"Harlan Ellison - No Doors, No Windows" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

Who is it, we wonder, whoreally still the golden voices of the geniuses, who turn their visions to dust?

Who, the question asks itself unbidden, are the savages and who the princes?
Fortunately, the night comes quickly, their graves are obscured by darkness, and answers can be
avoided till the next time; till the next marvelous singer of strange songs is stilled in the agony of his
rhapsodies.

On all sides the painter wars with the photographer. The dramatist battles the television scenarist. The
novelist is locked in combat with the reporter and the creator of the non-novel. On all sides the struggle
to build dreams is beset by the forces of materialism, the purveyors of the instant, the dealers in
tawdriness. The genius, the creator falls into disrepute. Of what good is he? Does he tell us useable
gossip, does he explain our current situation, does he “tell it like it is”? No, he only preserves the past and
points the way to the future. He only performs the holiest of chores. Thereby becoming a luxury, a
second-class privilege to be considered only after the newscasters and the sex images and the
“personalities.” The public entertainments, the safe and sensible entertainments, those that pass through
the soul like beets through a baby’s backside … these are the hallowed, the revered.

And what of the mad dreams, the visions of evil and destruction? What becomes of them? In a world of
Tiny Tim, there is little room for a Magwitch, though the former be saccharine and the latter be noble.

Who will speak out for the mad dreamers?

Who will insure with sword and shield and grants of monies that these most valuable will not be thrown
into the lye pits of mediocrity, the meat grinders of safe reportage? Who will care that they suffer all their
nights and days of delusion and desire for ends that will never be noticed? There is no foundation that will
enfranchise them, no philanthropist who will risk his hoard in the hands of the mad ones.

And so they go their ways, walking all the plastic paths filled with noise and neon, their multifaceted
bee-eyes seeing much more than the clattering groundlings will ever see, reporting back from within their
torments that Nixons cannot save nor Wallaces uplift. Reporting back that the midnight of madness is
upon us; that wolves who turn into men are stalking our babies; that trees will bleed and birds will speak
in strange tongues. Reporting back that the grass will turn blood-red and the mountains soften and flow
like butter; that the seas will congeal and harden for iceboats to skim across from the chalk cliffs of
Dover to Calais.

The mad dreamers among us will tell us that if we take a woman (that most familiar of alien creatures that
we delude ourselves into thinking we rule and understand to the core) and pull her inside-out we will have
a wondrousness that looks like the cloth-of-gold gown in which Queen Ankhesenamun was interred.
That if we inject the spinal fluid of the dolphin into the body of the dog, our pets will speak in the riddles
of a Delphic Oracle. That if we smite the very rocks of the Earth with quicksilver staffs, they will split and
show us where our ghosts have lived since before the winds traveled from pole to pole.

The geniuses, the mad dreamers, those who speak of debauchery in the spirit, they are the condemned of
our times; they give everything, receive nothing, and expect in their silliness to be spared the gleaming axe
of the executioner. How they will whistle as they die!

Let the shamans of Freud and Jung and Adler dissect the pus-sacs of society’s mind. Let the rancid evil
of reality flow and surge and gather strength as it hurries to the sea, forming a river that girdles the globe,
a new Styx, beyond which men and women will go and from whence never return. Let the rulers and the