getting personal: the bird who was afraid of heights
Writing is hard for me, except for the times when it flows with ridiculous ease. The process has mystified me since childhood when every year without fail I would buy myself one of those little diaries with a lock and key, the kind with a page per day or sometimes two entries per page. I was fascinated with the idea of writing and I desperately wanted to keep a diary like the girls in stories did. "Dear Diary," I would write, then, stuck for words, leave the rest of the entry blank or write, "Just routine today," or "Nothing new today." One year, I abbreviated ‘Just routine today’ to the letters ‘JRT’ and filled an entire year with those initials.
I wrote a couple of stories and a comic book around the age of ten. I remember the comic book in particular. It featured two women, one blond and one brunette (inspired by Betty and Veronica, of course), who dressed in harem costumes and flew around the world having adventures on a flying carpet. I believe I was into ‘I Dream of Jeannie’ at the time, but I didn’t approve of her slavery nor her confinement in the bottle. I can’t remeber if these girls had any powers or magic beyond that of the flying carpet; I rather think they didn’t. Their friendship was the central theme of the story, perhaps reflecting the fact that I had a sister 14 months younger than myself and seldom did anything by myself.
When I was fourteen, I wrote a poem, the only actual poem of my life up until I began writing free-form poems and songs in my late twenties. The poem was entitled ‘The Bird Who Was Afraid of Heights." Unfortunately, much of it has been lost in the mists of memory though it was published in the local paper a couple of years after I wrote it, so is conceivably retrievable, at least in theory. It’s not a particularly wonderful poem, but it was my first and I have a soft spot for it still.
A little bird sat on the limb of a tree
Three hundred feet from the ground
He looked out to see what he could see
And his dizzy head spun around
"My gosh," cried he, "It’s plain to see
If I’m ever going to learn to fly
I’ll have to go a little lower on the tree
where it isn’t quite so high."
It’s the epic tale of a little bird who hops from limb to limb, unsuccessfully trying to find a tree branch that doesn’t seem too frighteningly high from which to jump. The tree is very tall and he is very small. He frets aloud about not being more like his brother Jim who is already a fine flyer. Time passes and he realizes that it’s almost dinnertime, and his mother (who is very strict) will ‘crucify’ him (!) if he doesn’t show up. Fear of Mom compels him to close his eyes and dare to step out into the void, where a few flaps proved to him that flying actually comes quite easily to birds. He joyfully flies home to dinner, and the poem ends with a moralistic turn:
The moral of the story as the little bird found out
Is that flapping your wings and flying is what life is all about
I was then and continue to be mostly ruled by fear which stops me from taking most of the risks I would dearly love to take in life, and I have been frightened of writing even more than anything else, frightened to the point of mental blocks, confusion when confronted with a blank screen and reluctance to sit still long enough to string two sentences together. What I do begin, I have tended not to finish (as witness Beyond Hope, though I hope to shift that pattern by actually finishing the novel).
I am saying all this and anything else that I write in this category because I hope that writing about writing will help me to understand my blocks and patterns, freeing me and opening the flow of words that currently jams my synapses and clogs my cranium. Be free, little words. Flow like water, like flame, stream through my mind and out my fingertips, create worlds and characters that live and breathe in the ethers of imagination.ÂÂ