Notes & a completed scene seven, Ch.5

        Afternoon. Owen care, chores and errands all morning and into the grocery at thirteen hundred hours. Owen’s on a nap and Carol is play Sudoku. The house is quiet. You are usually your best for focusing on writing when it is library quiet. We need to take advantage of it.

         “Hello, I am Takis, one of the originals. Living or Dead the elements of our environment are useful be it one or two hundred thousand years. I detect you are cat minded is this so?”

         “I Merlyn do indeed have a cat. I must confess I am not Merlyn of old, and I have a cat not so old. She is short haired, an Egyptian, then Roman, then English, then American short hair, she is a natural therapy cat.”

         “I know the Merlyn you speak of as he is in the books. I have met the characters in the books and understand your dilemma.”

        

         “I am sorry. I do not remember the dilemma other than I did not feel comfortable ‘becoming’ a character such as yourself. I have a hard enough time with Merlyn. Amorella writes in my mind and the words run out my fingers.”

         “Just as well they don’t run out anywhere else, especially your tongue.”

         “I assume you will help the two who are coming your way find a way to connect with the other Dead, the foreign Dead as they are likely to say.”

         “You did not call me. Amorella did. Amorella is a ‘cracker-pop’.

         “What is a ‘cracker-pop’?”

        

“A 'spine-tingler', in the best sense of the word. I will help the boys, young Merlyn. But you have to remember we are all intangibles. All for now, young Merlyn.”

That was not expected.

        

What was, orndorff?

Looking up intangible (as a noun) I found this in Merriam-Webster: “something intangible: as A: an asset (as goodwill) that is not corporeal; B: an abstract quality or attribute (as loyalty or creativity).”

I assume Takis is talking about the characters in the book, which is obvious. Not so obvious, he is talking about the Living and the Dead.  I don’t know what he meant by ‘cat-minded’ as I do not imagine myself as a cat.

This is not true, orndorff. Empathy is a modern word for an ancient magical sense. Your cat and you communicate. For instance, less than an hour ago she walked by, tail up where you could stroke it, then she walked to a box with toys in it and looked inside. The sun was shining on the toys and she likes to take a sunbath in the box when the circumstance presence itself. You knew this from prior observation and took the toys out as she watched, walked back to the chair to sit and she was quickly in the box with the sun. Empathy is a key, a pathway to wisdom. Nothing magic about it these days, but it is still true nevertheless. – Amorella.

I don’t see empathy as a key to wisdom.

I don’t care. Post. Later, dude. – Amorella. 

NCIS is over and you are prepared to do some writing. Put some earphones on to block out the television. 

Scene 7

         Ten miles upstream from the bridge construction the Shaman Panagiotakis also sits cross-legged under a tree which is on the wooded edge some two hundred yards west of the River Styx as the other three, Mother, Mario and Aeneas are beginning their conversation in the previous scene.

         Takis, as he likes to be called, has eyes for all of his natural-like surroundings in Elysium. The greatest of human virtues in his moral eyes is Prudence not Justice. He governs and disciplines himself by reason and sometimes Reason with a capital. That is his perspective. Good Judgment and Circumspection surround this sense of Prudence like the great circles of stones surround the great tree at Mother’s. He is the stone and the wood that reflects the reality of wherever he finds himself. He is a chameleon, a Master shape-shifter of mind. Takis was as a ghost when alive. Now Dead for over 170 thousand years, he has a mind that has danced far beyond Merlyn’s and his Druid clans.

         Takis waits in Silence as Patience is another virtue. Waiting is easier when Dead. Besides, Takis has been to the other side of the Styx. Takis knows what others do not. He understands some of what he knows. This is what makes him a dangerous man even among the Dead.

Takis sits drifting over the surface of the River Styx in the distance. He thinks. ‘Vertical this river appears to Mother. A wall. Mother’s elite are constructing a bridge to walk across the Styx when they should be building a ladder for the climbing. When they arrive for my advice I will tell them of the necessity of the ladder.’

Foreign Dead. A strange term. No one is foreign Here just as no foreigners exist among the Living. Consciousness finds its own kettle for cooking. Up, down, left, right – these mean nothing by themselves. Intensity flowers and seeds then flowers again. Corners tackle the mind, corners pointed in or out comes nowhere closer to the truth than the River Styx. Thoughts end in tangles as reason bends into itself. The elements the Dead miss. Take away gravity and grave and where is Life’s purpose? Illusion is more important than the reality that creates it, just as Consciousness is more important than the reality it creates.

When we leave this Place our Elysium will surely fade like childhood, and become another footstep left for heartsoulmind to puddle into.

Unclouded, Takis’s mind lucidly dreamed in symbols as nearly always.

Aa Bb Cc Dd

Ee Ff Gg

Hh Ii Jj Kk

Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp

Qq Rr Ss Tt

Uu Vv

Ww Xx Yy Zz

The storied Letters run to and fro,

Where they land is where I go.

 A Cracker-Pop runs the Intangibles above and I see two young ones, Aeneas and Mario, a-walking this way from Mother’s to discover an untold mystery Here at Elysium, these Elysian Fields, these Islands of the Blessed. Where are the others? This is a question a long time coming. I ran the symbols above through three books and the beginning of a fourth told by Merlyn to one younger. Dimensions are two-fold in a symbolic language that roots Indo-European in reading but the dimensions are greater than four to the approaching mind. Strange they kept the Roman letters, children of the Greek and Egyptian pictograph in formation.

 The Styx, a one way current near the top and an opposite current near its bottom. Modern quantum electrodynamics theory coupled with the slanted and ancient view of these Elysian Fields and another vision may be seen where we Dead view a river, branch reality. What use is such modern physics here as there is no light. We Dead have no eyes but memory. Strangely, few remember this. Fewer still act upon it.

 I am Here because I enter at this place in the six books. I enter in another Here in the beginning of Grandma’s Story in book one. A good place to be from, the Beginning of Expanding Consciousness as seen and felt in a symbolic reasoning that fellow human beings can understand. One’s person is named in such letters as my own. Takis. Even my fourth letter ‘I’ is in such as you the reader as well as Mario. My second letter ‘A’ is the first in this modern alpha-beta. Every T and A and K and I and S is a part of my own human nature and yours too in translation to these books. This is what I will tell young Mario and Aeneas. From this they are on their own. The Dead are on their own Islands as Earth is an island of their once Living and memory.

 Now I wait for questions as they wait for answers. It is not an easy task to deconstruct to something less than a Dead consciousness, but it is possible, and even probable in such a place where even light is a construction of mind alone. Heart is another place altogether. If one desires real physics one begins with the beginning which is soul without it one is not touched.

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