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20 February 2002 (Wednesday): the name

Enjelani is actually the name of a girl in one of my private sci-fi/fantasy epics. It'll never get written down, because I'm a lousy fiction writer and a worse God, and one does need a taste for divinity in one's imagination to write sci-fi/fantasy books worth reading. Tolkien, Zelazny, Le Guin, Card, Simmons...all the good authors play God in their own way, and picking up one of their books is enough to make me swear never to humiliate myself with a feeble attempt at their art. Enjelani's story is a series of doodles in a sketchpad at best. I don't intend to ever make it a painting.

That said, I've been pulling out those sketches and looking at them a lot lately. Picked up a pastel or a colored pencil and shaded in a curve here and there. In this particular offhanded drawing she's eight years old, stick-thin, with stringy black hair that falls to the middle of her back. And then the picture expands: she's standing at the edge of a raft out on the ocean, looking down at the darkening swells. She's surrounded by a ring of larger boats, bearing torches and ceremonial drums. The sun has just slipped below the horizon. Off to left -- there, barely penciled in -- is a figure poised above the largest drum, one heavy arm raised, waiting for the signal. I look closer at Enjelani and see that she's captured here in that crucial moment, right before she throws her head back and sings out one last invocation, in a language that's at once exotic and familiar.

It's the last moment in which she'll truly be herself. After this she'll be lost in a way, made into an incarnation of something vast and incomprehensible. People will look into her eyes and turn away, unnerved. She'll bear it bravely, I think. But I like her best right here, when she's still a child seeing the world through a child's eyes, in the instant before it all changes.

This is why I don't watch TV. I have far more engrossing toys to play with up here.

posted by enjelani @ 04:09 PM PST