Going on noon. You have a hair appointment with Mary Ann at noon. Earlier you got the 2005 Honda washed as you are driving it to Westerville to see Bob and Fritz and your Class of 1960. Friday you and Carol are taking it to Cleveland (with the cat) in the morning as Carol wants to go with Kim and Owen to his 18 month doctor’s appointment mid-afternoon.
Yesterday afternoon you and Carol worked on the planning of the Maine and Boston trip with Craig and Alta and you are calling them later today. Afterwards you had an early supper at Chipotle/Panera, the grocery, then you sat back and watched Sunday night’s Masterpiece Theatre. Thursday, you and Bob are planning to see an early showing of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris as it focuses on the American expatriates in Paris in the 1920’s. Time to go, orndorff. – Amorella.
Late afternoon lunch, today at Max and Erma’s in Sharonville, I-275 and SR42. This causes you to think about the times when Kim was four, five, and six that you would take her to the Indian Hill football games on Friday night and stop for White Castle hamburgers at the White Castle (still existing) on Rt42 near the Max and Erma’s. You have a photo. - Amorella.
Post. You can work on the revisions later. – Amorella.
I cannot believe I knew where this photo was, what drawer it was in, in the desk in the basement. Who would have thought?
And, yesterday you couldn’t remember what chapter seven was about. – Amorella.
Life is a constant surprise.
[When first published last night I had included the photo, but I woke up during the night realizing I had not asked for or received permission from Kym S. to show the photo, so I just removed it. I still have the memory of daughter's youth which is what is important.]
An important admission. Correction accepted. - Amorella.
Life is a constant surprise.
[When first published last night I had included the photo, but I woke up during the night realizing I had not asked for or received permission from Kym S. to show the photo, so I just removed it. I still have the memory of daughter's youth which is what is important.]
An important admission. Correction accepted. - Amorella.
Scene 4
Mother smiles slightly as she invited Sophia and Kassandra into her chamber. She asked, “How was the walk up the stony path?”
“Always enjoyable. Just the two of us. The sidewalk of stones is a reminder of how it was being alive – after the rains the water running down the street.”
“Carts and horses and donkeys,” added Kassandra. “And the plastered stone walls. The left wall being twice as high as the right which is taller than most men.”
“I miss the morning shadows along the walk.”
“We all miss the sun,” consoled Mother. “Let’s sit where it is comfortable.” She directed them to the chamber on the right. Six foot tall plastered interior stone walls with a mostly open sky dome above. The far wall sat half circular with the sky dome mostly closed. Beneath within the half dome rested a beautifully sculpted marble tub large enough for two to bathe in comfortably.
“I don’t remember this room,” said Kassandra.
“I move rooms around like I move my mind,” responded Mother rather abruptly. “Please sit.”
Both women sat quietly as their comfort level drained down into formal Greek accented chairs in front of Mother.
Mother noted, “I had an early unexpected meeting with Mario.” She paused, noting the relief on the faces of her two daughters. “He and Thales thought it would be good to have representation when we make our demands to the Supervisor or whoever it is who has control of our shaded destinies.”
Sophia asked, “What does he mean, representation?”
“One from each of our twelve cultures.”
“But we Dead go back further, to you Mother,” replied Sophia.
“Twelve representatives has a good ring to it,” noted Kassandra. “I can understand. How are all the Dead going to show themselves in demonstration?”
“We could line arm in arm this side of the River Styx.”
“Mother, is that possible?”
“Sophia, I do not know what is possible here. We have our ways, we exist socially in relative consolation with our Fate.”
“Not much different than life,” inserted Kassandra.
The three uplifted similar smiles.
Mother spoke, “I will contact Takis.” Mother stood and so did Kassandra and Sophia assuming they were about to be dismissed.
Mother suddenly asked, “Why are you here?”
“Kassandra had an ominous dream about a rebellion on Olympus, she thinks Zeus or Hades is responsible.”
“It was terribly frightening. Full of dread. At first I thought, we Dead are out of balance, then I thought it was the Living. Now I am not so sure. The dread was so strong. Perhaps it is the Fate of the gods themselves.”
“A premonition. I will ask Takis.”
A short while later Kassandra and Sophia found themselves walking alone down the roughly treated street from Mother’s. This setting is built decayed, thought Kassandra. Mother changes her rooms. We are built for change but no one has really seen it here. Permanence does not become us even in Elysium. I cannot imagine anyone desiring permanence, even the gods. “What are you thinking about Sophia?” she asked.
“I am unsure. I wonder on how it will be to win this rebellion and return to Earth to be among the Living. It is a matter of patience. But, once firmly home and walking on the soil we were created from. . . .”
Kassandra stopped to listen more closely.
Sophia continued, “I am not sure of the difference between going back and going forward.”
“Our roots were planted from Mother. We have no choice but to follow her lead.”
Sophia replied, “I think we will have a choice. Mother is the one who, in the long run, may not have one.”
They continued their walk down towards the main thoroughfare, meeting the social drifting of spirits on Eleusis, down passed The Mikroikia and on east to the River Styx.
Scene 5
Mother approached Grandfather Takis on his own turf near the bank of the Styx and found him sitting cross-legged under an old tree staring out across the extensive and meandering river. She watched his eyes glance her way but he did not otherwise move from his seated position. Mother found herself smiling and replicating his sitting position. “Grandfather,” she said child-like. Tell me a story I have not heard before.”
He smiled reflectively causing his ruddy cheeks to rise, his eyelids to narrow. Above the eye gleams his thick bushy dark brows arched almost to the common white turban wrap on top of his head. He turned towards granddaughter and said, “Gloama, I have just the story for you.” With that he moved cat quickly, shifting his position to fully face granddaughter. “This tree we find ourselves sitting under has a story neither of us have ever heard. This is the tree story.”
A flash of unrehearsed memory lit in Mother’s mind.
> Grandfather Takis points to a not so bright star in the night sky and declares, “We are from there,” then he points to the soil beneath their feet, “to here.”
I, Gloama, turn in this same moment and ask, “How can we be here and there at the same time?”
I, Gloama, am the first human being who died and did not die at the same time. Grandfather knows I am reading his thoughts, grinned Gloama in delight.
A Voice: “Gloama. Look at your Grandpa’s eyes as you look deep down into yourself, child. I am Grandma Earth and I was your nature inside and out. The white turban on my head ain’t nothin' but the stars.
The white in Grandma Earth’s eyes reflected in her Grandfather’s eyes showing her Earth’s dark pupils were disappearing inside her Grandfather and herself. Grandma Earth’s Voice asserted, “I got me a chant to take us from a story in the past to a story in the future. I’m the board on which the Shamans dance. <
The flash of unrehearsed thought absorbed a small kernel in Mother’s mind.
Grandfather Panagiotakis’s
“The Styx Bank Tree’s Story”
The anchor, my chorded root, begins unattached in a warm string of thoughtanlight produced, held and managed in a solidified Nourishstance of fertilized EnthusaWill. The circumference beyond my main root is a hollowed black, forever bark without border, a non-binding, a non-circumciseable skin-like anchor extension, if you will.
Roots are deeper than the thought they can produce. Extensions, clusters of a lesser light unseen by conscious bodies without skin or bone. Light unfelt by organically spread dimensions unknown even to Betweeners. Egg whites of light, thinly pancaked by the frost from which the concept of cold is born. Roots eggshell light and on edge thin, stepping stones upon stepping-stones, thin sharp blades of pre-yoked Forms far from the Tree filled with thin-leafed universes, nutshells, if you will where consciousness can shout and hear their echoes in a seemingly individual skull-shell half the size from which nothing springs. A breastfast juggled to a womblike performance – a cornerstone of the First Form. A cornerstone with no height or width or depth, and no hope or faith either.
The axes and the plows came along later. Trimmers and tillers. Awareness brought them on first. I am Here. I am There too. Each arc, each corner came to an understanding that nothing can become unbroken. Root, trunk, limbs, leave are inseparable in tree forming. Understanding allows them to branch out. The Forms grow in the solution of understanding alone. Betweeners are the trimmers and tillers, yet a leaf, a single universe, was yet to bud. No need to go any further than Betweeners and us groves.
Some do though. Shade-seekers who want something for nothing. No shade in this light. Soulless meddlers. Hollowed rolling stones in need of sap for syrupy substance. Bark strippers. Nasty nuts of unconsciousness ready to break wind. This is all there is. Personification, a forest of trees and groves unseen before any period in which ends this story.
Grandfather Takis brought his organics home to roost and asked granddaughter Gloama what she thought the Tree story told her.
“I am the conclusion of a poetic devise. I don’t know what my children are.”
Grandfather responded distinctly, “The children are thunder in a whisper, child.”
Defiant, Gloama said, “And nowhere near the tree or me appears a flash of lightning.”
Takis sensed his mindanheart strewn about by Gloama’s angry words directed solely at him. He found himself without the friction of his soul as a striking board and knew what she did not, his soul had flown unattached to her own. The shaman’s much older soul had its own business to attend to.
Scene 6
Each universe in the form of a serving plate, let’s say, has a similar composition of seventy percent dark energy, twenty-five percent dark matter, and five percent normal matter.
The Supervisor observes spacetime, matter-energy and physics within the seed of what exists in all things great and small in five universes. Matter is to an unimaginable Mind in a soul casing small. Gravity is as the pumping heart and its obliging system radiated circulation, a necessary and thus useful friction that rubs life like a poorly struck match which may end up seemingly as useful as the crumbling, almost chaotic remains of a cigarette it once lit.
The Supervisor is thus as the cover on a cheap pack of matches or, if you will, the lid on the tempest (the matter and matter-less formanfunctional change a-brewing) in a teapot, even when the teapot appears less than the five seemingly larger universal plates that dwell within it.
The five plates rotate as one, transporting a circle in a circle, with the matter-n-mind juggler, the matched Supervisor, tip-toeing a dance on fainting waves of gravity. An ancient Greek concept into the hole in Carroll’s rabbit -- an inside out reversing of imagination to a reality of plain existential circumstance in a secret alphabet with an extra indefinable letter. Something not much different from the humanity jammed into the species Homo sapiens.
Matter, minds and souls all, particle-like falling into time without a past or future and yet pierce the heart of what is outside and in.
Threading the needle. Needling the thread. Rotating crops. Cropping rotations. Mind is not matter. In its conditional, a prepositional verbal rather than a noun.
The circumstance evolves causing the human species to evolve with it. Thus, this is what is seen by the Supervisor, reality is the grammar of observation.
***
Takis sat listening to the nature of the mind at work. From the leaf of a concept being fed from the root. In this case the leaf is the act of being human and being Dead. The main vein of the leaf is the River Styx. The mind runs back through the Styx to the Branch, the Branch to the Limb, Limb to Trunk and Trunk to Root. Growth, thought Takis, is not where the mind has been but where the leaf is expanding.
The leaf takes up space. The mind does not. The Dead want to return to real time. The mind knows it has no need of real time. Imagination is the spring in the feet of hope’s dance. Without our imagination we lose our height. Without our height we lose our dignity. Without our dignity we lose what we brought with us from the Living, our freedom to think. Osmosis needs photosynthesis not rebellion.
Scene 7
Takis blinked twice and focused on granddaughter Gloama, once mother of the future of Earth’s humankind. His left hand reached up to touch the white turban, smiled silently and let his dark eyes do the speaking.
In the moment of quiet, Gloama’s eyes lifted to meet her grandfather’s for a prevailing understanding, a touch, tongue-less of words, is too intimate for either granddaughter or grandfather to admit. What kind of understanding begins as a taste in the mind to be quickly swallowed whole and chewed by heart’s unknowingly sharp teeth, then quickly un-digested, regurgitated from the heart as from a mother robin’s beak slamming down to a recently hatched open-mouthed chick resting in the soul’s nest of what will be. The eyed silence between Gloama and Takis weighed and considered consequences that are unthinkable in the Living.
Two soul’s, one granddaughter’s, one grandfather’s, exchanged and slid down, feathering other’s nest. Each heart had tunneled to each mind and, as its once physical counterpart, developed valves and a beat, a rhythm of circulatory thought. Nothing stood between the two who began dead; who began as little less than air in the first place. Unknowable to either, the pump, the understanding, was already at work.
***
A shift in thought. Another shift in thought. “Grandfather, do you believe the story you told is the Tree’s story?”
“No need to go any further than the Betweeners and the Groves. That is the statement. This Tree is not connected with the Dead.”
“That is a fact?”
“It is clear to me. The illusion of Elysium is that common human consciousness created it. I say the Reality of this Place was created before there were any Living to become Dead, before there was any universe at all.”
“This is supposition on your part, Grandfather. You told the story. I heard your voice, not the Tree’s voice.” Then she muttered, “A dream is not a reality.”
“Being dead is not a dream, child. Why would you think such a thing?”
“You are a reader. You know things. You believe things that you know. We are not the same Grandfather. I do not think like you do.”
“You were here first. I came here knowing you.”
“I died first.”
“You did.”
“I went someplace else. Others, human-like in composure were already there. If the Tree’s story is correct as you say, Elysium was already here. Why didn’t I come here first?”
“I do not know. The story did not acknowledge that.” He paused, “However, it is I who suggested this place was here. I said we were in both places at once. You told me then that the concept changed your life.”
She mellowed. “It did. I believed. . . .”
“There, you see, child. You believed first. Why you were delivered to a stranger’s Place of the Dead I do not know. But you realized the mistake.”
“It was a fact, Grandfather. I was there with other Dead. Their hearts were just like ours.”
“Minds are less than hearts.”
“Your mind sets you to realize the heart was not as common as you first thought.”
Gloama pondered, then she said, “When swelled with passion, in argument or otherwise, I cannot tell heart from soul or mind. How can this be done, Grandfather? How can one tell heart from soul or mind?”
An honest question from childhood, he thought and pondered.
In a more sarcastic and whiny tone than she expected from her mouthless, tongueless self she asked, “Are you going to ask this Tree on the Styx or tell me what you know?”
“You must feel the balance first,” said Grandfather Takis.
“You mean they weigh the same?”
“They weigh the same only when weighing from the soul.”
Mother, the granddaughter, recollected her own thoughts on the subject. “I would think the three are of the same dimensions and tiny ones at that. We think of heartansoulanmind as three-in-one, a trinity, that together makes up our greater sense of self.”
“Then you think of such as a body, a solid, which none of us are,” suggested Takis. “Heart and lungs and liver made up our body, but the only bodies here are memory. Three-in-one? Is this stackable like pieces of bread?” He continued, “Our word begins with the heart, the soul, then the mind. The soul is the center for balance no matter what contains the heart and mind, all three have open doors one into the other.”
Mother replied, “The entrance to the soul is the fulcrum to balance the entrance of the heart and mind.”
Weighty browed, Takis noted, “More for you to know in this as the rebellion unfolds.”
***
You have three more scenes to complete tomorrow, before you head to Westerville on Thursday. Once these are updated to present we will begin work on chapter eight. All for tonight, boy. Post. – Amorella.
I am sure this chapter needs more clarity.
Once chapter eight is completed we can revise chapter seven once again. One more chapter should add the clarity you feel you need.
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