13. 'If these could talk.
I have 15 different keys on my key chain (I counted). The house key, silver with a blue head, the key to the mail box, big and yellow and 12 other keys, I have no clue what they are for. An exciting assortment of sizes and colors, dangling from my key chain, they take considerable space in my purse not to mention the additional weight.
I could throw them away, I know, but that will be a highly irresponsible act considering I don’t know what they can open. At least twice a day when I open the entrance door, or go to the post office, I pull the heavy bundle of lifeless, useless, metal, and examine it closely.
It makes no sense to me. I know I was the one who put them on the key chain, so at some point in time I thought they were important enough to keep.
How I wish they could talk, tell me their stories, lead me on exciting adventures, back to forgotten places and long gone memories. I shake them in moments of frustration; listen to the hollow sound, hoping for an answer. But all they do is stare back at me, dead as the door knobs they were designed to open.
14. Wishing? Lying? Dreaming? Dancing? Boxing? Cooking? What is writing like for you?
“Words have set whole nations in motion…Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.” Joseph Conrad
In the beginning
In the beginning, when god created the world, it was formless. The dark and the light were all intermingled, swirling in the open space. The moon and stars were in two opposite sides and the sun was tucked in a far shady corner. And so he patiently constructed an order and set everything in the right place. He created people and dressed them up, gave them names and rolls to fill. He did it all in six days and produced the biggest, most told story of them all.
When I sit across my loyal computer for a split second I feel the same kind of power. I am a creator; I create worlds with the movement of my fingers. I take words and tame them. I pull them out of the void or send them back. I place them one next to the other and then on a moment’s whim I rearrange them again and again. I create meaning, I create chaos, I create life.
“Bla...bla...bla…” I scold myself, in a moment of sincerity, nice, perhaps even creative literary piece, but essentially meaningless rhetoric. The less appeasing answer is that I write to maintain my sanity, to push away the boredom and the heavy feeling of passing through the world, unnoticed. I write because over the years writing became my drug of choice. I am an addict; there is no other way to look at it. Perhaps I should join a “writers anonymous,” support group (WA in short). Oh, wait a minute, isn't this group it?
16. What would you like to be paid to talk about?
When I was young, many years ago, I was what can be called, without sounding too pretentious, an educator. I had a lot to say then.
If I was stopped in the middle of the street, or woken up at night, I could without a minute of hesitation deliver a lengthy lecture on the faults of the education system. I would season it with anecdotes from my daily life, swimming against the undercurrent of rules, regulations, unsubstantiated theories, and sheer stupidity. It wasn't mere criticism; I had suggestions and well developed theories on how to fix those maladies which in my expert opinion, ailed a well meaning, perhaps one of the most enlightened, social systems.
The great equalizer that meant to open the doors for humanity everywhere, and need I mention, for no cost. I am overwhelmed every time I stop to think of the magnitude of this social endeavor. At the same time I realize that like so many other social actions, the results fell short of the expectations.
I could go on and on, discussing the pro and cones, the rights and the wrongs, the villains and the saints. Could pull out well- versed articles, statistics and testimonies, but that was then, when I was young, naïve, and thought I could change the world. Now that I am not young anymore (some will even say, kind of old) I have nothing new to contribute to this issue, nor that I would care to say it if I did.
Here's the most famous dead doornail in English literature, from 'The Christmas Carol.'
ReplyDeleteMarley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to.
Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
YOur key piece is charming, not a wasted word, and the last sentence is a mini-master class in how to twist a sentence, recycle a cliche, and end a piece with a pop.
In the beginning:
ReplyDeleteI like your pastiche of Genesis 1:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
Gen 1:2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness [was] upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
Gen 1:3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
Gen 1:4 And God saw the light, that [it was] good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
Gen 1:5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
Gen 1:6 ¶ And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
Gen 1:7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which [were] under the firmament from the waters which [were] above the firmament: and it was so.
and so on.
And I like your second graf where you become Creator--that plays off the first graf very cleverly and amusingly.
Graf 3--sounds like it was an add-on, something that wandered in from a different piece. Not needed IMO.
BTW, I only count 14 keys in the previous piece not the 15 you claim....
16--the topic you assigned yourself still ties you in the knots of the impotent forced to watch powerful idiots doing mischief. I sympathize as a fellow educator not very impressed with education as it is widely understood or constituted.
ReplyDeleteDefinitely an educator not a mathematician :-)
ReplyDelete1+1+12 = 15 seemed fine to me.