Dave’s Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #76: “A Satyr Once”

I write a lot about mythology, especially doing myths and revisionist fairy tales. When I saw a call for submissions about satyrs, it immediately got the creative currents flowing in my mind and soon the idea for a story unfolded. The creative impulses arose from various sources:  one would be the character of Mr. Tumnus is C. S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Tumnus was not a satyr, he was a faun, which is a little bit different, but the same sort of creature; from a section of Sir Edmund Spenser’s The Fairie Queene; and from an old English madrigal I liked, written by a poet from the Elizabethan era, called “A Satyr Once” (I took the title from that song). I’m always curious about what elements work together to create stories. A lot came from the era of Elizabeth and Shakespeare, when people knew their mythology better and were intrigued by it.

Satyrs were mythical creatures who were half-goat and half-human; goat from the waist down, human from the waist up. This physiognomy was highly symbolic. The goat was a symbol of lust, so the satyrs were driven by lust and desire and dangerous for women to be around. In the scene I referenced in The Fairie Queene, the female character of the first Canto, Una, suddenly finds herself surrounded by satyrs. She despairs, thinking her fate will be to fall victim to their insatiable sexual desire. But she is so holy, pure, and good that the satyrs do not assault her; they deem her a goddess and bow down to worship her. Spenser’s allegory uses this incident to illustrate the power of goodness and the magic of chastity (Una is a virgin). To me, it suggested the idea that a satyrs were not simply lust-driven, lecherous creatures. Maybe they had another side to them.

Lorena

Varinius is a satyr who has lived in England since Roman times. He faces the problem, though, that Chaucer noted:  the Christian church continually sanctifies lands and has driven all the elves, fairies, and spirit being away—including satyrs. As sanctuaries grow rarer and rarer, Varinius goes to the less-populated northern reaches only to be spotted and pursued to by a group of hunters. The idea for this phase of the story came from a poem by Seventeenth-Century writer Andrew Marvell, “The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn”: The wanton troopers riding by / Have shot my fawn, and it will die. Varinius runs from the hunters and dives into a pond where he is rescued by a nymph named Lorena who is the local deity of the pond. The two of them live together happily until local craftsmen pollute the pond with industrial waste, which poisons and kills Lorena.



Ionia

He buries her near a tree belonging to hamadryad named Ionia. They eventually become lovers.The entire story is told as flashback. As he tell the tales, Varinius is doing what satyrs do. He is whoring, drinking, and fornicating. Ionia has taught him to successfully live in human society and how to transform his appearance so he can feign being old, dying, and then reappear as his son and heir. He and Ionia continue their relationship have a child (a girl, since hamadryads only bear female children).

He adapts to human society—and the role of an English Lord who is a law to himself and who is expected to live a life of vice and dissipation, suits him very well. The satyr ran away but ran to a secure location where he live on and on, practicing his life of lechery, drinking, and orgiastic partying.

 "A Satyr Once" is available. See the link here. 

If you enjoy stories involving ancient myth, drinking, and lechery, you will find it all here.

For additional titles, see my Writer's Page.

I would love to hear your comments.

Dave's Anatomy: My History as a Writer, #75: "The Graveyard Roster"

 

I responded to call for stories on revenge. The title of the anthology was Best Served Cold, title taken from a line Ricardo Montalbán, playing the role of Khan Noonien Singh in the film Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan—which Khan says is a Klingon proverb, but is actually from a novel, Mathilde written in 1841by French author Eugène Sue ("La vengeance se mange très-bien froide"). A lot had been on television and the internet on bullying those days, and I decided to bring this in as an element in the story.  A woman with whom I play music worked as a document researcher for a legal firm and told me how she spends hours going through old documents in the basement of a building. This gave more grist for the story idea and it began to form with those two elements to guide it. 

Bonita and Friends

The story begins with the main character, Jeremy Blakely, examining graves in an old graveyard. He is in a journalism class, and the assignment he has received is to find an obscure name on a headstone and find as much as he can about the person—an exercise in finding sources not for celebrities but for everyday people. He finds the name Audrey DeJong. Being in graveyard saddens him because it reminds him of the recent suicide of his friend, Catherine. As he is writing Audrey DeJong's name, he sees Bonita Richardson, a classmate, and two of her friends enter the cemetery. Things have been tense between Jeremy and Bonita since Catherine Gabriel took her own life. The two women were rivals for the same guy and often antagonistic. Jeremy considers Audrey vapid and ridiculous.

After talking with her, he checks the internet and is surprised to find a reference to Audrey DeJong. He goes to the records room of the local paper (the "morgue") and finds out some facts about how Mrs. DeJong died:  

Reading until the room closed at six, Jeremy pieced together a composite of a local murder case. N. S. Thompson, a Grand Rapids physician, poisoned three women in the early 1960s by giving them arsenic in the guise of a prescription drug. He covered the crimes by doing the post-mortem examinations himself (since the women were his patients). Number four on his list was Marion Pachard, Audrey’s married daughter, who had been under Thompson’s care for a case of infectious hepatitis. She recovered. Thompson gave her a prescription, but her mother, who had somehow heard about two of the women who had died in his care, took the pills to a drugstore for analysis. The police tried to arrest Thomson. He eluded them, drove to Audrey’s home, and threatened to kill her. The law arrived, a shootout ensued, and a stray bullet killed Audrey. 

As he is reading, he smells the scent of lilac perfume and turns to see the ghost of Audrey DeJong standing behind him. After the initial fright and denial that happens when one sees a spirit, Audrey tells him that Catherine's spirit is not at rest because she is angry at Bonita Richardson, who bullied her and drove her to suicide.  

Like Hamlet, Jeremy is skeptical of a message from a ghost but decides to investigate. Under the ruse of helping Bonita with her writing assignment, he copies her computer files and sees that she ceaselessly and viciously tormented Catherine over a young man who left her for Bonita. Catherine finally cracked under the bullying. Jeremy wonders what to do, but Audrey appears to him and tells him she has a plan. 

When Jeremy and Bonita are together, the girl suffers from one of her migraines. He suggests they go to Health Services. Bonita says it's not open this late, but Jeremy thinks it is. They go there and she is treated by an old, thin doctor dressed in out-of-date clothing and sporting a flattop haircut. He prescribes pills for her. She takes a double dose of them and then begins to feel ill. She pleads with Jeremy to call for help. He whispers to her that she is dying, he will call Emergency but she will be dead by the time they get there, that he knows what she did to Catherine, and that the hahahahaha message now applies to her. She will have a lot to answer for, he says, when she gets on the other side. All the while, the scent of lilac perfume hangs in the air. 

Catherine

Bonita dies of arsenic poisoning. Jeremy is a suspect (the police also note that he associated with Catherine Gabriel, another woman who took her own life), but there is no evidence he had anything to do with poisoning her. When he turned, Audrey DeJong had vanished. Only a faint trace of lilac hinted she had been there. The public reacts angrily to what they perceive as "police bullying," and the authorities back off. Jeremy turns into a minor celebrity and gets to tell his story on the Today Show. Best of all, Audrey appears to him and tells him Catherine is now at rest. His revenge, served up cold, enables a young woman who was wronged to finally find peace. 

The story appeared in the anthology Best Served Cold, Volume 1, which does not seem to be available anymore.

For more stories and books that deal with ghosts and the paranormal, check out my Writer's Page.

A great read:  Sinfonia: The First Notes on the Lute: A Vampire Chronicle, Part One. Nelleke Reitsma plays the lute very well. After all, she has had 300 years to practice.

I would love to hear your comments on the story and on the subject of revenge.

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer #74: "To Keep a True Lent"

Poet Robert Herrick

I did my Ph.D on the poetry of Robert Herrick. Herrick was a Seventeenth-Century poet, known mostly for his line, "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may"—the poem that Robin Williams recites to his students in Dead Poet's Society when he takes them down to the trophy room at their school and shows them the pictures of former students, now all dead, and urges his current students to "seize the day." The name of the poem is "To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time," and it is considered one of the classic carpe diem poems.

I also had a neighbor. Let's call him Jerry. He lived around the corner from me when I was a kid. He had a wife and two adopted sons and was very devout religiously. My family did not pay much attention to religion, so his devotion to faith (he was a Roman Catholic) fascinated me. We lived in that house just across from his for about ten years, so I got to know him and his wife, and, later, his two sons, very well.

I give these seemingly unrelated facts because they came together to make a story. Hemingway is famous for his advice that writers should "write one story about each thing you know." And many times I've wondered, How do stories come about? What disparate elements congeal to make a narrative? It is possible to write about what we know. I write about music quite a lot because I am a musician. But how do stories form? I am amazed at how very remote matters can make a story. In this one my experience as a musician, my propensity to ponder religious matters, and my experience knowing some very devout people all came together to create the tale, "To Keep a True Lent."

The title is taken from a poem by Robert Herrick. Few people know that this poet of "seize the day" was an Anglican priest and wrote many religious poems, one of them titled "To Keep a True Lent." Lent is the time of year before Easter when many Christian sects deny themselves certain things so they can identify with suffering of Jesus Christ. What you gave up varied from age to age. In the Middle Ages, people gave up sex during Lent (now that was a true deprivation); I've know people today who give up the internet, soft drinks, candy, such things as this (which does not seem a particularly great deprivation). But people do this, and I often get asked by friends what I am giving up for Lent. Since I don't belong to a denomination that practices this discipline I tell them nothing.

My story centered around a successful musician, named Blake, nationally known, who likes to play local gigs in bars, not announcing who is playing, giving the people who show up a surprise that they will get to see a rock superstar play at their favorite pub. He plays one night and is tagged by a girl afterwards. He takes her home. When they are finished making love she tells him she is homeless and asks for money. He gets lots of requests for this, but something about the girl's sincerity moves him. He asks her if she wants to work for him, sets her up in an apartment, and pays her for shoveling snow and cleaning his apartment (his regular girlfriend is away for a stint working in Japan). She is amazed and accepts his offer. An occasional night in bed is also a part of the deal.

Enter his next-door neighbor, Jerry. He is a lot like my neighbor from so many years ago. He is devoutly religious. When Blake asks him how he is he says he's a little hungry because he is practicing a "black fast." This is when one only eats bread and drinks water during the Lenten season—to "mortify" (kill) the fleshly desires of the body. Jerry also know Julissa, the girl who Blake has hired and his housekeeper. He knows her story, says the way she lives has devastated her parents, and gently but thoroughly condemns her. For all their differences, Blake likes Jerry and parries his criticism of Julissa, saying her parents had been unfair with her, she had fallen on hard times, and he is helping her out. Still, Jerry has little good to say for the girl. Later on, Blake discovers that Julissa's family knows Jerry and Julissa knows a lot about him. She claims he doesn't have sex with his wife but lives in "married chastity." This, she says, is why they adopted children rather than having their own—though Blake is not certain this is true and thinks it might just be rumor and gossip.

Jerry's criticisms of Blake and his relationship with Julissa, grows more strident. He finally accuses Blake of exploiting the girl, a thing he denies, saying she consented to the arrangement and can back out of it at any time. They get in a heated discussion, but Blake and Jerry genuinely admire each other, despite their differences, and manage to remain civil and not part ways. And Jerry has brought Blake a gift. It is some of the bread he is eating for his "black fast." He thanks Jerry and takes the bread back to his apartment to eat it. He meditates as he partakes:

I took the bread inside, cut off a thick slice, warmed it in the microwave, put on butter, and bit into it. The sweet, wholegrain flavor filled my mouth. I thought of Jerry eating such delightfully flavorful bread as a way to suffer. Could he recognize its delightful flavor when he had framed the act of eating it in such a negative way? I thought of Julissa, probably back at her apartment by now, excitedly telling her boyfriend I intended to pay for her school and hire her as my booking manager when she graduated--or possibly before.

Julissa

He thinks of Samantha, his girlfriend, and of the tour he will soon embark upon.

The theme of the story is, of course, the nature of religious devotion. Blake, an unbeliever, is showing compassion and love to Julissa. Jerry is only condemning her. In the poem that is the title of the story, Herrick talks about how some people keep Lent by denying themselves meat but then "heap the platter high with fish" (an acceptable alternative to eating meat during Lent). To keep a true Lent, he says, is "to dole / Thy sheaf of wheat, / And meat, / Unto the hungry soul." Blake is showing genuine love and compassion to Julissa, and this is more important than only eating bread. Blake is in fact keeping a true Lent.

"To Keep a True Lent" appeared in a magazine called The Cynic OnLine, no longer published, but it does maintain an archive and you can read the story here.

A vampire who is an internationally known lutenist and guitarist has to be careful to keep her identity as one of the undead a secret--hard to do when you are a celebrity. Get a copy of Sinfonia: The First Notes on the Lute. Great reading. Don't read it alone!

For more titles, see my Writer's Page.

I would love to hear your comments.