The Breath of Death

Sometimes I wonder if I died a while ago and just didn't realize it.

Things that would have once sent me a'shivering, songs, for instance, or seeing something so touching, now just aggravate a fuzzy space where my box of shivers once resided. It reminds me of something I read in Stephen King's Bag of Bones, about death making someone crazy.

Ever since I read that book, I've meant to read The Moon and the Sixpence by W Somerset Maugham. I believe I have the text on my Kindle, or perhaps my Nook, which I cleverly called Nookworm. I amuse myself without reason sometimes.

The rain has had me itching to write. Just sit down somewhere with a pack of cigarettes, a pot of coffee, and a bottle of whiskey and just write until my fingers go blue. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, my children keep me this side of complete madness, for which I am grateful, but when I'm not with them, when I'm driving or sitting at my desk in my cubicle at my job, I can imagine, perhaps too clearly, going insane with words and music and all my vices.

My e-mail is full of messages from writing websites of all sorts, with how-tos on beginnings, middles, endings, contacting agents, convincing publishers that I'm the one, descriptives, character analysis, building to a climax, etc. etc., but they don't tell me how to get past this reality and lose myself in whatever I want to create.

I feel most of us are the same...being broken down one dashed dream at a time, one disappointment, one heartbreak, one loss, one memory at a time, until the children we once were who believed in, hoped for and whispered magic are naught but ghosts pretending to still breathe, walking through our day-ins and repeats until we can just figure out how to get to the other side. My belly burns with indigestion or perhaps even an ulcer, but even that is muted, tickles the bridge of my nose and makes me want to cry, but I don't, because I can't feel anything anymore. Only my children bring me back to life, to reality.

I fear this for them.

Boxes

I've been writing so long, it makes me feel old.

. I have boxes and folders and notebooks and journals and piles of loose-leaf paper filled with poems, diary entries, barely-begun novels, ideas, theories, research....nothings. I began in middle school when my English teacher, Mrs. Garza, had the class write twenty poems and make them into a slam book of sorts.

At the time of each piece, I was feeling what I wrote. To me, it was the most profound write ever penned. But as I thumb through so many pages I get paper cuts but no boom. Heartbreakingly few of them seem worthy of sharing, and not a one reads immortal. It's a very humbling, discouraging reality, going through thousands upon thousands of poems and not only finding fault with all of them, but also seeing them for what they are: bitter bile spewed volatile in the moment, now only a sour stench on parchment.

I wanted to rip them all to shreds, burn each tiny piece and scatter the ashes in the wind, but a narcissistic, obsessive-compulsive part of me knows it is absolutely necessary to retain all documentation of every emotional fallout, every literary failure, every time I feel my life is worth chronicling.

Even if/when it's not.

Seanchai

My fingers linger over the letters on the keyboard; I'm hoping inspiration comes to me.

It amazes and disgusts me that I have been so keen for so long on writing something spectacular, something that would bring people not just back to books, but back to the magic on the pages, and yet I feel I have nothing to show for it.

I read White Oleander recently. It was a great book. I tore through it. It will remain with me for many years. But it wasn't...magic. No, in contrast, it was rather tragic, from beginning to end, with an ending that left me feeling disillusioned.

I love stories that dazzle, mesmerize, hypnotize... A great fantastical epic adventure that will take me somewhere else. Don't get it twisted, I love my life. I have four children, so every day is an adventure to me. I like my reads to be the same. As a child, they fueled my imagination, the stories I made up as I ran through the woods in Maine. It was a completely different place and time and it breaks my heart that my children will not grow up in the same manner. It was sparkly, glittery...my childhood.

However, as with the poems I write, it seems everything I write inevitably turns dark, leaving the words staining the page in blood instead of ink, or so it feels.

I am not just taken by the stories, either: the writers fascinate me, their inevitable evolution from the travelling storytellers of yore.

In Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, he was referred to as a gleeman (my personal favorite). Well, entertainer is probably a more accurate description, but still. Travelling storyteller. Strolling minstrel. Gandalf. Oh, yes, Gandalf. Sure, his main part of the story was wizard, but he did travel the countryside entertaining the little masses, and therefore he can add gleeman to his resume. Bard. Silvertongue from the Inkheart trilogy (and if you were previously unaware that this was a trilogy and Hollywood eviscerated it with their film version, you're missing out). Edward Bloom from Big Fish by Daniel Wallace. Jongleur - which, truth be known, is a new word for me as I looked up "gleeman" on thesaurus.com. It's a French word for a minstrel in medieval France and Norman England. Griot - African. Seanchai - Irish. This word I love because it reminds me of the Seanchan people from The Wheel of Time.

Scheherazade from One Thousand and One Nights.

Vyasa from the epic Mahabharata. "If you listen carefully, you'll be someone else."

Troubadour.

I'm not snooty about it, either. I love the storytellers in the movies, too. Monte Wildhorn from the movie The Magic of Belle Isle (which I am sorely sore about not actually being a book). Izzy in The Fountain (yes, I consider her a storyteller and if you haven't seen the movie that's a tragedy). I loved Reading Rainbow, by the way, and Mr. Roger's neighborhood.

I'm sure my exhaustive references bore you, but to me, they're the real heroes of every story. Because what would a story be without its narrator?

Did you know, by the way, that there is a National Storytelling Festival? I am shocked and a little too excited. I looked at the website, and I see they have a list of entertainers who tell stories and do skits and standups.

Oh my gosh, my dream team of storytellers, let me tell you, is ridiculous, but here's a few just for your amusement:

Henry Rollins
Morgan Freeman
Neil Gaiman
Mark Z Danielewski
Erin Morgenstern
James Rollins
Helena Bonham Carter

The festival would be set up like The Night Circus, and everyone would have chocolate turtles and candy apples. There would be a constant ambient lullaby in the background, a Tan Dun composition, perhaps, or Lindsey Stirling. Maybe she'd even be flitting around telling her own stories with her violin. It would have a smoky atmosphere, people would be laughing, and later the memory would be a hazy one but most definitely a fond one.

And on that note, I suppose I will leave you to your own imaginations, dreaming of wagons hobbling down rocky roads, carrying old men in long robes carrying music and fireworks in their wagons, and stories in their hearts. I want to be the kind of storyteller that dazzles someone to the point they almost believe in magic again.