devour my guilty body
a musing on paranoia and on martyrdom (pyramus and thisbe are also there)
the real horror of paranoia isn’t that you’re suddenly afraid and your world is crumbling before you and you don’t know how you’ve possibly made it this far, it’s that you’re powerless to do anything about it. maybe it didn’t have to be like this, but it’s not like you could’ve done anything to prevent it. that’s the hard part about free will, the choice is yours, but the outcome isn’t.
when sartre talks about anguish perhaps he doesn’t mean the cosmic loneliness that comes with knowing there is no god, no creator, knowing there is nothing out there to help you, maybe instead he means the absolute desolation that comes with knowing things could’ve been different.
maybe the fatal mistake oedipus made was not thinking he was better than the gods, maybe the mistake was thinking things could be have had a different ending. a puppet is free so long as he loves his strings, and he had done nothing but try to break his. really, wouldn’t you? if you were given his fate? but things don’t work out all the time, especially when you’re living a greek tragedy.
there’s really only been one time i was convinced i was going to die, on a thursday. sometimes things happen and threats are made, and school carries on like nothing happened. but for me, at that point i had accepted the worst. my plan was to scream from the bottom of my heart for salvation to anything in the universe that listened to me. i got no response.
my google searches from that day:
“is praying in your head the same as saying it out loud”
“how to invoke angels”
“what angel to pray to for protection”
i hadn’t prayed in years.
i think if im going to die, id like it to be beautiful. the stuff poems are written about. id like to die a martyr’s death, if im going to go out, at least let me stand for something. let me be joan of arc. let me stand for something so that my humanity may slowly be replaced with divinity and iconography.
joan of arc didn’t want to be a martyr. i think she was just a young girl who did what she believed to be her destiny. “maintenez la croix haute pour que je puisse la voir à travers les flammes.” isn’t it cruel how something so pure in intention can be twisted into a tragedy?
let me be an inspiration, something with meaning, let my death be so engrained in legend i become something of a myth myself. i think id like to be a myth. maybe not one of the famous ones, let me be pyramus and thisbe. write beautiful poetry about how i died for love that inspires more poetry hundreds of years later. which inspires more poetry, 2014 years in the future. when i die i hope the poets are there. i hope they see beauty in the tragedy, as they often do.