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| Gaia |
I
began to run dry on story ideas for my ongoing character and started to write
tales without her benevolent presence—without the subject of music, a thing I
know a lot about; without the struggles
and ironies of being a musician; without
the conflicts one runs into when playing gigs.
But there are other things going in the world, and the past always
generously supplies. I came up with the idea for a story called "The Gaia
Contract." The past supplied again.
I
attended a college that had a seminary attached to it. Seminarians, training for
ministry, can be good, kind, thoughtful people; but they can also be
pretentious prigs. And the pretentious ones are the ones you remember. What
struck me as annoying is that the seminarians I knew were so—well, Shakespeare
would have called them "precise." To be a "precisian" in
his day was to be someone who had an extremely narrow theological approach and
would not vary from it at all. A precisian's beliefs were set in stone and any
slight variance, any open-minded interpretation, any deviation from what they
considered the orthodox norm was off-limits to their thinking.
I
knew one guy who wouldn't let his kids watch cartoons because cartoons
presented a false picture of God's creation:
animals can't talk. Another told me he never read Shakespeare because Shakespeare
was a moral relativist. A line in Hamlet said, "There is nothing neither
good nor bad, but thinking makes it so."
It was pointless to try to say that cartoons were harmless
entertainment, like fairy tales, or that something Shakespeare has a character
say does not necessarily reflect his personal views on a matter. But arguing with
these pastors-in-training proved a pointless endeavor. They were impervious to
other viewpoints.
One
friend was so pious he would
never call a stretch of winding
road outside of
town "the Devil's backbone." Everyone around there used the nickname,
but he probably thought using the Devil's name to characterize landscape
constituted something evil. He did not
celebrate Christmas, Halloween, or Easter, saying there were holidays with
pagan roots.
As
I thought on this, a story formed. What if someone ran up against a
pagan god or goddess and got obnoxious with them? In my story, the character of
Bob becomes hypercritical of an organic farm called Gaia Farms. And the people
there, neopagans, worship the ancient goddess of earth and soil. Bob tells
the narrator they sacrifice animals. He replies they are vegans. Bob insists
that in ancient times, Gaia's followers spilled human or animal blood on the
furrows of fields to ensure good crops. Bob eventually becomes pastor of a small
church near the farm.
The
narrator gets a call that Bob has been killed. An automobile accident severs an
artery in his leg. Leaving a trail of blood, he crawls across the fields of—you
guessed it—Gaia Farms while a worship of the goddess is going on. The people
try to help him, but it's too late. When the wife in the couple that owns the
farm starts to make a disclaimer, the narrator holds up his hand and says she doesn't need
to say anything. It was an accident. But, at the same time, it's not good to bad-mouth
Mother Nature.
The
story was an ironic take on closed-mindedness and pretense. It got published in
decomP magazine. I read, a week
later, that a site on the internet rated decomP
as one of the ten best literary sites on the web, which encouraged me (and boosted
my ego, I will admit).
So
I was not writing songs about music or about Sossity Chandler, my ongoing
character. Maybe I had become too dependent on her. What followed was a series
of stories that went off in new directions. More on this to come.
Here is a link to read "The Gaia Contract."
For more titles, check out my Writer's Page.
Summer reading: What do the Brothers Grimm have to say for science fiction? Read my novella, Mother Hulda.
I would love to hear your comments and observations. Have you ever run up against pretentious people? Written about them? What did you say?
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