Writing down the bones...

Here at 1430 we have an interest in creative writing programs. Because, where Donkee could be seen as, for instance, that huge underground fungus, these programs would then be the red-winged blackbird that swoops down for a mushy snack. So we did some research, and were interested to find that the first of these programs was from 3rd Dynasty Ancient Egypt. Many on the thesis its graduates, one presumes, were lost in that great conflagration. This one, from young Prince Bebe survived only in Donkee, it would be worth so much damn money if it weren’t priceless.

So, I wrote my second play this week. I looked down at the papyrus as a finished it an noticed how well I had lined the hieroglyphs on the page- how even my spacing was- that I felt like I was getting better at everything with practice. Anyway as soon as I finished I rushed out of my quarters and into the quarters of Princesses M. and T. They both are in love with me so I hoped that they would give me a good review. They went through the manuscript while I stood in the hall with Prince J. and when I came back into the room they had taken out their quills and were marking all over it, crossing out a beloved glyph here and adding another limb to a figure there. We bantered a bit, during which I expressed my bitteness as humor.

Later in the day I walked into the pillow room, knowing that my play had been circulated and read by two or three that day. There my reception was even worse. Princess J. and Prince C formed a coalition, saying that my play, which inverted the conventions of our sacred text, would have done better to simply let those conventions play out under the conditions of apocalypse that the work imposed. They also said that the blind allegiance to present forms of government as the foundation for the new post-apocalyptic society, one whose lifestyle would mimic not the present, but the ways of the native tribes that came before us, was equally untenable. Yes, they finished by calling my work overly extravagant.

I asked, is it really more extravagant than the work of Duke O.L? They nodded gravely. Then princess A stretched for a bowl of honey wine in such a way that left her prostrated across the body of Prince G, which was strange, because I hadn’t intimated an intimacy there before. Suddenly I looked at all of them in the pillow room, seated, relaxed, and me standing there in the doorway, and I felt very alone in the world. Surely they liked me, but my work met only with criticism.

Finally I said to Prince C., surely you must admit that my work was more about how we would act after the apocalypse, were I to return from here, the city, back to the country outside my home fiefdom, and discover how they were living after the apocalypse, subsequently convincing them that we must live as the old tribes before us, which prompted, as so much in village life does, a three-way election of coalitions who painted all their boats one color or another, and filled them with slogans, etc.

He looked at me and narrowed his eyes into a look that said, you exist, I am looking at you, and then said, 'Yes, yes, clearly.' So I continued, 'so really this text is serious, not extravagant. It might even be considered realist.' 'Oh I don’t think so, intoned Princess J,' and I was censored once again.

'But most of the extravagance is in the actual prose, the glyph choice and order, things that won’t make it to the stage. And what about the scene with the pickaxe? Where the protagonist says, ‘Oh sorry, did I brush your leg with the pickaxe THAT WENT THROUGH THE GUT OF MY FRIEND ON THE FIRST DAYS OF THE APOCALOYSE?’' Some people nodded, but it was clear that they preferred my play dead to alive. I made my bows and left thinking, at least I wrote something!