Between 1980 and 1981 and again between 1990 and 1991 I wrote short stories. I even showed some of them to a couple of friends, including a Butler English professor who was also trying to organize herself into getting a book on images ready for publication and a priest friend whom I admired greatly. For almost 20 years I believed myself incapable of writing plot and characters. My writing became limited to journals and blogs, philosophical essays about concepts and weighty doctrines. When a few years ago I began thinking of creating videos I immediately chucked the idea of narrative features and focused on documentaries. I do love ideas and love to trace the process of how they come about, the stream of consciousness that produces the delight that is perhaps the reason why we do the things we do.
This morning, unable to go back to sleep, I picked up Jay Quinn's Back Where He Started, the story of a gay man, "married" for 22 years, now on his own again after raising his lover's three children to adulthood. The setting on Emerald Isle, a North Carolina coastal resort island, was one reason I liked the story, and in the 47-year-old protagonist I found similarities to my situation. A year ago last month I took a sabbatical from work that has now become a permanent state. Without realizing it I have transitioned into a period of my life I had dreamed about for years. It came upon me and I didn't notice. Change like this should be announced with fireworks or at least toasted with champagne among family and friends. Not so. Like Sandburg's fog it came "on little cat feet."
What to do with myself now, after the fact? My house is full of books. One can love books without doing anything else than read and continue the pleasure of reading and owning them. But years ago in a past no longer remembered for being so distant I formulated the idea of someday writing. Is the time for this now? Or is the impetus as dated as many of what I once felt important. Life has a way of changing and we don't change with it because the momentum from a past no longer part of our present thoughts carries us forward blindly.
One story is set in Manila when I was still at Santo Tomás. Based on a friendship I had back then, that story today resurrected feelings and memories as though they never left. They had but words can have this geomantic power to transport us to real and imagined places in the past and future no longer now. A second story is set in Jersey City where I lived the first year after I came to America. These two periods are well suited as beginning points to tell maybe a fictionalized history of the terrible, fond years that are now accessible only through images and words. If I do a little more research I think I can come up with other feelings and memories that can serve to start the fire cooking again. I've always loved a feast...
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