impure_tale (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
impure_tale) wrote2012-11-11 02:28 pm
impure_tale) wrote2012-11-11 02:28 pm
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In light of our most recent port, I have given much thought to the idea of beheadings. I realize that for many, this is a subject far too close to the collar for them to comfortably discuss. For their benefit, I have hidden any offending commentary. Those who wish to carry on may, and I have given ample warning for anyone that might be too disturbed by the subject matter.
It is not really my style to report to my readers in stilted, conversational language. When I put pen to paper it is to weave a tapestry that at least looks attractive if you are good at not thinking, not comprehending the meanings of the words. This rather comforted me once, but today I wish to speak frankly:
Those of you that know my history or have read from the Barge Book still in progress understand that I survived a time in my nation known in later years as the Reign of Terror, so known because former aristocrats and suspected monarchists were executed by Madame Guillotine by the tens of thousands. Anyone could be accused and only the supremely lucky avoided sentencing. I was one of those lucky few, having avoided execution, the history books say, by clerical error alone. However, my cell had a dismal, nigh-unavoidable view of the guillotine beneath my window. I saw men, women and children, some familiar some not, of all bearings, weep, beg for their lives, resist the hooded men bearing them to the scaffold.
I also saw, uncomprehending at first, well enough to know that not every one of them immediately died upon severance.
Our port might have been rather unusual in that no one truly seemed to die, it put me in mind of that. It led me to think more of those who were rather permanently separated from their bodies, of the studies and accounts I have since read of heads responding to light, the sound of their names being spoken, and other stimuli, for as much as thirty seconds after the cut.
I still shudder to think.
I do not envy those that suffered in port, which is most everyone, many of whom suffered a great deal more than I. I certainly did not enjoy essentially reliving my time in that prison, and the walls of that cell in Wonderland are papered with ramblings and nonsense to prove it had taken hold of something in me I had once thought quite dead. The madness, the fear that comes of it.
The guilt. Guilt that you survived. Guilt that people you know and respect are suffering while you are powerless to act.
I am sorry, fellow denizens. So very sorry.
It is not really my style to report to my readers in stilted, conversational language. When I put pen to paper it is to weave a tapestry that at least looks attractive if you are good at not thinking, not comprehending the meanings of the words. This rather comforted me once, but today I wish to speak frankly:
Those of you that know my history or have read from the Barge Book still in progress understand that I survived a time in my nation known in later years as the Reign of Terror, so known because former aristocrats and suspected monarchists were executed by Madame Guillotine by the tens of thousands. Anyone could be accused and only the supremely lucky avoided sentencing. I was one of those lucky few, having avoided execution, the history books say, by clerical error alone. However, my cell had a dismal, nigh-unavoidable view of the guillotine beneath my window. I saw men, women and children, some familiar some not, of all bearings, weep, beg for their lives, resist the hooded men bearing them to the scaffold.
I also saw, uncomprehending at first, well enough to know that not every one of them immediately died upon severance.
Our port might have been rather unusual in that no one truly seemed to die, it put me in mind of that. It led me to think more of those who were rather permanently separated from their bodies, of the studies and accounts I have since read of heads responding to light, the sound of their names being spoken, and other stimuli, for as much as thirty seconds after the cut.
I still shudder to think.
I do not envy those that suffered in port, which is most everyone, many of whom suffered a great deal more than I. I certainly did not enjoy essentially reliving my time in that prison, and the walls of that cell in Wonderland are papered with ramblings and nonsense to prove it had taken hold of something in me I had once thought quite dead. The madness, the fear that comes of it.
The guilt. Guilt that you survived. Guilt that people you know and respect are suffering while you are powerless to act.
I am sorry, fellow denizens. So very sorry.