Jay Lake (jaylake) wrote,
Jay Lake
jaylake

[wip] From an untitled story in progress

All children draw, if the stick or coal or pencil is not snatched from their hand. All children represent the world they see, in a language which reflects the essentials of their vision. For most, growing up means accepting the way the world is said to look. But a few cling to their craft. A few hang on to their lidless vision the way ants cling to a rotting apple.

Very few find their way to the essential inks.

Very, very few find their way to someone with the wit and craft to instruct them further.

Someone, once, must have been autodidact. There was a first teacher. Perhaps many. In the lands across the ocean where little yellow men write their thoughts in tiny pictures, mine is perhaps a tremendously powerful art. Here on the country frontiers of America where no one recalls that 'A' stands for 'ox', the words do not mean so very much at all.

Here is the trick to the craft. Consider that there is no present moment. We have anticipation, then we have memory. The present flees our grasp at least as fast as it arrives, slipping from future to past before we can take note. Everything we experience is only a memory of what has come just before. Try to find the space between the earth and the sky — that is the present moment between memory and anticipation.

If you can see that space between earth and sky, if you can find that present moment, then you can craft a Foretelling, or a Truthsaying, or a Sending, or any of the dozens of forms it is given to me and my fellows to render.
Tags: wip, writing
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