Alice in Wonder

Here is something I have never done before--provide a glimpse of the novel I am writing: just 2 pages of the rough draft, but (trembling) maybe sharing and getting your questions and feedback will help me to stay on track? 

     If you expected a poem today, accept my apologies.  I think the novel is a bit poetic, but it is prose.  You will not hurt my feelings if you do not read it or if you read it and do not comment.  

     This seems to be the beginning of Chapter One, but anyone who's written knows this is mere conjecture at this point.   

 Copyright © 2012 S.L.Chast: Copying/using any part of this text is prohibited.  

Alice in Wonder, Chapter One.

            The tall mask seemed to enter of its own accord along with a loud echoing gong that made spinal chords twitch throughout the audience.  The next sound came out of the stillness.  A small voice whispered, "Hi, my name is Alice," and the mask touched the floor to reveal a tall, stoop-backed middle-aged lady in a white sweater and pearls.  Her hair seemed permed and purplish, or rather, it was curly and white except for a streak of purple on one lock in the middle and left side.  She peered at us over the mask as the lights faded up from the sharp spot.

            "Hi," she repeated in a stronger voice, "I'm Alice, and this is my Grandmother." 

            She tripped forward, mask in one hand and the straps to a black leather tote clutched in the other.  She lifted the mask with difficulty to the top of a pole stage right, dropped the tote stage center and opened it to extract a beautiful round wood and tile box, which she held up for all to see. 

            "My grandmother made this box," she said, then took the tiled top off and rolled it across the floor, its design whirling into a wind sign.  As it wobbled flat, she took another mask--a tiny clay one--out of the box, held it up and announced, "And THIS is my Mother."  She carried her mother mask  to stage left and hung it on top of another pole that was waiting for it, then stood back and clapped her hands. 

            She almost trotted down to the edge of the stage to announce, arms wide, "As you can see, I come from a long line of image makers!  My own art is story telling, and I am here to tell you the story of Helen of Troy!"

            With that she pulled a wooden rocking chair from the shadows on the right, sat down and beamed at us.  "I read about her in books,"  she continued, as she got up to retrieve her black bag.  She sat and pulled book after book out of her bottomless bag, all the while talking delightedly.  "I love books, don't you? I could hold them and touch them all day long, rock them and sing to them, and then open them and let them sing to me!  Their pages are so smooth and inviting.  The print looks like ants dancing from a distance. See?"

            She held up two books, one in each hand, then stood and came down to the spectators, "Feel them, come on, feel them!  Can you imagine giving this touch up for a computer screen?  Not in my lifetime!

            "Does anyone write in a diary?"  Alice waited.    "You can tell me; I do too.  Ah, there you are!" she applauded when a few hands inched up.  She rushed back to her bag and brought another book forward to show. "Empty pages invite dreaming, and I love to fill them up with ink and words, don't you?"

            As she listened to the "Yesses" and "Nos" she retrieved the books she'd passed out to people in the front row, and then backed up wiggling into the rocking chair, piling the books beside her.  She heard some giggles in the crowd, and when she began telling her story, she seemed to be responding to them.

 *******

            "I read about Helen of Troy in books.  The  first one was by Homer, and then by Sophocles and by Euripides, and then later by several non-Greek writers. All agree that she was beautiful and that she was a prize for a young Trojan named Paris when he said Aphrodite was the most beautiful of three competitive Greek goddesses: Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite.  But that's all they agree on."

            She paused while a newcomer found a seat on the edge of the audience, then continued. 

            "Some of these ancient Greek authors say she ran off to Troy with Paris, glad to be away from her own husband, Menelaus.  Some say she wanted to go to Troy with Paris but that Zeus, head god, hid her in Egypt where she spent 10 years.  Others say Paris had to kidnap her because she resisted.  And finally, others say that it was the gods who kidnapped her and hid her in the sky. 

            "Helen--yes, Helen herself--told me that the last story is closer to the truth!  I met her years and years ago.  Truly, she is good looking in a way, but of course she's older than I am now.

            "Well, Helen had resisted all of them--men and Gods and Paris and Troy!  She said that she didn't even have time to think about things before she was way up there in the sky watching the years unfold around her.  She told me she never even saw Paris, that he had only sent her a note saying she was his!  Imagine how that must have felt!  You get a note from someone you haven't even heard of saying:

Baby I'm yours and you are mine.  The great goddess Aphrodite said so.  Come away with me to another world named Troy and we will be happy forever.  PS.  I love you. You don't know me, but I've seen your picture, and Baby, Baby, I'm yours, you're mine, wedding bells are going to chime.

Now wouldn't you laugh and tear up that note?  But Helen didn't.  Oh she wanted to, she wanted to be that practical, but her life had not been a bed of roses.  

 To be continued . . .

Posted at Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads for "Open Link Monday." 
 Copyright © 2012 S.L.Chast: Copying/using any part of this text is prohibited.  

Living Together: just a song or two

I'm posting a song today, inspired by my Thanksgiving and last week's prompt at Theme Thursday: "Theme Thursday for November 22, 2012 - TOGETHER."  Hokey?  Maybe.  I haven't thought about this song in YEARS. Here's another version, maybe better, but without as much instrumental as above:  

I love the sound better than the fashions of the time,  Who remembers the variety show?

Eight years later Sade took this sentiment in a slightly different direction:

Powerful, powerful, but Sade covered an even more powerful version: Timmy Thomas wrote the lyrics and the music and recorded in 1972 during the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights struggle in the USA:

On and on we go.  I hope the music of togetherness never stops.  Someday everyone will hear the music in the air and get it together, right now.

Thanks Giving Eve

Minestrone scent curls to living room—family dinner for the day before Thanksgiving. 

Thus I greet my travelers whose accumulated miles this day are more than Pilgrims could travel in a life-time to eat more foods than grown locally and to enjoy more diversity beneath one roof than Pilgrims allowed on their shores.

We are bigger in our gathering: We reject Pilgrim occupation of land not their own.  We condemn betrayal of native generosity.  Tomorrow we join them only in eating free-range turkey, happy food, so we need not chew and swallow anger from our brutality.

We eat our history in the new world: Italian today and American tomorrow, friends before and enemies after, inviting in now and killing later. 

We plan our future is better than guns and germs and steel because we have dug in and we have seen the promised land and we forgive it and them as we wish to be forgiven by it and them still.

It is time: Cars pull into the driveway and line the street. Sugar-free apple pies and ice cream, banana bread, fruit salad, cucumbers, creamed onions and cranberry sauce climb the stairs to fill the table and contribute to the nosegay of this holiday.

In Plymouth, some Americans gather to mourn the past and in the Middle and Near East some United Nations' forces have a minute to share stories this evening here and in other places they have been.  I give them thanks.

In my family, those not in Pennsylvania are attending a birth in Ohio, the first baby girl to join our family in 61 years.  I know because I was the last one.  I smell the minestrone soup, grateful, indeed, to have home and family, cat and tablet—this big old desktop of a writing pad—my soup pot calling me into attendance and sunshine down the way.

Posted at Poets United where Ella asks us to write about gifts in "Wonder Wednesday #10 Gifts ."  This was already written, but it will do til I have the gift of time to give.


Copyright © 2012 S.L.Chast

The Fourth Wall

(Warning: This may not be a poem.)

Rooms and houses have 4 walls with doors and windows, but on the stage the number of walls depends on the actions of actors.  If actors see them and/or use them, they are there.  The audience will believe the actors and accept the fiction/reality they give us.  If actors talk to and interact with the audience, they have "broken the fourth wall" of their fictional world. 

Rooms and houses have 4 walls with doors and windows, but in the world of the spirit, four walls never exist, whether or not any human wants them to or believes them to.  By definition, spirit is not contained in a way that cuts it off from its source, IE, no one needs to break a fourth wall to communicate in realms of the spirit.  It is as if walls that appear to exist are porous or imaginary.

Rooms and houses have 4 walls with doors and windows, but--in the realm of spirit--four walls are only solid through magic or neglect.  It must surely be a kind of hell—even nihilistic—to admit no way of breaking them.  When I think of settings like Sartre’s No Exit or Becket’s End Game, I shiver.  Although I am a confirmed hermit and in perfect puddles of solitude most of the time, such spiritual isolation terrifies me.    I am spiritual and in relationship with God.  This faith is not blind.  I believe because I know—experience of the supernatural has given me faith.  In me, the fourth wall can not be broken, because it never naturally existed.   

Rooms and houses have 4 walls with doors and windows, but in labs of contemporary psychology internal human walls are often insubstantial structures strengthened by phobia and experience.  These walls may be broken if a person chooses to break out of them, but the task is not easy.  It is as if we are all actors on the stage of the subconscious and the number of walls depends on what we see and use.  If we find barriers to be useful, we build them into the many-chambered nautilus that we present to the world as if self.  Psychology and religion assist in cementing or breaking these walls at their pleasure, but the walls themselves are emotional and barely touch on the spirit.  

I speak of The Fourth Wall today because I am a member of Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads where yesterday, Kerry issued the challenge "Breaking the Fourth Wall" which asks us to see if we could do this in a poem.  Her explanation on the site is invaluable, and I know I have done and will do this type of poem again.  But instead of taking me to poetry this time, it took me here, to whatever this is.  It may be merely the ruminations I go through en route to a poem.

The poem arrived on 11/19/2012!  Find it HERE.

  

The poem that got away

          

                   
                    I dreamed a poem in my sleep last night.  I remember the entire process, but not the poem.  I rewrote it in my head several times: once to balance the comparisons, once to make the images more vivid, once again for both rhyme and alliteration.  I vaguely recall it had to do with the peace we have now.  I recall a deep satisfied smile at the result and a pleasant drift away from consciousness.

            I woke refreshed and happy after a great night’s sleep.  Since I’ve been sleeping in 2 to 4 hour naps lately, this was glorious!  But for the life of me, I cannot recall the poem.   

            I sat here waiting for it to re-emerge.  Then I started writing this in the hope that the brightness of the poem would return.  It has, but not the details—no words, no lines.  Only a sense of accomplishment.  

            I hope that I live my way back into that poem and its sense of victory.