Echo

The most mind-bogglingly obvious features of anything are the flaws, when viewed from a critical vantage. Our soul selves harbor needs, wants, and our minute foibles like baubles and broaches of indefinable value. Every time I write, I cringe at the glaring weaknesses of the English language with regards to relational linguistics: love, needs, wants, hopes, dreams - the words falter beneath the scope of what I crave to mean.
Needs. Wants. I wish there was a stratus of grey between these saturated extremes. I'm trying to navigate desires with a shoddy sextant beneath a sky of foreign stars. At least I feel like that's so, though feelings, too, are foreign features in this enigmatic landscape of the soul. Needs I categorize too closely to actual body requirements: food, sleep, water. If asked what I need, I usually reply "nothing." I'm not dying, am I? Sure there are psychological, physiological, emotional, psychosocial, biological imperatives, but are these moment-by-moment needs? Can I survive a day in no-space without these being met?
The next difficulty is "wants". Without the capacity for transforming those crude "scientific" terms into meaningful terms (a hug, a debriefing, a held hand), wants start feeling selfish, rude, and narcissistic. I'm staring into a pond, delighted at the beauty of my reflected face, wanting only to touch up the rippling water and clarify my own existence - how boorish and egocentric. But because these words: "needs" and "wants" are equivocated within my understanding, I cannot dissect my desires, necessities, hopes, dreams, passions, angsts, fears, failures, ennui, listlessness, pain, and tensions into queries and actions aimed at balancing out the terrible into the tolerable.
Christendom has instilled in me a refusal to accept empathy as selfishness, and a nervousness about help, and this bitter misunderstanding has transformed loving-kindness into a farcical facade of pity. Not in hindsight, but at the casual inquiry - I never need, I shall not want. If I'm lying down in green pastures and led beside still waters, either my wants must be illusory or faithless, or out of line with belief.

Story Writing Time Approaches

Everything, unwittingly, is old.

this time especially so,

and I don’t know if it understands

what the grass is, young man,

or comprehends spring things just yet.

it weeps without tears to shed;

sleeps without dreams or rest;

it wants with nothing to expect,

and exhales without air

or even breath.

It burns, loves, without anything

inspiring such regrets,

and it moves, with nowhere to go,

and nowhere it has ever been.

The time of stories approaches, and I’m still uncertain where this one is pulling me. At first, I began with a pretty standard fantasy tale, and then realized I wanted something a tad more dramatic. I wasn’t even sure what this meant, but just that I wanted a story that might not bore me initially. Even if the end result isn’t satisfactory, that can always be fixed up. But if the concept is lacking, only so much can be done without a complete rehaul.

But what? That is always the question, no?

So I decided to scrap the original concept of a medieval “tolkein-lewis” mash that perpetuates throughout our simplistic “fantasy fiction” and twist the setting. One of the things I enjoy about Brent Week’s writing is that he doesn’t fear treading on new territory with old themes. He can maintain the semblance of an epic fantasy, but set in Mediterranean Renaissance or pre-industrial revolution era. When western society catches up with the middle east in discovering gunpowder, and warfare gets a strange boost with the discovery that no skill is needed in warfare, only a factory-produced weaponry, a swift lesson on loading, and a bunch of boys with guns.

I don’t particularly plan on joining in on this era, but I think a little branching out, or even inventing of time periods, can certainly spice up an aging genre. I am not trendsetting, mostly because I don’t plan on selling any of this writing, but it will be a bit of a stretch for me doing some of the research required to produce a reasonable and believable setting. The ease of the tolkein-esque world is that it’s been done and overdone, so now we expect every traveler to find an inn, eat some stew, drink a frothy beer in a pub, catch up on the scuttlebutt, roll some dice and head off into the wild unknown after some great reptilian beast that has stolen our gold, burninated the countryside, and needs defeat. I think there is value in these stories, as Gaiman said (after Chesterton said something similar, I believe):

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten

I believe in the merit of fairy tales, but I also believe that if the writing is done right, you can place them anywhere you like.

I’m not exactly writing a fable or fairy tale this November, but a little mythos never hurt anyone.

Brief Autumnal Haiku

summer itches on,
die slowly, dear, or linger
autumn saunters in

barn owls hooting
pines bristling like hedgehogs -
leaves gold transform

the sun-browned grasses
crimson moon o'er city lights
red the fall anon



Haiku is not my specialty, turns out. But they are fun to try anyway.

Moon and Mythos

a la olwen

the fabular moon, unequivocal,

argentine in tiding time,

tugs the waves of my heart

fro and to phantasmal dreams

witness the boreal sky-shivers

boring into my deep being

where black, shadow, light

are born in a breath-bright

moment, it passes, and forever

bliss scars my sea-deep soul

scalding love, blanket violence

together we're never far from home

lunar lunacy, hanging bloody by,

a heavenly sacrifice, only why?

All too often, we flatten our colors into the simplest pictures of black and white. Knowing what we know now, what ill-prepared, naïve decisions might we make? There is little merit to making colorful decisions from black and white knowledge; we are not myths. How often, in our daily lives, do we find characters of unequivocal evil, or unblemished good? The knight in shining, undusty, unnotched armor must be fighting inside a mythos quarantine, for the moment he steps outside his sterilized story, dust settles into the corners, and branches snap at his suit, and swords will seek chinks in his defenses.

Sandburg Autumn - Crying over beautiful things

I'm working, already, on a story for nano. Though I'm uncertain about that actual plot line (generic, poor at the moment), it is character driven, which is something I've not done for a longer story yet - though perhaps the thriller was just a really lousy execution of something intended to be character driven. And perhaps I'm a bit bummed about the plot currently because I've only just started working on character, and it seems I'm stuck as to where the story will take these people. But I'm still working on a pattern to spice things up.




I cried over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts. 

The field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of the copper
   sunburned woman, the mother of the year, the taker of seeds. 

The northwest wind comes and the yellow is torn full of holes, 
   new beautiful things come in the first spit of snow on the northwest wind, 
   and the old things go, not one lasts. 
- Carl Sandburg

I think it is near enough that we can pretend fall has arrived. The weather is confused about the switch, but nighttime recovers from daytime's misled summer heat. I'll miss the sun, I'll cry over its absence, but I know the fall will be wonderful as well, in its own way.

Crux of the Morning

I and Lord
stumble into the coffee pot, the bus stop,
the close-mind gourd -
complacently divine, you'll find us
sitting, not dead,
relishing finger corn still hot
with Yeshua hoping I'll hold his cup,
though my chai is steaming full
in whose depths Rorschach wrestles
with murky devils new and old -
I swallow the last kernel my body represents
and the Lord looks betrayed
that nothing was saved.
ambling on down towards pumpkin morn,
chimney stubble, and ashen cheeks,
window smudges herald a bloody third dawn
whose sacrifice our morning greets
as I fork over thirty suspicious cents
for a glum and dismal paper
with naught save hellish news
of a father-forsaken earth,
and a cuckoo crows thrice on the hour
and I am not alone


I haven't written anything worth reading for almost a month. That's really rather embarrassing, and something I hope to rectify. When it comes down to a more full experience, life is a priority queue. I wrote in my journal a few things worth considering, including a passage on balance that is woefully incomplete, but has such silly, over-breathy sentences such as: "our foolish culture screams at us to fill only ourselves, and our childish comprehension of religion demands we only fill others, leaving us as useful as a broken see-saw."
Even though the sentence is a bit wonky, I appreciate the topic, and hope I have time to continue that train of thought.

Heliotrope

If I allow myself, the kaleidoscope of life might easily carry a negative image, a half-empty glass symbology. When I am thankful, I might feel guilty over those suffering, and when I cry out for help, I could feel shame at not considering all God’s providence. 

heliotrope

charioteer of gold

a solar snail solipsizing

over a cold and needy world:

shell out some warmth

along your sticky way -

rah the phoenix fire,

flimsy green necks turn

purple faces at your arcing egg -

boil us over easy

Heliotrope is my new favorite, though that may change in the next ten seconds. The sun turner, like a tiny sun-saint anchored and devoted: deep green your spades, digging through beams of light and sweetening the air.  But it’s the purple petals, the golden anther to the sun like an offering, an obsequious mirror, though you are none so shy or coy. 

Summer's Close

It’s amazing the different forms writing takes simply based upon what I’m reading at the moment, or what fascinates me, or how my days progress. As I encounter different stimulus, I find myself enamoured of certain facets of life, like angles on a beautiful gemstone or vantages on a ridge over a magnificent vista. A fleeting infatuation that my aesthetic teen dictates as love, for how can it be anything less?

Right now I’m reading an assortment of books: Gilead (Ems), The Sparrow (barely started), Fragile Things short stories by Gaiman (JG), and fluttering around with the attention of a fish for flowers over poetry. I’m probably not getting enough sleep, but summer is the season of love, not hibernation, and I’m more bear than marsupial – I’ve no tendency for estivation. I sleep poorly in toasty weather, and ever since my high fevers of this past Christmas, I’ve found myself waking up more and more drenched in sweat when using fewer and fewer blankets, or in chills when using more. I occasionally believe my sleeplessness is having an existential crisis, and inventing reasons for dragging me from the ocean depths of dream.

My journal lately is so hodgepodge, it’s certainly a testament to summer, sleeplessness, the wired and antsy reading regimen I’ve developed, relationship, and the ambiguous and divergent passions kindled by spreading myself thin over so many breads. Even now, I feel so tentatively tied to this topic, I almost wrote, as my next sentence: I haven’t even seen any waterfalls this summer; I do so want to see waterfalls afore the summer’s end. But what has that to do with the rest of this? Little, I expect.

There are many things to pray for this month, as it’s been bountiful in love and grace, but also hardship and pain. Matthew’s mother-in-law’s death, little brother’s going to college, P  getting a promotion and losing weekends, Ems starting school and the frustrations and angsts that attend that dramatic switch of lifestyle and scheduling, the continued changes of being a homeowner, friends moving from Bend to the valley, friends getting jobs and starting school, friends just continuing on in the norm and growing frustrated with the status quo or debating whether it’s worth a change in life to upset the balance of normalcy. Really, there are a lot of prayer requests, and as many joys if you remember to look for those, equally. There are always a lot of joys.

a people pauper, indigent of joy

holds a slim stack of papers

whose columns claw at the sky

and grunts, cold beneath the smoky night

without friend blankets or family fires

a lacrimae factory shivering and tired

he sneezes, allergic to life

until a cup, half full of empty wine

passed over from whoever

bears the stigmata tonight

saves some time for a fleeting life

ah ophelia, I loved you so

believe me well this time, and give up not