Escape

The time came for my escape from Erewhon. I knew that I would have to find an excuse to visit the eastern mountains during the dark of the moon. I told the King that I wanted to observe the residents of Naffity when they gathered the tears of mourning. He raised his left eyebrow, but granted leave.

I was handed a dark lantern and we hiked up to the plateau below the giant fallen statues. Once everyone was bent over with eyes fixed to the ground, I slipped away and climbed up the rocky slope. My hands and arms and face were scratched by the long thorns as I burrowed through the boor-geresy thicket and found the tunnel entrance beneath the up-bent knee of the statue of Xite.

[escape links: Thesaurus | Ish | Frog | Reconstruction | No]
[escape links: Traffic | Law | Beautiful | Common | Toaster]
[escape links: Sex | Submarine | Plexus | Accuse | Gardenia]
[escape links: Regret | Multilingual | Muscle | Invention | Garlic]
[escape links: Muscle | Which | Help | Text | Awake]
[escape links: God | Bombast | Bed | Factors | ^116]
[escape links: Engage | Seattle | Goodhearted | Reality | A-Bomb]
[escape links: Flower | Frame | Fret | Cinema | Understanding]
[escape links: Reasonable | Fridge | Master | Voodoo | Baby]
[escape links: Llama | Picture | Materialism | Will | Gleam]

I NEVER hear the word “escape”
Without a quicker blood,
A sudden expectation,
A flying attitude.

I never hear of prisons broad
By soldiers battered down,
But I tug childish at my bars,—
Only to fail again!

~~~Emily Dickinson (1830–86)

Much as I love words, they can be tyrants sometimes. Swarming together into thoughts and buzzing around my brain, they distract me from my body.

Then I make my escape into the world of numbers. There is nothing so clear and simple and elegant as an equation, where all the powers of x and y are discovered and revealed and work together.


^116

from all the others, from you,
from me ... from me?
how can I escape from myself?

If escape is not at hand then you must make your own escape.

Life, for us, is a series of dramatic escapes. We must leap from bed and escape the unproductiveness of sleep; we must don the armour of our cars and trains and busses and escape hellish traffic; we must escape the office at night and go home to not-work. We must escape into television, into movies, into games, into bars, into sex and into one another's lives. We must escape the conscious realisation that we never wanted to be more than twelve years old; we must escape conscious realisation of ourselves. Finally we escape back into sleep, where at last, for a time, we are free.

Ettore thought his escape manifested his freedom but he is fettered by the very word of it. His escape is a tunnel between cells: Ettore can erase his fingerprints, his precious signature, digging; but if only he would get off his knees and look around ... who told him he was in prison?