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fever and another barefoot stranger

fever and another barefoot stranger

The last winter before the completion of the new church he had an encounter with a stranger who had called upon him repeatedly and who was staying at the town’s only inn. He was dressed in simple, yet elegant clothes, cut out of fine, dark cloth. In a small town a stranger like this would normally have generated a great deal of curiosity. But he was so quiet and unassuming in his manner as to almost appear invisible. He went for daily visits to the rectory where he was served tea and would have long conversations with the pastor. The elegance of his appearance was so convincing that it took a while for the pastor to notice that the stranger wore but a kind of biblical footwear, close to being shoeless.

It was late fall. The trees were brilliantly red as if with religious fervor. The pastor felt alert, alive almost as if a lifetime of doubt and study suddenly held some promise, as if the dark aspects of his life were less weighing on him. Then the stranger came down with a severe flu which delayed his departure. High fevers made him delirious, and the doctor and priest both were called to soothe the rage which seemed to devour the man who had been a quiet guest until he came down with this fever. After three days he lost his consciousness and did not regain it. He died in the fourth night without the pastor at his side. The pastor himself was delirious in fever at this time and died only two days after the stranger.

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betrayal

betrayal

the death of his unborn son,
for the stonemason
it felt like a betrayal.

death was to be
a professional matter,
something to take place
in the realm of his customers,
who commissioned him
with carving memorial stones
for their dead,
not something to occur
in his own private life.

does not every profession
come with a privilege?
was it unreasonable
to expect a reprieve from death
as long as he carved memorials,
folded hands, lamenting angels?

he felt he had been let down
though by whom
he could not have said.

an atheist
in the service of the church,
loosing his unborn son
felt like a disciplinary measure
for his godlessness.

he had a system of inner convictions
unacknowledged rituals,
replacing religion.
he held on to the sacred
in the profane
he did not believe in a creator,
an organizer, a final judge,
and yet
he knew to have fallen from grace.

and no place to handle his complaint.

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The stone mason

The stone mason

He had seen them in the far off distance of the long street that moved towards the shop. Something in their movement had caught his attention. Two tall men moving oddly synchronically, not just the spacing and timing of the steps but all of their body movements seemed synchronized to exact, mechanical elegance. Both were dressed in black suits but wore no shirts. It was this odd detail that convinced him that they were coming to see him. Two men in black suits without shirts. Their faces were of a faint grey with sharp contours, very similar to each other like fraternal twins, their hair of the same shimmering raven black, held back with a tight ponytail. The suits accentuated their movements in the subtle way only an expensive fabric would and that could be mistaken for the confidence of its owner.
Both had light, almost dancing steps, yet one of them was clad in heavy, dusty work boots, the other in leather strap sandals. Upon entering his small front yard they parted ways and, abandoning their synchronical steps, started inspecting the sculptured that populated the yard, each on his own. He knew then that they had not come to commission a funerary stone. One of them bent over the mirror of the black granite and gravely studied his own reflection. Turned sideways and slightly stooped over, his shoulder blades protruded sharply under the fine fabric of his suit. His partner was reading the inscription on Linus Lindvall, as if he had been asked to pay special attention to it and was just now recording his impressions in his unfailing mind. The stonemason felt cold. He noticed that the sky had changed from a gay cerulean blue to a diffuse silver grey glare. He squinted his eyes.

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Monstrous Spelling Mechanism / Zen practice of giving thanks to a teacher

Monstrous Spelling Mechanism / Zen practice of giving thanks to a teacher

Art is time travel, no question. I didn’t know I still carried this monster around – but here it is. I learned how to read pretty early, before school, scanning my grandfather’s newspaper and imitating the strange throat clearing sounds he produced every now and then while reading. It was quite literally his newspaper, he was a co-publisher of some small town daily newspaper, back in the days when they were still independent.

Anyhow, reading and drawing quickly grew into something alike to breathing and running around for me. Imagine my bewilderment when in first grade I discovered that someone had torn all the words apart and stuck them into a strange primer expecting me to study each one of them separately. I decided not wanting to have anything to do with it and skipped to the end of the book where most letters founds themselves tidily arranged back to sensible words and stories.

I was quickly found out though by our teacher who then consulted with my mother, complaining about my absolute messy reading habits (being able to read but not to practice sound exercises with random letter-combinations). The following week she caught me with a book under the table again – and I still refused to fill out the worksheet according to the primer. We were at war. She took away my book and I kept busy studying the colophon in the reading primer.

Before you give me credit for my precocious rebellious behavior I have to admit that I plain did not understand what was expected of me, and for some reason the teacher had such a vague personality that I found it incredibly hard to focus my attention on that pale, almost transparent if upset presence who did not stop elaborating on how I was not supposed to read what I hadn’t been taught to read. It seemed to me that I could see the squiggles on the chalkboard behind her – through her. I could literally look right through her. It was a mess.

At home my mother followed up on my homework assignments and had me fill the lines of my notebook with squiggles and squabs. It was monstrous, it really was. I had absolutely no clue what I was doing and why. My mother meticulously instructed me how to fill a page with doodles, then she left me to it. When she left the room I took out a book and read instead. There were tears that night.

I don’t know what would have happened had we not moved to a new suburb. I got a new teacher who very nice about my keeping a book under the table and even encouraged me to put it on the table instead. While in the first school my teacher had insisted on my using the phonetic approach which was still brand new back then to acquire a skill I already possessed, in my new school I was allowed to spell with the whole word sight system which happened to be the way my reading comprehension just happened to work anyways.

Later I did learn to take the words apart, by the way. Today I am the master of the monstrous spelling mechanism. I wonder if the second elementary school teacher ever knew that she was a life saver. Thank you, Frau Bock.

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Woe to the unfortunate stranger who should come upon the gate they were keeping

For a brief moment also I did wonder now whether I was still dreaming. Yet the wet sand, the sea gulls of the lake circling overhead, the light on the water, the dark blue reflections of the two adjacent Mountains, Mount Hor and Mount Pisgah, in the misty mirror of the lake on the distant Southern shore, everything had a coherence that was not dreamlike. And yet the situation was surreal, not only because I had fallen asleep on my bed and woken up on a wet, cold beach hundreds of miles away from home. The sun, for example, was incredibly small, too small for our planet, planet earth. In the east the sharp crescent of a waxing moon, greeting the morning with disdain, was accompanied by a second crescent, a twin moon. And the surface underneath me was still breathing. And yet I knew the silhouettes of the twin peaks by heart. My mother used to tell us on warm summer nights, when the sun had already left the sky and only the patient outlines of the rock formations on both sides of the lake were still cutting into the advancing darkness, that the mountains were ancient guardians who were forgotten by their masters and not having been relieved of their duty had decided to keep their post to the edge of doom. Woe to the unfortunate stranger who should come upon the gate they were keeping. Lake Willoughby was an incredibly deep, glacial, water filled ravine, and there was some sparse folk lore about creatures living in the dark, about a connecting underground acquifer between the lake and its twin lake, Crystal Lake, to the West behind Mount Hor. It was a strange place, but being as remote had kept all stories at bay.

I sat still for a while, waiting for the scenery to change or disappear like dream images do, especially if you pay too much attention to the details, but the situation was as real as you can imagine, and not prone to change any more than Ms. Havenshire’s classroom during an especially tedious lecture on a philosophical concept that excited her. I stared around for a while, bravely ignoring the piercing cold, trying to take an inventory of everything. Except for the strange planetary constellations, the lake seemed real. I had never been up here in fall but I imagined it to look as lonely and cold as it did now. It is not exactly a lively place even in summer. And in winter, once the snow started, it would be one of those places that were cut off from the outside world for weeks on end, alas with the local people being prepared for it and not disconcerted by a few inches more or less of snow or even by massive boulders coming thundering down the mountains just like every winter. There was no skiing and therefore no seasonal dwellers in winter. Both, Mount Hor and Mount Pisgah were too steep and fully covered with trees.

I was shivering violently now, my clothes were as damp as if I had actually spent the night unprotected on the beach. When I finally stumbled up to my feet, it took me a moment to find my balance just as it would have on a big gym mat. I tried to disregard the breathing of the surface and made a few gingerly placed steps towards the water. What to do next? What to do if you are suddenly stranded in a place without any preparation or at least warning? Why was I here? In a dream, typically, events keep unfolding and you keep reacting but the lake was quiet with quick shadows dancing over the surface. I stopped at the water’s edge. Little waves arrived at the shore with a sweet sound. Light was dancing silver on the ripples. I was getting colder by the second, shaking most convincingly.

I had to find shelter. There was a colony of summer cottages at the North Beach, they would be boarded up for the winter, but maybe I could find a way in all the same to warm up and think. It seemed a reasonable plan, if you can at all call it reasonable that you have to think about finding shelter in a dream. Again I asked myself what I would do once I got inside. Maybe there would be a phone but even if there was, it probably would be disconnected for winter. Would it even make sense to call home and ask for someone to please come and rescue me? How ever to explain how I got here? And would it be possible to call home even if I found a working phone? I turned around to scan the tidy row of vacation cottages at the North Shore to find one that would suit my improvised plan and I faced an impenetrable row of trees. The cottages were gone.

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the earth itself, underneath my body, was a breathing organism, like a gigantic whale you find yourself stranded on

How hard my mind had to work to keep control, to still try to make sense out of a wealth on information that had long stopped to be apprehensible by any rules I had been led to understand applied. But only submission to the world of grown-ups would have you believe that they were – in general – truthful about the world. I didn’t believe this anymore but tried to rely on my own senses instead. It was treacherous ground.

For example that night. As I lay in the dark, eyes closed though wide awake, the surface of my bed felt soft as was to be expected, but it felt soft in the way I had experienced and shied away from before. It seemed to be soft in an organic, breathing way. I tried to distinguish between my own breathing pattern and the breathing of that soft, pliable surface I felt underneath my body.  It was an uncanny feeling – but just ask yourself how many sensations you can really clearly distinguish besides soft and hard, warm and cold, pain and pleasure. Truth is, you constantly rely on additional sensations and context to tell you about the thing you are experiencing through just one of your senses to make sense of something.

What was it that I was feeling? Something that I feared, but I didn’t know why I feared it or whether I had reason to fear it in the first place as I was completely unaware of its nature. All I knew was that last time I checked my bed had not been breathing. As before it felt actually – and it made perfect sense to think those words as irrational as they might seem – that the earth itself, underneath my feet, my body, was a breathing organism, like a gigantic whale you find yourself stranded on. It didn’t make sense and I couldn’t explain to myself where that strange idea actually orginated. Nothing I had read or talked about lately had pointed in that direction. Remember, there was no internet and but little TV. None in our house, by the way.

And yet, I just felt it, right there and then, the surface underneath me belonged to something alive, and I knew I had to open my eyes to find out what was going on, but I was entirely too scared to live up to my own imaginative ability. All I could manage to do, pathetically,  was to continue breathing slowly just as I had done during those long ago nights when I had led some non-existing intruder to believe that I was asleep. And with each moment the sensation of a sighing, breathing surface underneath my body was getting stronger.

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god and a decade ending with the brief and delirious ruling of acid freaks, post feminists and de-constructors of language

When I thought about the idea of god waking me (or not) I became afraid. There was a German lullaby by Brahms that my then ancient great-grandmother used to sing to me when I was really very little which ended with the words: “Tomorrow morning, if God wants so,
you will wake once again.…”  Our family life was altogether politically non-theistic, except for the great-grandmother who passed away when I was about four, but the idea of god deciding about my waking in the morning was still disconcerting. What if he did not want to? On a whim? Would I just sleep forever? Would I die? What if he plain forgot about me?

When I had asked my mother about the song she had explained to me that the lyrics dated to a time when it was understood that everything – everything – happened only with god’s consent and that these lines, by their content, did not deal primarily with the idea of god remembering to wake people or not.

I don’t know whether that explanation did much to put my anxiety to rest, I think probably not. But it certainly was with relief that one day I realized that I actively did not believe in god. That was an easy attitude to acquire in my family, by the way, and an easy attitude in that decade following the sixties, a decade ending with the brief and delirious ruling of acid freaks, post feminists and de-constructors of language which left a lasting impression on western societies and which was my intellectual parents’ undeniable contribution to a new cultural value system, a system that allowed for people like them to unfold their wings and discover entirely new horizons and ideas.  I don’t remember that we had ever attended any church service. Even wedding ceremonies in my parents’ circle of friends and family were civil ceremonies. No baptisms. Still, God remained a quaint distant relation who, after a history of misfortunes, had found asylum in old nursery rhymes and lyrics. All but forgotten and without charitable visitors, but hanging on.

My parents’ were avidly confessing atheists for many years until older age and the dawning sense of their own mortality softened their rhetoric. And yet, my childish sense of superstition, during the phase of their most decided and articulated stand on the topic, detected an ominous quality to the concept “god” and it took some years and my awakening intellect to overcome the threatening taste the fear of that forgotten but lingering god left in my mind. Maybe god explained and explored would have been easier to understand but I was pretty much left to my own devices to figure out what the idea of god stood for.  I vaguely feared god until I shed that fear pretty much like I had shed the fear of the nightly intruder eventually. Only much later did it occur to me that the elimination of god did not erase the randomness and with it the terror of the unpredictable nature of death.

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Plinius, the cat

And Plinius. The cat. Plinius was on my side. You can’t bend a cat. You can’t make a perfect copy of a cat. In his own way, Plinius was less predictable than the most extravagant human could possibly be. Starting with his smell. Yes, he smelled like cat, but not like any old cat. He smelled specifically like Plinius. I have had plenty of cats all through my grown up life but not one of them has ever smelled anything like him. If it is true that we are normally not very good at remembering smells (and though we have invented devices to record and play back actual sound and images we have never invented any automaton that would – on request – conjure up a specific smell.), but that rule does not include remembering Plinius’ smell. Equal part cat litter, dust, fur and … realness. I don’t even have a comparison, a word for that smell, but I can say “Plinius” and I can actually smell him. He was very present and himself until he just wasn’t anymore, until, one day, without proper good-byes, he disappeared.

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Lord of Mischief

English: Wicker man, engraving
English: Wicker man, engraving (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

may the Lord of Misrule not end as a wicker man but be allowed to see to his fields in spring hereafter. barren were the lands of our neighbors when saturn was still allowed his share of the human mind and barren be our own if we allowed this tradition to be continued. whatever name you might attach to the greedy deed – accident, mischief, malevolence – thou shall not partake of the feast and not grudge nor join your neighbors in their well deserved merriment. instead hold in your heart for twelve nights the coming of the light.

 

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the dragon lair

I did not stop at the reception desk but walked straight towards the staircase leading up to the first floor. I felt confident, no adrenalin rush this time.

A demanding voice stopped me: “And where do you think you are going, Miss?” I stopped dead in my track. This was not supposed to happen. I turned around slowly and walked over to the reception desk. A no-nonsense woman, maybe in her mid-fifties, observed my progress critically. When I had reached the desk, I put on my nicest smile and stated: “ I have an appointment with Prof. H. I can just walk straight up, thank you.” “Prof. H.?” the woman inquired. The buttons of her starched and ironed shirt strained against her quivering bust. “Yes,” I answered, leaning over the polished desk a bit, lowering my voice, “I have been working on an assignment she gave me.” That did not seem to impress her much. I waited. “Feeling a bit funny, aren’t we” she answered without any expression. I changed my tactic: “Please, M’am, why don’t you just call and ask her,” I suggested. “Her office is on the first floor.” We stared at each other. She slowly turned red. “Where do you think you are,” she finally hissed, “a fancy hotel? Wall Street?” She exhaled deeply, then inhaled again, as if she was practicing her yoga breath. The shirt buttons were getting a good work-out which I noticed as a detail despite my growing annoyance. Why wouldn’t she just let me find my way as was custom in the building or at least call up? I was certain that Prof. H. wanted to see me just about as urgently as I wanted to see her. But the reception desk lady behaved like a dragon in front of a lair. I thought I could even smell her foul breath. “Listen, missy,” she snarled “I don’t know what you intend by walking straight into a men’s homeless shelter and I am sure I don’t want to know. I do not care whether you are looking for your daddy or grandpa, you have to wait until they come out. What I want, right now, is for you to leave this building through the front door and not bother me any further.” I took a step back. Men’s homeless shelter? I looked around. This was unmistakably the same lobby I had crossed through the last time. “Now. Missy,” commanded the voice of the dragon lady  “… or I will call the police to see you out.”