View from the Flying House

the fairy ring

2009-04-22T18:29:00.000-07:00

Fairy Queen*

On my way to a long walk on the Mont-Royale mountain, I passed a lawn of an old house and noticed that there were little blue flowers growing in an uneven circle, right in the middle of the lawn. The sight of this rooted me to the spot. Is it a fairy ring? I wondered at first. Logic would say: 'Clearly the owners of this lawn planted these flowers in a circle.' Perhaps, but the idea that I might be admiring a fairy ring sounded so much better. Besides, the placement of the flowers didn't seem so precise, and many of them scattered into clusters further away from the ring near the right-hand side of the lawn, almost like th ering had 'leaked' some flowers out sideway.

A fairy ring. I could almost see the tiny irridescent bodies, flitting across the new grass with blue bell-shaped hats on, a procession of glowing blue dots going round and round. The delicate, tiny dancing bodies emminate a slight glow, and their dance speeds up. In time the dance whirls round so fast it looks more and more like a single glowing blue ring of light. Then the fairies stop dancing in a circle, do a corckscrew spin on the spot and disappear into the ground. In their place grow the little blue flowers.

*Fairy Queen by Serene Daoud, copyrights reserved.

White Elephant

2009-04-20T15:10:00.000-07:00

I went to the doctor's today and had this curious thought:

I am the white elephant. People don't believe that I exist, so much so that I've started to believe them. Now even if I fill up the whole room, I still can't believe that I'm there. There is no such thing as a white elephant, I've been told. They may be right, because I haven't seen any myself, except whenever I see myself. Even if I filled up the whole room, I still can't believe that I'm there, so why should they?

Coquette Warrior-Princesses

2009-04-13T17:39:00.000-07:00

Since two months now, I have been seized by this powerful urge to draw and paint characters and backgrounds which I haven't allowed myself to do since I was a kid. Naturally, these characters, very cute and frilly girls, are relics from my childhood. There was a period in japanese animation and manga art that was popular in the late 7o's, and consequently became availlable to me, when I was in grade school in Saudi Arabia, through the medium of animated TV series and their various paraphenelia.
One very popular type of paraphenelia was the "puffy-vinyl-cover" pencil-cases that snapped shut with magnets, and had compartments on both sides of the box. These pencil-cases were made in Japan, and featured drawn anime girl-characters with large sparkling eyes, candy-striped ribbons in their blond or red locks, frilly dresses and, ofcourse, surrounded by a ludicrous bouquet of flowers. One very popular TV series that boasted such a heroine was known in Québec as Cand Candy. I had a "puffy-vinyl-cover" pencil case that featured Candy Candy wearing a frilly cream-and-pink dress, surrounded by strawberries and wild-flowers. (I brought the pencil-case to school with me and was the envy of my classmates for about a week, until one girl stole it from me during lunch-break, then had the gall to show it off in class two days later!) The highly dramatic background of giant flower-bouquets owes its existance mostly to Lady Oscar (Bara no Berusai) 70's japanese manga and anime series.

Here I must point out that what is know as japanese 'anime' and 'manga' today is very very different from what was produced in the 60's, 70's and early 80's. Because there is such a
stylistic distinction between what was produced then and what is being produced now, various names for the different epoches in anime and manga's history have come into being. The 'type' of 'girlie-girl' anime and manga universe I am referring to here in my story and artwork is apparently known as classic shôjo manga (girl manga) used to describe that particular period in anime and manga in the late 70's best summerized by Lady Oscar and Candy Candy.

This still doesn't explain the weapons that my girls are brandishing in these illustrations.

Well, I had read and re-read Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind graphic novel about a dozen times now, and a big chunk of my childhood was spent watching the animated TV series that he produced, dubbed in arabic ofcourse. Osamu Tezuka's Princess Kinght was also part of my staple childhood-animation diet. As an adult I've seen all of Hayao Miyazaki's films made so far. Miyazaki is my biggest source of artistic inspiration. The women/girls that he portrays often display warrior-like qualities, and in some cases are out-and-out fighters (Nausicaa, Princess Mononoke). But he never shows them to be excessively "girlie" or coquettish. In the classic shôjo manga universe, there is an unabashed full-out celebration of everything "girlie". So, I wondered what would happen if I merged the two worlds; that of Miyazaki's strong women-warriors with that of the frilly-frocked Candy Candy and the dazzling flower backdrops of Lady Oscar? The result: Coquette Warrior-Princesses!

Princess Lily*

Princess Kiku*

Princess Anemone*

*copyrights reserved by Serene Daoud, Flying House Press, 2009.

Kimono Kitsuke Diaries

2009-04-04T11:28:00.000-07:00

Here's the irony: I learned how to put on a kimono properly only after I moved away from Japan. Another layer of irony: I learned traditional kitsuke from a Canadian woman, Maggie Hallem(photo: left), in her appartment in St-Henri, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Our friendship grew steadily as did my passion for kimono. We developed an annual ritual of dressing up in our best spring kimono ensembles every May, and then shuffling down in our zori to attend the Hanami picnic held at the Montreal Botanical Gardens. There we ate our bento lunches and admired the blooming crabapple trees, dead-ringers for the japanese ume and sakura, while garden visitors admired our kimonos and called us "geisha", much to the dismay of Maggie. (For those who are not familiar with this part of japanese culture, an ordinary woman dressed in a kimono for any kind of occasion does not make her a 'geisha'. A geisha, or more properly called 'geiko', is a highly-skilled and highly-trained traditional japanese entertainment artist, and what westerners normally see a geiko wearing, i.e. white make-up, oppulant gold broccade obi, long, richly coloured kimono, laquered wig, ect..., is her performance-costume. It's part of her job, but it's nothing at all like the everyday kimono she and all other Japanese women may wear as functional, traditional clothing. So the next time you see a woman wearing a kimono, don't call her 'geisha'! )

My collection of kimono has grown, from the handful of vintage kimono and obi I bought at flea-markets in Japan, to over a dozen thanks to on-line second-hand kimono shops based in Osaka. Looking back on my first wave of purchases from flea-markets in Tokyo, I realized that I was somehow correctly choosing to buy all the necessary accessories for a full and functional kimono outfit, from kumi-himo, obi-jime, obiage and makura, to the right size of nagajyuban and tabi, even though I had no prior knowledge of what comprised a kimono outfit, and none of my japanese friends could volunteer any guidance on the subject because they themselves knew so little about it. Luckily, the local bookstore's 'hobbies' section had a diverse and well-illustrated section on kimono kitsuke.

At one point, some kimono articles started finding me; I once found a perfectly new stiffener-board (for obi) just outside of a convience-store after a hanabi festival in Tokyo. Some yukata-clad festival-goer, tippsy on too much beer, must have just fished that board out from between the layers of her han-haba obi and flung it onto the side of the road, in a fit of drunken discomfort and impatience. I have to admit that I myself have done just that a few times since I've started wearing kimono regularly, but I wasn't drunk. That board is uncomfortable, and something tells me that it's a 20th-centurey addition to the kimono outfit to further flatten the silhouette. On another lucky day in Tokyo, I came across a plastic bag tossed along with the non-burnable trash and it contained perfectly clean and entirely hand-made red fleace undergarments for kimono. Perfect for the bitter cold of Montreal winter.

Anyway, all this to say that I had somehow intuitively equipped myself with all the necessary accessories so that when the time came for me to learn kitsuke, which came about quite by accident, I had everything I needed to just go right ahead, and I hand-made all the accessories that I was missing: cotton under-shirt, suso and datejime.

Another curious detail in my adventure: I had gone about collecting very subdued and multi-purpose kimono and obi so that wearing them casually in public, especially in a north-american city like Montreal, was not that big of a deal, even though, at the time, I had only the haziest idea of what makes the dfference between a furisode, a komon and a tomesode. I had been told about the sleeve-lengths viz-a-viz the age-appropriateness, but no one even hinted at the concept of iki, an approach of kistuke that idealized the subtlest co-ordination of color, seasonal pattern and accessory-details. Less is more, and says more.

Upon first encountering the world of kimono, I had naturally been drawn to the brighter-coloured kimono, though I never found myself attracted to the busy and over-the-top furisode and huomongi. A few moments of observation at most flea-markets in Tokyo showed me that tourists always went for the flashiest, brightest things they could find, and this made these articles 1.) more expensive, and 2.) unwearble because of how obvious they were, unless you were graduating from highschool, which I had already done nearly 2 decades ago. I concentrated instead on finding kimono with interesting weaves, dies and patterns that had a modern feeling but were clearly of vintage stock. The type of fabric was extremely important, I wouldn't go near any polyester obi or jyuban, let alone kimono; silk and wool had an infintly more human feel to them, did not irritate my skin, and hung more elegantly. I tried to imagine wearing what I found as ordinary clothing and this made the deeper hues and graphically simple patterns more appealing and more realistic to me.

Ofcourse, it's very easy to go to extremes when dealing with 'quieter and subtler', while the younger set were perscribed to wear very bright, acid colours for kimono, flower-patterns galore; the older ladies on the other hand, usually as a symbol of married-life, were expected to wear only the weakest and most sickly hues, the blandest conservative motifs barely visible on their obi. In the same way that the psychadelic armies of furisode-clad girls aggressively attracted immediate attention of the eye-popping halcyon patterns and colours, a sight at once arresting in its boldness but alarming in its efficacey in completely eclipse the girl in the furisode to the point where it's practically impossible to distinguish one girl from the next. The older women, in contrast, appear to us as though ghosts of their former bright girl-selves, everything about their 'fading-fading-gone'-hued kimono making them seem to be disappearing before our very eyes. Yes, I'm exagerating a little to make a point. I hope I didn't offend any furisode lovers or ladies who prefer to keep a low profile.

There is a happy medium, thankfully: what professional geiko wear during the day when they are not on-duty can be used as a good guide. There has to be a fine balance between colour and texture, and a hinted anticipation of a coming season shown through some unusual seasonal motif. The ensemble is never overbearing even when the colours for the kimono are strong, and never so subdued that it seems dead. Obidome for example, if used at all, should be of the most discrete design; a quiet complement of the total statement the wearer wants to make. Basically, the important thing to remember is that all the elements involved obey the 'Goldilocks' rule of 'just-right'.

this obi I made by hand.

Fushimi Inari: a living code

2009-02-03T20:09:00.000-08:00

There is a small town at the base of a small mountain just outside of Kyoto named Fushimi Inari. The town itself is nothing remarkable; a typical village-cum-suburb of a major Japanese city, with a declining population and a small train-station so deserted that even its ticket-booth attendant is missing. The first sight that greets you when you first step off the train is the ubiquitous row of humming vending-machines.

Outside, the streets are empty except for the occasional tidy old lady on her mid-day errands. On the day of my visit, it's a hot early October day. The sunlight is pouring down like liquide gold. I had been told a fairy-tale-like story about this place from the Taiwanese tourist I met at the youth hostel in Kyoto: at the heart of this village stands a small mountain, at the base of it lies a large temple. From this temple radiates a network of pathways covering almost the entire mountain-face. These pathways are made of row upon tightly-stacked row of 'torii', or gates. Each torii is a made of a pair of large, wooden columns with a bar across, painted bright persimmon-red.

The pathway begins with a single 'hallway', but soon devides into two 'hallways', then further up the mountain, they devide again into four, and continue on deviding as you walk up the mountain. Fushimi Inari is a pilgrimage sight, monks travel from far to climb to its summit to pray at all the small ancient shrines that are clustered up there. Inari is this mountain's guardian, the white Fox God.

I am a pilgrim of sorts too, I came to Japan from the peripheries of my imagination. It had been a goal for me for so long that I had not formed any expectations. Japan had somehow escaped the planner in my head, it had remained a blank page to be filled up by actual experience. And this blank page was quickly being filled up with experiences so mundain but magically so. A sublime everyday beauty covered everything I saw there. Nothing could have prepared me for the beauty I was about to encounter at Fushi Inari.

Everything that my Taiwanese tourist describes in his story is true. There are white fox statues of all shapes and sizes everywhere. Beyond the main temple, there is a rather underwhelming short row of these red gates or 'torii', the length of the 'hallway' is a mere two minutes' walk. I walk through them, delighted at the way the air around me is tinted red with the sun filtering through the gaps between the bright-red columns. The smell of pine, earth and moss grows stronger as the hallway cuts through deeper into the forest.

The hallway bends sharply and I emrge at a junction. Two hallways continue in parallel paths, for what seems to be a few kilometers. The space interrupting this flow of torii is a small shrine with an open, paved courtyard. There is a strange, large polished stone ball errected at the farthest corner, and it would be years before I learn what this stone represents. One by one, the Japanese visitors ahead of me take turns holding the stone with an air of concentration and hopeful expectation. When they let go, a secret sigh escape from their lips and each one shufles away looking mysteriously disappointed.

What I learn, years later upon my second visit to this place with a Japanese friend, is the reason for this behaviour: the large polished stone ball is quite old and sacred. It's believed that your wish will come true if you try to lift it and find that it feels light. The plaque next to it reads that this stone will feel as light, or as heavy, as the wisher's heart; if one's heart is pure, the stone will be lifted as though it were made of air.

Not knowing this yet, I immitate the last Japanese woman I watched hold the stone ball. I clasp the smooth stone between my hands as she did, but I don't lift, because I don't know yet that that's what she did, imperceptibly. I let go without releasing a sigh, having made no wishes that will not come true. I walk back toward the red hallway of torii not feeling the heavy condemnation of the stone ball's judgement of my not posessing a pure, light heart.

Before I re-enter the red hallway, I spot a stray cat dozing on stone wall. I deliberate which hallway to take and finally settle on the one on the right.

I walk down the rows of red gates languidly. Every now and then there's a gap between the gates leading to some cluster of old tombstone-like stone structures that have red aprons tied around each one.

Every time I stray out of the red hallway, I take pictures of the strange snake-like body of this structure. Half way through this section of the path, I realize that there's a small river running alongside. I climb between two columns to the other side of the hallway and gaze down at the waters. A movement in the water catches my eye. I hold still and watch. Between the murky shadows of trees and trails of river-weeds I glimpse the long body of a large fish. A carp, white as a pearl, moving lazily in and out of the pools of sunlight. The sight of it makes me freeze. There is something very true about this carp, but something also wildly mythical. If myth and truth could merge and manifest physically this carp is their merged form. I wonder if anyone will believe me even though I have no reason to doubt that there is anything unbelievable about witnessing a white carp in a Japanese river. And sure enough, years later, I would tell a Japanese friend about witnessing this white carp down in a river and he would tell me that white carp are rarely seen beyond captivity. This friend would tell me earnestly: "That was the Carp God."

The sun climbs as I climb. The heat builds and I still can't believe it's Autumn. I stop keeping track of how many times the red hallway has splintered into yet more paths. I keep taking the one to my right, going up, the path has turned into a steep series of stone steps. every 50 meters or so, there are gaps leading to dead-end spiderweb-paths to small shrines. Near by these, there is always a small tea-house flanked by a row of vending machines. At this point there are no more Japanese visitors milling about, and the only sign of people here are the tea-house owners.

Climbing ahead of me is a man carrying a large wooden board. It's thin and so flops like a sheet of cardboard with every step he takes. The wooden board is so large that all I can see of the man are his feet. He reaches the next gap of rest-areas and disappears into one of the tea-houses. I continue my climb.

Years later, a few years after my Japanese friend suggests that I've seen the Carp God, I'm standing on the corner of Jeanne-Mence and Fairmount in Montreal. I'm chatting with Sam, my Tai Chi teacher, before heading off home. It had been a good class and Sam is feeling particularly chatty; the night-time is still warm even though it's the end of September so we take our time parting ways. We have a good conversation about how effective Tai Chi is in instilling in one's body and mind a sense of "Now-Time", or timeless being. Sam goes on to tell me how Tai Chi taught him how to recognize the right decisions to make when they came.

"It's the same with the movements in the form," He tells me, tracing an arc in th air with his cigarette. "You lose touch with the movement as you're doing it and you're screwed. You have to be there at every moment because each moment is a transition."

"Tai Chi taught me that on a physical level first, then," he paused to throw his cigarette down and stomp it. "it started to work on my whole life. I started to see when the right opportunity comes and when to go through it. It's like a door, if you see that it's there and it's the right one so you go through it. If it's the right one, then another door opens after you've gone through the first one. And they kind of happen like that, in a series; you leap from one "right door" to the next "right door". Same in the form when you're doing it right, your body moves incrementally from the right position,through-into the next right position and it's effortless. Same in Boxing (a form of improvised Tai Chi hand-to-hand combat), you'll always win because you'll go through the right movement each time your opponent moves. Beating them becomes effortless."

While Sam continues to talk about Tai-Chi Boxing, something about what he just said triggers a flood of recognition in me. For a few minutes, I'm not even able to hear what he's saying because I'm trying to process this bizarre sensation. The image of a series of doors keeps playing through my mind like an old cartoon, and suddenly I see the doors open and beyond them the space is a filtered orange-red light. A man is carrying a large wooden, floppy board and he's climbing step by step through this red atmosphere.

"But that's what they are!" I cry out suddenly. Sam stops speaking."That's what what is?" he asks in his mafia-don tone; he doesn't like to be interrupted.

I tell him about my visits to Fushimi Inari, about the rows of tightly-stacked red torii gates. The long snake-like path branching out into hundreds of smaller paths tracing a shape not unlike a lung or a tree. As I tell him about this place, a growing certitude in me builds: it was built this way to represent the idea of "Now", awareness of the "Now" in an incessant river of Time, as an action, not a static symbol. Looking at them, these gateways form a long continuous path. But walk through them and they are transformed into magic portals, each one carrying you through into the next. If each moment that is "right" for me is there at every junction in time, every second, and all I must do is recognize it as the right one, then choosing that right "now" leads me through into a possible version of my life that is more in tune with the real Me. If I hone my intuitive abilities to recognize the next right "now" doorway , I leap through that one too . Do that steadily enough and you have a path outlined for you, a path that exists only so long as you need it and are aware of its truth. As soon as you've passed through it, it disappears and a new one forms. One moment at a time, one red gateway at a time, and somewhere along side this glowing red snake of time glides a giant white carp, deep beneath the cool surface of our waking life, like some ancient collective dream.

Saint George and Me

2009-01-28T21:59:00.000-08:00

Several years ago, shortly before my twenty-ninth birthday, I discovered that I owed my existence to St-George.

I had always assumed that one’s life story ought to begin at the moment of one’s birth; but now I belonged to that smaller group of people who can start their story even farther back: the moment of their parents’ first meeting.

The potential of my subsequent existence began when my mother, a young woman of twenty-two or so, accepted a lift from a young man driving a red Fiat convertible.

She knew him only as a friend of a friend and had noticed him because of the little red car. She also remembered her friend mention that this young man was in his third year in Electrical Engineering at the American University of Beirute, the same university she attended. All this information could not have gone unnoticed; there was a part in my mother’s mind conditioned by Arabic culture to keep stock of all the merits that made a young man a good “choice” for marriage. And this part of her mind, consciously or not, must have gone instantly into operation. So far, she liked his lanky dark looks and his exuberant personality; his choice of career promised a decent living, and his choice of a vehicle seemed to please her even more. Only one thing remained unknown; his religion.

While they drove down some dusty road in Beirute, she noticed a small laminated portrait of St-George glued onto the dashboard. This answered her final question; her mother would be happy to hear that her youngest and ninth daughter had found a good Christian engineer. After all, this was still Lebanon in the late sixties, and a marriage between a Christian and a Muslim was a rare incident to be avoided, by both sides, as much as possible. Little did my mother know that the young man was, in fact, a Muslim. His Christian friend who had sold him the Fiat had put the portrait of St-George there. By the time she found out about the portrait’s original owner, it was too late.

Two years later my brother was born, and a few years after that my parents moved to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

My mother was nearly twenty-nine years old when she had me, and my little sister followed five years further down the road. With five-year intervals between each offspring, our lives lined themselves up neatly unto the temporal line like increments on a ruler.

Without any one realizing it, St-George made a re-appearance. Among the few religious objects that my mother had brought with her to Saudi Arabia was a small, laminated, oval-shaped portrait of Saint-George. It hung on the wall beside the mirror of her dresser, and dangling about it was one of her mother’s rosaries, made of lavender plastic with a tiny crucified Jesus carved onto the cross. The third object was always in the farthest corner of the dresser, often hidden behind perfume-bottles still in their boxes, clusters of spiky hair-curlers, piles of make-up compacts and a pair or two of broken sun-glasses.

This object was a small wooden shrine containing a metal relief of the Virgin Mary and child Jesus. It was shaped like a shallow house with a tiny ornate tin cross on its pointed roof. It had a small fence made of delicate tin lace-work behind which Mary and baby-Jesus were mounted onto the wooden back-wall. Between the relief of the two figures and the tin lace-work sprouted a tin seashell protecting a small red light bulb, which when lit threw a warm fuscia light onto the holy pair.

A good portion of my childhood was spent with a magnifying glass in one hand and one of these three objects in the other. By the time I was nine years old, I had memorized every inch of their respective surfaces. But St-George’s portrait grew less, instead of more, comforting. I became more and more hesitant whenever, out of habit, my hand reached out to unhook the oval picture. If I happened to be near my mother’s dresser, my eyes uneasily darted over the wall where the portrait hung and then away again.

Occasionally, I would surmount my uneasiness and study the picture thoroughly. The saint was a young man, a knight in silver armor, mounted on a pearl-white horse. His spear, as thin as a needle, pierced the belly of the sea-foam-blue dragon coiled around the horse’s legs. The knight looked down at his dragon as he killed it, and the expression on his young calm face was not one of violence, but of compassion. The dragon in its turn was forever looking up at the saint, its expression as fathomless as that of the occasional salamander that was caught slithering around in our bathtub every now and then.

There were times when my mother caught me studying St-George’s portrait, and she would instantly begin telling the story of how St-George killed the dragon.
“There was a terrible dragon terrorizing the nearby villages, and every week a young girl would get kidnapped by the dragon. The people of the villages were very upset to lose so many of their daughters so they asked God for help and He sent them a knight to fight this greedy dragon.”

Some times this story took on a darker tone: “The people of the villages were very superstitious and believed that, by giving the dragon one of their young virgin girls as a bribe each month, the dragon would leave them in peace. Saint George believed in God and His power to help him defeat the dragon once and for all so that no more young girls would have to die because of an old superstition. You see how he killed the dragon?” my mother would point to the portrait as she picked up a basket of dry laundry. “God helped him, of course.”

There was no sign of God in the portrait, no halloed old man watching from behind a bolder in the background. I asked God for help to find a dragon many times, or at least a horse, but no help came. At least, not in the way I was told it came in stories in the Bible and the Quor'an.

I longed to meet a dragon, to look upon his otherworldly face and let his knowledge of a world without God pierce me. I drew dragons instead; dragons, damsels, horses and houses in the woods. St-George was too foreign to me by being a grown man, so I drew the liberated village-girls instead. These girls very rarely returned to their villages, but set off towards solitary houses in the woods where they rode their own horses and met with talking dragons behind St-George’s back. In the woods they remained; their yellow hair left untied and their white nightgowns now sporting pink polka dots.

Many years later, the year I turned twenty-nine, a brilliant girl from Calgary named Renée came to live with me for a few months. We set each other ablaze with talk, and during such late-night or late morning talks she mentioned Joseph Campbell’s “dragon analogy”.

According to Campbell, anyone searching for meaning in his or her life can be likened to a hero fighting a dragon. The dragon in this case is a symbol for whatever prevents a person from achieving his or her highest potential, or, as Campbell puts it, “following your bliss”. The hero begins his journey by climbing the sharp scales on the dragon’s back starting from the tail up. Each scale represents some obstacle such as social conditioning generating fear, emotional and creative repression, gender roles, etc. As the hero gets over a scale, he climbs higher towards the dragon’s head. The last scale is the steepest and sharpest, and it is where most people give up the fight. This scale is the obstacle of Social Duty. It isn’t only the hero’s family, but society at large which applies pressure to make the hero conform to its rules of conduct. The hero is pressured to give up any personal goals for the sake of fulfilling public ones such as a "good" marriage, raising a family and pursuing a financially rewarding career. If the hero resists such pressures, perseveres in his struggle to find his bliss and then follow it, then he will have vanquished the dragon. He will leap off of the dragon’s snapping head and onto new uncharted territories; he will finally enter Life in its truest form. Those who fail to pass the last scale will be hypnotized by the dragon; pinned down by its admonishing gaze, shamed into stagnation and nostalgia.

Most people will find Campbell's analogy a bit harsh, but I don't find that he wrote it as a judgement but rather a clue. When I first read Campbell's work, I felt a great connection to his ideas. I saw in print what I had intuitively known all my life: stories, especially fairy-tales and myths, came from somewhere very real and very necessary to us. Our lives seen through their lense revealed the inner patterns that spelled our own private mythologies. Every person is the heroe of his or her story, he or she writes it as they go along.