Today borders on two five-year anniversaries. Tomorrow marks Karen's official completion of treatment. Five days later, Noddfa Imaginings was formed. Like the bridge that Janus watches, it is a good day for me to look both back and forward.
About a month ago I was talking to a friend as we were working off the excess beer stock I'd picked up for Karen's party. He's the type of friend that sneaks up on you, the kind that you sit down with one day and find you've crossed some sort of threshold from acquaintance to close friend without ever realizing it. He and I met eleven years ago, at a game of course, through a mutual friend both of us have since lost touch with. He kept in contact during Karen's treatment as well as afterwards. He was one of the first to sign up for the e-mail list. We continue to game off and on as our lives permit.
He was asking me how writing was going after the chaos of the spring. This was before the floodgate opened that allowed me to finish "Terminal." I was telling him about the difficulties I'd had over the past few months and the decisions I had ahead. I'm always afraid the words will dry up, that my muse with flee screaming into the night. He looked at me and said, You have to write. It's like a compulsion with you, just something you have to do. It's in your personality. He said it in a way that said he both understood and wasn't worried.
And with that, I wasn't either. I knew he was right. Writing is not something I chose to do. It's something that chose me. Some days that's hard to remember that as my age settles on my shoulders like a knapsack slowly filling with sand as I wait for inspiration to strike.
Some days the empty parchment stares back at me smudged only by the smoldering light of another uninspiring dawn. Some days, the sting of rejection transforms into the sweet taste of artistic freedom. Or is that just the poison slipping deeper into my veins? Some days, after several eruptions nearly bury my desk, my notes metamorphose into a pile of karst-like blocks slowly eroding toward amnesia. Some days, I scramble up a midden of words whose meanings constantly shift and slide beneath my pen before I reach the top. Some days, the ink fades a little further from the page until, one morning, nothing remains of each line but the shadow of a memory.
Even then, bright blue ink courses through my veins, just waiting to redden with inspiration. All I have to do is slit my wrist and out it pours. All I have to do is dip my pen and bleed.
Perhaps that pen really is as mighty as the sword. Or in this case than the long spear of Lugh, the bright warrior of Irish mythology and namesake deity of this cross-quarter holiday. Whatever your blood-borne passion, I hope it brings you joy this Lughnasa.
© 2012 Edward P. Morgan III
Lughnasa 2012 - a reading (on YouTube)
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ReplyDeleteNotes and asides:
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I feel like I cheated a little on this one. I raided my stash of daily lines from a few years ago for almost all the best creative lines. Turns out they were spread throughout that year and were just waiting to be pieced together into something meaningful. This, kids, is why you keep a notebook, or a file of unused lines.
Janus is the Roman god of beginnings and transitions, as well as bridges, thresholds and gateways, and namesake of January, the month we in which we always look both forward and back.
Oh, and B, it was really nice to hang out with someone who understood. We need to do that again soon.
Edward has a bottle of blue ink and a fountain pen that uses it. For the Lughnasa message, we thought it might be nice to use those two items for the picture. We had two things working against us. Fading sun, and a spreading ink drop.
ReplyDeleteWhen I started looking for where to take the picture, the sun wasn't even out. But a few minutes later it did come out and I noticed it in our bedroom. We got out some of the paper we use for business cards for the bottom of the shot. Edward wanted a drop of ink below the pen so we used a bamboo skewer to drip some ink on the paper. With the sun on the bottle and paper, the background was pitch black. After a little scrambling, and shifting the pen and bottle and getting a drop of ink, we got a few shots. Then the sun faded, and the ink had spread too far. If one of these didn't work, we were going to try using artificial lighting.
Two shots looked like they would work. The first one showed the whole bottle and pen. The sun cast a gorgeous blue shadow behind the bottle, but not every shot showed that color. So I edited the shadow from one picture it did show in and put it in the other to get the color. In spite of my best efforts, all the dust specks didn't come off the bottle before we started, so those got edited out. That looked pretty good. Then I looked at the other images again. There was another option. This image cut off the top of the bottle, which was out of focus, but the pen was in sharp focus. With a little cropping and using the angle of the pen and the paper, and the rule of thirds, I got a much better composition. Again, a little color shadow editing, some removal of dust specs and we had our image.
Enjoy.
Think it all turned out very well...and congratulations to both of you!!
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