Censorship

My name is Interdict.

I bask in the radiance of custom, and I cloth myself in the cloak of tradition.

I am a headache short of a full-blown migraine. I am a sword’s sheath, although sometimes others might look at me and see only a prophylactic.

I call myself inoculation, but they call me spermicidal. Some rise to my defense; the good ones, those who understand piety, and perhaps even those who have been led to identification with despair.

It is I that comes across the dangerous gnosis, and it is I who protects the meandering masses from its perils. I take upon myself the cross of decadence and lust. I am the last bastion of endangered cleanliness, one worthy only of the very best detergent advertisements.

I am unchanging and unyielding.

Like the last remaining hexagram of an I-King destroyed, I am a token of that which has yielded. Yielded and yielded once again – a yin by brute force, quite formidably unchanging.

Once a year? I let something by, and, invariably, the force is consuming. Millions of tickets are sold, and the people rush to the film festivals. With a flare worthy of the grandest of arts, the movie titles are enhanced, transformed, and subsumed into a form far more flirtatious than their original counterparts had the temperament to be.

Am I testing the people?

Or am I giving in to them – or perhaps – supplying them with a morsel?

It matters not. I see how they react. They rush. They are a stampede of lemmings, and they perform their motions with about as much grace as the metaphor would allow. They are a heaving, a pushing, struggling slobber. They rush to see what I, in my wisdom, have let past; the nipple made supreme.

My power is a drunkenness. I lay myself to waste.

I carefully sift through what reality attempts to offer, a reality that the mass does not have the breaking burden of having to do battle with. I bargain with it, a diabolical negotiator working for the preservation of the good, and that which must, at all cost, remain true. The narrative itself is subject to my prognosis, a prognosis achieved at great personal expense. It is only by great strength of will and with the support of a sanctioned authority that I can withstand the corruption to which I am exposed.

There is no word I am more intimate with than pyhric.