CHAPTER 18
There would be years, and there would be generations.
Regardless, Frantz was beyond the counting.
When asked, he gave a counting, “Forty years.”
But few questioned him beyond this, accepting it as his age, accepting his scraggy features: weatherworn, not in the remotest asking the question about what Forty Years meant to him.
But Frantz had come to know the desert’s O’Side.
Come to the land and taken it as land.
Disembarked from the ocean. Pulled an oar with others pulling; heaving breaths. Beached the craft. Sat upon the sand. Slept in the desert’s deeply darkened embrace. Under a moon: cold fire. At the lip of ocean. Under a blanket of cool but arid air.
He also knew about the visions.
About the plants which induced hallucinations: of heaven, of hell.
About that which was burned and whose smoke was true dream.
And it was about the dream which he knew he had been about.
Knew himself as Friar Otto about the dream.
Knew himself as Frantz about the dream.
Knew himself as Dreamer within the dream, dreaming.
Not that he—nor they—were alone.
No. His first dream, his first vision had presented him to them who were already here. Already dreaming this land.
But he had waken, knowing that it was his to dream. Alongside? Beyond? Within? Despite? this other dreaming.
All he could remember was, “The time is near.”
It made him laugh.
It made him cry.
It made him anxious: heartfelt anxiety. For much was to be done.
What was to be done, he so clearly knew, was to prepare to engage what was coming from the other far-away shore—fully across the land from here his another O’side, a companion, there, a coastline plump with trees green and villages of ancient peoples...others, like him, coming from across the wide ocean of an Old World; dying, lost. Searching for a New World, for O’side.
As clear as the maps drawn together from all the remembered and forgotten bodies of those he explored: witches, goddesses, mothers, innocents...he beholds with his mind’s eye, his heart, his soul—he observes the first and endless landings on the other far-away side: tiny boats, like bugs adrift on a fallen leaf, bobbing, being led...Santa Maria, She conjuring their dreams, they swarming onto lands hot and steamy, fabled to be with riches of gold, finding ready servants, slaves among the naked and oddly clothes peoples...imaginary people, ones not of the dream, not Maria’s children...soon, She is pregnant, this Holy Land, populating with children of Her dream...the first fated to firmly beach in the northern cold clime: unkind, rejecting, nevertheless, they land with and because of Her dream—Errand into the Wilderness!
He hears timbers crack and split, the hammering of log cabins, the nailing down of frontier. He listens to the thundering words which would build a Promised Land: purified and God-sent. Prophet’s Words of a vision: Mother’s Dream but Our Father’s Plan: sacred yearnings. Endless migrating faces of a Dream unbounded. Ships: in ceaseless flow. Onto the shore. Then swiftly across the land, coming towards desert’s O’side—he sees wooden ships, he sights iron ships, he peers and beholds flying ships. It is the Great Story unfolding; Divine Providence—a land of Manifest Destiny!
Here, by his desert’s O’side, so Frantz visions this soon to be future life to his mates, now his brothers, now his family. None had dreamed this as he dreamt, rather, all others were caught in fantasies of horror or guiltless pleasure or mindless inconsequentalities…none had his dream of the Dream...none had “read” the maps on the bodies of Her: all Santa Marias. Awake! All in a flash grasped this, were grasped by it...Frantz stands and they behold the Chosen One: chosen to lead, Captain and High Priest. From O’side to O’side. Amen.
“Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the land.”
Replenish! Restore! Revivify!
Within his mind raced a hundred, a thousand—to him, incalculable number of images...of a group of twelve like his disembarking on other worlds—strange sites, peculiar environments, Frantz did not, could not speak to himself about where they were, but in this flash he sounded the words and knew them as echo, of a cosmic echo which reached beyond and through and was made real in those fiery balls which had become the map…he knew himself as not just not alone but as within a fullness, within a growing, within a yearning which was truly fire…yet truly aeonic wind…yet truly surging ocean: bosomful...yet truly the land: this the land—not Desert but Bountiful…Replenish: “It is ours to people this land.” Mother Earth!
vOYAGE:O'SIDE’s New World.
PART 3: DALORES
vOYAGE:O'Side Page 20