Week 5, Entry 6
Jun. 23rd, 2022 11:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
goatgodschildI was thinking about the way this project has affected me, how I have had to reject so many of the structures that I have considered right and normal and natural. Not just my mental structures, but my immediate responses, too. There's so fewer bounds on me than I thought there were, and the ones that are new, are -- a hackamore to a parade bridle. It's very weird, and often feels lonely and awkward and unpredictable in all its newness. Anyway, here's the Stephen King quote that's been kicking around in my head. It's from his novella The Langoliers, which is one of those stories that either works for you or it doesn't.
Deep in the trenches carved into the floors of the Pacific and the Indian Oceans, there are fish which live and die without ever seeing or sensing the sun. These fabulous creatures cruise the depths like ghostly balloons, lit from within by their own radiance. Although they look delicate, they are actually marvels of biological design, built to withstand pressures that would squash a man as flat as a windowpane in the blink of an eye. Their great strength, however, is also their great weakness. Prisoners of their own bodies, they are locked forever in their dark depths. If they are captured and drawn towards the surface, toward the sun, they simply explode. It is not external pressure that destroys them, but its absence. Craig Toomy had been raised in his own dark trench, had lived in his own atmosphere of high pressure.
[...]
By the time he was seven, Craig was a dedicated type-A overachiever, just like Daddy. He had made up his mind: the langoliers were never going to get him.
[….]
Pressure.
Pressure in the trenches.
Craig Toomy continued to get all A’s, and he continued to spend a lot of time in his room. The place which had been his Coventry had become his refuge.[….]
But some fish are built to rise just so far and no farther; they explode if they transgress their built-in limits.
[…] Who knows how the fish captured in one of those deep trenches and brought swiftly toward the surface -- toward the light of a sun it has never suspected -- may feel? Is it not at least possible that its final moments are filled with ecstasy rather than horror? That it senses the crushing reality of all that pressure only as it finally falls away? That it thinks -- as far as fish may be supposed to think, that is -- in a kind of joyous frenzy, I am free of that weight at last! in the seconds before it explodes? Probably not. Fish from those dark depths may not feel at all, at least not in any way we could recognize, and they certainly do not think…but people do.
Deep in the trenches carved into the floors of the Pacific and the Indian Oceans, there are fish which live and die without ever seeing or sensing the sun. These fabulous creatures cruise the depths like ghostly balloons, lit from within by their own radiance. Although they look delicate, they are actually marvels of biological design, built to withstand pressures that would squash a man as flat as a windowpane in the blink of an eye. Their great strength, however, is also their great weakness. Prisoners of their own bodies, they are locked forever in their dark depths. If they are captured and drawn towards the surface, toward the sun, they simply explode. It is not external pressure that destroys them, but its absence. Craig Toomy had been raised in his own dark trench, had lived in his own atmosphere of high pressure.
[...]
By the time he was seven, Craig was a dedicated type-A overachiever, just like Daddy. He had made up his mind: the langoliers were never going to get him.
[….]
Pressure.
Pressure in the trenches.
Craig Toomy continued to get all A’s, and he continued to spend a lot of time in his room. The place which had been his Coventry had become his refuge.[….]
But some fish are built to rise just so far and no farther; they explode if they transgress their built-in limits.
[…] Who knows how the fish captured in one of those deep trenches and brought swiftly toward the surface -- toward the light of a sun it has never suspected -- may feel? Is it not at least possible that its final moments are filled with ecstasy rather than horror? That it senses the crushing reality of all that pressure only as it finally falls away? That it thinks -- as far as fish may be supposed to think, that is -- in a kind of joyous frenzy, I am free of that weight at last! in the seconds before it explodes? Probably not. Fish from those dark depths may not feel at all, at least not in any way we could recognize, and they certainly do not think…but people do.
