Song of Cecilia -- The rock-novel begins

All original songs, writing and real-time performances:

BY ANGELO M. BRUSCAS III
Copyright 2009, Real News Network and AMBIII Publishing

SLINGSHOT LOVER
She’s a three-chord girl with nothing to lose. Loves
to rock n’ roll in those cowgirl boots.

When the sun comes up, she’s off to school.
Counts herself apart from those other fools.
Got a full-time job in a printing plant. She knows
some secrets about where it’s at.
When nighttime falls, she’s studying French.
There’s worlds beyond her so-called friends.

She’s a slingshot lady, tight around the thighs. Still
lifting weights for those emotional highs.
Smoking Old Gold Filters at every little break. Must
be her karma to give and to take.
Got a sassy jean jacket over a business suit.
Fishnet stockings and cowgirl boots.
Admits to 26 going on thirty-five. Couple of kids
who laugh when she cries.

She’s a three-time baby, been around the block.
Face of an angel, heart like a rock.
She’s a slingshot lady, ready to cut loose.
Loves to rock n’ roll in those cowgirl boots.

I need a lover, I need a lover, I need a lover,
to go undercover,
Under my covers. She’ll be my lady, she drives me
crazy, nothing can faze Me, if she is my lover, Oh
how I love her.

I need to love her, hover above her,
then she’ll discover, that she is my lady, she’ll be
my lady. It drives me crazy. She drives me crazy. I
drive her crazy, when I Need a lover, I need a lover.

When we get talking, she’s always talking,
adjusting her stockings.
It drives me crazy. She can amaze me. . . .

She’s a three-chord girl with nothing to lose. Loves
to rock n’ roll in those cowgirl boots.

Song of Cecilia is a literary journey of love and a lyrical joyride
into the triumphs and depths of marriage and divorce through
these ever-shifting sands of economic, moral and social turmoil
– a novel about the mythic and mystical music two lovers create
when they begin to believe and then shatter the myths they adopt
for their lives.

The contemporary mystery-romance storyline of 112,000 words
unwinds as a modern twist on “The Divine Comedy” with
obvious similarities to “The Great Gatsby” -- told through the
eyes of a writer in the maze of a major life transformation; the
spiraling economy has put an end to his newspaper, sparking a
renewed search for personal redemption and reconnection with
the lost love and the lost music of his life. His lost love has taken
on the myth of St. Cecilia, martyred for the love of God, sacrificed
for the music of angels.

The central theme is the universality of love, the endurance of the
love of friends and family, even the love of God, through the love
of writing or rediscovering the love songs within us all: That joyful
noise of life.

The story is highlighted by the “language of love” crafted by the
central characters, Mario and Cecilia, in letters, songs, poetry,
factual experience and fictional expression, assuming and then
consuming their namesakes in the myth of an angel and the
myth of the patron saint of music .

Song of Cecilia
Chapter Fifteen

God read Adam’s song and laughed happily. Creation had discovered love! His first humans were more than
companions -- they were lovers! God knew then that his love had a chance to conquer. Humans had begun
to love each other: they now might suspect that they were even loved by God.

-- Fr. Donald X. Burt, from The Song of Adam, bulletin from the Carmel Mission,, California’s oldest church,
picked up as a souvenir on the honeymoon of Mario and Cecilia.

SONG OF CECILIA: The Song of Adam

Try as she might, even with her infinite powers and knowledge of all the laws and science in the universe, God couldn’t
make everything work right or everyone act perfectly, even in a seemingly perfect world -- there was always this element
of probability and chance, so many choices that beings in her image would have to make that even God couldn’t control
the outcome of every little life on every little planet, much less every story that every writer begins to tell. Heck, if she
couldn’t control angels in heaven all the time, how was God supposed to solve such a dilemma with Cecilia and Mario?

God did give Mario everything else he ever wanted in life, figuring that would finally give him the freedom to write that
novel both she and Cecilia knew he was capable of writing. She, God that is, gracefully ended his newspaper career
just after he was fully vested at 25 years, allowing him to begin collecting his guaranteed retirement at 55, with a whole
life ahead just to write whatever he was capable of writing. She gave him his dream house on the Pacific Ocean,
returning him to the roots and the rhythms and the nature of his soul. She gave him his health, a loving and faithful dog,
the ability to play guitar and sing and write songs like the angels, books of great knowledge and wisdom, music that
touched his spirit, a loving family that blessed him with joy.

More than that, God had given Mario truly God-like visions. One day he had been just walking Babe when he saw a
cherry tree in full bloom, marveling at the wash of pink that resembled a full stick of cotton candy at the county fair. As he
got closer, he was drawn to the intricacy of an individual bud, its perfect form and fragrance, when suddenly the spirit of
his grandmother appeared before him.

As Godly experiences go, there was no blinding light, but Mario distinctly felt the entire essence of his mother’s mother
fill him with joy and wonder, peace and happiness, wisdom and truth and total realization. She told him how happy she
was that he was examining nature closer than just to glance at the tree, that he was doing exactly what he should be
doing and living exactly the life that he should be living in exactly the way it should be lived.

Marna Copsey had helped raise Mario as her first-born of 12 grandchildren, and lived one week short of a century when
she died so peacefully, Mario and God and other family members holding her hand for nearly an hour that last day,
feeling her spirit connect fully with his. Two weeks later, on a run along the ocean path connecting Monterey with their
family home in Pacific Grove, God allowed his grandmother to revisit Mario, who had written her obituary for the local
paper and also spoke in her honor at her funeral. Without even trying to conjure up such a concept at all, here she was
back in full unmistakable spirit and soul, and it was the most certain feeling he ever had since choosing to fall totally in
love with Cecilia. With God and Grandma Copsey, the message is always clear and unmistakable -- you are so
blessed and loved and it is so wonderful to use your life, your talents, your abilities to create joy and hope and faith, not
only for the ones you love but for all that you love. God loves you, too. Relax. Everything is all right and you are living
exactly the life that God has planned for you.

Mario did get that part of the message right, God thought to herself. God certainly did plan for Mario to be a writer and
he really never had much choice in that matter. He just started writing as a child and never stopped. Who can say why or
when? Only God. She did want him to write something worthy in her eyes, of her love, and not a trashy novel about
strippers in Las Vegas or a convoluted parody of himself as a sportswriter who tempts luck and fate to a plot of little
consequence. She did want him to get back to writing about God and love, or at least trying to work those concepts into
the storyline as an underlying theme. All of what he was writing about now seemed good, even bordering on glorious in
God‘s image.

But there was one problem, and it was something God still couldn’t entirely control -- how Cecilia was reacting and how
it would affect her in the end.

Like with Mario, God did hear Cecilia’s prayers and answered in her own way, and she certainly loved Cecilia just as
much as she loved Mario. She even had given Cecilia just about everything she ever needed in life, too -- a man to love
her and help her as she grew old and had to cope with continuing health concerns; the security of the love of her sons
with their lives matured and successful; the love of books and wisdom, the peace of a home in a new environment, the
ability to survive one of the most mysterious diseases on the planet. Heck, God had even given her Mario for as long as
any husband she ever had, and that was about as much love as she could give anyone on earth, especially when Mario
was at his best.

So what was God to do now when it all seemed to go so wrong and the two seemed so far apart that there might never
be any way in hell to ever reconcile the writing, much less save Mario and Cecilia from making the same mistakes all
over again in the name of love -- or with the love of God? She had allowed them to become the most loving couple on
earth and now they simply made a mockery of that love.

God was not pleased but not yet ready to give up.

On a glorious Sunday at the beach when Mario was at rest from the work, she dispateched a couple of women about
Cecilia’s age with literary backgrounds to visit him at his Ocean Shores retreat and check up on all this writing,
question his motives and themes and theories and actually read through the rough draft of his nearly complete book of
love.

First, they grilled him about his notion that love has to be about joy and happiness and faith and understanding and
wisdom, etc., and whether love also can exist in need or pain or even in loss. All he could write, he told them, was from
his own experiences, as a man, a lover and a father, a husband and a son and a friend: that the love of God can be the
same as the love of Cecilia or the love of a grandmother or mother or of a companion or of just playing the guitar and
singing about love. They questioned him at length about the suffering and hurt and how he responded to Cecilia through
her years of cancer and recovery. They questioned whether love of a romantic state could exist separate of a love of
writing, or even a love of God. He explained how he had come to know the certainty of God through the love of his
grandmother, something he had to have absolute proof of as a journalist, as a reporter and as a writer in search of
absolute truth.

“So how does this all end?” one of the women asked.

“God only knows,” Mario replied. “Maybe when Cecilia starts to write her side of the story again. She’s the one who got
me started on this book in the first place, and she‘s probably a much more perceptive writer than I am, or at least was
once upon a time. I don‘t think anyone else but she or God can really finish the story.”

Just like Adam, God sighed. Men always try to pass off their own shortcomings on women. Can’t they just take
responsibility and come without fear -- even if they are naked to the whole world -- when God comes calling? Why must
they keep chasing after forbidden fruit in the name of women? Why is love so complicated after all the books and bibles
and novels upon plays upon songs upon stories upon letters upon words that already have been written on the subject?

It all seemed so perfectly clear when God had started the story herself, once upon a time, long, long ago in a land called
Eden:

“And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was
taken out of man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother and shall cleave unto his wife: and they
shall be one flesh. And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.”

-- Genesis 2: 23-25, King James Version

I need you, lovely lady, but more, I love you
And I thank God for the delicate fragrance of your presence,
For every day we exist together,
For each day you toss and turn in my heart.

-- Final verse, The Song Of Adam

Dear Cecilia, song of my heart and soul,

“It feels fine to offer flowers on your doorstep to forgiveness.
It feels fine to think about all the joy we had, the spirit we impart.
It feels fine to write words of lasting love to lift our souls from sadness. . .
It feels fine once again to make a new start; It feels fine just to sing to your heart.”

Strumming and singing a free-form new melody this morning with my coffee and the rhythm of the starlings dancing on
the wind as they whirl into the yard for the seeds of summer.

Songs and lyrics for me come from nature and experience, adventure and observation, with notes and letters and
words and thoughts formed in some sort of inner creative process that rocks me to my very soul. I really don’t
understand my ability to write songs or even write well at all other than it is like breathing for me, something I do
because I am alive!

I really don’t in the same vein understand my ability to still love you as powerfully, maybe obsessively, (I’d like to think
fully and completely, even on faith, as strong as religion) as I do, other than it is also like seeing for me, something I
recognize because I have witnessed it with my own eyes.

Until a few years ago, before I lost your love, I always believed I had a hard time recognizing the so-called “existence” of
God until I saw it and felt it with my own eyes, my own hand, my own spirit, upon the passing of my Grandma Copsey
one week short of her 100th birthday, something that truly has made me a much better person, an enlightenment
beyond compare.

Likewise, I have seen and felt the pure state of joy, peace, harmony, understanding, spirituality, healing hope and total
love with you, from you, because of your love, too. I believe in it because I have experienced it and I know it is true.
I don’t have faith without some proof, and there really is nothing left to prove when it comes to my feelings or yours
about the love we have and will always have, past, present or future.

In some ways, maybe too many to really dwell on here, I was not worthy of your love when we were struggling with
ourselves and how to grow as a family, as friends and as lovers amid all the other drama of daily living.
I am totally worthy now.

What I lacked in patience and understanding, I have now.

What I hoped to accomplish has been accomplished. My life, my love is unencumbered, full circle, whole, unbroken,
realized, fully and completely. My writing soars, my spirit grows, my soul is peaceful and happy.

There is no pain. There is no suffering. There is only love, enduring love.

We really have nothing at all to lose except all the junk, bad baggage, dead leaves, overgrown weeds, unhealthy clutter,
cobwebs of time and settling dust that certainly does start to cover up and take over the true, lasting and most valuable
thing of all -- the shining, natural, abundant, always-blooming garden of love we planted with our very own hands, our
own words, our own sweat, blood and seed.

In my Adam and Eve story, however, I think the snakes and devils would all be driven off by the Weed-eater and a
lawnmower, or chased off by our ever-faithful hound. There would just be the Garden of Eden, you, me, God, all of us
naked in happy, blissful love. What more could anyone ever want in life? A heavenly thought to end this letter, and a
prayer once again for the light of your love.

Excuse me if I still see something spiritually uplifting and find song and joy and total inspiration in loving you. “Excuse
me while I kiss the sky!”

I vow not to use such a gift for anything but to preserve the love with which it was intended.
Thank you again for giving me the gift of enduring, loving, blossoming inspiration. Hope we can share it again in the
coming days ahead, but I always have what we have always been given.

With love, always, and naked from my true Garden of Eden,

Mario

POSTSCRIPT: Finally, I am beginning to see the end of the book, which I am now calling “Song of Cecilia,” with a full
half of the story already done, bracketed by my songs and inspired by our love. Of course, the Adam and Eve story
takes us back to the beginning of love, which is the goal all along, to prove that love is the key to eternity, that black hole
where time and space and even place are immaterial to something far more powerful and lasting and enlightening. The
fact that the beginning is the end and the end is the beginning is a perfectly distorted note to end on, like a Neil Young
guitar solo ending on an ear-ringing, feedback fadeout that simply leads into another song. “It’s all one long song,” Neil
would say of his own music, and I think that just about says the same for this book and the letters and the songs I
continue to write.

In real time now, I have burned through all the ink and paper in two printers and will be reloading tomorrow to finish the
full manuscript so I can have it to you soon. I also have two other editors who want to read the draft of the first six
chapters, so those already have been revised and fit together better than I could ever have imagined.

I have several chapters yet to finish revising, including one I know I must rewrite about the night we fell from the heavens
and damaged our wings irreparably. I know how horribly I failed to tell that story when I first tried, a terrible parody of
Steinbeck’s “East of Eden,” and how badly I hurt you in the process, but it’s hard for anyone who reads this to
understand the full context of what happened otherwise. Some words and actions you just can’t take back or change no
matter how hard you try, how long you wait or how many letters you write.

So to avoid that until another book in another time and another place, let me end with your words, your true Song of
Cecilia, the poem you wrote to me in the beginning of our love, when the writing bears witness to a love that is as true
and as real and as lasting as “Hadrian’s Wall.” A poem titled “Blue Moon,” like once in a Blue Moon you find a love like
ours.

Truly, since you wrote this for me, I think I have been trying all my life to love you like this and write something equally
worthy before God and you. Back to the start of our story, The Real Story:

I climb inside to meet you in the interior landscape that is mine
And effortless images flood my eyes.
Spilling images in single words and broken phrases,
I am the mediator, the translator,
Spirit speaker to you of night songs
While the blue moon blazes.
I whisper, “Summer.”
In the heat, the harvest ripens full blue.
Vast plains roll riches and rise upward.
You expand outside my vision, rippled beyond the catch
Of my words, or the seasons.
Patterns form and fall free,
Mountains and clouds, dewy and green, encircle me.
Let me be the conduit to dreams,
The face of such sorcery,
The hand of reality that breathes life to these hallucinations
Of light and imagination.
You chant to me your litany of love
Spent on a resting place, mortar and chink,
Solid as Hadrian’s Wall.

-- Cecilia Angelique, Poem called “Blue Moon”
given to Mario at the beginning of their love.

Dear Cecilia,

Yes, this IS the REAL letter accompanying the REAL beginning of the end to the actual book you will receive in full draft
form within the coming days.

I write in the joy of the morning sun this Monday sensing in my soul that I have finally written something worthy of the love
of my grandmother, the love of God, and I pray the love of Cecilia, too, even if I have to use your words of the past to
help me get here in the present.

It connects with the poetry and legacy of my great, great grandfather, and brings together all that I have ever known and
loved in the act of writing and the fact of living our lives in the time and place that we have been blessed on this earth.
Of course, the writing, the letters, the poetry and the music, the Song of Cecilia, will go on and on and on from this
moment forward, just like our memories drift back into the past. But the essential story is now in the present, ready to
take on a new life of its own.

I realized yesterday on a Sunday full of the company of friends and literary ambitions, even religious-like conversation,
that I had reached the same state as my grandmother in her life when she knew she had made perfect peace with God
in the perfect place she belonged. I never really knew exactly why I was drawn here to my new home at the ocean, but I
now see that it was to finish this writing to you and to build my future as a writer in a home that is truly mine for all time.
To build a perfect peace.

I look forward to the months of summer ahead as I release this book and prepare for the long winter that will follow. My
deck needs to be sanded and stained. I want to buy a new ladder to replace the one I never recovered in the divorce so
I can get up on my roof, clean the gutters and secure the rain spouts. I hope to build a raised garden with a fence
around it to keep the deer from munching on all the fruits of my labor, and I am going to see if I can re-learn a few old
carpentry skills to try to build a walk-in shed to match my wonderful house.

James and his two women friends were visiting this weekend, and Paul, the Toms, Helene, Greg and Lorna, BigCity
Mike his family, and Mike and Becky are coming down soon with other friends, too; I happily seem to have more visitors
here than I ever had in my place in West Seattle. The house always is bustling and brimming with life, even when I am
here alone with just the Babe, the deer, the herons, my songs, the guitar and the morning sun.

I truly wish you would consider visiting, too, especially this weekend when the peninsula will be alive and vibrant with
good energy, good food and drink, and even better conversation. All of these folks would be your friends if you just let
them back into your life.

By now, everyone who knows what I have been writing knows how much I have searched my soul to write this true-to-the-
heart labor of love. I can’t emphasize enough how good it feels, the joy it brings, the release that I realize, to be fully out
in the open and running free forever with the words of my life. I can stand on these words now, not run from them or
crawl to them any longer. Naked and unashamed.

James remarked how I looked like I had lost 20 pounds since he last saw me only a few weeks ago before he went to
Chicago for his last interview. He also marveled that Babe seemed to be in amazing shape, too, so these rambling old
dogs are really getting healthy, fit and happy here in our new home here by the sea.

I know you must have reached a happy balance in your life, too, and I have to apologize for disturbing that in such a
strident manner. However, I wasn’t going to make the same mistake I made before and start publishing all these words
before I truly made every last attempt under the sun to get your response, to let you edit out anything you felt
inappropriate, even to change the ending or the names of the characters involved in the plot, what thinly veiled plot there
is -- I couldn’t even begin to end it without a very real conclusion to the cycle of letters I have been writing ever since you
vanished with all my love and from my life.

I pray this finds you in good health and in sound mind and body. I pray that these letters have not been like a recurring
cancer in your life. I pray that these words have reached you in a time and a place where you are free to read them and
one day respond in love and understanding.

We still have time in this life that is ours, even if it is in bringing the time we shared from the past into the present. I hope
the time we spend apart is equally as fruitful as the time we were together. I know I have finally reached that state where
I see the individual blossoms of life and not just the whole blooming tree awash in a blur of color. I hear the ocean and
the wind and the birds and the frogs, not the sound of arguments and traffic, not even the sounds of people. This whole
entire place, my entire life now, is simply music to my ears and religion to my very soul.

It’s sort of like in my play on the Importance of Being Earnest, where I finally realize I have been speaking and writing
the truth all along, I just didn’t know it. In my case, I just didn’t know how to write it before. I do know it all too well now!
I think it might be like that for you, too, which is why you ended up where you are. You realized it was where you were
supposed to be in the time and place and space when love crossed your path again. Had you not gone there, I could
never have written what I have written and you may never have had any peace from the memories, from the story, from
the love of you and me. Had I not come here, I could never have completed it in my lifetime. I love this latest chapter as I
re-read it this morning. I have been batting it around in my head for several days, and actually waited until my company
left on Sunday to write it in full over about a three-hour span, incorporating a letter I wrote to you after my grandmother’s
death, or I would like to think, her resurrection in my life. Obviously, the idea that a woman is God comes from the love
of God that I truly believe my grandmother passed on to me. Believe me girl, I consider that a higher responsibility than
any I have ever been given in life.

The most revealing part of all, however, is not even my words in the final chapter or the part of my experience seeing
God through my grandmother -- it is the power and the glory and love that is in the poem you gave to me so long ago
now it does seem like our love must be as lasting as “Hadrian’s Wall.”

So this is my ever-evolving, always strengthening Song of Cecilia, note by note, word by word, brick by brick;
something I will guard like Hadrian and fight -- or write -- to death to preserve against time and the invading armies of
ignorance. Any time you’d like to leave the barbarians standing at the wall, you are perfectly free to come back through
to the other side of life. There’s nothing to disturb us and no one can ever take the love away even if they try. May peace
come to us both and may we find each other once again one day in a spirit of love and joy, together in love at the gates
of Hadrian’s Wall.

May we walk again naked and unashamed here in the Garden of Eden.

With blooming, regenerating, rooted love forever,

Mario

“And the man said, The woman whom thou gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.
“And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou has done? And the woman said, The serpent
beguiled me, and I did eat.
“And the Lord God said unto the serpant, Because thou has done this, thou are to be cursed above all cattle, and
above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shall thou go, and dust shall you eat all the days of your life:
“And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; it shall bruise your head
and you shall bruise his heel.
“Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception; in sorrow shall you bring forth
children; and your desire will be to your husband, and he shall rule over you.
“And unto Adam, he said, Because you hearkened unto the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree, of which I
commanded you, saying, Thou shall not eat of it: cursed is the ground for your sake; in sorrow shall you eat of it all
the days of your life.”

-- Genesis 3:12-17

THE PATHWAY

I saw the light of the future, there at the end of the world.
I was walking into that tunnel, chains of silver, beads of pearls.
They say I nearly died that night, the past is completely obscured.

Now I walk on down that pathway, skipping like a stone
No one dares follow me, as I walk on all alone.

The sun set on the horizon, when I cast my fate to the West.
My shadow grew behind me, you took the shade and the rest.
I never had time to say how I felt, I never did confess.

Now I skip on down that pathway, rolling like a stone
No one ever stops me. My soul is free to roam.

It is the time of the prophets, time for change.
Time to make a stand. Time to lead the way.

I dashed my hope against the tide, my dreams all washed ashore.
That was the moment I fell for you, drowning forevermore.
I never had time to tell you then, not knowing what was in store.

Now I walk on down that pathway, skipping like a stone.
My life is that pathway, here all alone.

I found a new life of salvation where there was nothing left to prove.
No one wants to be a prophet. No one likes to think things through.
Crossing this vast wasteland, following the truth.

Now I roll on down that pathway, roll way the stone.

Song of Cecilia soundtrack player:
Control chapter music selection here