(№1.1)
People nowadays digress and dislodge of it, so persistent, so caring to not believe, to strive unfazed and confirm the false-proven, turmoiling calm safety of delicious yet fatal denial. Coaxed and bewitched, they drink and bathe in it every single day of their miserable life, a great curative beverage to let fantasy be an affair frowned heavenly upon, an affair of only poets and man-children, fiction a matter you might enjoy occasional for needed servings per day to do yet another thing considered hale-forthbringing: Escaping reality. The shadows be mere shadows, and within the lurking, ancient, angsty powers figmented, fitted presumptuous vanity of your mind to conceal the anxious, consistent sentiment of fear, risen in the dark, nurtured by obscurity and homed also, preferably to rather vacate from this labile territory haunted by dimly silhouettes straying just beyond the flickering light cone of the torches.
The problem only arises and ascertains a finger where reality and supposed fiction rally and fight wars, the transitional points, grey and horribly simmering, disputing, where you couldn't assign, categorise, separate one from the other, mended and cleaved, terribly amiably interwoven, linked where lie and truth intersect in an overlap so confusing, deeply troubling even those present couldn't discern myth from utmost, happened, fixed substantiality. That's where bright minds delve in with the tools of philosophy and most humans despair and succumb in the end to their incapability of discerning the most evidently needed; The truth in itself.
Consumed by clearly-sectioned verity taught and oppressed in youth, written and translated into their every fibre to fear the unexplained, subtract yourself from danger with quivering limbs and absolute mortal agony, inseperate from their nature alike the togetherness of trueness and deceit, compounded at least somewhat occasionally along the path.
The rest of the lot, untouched and out of contact with the doubting metropoles, the hot unexplained that do oppose a challenge to dissolve, are an entirely different type of beast to tackle.
For no matter how strong you try to convince them – to see the truth through the adulty mist that concocted over time all alone and was only further vindicated by literature and academical wrongness, clang now to the grown-ups firmly like a second skin, decelerating and working almost like a soothing sedative (fear and curiosity are really like opposite poles, for indifference was far more effective than fear, for out of fright, anger and hatred might be the next children to be produced) - in retrospect, you would never succeed. Grey the thing they wanted to ignore, deny, grey they turned out to be themselves very ironically. The compendium of how to thread their lives sufficed and fomented.
Neither did they care or even mused in the possibility of "things" being out there in the wild, things far beyond human imagination and way older than legends and facile tales, that there was in fact something else, silently judging and thriving without human influences.
Yet back in the old days, the times of ancient Empires and fair courts of just kings and soft queens, the days of malicious courts led by horrible kings and vicious queens, when paper made of papyrus or animal skin, even earlier be it little squares cut out of stone - it used to be different. For unnormal, disgusting, forbidden behaviour, nature itself seemed to curse villages and long-lost-forgotten towns with spuming Sea, angered Sky and faltering Earth, demise and doom a constant variable expected deeply and anxious alike, mankind was determined to explain it in all its basic components, panelling the elements from action to reaction, from cause to consequence, much like the fraudulent white light of the sun is revealed to be in reality a conglomeration of all the seven rainbow colours existing, camouflaging in unison as one, being far greater and stronger jointly than apart. They did so with every fibre intent of creating the finest stories of terror and horror, but wholesomity and merit thereunto with every bit of great story-telling dexterity and tale-crafting aptitude they could muster. And really did they have to turn their minds upside down for a great fable, for unluck and misery truly are prone to strike periodically and never be far atwain.
Myths and anecdotes elucidating these long droughts, resulting in no harvest in autumn, with no pouring rain to nurture their fields and fill their stomachs, leaving them with substantially nothing to conquer long and vicious winter, with many children and men and women to succumb and decease in their frosty, ice-cold graves with nerve-splintering, wrecking abundance, so you might question, chilling with slender limbs and a growling stomach sprawled around a meagre fire, flocks and hoards of snow roaring around you as you mingled and shivered in a cave, if you are to be struck next by nature's unmercy to the point it will prove fatal? If you are to seek shelter next to your neighbours and friends and roost your last quarter now for eternity.
It was an easy explanation all together, an evil spell brought upon by an ancient God usually worshipped and deeply adored by the village and villagers and refunding their love and cherishment as much as his heart, diffused and engulfed with bleak golden liquid could, now offended for his worshippers missed a single time to sacrifice a tenth of their golden crops to him, grain to be devoured and purged within the fire, resolutely maiming them all with a barren glance and nothing more that was left to state to this obsolete audacity.
An unpleasant plague spreading effortlessly and decimating three quarters of an antique metropole, hotspot of noble high culture alike the contagious charm of easy dwellings and the promise of soon-found work in the ocean of millions of bodies, quite absurd the thought now to keep its oaths of health and safety, for when disease occured ironically, it would not quander long until spreading like a wildfire. With pinching rashes, smarting quite terribly and those mysterious yellow bulbs with urges to itch akin skin contact with the infamous rosehip, placed only by the most mischievous souls on the sheets of their arch-enemy, bulbs which would eventually contort, gifted with a will of their own, exploding into a sickening cascade of sombre blue gruel, infecting those who were healthy before and burning the skin of the person they stemmed from, where a ready hotbed would wait for more blisters and bulbs. Firstly, the size of a bull's eye ball, then proceeding to swell the magnitudes of fists, on its gruesome path creating the abhorrent, horrible image of villagers scattered with slender, starved limbs all in the valley, arranged in a sickening array, constantly coughing and throwing up in the tact of their blisters' ruptures. Black phlegm would run the canal way where before pure, clean water coursed, rain trickling and sprinkling the cherry on top of uttermost patheticness, of despicable ignominy in its basest form, the common man an obsolescent model, plotted with ailing disease to be suppressed by death in conformity with a last weak beat of his trembling heart, infamy the thing that remained for a tenuous species and one might assume somewhat pity regarding their deplorable shared misery.
Well, don't blame the poor conditions of sanitary systems and feeble knowledge of the human body, but rather a darkly brewed witch, ascended from genuine pandemonium, resurfaced to stir terror and demise over poor residents, disguised naturally as the prettiest, most radiant woman in town, uncaught and walking still with a nose proudly held high, since no one succeeded in relinquishing the hold of her claw-studded hand from this Earth. It was also for the pretty innocent women that would be erroneously accused in her stead.
Apparently, people always would find others to blame, to hate, to curse on, but never look as far as their own humane faults and mundane wrong-doings, when for this one singular instance, it really was their fault they leapt into this mess in the first place. That's another thing taught and drilled into the heads of the young impressionable. Sarcastically both principles facing conveniently each other quite confrontingly in being absolute opposites, a bothersome ambiance from the start.
Whether you think it was worse on midland, with two perfectly sound examples above, just consider the poor humans living at the shores of the merciless sea, occasionally being ruined by one single unfortunate wave to terminate their lives in drowned spectacle of bonkers elements or an unpleasant storm causing the sea to grow and thrive and attack and claim what it wants from land, by rushing in and finally eliminating all its natural boundaries, nature bribed to overlook this one faulty overstepping. The wild, untamed Sea being an element of itself too.
Humans of course never got tired of making stuff up about their oh-so-testing-awful lives, needed to be endured to gain salvation and the access to a world beyond the finest imaginings, a wondrous heaven of vibrant colours and puffy clouds, clean and neat, ever-lasting, the complete opposite of trouble-some life that must be merited only by suffering. A world full of rosy-red miracles and felicitous fairy-tales, exactly those things more and more fusing to be narration on carved stone or the stagnating old tongue of one's relative, than rather real-life occurrences or events curated to happen every once or twice a decade, backed to oblivion, wonders and marvel impossibly unfathomable to perceive, to be prefigured by mankind and thus haunting and stalking the at least ethereal depths of bounded fiction created by those who sacre the old tales. It was easier making something up than really believing it to be fatefully true.
Inventions of several gods or just one, but the one who matters the most, is nothing new a concept and quite literally an easy tool to control and restrict the liability of population, seen to this day. Blaming witches, which were demon-like creatures rendered of smoke of obsolete darkness, faced much in contrast to the gods, gifted with seraphic poise and rays of light sprouting from within unmatched to any source hitherto seen on this planet and the several sea monsters diving and swimming patiently, much differing from their name in every stretch or body of water imaginable, being a monster of a different kind, for they do not engage in stalking and mindlessly hunting, but rather float near the uprising surface of exiting the Sea realm, tolerant once again, for they let their estranged, odd prey come close by themselves, out of sheer stupidity, or inquisitiveness, despair or boredom is either insignificant or forgettable, leaving the poor captains, and skippers, crews of all kinds with raw scrubbed wounds right under their skin, a trembling, aggravating sensation spreading like unnoticed illness does with the brain to initiate declining mental ability, every waking moment brimming with disgorged pictures of their nightmares, displaying the horror they have seen as spectators of a cruel play written by life's crawly scripture, favouring always never the humans, but rather other creatures. Their comrades, lively and vividly being swallowed by the sark, brewing, white-tipped Sea, becoming an even violent animal of its own after dusk with rolls of waves diminishing the very kindred flame of life continued deep in their bodies, to toy with them above the surface and have their flesh be smashed and shattered by the beasts and animals, horrid and wicked in nature, sheltered below the dark, perling, surface complementing the dread and horror even further, whenever duty and dignity called these men and few women to dance and gamble with chance and fate once again.
The victims once their friends turned haunting faces of the past, conspicuously gathering together in a crowded nightmare in nights of weakness.
Perhaps now you can grasp why sailors were in fact the demographic prone to the most drinking.
Seafarers and seamen, sailors and navigators were in fact also the very best people to converse quite confidential about the evil supernatural hid in a blanket, malicious and protecting like a mother to her just born child, mariners shameless and queer in character, gladly spinning the wheel to another sailor's yarn to amuse a few people and attract a couple angled glances.
A year on the Sea though will really teach you different types of values and motions, will give you a thicker, tanned skin and enough thrilling stories which ought to last a lifetime.
People especially travelled or visited these few special places exclusively to hear multiple tales in one night, rum and other cheap alcohol bought to aid loosen one's tongue and availed as contribution, for humans might renounce any inexplicable phenomena to be nonsense and delusional fabrication of ill, old minds, a trick of the light or simply frequent flotsam, trapped in a convulsing roll of waves to appear and disappear unpredictably, yet the veiling charm of intoxication knew egression out of this complicated problem. They didn't exactly believe the themes and creatures mentioned, still longed to listen to the deep and strong voices, bitter and relentless like black coffee in the morning, with a weathered face and strange clothing apt perfect for the conditions over sea, mostly because the best immaterial gift from a quick abode to the coast would always and forever be the retelling of those over and over again, given you were safe again in the midland where you belonged, wide offside from the spook and mysteria concluding for outstanders mostly in hysteria, the truth brighter burning and hotter than furthermore anticipated. Madness and insanity lingering around a corner for a reasonable exit, facilitating the bargain that demanded explanation.
The people begged to hear more tragic stories, witches tempting to seduce honourable men to hatch in the middle of the act out of their siren's disguise, with long sharp teeth, claws the length of their very fingers, a scaly, musculus, strong tail, long green hair and eyes streaked the colour of crimson, abducting the poor, weak men in the dark and mysterious sea first for asphyxiation and laughing inebriatedly about their pulsing veins, strained faces speaking of the greatest stamina to attempt fleeing of her haft, to observe their lungs fill patiently with salted liquid, ironically being mere inches away from the brooding surface and the air nurtured with oxygen they so desperately yearned for and needed. To eat them afterwards was the grandest and proudest accomplishment any of the sirens could name, keeping the human teeth as a token thought to craft bracelets and necklaces, a hunting trophy essentially only worn on the most special occasion. Or the children of the sea found contented by compelling unlucky souls with a charm sitting in their eyes, to jump and providing oneself to the waves by jumping from cliffs for fun only that a sea monster would await them at the end, with sharp and fish-stained teeth, huge green shimmering talons as piercing as a needle in one's heart.
Of course today, out of the dangerous confines of this delineated paper, far from the reaches and influence they might prove to have on your body, you're perhaps smiling right now over the men's and women's foolishness in the old days as at present, thanks to science and mathematics, we're able to explain, calculate and predict everything about everything, phenomena bend to reason, mass paranoia turned to equanimity and magic to inexistent shenanigans. We discovered nature's cores and went far too far from the direction we intentionally strived to achieve, the objective to attain and we sailed far further and turned out greedier than we should have.
We tell ourselves every waking, walking, standing, sitting moment – and those right before falling asleep, giving in to the odd and awkwardity of our own very brains not shunning aloof from the paranormal just beyond the reach of our fingertips, procreating those images we do want to eschew from, we shield our consciousness to let it simmer in our subconsciousness, until met again in a dream we have no control over - yet we're telling us every subject to be explored in depth and thickness, no mystery or supernatural thing existed outside to hunt us in the night and prey on our defenceless being, our unawareness biting back where it hurts and doing so by laughing uncensored and unceasingly.
We're telling this to us, as we're afraid of what's really outside, walls meant to shield sight and noises and a roof to prevent hail and frailing rain, in fact the very things to allow us to forget the infiltrating predators and residential cabins meant to delight with a fake and easy feeling of safety and comfort, when in reality, it's the packaging wrapping paper to lock up the very price, being the very ignorant humans themselves, meat and flesh on a basic silver platter. Only in secret afraid one day we stumble upon something abominable and inappropriate, denying things right living under our noses, because we are too proud, too stubborn, too stupid to admit it.
But what about the things that aren't figured out?