She stares to the clock – it feels like she’s been writing for an eternity. Midnight strikes and 1921 quickly becomes 1922. Ethel is scribbled all over her papers – she can’t think of anything else to write but her name. Her body is heavy and dense and her mind is clouded but she does not want to give up – she utters to herself that she mustn’t give up. Ethel crazily begins to run around the small room that is darkly lit by the hue of the rising moon. Franticness fills her manically-ill creative-searching soul as she tears apart her small room in the Prussian town of Jest.
Ethel is beyond herself because she has no pen – there is nothing within the confines of her room to write with. She rips apart her room searching for a pen. She knows that she has a pen somewhere but she can’t seem to find it. All of a sudden, a gift occurs – the moment that she’s been patiently waiting for, after weeks of structured productive patience to sitting to painfully write, her creative daemons have finally begun to whisper inside of her ringing ears – one on each side – their heads are fish bowls filled with a thrashing ocean of thoughts, swaying back and forth as they sit upon Ethel’s boney shoulders. They whisper stories, ideas, full outlines of brewing notions that have been constructed within the subconscious confines of her creative mind – her eyes light and her fingers tingle to the godlike euphoria but she has no pen. Ideas crazily flow in her head but she can’t get them out.
Moments later, the cobblestone streets echo from Ethel’s frantic footsteps. She walks with her two daemons side by side and looks around to the eerie, desolate streets. She looks to a store nearby but it’s closed – this old pen shop seems to have it all. Quills sit in the window taunting her. Entranced she quickly smashes the window and grabs the quill. She enters into the store and looks around – an ink station is there but there is no ink. How could a pen store not have ink!? Ethel quickly runs out of the store as her daemons follow, their heads now becoming half-full – the ocean of ideas are receding and salt-laced dew forms around the edges of the perspirating bowl – her friends need water to survive and she knows this.
She crazily runs back to her hotel – up the quiet steps – and into her room. The pearl colored paper taunts her – her daemons begin to fade into the all-engulfing nothingness as she manically paces the room. All is becoming empty as saltwater evaporates to the ceiling then vanishing to vapor. She takes her old pen and begins to carve into the mahogany table – sweat beads upon her forehead and tears fill her eyes. She feels the presence of her daemons fading and then notices the trickle of blood upon the paper – it seems Ethel has a small cut from breaking the glass. She quickly rises and takes the quill; she squeezes the blood to the tip of her finger with her opposite hand. Blood pools to the tip – she dips the quill into it and quickly begins to write a sentence. The blood-ink quickly runs out. She squeezes and squeezes her finger and attempts to write – but no more blood. A letter opener, along with the metal wax sealer, stare back to her with a glimmer from the bursting orange moon.
She grabs the letter opener and without hesitation sticks it into her finger, then dipping the quill, and writing with her blood. Euphoria fills her as a purging release occurs – her daemons again appear in her ear and she feels it! The bowl fills and the ocean rocks the daemons as they surf upon the creative stream of bliss, happily perches on each shoulder, whispering and singing into Ethel’s hungry ears. Ethel finally has the tool to release all that she has work towards, it’s in her hands, it’s in her ears and now finally engulfs her but the blood runs out again and again. She gently slices into her forearm even deeper with knife, thus dipping into the pool of blood with the quill – her creative energy won’t seem to diminish. She begins to stab other parts of her body in order to quell more blood – her fingertips are red and raw – there’s been a drought. Ethel looks to her heavy pulse in wrist – she ponders as the beating bursts through her skin calling for her – she looks to both shoulders and sees that the life-tanks that her daemons inhabit are quickly becoming empty. Her pulsing vein within her wrist calls to her. And without hesitation she gently slices her wrists, writing and writing – Ethel then changes to her thighs and then toes, cutting just deep enough to not penetrate a vein; her daemons have now faded away but she has earned this right to creative productivity and is continually giving birth to her own thoughts that are beyond this time – she has become in tune with the universal flow and is absent of any sort of self – she has reached a godlike state of being that is inarticulate by words but felt within the invisible souls of all intuitive artists and spiritualists.
Her writing begins to slow as the loss of blood starts to drain her energy. She needs water or food but grabs the tall bottle of Fernet and chugs down – her blood instantly thins from the herbaceous alcohol and pools upon the surface of each small self-inflicted wound. Her body begins to become transparent as she loses more and more blood – the page is filled with sandwiched red cursive letters – Ethel has no desire to give up – she still cuts and cuts – deeper and deeper, finally nicking some veins – her body too then begins to dissolve with daemons as it frantically writes, fading into her leather-bound notebook stained with blood. She writes and becomes more and more transparent, white as lace; her daemons dissipate into thin air and so does she. The two glass bowls that once sat on her shoulders crash to the ground as she too becomes the salt-misted vapor. A pool of viscous blood sits in the room accompanied by an empty chair – but the lines within the notebook were filled with something too great to be spoken upon. Ethel gave her blood to her craft and died, in doing so she lived on eternally in the pages of her work and within the minds of her audience. Her craft gave her immortality and though it cost her own life, she courageously put in the work up to death. There were no excuses and if the ego spoke, she rendered it useless to her creative genius.
And little did Ethel know, that on the floor underneath her desk, covered with clothes, was a full bottle of black ink.
What did she write on that paper? What did she fill that notebook up with?
After the frantic scribbling of her name, as if she had been trying to remind herself of who she is, a new passage was started with these words: my words had become a regurgitation to all that I thought I had known until I persisted – until I created my higher Self…until they visited all was but a blur – until I saw that light I was writing in a fiery hell – and then I was under their spell…