Don't you know there ain't no devil, there's just God when he's drunk...

Mace had always hated telling stories, sharing experiences, recounting the mundane details of his day to anyone. Things happened around him, not to him. He made absolute sure of that.

There was one exception to this rule, an exception that burned him from the inside out. Violet happened to him, over and over again from his first conscious memory of her through the beginning of the end of the world, when he left her until the exact second he looked behind him to see her stumble and fall, the crack of a gunshot piercing her shoulder, now a violent bloom of red.

In that moment he felt nothing but the burn of hatred – for the men who shot her, for the crowds that kept running, for Violet for falling. The fear did not come until he realized that she wasn’t where she had fallen. In the moments between when she had been shot and when he had forced his way against the tide of people to where she was, she was gone. And the soldiers kept coming.

He had no choice but to turn around and sprint away. As it was, he had wasted precious seconds just staring at the drops of blood on the floor, flashing in between the pairs of fee that dashed by. They seemed to exist as light spots behind his eyelids as he ran.

He knew what Violet would have done in this situation, had it been anyone other than him. She would have asked questions, issued threats, bashed heads. She would have done something. Mace didn’t do, he moved around doers and doing. He, in fact, didn’t.

The crowds dispersed into well known hiding places where they felt safe. Mace slowed to a walk. The buzzing in his head competed with the desire to sleep, to forget that the past day had ever happened. Violet’s disappearing act could mean that she was dead, or worse but mace was numb to the thought. He only wished that his head would stop buzzing, that his skin would stop crawling.

He looked up. There was a circle of men outside his crawl space – middle aged me, which was weird enough. They weren’t wearing gray Agency uniforms and they weren’t dead and that’s where most middle aged men went. He fought the sudden urge to antagonize them, to get himself killed. He suppressed it because he didn’t know what it was and he didn’t want it so he turned around and left, as quietly as he came.

His backpack was cutting into his shoulders. There was nowhere to go to sleep so he went to the nearest station, found an unused bit of wall to lean against and pulled out a book. It took ten full minutes of reading it before he figured out what the book was.

He had long ago perfected the art of being invisible. It was easy to go unnoticed in a world you tried your best not to touch. The one person who went for him found himself face planting in the cement floor by a quick twist of Mace’s feet. He didn’t look up but the knowledge that there was a stain of blood, that it would be red like Violet’s, made the buzzing start again.

The chaos in the station slowed around him. There is no night underground, but there was usually a few over lapping hours during which the majority of people slept.

So Mace attributed his lack of attention to a lack of necessity when there was suddenly someone sitting next to him. He saw the flash of gray in the corner of his eye. A curse spilled out of his mouth before he could stop it.

My sister graduates from high school this year...

It's 2010. It's been 2010 for almost a month and a half now. I turned 21. My mother's birthday is today, but I'm not going to tell you how old she is because it would be mean. It's 2010 and I don't know what I'm doing with my life any more than I did last year. I'm still a college student. I dress like one, I eat like one. I probably think like one. I probably act like one...

(Side note: In a recommendation a boss of mine wrote for me she said that I could be a Jane Austen character if I weren't so well-adjusted. Just about everyone I know said that I'm not really well adjusted. I just am really good at faking it.)

Not much has changed. The census is this year. It is time to be counted. I've been writing again. Sometimes I do it when I'm supposed to be paying attention. Sometimes that's in politics class. What does it say that in the class that is supposed to be teaching me about what I want to do with my life, I can't stop writing about people and things that don't exist. Does it help that I do it in other classes too?

And now, for a presentation on the role of art in The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Through an examination of the way that Dorian Gray is treated as a piece of art throughout the novel, we can see the truth of these statements.

At the beginning of the novel there are two Dorian Grays – the one in the portrait and the real live breathing one. The portrait is two dimensional. It is all surface and symbol and no soul. It is also an interpretation, Basil’s interpretation and impression of Dorian Gray the person. Dorian Gray, the person, however, is Beauty personified. He lives and breathes. He interacts with the world around him and the world acts on him, but he is beautiful and people merely treat him as a work of art. For women he is clever and charming and beautiful and rich. For Lord Henry, he is a sort of experiment.

Once Dorian gives his soul to the painting of him in exchange for eternal youth it as though he is trying to become a work of art – an amoral symbol that exists only on the surface. Lord Henry encourages this. He calculates his statements to inspire Dorian to a life of pleasure and pleasure only. There is no good, there is only what you enjoy. Basil, at first, seems to see only the idea of Beauty in Dorian. Society, too, goes along with this idea of Dorian as simply Beauty.

Dorian however paves a path of destruction where ever he goes. He has no moral code, only a double life and a status to maintain. It is only when Dorian takes Basil’s life that he begins to fall apart. Humans cannot exist as merely amoral, beautiful symbols. They cannot be art. They act on the world around them, and the world acts on them. Though Dorian does not change on the outside, he does change inside. When Basil sees what has happened to the portrait he painted, he knows what is inside Dorian and is filled with an abject horror.

Dorian cannot exist as merely art, and he cannot die as merely art. In stabbing the portrait, he stabs himself, and when he regains his soul, he regains the appearance of one who has been as corrupted as he has. It is the act of annihilating another that undoes him. Despite his lack of morality and his lack of a soul, he cannot escape the manifestations of guilt and fear that plague him. When he attempts to destroy the work of art, the portrait, he destroys himself because he has become the portrait and it has become him.

We see this too with Sybil Vane. She is, to Dorian, a work of art. She is beauty and fictional characters and manifestations of Shakespeare’s ideals. When she becomes human, when Dorian creates in her these real feelings of love, she can no longer portray ideals. [“A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures…he lives the poetry he cannot write. The others write the poetry they cannot realize.”] Dorian then no longer loves her. He cannot appreciate her as a person, but only as art, and that destroys her.

Humans are not supposed to be art. It is true that they have surfaces that can be beautiful personified, but there lies beneath that surface a soul and a heart and a brain. There is curiosity and love and fear and death and sex. There is action. In order to be merely symbols, we will annihilate ourselves. [see: suicide bombers]