Vinyl Diaries XI: Radiohead - In Rainbows

Rainbows? Not exactly miserabilist material. But then neither, quite, have Radiohead ever comfortably fit the bill as moping marauders.

Posterchildren for the disaffected, perhaps, but those with at least a modicum of interest in the world beyond. While their albums have steered, at times, into near sociopathically paranoid territory, perversely revelling in android tendencies and industrial coldness, there’s always been a heart beating away in there – a tendency towards shedding the replicant’s tear.

Such has been their impact on the musical landscape since emerging from Oxfordshire in the early 1990s, a new Radiohead album can never simply arrive according to its own terms. The past rests heavily on each new outing’s shoulders, recent releases dealing with this by smashing any traces of a link with the past before they have a chance to find a foothold. It’s not a stretch to suggest that their 19997 opus OK Computer irrevocably changed the face of modern music, a multi-faceted monster that simultaneously tore the still beating heart out of the sickening rock beast and breathed new life into the decaying form.

The claustrophobic Kid A and its slow-burning late-born twin Amnesiac took a twist for the darker, while Hail to the Thief put the piano front and centre and ratcheted up the ice quotient, veering into a realm of electronic detachment and giving slightly too much rein to Thom Yorke’s maddened disconnect.

The long-awaited follow up was finally unveiled last week, a commercially courageous (yet ultimately savvy) decision to release it online without record label backing, with fans allowed to decide just how much they wished to pay. But gimmick or musical distribution model of the future, the simple and wonderful fact is 10 new Radiohead tracks are available, and in the context in which the band has always worked best – album form.

Opener 15 Step misleads with the electro-clap impulses of a semi-detached drum-machine, not a million miles from recent Yorke territory in last year’s solo outing The Eraser. But after Yorke drops a few vocal lines, the humans arrive in force. There’s an organic, jazz-flavoured licking from Jonny Greenwood’s crystal clear guitar, Yorke warbles through the next section over the top of Colin Greenwood’s bass murmuring along near-funkily, then, instead of a chorus as such, Yorke shimmers in as Jeff Buckley piped through a church organ.

Phil Selway’s complex beatkeeping breaks, snaps, crackles back into being – and then they’re gone.

Bodysnatchers swaggers in on a fuzzy, looping riff – an old-fashioned rock stomper that cuts through the skin, peels to the core of your being, appeals to emotional fraughtness rather than the intellect. It’s the long-lost missing link between Pablo Honey and The Bends, unapologetically abrasive and squallingly . Yorke’s in typical self-deprecating mode - “I’ve no idea what I’m talking about” - but the music just doesn’t back it up.

It thumps and stonks along on this rollicking rock plane until, suddenly, smack on the halfway mark, it tears headlong over the precipice – a gorgeous, bruising, soaring bridge bringing a quick run of shivers to the spine.

Has the light gone out for you?
Because the light's gone out for me
It is the 21st century
It is the 21st century

It's glorious, an unshackled freefall with the euphoria one experiences in a dream of flying, over far too soon and dropping you back into a squalling shambles of a noise-pit, hungry for more.

Avoiding the comfortable format of verse-chorus-verse, these tracks are being built in ways that seem a natural fit for the idea being expressed. The strongest point in the track is echoed throughout the album – occurring in the bridges, in which the extrapolation of the elementary ideas has taken place, taken hold, and the shackles are off. They, and we, are free to roam in this new place, a new space of imaginative freedom where nobody will laugh at you for falling.

Long-time live fan favourite Nude is the perfect comedown, wandering up a damp and dreary corridor with a ghostly passage of backsucking drums and Bjorky ooh-ooh-oohs, dropping away to reveal a bassline of Mogadon funk and gentle tacka-tacka-tacked drums, before Yorke’s echoing, plaintive, signature angel-whimper:

Don’t get any
big ideas
They’re not
gonna happen

Stripped back to blues-jazz flavoured guitar, vocals, bass and drums, it’s unadorned, warm-blooded, breathing, the human condition adrift in a cavernous darkening. Cue the sample wash, then Yorke’s first real soar skyward of the album – deliciously confusing, as it is with the word ‘sinking’. More oohs follow, then it’s gone.

Counted in on drum sticks, crystalline single guitar notes and then overlayed with handfuls of broken chords, Jonny Greenwood and Ed O'Brien's guitars tangling deliciously, Weird Fishes/Arpeggi is a bottom of the ocean swim through a tangle of lushly fecund reeds.

Again you actually picture a band, musicians playing to each other, for each other, chancing across the magical chemistry that has kept them yearning, stitched together for nigh on two decades. It’s the second track in a row that wouldn’t have found space on any of the last three albums, the mood too open, too natural, and one feels that Yorke’s solo album has freed up the band to explore new territory together, free of the electro-clinical albatross his dabbling was threatening to offer their exposed necks. It's not that the push towards these cold new boundaries wasn't welcome - it was an essential part of the Radiohead experience - but that it was threatening to become something of a new orthodoxy.

As the track progresses we’re sinking into the deepest ocean, drifting to the bottom of the sea. Yorke’s projecting out into the fish, but also drawing us with him. We’d be as crazy not to follow as he felt he would be, so we all weave amidst rocks phantom and real, perhaps searching for the near-mythical coy koi upon which Frank Black once chanced while on holiday from his mind.

This joyous underwater dive gets us three quarters of the way through, before we realise we really should have gone up for a breath much much earlier. It’s far too late now, and carried along by a sudden change in current, bright explosions in our mind as the oxygen entirely depletes in the form of the spangliest guitar undertow since Johnny Marr was but a Smith, we hit the bottom.

The track shimmers and glitters some more, light shattering as we look back through the ocean’s surface, absent-mindedly running our fingers against our scales and so comfortable in our new gills we don’t even wonder about them. Hidden at the very end, buried in the sand like a sunken gold sovereign, we hear Yorke’s chest voice, the rarely offered baritone we nearly never encounter these days, an alter-ego to the alter-ego reserved for a disarming dropping of the guard.

From the sea we travel into space, All I Need an open-sky odyssey that has Yorke waiting in the wings as angelic synths roll in, rippling around the growling, purring bass. It is a stripped back work of breathtaking beauty and heart-rending fragility – it’s Radiohead as the battered, heart-on-sleeve, baffled romantic, laying it all on the table for the world to see. Glistening glockenspiel gives it a bright innocence, until, once more, the safe ground crumbles beneath our feet and we’re thrust, along with handfuls of loose piano chord tumbles, into an Icelandic abyss reflecting a glacier blue hue borrowed from Sigur Ros.

Just as abruptly we’re tipped into Faust Arp, a strange, finger-picked acoustic guitar and string-swept folk-tinged affair. It’s modern folk yet without the psych or the freak, Nick Drake gone Mersyside.

Through headphones or well-spaced speakers the urgent coruscations of Reckoner offer disparate pieces playing in each ear - the left offering a 60s, Byrds inspired pop affair of tambourine and assorted other shakery, the right offering brilliantly broken beats and clangy cymbal stumbles. The two seemingly incompatible halves are allowed to drift in and out of their own parallel universes until the bass burbles in and the drums follow its looping bumble, the whole wonderful mess eventually sutured via plaintive falsetto, Yorke relishing his Dr Frankenstein stitching together of an album highlight.

The strings sweep back in for the bridge, the drums having dropped out to give them room, before all the goodies that have reared their head until now return. Divine melodies and optimistic progressions give it an air of hope, a move from minor keys into a more positive space than they may ever have inhabited.

This mood sticks around for House of Cards, yet there is ultimately something a little flat about the whole affair. It’s worthy enough in its own right, but too easily dealt with by that handful of dangerous tags – ‘pleasant’ perhaps being the most concerning. It drifts past without drawing the usual emotional response – there’s none of the sting in the tail we have come to crave. Perhaps it’s a grower, but I fear it’s a skipper.

A timely save comes with Jigsaw Falling Into Place, a rhythmically driven exhortation to ‘let it out’ and to dance - to dance the dance of the damned perhaps, but at least a dance to remember, a blunt instrument propelling us all gleefully along the road to ruin.

Album closer Videotape is the most pianofied track of the whole journey. Resting on a simple drum tack-boom, there is a pearly gate optimism difficult to recall anywhere in the Radiohead ouvre. Perfection is contemplated and – surprisingly - accepted .

No matter what happens now
I won't be afraid
Because I know today has been
The most perfect day
I’ve ever seen

Doubled piano chords high and low, tight drum rolls and stuttering tacka-tacks keep the space contemplative, the final lines echoing in our minds, a most un-Radiohead-like sentiment metronomically dropped and indelibly imprinted on the psyche as In Rainbows fades to black. The pot at the end of the rainbow reveals not gold as such, but life as it can be, a dream made real because, let’s face it, it’s there for the taking.

Surprising in its lack of grand gestures, histrionic propulsions and dramatic flourishes, there is a refreshing honesty throughout In Rainbows that is in reflection quite exhilarating. It is perhaps most groundbreaking in the sense there’s nothing groundbreaking about it at all. It doesn’t smash its way through, it doesn’t reinvent a wheel. It’s a band, five no-longer-lads from Abingdon, in love with music, perhaps even life, shamelessly, guiltlessly, displaying that love for the world to see.

The feeling is not that they are playing safe, but playing true. Muse can keep the overwrought drama queen territory they’ve carefully mined, Coldplay the syrupy hollowness over the emotional equivalent of a scraped knee. This newfound territory for Radiohead is both more moribund but – because of it – more true to life. It’s British but not the stiff upper lip; it’s the awareness of class, of difference, of struggle – personal and social – but with a newfound celebration of what can exist alongside and within all of that. If someone wants to be fitter, happier, and do so in a way at which they may once have reflexively sneered or despaired, they will, for now, be let be.

It’s not a return to any earlier stage, nor is it a complete exorcising of their last outing. Yet it’s undeniably, quintessentially Radiohead. The most striking thing is they seem comfortable in their own skin, finally happy to accept they are what they are and, as such, they have produced an unapologetic Radiohead album, soaked in the toys with which they love to play, the feints and glancing blows against normality in an unthinking sense, in favour of an aware position, an understanding of self in relation to a wider picture.

We don’t need to stop the fight for what we believe in, but we can occasionally let down our guard, smile at what we love, touch what we cherish, revel in the golden rays of sun peeking from beneath the approaching (or passing) storm.

The Music Box: Chapter Fifty-One

Emily had to get out. Somewhere in this book, she knew, must lie the answer to how she could get her life back on track, undo the damage she had done by going behind her mother’s back and seeking out the music box from Aloysius Crouch, knowing all along that it wasn’t the right thing to do.

She realised she was getting nowhere by simply being angry at herself for having led them all into this mess. She had to come up with a way forward and dwelling on the past was not going to help.

Placing the book in a pocket inside the coat, she looked around to see if there was anything else that might prove of any use. It was all pretty much as she remembered it, although something further down the bench did catch her eye. She wondered if it had been there the first time – a round, wooden, tubular device that looked like a small telescope.

Emily walked over and gingerly picked it up. It felt quite heavy for its size and as she turned it over in her hands, she saw that it did have an eyepiece – perhaps it was a telescope after all? On closer inspection it seemed more like a kaleidoscope, a glass dome perched at the other end.

Emily raised it to her eye, but couldn’t make anything out. She began to wonder what Crouch used it for and was startled to find his image suddenly appear. She almost dropped it, but realising he wasn’t in fact in the room she managed to keep him in sight. She watched as he picked up the device, placing it to his own eye, twisting it around for a few moments, then making some notes in his book with his quill.

Emily’s mind turned to Minerva, and Crouch’s image slowly faded to be replaced by that of Minerva at home in her subterranean sanctuary, deep in discussion with both Topkinses.

Lastly, Emily pictured her mother. As Minerva disappeared from sight, her mother replaced her. She looked happy and well, working on the garden of their home. Emily knew the image could be coming from any time, that she couldn’t be too certain that all was still okay, yet she felt a reassurance at having at least seen her mother after what felt like so long away.

She placed the ‘spyroscope’ (as she thought of it) in another coat pocket and turned for the door. There was much to be done and Emily had to get somewhere she could think.

***

Emily opened the door and stepped through into the empty shopfront, better able to see it than her first time through, her eyes far better adjusted to the gloom.

She saw now the shop must have once been a toy store. Along the wall there still remained shelves that held a few spinning tops, some books and a few troubled looking dolls. Emily wondered what those dolls must have seen, who they may have witnessed coming and going from this place, what secretive business they were here upon.

Making her way to the front door, Emily turned the handle and was shocked by just how bright it was outside. She lost her footing as she stepped over the threshold, not noticing the street was a little below door level. Her hat tumbled off her head and rolled a little way down the street. Leaning down to pick it up, she was surprised to see Trixie Sopworth, a girl in her year at school.

“Trixie!” she exclaimed before thinking, so pleased to see a familiar face after all this time. She realised her mistake just as she saw the petrified look in Trixie’s face. To be addressed by Mr Crouch would have been bad enough, for him to know your name would be truly terrifying. She knew there was little she could do to allay Trixie’s fears so she quickly dusted of the cap, placed it on her head as she regained full height and stepped quickly down the street.

Emily knew she was heading the wrong way, but catching a fresh waft of the harbour, she knew this was the place to go to clear her head and work out her next step. Passing the last of the street’s shops, she stepped out into the cobbled road, passed the whitewashed Pig and Whistle inn with its gently swinging sign and turned the corner, a blast of sea breeze stinging her eyes as she stepped onto the rickety pier.

Sea birds hovering nearby took off as she neared, their soft white feathers fleeing from the black coated intruder, circling warily and keeping a safe distance. Their harsh throaty cries layered and built with neither rhyme nor reason; a messy noise far from that of the tuneful twittering of those living further up the hill in the glens and dales she would occasionally wander when given free rein to disappear for the day.

She had often wondered at the life of the sea birds and how different it was to their cousins up the hill. They were separated by only a mile or two, but their worlds could not have been more disparate. The sparrows and starlings seemed to Emily very much home bodies. They may dart and dash here and there and poke about for bugs and worms when hungry, singing out their lovelorn whistling at others, but she knew they spent much of their time attending to fairly domestic duties, improving their nests, picking for it choice twigs and preparing it for laying.

Their colouring was complex – mottled, speckled, browns and blacks and reds and yellows and blues, while no two of their songs ever seemed the same.

These sea birds, on the other hand, the gulls and terns and cormorants, were almost uniformly black, white or grey. While they would hover in the same places, it never seemed to Emily that this was home. It was certainly their territory – Emily had seen some quite territorial behaviour by certain characters – but it seemed more like a marriage of convenience to a location that supplied them with enough fish scraps to fight over than any true link with the place.

Their cries seemed so base, greedy, always warnings rather than greetings, spiteful rather than playful.

She wondered at how little interaction there was between the two worlds, how rare it had been to see these sea birds up in the hills. Occasionally she would see them soaring high above them, but never landing and exploring, showing any curiosity about this green and brown world so differently textured and populated than their own grey and blue.

Once she had seen a lone sparrow hopping along the shoreline, as though looking for something it had lost – little sparrow spectacles or such. As the waves crashed into the beach and the suddsy wake washed up the shore, the sparrow looked so out of place, so dwarfed by the sea, she suddenly feared for its safety. It must have been innocent to the sea’s power, her ability to spring a fatal surprise as easily and thoughtlessly as a person might sneeze.

She watched it travel further and further up the beach, losing sight of it before she could be certain it would be able to return home safely. She wanted to follow it, to make sure it was okay, but knew she had to let it be, do its own thing regardless of the consequences.

Before this she had thought the sea birds somewhat simple and lacking in the charm of the hill birds, but seeing the sparrow up against the sea she realised she had been looking at the sea birds through unfair eyes. Now she saw their inner grace, the way they danced and tussled with the sea, the manner in which they were effortlessly at ease with her, in tune with her rhythms and pulses. She would watch them glide along invisible currents and soar with the updrafts, now almost disdainful of the hill birds and their nervous, stuttering flights that seemed in contrast so random, at odds with nature rather than one with her.

She never failed to thrill at that moment, that brave flash of courage and certainty, when they would soar up, up, up, and then plunge – a vertical missile ploughing through the sea’s barrier at break-neck speed, a precision dive that penetrated the unknown.

Emily had by now reached the end of the pier. She sat with her side resting against a white painted pylon, dangling Crouch’s long, thin legs from under the coat over the edge of the drop. The wind was a quite solid gale, lifting spray into her face as she kept her eyes open, smelling deeply of its freshening promise. There really was no better way to clear the mind, scour the jumble of thoughts and fears, except perhaps to plunge into her depths, feeling the buffeting waves tumble and toss you, all your thoughts spent on breath and survival and leaving no room for day-to-day trivialities.

While she longed painfully to run up to her home, throw open the door and confront Crouch for his wrongdoings, Emily knew this approach was impossible. She could try explaining to her mother what had happened, but how would she even get her to listen, let alone have any chance of convincing her?

And even if she did, what of it? She was still trapped in Crouch’s body, Crouch in full control of hers. There was no way she could ever hope to have her old life back if she lost her chance of drawing Crouch back to his chamber, finding a way to swap their bodies back. Emily closed her eyes, letting the sound envelope her. There was a guilty pleasure in all this, knowing her mother rarely brought her down to the sea.

She loved it here and she would often wonder at why they didn’t spend more time down by the harbour, or further along the coast where the village tapered out and only a few rough shacks, inhabited by silent, bearded men, shirtless, linen pants held up by a rough twist of rope around the waist, seemingly forever drunk on salt and sun.

Emily took a deep, salty breath, reached into her pocket, took out Crouch’s book and began to read.

The Music Box: Chapter Fifty

A slanting diamond of sunlight framed by the window rested on the kitchen floor. Isabelle wondered what would happen if one stood in it for too long; if the floor might open up and whisk you away, closing behind as if you had never been.

Going back over her dream of last night, a dream that hung in the air this morning like her own personal rain cloud hovering over her own head, she wondered at what it all meant.

It was true that she hadn’t had as much time to spend with Emily lately. While Percy worked by day and finished his book by night, a study on bird life that had received interest from a publisher he had met quite by chance passing through Seaforth, she had been working overtime to keep the house in order.

Percy, meanwhile, had been distant for some weeks. It wasn’t that he was deliberately avoiding them or anything like that, but even when he was there, at the dinner table or on their evening walks, you knew his mind was really in his papers, worrying over a wingspan or a flight pattern or a nesting habit.

Isabelle was immensely proud of Percy and his work, but she nevertheless felt a terrible loneliness when he was in his writing and sketching frame of mind, detached from her and impossible to form a connection. Emily always seemed to take it quite well, seemingly understanding that what he was doing was quite important to him.

The creaking door brought Isabelle back to her senses. Stepping carefully through the doorway, Emily shuffled through into the kitchen. In one hand she was holding a boar-bristled hair brush, in the other a length of buttercup-yellow ribbon. The way she held them out towards her mother seemed almost a peace offering, which Isabelle took it to be since Emily hadn’t come to her to have her hair brushed for a long time.

Wordlessly, she took the proffered brush and began stroking it through Emily’s hair. A pang of tenderness made her heart flutter. All her anger of last night began to dissipate. Isabelle thought back to when she was Emily’s age, the impossibility of relating with her parents, the troubled childhood that their chilly indifference to her existence entailed.

She wondered, not for the first time, what had happened to that fierce, independent spirit. Her family life was in many ways ideal – Percy was a loving, considerate, caring man; Emily was a bright, intelligent and generous daughter. They made ends meet and lived in relative comfort, certainly more so than she had ever imagined possible as a child.

Yet somewhere along the way, with all her needs met and a comfortable, untroubled life, something of her essence, her fire, has been snuffed out.

When the wolf had appeared at the window, everything changed. What had scared Isabelle most, what had terrified her more than the prospect that the wolf would enter the house and devour her, was the frisson of excitement that she felt, the sense that, finally, something was happening in her life again.

She did not dare admit anything like that to poor old Percy, particularly because she was unsure herself what it even meant. Spying Aloysius that night – for she knew it could be no other – she was given a glimpse into a world that could have been hers. She knew, of course, it was not a world for her, that she had followed her heart and that she loved Percy and Emily more than anything in the world, but it was nevertheless a shock to discover in herself these strange feelings of ambivalence to this life and an uncomfortable attraction to the danger of the unknown.

This had all messed with her fragile mind terribly and she put up little resistance to some time away to regather herself, relieved to be away from the scene of her encounter.

“Mother?”

“Yes Emily dear?”

“Tell me what you are thinking.”

Isabelle realised she had been brushing Emily’s hair in the same place over and over, quite absentmindedly. She reached for the ribbon and looped it underneath, crossed the ends and formed a quick bow.

“Oh, nothing particular,” Isabelle said in what she hoped was an off-hand fashion.
“Just thinking about what we might get up to today.”

Emily put her hand up to her hair, felt the ribbon in place and turned around.
“Mother?”

“Yes dear?”

“I’ll help you with anything you like today. But can I ask you one thing?”

“And what’s that?”

“Tell me about your time living in the woods.”

The Music Box: Chapter Forty-Nine

Emily sneezed. She was shocked to hear the sound it made, a rough, deep noise far from the dainty ‘atchoo’ to which she was accustomed. It reminded her of the task at hand. Alone, her thoughts twisted and tumbled and she found it difficult to put them into order. She looked around, her eyes now accustomed to the gloom, settling on the bench across the room. Striding over, Crouch’s coat billowing behind her with each step, she reached the bench before knowing quite what drew her. There, lying closed once again, was the book she had earlier spied:

Metaphysical Marvels and Unlocking the Unknown:
A study by Aloysius Crouch

Reaching out, her fingers softly traced the hard leather cover. She lifted it, her nose catching its musty, inky, bookish smell. Opening to the first page, her finger tracing the curve of Crouch’s neat looping script, she began to read.

It is here that I begin. Until now, there is nothing. After now – everything. The past is already forgotten. It never happened. It belongs in the dustbin of history, so much rotting horse-flesh, a broken vase that cannot hope to hold even a semblance of life, for the decay of its own demise has already overtaken the living, already stamped on each and every one of us the foul stench of defeat. Defeat at the hands of time, of the unswerving march of the flesh’s weakening.

I will not allow this to happen to me. I have too much to do to allow this pre-ordained defeat to diminish my grand plan.

There is, in this life, one chance given to us all. Most never truly grasp the moment when it arrives. But not me. My moment has arrived and I have taken it. I have the will, the need, and now the means to reshape this seemingly unbendable trajectory.

I will bend time to my own will. I will dictate how it moves, where it goes, what it allows to happen. No longer will it shape me, tell me what I am. I am in command. I will prevail. It is here that I begin.

Emily had to stop reading. The forcefulness of the passage had left her winded, a powerful blow that stopped her breathing. She wasn’t really sure what Crouch was on about, but more unsettling than the content was the sheer, naked vociferousness of its thrust, a brutal and unflinching hunger that felt distinctly at odds with nature.

Crouch was clearly determined to go to any lengths to pursue whatever twisted plans he had in mind and Emily was unsure as to how she could possibly hope to have any chance of coming up against such a man, of triumphing in the face of such a single-minded and calculating foe.

Forcing a deep breath, she read on.

I deny history but I hold on to what I have learned. That is this: Man is the greatest contradiction. So powerful. So weak. So capable. So inadequate. King of the jungle. At the mercy of all beasts.

It needn’t be this way. This weakness can be stripped away, this inadequacy banished to the pyre. Man can learn much from the beasts that show no mercy. Mercy is for the weak, the foolish, the misguided. To do so, Man must turn to the beasts that hold the secret of what he can be. There is much to admire in the lion, the jackal, the panther. But there is one beast above all that can open the door to understanding for Man, that can unlock the answer of how to be everything he intends to be.

Emily knew what must come next. She cast her mind back to what she had seen in the forest, the encounter between her parents and the wolves, the way her mother had saved her father all that time ago. An image of Aloysius burned brightly in her mind, quite literally – rimmed with fire, his very fur glowed with the intense heat of unbridled passion, aflame with his hunger.

She saw now what she had not seen the first time, the way he looked at her mother, the way the whole show seemed to be for her benefit. If he had thought she would be impressed he was severely mistaken – this brutality and blatant flaunting of power against the prone figure of her father had instilled in her mother an icy regard for Aloysius, while further cementing her love, care and affection for Percy.

Forced to risk everything to protect him, their hearts held so close to each other against a common threat, they began to beat as one. From that moment forward, there was no question of their separation. To be apart was to attempt the impossible – to be without their own heart.

Though she knew what was to come, Emily returned to the book. She hoped to glean at least some idea of how Crouch’s mind worked, to draw from his writing a hint of the man beneath the mask. The more she read, the more worried she became, but she knew she must go on.

The wolf has no contradiction. It is only what it is. It is power, hunger, need. It can be trusted for it holds no store in trying to be anything but what it is. The fox will wile, the hyena wait. The wolf will be itself, at all times, acting in its own immediate interests and answerable to nothing but its own hunger.

There is much to admire here, much to learn. Man, so distracted by notions of morality and social acceptability, has buried his true self. He is much closer to the wolf than he is prepared to admit. Man and wolf are born almost the same, yet from there everything is done to change Man from what he truly is. The wolf has no such shackles put on him and is free to be what he was born to be. Man, meanwhile, is made weak, compliant, shaped to believe that he is no better than his fellow, need want nothing more than what it is decided he should have.

I will change this. I will make Man everything he can be. I will learn to be Man from his closest cousin, I will run with the wolf and relearn how to be what I know, deep inside, I already I am. I will be reborn as myself, as who I was always supposed to be.

Robbed of this self for so long, stripped of my true being, I denounce all that has come before. History is dead. It is here that I begin.