WHATHAPPENED | a fictional memoir

Chapter 5.5 ~ Un Yoga Poétique

Travaillant et retravaillant
les même textes
jour aprés jour
perdant tout sens
de “production” et de “publication”
tout idée d’une “réputation” a forger
Engagé plutôt dans quelque chose
– loin de toute littérature –
que l’on pourrait pertinement nommer
___ un yoga poétique.

Working and reworking
the same texts
over and over again
losing all sense
of “production” and “publication”
and “furthering one’s reputation”
Engaged rather in something
outside literature
that might rightly be called
___ poetic yoga.

~ Kenneth Wilson

WHATHAPPENED | a fictional memoir
About ~ Chapter 1 ~ Chapter 2 ~ Chapter 3 ~ Chapter 3.5 ~
Chapter 4 ~ Chapter 5 ~ Chapter 5.5 ~ Chapter 6

I spent part of my youth on Mars. (I know, that would explain a lot.) No, really. I grew up in a noisy, contentious household, filled with all the suburban sturm und drang of the ’60s. Cowering in my basement bedroom as the culture wars erupted upstairs in the living room between my parents and my teenage brothers and sisters, I retreated. Into outer space. Ray Bradbury. James Blish. Isaac Asimov. Frank Herbert. Ursula K. LeGuin and a host of other writers. They took me off planet, took me away. Bradbury, especially, got me out of the house. His eerie, atmospheric “Martian Chronicles” still haunts my memories. (Re-reading it a couple of years back, it still told holds up, unlike so much youthful sci-fi). So, I was happy to finally take a fly-over of Mars in this animation based on some NASA data.

I am fitfully at work upon a space opera Web show and companion novel, channeling those years spent huddled in my bed, my body beneath the blanket, my imagination warping between planets and stars. Mars figures into the plot. Will humans fly over, walk its red sands, before I shuffle off to Buffalo? If not Mars, I hope to get off planet before then. At the least, how about a sub-orbital flight? Whose with me? Things are moving along!

The return of Sassy Gay Friend, this time to talk some sense into Juliet. Here was his first visit, to save Ophelia.