Sunday, 4/10/05 - 22:01
This is a story -- or maybe a myth -- created through a word association trance with C. and Ted. The exercise starts out with each person free-associating a few words based on the words of the person before her, and then shifts to image association, which is where the story starts:
Imagine a deserted baseball stadium, a haunted baseball stadium filled with cobwebs and green grass and wild mustard, but no people. Silhouetted against the sky, it looks like the ruins of the Roman Coliseum. That sends you back remembering--
Remembering the coliseum filled with crowds and pacing lions, where a gladiator dressed seemingly inappropriately in the deep blood-red of emperors is about to die. And a woman in the stands watches him, she loves him, she loves him and he's about to die. She has olive skin and long blonde hair.
And now she's walking on the beach, mourning him. The wind is cold and cold waves froth around her feet and glue her skirts to her legs. The gulls call on the salt wind. One gull sits on its nest, and a crow watches nearby, eying the eggs.
There are ravens in the Tower of London, too, and the Beatles' song "Help!" is playing in the background (instead of "Yesterday," which Tim Powers fans might have expected). Nearby in the Thames urchins with frozen toes search for scrap metal and pennies in the mud. The carriages going by pay them no heed.
A man with a huge afro is climbing a steep stone staircase up to the tower. The edges of the steps are worn away with age. Up and up he keeps climbing, until he gets to the top. You can see the whole city from up here, laid out flat before you, lights just beginning to twinkle in the dusk. The woman with long blonde hair ducks out from behind a corner and joins him. They hold hands, looking at the city, and melt together in a kiss.
Then they jump. The wind's rushing past their bodies, but they never hit the ground.
Everyone looked up, amazed -- no one could understand why they didn't stop falling. I saw them falling in my rearview mirror, what must have been centuries later. They kept falling, and they became the city. They're in the wind that blows over the cities; they're in the buildings and the trees. They're in the children playing in the city's yards.
I'm on a merry-go-round, spinning faster and faster, but my hand on the bar is loose and there's a bee that's crawled into the gap beneath my hand. A surge of adrenaline and it escapes without stinging me, but I lose my grip. Then I fall down, down onto the sand, onto the beach and a cold wave washes over me before warm hands pick me up.
It's sunset again, and the sun goes down over the water in glorious reds and pinks, with a green flash right after it goes under the horizon. I keep walking along the beach, past piles of wood they put down to keep the beach from washing away in the winter, and past the kids playing gladiator with scavenged bamboo swords. The water's cold, so I move onto the dry sand, and as I turn and look behind me in the dying light, I see that my footsteps are deeper than they should be, and filled with water reflecting the last orange of the sun. My long blonde hair blows around me.
The stars start to come out, blazing fire. I hear the sound of fire trucks going to put out the stars, and I sit down under a tree whose dark leaves are rustling in the wind and blocking the view of the sky. Then I realize that it's not the sirens of fire trucks I hear, but sirens in the ocean. The ocean is mourning its separation from the sky, wailing, trying to lure the stars back down into the water. They long to come together, long to reunite -- all that is, and was, and ever shall be.
Watching this happen before our eyes, not knowing where it was going, was pretty neat. I haven't intentionally added or subtracted anything, so a couple details seem out of place. But I can recognize a lot of the images as things I've seen or thought about recently, like identifying bits of a dream when you wake -- or evidence that the lady and her lover are still in our buildings and on our beaches?... :)
Long live Diaryland!
The five most recent entries:
More Naval Gazing - Saturday, 8/13/05
Anniversary Diving - Friday, 8/12/05
Academic Tip of the Week - Tuesday, May. 17, 2005
How to tell a Midwesterner - Sunday, 4/24/05
Academic Feelings - Thursday, 4/21/05
Ted's most recent entry:
Monday, May 12