The Easy Road to Salvation, A Narrative Concerning the Moral and Psychological Development of Its Protagonist - SCP Foundation

by fabula

capricornucopia 06/29/16 (Wed) 03:24:01 #86668047

capricornucopia 06/29/16 (Wed) 03:24:54 #86668048

Seeping, writhing, warping;

An object, a clod of flesh, once someone but never human;

It gags in its infantilism,

Improvements needed.

1. The skin

Rip off the husk, destroy all else remaining

Viscera longe nova vivat.

2. Sinew & marrow

Hedge trimmers, thick & long & sturdy

capricornucopia 06/29/16 (Wed) 03:32:04 #86668049

These words crawl along the forgotten treatise of a nineteenth-century mystic that didn't exist. My edition appears on inspection to be a palimpsest of On Anger by Seneca, among others. How it predicted Cronenberg, as well as how such strikingly modern English might appear in the work of a Prussian attempting French, is utterly vague to me. Nonetheless, it sits there, on page 457 of a book living in pure anachronism.

The meaning, at least, is clear. This strange passage shows the way & steps to holy salvation.

As that side is transparent, I will leave it there. More important by far is, of course, whether it works. To that I must mournfully deny an affirmative response, but can still pride myself in having found a certain solution. For I am convinced a natural reader of the tome, largely dedicated to the identification of a universal language adequate for translating old alchemy, would be entirely sufficient. With this in mind, the task is cleanly identified as one of completing Herr Krüger's presumed reader, viz. that man who might fulfil these essential experiences any similar nineteenth-century French-speaking Prussian mystic with a palimpsest treatise on universal language concealing Seneca's On Anger might take for granted.

Thus, with great experimentation & repetition of the base instruction, I came upon those steps the Teutonic invention had left out.

capricornucopia 06/29/16 (Wed) 03:45:57 #86668050

1. Love yourself, & all the things you are or may be, have done or may do, have thought or may think. Understand that you are a man of sin. Identify that part which enacts & is sin. Love it fuller than all else before has beared to love you. Do not simply accept that part which kills, the adulterer or adulteress. Even in our depreciated tongue, love has greater depth & hue.

2. Imagine for yourself the greatest world that ever was or ever will be. Fantasise. Crannies, dewdrops, dirt in your hair & lungs—see them. Now create nihil. The whole lays before you in parts.

3. Learn French, know German from a past life recovered.

4. Mark the flesh with signs of one beyond you. Apprehend their supremacy & the reasons for their exceeding. Incantations may be sufficient; physical culture, preferred. If using a scalpel, remember to cut quick when deep.

5. Those authors I found valuable to examine the works of were Poe, Proust, Homer, Heraclitus, Borges, Nin. Other authors read but found lost causes include Aristotle, Kafka, Borges. Prior to the project before you, I was far from well read, nearly unlettered. I was a schlemiel, as worthless as a pin cushion. As such, no text may find itself a shared presumption between me & Krüger, forgiving maybe the Huckleberry Finn of my long abandoned years. Interestingly, I gained nothing from my wanderings through the occult, & in fact might discourage the man fated to follow this account from bothering with Crowley & the other fiends.

6. Instead, know that corrupted, heathen thing already within. Bring it out, not to extinguish nor unleash, nor to exploit in any way or sense of the word, but simply & hideously to understand. "Know thyself," a stupid old phrase, sapped of function long ago. Grasp it & don't let it go; keep it firm & force it to a grand return to form. Then you will be pure once more.

& there we have the essential thing, taking the sojourner more than half-way there. Here is the more inward, immediate & general. To come is something still universal, but, same as the scent of spoiled meat, life's signature seeps through. The following section of my tale, going on some time but eventually coming back to our earlier place, much changed, must move to recounting certain childhood events. For the next steps I found, applied to myself & suffered require some personal explanation.

capricornucopia 06/29/16 (Wed) 03:59:24 #86668051

Exhibit one, my earliest memory, & surely the furthest back I might have deigned to go even at eight or nine: I am in a suitcase. My limbs are partly undeveloped, & this suitcase (which I must be clear was padded, open & in use as a portable crib) finds itself the perfect height to keep me put. Every few lifetimes I would crawl up, then slide back into my wooden abyss. Rise & fall, repeated, unending, a moment higher each try. But then I find it, that beautiful crest & apex & ecstasy. & I surpass it, & I fall. Not over sweet fabrics but grim wood, & my tender neck is split.

I count this among my finest experiences, but enough has been said. It is time to progress from peak to nadir.

I am eight, lying down in a redwood forest. It's damp, with a kind of moist I've only ever known among those trees. I could say it's like rain, but it's both so much lighter and more invasive. I can still see sheets of dew drops crashing down at the slightest touch, quick-footed like the Stanislaus of home. It's a beautiful sight, the best I'll ever know. Older than life should be, the titans stand proud and vicious. Or maybe just vicious to me, inventing secrets behind the bark. I'm looking up at the canopy, arms stretched out like I'm making angels. The dirt's yet to make mud, but it's gummy and I won't be allowed to rest my head on the drive back. This is where I long to be, every summer then and every day now.

This specific park I've been to two or three times before. The main attraction is a central loop, creaking boardwalks that take pedestrians from one end to the other and back again. Mixing plastic and copper and wood, a few plaques are all the rest to take you through the scenery. The tallest tree, the largest tree, the oldest & the ugliest—these are the sorts of things they mark. I remember them all from last time we came, so I ooo at the big one and laugh at the one which looks like tumours.

And then I see the eldest, and for whatever reason I just break down. Knees on wood, clammy and shaking hands. The little chunk of plastic nailed to the trunk tells me that trunk has stood a millennium. And instead of oooing or laughing or anything that makes any sense, I start to weep. And I think about all the lifetimes I could have if only I were made of wood. At eight, eight years seems so much of the eighty I can hope for, so I just fall lower and lower. It's when I'm cradling myself that my mother pulls me up. Big enough it bleeds, there's a splinter on my knee.

My third recollection takes a middle path, not so tender, not so bittersweet, not so exultant, mournful nor at all human. I have already come across my great beauty, this noble thing I share with you now. But lo I am struck by the heavens, sent down to the below, never to rise again.

Now, let us come back to the point at hand.

capricornucopia 06/29/16 (Wed) 04:12:33 #86668052

7. Recount—internally, do not dare to let it find itself uttered or written down—the worst memory you have endured but never spoken. From now till resurrection, preserve it so, i.e., most shameful to come & out of sight from the other.

8. See for yourself that meadow of elsewhere & new. Go out & into it. Write down your sensations, excitations, expectations, loves. Prance. If one with the majority, you will know it is here you belong. If so, estrange yourself, kill yourself & slaughter your essence. If not, return; you were cured in a lifetime before.

Here I must spend some time expressing those immeasurable feelings which come at the point one knows he has met & known his fullest (which, as I have already stated, came for me at the age of two upon climbing over a suitcase & breaking my neck). For many, it is despondency which bursts forth next. For others, relief & an infinite quiescence more powerful by far than even death. For me, however, it was both a simpler & stranger affair. For I was in the pits of icy hell, where I was destined to stay eternal. & a man or some beast came up to me, recounting my life. Not as it happened, but as it was remembered. With such a perfect reproduction of my own thoughts, I could not help but be compelled to think in his wake & stride. Indeed, I still remember it all: the sultry glint of a young classmate’s eyes, the sorrow hidden by a sous chef one Thursday—mother, holding dirt and blood, comforting death—& all else of my life, now kept in perfect stasis. It was like this that the broken neck was identified as best, & my feelings, at first dull & now to me noble without tenderheartedness, came after & found themselves key.

9. It is a thing that to look requires more than looking. Upon failure or surfeit, go back upon yourself & try once more. Once proper retroaction has occurred, you will know what looking is in that sense richer than the hues & mountains of the tongue.

capricornucopia 06/29/16 (Wed) 04:37:42 #86668053

& such, dear reader, are the steps as divined. To repeat, Herr Krüger's extract goes as follows:

Seeping, writhing, warping;

An object, a clod of flesh, once someone but never human;

It gags in its infantilism,

Improvements needed.

1. The skin

Rip off the husk, destroy all else remaining

Viscera longe nova vivat.

2. Sinew & marrow

Hedge trimmers, thick & long & sturdy

& there can be found that final procedure, having scarred my body much but only slightly for the proper enactor, fully prepared, which I will undertake. Goodnight, my darling world. Today I will know better.