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The Messenger | False Messenger!
Perhaps I am a false messenger.
A false Prophet hanging my threadbare talent over this great icon in hopes of being noticed. I know myself to be more of a sinner than a saint. I have no illusion of who I am.
Choosing David as the subject matter is where my magic happens.
David and Goliath have come down to us through the ages. Michelangelo sculpted David and the sacred Ark of the Covenant is a part of Davids’ legacy. These icons of western civilization lifted me on their shoulders.
I was lost in David’s world and did not take the time to look up and see what was happening around me. I worried about what Nitzevet thought of my work and if she would haunt my dreams. But more than that, I was deeply involved in delivering the reader directly into David’s world.
My guide, my pathfinder was James Alexander Thom, who wrote The Art and Craft of Writing Historical Fiction.
His words proved invaluable:
But here is the key, whether your historical story is ancient or recent history, what you want to do is re-create it in full-live, colorful, smelly, savory, painful, repugnant, scary, all the way it actually was — and then set your reader down smack in the midst of it.
I found refuge and solace in the desert world 3,000 years ago because I thought little of the modern-day, this dark 21-century world illuminated by the Golden Arches of a throw-away society.
I firmly believe that historians will look back on this time in history and deem it a dark age.
The signs are evident: disregard for the arts, disrespect of education, lack of compassion for those less fortunate in society, and politicians who care about re-election and little else. Something is rotten in Denmark, and as Shakespeare said so well, “ Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
But am I the messenger and what message do I bring?
I have a heroic sensibility. I believe that an individual can accomplish great deeds if they focus and have stamina in their chosen field, I see salvation in the struggle. My father, through example, showed me that you had to live in the practical everyday world of deadlines and tasks but also spend time alone and work on your great endeavors. Little did I know that he simply wanted to escape the kids and go into his den to be left alone.
Then another example struck me perhaps with greater effect.
Machiavelli, the Minister of War for the Medici family, based in Florence in the first half of the 15 century, was quoted as saying that after a days work as a politician, he would return home and take off his workday clothes, covered in mud and dirt, and put on garments of the court and step inside the venerable courts of the ancients.
Ahhh to struggle at a great task.
But something else heroic has to be present, and perhaps it is a gift given to one at birth. You have to be set on a unique path that demands that some sense is made of it. The chaos has to be tamed as best one can possibly tame the whirlwind.
My beginning in life could not have been conjured up by Dickens or Dumas.
But why I have come to this path, to write about David?
Perhaps it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy to make sense of my life.
Robert