Fugue States

[Valerie]

Floating Lantern

Seattle's Anarch Free Press since 1986 • floatinglantern.bloodspot

Fugue States
1.6.15

Like many of you before me, I was blessed to be given a long period of time in which to adjust to the ‘supernatural’ truth of Kindred realities. As an assistant to my sire, I was given an opportunity to commit to heart the presence of things that try very hard to keep your average human being from knowing they exist. By the time of my embrace, these secrets (and how to protect them) were reflexive facts, conjured up with the same ease as grammar or mathematics.

This knowledge and my modern mortal experience were, obviously, at odds in the beginning. There are things that I take very easily in stride now but which shocked me to learn of in those decades past. I still occasionally unearth truths which are so heavy that the weight of the knowledge itself serves as its price. To quote Carl Sagan: “Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.” If you get nothing else out of this, know that those words are excellent safeguard in a world where survival mandates the acceptance that very strange things do exist, above and beyond the n=1 rationale that each of us is one of those strange things.

Where does all of this knowledge and experience leave any of us now, after the meltdown at Elysium this weekend? What is the possible reasoning behind an entire city of Kindred perceiving time and space folding inward on themselves, collapsing this modern city into the Europe of WWII for a few long hours? How do I know what it feels like to die - to have my flesh shredded by explosions and my essence consumed by fire’s solar light - only to be born again through a ghastly dream? We have all, it seems, retained our memory of this shared wartime hallucination: the soldiers, fire, and pestilence. Whether or not we choose to take action on what this vision revealed seems to be a matter of gravity and personal preference… as well as individual ability to distill any truth from the madness.

Anything more than a passing familiarity with quantum mechanics or what the most arcane theories of physics truly allow for escapes me, and my ignorance in these matters accrues a strange shame as I realize that perhaps it’s only that very ignorance which saves me from a certain kind of darkness. Encountering something that you do not understand is pure inertia towards self-discovery, a feat which occurs for us so rarely. In moments of great doubt, you are utterly given up to the most basic operations of your mind. Whether it’s a slithering abacus of rational arguments or a desperate plea to some god for mercy, you will know yourself more intimately under that pressure than in your most carefully planned introspection. The facade of your skin and your politics and your power will slough, leaving only your blood, ethics, and fortitude behind.

So, what have I learned?

This place had not yet pressed me enough. My body has been lightened through this erosion, and there are others who have simply been made weaker as there was nothing underneath the surface to give. I have killed, if perhaps only to prevent someone else from being killed, and I will wrestle with the weight of valuing one existence over another. My flaws, like yours, are deep but fear is not among them. I continue to carry my weight, and I push forth to take the weight of others - to amplify the wounded howl of this city’s severed limbs, the misplaced indignation of a movement that would rather blame than learn, and the fury of a million innocents who died within a heart whose heat was insufficient to transmute them.

I am not afraid of ghosts and you must not be, either. What we must face is the fear of more common apparition: the burden-beast that Justice softly asks us to endure.

Valerie