You were thinking about John Newton and his hymn’s famous words:
“Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind but now I see.”
I was curious and checked Wikipedia and found why Newton, who was English, had a connection with the Scots, as one usually hears bagpipe versions of the song at military funeral ceremonies.
** **
Common meter hymns were interchangeable with a variety of tunes; more than twenty musical settings of "Amazing Grace" circulated with varying popularity until 1835 when William Walker assigned Newton's words to a traditional song named "New Britain", which was itself an amalgamation of two melodies ("Gallaher" and "St. Mary") first published in the Columbian Harmony by Charles H. Spilman and Benjamin Shaw (Cincinnati, 1829). Spilman and Shaw, both students at Kentucky's Centre College, compiled their tunebook both for public worship and revivals, to satisfy "the wants of the Church in her triumphal march." Most of the tunes had been previously published, but "Gallaher" and "St. Mary" had not. As neither tune is attributed, and both show elements of oral transmission, scholars can only speculate on the tune's origins. These guesses include a Scottish folk ballad as many of the new residents of Kentucky and Tennessee were immigrants from Scotland, or folk songs developed in Virginia, or South Carolina, William Walker's home state.
Selected from “Amazing Grace” – Wikipedia
** **
You used to use the PBS “Amazing Grace with Bill Moyers” in class when time would permit. The intent was secular and historic as William Wilberforce and others abolished slavery in Great Britain and the PBS show added the elements of Johnny Cash, Judy Collins, Jeremy Irons, Jessye Norman, Jean Richie, Marion Williams as well as the Shape Note Singers. All are important in your ‘folk music’ traditions from the Isles to Appalachian America.
I thought the Moyers program wonderful in its diversity and it was a good break from book literature. I tried to use works such as this from time to time to broaden students’ minds. In some ways, I made the class about ten percent humanities. It felt right to do so, so I did. Students, even the brightest ones, usually don’t know as much as they think they do. My diversions helped set that thinking straight. Besides, one segment focused on an older fellow who talked about his family tradition with the music and he mentioned to Bill Moyers that his father had been a slave. Later, it would give me an opportunity to talk about the old neighbor of my grandparents, Mr. Press Reynolds, in Westerville who had been born a slave and that I had met him when I was five. Students were surprised to see I was old enough to have met a man who had been a slave. They learned something not in the books that day, but learning it was.
Post, boy, while you still have some of that life still in you. – Amorella.
Later in the afternoon. You are home from a late lunch at Cracker Barrel – Carol had the trout and you had the special, a favorite, chicken pot pie.
That’s because Grandma Orndorff used to make foods similar to Cracker Barrel recipes. Both grandmothers cooked up good ‘country food,’ as both had been farm girls or at least had been within an arm’s reach of farm cooking. The focus earlier was on which motel to stay at and what are we going to do and see while in Boston. We talked to Craig and Alta and pretty much have it down except for making reservations for the motel and the about seven hour Boston Tour which picks you up and drops you off at the motel – no in town traffic for us, if we can help it. Time to work off the remaining scenes.
** **
Scene 8
This is the Supervisor. Nearby, in Elysium, along the River Styx, the old Greek seer, Tiresias, from the days before Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, will stumble into a vision and a singular occurrence not hitherto anticipated. Before this, however, he will greet our Merlyn, also a seer, though not quite so old. This kicks their intuitions up a notch as happenstance is not always what it seems. Upon their greeting, Merlyn senses The Chessboard beneath his naked feet while Tiresias’ fingers quiver slightly as he holds his ancient-looking walking stick. Merlyn immediately recognizes Tiresias as a helpful source, which raises Tiresias’s incredulous nature.
“The white of your eyes is paper and not of the Dead, Merlyn,” suggested Tiresias matter-of-factly. “I know you Merlyn, and I know you have a task but I see no need to be drawn closer to the Board under your feet than I already am.”
“You are a good one to talk, Tiresias, with skull bone showing from front to back. Drop that toga white dressing and show yourself whole. You are greater here, than I, even with conformation.”
Tiresias turned to the right and pointed at the Styx and said, “I stay along the River’s edge where I am most comfortable. The Living call for me still based on the early days.”
“I came calling for you here, Tiresias. You do not have to come to me. Paper, I am, in part, a long stretch from this place. Our rebellion will take place in the spirit with or without you. Only you can add your heart in the process.”
“Unlike you, I have no heart to hide, Merlyn,” said Tiresias, and he pulled off his toga-like garment leaving only folds of a loincloth wrapped about him. “Who am I to meet that I must show my heart?”
Merlyn watched in awe to see the skeletal bones shimmering within a loosely shaded sack of body. He replied succinctly, “Panagiotakis.”
Tiresias right arm raised his walking stick as if to playfully joust. He laughed, “I need no use of heart to see He-Who-Is-First.” Then he added, “Why does Takis send you when he can meet with me at his leisure?”
Merlyn gestured with downward arms and open palms, otherwise, saying nothing.
Tiresias envisioned Merlyn’s body language vertical and four-cornered flat. Merlyn’s marginal eyes rolled from left to right and down in horizontal trails of semi-decipherable symbols. The last word on the page, though foreign, was understandable through heartansoulanmind within Tiresias’s Hebrew pronunciation as he responded, “Ye-che-z-kel” to Merlyn.
Merlyn put himself in order though he appeared as he had been, unchanged. A polite thank-you-for-your-services was mutually understood and accepted. Merlyn became as air. Tiresias turned round, put on his dressings, and continued lumbering along in clay-like feet, and with walking stick in clay-like hand, in the direction of the path up and along twenty foot high rocky cliff besides the wide-river Styx.
Tiresias, now alone, glanced down the rocky cliff to his left, he hadn’t taken but a step forward when he detected a sudden slight shift of cool wind coming from a rugged but nearly vertical crevice two arms lengths long and one arm length wide. The Styx rolled on another fifteen feet below the crevice. Unlike the river, the cave smelled freshly created. A rush of air hissed out of the hole. He stopped, turned, and carefully climbed down five feet from the path. Curious, Tiresias stuck his face inside as a thought occurred that he was being re-birthed within an emptiness surrounding cleaned gray granite. He continued sniffing for a whiff of the fresh air that lingered upon his arrival at the small rocky cave.
Intuitively and childlike Tiresias, thinking ‘rejoice’ in ancient Greek, uttered, “Khai-reh,” He waited but there was no voiced response. Tiresias sensed the remanet, a flitting of soul on his mind, the flat rippling shadow of a living human soul as he edged further into the small cave.
Tiresias muttered, “As a fish out of water, one can nose the Living out.” He thought, this must be Merlyn’s doing. A challenge of resources is what he needs. Takis will need them too. Do we dance to Ezekiel or does Ezekiel dance to us? Back up the rocks am I in mind and heart, and onward I. Heart or soul, I will not know which leads as neither were made from this place, Elysium.
Once down the path to the Styx’s edge Tiresias stepped in to feel the comfort of the water running through his toes. Soul to heart and heart to mind. That is my reckoning thought as his own darkness turned inward and made his shade translucent. Giving up the mind to that which is much older is as undressing the heart and burning its clothes. What is more ancient that a soul of humankind? The soul – the engine of all that becomes light. Reason’s eternal birthplace; or so Tiresias thinks and settles on – Reason’s birthplace.
***
Zeus catches a glimpse and gains a small smile. What is this? Tiresias at Olympus? Called by whom?
A vision, responded older brother, Hades. “I raise Tiresias up to the apex of our spiritual mountain. I run the Dead brother or the Dead run me.”
“What do you mean?”
“The mighty Zeus asks me a question.”
“They are, the earthly Dead, gathering at the River and do not know it yet.”
“We cannot change our clothes,” muttered Zeus.
“Then we will dance naked, Zeus, unless you can contain them.”
“Bloodless thought,” grumbled Zeus. “A rebellion.”
“Diversion,” whispered the nearby Athena. Both gods listened.
Scene 9
Ezekiel sat contentedly in a lone stretch of meadow surrounded by forearm tall pink and yellow flowers with velvety leaves. Nothing foremost lit on his present winged mindedness. Friends and family but no angels appear. I am exacerbated by the lack of angels. I am here, as surely they are. The presence of one would be a confirmation of God in his Heaven.
A gentle breeze uplifted and stirred the colorful petals brightening to a slight westerly bent and he glanced upward to gaze the blue between the puffy white clouds. Why is there no sun? A moon appears in a starry sky by weekly schedules, but the effervescent light of day casts no shadows. His familiar inner voice whispered, “A sun may be mistaken for an Angel.” This caused Ezekiel to again think how an Angel might appear without his sense of earthly induced visions. Death cleaned my mind of torments and shadows, it is as filtered as spring water. How better to see and reflect on Michael, Gabriel or Raphael. Michael’s torch would be our Hebrew sun that is plain enough without a vision. Perhaps Michael cannot be seen without the sword of Gabriel gleaming. He returned his eyes across the flowers wonderful. This fair meadowland is a therapeutic presence for me. I may be resting on the healing breast of Raphael and not know it. Not to know is a joy unto itself and makes me, at times, as free as the surrounding and passing air I, now being dead, do not breathe.
***
Takis smiled broadly between his scopious white mustache and four to five inch long and thick white beard. He wore at wrapped cloth of coarse cotton about his head and the binding set at such that it dropped just beyond the thick gray-white eyebrows lightly covering the side beard and ears. The makeshift headpiece appeared as a soft helmet as if to protect his inner thoughts. The dark-pupils in eyes gleaned coal-like beneath crinkled lids each side off the thick bridge of his nose; cheeks ruddy full and below the large nose and mustache elephant tusk colored front gapped teeth. His simple draping robe was a plain blue with defined and undefined white markings. Takis waved his right arm in the motions of a light breeze.
With a return wave Meir slowly as he naturally materialized first from a small cloud of dew about ten feet off the shoreline. Within the time it would take to reach over with the right hand and scratch an itch on the left elbow Meir stood just above the waters of the Styx. He was barrel-chested with lanky arms and hands while the trunks were thickly athletic with solid feet and lengthy toes. The hair hung thick and long to beyond the muscular shoulders. His beard clinged dark and short surrounding a wide unlengthy nose and thick black eyebrows. The white of his eyes appeared to narrow the lids nearly surrounding the black pupils.
He wore leather-like leggings with an open leather sleeveless vest. His fingernails were dirt-diggers and those feet just above the Styx were quickly judged ruggedly calloused and coarse as he walked above the water with the confidence of an eagle swooping in for a kill straight towards Takis.
Meir took on the over-ended appearance of a man still solidly middle-aged and living. He would have appeared menacing in his pace and stature were not the matching grin of Takis reflecting a horse-full-like set of medium brown ivory-hued teeth. On the shoreline the two men hugged and rubbed foreheads mimicking small cat-like sounds before breaking the hug and beginning what appeared to Merlyn as actual human communication.
Meir could see a slender to medium sized man or woman walking up from the trail to the Styx from behind Takis. Takis, without turning, said, “This is Tiresias one of our greatest modern shamans. He will find it easier to gain the confidence of Ezekiel than either of us attached in our old ways.”
Meir watched the gait of the person and the body, clothed in a coarse, not so thick long white robe of cloth, enraptured him in a language all its own. Sheorhe, he thought, has long straight black hair over his shoulders as I. The face is narrow and bony to the point he appears to exist in bone dancing body with a six-pointed oval skull on its top. He or She is half bald over his brows, forehead and brown eyes that display a round calm understanding grace. A large nose flattens over his high cheek bones, and I would say he is a man but for those other feminine features. The smile is slight and his lips pursed. An air of confidence surrounds his features, even a slight light-green aurora shimmers the entire features showing, the mystic color of dark thunderclouds before a whirlwind. Long slender feminine hands; she is a woman I am sure of it. The hands and sandaled feet give her away. As Tiresias drew within an arm’s length, Takis turned. “See,” he said, “this is Tiresias. He is our Greek shaman’s shaman.”
With a slight smile and without a hint of forethought, Meir commented, “I am sure, Tiresias, you stay clear of the solders.”
“I dispatch them with my tongue,” smarted Tiresias, pleased that Meir developed a dumbfounded face that quickly settled back. Meir stood his ground, but an understanding had been swiftly screwed in.
Takis’s face was alight with this quick battle of wit and noted to himself the slight shift of Meir’s strong sense of footing. Takis chuckled and said, “No earthly tremors this side of the Styx, even in this Elysium, Meir. We are the old Masters, Tiresias and Ezekiel are two of the new.”
The three quickly nodded to one another – equality is important in the process, thought Merlyn sitting cross-legged high in the tree leaves behind and above the shamans. Merlyn couldn’t help but grumble to himself, ‘These three are all ancients as far as I am concerned.’ He felt self-pride well up and quickly diminished it with the thought most sincere, ‘I must watch while these old souls work.’
Merlyn continued his observations unaware he himself was being sensed by the shamans. The three sat cross-legged making a small circle within their toe range, a larger circle set while the placed the open palm of each hand on each knee. A larger circle still as their backbones, each struck a perpendicular stance. The three shamans, Takis, Meir, and Tiresias bent their necks back as if they were about to speak to the sky. Another circle within the cross-legged, perpendicular arched bodies and bent back necks and heads. Minds outstretched, hearts in the palms of their hands, and the toes glowed red, as a slow rising sun, thirty toes holding a single resolution, the radiation of three souls dancing in the center of the circle on the bank of the River Styx in Elysium.
Mystified, Merlyn, looking into the center of the circle saw heat where there was none. The heat, invisible as it was, rose from toes outward to the hearts in palms and up the spines and outward from neck to the minds of the shamans. And with that, Merlyn saw something never witnessed in Elysium or any other culture of the earthly Dead, The shadows of the three shamans lay flat outside the circles. The bodies of three dead shamans sat more circularly real than the mighty Styx itself. Merlyn observed the three sink into the sand at the bank leaving at last only a single shadow being cast from someplace else. Someplace Merlyn was not, some sunken place where rose a pillar, a river of water unheard of even by Zeus himself.
Scene 10
Ezekiel found himself walking the path back up to where he first sensed the fresh air from a small cave surrounded by rocky cliff, a soul surrounded by a pronounced amount of water in its breath. A thought suddenly hit him, ‘this River Jordan does not smell of water’. Is this then the retribution for my curses on Jerusalem and all Israel; the sweet smell of a soul awash in real water? No stone house for Ezekiel to slide into for personal comfort, only the ground, this new earth made of Heaven is my sanctuary. I will ease myself as a precious drop of water in the desert and I will sink beneath the sands, rocks and bountiful earth of heaven to be enraptured, to be one with all. Once a life pumping blood, now I become as the rain in Heaven.
He climbed down to quickly find this small hole in the rough stony cliff above the Jordan. I have searched these banks for Elisha and yet have found only a few wandering strangers along the way. This place appears Heaven enough but for the few souls, none who know my name. I too am a stranger yet this is the Jordan and I am at home in the heart of this new Israel. A few white clouds above set moving slowly in blue sunless sky. No sun or shadow needed in the just and radiant Light of God. I walk in God’s justice, home in Israel and yet foreign to this new place where the few Dead rise from and walk on this fair earth of Heaven.
With little apprehension Ezekiel poked his nose into the hole and sniffed. No fresh air. He pulled away and put his finger on the rather indifferent rocky cliff. No moisture. ‘The water is right down there, six feet away and no moisture. It feels wet when hands and feet are placed. Yet, it is dry. Here and gone in the blink of an eye. He turned to climb up to the path and he saw a stranger looking down at him. “Hello,” he said with a hesitant upturn of his lips. “We are strangers here, at least the few of us I have witnessed.”
“You are no stranger to me, Ezekiel, even though we have never met,” replied Tiresias quietly.
Ezekiel blinked in the forming tears. The repercussion within was jarring and absolute. “Wait. Please. Do not leave me. I have not heard my name uttered here in Heaven. I am blessed. What is there in the sound of one’s name by another voice? Friend or foe, I feel blessed.” Ezekiel quickly arrived at the path. “In kindness please, how is it you know me?”
“I am not from here,” replied Tiresias almost timidly, wondering what he was going to say. He had not expected to see tears running down the newly dead prophet’s eyes. He thought, ‘I do not think this man realizes he is crying.’
Wet faced, Ezekiel responded, “Nor am I?”
“I am Tiresias.”
“You are Greek?”
“The others I have met did not know me, nor themselves upon questioning. None could remember their names. He pointed up, “The sky is blue but I say it is brown earth. We dead are buried and God is in his Heaven.
“We are dead, Ezekiel.” Tiresias paused in consideration,” then continued, “Our souls survive along the same river. You know this by the name Jordan and we Greeks know it by the name Styx.”
“I must cross the River Jordan to find family and friends who have passed before me.”
“This river appears as wide as our Styx,” noted Tiresias sympathetically. “It may be you will need to find a way to cross,” he cautiously added, “boats cannot cross.”
“I have no body what need I of a boat?” abruptly responded an angry-minded Ezekiel.
***
Merlyn slid into the shamans’ shadow soul first, which was not his intent. As a nightly hollowness surrounded; ‘I am free,’ thought he.
In the surrounding pitch of darkness Merlyn, a-way, discerns a luminosity peaked. He easefully floated towards the flickering particle to see a tiny oval rainbow become engorged and circular – a rainbowing ball. ‘If I had hands I could pick up this pulsing globe and throw it,’ thought he who sudden realizes, ‘I have no hands?’
Kaleidoscoping shades of blue, green, red, purple, orange, yellow and the particular two small dancing white dots in the round. A multitude, no, eight trumpets in tones – (on the vertical) green to the top, blue to the bottom. A throbbing floating ball now twice my size twenty yards away motions and re-motions, what? Shapes of trumpets, diamonds and triangles – this so dressed floating ball rotates top to bottom, bottom to top. ‘What seizes my eyes? No lids, no balls,’ thinks he, the Merlyn.
A centered white dance – two dotted lights. Night grooms the sphere machined in the spectrum. ‘Tis but a glint, a gleam off the tip of the brandished fierce Sword of God, but cool, no torrid radiant heat clothes me here. ‘I am soul boned and unburied. Nothing, yet I am risen to see such a thing unwitnessed even by Zeus and his Pantheon. ‘I am below the Board on which I must stand and make my plays. How goes this? I know not even my own mind.’
This sphere of shapes and movement trumpet silently. ‘I am in the balls or tongue of Gabriel himself? Water works beneath this rainbow, interlacing. This is the meat of all matterless substance that touches we the Dead. What mechanism does not yield to the slow pumping throb of its own engine? My heart, were it here, would not pump so slowly that time falls in an Angel’s shine in the starless and moonless night stretched boundless and away from this soul’s seed of what I, Merlyn, am and once was.’
This is Anaximander’s apeiron, the First Principle, thought Merlyn. I sense a stirring, a cascading Dry in a rush to be Wet. Cold and Hot do not yet exist – a matter unresolved. How is this Dry comes forth first when it has an opposing element in the universe? Could it be this ‘thing’ is not bound by Nature’s Rule? Even Plato’s “Forms” are bound by Reason, these patterned colors is a single structure I observe, and though it is bound in itself has no boundary in my soul’s eyeless sockets are perhaps foreseen. Two shuffling dots. Top to bottom and a pass from bottom to top, it is as if time exists within the soul’s framework, were it my own, Merlyn’s soul, to believe or to deny. No Angel. No place this. One impossible interlacing with another impossible. An imprint in my soul where none can be.
The heart, fashion’s robust center. Passion would wet a whistle through the dry soul would it could. Dry Hearty Bone. Ezekiel. Passion and Will have not yet cloaked this soul, eyeless to blink, yet observe the silent trumpet raised to shout for any loose ears to hear. I exist only as a pronoun and cannot reconcile myself as one in three. The center only – soul – without heart and mind. There is no absolute Nature for any Consciousness of Being. Were I anything but I.
I refocus on the apeiron. The shapes, the orbs, fleshed out into imaginary eye sockets. Crystal without glass, without dimension. An oddly shaped human skull become the only understandable quality. A hallow mission, think I. Ovals and diamonds and horns aplenty, these are the skin wrapping this near formless skull.
“Merlyn,” whispered from the marginal blackness. “Merlyn is the antecedent, the dimensional substantiation.”
“Merlyn is? Who am I then?”
“I is not a Who. I is a What.”
“Merlyn is a noun not a pronoun.” Suddenly Merlyn’s mind consider the reality, “Dry is Wet.” And with that, Merlyn felt the inner rounds of his heart and his mind shuffling Top to Bottom and Bottom to Top near the lip, the circular edge of a large white hole pulling in the margins and all the dark shadows from untranscribed universes unimaginable.
***
The rebellion’s ninth day had its run; the shadows flowed from the great white hole and filled the night sky of Elysium. Thales called on Mother as he had acquired some daylight calculations as to the numbers of the Dead based on the numbers of Dead within Elysium.
Mother greeted Thales at the atrium and guided him to the plainly painted white and blue trimmed room on the right. There was a centered large wooden table surrounded by twelve chairs but she lead beyond to the small alcove wherein there sat a large empty brightly polished, thick marble tub with its wall about the same height as the table.
A formal bath, thought Thales, and as he drew closer, he could see it was two-thirds full of water. He wondered if Mother were going to ask him to symbolically submerge and baptize himself. Glancing about there were no distinguishing busts of gods of which to ally one’s self or to play a ceremonial cadence to. He shifted his toga to be more loosely dressed and waited for her instructions.
“The tub is full of fresh water from the Styx. Nothing floats and bubbles do not exist.” She smiled warmly and attractively, and asked, “What is your explanation?”
“The water of the Styx is perhaps not built to pool.”
“But there are pools of water, even near the edge of the River. And, we all see evidence of froth from time to time. Bubbles exist.”
“Nothing floats in either case,” groused Thales. “We do not understand the dynamics of the River.”
“So the philosophers say.” Mother stared at the surface and placed her right hand in to pull it up and out slowly. “The water is wet and it drips off my fingertips as any water should do naturally.”
Thales broke into a grin, “I have an estimate of souls among us.”
“This is important?”
“Earlier today Mario and I suggested representation.”
“Yes, you did. I was not pleased.”
“The estimates are twenty million dead in Elysium alone.”
Mother stood in puzzlement as her wet fingers continued to drip. “Numbers make no difference here. We are not raising an army.”
“Something is amiss, Mother. Anaximander himself gave me the figures based on calculation, but where are these souls? I cannot imagine a city with twenty million inhabitants. These are your children, Mother. Where can they be?”
“I do not know, child. That seems so many. My mind is better accepting a poetic one thousand or even a thousand, thousand. We have the time but I am not willing to count souls. Takis will take care of this. Give the number to Takis.”
“I have a sense much is displaced here. We see what we want to see and feel and touch through our senses, which give us reason. Somehow, the River is to blame for our order here. Where could the souls be but drowned in the ever-flowing River or heaped in the granules of would be earth beneath our feet? We must command the Dead to rise from water, earth, fire or air. You must eventually take command of your children in this rebellion, Mother.”
“You worry too much, Thales. Go home. Sleep as stone. Tomorrow when awake you will see we Greeks are not alone.”
Conclusion of Chapter Seven
***
There you are, boy. Seven chapters down and you are ready to begin the eighth.
I see some changes still. I used too many of the same words, ‘grumbling’ comes to mind. There are other words, a better vocabulary.
Some changes yes, some words perhaps, but there are not works to express your broader play on the thesaurus. You immediately think ‘Hamlet’ and the line ‘am I a pipe to be played’.
I do, yes, but I would have to look it up for the exact wordage.
That is my point, boy. The works must remain a mix of heart and soul and mind, not mind alone. This is not a contest, this is humanity, that is what these writings are about – mostly your own as you are not privy to the secrets of another’s humanity, not even your best of friends. Hearts and minds are more easily shared, but the soul pushes these letters onto the page. It is a trinity here, but no domination for clarity’s sake. This blog and works are meant for humans and marsupial-humanoids alone. You got that? – Amorella.
I do. Such I cannot believe I put on paper.
Post, boy, and good night. – Amorella.
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