Preface to Nectar of the Ordinary stories.
I am not even sure if anyone besides the people to whom these stories belong will read what follows in the collection. Maybe even they won’t. My sentences together serve as a frame to hold a snap shot of their element’s thumbprint on our big blue marble. A statement persistently orbits my peripheral consciousness as I begin to write. Over a decade ago, more years than I want to count specifically, a Literature professor in college tirelessly told the students in his class, every time staring directly at me (perhaps unintentionally each time), that all writers have an audience in mind and most importantly they write because they must. As I already stated, I don’t have any particular audience in mind. However, I know with more certainty than I have yet to know anything else that I must place these stories on a tangible medium instead of thought-provoking conversations over dinner and drinks with other soul-diggers that dissipate ever too quickly, leaving the longing for another fix to find our way around our selves. A dim flicker shines through the fractured spaces in these living apparitions’ tales, serving as a guide to tread upon expansive realms deep within ourselves where we are afraid to venture alone.
Stories are threads that weave us to one another. We suffer now as never before because we as a people every where have stopped sharing stories or have safely boxed and labeled our stories for the relating of individual ethnicities, cultures, religions, regions etc. The pop culture of Reality T.V and internet attempts to create a generic medium of connecting world wide. It certainly feels revealing of another’s most personal life but we view the stories as spectators in the shallow end without knowing where the deep end begins. And often those who are emotional exhibitionists flaunting their melodrama rarely know the deep end themselves, looping the circumference of the inferno that burns within. Showing is not sharing. A telling that stirs something within yourself and another is sharing. Just like the slicing of a thin layer of the cornea cannot be done without a slight flinching for the onlooker and the one on whom the eye surgery is performed, so is the case with truly sharing—both feel the pinch of a truth no matter how far removed. It is a pity we have ourselves convinced that which is offered through pop culture and our immediate surroundings, provides sufficiently of the colorful tapestry that is our being. Although this cursory sharing does create a dull reverberation within, in actuality, it merely tugs a stray piece of the thread, whereupon there are many other vital strands creating the fabric of our cosmos. Our collective humanity trembles; the grand picture remains blurry as we continue our search, not realizing that the more authentically and widely we share our stories, the tighter the tug creating cross-stitches which will reveal the picture we seek.
For the longest time my most enduring hindrance toward writing these on paper has been: it’s all been written before. The characters in the pages to follow are the characters alive throughout various classics of every ethnic literature and even contemporary literature. It’s all been said before, so why bother? Then it dawned upon me: I must write, and so must anyone who can, because people forget! Every story that has ever been written carries with it the messages we are all looking for since the beginning of time, every author carries the same light (and burden) to share what some have forgotten or what some still do not quite understand. And the reason those that choose to write, even when they write the same stories that have been told before, is because ultimately the writer hopes, that maybe, just maybe, this time around this writer’s words will reach where all else failed before.
I write with the liberty I do because overtime these stories have become mine. My hope is they will become yours too. No story, like no individual, stands alone in this world, and even those perceived to do so, their aloneness is defined by others.
~a.q.s.
Copyright, Annie Syed, 2009
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Thank you for sending me here to read these wonderful thoughts, ideas, and admonishments!
You are correct in everything you say. We MUST bother to write, to do it because we can and we love it.
No individual stands alone, and an individual who writes stands with the stories that are meant to be shared and remembered and defined.
Kindred spirits indeed! Tried to comment on your “About,” but didn’t seem to have the capability. Your background, though, is so much more rich and diverse than mine. Your childhood is the kind of thing I could only imagine when I was a kid.
I love this notion: “…not realizing that the more authentically and widely we share our stories, the tighter the tug creating cross-stitches which will reveal the picture we seek.”
Happy we found each other!
“A telling that stirs something within yourself and another is sharing.”
Yes, it is sad that so much of the drama & shallow experiences of life are paraded around as important.
I also have been discouraged by “it’s all been written before,” but you are right, everyone has a story to tell and we must tell it!