Jim Bowers

Jim received degrees from Dartmouth College, Yale University and the University of Redlands James Bowers taught English at several colleges and universities in the U.S., including a year at Yale teaching an advanced writing course.  He also taught in Finland, China, The Czech Republic and Lithuania.  His wife Jytte, born and raised in Denmark during World War II, is also a writer.  They reside in Spearfish, South Dakota and belong to the Bearlodge Writers (www.bearlodgewriters.com).

Read the Prologue from Jim's new book, Voices From the Underground below.

Jim Bowers

PROLOGUE

I am sitting in my chair in the cabin built by my own hands, looking out at the stream flowing through my property, with my feet elevated, piles of newspapers and my dog at my side. It is not that I am lazy. I'm retired, and retirement means not doing whatever I do not care to do, not talking with people I do not find interesting, not being anything other than what I want to be. It is the ultimate in freedom, just to be myself: no more games to play, no role to tell me how I ought to act, only silence and intuition. But that also involves getting to know who I really am. Memories from the past float to the surface, long-forgotten, painful, surprising. I am changing in unexpected ways: death and rebirth in my late sixties, as if one can start over again at that age. I am becoming more reclusive, more observant, delighted by the vast panorama of inward experience.

Room after room I wander through the mansion of my soul, ascending stairs toward ecstasy, descending into a murky cellar of horror and evil, desperately trying to find some stability within the energy between polar opposites. There are many faces populating my house of imagination. In the silence of meditation personalities gather in each room, conversing with one another, anxious to be bodied into words so that they can live in the light of the world outside. Most are strangers, unknown in the real world yet resembling colleagues known, conversations overheard, small events that somehow reveal meaning.

It is the meaning, the purpose of each unexpected inspiration that entices me now: how each piece of the puzzle begins to fit, how obvious it all is, how simple. The posts and beams, the tongues and grooves of my mansion fit together so perfectly. I could never have accomplished such craftsmanship myself, yet here it is. Mine has been a life flowing between granite walls of necessity; now it is opening out into a huge expanse of still water, deep, reflecting the light of the sky, clear and green to the very bottom.

The problem is how to embody this inner world, to articulate it in a form that will not become abstruse in the outer world. I must learn how to transform breath into words, not the spoken words I have used as a teacher, but written words with black rigid forms that will never change. The spoken word might live in the hearing of a few others, might somehow reach their souls with transforming power, but the printed word seems, like a rock, not to have a life of its own. Its form must enliven through the eyes of a reader, become a face in the reader's inner world.

I sit in my chair reading newspaper accounts of events in Russia, China, the far flung reaches of the world, but the words are simply informative. They do not reverberate in the soul. They are pebbles on the bottom of the stream, inert, without a life of their own, passed over quickly and soon forgotten.

To live, the words have to sing. They have to resonate with meaning, creating polytonal pictures in the mind of a reader. They have to dance on the page, forming and reforming until the mind is filled with images conversing with one another in spacious rooms of the imagination. They have to startle with unexpected associations, entice with intimate revelations, seduce with clairvoyant intimations until the soul of the reader is immersed in a world of the writer's creating. Writer and reader, together they dance and sing on the waters of a calm sea, their souls reflected in the depths, clear, green to the very bottom.