THE OLD GREY HOUSE
The old grey house sat on the hill.
“Now Mr. and Mrs. John or Johanna Q. Public
what do you think of my opening line?”
“Personally,
I’m yawning already, putting myself to sleep like a semantic glass of warm
milk, trickling down my gullet, or a soft feathered linguistic pillow as I
collapse into its cushioned caressing wonderfulness, bored to tears!”
A long weaving path led to the old grey
house that sat on the hill.
“Marginally better, but it leaves much to
be desired, as would anything that aspires to a utopian image or thought,
pilfered from the divine and trapped in the physical world of imperfect description.
Think of a bright tropical, fluorescent, neon fish carefully netted and whisked
away, kidnapped for a wealthy customers
aquarium and dumped unceremoniously into a tank losing its beauty, a shadow of its true self when free in its proper
environment, trapped in its translucent glass prison cell; or consider a diamond
cutter’s stone cut and polished, not to perfection but, to the point at which the
tradesperson can live with the results, a compromise to be lived with falling
short of its perfect utopian ideal gemstone,
but good enough to satisfy the jeweler and dazzle the public; maybe a game of darts
missing the bullseye, breaking a drinking glass, puncturing the wall or landing
imperfectly on the perimeter or concentric circles of the dart board. The
physical world creates hurdles, as in pens that run out of ink and pads of
paper that run out of pages. A linguistic series of compromises rudely swiped
from the divine and pulled down, packaged and presented in the physical world,
a shadow of their true ideal meaning, a sellout, settled on to finish a manuscript
and send it off to one’s publisher in return for payment of a contract and
royalties in order to go out and buy more imperfect pens and an affordable finite
amount of paper to repeat the process.”
A long weaving path led precipitously to
the weathered, ramshackle old grey house that sat on the hill.
“Another slight improvement but in the
halls of Valhalla, Eden, Shangri-la or Elysium clear perfection of expression
would be effortless. The printing house will definitely be sending a Page
around soon, banging on my door for the next installment of my manuscript and I
have already overspent from the sands of time in my personal hourglass on this
sentence. I need to settle on it and move on…
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