Most worthy subjects,
It is with great pleasure and delicate titillation that I write this to you. It pleases my pineal gland and such other udders my dying body may possess in its most intimate and secret recesses, that you have accepted this task with such brisk excitement and questionable bias.
What my consorts and I consider to be worthy of our time, is the following, my beloved.
A good lashing, early in the morn, the second hour prior to sunrise.
Over the eyes and with plenty of maquillage. I advise the use of a small rotund brush, the bristles and shape, like that of a pine cone. The paint itself, dark or misty. The tremble of a night shade.
Which brings me back to that gland I spoke of much in my treatise, at the Court of the Departed. A tiring venture, which left me, for many a time, dozing on the podium, like an irate bat in a cavern with streams of light.
Nonsense, I hear you clamour, most devoted subjects.
Allow this blank space that follows to be your moment of silence. We shall meet afore the minute.
Honoured and depraved loyals alike, I urge you to act immediately. The sanity of the eyes around you eats into your being. We cannot allow this. In all our infinite and most demented wisdom, we may not acquiesce to the demands of the Crone.
You must have seen her chicken legs and crow's feet. Terrible, terrible, and more terrible, I tell you.
My beloved, you are incoherently egotistic and charming, your watchful eye for the unnoticeable details has pained me and astounded me, and I love you.
Yes, I love you, my subjects, in the way the Baron of Aufgrund loves his gold purse.
I must now end this divine prattle. The Crone is at my gates and I must feed her, oats and mill seed.
The Baba is a delightful hag, she is.
A brief farewell.
My Esteemed Colleague,
ReplyDeleteI note that in your article in the Pallid and Macabre Weekly you mention the Pineal Gland. I wondered if you were aware of some new research that has come to light about this mysterious organ.
You may know the Baron Aubec de Verlain and his experiments in dissection. Very recently he has taken to spending more and more time with his cadavers. The gentle soul of inquiry speeds him to the task of discovering the use and origin of every organ and membrane in the human body. If I close my eyes I can imagine his stork-like figure hunched over books of notes, a glass of the finest absinthe in one hand and a hemp cigarillo in the other while a freshly opened corpse lies cooling on his work table.
THe heart for instance, has not as its object the movement of blood around the body. The learned Baron has discovered that this organ was designed by the Secret Masters with the express function of causing heart attacks, thus curtailing the human life span and placing a limit upon human endeavour. For, as the Baron has rightly observed, without the Heart, there would be no such thing as a Heart Attack.
As for the Pineal Gland which Descartes himself proclaimed the very "Seat of the Soul", the Baron dismisses this as mere nonsense. Despite its central position within the human brain, de Verlain has pierced the veil of mysticism shrouding this tiny and largely insignificant organism. Its purpose, he purports is nothing more than to provide an excellent source of calcium for cannibals.