1/23/2009 1:21:16 PM
Layers of Time
Layers upon layers....the last 8 years, the last 8 months... the last 800 years...tribes...goldpanners...peasants...kings...workers in factories with sealed windows...your teenage years...your childhood...her childhood...grandfather's childhood...journeys across oceans...world series...family trouble in your childhood, family joy....children born, people died
150 years ago there weren't even a million people in California, war and murders and alliances , deals made, customs lost but recorded in books, books and books and books...
and the universe once would have fit on the head of a pin, fires that burned villages and towns...and always human emotion on everything in all those layers and layers.
Layers of lives bumping against other lives, and stories upon stories they told about animals and heroes and devils and tricksters, myths that mean something but we don't quite know why...blood spilled....servants, served, jesters, executioners, soldiers, prisoners,, tribes losing their land, tribes taking others' land, father and daughter, mothers and sons, sisters betraying sisters, brothers killing brothers, layers of weird time down in the bible, down in the fables, characters in plays and novels, killers and those who hunt the killers, those hunted by them...
layers and layer and layers
and all there for our writing when you find out your job as a writer isn't necesarily about you...it can open up to all the layers of time. And you can mix them together in the same song. You don't even have to work out why they fit. Try it...they fit because it's all huumanity...
and then it all opens up so wide.