Tuesday, October 03, 2023

The games that children play …

 …are darker and deeper than they seem on the surface, outdoing even the politics of modern Britain, by pitching rabbit-hole conspiracies against hypotheses of honest spirit, and vice versa, polarities with children not unlike William Brown, Jane Turpin and other literary ‘gangsters’, although the modern children in question might claim never to have heard of those forgotten forebears upon whom angels once feared they may have trodden. The leader of this modern gang was destined to become prime minister should his or her eventual destiny remain undiverted from its assumed certainty of direction. They had played in the woods on the outskirts of a town called Colchester so perhaps you can judge for yourself the background of these child characters. I suggest they have a singular embryo of catchment area whatever future backstories were later due to be shown in Wikipedia. Plots were plotted and certain personality rôles were established and a pecking-order agreed between them. Just because they went to the same Comprehensive school did not prevent them comprehensibly masking each individual’s different routes from roots elsewhere in Britain and indeed in the whole wide world of different colours. A conspiracy of rabbit-holes that led to their own envisaged Wonderland at the incorruptible core of the Earth, a place they believed to be more of an outer space than outer space itself. How do I know? I was — am — one of them. And I write these words as a fanciful diversion from truth, that nobody could possibly believe. The most central truth of all alternate facts is a belief in disbelief as something incontrovertible. All lies within the fiction that made you credit it as truth in the first place, but then you publicly decried it as nonsense or shrugged it off as hidden in the plain sight of an obscure fiction author’s website, a tempting trap sprung in such a way as to have already snapped back upon you.

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