With the idea of creative collaboration in mind, we invite the public to read the Willow Patterns stories and come up with different responses to how the character felt, what was going on in the background, or what might have happened next.
Anything from photographs to poems can be included, as long as they are related to the Willow Patterns and follow along the story the people before you have concocted.
To start things off, here's a piece by Ryan from a Willow Pattern perspective that sets the mood for the responses we, and hopefully others, will create.
Kat has devised a letter written by Lyn, one of the characters, addressed to her father, as if it had been lost and undelivered. . .
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To all, whom it does concern.
We find ourselves here at the edge of the earth with an attempt to read a parallactic palimpsest. With each turn of the earth, history rewrites all science fiction fantasy and apocalyptic prophecy written in the skies. We stare off into chaos and wonder. What will the future hold?
We have become so that there is no longer a future to behold. We are living in the future - time travellers, screaming through space and time at such a rate that we miss everything passing us by. We just shut our eyes against such great velocity.
But we must open our eyes and look around. The world is changing. Where once were trees, there is sand. Where cities were, trees now stand. Species die out, perhaps never to return, perhaps in millennia. Species change, adapting under the whim of Mother Nature.
We have evolved in so many ways that are unrecognisable with our puerile grasp of time. These changes can be seen though, in the subtle intricacies of art and the stories we tell, reflecting each own epoch, and the accumulation of all moments before, along with our own subjective future.
This is how we make meaning. We communicate.
So talk to me, tell me your story and I’ll tell you mine.
There were once here, in this land, nine wanderers. They roamed, much as we do now. Only theirs was a perambulatory to pass on a story. We move because our blood moves. We move because the trees don’t. We move to survive, to live.
They were magicians, turning words into meaning to survive.
Like the Babylonians in their high tower, disgracing a god with universal language, we must remember how to communicate again. We ourselves must tell the stories that need be told, our stories. For each story becomes our own as it becomes part of us and shapes us, like a mother’s words or the nurturing earth. But we must leave their high tower and reach toward the high seas. Be gone and allow the earth, jilted, to mourn, and mend its broken heart.
They met in a kingdom of books, these vagabonds, a stronghold of wisdom. A centre of pansophy to breed ultimate knowledge in all reaches, with hopes that the truths passed down the ages through these stories would find homes in the collective consciousness, sprouting ganglia around the world.
Their words reached many, but nine is so far from universal.
Then knowledge became ubiquitous, a spiders web transcribed across the planet for all to be caught in, if only they were to walk the right path. It can be hard to have direction though, when there is no one to lead the way; and there were only wayward wanderers to reveal this spidery tapestry at fingertips length.
With lines of communication down we must take it upon ourselves to rework this tapestry as without communication there can be no shared knowledge. For knowledge not shared is a lesson not learnt and we will continue to make the same mistakes that lead us here.
This is why art is both egotistic and altruistic. It focuses solely on the artists’ perception of the world and sense of life but shares this openly and honestly with all.
I plead for your openness and your honesty. We need now more than ever to communicate. To unite in our new minority and adapt to new lives, be formless as the water we thrive upon.
Where are you in the story, your story? Where has the story brought you?
Don’t let me be schizophrenic flotsam talking to his reflection. I’m no Narcissus, I’m not that pretty. I’m just alone and afraid and I need help. We all do. But I’m not afraid to ask for it.
What advice has been passed to you from this story, that story, your story, any story?
My advice to you is this: head to sea, home of pirate radio, where the dark tides are predictable and there are no spiders, no trees, and, when the time comes, no walking dead. But don’t go silently, we’ve been silent long enough.
You can reach me on the airwaves or the waterways, and by surfing waves we can reach all the strays, because you are loved. And whether you’re walking down deserted highways or back alley byways, if you don’t see a soul and a soul doesn’t see you, then you can rest assured that someone does and it’s quite a view.
So record a message, for me or the world or a missing loved one.
This is Martin, babysitting all survivalists on Four Double B.
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