So, the title of that last Cauldron apparently should’ve been “I’d Rather Not Be Beheaded *Or Immolated*. Kthx.”
It seems ISIL wants to get late-Medieval on our asses with the recent immolation of Jordanian figher pilot, Muath Al-Kasasbeh. Something that harkens back to the Inquisición Española more than it does any recent form of execution widely used.
While this certainly serves to make ISIL even further reprehensible, I couldn’t completely stifle the morbid curiosity within to try to seek out the video. (I was unsuccessful, though I didn’t try very long.)
Because, like the Wolfpack’s Stuart Price, I have a demon in me (well, more than one, actually) that drives a seemingly instinctual gravitation toward The Dark. (However, unlike Stuart Price, I don’t have semen in me. At least, not in me bum.) And that indescribable excruciation that must be the nature of burning alive fills me with a kind of nether-fascination.
It’s not a common thing that this method of execution is captured on film. I mean, I’ve seen all four “Faces Of Death” at one point or another and I don’t recall too many segments featuring corporeal combustion as capital punishment.
I don’t think that measure of pain is even conceivable. I think that’s the root of my pursuit of depictions of such anguish: to conceive the inconceivable. (Yeah, that’s it.)
On a similar note, I recently saw Robin Hardy’s “The Wicker Man” again for the fourth or fifth time, which of course features a (*spoiler alert*) similar method of dispatching the policeman lead role, handily played by Edward Woodward.
Now that is profoundly disturbing: watch “The Wicker Man” and you’ll never be the same person again.
“O, I am come to the low country; och on, och on, och rie!
Without a penny in my purse to buy a meal for me.
One time I had a hundred sheep: och on, och on, och rie!
Skippin' on yon narrow creek and growin' wool for me.”
-- ∆☩Y§ ☨♆∀☥✠
