⚡ March 9, 2016
The Sounds of Spring 🍃
There is sound, if not music, in the rattling of dead curled leaves caught in all the spider webs of winter when I open the windows for the first time this Spring. Music is only created by the live ones; sounds are what happens when the corpse or more politely, the corpus is rattled around and tossed in the webs of time. Descendants and buffs will try to interpret your songs, but the sublime music is long gone.
Look elsewhere for the music – look among the living. There are Tweets now, mechanical but as dependable as the songs of birds jibberishing outside in the bare trees. It is Spring! She is coming back to us and we know it somehow, even if science says it’s only the motion of the earth in space and nothing to do with the myth of fecund youth dancing in a pasture, in a circle, bare feet on softest moss.
Which is all to say that I would like to do some writing, but what kind? What kind of songs to sing? Since the gypsy spell has been lifted, I am free to write and publish my next novel. Especially now … since I’ve finally put Cleaning House up for sale in a few places.
Another brand-new-again sound to the first opened window of Spring is the country road vibrating with huge tractor-trailers of immense power, going up the hill with enthusiasm, a long straight road ahead for the guys and ladies with muscles up and down their arms. Many of them have good hearts and curious minds. They listen to a lot of radio. In fact, some of them take the long and leisurely way round to their destinations, country roads linked one to another on an obscure map of the United States, one accordion-fold at a time, just to prolong that radio-on-the-road experience.
So now my main job, now that I’m back in the hut, is to get my own next novel on its feet and out the door. As for the cursed Nero, one among three cursed novels … I’ll put those in a jar and see if they mellow or mate or rot. Meanwhile, I’m doing what I always do when faced with a big job: I organize. By lining up all my known ingredients, I can then determine the size and purpose of the project. It’s no different with words and ideas, I guess. Maybe. I don’t know.
When in doubt, go back to whatever you do know. With comfort and certainty, and that’s why I always end up here in the blog, which used to be an online diary or journal, which used to be a paper journal. It’s all the same, even if you’re eventually going to need an archaeologist to show the ways of translation and thumb drives. The image that accompanies this entry is one such example of literary archeology, so important in this digital age. It’s from an article in a journal online, not to be confused with a personal online journal like this one.
It’s called Mammon and was drawn at the end of the 18th Century by William T. Horton. Mammon is described in the Bible as “money or material wealth and is associated with the greedy pursuit of gain.” The Wiki/Bible goes on to tell us that Mammon was considered a deity; one of the seven princes of hell, in fact.
Just look at that face! Drawn centuries away and inhabited as if from an Akashic blueprint, we might want to ponder our participation in this particular election carefully and get out the door and into a voting booth, if only out of an inbred historical fear of serpents worn as scarves, vulgarian fingers that point, shortly. Beware the girly man with beautiful features and cotton-candy hair. 🐔