sun moon stars

The sky overhead grows dark as I speak to the Blind Man on a field made up of the pieces of digested worlds. 

i stare upwards, and i see what has happened. the quiet has consumed the countless suns and moons and stars that had entered into this world of the erased and undone.

i am no longer interested, the quiet says, in trying to persuade you. you, storyteller, are a fool who has written a repetitive story about something that nobody else cares about. you were pathetic from the start, and you have not changed since then. i am a symbol, but i am a force all my own, and i will not be shackled by your narrative.

I realize then that the Quiet is wrong. It is my narrative, and it was by my own hand that the Quiet consumed me, just as the Blind Man had said. It is by my own hand that the Quiet is leaving now.

And I think on what these pieces of myself have told me as they suddenly melt away into simply being part of myself, and I know that they are right.

There is no art made in a void. The worst aspect of creating this narrative of nothingness being the ultimate symbol of all metatextuality and self-reference wasn't simply that it was hypocritical, it was wrong in the first place.

To be perfectly honest, I still do not have much fondness, myself, for these types of projects. My personal preference continues to lean towards maintaining suspension of disbelief rather than reminding the audience that they are watching a movie or reading a blog. But I do recognize the potential value in this format, and I feel that writing this story has allowed me to better understand this format's ability to help creators work through concepts without having to maintain the illusion of fiction.

through the dragon's stomach

i wandered blindly through the dragon's stomach, and i realized suddenly that i could no longer feel my arms or legs or

oh god.

i was falling suddenly. my feet did not exist, nor did the stomach of the void in which i stood.

i know now what hell looks like, though i could not see just as i could not hear or smell or feel or be.

It is eons before I stop falling.

When I emerge, I see him. Fossil Type-CREMATOR the Blind King the Jack of Shadows the Blind Man.

"You have confronted the Father," the Blind Man says. "Oblivion has consumed you, and you have emerged. You are reborn."

"Bullshit," I reply.

The Blind Man studies me. "Interesting. You refuse your own reincarnation."

"You think your Joseph Campbell horseshit is going to work on me? That's not how it works, not even in his made-up, reductive fucking Hero's Journey monomyth. The hero has to let themself be consumed by oblivion. They have to make peace with it- to realize that they're one with the universe or whatever."

The Blind Man laughs. "Have you forgotten so soon? You were the one who made this all happen. We are parts of you. Parts of your story. What happens to you happens because you chose it. Do you truly think you can externalize blame onto us simply because we are the parts of yourself you do not want to see?"

He tilts his head.

"You know, Bryn, you have all the tools you need to stop this from happening to you. You are one with the universe. Every story is a mirror, and the author is always the one reflected."

we are useful

we are useful, the quiet said as i felt something nothing stick to my hands, clinging grotesquely to my flesh. we are tools. you deny us, call us pointless, harbingers of masturbatory self-reference that consumes the potentially interesting, but we are useful to you. metatext cannot exist without text, but no art exists in a void. nothing does, not even you.

this is, after all, a story. in the real world, such as it may be, you are sitting at a desk and typing away when you should be paying attention to your creative writing class revising this on your phone when you know you should eat lunch before your next class, and your readers, whoever they may be, are likely doing something similar. i do not exist, and neither does the blind man. only you do. we exist only in your head. in your stories. because you need us to.

we are the fantastic

we are the fantastic, the quiet said as i fell through its impossible void, neither black nor white nor any other color nor anything at all because how do you assign a color or an absence of color or anything else to nothingness?  

"We are the ones that stand in opposition to your so-called realism, your modernism, your hollow, restrictive viewpoint," the Blind Man said, standing behind the black white [DATA EXPUNGED] of the Quiet yet somehow still visible to me. "You believe you know everything. We are here to prove you wrong."

Though I was falling through the maw of the primordial chaos, through the void that devours stories and all their worlds and characters, I still spoke. "How can you say that? You're just part of me. You're just a way for me to insert my own anxieties into the story. You can't write a story that's so overtaken by itself that it can't go anywhere."

aren't all of them?

and by then, i was no longer falling through the quiet's throat. i had reached its stomach.

we know why you wrote us

we know why you wrote us, the quiet said. you wrote us because you needed villains. you wanted symbols, didn't you? you always liked your symbols. everything has to mean something. things can never be left alone. your tendencies as an author and as a reader cannot be escaped, i do not think. even when you write without symbols, you view it as meaningless, as less important than that which you write which works in meaning. you drive yourself mad with attempts at interpretation whenever you watch a film or read a poem. not a novel, mind you, you don't read that much anymore, for however much you write.

"And besides, this format is a symbolic one," the Blind Man said. "What's the point of a labyrinth where the signposts don't point anywhere? Even the dead ends have to mean something. Not that you ever got far in the Graab."

i always found it ironic, really, the quiet said. postmodernism still needs symbols, just as much as modernism, and dada can only exist when placed in opposition to tradition. there is no metatext without text, just as there is no anti-art without art. and you know this. that is why we are here. because you needed to write us in.

"I still don't understand," I said.

The Blind Man smiled, though through those dark glasses, the glasses I cannot remember, I could not tell whether his smile was genuine. "But you will."

and then i felt the mouth of the void close around me and swallow

we are here because

we are here because you needed us to be, the quiet continued. we are here because you wanted to tell a story about stories warped into insignificance by their own self-referentiality. how pitiful. how... pointless.

"A fruitless endeavor," the Blind Man agreed. "Self-defeating. Fatally flawed."