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Those of you who actually read what I write know that my mind doesn't roll forward in a linear manner. As much as I hate football taking over winter TV, I have to admit my mind bounces around very much like an incomplete pass. Round balls roll and bounce in a predictable manner, but you can't expect that from a pointed ellipse. In the process of learning one thing I'm off in another direction, reseaching another component of the topic, until it becomes as chopped and convoluted as an egg roll, packaged with the contents hidden from view. An egg roll doesn't have eggs in it. It gets its name from the way the wonton is sealed closed with egg whites. Who knows what holds my thoughts together? I could offer an apology for how this particular article has evolved. But I won't. Instead, I urge you to use it as a jumping off point for your own research in a variety of directions. There are a lot more links than usual, and they lead to pages where you can progress to more information on ancient history, from all over the globe. I've tried to make each link load a new window, so you can close it when you're done with it. That way you still have the original page of The Journey of the Magi, in case you go wandering off through mountains of internet sites. I still remember when I first encountered the internet through AOL, and had no idea what to do, so I started clicking the mouse on things just to see what happened. With search engines like Google, it's become a virtual paradise of knowledge. To me that's the benefit of the internet. It's intricately woven fashion allows such freedom of discovery. I'm grateful to have the skills to become one more spinning spider in the development of a worldwide web. The Journey of the Magi began with an intent to create a fictional story, looking at the Christmas story from another angle. I suppose it was intended to be styled after the play, "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead," which was written by W. S. Gilbert, to give "Hamlet" a new perspective. I wanted to travel with the Magi, to try to experience what was going through their minds as they followed a new star in the sky, to understand why they even made the trip. As I researched different sites, it just evolved, getting out of my control. Trying to get it into some kind of order has taken days of writing and research. One of the most fascinating things about art is that the medium exerts a certain amount of control over the artist. If you carve wood, you need to understand the grain and hardness and how it flakes off. If you carve stone, you need the patience to know that it takes a lot of chisel pounding before the fragment you're working on finally breaks off. If you paint, you need to know about how to mix colors, how to balance their weight, how to direct the eye to move across the canvas. For a writer it's more mental than physical, but the letters and words do take over at times. The story is a creation of evolution, changing, mutating and maturing as it moves forward. I suppose it's a form of Intelligent Design, but I don't always know where I'm going or where I'll end up. I'm just following the light wherever it leads. The ideas come in and need to be sent out through the keyboard to form words, arranged, re-arranged, fine tuned, and sometimes deleted. Thank God we're done with typewriters and piles of trashed 8 by 11 sheets! Sometimes when I think about my own death, the thing that I will miss the most besides the people I like, is my writing. The flood of thoughts that want me to put them down on paper are a daunting array of topics, and I feel so hampered by having to distill them from mental images to physical reality. The body just doesn't work fast enough sometimes. Never! My fingers miss so many of the right keys that it's good I'm not singing in a choir. I wish I could think the words right on to the screen, but technology hasn't gone that far yet. I sometimes find myself like the person standing at a refrigerator, holding the door open. Sitting here, staring at the screen and wondering, "What was that thought I just had that I missed?" But no matter how many days, weeks, months -- even years! -- I spend at this desk, spilling coffee, eating pizza, and taking time to watch the world news, I can't seem to satisfy the stream of images that flood through me, wanting me to fish them out, hook them or net them. Words swimming by, phrases flipping up to break through the surface of some primordial unconscious, splashing down with sounds like, "Write me... No me... You gotta finish this one... Don't stop... Stay up all night and write!... Be a carpenter of language, nailing down words to form a structure... No, let me make you a fisherman of words!" Of course writing is meaningless without readers. Well, not entirely meaningless, but rather pointless. I suppose it's an excellent therapy for me, even if I'm the only reader. I learn a lot and I'm developing my own style. But it's you guys that make the work feel worth it. It's you guys that sometimes write to say you enjoyed something, adding a pleasant feather in my cap. It's you guys who I hope keep coming back, because that's the only reason I need to upload it to the web site. |
