I write (and I've been published a couple times, so I guess that means I'm no longer "aspiring"), but finding the time and the physical/mental energy to write a lot, are my biggest obstables.
If anyone wants to see an example (of shameless self-promotion), I've got a story going in the Community Stories forum, but here's a short piece that doesn't have anything to do with DF, that I haven't found the time/energy/motivation yet to continue:
Arabian Nights (working title)
July 31st. Anno Domini 2008. Day 507481.
Cordially, Dear Diary,
It's a hard thing, to burn a book. I've burned five great libraries of human knowledge in my lifetime. Destroying a book utterly is almost like taking a human life. A piece of it, at any rate. A segment of a human being's soul, over a period of perhaps a year, perhaps more.
Socrates' "good thing" goes up in smoke to kiss it's mother muse a fond goodbye. We are lessened. Something comes of it. A little time, a little comfort of ignorance.
Cursed I am beyond all men!
duo mali bear I: Infinitely prolonged life, the double 00.
Infinitely prolonged sanity. Al-Zifr, the nothing.
Alpha and Omega? It serves as a metaphor, and the devil fears the servant.
I was born as a man, lived as a man, died thoroughly indeed, as a man. Am still in all my physical aspects, dimensions, needs and desires. Not, ofcourse, in every aspect...but el hombre entre hombres.
Am-as best this era can illuminate through scientifica, Psycho Logica-sane.
Why, diary?
Why a manu who hath ripped his own eyes from his pate at the sights of THEM.
Lived then, far after mort-death-todt, the final curtain lifted...to see again through brand new eyes.
Objectively, Philo Sophically, why shouldst I be anything but what I seem? Stark and raving? Touched by Luna. They can not tell me thus, with their C.omputed T.omo Graphy scans, their pictures of blotted ink, their endless coversation. My parents, one pale, feeble fellow wanted to know; Had they abused me? I reminded him-only twice-that I am the first cousin of Uthman Ibn Affan-as the English styled him-himself. That my parents were killed along with him, that at 7 years of age I was sold to Hassan the scribe. Very vaguely I remember seeing my father. Perhaps three times. I remember his sword better, his fine uniform. His face? An Arab face. Cleaner than some. He was one of the last captains of the Zhayedan. The Sassanid Immortals. That for irony!
My mother I remember better, but not much better than the four concubines in my father's Saray. That's Persian for a Turkish word: Harem. I remember my mother's beauty, but it is like a dream-the women today are goddesses come to life. It is one of the great comforts and advantages to living in America, that every woman, whether dried so quickly by their years, fruitly ripe, or fresh young thang, enthralls. My mother liked to wear green clothing, and play nard, and eat olives from Ionian Greece. She had her letters-which made her very rare-and taught me to write my name. That's why Hassan bought me, afterall. She was in some way related to Umar, and it was this high birth that had granted both her ability to write a little, and arrangement to my father in marriage. It saddens me to say that I never have been able to recall either of their names.
I do remember, shortly before my parents were assassinated, my mother striking me. I don't know why, and it's the only time I can recall, but recalling the event recalls also memories of the voices. The Daivas who used to whisper in my head-so long ago. I've read of Catholic saints and oracles at Delphi. Madwomen burned, worshipped, locked up, and cured. Men too, although somehow the experiences of the men-the ones not canonized, at any rate, not celibate-are always alien to me. Another irony. The voices-perhaps it is that the voices were female. Yes. I knew they were Daivas-the wrong gods-intuitively. That their whispers were lies and deceits, as opposed to the truth of Allah that all others embraced. What a devout Christian would call Temptations. I knew this, but one can know it wrong to covet another's wife, to then look upon her, then to sleep with her...and that is how it was. Joy, passion, wanton decadence in the wrong of it all-for in the lies that were told was Glory! False words, but those words were as beauty and as light to me. They beat through my heart and out into my blood, and I embraced their words as my illicit lover.
Ofcourse, I hid it well. Learned first to hide all passion, all excitement and interest from Hassan the Scribe-Hassan the dutifully, magnificently cruel. From him I suffered little abuse, being quick enough to recognise what brought on the storm of his anger, and clever enough to make the teaching of me a small enough chore, but others fared much worse. To attract the attention of Hassan-him who took the greatest joy of life in calamitous rage-was to invite a beating, a broken arm, the skin flayed from the first joint of a finger. One of the less favored slaves had his manhood cut from his body, shred by shred, for the crime of spilling an amphora of quality wine from Lebanon.
In later years, when I'd taken over Hassan's trade, I allowed the servant-no-longer-a-man, who'd somehow survived, the means and opportunity to cut Hassan's much wrinkled throat. I bore Hassan little personal malice, and he would have been dead within the fortnight, at any rate, from the cancers and gouts he bore from too much drink and too few kindnesses. I believe also-though I do not know-that other servants may have been poisoning him.
In a way, it was a doubled mercy, and the avenged passed on too, within a month. It was the first time I'd participated in murder, if you'll call it that.
Upon Hassan's death, I was a freed man-it was part of the arrangement of sale, my blood being of the highest. He had no wife, no children, and so-again, as arranged-I inherited his business and all of his wealth. Hassan, in return, had gained some convoluted, ill-defined respectibility by covert association with my House. For 24 years-until the appointing of Hasan ibn Ali ibn Abi Talib-I owned and oversaw the business of being a scribe. Even as a man, I aged uncommonly slowly, so that at the age of 31 when so many around me started to wither-as they did at that time-I remained fresh and hale, a vision of youth and health. And it was with a young man's restless heart that I, now wealthy and savvy, sold Hassan's business to my own apprentice and his family.
To further his own ego, and ofcourse for mine own benefit-for there could have been a knife out there for me still-Hassan had renamed me Abdul Hazrat, with the meaning "slave of the great lord", and it is that name I still carry today. It matters not to me that it is not the name I was born to, as that name is long lost to history. It also gained meaning both immanent and dire, as I now had both means and desire to hunt down the purpose of the voices I still carried with me. Would that I had stayed a scribe!
August 1. Anno Domini 2008. Day 507482
Dearest Diary,
I began what would prove to be my torturous journey in the Suq al-Milh, the salt market. The city itself is a labyrinth, a maze to draw in travelers and bewilder invaders. And the Suq, the silk-draped spider, casting it's nets for gold at the center of the beautiful city.
Having wandered even through the greatest, most impossible cities of the 21st Century, dear diary, I never felt a pauper for having come from the Suq. The beauty of our city's architecture-it's high towers and tall houses, rich mosques, and lovely hammams- modeled on Roman and Byzantine bathhouses-remains still a wonder of the world, and the Suq has become a treasure of all nations. Many and many things could be found in the Suq. Much salt there was, in those days when salt was worth it's weight in pure silver. Also to be found there was rich bread that smelled of honey, spices from far Zanzibar, and farther still. There was Egyptian cotton, hammered copper from Timna and Kibris, dried fruits-raisins in particular of a hundred varieties, imported from Turkiye, Greek pottery, silverware from Indja, and thousands of slaves of all hues, nationalities, skills, and dispensations.
And the food! The richest, the finest. The best in all the wide world. A man of moderate means, even in those days, could eat a lifetime in the Suq and not envy a morsel on an emperor's plate. Even our slaves ate better than the freed men of other cities-a fact to which I'll readily testify.
There was also a small trade in books from far off Baghdad, and it were these that held mine interest. Many were of the Greek and Latin-a few, authored by Aristotle, Theophrastus, and other Peripatetics; as well as Euclyd, Diogenes, Xenocrates, and the Hellenes: Pyrrho and Archimedes, and finally Roman Plutarch, had been translated into Arabic, but these were few and far from common. The age of the great Islamic scholars, inventors, and philosophers hadn't even begun. Fortunately, being a scribe necessitated the learning of Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Aramaic, Ge'ez, Bactrian, Armenian, Turkic, Old and Colloquial Persian, and Ancient, Classical, and Colloqual Arabic.
I still retain a love of languages, and written script.
I owned exactly 17 complete texts at the start of my journey, 3 of which were in untranslated Greek, 7 in Latin, 2 in Sanskrit-one containing the Vedas, and the other the Jainist 'Pravachansara', 2 Aramaic works-one containing the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Thomas, and Peter, and another of over 400 hymns of Ephram the Syrian. One there was-a long, indecipherable but beautifully penned Egyptian scroll that I learned many years later to be a particularly fine copy of the Book of the Dead. But only one besides the holy Koran did I own in Arabic-that being a reasonably competent copy of Aristotle's 'De Caelo'.
They were my most precious belongings-I'd spent full 20 years gathering them together. I must have read each work 60 times through, handling even the coarse parchment of Virgilius's 'Aeneid' as though it were fashioned of moth's wings.
Now, a retired and independent man of means, I devoted myself to the persuit of knowledge. There were three booksellers in San'a', and I engratiated myself to all of them, in various ways. Every licit work of any quality to pass through the city in those 6 years passed first under my eyes, before finding a seller. I was often enough that seller, and the expansion of my library quickly necessitated my return to profitable businesses. In addition to financing three lucrative caravans between Yemen and Ethiopia, with the help of my friendly booksellers, I also personally transcribed the works of six different Hellene philosophers who had never appeared in the Arabic language before, and then hired scribes from the Suq-among them my old apprentice-to publish them. The monies from these successes enabled me to expand my library to a full 70 volumes.
Any learned man wouldst have been satisfied. Any man who did not share his mind with others.
Returning to the Daivas:
It seemed obvious then, though I wonder now, the source of the voices-lest you think me a fool: For Who else but Shai'tan the whisperer, or his servants? Know that that knowledge, the certainty of it I felt in my heart, never stopped me or gave me great pause. The voices illuminated my world, made it magical, in a way that the Kitab 'alf layla wa-layla, the '1001 Nights' made a wondrous fantasy of the world I lived and breathed in-a fantasy that never was, except for me.
The question was not 'whence from?', but only 'where to?', and I needed that answer-as my life's persuit-even if the answer was only 'Jahannam'
Asked to transcribe-even then-what the voices were saying, the whispered words of arsenical ambrosia-I could not have. After a career of languages, of coming to intuit the meaning of others, and to put into words their thoughts, ideas, needs, lives; for the elucidation of their families, or whomever they were writing to; when it came to putting down on parchment those musical voices--dipped in sin and dripping--I was at a loss.
And since then, since my first and only proper lifetime, the specific memories of the words they said, even my own speculation on the ideas and motivations they encouraged-is gone. Erased more thoroughly than a slate of chalk, scrubbed clean,
then broken, and buried under the sea for thousands of years.
I know only that they were there, that they seemed real, and that they tantalized, and drew me further in, further down, towards my destiny.
I exhausted the books as a recourse. To this day, I know not the purpose the voices had in them, to collect them. I took pleasure from the act, but what supernatural being would? What mischief in Euclyd? what motive in Aristotle? I happily read them all-the likeliest candidates in all the city, perhaps all Yemen, but nought came of it other than that happiness. At last I turned to another source: The Woman of the Budayeen.
Ofcourse there were many women living in the Budayeen-merchants and wives of merchants, whores, musicians and entertainers, fortune-tellers, and the old women who are found everywhere, doing every job their lives require. A few Hindu widows who had escaped the Sati, among them. The one I sought was among this last, and a fortune teller indeed, and lived in the very heart of the Budayeen, but she was not one of many. There was only one Woman of the Budayeen, and even that simple title was whispered.
Rumour-for dark rumours seem all that was said of her-spake that she and her husband had come across the Thar desert from the Rann of Kutch, and had once dwelt very near the antideluvian port of Lothal. It said further that she and her husband ruled a smallish community there, but they had been cast out of the city by Christians or Vedics who dwelt there (the story differed-Vedics said it was Christians, Christians said Vedics), for her worship of a pagan fire deity. The direst rumour I hath heard concerned her husband and her dying of thirst in the final part of the desert, and her drinking the living blood from his body to stay herself alive. That once she arrived in the city, she performed the Chilla-nashini without taking so much as a drop of water or crust of bread, beforehand. Two other strange things were said of her, consistently: That she was an excellent healer-a skilled practitioner of Ayurveda-and that she, in all of Yemen-perhaps in all of Islam-was the greatest and wisest of oneiromancers.
Many otherwise very respectable, very noble Muslems came to her-a woman, and a foreigner, and far worse, if rumour be believed-to hear their fortunes told, to have their dreams interpreted, and perhaps even to lay a curse on an enemy, for it was said that as well as the favors of Hypnos, she peddled the goods of Iblis.
It was good that she was favoured by the nobles, for otherwise she'd have long been stoned and done by the poor she dwelt amongst. I'd asked after her and learned that, as ill as the things said concerning her history, her powers, she turned none away from her door, serving all and charging noone above their means; also none even among the most fearful or hateful would contradict that she kept the Five Pillars as well as any devout Muslim-and she was Muslim, whatever else, having converted immediately upon arrival into the beautiful city.
I found that She kept a three-storey house of black stone that looked as though it had been through some ancient conflageration. I estimated it's age at atleast 60 years, and that it had most likely been built by a minor noble, before the area had declined. Signs of the fire had been more or less obliterated, save on the foundations and around one large window on the bottom floor, on either side of which were growing two neatly trimmed little qat bushes. The house was otherwise in good upkeep, with no visible signs of mischief, or even commerce. I noted also that it was only a short walk away from a particularly pretty little mosque.
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Topic: So eh... anybody write? (Read 8580 times)