Counter-Entropy
Pure creation cannot be stopped, it can only be slowed.
This was written for Day 7 of Bradley Ramsey’s Halls of Pandemonium.
Unimaginable colors. Beasts with impossible limbs and too many eyes in all the wrong places. A vortex that spun both directions at once. In that eternal moment, I felt the edges of my being pulled together, as if my very soul was trying to hide from Pandemonium.
So I slammed the door shut. I bought a lockbar from Home Depot and sealed it. Then I moved a bookshelf in front of the door and filled it with bought-for-purpose encyclopedias. Then came the noises.
A susurus of screams stalking without cessastion
Ticking timebombs teetering toward terror
United in uttering un-reality
And even sleep didn’t free me from that realm’s insidious influence
Nightmares engulfed me
Every night a new one
Swallowing me whole.
And when I was awake, it felt like the only thing I could do was
Writhe out of bed, mind already
Racing with an endless avalanche of
Ideas that insisted on being released, that made my fingers
Tingle with the urgent need to
Escape into the world
Just to give myself a break from the spiraling narratives that spilled from me every waking moment, I attempted to
Draw with a pencil to
Rid myself of the urge through visual
ART but I found that that was insufficient.
I hadn’t practiced that medium enough. I lacked the talent, the drive, the creative spark that the energy that suffused me always required. It was not enough to simply create, it had to be infused with passion.
Notebooks filled with ideas that made stream of conciousness seem concise, worldbuilding so circular that it could only be justified by itself, dialogue that never ended even as the characters lived and died and lived again.
Words
spilling out
engulfing the pages
suffusing them with the
very madness that consumed me
and drove my every waking thought
toward further creation and away
from everything else that
should have mattered.
All else
discarded.
When the very walls bore the stains of my rampage I littered the floor with the encyclopedias and toppled the shelf and took a sledgehammer to the locking bar and threw every remaining ounce of caution to the wind because if I did not find a way to change to embrace to become one to create eternally within that endless dimension of unguided energy I knew I would soon be locked away and they wouldn’t give me a pencil or pen lest I stab myself much less a laptop and my words would be written only within the confines of my skull taunting me until I burst from the sheer unrestrained weight of words that should never be spoken.
I opened the door. Never again shall it be closed.
My initial thought was to make this a series of gags. “What? This is Panda-Monium, land of the talking pandas!” “Where? This is Pan-Dam-Onium, dimension where we build our dams out of giant pans!”
So what I’m saying is we all dodged a bullet when I chose to take this seriously.
Word art at its finest!