Notes - overriding awkwardness / (final) Dead 13

         Early dusk. Your HL-2280DW Brother Laser Printer just arrived and you placed the sealed box on the coffee table. Spooky investigated by sniffing around the box from right to left discovered nothing of importance and headed to the window in search of birds searching the feeder near the miniature crab apple by the front porch.

         Not feeling well this morning you went back to bed after breakfast – Jadah followed you and slept on your stomach for about an hour. You did forty minutes of exercises and felt better. The big errand of the day was heading south to Tri-County Shopping Center and the Time-Warner Cable office to exchange your remote. Once home you found it not so easy to program; a telephone call didn’t help so TW is sending someone out at eight tomorrow morning. As the Presidential Address is on tonight you have no regular programs to copy anyway. You can still partially use the much older remote but the new remote will not change channels. The big treat was later when you and Carol headed to Graeter’s for her free birthday two-scoop turtle sundae, which you shared, then a stop at Lowes for bird food. You have begun editing Dead Thirteen and Diplomat has to edit Pouch Text Eleven from Merlyn’s Mind for tomorrow.

         1748 hours. Diplomat is not getting many readers but a handful is more than I expected. The first day her blog had 71 hits but once people saw what it was about it dropped down to an average of one or two hits a day with some days getting zero. I remember starting the Encounters blog and I mentioned it on Facebook. I have 16 people who signed up for the blog – a couple of family members and a few kind former students. This is what I am comfortable with. Once one of the postings got a big hit – about 200 or so hits. I went into a panic because numbers is not what the blog is about. Anyway, it quickly fell to three or four hits a day on average and that is a comfort level for me. Amorella says it is my obligation to make my writing sharable. I feel freer when the writing is shared, which I imagine is the reason for the sharing in the first place.

         You are trying to think of a way to express what ‘freedom of mind’ is in the context above. What you want to say is that to you ‘freedom of mind’ is worth much more than money and power can pay. – Amorella

         Well said. I never can communicate to any degree of real personal satisfaction. I have an overriding awkwardness with words – their meanings and intensities.

         Post, boy. Carol is working with supper. Later, dude. - Amorella

        2002 hours. I have edited Dead 13 slightly. All the way through the reading I am thinking of Hal Holbrook as the Stage Manager rather than Merlyn. That is, the tone and cadence of Merlyn’s script sounds like Holbrook’s State Manager in “Our Town”. I can’t imagine a stage production of these books or even a film – too complicated. It could never be pulled off.

         Why would anyone do anything with it but read? – Amorella

         I agree. I had a couple of readers for the first trilogy; perhaps I can find a couple more for this one. I am trying to imagine which of my two grandchildren (if either) will be curious enough to open the books one day. Then of course to read it would be another chore. Anyway, here is Dead 13 if you okay it Amorella.

         I do. I understand your sense of stage manager. In a way the whole books take on the flavor of Our Town which, like it or not, has been your bent all along. Add and post. – Amorella

***

(final) The Dead 13 ©2014, rho GMG.One

            It is a pleasure to awaken in a bed that is a memory of my adolescent days in life. A few blankets across a few wooden planks attached to four legs created from tree trunks. My pillow is a forearm in width and two hands high. The replica of Henry David Thoreau’s cabin at Walden's Pond is about the same size. The exterior dimensions of Thoreau's cabin are ten by fifteen feet. Mine is about the same but without the physical reality. The Living need to know a few of the rules we Dead have; particularly if my memory serves me well enough to return again to Avalon or Elysium.

            We Dead have particular rules we attempt to follow for a general social order to occur. For instance if one is walking it is helpful to walk on a path that delivers you from point A to point B. We are more ridged than you the Living might think. We must conform to the way things are. First, we have to realize who we are, who we really are. These are self-evident truths the Living may deny for a lifetime. Like Alice, you have to pass through the Looking Glass to enter our domain.

            We Dead survive for what Ends? We, like the Living, do not know. We attempt to be social while we wait. We have the right to mature while we wait.

            We Dead have a set of ethics focusing basically on the four cardinal virtues: temperance, courage, justice and prudence. These four are woven within the circulation of heartansoulanmind as blood was circulated throughout the body in life. The more giving the spirit is in these four virtues the freer one is, that is, the more transparent the spirit is, the more the spirit is as the soul from which it came, unseen but known and understood within one's humanity.

            We Dead wait, enjoying the learning, enjoying the company of others who always remind us of who we are as we grow or do not grow – to live, as it were, trafficking The Golden Rule within our own stuffing.

            We Dead who rose from clay; we are Dead and still alive and our judgments stay our own.

            "Says you," interrupted Vivian.

            Merlyn smiled as if he were let in on a joke, "How long have you been here, my love?"

            "As long as necessary. Where were you going with your monologue?"

            "I forget. I lost my train of thought."

            "You were thinking on how much energy it took to move from Avalon to Elysium. It nearly wore you out."

            "It wore me down to nothing and that was before I left Avalon."

            "I watched you leave."

            "I did not know that."

            "Your soul took you."

            "How do you know it was not my heart?"

            "Only your soul could move like that."

            "What did you see? A soul is what it is, a shroud, a covering protecting heartanmind."

            "That is what we are told but I saw something different,” said Vivian. “You were evaporating quickly and took the form a gray pinecone and then shrank to a brown walnut floating at navel height. I reached out and touched the walnut, which was becoming gray again; it was leathery like touching the back of an African elephant. I knew then that it was your soul because that is how I imagine your soul to be."

            Merlyn laughed aloud, "Leathery."

            "Do you remember me touching you?"

            "You are within me already. Touching would assume you were not within," replied Merlyn earnestly.

            "I felt your leathery passion, Merlyn. I felt your soul's fuel if not your soul itself."

            "What a strange thing to say, Vivian, that my passion is leathery."

            "Like an elephant's, thick, like the skin on an elephant's back," reiterated Vivian. She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. "Bye, Merlyn."

            Merlyn chuckled. "Things are like this here among the Dead. Heartsansoulsanminds come and go like thoughts of friends among the Living. Here thoughts come across more real and are acted out between two or among three or more; up to a group of a dozen or so friends. You Living know how that is, people show up in a flash, you have a good time, and then they say their good-byes and are gone. Not much different here, except I heard Vivian's voice as if she were standing right here. And, I felt her arm on my back and she gave me a kiss on the cheek. I felt those lips. I will never forget           Vivian's lips and her passion. Never. No leather in her passion, I'll tell you.

   ***