Wednesday, March 10, 2010

The Gardener: a peek into the story

I hereby provide you an email I sent to a friend describing who this Gardener is and why she (? he?) is important in the story. Most of this will not make sense.

So be it.

________________________________________________

Sandy,

Hey, thanks for the offer of help....

I know very little about gardening, so at this point I am doing a character study. I want to understand it well enough to build a character. I want to understand enough about its history to hopefully build on that knowledge.

The character is a god, of sorts, and a mortal character as well. I'm not sure how much even she/he knows of the dual nature. But the Gardener has been building, harvesting, nurturing for aeons. The garden he tends is as much heavenly, ethereal. They are the stuff of forces, wind, gravity, electricity, but they are also attraction, between people, inspiration, focus.

While I do want to study our own many mythologies for my stories, I plan to kind of tear them like you might make confetti out of paper. Reattach them as with tape, or water for papier mache.

The Gardener is interested in particular in a peculiar thing he/she has encountered. Its original form is lost to us, but upon the discovery of "DNA" in our mortal world, its reality changed and it became highly complex DNA, strands distributed throughout our reality, sometimes in people, many of whom are remarkable, known to history as saints, artists, philosophers, kings, but many of whom are animals, plants and even rock.

These strands were once part of one original god-like being, one of a handful at the time of the creation before creations, the creation that created the canvas upon which our Judeo-Christian god painted the light upon the darkness.

The Gardener doesn't understand everything -- in fact what the Gardener thinks she knows is mostly myth, misinformation, legends, deception, but she understands that, like mating different Orchids, one can create something new and unique, and so she serves the purpose of the story by heralding the first transformation I need for my main character.

In my stories, Sandy, I plan to follow a mortal, an ordinary divorce who moves to a small town to rebuild his life, as he faces the confusion and certain descent into madness as he discovers he is more than a mere mortal, but is -- what? Divine? Even that word is so Judeo-Christian as to be meaningless. But definitely made of subtler stuff than what can be understood is his world of physics, psychology, is, is not, either/or, mass, meaning.

So the Gardener is only representative of the next level of reality, but a reality that is just as false as our own, and once the first book is done and our hero has discovered a truer sense of himself, he will only come to discover that there are many layers to the skin that covers his eyes.

I want the Gardener to be as rich a character as I can make him or her. I want to know legend and history. I want to know what callouses form where, and how the clock is set differently each day and each season.


I hope this gives you a better sense of what I need......

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