(no subject)
erenriel had a valid point when she remarked to me this weekend that, as we are now, there will probably be no better, freer time to participate in NaNoWriMo. I've wanted to do it since I first heard about it, but what with essays and assignments coming out my ears every November, it just hasn't happened yet.
No longer.
I signed up today.
I may end up wanting to kill myself by the end of November, but I want to do this. I want to challenge myself. I want to prove to myself that I am, actually, capable of finishing something long, because to this day I have not done so. Not even a long fanfiction. I fail at finishing. The chance to complete something long and epic will be sweet enough of a prize for me.
Also, it's about time I turned my energy towards something continuous instead of starting like fifteen different pieces in as many days.
Anyone else going to be writing with me? We can keep each other going, bounce ideas off each other, procrastinate together... whatever.
If not, I hope you will pester me and ask for proof that I'm not just being a lazy ass, and actually writing.
----------------------------
Also in this vein, I was being writerly. So instead of a proper trip-log, you get this: stream of consciousness long line-ish sort-of prose that's not quite poetry.
Here's the first part. It is ten handwritten pages right now, and I'm STILL trying to finish it.
This Land Like an Ocean
Familiar currents of ruffled long grasses give way to heavy green
rollers, crested with sprays of trees
The prairies sigh on, interminable as the seas, until it crashes in tree-foam on the shielding rocks of the east,
black-grey-pink, bones showing through lake-speckled skin rising
into mountains,
clouds and mist, rain and trees, lakes black and full of mysteries
as we fly by swift as eagles
Dirty little towns, lost in the silence of the smothering trees
that roll down shoulders of jagged rock to the wide tideless shores
The smell and the look of wet rock, wave-smoothed sand
strewn with pebbles, brings back the ghosts of manitou,
lost long in the encroaching smog.
Strangers, still, on these wide grey strands,
clinging to the rock
as the forest watches
We are more transient still, and move with the flow of the rivers,
on towards the sea, an ocean of land between us
and the small rock we call home -
and onwards
This land whispers in my blood like water, glimmering with silver
foxes and ravens, spirits prowling soundlessly among them
The leaves of the endless trees whisper too,
and for a moment I think
I know their language, so old
it predates speech
It is my land, my heart's land,
and not mine at all
We are all still voyageurs when we venture
away from our cities, our lights,
our sterile dirty streets, the smokestacks and the trucks
and the square blocky skylines,
because there is still something in those woods,
though it has been sleeping for a long time
dreaming of silence and wide rolling lands, empty but for the cries of birds
and furtive fur-clad hunters
Clinging to, not commanding, and only the edges, of this land,
space without end, mere millions to hold it,
a scattering of humanity across the face of a nation,
that, like all nations, only exists in the mind
O Canada,
we know you as well as our hands,
and as little as the darkest corners of our minds;
you are both and all.
We cling to you
with love because you are beautiful and free.
We cannot be proud,
for deep in our hearts I think
we understand
that it's you who holds us,
and not we that hold you.
We are not possessors but possessed,
you do something to our hearts and claim them as your own,
tie us close to our homes, even to the hardest concrete streets,
strewn with refuse both human and not.
Why so beautiful? Why so ugly?
Deep in the woods lie wounds and an answer,
but not one in words we can understand,
though if we listen close enough
we can hear heartbreak echoing from the hills
as the leaves crimson and fall, and ice begins to fill your heart.
O Canada.
Even in the deaths
depths of winter, we remember your spring,
and the flowing of water, and the smell of fresh earth
and the dancing of fishes.
And as snow drowns you, drowns us,
in endless oceans of white, we hibernate like bears
and steal through drifts like deer,
scrounging and clinging
somehow surviving through till spring.
You are survival; you are persistence,
ugly and beautiful all in one instant,
cruel blessing and sweet violence
of living
here at the edge
of a sleeping giant's lair.
We are all immigrants here, and we know this, we name ourselves
Dutch Irish French English German Scottish Welsh Russian Ukrainian Chinese Polish Norwegian Swedish Danish Finnish Japanese Hindu Arabian Muslim Ugandan Afrikaans Lebanese Sudanese Nepalese Mongolian Pakistani Italian Spanish Greek
anything
but claim we are fully Canadian
Our mosaic our undoing
Pieces part of a whole
but how?
This land is deeper than we fathom,
and we scud along its surface, fishers
barely penetrating the unknowable
depths over a trench more
mysterious than Marianas,
where things lurk in darkness
History is broad and deep as it is long,
threads of past, of myth,
drawing together to form loops
to make earliest and farthest seem
but a step away.
As our fiberglass canoes slip through
the waters we recall
birchbark and pemmican,
the paddling songs of the voyageurs.
A tent
a fortress
in the wilderness, the small clearing home,
well-groomed hiking trails
the animal paths of Huron hunters
all the same in our eyes
Step by step across this broad (un)charted land,
home behind, adventure ahead.
Will the bush win over us, or will we win over the bush?
The prize either way,
survival,
for just a little longer.
We are looking in a rearview
mirror; objects may be further than they appear
Or maybe the past still lingers
in the shadows of our resource-full society
waiting and haunting
Is this what the trees are whispering?
Elegies for a world now lost?
Dreams of what was, what is, what will be?
Some of those must needs be nightmares.
No wonder the wind makes them groan and shiver
Are we the dream or the nightmare?
No longer.
I signed up today.
I may end up wanting to kill myself by the end of November, but I want to do this. I want to challenge myself. I want to prove to myself that I am, actually, capable of finishing something long, because to this day I have not done so. Not even a long fanfiction. I fail at finishing. The chance to complete something long and epic will be sweet enough of a prize for me.
Also, it's about time I turned my energy towards something continuous instead of starting like fifteen different pieces in as many days.
Anyone else going to be writing with me? We can keep each other going, bounce ideas off each other, procrastinate together... whatever.
If not, I hope you will pester me and ask for proof that I'm not just being a lazy ass, and actually writing.
----------------------------
Also in this vein, I was being writerly. So instead of a proper trip-log, you get this: stream of consciousness long line-ish sort-of prose that's not quite poetry.
Here's the first part. It is ten handwritten pages right now, and I'm STILL trying to finish it.
This Land Like an Ocean
Familiar currents of ruffled long grasses give way to heavy green
rollers, crested with sprays of trees
The prairies sigh on, interminable as the seas, until it crashes in tree-foam on the shielding rocks of the east,
black-grey-pink, bones showing through lake-speckled skin rising
into mountains,
clouds and mist, rain and trees, lakes black and full of mysteries
as we fly by swift as eagles
Dirty little towns, lost in the silence of the smothering trees
that roll down shoulders of jagged rock to the wide tideless shores
The smell and the look of wet rock, wave-smoothed sand
strewn with pebbles, brings back the ghosts of manitou,
lost long in the encroaching smog.
Strangers, still, on these wide grey strands,
clinging to the rock
as the forest watches
We are more transient still, and move with the flow of the rivers,
on towards the sea, an ocean of land between us
and the small rock we call home -
and onwards
This land whispers in my blood like water, glimmering with silver
foxes and ravens, spirits prowling soundlessly among them
The leaves of the endless trees whisper too,
and for a moment I think
I know their language, so old
it predates speech
It is my land, my heart's land,
and not mine at all
We are all still voyageurs when we venture
away from our cities, our lights,
our sterile dirty streets, the smokestacks and the trucks
and the square blocky skylines,
because there is still something in those woods,
though it has been sleeping for a long time
dreaming of silence and wide rolling lands, empty but for the cries of birds
and furtive fur-clad hunters
Clinging to, not commanding, and only the edges, of this land,
space without end, mere millions to hold it,
a scattering of humanity across the face of a nation,
that, like all nations, only exists in the mind
O Canada,
we know you as well as our hands,
and as little as the darkest corners of our minds;
you are both and all.
We cling to you
with love because you are beautiful and free.
We cannot be proud,
for deep in our hearts I think
we understand
that it's you who holds us,
and not we that hold you.
We are not possessors but possessed,
you do something to our hearts and claim them as your own,
tie us close to our homes, even to the hardest concrete streets,
strewn with refuse both human and not.
Why so beautiful? Why so ugly?
Deep in the woods lie wounds and an answer,
but not one in words we can understand,
though if we listen close enough
we can hear heartbreak echoing from the hills
as the leaves crimson and fall, and ice begins to fill your heart.
O Canada.
Even in the deaths
depths of winter, we remember your spring,
and the flowing of water, and the smell of fresh earth
and the dancing of fishes.
And as snow drowns you, drowns us,
in endless oceans of white, we hibernate like bears
and steal through drifts like deer,
scrounging and clinging
somehow surviving through till spring.
You are survival; you are persistence,
ugly and beautiful all in one instant,
cruel blessing and sweet violence
of living
here at the edge
of a sleeping giant's lair.
We are all immigrants here, and we know this, we name ourselves
Dutch Irish French English German Scottish Welsh Russian Ukrainian Chinese Polish Norwegian Swedish Danish Finnish Japanese Hindu Arabian Muslim Ugandan Afrikaans Lebanese Sudanese Nepalese Mongolian Pakistani Italian Spanish Greek
anything
but claim we are fully Canadian
Our mosaic our undoing
Pieces part of a whole
but how?
This land is deeper than we fathom,
and we scud along its surface, fishers
barely penetrating the unknowable
depths over a trench more
mysterious than Marianas,
where things lurk in darkness
History is broad and deep as it is long,
threads of past, of myth,
drawing together to form loops
to make earliest and farthest seem
but a step away.
As our fiberglass canoes slip through
the waters we recall
birchbark and pemmican,
the paddling songs of the voyageurs.
A tent
a fortress
in the wilderness, the small clearing home,
well-groomed hiking trails
the animal paths of Huron hunters
all the same in our eyes
Step by step across this broad (un)charted land,
home behind, adventure ahead.
Will the bush win over us, or will we win over the bush?
The prize either way,
survival,
for just a little longer.
We are looking in a rearview
mirror; objects may be further than they appear
Or maybe the past still lingers
in the shadows of our resource-full society
waiting and haunting
Is this what the trees are whispering?
Elegies for a world now lost?
Dreams of what was, what is, what will be?
Some of those must needs be nightmares.
No wonder the wind makes them groan and shiver
Are we the dream or the nightmare?