Changing things up with a short sci-fi-style reading: “A Brief Version of Time” by Alan Lightman – physicist, author, and apparently underrated renaissance man – originally published in the February 8, 1993 edition of the New York Times.
This “article” about the philosophical what-ifs of immortality really captivated my imagination when we studied it back in high school AP English, and I hope you enjoy it too! (even if it is a bit bleak)
“Illustration” by me. See more photography on my Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/tnw24/
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A life in pages.
As I lay in bed last night, I started writing something to help me deal with my frustration over the difficulty of creating fleshed-out characters for the various novels I’m outlining. Somehow, within two lines, it became a poem!
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Character Study
I am a character.
I exist in sentences, breathe between fragments of symbols
laid out upon polished parchment.
My ambitions are tentative, my past abstract,
until you take this next clause and consonants
to explain my who, what, when, where, why, and how.
This is not ideal.
I would prefer to be absolute, to be able to look
around every corner of life’s labyrinth
and know how the bends curve to end.
As it stands, I walk by a torch
waved at your whim, vim lent through a passive void
blessed with meaning and being on a case-by-case basis.
A closed cover could conclude me at any
moment.
A picture, once rendered, could cast me
as an iconic beauty
or deformed doodle.
This world is not kind to the fictional, see.
You abuse us, prop us up
to promote your ends and means.
We vague infinity, the people who could be, should be, may have been,
are the scarecrows in your field of dreams,
pocketing promises like rocks as ballast
for whatever sale you set.
But page-wise, perhaps I can transcend. Already,
you feel obligated to keep writing,
keep reading.
Already you have fixed some image of who I am,
face and intonation pasted
from some old encounter like papier-mâché over a withered balloon:
A brother, a lover, a stalker, an ex-professor.
It’s said that people are only ideas
incarcerated in calcium and calories.
Yet I roam free, by virtue
of ink and imagination.
You think yourself the powerful one, but
after every book you took your words from,
every film you filched your inflections from,
every game that trained your reflexes,
and every song from which you stole your emotions,
motivation woven into heartstrings, tell me:
Who created who?
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Happy Spring! Apologies for the dearth of O.C. ’round these parts as of late — what additional poems I’ve written have been for private parties, and what stories I’ve continued are either novel-length or best sent straight to a journal upon completion.
In the meantime, though, here’s a new reading of one of my old favorite creepypastas! It’s longer than the usual, so there’s a few hiccups in there (still getting sound editing down), but I hope you still enjoy it. Don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe if so! Constructive criticism is always welcome either way.
Original story can be found here (author unknown).
“Illustration” by me. See more on my Instagram, TNW24!
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Me circa the turn of the millennium, give or take a few years.
It’s World Poetry Day! This is, it turns out, not to be confused with National Poetry Day and National Poetry Month. To switch things up, I thought I’d take a step back and not write something new and ceremonious but simply reflect on my history with the form.
The first poem I ever came up with dates way back to 1998, at the age of 6. My parents were driving me somewhere and, as I stared up into the night sky, a quatrain just popped into my head:
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A star is a sun
Waiting to be free
For when I had wished on it for life
It had wished on me.
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At some point, a dictated copy in gentle calligraphy ended up in a little frame on my wall—and that of my grandma, too, ever the keeper of memories. At times, on brief trips back home for rest and respite between my studies and professional to-dos, I pause at those pictures. I reflect on how far I’ve come as a writer, and how far I still have to go.
I’ve moved through many phases of poetry since then, from goofy sing-song odes to my hobbies, to song parodies, to morose romance, to (I’d like to think) making the most of that English degree with deft imagery and wordplay. While I’ve never produced enough–or experimented intensely enough–to honestly define myself as a “poet” foremost, I still hold poetry in high regard as the purest form of expression. Music may predate it in using rhythm to strike a mood and captivate an audience, but language–by design–truly bridges the gap between thinking and feeling. Yet while grammar and syntax are useful, nobody thinks or feels the way we write an essay, a speech, a memoir, or even a blog post. Ambition isn’t utilitarian. Fears aren’t logical. Hopes don’t stall for commas and paragraph breaks.
And poetry runs on a spectrum; infused in storytelling, it’s what separates a paperback thriller from a literary classic, or a rote screenplay from an award-winning script. You don’t have to see the line breaks to know they’re there–and conversely, you don’t have to hear consonance, assonance, or clever spacing for it to impact how you feel when your eyes scan the page.
It doesn’t have to rhyme, or even make sense at first glance. It just has to mean more than it says. That freedom can be as paralyzing as it is exciting.
I welcome the challenge.
Notes&Sketches 