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Bob Elliott
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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.
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Bob Elliott
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1/24/2009 11:36:47 PM
So this man kills another man's brother from another tribe, but he refuses to pay the needed price to even the score, 60 dollars, he won't even pay ten or even negotiate. So this brother has to settle the insult. The white man that runs the little store sees a new native coming around the store, but only at sundown and he buys only the smallest amount of food you can get. He doesn't talk much and only comes in quietly when all the regular natives have gone. He does this for months. The store owner knows something's up but has learned from experience not to get involved.
This man waits hidden near the river all through the fall and into the winter, the store owner sees he is starving, he barely speaks. He waits for his enemy to just show himself once down at the river in the morning, but he is cold and tattered and hungry and the enemy never shows for days upon days.
Finally, one morning when he is so cold and so hungry, he see the man at the river, and now his body awakens and finds strength, fills with enough life, and he draws his bow and shoots him. Now the score is settled and he can return to life where he comes from.
And that really happened.
Patiently waiting, hungry and cold, quietly fetching supplies at sundown for months until the day comes and he kills his enemy that hadn't paid the needed price for the murder of his brother.
That is a feeling that might help drive a song or at least a section of a verse. That's human. That says a lot of things about humans, and even more if I can remember what the first murder was about.
Love hate loyalty suffering shame hiding patience hunger violence release sundown sunrise brother enemy blood in the cold water
and an outsider watching it all unfold and deciding to stay out
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