From Beyond the Pale
This is the online version of a hand-bound encyclopedia formerly known as Beyond the Pale ~ The Lost Child’s Guide to Imbroglio.
It is now titled From Beyond the Pale ~The Lost Child’s Guide to Wayward Lands.
We are still living in kingdoms, and the pales are still sharp.
25 December, 2012 09:39
From beyond the pale has moved to blogger
Please visit From Beyond the Pale at its new home at blogger. Sorry WordPress, but I am too busy to worry about embedding content in your tempermental themes.
Wish you were here!
Dear Hero,
Very Truly Yours,
Scapegoat
Buy From Beyond the Pale!
Notes on Lost Child, Vulnerabilities, and Pets
There has been some speculation on the possibility that a Lost Child who, spending eons beyond the pale, may metamorphose into a Madman. While typically, the Lost Child’s ability to navigate the dominion beyond the pale remains unrivaled by Hero, Clown, and Scapegoat, we should not assume that the Lost Child is at any time safe beyond the pale. Quite to the contrary, the Lost Child is so adept at walking around landmines and invisibility that she wanders the beyond without hazard because she is uniquely equipped to do so.
In a sense, by remaining beyond the pale, the Lost Child often achieves the role of Hero in her own mind, and indeed functions as one. Like any Hero, she possesses a proverbial Achilles Heel. The Lost Child’s sensitivity to animals and perpetual search for a long ago velveteen rabbit creates a temporary cataract of sorts, one that can sometimes blocks her peripheral vision. While the gentle Lost Child is not one to disturb sneaks of weasels or other dangerous animals, she does bond with chipmunks, prairie dogs, and marmots.
When the Lost Child adopts an animal as a pet, the animal’s well-being fuses with the Lost Child’s own weak inclination towards self preservation; any ill befalling the Lost Child’s companion will send her spiraling into madness. If the animal is harmed, the Lost Child’s pain will destroy her invisibility, making her an easy target for the known dangers.
Those who are mad beyond the pale appear irretrievably beyond.
The watchful quivering rabbits, too timid to approach her, will continue to cluster around the Lost Child. It is there presence that alerts travelers to the possibility that a seemingly random Madman may indeed be a former Lost Child who is unable to cope without his or her pet.
The fact that the Lost Child will behave in exactly the same way if she loses a pet within the pale is further proof that to her, the region beyond the pale appeals to her because she is less likely to be harmed.
Anyone who wishes to help a Lost Child must consider the pet’s needs equal to or as is often the case, greater than the needs of the Lost Child.
See also: fylgja, catatonia, madman.
Reading and Book Signing Thursday 03/24
Reading and book signing from Tara Jill Ciccarone’s
From Beyond the Pale
– the lost child’s guide to wayward lands
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Who Dat Coffee Cafe
7 pm
2401 Burgundy Street New Orleans, LA 70117 – (504) 872-0360
Click HERE for map!
Weasels, sneak of
Group of cunning animals that can understand human vocabulary and should never, under any circumstances, be cooked. Those wandering beyond the pale should avoid throwing yard waste at them. Thousands of weasels have been known to attack when avenging the death of one of their kind.
Directions for Scapegoats to Follow When Escaping the Pale
When the poets, grouchy about nothing, try to fuck you, you will know that they too have lost their grace.
That shortness of breath – you still think it’s those cats that have stolen it? Your cough is a winter cough, tuberculer and constant as your cigarettes. You will not always want to be as tough as the boys you think deserve to be legends, nor will your smile flash as boldly as trinkets caught in a Mardi Gras parade.
Maybe then you will believe you can choose not to die violently from asthma or dismemberment by rail car to the blue wail of a saxophone.
In the other place you arrange gingham nightgowns and lingerie over grey kittens that sleep in a Fisher Price shopping cart, back in the sawdust of the last room in some warehouse crammed more with secrets than out of tune pianos.
If you have not run into your soul mate by now, assume him dead.
Go back to the other place, exploding like a rocket of stars.
Away from the other place, the chill sets in early, every puddle an egg of blown glass gone to pieces. In a place that is not the other place, you will learn later that the victims had been giving hand jobs, but when they are first gone, you hear only of the weather.
The poets insist that you stop writing the sorrows. “How can you know so little about the world?”one asks. As if knowing children counted for nothing.
You will begin to wonder if you’d be better off knowing you’d reached the end of your life because perhaps then you would know why there isn’t any music anymore.
Spring will bring trumpets of danger, like certain tendencies to lie to doctors, as if good health consists only of the ability to fool them.
Now is when you must run. Run like you know it’s the taller one who hits softest, like you can see the blade hiding in the little one’s hand. Don’t bother stopping to try broken pay phones.
Follow the smell of chocolate steaming up from factories beneath the ground, and don’t stop for blisters or the poor little crazy things along side the rural highway.
You will recognize the other place when a man shows you the fossil of a rat. There will be more to love about him than his ability to forgive you, but you won’t fall for just any dream boy.
Leave a message for me near the railroad tracks, so when the trail back vanishes behind you, I will know where to look.
But do not be drawn in by the nostalgia of earlier notes, always brimming with apologies that reek of second guessing.
It’s not like you aren’t nearly intelligent enough to pull this off.
We are still living in kingdoms, and the pales are still sharp.
Lost Child’s Response to Scapegoat
Sometimes, codes to cryptograms are permanently painted on walls where messages are then written in chalk, as in the case above.
Message found on railroad tracks
from beyond the pale 
