Tales from The Children of The Sea, Volume 1, The Last Wooden House

by Jann Burner

Harry felt still and delicious. All his friends had moved away again and he turned toward the future feeling mellow and open and fluid. He walked for a long while across the vast prairie of Mind Ground that lay on the far side of the abyss. He traveled for days and days, plodding through the short grass and sleeping in small depressions to escape the terrible wind. During his waking hours he would blow his desire through the finely holed piece of red bamboo that he carried always at his side, along with his pouch and his pipe. As he played he would try to imagine the sea and the white dolphin that would lead him to the source, to the Dreamer of All That Is.

  After many, many hours, the self-conscious whistles and squeaks which he made upon his instrument became more and more melodious. Gradually, after many, many days of practice, his sound became transformed: it became musical...soulful, in fact.

  During these long slow days and nights, Harry saw no one nor any living thing. Since crossing the abyss, he had given up wishing and fantasizing about the source of this dream he called his life, his quest. He merely walked along, watching the light, and breathing in and breathing out. When he became tired he would simply sit and rest and play his flute. When he became sleepy, he would recline and fold his body into one of the many shallow craters that dotted the grassy landscape and close his eyes. His mind was peaceful. It was easy. Harry's life was simple. He neither hungered nor thirsted. He was now beyond desire. He blew it away each morning upon arising. He felt full and accomplished, like a rock...or a streak of light.

  One day as Harry sat, motionless, drifting with the stellar flux, he saw a large flight of small black birds. They seemed to arrive with the afternoon wind: at least five hundred of them, harvesting seeds from the fields. As he watched they swooped and zoomed through the air like one huge wing. They would climb high and then drop in massive elegance over the fields of short grass. Incredible and beautiful, they moved as one animal. They would sweep and fold and reverse direction, never bunching up, always in perfect position. The five hundred separate bird bodies were like individual knots that connected an otherwise invisible net thrown by an unseen hand.

  In salute to the first living things he had seen in a long while, Harry lifted his instrument to his lips and began to blow. As he blew his intention through the bamboo tube, he distinctly heard a low whistle somewhere in the distance. At first, he assumed that it must be some sort of sympathetic echo from the flight of black birds, but then, as he continued to play, the accompanying whistle grew louder. Turning, he casually observed a small cloud forming on the distant horizon. As he watched, the growing cloud gradually began to condense and move. The low whistle in the distance was coming from the cloud. It slowly began to tighten and turn, approaching over the grassy prairie like a golden fire. At first it was quite slow and graceful, like a drop of milk in a glass of water, but then it began to turn faster and faster as it grew larger, tightening into a massive cyclonic form of mythic proportions. Harry quickly stood and began to move off towards the right in hopes of evading it--whatever it was. But as he ran, the approaching cyclonic form tightened its focus and moved towards the right. Harry quickly reversed his direction and doubled his speed, but still the cyclone followed, moving over the prairie of barren Mind Ground like a predatory animal that had his scent and was intent upon a kill. As its approach and eventual interception grew eminent, Harry sat down upon the ground and attempted to gather his stray thoughts about him and prepare myself for the future. Once he was centered and his fears were accounted for he gathered my powers of concentration about him like a secure cloak in the face of an onrushing storm--for one thing, at least was certain, and that was the meeting between the approaching force that appeared to be plotting its own course and Harry--whose direction, whose very life was about to be suddenly and irrevocably altered.

  He slowly picked up his instrument. It felt like he was about to blow his life through its tiny narrow channels, for the magnitude of the onrushing wave of cyclonic activity, which now stretched from one edge of his mind's sight to the other, was about to make short work of his physical body.

  The gentle, initially-inspiring, low whistle had now grown into an awesome scream, as if all creation were contained within the cloud tower trying desperately to escape. The combined struggle seemed to give the white mass its whorling spin, like the most incredibly dense thought ever conceived within the mind of The Muse, turning back upon itself in appreciation of its own magnitude. As Harry recalled his one-time experience with the rather awesome Phoenix, it now seemed as a tamed bird in a gilded cage. He tried to take solace in some advice given him long ago by a wonderful little old man called And.

  "When you are going up or coming down, you are vulnerable, the window is open. When the elevator is moving there are no doors between floors. The blast of reality will blow right through. Sometimes it will blow right through you and other times it will blow you right through--to the other side of the maze..."

  Harry's first impression was of light-sparks reverberating through the tight moist warmness of his fingers as they continued to grasp the wooden fibers of the flute. And then the delirious skies opened for this wanderer, and it was on him and over him in an instant. The dense heat of the idea seemed to split his teeth in sections like lead fragments spent from the tube of a smoldering gun, while the rising odor of burnt sulfur began to waft through his skull, reminding his butterfly brain that it was time to be reborn. Faster and faster and faster he began to spin. Faster and faster and with each revolution, Harry began to rise, faster than the speed of light, faster even than the speed of Mind, he began to weep, to reap the laughter and the gift that is consciousness.

  It was a weighty experience; suddenly LIFE itself was lifting him to her craggy bosom and above the tops of the rolling waves a rich feminine voice began to speak and this is what it seemed to say..."I'm speaking to you, love, from the essence of what is true, love; infinity is yours, laid before you. You have feet as a base from which to view the infinite as it spreads before you in all directions with you as a center. It is made meaningful by desire and relevant through the freedom of choice. You have eyes from which to reflect love to all things. You have imagination as your crystal and you have an ego in which to hold it. By only trusting, you can have eternal realization..."

  Harry was exhausted. He felt like a wet sheet blowing in a polluted breeze. He was giddy. He felt like laughing. He laughed. He felt he could record the color and odor found within any specific room in space. His mind was reduced to a piece of litmus paper. He found himself testing for cosmic acidity. These anxious bits and pieces of human thought zipped and darted around and about within his mind like tropical fish in a closed tank at feeding time. Or like electrons and protons in a cloud chamber, these bits and pieces of insight cried out their message and left a smoky trail to mark their passing. Unfortunately, this specific cloud chamber must have been located in an American University and it must have been the lunch hour, for there was obviously nobody paying attention--no eyes other than Harry's to watch and be astonished at the series of random impulses spelling out patterns, which in turn twisted themselves helix-like into individual letters, which in turn grouped as words and as words found themselves attracted to other words, which gave want to feeling and feeling to phrase and phrase to metaphorical innuendo.

  Harry looked upward and beheld a great machine, a great cloud of fire enfolding itself with a brightness about it and out of the midst came the likeness of four living creatures. They had the likeness of a man but every one had four faces and each one had four wings. Their appearance was like burning coals of fire and their appearance was of lamps. The light traveled down among the creatures and it was bright and it moved back and forth like slow lightning. And when Harry heard the noise of their wings, it was like the noise of great waters, like the noise of speech. And there was a brightness around and about them like a rainbow.

  The leader told Harry to stand on a specific three fo
ot section of the metal floor. As he did, the small square of metal began to drop, lowering him into a room below. Protruding from the floor of this second room were the top portions of three globes he had observed under the belly of the huge craft as it approached. The globes were transparent and contained what seemed to be large diamonds or crystals. On each side of every crystal were rods which sloped inward.. He asked the leader to explain how this propulsion system worked. The leader replied with a subtle smile, "Don't even try to understand it." But then he seemed to soften and add, almost as an afterthought, "But with just a little more thought on your own, this could be developed by your people."

  "Where are you from?" Harry asked. "Which distant star or planet do you call home?"

  The creature smiled again, "This is home. We are your elders from a gentler time in space. We travel through time as you travel through water. We are from earth, my friend. We are the same as you. In fact, in a very real sense, we are you. Think of us as a future extension of yourself, as we see you as a past projection of ourselves."

  The Star Creature, for this was how he referred to himself, said that his essence came from the heart of the Sun and he made Harry realize that he was not discovering "the way it was," he was not discovering anything. He was creating "the way it is." He was part of a slowly spinning cloud of idea which was the very opposite of the abyss. He was caught up in the ultimate in focus which was engaged in sucking up energy from the Mind Ground in order to feed its central mystery. He was made aware that the whole of the earth with all of its flora, fauna, male and female, is but a conscious work of art, and the subtle inner tracings within the mind of man is nothing less than the gradual awakening of a fledgling artist growing through time and space and the experience of creation. Humans were creators, shapers, it would seem, suffering the pangs of birth.

  The Star Creature pointed down to a shiny thing; a smooth flat glassy reflective screen. Harry moved closer to see what it was that was reflected within its surface, but he was only able to catch a quick glimpse before the Star Creatures put him down again in the grassy field. From what he saw on the screen, it had appeared to be merely an old man dressed in gray. He hadn't been able to see the man's face because his head was turned.

  As Harry watched the cloud tower, it decreased in intensity and rolled off across the horizon like a summer thunder shower concealing the presence of the time travelers with a mask of rain and isolated stalks of branched lightning. As he watched, there was a second flash of lightning and as his eyes traced its path to the earth, he saw illuminated beneath it, a large old wooden house high on a hill. As Harry approached, he smelled salt in the air and he quickened his pace because he knew that the sea could not be far away. He could smell it and see the fog rising in the distance beyond the old house. In between the intermittent bursts of light, it was very dark and he could see nothing, but then another blast of explosive light would illuminate the horizon and the house would stand like an adulterer suddenly exposed beneath the burst of a photographer's flash. It was a familiar old place and as he approached obliquely from the rear, Harry could see a glow from the front of the house illuminating the yard. As he came around the side of the house, he stopped short. There, spread out across the front of the house, in the yard, were five men. They had their backs to him and they appeared to be totally nude. He waited for one of them to turn, for surely they had heard him kicking across the grass approaching the house. None of them moved a muscle. They stood about waist high in the blowing grass, their naked bodies seemingly frozen in mid-stride. As he approached, Harry noted that they stood in positions of quiet reflection, pensively, as if struck dumb and frozen in time by the sudden realization of one thing or another.

  The five appeared to be sculpted from some soft fine stone or molded from smooth river clay and baked brown in the light of the golden sun. But these were indeed living entities, as he was able to confirm by watching the slow but steady rise and fall of their chests. These must be questors like myself, Harry thought. At one time in the distant past, each and every one must have been clothed in the specific fashion of a particular age, denoting his place in time and point of origin. He walked around looking closely at the five men. Apparently they had been standing for such a long time at their lonely vigil, that they had become as statues. Perhaps, he thought, they have been standing so long that the very molecules, which constituted the fabric of their individual costumes, have ceased to spin out of boredom and finally sloughed off into some other probable reality where their efforts, might be, if not needed, at least better appreciated.

  Although they were physically different in stature and age as well as skin hue and musculature, each had a similar facial expression. It was as if someone had just whispered the punch line to a grand and glorious joke into their ear. They looked as if they were captured in amber at the very edge of open laughter. It was evident in the slight puckering at the corners of their mouths and in the fine wrinkled lines that folded back and about the corners of their clear sparkling eyes. Their eyes were open, colorless and brilliant like faceted stones. Their eyes were fixed open without the slightest motion, seemingly focused on eternity but with a deep sparkle of inner realization that had somehow brought them to the very edge of open laughter and then left them suspended, mid-stride, to consider their last thought for a while, perhaps forever. But then again, maybe they would all waken momentarily and proceed on about their business. Like still photographs fixed in a dish of developer, they just seemed to float there and stare out but with an inner life and light, as well as a slight, but unmistakable smile that played around the edges and threatened to become contagious.

  These must be the Standing Dead mentioned by the Geni of Desire, Harry reflected. These must be the ones who made it to the edge of the Big Sea and no further. The yellow, the brown, the black, the red and the white: the five races that were man. These were preserved along with the old house as a reminder that while some things work, others don't. This much he remembered, but as he turned toward the house, there seemed to be much that he was still forgetting.

  There was light coming from the front of the house and through the windows Harry could see many candles burning in the chandelier. He approached the house and climbed the stairs. At the door, he turned, his senses captured momentarily by the strong salt smell of the sea. Beyond the Standing Dead, he could see nothing but the formless whitish mist that contained the ocean, the Great Surround. As he turned into the house, he felt no rush of excitement or great sense of expectation, only curiosity. Harry couldn't recall ever having been in the house before and yet everything it contained seemed supremely familiar. There was the chandelier full of candlelight and the ornately carved wooden table situated directly beneath it, and upon the table, a crystal punch bowl...