Notes & Scene 14, Ch.5

         What a better day for Merlyn’s ‘pledge’ than Summer Solstice. Most awesome.

         Thought you would like that. – Amorella. First, though, breakfast is coming up then at eleven or so you and Carol are taking Mary Lou to the airport. I’ll make the pledge subtle enough for your present thinking.

         I am beginning to understand the duel purpose of this baptism.

         More than duel, orndorff, but you are ‘seeing’ a little further. Far enough for the gesture/jester. I was once less polite with you, but only the slightest whisper will do for those who listen. Everyone pays the piper one way or another.

         The solstice amidst the framework of a cathedral, my muse no less. Certainly a thought by old Merlyn himself.

         Later, dude. Post. – Amorella.

         You finished the scene before bed. Needs work but let it fester while you convert and clean up chapter five into audio. You’ve got the gist of it here.

Scene 14, first full draft

         An earthly mental framework formed without Merlyn’s conscious knowledge, the inward vision of the fourteenth century cathedral at Canterbury in southeast England’s district of Kent. In life, in the sixth century, this Scottish bard, Merlyn the Druid, had once tread the local grounds of St. Martin of Tours, the oldest church in England still in use today, in hopes of speaking to the then pagan Kentish King Ethelbert and his Queen, Bertha, the Christian daughter of Charibert I, King of Paris. Merlyn had surprisingly reflected upon his arrival at the church to meet Ethelbert that ‘this St. Martin’s is hallowed ground, but it is not Druidic hallowed ground.’

         Merlyn’s unconscious mind, trained in the Classical and Druidic way via Greek and Latin, worked its magical frame and stone. The earthly minded ecclesiastical nest-work settled into a mélange of added understanding – a crucible of powdered red earth, fire heated and slowly stirred in a beaker of the waters from the mighty Styx.

         Merlyn dipped this sacred mixture into the nave and quire of his now cathedral-like mind. The unconsciousness and consciousness of dreams wafted about leaving the characters of the first three books therein high and dry, standing or milling about in the great nave, baptized, as it were from duty rendered and listening to the echoes of their dialogues running along and up and down the walls of the quire. Ghosts of page filled dreams stuck within the cathedral that rose transformed from the voice of Grandmother Earth in a Medieval choral duet with an unknowable Voice only recently capitalized for the moment at hand.

         The great Board and the Cathedral became one. Each stone block of esoteric architecture cemented in a fiery mix of reason in imagination and imagination in reason. The great Tower Bell rang once. Only those with an inner eye and inner ear saw and heard the explosion that flashed within its own light and reverberated within its own sound. Merlyn saw and heard nothing but the characters of the dreams stood as still as the walls and embedded in the heart of one conscious reader in ten thousand. The rest, the emotional fire buried in the vaults of dead human and dead marsupial unconsciousness waiting for the unknowable echo of the great Tower Bell.

         My pupils, thought Merlyn, the dark lettered lines running the living white of my eyes. Pages bound into books to leak out our knighted Dead on squares of light and dark. And from within and beyond a secret hope squeaked from his unvoiced soul, it whispered to Merlyn alone, “What is once done cannot be undone.”


         Merlyn unconsciously responded, 'Learning I have done, and learning more I'll do.'

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