Fox Territory

This is Amorella in the orndorff north front side yard observing a wily fox about to mark his roaming territory. The photo had to be tweaked a bit with iPhoto and then with Adobe Photoshop Elements Six to brighten the shaded area. The photo was taken a year ago last summer. I chose it for two reasons. One, it is a reminder of how close the untamed is to the civilized; and two, the setting shows human inhabitants redesigned the natural elements.

The driveway belongs to the neighbor to the north while most of the grass shown is on the orndorff property. Stones were marched around the tree which as a sibling grew on the edge of a cornfield. There are two large Ash trees on either side of the prickly male Osage Orange. The honeysuckle bushes were also in place. The land begins to dip down about twenty feet or so to Muddy Creek which is on the other side of the driveway. Forty yards of woods down work their way down to the water.

The wily, live-dangerously fox is therefore sniffing on the edge of civilization, as it were, before he marks the outer edge of his rawer more limited wild territory along the narrow unlevel bottom land of Mason, Ohio’s north-flowing Muddy Creek.

In an opposite scenario, a human being, the self-conscious orndorff in this case, is looking down into the woods of the unconscious mind wondering what the unseen bottomlands of such a place might unfold to look like. The writing of the first three books is as the fox marking his mentally conscious territory. The book bindings are as a kind of invisible fence he cannot see past.

My writing a passage such as this adds to a level of personal anxiety that he can feel but the reader cannot. This is the way it may be if the reader looks deeper into that mirror the eyes appear to reflect. You have to find nearly invisible markers within and encompass them for navigation deeper into the forest, as the fox does in coming up from the forest into these ‘yarded organized designs of nature’ that he cannot distinguish from the wild except perhaps for the nearby human scent which ought to make any clever little fox take caution.

You see, at times (almost instinctively), I am perceived by orndorff as an uncommon, unknown-scented presence. Thus, the ‘caution’ flag is raised when I point further into the woods of human literary unconsciousness for which he appears to have no natural GPS to give him guidance.

This is the edge that Dante began from and he used Virgil (Reason) and Beatrice (Angelic-like love) to help him climb down into the very Classical and Medieval descriptions of the Inferno and eventually up into Purgatory and then up once again into and through the Rose of Paradise.

The theatre of books four, five and six will take place in the common center stage of the first ten thousand Dead at about the time of Homer. It is interesting that Homer supposedly lived in the eighth century BC at about the same time period that the Greek alphabet was created.

Scholars can spend lifetimes debating these things but the story has to have some actual historical time in terms of the now Living. Ten thousand human heartansouls in rebellion is a rather poetic number like Helen of Troy having launching a thousand ships.

Milton used the Biblical story of Adam and Eve in Genesis as a part of the rebellious setting of his metaphysics which would have easily captured the imaginations of the English readers of the time period. I am sticking with the Rebellion of the Dead during eighth century BC before Virgil, Dante, and Milton.

Okay, Amorella, but I am no Virgil, Dante, or Milton. I make no claims that direction. You are putting the rather rotund old guy in a foot race with Olympic winners here. Good grief, my fingertips are cooling down right before my eyes. I don’t mind a challenge, but let’s don’t go overboard.

Who else writes on metaphysics as well as the above three?

No one as far as I know though I am not very knowledgeable on the subject. I had logic in a philosophy course in grad school, that’s it, and I only earned a B in the class. The focus of my class presentation was on The Milesians: Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes. I don’t remember what my paper was on. I realized in that class that I wasn’t ‘philosopher’ material. I am an esoteric thinker but these people were quite scholarly and esoteric, they went overboard on minute details that I didn’t find all that interesting. I enjoyed the Milesians because they were scientific thinkers first, at least in my mind they were. They came to wrong but (at that time) valid conclusions on their observations on how parts of the world system worked.

I will construct a simple metaphysical system based on what you already have in books one, two and three. That is, the system will coincide with what is in the Merlyn books.

Amorella, I can’t remember what is in those books in terms of metaphysics. There were so many words and concepts, many of them from the alien marsupials. It is too much material. I can’t even remember writing most of it, even as keyboarding. It was like a three year dream.

We will assume the marsupial aliens are a separate region of HeavenOrHellBothOrNeither but that the two are connected. I want the Place of the Conscious Dead to be greater than just a human centered place.

That’s fine with me, Amorella. I think it was inferred somewhere in the story anyway.

It is better (in the books' presentation) if the reader becomes conscious of the concept of a Place of the Dead that is bigger than herorhis own species. Like you say, too much self-centeredness. 


I have no problem with that. I am assuming here that the reader will not have to have read the first three books.


This is a correct assumption, orndorff. We are starting fresh, where all this began.