Rabbit Hole Day

So, lots of my friends have been babbling about Rabbit Hole Day and it seemed like kind of a fun idea except there's some other stuff on my mind that make me not wanna be so overly jovial today (more on this later). Thought about it some.

My first idea was predictably lame (as most first ideas are unless they're outstandingly brilliant and inspired) I thought I might write as a conservative christian businessman who is completely happy with the current state of the world; a homophobic, racist womanizing jackass with 2.5 kids and an SUV. the .5 child would be there mostly to remind you about Rabbit Hole Day and keep him from being completely terrifying. But yuck. It's been done.

A variant on #1 would be to write about the alternate live I could have had if I hadn't gone down the rabbit hole 15 years ago and I'd been this other person that I was supposed to be. While that could have been interesting, it probably wouldn't have been very critical.

My next idea, spun from the first would be to be one of the creatures IN wonderland speculating on the stranger from the outside and tongue-in-cheek oh-so-wittily commenting on how curious and insane they seemed compared to us much more balanced types down here. This had potential and could have been done either with real life or imaginary events and been readable either way. It's certainly less contemptuous in tone. Probably also more how Caroll saw himself.

But still. My mood for today is a little crushing because it's not just Lewis Caroll's birthday. Auschwitz 60 years ago today, soviet troops opened the gates of Auschwitz and exposed the world to the horrors the nazis had comitted. (I couldn't even think of how to word this. I don't feel the people within were 'freed'. I even have difficulty with the word people because they had been so de-humanized. I don't think there are any words that can do justice to the kinds of things they survived. I don't think even my endurance is as great as theirs)

Dark thoughts, light thoughts, a greyish mist in my mind. I couldn't do it justice, but consider this rabbit-hole. A little girl, inconsequentially named Alice, living in Auschwitz, secretly reading a battered copy of Wonderland over and over again, desperately seeking her rabbit hole as an escape from the camp. A mutated and ugly wonderland sculpted from the pale gaunt flesh of the world around her. Every rhyme polluted, every metaphor used to mask something horrible in her real world so that she can cope for five more minutes; another chapter, another page, at least another sentence.

No. I can see her. In my head, I can almost smell the world she was in, but I couldn't do her justice. She stay imprisoned in the horrible fantasy world I created for her in my own head because I don't think I could make anyone else understand her or think her real and sincere. Sorry, Alice.

Alice's Hope

the entry about Alice set up an uncomfortable chain reaction in my head.

What if she is living there in my head, trapped in this world because I feel I lack the integrity and power to make her real and heard. What if ALL the characters in my head that I think about but never realize in some form and locked away like that, each suffering in their own horrible world? Younger versions of me reliving rapes and car wrecks againa nd again, characters in stories beaten abused, violated, hurt, mangled, and left to rot in their little Hells because I never flesh them beyond the few lines that triggers the thought but I never forget them and occassionally recall them with the horribleness of the scene they were associated with. I could have at least let Alice die, it would have been the most merciful thing. She's lucky PostVixen gave her an out that, while not the life I'd have given her, was probably one she would have liked.

One of the notes from the design class was to make the best you could with the skills and materials you have at the time. I've been so guilty of this, promising these characters that when I find the skill and the strength and the time that I'll set them free from their prisons. I've lied to them for decades, promising that one day they'll be free and I'll do them justice, make it up to them, all the time they've spent in their hells by making them beautiful and perfect so that people will loook on them and not see my shakey hand or trite dialog but see them real and alive.

Instead, I've just added new characters to the prison, given them the same lie, and let them all live in their hells, revisitng their most painful moments again and again. I'm a monster, a dead and lifeless thing that preys on their suffering and I've only just awoken to what I am. I did go down the rabbit hole today after all, but I'm not liking what I see.

-The Jailer

Feeling Snarky.

Bush sent Cheney to Auschwitz in his place today. (Figures, don't it?)
So I thought I'd speculate on why.

[Poll #426491]