Where Seas and Fables Meet

by B W Powe

  The girl said: “I don’t know exactly. I just saw a movie recently that was really weird. But I liked it. And the movie’s title made me think of this. So I drew it.”

  “What was the movie called?”

  “The Tree of Life. I didn’t understand it but I painted this tree.”

  “My mom’s a yoga teacher,” Peter said. “And she once taught me how to stand like a tree.”

  “I’ve heard of that. It’s the tree pose. Cool. Anyway. This is what I painted. Do you still practice?”

  “Not much. Maybe I should. I told a story about my mom being hit by a comet when she was trying to stand like a tree.”

  “Wow. That’s a wild one.”

  “I thought it was true.”

  “A bit like this image... I thought it was true.”

  He asked her out for a coffee after classes that day. But she said no thank you, I have a boyfriend.

  Instructors

  1.

  If all else fails, read the signs.

  2.

  If you can’t read the signs, then read the instructions. If you can’t read the instructions, then call up the instructor.

  3.

  The prospect of living each day should concentrate the mind wonderfully.

  4.

  Heart for heart’s sake.

  5.

  In Boris Pasternak’s novel, Dr. Zhivago, Yuri says: “This is the living language of our time...” The poet-physician was describing the wind.

  This means: you may run out of your momentum of words. History may run its course, the imperative exhausted. But the world never runs out – its voices speak –

  Zhivago’s friend Misha says at another point in the novel, when we are born of the heart, “there are no nations, but only persons.”

  This is why Zhivago runs afoul of the Structure’s resurgence in the guise of Leninism.

  “He [Zhivago] understood that he was a pygmy before the monstrous machine of the future. He both feared and

  loved that future and was secretly proud of it, and, as though for the last time, as if saying good-bye, was avidly aware of the trees and clouds and of the people walking in the streets, of the great Russian city struggling through misfortune – and he was ready to sacrifice himself to make things better but was powerless to do anything.”

  The poet-spirit in Zhivago impels him into exile with his wife, Tonya, and his family. Once he becomes Lara’s lover, he reignites lyricism in himself, recalling beauty: he writes poems of Beatrician devotion. The Lara poems are his signature, the symbols his soul left on the track of inexorable history. They’re counters of passionate protest set against the Leninist entity. But when he writes, hungry wolves howl outside his room.

  Elegy

  1.

  You are remembered...

  The most heartfelt words, the words that speak directly to your soul...

  I’m remembered by...

  When you’re closing in on the end of your life, it’s these words that may come to mean more than anything.

  2.

  These haunting words: remember me, I remember you. You may not become wiser, in life’s unfolding, but you may hold out the hope that someone, somewhere, will not forget you.

  Even in the greatest and most accomplished of people there is this longing: to be remembered, even if it’s only by your children.

  3.

  I remember my love, my children, my family, my friends: every day, no matter what ecstasies or tragedies or foolishness or crankiness may occur, I remember your presences in my life, your blessings.

  4.

  Ascent by a rainbow; on the bridge of mists...

  The rainbow in mythic terms: you’re not forgotten by the cosmos. This promise was made: the covenant that you will be remembered, your name imprinted on the scroll of creation.

  A Lantern Mind

  This is a story of a child on my street who reminded me how to see and feel light around me.

  The girl’s name is Kathleen, called Kait. She was five years old when this occurred. She’d always been a friendly and funny child, full of good will and mischief. She loved to talk to dogs and cats.

  One late warm afternoon in October her mother Karen brought Kait home from pre-school in their SUV. I was working in the front yard garden, raking leaves. I did this in part to clear my mind after a frustrating day trying to communicate with my own children, now teenagers. The autumn light was light blue, almost watery.

  I saw the SUV swing up into their driveway. Karen stepped out and ambled around the front of their vehicle to get Kait out of the front seat.

  “I don’t want to get out.” Her voice rang across the street. “Why not?” Her mother sounded exasperated.

  “I want to stay here and watch through the window at the whole world...”

  She had a confidence in her voice that made her sound older than her very young years.

  “Okay.” Her mother was mild. “Suit yourself. I’ll come back in a few minutes.”

  “Okay mom.” She drawled out the sounds of “okay” and “Mom”, making the latter seem like it contained the words “awe” and “om.”

  I went on raking maple leaves. Then Kait’s voice came sailing across the street.

  “Heya.” She called my name.

  I turned to see her looking out the SUV window.

  “Hi Kait.”

  A little later I called back to her: “What’re you looking at?” “Everything.”

  “Everything...?” I replied.

  “Everything.” Her voice brimmed with happiness. “Everything’s so clear and beautiful...”

  Falling leaves threw shadows on the ground while she spoke. The wind had been up for a time. And the shadows kept passing across my path.

  I smiled at her wisdom. In that afternoon, towards early evening, the world did seem lucid, every sound audible. Glancing upwards, I saw that the leaves were soaring birds, darting and vanishing.

  Two Degrees of Separation

  1.

  We greet each other across airwaves, strangers who know the other could be a friend. We’re here and there, and so we’re doubled: this makes it hard to know sometimes if we’re addressing a being which has no substance, a ghost. Yet this recognition is imperative: the images of one another, the voices and impressions, the appearances and masks, the traces and glimmering outlines, are how we’ve come to know one another. They’re the beginning of the greeting. The instruments of communication are pushing us on.

  2.

  There are now only two degrees of separation between us at any given time. The billions in the global theatre who are involved in communication, whether electronic or written or oral or pictorial, experience a form of telepathy. The gap between people is closing. During periods of extreme emotional engagements – say, September 11th 2001 – we face one another with more new intensities, our minds transmitting and reaping the Morse code of intuition and feeling.

  3.

  These communications may be cryptic – stenographic – coming in acronyms, bits, emoticons, blips, abbreviations, breaks, and they may come in forms we don’t grasp yet. But the greeting comes. The call to the soul may come at

  any time. We’re being called; if left unacknowledged, we’ll feel thrown, spun loose, AWOL and agog, as if our souls have run amok, gone missing: if acknowledged, we rise to meet the other, finding ourselves in the communicating process.

  4.

  We greet each other with... what?

  The message that we’re still alive; we’re inspired. It’s this which drew us here.

  This is what drew me to you.

  Untrammelled

  They walked on, talking. Surprise kept them moving forward.

  They felt a glancing touch.

  She sensed pressure on her cheek.

  She said: “Look. Listen.”


  “Where...?” He asked. “To what...?”

  “You heard the sound. Like a pulse,” she said. She turned around. It eluded them. Yet they felt the touch, both at once.

  It was like light hazing your skin on a warm summer night.

  On Breath

  There’s a story to come. We sense it. The old story – the great story that asks, who are you? – is about to change. We have a portion of it: an inkling. Something looms, coming, close to arriving, unfolding, waiting to breathe over us. Or: we’re waiting for the time when we’ll let ourselves breathe in the story we already know. Then that will be the new.

  Lovers

  1.

  Drive your heart over the bones of the deadened.

  2.

  She was always taking deliveries from the abyss.

  3.

  He tried to make sure that they shared an undestroyed heartscape.

  4.

  He remembers the way she kissed him in sunlight and in the dark.

  Her text messages said: “Feel my kisses. I love you so.”

  5.

  She was happy: she’d found her way home. Once there, she knew it was home.

  When he found his way to her, he knew this was home, too, because this is what she knew.

  6.

  The lovers: they see open ground outside their window, over the top of the fences –

  7.

  They didn’t know one another intellectually or verbally. Their bodies knew one another – and would always know.

  They made their way towards one another through touch. It was cellular knowledge of the deepest intimacy. Beyond soul-mates.

  8.

  The lovers learned: at any given point there is more open space then closed space, more blue sky than gray.

  9.

  A rose petal rouses them from their sleep.

  Vibration-Beings

  1.

  Wave-gypsies of the media sea.

  2.

  The vibration-beings sensed it coming.

  The storm was sudden, a great wave. But its form – the tidal wave – was ancient, therefore recurrent. It had happened before, but always in a different appearance. It was returning but not quite in the same shape.

  3.

  There were people who lived on the edge of new perception. They were attuned to the moods of the electronic sphere, changeable like the weather, mercurial in that the sphere also encompassed the weather: a storm could be reported on, analyzed, photographed, replayed, highlighted, scanned, filed and retrieved. The vibration- beings processed media rapidly. They’d extended their senses. They had experienced and studied the sensational ripples of extended electromagnetic fields, the mainlined source. We had transferred over into a new way of living when we hooked up to energy. The vibration-beings were on the vanguard of this sizzling, seething stream.

  4.

  There had been Tsunamis of nature: December 26th 2004, for one: the Malaysian tidal wave that drowned hundreds of thousands.

  There would be Tsunamis of the global soul when the world membrane of the externalized mind (the noosphere) trembled and recoiled from the high stimuli of controversial pressure. The noosphere Tsunamis were called the death of Lady Diana, 9-11 and the falling towers in New York City, the Occupy Wall Street Protests, and the Euro-econo- crashes of 2011 and 2012.

  5.

  (On a factual, historical level, Lady Diana was a slightly narcissistic, likely vacuous fashionista, who had little going on within her – except for a growing heart, a sense that she must help others. On a mythic level, in the speeding media now, she became a dazzlingly androgynous, magnetic symbolic being: the hunted Diana, who on an intuitive emotional level communicated the experience of beauty pursued and beauty denigrated. She became a transcendent creature of the air whose lonely anguish others shared.)

  6.

  The vibration-beings exist in masses. They sense emotional quakes because they strike chords of feeling. They feel we exist in the seas (and clouds) of big data – excited, irradiated, flooded and tided over – and nothing can arrest the rapid passage into the new.

  7.

  They also know that in the unleashing of energy there’s a threat to sensibility. The vibration-beings could experience sensory

  closure, emotional numbing – seduction and addiction to the flux, the emanations that pour out from the big data we’ve constructed to instantly channel the energy into us. Media waves, like mental waters, create Tsunamis.

  8.

  How do the vibration-beings sense what is happening? They do so through tuning.

  The news people call out alerts. The web begins to tremble with viral scenes. Rumour and hearsay ignite text messages. TV and PC images appear with mesmerizing regularity. Radio voices speak and squall. Noise teems. And there’s no silence to be found, except in meditation times, when people try to disconnect from the discharge.

  9.

  The vibration-beings recalled ancient stories. They went back to Ovid.

  It was Ovid – more than Homer or Virgil – who offered a key: the secret of Nature is unbridled metamorphosis (mutability). When people meet with theos, we call the event an encounter with the sacred. Theos “designates something that happens” (Roberto Calasso). When humans meet with sacred energies we sense this is a meeting with the gods, or with God. No one encounters these energies and emerges unchanged, or unscathed.

  10.

  The old stories told us that storms would come. Upsets and quakes: rapid assaults and onslaughts – they would

  always appear.

  “The electronic waves that consume our senses...”

  This was a saying, refashioned from the ancient wisdom.

  11.

  The vibration-beings sensed the storm of the new process called, by some people, globalization (the economic-based reading), and by others, the noosphere (the mind-soul- based reading). In their sensing they knew that at times they would have to withdraw into private spaces of temporary media relief. They would journey to find silent places. They’d rediscover moments in forests, by rivers. They’d have to go deeply in themselves, to receive through the conduits of their cells, funnelling and translating the waves. They’d have to learn how to shape their impatient rages. They would have to train themselves to sleep and rest.

  12.

  Our children are the wave gypsies.

  13.

  They’re on the cusp of epic metamorphoses – in matter, energy, light, spirit, and the global membrane. Their gift: comprehending the whole instantly. Their capability: to be lanterns and spotlights simultaneously. A lantern illuminates a scene from every angle; a spotlight focuses on one detail, highlighting it to the pitch of specialized attention.

  They’re children of cathode light and big data. Too much and yet too little... They’re the children on the streets

  protesting. But they can embrace and shutter themselves, and they’re already ahead of us, immersed in theos, gypsies of the global media, heads in the ether, making their bodies available to tattoos and public demonstrations, time-space travellers and aeronauts of the flesh, nighthawks and late- sleepers, roaming the future that is already apparent and crystalline to them, already their succour.

  14.

  The wave gypsies will in turn have children who will be karma-free (according to a freshly minted legend). They won’t be carrying good or bad karma (so I’ve been told by a person wiser than I am). These babies will be free of their parents’ and grandparents’ psychic debts. They will be starting fresh. I saw an ultra-sound that shows a figure like an angel hovering over a four-month-old foetus. Imagine the possibility: children without karma. The children of the generations after World War Two, after Viet Nam, after the economic crunches, after the terrorism of the end and the beginning of the millennium will be starting clean and clear.

  15.

  Everything fa
r is becoming near.

  More Beginnings

  1.

  The more they know about you, the less you exist. (An aphorism attributed to many sources.)

  2.

  Yet – they say – if you’re not on line – you’re said to be nowhere, nothing.

  Let’s listen to the overtones, read the associations: now here (always present); no thing (a process, being and becoming: the mysterious non-name for the energy, the Spirit, that permeates space, matter, time, physicality, you; Celan’s unspeakable other; the ineffable for Whitman). Nowhere, no-thing. You’re a channel, a locus, a voice, a line or radiance of intensity, an antenna, an eye, an attending ear, a touch, a wave, a glance, a detail, one note (pure and easy).