Those Who Know, Chuckle.
THIS DAY IS STEEPED IN regret — and resolve.
Yom Kippur is not as joyful as Pesach or Shavuot, which respectively mark the exodus from Egypt and embrace of the Torah[1], but it’s a day which carries its own spiritual riches. It is both comforting and discomforting to take stock of one’s last-year deeds, deciding what to build on and what to discard; call it one soul-bending enrichment experience. Continue reading “On Writerly Spirituality: Yom Kippur Edition”
THERE IS A MOMENT IN AN out-of-control situation when its utter wrongness becomes agonizingly apparent – and it’s the same moment that the experiencer realizes there’s not a damn thing to be done about it.
Such were Prosatio Silban’s thoughts as his galleywagon slid sideways off the ridge-girdling road and down the steep cliff he had been so carefully avoiding.
He barely had time to realize what was happening as he was thrown from the driver’s bench hard against a cliffside boulder. He bounced onto his back, head downward, near the cliff’s base. The sharp pain in his ribs made him want to cry out, but he couldn’t get his breath. All he could do was watch and listen to his portable home-cum-livelihood roll over twice and come to rest upright at the cliff’s bottom. Continue reading “Child’s Play (A Prosatio Silban Tale)”
SPEAKING FROM EXPERIENCE: IT IS easier to get rid of everything in one big purge than a few things in a bunch of smaller ones.
The time: June 1985. Hopped-up on Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and The Dharma Bums, I aimed to do a bit of my own road scratching of experience-itchy soles. So I bought some necessaries, stuffed them into a backpack, and invited my friends to a giveaway-the-rest party. The reserves (my great-grandfather’s holy books, my birth certificate, a deck of Tarot cards, a loaded pipe, and such) went into two small boxes destined for a trusted friend’s garage. When I returned a year later, they were waiting to greet me like cardboard puppies. Continue reading “Disposathon!”
I AM A FANTASY WRITER; that is to say, I fantasize about people reading my writings.”
–Your author, in a truth-pensive mood
(Three printed pages. If you’re new to these tales, here are the preface and introduction.)
IT BEGAN WITH AN ALMOST automatic kindness, and led to an inevitable but gracious end.
Prosatio Silban was tidying up after a somewhat slow morning when he first heard the mewing. His galleywagon was parked in the marketplace at Rathlu, the centermost of the Thousand Villages of the Uulian Commonwell. He was standing at the sink; one by one the beefy cook selected plates, bowls and cutlery from a small pile of dirty dishes; passed them through a large, teak-mounted voonith-bone hoop; and stacked the now-clean ones on the adjacent counter. I almost feel guilty using magik instead of water, he thought, seeing how there are so few of these. Still, it’s a relaxing noonday ritual.
He cocked an ear at the open half-door. Rathlu was known for its robust feline population, and the cats he had seen that day were magnificent specimens of their secretive race: cats large and small, black, grey, striped, yellow, and white, all sleek with loving care and lavish feeding. His favorites were the tiger-stripeds, and when he opened the door’s lower half, a smile lit his face. Before him sat an ancient grey-and-brown tabby, looking up at him with one golden eye; the other was a filmed-over blue. Continue reading “Prosatio Silban and the Sudden Feline”
1. ONE OF THE CHICKEN-OR-egg challenges of modern media (social and traditional) is their pervasive sense of nonlinear immediacy, by which I mean the everything-at-once flattening of the artistic landscape.
Continue reading “5 Thoughts: Seminal v. Derivative”
“ALMOST AS MUCH THOUGHT AND effort goes into the choosing of eating implements as for the selection of food for which they are meant,” said Prosatio Silban, reaching for the sea salt container next to his fatberry-oil stove. “Silver, gold, copper, bamboo, wood, clay — the list is as long as your imagination is broad. Some are meant for soup, others enable the eating of different types of meat or vegetable; there are even specialized tools for extracting delectable flesh from mollusk or crustacean shells.
“But they all have one purpose: to convey food to the mouth without social disapproval. Lose sight of that refined principle, and you might as well eat with your hands.”
Who’s “Prosatio Silban,” you may ask? Here’s a partial answer: https://metaphorager.net/ep.
RED SUN AT MORNING,
CLIMATE change warning.”
THERE IS A MOVIE THAT follows the struggles inherent in the so-called Hero’s Journey: a high-born child is raised in secret by commoners, and eventually groomed by a wise elder to overcome obstacles and fulfill his destiny by taking his rightful place among the knighted nobility. And that movie is called … The Black Shield of Falworth.
If TBSoF (1954) sounds a bit like Star Wars (or even Excalibur), that’s because it travels the same mythic highway. And if it feels like 1938’s The Adventures of Robin Hood, that’s because it too was based on a Howard Pyle book, Men of Iron. Continue reading “Of Heroes, Waterbeds, and After-Midnight Television”
(Two-and-a-half printed pages. If you’re new to these tales, here are the preface and introduction.)
ONE OF THE NICER THINGS about traveling in a buopoth-drawn galleywagon down a smooth dirt road is the slow pleasure of the unfolding scenery.
Prosatio Silban, as was his wont on such journeys, took it all in with wide eyes and a wider heart. The gentle hills just west of epicurean Pormaris were thick with rosemary, juniper and other fragrant underbrush. Olive and bay trees spread their branches over ubiquitous fatberry bushes rich with maroon fruit, with here and there a tumbled limestone shrine or bluerock outcropping accenting the landscape like three-dimensional punctuation marks. Now and then he could spy a furtive voonith near the undulating horizon, and musical birds in profusion cast their nets of song over the steady thump-thump-thump of his quaint lumbering dray-beast’s footsteps. Continue reading “Prosatio Silban and the Twice-Cooked Eggs”
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