the less I could feel it; the less I could recall how it felt to feel it. But...in those moments where I was stuck there – in the space between waking and sleeping – I had this sense...of intent. And...just for a moment...the thought would occur to me that...if I went to sleep, and just...never woke up...if someone else wok e up instead, and I just...stopped: then, perhaps, that would be...better. Perhaps that’s what I wanted.
But it wasn’t and isn’t, and the sense that I’d just thought some other self’s thought; a thought that was thought on my behalf by a self other than me – but from within me – jolted me awake. As quickly as it came, the feelings and thoughts were gone again...but while I felt them, they’d been solid. They’d been definite. And they had solidly...definitely...come from within, rather than without.
In the hazy back-end of mind...I was always aware, at that point, of the single que stion...this time definitely a question of my own making: what if I just gave in? What would happen, then? But I never let myself dwell on it. How could I?
When I said that – for some of us – something inside begins to ‘wake up’, this was the fee ling I was referring to. I’ve heard others describe it, too. Hearing it always sends shivers down my spine: a perfect replication of what I feel...even down to the unexplainability of it; the vagueness of the specific feelings being alluded to; the indescribable horror of it, and the accompanying inability to accept, on any genuine level, that something so macabre has actually been invented by one’s own mind. And, of course, there was always the deep, desperate desire to rationalise it away. But I’d never been able to do that. Because I’d never really been able to summon up the courage to try.
Fo r fairly obvious reasons, I had no desire to explore it further; whether to investigate why it happened, or to try to prevent it from happening. Whatever it was in me that made me feel that way at night...it was a part of me that I didn’t want to have anything to do with. The continuing problem was, that while I knew myself well enough to know where not to dig; to leave the holes alone and the dark places down in them hidden from the light...other people might not have been so...intuitively cautious. How could I trust another Human Being to know where not to dig? To understand – on an instinctive level – the dangers of doing so?
VI – Intake
~ Dio ~
23/11/2023
Wright ushered Dio and Yvonne into the Bureau. The building – an imposing granite dome ringed with incandescent foliage – made Dio nervous.
Like most of Palatine, it reminded him – more than any other thing – of a photo negative of something familiar. The memory of those hulking grotesqueries: those distant, sprawling testaments to the perverse architectural ingenuity, and unhinged, obverted fetishism of their creators...were, yes, definitively locked away in the repository of things mad and monstrous, situated in the very deepest corner of Dio’s shadowy back-mind. But most of what he saw struck him as the direct and uncomplicated execration of the known and familiar. It was as if the colours of Palatine Hill were inverted; as if he and Yvonne – ushered downward by their ‘Virgil-apparent’, Wright – had stumbled into a parallel world: the opposite – diametrically – of their own. A place where the very spectrum of visible colour had been tipped on its head, and committed to the dark night of day.
Once inside, though, the Bureau was very much what one might have expected of a buil ding bearing its name. Very much...or less than. It reminded Dio more of a free clinic, than anything else; starched and cut-rate; tacky and generic. There was an eerie sensation of familiarity, also: A kind of pantomime-normalcy that prodded and poked at Dio’s sanity with the experimental curiosity of a malign psychiatrist.
There was a reception desk with a friendly – if tense and
But it wasn’t and isn’t, and the sense that I’d just thought some other self’s thought; a thought that was thought on my behalf by a self other than me – but from within me – jolted me awake. As quickly as it came, the feelings and thoughts were gone again...but while I felt them, they’d been solid. They’d been definite. And they had solidly...definitely...come from within, rather than without.
In the hazy back-end of mind...I was always aware, at that point, of the single que stion...this time definitely a question of my own making: what if I just gave in? What would happen, then? But I never let myself dwell on it. How could I?
When I said that – for some of us – something inside begins to ‘wake up’, this was the fee ling I was referring to. I’ve heard others describe it, too. Hearing it always sends shivers down my spine: a perfect replication of what I feel...even down to the unexplainability of it; the vagueness of the specific feelings being alluded to; the indescribable horror of it, and the accompanying inability to accept, on any genuine level, that something so macabre has actually been invented by one’s own mind. And, of course, there was always the deep, desperate desire to rationalise it away. But I’d never been able to do that. Because I’d never really been able to summon up the courage to try.
Fo r fairly obvious reasons, I had no desire to explore it further; whether to investigate why it happened, or to try to prevent it from happening. Whatever it was in me that made me feel that way at night...it was a part of me that I didn’t want to have anything to do with. The continuing problem was, that while I knew myself well enough to know where not to dig; to leave the holes alone and the dark places down in them hidden from the light...other people might not have been so...intuitively cautious. How could I trust another Human Being to know where not to dig? To understand – on an instinctive level – the dangers of doing so?
VI – Intake
~ Dio ~
23/11/2023
Wright ushered Dio and Yvonne into the Bureau. The building – an imposing granite dome ringed with incandescent foliage – made Dio nervous.
Like most of Palatine, it reminded him – more than any other thing – of a photo negative of something familiar. The memory of those hulking grotesqueries: those distant, sprawling testaments to the perverse architectural ingenuity, and unhinged, obverted fetishism of their creators...were, yes, definitively locked away in the repository of things mad and monstrous, situated in the very deepest corner of Dio’s shadowy back-mind. But most of what he saw struck him as the direct and uncomplicated execration of the known and familiar. It was as if the colours of Palatine Hill were inverted; as if he and Yvonne – ushered downward by their ‘Virgil-apparent’, Wright – had stumbled into a parallel world: the opposite – diametrically – of their own. A place where the very spectrum of visible colour had been tipped on its head, and committed to the dark night of day.
Once inside, though, the Bureau was very much what one might have expected of a buil ding bearing its name. Very much...or less than. It reminded Dio more of a free clinic, than anything else; starched and cut-rate; tacky and generic. There was an eerie sensation of familiarity, also: A kind of pantomime-normalcy that prodded and poked at Dio’s sanity with the experimental curiosity of a malign psychiatrist.
There was a reception desk with a friendly – if tense and
Similar Books
