Failure…
So, I came back half a day earlier than I’d expected… Those are the good news, in fact, the only good news…
I can’t say I had fun, and well… everything was a disaster. To top this off, I’m expected to go there again in Monday. I do have some free time now to finish up the ninth chapter for ‘What lies unborn’ but forgive me I won’t. I’m not in the mood now for writing. Of course, since I will be missing in Monday as well, it means that sooner or later in this weekend I’ll have to finish it off. But as I have elevated procrastination to new heights, and right now I really, really, don’t feel like writing, that means Sunday.
Also I was kinda more despaired than what I’m now on the way back. And since it was a lengthy travel. I found some time to actually write something. It is a poem of a not-so-pleasant memory of mine, but I sincerely hope you’ll enjoy it.
The day I saw her coming bright,
my heart she stopped, she took my sight.
Her angel wings behind her spread,
beneath them hid a dagger red.
Her eyes, jewels, true sapphire,
my soul they set on fiery fire.
Her perfect smile of pure-white pearls,
stole me away from friends and girls.
I should have know that something’s wrong,
when she unleashed her forked tongue.
And when she washed her hands from blood,
I knew she’d rendered my brain mad.
Like victim old in spider’s trap,
she pinned me hard and flew me up.
Like just another that she loathes,
succubus vile in angel’s clothes.
And as I fell from insane height,
as my senses came to their right,
first time I saw her blood-red blade,
in heart of mine she had it laid…
So… see you tomorrow, with (I hope) a new chapter.
-Phoenix vanishes into his shroud
Shit… Happens
That was a long period of turmoil for me. The longest I have ever been as far as I care.
I doubt that anyone reads those stuff anyways, but just to be straight with anyone that might read it, i can only say that I’m not ready yet to come back.
It has been a shitty month, everything go awry, and I can’t tell if I’ve passed the storm yet, or if this is just a little sunny break.
The worst thing that can happen to someone who thinks that he is stable enough, one that has accepted that he will be gloomy and just below the average happiness rating, is giving him hope, and then CRASH this hope to tiny little pieces (yes, even in this medium of anonymity, even in this age of globalization and total invasion of privacy (either willingly or unwillingly), some things MUST and WILL remain personal, and so I’ll dwell on what that was no more). And thus a period of self-pity and self-loathing started. I had also some exams at that period that I shouldn’t fail no matter what. Well… you can guess right? I dedicated all my time in writing self-pitying and self-loathing pieces of either poetry or short stories, thus leaving me with no time to study, thus failing them. Of course, this only helped to lower my self esteem even more…
BUT as in my title: Sit happens. If one choses to dwell to much on his own misery… then he deserves it. I chose to move forward.
I decided NOT to show in public any of those pieces, I don’t think they represent me. I want to believe that all this is over now and that i can fight sorrows with happiness. I’ll just post here my last piece of those poems, and this only because it was the last. I promised this to myself, and this is the greater vow one can make. The fact and reason why I’ll post it, is evident in the finale of the poem.
I hope you’ll enjoy it.
Blissful Catatonia
Sun rises and sun sets.
A day passes, life’s hollowed nets
through me, harmlessly pass
incapable my heart to catch.
Eyelids lazily half-open.
My mind I wonder if it’s rotten.
In catatonic existence I’ll live.
My soul in emptiness I’ll leave.
Amusement I’ll find in day’s turmoil;
anxiety my insides won’t boil.
For hopes and dreams long now I’ve killed;
my life in emptiness I’ve willed.
Love’s arrows in armor halt.
Easily I evade happiness’ mad cult.
Pain and agony now only miss;
in apathy I find bliss
And as I watch her strolling by,
my cheek I sense that isn’t dry.
Air’s moisture I know it is,
not pained tears, nor happy kiss.
Yet I know that I’ve just lied.
My throat I bless for the knot I’ve tied.
Faithfully the words, imprissoned keep,
my apathy’s valiant, last, keep.
My frantic beat to calm down I’ll force,
again to achieve the bliss I’ve lost
through a bloodstained razor in an empty bath.
Yet, in my eyes flash your perfect laugh.
Sun rises and water drips.
A smile I force to my strained lips.
And as from sleep’s hazy fog I wake,
in my mind, anxiously, brilliant thoughts I make.
My morning routine: a vicious battle.
Consciously choosing life’s chaotic shuffle.
The bliss with smiles I’ll keep away,
as long as I hear her laugh every day.
A moment to stay still
Unfortunatly, those last days, my novel writing is left a little behind.
Don’t blame me! Blame work, throw your accusation at real life. But above all, blame spring.
It’s a really beautiful day, and so was yesterday too. I heard my own advice, and the little free time I had, I spent it savoring this joyful season. I just… stopped doing anything for a little while, and just enjoyed… being. A simple gesture, a moment to look at the blue sky, was all it took to give me back a whole lot of the energy I had spent to various tasks.
Really, it doesn’t take much to be happy. You just have to appreciate what natures provides…
So, no novels today… I will leave you with a new poem though, Defy Mundane (that I wrote yesterday, so I guess it doesn’t count as today’s writing ^^).
Caution: It sucks, but Hey! I wrote it while I was happy and this is something new to me, since I usually write when I’m depressed. It will take me a while, I figure, to adapt…
I hope you’ll enjoy it. But, much more, I hope you too take a moment off from the pressure of everyday life and enjoy the simple things.
Death and music part II (+new poem)
My time today has been somewhat chiseled away by my writing of a brand new poem, I was given the 1st and last sentence and had to fill in the rest. I hope you’ll enjoy it (or rather not >.< since it is not quite happy…). It is called “A sailor’s fate”.
Well, yesterday I carried on my rant about life so much that unfortunately I didn’t managed to finish my thoughts. And since I said that I don’t have that much of a time, it is a good opportunity for me to just add this one small thing today.
I wanted to expand a bit the topic, including the opposite view. And this would have been the perspective of Death (as an imaginary entity) and his views about music. At least, as writers and composers depict him.
Maybe through this, by sensing what and why, those people think about death, would give us the opportunity to see another reason for the happy music.
Again I shall use a familiar tune of mine that I believe that it describes many of the views that poets have about Death. It’s again a Cretan song, named “Death of a lyre-player”, written and sung and played (lyre) by K. Mountakis.
This song’s choice of music illustrates my point perfectly. It is a sad tune in almost all of its length, but on ~4min when we enter the 4th period of the lyrics, where Death explains why the lyre is not allowed to the hades, the music turns up really joyous. I like to see this as this: Death is a grim subject that is due to sad music, but Death himself explains that merry tunes are unfit for it, and so our lyre player decides to ‘speed it up’ a bit 😀
————–
In one’s lyre-player’s the courtyard, Death came.
And the lyre-player stood up, old wine to bring,
like (Death) was a valued friend, to lay him the table.
And he (the lyre-player) unhooked his lyre, sweet tune to play.
As if he (Death) was a roisterer, to make him have fun.
———–
-Leave the tray lyre-player and hang your lyre.
Hide your fiddle stick because you’re not getting it anymore.
And go to prepare, your best clothes wear,
because I’m taking you right now to get you to the underworld.
————
-Death, if you wish let me take my lyre,
where the cords talk and the ‘rider’* cries,
where the eaglebells* of the fiddle stick tell me
of the joys of the above world and the (joyful) escapades of the youths,
(of) the beauty of the girls and the grace of the gallantry,
and of an old love’s the commandment,
who double-ordered me the lyre to not forget,
when I’ll go to the underworld.
————-
-I won’t leave it to you, crazy (old man), better for me (that you) break it.
Because with your fiddle stick, you raise the dead,
and you will start playing little tunes to upset the men,
to drive nuts the girls, to shake up the old men,
and you will bolster the babies to cry for affection.
And everyone will hate the cells, the Hades castles,
and everyone would want to come up again.
—————-
*rider refers to the cordy part of the fiddle stick
*eaglebells are little bells traditionally hung by the fiddle stick so as to produce little noise when the player plays fast tunes.
We see here, that Death is afraid of merry music. Music is a representation of life, the liver the tune, the more close to the above world. So, maybe the cheerful music is something like a spell, like the laughter of children that banish away all fears of the old people. Happy music is there to lighten their burden, but not by making them forget death, but through making them remember life. Through chasing the dreadful thought away…
To write (+poem)
This will be my first attempt to blog. Not in the sense of keeping an online diary, but more as a place to throw in some of my ideas and works as a writer. I will try to have it at least somewhat updated at what inspires me, and maybe what I mean in a poem or two, but… for now lets see how it will work trying to explain why I write.
I’ll also put another poem of me in here, one conceived not long ago, when in a site that i used to post some poems, one urged me to not try to rhyme my words. In the end it produced a little nice self-explanatory mumbled piece about love…
And now to our main subject…
What does it means to write?
Undoubtedly, for each one that does, it means something different. And this is good. Because for each one that reads it is something unique too. I can only tremble at the thought that sometimes literature will become so streamlined that all writers would use the same format. It will, eventually, lead to the stagnation of the readers…
Enough of philosophizing anyways. There are four different things that I must explain about my writing.
I write because I love to read. Each passage I read from a book, unfolds a million time in my mind. There is not a single paragraph that I will not stop and think: what else could be done here? How could this play differently? In the end, some few stray tidbits stay on my mind. Those I expand even more. In my free time, I think and ponder upon them. If I look it in the end, if I manage to perceive what is created, I find something that I can only describe like a unique child of mine…
But that could be true only if I spent my life writing and reading. Sadly, this is not the case. As I lead a normal life, I’m bombarded by the mundane reality in each step that I make. What can I say? I’m a romantic fool that has no place in here to live. But I don’t bow my head. In each waking moment that I feel the gigantic pressure and stress of our time, I have an escape. A shelter made from pure imagination. For in my mind, in my stories, no one can shape things but me. And in those alternate realities I create, regardless if they are bleaker or lovelier, I laugh at the vain attempts of reality to intrude. But I also weep deep inside me. I weep because sadly, the average person that I meet in the world outside is slowly being crumbled down by harsh pragmatism. So I write for them too. Not only to create a shelter for me, but to show to others, that through imagination and creativity in real life, one can literally make miracles occur.
Those are my novels. My short stories inspired by me or others. But there exists a tiny space somewhere inside me that wants to decorate, or desecrate, things that range from the most exotic notions to the simplest material possessions. And for this, I do the only thing that a fledgling romantic fool can do. Write poems.
The above could be the birth of what I perceive as the cornerstone of my writing. It gives me the basic materials to build upon. But there is another reason I write. I started to write, and I continue to, because I really like pen and paper RPG. I still play, even though at the age of 25 many people say that I should move forward, And mainly, I still DM… My friends like my stories, and it was their urge to write down some of them that moved me to the decision to start posting some of my writing (not the stories of course, since they are, more or less, diagrams and not writing). It was through this that I developed an affinity to what I need to describe. It was through my players that I realized what it takes for a plot to become attractive. And it is for my players that I haven’t give up writing; always trying to give them the most magnificent story that they could participate in.
/RPG rant mode on
For those unfamiliar with the terms, I will try to simplify this. Imagine. This is the only word that can describe what a pen and paper RPG stands for. As the coordinator of a long term game, I have to create a story for my fellow players. I have to, not only make a plot that will last as for months to come, but I have to have it so fleshed out, that I will be able to describe even the tiniest bit if asked. Many could see it as a simple procedure. Create a story. Say thing A happens, proceed to B etc. But what it boils down to is that I run free thinking people, several of them to boot, in a world that is only limited by one’s imagination. And frankly, the one DM that says that his story goes out as planned… is blatantly lying. The ‘art’ of DMing, is to have created a nice, intriguing story that unfolds simultaneously with the players. No matter what they ask or do, this way, they cannot ‘surprise’ you. If the story is fleshed out enough, there won’t be any gaps. This has given me the ability, to manage to see a plot all around and not one sided. This, as you can imagine, has given me a great boost in my ability to form a likely scenario. But it is not the only thing that I have earned from my friends. They have illuminated me in the art of describing. For when the only mean to convey a situation is to describe to your players, you have to do it good. Admittedly, I’m not that good there, but what the heck… as I live, I learn.
/RPG rant mode off
Rebirth In Darkness 