Posted by NL on December 29, 2004 at 13:22:50:
Blood Tyme, In The Spring
Yes, it has come to that, to celebrate Blood Tyme In The Spring, but in so etiolated and even whispery a fashion that it hardly serves to stir a man's heart. I remember when we would go about, in Spring, in the good olde Bloodtyme of yore, to round up women and girls, religiously checking birth certificates to make certain we traded only in flesh of exploitable age, and herded them into stone corrals and the special reserved dungeon keeps, where they could be stripped to the buff or prettily costumed in scanty garments, as the Spirits moved us, for the great killing, and then the mighty orgy of necrophiliac delight that climaxed the festival. Some of us liked them freshly dead, freshly killed, and others of us would have them ripe. By "ripe" you should imagine the states of decomposition following rigor, that time when stiffened limbs loosen again, and even the slenderest lady acquires a round, taut, belly. And even others of us would create a companion to follow for the whole process, from warm and supple to cold and stiff, to cold and supple to-- ripe. Very, very, ripe.
You know, since it was traditional, and came to us from olden tymes, and since so many had seen it, even before they were of lawful age to participate, and we were, all of us, so well steeped in the mythos of Blood Tyme, In The Spring, hardly anyone objected, and it was all very well accepted, and even though you risked having your wife or daughter or even mother taken from you by a man you knew not, or even by a man you did know, even, perhaps, a relative, to be shot by him, or stabbed by him (since death by arrow/crossbow or knife were two out of three of the lawful methods of erotic killing-- the third being strangulation), the risk seemed part of life, and no greater and no worse than the risk of some natural catastrophe or stupid, fatal, accident. I always felt, and I was certainly not alone, that Blood Tyme, In The Spring, added a great sauce of piquance and poignancy to any relationship. I recall a time when I had joined a band of bowmen. We dressed our catch of ladies as harem girls in truly marvelous midriff-baring flowing veil-like garments of translucent silk, in scarlets and aquas and ultramarines. I drew by lot a rather plump brunette, large in belly, butt, thigh, and bosom. I shot an arrow into her abdomen, between navel and breastbone. By the time I was done, my precious bodily fluids annointed her body's most holy places. Ah, to have lived so long! There were so many pretty ones, over the years! Yes, I did at times sample the stong liquors of the advanced stages, post-mortem. I would snort ammonia spirits and temporarily annihilate my sense of smell, and rubbed myself well with anti-bacterial preparations.
They say we have, as a people, become more civilized. I read in the daily tabloid that our national army has lately slain tens of thousands of the enemy. I read of great war victories and preparations for a wider conflict and I can only ask myself what sort of person is it, who can enjoy a slaughter waged from the air, from comfortable battle command posts far, far, away from the killing zones. Blood Tyme, In The Spring, is now more an orgy of patriotism and race pride, and the only deaths celebrated are those of total strangers many miles from us, people I have never seen face-to-face, people who seem to have been killed with no regard for sex or age or beauty or any quality of human interest at all. I spoke to a young man, recently returned from the front with both of his legs blown off, and I asked him whether he had at least gotten to enjoy himself a little-- did he have at any time the leisure to take aside an attractive wench, to bayonet her and lie with her a little while? He only laughed bitterly. They sent him to the front before he had ever a chance to experience the Blood Tyme as it used to be, In The Spring. He said to me, he said, why, the weapons were so fierce and utterly destructive, there was rarely anything left but a few tortured scraps of flesh and bone! Even the small arms mutilated bodies so severely that only the most craven madman would think to couple with such shredded bags of sad flesh as were left-- brains excavated and splattered, faces shot away and guts streaming from great, ragged, exit holes! There was no personal touch, no art except, perhaps, that of accountancy at work, since it was very important to tally up the killing fields accurately. There was no respect for the victim, no appreciation of the terrible significance of the moment of death (from which came the erotic thrill)-- all was reduced to mere slaughter and cost/benefit analysis and coldly calculated killing efficiencies.
Yes, they call us, the Olde Ones, "monsters of lust", "demonic murderers" and "psychopathic revenants of ancient days"-- and other such tripe! If I weren't old enough to be safely beyond the reach of the State's conscription machine, I think I'd shoot myself in the foot, or even flee the country, to avoid participating in these modern forms of mechanized mass murder.