I reminisced of a time long ago when I was only twenty years old.
I was studying English 101 at the University Of British Columbia in the summer of Eighty-Four.
It was at a summer session because I had failed English 101 two years before.
A failure due more to my citizenship in a different realm than to the failings of my intellect, aptitude or the magnanimity of my core.
“You have such a poignant and evocative writing style,” wrote my teacher on the short-story I had submitted the week before.
I had written about a lonely sojourn on a desolate beach in the pregnant moment,
When sunset injures day's abandon and grants night the freedom to roam.
I had written about the mighty North Shore mountains,
Hoary with age and reverberating with an energy ineffable to the mind,
But savored by the soul.
I remembered how exhausting of mind, but above all of the soul, writing that short-story had been.
I tried to reveal my spirit bare and exposed.
I tried to destroy the ramparts and blow open the heavy gates shielding my secretive core.
But through my exhausting efforts I had only succeeded in weakening the facade between me and the world,
Usually held at arm's length,
But through my story then, only slightly nearer yet still remote.
There is an essence within everyone hidden in a chamber far beneath the veneer that encrusts our core.
We seldom allow it expression beyond just its fractured shadows dancing on an external wall.
But if we all dig deep and reach into this secretive chamber,
We will, to our astonishment, discover we are all reaching into the same chamber,
Not a separate one for each within the all.
And then we will grasp each other's same-hand.
We all share the same soul.
I knew that in the novel of my compulsion I would have to expose this chamber,
Ramparts and heavy gates destroyed once and for all.
And my novel would then cry out from this collective chamber,
And speak for my left and for my right with one voice for all.
It would be the ineffable ground of being reaching out to humanity from the navel of Creation,
Proclaiming the dawn of a Third Age.
It would announce the sunset of the Second Age before this coming dawn.
A moment pregnant with change that will forever be remembered in the annals of the Civilization of Man.
It would herald a paradigm shift far greater than the Renaissance,
Not just an age of reason, but of reason and divinity intertwined as an inseparable whole.
I envision the Third Age to be promoting the two primordial dancers,
The abstract magical and the other its complementary whole.
To engage in the Dance and thence unshard into the Eternal Garden from whence we all came forth.
They are in Eternity entwined, but sharded into the realms of space and time.
They are shards of the divine.
Would composing such a novel be an arduous journey,
Exhausting my body and above all my core?
Would I be as a drowning man,
Gasping for breath,
Kicking and screaming while with futility grasping for shore?
But would every paragraph and page exhaust me,
Yet also leave me yearning for more?
It would I am sure.
This arduous compulsion will also uplift and invigorate me with waves of catharsis and frisson.
And I pray dearly for the same in my reader,
of soul-piercing joy.
If I fail to evoke the same in my audience then I would have failed to breach the ramparts and the gates shielding my innermost chamber,
Our collective soul.
Only within this innermost shared sanctum can I truly touch someone's soul.
And by touching one, I will be touching them all.
