CONNECTING TO ANCIENT STORIES

BY TRACY SCHLAPP

This story felt like my past, my present, and my future. Fighting that war within as much as with my opponents. The poet reminds me that the honor inside me is for the choices I make. It is irrelevant to the battles I shall face when I choose a battle against those in the same mindset … He talked about the rage I feel sometimes when I think about my hometown jail and how when I was punished for something and I realign myself, learned my lesson but they don’t change how they treat me.  He showed me that good men would choose honor over their own family, just like the bad men will choose dishonor over theirs …

— A. LYONS

In May, we brought “An Iliad” performed by Paul Susi in collaboration with cellist Anna Fritz back inside to both Oregon State Penitentiary and Coffee Creek Correctional Facility. In this breathtaking show, the Poet (Paul Susi) breathes life into the Trojan War by placing the conflict between Achilles and Hector as a frame for the action. The Poet has sung this war for centuries and the palimpsest of conflicts and lost soldiers has beaten the very glory from his tale. The Muse (Anna Fritz) prods his telling with her original cello score as the Poet lumbers through the trenches. We asked members of our audience to respond to this contemporary retelling of an ancient story. As expected, these writers delivered with deft observations and inspired pieces of their own.

Drake Mosqueda directly identified with the Poet in relationship to healthcare struggles that have posed an epic personal battle in his life. He recognizes that his experience provides him the armor to protect others: “After my song had come to its end, another brother that could not carry a tune needed me to sing for him, and SING I DID! I have dedicated myself to singing for all that are unable to sing for themselves, and I will continue to sing until no singing is needed.”

Albert Wright’s observations bring us up to the activities floor at OSP where the production was staged in a Moment of Connectedness. Albert describes the performance not as something he connected to as an individual, but that Paul and Anna had connected the entire audience. The experience of feeling this story together — the laughter and the sorrow and yes, even the rage — tied these often emotionally guarded people to one another.

Two of the writers who participate in our ongoing Hecate’s Lantern group at Coffee Creek responded with poems. Shalyn Troxel pulled language from notes she took during the performance to write Oceans of Deep Blue Waters. In her An Iliad Response, Manda Moonlight writes an invocation to the muse. Another of our Hecate’s Lantern writers, Melissa Black was ignited in all directions: “It made me want to write, sing, and play an instrument to carry on the journey and footsteps of the story. And yes, of course, I would want to be a warrior Goddess. Blazing like a star with my fiery spear. Wearing the bones of the ones I had taken with their soul’s winging down to the house of death. I could see the ships coming. And my soldiers would be ready within their blood. And when it was over, we continue to sing for years with new songs.” | TDS