Where Seas and Fables Meet

by B W Powe

  This welcome was relayed. The message said: return – the starry shore, the glittering floor, are yours again. The gates of Eden stand open.

  •

  There were rumours that the opening had come. These rumours were misinterpreted. The possibility that the gates of Eden were open was called Armageddon or The Rapture. These were imminent ends through war or something that might be an extraterrestrial intervention (an ET ex machina). People began to take shifts in weather patterns to be signs. The clairvoyant, and the so-called clairvoyants, prophesied the end: nature would supplant technology, electricity would fuse out and we’d return to a golden state without machines. Movies and books provided catastrophic visions, shivers of dread.

  •

  The gates of Eden had opened. But the flood that came through them had a new shape. It looked like big data. The information battery sometimes seemed to sharpen into the callings of wisdom and the summoning of prophecy. It was hard to know if this was merely a seeming, nothing else. Experts and soothsayers appeared, and it was difficult to know if they were wiser or more gifted with insight than others. Messages crisscrossed. Technologies appeared that amplified and accelerated the messages. Sometimes these were like a calling out to eradicate loneliness: often they

  made loneliness worse. Whatever was happening, it was an overflow – the abundance was a deluge.

  This legend said: the gates of Eden would stay open long enough to allow people to find it, each according to the paths they’d chosen for themselves.

  •

  The realist’s question about the legend was this: where, exactly, are the gates?

  •

  How many of us have arrived at gates and looked into the promise of paradise, and said: no, thank you, I prefer suffering and slavery? How many have said I want to keep working for the Structure that encourages the pleasure of exploitation and the addiction to security?

  Exegetes of the legend suggested that the gates of Eden are a metaphor for our senses. We must taste, touch, hear, smell, and see, in a quintessence, to sense how paradise is around us. Other exegetes said paradise is in the imagination. Still others said the gates are made of streams of love. Others again said the gates are concepts of justice: all must march through so that the distribution of its bounty is fair. Pessimists said, since we live in exile – in cool desperation – it may take longer to get back to paradise: we aren’t ready for it. Still others asked how long do we have before the gates close again?

  •

  Then there’s another legend.

  It’s called the legend of exile.

  In this story it was said that it is alright to cry out, to call up, to chant and sing, to speak out, to refuse to be a doormat, to confess, to murmur and groan, to call out your lover’s name, to look for symbols, to follow the signs that were left by others who’d made their journey through the wilderness and to speak to your companions while you did so, to express a new idea, to act in love. All of this carried the traces of Eden. Open your mouth and a breath will begin to flow through. This is to say, we carry paradise, and we must find its opening in ourselves.

  An opening is a time of extreme vulnerability.

  Who knows what will be said?

  Who knows what will come through the opened passages?

  •

  But what will happen if the gates close again and the moment passes? Could the gates be closed by fear?

  The last legend: the gates of Eden are open and could close; the opening is brief. If they close again, we would have to wait another millennium. The Cherubim would be asked to return with their flaming swords and told to stand guard for centuries to come. Fear would win. And minds would close, and so would our dreams.

  Maybe we are being asked to choose the legend that speaks to us.

  Manifestations

  1.

  No agendas, just awakenings.

  2.

  No prescriptions, just guideposts on the road. You’re following the sparks.

  3.

  You need to rest once in a while to let the new dreams come.

  4.

  Once you’ve been broken, you look around for others who are the same. Do they bear the mark of receptivity, the imprint of the available? Can you detect their wounds? Do they move to protect your wounds, rather than gash them wider? Are they adjusting themselves to midnight and to morning? Can you sense that they are looking for ways to know what our hearts may be saying? Are they nimble in the community of open souls, welcoming many messages, but seeking the universal, the breath that is life’s beat? Once you’ve been broken, you look around and see the breaks in every face, in the desire for communiqués, to send and receive.

  5.

  But let us hope that any transit through the wilderness is temporary. (Please.) I don’t wish to become accustomed to wilderness. We want (I want) to be ready for the sensuality, the richness, the dynamics, and the surprises and joy of the garden. The wilderness is surely a place where we are only passing through on our way forward.

  Transitions

  1.

  Sometimes you find yourself on the other side of an experience before you realize you’ve crossed a bridge. Then you see: you’ve managed to get somewhere.

  2.

  Sometimes you’ve crossed several bridges before you realize you’ve truly crossed just one.

  3.

  The enigmatic quest: the journey of a phantom towards an apparition.

  4.

  The ironic quest: journeying without knowing you’re on a journey, unaware of the questions that have been put to you.

  5.

  The unforeseen is where there’s liberty.

  If the allegory of the soul’s value – if the story that underwrites all stories – the sacral design of you – includes liberty, then does this imply an openness to a pluralism of understandings of that story? Why not an infinity of readings?

  6.

  Rest, peace: the importance of being drained, of being worn down to the bone.

  I’ve been afraid of fatigue. I took it for weakness. Now I see it’s part of the world and its often stampeding babble: a gift. It’s the opposite of demoralization.

  7.

  Peace, rest. These were the last words of the Mystery initiations. They are the om-shantih shantih shantih and amen of prayers. They’re the wish for those who mourn and for those who are preparing to move on, the words uttered on thresholds. Peace is part of the blessing, a word that recurs in every culture. Shalom, the peace which passes understanding, the flag of truce, so it is, so be it... Rest is part of learning how to absorb what’s happened to you.

  Rest is the silence at the end of a piece of music, where even echoes cease.

  Two Truths

  You give a successful talk. You come home late, exhilarated by your words and by their effect on the audience. You open the front door to your home, and you step inside, into the dark. You’d forgotten to leave a light on for your dog. He greets you at the door. You greet him. You immediately step into the diarrhoea that he left on the carpet. You gasp and step back to one side, and step into more. The smell hits you. Your dog looks embarrassed (though still happy to see you).

  You’ve stepped back to earth.

  This is the reality of the realm of Spirit and ideas and the reality of the mundane and the body. There’s no punishment here, nor is there a standard of one against the other.

  They co-exist.

  It’s called the two truths.

  Wilde Things IV

  1.

  “In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes,” Andy Warhol said. In our Facebook future, there’ll be a need to be forgotten for fifteen minutes. Then after: remembered again.

  2.

  An opinion expressed with confident vehemence is still an opinion.

  3.

  Once the cat has driven away the mice, how do you d
rive away the cat? Do you become dependent on the cat? And do the mice simply take up a place somewhere else? Is there a problem with the way this is put?

  4.

  “Literature teaches us to be better citizens...” This is a well-known apology for literary study. (I’ve had to come back to this premise.)

  Contrary thought: it returns me to the uselessness of literature. There is no utility to the study of literature.

  So what does it do?

  It teaches us how to become malcontents of the word, masters of paradox and complexity, miscreants of the alphabetic medium, dissidents, outcasts from nightclubs and parties, exegetes of verbal energies and ambiguities, cranks, heretics, seers of the sentence, rebels of stillness

  (staying still in your room, reading, thinking), quixotic lovers of story-arcs, virtuosi of the slanting light between the letters, experts at multiple perspectives, vagabonds of the mind, seekers of alternative worlds, re-visionaries (adepts at re-seeing), orators on any subject, dandies (connoisseurs of unique verbal styles and pulses) and Dantes (on the pilgrimage towards cathedrals or chapels of your own making). It should teach determination – energy and will of re-creation, extensions of the texts – and inner resolve (bold imagining).

  Through it we learn the eternal physics of the quest, know yourself, and keep moving towards the texts of the world and their evolving language, and the texts of ourselves, the language of the soul.

  It teaches the hardest and simplest lesson: be different.

  5.

  “All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.” – Samuel Butler

  6.

  A hope: “She’s not going to be an outcast. She’s going to be a creative analyst.”

  7.

  Now is our perpetual destination.

  8.

  I can build dreams; I just can’t build a house.

  Identity Theft

  1.

  I’ve been asked:

  Who are you?

  An ignorant man in whom some seeds may have been planted. I pray the seeds may find soil and grow.

  Who am I?

  A vehicle for the possibility of the seeds... But many days I’m just ignorant: how much easier it is to be so, blank. The seeds then of art, philosophy, poetry, beauty, Eros, spiritual energies, communion with you, of wrinkled bed sheets and pee-stained laundry, all the ecstasies of miscommunication...

  2.

  Vulnerability of being, vulnerability of argument: to leave what you say wrecked enough that contrary modes can be posted and posited. This is the value of error and of broken forms – interruptions, cracks.

  3.

  Confusion is a watchword for the new. Those who pursue the inexpressible, the not yet clearly articulated, should be a band of brothers and sisters. “Should be...” because the process underway sometimes seems at once networking and isolating – communal and discrete. Maybe the searchers are wary of being found too easily.

  4.

  What am I now?

  ... A neo-romantic hyper-modernist whose milieu is composed of trees and screens, wind and wires, mythology and media, sentences and sensations, misreading and the natural ESP of the global communicating membrane.... A father of two extraordinary children, a girl and a boy (now young adults) who thrive in spite of me.... A follower of the cracks in pavement... sometimes I look to the horizon studying it for signs.... A lover who wants to be the soul- mate for the great woman in my life.... A listener to vibrations, a teller of tales, always trying to prepare myself for the elusive grace of understanding.

  5.

  ... A North-America transcendentalist whose faith in the power of mind and imagination (my spirit) is rooted, quixotically, paradoxically, in my Canadian soil. I’m a product of the land of snow and short spectacular summers, of red-leafed autumns and sudden bursts of spring, and the codes of technology. The muses both care for geography (where they find you) and do not care for geography. Letters, musical notes, images and script-scenarios live in the imagination, and hence are portable.

  6.

  ... A man striving for heart, in pursuit of the generous vision (the liberal vision gives each of us space; and I know hearts can be broken), with tinges of a spiritual utopian, raised on TV pixel-images and radio voices, and therefore diffuse in my thoughts – thus the fragments, the breaks, the heave

  of ideas, the quick entries, the trial impressions – living on jittery edges of rap and raptures, in the rampant points of insecurity, inside postings by mega-corporations and small neighbourhoods, within visions that are erupting in the cycling and re-cycling of our noosphere consciousness, and “Here Comes Everybody” (HCE), because truly it isn’t me who’s writing this it’s you and that person over there and she and he and they and them and we and you and you and you and you...

  7.

  This is me at my life’s midpoint. (I hope it’s the mid-point. I’d like to have more years to get one thing right).

  I send my solitude through global connectivity over the airwaves, across these pages.

  The Christmas Book

  Kelly found a very old edition of A Christmas Carol by the open-pit fireplace on Sunday morning, after the party by the lake under the clear full moon.

  She brought the book up to the sundeck where the family who’d hosted the party sat quietly, drinking Chilean coffee and contemplating the sun-sparkled lake. The summer party had been lavish, generous with food and drink. The hosts had done this because they were warm people who liked to share their good luck and wealth.

  “Did any of you leave this here?” she asked.

  She held up the book for all to see.

  It looked like a rare first edition from 1843 of Charles Dickens’ novel. The cover was made of faded leather, and its pages had jagged cuts. It was obviously an antique. It had the well-thumbed look of a book that had been passed from person to person.

  No one claimed it.

  “I didn’t see it there last night,” Kelly’s sister said. Her name was Jennie.

  “I didn’t either,” Jennie’s husband said. His name was Max. The others on the deck – Kelly and Jennie’s mother and father, Kelly’s boyfriend Harry – all chimed in: no one saw it during the night when there was candlelight and firelight, moonlight and starlight, enough light for someone to see something unusual.

  “What a strange thing to show up in July,” Max said.

  “I’ve never read it,” Kelly said. “I saw the movie version with Jim Carrey a few years ago. In 3D. I didn’t like it much.”

  “There’s an old black and white version,” her father said. “But I don’t remember who’s in it.”

  “Let me see,” Max said. Kelly handed him the book, and he stared at it and touched it.

  He read out loud the first sentence: Marley was dead, to begin with.

  “I remember what it’s about,” Jennie said. She remembered it because she’d once heard the story read over the car radio by an English actor, over a couple of days, during a Christmas some years ago. She remembered that she’d stopped at the side of the road to listen to its conclusion and avoid collisions when she was so distracted.

  “It’s a story about spirits visiting and an old miser’s change into a good man.”

  “That’s what I remember, too,” Kelly said.

  Max handed the book over to his wife. She touched it, admiring the old pages and the wrinkled leather cover. “How did it survive the damp last night?” Jennie’s mother asked.

  “And the sparks from the fire,” her father said.

  “Well, I stopped reading books a long time ago,” Kelly said. “I don’t think I’ve held one for years. Except for some porno novel I picked up at the airport in Paris once. That sucked.” “If you have to read about it instead of doing it...” Harry snorted and laughed.

  They laughed with hi
m. But their curiosity was strong. Their sense of the strangeness of the moment deepened. How did a battered edition of A Christmas Carol get here? An unexpected thing in July: this is how it seemed to them, while they passed the book around, and they opened pages and each read a line or two. They kept reading it aloud and passing it on so that each of them could take another look at it.

  “It must belong to one of our guests from last night,” Kelly said. “I’ll post it on Facebook that we found it. And see if anyone claims it.”

  “There’s no name on the inside page,” Jennie said. “It’s very weird.”

  They continued to read passages from the novel, each person taking a turn. Max read awkwardly, as if all words on a page were unfamiliar to him. Harry read smoothly, as if he had always felt a need to perform. Kelly read a passage quickly, as if to rush on to another concern. Jennie read a passage slowly, as if she were discovering the rich sound of each word, each sentence becoming a sensation for her. Their mother read in a stop-start way, as if she was still recovering from the shock of finding the volume there. Their father read a passage and another, and then skipped ahead and read on, and flipped pages forward, as if he wanted to know what was coming. They read through morning, and broke for lunch. Jennie made salami sandwiches on slices of rye and opened cold cans of beer. Kelly shaved off pieces of chocolate for dessert.