“The wild wind howled and the full moon shined thru holes in the billowing clouds as they passed overhead. A misty fog lay on the moors below.”
That’s about all I can get. The rest is hidden, occluded.
I can do the words. Invective. That word appeared this morning like magic while rolling around on my back, aligning my spine with the true north and south.
Maybe I’m going back to poetry. That’s how I started out. It was my first love. Simple, sensible, opaque, enchanting in meaning and sound, enigmatic, brave enough.
I can still read, in short bursts, until it gets too incoherent and I lose the thread, then I pick up my pen and write something. Like “The wild wind howled and the full moon shined thru holes in the billowing clouds” and wonder where that wants to go. A werewolf story? A lonely traveler walking thru the moors enveloped in fog obscuring trees and stream and sky? An owl calls. That’s all I got. I don’t know why the owl called, what it was trying to say and to who. Who, who?
My grandparents are unknown to me except for a few encounters with Nettie in her dotage. She was mean and judgmental and extremely stubborn. Not a lot to learn from her. All the others are lost behind the curtain of history - there, but inside, still alive in me in a way. Maybe that’s why I would like to meet them. Whoever they were. I would like to have a giant family reunion, a jamboree, all those old ancestors gathered together, both sides, going back 8 or 10 generations. That would be a hoot.
Sit down for a meal, a proper feast and argue about religion and politics. Oh! That would be a humdinger. Worthy of a novel. Six hundred pages. No pictures, just in your mind where you see these impossible people altogether in one scene trying to make sense.
Somerset, England was the source of some of my English forbears, and Mayflower Pilgrims. Pittsylvania, Virginia on my father’s side. Dirt poor farmers probably. So was my mom’s side but they had William Bradford and Anita Bryant so they were superior to the pig farmers and sorghum growers. Somehow. Anyways everybody would have their story and if you go back far enough it all merges into magic and mysticism and animism because that’s where we all came from and stories around the fire of fairies and elves, monsters and trolls and a full moon on a foggy night over the moors.
So there’s that and my pen is running out of ink. Good ole Pilot G-2 #10. Puts out alot of ink, will have to go with the alternate here soon to keep my narrative flowing if it is a narrative might be more of a diatribe or a diorama. Maybe a memoir.
Surely to the #7 then, finer nib. But it’s low too. Maybe I’ve inscribed enough. So convenient, the self-contained ball point pen. No more dipping the quill in the ink well and writing until it went dry. Dip again. They wrote the Declaration of Independence like that. That’s what it says in the picture.
No ball point pens in 1776. That would make it slower and more deliberate. Consideration. Quaint. And when the nub grew blunt, sharpen it with a knife and keep going.
So I guess what I’m trying to say here is I don’t know what I’m talking about. Just trying to flow with the words in my head, coming from the muse, the mystery, the divine infinite or wherever the words come from. We are word people after all. We make signs and signals with our marks. I have 3 preachers in my family tree, men of letters. They all made marks on paper - writing their sermons. Plus William Bradford. He wrote Of Plymouth Plantation, the story of the Pilgrims.
The Cherokee Indian, Sequoyah, invented a writing system for the Cherokee language after he saw the power of the written word that the white people had. He taught it to his people and within a few years most Cherokee could read and write in their native language. This literacy helped the Cherokee survive the trauma of colonization and genocide.
It became a trend. Other Native American tribes like the Cree invented their own written script using Sequoyah’s invention as a model. His work influenced the creation of 21 scripts for more than 65 languages as far away as Africa and China.
Wow.
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the podcast music is from this amazing Cafe De Anatolia collection :: 3:24-9:33
