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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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I keep running accross references to Plato's Cave these days. (A quick refresher: the world is a cave with a bunch of people constrained to stay in it, all facing one way. Shadows flicker on the wall from the doorway and the constrained cave dwellers mistake those shadows for the real [ideal] forms that generate them, because the shadows are all they know, and all they are capable of seeing.)
Some people are both frustrated and motivated by the philosophical (some would say physiological) impossibility of seeing the world as it is. I love very much this passage below from Roadside Picnic, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, MacMillan Publishing Company, 1977. pp.70. I see it as an elegant attempt at the impossible task of finding words to describe something that cannot even be properly perceived.
He squinted hard, sorry that he hadn't had time for an hour's nap before his important business. And then it hit him. [...] It was as though he were in a different world. A million odors cascaded in on him at once—sharp, sweet, metallic, gentle, dangerous ones, as crude as cobblestones, as delicate and complex as watch mechanisms, as huge as a house and as tiny as a dust particle. The air became hard, it developed edges, surfaces, and corners, like space was filled with huge stiff balloons, slippery pyramids, gigantic prickly crystals, and he had to push his way through it all, making his way in a dream through a junk store stuffed with ancient, ugly furniture...It lasted a second. He opened his eyes and everything was gone. It hadn't been a different world—it was this world turning a new, unknown side to him. This side was revealed to him for a second and then disappeared, before he had time to figure it out.
Back in March, I posted the text and images from one of my old three-fold flyers, a piece of art ephemera from 1996. Here is another one (with very minor edits), written just pre-Buffy, but well post-Pet Cemetery.
WARNING: Something Will Go Wrong
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An important thing to remember about bringing people or animals back from the dead is that something is bound to go wrong. It will probably seem like a great deal at first, you just perform some ritual with garlic and fingernails, or sneak around at night in the sacred burial grounds, whatever, it’s not a lot to ask to get your loved one back. Right? Right, until...well, until you actually do it and they do come back, and they’re all rotting, or they’re possessed by the devil, or they’re just plain zombies or mummies and they try to kill you or suck your blood or whatever, something will definitely go wrong. It’s as if there’s some kind of punishment for trying to do what anyone would do, and bring a loved person or animal back to life. It’s as if, when you try to do it, you become evil, or something, and from then on you deserve everything you get. |
It’s not like I really expect someone not to do it, if they've got the chance. All I’m saying is that something is pretty well definitely going to go wrong.
