This is a very wordy and long-winded response to guajolotl (guajolotl@aol.com)'s comment"Yetch!": In times of desperation and fear, people do awful, incomprehensible things. Everything you know is taken away, the comfortable fears of your daily life are stripped away in an instant and you are put in a situation you are completely unprepared for: you could die. People who live like us, who live safe, cannot comprehend the stark and brutal reality of facing your own death. A drag queen that descends from the air every night to serenade a drunken, orgiastic crowd of sexual outlaws may buy their own life with the lives of others. They may embrace a wave of evil and violence so that it doesn't pick them up and drag them under and do it with the same cool smile that they display on the stage. But their song is still bittersweet and regretful, they still have money and time and information for the people they betrayed. And on a train bearing you away from everything you ever knew or imagined for yourself, an outlaw who has lived running for a year before you were tracked down like an animal, you might simply sit (eyes to the ground) while they drag someone you love away. Maybe after taking home a cute blonde only to see his throat slit by storm troopers in your living room, you would listen when someone told you that in order to survive you needed to sit and listen to them torture your lover without moving to help him. And after hours of hearing his cries and screams and being unable to do anything (because there is no way this is your life and your out of you mind with fear and pain) you would say you didn't know your lover when his limp and bloody body was dragged before you. Maybe you would listen to a nightmare voice that ordered you to beat him because there was nothing else to hear. You would follow the one instinct that they had left you, the instinct to survive. By the time they tossed his body out of the train, would you have anything left to feel? When everything had been stripped away but your own life, what wouldn't you do to save it? And maybe your redemption would lie in love. Maybe when you saw someone (someone who had screamed at you and wanted you and needed you and laughed with you even in the face of death) refuse to let you go, run straight into the arms of death rather than let it shoot them in the back, you would finally become fully human again. The agony of that loss would rip through every part of you but you would feel it, you would know that you could feel. And when you took your own life it would be with the utmost dignity; you would stop fiercely clinging to the uncertain promise of survival and wrap your hands around the walls that bound you as you flew free.
Review of Bent
