Mid-morning.
Carol is reading the paper and you have to be ready to go to the vets by
eleven. The worst part, usually, is caging the furry little rascals. Cats and
people are like that except for caging themselves instead. – Amorella
0923
hours. O the existential beat goes on. Good one, Amorella
You are no exception, boy. – Amorella
I
understand, probably I am more so, caged in my own particulars. As it is easier
to work in fiction how is Merlyn caging himself, and what can he do about it?
Here is the story. In life the spirituality
of people is caged in the brain and body; in death the restraint is in memory
of brain and body. There is a line in Our Town that fits this particular
theatre bill.
** **
“You know as well as I do that
the dead don't stay interested in us living people for very long.
Gradually, gradually, they lose hold of the earth ... and the
ambitions they had ... and the pleasures they had . . . and the
things they suffered . . . and the people they loved.
They get weaned away from earth-that's the way I_put it,- weaned away.
And they
stay here while the earth part of 'em burns away, burns out; and all that time they
slowly get indifferent to what's goin' on in
Grover's Corners.
They're
waitin'. They're waitin' for something that they feel is , comin'. Something
important, and great. Aren't they waitin' , for the eternal part in them to
come out clear?
Some of the things
they're going to say maybe'll hurt your feel-
ings-but that's the way it is: mother'n daughter ... husband 'n wife ... enemy 'n enemy ... money 'n miser ... all those ter- ribly
important things kind of grow pale around here. And what's left when memory's
gone, and your identity, Mrs. Smith?”
From
Our Town by Wilder – Act III
** **
We are
going to allude to that line I’ve placed in bold. – Amorella
0955
hours. This is interesting, Amorella. I always liked that line, but what is
left after the memory’s gone?
Your character is built and uplifted, if you
will, and your character, your personality is free to move on. You have
accepted who you are, your full personality as is and you start anew. –
Amorella
0959 hours.
Do you mean like you are reborn, or are open to be reborn?
1606 hours. We had a late lunch at Marx’s Bagels then stopped for a Graeter’s on the way home. I think I need a nap before starting Dead 2.1. Is Merlyn going to have a conversation, if so, with whom? Or, is this philosophical?
You had a light supper and watched a “Modern
Family” and the first hour of a new drama set in the 1980’s centered on
building the first IBM clone in Texas, “Halt and Catch Fire” on AMC. It is dusk
and you are ready to work on Dead 2.1. Merlyn is going to be talking with the
Supervisor. – Amorella
2233
hours. I am surprised I completed this. I hope it makes sense in the morning.
Add and post. – Amorella
***
The Dead 2.1 - draft © 2014, rho
Merlyn is
sitting alone in his curragh, his memory of the small wooden frame boat of
stretched animal hides, on his memory of a slow moving mountain stream.
Glancing to the southeast he sees his never-changing hut and to the east his
favorite tall old oak that centers the sanctuary created through the vision of
his deeply spirited heartansoulanmind, his humanity. The humanity he took with
him when he died back in the seventh century. He thinks, I am a dream in a
dream in a dream and let’s it go at that as he cannot imagine more.
From
nowhere and nearby the Supervisor observes,
a middle-aged Merlyn sitting in the pleasure of his own company for meditation,
which is often a wont of his. He is as a lonely flower blossom on a high rocky
mountain crag. Merlyn considers who he is but not what he might in future
become. Things are not as they appear in this expanded World of the Dead, this
HeavenOrHellOrBothOrNeither as the marsupial humanoid Dead call this place.
Merlyn’s position is similar to that Schrodinger’s theoretical cat – he’s half
a spirit living in the hands and fingers of Richard Greystone on Earth and half
a spirit existing in the Worlds of the Dead. Merlyn’s dreams continue a story
that began in the Lightning or so told by the marsupial humanoids and other
higher conscious beings scattered about various scattered about universes that
began with one after so struck by the
continual Light Before even the smallest of things,
of matter, existed.
One
doesn’t become a Merlyn without order and reason first. He learns as he thinks
and considers the alternatives at his disposal. Right now he is resting, slumbering
nearly surrounded by a seemingly ever-present ghostly fog, a blossom unseen and
rarely heard except by his dead friends. Richard the Living perhaps heard
Merlyn’s voice once, but he is as unsure as he is existentialist who wonders on
the same sense of Reality that part of Merlyn now living within.
“Hello,
Merlyn” says the Supervisor. “You
hear me well enough.”
“I
do. I do not understand this place anymore. We dead exist. We revolted for a
second time and won. We have needed to speak to the Living and I am doing my
part. The Worlds of the Dead have changed with this Second Rebellion, earth
centuries after the First Rebellion during the time of Homer, the Storyteller. I
have explained everything in dream-story forms, these four segments of a
chapter, and I have fourteen chapters to go in this unbound book. I rather like
not being bound; the dreams are more real this way. But where do we go from
here? Universes abound, mostly unfilled from what I gather.”
“And
you too are unfilled Merlyn,” responds
the Supervisor. Even half alive and half dead your consciousness remains
unfilled.”
Wide-eyed
and sitting tense in the curragh, Merlyn declares, “This then is the natural
state of all humanity, Living or Dead.”
“It
is the natural state of the Dead and the Living,” coolly comments the Supervisor.
Merlyn
adjusts his body that does not exist but in memory and peers forward as if he
could see the Supervisor directly in
front of him above the forward frame of the boat and he simply asks, “What else
is there for this individual and collected consciousness of ours?”
Unseen,
the Supervisor smiles as if SheanHe had heard the smallest piece of humor in what
would be the longest of time, if SheanHe were the least bit physical. The Supervisor considers HeranHis smile
and wonders – what would Merlyn think could he see my slightly upturned smile?
He has no eyes yet he still has no sense of what vision is. I would have
thought he would have learned something from what he is dead. He moves the
memory of his body and brain forgetting he exists without either. He sits in
his small boat on a river that is not and never has been but a construction
within his six senses.
The
whole collective, consciousnesses of two species here, kept simple for the
telling live the memory as if there were nothing else in these Worlds of the
Dead. These Worlds are but the dressing, the horse whose hair tips the brush as
the rushing Lightning continues from Before through and on the picture that has
yet to be painted, so considers the
Supervisor.
Merlyn
stares ahead, muttering, “I see nothing.”
***
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