When you were getting on to the point where you felt like taking on the teens, you learned one day in a classroom of the fog coming in on little cat feet. Fog was never the same from that time, nor were cats. Each time you saw fog or a cat thereafter, both held you as your father once did,up on his shoulders, above the crowd, where you were able to see the parade.
By its intrinsic nature, parades move along a route, their pace sometimes changing as an antic moment breaks free, taking charge with the energy and determination of its mischief.
A parade becomes an excellent analogy for Reality; although its participants have some notion of what they ought to do and how to do it, parades are governed by the ruling forces of surprise and change, one often coming at the expense of the other, but also in the kind of tandem you see when watching a group of youngsters skipping along in the pure glee of some surprise or change in routine.
Everything about you is some tangible something until it changes into something else. In story, joy often takes a turn away from the parade of revelers to the place where it becomes changed into a sadness so profound that you cannot help feeling the entire universe has gone into some ritual of mourning.
Sometimes while in the process of shaving, which is to say when you are performing the act or causing individuals of your invention to shave, you look for and find traces of what you brought to the mirror when you were first beginning to shave, so eager to be chosen to play on a team in the game of adulthood and growing up that you considered it romantic and appropriate to shave. You saw traces of both your male grandparents, you saw yourself eager for the whiskers that would in time come to annoy you rather than give you the definition of your hopes.
Change paces as nervously through your stories as you paced through your teens, daring puberty to take you down,change you from the closet romantic you were into a character of your own design, a character whose voice not only changed but as well his way of engaging Reality.
There you would be, the romantic egoist, for you were romantic in hopes its energy would move you away from shyness with a slight hint of restraint you thought only the French could have because more and more, the characters you most admired were said to have sang froid. Although it means the same thing in English and French, cold blood meant something quite changed from the mere cold blood of English; it meant detached-but-observant.
Everything about you has changed, including the way you approach story, which is not at all to tell it and explain its meanings but to work yourself into it, at enough depth for the forces of change to take hold of you and it, and while it is playing out before you, there are moments when you understand what you have become.
Saturday, September 10, 2016
Change
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