After
noon. You had a lazy morning but a nap has helped. – It has taken you more than
an hour of work to change the bottom paragraph of the introduction to each
chapter to this:
"I,
Merlyn, have this little ditty above memorized to the point it sets stemmed in
letters out of which each four-leafed chapter dreams grow to clover size. I
knead the dreams into a word stream of music for the heart and soul and mind
with hope that when read these stories cast a light into those living with an
imagination that casts no shadow."
1318
hours. I want Merlyn to speak at the beginning of each chapter of dreams.
Good. Post. - Amorella
We shall continue to drop in the chapters
final draft. Why not. You want it free. You can have it that way online, at
least for now. - Amorella
Dusk.
You have worked off and on this afternoon. Drop in what you have that is final
draft and post. – Amorella
***
All rights reserved. Presently this e-book may be copied in this form. This may change when the book goes into ebook publication.
rhorndorff@gmail.com
Copyright © 2001-2014
by Richard H. Orndorff
This is a work of
fiction. The characters, names, incidents, mythology, culture and dialogue are
the products of the author’s imagination or they are used fictitiously.
All events, themes,
persons, characters and plot
are the invention
of the author.
*
GREAT MERLYN’S
GHOST: ONE
A Continuing
Exploration Into Consciousness
By Richard H.
Orndorff
*
Dedication
This
book is dedicated four-fold; one, to my friends; two, to my many former
students and colleagues with whom I taught for thirty-seven
years, 1966-2003; three, to my daughter Kim, her husband, Paul and my two wonderful grandsons, Owen and Brennan and; four, the book is dedicated to the memory of one of my
few dear ‘special’ friends Thomas Robert Pringle. We were kindred spirits,
twin-minded writing allies from our early days at Otterbein University and our
elections to its Department of English Quiz and Quill Honorary.
*
Acknowledgments
Many
of the legendary historical names, historical settings; the romantic and
neoclassical ideologies; and the scientific concepts and theoretical
plausibility’s entertained amongst these margins can be found throughout Google
and Wikipedia.
I thank my life partner Carol, daughter Kim and son-in-law, Paul for their
diligence and patience. I also thank specific friends, initial readers of my
original Merlyn’s Mind trilogy: Angie; Bob and Patti; Cathy and Tod;
Craig and Alta; Fritz; Gary; Jeanne and Jim; Laney; my Aunt Patricia and my
Uncle Ernie for their observations and helpful comments.
Also, a special thank you to my two living Muses; and, to my theoretical
physics advisor with whom I have discussed the many plausibility’s presented in
this edition, my lifelong friend John Douglas Goss, PhD. Physics and his kind and personable wife, Nancy.
During
these last twenty-five years Amorella has continually collaborated with writing
projects all of them setting the stage for this one. Since 2007 Amorella and I
have a working writing notes/journal at www.encountersinmind@blogspot.com. Feel
free to scan when, where, how and sometimes why the grammar and content pots
percolate as they do.
My
original objective twenty-five years ago was to intellectually stimulate and
entertain my heart, mind and imagination. Now it is time to more maturely share
the experiences of those years to interested readers.
Richard H. Orndorff, Spring
2014
This
is Amorella, Richard’s writing guide and collaborator. The work is a fiction
but the words are as honest as if he were swearing. What makes this truly a
ghost story is that it is being set down as if an Angel asked Richard, recent
among the Dead, to tell his story. I take the part of the Angel. Richard is the
ghost, the human spirit. The words come from where they would come from if he
were physically dead; the part one takes with her or him afterwards, the heart
and soul and mind/memory of who one is in the continuing life of the spirit. Is
it imagination or magic? Ask the engaging spirit of Merlyn.
*
Chapter One
Slavery
The Supervisor has a little saying:
Ring-a-ring
o'rosies
A
pocket full of posies
"A-tishoo!
A-tishoo!"
We
all fall down!
We
rise from clay
On
judgment day
Be
we dead or still alive.
I,
Merlyn, have this little ditty above memorized to the point it sets stemmed in
letters out of which each four-leafed chapter dreams grow to clover size. I
knead the dreams into a word stream of music for the heart and soul and mind
with hope that when read, these stories cast a light into those living with an
imagination that casts no shadow.
***
1801
hours. The work is beginning to ‘move’ on its own. As I proofread and edit it
is as though I am within an enchantment. I love the art of unfolding letters so
much. It contains a magic to me similar to that of how I think the ancient
Greek stage which was considered a magic ring for its theatre.
1801
hours. The work is beginning to ‘move’ on its own. As I proofread and edit it is
as though I am within an enchantment. I love the art of unfolding letters so
much. It contains a magic to me similar to that of how I think the ancient
Greek stage which was considered a magic ring for its theatre.
We shall continue to drop in the chapters
final draft. Why not. You want it free. You can have it that way online, at
least for now. - Amorella
I
added this to my Facebook page earlier:
**
**
I
have changed my plans. For those interested in reading the final draft of Great
Merlyn’s Ghost I will add it as I edit and make the corrections. It will be marked
‘Final’ at the top of my daily blog and you may read along as the final copy
comes into view. I do not know if I can make it free as an ebook. If not, this
is insurance that it is out there presently and you may copy the final in its parts
for your own private use among family and friends if you wish. Once this final
draft is complete and sent to an e-publisher I may have to delete these final
selections from the blog. Thank you
for your interest. – rho
**
**
2242
hours. I completed the Chapter One final draft.
Add and post. - Amorella
I could still find errors.
What else is new in the human world. –
Amorella
***
Chapter One
Slavery
The Supervisor has a little saying:
Ring-a-ring o'rosies
A pocket full of posies
"A-tishoo! A-tishoo!"
We all fall down!
We rise from clay
On judgment day
Be we dead or still alive.
I, Merlyn, have this little ditty above memorized to the point it sets stemmed in letters out of which each four-leafed chapter dreams grow to clover size. I knead the dreams into a word stream of music for the heart and soul and mind with hope that when read, these stories cast a light into those living with an imagination that casts no shadow.
The
Dead 1
This
is Merlyn. The date is 15 December 2009. I have been here entangled between the
Living and the Dead since Orndorff’s third book Merlyn’s Mind was
published in May 2008. Your twenty-first century Earth is not the Earth I left
in the seventh century. This is for me is a quantum entanglement of heart and
soul and mind between your Heaven and Earth.
I
am Merlyn's Supervisor and I am, through
no fault of my own, entangled also. Merlyn resorts to a billiard table mind
with six standard pockets but Merlyn cannot know which is the pocket to the
heart and which is the pocket to the soul in the table or elsewhere. No one
knows how or why the secret tunneling exists to heart and to soul. Glevema is
another nearby spiritual entity in "The Dead" segments. She speaks
not only to Merlyn, but to all the Dead. She is the ancestral mother of all
living human beings and in here her voice rolls up and out of the ancient
antennae-like spine humans are born to grow with.
“Merlyn,”
says Glevema, “you are indeed knotted as a belly button between me and our
descendants."
Merlyn
felt the smoothly rolling and solid black mother of 8 balls in his tabled mind
whisper, 'Life is the spirit’s armor.' The balled concept invisibly
black 8 moves on across his green felted table to strike at the bumper boundary
of Merlyn's soul-pocket, spin, then run the green only to fall into Merlyn's
heart-side pocket where Glevema rolls unceremoniously into darkness.
'Mother
vanishes below and I am sick at heart,' pops roundly yellow onto Merlyn’s mind
table as a now cautionary yellow 1 ball stopping at near the center of the
table.
Mother
of the eight ball reappears from near left pocket and rolls to a set on the
white cue mark. "Merlyn," commented Mother in slight irritation,
"it is confusing for me to be so mind-placed on your thinking table."
Merlyn’s
quiet smirk rose in a burnt orange 5 ball near the far side pocket in open
confrontation.
Mother
reappears from the side pocket catching the intended smile. Resting marked and
cued. She comments, "You have been on Earth for almost three years and are
still adjusting to the twenty-first century."
The
reality shocks Merlyn's mind into a full table of sixteen scattering balls and
he finds himself sitting instead on his favorite large piece of tabled granite,
a slab resting in the ever adjusting meadow-of-his-mind. He finds himself
suddenly staring at a petite and beautiful womanly spirit with the darkest of
eyes. Her long curly black hair swirls over her magically feminine arms and
fingers and legs and toes. Mother appears as he secretly endearingly imagines —
a legendary Celtic faery without wings or wand. Such are the distractions that
come from the depths that coil on the divide of the Living and the Dead.
Merlyn
queries, "Are you our once original ancestral Mother, Glevema, the
granddaughter of Panagiotakis the Shaman, or are you her later ancient Greek
look-alike twin, Sophia?” he paused, “Are you Sophia the Greek during the time
of the First Rebellion in HeavenOrHellBothOrNeither? Or are you something else,
a Shapeshifter?”
Mother
replies, “I am Glevema deballed Merlyn. I am your ancestral Mother of
the Dead and all those presently living within Earth’s boundary." She
stood slim, dark skinned and royal at her former living height of five full
feet at less than ninety pounds. ”Now, you see me as I am.”
Merlyn
stood, bowed slightly in the humility and whispers, "m'Lady."
Amused,
Glevema asks, "When did you last see Sophia?"
Merlyn
responds, "She was in charge of constructing a bridge across the River
Styx." Seemingly this event was only hours ago, realized Merlyn,
that I was delivered to the presence of Sophia’s spirit, to witnessed the
beginning of the Rebellion of the first fully conscious ten-thousand human
spirits in Elysium, the Place of the Greek Dead. The first revolution of the
Dead happened during the earth time of the great Greek storyteller, Homer, who
lived in the ninth century BCE.
A
brief and passing thought encompassed itself and rotated slowly into the shape
of a solid green 6 ball to the center billiard table . . . 'Wait,' thinks Merlyn, 'Today is a present
earth date. I am an fully engaged human soul entrapped within a living human
mind and body of Richard Greystone who is stuck not so solidly in the once
familiar world of three-dimensional physics.
The Brothers 1
Robert
Greystone sits down at his desk giving a glance to his younger brother and
asked, “Richie, what the world are you talking about?”
Richard
Greystone continues his spiel, “The brain and the mind are separate entities.
As such it is possible to be in two places at once."
“And,
who is it that writes these books for you?”
“My
imaginary Captain Lamar brings me slave stories on his ferry across the Ohio
River in my head. Lamar is my writing persona.”
“Right.
Lamar’s small ferry travels from Mason County, Kentucky to Ripley, Ohio in your
head.
“You
are being too literal, Robbie. Captain Lamar follows the famous route of the
historic Underground Railroad in my head. The words travel through the
underground in my head.”
“Richie,
why conjure up such a literary devise? You don’t do this when you write
poetry.”
“The
underground in my head surpasses the cultural slavery too long held in modern
times.”
Robert
quipped, “We are all cultural slaves, Dickie. This is the way the world is,
this is the way the world works." Society is not slavery, he thought, it
is the way things get done. How else would things get done? “Why don’t you sit
down and quite pacing.”
Richard
sat in the only available chair facing his brother behind the desk. “My stories
are corded in the spine first then to the brain and then on to the mind,"
responded Richard, “from concept through word order and grammar – that’s
Captain Lamar’s underground.” Secret words come from secret places, thought
Richard. I know I am right.
“Why
don’t you stick to writing the poetry?”
Richard’s
eyes narrowed, “Why? You are
better poet.”
Robert
smiles, “True. I am.”
“Your
poetry is clear and concise with no nonsense.”
Robert
expresses his amusement with the ‘yes, of course’ chuckle he knew his brother
hated. He remarked, “That’s
because my brain and my mind are in the same place. I don’t have an imaginary
old Captain Leo and his whimsical ferry, Johnny Sprout, creating me
poems hot from the northern hills of the Kentucky my mind.”
“It’s
Jonathan Sprout not Johnny,” grumbles Richard, “Captain Lamar just delivers
the stories, Rob.
“Johnny
Sprout the musician. It’s all in your head, Richie.”
A
spot of anger rose, “Of course it’s in my head. I know where it’s from, Robert,
but the mind is not the brain.”
“Is
this what floats your boat, Dickie? I mean we’re retired, you should know
better. ” Richard
continued his verbiage, “Neurologists argue on the definition of mind. Here’s
the first revised Merlyn chapter, read it over.”
“Why
didn’t your grand Captain Leo deliver your final Merlyn books the first time
around? Why are you now redoing the works?
Richard
truthfully responds, “It’s Lamar not Leo, Robbie;” somberly he added, “I have a
better understanding of Merlyn’s circumstance today.” We are all slaves,
thought Richard, but the Dead aren’t slaves to anyone.
Robert
reckons, I know where this is from, then he drew the mirror of a waggish smile,
“Do you remember when we first went to Ripley to see the Underground Railroad?”
Richard
sat in some frustration drumming his fingers on the soft chair arms, “Sure, I
was about eight. Grandma and Grandpa took and showed us where John Rankin
lived, the setting in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Richard chuckles, “I thought
there was going to be a real railroad.”
Rob
softens, “So your stories float up from the underground railroad in your head.”
“Look
Robbie, people still want freedom from slavery,” surmised Richard but he dared
not say it without further consideration from the Captain.
“We
live in America. We have freedom,” said Robert. “You liberal thinkers are all
alike.”
Richard
retorts, “This is not about politics, Robbie. God, don’t you ever get away from
politics?” You are an old fart just like always, a conservative cardio surgeon,
once and always. He fussed up, “I hate politics and religion too, what’s the
goddamn difference?”
Seeing
a win on the horizon, Robert taunted in reasonableness and control, “Too many
years being slave mastering to your students has gotten to you, Prof Dickie.”
“I
wasn’t a slave master. I never had a student do anything I hadn’t done myself.”
“The
way I remember it, you enjoyed whipping the college freshman in your expository
writing classes every year for thirty five years, man."
Richard
scoffed, “Bull,” but remembers when his students told him that some called his
class Suppository Writing 101. One student had even told him in private that
the few who failed the class called him, Professor Dick. What humor, he
thought. I heard wonderful college humor interspersed with wonderful years of
teaching; how I miss the classroom.
Robert
skimmed the first half page of manuscript in the nondescript blue folder and
said, “Is this a final draft?”
“It
is the final, one chapter at a time.”
“I’ll
read it,” said Robert abruptly, but who's to say this will be any better than
your first self published attempt?"
“You
are,” smarted Richard. “Surely, you, the significant poet, can understand how
novel writing is.” Wrong word choice, he realizes.
Resetting
his tone Rob comments, “I don’t know why you can’t just stick with poetry. We
could publish a good book of poems together. This is what we were going to do
when we retired, write books of poetry together and have them published.”
“It
appears golf is more important than getting any of “The Brothers Poetry”
published.”
“A
different vocation. I have room for both. I have been working on a couple
poems.”
Richard smiles nonchalantly, “Balls and
words both cut and slice.”
Robert
looks over his glasses after a quick skim of the chapter. “There are four
segments in each chapter? Why? You had three segments.”
"Old Merlyn is dreaming four stories simultaneously, one with the
Dead, one in the present, one in the past, and one in the future. The Dead
dream in a verb tense disorientation,” declared Richard with an air of
unconscious authority.
Rob
smiles, “Where’s more of “The Brothers” segment?”
"Read
what you have, carefully please. I'll get it to you. I'm reworking,” states
Richard who left Robert to read his draft more closely while he headed
downstairs to see Cyndi and Connie. Of all things, he fancied while traveling
the stairs, here we are, two at-odds, lone wolf identical twin brothers, each
married to the most compatible and popular of sisters, Connie and Cyndi
Bleacher who were born a year apart but who are otherwise almost identical
twins themselves. What were we thinking?
Grandma’s Story 1
This
is Grandma Earth. I show selected examples of human spirits going back almost
eighteen thousand years in the direct genetic lines, of the Greystone and
Bleacher families. The human spirits in these stories are connected to some of
you readers also. That is both the lighter and the darker humor resting in the
margins. Homo sapiens come onto the earth whole and a selection of that whole,
the spirit, survives, at least in here, whether one likes it or not — just like
when being born. The species provided the ancestors of Robert and Richard and
their chosen life partners Connie and Cyndi.
Grandma’s
old dark eyes glance off the page to view the reader as a representative of the
species, with clarity she says, “You forget your ancestors, and you forget what
you are, don’t you think? I have a long ago story for you, remarked Grandma.
This dead man is still stuck, just like some of the living.
“It
is dawn and my shoulders shiver. This is the way it is. I hear the crickets and
other small creatures around the swamp. I am in a hole on a wall and there is
no way out. This is the way it is. I am stuck. Let me out. My fingers are cold
to ice. It is Winter in Spring. The birds sing. I am no bird. It is cold, and I
am ice forming on the river. I am floating and cold but I am not the river. I
am the common ground frozen,” asserts the dead man.
He
turns to better face his audience. “I had a dream last night, and it was a
whopper. The dream was about people who live out among the stars, and how it is
that they are stuck too, like I am. I remember my own cold dawn. I am almost
eighteen thousand years old by Earth’s gauge, and I am stuck flat in the ice
near a surrounding the pond of stars. I am the first wizard and though solid I
am still dancing.”
Much
later, the first shaman, Panagiotakis, while alive on Earth also looks to his
audience and in a dancing memory points to a not so bright seemingly solid
northern star in the night and reveals from memory, “We are from there,” then
he pointed to the soil beneath his feet, “to here.” None of those who saw this
shaman in life point and speak those simple words slept well that night.
One
of those attentive listeners was Glevema, his granddaughter. She tossed and
turned in the darkness and a question unexpectedly brightened her mind, ‘How
can we be here and there at the same time?’
Later
in life, she died and found herself waiting for members of her tribe to join
her once they died and discovered they did not completely die. People had
become respecting of the Dead by the time of Panagiotakis and his granddaughter
Glevema. People had begun burying the Dead with rites and passages to
accommodate the living and the dead at the same time. The living had made a
conscious decision, to be in two places at once, to be with their living
friends and to be with the memories of their dead friends. In this story
Glevema becomes the first human consciousness-in-spirit to enter a Place of the
Dead because she accepts her spiritual condition.
*
Glevema
knows Grandma Earth with her white teeth gleaning as a white cloud usually
unsoiled with wordy shadows. Grandma stares out at her listener thinking, the
living and dead passing as wordy shadows on the whitest of walls. “Child,” she
says, “I’m gonna sit on this here stump and hope it won’t stain my pretty blue
and white dress floating along in a gentle breeze.” Grandma Earth sits down and
expounds, “You may not like it but
I am your Nature inside and out. This kerchief on my head ain’t nothin'
but the stars and the Beyond.”
Grandma
glances up into this dark sky and continues, “I got me this chant to take us
from the Dead and the past to Merlyn’s dream story future set. I am the heart
on which shamans like Merlyn dance. He don’t dance alone though. Nobody dances
alone. Everyone has a love to dance with and Merlyn’s no exception. He dances
with Vivian.
From these two
ancient hearts by soul made one
Show these stories
where passions are begun.
Our well-known druid
and druidess will do,
They are the same,
human spirits that make up you.
In a timeless
corridor where musing memories rightly tie
Our Vivian and Merlyn
do consciously lie.
From anecdote and
Grandma's tooth-filled gums
Our past shaped
narrative to a future dream story comes.
Diplomatic Pouch 1
Pyl
Williams-Burroughs sits next to her brother and pilot, while they await departure
instructions from Detroit to Burke Lakefront in Cleveland. Pyl
turned excitedly, "Justine, what'd you think of the auto show?"
"I
liked it. I liked the new plug-in hybrids the best."
"I
liked them too,” she replies. “Which ones did you like best, Blakey."
"Right
now, I like the sunny and mild weather — not bad for a third of the way through
January.” He paused, then matter-of-factly remarked, "We are a go on
33."
Justin
leans forward pushing himself back to sit up straight and adjusting himself to better
observe the instrument needles fluttering as the worn asphalt runway began to
more swiftly disappear beneath the fuselage. ‘We are up,’ rests his anxiety.
Intimately his next thought is, ’now all we have to do is come down.’
An
hour into their flight Blake and Justin were enjoying the meticulous drone of
the Rolls-Royce engine in line with the darker blue above and the gray blue
waters of Lake Erie ten thousand of feet below. Dusk will be around five,
brooded Blake as the tip of the Cessna Eagle’s left wing appeared to lightly
tap onto an unseen object. “What the hell?” mumbled Blake.
"Was
it a bird?" asked Pyl cautiously.
Justin
interjected, “It sounded like a car tire kicking up a stone."
Blake
picked up the small binoculars for a quick inspection, "There's a crack
near the wing tip light." His puffed lower lip and grouching demeanor lead
to another round nervous of cabin silence into a satisfactory landing at
Cleveland’s Burke Lakefront Airport.
While
Pyl and Blake visually inspected the landing light held fiberglass wingtip of
the parked Cessna more closely Blake observes a minute gray spongy substance
within the slight crack. This is secondary to the reassuring fact that the
crack appears easily repairable.
"What
is that gray stuff?" asks Pyl.
Blake
replies, ”Probably bled out bird gut."
"Scrape
me some," orders Pyl. "I'll have it analyzed. I want to see what kind
of bird was flying that high."
Her
husband Justin moans, "What for? Jeez, Pyl, it’s ground guts.”
Pyl
ignores the comment by saying, “Justin, get me something to put this in. We
were pretty high for it to be a bird."
At
that point a stranger walks up to the wing and begins inspecting the damage.
Pyl
asked politely, "May I help you?"
"I
saw you coming in. I am interested in buying an old Cessna P210N like this
one."
The
woman has such an odd dialect, thought Justin as he picked up a small plastic
envelope for Pyl. Noting the stranger’s dark Mediterranean-like eyes, he first
gives Pyl the envelope and then extended his hand, "I'm Justin. This is my
wife, Pyl and that's her brother, Blake, on the stool.” Curiosity gets the
better of him, “I’m surprised you just didn’t call the plane, the Eagle or
Silver Eagle, that’s what people usually say.”
The
female marsupial humanoid quickly gathers herself into a warm smile,
"Hello, I’m Fran."
"That's
your name?" questioned Pyl.
"Yes,"
as she gave her hand to Pyl she caught her error and she added, "My given
name is Francis Parker, and you are Pill?"
Pyl
giggled, "My brother couldn't pronounce my real name so I have been stuck
with P-y-l ever since."
The
humanoid turns slightly and shakes Justin's hand, "And you are the
brother?"
"No,
he's my husband,” answers Pyl. “My brother Blake is inspecting the
damage."
Blake
quibbled business-like, "We think a bird hit the wingtip light. A slight
crack, but it appears repairable."
"I
have a trace of the remains," adds Pyl. "I'm going to have it
analyzed to see what kind of bird it was."
A
slight crack, thinks the humanlike alien. Our Ship was considerate. Ship would
have been more so had he not allowed the touch at all. Interrupting her
thoughts she says, "Well, good luck making the repair.” Francis quickly
adds, "Blake, how much would you give for her?"
Pyl
moaned, "Daddy would never want us to sell this plane, Blake. She's
family."
Francis
declares, "Upon a decent inspection and fly about, I’ll give you up three
hundred thousand and not a dime more." The human lookalike concluded
masterfully with an in your face business-like smile.
"Give
me your card. I'll contact you tomorrow," responded Blake.
***
0634 hours. Sunday. I have already discovered and corrected several copy errors. I will try to be more diligent.
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