My Book at Last

I actually began writing yesterday. I spend most of the day in front of my computer and my book started to come alive. I decided to scrap the idea of writing fully from the beginning. Now I am just chronicaling the actual people and events of my story. This has really turned out to be the best thing that I could do. My story has developed in complexity and seriousness. I will have a skelton before I actually begin writing the scenes. I would have thought that this would be a soulless way of approaching it, but it's actually working very well. Wish me luck!

Heart Beat

A met another ghost on Monday. The ghost of an unborn child who haunts his parents relentlessly. I have a new friend from school. I wasn't really sure if I wanted to be friends with her and had been brushing her off in a careless and hurtful manner. There goes the image of Meredith the kind. One day she asked me why I shut her out so often. I must admit that I often let a curtian fall in front of my eyes, mind, and heart whenever she started down a tangent that didn't coo to my fancy. I answered blandly that I wasn't entirely sure if I wanted to be friends with a person who held some of the opinions she had demonstrated. I could see her swallow and tread carefully with her next few words. She described her life in Sweden, thousands of miles away from her family in Uganda and gave me an image of loneliness that cut me deeply. What a brute I was! When I was young and untarnished I always thought of friendship as something to be offered to those who needed it.. not those who were cool enough, or who fitted into a preconceived image of what a friend should be. Certainly one of my very best friends doesn't fit the bill.. but somehow that never mattered.. I loved her to the ground anyway. So I took her into my heart.

On Monday she called my celly. I was at school surfing on a natural high. The life was coursing through me and I was shining. Immediatley I heard that panic seeping through the phone. Contractions. The baby was only 5 1/2 months old.. too early. Way too early. I went immediatley to take her to the hospital with my heart chewing away at my throat. When I got there she was standing with a stocking covering her hair and a bathrobe on.. nothing else. She seemed rooted to the place with fear. We joked a bit and I made her life despite everything, then we drove to the hospital.

In the examination room the doctor squirted some cold gel onto her stomach then pressed an instrament that looked like a dildo to me against her tummy.

A heart beat.

It was regular, alive, unbelievable. It beat proudly through the silent room echoing in the ears of every person present. A heart beat. That was the baby.

The doctor, a thick beefy woman with stubby fingers and very wide nails smiled a hearty smile. She launched into an explanation of how in the sixth month of pregnenecy there is a section of the lower abdomen that is often over streached and hurts quite a bit... Nothing to worry about.

Then she did a physical exam and her face changed. While we watched my friends insides statically on the screen, we all saw it. A distinctive contraction. The doctor couldn't measure the cervix because it was changing size. And still the heartbeat. It was still there, reverberating trough the empty chambers of our hearts.

It is worse than I thought at first. The chance of you loosing the baby is very high.

But not certain, I said... pleaded.

Very high.

The doctor left the room to consult with a more senior doctor and my friend sat there, tears streaming down her cheeks. Her husband, who had joined us after we got to the hospital sat there stupidly, frozen to his seat. I gave him a solid jabb in the leg and pointed at his wife.

Go home and wait it out, said the doctor upon her return. We don't know why this happens sometimes and there is nothing we can do about it. Come back and check yourself in when the baby starts to come.

We left feeling desolate and a little sick to our stomaches.

And the heartbeat, that wonderful and dreadful heartbeat, echoed in our ears.

Icy Deeps

On my way out to the barn I drive by a small, dark pool. It sits on the outter side of a curve in the winding road and seems to be carved out the forrest. Last spring there was a layer of ice over the dark water long after the large lakes and the ocean were melted and now, in the fall, the ice has begun to grow like cancer. It streaches over the surface seperating the icy deeps from the outside world.

I notice this seemingly harmless pond every time I drive by. The cows don't pay any special attention to it. The birds fly over it unaware. Yet there is a feeling of darkness that seeps through the still surface.

Two days ago I began imagining a mermaid kindgom under the ice. My mermaids were not sexy sea virgins, but the stolen souls of heroine addicts, taught, streached, bony. Their luminescent skin enemated a silvery green hue and their dark eyes sucked the light from the surrounding world into their void. I shiver in my mind.

I want to write something about this lake, inconspicious and shrowded in mystery. I want to know what breaths in the frigid, lifeless deeps. Days and days go by and my book sits still.. still and lifeless as this little lake.. and I am filled with longing.. heroine? Writing? Cold?

My Unicorn

The unicorn.. a mythical creature spawned from an overactive imagination and longing. A horn that neutralizes poison and is wholey good, strong and wild... The unicorn is an untameable creature.

The one who slips away.

I wonder if we could tame this unicorn if we would begin to notice that its stall needs to be cleaned just as a regular horses does, and that its coat sheds in the spring and that everyonce in a while it gets a gummy eye infection. Or perhpas not. Perhaps it shimmers in the moonlight and awakens the lust and longing within us. Perhaps.

I have a unicorn.. a ghostly creature that lives in the periphery of my consciousness... slipping in and out of my hazy thoughts and dreams.. always functioning as a meter stick for my self worth and finding me lacking.

How strange that an imaginary creature is to thoroughly embedded in my unconscious... that a creature born of a wilderness that is untamable, the mind, that is perfect beyond conception, that shimmers with light, should be what i measure myself with. I have never properly laid hands on this beast. My sweaty, dusty, now totally white Gus is so much more real.. so much more loveable... yet it is the unicorn by which I measure myself.

Oh to face it and feel the roughness of its horn, smell the pungency of it's cloved hooves... I want it to step out of the shadows and show itself! Then I want the sun to shine throught he dust and watch it dissipate into nothingness.. the faced ghost laid to rest.

Uninspired

I'm having a bit of a problem... I have lost my belief in my book :(.. not that I can actually write it or anything.. but in the essence of it. Over the last year I have come to believe more and more that it is next to impossible to get away from things that were hardwired into your being at an early age. Yes we all have control over our own destiny to a certain extent.. but it is very hard to see our own weaknesses and quirkes... we're too close.. and they are so incrediably deeply imbeded into our psyche's that they are part of the way that we think, breath, interact, feel, make love... everything about us has a trace of our child self shining through.. like a ghost. I don't have much time to write more now.. but I have a lot of thoughts on this subject.. so I'm sure I'll get back to it.

Blogger Thrown In Jail

This is absolutly astounding. In the western world we take so many things utterly for granted. Yet all over the world, millions of people have their every move scrutinized. I feel as if my blog is a totally private thing. Perhaps my friends and family read it once in a while, but really who has the time or cares? Not many people. For Abdel Kareen Soliman, posting a blog entery was equivalent to waving a flag in the face of a tyrannical governemnt saying "Throw me in jail... for 4 years!"

Below is the link to the article:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6385849.stm

Ghosts

I have this idea about ghosts... not ghosts as in kasper the friendly ghosts.. ghosts as in memories and impressions that follow us through our daily activities and affect the way we experience everything. Words are like this too. Peter and I had an interesting conversation the other day about the word bizzar. When I hear that word a song with the lyrics "How bizzar, how bizzar," pops into my head. Peter, on the otherhand things about Pulp Fiction. Wow. My theory about words is that each and every one is a carries with it a shadow, ghost words, feelings, memories, connotations. The difference of one word can change the whole meaning. And literature.. it is litered with ghosts... other books that have inspired ideas and thoughts, discourse between fiction both contemporary and not, private and public. Then when one deals with the idea of haunting as a specific theme in a book.. the idea of shuddering, intangible undertones can be followed from the smallest microcosm to the largest macrocosm.. just as the levels of life begin with a cell and extend to a galexy... or perhaps life begins with a mitochondria and ends with some infinitly large entity.

So many ghosts go unnoticed... we are attracted to a certain kind of man, but have no idea why. We love the colour green, but don't realize until our late teens that the foundation of our delight in this colour is vanity... it brings out the luscious tones of our eyes. We follow specific behaviour patters without realizeing that they are simply the result of thousands of years of behavioural evolution. So often, we are haunted and we don't even know it. I know many people that like to think they are operating freely, with their eyes open and their minds engaged. I seriously doubt if there is a single person alive who is actually able to do this. What colours do you like? How do you view your body? Even someone who has attempted to mentally expunge sociatial expecations of body and body image is most likely still very attached to the human image.

There was a G.I. Joe comercial on television when I was little... it would give some message to the kids, then declare, "Now you know.. and knowing is half the battle." Knowing really is half the battle. How often weakensses plague us unaware. Simply realizing it is there and seeing it. Ah. You. Weakness. Ghost. Be Gone. And it is done. Of course it is not always that easy, but sometimes sunlight is needed to display the dust that covers us all.

I sat down to write about Sun Lit Dust and my computer screen happened to be covered in this magical mythical substance. I remember the first time I ever noticed dust in the air. I was small, I'm not sure how small, and I was soaking up the warmth of the sun as it shone through a large window at our family cottage. It was penetrating my body and my breath was slowing. I lazily opened my eyes and noticed that the air was chaulked full of stuff. What was it? I reached up with my hand and tried to catch some, but there was nothing there. All this dust in the air. It must be there all the time, moving in and out of our lungs and blood, but never visable. It is a substance that makes up a large part of our environment, yet we rarely see it. After that glimps though, I know it's there. Just as it litters the screen of my computer this very moment.

Somone said once that, "We live each day in a virtual reality of our own creating." I like to think of this dust as mine. My embodiment of the ghosts that haunt me. My dust has a bit of a sparkle to it.. almost like miniscule snow particals glittering in the winter light.

In the very last scene of my book, Melanie takes Emily by the hand and lead her out of the shadows and into the sun.. where the sun shines clear through the waif. All that remains is a cloud of sun lit dust, which drifts aimlessly away in the languid summer air. The ghost, when recognized, is nothing.

Perhaps it isn't really that seeing or knowing is half the battle, but that the battle is truely seeing or knowing. I think there is a huge lag time between seeing some proof with our eyes, and understaning it in our hearts. It is the sight of the heart that really counts.

No matter how many times I wipe the dust of my screen.. it will still be there, altering my view of the words I write and the way I feel about them... but at least I can see it. I know that I see the world through a cloud of particals... my skin and the skin of those I love, fluff from the sweaters I wear, hair from my dog and cat, pollen form the plants near my home, salt and water from the sea and lakes that are near where I live.. all of these things fill the air between me and everything I think I see.