Friday, February the 10th, 2006

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Blazing Excelsior Saturated With Turpentine

The best way to illuminate the pitch black Pit of Doom is to toss into it some blazing excelsior saturated with turpentine. But that is not as easy as it sounds, mark my words.

I have long argued that the Pit of Doom becomes less doom-laden when illumined, despite the craven voices of my opponents, and they are many. They have used the correspondence columns of many distinguished journals to attack my views, and I have until now refrained from answering their charges. They are a hectic bunch of cowards, ignoramuses, and pond-life, and I have had better things to do with my time. Why then, you might ask, do I now deign to respond to them? I have no intention of answering that question, but perhaps all will become clear to you as you read on. Or not.

What I would like to do is to demonstrate how you can illumine the Pit of Doom yourself, using blazing excelsior saturated with turpentine. By following my instructions carefully, you will be able to reach your own decision regarding the doominess of the Pit once it is illumined. My hope is that you will agree with me that it is stripped of much, if not all, of its Doom once lit.

First of all, of course, you need to locate the Pit of Doom. There are many pits which seemingly fit the bill, and many of them are shrouded in doominess, being bleak, unforgiving, dank, dark and hideous to behold. One of Dobson's out of print pamphlets attempted to catalogue the pits in a huge geographical area which might qualify as doom-laden, and it was an impressive piece of work, but the pamphleteer overlooked the fact that when one stands on the brink of the Pit of Doom itself, all doubts vanish. There is a curdling of the guts that tells you exactly where you are. No other pit comes close. This, you say to yourself, peering into the pitch black maw of the Pit of Doom, this indeed is the Pit of Doom. You teeter on the edge, terrified of losing your balance, every nerve in your body ready to snap. But you step back, if you are me, anyway, and resolve to banish doom by the simple agency of blazing excelsior saturated with turpentine.

And that is your next challenge. Having located the Pit of Doom, you must now get your hands on excelsior, turpentine, and a box of matches, or some equivalent means of ignition. And so you turn your back on the Pit of Doom, almost insolently, and you stride across the moors to the little hovel you noted earlier, and you rap your knuckles on the door.

You are expecting a snag-toothed peasant person to answer your rapping, and so you are momentarily disconcerted when the hovel-door creaks open and you are confronted by a winsome young woman who bears a striking resemblance to Tuesday Weld.

“Greetings,” you manage to say, “I come in search of excelsior, turpentine, and a means of ignition.”

“Then you have come to the right place,” says the Tuesday Weld-like woman, “For here in my hovel I have all those things.”

She ushers you inside, and you are stunned by the interior, which is done out with much velvet and satin and silk, with vases of cut flowers, with space-age plastic furniture in a dazzle of colours, all bathed in an unearthly shimmering light. You are mesmerised by this light. Entire days pass by, of which you are unconscious, for you have been captivated by a woohoo woman who is rearranging your brain cells one by one, for purposes either malignant or beneficial, depending on what kind of woohoo woman she is. When you wake from your entrancement, you find that she has placed in your hands a bag of excelsior, a bottle of turpentine, and a box of lucifers. You have been fortunate. She is a woohoo woman devoted to good.

“Go now,” she says, “And do what you must do.”

You are not aware that your brain has been tampered with, nor indeed that you have been entranced. You step out of the light, out of the hovel, and make your way across the moors to the Pit of Doom.

Crouching near its edge, you open the bag of excelsior. It is imperative that you check that it is uninhabited, for hamsters sleep all curled and comfortable in excelsior, as do hibernating tortoises, and other creatures, excepting those whose domain is the sea. You rummage through the excelsior until you are completely satisfied that it is innocent of life, hamster or otherwise. Then you open the bottle of turpentine and pour in such an amount that the excelsior is saturated. Then you seal the bag to ensure that the turpentine does not evaporate. Then you set fire to it with one of the lucifers, and then you toss it into the Pit of Doom.

Now you step even closer to the edge, and you peer down into what was until a moment ago an evil, pitch black vent into the underworld, but now is lit. What do you see?

I could tell you what I saw, on the day last September that I illumined the Pit of Doom with blazing excelsior saturated with turpentine. I could speak of the unimaginable horrors I saw, writhing in terror of the light, of the howling that beset my ears. I could, had I too not had my brain jimmied by the very same Tuesday Weldish woohoo woman, whose mercy means that everything I saw or heard in the Pit of Doom, lit by blazing excelsior, is forgotten, forevermore, for now I bask in that shimmering light, dressed in my peasant's smock, chewing on a piece of straw, at long last the idiot I always hankered to be.