Saint Paul said I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection, and so the church proscribed fasting and chains, and, to share in Christ's suffering, scourging with the discipline. Galahad had tried it, once, because he'd thought it couldn't be worse than the cilice, and he can still remember the way it felt to be whipped with God's strength. It was the most pain he has ever been in, and afterwards Percival curled around him in bed, careful to put no pressure on his back, and let him cry.
When Laertes describes the ritual of pain, it sounds like something beautiful, a mortification of the flesh that quickens instead of deadening. Galahad imagines him a saint, crossed with bloody lashes and crowned with a disc of light, holding the whip in his own hand as martyrs do with the instruments of their death. A patron of pain made pleasure for love's sake. It is glorious, and he wonders whether it would be wrong to try to draw him like that.
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momijizukamori
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Date: 2024-02-29 11:20 pm (UTC)When Laertes describes the ritual of pain, it sounds like something beautiful, a mortification of the flesh that quickens instead of deadening. Galahad imagines him a saint, crossed with bloody lashes and crowned with a disc of light, holding the whip in his own hand as martyrs do with the instruments of their death. A patron of pain made pleasure for love's sake. It is glorious, and he wonders whether it would be wrong to try to draw him like that.
"I understand," he says.