Two holidays I feel at odds with these days, one is Saint Patrick’s and the other is Independence Day. The former was a date of my darkest hour two years ago, when kinship didn’t mean anything and I was looking upon a remark of pure evil after asking for help. The latter is because as a Veteran’s Wife I see beyond the firework smoke and I know those that probably had a hand over their heart when singing The Star Spangle Banner and not mean a single word.
I’m my mind as a Writer, The Fourth of July is a Grand gospel choir where some attendees don’t practise what they preach. I grew up in the absolute glory of the 80’s and I ate every bit of the Pop Culture up, every bit, I realise now it was quite an unhealthy diet! Muse is a teacher and like all good teachers she is not meant to be your friend, merely a guide. Last year I tried to enter a contest making a horror story out of this recent trauma and I just couldn’t do it, I was full of so much rage. The name of this True Evil fills me with such rage as she celebrates the holiday whose meaning she defiled one lonely St Patrick’s night.
But in the many months after, Muse rescued me with poems to write and song lyrics to arrange. True Evil was spent for some good so there’s that, there’s many a villain I can create because of that True Evil, many life lessons to enrich whoever wants to hear it. That novel I’m too enraged to do may be tempered one day (very, very far off in the future!). But that’s our trouble, the artist’s beasts of burden are many and yet, and yet we always find a way to make them into fluffy little pets as long as we have our paper and pen.
So, the Pen really is Mightier than the sword, it can cut and parry, mark and gravely injure, it can destroy, redeem and memorialize. It can record our small little lives after we’re long gone – But that’s if we’re lucky –
To War then Artists, avenge yourselves through your ideas and stories, go forth and fear no darkness…
Belle's Gateway 