gabriele > Recent Status Updates

and now, once again, i bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper.

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos. the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.

These things were permanent, they could not be dissolved. They were memories that cannot hurt.

The house was a sepulchre, our fear and suffering lay buried in the ruins. There would be no ressurection. When I thought of Manderley in my waking hours I would not be bitter. I should think of it as it might have been, could I have lived there without fear. I should remember the rose-garden in the summer, and the murmur of the sea coming up to us from the lawns below.

I walked enchanted, and nothing held me back.

There was Manderley, our Manderley, secretive and silent as it had always been, the grey stone shining in the moonlight of my dream, the mullioned windows reflecting the green lawns and the terrace. Time could not wreck the perfect symmetry of those walls, nor the site itself.

A jewel in the hollow of a hand.

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

cassandra; psychologically complex and dangerously driven

i remembered her, the wide-apart eyes, the straight shoulders, the absolute refusal to bend.

hecuba, who’d been huddled in a corner out of the way, was transformed into a mad dog with slavering jaws and red-rimmed eyes.

i was reminded of Achilles, who’d sacrifies twelve trojan youths, the pride and hope of their families, on Patroclus’ funeral pyre. they were alike in their insatiable desire for revenge.

it wasn’t enough for Cassandra that her father’s body had been cremated with all the honour due to a great king. she’d have thrown pyrrhus on to the fire if she could, used his body to feed the flames.

greek fighters were – are– immensely proud of their long, flowing hair. it’s almost as if they think their strenght resides in it. a man will throw a lot of hair on to his father’s or his brother’s funeral pyre, but it’s rare to cut off the entire lenght. Achilles did it for Patroclus– I can’t, for the moment, think of anybody else.

then rising high above the clash of swords on shields, the pipes began to play Achilles’ lament, the music that had haunted me – driven me to the verge of insanity, almost – in the weeks after his death.

by now hecuba had seen the funeral pyre and was holding her lips together in the way she sometimes did when grief and anger threatened to overwhelm her. i wanted to reach out and touch her, but held back. there was an isolation about her now that no amount of love could breach.

cassandra sat down, tucking her legs underneath her as neatly as a cat.

not nasty, not threatening –or not yet.

when great Achilles was alive, he defied even the gods.

she was incapable of appreciating the full extend of Hecuba’s power. Calchas saw it. There was something in his voice whenever he mentioned Hecuba, a softness that certainly wasn’t there the rest of the time.

i’d never met anybody like Cassandra, that curious mixture of the childlike and chilling.

she fixed her startling yellow eyes on me.

what was left to her really except grief and anger and craving for revenge?

since the last three months i’ve said i’m fine 132 times.

heart decay

these all co-mingle with a noisome choir of angels who - not rebels, yet not true to God - existed for themselves alone.

through me you go to the grief-wracked city

my moral compass is spinning next to the magnet that is all of my desire.