Saturday, May 23, 2009

Kate Anderson and the Dark Backward and Abysm of Time-Part Two


It was in the May of 2001 that I began the endeavor which I relate to you now. Feeling unfulfilled with my current theatrical work, which was being slaughtered on the stage like an unsuspecting bovine, I turned my attention once again to that solitary vice of writing. Many was the sleepless hour I spent hunched over my keyboard, the cerulean illumination from the monitor the only source of radiance in my darkened quarters. Neither food nor drink compelled me to turn away from what I had begun. Neither too did my studies, and a monograph on Wagner’s Bayreuth festival went by the wayside, not returned to until the last possible juncture. I tried drowning my thoughts with music composed by a sovereign of the crimson nation, but to no avail. My head was filled instead by the inhuman ululations of the muse that had attached itself to my brain, unwilling or perhaps unable to release its hold until my narrative had been completed.

When I had at long last finished my magnum opus, I discovered that three weeks had passed. The passing of time had completely circumvented me! I had had not witnessed its flight and had I not been assured by several acquaintances that this was the case, I could have scarcely believed it. My faculties recovered, I began to study the manuscript I had produced. O, what a foul creation it was! Had I not been there to witness its inception, I would not have thought it to be crafted by myself. Creatures being summoned forth by a hideous tome in an attempt to cause the premature extinction of our great hominid derived race? Who could accredit such a chronicle? I sealed the beast to a derelict folder in a desolate section of my hard drive.

In the days and weeks that followed the banishment of my creation, I did my best to try and continue on with my life. And for a time I succeeded, but the anathema of my handiwork haunted the recesses of my mind in the same manner as the laughing dogs of the Negav Desert track their quarry. In order to silence the baying of these ghastly hounds, I submitted my abomination to the Chautauqua Festival, the very place where my work had been dismembered two years previously. The irony was almost too much for me to bear, could my salvation be in the very locality that had driven me to write in the first place? For my sake, I hoped that this would be the case.

And it was, the Chautauqua Festival accepted my hideous creation and quelled the growing din in my mind. But, in my moment of salvation I did not consider the consequences. Previously, my work had been contained within the confines of my skull, but now it was unleashed upon the community like a plague. I tried distracting myself through the manipulation of innumerable sonances for other shows in the Festival, all for naught because Kate Anderson and the Book of the Dead was performed. I can only hope that any cases of dementia coming after its exhibition are hereditary and any connections to my creation are pallitated. As for me, I write this final note as an explanation before sealing myself in an iron lined crypt, its whereabouts remaining hidden against those who would try to rescue me. Leave me be, it is safer for the world if I am ensconced where I can do no further harm. Beware The Book of the Dead, for surely it shall drive you mad as it did me.

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