The Owl's Secret -- afterthoughts

One day, after a nice lunch, my friend Blake said to me. "Hey! Why don't you write a story about this owl." So I did, or rather tried too. For The Owl's Secret is more of an emotional impact statement than a story. Me processing the impact of a dear friend sharing parts of her life's story. Sadly not many people have even been able to get through it...one, maybe two... Sorry about that... But I will say that it is one of the deepest and most heart-felt pieces that I have ever written. I cannot yet read part 09 without crying.

For as long as I can remember, I have used my stories to process, to deal with life. Sitting on the swing-set and staring at the cracks in the asphalt..seeing not urban decay, but tiny rivers and kingdoms. Looking up to see the zeppelin descending to make me a part of its crew.... All that I took in from books and movies was, and still is, packaged and put on shelves in my mind to be used in processing the emotional content of whoever and whatever life brings my way. Sometimes only a page of notes written and cast aside in a few moments....sometimes a whole vast world elaborated over decades...

Anyway, if you are reading this, then I hope that you have read The Owl's Secret in it's entirety. At the end we find the key to the magic...a power which connects the two main characters in the present day, projecting them back in time to re-make the past as they would have it be. She found the book first, but did not tell him because she did not want to hurt his pride. She attempted a few spells, like invisibility and headache-removal, but the one we do not see is this: after she was taken, she wished her true self to go and be safe in a place where he would be able to find her. Which of course he did.

Silvanus

Tell me. tell me, good Silvanus,
What the fauns are bringing in;
Perhaps it is that we should join them,
And with that the song begin.
Dancing, dancing in the forest,
'Ere the morning stars were made;
Piping, piping comes the music,
Here ye now before it fade.
Were you there in early morning,
'Ere the shining dew was spread?
Were you there when man awakened?
Will you live to see him dead?
Yes, Silvanus, I am coming,
Wait you just a moment here;
I will join you when I'm ready,
There is one I would be near.
Eros daemon has compelled me,
Onward, upward through the sky!
Now I rest, for I am weary;
Let me drink or I will die.
Many things that you can tell me,
Many things I want to know.
You will lead and I will follow,
Take me where I want to go.
We will leave the frozen city,
Take the trail to forest land;
I am sad no one will join us,
Yet tis good you don't command.
Yes, I know it, none can follow,
Save them that desire to go;
You can only point in silence,
And to us your vintage show.
I will sit with you in silence,
Under starry moon-lit sky.
There it shall be in the morning
Fauns will find us where we lie.
They will come with feast and music;
We will dance around a ring:
Then we all shall sit together,
Have a cup of wine and sing!
We will talk of buried treasure,
Elf and daemon, fire and sword.
Then we all shall call together
To the shining heaven-lords.
And perhaps they'll come and join us
Lead us to their hidden land.
There we all will live together,
Nourished by Her loving hand.
Come, Silvanus, we must hurry,
Or we'll miss the feast today!
They only come when they are ready.
When that is, I cannot say.

29 November 1979 (found in a draft of a letter to Barb Black)

Within safe borders

Just for a moment, let us peek through the broken window of an abandoned farm building on a warm muggy summer afternoon. There in the woods, out of sight of the road, two young people have set up what could only be described as the palace of the kingdom of their dreams. If we look closely, we can see a slender girl in a powder blue sun dress, wearing a simply woven garland of meadow flowers. She wags her finger in mock seriousness at a pale brown haired young man, who appears to share her love of freckles. He is wearing a painted Wehrmacht helmet, and has a cardboard imperial eagle pinned awkwardly to his dark green polo shirt. Suddenly, he drops to his knees and clasps his hands together as if in prayer. The girl pivots gracefully to pick up what looks like a hockey stick, and taps him gently on the left shoulder. He pauses to adjust his thick, smudged glasses, then looks up at her with a radiant, heart-melting smile. What is going on here? The girl is a princess, not yet a queen. The boy is at the beginning of his journey as a knight. As he stands and they move together towards the door, she hands him what appears to be a blue M&M... Let us leave them for now in their dreams, as they prepare for adventures within the safe borders of their kingdom.

Wordstream I

Well aloft aloft i float suddenly as if my weight has fallen all away and at last along the way of life i can soar free of all earthly dross and societal constraints imposed on me by gods and ancestors so long age that most have forgotten how they ever came to be but they are o yes they are and they are here with us every day as we walk in the mud and the rain ahh now yes not today for me because i have escaped for this brief moment and soared up to the lofty heavens where only the gods have been allowed to dwell along with the holy ones of earth that we humans have elevated but why o why just those and why not others for to limit is to control and for my brief moment i do so want to feel the freedom of the weightless clouds and look as i choose down to see those dear friends i cherish and say to them come, o please come along with me to the golden gates of this paradise eden wonder space, a magic circle where we can all meet as spirits who are truly able to commune with one another and freely give the empathetic love and life support that we all so feel the lack of in our daily lives upon the surface of that often cold, wet and dark planet out of which our bodies formed to live but a brief span of life and then to plunge away into what o what we cannot say for sure but our hope remains as the substance of our dream that we will then at last be able to float freely on the wonderous places that our imagination shows us.

Ending to a story I wanted to write...

There was no time to think. "Go, NOW!," roared the elderly dwarf, as he staggered against the elfcarven walls of the ruined crypt. Rin just stared at him, she could not move from the spot she had chosen to die. How had this happened? The ogres were closing in, and would soon overwhelm their small party. Then, somebody grabbed her arm, nearly tearing it out of its socket. She turned her head. It was Keta the warrior, Keta the strong elven princess, who had endured so much abuse from the ogres, and from her own people. Now, Keta pulled her down the hall. Rin stumbled after, down the damp passage to the core, the goal of their quest. This was the place that her teacher has spoken of, the first home of the elves. In the distance, she heard Gehrhelm give the throttling cry of the dwarf clan that had cast him out. Raz was there too. He would know what to do; he was sarcastic and rude, but always had a plan. Rin lost sight of them. They were in the core, a round room full of shadowed carvings of lives long past. "Here it is," shouted Keta, adding earnestly, "do it!" But do what? Rin did not know what she was supposed to do, her teacher had never told her. He hid much about the past, about the magic that cursed her. Oh Goddess! What was she supposed to do? Keta stared at her, "What are you waiting for! They can't hold them for long! Rin!" The girl gasped, then looked up at Keta. On the journey, Rin had grown to love Keta with all her heart. The elf had become her mother, sister, and friend...all the relationships she had never been able to have in her short life. How could she fail her now. Shouts and growls grew closer in the passage. Raz and Gehrhelm were probably... Aah! She could not think about it! Rin suddenly stood up and faced the center of the chamber. There she saw the dead Arcus, the heart of the elven city. Once it had throbbed with magic, wild uncontrolable magic. Like that which resided within her...her curse... Rin knew what she had to do. As Keta fought the ogres as they swarmed into the chamber, Rin hurled the magic out of her heart. It streamed across the distance to the Arcus, then fanned out, flooding the chamber, burning the ogres to ashes. Keta will live, thought Rin, she is an elf...my love...my....

A great distance away, in an ivy covered tower by the sea, an old mage slumped in his favorite chair. He gently touched the burn marks caused by Rin when she had struggled to control the elven magic he had placed in her to save her life. Now he knew...he knew that borrowed life had served a good purpose, had given back to the elves what had been theirs. It was all that could have been done, wasn't it? Yet still he cried for the loss of his most troublesome pupil.

Paracosm---fail!

Throughout my library lie the bleached bones of obsessions past, still waiting for the time when I will bring them to life again. The issue is, how many of these bones can I return to the masoleum of human thought & experience? And how many will I visit again, if I am granted future years of exploration?

Why did I fail to create a paracosm? Deity knows, I tried. I pull from the corner of the room a map of Iargalon. At 34"x 102", it is (almost) the largest work I have ever created. In fact, it was even bigger once....

At first, I tried to place myself into the stories that I was reading. There is still a log somewhere of all the miles I walked in Middle-Earth. As a "mary sue"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sue i did not place myself with any of the main characters. I wanted to have my own adventures, and explore interesting parts of the map. So i did actually walk all of those miles arould the grounds of the chlidrens' home where I lived. But the adventures took place all in my imagination.

With Dante's Commedia, my experience was similar. I explored Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven (aided, to be sure, by the illustrations of Gustav Dore). But, again, I had my own adventure, seeing people I wanted to see...envisioning them in Dante's landscape. With each of there authors, JRRT and Dante, I performed the magick of conjuring the world through their words, and entered therein to explore. Here it can be clearly seen that I was not strong enough to pull away and create my own unique world, my paracosm.

In high school, I tried to break free from my influences. A poem called Protogenesis was created, destroyed, and re-created, as I went through phases of "enchurchment." A re-casting of the basic Bible narrative, with Tolkenian touches, this work focused on the loss of parental guidance, and the desire to find a new Eden in a cruel world. Only the apocalypse could bring in the longer-for new world.

Later, the Rand/Wissar narrative was also heavily JRRT influenced. The more detailed sucessor to this, the Iargalon World, presented kingdoms expanding to subdue indigenous peoples and set up new realms all over the world. The Iargalon map got so big because the expansion continued unabated, untill it became impossible to continue, due to the size of the map. Iargalon was basically a Biblical-type kingdom set in a map of New England, which was attached to S.France/NE Spain. Greece was attached to Italy.... From the original kingdom crusader armies set out to explore and conquer, only stopping when larger empires blocked their way.

The last narrative paracosm I attempted was Irland/Ladakha. This started as an island realm, based on Ireland being conquered by Anglo-Saxon types. They set up kingdoms, were converted to "Christianity," and were then themselves conquered by invaders. I later transported this whole realm to the area of Tibet and re-wrote it, as works supposedly surviving from the "fall" of the imagined kingdom. This book http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_the_Country_of_Albania was a huge influence.

Finally, since the time I read about the Bronte family and their paracosm Angria/Gondal, I have wanted to try to create a world with someone else. A few years ago I tried this with a person whom I had known for a long time, who had a great imagination, and who would not be freaked out by the proposal. She wanted to do it, so I started a story and gave her a note-book. But after a month, she gave it back to me and said she could not do it. I was really crushed by this, because, at my age, I don't see any other person with the vision and acceptance of imagination coming along to make the attempt. But I had to accept this failure and move on.

Even now I am drawn in to the worlds created by others. And there are so many more of them now..in manga, anime, movies, video games, books &c My personality leads me to be drawn in to them, to conjur them in my mind, rather than to create my own world. My last hope was the shared world, a world created by two people accountable to one another, and, sadly, that moment has passed. So this is the story of my paracosm fail...I will always wish to be a JRRT or Henry Darger, but in reality I will always be stuck in the dreams of others.

Time to Think

While I am at home on vacation, I have time to think. On a normal weekend, Saturday is spent recovering from the work-week past, and Sunday is spent worrying about the work-week to come. This is why I believe in the 3-day-weekend...i need that pure, untouched day in the middle, unconnected with making a living.... let that concept go hand in hand with property tax reform, politicians! and social justice for non-traditional-americans! aah, but i don't want to soap-box politics..at least not till fall...

How do we view the world around us? We take in signifiers from our surrounding society and modify them as we add our own experiences. I'm not saying this as an absolute, but as an explorer of human consciousness. We create models and destroy them, but all the models show a facet of truth. Right now I am fascinated by Lakoff &Johnsons' books on metaphoric thought. How many have I used so far...."have time"--possession of an object, "(time)spent"--time as money, "concepts (going) hand in hand"----well, you get the idea.

The world view of some is shaped by the paracosm(s) they create. Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracosm defines paracosm as an imaginary world--developed during childhood--and continuing over time. Paracosms are a bit different from fantasy worlds because the person who creates them does so for survival, rather than for entertainment. The elements of a paracosm arise out of one's everyday experiences with the society around us, but these experiences are woven on a faerie loom. This loom contains the desire to create, as well as the desire to reshape and control. Those of us who create paracosms do so because we are unsatisfied with the world as it is. This can be for a variety of reasons...the death/departure of a parent, or a close friend, illness, injury, betrayal... The key, I believe, is having the knowledge that YOU can re-write the narrative, you can use the words, the ideas, the elements around you to bring about the world that you desire, and having the will to do so. The Brontes' did it, Henry Darger did it, as did JRRT, William Blake and Dante Aligheri.

A key to this is...how do you read a text? To gather information? To be entertained? Or to live? In my own experience, reading is an act of magick. By that I mean that the words on a page are a conjuration of thoughts, they "become real" in the very act of reading them. I believe that this is how writing was viewed by society when the art was first invented. As the writing "becomes real" it is like a seed planted in the mind. We each have our own ideas and histories about what the words mean, so these seeds will grow in a variety of ways according to the hearers' experiences. What this brings forth in us depends on our personality. Some wish to re-create what they are reading by acting out, by writing our own version, like a fanfiction, but some use what they have read to re-create the world as they see it. This truly is high magick.