Writing Resources from Fifteen Minutes of Fiction

Tutelary Spirits and Biographers

I have no mother or father, yet the number of my brothers and sisters is uncountable as the sands at the shores of the great waters, as innumerable as the stars of a thousand galaxies.

We gather wherever the people of this world congregate; in the churches and great halls where eloquent and profound thoughts are discovered and expressed, in the simple yet joyful homes where love and festive delight abound, and even in the parlors of death where the darkest and most frightful of hours of human existence are faced with grim expression and heavy heart.

The greatest among us are drawn to the strongest and deepest of human emotions. In my family some believe it is the humans, with their capacity for powerful emotion, who give birth to us, who give us life - that they are our mother and father. Many others believe that our origins were from an age before the advent of the human race, that we were invented and created in the mind of God himself.

Perhaps we are the dreams of God, breathed into life.

But if God gives us life, it is still the humans who give us form, who craft our essence into shape and structure, the rhythm and rhyme of the universe. Thus, though they are not parents, they might be tutelary spirits, showing us what we can be, what we were meant to be. And if they are our tutelary spirits, then we are their biographers, penning for all of history the story of who they were.

A symbiotic relationship in which each relies on the other for existence or for meaning, for expression and for transcendence.

They are aware of us, but only as an ant would be aware of an elephant from examining one square inch of its thick, rough hide. Though the humans have given us shape, in that form we found the gift of freedom - freedom to become far more than they ever imagined or dreamed we could be.

I was poured forth into this world in the late eighteen hundreds, my essence formed by the passionate struggles and turmoils of a troubled mind unable to break free of the illusions and delusions of fate and providence. Thus, I am known to my siblings by the succinct yet enigmatic name Elegy.

To the human race, which understands me far less, but has heard my voice again and again for over a hundred years, I am known by the less eloquent, more prosaic name Symphony Pathetique by Pyotr Illytch Tchaikovsky.

But I am more, much more than that...if they could only know.

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