Forgive a musical creature her occasional abstractions. I have tried to be sure they are few and far between, and not damaging. I do not claim scientific accuracy, only empathy, and this particular issue is new to me so I am certainly missing things. My heart goes out to Tilikum, Lolita, and all the rest, though this one is for him.
Also there's a musical easter egg. Points to anyone who notices it.
Lyrics credit to the lovely rendition performed by Aine Minogue, called Blessing. Which everyone should go listen to.
You were a great living warmth once, voice like some unearthly instrument. You spoke a haunting language that the whole world could not know. But you fell in to a trap one day ... it is not your fault. Some unsettling human spider wove its web around you, caught you fast. And then with that web, surely the stuff of nightmares, they forced you to react. You danced on someone else's strings. People who knew you thirty years ago still praise your determination and intelligence, but it wasn't enough for a people who demanded perfection from you.
You did what you had to and still you went without. You knew the inside of a glorified coffin for half of your life then, you became everyone's doormat. No one thought of you, and even everyone who was in this with you objectified you. You became a physical and emotional punching bag. You grew up too fast, because in the end you gave up everything to them. Everything, though their stress left little to show for that. And still you continued on, you never told us why or how you did it.
But still, it wasn't good enough. And then one day you snapped, maybe it was manic, maybe it was rage, maybe it was an automatic reaction to a life of monotony. Someone died that day, she may have never done you wrong personally, but in the moment it did not matter. She was in your element. You never told anyone that either.
Like so much meat, you were packed up and sent off, so you could do what everyone assumed you did best. Still alienated, stored in a corner alone, and rejected by everyone you could have connected with unless they needed to use you. You were just a novelty, continuing to dance to people's strings. But still, you carried on.
With no outlet for energy that should have been boundless, no one willing to accept you, and constant sources of abuse from all sides, you pressed onward. At this point it begins to seem deliberate, an act of conscious willpower, but you never told anyone that either. And then someone had the gall to invade the only space that was left to you! Maybe he didn't know better, but you made an example of him that no one would forget. "Don't cross me," you said, while you pressed on. "Don't take from me," you said, while people manipulated you. "Know that I will only let you humiliate me so far," you said, while people made you in to a spectacle.
But you never said a thing. It was up to others to try and understand what was happening. While theories flew like startled birds, you went on as before. You made one final example of someone who would not acknowledge you. It didn't matter that there were scripts to follow. Scripts hold nothing on forces of nature. You destroyed someone who many people seemed to love. Some might have called it a statement, or pent up energy, or creeping insanity. But you never gave them a sign either. "Speculate," you seemed to be saying if one were to humanize you, "think on what I can do, I will never tell you why."
Oh, there was quite the commotion after that, and in the meantime they put you away like a faulty piece of equipment. And there you stayed, unless you could be made useful again. No dancing on strings, no contact save medical work and humiliation (though few species are shy about these things), no connection left but the primitive one that unites so many living things. Some creatures can let out pent up energy that way, but in most eyes you were a clever mimic, and wouldn't have energy or emotions to release.
You would be reduced to numbers on a chart somewhere, except you had given people pause. You were a puppet for both people and plans, but you would not leave it at that. You became a breaker among breakers, crossing lines that had not been crossed before. Bored? Definitely. Unchallenged? Most likely. Insulted? It certainly seems so. People fear the unstable individual with reasoning in their eyes. No one had a concept of what to do with this one. It was unlike anything they'd ever seen before.
They alienated you all, alienation is familiar ground to you. They let you out eventually, but something had changed. Something crucial was lost, maybe, no one knows. Maybe you couldn't tell anyone if you wanted to.
Time passed, everyone slipped in to an uneasy routine. You became a celebrity. I wonder if you even know it. I wonder if you'd get it. People have dreamed of talking to your kind, but what if you no longer have anything to say? What if the very dynamic of your personality was stolen? I know most creatures resent pity, humans included, but it's not so simple as pity for some. For me it is a deep sadness, another of the world's strange lights was put out.
In the end they all but confirmed it. A complex, determined spirit is failing, said the world. An indispensable piece of my equipment is failing, said the jailer. But you'd already broken patterns established over millennia. You'd already endured more than the amount of hell that would put a human in an institution, and we're supposed to be the adaptable type. Fight with impossibility? Why not? That was the game no one could win against you.
Maybe no such thought crossed your mind at all, but what if you still have something to say? What would those thoughts sound like? You challenged big corporations, which humans still have a hard time doing if that says anything. You forced people to rethink your perceived place and theirs. You did certainly stir up a nation. You confronted us in counterpoint to what your distant kin tried to do. It was like music--dark, uncertain, dangerous, and if you believe some experts, somewhat insane.
His was a fragile tune, hope and uncertainty mingling with the participants' manipulations in to a bittersweet melody one can almost taste. It ended in the middle of a measure, and people will fight over that ending for many more years, too selfish to acknowledge that they were the cause.
Yours was the deep and windy voice of a cello, though your own sounded nothing like it. Rich tones blended in to vast minor chords, discords rising out of the progression like nightmares made real and painfully confusing. Woven through its fabric is the master's part of your piece--the full-bodied almost minors, painful in their struggle between the sweet notes and the strong. Paradoxically they only hint at the confusions surrounding you, their focus a blend of inflections that no one can interpret but you. A powerful melody draws people in, both the emotional and the scientifically inclined. It refuses to give anything away but its contradictions--riding the line between art and wild music, at once fighting and surrendering to it, shattered yet unbroken, contained but not dominated, reflecting immovability even in its final measures.
Yet for all the detail in your piece, for all the recorded perspectives, for all the articles and accounts and pictures and videos, despite the fact that nearly every inch of your frame is in the public eye, not one of these things speaks of you. You are a challenging sort of creature, broken or not. You will be more than a footnote, more than a sire on a pedigree sheet. You will be a story, mixing willpower with instinct, intelligence with confusion, strength with something that has been hammered in to fragments. Anything you may or may not have meant will be lost to time, a daunting communication barrier, and a mind with more than valid reasons to never trust us at all. But what you did will make humanity confront each other over these hopeless, helpless and desolate predicaments. After all, they think only humans have the intelligence and will to break conditioning, to show their own minds defiance. But now and then, one of you teaches us--sometimes quite firmly--that we should know better.
People will remember you, make a drama of your life. They will mock what you endured, tragedy is humanity's money tree. But what is it that you, personally, need? I know they can't understand you, but they didn't even try. Everyone had to put their fingers in the pie. The worst were the ones who assumed they knew, and looked down on anyone who admitted you were significant to them. "How dare you be egocentric about him," they said condescendingly, while being egocentric about you. What a mockery everything has become. How could any single creature have it so bad?
Is there any resolution to this story? Not for the thousands and perhaps millions who capitalize on your pain and suffering, but for you. Is that even possible? After all you've done, intentionally or not, will you manage this last thing? Defying them even in dying, will you find a fragment of dignity they didn't manage to steal? Will you make one final statement, on purpose or not, what form would it take? I know more than one person is wondering what you will do next. I do, I care so much, and if I could give you peace I would, even to my own disadvantage ... but no one can ask, and sadly, no one would.
I will turn out all the lights and light a candle for one of our world's strangest flames. There will be music, not silence, to accompany you. They've stolen even your end. Here and there and everywhere people will take up the song, voices will raise in a tidal wave, but no one can give you back your entire life.
If you have a next chance, may it serve you well.
May the long time sun shine on you ...
All love surround you ...
And the pure light within you
Guide you on your way.
Akal, akal, infinity ...
Akal, akal, no end ..
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