Puppets

Lukas Allen

               Just think of them as puppets, puppets held up by a-

            I suppose by a monster.

            I don’t know what is at the other end of the voices. I don’t know, and nobody seems to know. They don’t sound like me. They don’t act like me. Where do they get their personality?

            I put on my favorite blue hat. Had this hat since forever, since I was a child. I hear something loud far away in the distance, which is probably a gun shot.

            The hat is comfortable, feels lucky. It is a cherished valuable to me.

            I am an author and artist. I am in a better position than I ever have been. I’ve been approved for disability income, I am safe, I have medication. I am not always depressed, and I am making great strides for my wellbeing.

            Some creators make their best work when they do not have the privilege of being in a good position. Sometimes, when a creator is scared, hungry, lonely, or depressed, they have the ability to create masterpieces. At least for themselves. When a creator has nothing, what they make may be what is saving their life. Art keeps the artist alive, maybe not with necessities for life, but with drive and purpose that is unmatched.

            I understand the need to create, the drive to write, to work on the book. It was the only way to keep the monsters back, the voices of my illness which cause me so much harm.

            Work on the book.

            That phrase was once commonly repeated by myself, written on the wall once in madness as well. It was my reminder. Perhaps a reminder to live.

WORK ON THE BOOK.

I would tell myself this, when I needed to get back to work. It sometimes seeped into some of my characters, as I would write fictional accounts of myself. One character said that’s all I cared about, the book, and she was probably right, just as I had written her.

The work wasn’t its own reward. The work was my need to survive. I’d often tell myself I’d kill myself, after I finish this book, this series, my next project… It was an ultimatum accidentally produced. Work on the book, or kill myself.

Thus, in order to belay that inevitable outcome, I would continue to write, to create, to build galaxies out of words spewing from my fingers like rushing rivers.

Writing was the only way I could actually think to myself… It was the only safe sanctum I had. The voices would yammer on, insulting me, hating me, hurting me. They could not do that in the worlds I created. They simply had no purpose there, and didn’t belong in my world. Still, I’d say they don’t belong here as well, but the only way I can enforce that is in my written words.

The other defense is music. Blasted into my ears, cranking up the volume, smashing my eardrums with the beat of percussion. I am not as experienced in creating beautiful music, and only ever have created a bit for myself for fun. Sometimes I only sing to myself, no one around, but mostly I am content as the listener.

The voices are quieted when concentrating on the music. I lose focus of them, and they eventually fall back. In my writing I would sometimes challenge the voices, sometimes try to portray my struggle to a viewing eye, whoever that would be. There were certain villains of absolute evil I brought in, specifically to defeat my worry about them, despite knowing they were fiction.

I only knew they were fiction when I am sane enough, and able to resist the voices. Still, sometimes I do not understand how my characters, especially evil characters, come from my mind. It is some illusion, that even I do not understand. I’m like a magician who believes in his own tricks.

I can always chop the writing to pieces, vivisect it until I find all I need to explain. In the moment of writing, even if I know my intentions for the characters I am producing, the story can sometimes twist and turn unbeknownst, as every encounter feels so real and in the moment. When I look back on what I’ve written, it is sometimes like looking back at an old family recording. I remember why I wrote that, how it felt to have this happen, as I know how the story has ended already written.

Some characters I have lived with even before their written form. Some characters. My villains. Let me flourish the blade once more, and step back from the curtain to allow the monsters to show their faces.

Are they the monsters? Or are they puppets themselves?

2.

In my illness I can often feel them on and under my skin, taking over my action as I am lucid they are there.

The first, although my second villain in my second series… Satan.

I grew up Catholic, and Satan is more real for some than others. I was always a strong skeptic, and even drifted away at the ridiculousness of my religion, believing in demons and devils when I know none are there.

I still know that Satan isn’t here… but it is strange that my own reclaimed belief believes in this form of evil. There is even a sort of oath, repeated in every Catholic mass, to deny Satan.

Are the words only rote repetition of tradition? Or do they mean something symbolically and analogous to real life? OR… Are there demons and devils in the night?

I worked on Satan as a villain as I was beginning to accept all the knowledge I had sponged up learning about my faith, and decided to put it to some sort of use. I thought Satan a classic villain that I could use in a broader sense. Satan to me means a few hard things. The first being suicide. I hate suicide, and I have wrestled for a long time with suicidal ideation and tendencies. I hate that I was in that pit, yet know that pit still has maws agape, for me and many others. The other characterization of Satan I battled was forgiveness.

I believe that anyone is redeemable, even though many hardcore Christians also believe in Hell, where strangely enough our all powerful, forgiving God cannot muster the powerful act of forgiveness, as Hell is the place where only the sinners go, for all the rest of their eternity.

I decided to use a little place not known to many of Christianity, even though it is doctrine somewhere, at some times. I used Purgatory, inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy wherein Purgatory was the second place Dante traversed, after he got out of the Inferno.

I brought Purgatory into my religious fiction stories, in order to give forgiveness to ultimate evil. Now, anyone can have forgiveness, we all have the power to give it, even if some do not ask for it.

Satan is one such character that can be forgiven, but it may never be taken. Satan was the hard baseline of ultimate evil. Satan was also the character who inspired my most hated of sins… suicide. Satan in my stories often whispers to the character, mocking them and their will to live. I believe that suicide is perhaps the worst sin, because when one commits suicide they are denying themselves life. In a way forgiveness and suicide are tied together, as forgiveness allows someone to change for the better, while suicide denies them any chance of life or change.

I don’t believe Satan is there… even if I have heard his whispered words myself, as hallucinations of my illness, and even had a hallucinatory shot in the head by Satan.

My illness makes impossibilities possible. It can change my perceptions, make monsters in the dark. They run rampant in my reality, and I often wish for saviors from my own Hell.

And strangely enough… saviors appear.

The first were my book characters, all fictitious, and then later on there was my Messiah, as well as a long dead uncle.

Do you believe in miracles?

I don’t. I have lived them firsthand, I have spoken to Jesus Christ and brought back the dead, but I do not believe in miracles.

I could easily classify Jesus and resurrection as hallucinations, and in a sane world, where I believe God is quiet to allow us to think for ourselves, I am prone to category them as such. I believe that a silent God is the best God, as I never want to hear another disembodied voice commenting on my life and giving me commands. In a sane world, God should be so good at his job that he is even blamed for not being there.

Jesus was a real, actual being to me in my absolute worst. He was right beside me, actually felt and heard, and I listened as he kept the ultimate evil back from my life. I first arose against God to fight him, but instead he saved me from even myself.

3.

I have another character that is more personal to me, a villain. He arose in my mind as a fascination, then as an obsession. His fractured skull was everywhere, bringing in horror I never knew existed. This being, the Lich, is symbolic to me as well, a being of madness.

Madness, to one who is sane, can seem like there is no rhyme or reason to any of it. The problem with having madness is that it is sane to the experiencer. Madness is the only way someone who’s crazy can organize their life. Madness can happen from stress, drugs and alcohol, loneliness, or even genetic disposition. There are many ways to be mad, what matters is what one can consider sane.

If there were no changes in the world, if everything was absolutely the same, we would all be sane as well. There is an unseen code to sanity, given by society and one’s own beliefs. There are vast learnings of what makes one insane, medical studies and studies done on a societal scale. I will, instead of damning another with a term of madness like I have been damned, instead speak about madness and sanity on a more personal scope.

The Lich to me was just a picture. A character, created by me and accidentally given more and more purpose in my life. Just a picture… sometimes thought of as a spirit as well. This skeletal monster continued to grow and grow and grow. It terrified me but I could not look away. In some very early writings of mine the character grew too much, feeding off my own thoughts and somehow being poised against me.

I tried to reckon with this madness, I tried to make my mind clear again, but I fell more and more into suicidal thoughts, and once crazy thoughts became more real, the Lich only grew and grew. I was obsessed with it at a point, and as I drew and redrew the creature, the less I could get rid of it.

They were horrible times for me, and the Lich was only another character amidst the madness. The unholy trinity we were… Satan, the Lich, and I. Satan was sometimes my dead “granddad” based off a real person I am related to, smoking a cigar in the shadows beside my hospital bed, as I lay petrified that he was right there. The Lich, being many different characters, like an imagined serial killer dead in the basement, to even me, was horrifying me as I tried to make sense of my crazy surroundings, that every horrible, little thing there was another secret meaning to, that of course I somehow knew.

I spoke of truth, believing I could see the lies. The reality was that they were all lies… every little thing. But who was the liar? Partially me, and partially the hallucinations.

I do blame my madness on the hallucinations, despite not knowing exactly how they manifest. I just also blame myself for not being able to pull myself out of it.

I forgive myself for my madness… Sometimes forgiveness of self can be the hardest part. I only can pray that I will not fall down that horrible pit again.

4.

So why do these hallucinations appear as they do? That is my biggest question, that nobody seems to know the correct answer to. It infuriates me that I can be so close to being where I want to mentally be, and then as I lay in bed in the dark and quiet, I hear them mocking me and taunting me. They particularly like to hate whatever I like. They are just so… antagonistic! Nobody needs this sort of battle, especially when I can hate myself all on my own as well.

You can say that they don’t know anything I don’t know, but that won’t stop the torture. Imagine eating a sandwich, an awesome sandwich you made because you are really hungry, there’s someone whispering to you about how you suck and are pitiful.

            Words can hurt.

            What if I told you, “Why are you reading this? Are you really trying to get something out of this? Just go fuck off, find some other way to waste your time, you idiotic, retarded imbecile.”

            That’s a little taste of how words can be unpleasant. They are only words. They are silent symbols that only are given their meaning by the reader.

            To explain my little jest, I particularly hate the word “retard.” I have been called that for my illness, probably behind my back as well as from the voices I hear. It is a damning sort of word, which basically is used to say someone is worth nothing, and that whoever they are they do not matter.

            Retard is an outdated word, no longer meaning its intended medical definition. The same goes for schizophrenia, which unfortunately I carry as a sort of invisible brand, given to me by the medical examiners I have met.

            I will say I dislike the word schizophrenia, even though it is used to categorize specific needs for me. Popular culture tends to use the word schizophrenia very wrong. The ignorance doesn’t only come from kids who don’t know better, it can go far into society, from incorrect media to even the most successful people today. The word schizophrenia is pretty much at the same point as retard, similar to psychotic and psychopathic. The words do not mean anything medical. They all have the same meaning: worthless.

            I’d honestly probably prefer the term mad. A mad hatter, in a blue hat.

            Where do my monsters come from? I do not control them.

            They’re puppets held up by puppets, that somehow come back to me, as they are pitted against me.