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Posts Tagged ‘experimental fiction’

Forgive me for not posting the last couple of weeks. Walks and concerts and slicing a finger, etc . . . I’ll post again toward the end of the month, but I’ve made an agreement to rest my normal posting schedule until then. So, until the end of the month when the angels WILL return, take this humble offering and enjoy! (And an extra link toward the end of a favorite, short, SNL clip of mine.

The Name

When the name was spoken, it no longer was what it had been; it had become something more; the same, plus. And so the names continued to make it more still, for what was discovered after many names had been uttered was that so had been created awareness by virtue of the fact that a being could point back at those things of which it was a part, and thereby itself.

Before the name was spoken, It had no reason to think in terms of itself. Once the name was spoken, it could. After that was only the simple realization that it could never be named; for if no tongue could exist from the beginning of time to the end of eternity, then its fullness could not be uttered in fullness.

And so has it ever, it speaks its own name alone for any who wish to stop speaking, and listen.

(As promised, click here. Peace!)

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Last year about this time I made a switch to the format of my blog. The time has come to make a minor adjustment once more. Last time it was the obvious answer to a question I had been asking too many times. This time the answer was obvious before the question was even asked. So, after a year of flexing my fiction muscles, I think it’s time for something that better resembles a story than the free-flow-of-thought fiction I’ve been posting up until now.

The idea for this format of publishing came from the great Mr. Dickens. I remember studying his work Great Expectations and learning that the way that book was originally written was by being published week by week, chapter by chapter in the Newspaper at the time. Since my time to write is severely limited by three jobs, I think this format will keep me fairly well together so that a cohesive work will be created sooner than later. In fact, at this moment in my life, this is the only way I can conceive of writing it at all.

In the following weeks, months, maybe years, I plan on unfolding the story of angels who wanted to help the human race. I will tell a tale that begins in the Garden of Eden, and unfolds right up unto the modern age. Their story of how it happens that they came to help, how humanity came to regard them as demons, and how they redeemed themselves by accomplishing the work they chose to exist so as to accomplish.

This work will be presented in rough draft format. After the work is more or less completed there will likely be an editing process cleaning things up and, depending on my mood, altering the story for whatever reason. Though, I do tend to like what comes out the first time and generally don’t like changing my own work much because I think there is value to the art of the first attempt. That being said, I reserve the right to alter my work if it seems appropriate later on. In the meantime, I will present my work in more than less rough draft format with the belief that a good story will be written as its written, and with the desire that such be the case so that y’all will enjoy continuing to read as time goes on.

If you do like what I write, I have a donation button on the side of the page and welcome any contribution. I’d be very grateful if I can earn a living from my story telling alone, so, every bit helps toward those ends. A buck in my proverbial hat now and then is a welcome incentive! Money aside, I am grateful to be fortunate enough in my life that I can share my stories so easily with any audience, and am grateful that anyone may enjoy my work.

To be sure, may you enjoy!

-Tygar

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Much as around this time last year, I’ll be shortly shifting the focus of my blog. I’ll still be posting fiction, but I’ll write an entry exclusive to the nature of the shift next week.

In the meantime, I wanted to end a year of posting short fiction with one last tale of my recurring character. Here was her first appearance, and here her second. This time the idea came to me while in transit, the idea will unfold in front of me at the computer now. May whatever comes out of me bring something very good to whoever takes it in. Thank you to everyone who has checked out any of my short work, and I hope y’all take the journey with me as I post here starting next Sunday my new work. Peace, and, may you enjoy!

Leslie

Leslie took a step toward getting for herself a cup of water. One step later she felt everything shaking as the floor split open below her, and down she fell.

Past floorboards, and earth, and rock, and dirt, down, down, down. And further, and further, and further. She considered for a moment the end to Don Giovanni, and then decided that her virtue would declare her fate otherwise. She felt no heat as she descended.

After many minutes the light from above began to fade until she was left in darkness, descending. No rumble below her as after the first break of ground, there was nothing below her to open wide. She dared not test the aerodynamics of trying to go in a direction since at this speed she didn’t relish the idea of crashing into the wall of ground, and to what end? Could she climb if she found wall? Why would she want to stop the journey she didn’t ask for, but found herself upon?

Last known location of walls to touch, feet away in any given direction, no bottom in sight, and darkness and quiet surrounding her, she found relief in her fall as she closed her eyes and tried to experience fully the unique situation in which she found herself rather than thinking about what she wouldn’t dare change. So in silence, much to her relief, she let herself continue to fall without thinking of interrupting.

What felt like hours later, she saw the color of the inside of her eyelids lighten, and so opened her eyes. The dirt wall surrounded her with roots poking out out of reach every now and then. The vertical tunnel filled with light slowly as she fell for the next minute. She half-expected to see a white rabbit checking the time shortly before the tunnel flew past and she found herself falling through what seemed to be blue sky, lit from a source apparently far below her and indistinguishable from the blue the light reflected into existence from further than she hoped to fall.

Occasionally a dolphin swam by her, and it occurred to her over time that now that there were no walls to crash into, perhaps if she shifted her body she could choose in someway, if not direction alone, where she fell, and so in some sense fly.

She spread her arms and found that she did not feel as though she fell any longer, but even seemed to be able to will herself upward as she chose. She thought it curious that she’d never felt freedom before, now that she had an eternity in any given direction with nowhere to go.

As she felt her lungs fill, she felt neither hunger nor thirst; flying was all the sustenance needed to satisfy.

As a dolphin came swimming in into view, she flew to it, felt the side of its body. It seemed to like her. They kept each other company as she followed with her new, flippered friend. She had nowhere she wanted to go, so, it led.

The time they spent flying and swimming together was deeply satisfying  to her sense of experience when out ahead they were heading toward a convergence. Dolphins everywhere heading toward, swimming around a brightness hanging in the blue.

And as they approached, it grew and felt happy. The light washed over her in waves of warmth as she patted her companion a final time to say goodbye and dove straight toward the center of the light. She flew toward it faster and faster until coming upon it, she penetrated deep and sure. In she went, and moments later, at its center, there she stopped.

There was no further she could go. Still she found herself resonating outward from what filled her completely, the heart. Warmth flowing from her in every direction as she was the same as it. Perfectly still, without care of body that was satisfied in every way where motionless it arrived. There she was for as long as she’d have liked.

And when she was again outside of it, she saw a tunnel above her leading what her current orientation could call “up” unless she decided to rotate somewhat, which she did not.

Up she flew.

Through tunnel, past dirt, and rocks, and the rest, until she shot up two-and-one-half feet above the floor with just enough time for it to heal itself before landing with ease and grace in front of her water cooler. She took a glass from the counter and filled it. She was satisfied as she drank.

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I actually don’t spend much time at bars. Symbolically I think I think of bars as a place of reflection.

Cheers!

A beautiful women is looking at me from the other side of the bar. While holding her eyes to mine she’s moving her tongue up and down the outside of her straw before taking small, dainty sips while never for a moment breaking eye contact with me. I sit with my elbow on the bar and my hand on my cheek watching her as I rest, a half a smile as though to say, “How nice to share this moment with you from across the room, your company is pleasant.” She is beautiful, but I have another on my mind.

I haven’t seen her for so long that it would be stupid for me not to consider the loveliness whose eye I’ve caught as the possibility of a nest that would not be shaken by hurricanes; a place to rest my heart after wandering a desert in hopes that my memory of water is not merely one more accursed mirage. I’ve met her before enough to know she is in every way likeable, but not enough to know what the feel of her hand tells my heart and hers after communicating for five minutes apart from the speech of the rest of me. Beauty looks me in the eye and says we both have a basic common denominator; identity says there is nothing glaring to alarm. And yet my mind reminds me as I connect with a friend from a distance that at a further distance yet is the reason regret may exist where otherwise my mind would have no reason to exist.

But because I have a mind, and it remembers another beauty in another time that made my heart pump blood where before it only knew how to process bile, I can’t help but be reminded of another face by whose light I began to live as appropriate to one who should see beauty in friendship across a bar and respect that every face contains a universe that bears exploring respectfully before creating eternities more calling themselves by individual names always striving to declare “I Am.” And in light of the importance of mind to reason the desire to see another universe created to flourish, I say hello and shake hands when she brings her drink to where I sit, and we begin to discuss what we really enjoy for the rest of existence when we are too sated to eat and quenched to drink.

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Don’t quite remember where my mind was at when I wrote this one a few months back, but, it is interesting . . .

I’m trapped!

This mind is a prison. The only thing worse than knowing that I cannot escape myself is knowing that who I can not escape fits perfectly as a puzzle piece into the mind that is the unity of all other individual minds upon this planet. Myopically oriented, or aware of my placement within the perfect workings of all surroundings, I cannot escape who I become past who I was, that who I am.

No straight-jacket needed if I be deemed insane, I cannot escape myself. As a bus passes fruit stand after fruit stand; an oasis of exotic strawberry pie by the side of the road to quench one’s hunger on a long summer day. And yet I am not in control of this bus and there are too many passengers to request pulling over. Hurling myself through a pane of glass toward the quenching of desire for a taste a sign creates in my head promising simply doesn’t seem practical in the light of having a genuine impulse to be somewhere, especially in light of not being able to be anyone but this person with the desire to be there. And so hunger becomes only stronger on the way to the next stop of this bus where I have no choice but to pray food resides.

I choose my prison only because choosing liberation in a ditch chomping on poison seems so much worse.

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As I was transcribing the part of this story I wrote by hand, and considering how I wanted to end it, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Plato . . .

What Dispels the Dark Side

And whence engulfed by darkness I cast forth from my fingers a single spark of light, and could hear in the shadows surrounding me innumerable figures running in every direction from what scared them most. This spark landed upon the wick of what I held in my other hand. Upon landing, I breathed into it ever so softly to start the flame of the candle I now wielded like a knife to the world I kept from knowing by casting upon it its greatest dread; itself.

As I walked forward, staring me eye-to-eye was a nose with a ring, two eyes, and horns; the silhouette of a bull stopping me to my latest footfall. And eye-to-eye we continued to stare. Unmoving did it remain save for its nostrils, its obvious breathing, and movement of the air warning accordingly. I brought the flame of the candle between its face and mine as it continued not to stir. As the light shined closer to its face, it revealed it imprisoned by a mirror, the flame now reflecting its own light most dominantly between its face and mine. Lowering that candle again, I placed my hand before its nose and felt myself warmed by its breath. I reached my hand to its forehead and the glass shattered at my finger’s touch. Holding the light I held before me, I walked forward into the apparent dark.

I walk for hours not knowing where to go, accompanied by the sound of scurrying as my feet wander aimlessly upon the stone. If a spark is waiting at my finger tips, I have a source to illuminate; if I can set my hand ablaze to ward off what monsters lurk in this unknowing, and if I have nowhere to know to go, surely I can extinguish this small flame, a weapon against the unknown, with my breath.

So I continue blind. Let them crawl upon me! I have chosen to see another way. . .

In the darkness I close my eyes. Light appears a way to stars overhead. Desolation is not my fate.

 

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Lately I’ve experienced pity when running across those who clearly could choose for themselves something better. This being on the brain, I decided to write a meditation on what I would call the source of most problems. I believe this bit of writing reveals good news after all, but then again, I did choose at some point to become an optimist for reason’s sake.

Fear

Here it is so dark that as the question goes through my mind, do I even exist at all?, I cannot be sure that there was a person present to think said thought. Darkness; pure and complete. Blackness implies a tint, a comparison color that betrays some form of hope; such a concept is too bright for this place. The murkiness like drops of ink in water fill the mind slowly; cover through every brain cell and take root down into the base of one’s spine and then back through to surround the heart to stop its beating and suffocate the lungs by making their purpose null. And then the removal of the light sets in as the perfect suffocation of self-existence makes one a slave to any image of conception that could reflect light, and thus betray the broken mind into believing is preferable to the waking death where the absence of even the hope of a promising nightmare reigns supreme.

It is here where the nightmare’s noose tightens its hold around the neck unable even to gasp; to the contrary, the neck is grateful to be able to feel, it longs to have claws to be able to see before feeling that it is not alone as those claws begin to keep the neck company, and even make its acquaintance intimately.

And once the pain has declared loudly for the conception of the blind that that pain is all the world has left to offer, it is only then that an apple made of glass hangs just out of reach with a single ray of light shining upon it to remind the blessed one taken from the perfect non-existence of light that there is such a thing as hunger, such a thing as beauty, such a thing as joy, and that try as the one might, such an entity will always be just out of reach, and false if ever by accident it were to be obtained.

To the blind one made to look at the ray of light as though the only blessing in the world a voice speaks muffled by the joy of the dangling out of reach, “Look away from poverty and see inside yourself the light by which you could escape by opening your eyes to the world as it exists in truth,” and those afraid will always look away from themselves: for to see one’s self one would need first to close one’s eyes, and that would mean depriving themselves by choice of the only light they could conceive from the breadth of experience they never chose to enact for the sake of enjoyment as existence they cannot believe because despite the voice telling them something better exists if they look toward what looks like darkness from a lack of experience, their own belief of experience tells them to obey their master.

And so the false fruit dangles, and one may take solace that it is never eaten.

But fear does not like joy, and so the day comes when the fruit is placed in “lover’s” hand to be eaten; and on that day, that one prefers having food to eat as opposed to blinking for a glance inward toward the freedom of all-being burning with joy for all existence to partake.

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This one just kind of slinked its way into my brain and so I started tapping . . .

Everyone Loves . . .

I slink through the creek bed under a low cool stream across the smoothed stones. I then slink onto cool, mossy sandy shore over logs and through bushes. I slink up a tree to rest for the night. Slinking is all I do, you see, I, am a slinky.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, that’s just plain silly! But, It’s true. What you don’t realize is that after the last election, when Mitt Romney became president, he launched a nuclear attack against Iran, accidentally sent one of the nukes into Israel, Israel fired back at the U.S., then China fired at Israel because they wanted their money from the U.S., the U.S. fired at China because the U.S. always has the back of the holy land, and Pakistan started firing in every direction because it got scared, which of course set India off, and all you people died in a horrible fiery mess because you didn’t learn your lesson the last time you hired the town idiot to be president. Of course, the truly odd thing is the way my species was created because of the radiation. The cockroach people of Marseilles were created due to the increased ambient radiation, but not my species; not directly anyway.

No, we formed a slightly different way. After the blasts, several Slinkys went slinging off in different directions from the sheer force of the explosions alone. Those with the most momentum wound up slinking at before unheard of velocities through all sorts of different animal and vegetable matter. A slinky passed through some lichen, the carcass of a opossum, picked up a couple of ants, got wound up in some tree leaves, was drenched in the blood of a moose, then wound up in the festering radioactive abdomen of a human being. After stewing in that abdomen for about five minutes all the genetic material fused, and a new species was born. Imagine if a worm had a spine and was hairy!

Of course, that wasn’t the only of our species created. I mean, that many Slinkys flying off at such high speeds in that many directions through all that raw genetic material with so many radioactive human torsos to incubate in, the odds were simply in the favor of the genus of slinkskus that day! And so, depending on the region where the Slinkys flew and the indigenous flora and fauna of those regions, accordingly different species of slinkskus emerged. Basic evolution for you really.

So, about 500 years after the fact, here I am slinking through a lush wood in North America. We’ve developed a basic society in which we share whatever we need with each other and serve each other all we can give to make each other happy to the best of our individual abilities. We work together to make sure that none are ever wanting the basics for living healthily enough to be able to cultivate more individually than merely health. And the rule of our society on all parts of the world is simple and thereby successful: First, do no harm. It’s sad that the human beings weren’t able to conceive of a concept so practical and so simple, but, you can’t really hold a stupid bunch of primates accountable can you? I mean, that’s the thing about lower intelligence, you just can’t hold it against them for not thinking in terms of their own best interests.

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So the first one I wrote most of while watching improv comedy. This one I wrote while listening to my friend sing the blues with her band. I don’t know if I’ll be writing anymore episodes while viewing other forms of art, but as of now she is officially recurring, if not but just for now . . .

Winding Road

Leslie stood and took one step forward. Two steps later across the carpeted floor and she was walking through the wall painted white; one step later she saw her other foot through to a dirt path winding through the trees, her house nowhere behind her to be found.

Her bare feet continued down the soft, cool dirt. A butterfly by her eyes and the flowers of purple, blue, red, and yellow peeking out through the high, green grass seemed to breathe all around her. Behind her it all began to swirl and blend into itself as slowly the path began to be closed in upon by the colors melting into one another. As she stepped forward along the path, a young deer that had recently lost its spots began to follow alongside her. As it continued to follow, its spots of red, white, and purple reappeared and then shortly after again dropped away as she journeyed onward.

Two trees arose either side of her and met at their tops where the branches swayed together as though holding hands in a gentle dance. From that gentle swaying their arms descended together slowly before her, and Leslie took the ends of the branches from both trees in her hands for a moment as though making the acquaintances of both. The trees then raised their arms together again toward the heavens where they returned in holding each other in reverence to the light and vapor suspended in the blue above where occasionally a bird would pass by.

The path slanted ever-so-slightly upward between the trees as, accompanied by her sometimes multi-spotted friend, she made her way onward. The next butterfly to pass by her eyes winked at her from one of the spots on its wing; she decided this particular forest was without question a friendly one.

Looking backward for a moment, she saw the colors swirling over the path behind her. She smiled and stopped walking. She stood still and waited while staring forward. The colors continued to blend forward over the path until at last coming to her heels. She felt herself lifted and carried, her journey forward begun again, the deer just ahead of her and to the side out of reach of the melted forest. Forward the journey continued, and Leslie was delighted to feel herself sliding ever forward, wound around trees as she was glided to following the same path upon which she would be walking had she been left to her own two feet.

Upward it carried her off the forest floor, her four-legged companion continuing its following alongside the path alone down below. Standing still, she felt herself being levitated over the tops of trees and toward the mountain’s summit. Over the next half of an hour she found herself encircling the protrusion of rock, soil, and trees. Round and round was she raised until to the top, where land plateaued, was she brought to rest by that which had carried her this far. Brought no further, she took a single step forward onto the clearing that which she stood upon was now perfectly aligned with. At the other end of the clearing she saw the end of a simple path of dirt where a young deer with spots occasionally dropping off was eating blades of grass sticking out between the flowers.

In the field before her were many flowers, like large daisies, with petals that alternatingly flowed black to white to black to white to black to white continuously through every petal almost as far as her eyes could reach. In the middle of this clearing was a single, giant red rose that reached high upwards and bloomed toward the heavens. It was to the rose she walked now.

There at its base, she looked up and down at the many thorns that grew from its stem. The thorns were so large, though, that they posed no threat of accidentally sticking her. In fact, she assessed at a glance that they seemed to be close enough together that they formed what looked like a sort of ladder that went all the way up the flower’s stalk. Taken as such, she grabbed onto the thorn closest to her accordingly.

Hand-over-hand, foot-by-foot, until coming finally to the hip of the rose, she plunged her hand into a petal sticking up from it, then her other hand into the petal beside it, and between petals she climbed her way into the giant flower. Once her feet were inside, she climbed up a particular petal until it took her up to the flower’s edge, and there she sat.

The scent of the flower filled her as rose while she looked below between forest and path and the swirled color that had brought her to the field below. Then, turning, the sun’s iris looked at her. The eye lighting the sky stared only for a minute or two toward Leslie, then looked down, followed by an eyelid that closed over it before it descended for her below the forest’s floor. During the minute it took for the sun to set, the sky filled with color before opening to black embedded with diamonds everywhere she set her gaze. She marveled to see what she was made of shining upon her from every direction. She turned her body toward the center of the flower and lay down to better breathe in the rose-scented universe with her eyes. She allowed every part of her musculature, mind, and heart to relax. She felt her self as though dissolved into the petal atop which she lay; she felt her self sway coolly, gently with the breath of the cosmos; she let the dazzling jewels of stellar flesh above her fill her eyes and her smile.

Some hours later the sun decided to raise itself again to a place where the sky filled with rainbow, and there the sun stayed. She raised herself by her fingertips atop the petal and inched forward toward the rose’s center until gravity could take the work over, and she glided down into the rose’s core. Feet-first she flowed down, and in, surrounded by fragrance and the silken smooth of the petal upon which she rode. She felt surrounded and hugged by its heart as she continued sliding downward and through. Laughing, she blinked while being engulfed in the pure red. When her eyes opened from her blink, she stood again in the middle of the carpet, surrounded by the white walls of her home. She wondered where her next step would take her.

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Hi all! I’ll be walking Relay for Life this weekend, and, as is such my new story won’t go up until next Sunday. Hope y’all have a good week, and, if you haven’t checked it out yet I hope you take a look at the two-parter I posted most recently Wizardry part 1, and Wizardry part 2. Or for that matter please peruse older entries. In the meantime enjoy the walking-related music below.

TTFN!

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