Murder in the Cathedral and Other Topics

Amorella reflecting on the martyrdom of Thomas Beckett. This photo was taken two years ago on orndorff’s second visit to England’s Canterbury Cathedral. This is the exact place the murder took place, supposedly on a misunderstanding of an uttered wish that was not King Henry II’s explicit command. Here is a side note orndorff found in Wikipedia:

“Edward Grim was a clerk from Cambridge who was visiting Canterbury Cathedral on Tuesday 29 December 1170 when Thomas Becket was murdered. He subsequently researched and published a book, Vita S. Thomae (Life of Thomas Becket), published in about 1180, which is today known chiefly for a short section in which he gives an eyewitness account of the events in the Cathedral. He himself attempted to protect Becket, and sustained a serious arm wound in the attack. Whilst there are four other accounts of the events of that day, Grim was the only eyewitness to actually observe the killing itself. Little else is known of his life, before or after the murder.”

The first thing that came to mind when Amorella picked out the picture for the day was T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. When I did a quick Wikipedia check I spied some lines from the play that I really like:

“Becket . . . specifically addresses the immoral suggestions of the fourth tempter at the end of the first act:

‘Now is my way clear, now is the meaning plain:

Temptation shall not come in this kind again.

The last temptation is the greatest treason:

To do the right deed for the wrong reason.’”

You favor the last two lines orndorff because they already rest in your heart for personal reasons you cannot deny.

Why do you confront my very sense of being so, Amorella?

Because you need to be conscious of how very level the playing field is. Your greatest personal wish is to remain an honest man, or as nearly honest as possible in a world such as the one you live in. You discovered in the last line that holding onto self-honesty for the wrong reason takes the glitter away.

Indeed, it appears impossible to get through this world honestly.

Why do you think that is?

I do not know other than for self-survival.

Do you think it reasonable that the Dead are an honest lot?

They have no fears, except as you say, lack of reason and lack of dignity.

In the books both lacks (of reason and dignity) demand self-honesty to fill them.

Such a wonderful sense of humor, the more honest a person in life is the better off sheorhe is dead.

It does have a simple ring to it doesn’t it?

I’ll have to think on it, but it seems to have an underlying punch built in. Very clever, Amorella.

Now you have shifted your thinking: 'putting all this online might give other people ideas to use instead of you.'

Not a very nice thought, but yes, it just did occur to me. This outline or background material for the next three books could be used by someone else. I don’t think you can copyright ideas and concepts for books in advance. Besides, it already happened to me once back in the late seventies.

You need not concern yourself about that, orndorff. Just as the first three books are original so will the next three be. An honest person will not take and use any of this material or the material in the other three books either. Dishonest people have their uses in the Place of the Dead. It is a very ecologically friendly place to be sure. The seven deadly sins as well as the seven ancient virtues will also be put to use.

This sounds more like Dante than Milton. Or, perhaps it is even more like a classical representation of Elysium and Hades as seen in Virgil.

The description of HeavenOrHellBothOrNeither needs to fit in context with the general concept of classical thought as the Rebellion is taking place in classical times.

This is good thinking, Amorella. Of course, you are right. I had not thought that far into this. Already, this is a better set of concepts than I had drummed up in my three chapter false start.

I took Merlyn out of it. He was a stumbling block to you. Three books of Merlyn’s dreams and you were ready to continue on. I have a place for him in the books, for continuities’ sake. But for now, Merlyn can relax a bit in the twenty-first century. Besides, he is more closely connected to the second Rebellion in HeavenOrHellBothOrNeither, the one that occurred mid-twentieth century, the project of Book Six.

Yes, of course you are correct here. I cannot absorb all that material from those books. I have thought about creating various chapter outlines as reminders but have never followed through with it.

You were, as they said in the old days, in an ‘enchantment’ when those books were being collaborated between your human background and myself. It was as a Shaman’s Dance, orndorff, twenty-first century style.

At least I lived to see them in print no matter where they came from within. I don’t really care about that. If I do have another three books in me, then let them come out.

In due time, orndorff. The first two, Books Four and Five are complete, waiting for your signature, your input, as it were. You have more background than you think, plus you and most everyone else today knows more about the real world than Virgil, Dante and Milton. All six of my books are for modern times, orndorff. That’s it for today’s posting.

Fox Territory

This is Amorella in the orndorff north front side yard observing a wily fox about to mark his roaming territory. The photo had to be tweaked a bit with iPhoto and then with Adobe Photoshop Elements Six to brighten the shaded area. The photo was taken a year ago last summer. I chose it for two reasons. One, it is a reminder of how close the untamed is to the civilized; and two, the setting shows human inhabitants redesigned the natural elements.

The driveway belongs to the neighbor to the north while most of the grass shown is on the orndorff property. Stones were marched around the tree which as a sibling grew on the edge of a cornfield. There are two large Ash trees on either side of the prickly male Osage Orange. The honeysuckle bushes were also in place. The land begins to dip down about twenty feet or so to Muddy Creek which is on the other side of the driveway. Forty yards of woods down work their way down to the water.

The wily, live-dangerously fox is therefore sniffing on the edge of civilization, as it were, before he marks the outer edge of his rawer more limited wild territory along the narrow unlevel bottom land of Mason, Ohio’s north-flowing Muddy Creek.

In an opposite scenario, a human being, the self-conscious orndorff in this case, is looking down into the woods of the unconscious mind wondering what the unseen bottomlands of such a place might unfold to look like. The writing of the first three books is as the fox marking his mentally conscious territory. The book bindings are as a kind of invisible fence he cannot see past.

My writing a passage such as this adds to a level of personal anxiety that he can feel but the reader cannot. This is the way it may be if the reader looks deeper into that mirror the eyes appear to reflect. You have to find nearly invisible markers within and encompass them for navigation deeper into the forest, as the fox does in coming up from the forest into these ‘yarded organized designs of nature’ that he cannot distinguish from the wild except perhaps for the nearby human scent which ought to make any clever little fox take caution.

You see, at times (almost instinctively), I am perceived by orndorff as an uncommon, unknown-scented presence. Thus, the ‘caution’ flag is raised when I point further into the woods of human literary unconsciousness for which he appears to have no natural GPS to give him guidance.

This is the edge that Dante began from and he used Virgil (Reason) and Beatrice (Angelic-like love) to help him climb down into the very Classical and Medieval descriptions of the Inferno and eventually up into Purgatory and then up once again into and through the Rose of Paradise.

The theatre of books four, five and six will take place in the common center stage of the first ten thousand Dead at about the time of Homer. It is interesting that Homer supposedly lived in the eighth century BC at about the same time period that the Greek alphabet was created.

Scholars can spend lifetimes debating these things but the story has to have some actual historical time in terms of the now Living. Ten thousand human heartansouls in rebellion is a rather poetic number like Helen of Troy having launching a thousand ships.

Milton used the Biblical story of Adam and Eve in Genesis as a part of the rebellious setting of his metaphysics which would have easily captured the imaginations of the English readers of the time period. I am sticking with the Rebellion of the Dead during eighth century BC before Virgil, Dante, and Milton.

Okay, Amorella, but I am no Virgil, Dante, or Milton. I make no claims that direction. You are putting the rather rotund old guy in a foot race with Olympic winners here. Good grief, my fingertips are cooling down right before my eyes. I don’t mind a challenge, but let’s don’t go overboard.

Who else writes on metaphysics as well as the above three?

No one as far as I know though I am not very knowledgeable on the subject. I had logic in a philosophy course in grad school, that’s it, and I only earned a B in the class. The focus of my class presentation was on The Milesians: Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes. I don’t remember what my paper was on. I realized in that class that I wasn’t ‘philosopher’ material. I am an esoteric thinker but these people were quite scholarly and esoteric, they went overboard on minute details that I didn’t find all that interesting. I enjoyed the Milesians because they were scientific thinkers first, at least in my mind they were. They came to wrong but (at that time) valid conclusions on their observations on how parts of the world system worked.

I will construct a simple metaphysical system based on what you already have in books one, two and three. That is, the system will coincide with what is in the Merlyn books.

Amorella, I can’t remember what is in those books in terms of metaphysics. There were so many words and concepts, many of them from the alien marsupials. It is too much material. I can’t even remember writing most of it, even as keyboarding. It was like a three year dream.

We will assume the marsupial aliens are a separate region of HeavenOrHellBothOrNeither but that the two are connected. I want the Place of the Conscious Dead to be greater than just a human centered place.

That’s fine with me, Amorella. I think it was inferred somewhere in the story anyway.

It is better (in the books' presentation) if the reader becomes conscious of the concept of a Place of the Dead that is bigger than herorhis own species. Like you say, too much self-centeredness. 


I have no problem with that. I am assuming here that the reader will not have to have read the first three books.


This is a correct assumption, orndorff. We are starting fresh, where all this began.

Shelley and Book One

Amorella returns to the British Museum for this photograph. First, a word of explanation via Wikipedia.

“Ozymandias was another name for Ramesses the Great, Pharaoh of the nineteenth dynasty of ancient Egypt.[4]Ozymandias represents a transliteration into Greek of a part of Ramesses' throne name,User-maat-re Setep-en-re. The sonnet paraphrases the inscription on the base of the statue, given by Diodorus Siculus as "King of Kings am I, Osymandias. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works."[5] Shelley's poem is often said to have been inspired by the arrival in London of a colossal statue of Ramesses II, acquired for the British Museum by the Italian adventurer Giovanni Belzoni in 1816. . . . It may have been [the statue’s] repute or news of its imminent arrival [to the museum] rather than [Shelley] seeing the statue itself which provided the inspiration.”

I wondered where Amorella was going to go today as Italy has been posted. I suspected a bit of simple nature in the United States. Thus, this is a surprise. I always took pleasure in teaching Shelley and Keats equally. Only a poem or two though as we had to move on in a survey course to the likes of William Blake whom I personally enjoy more than either of the two Romantic poets. 

I let orndorff interrupt here to show his lack of decorum. I thought he would be pleased by my inclusion from Wikipedia but that was not enough to satisfy his need to inject personal thoughts which were not requested here. 

This is indeed a major problem. I like to talk (and think and relate) and at school I loved lecturing, though even then I would interrupt myself and tell some little story or two along the way. The students usually didn’t mind but some could hardly stand my drifting off task for one inane  reason or another. I have this same problem here, with Amorella. I forget she is talking and begin talking myself. It is no wonder I have false starts on books. I move right in, taking over for Amorella, until I eventually realize it is just me. I can be as an old fart in a windsock.

Sorry, Amorella and to all the others I have impolitely interrupted in my lifetime. I was raised to be polite but obviously I slip. Too much built in arrogance. Too much ‘self’ orientation. This is probably the reason I haven’t decided what a human being is. It’s a wonder Amorella was able to produce a book a year for three years. I have to continually set myself aside and let her do her work. 

                                      “Ozymandias”

                            By Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown

And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear:

`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away".

Some say the theme in Shelley’s poem can be reduced to the lines found in Proverbs 16:18. However, “Ozymandias” is not a translation. A likeness of Ozymandias remains in both the British and Cairo Egyptian Museum(s) (which also has Ramesses II’s mummified remains) and Shelley’s works remain in English literature. ‘Something remains in biography and history. Nothing, by definition, cannot remain.

Yes. I like the humor which seems reasonable at first glance anyway. The world changes. Geopolitical landscapes change with it. In Book One, in an alternate dimension, where almost everyone in the world dies within about twenty minutes, no Americans survive. One Brazilian, one South African, one European and an Australian are alive when the alien marsupials finally arrive, obviously too late to be of much help – four adults and a tiny baby (half South African and half European) actually. Two aliens discover the earthlings and help them survive. That is basically one of the subplots in a couple of sentences. It doesn’t seem like it should have taken so many words to say but it did. I suppose I thought of Shelley’s  “Ozymandias” when I was scribing that section. 

Do you remember what killed most everyone?

I’d have to re-read the book. No one was sure. Personally, at first I assumed it was the Wrath of G---D because the Marsupials had a prophet or two who thought it was going to happen in their planetary system but it didn’t, it happened in ours instead. I enjoyed the humor. Prophets picking up on the future and they get one from across the galaxy instead. 

Then, after I thought about it more I considered some terrible disease that destroys the heart, not the blood-pumper but the one that holds our humanity.I figured an Angel took our humanity back because we weren’t using it anyway, at least not for everyone equally, particularly the children of the world. Or, the heart of humanity just withered away from lack of use. The latter is more reasonable. Use it or lose it. That’s easy enough to remember. 

Besides, why send an Angel to do something we can do ourselves? Angel-sending would show a lack of efficiency. I cannot imagine G---D not being super efficient, the ECOLOGIST, so to speak. That is part of the satire in the story. You have to see the humor, otherwise parts of the story are just downright depressing.

Okay, orndorff. Enough for tonight. I do see the humor though, it is rather funny. Living people sometimes have a tendency to take themselves too seriously. The Dead in these stories are surrounded by self-effacing humor, otherwise, who is the joke going to be on? 

Stone Lions and Other Art (Photo/Theme: 20 November 09)

Amorella here at the Museo dell’ Opificio della Pietre Dure (Museum of Precious Stones) with remnants of the Medici workshop from 1588.

Carol found this museum after a last minute perusing of Rick Steve’s Florence Thursday night and we decided on relaxing Friday as we were leaving really early Saturday morning – an Air France flight to Paris to catch a late morning Delta flight to Cincinnati.

Carol found the ceramics wonderful, but again you discovered you were not to take photos with flash. You did though, so here is one more that captures some of what Carol loved about the place.

Again, there is an elegance of sort, not like the Greek architecture and design in Pompeii, but still elegance with a Florentine flourish.

The point is that this is art created by a human being with money donated by the Medici family. Art and beauty go together with the weaving of mind, eyes and hands in this case. Pompeii and Florence were produced by different cultures in different times but human beings today and tomorrow are still built to appreciate the value of art and science.

People, some, say the soul is seen in the human eye, but I say it is a reflection of the heart not the soul. The human soul is seen in the humanities and the sciences that express dignity surrounded by reason.

You the Living don’t have to agree, of course, but in here, in the books, the Dead agree not because they are directed to do so, but because they, as reasoning creatures, have no choice but to agree.

This is the line of thinking that leads to the rebellion of the first ten thousand in the Place of the Dead. They have Free Choice, but by Necessity it is reduced to walking in one direction. Fate has nothing to do with it.

This is a little too much, Amorella. Too heavy. You are forgetting to mention the dark humor between the lines. The ten thousand are fully conscious of their situation. Shoot, the Dead are more conscious of it than the Living. Such is the humor. What do the Dead have to fear? Nothing. This is a concept I would really like to get a grasp on.

You are wrong, orndorff. What the Dead have to fear is the lack of Reason and the lack of Dignity, that’s the way it will play out in the next three books. It is as simple as that. – Amorella.

Obviously, this is not resolved. However, the trip to Italy is nearly over and the last bit of Florentine art I have and Amorella has chosen to be shown is one more door, in this case, an interior one.

I chose this door because, to me, it is symbolic of a door into the human mind. One that is presently closed, just as this reflection of the trip has come to a close. Another week has gone by. It is Saturday night, and a week ago the Orndorff’s arrived home about seven hours ago. Just like that, the recent trip to Italy is over, on the other side of the door and another week has passed by. 

Il Duomo and Dante (Photo/Theme: 19 November 09)

Amorella here looking up into the interior of ‘Il Duomo’ which is the inspiration for St. Peters in Rome and the U. S. Capitol. Here is what Wikipedia has to say:

“The Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore is the cathedral church (Duomo) of Florence, Italy, begun in 1296 in the Gothic style to the design of Arnolfo di Cambio and completed structurally in 1436 with the dome engineered by Filippo Brunelleschi. . . .

The cathedral complex includes the Baptistery and Giotto's Campanile. The three buildings are part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site covering the historic centre of Florence. . . .  The basilica is one of Italy's largest churches, and until the modern era, the dome was the largest in the world. It remains the largest brick dome ever constructed.”

The photograph does not do the design and art justice, Amorella, but it took a couple of shots to get this one as all I did was hold my arm out with Carol’s camera (a Sony DSC-T90 Cyber-shot) flat in my palm and snapped.

Accordingly, the tower base was built before the dome could be constructed. Richard is impressed that the designers were confident enough that eventually the architectural problems of the dome could be conquered (as none like it had ever been built before).

I am still inspired by the confidence of those in charge. What a time to have been alive and working on such a project. It was a Renaissance of mind as well as art and science. We have had such times. Little is more wondrous in nature than the human mind, that is my feeling, but I do not know of course. We can do such wonderful things, one would be to help everyone grow into and live a more humane life. That is my dream.

It is already worked into the books, orndorff. The alien marsupial way of life.

It could not be in real life, Amorella. Fiction is what it is.

Where is that confidence that inspired you little more than a hundred words ago?

I am content to write fiction. I enjoy the concepts not the probabilities. Alas, my mind settles more in Platonic territory than that of Aristotle.

 I chose the next photo (Casa di Dante) because of your interest in Dante and particularly the Divine Comedy.

I was disappointed Dante’s house was a reconstruction, but still he lived in the area. We visited some of the places had also visited in his life. On one of these nearby streets he said his ‘hello’s’ to Beatrice. What a love story. (If interested check out:

fascinatinghistory.blogspot.com/2006/01/dante-and-beatrice.html)

In college, reading Dante’s imaginary and literary concepts of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven in the Divine Comedy was fascinating, as was Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Virgil’s The Aeneid. Those themes are fun and logically challenging to write about. The themes cover one of my favorite subjects – metaphysics.

So it is that you will enjoy scribing the next three books even more than the first three.

I cannot image such a thing, Amorella. My heart and soul are in those three books even though you wrote through my hands.

For me then, the challenge will be to create such a work that serves your purposes as well as my own.

What purposes could you possibly have, Amorella?

As your inner friend, one would be to show you what you are capable of.

You are kind to me, and I thank you with all my heart for what you have done through writing those books that I can put my own name on, but still, I cannot imagine.

You are a product of your own times, orndorff, not mine. – Amorella.

Sometimes you really make me question what a human being is.

Glad to finally see you put this in print, old man. 

On the Arno, Friends, and Book Four (Photo/Theme: 18 November 09)

Amorella standing on the top floor of the wonderful Uffico Museum looking down on the Arno River and the medieval Ponte Vecchio (Old Bridge). Richard is immediately reminded of the famous old store-sided London Bridge across the Thames to Southwark.

I was. That London Bridge burnt down. I am thankful the World War II German officer in charge did not destroy the bridge as he was ordered. Good for him and his sense of historical objects. 

Florence is a beautiful city and I was struck by how the sunlight penetrates and reflects. No wonder this was and still is as a Mecca for artists. One of my favorite pictures is the one to the left. It appears (to me) that we are standing in front of a painting, but there we are standing near the middle of the bridge looking downstream.

We traversed many of the museums and churches as many other first time tourists. Even so, for all we saw, this is one of my favorite most unforgettable views of the city.

Need I remind you this is not a travel journal orndorff. You dropped this photo in, it is not one I chose. (At least you are not apologizing for doing so.)

Like the first, this next picture is the one I chose. I did so because beyond museums and favorite views this shows three satisfied friends sitting after having a very good gelato down near the bridge. Ice cream is a favorite of the four who have been friends since college days.

Old friends are important. Richard is thinking about all those old friends he had growing up through high school and wonders if he should list them all. Then what about those from college days, his neighbors, the special colleagues from his teaching days, and his many former students, they are old friends in their own individual ways as far as he is concerned because he shared his life with them and they shared a part of their own with him.

Sometimes I think the Heaven in the books should be set up like Facebook, at least in principle. Sometimes I think Heaven is like that – that Facebook came about because the mechanics, the concepts, are from the invisible world.

I really don’t think the billions of Dead are as far away as people put them. In consciousness we are all in the same room, at least I would like it to be that way, and as such, why not? Fiction is a joy. Amorella conjured up HeavenOrHellBothOrNeither out of my head. Heaven is friends as far as I am concerned.

That’s the way it is in book four, The Rebellion orndorff. Friends want to go home, to go back to Earth to tell the Living how it is being Dead. The Dead want to share with the Living. How do you set up such a rebellious plan in the days of the first Ten Thousand Dead? Who do you negotiate with?

Traditionally speaking, they would negotiate with an Angel I suppose.

In the books orndorff, they negotiate with me. How’s that?

Whoa. That’s pretty heady stuff, Amorella. I remember some mention of this in either the notes or somewhere in the first three books or maybe even in the earlier false start of book four. I get on a roll in research and writing and run the fingers thinking you are writing and then eventually I just stop cold. It was not you at all, just me on a letter-lined roll, a kind of easy literary ecstasy across and down the page.

Writing is a process orndorff, you know that. All those post graduate hours at Miami University on the Ohio Writing Project – what you call a false start is but “percolating”. You need more conscious background for book four and this blog helps provide it. You feel better sharing because sharing makes you free, and I work when your mind is free. You have to write what you know, or in your case, what you intuitively feel. The unconscious works its way out between the lines. Change of plans, I will show the story, not Merlyn.

What use was there in having his character work its way back into life from the dreaming dead man he was? It took Merlyn three books to return as a living consciousness.

And, it will take you the next three books to become more conscious of the Dead, orndorff.

I see a dark humor brewing in this.

That is the plan, boy. The story of the rebellion is mine, but the humor is all your own. And, the joy will be to share it with your friends who are interested, only this time online, just as you did with the first three books. – Amorella. 

I don't want anyone reading this to feel obligated to read on. 

You are not asking your friends to read anything, orndorff. No one has to read it, but it will be online if one wishes to read, that's all. 

I can live with that.

Really now, who would have guessed. 

Food and the Fast Train (Photo/Theme: 17 November 09)

This is Amorella. Our fast train to Florence is pulling into line seven. First class on the electric bullet – smooth, quiet, and comfortable with speeds up to 198 miles per hour on the way. The last time the Orndorffs were on a train was in Peru:  Puno to Cuzco in 1972.

Excited when the train pulled up, and I was further delighted with the ride through the Tuscan countryside. I thought of my ancestral (DNA) mother of 17,000 years ago, who apparently lived in the area. Such connections are important within, even the very old ones. Biologically, we are who we are and who we once were a part of too. Our great-grandparents go a long way back. We share our ancient DNA like we share the air, unconsciously.

Once in Florence the driver who picked us up at the station and took us to our hotel proudly said (upon my asking about the construction of their modern trains), ‘It now takes four and a half hours to travel by rail [on Italian built trains] from Milan to Naples, it used to take eight.’

To your left is a photo of Tavola Calo a pleasant and quiet family restaurant suggested by the friendly staff at the Hotel Diana in Rome. The pastas and pizza were quite good and you chose a different menu each of the two days you suppered. Those are friends Craig and Alta standing behind the bicycle.

The four had a favorite nearby family restaurant in Florence too. Lunch at Mario’s, also twice (pictured below). Mario’s has been written up in Bon Appétit and is a lively place, full of humanity of all sizes, shapes and nationalities. It was busy and noisy, with good food and cheaper Cokes than the nearby surrounding Florence.

Most people don’t have a problem seeing a connection between spirituality and food, particularly when sharing it with friends and family. In the Merlyn’s Mind stories what most people think of Heaven is based on this same human quality, sharing one’s bounty with others. Not food perhaps, but conversation and friendship are still a part of the environment of the Dead. What else would one expect in a spiritually driven human orientation in consciousness?

What is amazing to me about this posting is the theme. In no way did I consider the ‘food’ theme would be posted on Thanksgiving. My main concern is always being able to walk off the plane after it has taken off, if anything was in the back of my mind that was it. Amorella notes the calendar and specific dates that I do not until I fall upon them. To end, I trust that those of you who celebrate Thanksgiving are having a good one, and a good day to everyone else too.     rho