HOUSE OF MIRRORS
Plate XII: "The Sideshow Freaks"
ACT XII: Decendre (The Hanged Man)
- In which the boy joins the house of mirrors to become a permanent actor in the ancient play
He whispered softly to himself, half in horror, half in exultation:
"Now I too am a partner in this fractured house of glass. A patriot of the weird, I walk between the walls of the normal day. I am you in your dreams. My friends are the outcast, the lost and the insane. I live in the twilight of reality. All is revealed and concealed in the House of Mirrors. For here life in your fragile sphere is pulled apart: both for its transient beauty and its ephemeral folly. Dance with me, dance with me my friend into these strange paths. Where all is not what it seems, and what is, becomes what is not.
"In this dream of dreams dreaming, I am free to find freed freedom. For in a modern world where what is, is its opposite - where love is pain, where happiness is emptiness, where kindness is selfishness, where freedom is oppression, where peace is a guise for war, where fulfillment is seductive enslavement, where lies become truth - only the freaks, the loners, the lost are found in the realization of their own isolation. So fly with me on silvered glass to that which is not, so that you may become that which is.
"The path of the lost is the path of the found. The fool is the wise one. Those outside are really within. The flowing away returns to the source of the stream: to again drink, and again drink fully of the fountains of truth. Fly away, fly away, fly away now, and so return to that source, the Arcadian stream: the Outsider land of Self and the kingdom of Truth." |