Letters to Cicero - Book 2

Letter 2

Dear Herodotus,

This is a story that was told to me by a travelling Gypsy from Macedonia. He claimed to have heard it from a disgraced member of the Macedonian Royal Family, who recounted this tale to him as he drank himself into a stupor in a bar in Amsterdam.

This is the true story of Sir King Kissalot, the unacknowledged brother of Alexander the Great.

“Sir King Kissalot?” You ask, somewhat doubting my story already.

“Why yes,” I reply, “That was his name. First name Sir, and his mother's family name was King.

The Kissalot part is what the story is about.

The story begins with a harp. You see Alexander the Great was a very skilful harp player as a young man, so much so that his father Philip, was ashamed of him, certain that such a useless skill would only lead to his degradation as a man, and the disgrace of the whole family. Philip forbade his son Alexander to play the harp, and so the instrument was given to the illegitimate son Sir King.

Sir King was raised in the palace with the Royal Family, but he was regarded as little more than a bothersome insect, and so he was left to his own devices most of the time. Having no one to teach him and no friends at all, he developed skills in many useless arts and crafts such as painting and singing and poetry and hat making and dancing. Dancing and harp playing were considered the worst of his vices, and his whole family were ashamed of him for it, so much so that he was only able to dance and play on those rare occasions when he was permitted to leave the Palace altogether. For such was his family's shame felt in his own heart, that he could not bear to dance or play in the same home as they, for fear that his disgusting vices would make them sick, or even infect them.

So on those occasions when Sir was out amongst the people, he discovered that he possessed yet another set of useless skills that his own family were seemingly unaware of. Sir was exceedingly handsome, perhaps the most perfect example of a man born in the world until that time, and his lips were of such a shape and colour as to make them irresistible to ladies of every class and station. So Sir King earned his nickname, Kissalot.

At first his talent was delightfully entertaining, but soon it became as troublesome as all his other skills, for the men of the town would become violent towards him as soon as they saw him, each man already suspecting his own wife of having locked lips with the bastard prince. So it was that Sir King was forced to live abroad and to hide his face from everyone, living in exile for many, many years in a lonely castle on the coast. Here he devoted his time to music and dance and hat making and all the other useless things which it delighted him to do. With no one to praise or shame him, however, he quickly lost the urge to create, and so, suffering from the boredom and depression resultant of his inactivity, he ventured into town to find some trouble to get into.

When a man goes looking for trouble, it has a way of finding him first.

Her name was Esmerelda the Hag Faced Elephant Woman, and she was not so ugly as her name suggested, but rather was just from a part of the world where people looked a little different in terms of skin colour and and eye shape...and facial tattoos. Her name wasn't really Esmerelda, that was just what the people called her, she was really Ninshubar and she had a magical power that was as much trouble as it was a blessing. Whenever anyone was around her, they were able to remember everything from their whole life, perfectly.

This generally caused in others an incurable madness, sometimes violent, sometimes catatonic. So Ninshubar the Woman From a Foreign Land, and Sir King Kissalot became good friends. For Sir King had another talent that only revealed itself when he was able to remember everything from his whole life.

Sir King Kissalot remembered that he didn't give a shit what other people thought of him.

You see, he had been away from his family for so long that he had forgotten to be ashamed of his dancing and singing and hat making, but when he met Ninshubar, he remembered that he had forgotten to be ashamed of himself. So, knowing everything he had ever done, Sir King chose to forget everything about his family. His family who had spurned him and burned him and spat on him and called him horrible names and ignored him and even went so far as to forbid him entirely from ever in his life engaging in flower arranging.

He forgot them all.

Of course, this made Sir King so happy that he wanted to be around Ninshubar all the time. She constantly reminded him to forget about his family and to forget about his past and to never ever give a shit about what other people thought about him. Sir King began again to paint and dance and to play the harp, and for a few years they lived together happily ever after, kissing each other everywhere they did go.

Only, not caring what other people thought of him, turned Sir King Kissalot into an asshole who didn't care about anyone or anything but his own happiness. So after three years of his intolerable, insufferable, smug grin, Ninshubar packed her bags and moved on.

Sir King went back to his castle by the sea, covered his head and tried to forget about Ninshubar.

He remembered his family, and the palace and his brother Alexander, and he missed them. Even though he remembered all the pain they had put him through, even though he remembered that he didn't care what they thought of him, he missed them all the same. So he went home, only when he got there, when he returned to the Palace, he found that his family where not there, for they had all moved away to follow the war, and none of them had returned. Alexander had died of chronic alcoholism by the time he was thirty two, having conquered the greatest empire known to mankind. His father was dead, his mother was dead, and so Sir King Kissalot was the only member of the family line living in the Palace. But nobody cared about him because he was the illegitimate son, so they all left him alone, while in distant lands the empire won by his brother was carved up between his generals, and very important men went on living very important lives, far away.

Sir King lived a long and healthy life after that. He had loves and triumphs and tragedies and failures. He was, as they say, a man. He made hats and songs and dances and poems, and he even arranged flowers, but in the two thousand years from his time until now, nothing is left of his useless life other than this story, told to a gypsy by a disgraced and drunken liar in a tavern in Amsterdam.

Now I've told it to you, so a little bit of him lives on even now.

Book Two

Letter One, Part Three.

To Plutarch on Oracles, Intoxication and Music

A friend of mine recently related a story of finding himself in a cell at the police station, having been taken from his home in the early hours of the morning by a squad of angry, noisy officers. My friend claims it was a false charge, a case of police harassment in retaliation for some slight, but that's not what this story is about. You see my friend plays harmonica, and finding himself alone and dejected in the cold cell at dawn, he began to play music and to let it echo throughout the tiny jail.

The officer on duty at the station (not the officer who arrested him), hearing this music, came to investigate and enquired what had brought my friend to be in his sorry position, at the same time praising him for the music he played. My friend told his story of woe, and so effected was the officer on duty by his music and his charm, that the officer immediately released my friend and arranged for transport to take him home, offering great apologies.

My friend has said that a famous blues musician, Leadbelly, confesses to several similar experiences.

So, there's an answer to my question, what is music for? It sets us free.

Only sometimes it does not.

Sometimes music won't let us go.

Sometimes the hold that music has over us is the warm embrace that keeps a person alive, or keeps them sane, or releases a pressure that builds up inside us and that only music alleviates. Sometimes it's less dramatic than that and music is just music, and I am just a musician and all this drunken rambling and mad belief in prophecy is just mad rambling and even my featherweight Setar seems too heavy to lift. When notes are just dumb sounds, and melodies are just tricks of the ear and I go round and round in circles asking myself silly questions like, what is music for?

Curt Sachs, a 20^th Century historian claims that the sound wave was possibly first discovered by Lasos of Hermione, a Greek poet from the 6^th Century BCE. Lasos is also credited with innovations in the dithyramb hymn. There's a lot of good stuff in Sachs' book, The Rise of Music in the Ancient World, like the fact that the Spartans considered music more important than grammar in regards to the education of their children. The art of choral singing spread from Sparta and throughout the rest of Greece, where men and women formed choral societies which accompanied the pilgrims sent to the oracles, with rival towns competing to form the largest choirs, six hundred singers recorded for one such event.

Choirs like these often sang the Paean'. Originally a medicine dance, it seems, as far as I can tell, to have been performed for loads of different reasons. Xenophon mentions it being sung before and after battles, a sort of prayer for good luck, and afterwards a thanksgiving for success. The Iliad describes a paean being sung to drive away the plague, and centuries later in Sparta, the government appointed the Cretan musician Thaletas to organise paean's to help drive out another plague.

Another form of song, the skolion, were common folk songs, tavern hall drinking songs. Curt Sachs writes that: “Everybody in Greece was expected to know such songs; one general who refused to sing because he did not know any was unfavourably criticised.”

The instrumental solo contests held at Delphi, the nomos, are known from the description of a concert piece played by Sakadas, performed in 586 BCE at Delphi in the Pythian games. “On his double oboe he represented the contest between Apollo and the dragon in five movements: a prelude, the first onset, the contest itself, the triumph following victory, and the death of the dragon, with a sharp harmonic when the monster hissed out its last breath.”

The musical contests and other performances are recorded as being very popular and well attended by huge crowds of utterly silent listeners, apparently no citizen would be absent. Huge open air amphitheatres filled with families. A Persian general once made a census of a several conquered Greek towns simply by counting the number of people attending a concert by a noted Lyre player.

Here in my home city in Australia, we have a different sort of silence. That friend I mentioned earlier, the one who played music in the police cell, he told me only a few days ago of an experience playing harmonica on the tram. My friend found himself in the company of a family visiting Australia from from Cyprus, and since my friend knew some traditional folk songs from their homeland, he began to play for them. The father began to sing and the whole family clapped in time with the music until a security guard (just imagine a low paid centurion without a spear, shield or helmet), stopped them from making such a public disturbance. My friend protested that he was sharing culture with a visiting family of travellers to our country, but the guard insisted that they stop.

So in my time, the generals are not criticised for their ignorance of folk songs, but rather the musicians are prevented from playing such songs as might make of ordinary public life, something more interesting. Yet, drawing such large conclusions from isolated stories may not be a useful thing to do, misleading us to believe that simple answers can be found to complex problems.

But Plutarch, the streets are so very quiet, and the generals do not sing.

*

“Listen, whatever it is you try

to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you

like the dreams of your body

its spirit

longing to fly while the dead-weight bones

toss their dark manes and hurry

back into the fields of glittering fire...”

From Mary Oliver, “Humpbacks”

I'm writing in a very disjointed way today, but my eye remains fixed on the goal. I'm not trying to make a link between the power of prophecy and the power of music. I'm not sure that the future can be predicted, I draw no conclusions on that question whether by consensus of evidence, or by instinct. But I do believe in my experiences. I do believe in magic. I do believe that the world is changed by the way we each view reality, for the simple reasoning that we are able to effect, only that which we acknowledge as real.

Is magic real? I believe in my experiences, and I experience magic as a real thing.

Is prophecy real? I don't know.

Is music real? It is at least as real as magic, and possibly more magical than reality.

What is music for?

Just imagine a world without it and you will probably have as good an answer as could possibly be divined by the Oracle at Delphi.

Why don't the oracles give prophecy any more?

Well, I'm only half way through reading your essay Plutarch, so I'll have to get back to you about that one, but I will leave you with this little quote from Cyropaedia: the Education of Cyrus, by Xenophon. Cyrus' father, Cambyses, says this to his son.

“My son, the gods are gracious to us, and look with favour on your journey – they have shown it in the sacrifices, and by their signs from heaven. You do not need another man to tell you so, for I was careful to have taught you this art, so that you might understand the counsels of the gods yourself and have no need of an interpreter, seeing with your own eyes and hearing with your own ears and taking the heavenly meaning for yourself. Thus you need not be at the mercy of soothsayers who might have a mind to deceive you, speaking contrary to the omens vouchsafed from heaven, nor yet, should you chance to be without a seer, drift in perplexity and know not how to profit by the heavenly signs: you yourself through your own learning can understand the warnings of the gods and follow them.”

So maybe, in the absence of an answer from you, Plutarch, I might instead seek my own.

Thank you Plutarch, for everything

Morgan.

Book Two

Letter 2 (Part two) Plutarch – Oracles and Music

A few days later.

Here's my idea. Delphi was considered 'The Navel of the World', the wealthy centre of regional affairs, a situation directly connected to the Temple's trade in prophecy. The Priestesses, young women, (or old women depending on which era you are talking about...) apparently intoxicated from breathing vapours issuing forth from a crack in the earth, speaking in riddles and sometimes in tongues, gave prophetic advice about all manner of affairs, from the everyday concerns about harvests or winters, to major political and military decisions governing the lives of hundreds of thousands.

So Delphi was the most powerful city around, with its power centred on the temple, and that temple held a festival every eight years to celebrate the god Apollo, and in this festival there were music contests, the names of some of the winners of which have survived recorded for two and a half thousand years. The following words are engraved into a monument in Athens (from 335 BCE). “Lysikrates, son of Lysitheiedes of Kikyuna, was the dance leader when the boys chorus of the Phylé Akamantis won the prize. Theon was the piper, Lysiades of Athens had trained the chorus. Enaenetos was the mayor of Athens.”

My proposition is this: Music and Religion share a link through the experience of intoxication.

Music itself is intoxicating. Whether you are the performer or a member of the audience, it has the power to alter moods, transform thinking, and to burn memories deep into the mind's eye and ear.

From what I have read it seems that a common method of prophecy in ancient Greece was the observation of birds. There were also animal sacrifices, reading of entrails and burning of offerings upon an altar, and of course the hallucinating priestesses, but many prophecies were taken from observing the behaviour of birds. I don't really have to tell you any of this do I Plutarch? You lived and worked as a high priest in Delphi for decades as an Augur, a reader of signs. It sounds like quite a job, observing the weather and bird watching. Nice work if you can get it.

The people of the ancient world did not believe in prophecy with blind faith, there are plenty of examples of scepticism and even a sort of scientific testing of different prophets. Herodotus tells a great story about Croesus, the King of Lydia, who wished to test the powers of the different oracles in order to decide which was reliable and which were fraudulent. So I quote:

“The Lydians whom Croesus sent to make the test were given the following orders: on the hundredth day, reckoning from the day on which they left Sardis (the city where Croesus lived), they were to consult the oracles, and enquire what Croesus, son of Alyattes and king of Lydia was doing at that moment. The answer each oracle gave was to be taken down in writing and brought back to Sardis. No one has recorded the answer of any of the oracles except that of Delphi: here, however, immediately the Lydians entered the shrine for their consultation, and almost before the question they had been told to ask was out of their mouths, the Priestess gave them, in hexameter verse, the following reply:

I count the grains of sand on the beach and measure the sea;

I understand the speech of the dumb and hear the voiceless.

The smell has come to my sense of a hard-shelled tortoise

Boiling and bubbling with lamb's flesh in a bronze pot:

The cauldron underneath is of bronze, and of bronze the lid.

The Lydians took down the Priestess' answer and returned with it to Sardis. When the other messengers came back with the answers they had received, Croesus opened all the scrolls and read what they contained. None had the least effect upon him except the one which contained the answer from Delphi. But no sooner had this one been read to him than he accepted it with profound reverence, declaring that the oracle at Delphi was the only genuine one in the world, because it has succeeded in finding out what he had been doing. And indeed it had, for after sending off the messengers, Croesus had thought of something which no one would be likely to guess, and with his own hands, keeping carefully to the prearranged date, had cut up a tortoise and a lamb and boiled them together in a bronze cauldron with a bronze lid.”

Some modern historians think that perhaps the general population did believe in prophecy, but that the leadership can be easily observed callously manipulating the people's faith, bribing the temples to give certain answers and censoring unfavourable prophecies. In your essay On why the oracles fail to give answers, Plutarch, you seem to offer rational arguments for the belief in prophecy. You in fact go so far as to accuse the natural scientists and the Epicureans of being irrational in their belief that the universe is not ordered by divine force, since divine force is so plainly observed.

But Cicero puts it rather succinctly,

“Who is there so mad that when he looks up to the heavens he does not acknowledge that there are gods, or dares to think that the things he sees have sprung from chance – things so wonderful that the most intelligent among us do not understand their motions?”

It's the reverse of the way my scientific, atheistic society views things, and it must be said that “the most intelligent” scientific thinkers of my day are a long way ahead of your own in terms of a comprehensive understanding of the machinations of the universe. It is fascinating to note however, that we no longer tend to ascribe divine power to things we don't understand. These days we believe, and have faith in the laws of physics and no longer believe that those laws are the workings of the gods. The unknown processes of the universe are no longer divine, they are merely undiscovered. Religious belief still has a staggering influence on the world, known and unknown but it is perhaps less dominant than it was in your time, Plutarch, perhaps.

But religion aside, I wonder, why people don't widely believe in prophecy any more? It's not because of a reduction of the influence of intoxication on society. I would say that the world is influenced more than ever by intoxication, across all levels of society, but no one goes down to their local church to have the future prophesied for them in exchange for gold, at least not around here. Plutarch, you offer a sort of answer to my questions in your essay:

“I entreat you to let me put a fit conclusion to my discourse (for now the time requires it), and to say what several have said before me, that when the Daemons who are appointed for the government and superintendency of oracles do fail, the oracles must of necessity fail too; and when they depart elsewhere, the divining powers must likewise cease in those places; but when they return again, after a long time, the places will begin again to speak, like musical instruments handled by those that know how to use them.”

So you're saying that the oracles no longer have power because the Daemons, (the spirits), of the oracles are no longer present in the temples. Thus the oracles no longer give prophecy, or their powers failing them, they grant only false prophecy.

I do not know if Daemons exist, or if the future can be known, but in the sky above me at work there often hovers a hunting bird, floating hollow boned on the gentle breeze, just watching me, sometimes for an hour or more. The sun casts the bird's shadow upon the earth and I am overcome by a peculiar feeling of time moving more slowly, or not at all, and there is a great silence that falls between us, between the bird and I.

In that silence...well, I don't know what is in that silence. I suppose that's what I'm asking you Plutarch.

What is this music? This silent orchestration of all nature that casts the shadow of a hunting bird across my path. This silence that follows me throughout the world and which reveals itself to me in beautiful moments that pass and linger with equal swiftness...

...I will write more soon....

Letters to Cicero (and my other dead friends)

Book Two

Letter One (Part One of Three):  To Plutarch on Oracles & Music

Dear Plutarch,

It has taken a while, but I've finally finished reading your book, The Rise and Fall of Athens, and I found your description of the tearing down of the walls of the city of Athens. Your book seemed like good preparation for starting Thucidides' The History of the Peloponnesian War, which is twice as thick and a much more serious, dry text. Those last few chapters of The Rise and Fall... are a magnificent tale of the struggling, complex layers of Athenian politics, and the war with Sparta and the whole mess being funded by Persia...but I'm getting off topic already. I wanted to talk about what happened outside the walls of Athens.

“After the Athenians had finally given way to all Lysander's (The Spartan commander) demands, he sent for a great company of flute girls from the city and collected all those who were in his camp. Then to the sound of their music, he pulled down the walls and burned the ships, while the allies garlanded themselves with flowers, rejoiced together, and hailed that day as the beginning of freedom for Greece.”

They were celebrating freedom for Greece in the defeat of the tyrannical democratic city-state of Athens. It's really weird for me to think of democracy of in such a way. Living in a democracy myself, I tend to think of democracies as being the very spirit, the essence of freedom and liberty. The Spartans didn't think so. Neither did a lot of the tribute paying states under Athenian rule. But I'm getting off topic again...I wanted to talk about the celebration outside the walls.

There's a lot going on in this scene, but I would like to start with that image of the burning ships and the flute girls and the garlanded allies of Sparta and the walls of Athens coming down. I can see it in my mind, the horizon blotted out by smoke, the bay a turbid mess of burning ships and all along the hills rising up from the coast, the great walls of Athens being pulled down by thousands of slaves, while kings and satraps and commanders celebrate the 'liberation of Athens' with flowers in their hair and hundreds of women playing flutes. Incredible.

There's a set of questions I ask myself often about music.

What is it for? What purpose does it serve? What do people want it for and what uses is it put to?

These days, entertainment is the first answer to all those questions. Every month of the year in every part of my country, there are music festivals devoted to many different cultures and music styles, with paying customers filling halls and amphitheatres. Churches still use music in their ceremonies, but they are not the public affairs they once were. The army too, still has bands for formal ceremonies, and each division still has its own songs, but they certainly never bring out the brass bands for public performances while the walls of enemy cities are torn down and their ships burned in port.

Plutarch, you mention on many occasions the Pythian games, a pan-Hellenic festival where music contests were held as part of the Festival of Apollo. Singing and lyre contests were included first, but gradually other instruments were added, as well as drama and poetry and later on, athletic and equestrian events. It is a sad fact that very little has survived to tell us about these ancient contests. Music is a contradiction: ephemeral, yet everlasting.

We have music contests in my time which showcase very serious talent, there are some international festivals and competitions that attract audiences of staggering proportions. Yet there's an incongruous aspect to all this glamour and festivity. The prevalence of music in my time is astounding. There are more musicians alive and playing than ever before at any time, more music being shared globally and locally than history has ever known, yet somehow certain ideas and attitudes towards musicians remain laughably similar to your time, Plutarch. In your biography of Pericles you say:

“...it is quite possible for us to take pleasure in the work and at the same time look down on the workman. In the case of perfumers and dyers, for example, we are delighted by the product, but regard perfumers and dyers as uncouth persons who follow a mean occupation. The same idea was well expressed by by Antisthenes, when he was told that Ismenius was an excellent oboe player, and retorted: 'Then he must be good for nothing else, otherwise he would never play the oboe so well!' We are told, too, that King Philip of Macedon, when his son was playing the harp delightfully and with great virtuosity at a drinking party, asked him: 'Are you not ashamed to play as well as that?' For a king it is surely enough if he can find the time to hear others play, and he pays great honour to the muses if he does no more than attend such contests as a spectator.”

You conclude that: “...it does not necessarily follow that because a particular work succeeds in charming us, its creator also deserves our admiration.”

It's a contradictory and confounding thing being a musician, that we should be so highly admired and so lowly regarded simultaneously. So those questions loom again: What is music for? What keeps it alive? What need does it fulfil? Since nothing in nature is redundant, music must have a place in the ecosystem of the human animal. Music's social aspects I think are well enough understood, but what deeper need does it fulfil other than the decoration of societal functions? We can throw dance in here to balance the question, since they share a lot of qualities as art forms and I think that a lot of what can be said of one can be understood of the other. Nietzsche said once that “Without music, life would be a mistake” which is a beautiful sentiment, but a little more philosophical than I want to get right now. What I want to talk about it this, from your essay On why the oracles cease to give answers:

“For wine does not at all times alike surprise the drunkard, neither does the sound of the flute always affect in the same manner him who dances to it. For the same persons are sometimes more and sometimes less transported beyond themselves, and more or less inebriated, according to the present disposition of their bodies.”

Delphi, home of the famous Oracle and birthplace of the Pythian games, was a powerful place, the oracular shrines brought a steady stream of pilgrims and offerings. That means GOLD, and lots of it. The festival of Apollo, held every eight years, included singing contests at first, and gradually included the lyre and the flute. For six months before each festival, huge sums were spent on repairing public structures and building new ones. Delphi was rich.

So here's my proposition. Religion and Music are linked through the common experience of intoxication, and as the 20^th Century anarchist writer Hakim Bey asserts, “To the dullard, the finest wine is tasteless, but to the true sorcerer, the mere sight of water is intoxication itself.”

There is something in the way that music transforms reality that is so like intoxication as to really be no different at all. Without music, everything in life is just as it is, unadorned by intentional melody, unaffected by the emotional stimulants of tempo, tone and timing.

With music, life is completely different. The emotional nature of all humanity is present in music, every combination of sounds corresponding to a host of feelings which may or may not have names. With music, the everyday becomes the incredible, from the dust that settles at sunset, to the silence between the bird calls at morning.

You, Plutarch, also say, "Medicine to produce health must examine disease; and music, to create harmony must investigate discord.” So those questions loom again, what is music for? What discord does it harmonise in human beings, what dis-ease does it counter? Which brings me to the parallel question of this letter.

Why don't we believe in the oracles any more?

Dear Readers,

Twelve weeks, twenty letters to my dear, dead friends. Let it never be said that the end of one's life is the end of one's story. “Why, in a certain sense we may be said to feel affection even for men we have never seen, owing to their honesty and virtue.” To quote Cicero, yet again.

We live as long as our name and our deeds are remembered. “Writing is the only true form of immortality one can achieve.”, for Cicero is endlessly quotable, and furthermore, his words contain their own proof.

But I am writing to you today, my readers in Italy, Germany, Spain, Panama, Canada, Romania, the United Kingdom, France, Australia, Bangladesh, Ireland, India, Sweden, the United States,Thailand and the United Arab Emirates, to name just a few of the nations among the growing readership of this blog.

I am writing to you all to say, thank you. I feel your eyes upon the page, and I am grateful to be able to share this with you. There is much to be learned from these ancient books, and I am learning more every day, for this has become a daily project of passion. It takes about four weeks for each letter to reach its final edited state before uploading. I am often writing many letters simultaneously, and studying in preparation for the next letters to come. My youngest son calls them my letters to dead dudes, or my bromance with Cicero.

Twelve weeks, twenty letters. So lets say that Book One is complete.

Book Two will continue the overall philosophical narrative arc I have been developing, with new dead friends being added as I read new authors, not all of which are from the ancient Greek and Roman world. My most recent letter to Herodotus (at four thousand words), has shown me that I want to be writing longer and longer letters, as deeper parallel historical connections reveal themselves to me. However, I am keenly aware that these peculiar essays of mine might be better presented in shorter forms, to make them easier to absorb.

So I ask you, my dear readers, what do you think? Do you like the very long rambling explorations of interconnected historical, ethical, social and philosophical ideas? Would you prefer that I write shorter letters, more compact in their delivery? Or have you enjoyed the way I play back and forth between these styles? Or, a fourth option...I have been experimenting with audio recordings of these letters, with the notion that I might release them as a podcast, so what do you think of that idea?

So if it matters to you one way or the other, feel free to write a comment on the blog page, or you can contact me through Facebook or email me at zebulonstoryteller@gmail.com .

Book two will begin next week.

'til then, dear readers,

thank you for reading.

Morgan.

PS. If you have enjoyed this blog, you might enjoy my previous work, Indivisible from Magic, a completed nine month long writing project exploring the blurry edge between fact and fiction. Prior to that was Music of an Invisible Enclave, also a nine month project, a journal detailing my life as a musician during the year I recorded my solo album, of the same name. The album is still in the mixing/mastering stages, so in the meantime you can listen to my music on my youtube page.

Links to all these things are at the top of this page.

Thanks again.

m.

This photo was taken in 1981.  My Grandfather, Frederick "Snow" Pedersen is holding me.