Post by 'The Monster' Dredd on Aug 30, 2009 22:02:54 GMT -5
Battleground…
Some would say the most violent of places…
Some battlegrounds are legendary…
Never forgotten…
Somme…
That’s the sort of battleground I am looking to leave behind…
Bodies scattered…
Bodies shattered…
Bodies splattered…
The blood of my enemy spilled…
The earth salted with the carcasses of the defeated…
That’s why I am here…
To leave a trail of destruction behind me…
To fight…
To emerge…
Victorious.
The ultimate goal…
To beat they will know what they’ve been through…
They will remember…
What they have gone through…
Their sleep broken by the constant nightmare of my face…
When they have followed me through the fire and out of the ashes…
Only the Monster will rise like a phoenix.
I have to believe that… Or I don’t exist.
Ryan Cross is sitting across from Cal Raynor playing with something that looks like a calculator. Cal seems lost in thought, looking past Cross, beyond the window pane and out in the masses of warehouses that occupy the districts that surround the establishment known as the Vampyre Lounge.
“Five. Eight. Zero. Zero. Eight”says Ryan to no one in particular and I’m sure even if he was talking Cal, he wouldn’t have noticed.
Ryan turns his calculator upside down and looks and what he’s done.
“Cool. Boobs.” Ryan chuckles to himself.
Cal just stares. While, Ryan continues playing with the calculator to see if he can find anymore mildly amusing words spelt by numbers.
And Cal just stares.
The church is full, people staring at the podium, the priest in all his elegance standing at front addressing his people, his children. In the back of the church there is a massive figure – a solitary man.
And he just stares as the priest begins his sermon to the masses.
The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; for unto us a son is given, the Prince of Peace.’ Isaiah’s words are all the more poignant when we think of the sons who were given – born, nurtured, loved, sent off to school, delighted in as they developed powers of mind and body – and then cut down on the very threshold of a long and fruitful life. War memorials are always moving, if you open the windows of your imagination even a small crack; war memorials are like an unfinished symphony, a sonnet whose first eight lines never knew the last six that would make full sense of them. The Rabbis used to say that he who kills a man kills a whole world; who knows what that man might have done, the children he might have had, the beauty he might have created?
‘Unto us a son is given, the Prince of Peace’; and of course the double irony there is that when the Prince of Peace finally arrived he, too, was cut down in his prime, as the brutal military empire of the first century did what brutal military empires have always done.
It may be that connection (mostly, no doubt, subconscious) that keeps calling us back to remember the horror of wars most of us are too young to have known, just as our society finds itself called back again and again to the message of Jesus, the Prince of Peace, despite the scoffers and skeptics. When I was here in the cynical 1960’s and playing in the CCF band (not that we had those smart red uniforms and pith helmets) the master in charge on Remembrance Day had to remind us to take it seriously and remember the people in the town who’d lost a brother, a father, a son. We assumed such remembrance would fade with time, just as the skeptics assumed that Christian faith was on the way out. But here we still are, remembering the fallen and pondering Isaiah’s words about the Prince of Peace.
They need some pondering, mind you. When we hear them at Christmastime we normally miss out the middle verses, the bit about the yoke of burden and the rod of the oppressor, about the tramping boots and the bloodstained uniforms. But these are crucial to the prophet’s meaning. In between the promise of the coming great light for those who sit in darkness and the promise of the son who will be the Prince of Peace there are two detailed promises which address directly the double problem that haunts international relations to this day; and when I say ‘this day’ I think of those who wake up this morning in Basra and Baghdad not knowing whether they will wake up again tomorrow.
The double problem is that of tyranny on the one hand and violence on the other. Of course they often go together, as tyrants regularly use violence to gain and maintain their position. But, as the Roman Emperors always claimed, when you have a strong ruler you have peace – albeit at a price. Conversely, when people who suffer oppression and injustice, or who face national danger, they seek a solution, they make war. It’s quite easy to have peace if you’re happy to settle for injustice. It’s quite easy to work for justice if you’re happy to do without peace. The relations between ourselves and Iraq have oscillated between those poles over the last fifteen years, just as the relations between ourselves and Germany did in the first half of the twentieth century. Of course there are plenty of ideological and economic factors at work as well. But today, faced with the stark simplicity of a list of names in a book and in a cloister, let’s look at the stark simplicity of the promises of God.
First, we are promised victory over tyranny – but not the normal kind of victory. ‘The yoke of their burden, the rod of the oppressor, you have broken as on the day of Midian.’ Now just as we know the stories of the Somme and Ypres, of Dunkirk and Arnhem, so Isaiah’s hearers knew the stories of the old battles and the point of the famous victory over the Midianites was that it wasn’t a battle at all. Read about it in the book of Judges. Gideon and his men surrounded the camp by night, blew their trumpets and waved their torches, and the tyrannical Midianites fled in panic. Justice re-established without violence.
And where there is true justice, justice without tyranny, there can be, second, a peace in which the very memories of war can be laid to rest. ‘The boots of the tramping warriors and the garments rolled in blood’ – and those of you who’ve visited the battlefields and museums will know all about those – ‘will be burned in the fire.’ The horrible reminders of the sheer brutal nastiness of war – and if these names could speak, this is one of the main things they would tell us about – will be put away forever.
Thus: justice attained without violence; peace attained without accompanying tyranny. My friend, the world today is still wondering how to get to that result.
And Isaiah says: ‘The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; for to us a Son is given, the Prince of Peace.’ And we who live between the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth and the final establishment of the kingdom be came to bring, the kingdom in which justice and peace shall be knit together at last and forever – we are entrusted with a mission. Not simply to save a few souls from the wreck of this world, since God so loved the world and has promised to redeem it. Nor simply to tinker with the world’s own systems, merely to do things a bit differently here or there. No: rather, by prayer and courage, and holiness and hard work – and it will be hard work – we are called to discover the practical ways in today’s and tomorrow’s world of seeking justice without violence, of making and maintaining peace without tyranny.
The world sneers and says it can’t be done. We, who honour those who gave their lives, and who do so in the name of the Prince of Peace, are committed to saying it can be and will be. That is why every act of Remembrance must also be a moment of vocation – perhaps for someone here today, to follow the Prince of Peace and become a peacemaker, and God knows we need some right now. And that is why the rededication of the Cloisters must be also a rededication of our own lives, to serve the God of justice and the Prince of Peace and to follow wherever they may lead. The people who today sit in darkness need to see the great light; for to us a son is given, and he shall be called the Prince of Peace.
Cal nods almost motionlessly to himself and turns before leaving the church. The door wearily creaks echoing throughout the great hall of the building.
Cal just walks.
[Dredd is standing on the steps of an elegant pre-modern church.]
Fuck. Can’t escape these guys anywhere.
[He is staring straight at the camera crew in front of him. He knows what is expected of him.]
Like blood from a stone…
[Dredd reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out a packet of cigarettes, he taps one from the packet and places it in his mouth, before putting the remainder of the packet away and removing a book of matches from his jeans and striking up his cigarette. He tosses the used match away and exhales the exhilaration from the hit of nicotine to his brain.]
No time like the present…
[Dredd starts walking and walks straight past the camera. The unfit cameraman turns and jogs after Dredd, who is walking a pace too brisk for most to keep up, putting a strain on his weakened joints and aging muscles.]
Like a horse to water…
[Dredd walks through the car park and past the wrought iron gates that mark the entrance to the house of worship.]
And still the leech seeks his sustenance…
[Dredd continues on his way. And the cameraman still follows; his desperate gasps for breath can be heard faintly on the camera’s microphone. Suddenly, Dredd stops and the camera bumps into him before that several small steps backwards. Dredd reaches to the camera and takes it from his hands. He holds the lens within inches from his face.]
Dredd: I am not who Isaiah foresaw. I am…
[Dredd drops the camera.]
“Five. Five. Three. Seven. Eight. Zero. Zero. Eight.” A smile crosses Ryan’s face.
“Ha. Ha. Ha. Boobless.”
Cal just stares.
[Dredd just stares.]
Dredd: I am not the Prince of Peace. I am not the Harbinger of War. I merely am. I am here to do what I need to do. I need to feed the hunger inside me.
The need to fight for me is stronger than a vampire’s need for blood, greater than crack addict’s need to a fix.
I need to fight to feel alive.
So I fight.
It just happens that at Battleground… the rules have been thrown out the door and anything goes.
I won’t feel bad for breaking bones and I won’t feel bad for bludgeoning some of you into unconsciousness. I will relish the opportunity for you to use every instrument at your ready to bludgeon me to my knees just so I can rise to my feet and choke the living shit of you for shits and giggles.
And then maybe someone else can have a crack a breaking my spine. Remember Donovan Hastings set me on fire and I lived to tell the story another day, and at Battleground it’s got nothing to do with Victory or Valhalla.
Theoretically it’s about the currently vacant GIW.Com Title. Theoretically.
But it’s not.
That’s the prize.
But the glory is the fight.
The blood splattered audience, the claret soaked canvas. The weeping of open wounds that are far beyond any ability to heal naturally. The inevitable scars that will remind you of this one night in September where you walked through the valley of the shadow of death and laid down with the darkness in search of the light that never coming.
The have been many famous battlegrounds where masses have been laid to rest and the grim reaper stands like a shadow over their shallow graves.
Gettysburg.
Somme.
Ypres.
Gallipolli.
Pearl Harbour
Hiroshima.
Basra.
San Antonio, Texas…
[Dredd just stares, his eyes unmoving.]
I am the Grim Reaper.
I am the shadow that you fear.
I am the nightmare that keeps you up at night.
I am the fight you need.
I am the fight I need.
Korpi. JK. Montana.
Make me bleed.
Make me hunger.
Make it worth my while
Beat me.
Adios!
[Dredd just stares.]
Ryan is still playing with his calculator making naughty words, while….
Cal just stares.
Some would say the most violent of places…
Some battlegrounds are legendary…
Never forgotten…
Somme…
That’s the sort of battleground I am looking to leave behind…
Bodies scattered…
Bodies shattered…
Bodies splattered…
The blood of my enemy spilled…
The earth salted with the carcasses of the defeated…
That’s why I am here…
To leave a trail of destruction behind me…
To fight…
To emerge…
Victorious.
The ultimate goal…
To beat they will know what they’ve been through…
They will remember…
What they have gone through…
Their sleep broken by the constant nightmare of my face…
When they have followed me through the fire and out of the ashes…
Only the Monster will rise like a phoenix.
I have to believe that… Or I don’t exist.
~~~
Ryan Cross is sitting across from Cal Raynor playing with something that looks like a calculator. Cal seems lost in thought, looking past Cross, beyond the window pane and out in the masses of warehouses that occupy the districts that surround the establishment known as the Vampyre Lounge.
“Five. Eight. Zero. Zero. Eight”says Ryan to no one in particular and I’m sure even if he was talking Cal, he wouldn’t have noticed.
Ryan turns his calculator upside down and looks and what he’s done.
“Cool. Boobs.” Ryan chuckles to himself.
Cal just stares. While, Ryan continues playing with the calculator to see if he can find anymore mildly amusing words spelt by numbers.
And Cal just stares.
~~~
They went with songs to the battle, they were young.
Straight of limb, true of eyes, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their faces to the foe.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.
Straight of limb, true of eyes, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their faces to the foe.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.
~~~
The church is full, people staring at the podium, the priest in all his elegance standing at front addressing his people, his children. In the back of the church there is a massive figure – a solitary man.
And he just stares as the priest begins his sermon to the masses.
The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; for unto us a son is given, the Prince of Peace.’ Isaiah’s words are all the more poignant when we think of the sons who were given – born, nurtured, loved, sent off to school, delighted in as they developed powers of mind and body – and then cut down on the very threshold of a long and fruitful life. War memorials are always moving, if you open the windows of your imagination even a small crack; war memorials are like an unfinished symphony, a sonnet whose first eight lines never knew the last six that would make full sense of them. The Rabbis used to say that he who kills a man kills a whole world; who knows what that man might have done, the children he might have had, the beauty he might have created?
‘Unto us a son is given, the Prince of Peace’; and of course the double irony there is that when the Prince of Peace finally arrived he, too, was cut down in his prime, as the brutal military empire of the first century did what brutal military empires have always done.
It may be that connection (mostly, no doubt, subconscious) that keeps calling us back to remember the horror of wars most of us are too young to have known, just as our society finds itself called back again and again to the message of Jesus, the Prince of Peace, despite the scoffers and skeptics. When I was here in the cynical 1960’s and playing in the CCF band (not that we had those smart red uniforms and pith helmets) the master in charge on Remembrance Day had to remind us to take it seriously and remember the people in the town who’d lost a brother, a father, a son. We assumed such remembrance would fade with time, just as the skeptics assumed that Christian faith was on the way out. But here we still are, remembering the fallen and pondering Isaiah’s words about the Prince of Peace.
They need some pondering, mind you. When we hear them at Christmastime we normally miss out the middle verses, the bit about the yoke of burden and the rod of the oppressor, about the tramping boots and the bloodstained uniforms. But these are crucial to the prophet’s meaning. In between the promise of the coming great light for those who sit in darkness and the promise of the son who will be the Prince of Peace there are two detailed promises which address directly the double problem that haunts international relations to this day; and when I say ‘this day’ I think of those who wake up this morning in Basra and Baghdad not knowing whether they will wake up again tomorrow.
The double problem is that of tyranny on the one hand and violence on the other. Of course they often go together, as tyrants regularly use violence to gain and maintain their position. But, as the Roman Emperors always claimed, when you have a strong ruler you have peace – albeit at a price. Conversely, when people who suffer oppression and injustice, or who face national danger, they seek a solution, they make war. It’s quite easy to have peace if you’re happy to settle for injustice. It’s quite easy to work for justice if you’re happy to do without peace. The relations between ourselves and Iraq have oscillated between those poles over the last fifteen years, just as the relations between ourselves and Germany did in the first half of the twentieth century. Of course there are plenty of ideological and economic factors at work as well. But today, faced with the stark simplicity of a list of names in a book and in a cloister, let’s look at the stark simplicity of the promises of God.
First, we are promised victory over tyranny – but not the normal kind of victory. ‘The yoke of their burden, the rod of the oppressor, you have broken as on the day of Midian.’ Now just as we know the stories of the Somme and Ypres, of Dunkirk and Arnhem, so Isaiah’s hearers knew the stories of the old battles and the point of the famous victory over the Midianites was that it wasn’t a battle at all. Read about it in the book of Judges. Gideon and his men surrounded the camp by night, blew their trumpets and waved their torches, and the tyrannical Midianites fled in panic. Justice re-established without violence.
And where there is true justice, justice without tyranny, there can be, second, a peace in which the very memories of war can be laid to rest. ‘The boots of the tramping warriors and the garments rolled in blood’ – and those of you who’ve visited the battlefields and museums will know all about those – ‘will be burned in the fire.’ The horrible reminders of the sheer brutal nastiness of war – and if these names could speak, this is one of the main things they would tell us about – will be put away forever.
Thus: justice attained without violence; peace attained without accompanying tyranny. My friend, the world today is still wondering how to get to that result.
And Isaiah says: ‘The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; for to us a Son is given, the Prince of Peace.’ And we who live between the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth and the final establishment of the kingdom be came to bring, the kingdom in which justice and peace shall be knit together at last and forever – we are entrusted with a mission. Not simply to save a few souls from the wreck of this world, since God so loved the world and has promised to redeem it. Nor simply to tinker with the world’s own systems, merely to do things a bit differently here or there. No: rather, by prayer and courage, and holiness and hard work – and it will be hard work – we are called to discover the practical ways in today’s and tomorrow’s world of seeking justice without violence, of making and maintaining peace without tyranny.
The world sneers and says it can’t be done. We, who honour those who gave their lives, and who do so in the name of the Prince of Peace, are committed to saying it can be and will be. That is why every act of Remembrance must also be a moment of vocation – perhaps for someone here today, to follow the Prince of Peace and become a peacemaker, and God knows we need some right now. And that is why the rededication of the Cloisters must be also a rededication of our own lives, to serve the God of justice and the Prince of Peace and to follow wherever they may lead. The people who today sit in darkness need to see the great light; for to us a son is given, and he shall be called the Prince of Peace.
Cal nods almost motionlessly to himself and turns before leaving the church. The door wearily creaks echoing throughout the great hall of the building.
Cal just walks.
~~~
[Dredd is standing on the steps of an elegant pre-modern church.]
Fuck. Can’t escape these guys anywhere.
[He is staring straight at the camera crew in front of him. He knows what is expected of him.]
Like blood from a stone…
[Dredd reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out a packet of cigarettes, he taps one from the packet and places it in his mouth, before putting the remainder of the packet away and removing a book of matches from his jeans and striking up his cigarette. He tosses the used match away and exhales the exhilaration from the hit of nicotine to his brain.]
No time like the present…
[Dredd starts walking and walks straight past the camera. The unfit cameraman turns and jogs after Dredd, who is walking a pace too brisk for most to keep up, putting a strain on his weakened joints and aging muscles.]
Like a horse to water…
[Dredd walks through the car park and past the wrought iron gates that mark the entrance to the house of worship.]
And still the leech seeks his sustenance…
[Dredd continues on his way. And the cameraman still follows; his desperate gasps for breath can be heard faintly on the camera’s microphone. Suddenly, Dredd stops and the camera bumps into him before that several small steps backwards. Dredd reaches to the camera and takes it from his hands. He holds the lens within inches from his face.]
Dredd: I am not who Isaiah foresaw. I am…
[Dredd drops the camera.]
~~~
“Five. Five. Three. Seven. Eight. Zero. Zero. Eight.” A smile crosses Ryan’s face.
“Ha. Ha. Ha. Boobless.”
Cal just stares.
~~~
[Dredd just stares.]
Dredd: I am not the Prince of Peace. I am not the Harbinger of War. I merely am. I am here to do what I need to do. I need to feed the hunger inside me.
The need to fight for me is stronger than a vampire’s need for blood, greater than crack addict’s need to a fix.
I need to fight to feel alive.
So I fight.
It just happens that at Battleground… the rules have been thrown out the door and anything goes.
I won’t feel bad for breaking bones and I won’t feel bad for bludgeoning some of you into unconsciousness. I will relish the opportunity for you to use every instrument at your ready to bludgeon me to my knees just so I can rise to my feet and choke the living shit of you for shits and giggles.
And then maybe someone else can have a crack a breaking my spine. Remember Donovan Hastings set me on fire and I lived to tell the story another day, and at Battleground it’s got nothing to do with Victory or Valhalla.
Theoretically it’s about the currently vacant GIW.Com Title. Theoretically.
But it’s not.
That’s the prize.
But the glory is the fight.
The blood splattered audience, the claret soaked canvas. The weeping of open wounds that are far beyond any ability to heal naturally. The inevitable scars that will remind you of this one night in September where you walked through the valley of the shadow of death and laid down with the darkness in search of the light that never coming.
The have been many famous battlegrounds where masses have been laid to rest and the grim reaper stands like a shadow over their shallow graves.
Gettysburg.
Somme.
Ypres.
Gallipolli.
Pearl Harbour
Hiroshima.
Basra.
San Antonio, Texas…
[Dredd just stares, his eyes unmoving.]
I am the Grim Reaper.
I am the shadow that you fear.
I am the nightmare that keeps you up at night.
I am the fight you need.
I am the fight I need.
Korpi. JK. Montana.
Make me bleed.
Make me hunger.
Make it worth my while
Beat me.
Adios!
[Dredd just stares.]
~~~
Ryan is still playing with his calculator making naughty words, while….
Cal just stares.
~~~