The Things Betwixt...

For Love of the Children...

There lies a power in the mind, betwixt the worries of day-to-days and the fleeting imageries of the pleasurable, that garners afore us a palpable sensation of our deepest desires and darkest dreams. In our brief history as a species, we’ve birthed a society so superstitious and fearful of the hearsay, that I dare say we’ve placed ourselves at the mercy of this power.

I say this to you with as much care as I can express in words, that everything we fear is in fact – real. For when enough of the fearful believe in something, it exists. We fear god, thus he exists, mayhap it’s not in physical form, but the projections of our thoughts and actions give rise to the fact that there is a power transcendent of explanation that exists beyond subtle sciences and is capable of a many great miracles. Thus, we hold one another accountable to the judgement for fear of hellfire. I’ve since shed such beliefs, for when we no longer fear eternity, we are accountable only to each other. Whether it is for better or worse, without a god, man is capable of being man.

There lies, however, a vast and dark belief in the wicked forces that swirl about our lives. We oft blame the devil and his mischief, but in my many years studying and exploring that darkness, I’ve learned the devil is rarely to blame.

I shan’t presume on the half-hearted hypotheses of the self-proclaimed scholars of insanities and afflictions of the mind, for that is another world entirely. No, I have no interest in the shattered minds. The darkness that I refer to is naught but the sanest of afterthoughts and nightmares born within our young and hungering minds when we are children. For it is then that we open our minds to the beliefs in the fantastical and the wicked.

Thus it was upon that conclusion that I oft found myself amongst the discarded younglings of the English paupers. Many of them were dumped upon the decrepit and derelict steps of Powick Hospital. A shrewd sickness pervaded my heart the first time I laid eyes on the establishment. It stood amidst a decaying tangle of dead trees at the edge of a largely neglected road. Upon my arrival, it was difficult to coerce my mind into aught but a sickening imagery of a great crash into the stark harshness of the lives of the indigent. That is what this place was after all, a pustule filled to its limit with England’s poor - festering like an ill-treated boil upon a remarkably dreary tract of land.

Its tall, brick structure cast a shadow upon that deteriorating causeway to an extent that begets a reluctance to continue the trek. Upon inexperienced and half-hearted inspection of the place, one could note each brick being singularly incapable of contributing to any real structural significance, for they were crumbling. The walls however, held no discernable notion of collapse. Thus it was that the mind’s eye perceived it entirely as a remarkable dilapidation amidst unremarkable craftsmanship long bereft of any outward welcoming. Scars of weather clotted the walls with sooty blacks and browns that created a fresco of aged and rotted tarnish that with all the strength the imagination could muster, could not be undone nor readily dismissed. Cold it was, and malevolent in such a way that would suggest to the sane mind that any admitted should abandon hope of the day-to-day strokes of normalcy.

Despite the tired, abandoned, and resentful presence the hospital summoned upon the countryside, I found myself ascending its mossy stairs. There was however, an inward reluctance – a stark whispering that implored me to turn round and run. It was after all, an asylum, and what was contained therein would be far better left to those proclaimed experts on the subject of madness and peculiarities of the shattered mind. I however, counted myself amongst the lunatics, though a rather different lot of lunatics to be certain. As such, I felt an affinity – nigh a sympathy toward those whose minds were overthrown by imageries that, through all manner of delights, could not be stymied. I was, and still am, a man whose fascination lies in the morbid and macabre and all things that the well-offs consider to be deplorable.