The Self

The self is important, you rarely speak about yourself, you stay on the fence rather than open up about who you are! Come on! Tell me how you see yourself, don’t think about how others see you, imagine you are really on your own, who are you? Maybe imagine you are speaking to an older version of you… 

Well, there are lots of bits to reconcile, and it’s very fluid, for I am about change, in some ways, a person of trial and error… She smiles encouragingly. I pick ideas and wonder how relevant, maybe useful, to me it might be. I try things, I test if “it”works for me, sometime I put “it” on the shelf for a while, to come back to it later. As a young person I was shy about my ignorance, to the point of sometime (too often?) claiming a knowledge, an understanding, I did not really have. That is a cardinal sin, and no good comes out of it, as I learned to my cost. 

Denial

So as a result, I later started denying knowledge, even when I had by then acquired plenty. This was going all the way back and reinventing myself as the constant searcher, for example, in writing. Writing very much defines the person I am, or have become. I live both in this reality, and in the dreams, in the imagined universe. My novel The Page is all about that, I am that character, Julian, a vacillating being, only in a solid state when surrounded by his women. He searches for a lost love, and when he finds her, he’s frightened, in fact in the end it might destroy him.

Wonder

If writing defines me as a thinking (I hope) being, my love of women is what my mind returns to, time and again. At school, in those years of adolescence before I joined the army, I was observing, wondering, imagining how “they” lived, what “they” thought, dreamed of, hoped for… I would have loved to be, for a brief few hours, one of them, in order to know, from inside as it were. But I learned it wasn’t possible, and acquired enough depth of reflexion and spirituality to accept who I was, and the changes that inevitably would take place right up to my demise.

As I told you, there is a lot to reconcile. To date I have never yet completed any of my books, they await the final chapter, all that editing, that patient submission to critique, correcting, rewriting, I have only succeeded in pushing forward. The text that is closest to me, as I am at this point, is the Owl story, which I intend to continue.

Mystery

The woman in that story is a witch, and possibly, a vampire, unless that part is in a dream. The ambiguity is there, between a realistic description, the city we knew and loved before the plague, and the imagined sequel, the Owl, who symbolises the mysterious, wisdom, deep secrets, an even deeper eroticism. Perhaps the Owl is my ideal being, aloof, yet with universal understanding of the human soul, detached but all-seeing and knowing. If the Owl was willing to write, all his pronouncements would be best sellers! 

I am not the Owl, neither am I any of the women I described in my books. As you know I am not you, however I love and cherish you, in our reality, and in my dreams. What comes next, you could ask. Well, I can no longer reinvent myself, but I can nudge in some directions. Some of those are more attractive. I also have guides, Ilyin especially, Bret, who knows a lot about appearances and what stands behind the veil (“the better you look, the more you see”), and more recently Donna, about whom I will be writing later.

Writing

There is certainly a lot of writing in prospect, and personal experience that, if it does not kill me outright, will be source of new stories. What else can I tell you: you know about the sinner, the lover, the frightened little boy in the dark, the writer. I don’t lie, I just invent, and for a while believe my invention.

Quote:

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere. – Carl Sagan