Christopher Bernard’s “AMOR i KAOS”: Seventh Installment
It could be a lifetime. Between the screed and the admonition, the command and the oath. Your followers lined up like soldiers on a ridge gazing down at the ignorant city. The horses neighing as they slip on rocks wet with dew. The dawn treacherously beautiful and cool, as if carrying, clutched in its hand, the message that will never reach them. Stop. Do not attack. We have surrendered, the war is over. And they descend, silent, to a pointless destruction. It could be like that. Or it might be briefer, a sojourn over a weekend or no longer than a summer of one’s youth. Remember that? It feels like yesterday. But it was a lifetime ago. It might be a gentler doom, more quiet, discreet, causing damage to only two people, bruised and aching and left for dead on the indifferent battlefield of love, cruelest of tyrants, your gauntlets bloody, your banners torn and fluttering in the dust-filled wind.
xxxxx
He closed the book and gazed at her gravely.
—I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, she said. You hopeless romantic!
His mouth smiled. Which looked strange since his eyes were so bleak.
Basque mythology is the set of myths typical of the original population of Euskal Herria. The myths have a direct relationship with the ways of acting, thinking and feeling, which constitute the common heritage of a society that through the ages transmits from generation to generation the distinctive signs and the uniqueness of a people. The existence of myths is linked to factors of antiquity and tradition. The permanence, at least since the Neolithic, in the territory they occupy is the origin of the Basques. A peculiar town that is the oldest in Europe that allows us to deduce the importance and identity that Basque mythology has historically and culturally in its roots.
Amalur is the name in Basque that means “Mother Earth.” In the legends of the Basque people, Earth, Ama-Lurra, is the main deity. The Earth appears as carrier of all living beings, possessing own vital force that created our natural environment. The Earth is a huge vessel, an unlimited receptacle, where the souls of the dead live and most mythological characters. Faith in Ama-Lurra is very old in prior to the invasion of the Indo-European peoples Basque people. Teluria is related to the Earth cult, energies that come from inside the earth, come, circulating and continuously emanating from the earth’s surface and subsurface, being closely related to the energy variations of the geo-magnetosphere, the electro-conductivity gravito-field and magnetic influences of the Sun and the rest of the planetary system.
Writing is one method for revising Mr. Ben’s outlook on life and observing the world and one’s place therein from an altered perspective. This Nigerian writer changes his worldview by examining fragments of our historical and biological content and by considering the context of human reality from multiple perspectives, which in turn provides him with a more enlightened understanding of human existence. By perceiving the world and humankind’s march into civilization from a more perceptive vantage point, he is more likely to appreciate all aspects of life including the beauty of nature and the historical struggle for human existence. Along with greater understanding of both nature and human history, he gains a more comprehensive understanding of himself, and grasps the futility of despising all of his human failings. Perceiving the self from a proper vantage point enables him to establish a premeditated and reasoned way to live, set modest personal goals, realizes that struggle, loss, and failure are inevitable, while comprehending life is nonetheless worthy of living. His works cut across almost very literary category to help improve the cause, shape and existence of humanity; sexuality, science, home affairs, marriage, relationships, friendship, self-help, gender issues, life matters, motivational and inspirational interests, educational/academic matters and many more.
Life is a collection of memories and feelings for him. Memories and imaginations allow him to enter the womb of creation, devise the lens through which he translates his surroundings, and creates the spectrum that transliterates his experiences. Experience is the catalyst for all great stories. Mawkish urges Mr. Ben to engage in artistic overtures, he yearns to share with other people a melody of rudimentary experiences and respond to a stabilizing tune strung together with a shared ethos. He walks in parallel strides seeking out equivalent affirmations of his being. He longs to shout out to the world that he once walked this earth; he seeks to leave in his wake traces of his pithy habitation. His unfilled longing propels him into committing senseless acts of self-sabotage and then he desperately seeks redemption from his slippery selves by building monuments to the human spirit. He employs a bewildering blend of conscious and unconscious materials to construct synoptic testaments to his temporal existence. He labours on the canvas of his choosing to scrawl his inimitable mark, fanatically toiling to escape a sentence of total obliteration along with his impending mortality.
Chimezie Ihekuna
Storytelling is an ancient art. The lucent vibes of stories express what we cannot articulate directly. When we hear someone’s story, we respond to the spark of humanness within ourselves that seeks to come out in the light and greet the world. When we tell the stories of our lives, we give voice to people bereft of speech, we make the persons whom we love or loved immortal, and we pass along our familiarity with the natural and physical world. Mr. Ben succeeded here for establishing his identity by constantly reshaping layers of his inner world by reconnoitering his thoughts, opinions, emotions, observations, and sentiments. Through an act of self-will, a writer builds a sincere world that attends the influx of the spirit. Investigating a person’s innermost feelings on paper allows Mr. Ben to dispel his fears, expands the depth of his soul by thoughtfully enduring pain and sufferings, spread love and compassion, quantify personal expectations of a mortal being, and face death without remorse and regret. Mr. Ben is simply taking dictation from his soul. For him writing is more about telling other peoples’ stories than his own.
You will never learn how to write well if you don’t learn how to edit. We write, edit, and rewrite the story of our own life employing descriptive words, metaphors, and symbols. Our lives are full of symbols including those supplied by nature and religion, which touch upon the mystical and spiritual aspects of life. Symbols inspire enduring hope by formulating idealist expectations. When we go through Mr. Ben’s writings whether it is fiction or non- fiction we can identify that he recreates moments to spend in introspection and in reflection. These moments make him pensive and help him write his thoughts with clarity. A life of devotion to one’s passion gives us meaning to our life.
A good plot is like a well-crafted puzzle. Each piece is vital to the bigger picture, connecting to each other to tell the larger tale. If a plot is a novel’s skeleton, and characters are the muscle, then theme is its soul. Mr. Ben’s almost all prose fictions like A Successful Marriage, Maya: Initiate 39: The Long Walk to Destiny, Life In Space, The broken mirror, One man’s Deep word, portray his honest approach towards life. The artistic creation of the writer is a reflection of the artist’s inner world. The agenda of consciousness that spurs all forms of art is not to represent the outward appearance of things, but to portray its inward significance to the creator. A great poem and written composition fully express what the creator feels, in the deepest sense, about the distinctively depicted image that captured his imagination.
Human beings innate complexities resist reduction into simple sentences and neat paragraphs. The stories that come nearest to expressing the ambivalent nature of people are textured and occasionally inconsistent and express waves of inner uncertainty. This inconsistency and uncertainty are Mr. Ben’s strength in his composition in many of his titles like ‘The Christian Matrix’, ‘Christmas Time!’, ‘Journey to Love’ e t c. A simile and a metaphor are not literally true. A figure of speech, symbols, and allegories are mere expressions that when interlinked with other text assist explain facts, ideas, and emotions. Useful facts are elusive; we must look for them, and then express them using whatever mechanism proves most authoritative. We can never directly describe emotions; we resort to metaphors to describe emotions and other illusive thoughts. Ideas by virtue of their untested nature are often untrue or at best rough approximations of truth. Mr. Ben’s task is to discover the liquidity of a passionate inner life that provides the hot breath to our steamy humanness. In this task he achieved a greater position in the literary arena through his masterful works.
