Imagine that that everyone ended up in the same place after death and imagine that they called that place Addewid...
by
James Oliver Smith, Jr.
josjr69@gmail.com
josjr.com
Introduction
Caradog Welsh Pub
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FPG
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Aniv
Darogan
Grith
Imagine that that everyone ended up in the same place after death and imagine that they called that place Addewid...
Fractured Paradise is an effort that began in the open microphone community in Minneapolis in the 1990's. It was not intended to be a novel originally, but rather a simple poem about three open microphone poets (Preacher Jim, Rabbi Billy Bob and Brother Nathon) who were sitting on the banks of the Jordan river in the afterlife discussing what had happened to each of them. I soon found that it was difficult to articulate everything I wanted to say in this scenario within the context of a single poem, so I started to think of it as a larger, more expansive narrative poem that would document, as background, the lives of the three main individuals in the poem. That led to the development of genealogies, historical reasearch and a fascination with how humanity, as a species, developed and what were the foundations of human spirituality and religion.
While studying the evolution of religion for this project, in addition to my long-term interest in spiritual matters due to my fundamentalist upbringing and subsequent spiritual journey to a significantly more inclusive global mythological perspective, it became increasingly evident that mythology, religion and spiritual manifestations were being pushed, in some manner, from feminine-oriented polytheistic mythological systems to a male-dominated, revelatory, monotheistic mythological system ( Zoroastrian, Hebrew, Christian, Muslim, Ba'hai, Mormon ). The question that kept coming to mind was: why would 35,000 years of goddess spirituality give way to a more singular, rigid, legalistic (as in people of the written "word") male-sky-god religion?
In order to work through this puzzle, I started working on a vision of what the after-life would be like, or more accurately, what the "other" life (as in outside of this life) is like. Since most spiritual systems throughout human history believe in some form of "other" life, or "other" world, or "after" life I wanted to see if I could define a mythology that would account for this diversity of spiritual perspectives. The Sufi use the metaphor of an elephant in a dark room to explain this diversity. This is a scenario where an elephant is placed in a dark room with holes distributed in every direction around the elephant, allowing people to reach in a feel one part of the elephant. Some would feel a part of a leg, another group would feel different parts of the head and others would touch segments of the torso. In short, they would all feel something a little different than all of the others. Then when you bring the unique knowledge base of each individual into consideration, even if two people felt the same part they would probably interpret what they experienced in a different way. Ultimately, when the people are asked to describe what they saw none of them would be envisioning their experience in exactly the same way.
I began to look at spiritual systems through the lens of this metaphor and set out to describe the "elephant" that every human seems to yearn, so deeply, to reach out and touch.
Since I considered myself a poet for so long, my first effort to capture the images that were formulating in my mind involved the writing of some form of long heroic narrative, with a protagonist by the name of "Preacher Jim". He was to be a part of a group of people, which originally included Rabbi Billy Bob and Brother Nathan. I was also trying to avoid being an earth biggot and included creatures from other planets as well, but the story was starting to look and feel too much like science fiction, which was not my goal, so I pulled back to focus on the path of spirituality on earth.
Although I love the medium of poetry, I was having difficulty with getting a feeling for the characters and plot that were evolving in my mind for Fractured Paradise and eventually shifted my thinking and creative energies into crafting a novel from the ideas that were rapidly crowding the story space. I have even presented pieces of Fractured Paradise in story telling adventures around the Twin Cities in order to get some feeling for how the parts were fitting together. This is a process that is developing incrementally and becoming more complex, sufficiently complex to challenge the use of a word processor on my personal computer. I was starting to feel claustrophobic in my efforts to get all of the facets of Fractured Paradise packaged into the usual tools available to writers.
I then decided that it was time to take the writing process itself onto the Web and use the explosive facility of hypertext-linked pages to free myself of the limitations posed by traditional writing methods. That has led to the development of this site, www.Addewid.com /www.FracturedParadise.com (both domains point to the same site), which will become a continually evolving account of where I am at in the development of Fractured Paradise. It will be quite a while before I get all of my handwritten and electronic notes onto the site, but one has to get started somewhere.
I have been writing HTML code since 1993 and am very comfortable with Web-enabled technologies, so it should come as no surprise that I have been quite happy bringing my efforts to develop Fractured Paradise onto the open Internet.
It is my hope that the web site Addewid will facilitate several things:
I don't see that this site will ever be done. It will be, and should be, as organic as our human spiritualities are. Feel free to write. I look forward to hearing from you ( OliverSmith@Addewid.com ).
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