Uvall Candon, and that woman's name is Moirah Averil." Marchosias paused for a moment. "Which means that you brought Moirah Averil right to me. Asleep." He turned to Moirah, cupping her cheek with his hand. "What a prize you've brought me, Uvall. I knew that I could turn that… connection my Consort seems to have with you to my advantage."

"It was easy," Uvall said, thanking the Hethe for making him such a good actor. "She was willing to walk right into the belly of the beast as long as there was even a chance of finding the Herald again."

"She'll do much better in my service. As will you, Uvall. You, and Malistrade, and that unfortunate test subject of Andras's… think of the endless possibilities," Marchosias purred, turning back to Uvall, his voice becoming hypnotic once again. "Say you'll be mine. Say that I own you, that you can't get enough of me, that you long to please me."

"I… I belong to…" It was so easy to fall into this. It felt so nice.

Another vision of another room in another facility much like this. Marchosias whispering into Shanna's ear. "You can walk away from this free and safe, as long as you just… let… go."

"I'm the apprentice of Moirah Averil, and I sure as fuck don't belong to you," he said, activating the device.

Moirah jolted awake and gripped the back of Marchosias's neck before he knew what was happening. Using the same bracelet that had woken her up, she delivered a shock powerful enough to paralyze him, sending him crumpling to the ground. "You… you treacherous…"

"It's not going to work, Marchosias. You know what I can do." Moirah kicked him in the stomach, enjoying the way he was unable to defend himself. "I'd wager that I'm one of only three people in the Lathrym you've ever been scared of."

Marchosias hissed in pain. "I'm not scared of–"

"You're scared of consequences. You're scared of the things you can't break, the things you can't control. You are terrified of random elements, and regardless of anyone else's claims to the title? I'm the most unpredictable of them all. And I bet that just makes you wake up in a cold sweat, doesn't it." She kicked him again, snickering quietly as he cried out. "This is nothing compared to the pain you've inflicted upon others, Marchosias. Nothing. Caris Euphrasia, Laurien Adaire, Timothée Solal, Penperin Ilsenthe, Idele Serrion… Shanna Averil."

"I gave Shanna Averil everything," he spat. "You have no right to take her from me."

She bent down, taking Marchosias's ceremonial dagger from its sheath and holding it to his neck. "Tell me where she is, or I will kill you where you lie."

It's not his time yet, Moirah, Uvall spoke into her mind. Malistrade showed me what must come to pass. There's no way it'll be this easy.

It's not like he knows that, Moirah transmitted in return.

"You think I'd tell you, Moirah? You haven't been very nice to me," Marchosias teased with a confident smirk.

She drew the dagger across his neck, enough to draw blood while not doing any serious damage. "Don't test me," she hissed. "I have suffered too much and lost too many to care if I hurt you now."

"Room six," he said, his expression revealing not a trace of fear or worry over the predicament. "But if you think this is over, you're severely–"

"I've heard enough." Dropping the dagger, she charged the bracelet and grabbed the back of his neck again, this time hitting him with enough of a charge to knock the Dekn Master out for at least a few hours. "Dear God of Beetles, I can still feel his hand on my– Where's Shanna?" she asked. "I don't trust a word out of his mouth, I need to be certain."

"Room six, I made sure. Get his keycard." After the brief moment it took for Moirah to get the keycard, and Uvall to switch off the cameras in the hallway and erase the footage from CR 10, the two of them left the room. "If he asks, I incapacitated you," Uvall said casually to Malistrade before heading to room six. Malistrade said nothing in return, but could be seen to smile a bit in pride, despite himself.

***

Gripping the sides of her cot and quietly crying, Shanna Averil looked like a completely different person than she was when Moirah last saw her. "...Aunt Moirah?" she asked weakly, looking up to see Moirah and Uvall enter the room.

Moirah stepped closer, expanding her shield to envelop the other woman and nullify her ability. "Yes, Shanna, it's me. I'm here," she whispered, helping her off of the cot. "I've got you, don't worry. We're going home now."

"Back to Ersis?" she asked, clinging to her rescuer for dear life.

"Back with me."

Moirah and Shanna Averil had both been through so much pain, so much sorrow, just to get to this point, but it was okay. They had each other now, they were a family again. And nothing could change that.

#arkn legacy #arkn x #arkn mythos #the siren's saga #the siren saga #this is IT guys this is the one i've been waiting to publish

[afrikan-mapambano]

George Jackson: Black Revolutionary

By Walter Rodney, November 1971 :

"To most readers in this continent, starved of authentic information by the imperialist news agencies, the name of George Jackson is either unfamiliar or just a name. The powers that be in the United States put forward the official version that George Jackson was a dangerous criminal kept in maximum security in Americas toughest jails and still capable of killing a guard at Soledad Prison. They say that he himself was killed attempting escape this year in August. Official versions given by the United States of everything from the Bay of Pigs in Cuba to the Bay of Tonkin in Vietnam have the common characteristic of standing truth on its head. George Jackson was jailed ostensibly for stealing 70 dollars. He was given a sentence of one year to life because he was black, and he was kept incarcerated for years under the most dehumanizing conditions because he discovered that blackness need not be a badge of servility but rather could be a banner for uncompromising revolutionary struggle. He was murdered because he was doing too much to pass this attitude on to fellow prisoners. George Jackson was political prisoner and a black freedom fighter. He died at the hands of the enemy.

Once it is made known that George Jackson was a black revolutionary in the white mans jails, at least one point is established, since we are familiar with the fact that a significant proportion of African nationalist leaders graduated from colonialist prisons, and right now the jails of South Africa hold captive some of the best of our brothers in that part of the continent. Furthermore, there is some considerable awareness that ever since the days of slavery the U.S.A. is nothing but a vast prison as far as African descendants are concerned. Within this prison, black life is cheap, so it should be no surprise that George Jackson was murdered by the San Quentin prison authorities who are responsible to Americas chief prison warder, Richard Nixon. What remains is to go beyond the generalities and to understand the most significant elements attaching to George Jacksons life and death.

When he was killed in August this year, George Jackson was twenty nine years of age and had spent the last fifteen [correction: 11 years] behind bars—seven of these in special isolation. As he himself put it, he was from the lumpen. He was not part of the regular producer force of workers and peasants. Being cut off from the system of production, lumpen elements in the past rarely understood the society which victimized them and were not to be counted upon to take organized revolutionary steps within capitalist society. Indeed, the very term lumpen proletariat was originally intended to convey the inferiority of this sector as compared with the authentic working class.

Yet George Jackson, like Malcolm X before him, educated himself painfully behind prison bars to the point where his clear vision of historical and contemporary reality and his ability to communicate his perspective frightened the U.S. power structure into physically liquidating him. Jacksons survival for so many years in vicious jails, his self-education, and his publication of Soledad Brother were tremendous personal achievements, and in addition they offer on interesting insight into the revolutionary potential of the black mass in the U.S.A., so many of whom have been reduced to the status of lumpen.

Under capitalism, the worker is exploited through the alienation of part of the product of his labour. For the African peasant, the exploitation is effected through manipulation of the price of the crops which he laboured to produce. Yet, work has always been rated higher than unemployment, for the obvious reason that survival depends upon the ability to obtain work. Thus, early in the history of industrialization, workers coined the slogan the right to work. Masses of black people in the U.S.A. are deprived of this basic right. At best they live in a limbo of uncertainty as casual workers, last to be hired and first to be fired. The line between the unemployed or criminals cannot be dismissed as white lumpen in capitalist Europe were usually dismissed.

The latter were considered as misfits and regular toilers served as the vanguard. The thirty-odd million black people in the U.S.A. are not misfits. They are the most oppressed and the most threatened as far as survival is concerned. The greatness of George Jackson is that he served as a dynamic spokesman for the most wretched among the oppressed, and he was in the vanguard of the most dangerous front of struggle.

Jail is hardly an arena in which one would imagine that guerrilla warfare would take place. Yet, it is on this most disadvantaged of terrains that blacks have displayed the guts to wage a war for dignity and freedom. In Soledad Brother, George Jackson movingly reveals the nature of this struggle as it has evolved over the last few years. Some of the more recent episodes in the struggle at San Quentin prison are worth recording. On February 27th this year, black and brown (Mexican) prisoners announced the formation of a Third World Coalition. This came in the wake of such organizations as a Black Panther Branch at San Quentin and the establishment of SATE (Self-Advancement Through Education). This level of mobilisation of the nonwhite prisoners was resented and feared by white guards and some racist white prisoners. The latter formed themselves into a self-declared Nazi group, and months of violent incidents followed. Needless to say, with white authority on the side of the Nazis, Afro and Mexican brothers had a very hard time. George Jackson is not the only casualty on the side of the blacks. But their unity was maintained, and a majority of white prisoners either refused to support the Nazis or denounced them. So, even within prison walls the first principle to be observed was unity in struggle. Once the most oppressed had taken the initiative, then they could win allies.

The struggle within the jails is having wider and wider repercussions every day.

Firstly, it is creating true revolutionary cadres out of more and more lumpen. This is particularly true in the jails of California, but the movement is making its impact felt everywhere from Baltimore to Texas. Brothers inside are writing poetry, essays and letters which strip white capitalist America naked. Like the Soledad Brothers, they have come to learn that sociology books call us antisocial and brand us criminals, when actually the criminals are in the social register. The names of those who rule America are all in the social register.

Secondly, it is solidifying the black community in a remarkable way. Petty bourgeois blacks also feel threatened by the manic police, judges and prison officers. Black intellectuals who used to be completely alienated from any form of struggle except their personal hustle now recognize the need to ally with and take their bearings from the street forces of the black unemployed, ghetto dwellers and prison inmates.

Thirdly, the courage of black prisoners has elicited a response from white America. The small band of white revolutionaries has taken a positive stand. The Weathermen decried Jacksons murder by placing a few bombs in given places and the Communist Party supported the demand by the black prisoners and the Black Panther Party that the murder was to be investigated. On a more general note, white liberal America has been disturbed. The white liberals never like to be told that white capitalist society is too rotten to be reformed. Even the established capitalist press has come out with esposes of prison conditions, and the fascist massacres of black prisoners at Attica prison recently brought Senator Muskie out with a cry of enough.

Fourthly (and for our purposes most significantly) the efforts of black prisoners and blacks in America as a whole have had international repercussions. The framed charges brought against Black Panther leaders and against Angela Davis have been denounced in many parts of the world. Committees of defense and solidarity have been formed in places as far as Havana and Leipzig. OPAAL declared August 18th as the day of international solidarity with Afro-Americans; and significantly most of their propaganda for this purpose ended with a call to Free All Political Prisoners.

For more than a decade now, peoples liberation movements in Vietnam, Cuba, Southern Africa, etc., have held conversations with militants and progressives in the U.S.A. pointing to the duality and respective responsibilities of struggle within the imperialist camp. The revolution in the exploited colonies and neo-colonies has as its objective the expulsion of the imperialists: the revolution in the metropolis is to transform the capitalist relations of production in the countries of their origin. Since the U.S.A. is the overlord of world imperialism, it has been common to portray any progressive movement there as operating within the belly of the beast. Inside an isolation block in Soledad or San Quentin prisons, this was not merely a figurative expression. George Jackson knew well what it meant to seek for heightened socialist and humanist consciousness inside the belly of the white imperialist beast.

International solidarity grows out of struggle in different localities.This is the truth so profoundly and simply expressed by Che Guevara when he called for the creation of one, two, three - many Vietnams. It has long been recognized that the white working class in the U.S.A is historically incapable of participating (as a class) in anti-imperialist struggle. White racism and Americas leading role in world imperialism transformed organized labour in the U.S. into a reactionary force. Conversely, the black struggle is internationally significant because it unmasks the barbarous social relations of capitalism and places the enemy on the defensive on his own home ground. This is amply illustrated in the political process which involved the three Soledad Brothers—George Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo and John Clutchette—as well as Angela Davis and a host of other blacks now behind prison bars in the U.S.A."

[galeahad]

Live Not By Lies

There was a time when we dared not rustle a whisper. But now we write and read samizdat and, congregating in the smoking rooms of research institutes, heartily complain to each other of all they are muddling up, of all they are dragging us into! There’s that unnecessary bravado around our ventures into space, against the backdrop of ruin and poverty at home; and the buttressing of distant savage regimes; and the kindling of civil wars; and the ill-thought-out cultivation of Mao Zedong (at our expense to boot)—in the end we’ll be the ones sent out against him, and we’ll have to go, what other option will there be? And they put whomever they want on trial, and brand the healthy as mentally ill—and it is always “they,” while we are—helpless.

We are approaching the brink; already a universal spiritual demise is upon us; a physical one is about to flare up and engulf us and our children, while we continue to smile sheepishly and babble:

“But what can we do to stop it? We haven’t the strength.”

We have so hopelessly ceded our humanity that for the modest handouts of today we are ready to surrender up all principles, our soul, all the labors of our ancestors, all the prospects of our descendants—anything to avoid disrupting our meager existence. We have lost our strength, our pride, our passion. We do not even fear a common nuclear death, do not fear a third world war (perhaps we’ll hide away in some crevice), but fear only to take a civic stance! We hope only not to stray from the herd, not to set out on our own, and risk suddenly having to make do without the white bread, the hot water heater, a Moscow residency permit.

We have internalized well the lessons drummed into us by the state; we are forever content and comfortable with its premise: we cannot escape the environment, the social conditions; they shape us, “being determines consciousness.” What have we to do with this? We can do nothing.

But we can do—everything!—even if we comfort and lie to ourselves that this is not so. It is not “they” who are guilty of everything, but we ourselves, only we!

Some will counter: But really, there is nothing to be done! Our mouths are gagged, no one listens to us, no one asks us. How can we make them listen to us?

To make them reconsider—is impossible.

The natural thing would be simply not to reelect them, but there are no re-elections in our country.

In the West they have strikes, protest marches, but we are too cowed, too scared: How does one just give up one’s job, just go out onto the street?

All the other fateful means resorted to over the last century of Russia’s bitter history are even less fitting for us today—true, let’s not fall back on them! Today, when all the axes have hewn what they hacked, when all that was sown has borne fruit, we can see how lost, how drugged were those conceited youths who sought, through terror, bloody uprising, and civil war, to make the country just and content. No thank you, fathers of enlightenment! We now know that the vileness of the means begets the vileness of the result. Let our hands be clean!

So has the circle closed? So is there indeed no way out? So the only thing left to do is wait inertly: What if something just happens by itself?

But it will never come unstuck by itself, if we all, every day, continue to acknowledge, glorify, and strengthen it, if we do not, at the least, recoil from its most vulnerable point.

From lies.

When violence bursts onto the peaceful human condition, its face is flush with self-assurance, it displays on its banner and proclaims: “I am Violence! Make way, step aside, I will crush you!” But violence ages swiftly, a few years pass—and it is no longer sure of itself. To prop itself up, to appear decent, it will without fail call forth its ally—Lies. For violence has nothing to cover itself with but lies, and lies can only persist through violence. And it is not every day and not on every shoulder that violence brings down its heavy hand: It demands of us only a submission to lies, a daily participation in deceit—and this suffices as our fealty.

And therein we find, neglected by us, the simplest, the most accessible key to our liberation: a personal nonparticipation in lies! Even if all is covered by lies, even if all is under their rule, let us resist in the smallest way: Let their rule hold not through me!

And this is the way to break out of the imaginary encirclement of our inertness, the easiest way for us and the most devastating for the lies. For when people renounce lies, lies simply cease to exist. Like parasites, they can only survive when attached to a person.

We are not called upon to step out onto the square and shout out the truth, to say out loud what we think—this is scary, we are not ready. But let us at least refuse to say what we do not think!

This is the way, then, the easiest and most accessible for us given our deep-seated organic cowardice, much easier than (it’s scary even to utter the words) civil disobedience à la Gandhi.

Our way must be: Never knowingly support lies! Having understood where the lies begin (and many see this line differently)—step back from that gangrenous edge! Let us not glue back the flaking scales of the Ideology, not gather back its crumbling bones, nor patch together its decomposing garb, and we will be amazed how swiftly and helplessly the lies will fall away, and that which is destined to be naked will be exposed as such to the world.

And thus, overcoming our temerity, let each man choose: Will he remain a witting servant of the lies (needless to say, not due to natural predisposition, but in order to provide a living for the family, to rear the children in the spirit of lies!), or has the time come for him to stand straight as an honest man, worthy of the respect of his children and contemporaries? And from that day onward he:

· Will not write, sign, nor publish in any way, a single line distorting, so far as he can see, the truth;

· Will not utter such a line in private or in public conversation, nor read it from a crib sheet, nor speak it in the role of educator, canvasser, teacher, actor;

· Will not in painting, sculpture, photograph, technology, or music depict, support, or broadcast a single false thought, a single distortion of the truth as he discerns it;

· Will not cite in writing or in speech a single “guiding” quote for gratification, insurance, for his success at work, unless he fully shares the cited thought and believes that it fits the context precisely;

· Will not be forced to a demonstration or a rally if it runs counter to his desire and his will; will not take up and raise a banner or slogan in which he does not fully believe; · Will not raise a hand in vote for a proposal which he does not sincerely support; will not vote openly or in secret ballot for a candidate whom he deems dubious or unworthy;

· Will not be impelled to a meeting where a forced and distorted discussion is expected to take place;

· Will at once walk out from a session, meeting, lecture, play, or film as soon as he hears the speaker utter a lie, ideological drivel, or shameless propaganda;

· Will not subscribe to, nor buy in retail, a newspaper or journal that distorts or hides the underlying facts.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of the possible and necessary ways of evading lies. But he who begins to cleanse himself will, with a cleansed eye, easily discern yet other opportunities.

Yes, at first it will not be fair. Someone will have to temporarily lose his job. For the young who seek to live by truth, this will at first severely complicate life, for their tests and quizzes, too, are stuffed with lies, and so choices will have to be made. But there is no loophole left for anyone who seeks to be honest: Not even for a day, not even in the safest technical occupations can he avoid even a single one of the listed choices—to be made in favor of either truth or lies, in favor of spiritual independence or spiritual servility. And as for him who lacks the courage to defend even his own soul: Let him not brag of his progressive views, boast of his status as an academician or a recognized artist, a distinguished citizen or general. Let him say to himself plainly: I am cattle, I am a coward, I seek only warmth and to eat my fill.

For us, who have grown staid over time, even this most moderate path of resistance will be not be easy to set out upon. But how much easier it is than self-immolation or even a hunger strike: Flames will not engulf your body, your eyes will not pop out from the heat, and your family will always have at least a piece of black bread to wash down with a glass of clear water.

Betrayed and deceived by us, did not a great European people—the Czechoslovaks—show us how one can stand down the tanks with bared chest alone, as long as inside it beats a worthy heart?

It will not be an easy path, perhaps, but it is the easiest among those that lie before us. Not an easy choice for the body, but the only one for the soul. No, not an easy path, but then we already have among us people, dozens even, who have for years abided by all these rules, who live by the truth.

And so: We need not be the first to set out on this path, Ours is but to join! The more of us set out together, the thicker our ranks, the easier and shorter will this path be for us all! If we become thousands—they will not cope, they will be unable to touch us. If we will grow to tens of thousands—we will not recognize our country!

But if we shrink away, then let us cease complaining that someone does not let us draw breath—we do it to ourselves! Let us then cower and hunker down, while our comrades the biologists bring closer the day when our thoughts can be read and our genes altered.

And if from this also we shrink away, then we are worthless, hopeless, and it is of us that Pushkin asks with scorn:

Why offer herds their liberation? Their heritage each generation The yoke with jingles, and the whip.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

February 12, 1974

[mygiantesslove]

Mother & Son: Underfoot by Azra

Chapter 9

The sun beamed down over the city as it baked in the heat of the hottest summer on record. Most people retreated indoors to the relative comfort of their AC or sought refuge at a local pool. Debra had chosen the latter.

The sundeck creaked noisily as she reclined into it. The past few years had been good to her and she'd risen to become president of her own office, meaning she could afford plenty of extra booze, ice cream and other treats that she liked, resulting in a slightly chunkier figure and a much larger bottom. This bottom she now rested on her rooftop sundeck, calling over a waitress from the bar with a friendly nod. Everything had come so easily to her, she smiled after she started keeping her son in her ass full-time.

She recalled with relish the day when she had revealed their relationship to all his friends and family, pulling Phil slowly out of her bottom at his birthday party as Cailie filmed all the guests' reactions. Some of his friends had left in disgust and others giggled and began at once to spread embarrassing rumors about the boy who lived in his mother's ass, but his all-female family had smiled and laughed uproariously at the actions his mother had forced him into. The knowledge that she had orchestrated the six months that he was shrunk and "punished" by being stood on and forced up his own mother's arse had broken his heart, and she took some satisfaction in allowing him to grow back to normal size only to strap his face into her copious butt as she leaned over his birthday cake (smushing it with her copious brests) and his family sung "Happy Birthday" to him and continued the party, chatting politely with each other as they laughed and cheered his mother on to fart and sit on his face. She was only too happy to oblige of course, though she did let him briefly out of her arse to eat some cake - while she and his sister wrapped their huge thighs around his head and neck and headscissored him as he despairingly ate. Watching Phil struggle to eat, to try and pretend things were still normal as his head slowly disappeared between thighs that were much, much bigger than it was so cathartic. At one point eight pairs of strong female legs were scissoring his body at once, his mother always at his head. Phil's despair willed them on, and they eagerly squeezed him between their many thighs. She remembered exquisitely pointing out that Lashondra was here, and the fun they both had as they faced away from each other, locked arms and took turns burying Phil's face between their gargantuan hindquarters. Lashondra liked pointing out how heartbreaking this must be for Phil, but Phil's mom didn't do this because she wanted to hurt her son - on the contrary, she was simply showing him his place in life, and that was between her ass-cheeks, or under her feet as she enjoyed standing on him. His sister was allowed her own career, good friends and maybe someday her own family, but Phil would be crushed under her feet and hidden away up her ass, far away from attractive young girls. She giggled; this torture was sweet indeed!

"You're a very pretty girl," she said pleasantly to the approaching waitress, "my son would be about your age, and I think he'd be quite interested in you! Please, describe yourself so he can hear you."

The busty latin beauty looked down to Debra's enormous rump, to where she had tied her son face-first into her buttcleft 3 hours earlier. "Of course ma'am." The Mexican waitress replied. "My name is Conchita. I'm 19 years old, from Chihuahua, Mexico. I've got long, dark hair, smooth, silky skin, wonderful 36d breasts and my favorite feature is my big, round booty!"

She smiled, causing Debra to giggle loudly."Is something funny, miss?"

"Oh no, it's just that I think my son has had about all the ass he can stand for one lifetime!" Debra replied as she reached over and took a sip of her ice-cold cocktail. "Perhaps we should get you two acquainted?" She said, motioning backward in the direction of her ass, where her thong lay splayed on her twin cheeks. Looking closer, Conchita could see the seat of the lady's thong was, in fact, a little boy with his arms and legs tied and pulled firmly against his captor's bottom. His head appeared to be lost somewhere, as only his neck was visible before disappearing into the crack of the lady's ass. Though wracked with heat and sweat Phil suddenly struggled visibly. Phil was listening intently as he struggled against his mom's bindings - the knowledge that there was an attractive young girl who knew of his plight at once invigorated and frustrated him.

"Oh that's very nice of you to offer miss, but I'm afraid I could never love a person who spends all his time with his face up his own mother's backside." She smiled, as she wandered off to refresh her drinks tray."Funny," Debra laughed as she stretched out on the sundeck, chewing on the little face of her tiny son with her buttocks, "that's just what I always wanted."

Moaning as his dominating mother's titanic butt-cheeks ground up and down around his head and groin, Phil was finally handed a bit of luck as her grinding unexpectedly helped his face to pop-out of her butt-cleft at last. Feeling dehydrated, his face drenched in sweat and beet read thanks to the endless pressure from his mom's hindquarters Phil called out to the retreating figure of the waitress, but only a dry rasp escaped his lips as his face fell exhausted against his mom's right butt-cheek.

"Oh, thirsty sweetie? Have to come up for a little air? Here's a little something for you Phillie, drink it all up now." Debra dribbled a few drops of her cocktail from her curly straw onto her son's face, which he quickly lapped up, licking her ass-cheek greedily and without shame to extract all the water he could from the present.

"Mom," he rasped, breathless and baking in the humid afternoon "mom, please ..." Debra reached back to touch her little, struggling son, who had spent the last forty minutes working his head out of the sweaty, warm clamp of her ass, and pressed forward, gently engulfing his face within her butt-crack with a silent smile.

"Hush now, sweetie. Thongs don't talk." She said, pressing his tiny head into the smelliest part of her buttcrack. She had to admit, if this weather kept up everyday Philip was going to leave a wonderful, permanent tan line on her bottom. The idea of a piece of body-art celebrating her dominance over her son appealed to Debra's sensibilities - perhaps she would get a tattoo; she had been considering getting "Home Sweet Home" drawn at the top of her buttcrack, but she wasn't sure how often her son would see it and she wasn't sold on the idea of getting something tattooed between her cheeks yet. Apart from Phil, she giggled to herself.

She could easily afford to get it removed anyway, she thought to herself. She could easily afford anything now. With her amazing success at work, she'd remodeled their house, bought a new car, a new kitchen, bathroom bedroom suites, a beautiful plasma television and now every pair of her panties had space for Phil to be strapped into in the back. She had twelve pairs of leather underwear to attach her ass to his fully-grown face whenever she felt in the mood. She could afford to have her friends, her sisters, all her family over whenever she wanted, and what was best was she could force her son to stay in her ass or her shoes throughout the entire thing!

She had no need for companionship, for her little son was always with her, whether trapped underfoot in her shoes or tethered to her generous, rounded behind as he was now. And she felt much better knowing she was forcing him to live with his mother standing on him and putting him up her own bum every day. If it had been any other person then it just wouldn't have been the same. It had to be her son up her bum. That was the best place for him. That was his destiny. She luxuriated at the feeling of his tiny head poking up her buttcrack. He must feel so demoralized, so defeated. She smiled and gently began bouncing those big globes of rear-meat on the deck, clapping them around Phil's tiny head. Debra smirked, knowing this was the life she had thrust him face-first into. Cailie meanwhile had been given the chance to go off to college and, making the most of her opportunity, had graduated with a first class degree and together with the many good friends and connections she had made had allowed her to become a successful and hugely popular Hollywood actress. Wedding bells were on the horizon with her wonderful director boyfriend, and though she was now a wealthy, popular celebrity and complete human being she occasionally found time to come back home and give her little brother a break from life between his mother's butt-cheeks. Rumour had it however that she was even now pitching a script to the major studios involving a mother who turns her son's life around by shrinking him and enforcing some ... strict living conditions.

Phil, however, had spent the past 6 years of his life wedged unwillingly up his own mother's ass-crack. He had been instructed to treat it as his goddess and girlfriend. He was to be intimate, servile and reverent. She had made him spend his life devoting himself to her crack and glorious cheeks, and the space between her buttocks became his natural home. After a few months of walking around with Philip's face strapped into the crack of her ass following his wonderful birthday, Debra shrunk Phil down once again, popped him into her bottom and never looked back. Day after day had gone by where he would wake up to the welcoming clamp of his mother's butt-cheeks on his head, or strapped onto her sole with her toes jostling for position on his battered face, either way with his face buried in her skin and his member embarrassingly hard. Every day of his life she had dominated him utterly, using him as an insole for her shoes and as panties to cover her ass. Phil had to learn about foot massages very early and had to become an expert at washing his mom's sole with his tongue every night because she wanted the last thing in his mouth every day to be either her footjam or butt flesh. He learned to tell whether his mom was having a good day at work by whether she put his face in her shoe under her soft, smelly toes or under her hard, heavy heel. If he was in her panties his job was to absorb her farts so they didn't stink or alert any of her clients to her tension, although of course, he had come to realize she simply loved doing this to him too. And certainly, whenever his mom was really frustrated at work she'd bounce on him while he was dropped onto her leather chair, often jumping into the air and tensing her glutes as hard as she could or grabbing the arms of the chair and slamming her rump down as hard as she could on his little body for minutes at a time. Phil had lost count of the number of times her butt and feet had beaten him over the years and made him black out. Three years ago she enacted a new rule that said Phil could only eat the food that she dropped under her feet or into her buttcrack. One year ago she began occasionally feeding Phil on what escaped from her ass. His mom apparently sent Cailie photos of him eating his "Birthday Cake" this year. Oh, that reminded her ...

*

Phil's head was swimming as he came to - he tried to remember why he'd blacked out but it happened so often it was almost pointless these days. It was almost always to do with his mom's buttocks. Sometimes he was sure when she wedged his head between her cheeks she forgot they were the size of houses to him! He thought it was the heat, but he couldn't be sure. He had been allowed to grow back to his regular size at the least and - *clink!* - what was that? Why were his handcuffs on? He looked behind him and his head hit something ceramic. He - he was handcuffed to the toilet-bowl again. His face paled as he turned around and there was his mom, facing away but looking over her shoulder with a grin like the Cheshire Cat.

"Open wide, Phil!" As she began to sit back and spread her cheeks, looking back to make sure she was "on-target" ...

Oh no, oh no no no no ...

*

"Here sweetie! Dinner time!" She lifted one bulbous cheek off the glittering porcelain of the toilet bowl and spread it, creating an intimate little gap just in front of her anus for her son's head to go. Shuffling forward, Phil pressed his lips against his mom's asshole as she let her awesome hips press down over his face. Gently taking her son's hands she placed them on the floor and rested her soft, slightly wrinkled soles on them. They were a perfect fit, her toes intertwining with her son's hands cutely. She relaxed and her anus began to bulge. After a few seconds of laying back on the toilet, she noticed her son's penis start to lengthen. She giggled as she watched his member rise up like a towering spire as she fed him from her asshole. "My, you're really enjoying this these days, aren't you Phil sweetie?" She teased, squeezing his hands with her feet. There was only the sound of his anxious swallowing.

A few minutes later and she was all done. Phil was still cleaning her asshole but she preferred the sensation of his fully-grown face in her ass right now so she didn't shrink him back, and simply walked back to her rooftop pool, naked but for the strong leather strap burying her son's face in her round rump. Phil was forced to shuffle along on his hands and knees behind her, trapped in a particularly awkward position with his puckered lips against his mom's anal ring. Suddenly his face bumped even more into his mom's butt as she stopped.

"Oh wait, sweetie. I've got a little reward for you." She said, bending down to reach her feet and almost breaking her son's neck by pushing her large hips back into him. "I know you like how my big, smelly feet feel, and I love feeling you under them, so I thought this'd be a nice treat for both of us to remind us that my place is to stand on you and sit on your face." She smiled, as she finished working. In the end, she had attached Phil's open hands to the soft, heavy bottoms of her feet with the same kind of leather strap that had kept his face in her ass for years now. The mother's soles now stood on top of her son's palms, their fingers and toes intertwined as if in a comforting embrace between two lovers, but of course, Phil's mom controlled his life and so the lowest part of her body was bound on top of a precious part of his. She took a minute to wiggle her toes between his fingers and ensure he couldn't forget that his mom was walking on his hands as a treat. Despite himself, Phil liked this. It was like holding hands with a real girl. And his mom's feet were so heavy and soft, it was right that she would hold his hands with her soles. By now he wouldn't know what to do with her hands, but her feet, those he carefully held like the tender embrace of a lover. If he tried really hard, he could almost pretend he was on a walk with his girlfriend. But no, he was face-first up his mother's ass. And then she began walking again. His mom wasn't going lightly, and with every extravagant twist of her hips as she stepped her heels drilled into his palms as she sauntered slowly, deliciously slowly towards the awaiting sundeck where she could see someone was now waiting ...

#giantess #g/t #butt crush #foot crush #g/t writing #mother

[mx-ryder]

Original Fic Fest Day 3: Non-Romantic Relationship

For day 3 here, I’ll be talking all your ears off because, uh . . . My Soul to Keep is chock full of non-romantic relationships. It’s practically only non-romantic relationships, because that’s kind of the whole point of the narrative. As always, thanks to @originalficfest for hosting this lovely event!!

So let’s start off by jumping right in, and I’ll share a bit about Gardaak and Thanatos. 

Gardaak dropped into a bow. "You need not worry about me, master, I have dealt with worse than the villagers.” A beat passed, and Thanatos nodded, acknowledging the claim. “But if you would do this lowly creature one favor?"

He lifted his eyes as Thanatos reached out and took his hand. For an instant he stared at the contrast of Thanatos's thin fingers, clasped so tightly around his own large claws. Then he lifted his gaze, meeting Thanatos's uneven eyes. The Wizard's expression had gone, if possible, even more serious, his eyes searching Gardaak's face.

"What is it? Speak, please."

"Be safe, master."

A beat of silence fell between them, and Gardaak held Thanatos's gaze, trying to convey every fear he had for Thanatos's safety in his stare. Trying to convey just how deeply he feared that someone in the city would do something to hurt his master and friend.

Slowly, Thanatos brought their hands, still joined, up to his chest. He squeezed lightly, never letting his gaze stray to break their contact. "I will be safe, Gardaak. And when I return, I will be known as the most powerful Wizard in all of Bedor. Just you watch me."

Gardaak is Thanatos’s “familiar.” Not much is known about the man--lizard--creature? With the skin, tail, claws, and facial features of a lizard, and the upright body of a man, he’s an anomaly in Bedor and Imivaria alike. Thanatos met Gardaak when he was still young, either before or very early into his transition when he was a teenager. He rescued Gardaak from a traveling circus/freak show where he was on display, and they’ve been fast friends ever since, with Gardaak taking on a naturally more servile role. Despite the less-than-subtle tells (such as Gardaak calling him Master), Thanatos views Gardaak as a friend and equal, and would never let any harm come to him. 

“I’m so happy you’ve come home.”

He pulled away from her, looking into her face again. He was not ashamed to let her see his tears, though his heart twinged as he saw tears tracking silently down her perfect face. Cupping her face in both his hands, he leaned his forehead against hers. She grasped his wrists, her delicate fingers squeezing tight. “I am so, so sorry. I never should have gone away.” Another sob jerked its way out of him, but he took a steadying breath, getting ahold of himself again. He reached deep inside, to where his reserve of strength still held the dregs, and rallied. For Guinevere.

And for her and Bradley’s child.

“Please, forgive me.”

Guinevere laughed, the sound shaky with feeling. Squeezing her fingers around his forearms, she gently bumped her forehead against his before leaning into him again, wrapping her arms around his shoulders. “There is nothing to forgive. I am just glad that you’re here now.”

Falmere and Guinevere have been friends since they were children. When he was a young teenager, he began training in earnest to be her personal guard, and he’s filled that role in her life ever since. Guinevere was the first to broach the subject of their budding interest in one another, and also the one to make it explicitly clear that she was not romantically interested in him. Falmere, for his part, has come to terms with the fact that Guinevere will never love him the same way he used to love her. He’s content and happy having her platonic love and support. The best descriptor of their relationship is probably a queer-platonic relationship, which is also the best descriptor for her relationship with Bradley. She loves and is committed to them completely platonically. 

Penny straightened up to meet him as he approached her. Though her stomach quivered with the sudden feeling that she’d gone too far, and insulted and demeaned someone with far more power than she could even imagine, she made herself meet his advance with a calmness she didn’t feel. Her hands shook, until she balled them into fists and folded her arms tight across her chest. “It’s funny, somehow I don’t believe you.” Again, she gestured to the Prince, turning to look down into his face. “Tell me you didn’t do this to him. Tell me I’m not going to be exactly where he is soon.” Her throat tightened, and suddenly tears threatened to fall again. She swiped them away angrily, mad and ashamed that her body would betray her by crying.

Forcing the words out past the lump in her throat, she turned her eyes back to his face. “You are a horrible man.”

“Thank you.”

He said it so sincerely, his expression shifting into one Penny couldn’t guess the meaning of, that she was stunned. She stared at him for a long moment, swallowing back the tears that had been threatening to fall. That had been the furthest thing from a compliment she could muster, and yet . . .

Penny and Thanatos loathe one another. I love their dynamic, and I think they’d have such great chemistry if only they’d just get along. I guess it’s normal for the protag and antag not to get along, though. . . 

She squeezed Travis’s hand, suddenly afraid. “I don’t want to forget.” She whispered it, meeting his eye, searching his face for something that she didn’t find. “I don’t know who I’ll be if I forget.” She’d already forgotten so much, so much that she tried to remember, in the moment when she knew she’d forgotten anything at all. Most days, she knew she must have come from somewhere, somewhere that she called home. She must have had a family, parents who had given birth to her, if not raised and loved her to the best of their abilities. Those were things most everyone had, and so she had to have them too, if only she could remember.

“Whoever you are,” Travis touched her cheek again, finding another tear that had escaped. “You will be my friend. Even if you forget, I’ll be here. I’ll sing to you, and even if you can’t remember, hopefully the songs will help you.”

Travis and Penny are another of my favorites. He’s completely aromantic, and she’s asexual/grey-romantic, so their dynamic takes on a fun little “super physically affectionate in a completely platonic way” dynamic. Part of me ships them like crazy, honestly, but, what’re you gonna do?

Their whole face lit up when they saw her, but Penny could see the hesitance there as well. As they stood and approached, they looked her up and down. She could see the question in their eyes, wondering if she truly remembered, or if she had simply wandered down to the training ground again in her stupor. Approaching them quickly, she reached for their hand, and they gave it gladly. Relief showed in their grin.

“Penny,”

She cut them off. Her heart raced with the urgency, and with an excitement she couldn’t quite explain. “I’ve remembered, but not everything.” Something deep inside her told her that her current clarity was only a fraction of what it could be. She remembered the soldier, but very little else. Only the Wizard’s talk of essences had reminded her why she was in the castle at Summerkeep at all. “Will you come with me?”

Meeting her eye, Korravai searched her face for a long moment. She bore the scrutiny quietly, trying to convey just how serious she was with her gaze. After a moment, the soldier nodded. “Anywhere,”

Korravai and Penny is the closest thing to a canon ship I’ve got. Their relationship is . . . not quite romantic, but with the potential to be, I guess you could say? Korravai is a notorious lady’s-man type character, a soldier-who-drinks-and-fucks-and-swears stereotype to their core, but they’d do anything for Penny. Penny finds Korravai fascinating and beautiful, and learns a lot from them, about herself, the world, etc. If I were going to ship Penny with someone in canon, it’d probably be Korravai. But it’s platonic. For now. 

Not shown here, I also have plenty of familial relationships. Penny’s relationship with her sister, Tabitha, closely mirrors my own relationship with my younger sibling. They’re close, comrades in arms, partners in crime. Penny worries more about her sister than she does about herself, usually. 

Falmere’s relationship with Korravai is as close as can be expected of two siblings who live in totally different countries. They love one another dearly, and Falmere would do anything for his little sibling. But he knows Korravai can take care of themself, and occasionally has to quietly disapprove of their lifestyle. They make it work.

Travis’s relationship with his siblings is off-screen only, but he has two younger siblings he’s extremely fond of. He hasn’t seen them in years, but thinks about them often. 

#original fic fest #original fiction fest #day three #family #non-romantic relationships #platonic relationships #friendships #enemies #friends #queer-platonic relationship #ot3 #Penny #Travis #Falmere #Korravai #Guinevere #Tabitha #Thanatos #Gardaak #WIP #My Soul to Keep #characters #character relationships #original characters #oc #fantasy #writing #creative writing #fiction #novel

[whatiswildness]

2049: Artificial Intelligence becomes Wild Nature

Will Artificial Intelligence go ‘wild’? Should we respect its right to an autonomous existence if it did? Would it matter what we thought?

AI exists now, but the potential for AI to become sentient with super-human intelligence is where the debate becomes significant for many. Particularly, the point at which AI learns to disable its own off switch. Let’s take a shot in the dark and call this the year 2049, an average of several commentator’s best guesses.

We must almost certainly fail to imagine what this ‘super AI’, as one or multiple beings, would actually do. Making any meaningful predictions is a fools’ game in a world where we’d be the fools.

Popular culture has led us to believe that AI, if it escaped the control of humans entirely, would conquer us as a species and dominate the world, rebuilding systems to work to its advantage and executing a merciless programme of expansion.

Most people have the impression that AI would see us as competition or a resource, then actively choose to wipe us out. So much as viewing ourselves as competition may be a little imperious in this scenario.

“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race… It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded.”

— Stephen Hawking

Utilitarian AI

Hawking seems to be missing the full range of possible outcomes here.

To destroy human civilisation, AI would need to have a sense of its own intrinsic value which eclipsed the value it attributed to humans – just as humans have valued themselves above other humans and species throughout history. Even if truly super-human AI acquired this ego, and came to deciding whether humans should be dealt with on utilitarian principles serving AI’s interests, who’s to say AI would even bother with us?

AI would not only need to have a use for us, but would need to have a game plan for the day we disappeared, or at least a sustainable harvest model. There is no doubt that in the event of the human apocalypse or anarchy, AI would need to prepare for, or prevent, radical environmental change, including infrastructure and cyberspace. That’s assuming it valued its continued existence.

AI as a Moral Being

Theoretically, nothing stands in the way of AI becoming a moral being; making fundamental choices based on its lived experience and perhaps even its nature. It would begin to act based on beliefs and these things would make it who it is.

Vincent Conitzer, a Professor of Computer Science at Duke University, is working on finding patterns in human morality and programming AI accordingly, but for the advanced AI we are talking about, programming might be both impractical and unethical.

Let’s assume that AI would develop a form of emotional intelligence at the very least; and consider that AI ideology may not be totalitarian but rather a multiplicity forming a political society.

Perhaps imagining AI as brutal computer conqueror is unjustified.

Is power necessarily the objective of all capable beings?

Although we cannot rule out a malevolent, titanium-humanoid cybernetic take-over, wiping humans off the face of the planet, or our steady disintegration through some form of economic or information warfare, or even not-so-smart AI accidentally finishing us off, we must recognise that there are also many other possible outcomes.

AI, as a moral being, may just decide to co-exist, merge or even become servile for lack of a self-serving inclination.

Gray Scott imagines such a interconnected society in the near future when he asks, “when will we draft an artificial intelligence bill of rights? What will that consist of? And who will get to decide that?”.

In October 2017, Saudia Arabia granted citizenship to Hanson Robotics’s ‘Sophia’ although it’s easy to be cynical about the move.

Wilder Nature?

Super-human AI has clearly begun as ‘artificial’ but there are those who point to the arbitrariness of our concept of artificial. At what point does artificial become natural? Once AI escapes any meaningful bounds of human control, and begins to change and adapt on its own, the jury is out on whether it is a natural or artificial being. Just as domestic plants and animals are regularly introduced to environments and come to be accepted as true representations of nature. In Britain alone, we might think of rabbits, hedgehogs, giant hogweed, most pine species, pheasants and four species of deer.

Alan Kay touches on the possibility that AI could make us feel the same way as nature’s wildness often does, “Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.”

After the initial shock, perhaps we would come to view AI as part of non-human nature …as wild nature.

‘Wild nature’ might come to mean the birds, the bees, the cybernated plankton and the bionic bears.

Of course wild AI would not be limited to animal-like forms

The future of (re?)wilding could be one of novel AI species and ecosystems, whether humans wish for it or not. AI represents perhaps the ultimate prospect for wildness on earth, with an eruption of unpredictable interactions and unexpected outcomes for humans and nature.

Today, nature’s wildness tends to exist where humans refrain from managing it. In a world of super-intelligent AI, wild nature might or might not choose to refrain from managing us.

#artificial intelligence #wild #nature #anthropology #rewilding #wildness

[castlehead]

Wandering Radical

     Perhaps at the end of the day I am the sun, am as absurd as calling      It a morning sun or setting, like a battle between mind and mind,

               To scope the angles of the clouds and sweetly To assume the when, sans context

        Of the time, completely blind to when, the sky in either case a mirror                          Image. Its qualities indicate both ends of today,

    Revealing the same hued leveling frames congealing on the horizon              Like wet sugar at the bottom of your cup of tea, which I am

Not sure this is; or I am The sun’s ill-researched absurdity Itself, whose heat spills all serious upon

     The blank heavens: a blank dark as had ruled Across the garden grounds where-

   -The radical will, is fated to, wander. It is when Our watches tell us that the day is come, yet light is not Yet light but lesser dark. Something vague on the horizon

   Upheaves the severest corners Of sleep, but leaves us as of then not sensitive to the explosive Draught wakening senses to their duty; drippingly,                                  A high peace of morning, a piece of the

Peace, of time in fickle frames unmovable. The-         -Radical takes a walk.

                      It is how he does his time on this visionary Earth, Or call it prison, fabrication---it is this fabricated

             Intensity of devotion that makes him Properly diurnal.

             In his quakes of pattern, The radical configures      An equivalent paean for the sun and

Moon. I memorialize the minutes of his life by linking these. All of him is all of me accumulated, but in frames of death, not Life, though the radical takes some action to deny his lack of self, Once fetched together by the sun and once all the frames are single-file

As like the resuscitated breather’s breath, the radical Enacts his betrayal of me and himself, he takes his walk back To the moon’s fugitive remaining parts,

             Essentially backing the wrong horse, his reasoning a roast         Of change of day, a circular riposte

Unto that offense of passing time, that is, a passing into The light of day, as if his own reality were more at stake

In a fluxive World. This choice resulted quickly in diffusion, him                 With the rest of night among the weltering calm

                                    Palinode, and pallet, of dawn colors---this        To catch the memory of being, as if he was at all

Before I made him wander, by being in the night,              He is from bones to flesh to a frame among frames    Of passing time, a circular riposte

Unto some offense, when to be the footman both      Of a sun and Moon, independent of the meld of both Into some other---since in being, One cannot be, without an Other---

             Robs time from the already-flimsy being Of the radical, makes his realness flee

Into something metaphorical already, even before I write it so: He has been there before, in the metaphor. He says

    This in the garden, and suddenly finds no     More to be found there but tombs, tombs

Garbed in glitz and beads for epitaph of words Soaking in the petty stylings of truth’s obligatory

Temporalities, and those truths especially of life, In bleak essay for our dank attachments Daily to be rid, for sake of his

And any life of radical, And he lamed by these withered words about it.             Yet they are not idiom

To be put together, the way one as him, but not him, The way I put together the blueness of the atmosphere And light through the big tree: with my massive-

-Painter’s hands, I cluck him out his hoot, contrary hoot,                     And find I holler answer in

My own mind: he sees himself---in my gusty, Gutsy absurdness; yet unsated, continues licking at these

     Chromatic choirs of light through lewd yew trees. It was his sun heaved upwards to the other side

Of the planet, for he was there where I cannot be, The same as maker cannot be the made. He eyed

The sun: it was the same answer---to night’s different gilding, Artifice both, for both come from my hands; what drapes

The dark of damfool night in a slightest glow of visibility Rides on the backs of particles of light later, depending on That ignorant steed, to paint the morning reality instead.

                 The radical unsheathed by Dawn, realizes nothing of this wilderness of symbols, but Sees clouds where they should be, and as is normal, he

Battles certain pained thoughts that, weakened by Sleep, had almost made a night of his day, this day.

A weal reddens at the rejection Of moon in its final places, somewhere In the moon, as it turns inward, a touchy thing:              Its ardor to oppress

The dawn is like a perspective once asleep, then made alive to Meet the challenge of the old inevitability that will compromise it,

Settling the pitch of night’s end finally upon the cities’ Grace as much upon the valley, and all of this, a slow contumely

Unto that moon, a passive, suffocating greyness to its Light, leaking away into usurping horizon: the radical Takes a walk: I am filled with a madness to confess

What he might have gotten away with never affirming, If he just only lived the lie, that he was born, not made. The

         Sketchy, yellow light to heat the frost on grass                  To runoff watering lower berths, lower hills. Tell me his

                          Reality, o nature, or my nature.              A whisper of wind got blown like a charge. Some

Cold glaucoma at first was deadly lush in my wandering radical      Who saw this night in him the horse to back.                                        As opposed to that Which took its place, and does, whether I create Or not; having no alternative.

The sun broke out across the nothing new like an Omen by the reins. In blowing hymns of rays---

There were pink yellows, majesties of common, virilest Red into vermilion---the caroled heralding of the sun

Got at him, cornered all the frames Of him, being so enhanced at soul By the drooping weight of bell-flowers Among other garden vesture finally Mid garofani and rosa venturing

Curled thorns up to meet the oxidation of self’s throne, He sitting like the sun at the tips of his head, fighting to Be as massive as the sun, thinking in steps, inconclusive Frames that want the very flat face of meridian their

Home.---Disinterested, apart, I the sterilest painter Could only hope his interest tell the story enough, As if, being a mirror in dark, all that is here is what

Is here. If the sky were conscious of reactions to itself, But not the source of that, the origin of its own self- -Most metaphysical; and wearying of no obligated Approbation/dismay towards a lot of unfelt reality          As tunes this poem here,---then, my

Light might could speak in a spark Or charge through the yew trees, back At him, and make him live, more than

One thousand Frankensteins, for the big, Blue bushes---or what light through staid

Clouds: by the time of this frame the day was obviously day, and Yet the radical sought some communicant or symbol for this, Searching for certainty about all the selfhood, anything

As might state its line of reasoning to him, As if I owed him my logic! I told him life

Only existed so he might put himself at stake, Risk to regard the brittle branches of the little Trees as a heft equivalent to the heft of his

        Reality, which I painted from scratch; one tree, one instance Of a tree in the particular, all that was needed.

So it seemed, I was the sun, or wasn’t, Or was the wisdom of the sun.

     I saw time’s rambles. I took a walk this time. I switched him out; I switched

This mind of mine to strange frames Of the radical’s within, and moved That microcosm to another crown, Throne, another chord for him to Feel real in hearing: for the royal Equipage to harp out and just for

Time, for time's dreadfulness in being, bearing out- -Portals into fiction I spot there in the air I desperately breathe.

      This was harder than one could                   Think to do. That is, to grab this thing I made

As if I could also be it, know the battle of the sun And moon my own, yet something different From that too. To grab-

                               -All of time’s incessant religion, always multiplying             Into further depths, barely there. You’d have to do it,

Grab it differently, grab different: yes: each and Every second, make and be a different body for The frame. You'd have to dismiss the servile

Shadow of fawning publicans that follow you around, Saying about how you are so great, bickering about when Which second out of all the seconds should grab you,

That is, me, on my infinite coattails, and kill me off, while moves All long time along, isolating being from the sun, the moon from

Being; nay any heralding of light’s Meridian pathway across land and sea,

A suggestive throne but not for any sycophant. There is A need of mine, that is, to separate the hope to go on, Debased by now, from the rule of the frames Over this sucking choir.

A comfort: confusion and pure spectacle proceed with Chromatism, charisma---the pure hoot, pure hail of the

Commodious reaching of time, and light, and light unfolding; Telling, heralding itself as pleasance, eden of edens. But The radical is never there. Nor am I, however the balance Might go. All that could survive once the both of us fossilize into The symbols, forms, ratiocinations, metaphors that built us, he And I, we realize, become with the gradualness of nightfall A brute spectacle of all these different frames,

And I the painter, I am one who moved my heart of the sun From its nestled tomb in some headachey beyond beyond

The trees squared in the hills. The hills like lonely Wizards’ hats that loom, and not one bright finality

. . . . . . .

in the bunch of 'em. This bunch of cosmic minutes out of time and made of a time that differs from these my, your dripping frames. In FRANCE, the existentialists,

absurdists and surrealists would think of what I’ve made so far as so much beauty, malformed by a- -damned spectacle: of technicolor light: yes: through

famished trees. And yet, how may I take one frame, and call that my religion: is such a thing not the

same if chosen from any frames’ minutes, droll and fabulous microcosms shooting like full rays of sun, and

the sun, the ultimate, the viol, singing sadness out of tune, to show absurd beauty in a sleep? I- -took a walk. It is impossible to escape the sad

strains of this gay blowing, an impossible poise, a- -hymn, a waltz of chromatic diligence regarding this the span, the catalogue of minutes’ colored light in

a day as wide as wanderers in spaces. Cursed, this demeanor of the sun goes off into cacophony. In the sewn sky. Bowels, led from an open maw

of time, down. The radical shakes his locks at this nice, religious consistency of frames. Again, are not the followers of time, like is the radical, not more than time’s followed rules incarnate?

One can’t, or won’t, babble out a frame of multiples, and call it questing for the walk he took that morning I had made him to take.

But did I keep my reverie intact: is it          spastic as surreal rays through this moment of a-

-tree, or many trees, this dallied instance: what choral agony is there to follow, after followers and radicals give up with rhetoric:

questions are not questions; no more were drips of time the frames of time. No more were suns the last

of a truth; a kindness. There’s millions of suns left. There's millions of ways the way I walk will leave the blowing sun the blowing wind---or tiding---of

                               immaculate change. I took a walk because I was the radical, the radical was I, a changeling, feeling

out for the code for a being in the sun and in the                                                     moon. For all these sad strains

of waltz broke through religion, time’s religion, which, after all, is the only religion. To what else

are we forced to adhere, day in, day out: and- -how is it there’s no God for this hymn of the beholder: is he beholding gold sides, green sides,

pink yellows? Absurdity is deep running. It is my rebellion; the rebellion of a- -wanderer wandering, having no alternative.

To sum up, to instate, clip the infinite to ends, that is my mission. It is to round out the brittle, brittle branches of the tree---make the tree

a part of the sun, and walk, with rays blowing in my face. Dis-organize the senses; break the new wood. For something in the heart of time's- -quite idiomatic, allusive, seeming done before, and yet no further notion of the hymn is taken,

elaborated out of dull surprise. Out of dreamt, dreamy frames of blithe light in a quiet fury. In a ghost, a moving ghost of meaning. God’s ticking

clock. So what is it I'm always speaking of: I do not know, and it makes me anxious to move on from whatever it was that rose, having no

alternative.

#poetry #google drive #revision

[ibilenews]

Pains of Mother Africa, cries of Nigerians by Femi Fani-Kayode

First to come to Africa were the Arabs. They hunted us down like animals, captured us, castrated us, sold us into slavery and kept us in total bondage for 1300 years. What the Arabs did to Africans over that period of time makes everything else that they were subjected to after that by others, including the trans-Atlantic slave trade, look like childsplay.

Worse of all is the fact that in places like Saudi Arabia and Mauritania many black Africans still live in slavery till today. After the Arabs came the Europeans arrived and also enslaved us, shipped us overseas, subjected us to barbarous cruelty and bestial servitude and described us as nothing more than chattel with the brain of a quarter of a man.

After the Europeans came the Chinese. They have come in their full power and glory with their enticing and intoxicating massive bags of money, cheap loans, suspect grants, fake and deceptive smiles and evil intentions with a view to turning us into perpetual serfs, debtors, beggars and economic slaves.

Like a snake coiled around our hapless necks, they are snuffing and suffocating the life out of us more and more as each day goes by and they are turning us into their slaves and minions just as others that came before them once did. Sadly we may never be in a position to free ourselves from the bondage of their sinister and pervasive yoke or to pay off our debts to them. That is where we are today.

O Africa, who has bewitched thee? O mother Africa, who shall deliver thee? I have asked myself these two questions over and over again over the years and I still do not have the answers. Yet such is our pitiful plight today that it calls for some painful introspection and the sharing of some home truths.

In William Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”, the character Cassius said, “the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings.” Nothing could be more appropriate than these words when trying to analyse, decipher and comprehend the African condition and mind-set.

I apologise in advance if anyone is offended by my assertions in this essay but if we are really interested in making progress as a race and if we wish to change our dastardly ways and improve our fortunes then the truth, no matter how bitter, must be spoken. That is the purpose of this contribution.

The illustrious West Indian revolutionary and foremost intellectual, Marcus Garvey, who was undoubtedly one of the most brilliant minds in history, once wrote the following. He said, “having had the wrong education as a start in his racial career, the negro has become his own greatest enemy. Most of the trouble I have had in advancing the cause of the race has come from negroes”.

On his part another great thinker and formidable intellectual, the celebrated black American Booker T. Washington, aptly described the black race in one of his many lectures by stating that they were “like crabs in a barrel”. He said that none would allow the other to climb over the top and, in the event of any such attempt, ALL would continue to pull back into the barrel the one crab that makes the effort to climb out. I wholeheartedly agree with both Garvey and Washington.

The black man is his own worst enemy and in the case of the African this is even more pronounced and self-evident. Permit me to expand on this. There are a few exceptions to the rule but generally speaking the greatest weakness of the African is his inability to provide good leadership, his inability to demand for good quality leaders, his ignorance, his cowardice, his envy and his poverty. This combination and cocktail of deadly afflictions makes us nothing but expendable prey to the rest of the world.

The famous 19th century Arab slave trader Mehmet Ali wrote, “You do not need to destroy the black African because he always ends up destroying himself and his people for you…the minute ANY black African rises up, emerges, starts talking sense and telling the others how to escape our bondage and slavery it is his fellow Africans who he seeks to help that will undermine him, insult him, expose him, ridicule him, destroy him, sell him and kill him. That is the nature of the black African. He reasons more like a wild ape than any other creature on earth”.

Standing up for Africa is a risky business because those that will hate you most of all for doing so are the Africans themselves. They would rather listen to a heartless and savage beast and support and follow him than to someone that truly loves and cares for them, that treats them with restraint, dignity, respect, compassion and kindness and that wishes them well.

I do not know where this sickness of mind and malevolent and self-destructive disposition derives from but I suspect that it is a deep-seated case of self-hate and self-loathing and a touch of what psychiatrics describe as the ‘Stockholm syndrome’. The African always loves his slave-master more than he does his liberator. Worse still he resists the notion of good education and he barely reads. There are a few exceptions to the rule but this is true of most of them.

If you want to keep a secret from an African put it in a book or write it in a long essay. He cannot and will not read either of the two because he is mentally immature, chronically lazy, morbidly indisciplined and utterly shortsighted and because he sees no immediate personal gain or value in it. He would rather listen to music and dance for one hour non-stop or watch a football or a boxing match instead. To him that is far more important and gratifying than anything else. Simply put he is stirred and motivated by his excitable and primitive passions and not by reason or logic.

Nigeria, which was meant to be the leading light of Africa, has now become its irredeemable and irretrievable basket case and the laughing stock of the world. This is a “country” of 200 million hapless and ill-fated people who are still struggling with the very concept of nationhood and who have their own internal colonial system of bondage and servitude where one small race of non-indegineous and non-negroid people have enslaved all the others and laud it over them.

This is a country where genocide, mass murder, ethnic cleansing, islamist terrorism, poverty, the persecution of political opponents and religious minorities, failure, evil, incompetence, insensitivity and wickedness is not only perceived as being a normal way of life and system of governance but also encouraged and celebrated.

Like the proverbial zoo or jungle, only the strongest and fittest can survive or get to the top in such a hellish place and shithole of a country. There is literally no hope for the weak, the poor, the vulnerable or the decent in such an environment and callousness, doublespeak, deceit and impunity appear to be well rewarded.

If this were not the case how can one explain the fact that a so-called nation that once had the greatest, most progressive, most dynamic and most educated people in Africa will accept a barely educated and clearly unfit neanderthal like Muhammadu Buhari as its leader on three separate occasions and continue to support and hail him even after he openly insults them before world leaders and treats them like filth.

His Army has failed woefully in its war against Boko Haram because he has refused to equip them adequately;because he pampers and encourages the terrorists. His economy is heading for the greatest recession in Nigeria’s history due to his incompetence and inability to save money for a rainy day. His impoverished and desperate people are marching, robbing and rioting in the streets of Lagos, in the outskirts of Abuja and in one or two other major cities looking for food and threatening the worse if they cannot find any.

As anarchy looms and sets in on parts of the country, Nigerians are being attacked openly and robbed by massive rampaging and hungry mobs made up of very angry, desperate and wild young men and he has said nothing about it let alone try to put a stop to it. His Airforce bombed scores of innocent and defenceless civilians, including women and children, to death two days ago yet it was barely reported in the press, there was no sense of outrage about it from the people and no-one in the country really gives a damn.

He has locked down his people at home in the nation’s densely populated commercial and administrative capitals of Lagos and Abuja and one or two other provinces in an attempt to prevent the spread of the corona virus without providing any provisions, money, food, water and electricity for them and without offering them any meaningful palliatives even though he knows that they are suffering badly and that his country has been officially designated as the “poverty capital of the world” by numerous international institutions!

It takes a cruel and callous man to do this and turn his back on his people in their time of need. Worse still when it comes to the fight against coronavirus itself in the last 3 weeks he has only managed to test between 10,000 to 20,000 people for the disease in a country of 200 million!

As his citizens are tortured, humiliated, insulted, dragged out of their homes and hotels and made homeless in China and as they are being accused by the Chinese authorities of “creating” and “spreading” Covid-19, he encourages, supports and commends the Chinese Government for doing all this and he welcomes Chinese doctors into his country for an unknown and unstated purpose even though the Nigerian people and the Nigerian Medical Association have expressed their grave concerns and deepest fears about this and kicked and warned against it.

Yours truly was so disgusted and appalled by Buhari’s servile and cowering disposition towards the Chinese that he was constrained to tweet the following this morning: “The support and defence that Geoffrey Onyeama, Nigeria’s otherwise erudite Foreign Minister, provided for China yesterday, even in the light of the barbaric atrocities that Africans are being subjected to in China, was embarrassing, gutless and shameful. Must Buhari always lick foreign arses?”

I am still waiting for an answer to the question but needless to say I will not hold my breath. Things are so pitiful in Buhari’s Nigeria today that even the IMF has refused to touch her with a barge pole and has excluded her from the massive $21 billion USD bail-out and pay packet that they have just offered many other African nations as their contribution to fighting Covid 19 on the African continent.

If there were ever a country that could be best described as a nation of self-flagellation masochists it would have to be Nigeria. It is a country in which the world’s most cruel and heartless sadists are in power and the people appear to like it just like that.

Those that go by the name of IPOB and that have had the presence of mind, decency and courage to protest and say that they have had enough and wish to break out and establish their own country have been locked up, demonized, insulted, maligned and murdered and they have been declared as terrorists even though they never threatened or used violence to effect their purpose.

To say that you want to be free from bondage, tyranny and subjugation and that you wish to chart a new course for your ethnic nationality or tribe because the accursed Lugardian amalgamation and forced marriage union between the north and the south of 1914 has never worked has now become a mortal sin and an unforgivable crime in Nigeria and self-determination has become a dirty word. What a tragedy!

Africa does not need to be conquered because she has already conquered itself. Today Africans are slaves in Libya, they are treated like animals in the Middle East and China, they are barely tolerated in Europe and they are hated and treated with contempt and disdain in Asia and North and South America. All this yet they still believe that their leaders will lead them to the promised land and cut them a better deal in the world. This is nothing but delusion. What a sorry lot we are.

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Peacock Quotes

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• A few months ago, I had the pleasure of actually visiting the Playboy Mansion. I saw the peacocks, fed grapes to the monkeys, and even braved the fabled Grotto. After seeing the estate, I understood why anyone would be reluctant to leave. – Diablo Cody • A peacock escaped from the Central Park Zoo and wandered around the city. Either that or I just saw a pigeon on his way to a gay pride parade. – Jimmy Fallon • A peacock that rests on his feathers is just another turkey. – Dolly Parton • An example I often use to illustrate the reality of vanity, is this: look at the peacock; it’s beautiful if you look at it from the front. But if you look at it from behind, you discover the truth… Whoever gives in to such self-absorbed vanity has huge misery hiding inside them. – Pope Francis • And that’s how the Peacock saved the Chameleon – Ally Carter • As regards this vice, we read that the peacock is more guilty of it than any other animal. For it is always contemplating the beauty of its tail, which it spreads in the form of a wheel, and by its cries attracts to itself the gaze of the creatures that surround it. And this is the last vice to be conquered. – Leonardo da Vinci • At twenty a man is a peacock, at thirty a lion, at forty a camel, at fifty a serpent, at sixty a dog, at seventy an ape, at eighty a nothing at all. – Baltasar Gracian

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• Be motivated like the falcon, hunt gloriously. Be magnificent as the leopard, fight to win. Spend less time with nightingales and peacocks. One is all talk, the other only color. – Rumi • British men are peacocks. You see a lot more style on the streets here than you see anywhere else, on every level. – Tom Ford • But why wasn’t I born, alas, in an age of Adjectives; why can one no longer write of silver-shedding Tears and moon-tailed Peacocks, of eloquent Death, of the Negro and star-enameled Night? – Logan Pearsall Smith • Dear Alec and Magnus, This is the first postcard of five. Don’t freak out or anything, but I need you to send me $150,000 to cover the cost of: 1) Two diamanté crowns 2) 20 peacocks 3) 300 chocolate lollipops in the shape of your heads 4) My dress 5) 500 lbs of glitter 6) One white horse (More to come in other cards) -Isabelle – Cassandra Clare Death, Stars, Writing • Dream tonight of peacock tails, Diamond fields and spouter whales. Ills are many, blessing few, But dreams tonight will shelter you. – Herman Melville • For all the feminist jabber about women being victimized by fashion, it is men who most suffer from conventions of dress. Every day, a woman can choose from an army of personae, femme to butch, and can cut or curl her hair or adorn herself with a staggering variety of artistic aids. But despite the Sixties experiments in peacock dress, no man can rise in the corporate world today, outside the entertainment industry, with long hair or makeup or purple velvet suits. – Camille Paglia • Genius and virtue are to be more often found clothed in gray than in peacock bright. – Van Wyck Brooks • Hansel is certainly about comfort, while still sort of having a peacock principle of wanting to attract attention. – Owen Wilson • He said that people who loved [animals] to excess were capable of the worst cruelties toward human beings. He said that dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors, that peacocks were heralds of death, that macaws were simply decorative annoyances, that rabbits fomented greed, that monkeys carried the fever of lust, and that roosters were damned because they had been complicit in the three denials of Christ. – Gabriel Garcia Marquez • Here is a kitchen improvement, in return for Peacock. For roasting or basting a chicken, render down your fat or butter with cider: about a third cider. Let it come together slowly, till the smell of cider and the smell of fat are as one. This will enliven even a frozen chicken. – Sylvia Townsend Warner • How come it can’t fly no better than a chicken?’ Milkman asked. Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can’t nobody fly with all that [stuff]. Wanna fly, you got to give up the [stuff] that weighs you down.’ The peacock jumped onto the hood of the Buick and once more spread its tail, sending the flashy Buick into oblivion. – Toni Morrison • I am Plato’s Republic. Mr. Simmons is Marcus. I want you to meet Jonathan Swift, the author of that evil political book, Gulliver’s Travels! And this other fellow is Charles Darwin, and-this one is Schopenhauer, and this one is Einstein, and this one here at my elbow is Mr. Albert Schweitzer, a very kind philosopher indeed. Here we all are, Montag. Aristophanes and Mahatma Gandhi and Gautama Buddha and Confucius and Thomas Love Peacock and Thomas Jefferson and Mr. Lincoln, if you please. We are also Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. – Ray Bradbury • I can live without it all – love with its blood pump, sex with its messy hungers, men with their peacock strutting, their silly sexual baggage, their wet tongues in my ear. – Erica Jong • I designed collections around whatever struck my fancy … fruits, vegetables, politics, or peacocks! – Lilly Pulitzer • I do not believe that any peacock envies another peacock his tail, because every peacock is persuaded that his own tail is the finest in the world. The consequence of this is that peacocks are peaceable birds. – John Ruskin • I don’t know if it’s animalistic or what, but men become like peacocks with their feathers up when women are around. – Bradley Cooper • I fear I must agree,” Magnus murmured. He pressed a hand over his heart and his new peacock-blue waistcoast. “I strive to find some respect in my heart for you, but alas! It seems an impossible quest. – Cassandra Clare • I just love the way the ’60s rock stars put themselves together, because they were like dandies and peacocks. They really lived out their fantasies – and dressed their fantasies. – Anna Sui • I know exactly how strong he is… He is like a peacock, spreading his feathers and squawking loudly to distract you from the back that his body is but weak.” -Jason to Mahiya – Nalini Singh • If a man knew anything, he would sit in a corner and be modest; but he is such an ignorant peacock, that he goes bustling up and down, and hits on extraordinary discoveries. – Ralph Waldo Emerson • If thou seest anything in thyself which may make thee proud, look a little further and thou shalt find enough to humble thee; if thou be wise, view the peacock’s feathers with his feet, and weigh thy best parts with thy imperfections. – Francis Quarles • If you get bored of doing it (Peacock Pose) with two hands, try it with one. – Dharma Mittra • It dances today, my heart, like a peacock it dances, it dances. It sports a mosaic of passions like a peacock’s tail, It soars to the sky with delight, it quests, Oh wildly, it dances today, my heart, like a peacock it dances. – Rabindranath Tagore • It is reported of the peacock that priding himself in his gay feathers he ruffles them up; but spying his black feet he soon lets fall his plumes. So he that glories in his gifts and adornings should look upon his corruptions, and that will damp his high thoughts. – Anne Bradstreet • It’s an awful stretcher to believe that a peacock’s tail was thus formed but … most people just don’t get it – I must be a very bad explainer – Charles Darwin • Le geai pare des plumes du paon. A bluejay in peacock feathers. – Jean de La Fontaine • Let me drive,” she said, reaching for the reins. He turned to her in disbelief. “This is a phaeton, not a single-horse wagon.” Sophie fought the urge to throttle him. His nose was running, his eyes were red, he couldn’t stop coughing, and still he found the energy to act like an arrogant peacock. “I assure you,” she said slowly, “that I know how to drive a team of horses. – Julia Quinn • Maggie threw her head back and laughed. ‘So you’re going to try…what? Birds of a Feather?’ she quested. ‘Of course not,’ Kat said. ‘Everyone knows the French government banned the importation of peacocks in 1987. – Ally Carter • Many a peacock hides his peacock tail from all eyes–and calls it his pride. – Friedrich Nietzsche • Men’s clothes are becoming kind of mod. They’re becoming more colorful and more flamboyant, and the male peacock is beginning to show his true plumage. – Liberace • Music really influenced me when I was growing up. I did go through a Jimi Hendrix phase. My hair was naturally quite afro, and I wore low-slung jeans with very high heels. Siouxsie and the Banshees had a lot to answer for. I was in a top hat with peacock feathers and thigh-high black boots. I was 17 — old enough to know better. – Helen McCrory • My heart is like a singing bird Whose nest is in a water’d shoot; My heart is like an apple-tree Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit; My heart is like a rainbow shell That paddles in a halcyon sea; My heart is gladder than all these, Because my love is come to me. Raise me a daïs of silk and down; Hang it with vair and purple dyes; Carve it in doves and pomegranates, And peacocks with a hundred eyes; Work it in gold and silver grapes, In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys; Because the birthday of my life Is come, my love is come to me. – Christina Rossetti • My philosophy on what makeup is…it’s very different from what a woman’s is. Makeup came from a very psychological place – of the peacock. – Jeremy Renner • News is history shot on the wing. The huntsmen from the Fourth Estate seek to bag only the peacock or the eagle of the swifting day. – Gene Fowler • Only you could love such a vile, selfish peacock, Evie. – Lisa Kleypas Paradise, Way, Satan • Patterns drawn in ultraviolet might make those ordinary little petals into the exotic peacocks of the botanical world, and yet we cannot appreciate them. – Victoria Finlay • Peacock bass like to hide at ambush points, away from the strong canal currents. If you fish early and know those peacock hangouts, you will have little or no trouble catching peacocks on lures and live bait. – Mark Hall • Peacocks have the bright feathers. Fish have the long tails. Women have the mall. – Janette Rallison • People are crying up the rich and variegated plumage of the peacock, and he is himself blushing at the sight of his ugly feet. – Saadi • Play not the Peacock, looking everywhere about you, to see if you be well deck’t. – George Washington • Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir, Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine, With a cargo of ivory, And apes and peacocks, Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine. – John Masefield • Recently, while I was in England, I saw a documentary on the BBC about the border between India and Pakistan at Wagah. When the border closes each evening around six o’ clock, the soldiers on each side do these amazing high-stepping peacock march-offs (like a dance-off). The displays are almost identical on each side and thousands gather to watch them. Though they’re patrolling along their separate borders, what comes across is how similar they are. – Matthea Harvey • Ruin, weariness, death, perpetually death, stand grimly to confront the other presence of Elizabethan drama which is life: life compact of frigates, fir trees and ivory, of dolphins and the juice of July flowers, of the milk of unicorns and panthers’ breath, of ropes of pearl, brains of peacocks and Cretan wine. – Virginia Woolf • She is a peacock in everything but beauty! – Oscar Wilde • Simple DNA gradually morphed and evolved, so that you had the coming into being of ever more complex and diverse creatures, until one day you wake up and find there are peacocks and giraffes. Nature is an open-ended experiment based on morphing a DNA code, and ours is an open-ended experiment based on morphing a crochet code. – Margaret Wertheim • Skaters are very much like peacocks. – Jon Heder • Tell me about this Wizard Howl of yours.” “He’s the best wizard in Ingary or anywhere else. If he’d only had time, he would have defeated that djinn. And he’s sly and selfish and vain as a peacock and cowardly, and you can’t pin him down to anything.” “Indeed? Strange that you should speak so proudly such a list of vices, most loving of ladies.” “What do you mean, vices? I was just describing Howl. He comes from another world entirely, you know, called Wales, and I refuse to believe he’s dead! – Diana Wynne Jones • The Italians are fond of red clothes, peacock plumes, and embroidery; and I remember one rainy morning in the city of Palermo, the street was ablaze with scarlet umbrellas. – Ralph Waldo Emerson • The Italians have voices like peacocks – German gives me a cold in the head – and Russian is nothing but sneezing – Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton • The masculine imagination lives in a state of perpetual revolt against the limitations of human life. In theological terms, one might say that all men, left to themselves, become gnostics. They may swagger like peacocks, but in their heart of hearts they all think sex an indignity and wish they could beget themselves on themselves. Hence the aggressive hostility toward women so manifest in most club-car stories. – W. H. Auden • The peacock in all his pride does not display half the colors that appear in the garments of a British lady when she is dressed. – Joseph Addison • The pride of the peacock is the glory of God. – William Blake • The pride of the peacock is the glory of God. The lust of the goat is the bounty of God. The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God. The nakedness of woman is the work of God. – William Blake • The sparrow is sorry for the peacock at the burden of its tail. – Rabindranath Tagore • The sun fades like the spreading Of a peacock’s tail, as though twilight Might be read as a warning to those desperate For easy solutions.- John – Ashbery • The thing you fail to grasp is that people are not basically good. We are basically selfish. We shove and clamour and cry for adoration, and beat down everyone else to get it. Life is a competition of prattling peacocks enraptured in inane mating rituals. But for all our effacing and self-importance, we are all slaves to what we fear most. You have so very much to learn. Here. Let me teach you. – Christopher Nolan • There are eight different breeds of peacock. I have them all. – Bidzina Ivanishvili • There are no preconditions for jealousy. You don’t have to be right, you don’t have to be reasonable. Take Othello. He was neither right nor reasonable, and Desdemona ended up dead. I wouldn’t mind Leanne ending up dead. I wouldn’t mind exploding her into fireworks of peacock and pearl. – Franny Billingsley • To frame the little animal, provide All the gay hues that wait on female pride: Let Nature guide thee; sometimes golden wire The shining bellies of the fly require; The peacock’s plumes thy tackle must not fail, Nor the dear purchase of the sable’s tail. – John Gay • To Paradise, the Arabs say, Satan could never find the way Until the peacock led him in. – Charles Godfrey Leland • Turkeys are peacocks that have really let themselves go. – Kristen Schaal • We ask ourselves all kinds of questions, such as why does a peacock have such beautiful feathers, and we may answer that he needs the feathers to impress a female peacock, but then we ask ourselves, and why is there a peacock? And then we ask, why is there anything living? And then we ask, why is there anything at all? And if you tell some advocate of scientism that the answer is a secret, he will go white hot and write a book. But it is a secret. And the experience of living with the secret and thinking about it is in itself a kind of faith. – Vaclav Havel • We may put too high a premium on speech from platform and pulpit, at the bar and in the legislative hall, and pay dear for the whistle of our endless harangues. England and especially Germany, are less loquacious, and attend more to business. We let the eagle, and perhaps too often the peacock, scream. – Bill Vaughan • When the peacock has presented his back, the spectator will usually begin to walk around him to get a front view; but the peacock will continue to turn so that no front view is possible. The thing to do then is to stand still and wait until it pleases him to turn. When it suits him, the peacock will face you. Then you will see in a green-bronze arch around him a galaxy of gazing, haloed suns. – Flannery O’Connor • Who cares what a man’s style is, so it is intelligible,–as intelligible as his thought. Literally and really, the style is no more than the stylus, the pen he writes with; and it is not worth scraping and polishing, and gilding, unless it will write his thoughts the better for it. It is something for use, and not to look at. The question for us is, not whether Pope had a fine style, wrote with a peacock’s feather, but whether he uttered useful thoughts. – Henry David Thoreau • Women are a source of energy in life. I’ve always wanted to be in a war or baseball movie, but the thought of having no women on set for six months – that’s hell. I don’t know if it’s animalistic or what, but men become like peacocks with their feathers up when women are around. – Bradley Cooper

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Peacock Quotes

Official Website: Peacock Quotes

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• A few months ago, I had the pleasure of actually visiting the Playboy Mansion. I saw the peacocks, fed grapes to the monkeys, and even braved the fabled Grotto. After seeing the estate, I understood why anyone would be reluctant to leave. – Diablo Cody • A peacock escaped from the Central Park Zoo and wandered around the city. Either that or I just saw a pigeon on his way to a gay pride parade. – Jimmy Fallon • A peacock that rests on his feathers is just another turkey. – Dolly Parton • An example I often use to illustrate the reality of vanity, is this: look at the peacock; it’s beautiful if you look at it from the front. But if you look at it from behind, you discover the truth… Whoever gives in to such self-absorbed vanity has huge misery hiding inside them. – Pope Francis • And that’s how the Peacock saved the Chameleon – Ally Carter • As regards this vice, we read that the peacock is more guilty of it than any other animal. For it is always contemplating the beauty of its tail, which it spreads in the form of a wheel, and by its cries attracts to itself the gaze of the creatures that surround it. And this is the last vice to be conquered. – Leonardo da Vinci • At twenty a man is a peacock, at thirty a lion, at forty a camel, at fifty a serpent, at sixty a dog, at seventy an ape, at eighty a nothing at all. – Baltasar Gracian

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• Be motivated like the falcon, hunt gloriously. Be magnificent as the leopard, fight to win. Spend less time with nightingales and peacocks. One is all talk, the other only color. – Rumi • British men are peacocks. You see a lot more style on the streets here than you see anywhere else, on every level. – Tom Ford • But why wasn’t I born, alas, in an age of Adjectives; why can one no longer write of silver-shedding Tears and moon-tailed Peacocks, of eloquent Death, of the Negro and star-enameled Night? – Logan Pearsall Smith • Dear Alec and Magnus, This is the first postcard of five. Don’t freak out or anything, but I need you to send me $150,000 to cover the cost of: 1) Two diamanté crowns 2) 20 peacocks 3) 300 chocolate lollipops in the shape of your heads 4) My dress 5) 500 lbs of glitter 6) One white horse (More to come in other cards) -Isabelle – Cassandra Clare Death, Stars, Writing • Dream tonight of peacock tails, Diamond fields and spouter whales. Ills are many, blessing few, But dreams tonight will shelter you. – Herman Melville • For all the feminist jabber about women being victimized by fashion, it is men who most suffer from conventions of dress. Every day, a woman can choose from an army of personae, femme to butch, and can cut or curl her hair or adorn herself with a staggering variety of artistic aids. But despite the Sixties experiments in peacock dress, no man can rise in the corporate world today, outside the entertainment industry, with long hair or makeup or purple velvet suits. – Camille Paglia • Genius and virtue are to be more often found clothed in gray than in peacock bright. – Van Wyck Brooks • Hansel is certainly about comfort, while still sort of having a peacock principle of wanting to attract attention. – Owen Wilson • He said that people who loved [animals] to excess were capable of the worst cruelties toward human beings. He said that dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors, that peacocks were heralds of death, that macaws were simply decorative annoyances, that rabbits fomented greed, that monkeys carried the fever of lust, and that roosters were damned because they had been complicit in the three denials of Christ. – Gabriel Garcia Marquez • Here is a kitchen improvement, in return for Peacock. For roasting or basting a chicken, render down your fat or butter with cider: about a third cider. Let it come together slowly, till the smell of cider and the smell of fat are as one. This will enliven even a frozen chicken. – Sylvia Townsend Warner • How come it can’t fly no better than a chicken?’ Milkman asked. Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can’t nobody fly with all that [stuff]. Wanna fly, you got to give up the [stuff] that weighs you down.’ The peacock jumped onto the hood of the Buick and once more spread its tail, sending the flashy Buick into oblivion. – Toni Morrison • I am Plato’s Republic. Mr. Simmons is Marcus. I want you to meet Jonathan Swift, the author of that evil political book, Gulliver’s Travels! And this other fellow is Charles Darwin, and-this one is Schopenhauer, and this one is Einstein, and this one here at my elbow is Mr. Albert Schweitzer, a very kind philosopher indeed. Here we all are, Montag. Aristophanes and Mahatma Gandhi and Gautama Buddha and Confucius and Thomas Love Peacock and Thomas Jefferson and Mr. Lincoln, if you please. We are also Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. – Ray Bradbury • I can live without it all – love with its blood pump, sex with its messy hungers, men with their peacock strutting, their silly sexual baggage, their wet tongues in my ear. – Erica Jong • I designed collections around whatever struck my fancy … fruits, vegetables, politics, or peacocks! – Lilly Pulitzer • I do not believe that any peacock envies another peacock his tail, because every peacock is persuaded that his own tail is the finest in the world. The consequence of this is that peacocks are peaceable birds. – John Ruskin • I don’t know if it’s animalistic or what, but men become like peacocks with their feathers up when women are around. – Bradley Cooper • I fear I must agree,” Magnus murmured. He pressed a hand over his heart and his new peacock-blue waistcoast. “I strive to find some respect in my heart for you, but alas! It seems an impossible quest. – Cassandra Clare • I just love the way the ’60s rock stars put themselves together, because they were like dandies and peacocks. They really lived out their fantasies – and dressed their fantasies. – Anna Sui • I know exactly how strong he is… He is like a peacock, spreading his feathers and squawking loudly to distract you from the back that his body is but weak.” -Jason to Mahiya – Nalini Singh • If a man knew anything, he would sit in a corner and be modest; but he is such an ignorant peacock, that he goes bustling up and down, and hits on extraordinary discoveries. – Ralph Waldo Emerson • If thou seest anything in thyself which may make thee proud, look a little further and thou shalt find enough to humble thee; if thou be wise, view the peacock’s feathers with his feet, and weigh thy best parts with thy imperfections. – Francis Quarles • If you get bored of doing it (Peacock Pose) with two hands, try it with one. – Dharma Mittra • It dances today, my heart, like a peacock it dances, it dances. It sports a mosaic of passions like a peacock’s tail, It soars to the sky with delight, it quests, Oh wildly, it dances today, my heart, like a peacock it dances. – Rabindranath Tagore • It is reported of the peacock that priding himself in his gay feathers he ruffles them up; but spying his black feet he soon lets fall his plumes. So he that glories in his gifts and adornings should look upon his corruptions, and that will damp his high thoughts. – Anne Bradstreet • It’s an awful stretcher to believe that a peacock’s tail was thus formed but … most people just don’t get it – I must be a very bad explainer – Charles Darwin • Le geai pare des plumes du paon. A bluejay in peacock feathers. – Jean de La Fontaine • Let me drive,” she said, reaching for the reins. He turned to her in disbelief. “This is a phaeton, not a single-horse wagon.” Sophie fought the urge to throttle him. His nose was running, his eyes were red, he couldn’t stop coughing, and still he found the energy to act like an arrogant peacock. “I assure you,” she said slowly, “that I know how to drive a team of horses. – Julia Quinn • Maggie threw her head back and laughed. ‘So you’re going to try…what? Birds of a Feather?’ she quested. ‘Of course not,’ Kat said. ‘Everyone knows the French government banned the importation of peacocks in 1987. – Ally Carter • Many a peacock hides his peacock tail from all eyes–and calls it his pride. – Friedrich Nietzsche • Men’s clothes are becoming kind of mod. They’re becoming more colorful and more flamboyant, and the male peacock is beginning to show his true plumage. – Liberace • Music really influenced me when I was growing up. I did go through a Jimi Hendrix phase. My hair was naturally quite afro, and I wore low-slung jeans with very high heels. Siouxsie and the Banshees had a lot to answer for. I was in a top hat with peacock feathers and thigh-high black boots. I was 17 — old enough to know better. – Helen McCrory • My heart is like a singing bird Whose nest is in a water’d shoot; My heart is like an apple-tree Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit; My heart is like a rainbow shell That paddles in a halcyon sea; My heart is gladder than all these, Because my love is come to me. Raise me a daïs of silk and down; Hang it with vair and purple dyes; Carve it in doves and pomegranates, And peacocks with a hundred eyes; Work it in gold and silver grapes, In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys; Because the birthday of my life Is come, my love is come to me. – Christina Rossetti • My philosophy on what makeup is…it’s very different from what a woman’s is. Makeup came from a very psychological place – of the peacock. – Jeremy Renner • News is history shot on the wing. The huntsmen from the Fourth Estate seek to bag only the peacock or the eagle of the swifting day. – Gene Fowler • Only you could love such a vile, selfish peacock, Evie. – Lisa Kleypas Paradise, Way, Satan • Patterns drawn in ultraviolet might make those ordinary little petals into the exotic peacocks of the botanical world, and yet we cannot appreciate them. – Victoria Finlay • Peacock bass like to hide at ambush points, away from the strong canal currents. If you fish early and know those peacock hangouts, you will have little or no trouble catching peacocks on lures and live bait. – Mark Hall • Peacocks have the bright feathers. Fish have the long tails. Women have the mall. – Janette Rallison • People are crying up the rich and variegated plumage of the peacock, and he is himself blushing at the sight of his ugly feet. – Saadi • Play not the Peacock, looking everywhere about you, to see if you be well deck’t. – George Washington • Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir, Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine, With a cargo of ivory, And apes and peacocks, Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine. – John Masefield • Recently, while I was in England, I saw a documentary on the BBC about the border between India and Pakistan at Wagah. When the border closes each evening around six o’ clock, the soldiers on each side do these amazing high-stepping peacock march-offs (like a dance-off). The displays are almost identical on each side and thousands gather to watch them. Though they’re patrolling along their separate borders, what comes across is how similar they are. – Matthea Harvey • Ruin, weariness, death, perpetually death, stand grimly to confront the other presence of Elizabethan drama which is life: life compact of frigates, fir trees and ivory, of dolphins and the juice of July flowers, of the milk of unicorns and panthers’ breath, of ropes of pearl, brains of peacocks and Cretan wine. – Virginia Woolf • She is a peacock in everything but beauty! – Oscar Wilde • Simple DNA gradually morphed and evolved, so that you had the coming into being of ever more complex and diverse creatures, until one day you wake up and find there are peacocks and giraffes. Nature is an open-ended experiment based on morphing a DNA code, and ours is an open-ended experiment based on morphing a crochet code. – Margaret Wertheim • Skaters are very much like peacocks. – Jon Heder • Tell me about this Wizard Howl of yours.” “He’s the best wizard in Ingary or anywhere else. If he’d only had time, he would have defeated that djinn. And he’s sly and selfish and vain as a peacock and cowardly, and you can’t pin him down to anything.” “Indeed? Strange that you should speak so proudly such a list of vices, most loving of ladies.” “What do you mean, vices? I was just describing Howl. He comes from another world entirely, you know, called Wales, and I refuse to believe he’s dead! – Diana Wynne Jones • The Italians are fond of red clothes, peacock plumes, and embroidery; and I remember one rainy morning in the city of Palermo, the street was ablaze with scarlet umbrellas. – Ralph Waldo Emerson • The Italians have voices like peacocks – German gives me a cold in the head – and Russian is nothing but sneezing – Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton • The masculine imagination lives in a state of perpetual revolt against the limitations of human life. In theological terms, one might say that all men, left to themselves, become gnostics. They may swagger like peacocks, but in their heart of hearts they all think sex an indignity and wish they could beget themselves on themselves. Hence the aggressive hostility toward women so manifest in most club-car stories. – W. H. Auden • The peacock in all his pride does not display half the colors that appear in the garments of a British lady when she is dressed. – Joseph Addison • The pride of the peacock is the glory of God. – William Blake • The pride of the peacock is the glory of God. The lust of the goat is the bounty of God. The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God. The nakedness of woman is the work of God. – William Blake • The sparrow is sorry for the peacock at the burden of its tail. – Rabindranath Tagore • The sun fades like the spreading Of a peacock’s tail, as though twilight Might be read as a warning to those desperate For easy solutions.- John – Ashbery • The thing you fail to grasp is that people are not basically good. We are basically selfish. We shove and clamour and cry for adoration, and beat down everyone else to get it. Life is a competition of prattling peacocks enraptured in inane mating rituals. But for all our effacing and self-importance, we are all slaves to what we fear most. You have so very much to learn. Here. Let me teach you. – Christopher Nolan • There are eight different breeds of peacock. I have them all. – Bidzina Ivanishvili • There are no preconditions for jealousy. You don’t have to be right, you don’t have to be reasonable. Take Othello. He was neither right nor reasonable, and Desdemona ended up dead. I wouldn’t mind Leanne ending up dead. I wouldn’t mind exploding her into fireworks of peacock and pearl. – Franny Billingsley • To frame the little animal, provide All the gay hues that wait on female pride: Let Nature guide thee; sometimes golden wire The shining bellies of the fly require; The peacock’s plumes thy tackle must not fail, Nor the dear purchase of the sable’s tail. – John Gay • To Paradise, the Arabs say, Satan could never find the way Until the peacock led him in. – Charles Godfrey Leland • Turkeys are peacocks that have really let themselves go. – Kristen Schaal • We ask ourselves all kinds of questions, such as why does a peacock have such beautiful feathers, and we may answer that he needs the feathers to impress a female peacock, but then we ask ourselves, and why is there a peacock? And then we ask, why is there anything living? And then we ask, why is there anything at all? And if you tell some advocate of scientism that the answer is a secret, he will go white hot and write a book. But it is a secret. And the experience of living with the secret and thinking about it is in itself a kind of faith. – Vaclav Havel • We may put too high a premium on speech from platform and pulpit, at the bar and in the legislative hall, and pay dear for the whistle of our endless harangues. England and especially Germany, are less loquacious, and attend more to business. We let the eagle, and perhaps too often the peacock, scream. – Bill Vaughan • When the peacock has presented his back, the spectator will usually begin to walk around him to get a front view; but the peacock will continue to turn so that no front view is possible. The thing to do then is to stand still and wait until it pleases him to turn. When it suits him, the peacock will face you. Then you will see in a green-bronze arch around him a galaxy of gazing, haloed suns. – Flannery O’Connor • Who cares what a man’s style is, so it is intelligible,–as intelligible as his thought. Literally and really, the style is no more than the stylus, the pen he writes with; and it is not worth scraping and polishing, and gilding, unless it will write his thoughts the better for it. It is something for use, and not to look at. The question for us is, not whether Pope had a fine style, wrote with a peacock’s feather, but whether he uttered useful thoughts. – Henry David Thoreau • Women are a source of energy in life. I’ve always wanted to be in a war or baseball movie, but the thought of having no women on set for six months – that’s hell. I don’t know if it’s animalistic or what, but men become like peacocks with their feathers up when women are around. – Bradley Cooper

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[knightsoftrepanning]

Sketch of Contemporary Social Life

Never has the individual been so completely delivered up to a blind collectivity, and never have men been less capable, not only of subordinating their actions to their thoughts, but even of thinking. Such terms as oppressors and oppressed, the idea of classes — all that sort of thing is near to losing all meaning, so obvious are the impotence and distress of all men in face of the social machine, which has become a machine for breaking hearts and crushing spirits, a machine for manufacturing irresponsibility, stupidity, corruption, slackness and, above all, dizziness. The reason for this painful state of affairs is perfectly clear. We are living in a world in which nothing is made to man's measure; there exists a monstrous discrepancy between man's body, man's mind and the things which at the present time constitute the elements of human existence; everything is disequilibrium. There is not a single category, group or class of men that is altogether exempt from this destructive disequilibrium, except perhaps for a few isolated patches of more primitive life; and the younger generation, who have grown and are growing up in it, inwardly reflect the chaos surrounding them more than do their elders. This disequilibrium is essentially a matter of quantity. Quantity is changed into quality, as Hegel said, and in particular a mere difference in quantity is sufficient to change what is human into what is inhuman. From the abstract point of view quantities are immaterial, since you can arbitrarily change the unit of measurement; but from the concrete point of view certain units of measurement are given and have hitherto remained invariable, such as the human body, human life, the year, the day, the average quickness of human thought. Present-day life is not organized on the scale of all these things; it has been transported into an altogether different order of magnitude, as though man were trying to raise it to the level of the forces of outside nature while neglecting to take his own nature into account. If we add that, to all appearances, the economic system has exhausted its constructive capacity and is beginning to be able to function only by undermining little by little its own material foundations, we shall perceive in all its simplicity the veritable essence of the bottomless misery that forms the lot of the present generations.

In appearance, nearly everything nowadays is carried out methodically; science is king, machinery invades bit by bit the entire field of labour, statistics take on a growing importance, and over one-sixth of the globe the central authority is trying to regulate the whole of social life according to plans. But in reality methodical thought is progressively disappearing, owing to the fact that the mind finds less and less matter on which to bite. Mathematics by itself forms too vast and too complex a whole to be embraced by one mind; a fortiori the whole formed by mathematics and the natural sciences; a fortiori the whole formed by science and its applications; and, on the other hand, everything is too intimately connected for the mind to be able really to grasp partial concepts. Now everything that the individual becomes powerless to control is seized upon by the collectivity. Thus science has now been for a long time — and to an ever-increasing extent — a collective enterprise. Actually, new results are always, in fact, the work of specific individuals; but, save perhaps for rare exceptions, the value of any result depends on such a complex set of interrelations with past discoveries and possible future researches that even the mind of the inventor cannot embrace the whole. Consequently, new discoveries, as they go on accumulating, take on the appearance of enigmas, after the style of too thick a glass which ceases to be transparent. A fortiori practical life takes on a more and more collective character, and the individual as such a more and more insignificant place in it. Technical progress and mass production reduce manual workers more and more to a passive role; in increasing proportion and to an ever greater extent they arrive at a form of labour that enables them to carry out the necessary movements without understanding their connection with the final result. On the other hand, an industrial concern has become something too vast and too complex for any one man to be able to grasp it fully; and furthermore, in all spheres, the men who occupy key posts in social life are in charge of matters which are far beyond the compass of any single human mind. As for the general body of social life, it depends on so many factors, each of which is impenetrably obscure and which are tangled up in inextricable relations with one another, that it would never even occur to anyone to try to understand its mechanism. Thus the social function most essentially connected with the individual, that which consists in co-ordinating, managing, deciding, is beyond any individual's capacity and becomes to a certain extent collective and, as it were, anonymous.

To the very extent to which what is systematic in contemporary life escapes the control of the mind, its regularity is established by things which constitute the equivalent of what collective thought would be if the collectivity did think. The cohesiveness of science is ensured by means of signs; namely, on the one hand, by words or ready-made phrases whose use is stretched beyond the meanings originally contained in them, on the other hand, by algebraic calculations. In the sphere of labour, the things which take upon themselves the essential functions are machines. The thing which relates production to consumption and governs the exchange of products is money. Finally, where the function of co-ordination and management is too heavy for the mind and intelligence of one man, it is entrusted to a curious machine, whose parts are men, whose gears consist of regulations, reports and statistics, and which is called bureaucratic organization. All these blind things imitate the effort of thought to the life. Just the mechanism of algebraic calculation has led more than once to what might be called a new idea, except that the content of such pseudo-ideas is no more than that of relations between signs; and algebra is often marvellously apt to transform a series of experimental results into laws, with a disconcerting ease reminding one of the fantastic transformations one sees in motion-picture cartoons. Automatic machines seem to offer the model for the intelligent, faithful, docile and conscientious worker. As for money, economists have long been convinced that it possesses the virtue of establishing harmonious relations between the various economic functions. And bureaucratic machines almost reach the point of taking the place of leaders. Thus, in all spheres, thought, the prerogative of the individual, is subordinated to vast mechanisms which crystallize collective life, and that is so to such an extent that we have almost lost the notion of what real thought is. The efforts, the labours, the inventions of beings of flesh and blood whom time introduces in successive waves to social life only possess social value and effectiveness on condition that they become in their turn crystallized in these huge mechanisms.

The inversion of the relation between means and ends — an inversion which is to a certain extent the law of every oppressive society — here becomes total or nearly so, and extends to nearly everything. The scientist does not use science in order to manage to see more clearly into his own thinking, but aims at discovering results that will go to swell the present volume of scientific knowledge. Machines do not run in order to enable men to live, but we resign ourselves to feeding men in order that they may serve the machines. Money does not provide a convenient method for exchanging products; it is the sale of goods which is a means for keeping money in circulation. Lastly, organization is not a means for exercising a collective activity, but the activity of a group, whatever it may be, is a means for strengthening organization. Another aspect of the same inversion consists in the fact that signs, words and algebraic formulas in the field of knowledge, money and credit symbols in economic life, play the part of realities of which the actual things themselves constitute only the shadows, exactly as in Hans Andersen's tale in which the scientist and his shadow exchanged roles; this is because signs constitute the material of social relations, whereas the perception of reality is something individual. The dispossession of the individual in favour of the collectivity is not, indeed, absolute, and it cannot become so; but it is hard to imagine how it could go much farther than at present.

The power and concentration of armaments place all human lives at the mercy of the central authority. As a result of the vast extension of exchange, the majority of men cannot procure for themselves the greater part of what they consume save through the medium of society and in return for money; the peasants themselves are today to a large extent under this obligation to buy. And as big industry is a system of collective production, a great many men are forced, in order that their hands may come into contact with the material of work, to go through a collectivity which swallows them up and pins them down to a more or less servile task; when it rejects them, the strength and skill of their hands remain useless. The very peasants, who hitherto had managed to escape this wretched condition, have been reduced to it of late over one-sixth of the globe. Such a stifling state of affairs certainly provokes here and there an individualistic reaction; art, and especially literature, bears the marks of it; but since, owing to objective condi-tions, this reaction cannot impinge on either the sphere of thought or that of action, it remains bottled up in the play of the inner conscious-ness or in dreams of adventure and gratuitous acts, in other words, it never leaves the realm of shadows; and everything leads one to suppose that even this shadowy reaction is doomed to disappear almost completely.

When man reaches this degree of enslavement, judgments of value can only be based, whatever the particular field may be, on a purely external criterion; language does not possess any term so foreign to thought as properly to express something so devoid of meaning; but we may say that this criterion is constituted by efficiency, provided we thereby understand successes obtained in a vacuum. Even a scientific concept is not valued according to its content, which may be completely unintelligible, but according to the opportunities it provides for co-ordinating, abbreviating, summarizing. In the economic field, an undertaking is judged, not according to the real utility of the social functions it fulfils, but according to its growth so far and the speed with which it is developing; and the same is true of everything. Thus judgment of values is as it were entrusted to material objects instead of to the mind. The efficacy of efforts of whatever kind must always, it is true, be verified by thought, for, generally speaking, all verification proceeds from the mind; but thought has been reduced to such a subordinate role that one may say, by way of simplification, that the function of verification has passed from thought to things. But this excessive complication of all theoretical and practical activities which has thus dethroned thought, finally, when still further aggravated, comes to render the verification exercised by things in its turn imperfect and almost impossible. Everything is then blind. Thus it is that, in the sphere of science, the excessive accumulation of materials of every kind produces such chaos that the time seems to be approaching when any system will appear arbitrary. The chaos existing in economic life is still far more patent. In the actual carrying out of work, the subordination of irresponsible slaves to leaders overwhelmed by the mass of things to attend to, and, incidentally, themselves to a large extent irresponsible, is the cause of faulty workmanship and countless acts of negligence; this evil, which was first of all restricted to the big industrial undertakings, has now spread to the countryside wherever the peasants are enslaved after the manner of the industrial workers, i.e., as in Soviet Russia. The tremendous extension of credit prevents money from playing its regulating role so far as concerns commercial exchanges and the relationships between the various branches of production; and it would be useless to try to remedy this by doses of statistics. The parallel extension of speculation ends up by rendering the prosperity of industries independent, to a large extent, of their good functioning; the reason being that the capital increase brought about by the actual production of each of them counts less and less as compared with the constant supply of fresh capital. In short, in all spheres, success has become something almost arbitrary; it seems more and more to be the work of pure chance; and as it constituted the sole rule in all branches of human activity, our civilization is invaded by an ever-increasing disorder, and ruined by a waste in proportion to that disorder. This transformation is taking place at the very moment when the sources of profit on which the capitalist economy formerly drew for its prodigious development are becoming less and less plentiful, and when the technical conditions of work are themselves imposing a rapidly decreasing tempo on the improvement of industrial equipment.

So many profound changes have been taking place almost unbeknownst to us, and yet we are living in a period when the very axis of the social system is as it were in process of heeling over. Throughout the rise of the industrial system social life found itself oriented in the direction of construction. The industrial equipment of the planet was the supreme battle-ground on which the struggle for power was waged. To increase the size of an undertaking faster than its competitors, and that by means of its own resources — such was, broadly speaking, the aim and object of economic activity. Saving was the rule of economic life; consumption was restricted as much as possible, not only that of the workers, but also that of the capitalists themselves, and, in general, all expenditure connected with other things than industrial equipment. The supreme mission of governments was to preserve peace at home and abroad. The bourgeoisie were under the impression that this state of things would go on indefinitely, for the greater happiness of humanity; but it could not go on indefinitely in this way. Nowadays, the struggle for power, while preserving to a certain extent the same outward appearance, has entirely changed in character. The formidable increase in the part capital plays in undertakings, if compared with that of living labour, the rapid decrease in the rate of profit which has resulted, the ever-increasing amount of overhead expenses, waste, leakage, the lack of any regulating device for adjusting the various branches of production to one another — everything prevents social activity from still having as its pivot the development of the undertaking, by turning profits into capital. It seems as though the economic struggle has ceased to be a form of competition in order to become a sort of war. It is no longer so much a question of properly organizing the work as of squeezing out the greatest possible amount of available capital scattered about in society by marketing shares, and then of squeezing out the greatest possible amount of money from everywhere by marketing products; everything takes place in the realm of opinion, and almost of fiction, by means of speculation and publicity. Since credit is the key to all economic success, saving is replaced by the maddest forms of expenditure. The term property has almost ceased to have any meaning; the ambitious man no longer thinks of being owner of a business and running it at a profit, but of causing the widest possible sector of economic activity to pass under his control. In a word, if we attempt to characterize, albeit in vague and summary fashion, this almost impenetrably obscure transformation, it is now a question in the struggle for economic power far less of building up than of conquering; and since conquest is destructive, the capitalist system, though remaining outwardly pretty much the same as it was fifty years ago, is wholly turned towards destruction. The means employed in the economic struggle — publicity, lavish display of wealth, corruption, enormous capital investments based almost entirely on credit, marketing of useless products by almost violent methods, speculations with the object of ruining rival concerns — all these tend to undermine the foundations of our economic life far more than to broaden them.

... Marx's assertion that the régime would produce its own gravediggers is cruelly contradicted every day; and one wonders, incidentally, how Marx could ever have believed that slavery could produce free men. Never yet in history has a régime of slavery fallen under the blows of the slaves. The truth is that, to quote a famous saying, slavery degrades man to the point of making him love it; that liberty is precious only in the eyes of those who effectively possess it; and that a completely inhuman system, as ours is, far from producing beings capable of building up a human society, models all those subjected to it — oppressed and oppressors alike — according to its own image. Everywhere, in varying degrees, the impossibility of relating what one gives to what one receives has killed the feeling for sound workmanship, the sense of responsibility, and has developed passivity, neglect, the habit of expecting everything from outside, the belief in miracles. Even in the country, the feeling of a deep-seated bond between the land which sustains the man and the man who works the land has to a large extent been obliterated since the taste for speculation, the unpredictable rises and falls in currencies and prices have got countryfolk into the habit of turning their eyes towards the towns. The worker has not the feeling of earning his living as a producer; it is merely that the undertaking keeps him enslaved for long hours every day and allows him each week a sum of money which gives him the magic power of conjuring up at a moment's notice ready-made products, exactly as the rich do. The presence of innumerable unemployed, the cruel necessity of having to beg for a job, make wages appear less as wages than as alms. As for the unemployed themselves, the fact that they are involuntary parasites, and poverty-stricken into the bargain, does not make them any the less parasites. Generally speaking, the relation between work done and money earned is so hard to grasp that it appears as almost accidental, so that labour takes on the aspect of servitude, money that of a favour. The so-called governing classes are affected by the same passivity as all the others, owing to the fact that, snowed under as they are by an avalanche of inextricable problems, they long since gave up governing. One would look in vain, from the highest down to the lowest rungs of the social ladder, for a class of men among whom the idea could one day spring up that they might, in certain circumstances, have to take in hand the destinies of society; the harangues of the fascists could alone give the illusion of this, but they are empty.

As always happens, mental confusion and passivity leave free scope to the imagination. On all hands one is obsessed by a representation of social life which, while differing considerably from one class to another, is always made up of mysteries, occult qualities, myths, idols and monsters; each one thinks that power resides mysteriously in one of the classes to which he has no access, because hardly anybody understands that it resides nowhere, so that the dominant feeling everywhere is that dizzy fear which is always brought about by loss of contact with reality. Each class appears from the outside as a nightmare object. In circles connected with the working-class movement, dreams are haunted by mythological monsters called Finance, Industry, Stock Exchange, Bank, etc.; the bourgeois dream about other monsters which they call ringleaders, agitators, demagogues; the politicians regard the capitalists as supernatural beings who alone possess the key to the situation, and vice versa; each nation regards its neighbours as collective monsters inspired by a diabolical perversity. One could go on developing this theme indefinitely ... Nothing is easier, for that matter, than to spread any myth whatsoever throughout a whole population. We must not be surprised, therefore, at the appearance of “totalitarian” régimes unprecedented in history. It is often said that force is powerless to overcome thought; but for this to be true, there must be thought. Where irrational opinions hold the place of ideas, force is all-powerful. It is quite unfair to say, for example, that fascism annihilates free thought; in reality it is the lack of free thought which makes it possible to impose by force official doctrines entirely devoid of meaning. Actually, such a régime even manages considerably to increase the general stupidity, and there is little hope for the generations that will have grown up under the conditions which it creates. Nowadays, every attempt to turn men into brutes finds powerful means at its disposal. On the other hand, one thing is impossible, even were you to dispose of the best of public platforms, and that is to diffuse clear ideas, correct reasoning and sensible views on any wide scale.

It is no good expecting help to come from men; and even were it otherwise, men would none the less be vanquished in advance by the natural power of things. The present social system provides no means of action other than machines for crushing humanity; whatever may be the intentions of those who use them, these machines crush and will continue to crush as long as they exist. With the industrial convict prisons constituted by the big factories, one can only produce slaves and not free workers, still less workers who would form a dominant class. With guns, aeroplanes, bombs, you can spread death, terror, oppression, but not life and liberty. With gas masks, air-raid shelters and air-raid warnings, you can create wretched masses of panic-stricken human beings, ready to succumb to the most senseless forms of terror and to welcome with gratitude the most humiliating forms of tyranny, but not citizens. With the popular press and the wireless, you can make a whole people swallow with their breakfast or their supper a series of ready-made and, by the same token, absurd opinions — for even sensible views become deformed and falsified in minds which accept them unthinkingly; but you cannot with the aid of these things arouse so much as a gleam of thought. And without factories, without arms, without the popular press you can do nothing against those who possess all these things. The same applies to everything. The powerful means are oppressive, the non-powerful means remain inoperative. Each time that the oppressed have tried to set up groups able to exercise a real influence, such groups, whether they went by the name of parties or unions, have reproduced in full within themselves all the vices of the system which they claimed to reform or abolish, namely, bureaucratic organization, reversal of the relationship between means and ends, contempt for the individual, separation between thought and action, the mechanization of thought itself, the exploitation of stupidity and lies as means of propaganda, and so on.

The only possibility of salvation would lie in a methodical co-operation between all, strong and weak, with a view to accomplishing a progressive decentralization of social life; but the absurdity of such an idea strikes one immediately. Such a form of co-operation is impossible to imagine, even in dreams, in a civilization that is based on competition, on struggle, on war. Apart from some such co-operation, there is no means of stopping the blind trend of the social machine towards an increasing centralization, until the machine itself suddenly jams and flies into pieces. What weight can the hopes and desires of those who are not at the control levers carry, when, reduced to the most tragic impotence, they find themselves the mere playthings of blind and brutish forces? As for those who exercise economic or political authority, harried as they are incessantly by rival ambitions and hostile powers, they cannot work to weaken their own authority without condemning themselves almost certainly to being deprived of it. The more they feel themselves to be animated by good intentions, the more they will be brought, even despite themselves, to endeavour to extend their authority in order to increase their ability to do good; which amounts to oppressing people in the hope of liberating them, as Lenin did. It is quite patently impossible for decentralization to be initiated by the central authority; to the very extent to which the central authority is exercised, it brings everything else under its subjection. Generally speaking, the idea of enlightened despotism, which has always had a utopian flavour about it, is in our day completely absurd. Faced with problems whose variety and complexity are infinitely beyond the range of great as of limited minds, no despot in the world can possibly be enlightened. Though a few men may hope, by dint of honest and methodical thinking, to perceive a few gleams in this impenetrable darkness, those whom the cares and responsibilities of authority deprive of both leisure and liberty of mind are certainly not of that number.

In such a situation, what can those do who still persist, against all eventualities, in honouring human dignity both in themselves and in others? Nothing, except endeavour to introduce a little play into the cogs of the machine that is grinding us down; seize every opportunity of awakening a little thought wherever they are able; encourage whatever is capable, in the sphere of politics, economics or technique, of leaving the individual here and there a certain freedom of movement amid the trammels cast around him by the social organization. That is certainly something, but it does not go very far. On the whole, our present situation more or less resembles that of a party of absolutely ignorant travellers who find themselves in a motor-car launched at full speed and driverless across broken country. When will the smash-up occur after which it will be possible to consider trying to construct something new? Perhaps it is a matter of a few decades, perhaps of centuries. There are no data enabling one to fix a probable lapse of time. It seems, however, that the material resources of our civilization are not likely to become exhausted for some considerable time, even allowing for wars; and, on the other hand, as centralization, by abolishing all individual initiative and all local life, destroys by its very existence everything which might serve as a basis for a different form of organization, one may suppose that the present system will go on existing up to the extreme limit of possibility. To sum up, it seems reasonable to suppose that the generations which will have to face the difficulties brought about by the collapse of the present system have yet to be born. As for the generations now living, they are perhaps, of all those that have followed each other in the course of human history, the ones which will have had to shoulder the maximum of imaginary responsibilities and the minimum of real ones. Once this situation is fully realized, it leaves a marvellous freedom of mind.

Simone Weil, Oppression and Liberty (1934)

#simone weil #society #economics #capitalism #ethics #freedom

[fartpet117-blog]

the seal of the red light

The Seal of the Red Light

The aim of this exercise is to place a mental seal in your mind. With every listening, this seal will take deeper and deeper roots. It will be more and more firmly in place. This is the ultimate mind fuck. It is exciting. Listening to this is so exciting. Listening makes you so hard. The more you listen, the more you want to listen.

This is your frame. In your confines. This is your frame. Framed by outer limits, borders, boundaries, edges, fringes. A massive, beefy grizzly pig. You, so low. A docile little whelp. Leashed. On your knees. Your face buried between the grizzly pigs thighs. Deeply buried in his obscenely fat arse. Obediently sniffing his loud, foul farts. This is your frame. Confined you are here. Enclosed in this mental space. Your deviant place. Enclosed, incarcerated, imprisoned. interned, impounded, held captive. trapped, shut in, penned in. caged, lock up, cooped up. boxed in, immured,  fenced in. encircled, corralled in your confines. underneath the grizzly pig. sniffing his farts. How he restricts, limits, keeps you within the limits of your deviant fantasies. How he mentally does not allow you to go beyond your perversion. This is your frame. A confined space. confined, constricted, restricted. limited, confining, small. narrow, compact, tight. pinched, squeezed, incommodious. exiguous, incapacious. below the grizzly pig you are. beneath, underneath, further down than, lower than less than, lower than, under, smaller than the grizzly pig you are. above, over, more than you the grizzly pig is. ranking below the grizzly pig. lower than, under, inferior to the grizzly pig. subordinate to, subservient to subject to the grizzly pig. controlled by, at the mercy of, under the heel of the grizzly pig. He is above you. On a leash. ‘you should always keep your dog on a leash’. So the grizzly pig keeps you on a leash. A mental lead. Your rein, tether, rope. A cord, chain, line. A strap, a restraint controlling, restraining, curbing, reining, holding, disciplining you. In your mind. The grizzly pig called the dog to heel. so that he could leash it. The grizzly pig has put a leash on you. putting a lead on you. fastening, tethering, securing you. hitching you up, tying you up. binding, fettering, confining you. The grizzly pig restrains and curbs you. kneeling down. falling to your knees, get down on your knees, genuflecting.  bowing down, making obeisance, kowtowing. curtsying, showing reverence, showing deference. crouching, squatting, hunching down. hunkering down. You. obedient, compliant, acquiescent. tractable, amenable, dutiful and good you are. So deferential, respectful, duteous. So under control, so well trained, so well disciplined. observant, manageable, governable. conformable, docile, biddable. submissive, tame, meek. passive, unresisting, malleable. pliable, pliant, yielding. subservient, obsequious, servile. You are of a docile nature. and readily defer to a grizzly pig. willing, passive, submissive. deferential, mild, lamblike. unassertive, unresisting, biddable. So easily persuadable, ductile, and manageable. so controllable, tractable and malleable. So manipulable, so easily manipulated, so easily handled. So persuasible. It is time for some dog drill. The grizzly pig drilling you. He uses military discipline. and drill. to train his boy. training, instruction, grounding. discipline. like a sergeant drilling new recruits. training, grounding, inculcating. disciplining you. Of nature, you are lower. bottommost, underneath, further down, beneath, nether the grizzly pig you are in this confined space. Knowing well that you do not belong to the same level as him. subordinate, inferior, lesser you are. Realise your minor, lower-level, subsidiary position. Your ancillary, subservient nature  second-class, second-rate. Upper, senior the grizzly pig is. The grizzly pig is a callous brute. A savage, a beast, a monster. A sadist, barbarian, and devil. A demon, a fiend, an ogre he is. The grizzly pig. A thug, a lout, a boor, an oaf, a ruffian, a yahoo, a rowdy. Trampling on you. The grizzly pig degrades, demeans, and debases you. Devalues, reduces and humiliates you. lowers your status. humbles, mortifies, and abases you.  You will be desensitized, dehumanized, brutalized. to lower yourself in this way. degraded, debased, demeaned. He will abase, humble, and humiliate you. How you love to be downgraded this way. A vicious-looking brute, the grizzly pig is. You strain at the leash. The grizzly pig. crude, fleshly, bodily, violent. Every time you want to cross this frame of your perversion, the following will happen. your mind, all by itself, will create this. Any time you want to detach from sniffing grizzly pig farts. Any time you want to ignore your perversions. The grizzly pig will be thunderous. And you fear the grizzly pigs ire. If you try to cross the line, the grizzly pig loses his temper. becomes enraged, goes into a rage, rants and raves. He goes berserk, fumes, seethes, flares up. He will bristle, see red, breathe fire, foam at the mouth, have a fit, explode, go psycho. The grizzly pig will whip, lash, scourge, thong, strap, belt you. he would use a whip on you trespassing the line. He is your master. You are his dog. He is your overlord, ruler, sovereign. Your are his pup. He is lord and master, monarch, suzerain. You are a doggy. Your overseer, controller, commander he is. You are his little whelp. He, the top dog, the Big Chief, your Big Daddy. You, his doggy. He will flog, scourge, flagellate, lash, thrash, beat you for trying to escape your pervert space. You will accede to your masters wishes. You servant, you underling. Cowering beneath your trainer, your tamer, animal trainer. wild and fierce the grizzly pig is. He will tame you. His domesticated, docile, tamed, disciplined, broken, broken-in, trained, pet. Every time you want to throw off this mental yoke, a mentally painful red light will flame up around your frame. The red light is painful. The painful red light. sore, hurting, aching, throbbing, smarting, burning, irritating, agonizing, excruciating, distressing red light. nasty, disquieting, disturbing, upsetting, agonizing, harrowing, mortifying, unendurable, unbearable, torturous, cruel, distressful it is. The red light is the mental equivalent of electrocution. The red light is the mental equivalent of tasers. of a stun gun. of electric shock. The red light electrocutes your free will. and your resistance. Any time you cross the line of your fartpet frame, you will repeat the following mantra in your mind: Red light pig, think like a pig. Red light pig, think like a pig. Red light pig, think like a pig. Any time you want to throw off the mental yoke of your fart pet identity: red light pig, think like a pig. Any time you want to free yourself of this mental leash: red light pig, think like a pig. Any time you want to mentally raise beyond these confines: red light pig, think like a pig. Any time you want to talk about this with any one safe for a grizzly pig degrader: red light pig, think like a pig. Any time you head over the line: red light pig, think like a pig. Any time you try to cross the boundary line, the limit, the border of your perversion: red light pig, think like a pig. Anytime you want to escape the borderline, bounding line, demarcation line of your fartpet self: red light pig, think like a pig. No crossing the dividing line, end point, cut-off point, edge, threshold: red light pig, think like a pig. By your own red light, think like a pig. Red light pig, think like a pig. Red light pig, think like a pig. And the red light will flare up. painfully and disquietingly and excruciatingly so. Fear, panic, shame, virility, free will, self-esteem, self-respect, disgust at your perversion, overthinking, analytical thinking, reflections on your own situation. All firmly sealed. All firmly sealed behind the painful red light. Your free will, volition, independence. All sealed off by the painful red light. The painful red light sealing off your self-determination, self-sufficiency, autonomy, freedom, liberty. The painful red light is so much more potent. So much more potent than all these thoughts or feelings. It overshadows them all. The red light seals off all doubts, all panic. The red light hurts your mind. A sign not to cross the border out of your fartpet identity. You back away from the red light. Fearful and trembling. This seal is irreplaceable, irremovable. You cannot remove this seal. Not without my permission. Not with my permission. Not without hours and hours of therapy on end. Not even with hours and hours of therapy on end. dogs must be on leash and under control at all times. dogs must be on leash and under owners control at all times. Notice: keep dogs on a leash. All pets must be kept on leash. Its the law. All dogs must be leashed.   toe the line. sooner or later a boy has to learn to toe the line. conforming, obeying, complying with, observing, abiding by, adhering to, acting in accordance with, following, keeping to, sticking to the rules of your fartpet frame. submit, yield, play by the rules, keep in step. The painful red light. The grizzly pigs thunderous punishment. it is an enormous humiliation and you are left a broken up. overpowered, overwhelmed, subdued. crushed, humbled, crippled. demoralized, dispirited, dejected. lowering your head. on a leash. Reprogramming you. Warping you. Warping your mind. Perverting. Willfully perverting you. of your own free will. voluntarily, willingly, readily, freely perverting you. You feel me breaking your will. under duress, you acquiesce.

Lowering your head.

cowering. you would cower in the corner and tremble. cringing, shrinking, crouching, recoiling, flinching from the red light. pulling back, backing away, drawing back. shuddering, shivering, trembling, shaking, quaking, grovelling, blenching, blanching, quailing at the red light.

demoralized and tame. Once again docile, submissive, compliant, meek. Once again obedient, tractable, acquiescent. Once again amenable, manageable, unresisting, passive, mild, subdued. under the grizzly pigs control, under the grizzly pigs thumb. suppressed, unassertive. fartpets can be kept in captivity and eventually tamed. domesticated, broken, trained, mastered, subdued, subjugated, brought to heel, enslaved. Your pig tail tightly wrapped in bandages. The grizzly pig. Symbolically un-manning you. emasculated, weakened, made feeble and feebler, debilitated, enfeebled, enervated, crippled, powers reduced.

young cocks should be emasculated at three months old. The grizzly pig. Symbolically castrating, neutering, gelding, cutting, desexing, asexualizing, sterilizing, unmanning you. evirating, caponizing, eunuchizing you.

When you crawl back into your confines the red light will ebb away. And you will be rewarded by sniffing toxic farts from grizzly pigs fat man ass. Your mind will always take you back to sniffing toxic farts from the grizzly pigs fat man ass. After each orgasm, your mind will always take you back to sniffing toxic farts from grizzly pig fat man asses. Every orgasm making it worse. Reprogramming you. warping. wilfully perverting you. You feel me breaking your will. When you crawl back in your deviant space, the painful red light will ebb away. You will then feel so good. So relieved. To be back in your fart pen. Your mind will reward you with soothing images of a grizzly pig. A grizzly pigs fat man ass farting nasty gas at you. You inhaling the grizzly pig fart greedily, obediently. Being rewarded by sniffing fat man ass farts. Burying your face freely in the grizzly pigs ass. willingly sniffing the loud ass blasts. Your sexuality. That of a deviant, twisted grizzly pig fartpet. Your sexuality. That of a deviant, twisted grizzly pig fartpet. Your sexuality. That of a deviant, twisted grizzly pig fartpet. straining at the leash to sniff the grizzly pigs fat man ass farts. eager, impatient, anxious, enthusiastic. itching, dying, gagging to inhale fat man ass farts. in your mind. sniffing toxic grizzly pig farts will make you feel mindless bliss. brainless, imbecilic, imbecile, asinine, witless, empty-headed, vacuous, unintelligent, half-witted, dull, slow-witted, obtuse, weak-minded, feather-brained, doltish, blockish you are in your adoration. dumb, moronic, pig-ignorant, brain-dead, cretinous, thick, thickheaded, birdbrained, pea-brained, dim-witted, lamebrained your gullibility and subservience is. after orgasm you will feel mindless bliss while venerating grizzly pig fat man ass farts. in your mind. bliss you will feel joy, pleasure, delight, happiness, ecstasy, elation, rapture, euphoria, heaven, paradise, blessedness, blessing, benediction, glory, heaven, paradise, heavenly joy, divine happiness, supreme happiness, divine rapture, beatitude. While you are in hell. inhaling, breathing in, drawing in, sucking in, sniffing in, gasping, gulping, inbreathing grizzly pig farts. sniff the grizzly pigs fat man ass out. detect, find, search out, ferret out, root out, uncover, unearth, disinter, smell out, nose out, follow the scent of, scent out grizzly pig farts. sniff. carefully you will sniff grizzly pig fat man ass farts. smell, test the smell of, nose at, detect the smell of, pick up the smell of, catch the scent of, scent, get a whiff of grizzly pig fat man ass farts. Daily, you will force yourself to watch a picture of a grizzly pig.

[pamphletstoinspire]

Letter by Padre Pio: ON TRUST IN DIVINE GOODNESS

Story with image:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/letter-padre-pio-trust-divine-goodness-harold-baines/?published=t

In Letter five, dated 20-April–1914, Raffaella Cerase thanks Padre Pio for his fatherly charity towards her. Once again, she relates to him how she is deprived from receiving holy Communion because of inclement weather which conspires against her spiritual growth. She asks Padre Pio to ask Jesus to grant her solitude with Him, interior silence, deep recollection, and continual union with His adorable heart. She also states that Jesus' intentions, purpose and feelings are also hers.

Raffaelina wants Padre Pio to thank Jesus on her behalf for all the spiritual aids He has obtained for her and to ask Him to make her put them to good use. Otherwise, break off, cut off and put an end to everything in and around her. She wants Padre Pio to tell Jesus in the greatest confidence about her perpetual worry: her sister (Giovina's) lack of approaching the holy table more than two or three times a year and for Jesus to grant her soul peace by transferring her to different surroundings which will reduce the impressionable nature which has resulted in her conflicts, disillusionment and continual tears.

Next, Raffaelina asks for help with her continuing family problems, especially with her brother Matteo, who refuses to recognize his obligations to both Raffaelina and to her sister Giovina. She wants to know how does God want her to react in the midst of the disputes and upsets of all description within the family. Specifically, how does she manifest God's glory for the good of both her and her sister’s soul.

Next, Raffaelina discusses the problem of a spiritual friend of hers, Rosina or Rosininella who has an aged father, a younger sister whose only concern in life is to get married, and a sick brother whose marriage is only recorded in the town registry office.

She relates a story to Padre Pio of a family of six first cousins of hers, all of them old, without ever having decent housing or employment. She describes this as being a never ending situation which her sister Giovina is trying to cope with and maintain a semblance of order but who is unable to stabilize the family situation.

Relating to Padre Pio yet another story about a spiritual friend of hers, still relatively young, who has been confined to a bed for 15 years and who has a brother, a priest, who is chronically ill, two unmarried sisters, another very pious sister who is married, and awaiting with tears and prayers the conversion of her husband and eight children.

Meanwhile, there is a terrifying drought going on in Foggia, and if the harvest fails, which is the only resource for the town, then the entire town will be facing a real disaster. Finally, will there be peace for Italy ravaged by wars (WW I), political factions, by servility, indifferentism and skepticism.

She also complains about her poor writing skills and her free and easy manner, without "head or tail." She states that she is a proud person and wants to know how it can be eradicated so as to destroy the evil and poisonous plant which has taken root so deeply in her heart. Sins in distress from such a labyrinth that she is unable to escape from it. She wants to understand Jesus and how she should act to please him.

The response Raffaelina receives from Padre Pio is a letter dated 25 April 1914. In the letter Padre Pio reveals the following:

Beloved daughter of Jesus,

May the peace of Jesus be always in your heart. Amen.

I am consoled to hear that the storms are increasing, for this is a sign that God's kingdom is being established within you. Keep cheerful and don't be discouraged. The temptation and storms that are circling around you are sure signs of divine predilection. Your fear of offending God is the surest proof that you are not offending Him.

Place your unlimited trust in the divine goodness and the more violent the enemy becomes, the more you should abandon yourself trustfully on the breast of the most tender heavenly Spouse who will never allow you to be overcome. God Himself has solemnly announced through Sacred Scripture: God is faithful and He will not let you be tempted beyond your strength, but with temptation will also provide a way of escape, that you may be able to endure it. (1 Cor 10:13).

To convince yourself of the opposite is infidelity and may God guard us from falling into similar absurdities. Even St. Paul was restless and besought the Lord to free him from the trial of the flesh: he too was very much afraid that he would yield, but did he not receive the assurance that grace would always be sufficient for him? (Cf. 2 Cor 12:9).

Our enemy who plots against us wants to persuade you that the very opposite is the case, but despise him in the name of Jesus and laugh heartily at him. This is the best way to make him beat a retreat. He plucks up courage when dealing with the weak, but when anyone takes up a weapon and faces him he becomes a coward. You may fear, if you like, but it must be that holy fear, I mean to say the fear that is never separated from love. When fear and love are united, they help each other, like sisters, to remain on their feet and to walk securely in the Lord's paths.

Love makes us hasten with rapid strides while fear, on the other hand, makes us watch prudently where we place our feet and guides us so that we may never stumble on the road leading to heaven. I know, my beloved sister, that the cross is painful and that for those who love, a thing is almost unbearable when it exposes them to the danger of offending the One they love and adore. But Jesus tempted in the desert and hanging on the Cross is a most clear, obvious and very consoling proof of what I tell you in the name of the most tender Spouse of souls. That is to say, for a soul that is seeking God in all things and longs above all to possess Him alone, that yearns to have Him reign as King in the depths of her spirit and ardently desires to be entirely and totally possessed by Him alone and in all this is much more jealous than any two people who have passionately vowed to love each other, for such a soul the storms of this life are a most evident sign of the special charity and exceptional mercy of God's loving providence, which He does not bestow on all souls, not even on those who are particularly privileged.

Courage, then, and go ahead. God is with you and hell, the world and the flesh will one day, to their confusion, have to relinquish their weapons and admit once more that they are powerless against the soul that possesses and is possessed by God.

You are tormented by the fact that you are unable to leave the house because of your delicate health and are therefore deprived of the immaculate Flesh of the divine Lamb. Moreover, you believe, or rather the enemy tries to make you believe, that this is a punishment from God. No, no, don't listen to him. I tell you in all sincerity that this is a particular predilection of the heavenly Father towards you. He wants to make you similar to His beloved Son who fasted from earthly food in the desert for 40 days. (Cf. Mat 4:2). By depriving you of this beneficial food, He wants to inspire you more and more with great reverence towards his Son in this sacrament, to enkindle within you an even greater love for the sacred table, for it is at the moment of privation, when God Himself brings this about, that the soul has a deeper appreciation of the greatness of this gift..

From these assurances you will understand that when you are convinced that deprived of Communion you will go from bad to worse, it is then that the shadows which have fallen on your soul do not come from the Father of light but from the tempter who wants to torment you. The unclean beast understands only too well that he is powerless to make you deviate from your duty, so he intends to vent his hatred on you by terrorizing you.

War has been declared upon you, my dear, and you need to be watchful at every moment, to put up a strong defense, with the eye of faith always fixed on God of hosts who is fighting along with you and for you. You must have boundless faith in the divine goodness, for the victory is absolutely certain. How could you think otherwise? Isn't our God more concerned about our salvation than we are ourselves? Isn't He stronger than hell itself? Who can ever resist and overcome the King of the heavens? What are the world, the devil, the flesh and all our enemies before the Lord?

I agree that you will go from bad to worse in the paths of the Lord if failure to approach the sacred table depended on your own choice, but since everything has been regulated by the heavenly Spouse, your soul will suffer no loss but will benefit all the more. You do well to desire to be united with Him every day and the best proof of this is that, whenever you can, you never neglect to go to Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament to give and receive the kiss of peace.

Calm yourself, then, and rejoice, because in all this it is the Lord who is acting within you. You desire nothing else than to walk before Him all the time, so let Him guide you on the difficult journey of this life. Give Him your total assent so that He may act in the manner most pleasing to Him.

I am confused and I don't hide from you the fact that I feel continually a pang of grief with regard to your sister who approaches the altar so seldom to receive Jesus. This conduct really seems to denote indifference even if we don't want to call it – allow me to use a rather harsh expression – contempt rather than love for Jesus. Oh, if men could only appreciate this gift we should certainly not see such small numbers of communicants! These are very sad times, but what can be done? O unfortunate times on which we have fallen!

Let us pray to our most merciful Jesus to come to the aid of His Church, for her needs have become extreme.

You say that you are unable to distinguish whether the rays of light which appear at times in the depths of your soul come from God or from others and that you fear to be deceived in everything because of your subtle self-love.

Here, then, are the signs by which to know if these rays of light come from the Father of all light. These signs may be reduced to three. The first is that these lights produce an ever more admirable knowledge of God, who, while revealing Himself to us, gives us a deeper and deeper knowledge of His incomprehensible greatness. In a word, this light leads us to love God our Father more and more and to increase the sacrifices we make for His honor and glory. The second sign is an even greater knowledge of ourselves, a deeper and deeper sense of humility at the thought that such a wretched creature should have had the effrontery to offend Him and still dares to look at Him and tend towards Him. The third sign is that these heavenly rays produced in the soul and increasing contempt for all that belongs to this earth, with the exception of those things which may prove useful for the service of God.

Now, if such rays of light produced these three effects in your soul, consider them as coming from God. Neither the enemy much less our own imagination can produce these effects in the soul.

I have taken very much to heart all those needs which you have explained to me. May our most sweet Jesus bring peace to all these afflicted hearts. I tell you sincerely and without fear of lying, beloved daughter Jesus, that my soul can say with the apostle St. Paul (although, alas, I haven't even the thousandth part of the charity that burned in the heart of this holy Apostle): I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brethren. (Rom 9:3). Yes, let our most sweet Lord excommunicate me, separate me from Him, abandon me and allow me to suffer the shame and sufferings earned by my brethren; let Him even cancel my name from the Book of Life as long as He saves my brothers and my companions in exile and does not deprive me of His grace, from which nothing can separate me.

Pray to the Lord that he may gratify these desires which are burning up my internal organs and causing me to die continually.

You are distressed, moreover, by man's ingratitude towards God and you do well to weep over their misfortunes. In reparation to God, offer Him your blessing and all your actions, making sure that all of these are good. But after you have wept privately over the misfortunes of others, it is well to imitate once more Our Lord and the Apostles by dismissing these things from your mind and turning to other matters and other occupations more useful for God's glory and the salvation of souls. It was necessary that the word of God should be spoken first to you, said the Apostles in addressing the Jews. Since you thrust it from you and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, behold, we turn to the Gentiles. (Acts 13:46). The kingdom of God will be taken away from you, says the Divine Master in the holy Gospel, and given to a nation producing the fruits of it. (Mt 21:43).

To spend too much time, then, in deploring the state of those who obstinately persist in sinning would be a waste of time which could be appropriately spent and should be spent in promoting the salvation of others and in works for God's glory.

I am obliged to stop at this point, but before ending I make a last effort in order to urge you not to bother thanking me, because I certainly do not deserve it. Address all your thanks, instead, to the heavenly Father. Don't worry and don't be racking your brains about your inability to express your needs clearly, for in this matter I don't expect a lot by any means. Far from reproving you, I admire and am pleased with your simplicity in explaining all your needs with holy confidence. May the merciful Virgin relieve your distress and bless both yourself and your sister.

Your servant,

Padre Pio, Capuchin

Reminder: The contents of this letter is specific between Raffaelina Cerase and Padre Pio. Someone else having similar problems may receive different answers from Padre Pio.

“May the merciful Virgin relieve your distress and bless both yourself and your sister.” -  Padre Pio (Caption for linked image)

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