Te Peacock 1996

Our Lord turns to both Carl and Melissa who are seated side by side.  "Your mother has returned to hospital.  She will experience a remarkable recovery and will be out of there within three days, and you will both be ready to receive her." Then, turning to Aaron, he says gently but also a bit portentously, "Aaron, you have some things you would like to say to everyone here."  His shirt has suddenly changed from pale blue to another shirt of vertical light blue, pale yellow stripes, set off with black, light green and white.  Another day must have already passed for him, though this happened just five minutes ago. "Hello, everyone.  I am so glad to see so many of you here right now.  I think it is time I made it clear to everyone just what is going on from my end as I have been writing your story these past five years.  Yes, it has been a long time, and you are all just into your third week now, and for you it is still May, 2021.  My original motive for writing the work was largely influenced by the covid pandemic that was still in its first year.  i thought, how interesting it would be to write a modern version of the Decameron, in medieval Italy during the bubonic plague, when a collection of persons of wealth were all finding refuge in an elegant, Florentine, I think, villa, and how they spent their time entertaining one another with quite the collection of stories. From the very onset, it was quite clear to me that this work of literature had already taken on a life of its own.  I was no longer, never was the creator, and found myself demoted to scribe and collaborator.  From the onset it was clear that I was writing about real people, and that I was no longer in control of the narrative.  The creative process really needs to be reexamined and re-explored, because the artist is not the creator, but an accomplice to other, more powerful and eternal forces.