Giorgio de Chirico: The Seer, Winter 1914–15
" … wondering if my Authoring voice might ever gain parity or prominence."

I have a voice in my head. Or is it that a voice in my head has me? Either way, there's a voice up there, though I'm uncertain if that voice belongs to me, if it's mine. Like when I hear my voice on a recording, this voice doesn't very much sound like mine, like the one I hear when I speak out loud to myself or to anyone, so I suppose that the voice in my head could belong to anyone. It chatters. It narrates my life. It tells the stories as they unfold before me, as if it had access to the script. Sometimes it reads ahead. It can fill me with delight or dread. It's my faithful companion. When I startle awake at zero dark thirty in the morning, ThatVoice greets me. As I fall asleep in the evening, it wishes me well, often by replaying that day's greatest hits and misses. It's never far and rarely silent.

Radios were originally installed in cars to prevent ThatVoice from having too much influence over each driver, to promote more uniformity and less daydreaming. That's what they call ThatVoice when he's telling stories, daydreaming. It's not a dream state, though, and might best represent reality as each of us know it. The noise around us seems generally intrusive and hardly informative, while ThatVoice seems more focused and illuminating. You've got one too, right?

I imagine my ThatVoice being somehow more mature, more developed than others', for he dictates my writing. He's the one, not really me at all, who makes up and forms the stories. He decides which idea gets developed. He's at fault when one of "my" stories bellyflops, though I suspect writing's a collaboration. I personally never caught on to how to do it and were it not for ThatVoice, I'd still be sitting clueless before the keyboard, not even able to use my two and a half good typing fingers to produce any result. These days, with The Muse so engaged in Zoom® calls all day, ThatVoice and I tend to hold sway over the place. I will occasionally attempt a conversation with one of the kittens and Max even tends to respond appreciatively, but most of the time I'm in an ongoing dialogue between ThatVoice of mine and me, whomever they tend to be. Crazy? Sane? Definitely!

ThatVoice can talk me into anything and also dissuade me from ever engaging. He makes up stories to tell me and I wholeheartedly believe in them as if they were not fiction. I suspect that they're all fictional, though it does not then follow that none of them are true. Since ThatVoice's stories are all allegorical, they can hold deep truth along with absolute fiction, though they require some interpretation to determine what they're trying to impart. The writer in me has become a rapt listener, a secret transcriber of ThatVoice and his stories. The budding Author in me has been listening, for I suspect that there's another voice slightly meta to my writer's one which might be whispering the plot for Authoring and its outcome. I remain spellbound by ThatVoice each morning and continue wondering if my Authoring voice might ever gain parity or prominence. It seems so small and distant now, like I can see its lips moving but somehow cannot quite comprehend its meaning.

©2022 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Authoring, #PureSchmaltz