Cool title, right? No? It needs a lot of further explanation? All right, here goes.
“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist of creating out of void, but out of chaos”—Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Whether you prefer the stealer of Tesla inventions or the author of Frankenstein for invention quotes, you have to admit they are both right. Those of us who think creatively try with all our might and mind to take the wreckage life has given us and make something new. Preferably we make something that is good for us and improves our situation. But sometimes it turns out that it only makes matters worse and creates monsters of the mind.
When I was ten, I was sexually assaulted by a neighbor boy who was older and stronger and decidedly crueler than me. It split my world into pieces. I retreated into fantasy worlds and lived in my imagination far more than the real world. The monster in my memory was locked away in a tightly sealed forget-me box. I repressed the memory successfully until I was twenty-two. My creativity and inventiveness turned to fantasy art and fanciful fiction. I worked at having a good sense of humor, being a tough athlete on the high school football field, and trying to force people to accept me as the brainiac weird kid who always knew the answers in science class and could do practically anything except successfully talk to girls.
Surprisingly my greatest invention would turn out to be me. I reinvented myself.
I would’ve never believed when I was young that I was made to be a teacher. I lived inside my own head. How could I be a teacher and control a classroom and make people listen to the various shards of nonsense that I was completely full of? But, through gradual problem-solving, I learned to be an effective public speaker. I learned how to be an engaging presenter. I did a few magic tricks. I told more than a few jokes. Some of them were even funny. I learned how to put ideas in front of children in visual displays and organization charts. I learned how to teach people to read. And more than that, I learned how to teach people to learn.
I honestly don’t think I would’ve learned to do all of that if my childhood psyche hadn’t been broken and hidden away in brain boxes when I was ten. I might still have been an artist. But not the teacher and story-teller I ultimately became. Without the mountain to climb, a boy can never become a mountain-climber. Without a star to see and study, he can never be an astrophysicist. And without a brain filled with broken brain bits, a man can never learn how to put himself back together again, let alone teach others how to do it. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men are no help with this endeavor.
Have I now explained my terribly tilted title? Does this help you see how I have sung the songs taught to me by the Mother of Invention? Probably not. I am a rather dense little goof and the work of making me into me is not yet finished. I crashed and burned again a couple of years ago when I had to retire from teaching. I had to invent myself again as something new. I am certainly not done hitting the metal work with a big black hammer. But, perhaps, you can see the tool-marks on this blog and learn something from it too.
Catch a Falling Star 
Fauns
Fauns originate in Greek mythology as forest spirits, sensual, playful, and infused with the energies of the natural world. They are followers of Pan, the god of the forest. They are hedonistic, seeking sexual gratification from nymphs and human girls, loving wine and feasting. They are not the same things as satyrs, though Roman mythology would come along and squeeze them both into the same mold.
So, why am I, a boy from Iowa of distinctly German ancestry, so fascinated and obsessed by fauns in art and literature?
The answer is both goofy and creepy. I have a faun of my own. He lives with me as an invisible friend. His name is Radasha. He is Harvey to my Elwood. (That’s a Jimmy Stewart movie reference if the twists and turns of my mind confuse you.) Just like the fauns of mythology when confronted with travelers and wanderers, he sometimes helps with guidance and advice, and he sometimes does me mischief with ridicule and wicked tricks.
My theory for why my convoluted psyche has need of invisible companions goes back to the fact that I was sexually assaulted when I was ten. That is why Ra is basically a ten-year-old boy with the legs, tail, and horns of a goat. He is the sexual/sensual part of me that got split off from my inner self by that traumatizing event.
Being a child-victim can do terrible things to a boy. It seriously interfered with my blossoming interest in girls. It turned me from an inventive, out-going leader of the gang into a quiet and somewhat timid introvert. I repressed the memory of the actual event, more of a torture-situation than seduction, so that the real psychological damage of it occurred at the subconscious level. I began to worry that I might be gay. I began to seriously loathe myself and my own body. I went so far as to burn myself on my lower back by lying against the furnace grate in order to repress desires I felt were evil.’
Radasha showed up at my bedroom window late one snowy night when I was about seventeen years old. He began talking at me, making fun of me for being terrified of girls, and encouraging me to risk being naked more. He wanted me to enjoy the idea of sex more and shy away from it less. In some ways, he kept that part of me alive.
Of course, I made myself familiar with the mythological creature Radasha obviously was. I read everything I could about it. I even acquired a copy of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun and read it with great fascination even though the prose was dense and archaic. I realized that I wasn’t alone in using fauns as an artistic expression of the repressed sensuality that constantly consumed me. Ra was there to needle me and encourage me, to lead me to learn how to better like myself.
I know by now most readers will have given up on this post already, put off by bizarre self-analysis of my rather atypical case of abnormal psychology. But being naked more is apparently part of faun-therapy. At Ra’s insistence, I am making myself more psychologically and metaphorically naked by revealing these things here in a blog that mostly nobody reads anyway. And naked fauns in my artwork are a definite thing that merits exploration. So if you have actually read this far through this mythological mold spore of an essay, you now know about as much about me as I know about myself. And you will probably do just as I do. You will shake your head and continue to wonder how any one old guy can be quite so weird.
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