Elowen Threesixty

The Symbolists and Decadents. A return to the roots

I have that disease that afflicts a lot of people, I guess. Even big, important, famous people, from what I’ve read. It’s that feeling that - even with my small successes - someday they will find out I don’t belong here. I forget the name of it, but it is a known condition. It’s like one day “they” will find out I’m faking it. That I’m incredibly inauthentic or something.

I have another disease that I’m not sure has a name. It’s the one that makes me absolutely hate everything I’ve ever published. It’s like - when I’m in the process of doing “it” it’s the best writing I’ve ever done and look out here it comes. Then when it gets published and is out there all I see are the things that I could have been done better and sometimes it is actually embarrassing.

I dunno…

The current “thing” going on here lately came about when I rediscovered a book I’ve had since high school on the Symbolists and Decadents movement of the 19th century. I’d forgotten what a huge influence it was on me, even in my weird little high school writings at the time. I read it again, probably for the twenty-ninth time, and immediately had a notion and a question.

Who says things have to be this way? What if the subconscious, even the unconscious, fueled the collaboration between writer and reader? That’s what it is, isn’t it? Reading. A collaboration between writer and reader. The writer stokes the fuel and the reader provides the misty pictures in their head. There is a purpose to deconstruction of the normal. One deconstructs to reconstruct. And, in the process, fulfills the mandate to entertain. To fuel the reader’s fire.

So I scrapped a project I’d been working on for months, tore up over 40,000 words already in a third draft, and stripped it to the bones to build it back up so that all it becomes a book about Elowen. And nothing else.

“What I should like is a book about nothing at all. A book which would exist by virtue of the mere strength of its style.” - Gustav Flaubert

Challenge accepted. We’ll see.

“How many times did Elowen sit as a little girl looking out at the blue morning with the scent of summer fish rising from the wet edges of the river, wondering what would it be if she’d only turned left instead of right, if she’d only said no instead of yes, if she would have only done what she should have done instead of not knowing what could be done when all was said and done, making it so that if any one of these things were true because, or false instead, how the entire trajectory of her life would have been different? There was no proper count of it to be had. If, then, go, to, known faces would be a continual mystery and how many unknown names then would be close friends now. The world would turn just the same, but that cup would be on another part of the shelf, that curtain would be drawn instead of open. As a girl she gathered golden stones by that river. Not just any gold colored stones but the ones with red flecks in them, tossing the others aside. She said these were the special stones. She imagined they were formed by the sun in the last ice age and had nothing to do with volcanoes. She only paid attention to the proper stones and in her own voices, though three of them had proven to be liars. And at some time in the future, far ahead, when the judge would ask her to explain the stones, as all judges will, she’ll say she was a swan sworn to secrecy by the darker priests, the other ones, the ones beyond the red doors, and no amount of torture would get her to talk. And so it was up to the police to interrogate the stones, which will reveal all they need to know when spun properly in the dish.

“Everyone ever born is like those who lived anonymously a thousand years before who are now swallowed by the valid black and never spoken of again, forgotten by the current generations and gone from every dream and memory. And the rush of air pushed their hair and buried their footprints under the sand, and all photographs have been lost in the flood, and three generations later no one can recall a name, a face, or the sound of a voice that once could sing. If she could only lay back in her old rotten blankets and listen to some nameless symphony on the radio she might nudge the reminder sneaking around the lobes inside and spare the memory from its drain. But there was no time for that. The disappearance of everyone left was the all-consuming mystery now, for which she blamed herself, being at heart a father’s sweet daughter after all. If she could only have a minute of breath she might be able to get a hold of herself, and the anger that was trying to destroy her peace would subside.

“She would stand by her window, the necklace in her fingers, knowing there were people, everybody else, mindless of the tragedy, lost in their own lives.”