Poetic
Tongues

Prologue

Memory is ephemeral, undependable at best. The older the memory, the simpler it can seem, the far past less cluttered...as a lifetime of psychological rubble becomes diminished.

Of course, memory is selective. To see the true past... one must concentrate, eliminating all the filters and smokescreens that the mind has created to affect a more desirable, though perhaps, fictive history. If this true past is achieved, recollection materializes, the true narrative of life...with all its actions, choices, and results at last appears...detailed, painful, feasibly transformative, possibly destructive. And with it, the weight that one must carry to the end.

Chapter 1...

The cabin, set on the edge... in the hinterland, way up in the hills as high as you can go, and still afford, is where you’ll find Giacomo’s Cabin.

The road to get there, cuts through a green valley stretching south from the city, leading into the rural countryside. The further you go... the more peaceful it becomes... and eminently so, traveling along the verdant river valley, through scenic glacial country formed 12,000 years ago, with tiny farms dotting the hills.  Andre often wondered if rural were people less intense, less seeking than city people? Maybe he’d find out.

In any event, it had come down to this. “He had no place to go, no place to run to, nowhere to go fetal in. He needed a place to take the time, to refine and define, the state of absolute chaos and emotional collapse he found his life in...”

Andre had come to realize what a cold place the world can be. You only find out who your friends are when you are pushed hard against the wall and you haven’t got any money, or any place to go.

Who is it...who opens their door and lets you in?  Who says...“take the time... to sort through the state of your inner self?”

For Andre... it had been Giacomo who had opened his door, offering his private haven to him, his lonely outpost... his poetic monastery where he lived amidst Nature... high in the hills...