Goat Notes

Suddenly afflicted yesterday with either a significant irritation or a minor infection in my left eye, whereafter not much sitting at computer screens possible. Better today but not yet quite right, so communications may continue economical.

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 280 words more of Kate's Speech. How vile is my disposition when the stories are not flowing, and how little I notice until the cloud lifts! I think I usually more or less fake homo sapience socially during lulls like the past week's, even to myself at the time; but the mood's aftertaste is not a lovely one; and as for the effect on the housework, I stepped out this morning to find the silverfish forming a picket line and waving little teeny placards demanding cleaner and tidier working conditions. Or perhaps there was just something in my eye, and I saw what I secretly expected to.

I dreamed a brand new fantasy world and have forgotten almost all of it, except for the map of the region I was in and its near environs. I was on the western side, which was a sort of combination of Dark Lord's Wasteland and 1970s Slump London - more lava lamps than Mount Doom - with various punky subcultures around the fringes. There were various impassable barriers to the happier and more diverse countries to the east, except that they weren't entirely impassable either on the magical barrier end or the big enormous mountain range end, and evil imperial invasion was being plotted going eastwards, as well as serious iffy eastern sorcerous plots whose details I don't remember leaking westwards onto my own side of the barriers. I was involved in some Arab Spring style of sedition against the Lava Lamp Imperials, and either I have forgotten all of the details of that too, or I was just engaging in my usual dream strategy of Victory Through It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time.

The little I do remember of its general feel makes me wish I retained enough of the setting to use it for something.  I wonder if it was influenced by thoughts of the late Diana Wynne Jones?  The register seems right.  Ah well, back to my work again!

No words of making: no juice for them, last night or this morning.  Bad case of the Sisyphus about now, thought my brains, and felt my bones.  And lo, much self-pity cheered me on from the sidelines.

And then I had a vision of the old hellion at his long task - a simple one, that yet I'd never met before.  I'd be interested to hear reports of it from elsewhere.

The most obvious interpretation of a guy who must be constantly pushing a rock up to the top of a hill only for it to roll all the way down again is, of course, an image of the pain and futility of mortal life.  But who'd be a futilitarian?

Then there is Camus's notion of Sisyphus as absurdist hero: "The struggle itself... is enough to fill a man's heart.  One must imagine Sisyphus happy."  That is better - but I have no heart to be an absurdist, either.

What I saw: Sisyphus reaching the peak, leaping goat-like aboard the boulder, and madly dancing and whooping on top of it all down that murderous and exhiliarating descent - until it finally comes to rest, and there are only the lifeless dances of Hades until he gets the rock of the world up the mountain again.  So he does that just as soon as ever he can.  And one day his foot will slip, and then he will be nothing more than strawberry jam for Persephone's supper crumpets - but not this time!

The point of Sisyphean labours is neither nothing nor the labours alone.  It is to dance on top of the world, for all of the swift and giddy way down.