Attack Of The 50-foot Verbose Mutant Killer Fountain Pens From Mars | Page 3

numbers and algebra. Why should ours be any less real
because the mnemonics assemble in our heads and encoded on paper by
the mechanics of the motor cortex, bones and muscle. Oh yes, and the
pen (or keyboard).
The Muse is out there. Hiding, and giggling coy in the cosmology of
our altered state.
And we search in strange places every time we sit at a desk.
So be adventurous. Don't just push at the doors, fling them wide and
see what's out there. You might be amazed at what comes back with
you.
Writing is metaphysical, spiritual cosmic exploration, without never a
need to worry about the vice squad a'calling.
Unless, that is, you like to wind down with the old prohibited stuff.
Me, I'll just stick with the words.
December 2003

Hunters Of The Untamed Idea

The invention of writing might have domesticated the story, but the
beast can still bite...
BEFORE the written word there was only the spoken word. The
attempted domestication of the story is a mere blink of an eye in the
history of storytelling. Scarce a few thousands years old, writing has far
from tamed the story. They are as wild and free as they ever were, and
the author is still a hunter-gatherer tracking ideas across the
dreamscape.
So we can capture them in words, pin them to the page like insects in a
museum collection, but the breed goes on. It grows and shifts in the
same chaotic patterns that enthralled our distant forebears. All we have
done is shift the balance, for the story still evolves - along with us. The
story lives feral in our imaginations, skulking in the shadows of our
darkest fears, or soaring high on the thermals of our greatest dreams.
The world is reflected in our dreamscape. As we change the world, it
changes us, so too does the visionary stuff of fiction shift under our
fingertips. What writer hasn't felt the story fight back, twist and wriggle
to become something else? Fiction is a living thing for it is nothing less
than an idealisation of ourselves, of our world in all its sordid, nihilistic
complexity.
Fiction is the place where reality and imagination merge. This is the
dreamscape. Ideas are derived from the world around us. They are
fashioned into shape, spliced with other notions and fermented in our
minds, only to be frozen in time on the written page. In that sense our
modern stories are dead things, yet like fossils they can reach out
beyond their own age to tantalise generations unborn.
Like all storytellers, we are rooted firmly in our age. The tales we
weave are dependent on the world around us, and what we know of the
world that went before. We may fantasise the future, but the truth is
tomorrow is forever unwritten. Our future-shocks are a product of
present day fears and hopes, projected onto our children and their
children. Yet paradoxically, by envisioning the future we can shift
consciousness towards realising at least something of that vision.

So our stories are rooted in time. Yet the very best can reach out,
become timeless by capturing the eternal essence of what it is to be
human and to convey the very spirit of the age in which it was written.
In a sense that gives us a far greater power than our forebears who
wove their words only in the transient human mind, through the
medium of the spoken word. Their stories were timeless in the sense
that such peoples rarely had any notion of linear time. To them, time
was cyclic. The present was simply the here and now on the way to
future, which was itself merely a foretelling of the past. Divorced from
a sense of history, their stories could only shift and change as they and
their world shifted and changed.
Yet for these people, these ancient hunter-gatherers, or simple farmers,
who existed on the edge of the war-zone that we call civilisation,
stories possessed a far greater power than their modern descendants.
For them, stories were a powerful rendition of their daily lives. The
storyteller possessed an almost magical gift to walk with the Gods in
the mythic realm. He wove great heroes, gave his audience an
expanded sense of their own lives. In this way, he expressed the values
and provided the living links with one generation to the next.
Through the story, our ancestors learned who they were - not just as
individuals but as families and communities. Stories expressed the
relationships between humanity and nature. They strove to make sense
of the world at the dawn of time. Reality and fantasy intermingled in
these stories. Heroes became mythologised into demi-Gods, the ills of
the world were given shape as the beasts