[Morning freewrite]
Yesterday I didn't write anything.  I wonder, act of rebellion?

I've been having dreams about the trail.  Dreams about hiking.  About seeing
people.  What people are important?  Where am I going with this hiking
thing?  I think I don't know what to do.

What is love?  A mad passion?  An emotion?  A need?  Where do we find it?
With a special someone?  In ourselves?  All over?  What is our purpose?  Do
we each have our own?  Is there a common purpose?  What if no one else has
my same vision?  Do we travel our road alone forever?  Do we try to urge
others on?  Do we sacrifice our vision?  What is madness?  Do we know that
we are no longer sane?  Is it societal onlly?  ((ie: could a society of
madmen exist?)

Henry Miller.  Banned author.  Sexually explicit.  Literature.  Why don't we
teach his writings more often?  The Karl Shapiro introduction says that he
is one of the most influential of modern authors.  Why is it that we don't
devote classes to him?  The sexual revolution of the 60s has died?  We are
no longer willing to acknowledge sex as something "we do," only that others
do?  There was once an author who wrote soap opera type stuff.  Steamy
affairs and etc.  But she was taken in by the general public as being fit
reading for their children.  The introduction to that book asked the
quesiton why?  Were the times different then?  Did the mothers ignore the
subject matter, never ask well, what exactly did happen in the horse barn?
Perhaps it's more of an us and them.  The people in the novels were more
upper class than the readership.  These are things that happen to movie
stars and nobles.  Not to us.  We marry and have children and live lives
that are good.  But our gods and idles have always ben held to a different
set of morals, haven't they?

(Incest was okay for the Greek gods, but read Oedipus to find out what
happens when mortals engage in it, even unwittingly.... Mr Darling)

What am I writing about these days?  SOmething of importance?  No.  I am
writing about me.  So I should expand on that.  I should try to walk in the
shoes of Henry Miller.  But different.  According to my lights.  I see
myself as a scared individual.  I should write, instead, things that are
better than my life.  Explore more topics than my life.  Do more things.

But stay true to me.  For I can only truly understand me.  No one else.

Perhaps that is why some writers paint multidimensional characters and
others give us black and white.  We are drawing on our own archetypes -- the
things within ourselves.  If we label our own inner self(ves) good and bad,
inner demons on one shoulder and angels/conscience on the other, then our
characters will reflect one or the other sides of our own nature.  If we can
see ourselves as acting with a mixture of both, never able to pull the black
from the white, but always a muddy gray is tracked in by our actions, then
we create characters that have this same ambiguous character.  In any case,
all characters in a story are ourselves.

[End morning freewrite]