A Writer’s Rites

On that eleventh day
sadly he told us
the war against terror is begun
My God
I said
there’s to be more killing!

But the other day
someone else told us
the war and terror are over
Thank God
I said
there’ll be no more killing!

On another day
some others told us
wasn’t his plans that did it
No matter
I said
there’ll be no more killing!

The very next day
still others told us
the hell might go on forever
You mean
I said
there’s to be more killing?

Just yesterday
this one told us
the promise can’t be kept
just yet
he said
there will be more killing.

I said
if the truth be told
it seems
nobody
will tell us
when
there’ll be no more killing.

wgb

(An excerpt from The Last Andy)

Slowly, I raised the lantern until it was even with my face. I turned the knob and the door swung inward. Still holding the lantern high, I stepped through the doorway and entered the room. 

The floor was a sea of mud. I sank in it almost to my ankles. I had to struggle to lift my feet so I could walk.

I faced the wall at the rear of the room. There were shapes. Too dark to see. I raised the lantern higher.  People? Trees? Was that a horse?

I moved closer, lifting my legs high to release my feet from the mire. The wall was teeming with paintings of half-size human figures. A vast mural of writhing, distorted bodies. Panic-stricken faces. Some without arms and legs. Some without heads. Those without limbs slithering on top of each other, struggling upward. The headless stood on severed heads reaching their arms upward to some unseen savior. All of them were seeking to escape. All of them stared with eyes and mouths open in silent terror at the wall to my left.

 I turned to look. What they sought to escape was another figure—short, lumpish, dark. A man? I moved closer until he could see a face. Its eyes were the color of rotting lemons. Its cheeks sunken under high cheekbones. Gray, pursed lips. A long, thin mustache that fell below a scarred chin. On his forehead, the blade of an axe was embedded from the hairline to the bridge of his nose. A swarm of hideous, yellow demons poured out of the incision on a river of blood and grey matter. Above them rode a headless man on a large white horse. He held an axe with a flame in place of its blade.

The ugly little man carried a large sack in one hand. In the other, he held a long-handled axe. A battle-axe with a double blade. 

I sensed that I once knew what was in the sack. But now I couldn’t remember. I began to groan and shuffle backwards. I must leave this place. I was surrounded by death. I was in danger. 

As I moved backward, the lantern lit the area at the feet of the hideous man. Another human head. I stared at its portrait. Blue-green eyes gazed back at him, ambiguously, mysteriously. A young man. Brown hair, brown eyebrows. Strong nose. A thin-lipped, determined mouth. I moved the lantern closer. It was a face I’d seen before, a face I could never mistake. The face broke the dark silence. It screamed a high piercing scream at him.

I screamed back. It was my face.

Emily Dickinson

“Follow your bliss. There’s something inside you that knows when you’re in the center, which knows when you’re off the beam or on the beam. And if you get off the beam to earn money, you’ve lost your life. And if you stay in the center and don’t get any money, you still have your bliss.”~Joseph Campbell, Mythologist

Rejection is the Evil that haunts all writers. Some of us succumb and turn off the word processor, never to return. Most of us, however, keep trying, keep hoping, keep going. We write because it’s who we are. It’s a life. No matter that, too often, it’s not a living.

A young Emily Dickinson, in 1866, gathered together all the poems she had written and hand-carried them to a publisher. He rejected all of them. Instead, he offered to teach her grammar. Emily politely refused the offer and continued to write the rest of her life only for herself. After her death, her poems were found bundled in a cloth bag, hidden under her bedroom carpet.

She once wrote, “Getting there is going there. The journey is all, not the destination.”

Notes from my moleskine:

I can’t think of anything,

truthfully, 

any more beautiful

than your swirly brown hair.

Though I’ve thought about it

endlessly,

nothing’s as beautiful,

nothing can compare.

Not roses in morning.

Nor butterflies after noon.

Not daisies on mountains

or shimmering fountains

can match ringlets so fair.

Not combs or ribbons

or even tiaras

will do for such beautiful hair

So I have decided,

thoughtfully,

I will buy you mirrors

for your curly brown hair.

Mirrors it will be.

So you can dance in them

and then

everyone can see

your beautiful,

so

swirly

curly 

ringlety 

brown hair.

(An excerpt from Chapter 20 of The Last Andy)

I was exhausted. My alarm clock said four. I felt a dull heaviness in my arms and legs. Sleep. I needed to sleep. Hours of unbroken sleep.

 I sat down in a chair and put my head down on my desk. I pressed my face into the crook of my arm and drifted off.

I saw the two of us walking, side by side. It seemed like we had made good progress, Grandfather and me. And now we were at the end of the road.

We stood looking at what had once been a village.  Burnt timbers were heaped in clumps where cottages had stood, and a pile of stone where the church had been, the jagged stump of its steeple gaping at the sky.  My mental projector began flashing stark black and white images across my imagination:  Women and children locked inside a church, hiding from Nazi invaders. A soldier lofts a flaming torch into the belfry. The steeple bursts into flames, then the roof. A grenade is hurled against the heavy church doors. They explode inward. In the street, gallows have been erected and the village priest stands blindfolded, noose around his neck, his cossack in tatters, waiting quietly for the trapdoor to open to his death. On the stairs leading up to the gallows platform stand three naked women, their heads crudely shaved, leaving clumps of brown stubble and jagged red scars on their scalps. They each wear a large crucifix that hangs between their breasts. It is all that is left to identify them as nuns.

My silent film ended and I watched as my grandfather walked slowly up to the gallows, still standing at the edge of the village square. He bowed his head and crossed himself. Tears washed down his unshaven face. His shoulders shook with sobs.

After a while his shaking stopped and he held up a hand to me, signaling me not to follow. He walked across the square and into the ruins of one of the cottages.

A dark figure emerged from the rubble to meet him. I moved quickly across the square and stood at the edge of the destroyed building. I saw the man clearly. He was short. He stood, head tilted back, ape-like arms hanging in front of him, holding a two-edged axe. He stared at my grandfather. His face became a dark shadow.

Who was this man? This stranger? And then I saw the eyes. I knew the eyes.  I had seen them before. Where? I couldn’t remember.

The main raised the menacing axe above his head. Run, Grandfather, run!

I looked on helplessly as he turned to run, but stumbled and fell.

And then I watched the axe move at blinding speed in a descending arc, a ripple of flashing metal, a black and white rainbow from over the stranger’s shoulder into my grandfather’s body. Thaack! The sound penetrated my sleep like an axe slicing through a thick slab of oak. Thaack! The man dealt another blow to my grandfather and raised the axe above his head in mock triumph.

 “Grandfather?” I cried out to him.

There was no answer. He lay dead on the burnt ground.

#

Try and be a sheet of paper with nothing on it. Be a spot of ground where nothing is growing, where something might be planted, a seed, possibly, from the Absolute. Stop the words now. Open the window in the center of your chest, and let the spirits fly in and out.

~Mowlana Jalaladdun Rumi, 13th century Persian mystic and poet