The Story of Life
There are things in life I devoted a good deal of energy and effort to. One might argue, perhaps not enough or I would have seen greater success. Sometimes, being obsessive leads to success. One can also argue, had environments been more ideal and supportive, more success could have been had. It’s a good argument, but I notice when I consider that I feel bad and it gets me nowhere. I can only focus on my own thoughts and behaviors and analyze those attributes to measure movement towards a goal.
The sheet music above was given to me by my favored piano teacher, Myrna Von Nimitz. My time with her, and the other student, was the most surreal time of my life. I have compared it to being Pip in the Great Expectations. Nothing untoward or unsafe happened there, but it was clear I was in an adult world, in a place of extreme wealth, and there were games and drama beyond my ability to comprehend. It was a time of magic and music.
This one bit of music would become the theme, the movement for that time. I don’t remember the artist, the OP number, and I have yet to find another artist preforming this. I am confident it is Beethoven. It is not Op 10- 2. If you know this piece, and can direct me to any performer playing it, please leave a comment.
My peer who shared a weekly, 2 hour music, art, history, and philosophy class was a brilliant pianist, way beyond my skill level, I think 4 years younger than I, and yet Myrna frequently played us against each other. John, ‘listen to her rhythm, emulate her technique.’ She got, ‘listen to the feelings John puts into it. It’s not enough to be technically correct.’
John, this is clearly yours. You’ve earned it. This is concert level performance for this piece. Don’t ever lose it.
I walked away from music 30 years ago and didn’t touch a piano again. The music muscles atrophied, my knowledge is so remote I am unable to pass even simple, technical skill to my son, who shows an interest and aptitude. This music, it is in me, I can hear it, but I can’t produce it. This stirs emotions in me, nostalgia, persistent melancholy, love, lamenting… Interestingly, that is exactly what this movement transmits when it is performed well.
This is my theme?
the narrative life
Speaking that might suggest I am unhappy. To be honest, I have been, much of my life, and can clinically admit to a history of dysthymia and episodes of MDD. There are lots of artifacts contributing, but I suppose the biggest artifact is not staying focus on the thing that I most wanted to do. Writing and telling stories, contributing to stories arcs, is what I wanted most to do. I found that sheet music in a box of scripts that I had submitted.
Everything I submitted came back. Most came with form letters. Some came with personalized letters. There was always this hope, I can do this.
I would have dreams that I could turn into full motion pictures, and sometimes I would write them down. Do you remember Speed, Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock. I enjoyed that movie so much, I had a full dream of a part two. I won’t tell you it all, but the sequel was on an airplane, and the passengers were zip-lined from one plane to the next. It was so real I would have said I was there! I wrote it down in a journal, thinking I would write this… But I delayed, and it became a scene in another movie by another writer. Airforce One, Harrison Ford.
I have had many dreams like that. Maybe they’re were prophetic, and I was seeing future movies. Maybe there is a collective unconscious and where all movies and inventions come from, and I, like many, accessed that. The one with the greater discipline manifested it into life.
The thing about muses, they’re not fickle. They simply stop giving you stuff if you don’t commit to a daily process of communion with them. I thought I was waiting on them for inspiration. They were waiting on me.
“John, I need you to jump into the volcano.”
Committing to communion.
In 2004, I sat down to write a fanfiction. Discussing this here is not me pushing the fanfiction, but I admit it was a Star Trek fanfiction. I wanted to do a sequel to the original episode, A Piece of the Action. It was to be set in the Next Generation’s time, and I had the title, Another Piece of the Action. I started writing but what I got was a totally different story. Star Trek: A Touch of Greatness emerged.
It’s a funny thing. Perfect at the time, but looking back, I think it’s ‘cringe’ awful. It feels like a high school student wrote it. I made so many mistakes, not just grammar. My chiropractor, doctor friend, loved it. My professor friend, Doctor Bradley Chilton, author of the academic book Star Trek: Visions of Law and Justice, loved it. I put it online. It was well received! I was baffled, but I couldn’t get out of the story, and within three months I had three solid Star Trek fanfictions, and I considered book three, Star Trek: Both Hands Full my breakout story. That is the book that I thought, okay, this is good enough to be a reboot, and solid enough story that I might be able to start writing more often.
Those three books, again just fanfiction, nothing immensely important in the scheme of things, were published online, for free, in 2004. More in that line would come. All before 2008 reboot. I can make arguments that 2008 reboot, by JJ Abrams borrowed from my fanfiction. The freefall, transporter rescue scene, that’s in the first book! The whole premise of my series was to protect the time line from going dark, from a temporal change the resulted from destroying the Romulan star and planet with a modified Genesis weapon, resulting in a time travel event…
Yeah, it is what it is. I had an agent for just over a year with no traction for legitimizing the fanfiction. All together, on one site alone, free-ebooks.net, the Star Trek books have over 10,000 downloads. If I had 1 dollar for each, student loans would be gone, but no money can be made on fanfiction. Interestingly, my books keep showing up in paid online vendors shelves. Someone at work found that first book on Nook. Interesting. I still get emails from that first Trek book. I still get surprised and baffled…
Narrative therapy
I didn’t realize it at the time, but that first book, A Touch of Greatness, was narrative therapy. It wasn’t just sorting the bad and trauma from my life, or the confrontation with the thing I struggled with the most- finding a voice and being heard- but it was a celebration of all the good things in my life. Star Trek was a good thing. That book highlighted the good things. It’s not that the story didn’t have problems. There were family issues. There were obstacles. The antagonist was family, the grandmother… That should have a clue for me right there…
In writing, I healed. Even after I learned about narrative therapy as a form of clinical engagement perspective, it still didn’t occur to me, until a peer at work and I were discussing why I decided not to write another Trek fanfiction. His response was clear, “John, you’ve healed, and moved on.”
“What?”
John, it’s clear to me this is your story. Your family story. This was narrative therapy. In telling your story, you healed. In being heard and accepted by many, you realized you weren’t alone. You say it’s badly written, but clearly the appeal of it to the people who keep telling you it’s good is that it resonated with a part of their being because it’s truth, and they experience something similar in their own lives. In telling your story, you got better. In sharing your story, others got better.
Writing is never just self-indulgent fantasy. Others benefit from you sharing!
If you like a story, any story, and it brings you joy- that is evidence it has touched something in you and moved you forwards. You don’t have to write a story to be moved in narrative therapeutic way. You only need have a story. Any story will do. If you resonate with a character, you have a harmonic that could be explored that opens an entire orchestra rendition of a life melody.
You can resonate with a villain and get movement towards health.
Orchestra, many instruments, many themes, coming together to make one movement. Forwards and out. People heal when they move. We can’t stay stuck. Not writing all those years, I was stuck. When I wrote, I moved forwards. A trickle here, a trickle there, sudden stream, now a river… In 2016, I committed to a daily process of writing, and regardless of what grade level you put me at in terms of communicating in writing effectively, I can tell you I have progressed in many domains. The most important domain I have discovered, when I committed to writing daily, I have never had ‘writers block.’
I am so in tuned with this process now that I often think I did not write this, but something inside me wrote this. I have accomplished multiple artifacts that I point to and say, that wasn’t me. Loxy, my tulpa spirit guide and friend, wrote several of her own books. My friend, who happens to be a retired psychiatrist, will assure you, Loxy is the better writer.
Maybe I needed early music to get me unstuck. I can see a sudden clash of piano keys and a whole orchestra screaming incoherently, only to slowly come into resonant harmony with each and every other instrument, followed by one instrument taking the lead heading out of that cacophonic forest of the night, and the others following, mapping out their own little side eddies and currents…
I continue to write, not just out of self-indulgence, but because it is the thing that brings clarity in my mind and gives me movement forwards. It gives me hope. I have been making a little money at it over the last year or so, enough that I have considered doing this full time. I write, on average, about an hour, an hour an half a day. What might I discover if I could do that full time?
I don’t know. Maybe that is the thing I need to discover. Maybe this is where I let go and realize you got me. Is that why I incarnated on Earth? To learn, you got me?
Just a little melancholic hope to move. Even trees can sway to this.
