~~There comes a time when~~
~~Talk about how I got here?~~
~~Life must be lived forward but experienced back~~
List:
--Talk about the first morning?
--Reflection?
--The ~~cosmology?~~ find out native word
--On Writing?
--Should I start with poems?
Look.
I don't know how to start this. It's not a good beginning for a writer and I'm well aware of that. Why should you read this little book of poems when I apparently can't even put together a few sentences to describe what it is you're holding? I can hear you asking it even now.
I write you from my new home, dug by a friend into the side of cliff face. It is warm as such things can be, drafty at times but not unbearably so, and overlooks a great lake. It truly is a better home than the last few months have led me to expect. Shipwrecked as I was, I had come to see nothing in my future but a kind of awkward eternal vagrancy. But I have a bed now, and slightly primitive wood floors. I even have candles and a rough table I built myself.
All this to say, that I'm struggling to find a way to express what this volume in such a way as to impart any of what it actually means to me, and what it's already done.
I could describe how its existence bouyed my spirit in terrible times. I could mention how I risked death more than once so as not to be separated from the pack that held my bundled poems and maps. I could tell you about scrawling these words hiding under trucks and waiting in ditches. I had nightmares after the Antean that the words helped to soothe. Time has washed over me and only this final tie to my former life kept me sane, kept me who I am.
That's the best I can do. I can write when I need to, and when I want to. The story, the poem--the words on the page are a dream and once I wake from the dream I'm clueless. Right now, I'm awake, and all to self-aware, and so I stumble all over myself.
Maybe one day, all of it will be put together but I doubt it. Have you ever looked at a page and wondered how long it took to write that page? No doubt you've assumed all of this page was written at one time.
But already I've stretched it all out over a few years. I return over and over again to this pile of prose and verse and poke at it. I'll grow obsessed, working feverishly. Editing, writing new material, changing names and details... And then eventually, slowly, inevitably, I give up. I go back to my life in the river reeds and the creek beds. The book is too big. Life is fleeting before the longevity of art, even shoddy attempts like my own.
How many times can you say--this should be finished. I should write this--before you grow to hate the taste of those words in your mouth like curdled milk? How long can you hold a story or a feeling before it wilts and rots and infects you? Can you cradle words like a foal asleep at last and expect of them timidity? Could you bind the Antean? And could you with time and world enough cut language down to size?
It's thoughts like these, aimless, formless, frustrating, bleary-eyed--let's dispense with all that. The truth is that its thoughts like these, cynical at best, that keep me up at night. Thoughts, honest ones and forthright ones, concerning my absence from Equestria. Concerning my farm and my agent and the shop down the road in the village. How long did it take for the back entrance watchpony to notice I was gone?
It's sad to realize that only my regulars, old stallions with bitter tongues and sad eyes, knew I was gone. At some point only they knew and nopony else. I had no wife or husband, no darling foal. I was myself alone, a family unto myself, an island in a sea of equinity. And now, ironically, fittingly, I am this way forever.
Eight years. Wow, I really got sidetracked there, didn't I? This is more of a log than an introduction.
The snow? The snow can bite my ass. Wish I was worth a damn at weatherworking. But it makes for good writing, strange enough. The world rarely makes for bad writing. When we write foul or untrue things I find the world was working against me more than not. Perhaps that's bias. Probably is. Perception is flawed fundamentally. Sometimes I wonder how arrogant it must be to assume any of what I see is accurate.
Even on the verge of sleep I finish this, writing a decade in exile.
This was to be my introduction and after some thought, it is a good one.
I was not structured or organized. I postured as much as I wilted in apathy. I tried but did not always try. I was lonely. The world was often dark and often cold and always dangerous. My call for help never made it.
This is what I lived as I wrote. And it's all you need to know.
This wasn't for you.
I think it was for me.
~Perique Blend
Book I.1-3
On Earth Ponies (A Hymn)
The works and the days they are
Done with, the long stretch of
Agrarian years they are
Done with all, the call of the trees is
Done with, and accomplished the
Apple demands—family and the
Weight of duty.
Oh, but the Earth was ever mine—
Ever faithful ever true.
Ponies of the earth, we the movers
Of the grain, who tend the vineyards
Of the Grapes, who are the growers
Of Apples—
Who love the Good Earth.
Oh, but the Earth was ever mine—
Ever faithful ever true.
No flyer of clouds am I, nor my
Ponies those who build pillars
Of cloud—These hooves built for
Hard things are, built for the
Slow things are to guard and for
Living things are the hooves of
The Ponies I come from meant.
Oh, but the Earth was ever mine—
Ever faithful ever true.
And I have no magic because I need
None, need no wings, need no
Wine of heady sort to grace tongue
And no mysteries in runes. I have
World enough, and time,
And commands to ask not of
Tomorrow
But only to enjoy the lilies of the
Field
Which is to say
That the love of Earth is mine and
The World is enough.
On Pegasi—A Primer
When you ride the lightning, it doubles back and
Without fail, you’ll lose it. Without fail,
Promise you with all my heart, you’ll
Get that aching. The Aching, you’ll think, with a big proper
Capital A to make it all special. There’ll be
Lightning in your brain and lightning in your heart and
Lightning in your eyes. Son,
When it crashes, keep your wings steady and
Your eyes rolling all about. You’ll want to play
And revel and love in the storm, want to
Live, but it’s not time to live, it’s time to work and
All that entails and means.
It’s like preening, when a pretty mare wants you, when
You win—that’s what a storm’s like, son. It’s all sound
And fury, noise and preparation. Your throat closes up,
Your eyes don’t wanna stay still, and your hooves shake in midair
And that is okay It’s okay, though the wind tear and the rain pour and
The lightning yell its rage at you,
It’s all okay. World needs a few strong storms now and then
And I guess that means you too.
Concerning Unicorns, a Lesson
My son, my apprentice:
Listen
Closely, keep your eyes straight
And your mind clear. Open your heart
And keep your horn lit--keep those
Orbs balanced in harmony with
Themselves and the Song-spun
Universe. Now--
I'm going to tell you what it all means
Surely you've felt it
Seen it
Creeping at the corners, shy before
Your questing, searching eye.
Our tribe guided the sun
In its glory
And the moon
In its splendor
And we counted the stars and knew them
Each by name. Yet that does not
Satisfy. Does it?
Our brothers understood the earth
And our sisters understood the sky
But what did we understand?
What was there apart from
The Good Earth and the Joyful Sky?
You've seen glimpses of what we
Knew in your studies already,
Lifting training weights, lighting up
Rooms, adjusting heat and cold,
Reading in silent vaults.
You've glimpsed the recursive, spiraling
Of existence like the grooves in your horn.
Beneath the recursion
"there lies an inviolate layer"
So also beneath our feet and above our horns
There too is an inviolate Mystery.
Do not lose your focus,
For we know the Mystery now.
So eager for knowledge and so
Eager for something to show our brothers
And our sisters, we chased it and chased it--
Finally we too would return with
Something of worth and they would
Love us and we would be worthy
Of their love.
We locked ourselves in high towers
And in endless libraries,
We searched the vast darkness of space
And we delved into the darkness
In the corners of our hearts,
And with time we became cold.
Our desperate love grew cancerous
Until it became disdain for companions
And the revels of our former friends.
(We were cold just fine in our
Finery, before ever the Windigo!)
That's good for now. Put your
Tools of practice away. Come down
And eat.
The Mystery? If you insist.
In all of our grasping, we failed to see
That all alone beneath all things
In decency and order there beat Love
At the heart of all magic worth casting.
When you weave arcane energy
You weave your heart-strands,
You weave your own world-love
And make of it a light for your friends in the dark.
We thought the answer was to Know.
We never needed to know.
Our brothers and sisters loved us
All along.
A Pegasus to fight for me
And an earth pony to sing for me
And tell yourself:
I will repay their love with my own.
Power, mystery, lore, philosophy, riches
And yet.
It is the greatest of these.
Author's Note
[Twilight Sparkle]
I'm not really sure what to feel about the one to, well, Unicorns.
Who is Perique? The question is still bothering me. What, for that matter, is Perique? Some investigation reveals that perique is a term used to describe a labor intensive way for curing tobacco, which would suggest that Mr. or Ms. Blend is from the east. Griffon country. A griffon? But a griffon writing a trilogy of poems to the three main tribes of Equestria is a bit odd. Not impossible, mind you, simply odd. For that matter, griffons have different naming conventions than ponies... no.
It's too much to get bogged down in.
I sent my request for information to the constabulary of Canterlot, hoping that they might have some information on missing ponies named Perique. Dropped by the mayor's office, but she didn't have anything helpful. Still, we had tea, which was nice. She's been really accommodating about the whole "castle sprouting up out of nowhere" thing.
~~The unicorn poem caught my eye, but it didn't seem to really~~
~~It's just that no one thinks like tha~~
I thought about my own reaction to Trixie, the first time around. Unicorns with a lot of magical power and potential are often isolated socially. I'm not really alone there, but I was fortunate to at least have Spike and my family around me. Some unicorns in Canterlot who were prodigies didn't have that glowing support system and they became insular and bitter.
I'm not sure that my friends would understand why--and honestly, that's okay. We're all different. I wouldn't understand what growing up on a farm or up in the clouds was like, though I could read so as to not be totally ignorant. There are a lot of things I can't really talk about with most of my friends because they've never felt the surge of magic outside of the Elements and even then they didn't understand it. High-level unicorns find that so much of their life becomes swallowed up in this thing that your classmates can't keep up with or your parents find strange and then...
And I guess someone had told me this when I was younger. Or, well. I take it back--my father said things not unlike this. I just wish I had listened and realized there was more to life than work and study and the thrum of arcane energy along my horn.
[Perique's Notes]
Old. Garbage. Really want to try again with these before I return.
