Splatterism: The Disquieting Recollections of a Minotaur Assailant: An Upbuilding Edifying Discourse

by Christian Winter

  He finished and looked at me. His eyes seemed brighter and more vivid than ever. “And now Evander, a paradox for you to ponder,” he said peering out across the plane of black glass. “For as the philosopher of my heart says, the paradox is the passion of thought, and the thinker without the paradox is like the lover without passion: a mediocre fellow.

  “They all think that life lies in the forwardness of the future, but life is already beyond them, or more correctly, above them. No, life is not a rise to the gleaming firmament where one can eat the sweet skin of golden apples in celestial gardens, but a harrowing plummet. For with birth one is already falling, and if it is a thrownness, as some have observed, it is a hurl, a hurledness, a great casting down. And just as the star falls, many will not be seen at all and will leave no trace. But the best will flare and glow and burn with the long iridescent fire of eternity as they travel their wild way and leave a mighty crater when they crash into this terrible and barren planet. Yes, oh yes, for the world is like the mind—it only remembers what strikes it the hardest.”

  So life is like a deep-plummeting meteor. “Let’s just hope they kill someone, or crash into a city and kill thousands,” I said as I started walking towards the sunless lands. “I wouldn’t mind getting crushed by a comet.”

  Souvent me Souvient III

  “It is true that the police forbid carrying secret weapons, and yet there is no weapon as dangerous as the art of being able to recollect.”

  Kierkegaard

  My neck was stiff and my horns ached.

  I could see his faint outline across from me.

  “This is the most tortuous story,” he said writhing in his chair and grimacing.

  “As though a life was something simple and straight,” I whispered very slowly. The words felt heavy in my mouth and my head felt light. Existence was thin and unmoored, evanescent—like a meandering will-o-th’-wisp. “Besides, it was Scammander I was following, and he is rather serpentine and sinuous.”

  Tristan scoffed.

  My funeral robe hung heavily across me— it was dripping wet. My neck was matted with thick, cold sweat familiar to the plagued and perishing. Everything went black again and my head was forced back.

  “As far as I can tell, you shall know,” I whispered. My voice was weak and raspy from all the talking I had been doing.

  “Yes well it seems rather far-fetched.”

  “It is far-fetched, fetched far away from these familiar lands. As it has never happened before, it must have happened afar; thus it is well that you bid farewell and fare with me and my beyond-the-sea style.”

  I did something defiant.

  I grinned.

  Tristan fell silent for a moment. “Did you enjoy killing those men, women, and children?”

  “I only wish I could bring them all back to life to kill them all over again.”

  “Did you feel nothing? Did you feel anything at all?”

  “Only the passing of time,” I said.

  I heard Tristan get up and move away.

  When I opened my eyes I was staring at the ceiling. There was a giant crack that ran through the middle of the fresco and split off in opposite directions, like a nervous bolt of dark lightning fracturing the cosmos.

  Written half way up the wall in thick, straight black letters was a beautiful philosopheme which wrapped around the room in a single band: “I have often thought, Alexander, that philosophy is a divine and really godlike activity, particularly in those instances when it alone has exalted itself to the contemplation of the universe and sought to discover the truth that is in it.”

  Tilting my head lower, my eyes finally landed on Tristan. He was standing behind a lectern, and I realized I was a few rows back in an academic amphitheater.

  “It is not a little vexing to me that you seem to be unaware as to where you are. But then again, I suppose you were never fortunate enough to attend lectures in this hall.”

  He paused and glanced up at the ceiling, tilting his neck slightly to the left as though he was working through a large metaphysical puzzle. “You must wonder why you are not in the front row,” he said, breaking the pensive pause. “The front row is for the eager student, the bright star who strives to be a planet of weight. You are none of those Evander.”

  “You should put me in the back where I could catch some sleep,” I muttered. I rolled my head to the right and looked at the floor. “Perhaps great thoughts fly on winged-words—some even in this very hall—but yours drag themselves through the dirt on the ground,” I spat. “Hopefully some just drowned.”

  “It is a shame I was never able to deliver a peroration in this hall. My papers were sterling works; they received the highest marks, my professors wrote panegyrics below my essays. There is little doubt that I would have received a double first. A vita would have been required and my professors would have stood up and applauded me, just as they did to my father.” He paused and gazed up at the ceiling. “It used to move, you know. It used to be so much brighter, especially in the winter before we all went home to holiday.”

  I knew that Scammander was not coming, and I knew what I had to do next.

  I began to fight.

  “No Evander, no one is ever going to know your story. You are telling me exactly how this happened, and then I am going to thoroughly edit this tale, and no one will ever discover the original. After I’m done editing it, I’m destroying this thought diamond. I will make Scammander look like an absurd impossibility, so absurd that no one will ever believe someone like him could have ever existed.” He fell silent as he strolled across the stage. “So that no one will ever try anything like this again.”

  He whirled around and began walking back across the stage. “They will have careers, not ideals. They will have entertainment, books without ideas, and will be subtly ruled by the theatrocracy. They will make money, not trouble for their rulers. From early in their lives they will be told that anything is possible, and they will be told to hope and to work hard.” He shrugged. “We will even let them teach philosophy and skepticism in the academies. Yes, they will all go to college, they will all receive a college education, for we will teach them that a college education is the key to success. But their education won’t be the kind that you and I know of. It won’t be the kind that Scammander and myself received.”

  He arrived at the lectern and looked out into the amphitheater. “I imagine few of them will read at all. They will have so much to do in their job every day that they won’t have time to think, much less time to think about your ridiculous story, Evander.

  “We will let them talk to each other as much as possible. As long as they have a way to vent any sort of frustration, they won’t rebel. Yes, they will be allowed to protest, to yell, to speak: for as the saying goes, talk is cheap. And all they will ever do is talk. We will create a government that celebrates talk, that holds the freedom of speech to be sacrosanct. I will create a brave new world: I don’t need to monitor people; I don’t need to suppress rebellions or speech; the rulers of this brave new world will be buried in a beaurocracy, a system so large and so complex that there is no such thing as accountability.

  “And since these people will be inculcated from early in their lives, that their life is their own, when they look for wrongdoing, the poet’s maxim ‘our faults lie not in our stars, but ourselves,’ will be the harrowing words with which they rebuke themselves. And these words lead immediately to futility, and if they cannot serve the system, then they will wither away within it, or will commit suicide. In fact, I prefer the later, but will tolerate the former. But as I was saying, they will wither away quietly or will kill themselves quietly, for no one will hear it over the chatter. And what if they do? Their death becomes another topic for conversation!

  “But the important thing is, no one tries to change the system. No one risks their lives in grievous turmoil and strenuous trials to change the system. Sure they try to change the system. Sure they are dissatisfied with the status quo, but t
hey try to change the system from within the system. They believe in the system, for they believe in themselves. They believe in rationality, in rational modifications, not massive, world-historical changes.

  “And the Academy! It will no longer do the sort of instruction that it was famous for. No, it used to teach about ideas—ideas that created powerful beings like Scammander, bent on usurping laws and changing the world. For why would I want to change the world when I rule it? I and the families and interests closest to me now govern, thanks to your failed revolution. Why would I want to educate someone to locate the flaws in my thinking? No, they will learn to serve the system. Of course they will still be told, and believe that they are learning radical things, being exposed to fresh ideas, and that they have the power to change the world.”

  My breathing became slow and solemn. My memories were like rushing liquid, spilling and pouring out of my mouth in an oozy verbal foam.

  A small piece of the ceiling bounced off my forearm as I began to drift into the billowing aether of unconsciousness. I heard Tristan scream followed by a huge crash as a massive part of the ceiling collapsed. As dust and debris rose up around me I heard more and more thunderous crashes as the great academic sky cracked and fell.

  I could only hope the next chunk fell on me.

  Ode to a Saturnine Lycanthrope (Untimely Medications)

  “In 1821, I found it very difficult indeed to resist the temptation of blowing my brains out. I drew a pistol in the margin of a mediocre love drama I was scribbling at the time.”

  Stendhal

  At the end of the path was a lugubrious lycanthrope, leaning on the low iron fencing with an old guitar in his lap, legs stretched out in the grass. Next to him was a pile of old broken ale bottles, some still with spirits in them, but most of them empty—just like the werewolf.

  “Come to visit Johannes Dubitandum, Scammander?” moaned the werewolf bard. The moon emerged from the clouds, casting its pale fire solely where the werewolf lay. His finely stitched breeches were blue and torn at the knees, and though most of his shirt was gone there was a small patch stuck in his fur, which was also blue.

  “Leyland?” exclaimed Scammander, awestruck. “Shouldn’t you be at court dancing with girls and singing sentimental lyrics to the threshold of morn?”

  “Oh, I go to court and sing and play in purple riot, then pen idle odes that ooze from a lazy wrist. But that is not how I pen the humid odes everyone loves and talks about,” he grimaced and picked up a skull from the pile. “I can’t even remember her name, but I had to devour her, especially the heart, in order to write the poem,” he sighed. “And those are the passionate poems I am famous for.”

  “So it is you that has been plucking women from all these towns and villages, and killing them?”

  “They torture us so!” he roared. “Besides, I write a lay of love for them before I kill them, and one after. Oh yes, I see them in town or at a ball, and they set my heart to fire!”

  He lowered his head. “I don’t want to write anymore. I don’t want to kill anymore.”

  “What are you doing out here? How did you even find out about this place?”

  If the lycanthrope had looked sad when we first saw him, he looked completely lost and miserable now. “Well, when you never talked to me after the New Year Ball my—condition—worsened, and I grew ever desperate. So I began to ask around, or listen as a dark thing in dark places, in forbidden alleys, secluded, haunted gardens, the sewers, for someone who could help me. I eventually found Johannes and he said he could cure me.” A small tear rolled out of Leyland’s eye. “I…I really wish you would have helped me Scammander.” He lowered his head a little and set his guitar up on the pile of skulls. I wondered which one belonged to the girl from the ball.

  “The only cleric I know who could actually even have a chance to help you would be Bertram,” Scammander sighed. “How did you get like this anyways?”

  “A poorly mixed love potion,” he replied, then howled.

  Scammander squinted and scratched his head. “New Years Ball…I don’t remember talking to you there.”

  “Of course not,” I replied. “I had to do all the talking for you. And some fighting too,” I added before he could reply.

  I turned to the distraught werewolf. “Where did you get the love potion from?”

  “A poet I met a very long time ago who I saw die in a tavern brawl. His name was Absinthe. I confided my love for a girl, Aporia, who never seemed interested in me, or the rhymes I wrote for her.”

  There was a very long pause. “Scammander, Johannes wants me to kill Meredith in exchange for an elixir to cure me.”

  Scammander froze.

  “I confess I would have done it already, but I can’t find any elves to kill anyways, after all the terror and chaos from that evening.” He began shaking his head. “The world has gone mad, it is being torn apart.”

  That should have cheered him immensely. I know it made me happy.

  “We’re going to kill Johannes,” the wizard said mounting the scaffold. “Wait here and I will retrieve a potion to help you, for a little while at least.”

  “And this is the only way I know how to get to where he dwells.” He drew the rope around the black bag and handed it to me.

  “I think you know what to do,” he said, giving a harsh tug on the noose.

  “I imagine you know what you are risking, visiting Johannes, but does the young bull know?”

  “No, b—”

  “There is a good chance you might die on that scaffold, instead of being transported to his nether kingdom,” said the werewolf.

  “Good,” I said. “It’s about time Scammander started respecting my wishes for a change.”

  I thrust the bag over my face and jumped off the edge of the scaffold; the noose strained, my feet wiggled, my neck snapped, and finally—I died.

  Dithyramb for Incredulity: Writ with Ecstatic Breathings

  “So serious are the doubts into which I have been thrown as a result of yesterday’s meditation that I can neither put them out of my own mind nor see any way of resolving them. It feels as if I have fallen unexpectedly into a deep whirlpool which tumbles around me so that I can neither stand on the bottom nor swim up to the top.”

  Descartes

  Or so I thought.

  I was standing on thin black cobble stones, upside down. I looked up, which was down, and saw nothing but an ubiquitous, slowly turning crimson and saffron banded abyss. I lost my breath as I fell off the cobblestones towards it until a hand grabbed my arm.

  “The mansion! Look at the mansion!” Scammander shouted, his face as red as one of the listless turning streaks. I moved my eyes from his face, timidly inching them down until I saw it. A huge ebony mansion hung upside down in the abyss at the end of the cobblestone road.

  Libraries hidden beneath graveyards. Whispering forests. Cities in the clouds. Labyrinths full of cannibalistic criminals. And now this.

  We walked to the door of the upside-down manor and as the blood pooled in my head we paused to read something written on the home of the world’s most insane wizard.

  Even in the swirling abyss I could clearly read the dark phrase etched into the stone over the door: “Once the foundations of a building are undermined, anything built on them collapses of its own accord.” I winced as the destructive philosopheme weighed on the last tenuous threads of sanity holding my mind together. I didn’t need to destroy the world, it would do it all on its own.

  As I stepped slowly across the threshold even though I was standing on the floor, it felt like I was hanging from the ceiling.

  “So this is what it’s like to be mad,” I whispered into the somber shadows.

  “No,” Scammander replied, looking around. His rainbow-eyes glowed out into the thick darkness with unusual vividness in the topsy-turvy gothic mansion. “It’s too quiet.” He looked tense, like he was waiting for something.

  On either side of us was a giant suit of antique armor; i
t looked like neither had been polished in thousands of years. One had its arms stretched out, palms meeting at the pommel of a battle axe. The other suit’s helmet had fallen to the floor, and was holding a blackened flail in one hand and a sword in the other.

  “I remember—”

  “Some magic? To kill him quickly? To remove this curse that keeps me alive?”

  “I remember what this place is,” he grinned, sliding his pale hand down the dark wood paneling. “He’s modeled it on one of the old ghost stories written by Count Alfred von Shudder,” he chuckled as he turned around in awe. We crept down the narrow hall, then slowly turned the corner and faced a pair of doors with the word “Librarium” written over them.

  I shook my head wearily. “No more libraries.” I shook my head again. “Only pain and misery come from libraries.”

  Scammander looked back at me like I had let slip a sleepy tautology. “Well of course, that’s because they contain so much knowledge.”

  As we walked up to the double doors, Scammander pointed up to another harrowing quote carved into a plaque. “Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them. I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last.”

  My stomach shrank a little when I had finished reading the philosopheme. “Even the most steadfast mind would succumb to madness when surrounded by such thoughts,” I whispered, thinking back to the study wall with insane quotes inscribed upon it.