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ahavalyssa · 7 years

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A Daring Leap:

I was cleaning out an external hard drive and came across all of my writing from my college days; one piece in particular caught my attention. I'd taken an "Environmental Writing" course during my senior year at Brandeis. My (brilliant and beloved) professor, Victor Luftig, challenged us to a bit of 'parallel writing' - essentially, I was to use the structure and syntax of one writer's essay as a model or map to follow in creating an original piece of my own. For example, if the original essay began "After the birds scattered from the field, the place seemed empty" my piece might say "Once the passengers congregated around the luggage carousel, the air felt thick". Luftig called it imitation; I eagerly threw myself into the project.

I took an essay by environmental writer Barry Lopez and changed it...made it my own. But I did something that surprised my prof enough to warrant a personal phone call to my home over Spring Break 1998. Professor Luftig received an assortment of these imitation papers from his students, but apparently I was the only one who did not write a dry, non-fiction academic paper that one would traditionally produce for a university-level environmental studies course. I actually had fun with the assignment. I created a Tolkien-esque universe rather than forcing another essay about the evils of global warming. I remember wondering if I'd done the assignment "correctly" - now, at 40, I realize that "correctly" isn't something a writer should be worried about. Art is art.

Professor Luftig thanked me on the phone that day. He said he'd read the paper to his wife and that he'd never before received an essay like mine for this assignment. I remember the the glow, the high, the glory I felt after that phone call......I was 19 years old and it was my first real-world accomplishment: validation from the world of academia. It was the first time I believed in myself as a writer.

(And, disclaimer, it isn't really a good bit of writing. I think the phone call was really a high-five for having the balls to be different.)

Assignment I: An Imitation of In the Garden of the Lords of War by Barry Lopez

Seventeen decades following the start of the Emergence, in the heart of the one remaining thicket of Enchantment, the Under way of organo-magical eradication is drawing to a close. The Under Elders, those pale-skinned overlords who declared themselves gods of the Beneath, vowed to cease the flow of undefiled natural beauty on the surface of the Sphere, and this will Emerged to consume their kind and all others, the birth of a new perspective.

Thickets I had taken root in during the time previous to the Emergence--Shimmerian, Lushed, Laywen, Elswood, and little known Burr near the Draco Swamp in what used to be Dalamar--no longer spread their branches and thorns across the nurturing surface. It is my duty as a surviving victim of the Emergence and the last of the Dryads to be present at the dismal destruction of the final thicket. This very moment, I reach back for lambent detail, those precious gifts offered by others on the journey, by which, if all goes well, I will ensure that the Under future knows of what beauty was destroyed.

The Holders of the Magic, those who led me to my proper path, have all disappeared. The first of the ten slipped away at the dawn of the Emergence, the last just this cycle. Their awareness of me began at the moment of my creation in the living forest of the Dryads. I stood balanced on thin roots, green, next to my Maternal Branch. I knew that I was to be attentive when the Maternal Branches gathered for a moisture ritual or during the offering of an ancient one back to the surface. Mornings when they oriented their highest leaves toward the Vast Outer Sphere, I followed in synch. I internalized well-nigh all of my kind’s rites during this time of innocence, much more than any other seedling. These beings who taught me were rigid in practice, but flexible in that their mystical awareness of the coming Emergence demanded they leave room for change.

I will imprint the beliefs of my kind into the Universal Lattice once I fall prey to the Unders with the rest of the thicket, the closing chapters, now, of the living books of Spherical Organo-Magic.

The original dwelling place of the Unders is reached by a thin tunnel that leads toward the center of the Sphere. Its entrance is situated in such a way as not to be noticed by any other but to be visible to those with Under eyes. The doorway to the hidden domain seems not to be a gate, but a long hallway, cluttered, crowded, crawling with the hollow and lurid Unders. At the opposite side of the hall, every few paces, is an entrance to the Main City. Within, the world of the Unders unfolds with winding tracks made of stone, piles of granite and scrap metal, the elevated towers of the Under Elders, large iron and wooden machines, and dark alleys filled with the weak, the starving, and the trapped. Of course, my being of organo-magic essence means that I have never physically visited the dwelling place of the Unders, so I can only present my own impression, based on my experience in the Dryad collective-visitation ritual performed to plea for our home.

Most commonly, Unders who have lived twenty cycles choose to participate in the Emergence, and those who stay under the surface are few and far between. The requirements for each Under who takes part in the Emergence are as follows: (1) the Under must agree to build at least one iron structure on the surface; (2) it must never have collaborated with or in any way sympathized with an agent of organo-magic; (3) it must be prepared to generate offspring, though I have seen that the androgynous beings do so without much effort, nor with restraint; (4) it must destroy any superfluous organo-magical beings on the surface. Finally, the Under must have served in the Army of the Below for twelve full cycles. In addition to this one may strive to become a leader of the swelling society. To be considered for a seat on the Elder Directory, one must be brought unprepared before a selection committee, and then those selectors must sift through the life of the prospective and decide whether it indicates a future of progress and mechanistic development. At this hearing, the Under is doubtlessly on trial by his own. With good reason, following a bleak outcome, the ashamed candidate may take to roaming the alleys of the dwelling.

In outdated contrast, a being became one of ten Holders of the Magic by gift of the Vast Outer Sphere. It was common for a being to be born with a spark of the Outer Sphere, to engage in a youth of study, practice, and development of the internal, to perfect learning and teaching of ritual, and to play a vital role in the maintenance of the balanced Sphere. (These beings like myself were always surface dwelling organo-magical entities, located even before creation using the Universal Lattice, who were informed by the Holders about the organo-magical eradication before given a task, a piece of a Plan.)

From here in the last thicket, the machines of the Elders appear to line one another closely, as though the variations in the structures, the handles on one and the railings on another, run together in my sight. Each being around me waits patiently on the familial surface and is drenched in paranoia. Sudden screeches, followed by three enormous clockwork vehicles, arrive on one side of the thicket. The high-set black doors, made from extracted, amalgamated metals, opened toward the sky. From inside each, two Unders head toward the thicket. The six seem to work as one being, each carrying enough measuring equipment to design two or three machines, a metal digging weapon, or shovel, and a small communication device. Mention of removal, of unnecessary existence, and of victory over the passive pour from Under mouths. A thornbrush on the edge of the thicket taps into the Universal Lattice. Screams are heard from the internal, an external silence sits thick on the surface. From one end of the thicket to the other, inward voices blend into a screaming finale.

The moment I was told about the plans the Holders had for me was the day the third Holder ceased to exist. The Dryads were in full glory, seedlings were stretching new branches and comparing fresh blossoms, and the flight beings, nut hoarders, and the canary-reed Elves perched on our branches. I was learning from a Maternal Branch, a Dryad named Tevah Asina, when the Holders approached. Mine would be an existence of only nine decades but I would move with pride and determination about the surface--long enough to warn all of the inevitable end of we organo-magical beings, and to observe that though the careful design and mastered efficiency of the Unders’ reconstructed surface suggested utopia they were blatantly unbalanced. All hope of regenerating the new surface lay inside the Universal Lattice, a realm so sacred that it exists even without our roots in the surface. It is where I now dwell, and from here my duty is to remind the new surface of what was lost, to ensure that the Under future dreams of that beauty which was destroyed.

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