MsTiara’s Thoughts

There are only two ways to live your life. One as if nothing is a miracle. The other as if everything is a miracle.

Albert Einstein

This morning when I was driving into work, I looked over at the car next to me while we were stopped at a red light. The driver was a woman in this bright fuchsia pink top, but it was the expression or lack of expression that has stayed with me all morning. She was empty, there was no life in there. She stared straight forward, body slightly curved away from the seat. But her face, her eyes, her soul was empty. No energy, no life, I don’t even think that she blinked.

How do people get to that moment in their life? Are they even living a life? Is there anything more out there for them or is that who and what they will be till the end of this time?

When I was a young one and the world wasn’t going that well, I remember a time where everything was darkness and just getting through the moment was a miracle. But, I made a choice and that choice was to live. The world is an amazing place, filled with the beauty of the sky, the smell of the ocean and the sound of the birds.

I am very thankful that I do not live life as one of the vacant people.

For all that know me, Jonathan Carroll is one of my favorite authors (along with the brilliance of Neil Gaiman and Charles de Lint) This morning, on his blog, he had a couple of deep thoughts that made me stop and think…

Reprinted without Permission:

http://www.jonathancarroll.com/blog1/2008/04/

“A lover exists only in fragments, a dozen or so if the romance is new a thousand if we’ve married him, and out of those fragments our heart constructs an entire person. What we each create, since whatever is missing is filled in by our imagination, is the person we wish him to be. The less we know him, of course, the more we love him.”

Andrew Sean Greer, THE STORY OF A MARRIAGE

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“I want to spend the rest of my life Everywhere, with Everyone, one to one, Always Forever, Now.”

Damien Hirst

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My parents lived in New York for many years. A very small old man lived on the top floor of their building. I used to bump into him now and then when I visited the folks. He was always dressed in a perfectly tailored three piece suit, thick silk tie, and white shirt with cuff links. We smiled and nodded at each other but never spoke. One day when I was with my father we ran into him in the hall and were introduced. His name was Lewis Galantiere and from the way he dressed and spoke, he was elegance personified. For some reason I didn’t understand then, my father told this stranger that I was studying literature in university and hoped someday to be a writer. Galantiere lit up and said well, we should talk about that–why don’t you come for tea sometime. When he was gone, my father told me Galantiere was one of the greatest French to English translators. His Proust translations especially were world renowned and used in many universities. But even more interesting, this man had lived in Paris in the 1920’s and knew everyone who was there then– Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Picasso– the whole starry sky of talent that lit up that glittery city in those days. A week later we went to visit him. The apartment was small but beautiful. Oriental carpets on the floors, substantial leather and wood furniture, and artwork covered the walls. My father spent much of the visit studying the pictures and later told me there were original Matisse and Cezanne sketches, a Picasso, photographs by Man Ray, on and on. We spent a couple of hours with Galantiere and I think he was glad for the company. In his quiet ironic voice he spoke casually of having picnics with the Fitzgeralds, going to the horse races with Hemingway, arguing with the irascible Ms. Stein. He was not showing off– just talking about the early days of his life. His stories were amazing, as close as I will ever come to knowing or being with those gods. One thing I remember vividly happened at the end of the afternoon. When he was obviously tired and winding down, Galantiere paused and deep in thought, stared at his hands. Then he said, “The one thing biographers rarely talk about is how hard these people worked. Most biographies just go on and on about Fitzgerald’s drunkenness or Hemingway’s carousing. But they give little credit to how *hard* they worked and at least in those days, their complete dedication to their craft. I have never seen harder working people; they were like ditch diggers. When they finished for the day, their hands were always very dirty.”

Jonathan Carroll – Blog 04/24/08

So, my last journal was all about change, endings that lead into new beginnings. On Monday I finished off the last page and have just shipped it home to go into my bookcase. Today, I am starting with a fresh one. I am sitting here, taking off the case, removing the extra pages, holding it in my hands… Wondering, what will the next month(s) bring that will fill this small book in my hands. Will it be filled with joy, laughter, tears? Will there be even more change or maybe this time it will be filled with relationships, love, friendship that will last a lifetime. What stories will my mind conjure, will the soul pets finally finish their adventure with the Sandman?

When I was younger, I would sit and write thoughts, daydreams, and tears, a cheap notebook of paper and a cheap pen serving as my tools. Most of those old notebooks are gone, never to be found again. Sometimes that makes me sad and other times very happy, why carry around the sadness of the past when with but a flick of the wrist it can go away with no reminders.

Now days, I have many a journal. Leather bound, beautiful hand crafted papers (my favorites) and these wonderful Moleskine’s that are small enough to fit in my purse so I can write whenever a thought runs through my mind. I have ended up falling in love with nice fountain pens (evil things, whatever happened to my $1.00 pens that I could find anywhere?) and now have a couple that I use to write my thoughts as they flow from my head.

But today it is all about new beginning, what quote should I put on the front, what thought should start this one off to take me into the new future.

He felt that his whole life was some kind of a dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether or not they were enjoying it.

Douglas Adams

So, I am a magician/wizard/scientist and I go to some type of awards ceremony. The back of the stage is outside and it is vast, an alien land. The skies are dark, velvety and midnight blue. The land is flat and dark. The place seems to be set in a vast outdoor cathedral.

The other magicians/wizards/scientists are all there to present their findings for some competition? Black robes, faces masked out. Each goes forward and presents their findings, all hold a blue bottle in their hands that is glowing and each presents the same thing, pheromones.

I go to step up for my presentation, instead of being an observer, I am now in my body and I am going to present true magic, what it is I don’t know, because as I step up to the curtain to go before the council, a creature in a black robe and a glowing white mask flies up to me (yes, flies/floats) from out of nowhere. It is me from the future/past… Was that what I was presenting, the ability to move through time?

All the other presenters get excited and try to grab this other me. But, he/she (gender is in question) grabs my arm and tries to convey that we are the same and then we are transported to a rock further away in the alien landscape. It is still dark, but I get the impression it isn’t night but that is the way it always is. It is warm, comfortable but warm.

As we stand there and this future me in the black robe, white glowing mask conveys information to me without me talking, I am different, I am no longer all knowing, powerful, I am now more human?

The future me goes away and as I stand there, the other me, sister, lover, comes up to me, but now she has someone else with her, someone I love, someone who is connected to me.

We head off to our homes. Two separate homes, connected. They are in a place with molten lava. But it is not burning or uncomfortable, just red and moving like water.

There is some sort of a party, Halloween, haunted house thing we are trying to get ready for.

Moving, I just moved in? House has many rooms. The female comes over to help, do what I don’t know…

Then my alarm goes off.

I felt affection, love, acceptance, safe. Kept on changing perspective from knowledge inside of my head..

Kitten and Dragon found themselves in a room that seemed like it was made out of crystals. Beautiful shapes that flowed and melded. Some like snowflakes other jutting out of the wall like icebergs, no two alike. And the colors, some were so clear that when you looked inside they seemed to go on forever and ever. And some that that appeared white when you looked straight at them, but when you looked at it next to the whole, you could tell that is was unique, a whole different color than the others. Some blue, other were purple or green or yellow, or colors that there were no words for.

The most amazing thing about the room though, is that it sang. Beautiful notes, twining around each other, sometimes high layered with low notes and other times a deep low note with this high refreshing melody twisting through it, around it, dancing in the air. Then silence, that wasn’t silence like the music kept on playing, just with sounds that they couldn’t hear.

All the time Dragon and Kitten stood there they felt the music twine around them, then deep inside of them. Learning who and what they were, till the song that the crystals started to play was them. At that point, Dragon and Kitten’s bodies started to sing back, resonating with the crystals till they were one.

Kitten and Dragon knew all that the crystals knew and the crystals knew all that they knew. No words, no patterns, it was as they had always been one and just needed to learn how to connect to the patterns of life.

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2007/05/nature-of-infection.html

The Nature of the Infection

The years pass, and the arguments go back and forth over whether watched fiction actually has an effect on the reader or the viewer. Does violent fiction make a reader violent? Does frightening fiction create a watcher who is frightened, or desensitised to fear?

It’s not a yes, or a no. It’s a yes but.

The complaint about Dr Who from adults was always, when I was small, that it was too frightening. This missed, I think, the much more dangerous effect of Dr Who: that it was viral.

Of course it was frightening. More or less. I watched the good bits from behind the sofa, and was always angry and cheated and creeped out by the cliffhanger in the final moments. But that had, as far as I can tell, no effect on me at all, as I grew, the fear. The real complaint, the thing that the adults should have been afraid of and complaining about was what it did to the inside of my head. How it painted my interior landscape.

When I was three, making Daleks out of the little school milk bottles, with the rest of the kids at Mrs Pepper’s Nursery School, I was in trouble and I didn’t know it. The virus was already at work.

Yes, I was scared of the Daleks and the Zarbi and the rest. But I was taking other, stranger, more important lessons away from my Saturday tea-time serial.

For a start, I had become infected by the idea that there are an infinite number of worlds, only a footstep away.

And another part of the meme was this: some things are bigger on the inside than they are on the outside. And, perhaps, some people are bigger on the inside than they are on the outside, as well.

And that was only the start of it. The books helped with the infection – the Dalek World one, and the various hardcovered Dr Who Annuals. They contained the first written SF stories I had encountered. They left me wondering if there was anything else like that out there…

But the greatest damage was still to come.

It’s this: the shape of reality – the way I perceive the world – exists only because of Dr Who. Specifically, from The War Games in 1969, the multipart series that was to be Patrick Troughton’s swan song.

This is what remains to me of The War Games as I look back on it, over three decades after I saw it: The Doctor and his assistants find themselves in a place where armies fight: an interminable World War One battlefield, in which armies from the whole of time have been stolen from their original spatio-temporal location and made to fight each other. Strange mists divide the armies and the time zones. Travel between the time zones is possible, using a white, boxlike structure approximately the same size and shape as a smallish lift, or, even more prosaically, a public toilet: you get in in 1970, you come out in Troy or Mons or Waterloo. Only you don’t come out in Waterloo, as you’re really on an eternal plane, and behind it all or beyond it all is an evil genius who has taken the armies, placed them here, and is using the white boxes to move guards and agents from place to place, through the mists of time.

The boxes were called SIDRATs. Even at the age of eight I figured that one out.

Finally, having no other option, and unable to resolve the story in any other way, the Doctor – who we learned now was a fugitive – summoned the Time Lords, his people, to sort the whole thing out. And was, himself, captured and punished.

It was a great ending for an eight-year old. There were ironies I relished.
It would, I have no doubt at all, be a bad thing for me to try and go back and watch The War Games now. It’s too late anyway; the damage has been done. It redefined reality. The virus was now solidly in place.

These days, as a middle-aged and respectable author, I still feel a sense of indeterminate but infinite possibility on entering a lift, particularly a small one with white walls. That to date the doors that have opened have always done so in the same time, and world, and even the same building in which I started out seems merely fortuitous – evidence only of a lack of imagination on the part of the rest of the universe.

I do not confuse what has not happened with what cannot happen, and in my heart, Time and Space are endlessly malleable, permeable, frangible.

Let me make some more admissions.

In my head, William Hartnell was the Doctor, and so was Patrick Troughton. All the other Doctors were actors, although Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker were actors playing real Doctors. The rest of them, even Peter Cushing, were faking it.

In my head the Time Lords exist, and are unknowable - primal forces who cannot be named, only described: The Master, the Doctor, and so on. All depictions of the home of the Time Lords are, in my head, utterly non-canonical. The place in which they exist cannot be depicted because it is beyond imagining: a cold place that only exists in black and white.

It’s probably a good thing that I’ve never actually got my hands on the Doctor. I would have unhappened so much.

A final Dr Who connection – again, from the baggy-trousered Troughton era, when some things were more than true for me – showed itself, in retrospect, in my BBC TV series, Neverwhere.

Not in the obvious places – the BBC decision that Neverwhere had to be shot on video, in episodes half an hour long, for example. Not even in the character of the Marquis de Carabas, who I wrote – and Paterson Joseph performed – as if I were creating a Doctor from scratch, and wanted to make him someone as mysterious, as unreliable, and as quirky as the William Hartnell incarnation. But in the idea that there are worlds under this one, and that London itself is magical, and dangerous, and that the underground tunnels are every bit as remote and mysterious and likely to contain Yeti as the distant Himalayas was something, author and critic Kim Newman pointed out to me, while Neverwhere was screening, that I probably took from a Troughton-era story called “The Web of Death”.

And as he said it, I knew he was spot on, remembering people with torches exploring the underground, beams breaking the darkness. The knowledge that there were worlds underneath… yes, that was where I got it, all right.

Having caught the virus, I was now, I realised with horror, infecting others.

Which is, perhaps, one of the glories of Dr Who. It doesn’t die, no matter what. It’s still serious, and it’s still dangerous. The virus is out there, just hidden, and buried, like a plague pit.

You don’t have to believe me. Not now. But I’ll tell you this. The next time you get into a lift, in a shabby office building, and jerk up several floors, then, in that moment before the doors open, you’ll wonder, even if only for a moment, if they’re going to open on a Jurassic jungle, or the moons of Pluto, or a full service pleasure dome at the galactic core…

That’s when you’ll discover that you’re infected too.

And then the doors will open, with a grinding noise like a universe in pain, and you’ll squint at the light of distant suns, and understand…

NEIL GAIMAN
August 19, 2003

You know, the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don’t alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit their views.

Which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.

Doctor Who

I had a strange dream upon waking this morning. I was at the copy machine waiting for copies, but as I stood there, people started coming in and chatting and my copies were printing over other printed stuff. I opened up the copier and flipped through the paper in there but all the paper was pre-printed with other stuff. Bright color prints, lots of aqua green, graphs, well defined professional prints, almost a quarterly report. Then I went to get a new ream of paper, but as I opened it up, it was also printed with the same type of printing. More people came in waiting to print, but every reamed I opened was already printed on. I stepped to the side of the printer to let other people get their copies as I went and tried to find a new ream of paper, but every ream I burst open was already printed on.

Strange dream, there was neither ending nor resolution.

I don’t know what to think of the dream. I kept on feeling like I had stuff to do, but I was holding things and people up, a pest, not that important at the time, everyone chatting but not really hearing them.

As I think back, I feel that the times were changing, that elements were writing over the old or pre-defined. Things were not changing as much as being written over.

The rules have changed, what was, is no more.