Melancholy angles
swift renaissance flash horror
The famed Maze at Hampton Court Palace is where Elizabeth the Virgin Queen amused herself while cooking up pretexts to stay childless and consign her cursed line to oblivion. During the day-to-day it's packed with giggling Japanese teens and lane-blocking Yanks with bologna behinds, which is no fun at all.
But at night, if like me you risk the razorwire perimeter and the prowling bloodthirst of the beefeaters and their hounds, you can wander alone in the moonlight through the labyrinth and lose yourself in every possible way.
There's something in this trespass that warps the right-angled corners of the maze round some eerie lunar geometry. It bends those corners into a melancholy silver impossibility. You can turn the bend and find your sadself in a parcel of forgetting. Forgetting who you ever were and who you'll never be.
But I'm explaining it wrong: let's start again. The corners turn left, they turn right. There is but one path into the centre of the labyrinth, where the notional minotaur of the answer lurks, and but one path out again. Right?
But in the light of the moon, right and left are not right and left, but skewed to other directions. They are slightly misaligned, these ways - they lead to places where you've never been and where you never can be. These unplaces are happier worlds than yours will ever become, but you can't go there in the wake of day.
The moon goes behind a cloud again. All other angles are cancelled. You must turn left or right. Stay in the world defined by a regularity of expectation. Only left or right. It's what's required of you, so it's the bifurcating path which you necessarily must take, oh forlorn human waif.
An illusion of free choice where all choices got cancelled before we were even born or fated to be. And the sadness in those impossible moon angles, so soon to be annulled, consumes you at every turn. And in the end you become a minotaur of despair and not a solution.
Lurk, then, in the central darkness. Weep and wait in the moonless dark for the beefeaters to release you at dawn, to drive their ceremonial halberds with gold-fringed tassels deep into your heart.
That is if dawn hasn’t been voided completely, along with your ragged little wisp of oblivion being, that self of yours which you so proudly carried with you into the maze.
=== MELANCHOLY ANGLES / END ===
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