Eat me, drink me, love me;

 Laura, make much of me;

 For your sake I have braved the glen

 And had to do with goblin merchant men. -Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti

To forget yourself is the best remedy for everything -Peer Gynt by Henrik Isben

Characters:

Solveig

Ingrid

The button moulder

The forgotten boy

The writer.

Scene: A black void.  A night, filled with stars.

There is a certain fire on the breath of the angels and the daemons.  A certain explosive truth.

A truth underneath the truth.

A higher construal level the psychologists would term it. 

When the ‘why’ becomes clear.

The in between realms.

The Realms beyond realms that are coded by stories and symbols.

Psychologists call these schemas.

They help with the remembering. 

You are not the first to awaken with a 7 legged hairy monster on your chest.

You are not the first to wake up to the little people jumping on you sticking tiny spears into your skin.

You are not the first to be thrown around the room by opaque spirits.  To meet a daemon up a tree.  To be forced to marry a troll.

But these are things to bring you in, to the place where you remember.

There was and will be a time when empires didn’t bleed the clouds, when history wasn’t written with teeth and claws, when the great forests were respected and the sacred sites preserved. 

There was a time and will be a time before the button moulder, where we simply ate people for breakfast that refused to remember and refused to love.

Where the rivers breathed the names that the scriptures never knew.

And if a story is to be timeless.  Truly timeless.  That story must hold these symbols and myths, spelled in the spaces between the words the worlds.

Time is a circle.

An opaque circle.

A plastic circle

A moon

A button. 

And if time is a circle then death never ends

And this is a story about death.

A terrifying erotic tale.

Death is not a grim reaper.  She has stars for eyes and wooden spoons for arms and coats made out of buttons

She has no mouth yet somehow speaks with a high pitched metallic sounds, clinking as they walk.

 Come buy.

Come buy.

Scene:  An orange house with a green roof and a blue wooden fence stands on a hill full of wildflowers.

Solvieg had a heart that was full of the land, as clouds gathered above her head.

A river rushes down the slope.  The ground is soft and sinks the foot.

When he left her she cried.

Many say she waited, that her heart was pure.

But you don’t wait for a ghost.  You mourn them.  Hope is like a curse most of us can’t afford.

Stupid stories of Isis gathering the 14 body parts of Osiris to make him whole again

Tales of leaving a heart out on the road and expecting it not to be run over.

Tales of Savitri arguing with Yama for her husband’s life. 

Tales of faith. Of a love that can beat death. 

But Solveig had learnt from many tales

How snow white and Sita were tricked into kindness by black magicians.

Nine headed daemons and evil stepmothers can be disguised as beggars and draw people away from the safety zone. 

Is it that hard to tell wheat from chaff?

The wisdom to know when to give and when to take.

The wisdom to know the sky from the earth.

The wisdom of the elephants. 

Is it hard to tell?  It is when you can’t remember

Remember to leave fruit on the trees for the possums and birds

Remember to leave offerings of jewellery for the water spirits.

Remember the bravery of crossing through forests and swamps

Of braving the trolls.  Of fighting of the dragons.

Of remembering that it made a difference.  Just not to the person you wanted to change.

It helped her find the wolves in the walls.

It helped her find herself

It helped her remember.

How they wrote about her heart as if it was pure,  attempting to carve her heart up with a butterknife.

Fools, her heart beats with the earth. 

Some guy came to Solveig once begging her to stop keeping his name safe in her mouth.

‘I beg you, release my name to the daemons’

But she could not remember his name.

And in her forgetting the Button Moulder with her stars for eyes knew she was not bound for the Button Factory.

She was a lover. 

She was a promise keeper.

She could never be kept. 

Scene: A long strait road cuts a windy red desert in two.  Yellow and red flowers look like little fires amongst the sand.  Ingrid dances along the road in a crimson dress, carrying a large silver sword. 

The kindest thing you can do for yourself in times like this is also the hardest.

The kindest thing that Ingrid could do for herself was to run away from the wedding.

To others it seemed irrational.  But to us lovers and romantics, and you are a lover and a romantic if you are still reading

It’s tempting to prove yourself.  To speak truth when the world is in chaos, and every one is fighting with each other. 

Go to the desert

How the fickle will be out fickled there

How the players will be out played, and will never shut up about it.

You will say nothing

In the desert.  In the extremes.  Where you can only be yourself.

Where the only way out is in.  To know where you are at.  With no one to blame.   

To the magick.

Unforgiving brightness, unforgiving darkness,

Dust storms in the desert. 

A  big clear blue sky.

A woman who embraced her wildness so fully, that the button moulder left her alone.

Scene:  The inside of a volcano

The button moulder, with stars in her eyes, has one purpose in life.  That purpose is discernment. Being able to tell the difference between looking and seeing is the world.   Don’t just look at the destruction, we have to see it.  We can’t see the destruction without being changed.  It changes us. It’s heavy.  It weighs us down.  Theres no energy for false niceties and pop songs.  When we need to recover, we walk on the beach.  To survive we stare at the ocean.  It’s on both our shoulders, Button moulder and us once we reach the in between.  

Our shoulders ache the ache of a witness, the ache of pre emptive grief and vicarious sorrow.  Living in the western world with a button moulder for a death goddess is perpetual vicarious sorrow and collective responsibility.  The knowing that we are dressed in this violence as sure as we consume it. The remembering that it wasn’t always thus.   We eat violence while we are dressed in violence listening to the soundtrack of the forest crack like the knuckles crack.  Listening to the politicians say the holy water may just wash the blood from our hands.

Holy water means nothing to the Button Moulder.  She is a woman of fire.

Come buy.

Come buy.

The beige buttons were prominent government officials.  The beige buttons with silver trim were Queens.  Royal buttons. Expensive.  Will cost a loaf of bread.

The floors of hell sing with the suffering and joy of being able to escape after a time.

Yet the buttons simply melt.

Come buy.

Red ones and green ones, pink ones and spotty ones, ones with the coat of arms, silver ones for corporals

Come buy, come buy.   

Scene:  A crystal-clear blue lake surrounded by dark green grass.

Love doesn’t change you.  It returns you.  LOVE REMEMBERS YOU BACK. Love is a birthright.  Don’t think about what you can give.  Remember that you can.

The job of the writer is to help people remember, if anything. 

The writers of faery tales must blunten their quills, lest every story gets dulled down to happily ever after and other such ghastly moral judgements.

All the grotesque analysis of individual karma, the mill stone was dropped, the foot was cut trying to fit the glass slipper.

The nightingale and the little mermaid, too pure for this world.

The big bad wolf was eaten in the end.

What would be the point of writing of a purgatory.

One that held those who justified unjustifiable crimes.

One that held those who avoided the consequences.

If it didn’t include a key to a locked door.  The door that hides the fears and the daemons.  The door we walk through to remember ourselves back,

The best stories are made up of cause and effect,

Telling lies about a human spirit that is dictated by such unseen patterns.

And how so many stories have made us believe such lies.

The patterns of the buttons

The patterns of the stars.

The blood that pumps through the heart knows nothing of the desire to hurt.

It knows of the motivation to help without reward.

Reason chokes on a cherry seed.

The poetry in the newspaper tries to justify Hiroshima and glorify Captain America

The poetry is black magic

The poetry bombards our memories

The poetry makes us forget our love and rejoice in the arms dealers.

We are fed so much suffering and relate to the Rancor trainer lest we have to mourn the demise of the Rancor, the status quo, the people eater.

People will always be using the Button Moulder to justify the people eater.

People are scared like that. 

Lies out of fear of rewards for good and punishment for bad,

Lies of karma.  Or reincatnation. 

All told to make us fear our own remembering

All told to make us fear we weren’t made out of love to begin with.

Inside the black hole is a dragon rising. 

Scene:  inside a kitchen, whatever that looks like to you, with the forgotten boy and the Button Moulder.

I loved today, said the forgotten boy.  Resilient in the knowledge that as mediocre he was, he would chance to give the Button Moulder a run

He fondles the packaging of a pre made 2-minute meal, and remember a time when things were slower, and deeperthe fingers linger on the curve, how smooth the plastic, how indented the rim the inner rim of the packet.  A circle within a circle.

There is a beauty in the non -eventful.  There is a beauty in the mediocre.  There is a beauty in repetition.  There is a beauty in the mundane. 

While he was waiting he connected to something else.

He gladly betrayed the idea that love is finite, and directed. 

There’s a list of ways that people can end up at the button factory.

It starts with forgetting,

It starts with trying to live in a finite world

How the colours melt around the rim

How kaleidoscopes do meld.

Know thyself says Socrates.

Slay thyself says Isben.

Come buy, come buy, the Moulder shakes her button jars.

Once tasted, twice shy, come buy come buy.

Come buy.  I am the fire, behold me and transmute.

Come buy, I am the flame, behold me and drip, melt, mould.

She will convince you to stay

She tells him he has need  of green buttons, stolen from the moon.

She tells him he was dreaming the same dream as her.

She lies

Come buy

Come buy. 

The man who broke a hundred hearts

Thought he was headed down for sure

The daemons there would know his name.

But when they asked those in his wake, none could remember his name

So evil was his heartless cruel.  How souls he broke and named them

You’ll have to hurt someone and never say sorry.

You’ll have to blame other people for things that you control.

You have to believe in a Heaven with walls.

One with a negotiable gate.

Devils you will beg.  “But I hurt them soul deep, I drove them to hate themselves, I picked at there bones.

‘But what about the non -disclosure clause the devil will say. You forced them to heal. They ascended and never looked back.

What about how when you ignored them that severely, their hatred turned to indifference, and now they don’t even have a bad word to say.

Angels you may turn to as a last resort.  Angels that will mirror you, and have nothing good to say.

 You can’t punch your way to hell.

Nor can you get others to do your punching.

You can’t demand your name be kept safe in their mouths and then get them to speak of your ills to  deamons

He was a part of corporate tyranny but he did not study it. 

These buttons are not the beautiful things that inspire revolutions.

They are not circles to replace the rectangles and squares that were created to replace the rectangles and squares of government.

They will not reawaken, reconnect nor reenchant. 

Scene:  A blank page blinks before me

I asked the button moulder who she was, how to describe her in prose.

It is impossible to humanise infallible beings she replied

That’s literally the writers only job I responded.

No, your job is to help people remember she argued.

I was not satisfied, and unafraid I lingered.  

 Are you a Demiurge?

The untimate materialist?

A hedonist?  A gypsy?

Vampires find your own worlds to destroy.

 Dead people, find your own minerals.

Banks find your own forests to destroy.

Men, find your own happiness.

Vampire buttons are crimson red, the Button Moulder explains. 

They’ll never take responsibility for what they have done to you I respond

Surely you remember that by now.

They hung a picture of my sister on the wall and the proud men claimed that they owned her.

‘I’m sorry about that’     

You got further away from the melting pot with every tear the button moulder responded.

Everytime you were hurt, you remembered the source.

It’s about time we sent the money back to the banks.  Claimed back what was taken.  Did the long division before the sub division. The disappearing dollars.  The disappearing earth.  The maths is all wrong.

You were not a button.

You were the flow that stops the flow

The paint that puddled on the canvas

You were a red flag that was held by the judges.

You were far too cool.

The sound of a bong being smoked

  The click click click of heels walking on the marble floor of parliament house

The chink chink chink of the clowbar taking down the coat of arms

The crackle of the fire

The sound of laughter

P.S.  The Button Moulder

I guess it was my fault for trying to make a fish climb up a tree, the Button Moulder finally lamented.

An untrained hand cannot pull a sword from a stone.  

A bird in a cup

So don’t slay yourself to stop from being melted

Don’t slay yourself for yourself

But for others

So that other people                                                                                                                                       

Can write better stories than this. 

Deeper than the roots.

Clearer than the ponds of cyanobacteria caused by eutrophication and lack of turbidity.

Clearer than mud