Notes - Aunt Catherine / Clarification / The Dead - 5 / Brothers-5 wrk /

        Last night you got word that Carol's Aunt Catherine Hammond Zulauf died yesterday and that services will be Friday.

        Aunt Catherine was a sister of Carol's father, Granville S. Hammond. Her remaining uncle, John, is the brother of Catherine and Granville.

        You are at a loss of words here.

        Aunt Catherine lived a good and long life. I am sorry for the family.

        On another subject I have a clarification. Even in a fiction I cannot have the Piper being a representation of G---D and the Boatman being a representation of Necessity. First, the story is about metaphysics and physics (our human equation) not about G---D. I have my doubts as an agnostic, but I think of G---D as singular and beyond (even) 'First Cause'.

        Clarification is what you are about. Post. - Amorella

       You are resting upstairs with stomach problems (probably from a mixture of orange juice and milk according to Carol). You are thinking of (human) Will as being the Piper and the Boatman being Necessity. This will work better. You are still learning, boy. Now we can continue with Dead-5. You want to apologize but the apology is arrogance driven. We just move on, boy. Post. -  Amorella

       You had a nap. Carol is on the phone. The last few minutes you were reviewing the notes to see what we are going to be writing. Merlyn is listening to his soul remember. - Amorella

        He is ready to listen to his own voice.

        That will do. Let's get to it. - Amorella

        1256 hours. Is this right to go to chapter six and scene six of book four?

        We are turning the tables here. It is Merlyn going visiting and he finds Ezekiel's heart. - Amorella

        I don't see the connection to Ezekiel. The first and the second Rebellion are completed.

        1554 hours. I have completed the draft for Dead-5.

        Indeed, you have. Place it below and post. - Amorella

        I am looking forward to beginning the redo of Brothers-5.

***

The Dead - 5

         Merlyn sat on the rock in front of his comfortable hut-of-a-home on the meadow in the river valley mostly surrounded by hill and forest and that huge granite dome to his northeast. No billiards this time around, his mind acquiesced to his heartfelt surroundings and his heart in turn acquiesced to his soul. His only thought, 'I love this solitude.'

         Amid the solitude a much older feminine voice stirred within, 'this is your Soul, Merlyn. I surround your heartanmind,' is a scenario he had heard before. He didn't believe it then nor does he believe it now. He thought of the great horned owl and the fox he had as pets when he was a child. Good teachers, both.

         His pets had listened to him; it was only right that he listen to the introductory voice within, who, soul or not, was a part of his human nature. He glanced to the north woods to see the great horned owl sitting on a limb and the fox rolling and scratching his reddish brown coat in the grass below. He wondered on how it was, that once in a considerable while, he would observe one pet or the other eating a rodent. He knew this is heartansoulanmind's environment, yet he had not commanded the rodent for their nourishment. They needed none, nor did he. Food existed even though it was no more there than Merlyn himself, no more than an ever-sustained consciousness. The soul's voice had burrowed into his immediate seclusion.

        

         Listen closely my friend. A music is close at hand.

         Merlyn waited intuitively tuned and found a rolling and then a disappearing into his own tunnel and a distant heartbeat, the heartbeat of his friend from the Rebellion of the first ten thousand, Ezekiel, grew closer.

         Ezekiel’s inner light diffracted at Merlyn's edge of consciousness. A single ray quietly plunged into his mind as a sunbeam may break through the surface of water. Surprised, Ezekiel suddenly consciously pronounced, ‘who is the least angelic-like of all my dead friends? And then declared, ‘That is who I most wish to see.’

The shadows of this scattered thought felt as shades of dispersed bubbles of mind dictating matter. ‘I wish for G-D himself.’ As Ezekiel had not just wished for G-D, his consciousness froze at the thought.

What came next was an interweaving event-in-mind that neither Ezekiel nor Merlyn could not have expected.

It is the beginning and my spine shivers. I am inside and there is no way out. This is the reason my forearms shiver. My fingers are cold and I am becoming an ice forming on the Great River. I am a floating semi-solid continuity in uncommon ground. I am Ezekiel dancing . . . I am as a string of poetic devices – dancing within.

To this Ezekiel thinks, ‘I do not exist and am able to reflect on this fact at the same time. This is the bottom line of being Dead. The top line is that the righteous will be reunited with their loved ones, that is the spirit of the words remembered.’

         To this Merlyn wonders on Ezekiel's heart and the directed  . . .  "spirit of Ezekiel's words,” enters Merlyn's tabled mind; having been rolled and tunneled from his soul to drift unsanctimoniously onto the rapids of his ever-unsettling heart.

         Reunited, thought Merlyn, the deadanliving and the living. What appears to be a one-way street need not be. Here and now I am becoming floating ship-like rhythms, the ribs of our Mother's replicating soul hold me up. I sit quietly above the turbulence in my ever-rebellious human heart. Deadanliving it is not so easy crossing from soul to mind no matter what or who the heart's bridge be. How much more difficult would it be for the living who are not so human as we?

         Solidification. The act of the human spirit become stone in mindansoul freezing the heart to calm so it might thaw in reasonable contemplation. This is how Merlyn sees this event in his heartansoulanmind, no more real than imagination becoming thought and thought becoming the evaporation of wonderment.

         Consideration becomes the pretty package to open and see the present, the here and now of an existential Merlyn unbound and ready to tie the binds cover to cover all within the human margins of error.

    Ezekiel, a heartansoulanmind I remember singularly. There are other deadanliving friends such as myself who have danced in a rebellion or two above and below the Great Many-Named River's Divide. Deadanliving or Living, to tap a friend's soul is to tap the echoes of a beating heart and considering mind. - 766 words

***

       You have been reading the original Brothers-5 and noticed it has to do, in part, with the gravestones and the mausoleum at John Knox College Cemetery. Let's cut out what is useful before bed and tomorrow's trip to Cleveland to see Kim, Paul, the boys and the cats, then bring Jadah home Tuesday. Brothers-5 is 2146 words. Let's cut it down to 750 or so. - Amorella

        2248 hours. With AutoSummary at 50 percent this is what we have of the original. This is what I will primarily work with.  

** **

Original Brothers-5 summarized 50% automatically

         The College Cemetery is set up as a rectangle somewhat wider east to west than north to south. The oldest section is on the far west side.          I have known these gravestones since I was a small child, thought Richard as they walked the narrow tar and stone chipped road to the south on the west side directly towards the steel and glass always locked door of the mausoleum’s Bedford Stone exterior. He asked, “Do you remember the size of this place?”

         Robert grinned, “Sixty by eighty feet, something like that.”

Rob.          “I’d forgotten that. It’s pretty good size in relationship to the cemetery.”

         “Particularly this old section,” added Richard. Between the glass and themselves were square pillars separating the first bank of crypts to the east and west, then a second bank, and then yet another third bank of crypts just before the outer wall. A wooden podium stood centered just in front of the stained glass blues, yellows and greens. On either side of the podium were Doric columns.          “It always looks ancient Egyptian or Middle Eastern to me,” said Robert. “Odd that a small college town like this would build such an elaborate structure.”

         Richard backed from the door. “I’ve the key,” he said. I want to see our great grandparents’ crypts and take some pictures.”

“Wait,” hesitated Robert.          “Good guys versus the bad guys.” Robert’s smile dissipated.          “Nope,” responded Richard, “it was fun just playing and speculation on things here. The sky above, stones, trees and grass, and the Dead resting below. This place was always good for such philosophizing.”          “How’s that?” asked Robert still staring out at the gravestones.

Richard added, “It is just the opposite of looking at a large city from let’s say, ten thousand feet where the city blocks and freeways look like the top of a circuit board on a microprocessor.”

         “What’s the point, Richie? Of course there is a connection between city planning, circuit boards, and cemeteries.”

         “I know, Rob,” whined Richard sarcastically, “but think of the layering, the layout of the patterns, it is like an integrated circuit put together layer by layer, very thinly, but still layered.          “That works with the city and the circuit board but not with the cemetery.” Robert chuckled, “I mean, Richie,” he paused appropriately long enough that the sarcasm was understood, “you turn the tombstone of the circuit board upside down and you have the coffins underneath. Your analogy is making the Dead or their coffins as transistors.”

         “Maybe that’s what makes this place haunted?”

         “People used to say this cemetery was haunted,” said Robert in a matter of fact style, “but they are all dead.”

         “That’s funny, Rob. Rob always has the good one liner, thought Richard.          “Yep.          “Yep,” mirrored Richard, “You always come in first.”

         “Yeah.          Robert changed the subject, “Remember Hugh Mearns little poem?”

         Richard smiled straight ahead, “Yes. We both memorized that when we were kids. Grandpa taught us that poem.          “Good poem,” said Robert as he thought ‘Grandma and Grandpa are buried out at the entrance where we came in.’

         “Yep. Good poem,” retorted Richard as he thought, ‘Grandma and Grandpa are buried out where we came in.’

         “What’s the first poem Grandpa taught us, do you remember?”

         “The Earth,” said Richard.

         “I thought he was talking about that gyroscope he got me.”

         “Yep,” replied Robert.          “Nope. I like the fact that the college keeps the door locked. It adds to the mystery of the place.”

         “Who had the key at the fraternity?” asked Robert.

         “I wasn’t scared.          “You about peed your pants when the door locked on you,” said Robert.

         Robert stood, “What does the mausoleum do to your analogy with the circuit board?          “I don’t know,” replied Richard tired already. “It’s supposed to be a reverent place.          Richard pouted, shrugged his shoulders reluctantly, and pulled the key from his right front pocket.          “Why the hell not?”

         “I remember the musty odor.”

Robert turned the key but the brass door wouldn’t open. “It’s stuck.”

         With a solid push, it opened. The center green and blue stained glass colors, looking like a modern art piece, shimmered from the south end of the building.

The tall thinner stained glass to its left appeared light blue with green edging at the top and bottom. In the upper middle of the left stained glass was a dark figure appearing as a beetle from the door’s distance. The thinner stained glass on the left of the center blue green piece has shades of desert sands, with the dark green across the top and burnt orange wings under. A dark wooded podium with a carved cross within its framework sets in the middle of the small south niche. Two Vermont marble classically styled round pillars rest on either side of the small south room displaying the stained glass. Eight feet closer are two squared pillars of white and gray stained marble and fifteen feet closer to the entrance are two more squared pillars of the same Vermont marble. Between the four square pillars is a marble bench on the east and the west side. The marble square pieced floor is made of the same Vermont marble. Above in the center a lone electric light bulb hangs from a brass socket hanging from the thick heavily plastered ceiling.

Something out of ancient Egypt,” said Robert in a highlighted schoolboy tone. Richard smiled glanced at the huge lower branches of an Oak to his left, stood and sighed. We had such fun as kids. Robert was standing just inside the second unopened brass door. Squinting, Richard ignored the stained glass at the southern wall and said, “What’s the pinkish glow coming from the back left chamber?”

“Sunlight, idiot. It’s late morning.”

The stained glass is dark.”

“Shade will do it every time, brother Richie.”

“Four crypt chambers. Weird business storing bodies.”

“I think it is a good efficient design in marble,” commented Robert. The small room in the south is also a chamber if you remember. Four or five crypts stacked long-ways like meat on a marble bun.”

Richard smiled, “You shouldn’t joke like that in here.”

“Why the hell not? Robert sarcastically toned, “You expecting some sort of miracle baby brother?”

“No miracles, Rob. Light through stained glass still can set an eerie mood though.”

Robert retorted, “The eeriness is in your head, Richie, not with the Dead slabbed in stone.”

** **

         Good. Post. - Amorella

          

          This seems a bit like cheating, Amorella. 

          You need to realize what you have done already, boy. You have spent twenty-four years working over an imaginary experience, isn't this correct? - Amorella

         I would like to say, "Yes, this is correct," but the way you have worded this, I have to say, "I don't know."

         You are being an honest man, and in here, I intend on keeping you this way. - Amorella