Where Seas and Fables Meet

by B W Powe

  “What do you want to do today?” she asked.

  “I want to be a soldier,” he said.

  She smiled kindly because she’d known soldiers. She’d often appeared to them during battles. Many soldiers once saw her in grey barrage smoke. They’d stopped fighting for the moment, looking on in awe at her size and beauty. But today she was small. She’d muted her magnificent light so that the boy would be at ease.

  “What kind of soldier?” she asked.

  “A brave knight who fights dragons all day,” he said. William held up his toys so that she could see them. He had dragons, puppets, clowns, horses, unicorns, and many medieval soldiers with plastic swords and helmets with visors that could open and close. One of the soldiers had a sword that flashed red and white lights.

  “Let’s do that,” she said.

  The angel and the boy played until it was lunchtime. Then the nanny appeared. She was a friendly soul who truly liked the boy, but her English was limited, and most of

  the time she had to gesture to him or utter basic words. The boy liked her, too, because she served grilled cheese sandwiches and sweet pickles for lunch, and these were his favourites.

  Angels were invisible to her, but she believed in them. Just because she never saw one didn’t mean they didn’t exist. Many things existed in the world which she hadn’t seen, yet she knew they were there. Like the Eiffel Tower. She’d never been to Paris, but she’d seen the pictures. And though she knew that pictures could be faked, the pictures could always point to something true. When she was a little girl, she liked to talk to her dolls. They listened, and she had often thought that her dolls could be angels. But when she came to this country, a teenager looking for work, she put her secret conversations aside.

  After lunch and a walk with his nanny, the boy had a nap. After this he called his angel back. His little room felt wide and beautiful when she was there. It was as if his room became the universe. He could become a knight charging through space, battling with anything that tried to block his ride. The angel laughed, encouraging him in his dreams. She was happy to be with him.

  •

  One day the angel found that the boy had matured. He was going to pre-school. William learned how to sit in a row at a desk and look towards the front where maps and “ABC’s” and “123’s” and the flags of nations were placed. He organized his time.

  He put his toys aside, though he kept them in his room. He kept them because he remembered they had a light around them. Whenever he looked at his toys, his heart glowed. But he couldn’t see her. This happened suddenly. It was as if he’d opened his eyes to something else.

  The angel hovered close. She was open to his call. But the more he sat in rows and faced forward and concentrated on the new instructions and what others said, the less he seemed to remember she’d been a presence in his room. She grew sad.

  But there were times when the boy experienced strange things. A sun shower suddenly occurred when he looked outside his classroom. Sometimes a quick rain bathed him and his friends when they were out playing or walking or arguing or skulking around the schoolyard.

  William found that he liked the sun showers. They made him feel warm and inspired. His imagination would start up. When it rained he told himself stories.

  But over the years this stopped, too. He progressed from classroom to classroom, each room growing larger and more crowded. People jostled with ideas and views. He was interested in them, and sometimes distracted by them. The angel found she was never asked for.

  She went away and returned to the source that created her. This angel came to be called the sad one, though she wasn’t as sad as the mother who wept for the world. The angel brooded near the source. She sought its protective solace.

  •

  The angel had a dream one night. (The angels aren’t human. They’re a separate order of creation. Still, like people, they dream and yearn.)

  She dreamed that she’d turned to stone. She was frozen in the posture of weeping. She could see herself becoming a sculpture called “The Sad Angel.” The sculpture stood on the side of a great cathedral. People paid to see her. They said: “Why does this one cry?” None of the other angels wept that had been turned to stone and placed on the sides and at the entrances of the cathedral. Maybe if she turned to stone she wouldn’t feel the pain of her tears. Maybe she’d feel nothing. But in her dream this wasn’t true. She felt everyone’s sorrow. She could weep forever.

  Then she woke up and what lingered from her dream was the trace of her grief. Like people, angels only remembered pieces of their dreams.

  She thought the boy would call her back. He’d find himself asking big questions about meaning. And he’d crave enchantment again. Once you asked the big questions, you could see the ladder of angels, and nothing would stop your quest, your ride into the unknown.

  She would come into his room, and he would ask her if she’d been present in the light of his play and in the summer rain.

  “Yes,” she’d say.

  And he would have to prepare himself for a new kind of fight – to acknowledge he believed in her.

  But it was possible that he wouldn’t call her back. That he would think she was a fantasy. It was possible he’d dismiss all such stories, calling them “hard-wired, genetic expressions.” The real world was here, now. This is what he’d know and accept.

  •

  William grew to be a man with a wife and two children. One day he and his wife decided to take a vacation to a city in Brazil. They took a guided tour so that all would be taken care of for them. They took bus tours through the country’s greatest city, and then a bus tour out into the countryside, to a lesser-known city that was renowned for its cathedral.

  William looked up at the cathedral. He saw a sad angel. The posture of the sculpture reminded him of something, but of what – he couldn’t say. He stared. His heart was moved, but he didn’t know why. He said nothing to his wife, because he wasn’t sure how to describe his feeling. He went to another sculpture. There were more figures of angels in different postures. He studied his guidebook. He read about the impressive enigmatic stones of the cathedral. Then he rejoined his wife, and they went on, and then back to the bus.

  In the plaza outside the cathedral a shower of summer rain began. It only rained on the plaza, nowhere else.

  There were no clouds in the sky, and the sun was brilliant and yellow, close and hot.

  Nevertheless, it rained.

  An old gypsy woman was selling tiny wooden replicas of the cathedral and small metal replicas of the angels. She looked into the sun shower. She muttered to herself, and turned and muttered to those nearby. People stood in the warm mist that poured from the cloudless sky, wondering how this could be, commenting on the beauty of the moment. The mist carried small rainbows, dozens of them arching around the plaza and around the people who had stayed outside.

  The gypsy had spent many hours in this place by the cathedral. But she never saw anything like this.

  She said to no one in particular: “A sun shower means an angel close to God is weeping.”

  A woman standing nearby (another tourist from another continent, also on a bus tour) asked the gypsy to repeat what she said. The old woman did so.

  The gypsy crossed herself and said: “Hail Mary.” The sun shower stopped. The old woman shrugged and turned to the woman from the bus tour and asked her if she’d like to buy a replica of the cathedral.

  Musing

  1.

  The muses or inspirational figures (elements, angels, elders, saints) may visit, and abruptly they don’t. When they pass on, they leave you gaping. If you take the moment they offered, and open to them, they offer gifts, sometimes strange, but gifts nevertheless. If you step away from the gifts, and ignore the offerings, they could move on to another. You may be beloved by them, but how do you live outside of the room – the space – where
they sing and linger, press and infiltrate, inspire and lift, kiss and slap, singe and sting?

  2.

  I have many voices inside me. I call them children, poems, lines, stories, essays, events, dreams, longings, the future, lessons, talk, advice, love, family, and friends. There’s no sequence to their speaking. This I have to arrange for myself. They tumble in at once. Which voice to listen to and to know truly?

  Mystic

  1.

  ... at the rim of analytical consciousness, away from the spotlight, where emotion, the numinous, prayer, poetry, music, shock, analogy, and correspondence, take possession of you...

  2.

  ... difficult to express or schematize, but then so is love, so is sex, so is family, so is connection, so is the wind.

  3.

  ... often said to be otherworldly. Asceticism, abstemiousness, it’s said, must accompany the experience. But it can refer to the courage of the inward spirit, and it can refer to spiritual vitality.

  4.

  ... there is mystical Eros, and there are mystical trees, mystical marriages, mystical rivers, mystical art, mystical dreams, mystical expressions, mystical comedies.

  5.

  ... the practical path: finding the miraculous and mysterious in every way or wave, every day. It’s available to anyone. Maybe one of the marks of a practical mysticism is its hopeful state, its deep receptivity.

  6.

  ... comes to you in flashes, cracks, probes, splinters, images, reveries, moments of stillness, by confounding zigzags, in parables, keys, protests and heartbreaks...

  ... in ways you can’t always control or command...

  ... a trace, a catalyst, a crossroads in your reading room, an ecstasy, a provocation, a passage, an impure mixing, a decreating...

  ... a tear at the hide, a frayed nerve...

  ... unfolding with the perception that the soul may only be known, at this time, through jolts and glimpses...

  7.

  ... the windows are open, the doors are open. We can move outside and welcome the wind.

  8.

  ... I write these lines with passions and dreams, with the images and beats I’ve been given. Summon me again, be with me...

  9.

  ... it comes to you, in striving and evocations.

  10.

  ... what if we broke away and flooded institutions, the arresting Structure and its limiting meanness, its abiding fear of the personal, with the wrath and ecstasies of ourselves? Intention: to have no goals, only holy grails.

  11.

  ... we could revel together, you and I, in the spiritual chaos outside certainty’s walls...

  12.

  ... the Morse code of the heart is love.

  Loving Destiny

  1.

  I admire the cabalist precept, ancient and venerable, that says we need lots of kisses, and thus untold amounts of intimacy, to bring forth the Messiah (or the return of the Messiah). Is the Messiah in us, or an actual being? Since the idea of the Messiah seems to be slow in his or her return, either within us or without, then surely we need many kisses. No end to our intimacies, our aspirations towards intimacy with another.

  2.

  I see you passing.

  And it is as if I’m walking down a dark street in an unknown small town and you’re in a car driving by, going in the other direction, and we see one another, only for an instant.

  And I say openly how I love you, and you mouth a saying of regret and yet of tenderness, and we pass on, and pass by. The street is quiet, full of lamplight and shadows.

  You are that night, and I am, too.

  In whose arms will you be tomorrow?

  In what light?

  Reception and Transmission

  1.

  A shadow keeps falling on us: we often fight ourselves with nihilism’s knives.

  2.

  While we’re at the edge of the Tsunamis of the soul, we try to talk from our many sides.

  3.

  Writing on the wall: “You have to find every way you can to strengthen your children.”

  4.

  Take everyone you love to the alchemists to get them to pour gold.

  5.

  The intensity of the background noise has been trying to drown this out: blessings – peace – amen – om-shantih shantih shantih – shalom – namaste – all mean we can bear new life inside us.

  The Story

  Once an originator told a story.

  The story seemed clear enough.

  But no one quite got it.

  People were impelled into explanations. Soon no one understood the explanations either.

  So there was a need for more elaborations and commentaries. This became everyone’s greatest need. During this process of elaboration and explanation, the original story was forgotten. The explanations became the source. Now there were so many explanations that the world was laced with their overlapping networks. The explanations and commentaries became the world. Argument soon replaced storytelling.

  But one day a person interrupted all the arguments with a wonderful new story.

  The world was briefly hushed. Everyone was impressed. Something new had entered time.

  But soon people had trouble understanding the new story. Explanations began again. Only this time there was a memory: somewhere (somehow) an original story lived. Would people be able to find it again?

  The explanations continued. But they didn’t do so in the way that they had before. They had a new design and direction. The old explanations were forgotten. The new explanations were better and they replaced the others. Traces of the old ones still existed, like a design within another design, a master’s painting hidden inside the strokes of a new painting.

  The world appeared larger than it did before. All the explanations kept expanding it.

  Then one day someone came up with another new story. Everyone was enthralled.

  The world was getting larger and larger because of the stories and their explanations.

  Soon people began to wonder if they’d need another world to store all this information. The search began.

  The Library of Mysteries

  1.

  Swallow a tormenting or ecstatic book like a fish-hook.

  2.

  Some books you don’t read: they crack you open, so that you’re the one who is read.

  3.

  Reading can sometimes be a necessary distraction, like a vital daydream, for those who are tempted towards destruction. Reading can also transform the urge to exit this world by letting you enter another, without harming your body.

  4.

  I need books made of voices.

  I search for pages that talk and breathe. My readings become a listening.

  And reading becomes sensitivity to mood.

  5.

  I’m less (and less) interested in argument than in the voices inside the argument. Some arguments like poems and stories carry a voice or many voices.

  6.

  Being made of voices means each book could become a call; each reading could become a calling.

  7.

  The books I need: where words tremble like cells on your skin, sentences ripple like water, voices come through the images, the images are like entry points to the other worlds that wait for us, sentences remain with you like invitations to journeys.

  8.

  The book that I look for is never in at the Library of Mysteries. Or I’ve yet to find it – or, it’s been forbidden to me, prescribed on an index decided upon by strangers – or, it’s been temporarily mislaid – or, it’s been signed out by someone else – or, it’s the book a person close to me was meant to write – or, it’s the book I’ve already brought home but I don’t know how to read yet.

  9.

  Inside the books another book is written.

  Q
uotation Firewall

  1.

  “It whispered: where I please.” – Henry Vaughan

  2.

  “Any trip along our own path is a razor’s edge.” – Kena Upanishad

  3.

  “The eyes go forth to find an image to recommend to the heart.” – Giraut de Bornelh (a troubadour, 1138-1215)

  4.

  “The aphorism, the apophthegm... are the forms of ‘eternity’.” – Nietzsche

  5.

  “If search means that one has a goal, then finding means to be free, to stand open, to have no

  aim.” – Hermann Hesse

  Babylon

  The warriors took the captured people to the greatest city in the world.