Morning. Up, did some chores, and you have been thinking about the concept in your mind when you woke up. “The Merlyn’s Mind series is a story of Grace and Redemption which takes place unknown to all the characters including the Supervisor.” Now, time for breakfast and the paper. – Amorella.
During after breakfast chores I wondered if it is not arrogant upon blasphemous to use God’s promise to Abraham (and Sarah) in a six book fiction.
You need reminded that you did not write the promise down it is found an ancient biblical text. Here it is in translation. . . .
I am having trouble finding a translation online without commentaries attached. . . .
That, in itself, should tell you something. – Amorella.
I cannot find the passage as I remember reading it originally for “Pouch Text”, Chapter Eleven, Braided Dreams.
The book’s subtle suggestion to the Promise does no harm. The series is about your hope that God will fulfill the Promise for a better world, and as your hope is not so deep to see a real possibility, you make one up for yourself in a fiction instead. That appears allowable from my perspective. - Amorella.
Being an agnostic and a cynic I cannot imagine why I would have any hope for humankind at all.
Such is the irony and the humor in your (legally) writing any of the books in the first place. Post. – Amorella.
While in the tub late morning Merlyn showed up in your head and said to look to the rising full moon tonight if the sky and clouds are right. You chuckle because a day or two ago you had a note from NASA about the full moonrise tonight, and hoping for good weather, are looking forward to it.
It is good to know Merlyn is still around though. Sometimes my characters do talk to me, silently of course, but I catch their drift. Carol just mentioned on going for a walk, as it is a very sunny and pleasant March day so far. I suppose that will happen. I was invigorated enough to use my weights this morning. That is a rarity in itself. I do have some yard chores to do and I’m sure we have a couple of errands to run. Seems like I’m forgetting something, although I would hope my thank you for the unusual blueprint to the books’ conclusion I would have never thought to go so far – it takes a certain amount of audacity to come up with such a thread for the main theme of the series.
Audacity. 1a. intrepid boldness; b: bold or arrogant disregard of normal restraints. (Merriam-Webster) – Synonym: Temerity: 1. unreasonable or foolhardy contempt of danger.
I’ve been here before. When you think, the only way out is to continue to think, at least as far as writing is concerned. I always stressed the importance of thinking to my former students so it is time for me to practice what I preached. I trust you and myself, Amorella, to work through these books one way or another. It would be nice to leave this planet hopeful rather than the cynical and crotchety old geezer I see in the mirror most every day. Merlyn is right, it is better to look into the reflected light and admire than into the sun and be blinded.
Post. – Amorella.
Sitting at Natorp’s Nursery while Carol looks for bluebells. You have it in your head to send your original group of readers plus Doug as he is helping you with this book, a copy of the last few days of the blog to let them know you now have a central theme. It is a polite response that is needed and I will help you with it. You are stopping for a walk in nearby Rose Hill Cemetery first; at least that is the plan presently. No luck at Natorp’s so you swung over to Lowe’s to check out their garden store for wire protectors to place over plants mainly eaten by rabbits and groundhogs.
We had lunch at Longhorn’s and our favorite server, Jennifer, was there. We have excellent meals every time. Rather expensive, but like Outback, worth it once in a
while. Good food is a weakness, most always has been.
You had your walk and are now at McD’s near King’s Island Amusement Park watching traffic, Carol has an ice vanilla coffee and you a diet Coke.
Home and it’s almost eighteen hundred hours. High clouds in part. Hope it is okay for the moonrise. Carol is out working in the yard. I’m content to be at my MBA in the living room. She said she would get a new car in two years, which is fine with me. At one time I would have enjoyed a new one, a 2012 model and told her so, but I don’t really care about buying a new one anymore. In 1965 I had a new dark green VW Beetle with light leatherette interior, an AM/FM radio and a rear speaker as well as pop out back windows and a moonroof. My first new car and I bought what I wanted. My second favorite car was a red1985 VW GTI with all the fancy trimmings and a moonroof; a pocket rocket is what they called it in those days. Our next car will be a good car; I’m sure, with four doors, perhaps a hybrid, probably a Honda Accord EX like we have two of now. It is not difficult to imagine. The 2014 model will probably be little different from the 2012 model, except newer. I loved that green Beetle and red GTI, I had my run as far as cars I really desired and actually bought and paid for. I’m not chasing forty as far as cars go. Now, my new MacBook Air, that takes the place of cars. Again, I bought what I really desired and paid for it. What could be better?
The nightly news may be coming up soon. Post. Later, dude. – Amorella.
Dusk. You and Carol are at the park near the outdoor pool waiting patiently until dark. You brought binoculars and the camera knowing full well the optical effect is not discerned by the camera mechanics. Hazy clouds so you should be witness. You are reminded of Merlyn’s Epilogue in Merlyn’s Mind and how the eclipse of the moon played a part. Here is that Epilogue from book three.
First, Amorella, wouldn’t it be better to shorten this? This doesn’t really have that much to do with the moon rather than it was written under its shining.
It was important for Merlyn’s character to witness the event. His character wants to witness tonight’s moon event. As a further introduction to Merlyn’s character for the readers of the blog, they may read Merlyn’s words if they wish. Why not? You don’t really care because you have already read and forgotten most of it. If the reader chooses not to read, fine, but to not allow the reader the freedom to do so, quakes among your basic principles as a character yourself. For those interested here it is. – Amorella.
The Merlyn’s Mind Epilogue (Conclusion of Bk. 3)
The design of these six works was deliberately held secret from the writer for good reason. For one he is not an author in the traditional sense. He is a lover of words first because he sees words as small living entities. When he was quite young he had quite an imagination and one of the uses of it was playing with his parents’ Underwood typewriter, 1940’s vintage. The big letters were the parents and the small letters were the children. He wasn’t old enough to read or write, nor did he need to be. The typewriter was a fun toy for a small boy during World War II. A second early example of his imaginary life was the development of friends he could converse silently with. One was the Aunt Jemima logo on a pancake box. They had quite a few private conversations.
His paternal grandparents lived across the street from the Otterbein College Cemetery in Westerville, Ohio and he used to play among those headstones. He realized people were buried under the headstones so he would talk to them. None ever replied though. He understood early on that the Dead were a quiet lot, and he didn’t want to be disrespectful so he would talk to them silently. He was a very polite and mannerly boy and told the Dead how it was for the Living. The sky was blue and partly cloudy. It is spring and the flowers are growing as is the grass and the leaves are coming on the trees, that kind of thing. He was a quiet boy who found the world rather noisy, that is, most people he encountered talked all the time but he rarely understood what they were actually saying. Early on he understood that people don’t always say what they mean so he spent his time attempting to translate what was actually said into what was actually meant. This was and still is a primary interest.
As you have probably read, he grew up following the dictates of the Boy Scouts and he tried to always be prepared but it was difficult when he did not know what he was to be prepared for outside of emergencies. He delivered newspapers in a suburb between Westerville and Columbus called Minerva Park. In those days, outside of school, he was an explorer as many children are. The lakes and wooded areas of Minerva Park and Alum Creek and the woods around Otterbein Cemetery were as the far reaches of the world, mostly the ruins of ancient Greece and the jungles of the Amazon basin. Another fun place of exploration was the Westerville Public Library. The pre-adolescent boy loved ancient artifacts and ancient civilizations whether they were legend or real it made no difference. The adolescent boy fell in love with science fiction. One of the first books he read was I Robot by Isaac Asimov and short stories by Arthur C. Clark. He was hooked on UFO’s and ancient mysteries both at once. He also liked Mark Twain and Robert Lewis Stevenson adventures. Words were a cheap and fun way to escape the world he lived in. Early television was entertainment. The movie theatres showed the national and world news and adventure stories of all kinds. Words were the medium that moved his mind to thought and sometimes action.
His early college years and his twenties did not detour his imagination and they heightened his reasoning abilities. He focused on poetry and short descriptive pieces of his everyday life. He and his friends enjoyed European art films as they were called in those days. Fellini and Bergman come to mind. Literature became a love affair. In his late twenties he taught grammar and literature and he became the English chair at Escola Graduada, the Graded School of Sao Paulo, Brazil. His wife taught at the elementary school on the same grounds. They traveled Latin America during their time in Brazil. Once again in the United States this writer continued to teach British Literature, World Literature, Science-Fiction/Futures Studies, Mythology and Expository Writing. He also was the chess advisor for a time at his last two schools. He taught words with passion for thirty-five years and retired five years ago this year, 2008. He loved his students, but he loved the silent word more. What is more important here is that he arrived in his sixties with his reason and childhood imagination still intact.
Reason and imagination is what this Merlyn is. Reason and imagination are two things you take with you when you die. What use for a Heaven or Hell without them? Both are mixed with memories you take with you too. Do the Living want to be transformed into something other than their human selves when they die? Why? Is it not good enough to be human? These dream-books are no different than the mind who once lived. These dream-books, studied as well as read, show this. The imperfections show. Call them my imperfections if you will and work your way past them or through them as if I were the unseen spirit I am. You want to witness a spirit world, witness mine through the writer.
These first three books have been deceptive in the sense they are as one book in three bindings, but it does not take a classical Caesar to conquer them. Strangely the writer cannot imagine himself writing these books, but here they are. He cannot imagine writing the next three either, but they are in his head waiting to make themselves known to his fingertips so that he might read them for the first time himself. Some might think this is fiction but it is not, and it is funnier than it is mysterious. What is interesting to me is that this is how many of the Dead feel upon arriving at the Other Side as it were, funny. Being Dead might first appear a fiction, but here you are anyway. Surprise. What did you bring with you from the Living? Reason, Imagination, Memories, and Memories of Life Experiences. Human Reason is always first. Human Imagination always second. It is a preordained rule of sorts. Friends Memories require thought and introspection and sometimes discussion with friends who have similar shared memories. are needed to separate the imagination from the shared reality. Without your friends you cannot collaborate your existence. Your friends have to be completely trustworthy and they have to trust you as well. Just like with the Living, you work with what you have. The problem is that you don’t have much. Now, if you see the humor in the situation you find yourself enlightened, just as I once was. The Dead are basically a friendly lot. They have little choice. Sometimes though, one needs time for introspection. At least you have your mind, you might as well use it.
This is how the Place of the Dead exists in these books. You may remember Erwin Schrödinger’s thought experiment concerning the cat that was alive and dead both at once. He said that in theory no one would know if the sealed cat was living or dead if it depended on the state of a subatomic particle inside the closed box. Put the remains of a recently deceased human being inside a sealed box and you assume sheorhe remains dead. You do not know however if the human mind that belonged to the body is sealed in the box also. You don’t even know if it is sealed in your body when you are alive. And, some people, those who are out of their minds, are alive anyway. The mind is as the cat sealed in the Schrödinger box, it all depends on its own existential state of existence.
Panpsychism is a philosophical theory, an experiment in thought in its own right. For my purposes it states that consciousness is needed to exert personal will. The will in this case is the individual human mind’s will to continue to exist after the physical death of the individual. With this consciousness are feelings, emotions, and memories as well as imagination and reason. The freed from the body mind remains a reality within itself and its surroundings just as the mind in a living human body. The only way it can reasonably determine it still exists is that if another human mind recognizes it in its newly freed from the body condition and circumstance.
If you were the only human being alive, how would you prove your own existence? You see, there is no real difference in the thinking whether you are alive or dead. As it appears as natural to be dead as it does alive, then this is a natural circumstance. God is not denied. God may indeed exist, perhaps more likely to exist under such circumstance. This some people would find positive and uplifting in itself. The observation of another mind that recognizes your own is a very positive experience. It stimulates the human spirit. This is true in life and it is true in death. Being dead in these books is a truly existential existence.
In twenty-first century terms I like to think of the human mind existing in a quantum mechanical soul-like apparatus if you will. Does a dead human mind make a difference in the world of living human minds? According to Chaos Theory it may, because first, you don’t know if the mind is living or dead to begin with. The illusion or imagination may be enough. And, like the butterfly effect, it makes no difference how small the mind may be, it will indeed, if it appears real enough, make a difference.
The human spirit is in your Present and it exists beyond time and space. Every time a person asks a sincere and legitimately thought out question, the human spirit shows itself. The writer asked a few questions once, and I was the response to one of them. When you have an answer without remembering what the exact question is, it is necessary to dig the question out. Orndorff is writing the books because he is attempting to discover that exact question that caused me to be here. That is his objective, his goal. He will write until he can no longer physically or mentally do so. He is not an author, he is a writer, he is presently my writer, and I am the Merlyn who was once a Scotsman who lived in the sixth century. He is my writer because his mind and fingers can reason my personal dreams into twenty-first century words and concepts.
What does the reader gain from all these words? A perspective of the world/universe in which you live that you may not otherwise have. The perspective is drawn from the twisted twins of higher human thought: reason and imagination.
What perspective is drawn from the writer’s some sixty-five plus years of human experience? Subtle humor is the highest level of human thought in these books because it is the highest level of thinking of the writer, and it is the one human condition most necessary for the continued satire on a dreamed human existence.
The reader should realize old Merlyn is limited to work within the framework of this writer’s intuitive and anomalous mind. What I send to his fingertips has to run through his open mind first. Parts of my dreams may become lost in translation from the page to the reader. However, if the reader has the mind and energy sheorhe will come to an understanding about human beings that above all, retains a sense of humor. Without understanding the usually understated humor the reader will have to wait patiently, sometimes for decades, to pick up a wry chuckle here and there among the marginal hallways. As for the writer, he would rather write than breathe, and as such, he already has a more than a whiff of the scent of understanding in much of the flavored humor.
Merlyn, the Bard,
Written Under A Full Moon
The Night of a Full Eclipse
20 February 2008,
Local Time: 1920 Hours
Earth
** **
You are home sitting in the car waiting in the driveway for the moonrise as Carol grew tired of sitting in the public park where there were no streetlights. You returned to the park but because of the hazy clouds disappointment descended. It was large but you have seen it larger as well as brighter. This morning Carol got you up to see the moon begin to sink in the western sky, it was very bright indeed, like a car headlight on bright. Moving on twenty-one hundred hours. Time to shut down and give the computer a rest. Post. – Amorella.
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