These are samples of of my writing (needless to say, I claim all rights to my work).
This is a passage from my novel Light Queen/Dark Queen. . .
With the wealth of a continent at his disposal, Renemera had built the southern wing of the palace not long after he had taken up the Seal of Atlantis. The northern wing, the residential quarters of King Renemera and Queen Zepfer-dan, were blood-soaked, he said, and undoubtably haunted. "I am the fore-runner of a new line of monarchs;" he claimed, "it is only fitting that my master shall have a new and glorious home!"
The priests of One had been dismayed, for the proposed wing of the palace would overshadow the courtyard before the sanctuary of the temple. How could the high priest greet the sun on Parraglia morning if the palace was built across his line of sight?
Renemera had no feel for sun-celebration. He was a priest by accident, and a Ba'alite at that; and most Ba'alite rituals were conducted in a cellar. He was an architect at heart, and he could not look at a long expanse of lawn without designing a building to go on it. However, before the Book of Prophecies, he had been a man with natural human feelings: back then it had disturbed him to see grown men weep and kneel at his feet. . .
It was fortunate for Atlantis that the Great Worm, as my Old Man called him, was naturally was a tig and not a tyrant. Renemera was always willing to seek an elegant solution to disputes. He built his new halls exactly where he wanted them, but he honored the Temple's objections as well: opposite the temple sanctuary he built three chambers of glass--three chambers which opened to create one magnificent hall with walls of glass which reached from floor to ceiling. With supports so thin that when the early morning sun shone through the hall, the shadows on the courtyard were almost indistinguishable from lines between the flagstone tiles. At that time, in all the savage, mostly stone-age world, there was nothing else like the Sun Halls of Atlantis.
Six men were employed to keep the glass brilliant. They could be seen, day in and day out, with their buckets and their bamboo scaffolds, cleaning the diamond-bright panels. Gardeners, too, danced attendance upon the halls. The apprentices could be seen every morning picking up gulls and shearwaters who had flown into the glass. During migration season, the halls were festooned with brightly colored streamers to warn the birds away.
The Sun Halls by day were as beautiful and as natural as a rod of crystal laid upon the lawn--too wondrous to have been built by human hands. At night, lit from within by the six gold and crystal chandliers, the halls seemed to blaze as if by magic.
On the mild winter night when Harka, Anescia, and Risor prepared to meet Lord Renemera, only a third of the High Priest's birthday guests were old enough to remember the construction of the Sun Halls. And Renemera, always willing to obscure just how long he had been waiting for his sovereign, had over the last fifty years falsified or destroyed records relating to the creation of his master work, making it appear to the rare, curious researcher that he had simply refurbished what had been built in other times. And yet everyone knew that the Sun Halls were Renemera's creation. When the lords and ladies, dressed in their velvets and their feathers and their furs, riding in their burnished carriages, pulled by their sleek, high-stepping horses, saw their destination, burning in the night--saw the Great Hall filled with golden fire, thrumming with an undercurrent of music--they were willing to believe that Renemera had conjured the palace out of crystal and flame.
TOPAmerican Beauty: on a writers email list, one member said
>AAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
>
>How could you like this film? What was it about this film that you
>actually LIKED? I thought it was the most pointless bit of crap I had ever
>seen!!!
>
> What sort of a message is it supposed to give off?
American Beauty is actually a 12th-13th century Romance. Two Romances in fact. One is a story of courtly love a la
The Romance of the Rose--which tipped me off the true story. I went to bed feeling that I had missed some aspect of the movie and woke up at 6:00 a.m. the next morning saying, "Romance of the Rose!"
(Actually I sat up and yelled "Christine de Pisan!" She was a protofeminist--yeah, I'm
a feminist sf/f person--and in the early 1400's she wrote the rebuttal to The Romance of the
Rose, which had started off as an allegorical treatise on Courtly Love and ended up as a giant dump on women. Christine de Pisan was one of the first women in history who actually earned her living as a writer.)
Lester is the protagonist of the first story, "The Rose". He's this poor hedge knight finally come home from the wars to find that his wife has been running the castle to her own satisfaction and doesn't want or need him underfoot. His daughter has grown up without him and finds him crude and boorish. He is presented at Court and is patronized by the King (of real estate). His ambitious wife, however, finds favor with the King and pretty soon they are getting it on hot and heavy! Lester goes to a tournament where his daughter is one of
the court maidens and falls completely under the spell of his daughter's friend, who is the embodiment of the Courtly Lady, the Mistress of his Heart's Desire. In one vision after another he sees her surrounded by rich Marian imagery. (Lester lives on Robin Hood Lane, if you didn't catch it). He sets out to become the perfect knight in order to win her favor. But his is to be a spiritual quest, not a physical one. Ricky, the strange young man next door, gives Lester herbs to open his eyes to a world of Peace and Beauty that he could barely imagine. In the end Lester's love for his Lady is pure. When he finally has a chance to physically consumate his love for his Lady, he turns aside for a higher, more spiritual Love. He dies happy and renewed and goes to Heaven--or something close to that.
Now, Lester lives next to the Grail Castle, where the second story, a
variation of the the Fisher King is being played out in condensed form. There were many knights who searched for the Grail; Percival and Galahad were the most famous. The meaning of "grail" was originally a plate or platter, and the plate of this
Fisher King is a cursed thing: a piece of Nazi china. (There's a platter in Lester's story, too, if you remember--his moment of liberation comes when he hurls the platter at the
dining room wall.) Percival was the son of a noblewoman and a brutal knight. His mother raised him in isolation because she did not want him to become a knight, but Percival slipped off to the court of King Arthur and became a scullion and then a page. When a dreadful knight rides into Arthur's court with the story of the Fisher King, Percival persuades Arthur to let him go on the quest. When we meet Ricky, he is a waiter at the Real Estate King's party.
Percival goes to the Grail Castle and observes the strange rituals of the Grail Maidens but he fails his quest because he does not ask, "What is the significance of this ritual?" Galahad succeeds because he asks the question. Ricky looks--he looks obsessively through his camcorder and records both the beauty and the horror around him. He asks, "What is the meaning of all this?" He is able to relay his vision and his understanding to both Lester and Lester's daughter. Lester's wounds are healed and the children escape.
Alan Ball did not write THIS story. I know: I asked him! In fact his screen play ended much differently. He confessed that he had been semi-consciously working with archetypes and Joseph Campbell's monomyth, but he had not been aware of all the Marian imagery or the Grail imagery.
If you try to understand American Beauty as a satire on modern suburbia, it will leave you bewildered and disturbed. (And isn't "bewildered" a lovely word? "To be lost in the wilderness") If you understand it as apocrypha from L'Morte
d'Arthur, it really isn't that strange.
I just finished reading The Alphabet Vs the Goddess, by Leonard Shlain. It's about the Dark Side of literacy, and the destruction of the Goddess religions. In the last chapters, Shlain says that we have entered a new era. We are now in the midst of the Iconic Revolution, which is restoring right brained thinking and Goddess values. (And this movie is just FULL of Goddess imagery!) One of the tools that brought about this revolution was the camera--and Ricky's camera is the
magical talisman that frees him, Lester, and Lester's daughter from the Fisher King's repressed, left-brain, military-industrial complexes. It's a fascinating book. I've already bought three copies and plan to purchase a couple more for Christmas. --June, 2000
This will be my paper on Peter Pan and the DuMaurier Family.
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