for the record:
Protect me from the mangled utterances of
witchfinders and the convoluted,
the diapered rebuke of incontinent dribblers.
Flycatchers and the sanctimonious;
"My name is Legion, and we speak for the many."
Protect me from rulers smiting down the left hand.
Churchwardens waxing promiscuously.
Deliver me on those days when the postman strikes,
dyslexic, slovenly and ambidextrous.
"My name is Legion, and we speak on behalf."
Protect me from arbiters of moral diseconomy,
ambulance chasers and the self-deluded;
social workers, priests and customs investigators,
the recently excised or circumscribed.
"My name is Legion, and we are fewer than before."
main picture:
aramaic book script, mesopotamia, overlaid on hamesh;
'protection from the evil eye'.
aramaic book script, mesopotamia, overlaid on hamesh;
'protection from the evil eye'.
7 comments:
Good writing. The graphic bears a faint resemblance to Chthlulu.
Damn. It seems very obvious now you mention it. I was thinking jellyfish, but those fingers are more like tentacles.
One of the first books I ever read as a child was a collection of Lovecraft: "The Outsider and Other Tales", I think it was. It contained "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", maybe, and the lurid cover was very obviously cribbed from a movie still of Max Shreck.
I still love H.P. Lovecraft; M.R. James, too.
It don't matter who won the Booker prize. H.P. Lovecraft is still the king.
Merely reading about prizewinners always makes me take cover behind something pulp. All that literary hyperbole gives me migraines.
To quote a writer of sound principle:
"[it] makes me feel a little too speedy and 'ADDish'."
I agree with you, but that writer of sound principle guy sounds like he is a little too given to bombast. I was paraphrasing a Waylon Jennings song,
"It's the home of Willie Nelson
It's the home of Western Swing
It don't matter who's in Austin
Bob Wills is still the king"
I don't expect you to get all of my obscure musical references. I don't get yours. Let's keep throwing them out there anyhow.
By the way, you read Lovecraft as a child? That's the sort of thing that makes you unfit for most forms of human endeavor! I blame it all on my mom. She dug her copy of Alice in Wonderland out of grandma's attic and ruined my little mind for anything but the marvelous. I blame my current depression, and all past depressions, on the unbearable dullness and meanness of reality.
Ha. Perhaps. ADD seems very apt a response; I don't think I would have caught that Waylon Jennings reference, mind you.
Blame it all on comic books. In the space of one summer - when I was laid up mostly in bed recovering from one childhood illness or another - my reading diet graduated from comics solely to books without any pictorial content. H.P. Lovecraft helped smooth the transition.
And. Speaking of Lewis Carroll, in a roundabout fashion, I remember inheriting a very old hardcover compendium on Hans Christian Andersen. The engraved illustrations - Dutch, I think - were infinitely more terrifying than anything I had previously encountered in reprints of "Tales From the Crypt" and other magazines. Very real in their allusions to madness and vice and dissolution. Almost photographic in detail, yet oddly wooden and contrived.
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