Puppet Passage of the Day...

[dr. locrian]

Monsters like that give ventriloquists a bad name.

Charlie Brookers Screenwipe: Junior Christian Science Bible Lesson - YouTube

[miguel1984]

"Death is a release from the impressions of the senses, and from desires that make us their puppets, and from the vagaries of the mind, and from the hard service of the flesh."

-Marcus Aurelius

"Puppets seem like vampires sometimes. They live, and you're depleted."

-Henry Selick

"We're all puppets, Laurie. I'm just a puppet who can see the strings."

-Dr. Manhattan, Watchmen

[Piranesi]

It's as if we never came into this world,
it's as if we had stayed non-existent.
Darkness all around with no glimmer of light.
Human only in other people's fantasy.

Fashioned from paper and indecision,
marionettes in the two blind hands of Fate,
we do the dance, we accept the jeers,
feebly, passively, we gaze at the stars.

For us every joy is a distant land,
hope and youth are abstract concepts.
No one else knows that we are here, except
whoever steps on us when crossing our path.

So many years, so much time has passed.
O that our body did not feel deep sadness,
O that our soul did not know real pain
telling us that we still do exist...

Kostas Karyotakis: Marionettes (translated by Reader and Taylor)

[T.E. Grau]

This entire book:

The House of Small Shadows: Adam Nevill: 9781250041272: Amazon.com: Books

 

The House of Small Shadows: Adam Nevill: 9781250041272: Amazon.com: Books

[MTC]

"Already, automatons multiply and dream."

- André Breton, "The Automatic Message" (1924)

[T.E. Grau]

Not really about a puppet, but a doll:

"It had begun with Christmas and the gift of dolls. The big, the special, the loving gift was always a big, blue-eyed Baby Doll. From the clucking sounds of adults I knew that the doll represented what they thought was my fondest wish. I was bemused with the thing itself, and the way it looked. What was I supposed to do with it? Pretend I was its mother? I had no interest in babies or the concept of motherhood. I was interested only in humans my own age and size, and could not generate any enthusiasm at the prospect of being a mother. Motherhood was old age, and other remote possibilities. I learned quickly, however, what I was expected to do with the doll: rock it, fabricate storied situations around it, even sleep with it. Picture books were full of little girls sleeping with their dolls. Raggedy Ann dolls usually, but they were out of the question. I was physically revolted by and secretly frightened of those round moronic eyes, the pancake face, and orangeworms hair.

The other dolls, which were supposed to bring me great pleasure, succeeded in doing quite the opposite. When I took it to bed, its hard unyielding limbs resisted my flesh—the tapered fingertips on those dimpled hands scratched. If, in sleep, I turned, the bone-cold head collided with my own. It was a most uncomfortable, patently aggressive sleeping companion. To hold it was no more rewarding. The starched gauze or lace on the cotton dress irritated any embrace. I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me. Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs—all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired,pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured. “Here,” they said, “this is beautiful, and if you are on this day ‘worthy’ you may have it.” I fingered the face, wondering at the single-stroke eyebrows; picked at the pearly teeth stuck like two piano keys between red bowline lips. Traced the turned-up nose, poked the glassy blue eyeballs, twisted the yellow hair. I could not love it. But I could examine it to see what it was that all the world said was lovable. Break off the tiny fingers, bend the flat feet, loosen the hair, twist the head around, and the thing made one sound—a sound they said was the sweet and plaintive cry “Mama,” but which sounded to me like the bleat of a dying lamb, or, more precisely, our icebox door opening on rusty hinges in July. Remove the cold and stupid eyeball, it would bleat still, “Ahhhhhh,” take off the head, shake out the sawdust, crack the back against the brass bed rail, it would bleat still. The gauze back would split, and I could see the disk with six holes, the secret of the sound. A mere metal roundness." -- THE BLUEST EYE, by Toni Morrison

[MTC]

"If the dialogue in these plays consists of meaningless clichés and the mechanical, circular repetition of stereotyped phrases - how many meaningless clichés and stereotyped phrases do we use in our day-to-day conversation? If the characters change their personality halfway through the action, how consistent and truly integrated are the people we meet in our real life? And if people in these plays appear as mere marionettes, helpless puppets without any will of their own, passively at the mercy of blind fate and meaningless circumstance, do we, in fact, in our overorganized world, still possess any genuine initiative or power to decide our own destiny? The spectators of the Theatre of the Absurd are thus confronted with a grotesquely heightened picture of their own world: a world without faith, meaning, and genuine freedom of will. In this sense, the Theatre of the Absurd is the true theatre of our time."

- Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd

[bendk]

There had been a pause in the music. Now, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the orchestra leader mount the little platform where the musicians were. He waved his baton wearily at them. They doused half-smoked cigarettes and picked up their instruments. The leader brought his stick down sharply; music blared.
The room's weight shifted as a great number of people got up from their tables and oozed onto the dance floor. Sleek ladies allowed themselves to be crushed to the bodies of slick men, and the peculiar, machine-like precision that is ballroom dancing filled his sight.
They were, he thought, like so many dumb puppets manipulated by unseen hands; so many odd-sized figurines of wood and clay, dressed in shiny rags, painted, primped, fixed with automatic smiles, pulled up and down on invisible strings. He was not witness to a social endeavor that had to do with flesh and blood: what he saw was a dumb show, a horribly grotesque and childlike thing of terror with all the idiot simplicity of a marionette ballet.
By concentrating, it seemed that he could slow and control the action of these dancers, could, if he desired, halt the action to see them as conjoined bodies which jerked in spasmodic unison and remained suspended, immobile until another beat of music blared from the orchestra; then he could watch them jerk again, and halt, and continue that unreal contortion, jerking, twisting, squirming, and halting with each successive beat of the music.
He changed the focus of his eyes and allowed the action to speed up to its normal acceleration; and the floor became a pit where eel-like bodies writhed and flowed in liquid stops and starts. The men and women seemed almost pasted, pressed together until they were one irregular, bulky shape of contrasting color, two-headed monsters of another world. Lips were bared back from teeth in ludicrous retractions which were simultaneously smiles, vicious snarls, and grimaces of deep pain.
Yet despite all the hysterical movement, the erratic tortuosity, there was some basic thing mechanical and grim about the dancing figures. It was as if only an unimportant, physical part of them danced, as if the other, more significant portion of them looked down from an unimaginable height. Or it was as if they were really wooden-bodied, clay-masked puppets of his first imagining, trying desperately to achieve some semblance to life, and failing in the very method of approach, and aware of that failure.

- John Williams, Nothing But The Night

[bendk]

"Female impersonator Walter Lambert included a ventriloquist routine in his stage act where he played a nurse tending to sick dummies."