The first printing of my novel, Soliloquy, is done and I'm making copies available to anyone who would like one. FREE. Yes, I just want to get my work out there at this point, so I'm covering the printing and postage right now in an effort to promote myself. Send a message or an e-mail and I will get one to you as soon as I can.
****
Soliloquy: or, Emanations of the Muse (190pp, plus illustrations)
Excerpt from Chapter 3:
I stay awake at night with these thoughts churning, the same thing being said over and over, the wording altered slightly each time. Like a song playing over and over again in your head but instead of a song it’s a whole spectrum of ideas branching off one another eternally in an infinite number of directions. I’ve seen so much madness and studied so much of it, what if I’m purposely driving myself mad, I wonder sometimes. Using myself as a guinea pig for some massive long-term psychological experiment. Better than popping out a couple kids and instilling all the hype and fear and ugliness my upbringing forced upon me. Most children are born as Frankenstein monsters—a genetic and psychological patchwork design of the parents and their environment. While the virtuous legacies continue so do family vices strengthen with each imperfect generation. Evolution depends upon your point of view. Evolving toward what? Evolving from what? For all the gifts it affords, we lose something else. Somewhere in that dark rift between the push ever-forward into the future and the heavy magnetic pull of the past is the birthplace of madness. Everyone’s madness unique. At the very heart of that madness is one’s personal salvation. Back to the source. Acknowledge and confront the shadowy sides of our personality, bring them out into the light, sort through the many possibilities to find the real self.
When the human brain begins developing, it is one. As the fetus matures, the brain splits in two. Life is a struggle to keep polarities of all kinds in balance. Persona and Anima, outer and inner selves. A constant struggle to merge the two. Our Shadow emerges throughout the conflict, teaching us the lessons we need using the most base language our psyches can comprehend. Billions of years of evolution, the fission and fusion, the collapse and release of the universe into itself, anchoring us down to the ylem, swimming in the Void’s amniotic seas.
So many selves. The true self, one’s true personality forever hidden in this diverse cacophony. But some are able to shape the crude key needed to open this lost door. And enter the Secret Room. In the hidden depths of our primal, elemental nature is the mold to fashion this key.
I go over past relationships, what they mean, how they may have affected me. My mom is the big question mark. I was born the day she died. This fact haunts me. A helpless guilty feeling. I know it’s completely irrational to blame myself, but the feeling is always there, active or dormant. She sacrificed her life for mine. Naturally, I’m gonna have issues: idealizing women, I know I’m guilty of this. And perhaps there is some selfishness born out of it, as well, due to some of the high expectations I don’t even realize I’m putting on a woman. Consciously, I want only what is there, but I see these deeper desires in the women, places I know their minds want to go, things they want to be. Yes, I love the women, but I also love the potential their souls reflect. When I’m at my worst, during a lingering spell of depression, I feel let down by what I see as a hopeless projection my mind has created: that I can’t live up to the pure beauty she represents. At my best I have all the questions and their answers etched into my mind. I have the solar system sitting in the palm of my hand, the Sun burning in the center, the planets madly rotating and revolving in their predetermined orbits. This kind of radiating confidence is wonderful.
How Mom’s death must have affected Dad and how it may have affected our relationship, they didn’t teach us this in school. This is probably what I was seeking when I decided on my major. Answers to my questions. But I’m too close to my situation. The idea being that answers to childhood questions will make things easier now if I could figure them out, so far from the nest, years later now. All grown up. The thought frightens me sometimes.
The finger-pointing days are over. This phase of my life has been devoted to integration. The observational days of my youth are never far behind, but looking deep inside my self, my soul I guess, strange as it may get, I know I can find a little peace of mind. A lofty enough set of wings to catch breezes of freedom and wisdom. Fully savor the morsel of every moment.
And, after all, isn’t that what we all want?
Sometimes I wonder how much of my present life I’ll be sorting out in the future. Is it a never-ending cycle, will the past always haunt me?
