Gordon Watt
Dale Bayle wakes up with a whole new, quickly expanding range of life questions:
'Why and how, this morning, am I able to jump instantaneously from place to place?'
Then: 'Why (and how) am I, today, able to float--in the air?!'
Plus: 'Who is that dead man there in my bed? And if that's really me...
What happens next? And what in creation is keeping me here?
Must be a reason, then.' Glad for that!
But just like life, he fears, this doesn't look easy.
'This is so strange. Feel so tentative...' (Who wouldn't?)
'Still, this is amazing!'
Here goes...
My feeling for writing comes from my core love of the written word, and since my high school years of devouring most every good book on my little hometown library's shelves, I've had this craving for the engaging novel, for stories with brilliant human insight and exquisite use of words. I've written regularly through the years, but mostly as a hobby, to test whether I really had something to say, with any power. In this latest story, Fading Home, I wanted to let go, let the words spill over and cry out the question whether the thoughts that I wonder we all wonder, what I question, anticipate and dread, everyone alive does, too. Which led me to publish it, to see if it hits home at all. Which, to me, is the point of the written word, the novels: Our desire to be reassured and read that, in all this, we're not alone.
Along continent shores, waves roar, drown the world with mist murmurs, torrents; swirl, howl unheard inside inland gales, breezes…water once, to be, the flow of human tears.
Waking up...penetrating red sun, green-leaves-tinged-fire. Waiting light, quaint-shadowed through rippled panes on quiet bedroom walls. Or feeling first poetry of subtle sunrise, a few auspicious words thought...
Well, dramatic, he admits. He is.
(The shore waves line he wrote himself, long forgotten, some years ago.)
Though, seems to flow, out through some depth-felt surface, spirit-in-a-shell, in us all...mostly all. We. Most of us alive willingly. Aware, tuned. To some little degree, anyway -- or what's allowed.
But he, he believes, he could say, that he is most of the time vitally, molecularly, part of the working mechanism of the living. Or, at least some otherwise real though clearly minor-motive mote in this enormous dreamland of the Cosmos instead.
He likes both images, in fact.
This morning, however, he has to get going. To work...
Waking is truncated dreamflow.
Cut by the counterworld life...
He, D.B., Dale Bayle, enjoys mornings -- retrospectively. As in looking back after the waking's head-settle that all of us experience and recognizing morning's certain sense of: clarity. Vivacity.
Unovershadowed by gray yesterday.
Yes, as always, it's bilious otherwise and all-too-often fudged reality: daily tedious tread, extraneous routines, somber movements of seemingly autonomous automatism.
'So, then, where is my life?!'
