I would comment on my vast disappointment in the people of FimFic, but instead · 9:09pm Aug 14th, 2014
something I scribbled in a Gdoc
Many things change in the wake of a murder, especially one of such horrible circumstance. Fear is, after all, the oldest and perhaps most motivating of forces. If faith can move mountains, simple animal fear can deface continents. It launches missiles. It shoots into angry, unarmed crowds. The mere shadow of some true terror or suggestion of some slight evil can send a whole city into panic. They say that love is a temporary madness; Plato said that, at least. If it is true, one could suppose that fear is something worse. Maybe something underneath madness.
Another side-effect of fear is avoidance, which is what this is, mostly. Fast people sprint away, talkative ones ramble, and those of us who think that we’re smart sit around and try to make sense of the ineffable. We use words like ineffable to describe things that you can’t describe, as if that’s any better than a wordless shrug and a few gestures of alarm. We write papers and books and pamphlets. We talk about educating people or trying to calm them, when in truth we’re terrified.
In the wake of tragedy, people can do extraordinary things, good or bad. In the wake of murder, once again, things change. They change in a very peculiar way.
When a teenager goes off the road on the Trace and careens into a tree on federal park land, we mourn but do not fear for our own safety. Not really. After all, we are good drivers. We would have gotten some coffee to stave off sleep, or kept our noses out of drugs, or whatever other thing we try to pin the events in question on. Parents will fear for their children, whether they are good or bad, careful or reckless. But murder isn’t like an accident. There’s still the dead body, but this time there is intention, an act of will. One of us killed another of us. Some human sat in a bedroom somewhere, rolling the chamber of a revolver idly, thinking about using the gun. Even that image is romanticized, because we have to put some sort of poetry into it, before we know anything about the killer, just to make him seem human. We imagine rage because everyone knows what it is like to be furious. Anger is understandable. It’s frightening, but understandable and controllable. Angry people can be diffused or destroyed or led around by the nose.
But in the wake of murder the average man or woman on the street finds themselves glancing sidelong at every other man or woman. They begin to see little quirks as serious faults. The neighbor who is a slob seems less like a loveable fool and more like a potential unabomber. The turban-wearing man who loves gardening down the street, the one you wave to as you drive by or who helped you fix your car that one time--doesn’t he make you nervous? The neighbors whisper. After all, isn’t his knowledge of the inner workings of engines suspicious? Surely this is the kind of thing they teach you in the training camps of North Africa. The better to kill you with. Every teenager looks a little more like a thug, every black man like a gangbanger, every white one like a smiling sociopath. Of all the sins, murder is the one that destroys us quickest.
Perhaps.
In an event, the ritualistic murder of a bright young college girl has certainly changed the air of the sleepy, mundane town of Thebes, Mississippi. The Arcanist General showed up the day after the body was found, which mostly served to make people more nervous. Those who know little of magic whisper more about Blood Magic then those who actually have seen those arts. Mostly because those who have seen war talk less of it than those who have no idea what it is like to crawl in the mud and wait to die.
And so they whispered. It happens.
Those of us at the college, up on the hill, whispered too. Another unfortunate side-effect of murder is that we forget the nature of the deceased. Either they are worse in our minds or better than their actions would warrant. In the case of Haley, it was the latter. Not to imply that she was anything but a rather normal human being with normal desires. In fact, that is exactly what I would imply. But within hours she had been apotheosized into an angel larger than life, Mother Teresa and Wonder Woman and the female Dietrich Bonhoeffer all combined. A woman of faith, family, hearth, home, and justice. Or something.
The police whispered too, I imagine, but the only thing any of us heard about was the official report and the chief of police for the municipality affirming that the trappings of ritual were just that, trappings. Anyone with training could see that this was nothing like a real cult killing. It was obviously a ruse to cover the tracks of a dangerous individual, one which the police would catch soon.
As for myself?
I don’t whisper much.
Interesting blog post. Rather poetically written, too. Now I just wonder what all this disappointment in FiMFic is all about.
wat
What're you talking about, Cyne?
First off, Plato is an egotistical asshole.
*EDIT*
>From the eyes of a sociopath, with their understanding of how people react when their deeds are committed.
>A nice prologue to a novel, or intro to a movie.
Thats what I see in this after I read it the second time. Very nicely done.
To write is to forget. Literature is the pleasantest way of ignoring life.
To narrate is to create, for living is just being lived.
Art consists in making others feel what we feel.
--Pessoa
Everyone has their vanity, and each one's vanity is forgetting there are others with an equal soul
Sounds like you just killed someone.
2370947 Plato is indeed an asshole. Xenophon and he paint Socrates very differently.
However I will always pick Plato over Aristotle because Plato was just selfish and Aristotle is a prick
I was fiddling with a novel idea
2371793
It sounds like a novel I want to read.
Your work never fails to astound me.
2371793 They all have faults, he was just the only one you mentioned.
It would be a novel I would read then.
If this were indeed a novel, in the same vein of style and voice – goodness gracious, the voice – as displayed here, I would surely read it. For a seemingly mystery-esque plot, it all seems to fit perfectly.
Oh, and hours after proofreading other people's bits, this was like dunking my scorched, dry eyes in a bucket of water. I suppose I should thank you. :P