"Harlan Ellison - No Doors, No Windows" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)
Disraeli; Epicurus, Edison; Faur├й and Fitzgerald; Goethe, Garibaldi; Huysmann and Hemingway,
ibn-al-Farid and Ives; Jeanne dтАЩArc and Jesus of Nazareth; and on and on.All the dreamers. Those
whose visions took form in blood and those which took form in music. Dreams fashioned of words, and
nightmares molded of death and pain. Is it inconceivable to consider that Richard Speck тАФ who
slaughtered eight nurses in Chicago in 1966, who was sentenced to 1,200 years in prison тАФ was a
devout Church-going Christian, a boy who lived in the land of God, while Jean Genet тАФ avowed thief,
murderer, pederast, vagrant who spent the first thirty years of his life as an enemy of society, and in the
jails of France where he was sentenced to life imprisonment тАФ has written prose and poetry of such
blazing splendor that Sartre has called him тАЬsaintтАЭ? Does the mind shy away from the truth that a Bosch
could create hell-images so burning, so excruciating that no other artist has ever evenattempted to copy
his staggeringly brilliant style, while at the same time he produced works of such ecumenical purity as
тАЬLтАЩEpiphanieтАЭ?All the dreamers. All the mad ones and the noble ones, all the seekers after alchemy and
immortality, all those who dashed through endless midnights of gore-splattered horror and all those who
strolled through sunshine springtimes of humanity. They are one and the same. They are all born of the
same desire.
Speechless, we stand before Van GoghтАЩs тАЬStarry NightтАЭ or one of those hell-images of Hieronymous
Bosch, and we find our senses reeling; vanishing into a daydream mist ofwhat must this man have been
like, what must he have suffered? A passage from Dylan Thomas, about birds singing in the eaves of a
lunatic asylum, draws us up short, steals the breath from our mouths; and the blood and thoughts stand
still in our bodies as we are confronted with the absolute incredible achievement of what he has done.
The impossibility of it. So imperfect, so faulty, so broken the links in communication between humans,
that to pass along one corner of a vision we have had to another creature is an accomplishment that fills
us with pride and wonder, touching us and them for a nanoinstant with magic. How staggering it is then,
they lived. To look out of their eyes and view the universe from a never before conquered height, from a
dizzying, strange place.
This, then, is the temporary, fleeting, transient, incredibly valuable, priceless gift from the genius dreamer
to those of us crawling forward moment after moment in time, with nothing to break our routine save
death.
Mud-condemned, forced to deal as ribbon clerks with the boredoms and inanities of lives that may never
touch тАФ save by this voyeuristic means тАФ a fragment of glory тАж our only hope, our only pleasure, is
derived through the eyes of the genius dreamers; the genius madmen; the creators.
How amazed тАж how stopped like a broken clock we are, when we are in the presence of the creator.
When we see what his singular talents тАФ wrought out of torment тАФ have proffered; what magnificence,
or depravity, or beauty, perhaps in a spare moment, only half-trying; they have brought it forth
nonetheless, for the rest of eternity and the world to treasure.
And how awed we are, when caught in the golden web of that true genius тАФ so that finally, for the first
time we know that all the rest of it waskitsch; it is made so terribly, crushingly obvious to us, just how
mere, how petty, how mud-condemned we really are, and that the only grandeur we will ever know is
that which we know second-hand from our damned geniuses. That the closest we will ever come to our
тАЬHeavenтАЭ while alive, is through our unfathomable geniuses, however imperfect or bizarre they may be.
And is this, then, why we treat them so shamefully, harm them, chivvy and harass them, drive them
inexorably to their personal madhouses, kill them?
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