"You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention..."

The magic of fiction is that somehow, though different incarnations of your life, you find yourself looping, swishing, circling through recursive periods and you find the vertical hard slant of the book that has spoken directly to you once again stationed at home in the grip of your palms; its spine slightly tattered, its glossed titled creased like outdated billboards. The pages of your book have become sallowed with expired coffee daubs sprinkled throughout chapters, its plot and characters a familiar comfort like scented holiday nostalgia; its language a reunion of taut syllables steamboating across the page puffing the scent of imagery into the transparent margins above, halting just short of the optical shore where sight diffuses language at the tablecloth edge of reality...a still-life pond of language dribbling into your lap below.

My first formative read in High school was Alice Walker's Possessing the Secret of Joy.
Apparently Walker's text served as the spiritual sonic impetus for Tori Amos's song Cornflake Girl. ( I was going to marry Tori Amos of course. She'd have to marry me! Once she met me.) I still remember reading Walker's novel ten years ago this autumn, 1994, beginning of my Junior year in high school. I was sitting on the swing on my old front porch in the neighborhood where I grew up; the neighborhood where Uncle Mike has just relocated. It was probably the first time in my life I had ever seriously read anything outside of class...

Like my Father I'm a tad dyslexic and the words entered my vision like circus contortionists; with chipped shapes and sights and subtle nascent kicks. The creature of langauge swiggling into my sight, clanging against the tissue of my optic nerves with the quiet quavering resonance of a timpani.

I kept with it, kept reading and kept trying to write and ten years later I find myself living less than a mile from where I grew up, my hair cropped short (just like it was ten years ago...exactly)....a few more subtle facial blemishes dotted across my face and deeper skid marks tracked beneath my once optically strained sockets. Ten years later and I'm re-reading Alice Walker's THE COLOR PURPLE for Prof. Worthington's splendiferous 20th century lit class. Ten years later and I'm still dutifully searching for myself, following the linguistic creek of inky words, hoping to follow this treacle of language into a deep ravine fraught with self-discovery.


"
God don't think it dirty? I ast.

Naw, she say. God made it. Listen, God love everything you love--and a mess of stuff you don't. But more than anything else, God love admiration.

You saying God Vain? I ast.

Naw, she said. NOt vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.

What it do when it pissed off? I ast.

Oh, it makes something else. People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.

Yeah? I say.

Yeah, she say. It always making little surprises and springing them on us when us least expect.

You mean it want to be loved, just like hte bible say.

Yes Celie, she say. Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance, make faces, give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?

Alice Walker, THE COLOR PURPLE