Old Stories Become New Paper

[qos]

I've written here before about the internal experience of my old stories no longer having the same meaning, except for the reflection of who I used to be.

Today during a serious cleaning session, I went through three notebooks of primarily hand-written fiction, some of it dating back as far as junior high. None of it had seen the light of day in several years. At first I went through it page by page, deciding which to keep and which to throw in the recycle bag. But the further I went on, the less time I spent on any one page. By the time I came to the last notebook, the one containing at least one hundred pages of handwritten episodes from my Journeys, the core myth of my youth, I was ready to simply pull them all out, knowing that I would never read them again, nor use them as inspiration for new writing. Quite literally, those chapters of my life are at an end.

I did keep a few things. _storyteller_ just asked me what those pieces said to and about me. I hadn't thought about it yet. Some are simply mostly-finished pieces that I still like, or am proud of in some way. Many, as I reflect now, are explorations of themes of sovereignty which continues to be a powerful, meaningful concept to me. So there is some continuity.

It always feels good to purge possessions, but this is the first time I've seriously purged my creative past. And I feel lighter for it.

Comments

[bodhibird.livejournal.com]

I did something very similar when we moved this summer, from a two-level apartment into a much smaller one-bedroom. I threw out most of my journals. I kept the first volume or two that I wrote, the one in which I recorded my mother's death, and volumes from the last three years. Once we moved, I regretted even keeping things from the last three years--they're sitting in a box in the floor here in the study, and there just is no place to put them. But it wasn't hard to purge those things; I was truly ready to let go.

[qos.livejournal.com]

I still have all my journals. It's never even occurred to me to purge them.

[professor-mom.livejournal.com]

Tell me about sovereignity. Sovereignity over what? By whom?

[qos.livejournal.com]

The kind of sovereignty to which I refer here is the ancient concept that the king of a nation/land derived his right to rule not from bloodline but from having earned the favor of the Goddess of the Land. The oldest (I believe) example of this is found in the marriage hymns of Inanna from ancient Sumer (some of the oldest writing known to humanity), in which the goddess Inanna gives kingship to Dumuzi, the former shepherd with whom she has fallen in love.

In Celtic myth, you see this concept in the stories of heroes who kiss an ugly woman and are awarded lordship. In the Arthurian cycle, Guinevere can be seen as an embodiment of sovereignty, reflected in the number of times she is kidnapped by kings who want to rule through her.

So-called sacred prostitution and the rite of the hieros gamos are associated with these concepts, especially in the Ancient Near East. The concept of the King Sacrifice, in which a ruler whose vitality (and fertility) was failing, was ritually killed so a younger man, one more fit to be the lover of the Goddess and promote the fertility and prosperity of the nation, could take his place, is also part of this mythic complex.

Since adolescence, before I had read about these practices and beliefs, I was writing stories which reflected these motifs and themes. And they continue to have resonance for me. They don't often intersect with my daily life, it's more that they are part of my deep spiritual inheritance.