Jillian De Paul unravels herself in this collection of thoughts and experiences expressed through complex metaphors. Can sanity be harmful when living through sexual abuse? Explore your own answers with ruthlessly provocative stories, interpretive photography and guided personal reflection. Contemplate mind-and-soul, good-and-evil and life-and-death with prevalent bdsm themes. All become part of … of a puzzle for piecing together a semblance of balance. Darkness lives inside – tread carefully!
more
The Feral Child: This story is really striking. Three characters: submissive, dominant, and feral child. The submissive is interesting because she plays no direct role in the action. The dominant controls her, but he’s taken by the feral child, whom he cannot control. He’s fascinated by the girl who is beyond his normal reality. She leads him through the woods to a cabin where she lures him with cookies. He claims to have been trapped, but there’s no explicit form of detention. So is it figurative, or is he now lost in the woods?
Approaching The Sun
This was a story of grief and isolation. A woman lost her mother for whom she’d been caring, and struggled to fill the void that loss of reason for being had left. The last paragraph confused me, as a male character enters the story. The woman apparently hangs herself, seeking a better existence, as the male character watches. So I missed something. But the search for a life motivation, when the life has been completely given to caring for a now lost mother, was striking, and foreshadowing what awaits those whose mothers are old but still able to care for themselves.
The Venn diagram provides more insight — the male is the moth, who perhaps led the woman to suicide. But it’s still a mystery.
Changing Memories: Wow — this is a horrific story of domestic abuse, of a little girl and her mother whose lives are an obsession of fear over the abuse delivered by an alcoholic father. There’s an abuse scene where the father goes into the girl’s room, and physical abuse is implied but not explicitly described, so I wonder if it’s omitted as a literary means to show how the girl mentally shuts down during the abuse. With the story describing how the father carries his shotgun with him, carelessly leaving it aside as he abuses his wife and daughter, it was a natural expectation one of them would shoot him with it to end the abuse. However, in the end it was a peace offering which appeared to end the abuse. I simply cannot understand this sort of cycle of abuse so didn’t know what to make of the ending, but it was quite striking.
The Venn diagram at the end implies memories have been changed. This is intriguing so I might have missed something. The omission of the physical abuse was clearly an indication the dialog wasn’t necessarily completely reliable. So the question is then whether the rose in the gun was accurate, or whether the actual events were more tragic. The photography in this section seems particularly wonderful.
Forevermore: This is a big change from the other stories here. It’s a fairy tale about a crippled girl who transforms into a swan, after her older sister accidentally kills a swan in attempting to capture its beauty. Obviously this is loaded with metaphor. The father, who abuses his children with neglect and confinement, realizes the error of his ways and is transformed. In that sense this story is a lot like “Changing Memories”. The explicit physical transformation is in Ivy, but the more innate transformation is in the father.
And so many more interesting stories with over 100 images inside.
http://www.lulu.com/shop/jillian-de-paul/equilibrium-when-tragedy-confronts-peace/paperback/product-23984179.html