Do Not Let Down Your Guard

"There haven't been any recent attempts on his life."
"It's a miracle noone's killed him." 
"I don't mind that side of him at all." 
"A Sensitive alright." 
He heard them all and responded:
"I will build a perimeter of fire and ice." 
The thought came automatically. The most familiar defence.
But the walls and trenches and shooting shouting streams of material not found in this dimension, none of it would  form. 
And truth known, he did not want to go that way, not this time. 
"He knows something and we never asked him. We chose to protect our own. By trying to prevent one scandal we created another."
There was no higher moral force, not here. 
On the back of an envelope, that's how they formed their plans. 
The marshals with their alsation dogs in the mud. 
Always with us.
Finding an intelligent overlord was like trying to find a sensible guiding principle atop a family court system. There was none. 
There were a string of accidents and colourful personalities. 
And some with the personality of warts. 
Even they felt guilty at their own connivance. 
Dark dark policing, he was coming to that. 
He knew they were guilty. They knew he knew; as they twisted on a wire. 
That's the way he sees it. Let him see it as he wants. 
Dress it up as much as you like. He knows. 
Imagine you are beside a stream. Imagine you are being set up. Imagine no one trusts you, they've never seen the like.
They ran through the subterranean aquifers screaming love lost while he sank further into the mire. 
They would come running towards him and die as they entered the battlefield.  
There was a storm out to sea and the afternoon rays established rainbow splatters he had never seen before, as if drifting upwards in a faraway mist. 
The country was dying, the country he had known. 


THE BIGGER STORY: 

Hundreds of demonstrators gathered at the Sydney Opera House with torches in hand to disrupt and protest the controversial projection of the barrier draw for the Everest horse race on the sails of the country’s most recognisable building.

The protesters shone torches onto the world heritage-listed structure, seeking to interfere with the display, and chanted “not for sale” and “whose house? Our house”.

QUOTE:

The impulse to tell stories, to put events into a sequence, to form plots and bring them to a conclusion, is so fundamental that it is as if this Impulse is biologically rooted in our species. We are driven to make connections, from A to B and from B to C. In the process, we develop ideas of how to get from one point to the next comma what drives a story forward, whether the answer is cosmic fate, chair, social forces comma or the will of a protagonist. Often characters Harbour a secret they must not reveal, and yet we long to pry into it, and by the law of storytelling, their secret is forced out of them, if only to satisfy the king's and our curiosity. No matter what forces Drive these protagonist, we watched them make their way through hostile or friendly circumstances, and before we know it, a storyteller has created entire world.

The worlds of our stories often obey different rules, some fantastic, some sober, set in the remote past or remote parts of the world, others more familiar and closer to home. This is what imagination and language allow us to do, to create scenes that are different from what we see right in front of our eyes, to make up world with words. In this storytelling universe, anyone you meet on the street harbours a story, often full of marvels and coincidences; a beggar might have been born a king, and even a simple porter may have something to tell. Everyone is a story.

The Written World: How Literature Shaped History, Martin Puchner, Granta Books, 2017.