“And just like that, with the impatient grandeur below accident, coincidence, you’re introduced to your muse, a moral hero, a girl with a stuffed kitten named John Grady Cole.”—Vicenzo Barney
*****
He read the truth before ever encountering the fiction. It was the truth that caught his mind and guided to grandeur of the fiction.
He opened the pages, cellophane crackle of hardback cover housed on public shelves—waiting and patient for anyone who might seek and find.
Page into page he read, entering into the world.
Finding, the name was there: John Grady Cole.
Origin and history of character that enriched the author’s life.
And just like that…how strange it happens, not of force, not of will, but simple happening of fate, accident of coincidence…who knew. No one knew the reason, but all knew when it occurred.
An inspiration, curiosity and enchantment of something that maybe isn’t even there, and yet it drives one into creation of a dream: fiction worlds, fiction lives sometimes seeming truer than reality of one’s own—when written, when read; when encountered and made, manifested, in infinitude of minds; spell and power of words.
His world was not New Mexico deserts, Comanche country of blood and violence. His was of a calmer wild: pastures and fields and wooded river bottoms where the Osage and Osceola roamed and signs of their heritage still shone: in names, in places, histories, and relics found in rainwashed creeks—arrowheads and spear point tips washed from their buried hides. His world was not of violence, but one of peace; serenity of witnessed sunrise, awe in sunlight dance of evening shade when shadows cast, lengthening across the lawn; blood-cooling of the sky from red and flame to steel and violet setting into starlit depths in black.
A fiction world into which one goes from which dreamers sometimes never return: writing, dreaming, creating on in dimension apart from physical world but ever-bit as real to inspired and manifesting mind.
Having read the truth, he sought the story, one of desert and adobes and adventures in open lands; world made of the muse, eternal as author’s dream.