The Moving River

                                                      

 Recent letter to a friend. 

Just decided to post this. Musings on a Sunday morning. Dawn. 

                                                                   The Moving River

Ah, my friend. Yesterday was dark for me. That artist's mind the article talks about went towards whatever demon place it sometimes leads. Thoughts of failure and how foolish my choices have been, thoughts of how irrelevant my words are, how poorly wrought, and thoughts of not being. Yeah, all that junk got cranked up, brought stage front, into the footlights of my little internal theater. Man, that is unpleasant. I know you do it too, as do all us humans, for whatever reasons, paranoia, old time baggage, fantasy, reality, whatever the cause, those times are wretched. 

Being who I am  and what I am, I go more often than many, maybe more than most. I don't compare myself with the real artists, only in IMPULSE do I include myself. Van Gough, Hemingway, all the remembered ones, all were hoar haunted and more than a few chose the self handed end of life. 

My thoughts go there on occasion. Last night for a couple of minutes. Not real, but seemingly real. Those, "what difference would my not being here make", and so on and so forth. 

One of my literary heroes, Robert E. Howard, who invented Sword and Sorcery, who eked out a living in Waco Texas writing for the pulps, who could not find a like minded person there in the dry plains, shot himself at the age of 26 in his car outside his father's house. His mother had just died. 

What is the point of this missive? I don't know. 

I suppose just to note that we celebrate the celebrities. The famous, those whose works, whether actor, writer, painter, politician, pope, blare into the public consciousness. Their images, words, faces, deeds, edicts, become landscape of the culture, of the world. And they are the few. The mighty. The remembered. 

But, what about those who toil and are forgotten? Those whose vision might have been as grand, as prescient, as beautiful, but for whatever reason were never seen nor noted? Those whose works were destroyed by fire, war, disease, or just through being in the wrong place at the wrong time? Whose eyes saw things considered foolish, or worse, blasphemous by those in power, and were thus expurgated from the eyes of history? What of them?

And what of the ordinary people? Those who toil for years to raise a family, and work themselves to the bone, even unto death? Who celebrates them? Who acts as their advocate, who speaks for them?

This one morning, sitting alone, as I have spent the vast bulk of all my mornings, a thought that makes tears roll from my eyes, I do.  

I speak for the dead, the everyday, those magnificent invisible billions, yes billions, of people who built the world. Who toiled in the mines of the remembered rulers, the masons, the vintners, the whores, the famers, and wives and husband. The faceless warriors, who had faces, and dreams and children and a whole universe of life in each of their now unremembered minds, who died. Whose mark on history is in an obscure text, or a bestseller that state that Ceaser's legions destroyed the Gauls and not many were killed. The not many. The few. They died. Their dreams ended, were scratched out. 

And no one can say what great things they might have done had they lived. Or what terrible things. The fact is they did not live, did not survive, were not marked, or if marked, their small monuments, many carried only in the minds of their wives and children, or husbands, those ephemeral spires of the inner self were thrown to the wind and lost, erased, and gone forever. 

Unless you believe, as R. E. Howard did, that all those lives lived in the wind, came to him in dreams. That those imagined worlds had real existence somewhere. And why not? 

Why not other lines in the endless whirl of the universe? Why not alternate lines of every dream ever dreampt? 

Einstein said that every moment ever lived existed somewhere. Had existence still. 

And, perhaps each and every lost artist, seeker, farmer, soldier, sailer, wife, mother, daughter, tather, perhaps somewhere each and every one of them achieved their dreams, whether grand or small, of having an empire, a farm, a child, a perfect world, peace, plenty, perhaps somewhere along these endless lines, they each achieved the unimagined, the unimaginable. Their dreams. 

I won't tell you mine. You are familiar with some of them. Enough. And, in this sadness I am seized with this morning, I hope my dreams on some plane are realized. And I am not done, not yet, despite these demons sitting with me in this room, in me, in my too busy mind, I am not finished. Not yet. 

At best few years remain to me. I want them to be happy, filled with love and more plenty and more peace. I want people to read my tales and be recognized and appreciated. 

I want those things, and of course the demons whisper and hiss that none of those things is possible, or that what worlds live in my dreams are not worth the writing, not worth the effort to put down. 

Just fade, they say, stop, wander into the dark trees and let your bones be found in spring. 

But I choose for this day at least not to listen to them. Instead I speak for the dead. For the forgotten, in this little message, sent to my best friend, let us not forget those whose bones we walk on now. Whose lives were real and so many and whom are now the dust of the stage we dance upon. Let us remember those who gained no words but as background noise in the great symphony of time. 

Greet our ancestors in this moment. Let us remember the faceless great, all who came before, joined by the genes, and all of them, the grand horde that has walked the planet, from single cell to the awesome high thinking genetic dreams we have become. Let us pause and celebrate them. Remember them. Their sacrificies and glory, even if for only this one holy moment.