The Twig Already Is Bent. . . Before We Are Born. . .
Before. Apriori. I love that word but I don’t see it often. It encapsulates meanings long held on whatever subject. I use it to mean lives lived before now; some of us with long histories and others freshly minted. Those who think we are a clean slate are right, for some are born closed off to their pasts.
Others, and the list is growing, come with open heads with glimpses and bleed throughs from lives lived elsewhere. Some children learn early to close down memories making living easier but others slug on through unhappily and others spend a lifetime accommodating and alibiing either themselves or others.
In my lifetime I have come across a few writers who bear me out. One whose life was a line to sanity was Jane Roberts and her artist husband Robert Butts whose support was inestimable. Others like Catherine Cookson was a novelist whose needs were keen when she rented a room with a card table for her typewriter and shouted to the heavens she was ready so send her a book!
Another was Joyce Carol Oates who was teaching in Windsor when she was interviewed by a Detroit newspaper and said she never outlined, just sat at her typewriter table with a ream of paper and started mentally taking dictation.
The prolific Norah Roberts in one book had a writer tell his mother who commented on the progress he made on his novel that it is all up there, you just have to reach for it.
If it is marketable there are trips to the bank. I missed the marketing by a long shot but the satisfaction of needing to know made life comprehensible, has kept me from the bridge and has been worth the work and struggle. My work does not meet laboratory tests nor credence but it has carried me through crises that would cow the most able soul.
Most of my work is a Given with the footwork immense. Memories of past lives in glimpses taught me many things that this life did not include.
On her deathbed in a conversation with me my mother said she did not know how to love because she had no one to teach her. Orphaned, her life was work centered and that she learned. She taught us all diligently to persevere and I call those the ‘jenny genes.’ To know how to show love has to be taught. Think on that.
Being open headed like some writers are, also presents certain abilities offensive to others. One is being able to walk into a room and pick up thoughts. It seems an invasion of privacy but to the one receiving thoughts in a large group oftentimes feels like a shower of pellets from BB guns at an unclad body.
Unless told that it was what someone was thinking at the time, the person is innocent of invading thought. It just is part of their thinking mechanism as a stray thought usually is, like where did that come from?
Muses are still at work. Writers are writers and do not give up their craft. I crashed the cosmic gates and headed for Olympus because my life depended on what the sages continue to argue. I’m no fun, am I? I was not in other lifetimes either it seems. Sorry about that. But no regrets also, from either side.