Monday, January 7, 2008
Friday, January 4, 2008
PART V THOSE ARE PEARLS THAT WERE HIS EYES
full fathom five
thy father lies,
of his bones
are coral made,
those are pearls that were
his eyes;
nothing of him that doth fade
but doth suffer
a sea change
into something
rich
and
strange ...
william shakespeare "the tempest"
thy father lies,
of his bones
are coral made,
those are pearls that were
his eyes;
nothing of him that doth fade
but doth suffer
a sea change
into something
rich
and
strange ...
william shakespeare "the tempest"
Thursday, January 3, 2008
PART IV: FRAGMENTS FROM THE SHIFT 3200
HISTORICAL FIND in the year 3200
the future the year 3200she walks across the desert. and the sun shines its brilliance all over the plain. for miles to see or either side just desert dashing off in all directions towards the horizon. she senses no city no distant humming signifiying life.she stops to survey 360.her mind must have changed since she started on the journey. when that was she could remember when she began, but how many nights and days had lapsed by she couldnt remember at all.so her mind must have changed. literally. physically. mentally. she looked up at the sky. vast sundrenched blue arching its way like a dome. as if u were at the centre of a soap bubble and looking outwards and beyond. she hadnt seen this before. this kind of landscape. there was somehow more warmth about it, it kind of pulled you in on waves. she could breath easier. she had stopped and she had thought and this was a great moment for her. just to stop and think.her reason for coming this way? the distance between the old civilisations and the new civilisations is huge. in whatever way you wanted to measure it, it is huge. light years? the Shift had been so sudden that it seems like yesterday, it didnt happen gradually you see, it happened like a shift from one blink to another. everything had changed. it was like something had happened to every one of the atoms in the body at once, like they had spun. and here she was now a desert queen. this dry hot air suits her skin and this warmth she absorbs like breathing it in to every cell in her body. and out again. and in again. and out again. and in again.there had been nothing left of the days before the Shift. they could find nothing the same. the world had changed beyond all recognition. she had been walking mainly through the valleys across hills of soft green grass, and then through mountains, gleaming with snow in the dark night, and stars (still the stars) were so close and the sky from the top of the mountain was huge.but they had sent news from over the desert. they had found a sea. far far away. the desert was so vast. that had been the first news. the second news which quite staggered them. it was almost unthinkable. it couldnt be true. nothing else remained of their world but this. it seemed on the edge of a lonely sea where there is a pink sky and the mists rise so high, they have found a square silver metallic geometrically perfect box. and in this square silver metallic geometrically perfect box they found the ------------
the future the year 3200she walks across the desert. and the sun shines its brilliance all over the plain. for miles to see or either side just desert dashing off in all directions towards the horizon. she senses no city no distant humming signifiying life.she stops to survey 360.her mind must have changed since she started on the journey. when that was she could remember when she began, but how many nights and days had lapsed by she couldnt remember at all.so her mind must have changed. literally. physically. mentally. she looked up at the sky. vast sundrenched blue arching its way like a dome. as if u were at the centre of a soap bubble and looking outwards and beyond. she hadnt seen this before. this kind of landscape. there was somehow more warmth about it, it kind of pulled you in on waves. she could breath easier. she had stopped and she had thought and this was a great moment for her. just to stop and think.her reason for coming this way? the distance between the old civilisations and the new civilisations is huge. in whatever way you wanted to measure it, it is huge. light years? the Shift had been so sudden that it seems like yesterday, it didnt happen gradually you see, it happened like a shift from one blink to another. everything had changed. it was like something had happened to every one of the atoms in the body at once, like they had spun. and here she was now a desert queen. this dry hot air suits her skin and this warmth she absorbs like breathing it in to every cell in her body. and out again. and in again. and out again. and in again.there had been nothing left of the days before the Shift. they could find nothing the same. the world had changed beyond all recognition. she had been walking mainly through the valleys across hills of soft green grass, and then through mountains, gleaming with snow in the dark night, and stars (still the stars) were so close and the sky from the top of the mountain was huge.but they had sent news from over the desert. they had found a sea. far far away. the desert was so vast. that had been the first news. the second news which quite staggered them. it was almost unthinkable. it couldnt be true. nothing else remained of their world but this. it seemed on the edge of a lonely sea where there is a pink sky and the mists rise so high, they have found a square silver metallic geometrically perfect box. and in this square silver metallic geometrically perfect box they found the ------------
PART III BLACK VIRGIN
Jessica. We were married in 1975. I’m not interested in the ins and outs of the marriage. So, I’ll skip all that preliminary stuff. But we were married and happy for some time. Five years of happiness. Or thereabouts. She graduated from Edinburgh University, where I had met her. She had been in a show on the Fringe. Great reviews. I went backstage to meet her one night. I was a student journalist up there from Cambridge, where I was studying. And it went from there. I stayed in Edinburgh for longer than I should have. Because of her of course. And then I came back down to Cambridge. And she came with me. It was summer.
That summer was unusually hot. We put our money together and bought a little Fiat. Little blue thing, and went bombing around the Cambridgeshire countryside. Around the Fens. Up to Ely. She loved the cathedral. We spent hours just driving around. The wild marshy vastness of the Fens. The huge sky. Just me and her. That summer was bliss.
What do you mean what went wrong? Did I say that anything had gone wrong? Jumping to conclusions there, writer.
Oh, a tone? A tone, was there? Well, actually, you’re right. Things did start to go wrong. But not for a long time. Like I said, we had five years of married harmony. I loved her. She loved me. How’s the drink?
Well, things started to go wrong when we moved to Brighton on the South coast of England, in – I don’t know- it must have been October 1980. towards the end of the year anyway. Around my birthday.
We moved to Brighton. Her father had a small flat down there. We decided to move there. Permanently. And to try for a child. She wanted a child.
I was too young. I wanted to write. To put my heart and soul into writing.
She would have loved to stay at home and look after it, him, her, whatever it would have been. I was just being incredibly… selfish. Something which was to develop ten fold over the next few months. I just didn’t want to have another human being in my life. Something , someone I had to devote more time to than I did to myself.
Yes. Yes, there was a child. Of sorts.
My dear man, you are jumping ahead in our story. Almost as if you know something before-
Before I do.
She was thrilled. Absolutely. She couldn’t have had better news. I, on the other hand, went into a kind of shell. I began coming home late from work, driving around the town, going down to the beach in the evening and just sitting there- watching it all, watching the silly little world.
Silly and hollow. You see by then, our love, the spark, whatever you want to call it- it had gone. For me anyway. And she- she was so besotted with this child growing in her that she didn’t have any inkling of how I was feeling. I daresay she didn’t even notice me. But then one day things changed- something changed-
Her. She. She changed. The bloom went out of her. The sunshine that had glowed so warmly from her cheeks when she knew about the child- it just vanished. Boof! She looked like a wilting plant. A dying flower.
We had grown so distant at that time. I was-
I was – I wasn’t interested in her sexually any longer. And naturally, the streets of Brighton called. In those days it was easy to get anything. Anything one wanted. I daresay it still is.
Oh shutup, shutup. Don’t say anymore. Your words are empty. They mean nothing.
Though she was no saint. Although after the accident, many said she was. Those fools in the press. I’m sorry to denigrate your profession, but they were absolute fools when it all happened. How did they know her? What did they know?
She became ill. Very ill. Not anything physical. Or so it seemed. Something had happened in her head. Something was eating away at her. Gnawing away at her sanity. And I was having none of it. I really didn’t care.
I don’t care. Just as I didn’t care then. I told you- I didn’t want the child. I had no desire to have the child. As far as I was concerned- it was nothing to do with me.
I just didn’t want to know. I didn’t care. And I made up my mind to leave her. One weekend, I just decided. I was to go to a friend’s in London. I had contacts in a newspaper, some local rag in Ealing. I was to go there and as far as I was concerned never set eyes on her again. Or the thing she was carrying.
But something happened.
I was in a bar. In the town. Something , I don’t know what, something inside told me something was wrong at home. I got in the car and drove the half mile or so along the seafront. We lived on the outskirts of Brighton, a little terraced house, one of the last on the town’s edge, by the sea, near Shoreham, you might know.
As I turned the corner into our road, and then turned into our drive, I noticed all the lights in the house were on. Every one of them. The house was just full of light, and the front door was open. But there was this quietness. This stillness. It felt like there was no one at home. Anyway, so I went in, expecting to find her watching the tv or doing god knows what, but I could find her nowhere. She wasn’t in the house. But the house, the rooms- they were full of flowers. Huge bouquets, little posies, petals strewn on the floor, up the staircase. I had seen nothing like it. I mean, I knew she liked flowers but not to this extent. There were roses and daffodils and gardenias and – and the smell. It nearly overwhelmed me. Suffocating somehow. It reminded me of when I was a child. I was playing with a friend in the churchyard, a mile or so from my mother’s house. For some reason we thought it would be good to water the flowers people had put on the graves. I found a small bucket. And I went to this tin font which stood by the side of the old church to fill it up. The water was green and opaque and had the sweet yet repugnant smell of rotting flowers, this perfume of death, it quite scared me. And as I was leaning over the edge to dip my bucket into the water, my little friend decided it would be a hoot to push me in; which he did. I remember the awful taste of stagnant pond water in my mouth. I must have swallowed so much in my struggle to right myself in the water, I was so disorientated. Well, it brought back memories of that. The flowers in the house. There was something wrong. And I went up to the bedroom, turning off the lights as I went, and when I had turned off the bedroom light, I looked out toward the sea, over the beach, and there she was. In the moonlight on the beach. Standing talking to someone. But I couldn’t see who she was talking to. Her mouth was moving, and her arms were gesturing this way and that, but there was no one with her. She looked like she was talking to herself.
I was – intrigued. More than worried. What was she doing? So, I went out. Out into the night across the road, down the track, over the small dunes, and onto the beach. As I got closer I could hear her talking.
I couldn’t make it out. It wasn’t windy. It was a very still night. But she was speaking in such low tones, with such a muffled voice, I couldn’t work out anything she was saying. She sounded like she was chanting.
I think she must have felt my presence because she turned round suddenly. There was this wild, mad look on her face, I felt like I had disturbed her from something that I wasn’t supposed to see, wasn’t supposed to hear. I felt embarrassed. But she looked so – so gone. Like it wasn’t her. Like Jessica had gone.
What did she say?
She said that she was speaking to the Virgin Mary. But- well, it wasn’t just the Virgin Mary. She said the Virgin Mary was standing beside her on the beach, and that they had been talking for some time. And that the Virgin was black. She had black hands and a black face. And she was giving Jess advice. She was amazed I couldn’t see her.
But she kept insisting she saw.
She continued talking to her. I might as well have not been there. I wasn’t there as far as she was concerned.
She was saying that she was sorry. Sorry that she was to lose her child. But she understood that it was necessary. That it was part of a bigger plan. And that she would weep. She would grieve. But she knew why. She understood why.
She was being told she was going to lose the baby.
I finally managed to persuade her to come back into the house. Some part of me still, still was fond of her, I suppose, and – and so I took her back into the house. I called the doctor.
Her diagnosis was that the baby was fine. There was no cause for alarm. She had done many tests, and all was well. Of course, if she felt overly worried, Jess should go to the hospital and get some more tests, but as far as she was concerned everything was as it should be.
And that was that.
Iwas intrigued. Intrigued by this – this vision that she said she’d had. Of course I didn’t believe her. I mean, I thought that she believed that she had seen something, but – well, it had happened before.
This time, she had heard something. It was shortly after we had gotten married. And believe me, at that time we were very happily married. But we had gone down to Cornwall for the weekend, to visit her brother, who was selling his cottage by the sea, and I was interested in buying it. But we were sitting by the sea, on deckchairs, this grey, damp day I remember, typical English weather, though one would expect better in the south- I had fallen asleep. Well, it seemed like only minutes after I had nodded off that I woke with a start, something jolted me awake- and I looked up, and I saw her- saw her walking into the sea- with a purpose, as if she was going somewhere- but it was only the sea in front of her.
It was a surreal moment. I shouted, “Jess! Jess!” but she didn’t look back, she just kept walking. Further and further into the sea, until she was up to her waist, and still she kept walking. I was –
What? No. Well, I didn’t have the chance. Suddenly out of nowhere it seemed, her brother raced along the shore, darted into the water and pulled her out. She didn’t struggle. She was limp. It looked like she was – Next thing I know, there was all this commotion. “What’s wrong with you?” someone shouted at me. “Why didn’t you do anything?”
“I didn’t see anything,” I lied.
The situation- it was too complicated. I didn’t know what to say. And I hadn’t tried to help her. I had just sat and watched.
She had heard a voice. She said it was loud and clear in her ear. It came from over her left shoulder. It told her, “You’re no good. There’s no more use for you here. Walk into the sea.”
Had it happened before?
Yes, according to her brother. I had never seen anything. I had never suspected. To me she was just Jess.
And then she saw the Virgin.
I was intrigued. I knew what she had seen was an illusion brought on by her condition. Of that I had no doubt. But what struck me as interesting, as curious, was why had she seen a black Mary. I had never heard of a Black Virgin before. I mean I had always assumed she was white. So, I did a little investigating. There are many statues, so it would seem, of Black Madonnas. They crop up all over Europe. Some statues are made of ebony or other dark wood, but there is debate about whether this choice of material is significant. Other Madonnas were originally light-skinned but have become darkened over time, for example by candle soot. But lately Scholars of comparative religions have suggested that Black Madonnas are descendants of pre-Christian mother or earth goddesses.
Like Isis or something.
Their dark skin may be associated with ancient images of these goddesses, and with the colour of fertile earth. Black Madonnas express a feminine power not fully conveyed by a pale-skinned Mary, who seems to symbolise gentler qualities like obedience and purity.
It may be linked to Mary Magdalene and female sexuality repressed by the medieval Church. And probably the most significant to Jess is that this Madonna was particularly important to the new mother. I don’t know where she had ever found out anything about this. It baffled me.
The child was stillborn. She had it one evening. One rainy evening in the late autumn. I sat outside in the car for an hour or so. The rain was beating down on the windscreen. It sounded like...
That summer was unusually hot. We put our money together and bought a little Fiat. Little blue thing, and went bombing around the Cambridgeshire countryside. Around the Fens. Up to Ely. She loved the cathedral. We spent hours just driving around. The wild marshy vastness of the Fens. The huge sky. Just me and her. That summer was bliss.
What do you mean what went wrong? Did I say that anything had gone wrong? Jumping to conclusions there, writer.
Oh, a tone? A tone, was there? Well, actually, you’re right. Things did start to go wrong. But not for a long time. Like I said, we had five years of married harmony. I loved her. She loved me. How’s the drink?
Well, things started to go wrong when we moved to Brighton on the South coast of England, in – I don’t know- it must have been October 1980. towards the end of the year anyway. Around my birthday.
We moved to Brighton. Her father had a small flat down there. We decided to move there. Permanently. And to try for a child. She wanted a child.
I was too young. I wanted to write. To put my heart and soul into writing.
She would have loved to stay at home and look after it, him, her, whatever it would have been. I was just being incredibly… selfish. Something which was to develop ten fold over the next few months. I just didn’t want to have another human being in my life. Something , someone I had to devote more time to than I did to myself.
Yes. Yes, there was a child. Of sorts.
My dear man, you are jumping ahead in our story. Almost as if you know something before-
Before I do.
She was thrilled. Absolutely. She couldn’t have had better news. I, on the other hand, went into a kind of shell. I began coming home late from work, driving around the town, going down to the beach in the evening and just sitting there- watching it all, watching the silly little world.
Silly and hollow. You see by then, our love, the spark, whatever you want to call it- it had gone. For me anyway. And she- she was so besotted with this child growing in her that she didn’t have any inkling of how I was feeling. I daresay she didn’t even notice me. But then one day things changed- something changed-
Her. She. She changed. The bloom went out of her. The sunshine that had glowed so warmly from her cheeks when she knew about the child- it just vanished. Boof! She looked like a wilting plant. A dying flower.
We had grown so distant at that time. I was-
I was – I wasn’t interested in her sexually any longer. And naturally, the streets of Brighton called. In those days it was easy to get anything. Anything one wanted. I daresay it still is.
Oh shutup, shutup. Don’t say anymore. Your words are empty. They mean nothing.
Though she was no saint. Although after the accident, many said she was. Those fools in the press. I’m sorry to denigrate your profession, but they were absolute fools when it all happened. How did they know her? What did they know?
She became ill. Very ill. Not anything physical. Or so it seemed. Something had happened in her head. Something was eating away at her. Gnawing away at her sanity. And I was having none of it. I really didn’t care.
I don’t care. Just as I didn’t care then. I told you- I didn’t want the child. I had no desire to have the child. As far as I was concerned- it was nothing to do with me.
I just didn’t want to know. I didn’t care. And I made up my mind to leave her. One weekend, I just decided. I was to go to a friend’s in London. I had contacts in a newspaper, some local rag in Ealing. I was to go there and as far as I was concerned never set eyes on her again. Or the thing she was carrying.
But something happened.
I was in a bar. In the town. Something , I don’t know what, something inside told me something was wrong at home. I got in the car and drove the half mile or so along the seafront. We lived on the outskirts of Brighton, a little terraced house, one of the last on the town’s edge, by the sea, near Shoreham, you might know.
As I turned the corner into our road, and then turned into our drive, I noticed all the lights in the house were on. Every one of them. The house was just full of light, and the front door was open. But there was this quietness. This stillness. It felt like there was no one at home. Anyway, so I went in, expecting to find her watching the tv or doing god knows what, but I could find her nowhere. She wasn’t in the house. But the house, the rooms- they were full of flowers. Huge bouquets, little posies, petals strewn on the floor, up the staircase. I had seen nothing like it. I mean, I knew she liked flowers but not to this extent. There were roses and daffodils and gardenias and – and the smell. It nearly overwhelmed me. Suffocating somehow. It reminded me of when I was a child. I was playing with a friend in the churchyard, a mile or so from my mother’s house. For some reason we thought it would be good to water the flowers people had put on the graves. I found a small bucket. And I went to this tin font which stood by the side of the old church to fill it up. The water was green and opaque and had the sweet yet repugnant smell of rotting flowers, this perfume of death, it quite scared me. And as I was leaning over the edge to dip my bucket into the water, my little friend decided it would be a hoot to push me in; which he did. I remember the awful taste of stagnant pond water in my mouth. I must have swallowed so much in my struggle to right myself in the water, I was so disorientated. Well, it brought back memories of that. The flowers in the house. There was something wrong. And I went up to the bedroom, turning off the lights as I went, and when I had turned off the bedroom light, I looked out toward the sea, over the beach, and there she was. In the moonlight on the beach. Standing talking to someone. But I couldn’t see who she was talking to. Her mouth was moving, and her arms were gesturing this way and that, but there was no one with her. She looked like she was talking to herself.
I was – intrigued. More than worried. What was she doing? So, I went out. Out into the night across the road, down the track, over the small dunes, and onto the beach. As I got closer I could hear her talking.
I couldn’t make it out. It wasn’t windy. It was a very still night. But she was speaking in such low tones, with such a muffled voice, I couldn’t work out anything she was saying. She sounded like she was chanting.
I think she must have felt my presence because she turned round suddenly. There was this wild, mad look on her face, I felt like I had disturbed her from something that I wasn’t supposed to see, wasn’t supposed to hear. I felt embarrassed. But she looked so – so gone. Like it wasn’t her. Like Jessica had gone.
What did she say?
She said that she was speaking to the Virgin Mary. But- well, it wasn’t just the Virgin Mary. She said the Virgin Mary was standing beside her on the beach, and that they had been talking for some time. And that the Virgin was black. She had black hands and a black face. And she was giving Jess advice. She was amazed I couldn’t see her.
But she kept insisting she saw.
She continued talking to her. I might as well have not been there. I wasn’t there as far as she was concerned.
She was saying that she was sorry. Sorry that she was to lose her child. But she understood that it was necessary. That it was part of a bigger plan. And that she would weep. She would grieve. But she knew why. She understood why.
She was being told she was going to lose the baby.
I finally managed to persuade her to come back into the house. Some part of me still, still was fond of her, I suppose, and – and so I took her back into the house. I called the doctor.
Her diagnosis was that the baby was fine. There was no cause for alarm. She had done many tests, and all was well. Of course, if she felt overly worried, Jess should go to the hospital and get some more tests, but as far as she was concerned everything was as it should be.
And that was that.
Iwas intrigued. Intrigued by this – this vision that she said she’d had. Of course I didn’t believe her. I mean, I thought that she believed that she had seen something, but – well, it had happened before.
This time, she had heard something. It was shortly after we had gotten married. And believe me, at that time we were very happily married. But we had gone down to Cornwall for the weekend, to visit her brother, who was selling his cottage by the sea, and I was interested in buying it. But we were sitting by the sea, on deckchairs, this grey, damp day I remember, typical English weather, though one would expect better in the south- I had fallen asleep. Well, it seemed like only minutes after I had nodded off that I woke with a start, something jolted me awake- and I looked up, and I saw her- saw her walking into the sea- with a purpose, as if she was going somewhere- but it was only the sea in front of her.
It was a surreal moment. I shouted, “Jess! Jess!” but she didn’t look back, she just kept walking. Further and further into the sea, until she was up to her waist, and still she kept walking. I was –
What? No. Well, I didn’t have the chance. Suddenly out of nowhere it seemed, her brother raced along the shore, darted into the water and pulled her out. She didn’t struggle. She was limp. It looked like she was – Next thing I know, there was all this commotion. “What’s wrong with you?” someone shouted at me. “Why didn’t you do anything?”
“I didn’t see anything,” I lied.
The situation- it was too complicated. I didn’t know what to say. And I hadn’t tried to help her. I had just sat and watched.
She had heard a voice. She said it was loud and clear in her ear. It came from over her left shoulder. It told her, “You’re no good. There’s no more use for you here. Walk into the sea.”
Had it happened before?
Yes, according to her brother. I had never seen anything. I had never suspected. To me she was just Jess.
And then she saw the Virgin.
I was intrigued. I knew what she had seen was an illusion brought on by her condition. Of that I had no doubt. But what struck me as interesting, as curious, was why had she seen a black Mary. I had never heard of a Black Virgin before. I mean I had always assumed she was white. So, I did a little investigating. There are many statues, so it would seem, of Black Madonnas. They crop up all over Europe. Some statues are made of ebony or other dark wood, but there is debate about whether this choice of material is significant. Other Madonnas were originally light-skinned but have become darkened over time, for example by candle soot. But lately Scholars of comparative religions have suggested that Black Madonnas are descendants of pre-Christian mother or earth goddesses.
Like Isis or something.
Their dark skin may be associated with ancient images of these goddesses, and with the colour of fertile earth. Black Madonnas express a feminine power not fully conveyed by a pale-skinned Mary, who seems to symbolise gentler qualities like obedience and purity.
It may be linked to Mary Magdalene and female sexuality repressed by the medieval Church. And probably the most significant to Jess is that this Madonna was particularly important to the new mother. I don’t know where she had ever found out anything about this. It baffled me.
The child was stillborn. She had it one evening. One rainy evening in the late autumn. I sat outside in the car for an hour or so. The rain was beating down on the windscreen. It sounded like...
PART II DEATH OF A HIMALAYAN SNOW LEOPARD
They are the fur of the Himalayan snow leopard.
I cut them myself from their still warm bodies. A great male cat. And a cub. How soft they are. The fresher the kill, the softer the fur...
You can see the rosettes. Look. The spots, the markings. Such extraordinary beauty. I had to have it. I simply had to have it.
We were in the Himalayas. I’d spent more than a month in Kathmandu and was tired of it. The city smelled. Mists, fog, god knows what it was hid the mountains. The view ? there was no view. The city could have been situated in the middle of the ocean, there was not even a hint that the mountains were there. But the city was, the whole place was wonderful. Had been wonderful. Magical. A magical city. But after a while, after a month, it started to wear me down. I had to get away. The noise. People trying to sell this. People trying to sell that. It was the sixties. Hippies. There were a good deal of them around in the city. All these Westerners reaching out to the East. Trying to find some reason for their lives. The mindless materialism that was beginning to suffocate the West. Anyway, I had to get away from the city.
Along with a Nepali guide, I took a bus to Pokhara. To the east of Kathmandu. And as we traveled further into the country, the mists continued, the mountains, those huge majestic mountains I had heard so much about, they continued to evade me, until I almost gave up hope of ever seeing them.
As I said, there was a guide. No one else. Of course, people on the bus, people on the street, but apart from that, just me.
Pokhara turned out to be much the same as Kathmandu, though less crowded. There was a certain peace there that I enjoyed. I spent maybe two weeks there, rowing on the lake, eating, sleeping long hours, reading, thinking, watching. The mountains were still shrouded in clouds and mist, the sky a uniform grey. If I stood on the roof garden terrace of the guesthouse I was staying in, early in the evening, I could just make out the two tips of Machapucha, miles in the distance. But that was it. For the two weeks I was there.
At the end of the two weeks, we – the guide and I- took a bus. It took us to the beginning of a trail. and from here, we began our walk into the foothills. I intended to go for three weeks. This is what I had come for. To walk deep into the mountains. To venture into the heart of the Himalaya. Alone. the guide carried my bag and I with a walking cane to support me, walked unencumbered. I felt free. The most free I think I had ever felt or ever felt since. And as we went deeper and deeper in, and further and further up, the clouds and mists began to dissolve and the skies became a sharp blue, and the mountains rose up huge and magnificent around us. It was breathtaking.
And for a long time there was no one in sight. Just us, the slopes, the craggy rocks, the powdery, cold air on my face…
It was strange, the deeper you go into those mountains, well the deeper we went into those mountains, the flatter, the rockier, it got. The first night we came to this small town, village, in the middle of a huge plain. We had emerged from the foothills and found ourselves walking across this expanse, this vast expanse in the middle of the mountains. It must have been a good five miles in the distance, I didn’t expect that. It reminded me of something… something out of the wild west, you know those western movies, not that I’ve ever been to the wild west but, not that I’m sure it even exists, but… this big plain. And in the distance, way in the distance, my imagination told me, lay Tibet. We stayed that night in the village, some small cobbled, stone house, or what, I don’t know, and the next day we continued on out way, after a good breakfast across this plain stretching as far as the eye could see. And then, the guide, he called himself Swift, I suppose it was easier to say than some Nepali name, or so he thought, then he suggested we go off the path and head off to the right and up the mountain slope that we could see from the plains. I was all too eager. He said that if we did, and if the time was right, we were likely to see a snow leopard or two, as families of them often appeared in those parts. ..
I was a western man traveling almost alone in the east. I wasn’t prepared to take any risks. So I hired a guide who carried a gun.
Animals. People. One never knew what one would come across in those mountains.
That’s left you feeling uneasy, hasn’t it?
And so we left the plains behind us, and headed for the mountain slopes. The terrain was very different from the flatness we had just left. I found myself going higher and higher up, along a twisting mountains path, a sheer drop, a hundred feet or so to my right. And as I got higher, the air got colder, and after some time we were forced to make camp. The altitude you know, can cause such trouble, I was informed it was best to stay put for the night.
But as soon as dawn came, and dawn was indeed spectacular over those mountains, as the stars and the crystal night gave way to the great swathes of color that heralded the sun and the morning. Now that was the meaning of spectacular, and such clarity of sound and vision. Every one of my senses was heightened. I felt almost more than human, Wolf. Like a super human. A superman.
We walked further on and upwards, and I remember it as if it were yesterday. We turned a corner, a sharp bend on the path, and suddenly there it was- about a hundred feet ahead of us and further up a slope. We were almost in a kind of rocky valley, and there it stood above us, silently, and still. It made me freeze. I stood frozen for a while.
I was in awe.
It was so striking. Long, woolly fur, grey with brown, yellowish tinges on its flanks, and lighter, white , white fur on its belly, its chest , its chin. Of course I only saw all of this once I got closer, but it was such a beautiful sight.
A feeling came over me. A feeling so deep, so deep…. A longing. It wasn’t enough just to look. Just to see it and then carry on. I – I wanted it….
I wanted it, Wolf. I had to have it. I wanted it for my own.
We watched it for some time. It had maybe seen something, some smaller animal maybe, in the trees ahead, and it was waiting, waiting to pounce, waiting for something anyway. Its body was huge, more than a metre long, and its head… its head was small in comparison, it didn’t quite seem to fit with the body, tiny ears, this heavy, heavy brow, frowning. And short, again, almost out of proportion, short legs, yet powerful, so, so powerful, and large paws. Such latent energy. Such …
I knew I had to have it. And I knew I was going to have it.
They are not generally aggressive to Man. It was nothing like that. After a while, it took off. I don’t know what disturbed it. It sensed something. It took off, up the slope and across the ridge. For a while I was feeling a kind of sickness, nausea, I don’t know, it could have been a mixture of altitude sickness and hunger, I don’t know, but we set up camp again on a small plateau on the side of the valley, which was the only place with trees and shrubs, and so we settled in for the night. After some time I felt better, Swift cooked us a meal, and I fell asleep, cold slightly, but the food had warmed me up and I was exhausted. My mind full of the snow leopard, the fur, the white fur on her belly and chest and chin…
I awoke with a start. Again it was dawn, although this time there were fine, twinkling sheets of snow falling, blowing in the early morning mountain air. I crawled out of my sleeping bag, Swift sound asleep beside me, and crawled out of the open tent door. Something had woken me up. I knelt by the side of the tent, and looked down into the valley, my eyes kind of blind to the snow after the relative darkness of the inside of the tent, but I could see, about fifty yards ahead of me, further down the valley, in almost the same place as the day before, the beautiful snow leopard, still and … she looked as if she were waiting for something. And I did it. I knew what I had to do. It was some kind of internal drive that had brought me to this point in time and had said “now- do it. Do what you came here to do.” I quietly, ever so quietly, took the gun out of the bag. I was so, so quiet, I did it slowly, I knew any noise would make her turn and run. I took the gun, my fingers were covered in the gloves, so of course I had to take them off. I had never handles a gun with gloves on before. I had hardly ever handled a gun.
I lay there, or did I crouch there in the snow, and I raised the gun to my eye and lined it with the aim, the target, the target, the big cat in front of me. It all flowed, seemingly, so effortless. And just, just as I pulled the trigger, the snow leopard’s face directly in my aim, it turned, it saw me, I saw it, I looked into its eye and I fired. I shot the snow leopard.
Neither of us carried the dead carcass. When the guide, when the gunfire woke Swift up, I told him that I was , I had been protecting myself, the animal had been coming towards me. It was self defense, me or her.
He explained that the snow leopard was getting rarer and rarer. Apparently they only exist in those Asian regions. He was saddened.
I persuaded him to help me do what I had wanted to do ever since I saw the cat. Skin the leopard. Remove the fur. I bribed him to keep quiet. He was easily bribed. Poverty makes a mockery of pride. All the time in my head, I had that nursery rhyme, this crazy rhyme going through my head, I remember being read to as a child:
There was a little man,
And he had a little gun
And his bullets were made of
Lead lead lead,
So he went to the brook
And he shot a little duck
Right in the middle of the
Head head head.
I cut them myself from their still warm bodies. A great male cat. And a cub. How soft they are. The fresher the kill, the softer the fur...
You can see the rosettes. Look. The spots, the markings. Such extraordinary beauty. I had to have it. I simply had to have it.
We were in the Himalayas. I’d spent more than a month in Kathmandu and was tired of it. The city smelled. Mists, fog, god knows what it was hid the mountains. The view ? there was no view. The city could have been situated in the middle of the ocean, there was not even a hint that the mountains were there. But the city was, the whole place was wonderful. Had been wonderful. Magical. A magical city. But after a while, after a month, it started to wear me down. I had to get away. The noise. People trying to sell this. People trying to sell that. It was the sixties. Hippies. There were a good deal of them around in the city. All these Westerners reaching out to the East. Trying to find some reason for their lives. The mindless materialism that was beginning to suffocate the West. Anyway, I had to get away from the city.
Along with a Nepali guide, I took a bus to Pokhara. To the east of Kathmandu. And as we traveled further into the country, the mists continued, the mountains, those huge majestic mountains I had heard so much about, they continued to evade me, until I almost gave up hope of ever seeing them.
As I said, there was a guide. No one else. Of course, people on the bus, people on the street, but apart from that, just me.
Pokhara turned out to be much the same as Kathmandu, though less crowded. There was a certain peace there that I enjoyed. I spent maybe two weeks there, rowing on the lake, eating, sleeping long hours, reading, thinking, watching. The mountains were still shrouded in clouds and mist, the sky a uniform grey. If I stood on the roof garden terrace of the guesthouse I was staying in, early in the evening, I could just make out the two tips of Machapucha, miles in the distance. But that was it. For the two weeks I was there.
At the end of the two weeks, we – the guide and I- took a bus. It took us to the beginning of a trail. and from here, we began our walk into the foothills. I intended to go for three weeks. This is what I had come for. To walk deep into the mountains. To venture into the heart of the Himalaya. Alone. the guide carried my bag and I with a walking cane to support me, walked unencumbered. I felt free. The most free I think I had ever felt or ever felt since. And as we went deeper and deeper in, and further and further up, the clouds and mists began to dissolve and the skies became a sharp blue, and the mountains rose up huge and magnificent around us. It was breathtaking.
And for a long time there was no one in sight. Just us, the slopes, the craggy rocks, the powdery, cold air on my face…
It was strange, the deeper you go into those mountains, well the deeper we went into those mountains, the flatter, the rockier, it got. The first night we came to this small town, village, in the middle of a huge plain. We had emerged from the foothills and found ourselves walking across this expanse, this vast expanse in the middle of the mountains. It must have been a good five miles in the distance, I didn’t expect that. It reminded me of something… something out of the wild west, you know those western movies, not that I’ve ever been to the wild west but, not that I’m sure it even exists, but… this big plain. And in the distance, way in the distance, my imagination told me, lay Tibet. We stayed that night in the village, some small cobbled, stone house, or what, I don’t know, and the next day we continued on out way, after a good breakfast across this plain stretching as far as the eye could see. And then, the guide, he called himself Swift, I suppose it was easier to say than some Nepali name, or so he thought, then he suggested we go off the path and head off to the right and up the mountain slope that we could see from the plains. I was all too eager. He said that if we did, and if the time was right, we were likely to see a snow leopard or two, as families of them often appeared in those parts. ..
I was a western man traveling almost alone in the east. I wasn’t prepared to take any risks. So I hired a guide who carried a gun.
Animals. People. One never knew what one would come across in those mountains.
That’s left you feeling uneasy, hasn’t it?
And so we left the plains behind us, and headed for the mountain slopes. The terrain was very different from the flatness we had just left. I found myself going higher and higher up, along a twisting mountains path, a sheer drop, a hundred feet or so to my right. And as I got higher, the air got colder, and after some time we were forced to make camp. The altitude you know, can cause such trouble, I was informed it was best to stay put for the night.
But as soon as dawn came, and dawn was indeed spectacular over those mountains, as the stars and the crystal night gave way to the great swathes of color that heralded the sun and the morning. Now that was the meaning of spectacular, and such clarity of sound and vision. Every one of my senses was heightened. I felt almost more than human, Wolf. Like a super human. A superman.
We walked further on and upwards, and I remember it as if it were yesterday. We turned a corner, a sharp bend on the path, and suddenly there it was- about a hundred feet ahead of us and further up a slope. We were almost in a kind of rocky valley, and there it stood above us, silently, and still. It made me freeze. I stood frozen for a while.
I was in awe.
It was so striking. Long, woolly fur, grey with brown, yellowish tinges on its flanks, and lighter, white , white fur on its belly, its chest , its chin. Of course I only saw all of this once I got closer, but it was such a beautiful sight.
A feeling came over me. A feeling so deep, so deep…. A longing. It wasn’t enough just to look. Just to see it and then carry on. I – I wanted it….
I wanted it, Wolf. I had to have it. I wanted it for my own.
We watched it for some time. It had maybe seen something, some smaller animal maybe, in the trees ahead, and it was waiting, waiting to pounce, waiting for something anyway. Its body was huge, more than a metre long, and its head… its head was small in comparison, it didn’t quite seem to fit with the body, tiny ears, this heavy, heavy brow, frowning. And short, again, almost out of proportion, short legs, yet powerful, so, so powerful, and large paws. Such latent energy. Such …
I knew I had to have it. And I knew I was going to have it.
They are not generally aggressive to Man. It was nothing like that. After a while, it took off. I don’t know what disturbed it. It sensed something. It took off, up the slope and across the ridge. For a while I was feeling a kind of sickness, nausea, I don’t know, it could have been a mixture of altitude sickness and hunger, I don’t know, but we set up camp again on a small plateau on the side of the valley, which was the only place with trees and shrubs, and so we settled in for the night. After some time I felt better, Swift cooked us a meal, and I fell asleep, cold slightly, but the food had warmed me up and I was exhausted. My mind full of the snow leopard, the fur, the white fur on her belly and chest and chin…
I awoke with a start. Again it was dawn, although this time there were fine, twinkling sheets of snow falling, blowing in the early morning mountain air. I crawled out of my sleeping bag, Swift sound asleep beside me, and crawled out of the open tent door. Something had woken me up. I knelt by the side of the tent, and looked down into the valley, my eyes kind of blind to the snow after the relative darkness of the inside of the tent, but I could see, about fifty yards ahead of me, further down the valley, in almost the same place as the day before, the beautiful snow leopard, still and … she looked as if she were waiting for something. And I did it. I knew what I had to do. It was some kind of internal drive that had brought me to this point in time and had said “now- do it. Do what you came here to do.” I quietly, ever so quietly, took the gun out of the bag. I was so, so quiet, I did it slowly, I knew any noise would make her turn and run. I took the gun, my fingers were covered in the gloves, so of course I had to take them off. I had never handles a gun with gloves on before. I had hardly ever handled a gun.
I lay there, or did I crouch there in the snow, and I raised the gun to my eye and lined it with the aim, the target, the target, the big cat in front of me. It all flowed, seemingly, so effortless. And just, just as I pulled the trigger, the snow leopard’s face directly in my aim, it turned, it saw me, I saw it, I looked into its eye and I fired. I shot the snow leopard.
Neither of us carried the dead carcass. When the guide, when the gunfire woke Swift up, I told him that I was , I had been protecting myself, the animal had been coming towards me. It was self defense, me or her.
He explained that the snow leopard was getting rarer and rarer. Apparently they only exist in those Asian regions. He was saddened.
I persuaded him to help me do what I had wanted to do ever since I saw the cat. Skin the leopard. Remove the fur. I bribed him to keep quiet. He was easily bribed. Poverty makes a mockery of pride. All the time in my head, I had that nursery rhyme, this crazy rhyme going through my head, I remember being read to as a child:
There was a little man,
And he had a little gun
And his bullets were made of
Lead lead lead,
So he went to the brook
And he shot a little duck
Right in the middle of the
Head head head.
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
PART I OF STARS AND TELEPATHY
In a galaxy billions of light years away from ours, in the farthest reaches of the universe, there is a planet which orbits a star very much like our own. In this world, there lives a man who calls himself an astronomer although most others call him a trickster at best and a liar at worst. He spends night after night, day after day, year after year at the top of the highest mountain in that land, where he has vowed to himself to stay dedicating the rest of his life to finding the answer to a mystery that has perplexed him for a long, long time. At the top of the mountain he has built a large observatory, and within the observatory he has built the largest telescope that planet has ever seen, and it is through this telescope night after night that he directs his gaze into the black space upwards and beyond.
To the naked eye there is nothing to see. In this world, there is no moon, and in this world, there are no stars. Just a silky, inky blackness once the sun has gone down. And nothing else. There are no stars.
The people in this land would stare at you blankly if you telepathed the word “star” to them. Their telepathy language has nothing resembling our word. No such rhymes as twinkle, twinkle little star. They have no idea in the slightest what is meant by “star”. It has no meaning.
So when the astronomer came down from the mountain one evening, his face all aglow with the setting sun’s light, running down the mountain waving his arms: “I’ve seen something! I’ve seen something! There’s something out there. Something bright. And there’s so many of them, such brightness you have never seen!”, those at the bottom of the mountain looked at him with that blank look as if to telepath, “Who’s that crazy man!” and went about their business.
Unperturbed, he ran to the Ministry of Science with his discovery. Here he telepathed them his theory. This particular world they lived on was only one of perhaps billions of other worlds existing up in the sky, and the sun they experienced in the day was only one of perhaps billions of suns. His claim was that they just happened to live in a part of the universe where there were no stars; where there were no other suns. The other stars were so far away that they couldn’t be seen with the naked eye. Their part of the galaxy was one of the darkest corners of the universe. But with his telescope he could see further than anyone had ever seen. And there was so much light out there!
The important people at the Ministry of Science looked at him with blank faces as if he had telepathed to them in a language they could not understand. And they frowned and telepathed important long thoughts and telepathed of the centuries and centuries of learning that had brought them to the conclusion that nothing was out there in the sky. Centuries and centuries of learning by some very very important people who had established the way things were. How preposterous of him to telepath he knew better! A telescope!? What could a telescope tell us about how things are!?
And so the man walked away and went back up the mountain and sat and thought about what to do next. The world must know what he had discovered. But how could he convince anyone that this was true? The universe, far far away from their world, was awash with starlight!
In another galaxy, so far that it would take light traveling at 300,000 km/s 2 million years to reach its outermost stars, in a small gemlike world of blue and green, two girls sit by each other on the shores of an ocean. In the sky, the moon, and the light from the moon washes everything in a pearly glow, and above the moon stars strewn across the sky, like diamonds. Two girls on the beach holding hands, wrapped up for warmth under a soft, brown rug, looking out at the night and the ocean and the moon and the stars.
“When I was in Thailand, I was on a ferry going from Ko Samui to Ko Pan-gan and I could see the shape of the Milky Way. The spiral of the galaxy. The stars were that close,” said one. “It was night, we lay on the deck looking up. I felt like I was perched on the edge of the world, like I could feel the spherical shape beneath me.”
The other looked at her friend. She said nothing. For a second she did nothing, and then slowly, she unwrapped herself from the soft brown rug, stood up, wiped the sand from her legs, and walked over the beach to some rocks, dark, untouched by the moonlight. Here she sat.
In her mind, she spoke to the other girl still sitting quietly on the sand.
“They will never believe us.”And in her mind, the other replied:”They will have to. We will show them. We will prove to them.”
“But this is crazy,” said the girl on the dark rocks to her friend through her mind.
“Only if you don’t believe,” the girl on the beach telepathed. She turned toward the rocks and smiled. Both girls. Wordless communication. Just the millions of whispering voices of the sea.
They took themselves to the Ministry of Science and some very important people listened to what they had to say. They could communicate. But not through the conventional ways. They could speak – mind to mind. There was no need for words. They had discovered something that had been spoken of for centuries, but which they could prove. The implications were amazing they said.
But the important people at the Ministry frowned upon what they had to say. And they frowned and spoke of important evidence and of the centuries and centuries of learning that had brought them to the conclusion that this mind to mind communication was impossible. Centuries and centuries of learning by some very very important people who had established the way things were. How preposterous of them to suggest that they knew better! Telepathy !? What could telepathy tell us about how things are!?
Tonight the girls sit again on their beach watching the stars. They sometimes wonder if they are indeed crazy; if they are imagining they have powers that they really don’t have. Sometimes one girl goes to sit on the dark rocks and tries her best to block out any mind to mind communication with the other girl. She hopes she will succeed. She hates being this freak. She wants to be like the others.
Tonight the man sits by his telescope alone unsure what to do. He thinks of smashing the telescope. He thinks that maybe he is crazy too.
But telepathic thoughts travel faster than light across the universe, and somehow everything that needs to be connected is truly connected. And the man’s thoughts racing across time and space tell the girls: “Don’t give up! Don’t give up!” And the girls’ thoughts come like a flash of realization to the man, and all at once his mind is struck like lightening, like he has been blessed with divinity, with vivid, explosive images of billions and billions and zillions of stars.
To the naked eye there is nothing to see. In this world, there is no moon, and in this world, there are no stars. Just a silky, inky blackness once the sun has gone down. And nothing else. There are no stars.
The people in this land would stare at you blankly if you telepathed the word “star” to them. Their telepathy language has nothing resembling our word. No such rhymes as twinkle, twinkle little star. They have no idea in the slightest what is meant by “star”. It has no meaning.
So when the astronomer came down from the mountain one evening, his face all aglow with the setting sun’s light, running down the mountain waving his arms: “I’ve seen something! I’ve seen something! There’s something out there. Something bright. And there’s so many of them, such brightness you have never seen!”, those at the bottom of the mountain looked at him with that blank look as if to telepath, “Who’s that crazy man!” and went about their business.
Unperturbed, he ran to the Ministry of Science with his discovery. Here he telepathed them his theory. This particular world they lived on was only one of perhaps billions of other worlds existing up in the sky, and the sun they experienced in the day was only one of perhaps billions of suns. His claim was that they just happened to live in a part of the universe where there were no stars; where there were no other suns. The other stars were so far away that they couldn’t be seen with the naked eye. Their part of the galaxy was one of the darkest corners of the universe. But with his telescope he could see further than anyone had ever seen. And there was so much light out there!
The important people at the Ministry of Science looked at him with blank faces as if he had telepathed to them in a language they could not understand. And they frowned and telepathed important long thoughts and telepathed of the centuries and centuries of learning that had brought them to the conclusion that nothing was out there in the sky. Centuries and centuries of learning by some very very important people who had established the way things were. How preposterous of him to telepath he knew better! A telescope!? What could a telescope tell us about how things are!?
And so the man walked away and went back up the mountain and sat and thought about what to do next. The world must know what he had discovered. But how could he convince anyone that this was true? The universe, far far away from their world, was awash with starlight!
In another galaxy, so far that it would take light traveling at 300,000 km/s 2 million years to reach its outermost stars, in a small gemlike world of blue and green, two girls sit by each other on the shores of an ocean. In the sky, the moon, and the light from the moon washes everything in a pearly glow, and above the moon stars strewn across the sky, like diamonds. Two girls on the beach holding hands, wrapped up for warmth under a soft, brown rug, looking out at the night and the ocean and the moon and the stars.
“When I was in Thailand, I was on a ferry going from Ko Samui to Ko Pan-gan and I could see the shape of the Milky Way. The spiral of the galaxy. The stars were that close,” said one. “It was night, we lay on the deck looking up. I felt like I was perched on the edge of the world, like I could feel the spherical shape beneath me.”
The other looked at her friend. She said nothing. For a second she did nothing, and then slowly, she unwrapped herself from the soft brown rug, stood up, wiped the sand from her legs, and walked over the beach to some rocks, dark, untouched by the moonlight. Here she sat.
In her mind, she spoke to the other girl still sitting quietly on the sand.
“They will never believe us.”And in her mind, the other replied:”They will have to. We will show them. We will prove to them.”
“But this is crazy,” said the girl on the dark rocks to her friend through her mind.
“Only if you don’t believe,” the girl on the beach telepathed. She turned toward the rocks and smiled. Both girls. Wordless communication. Just the millions of whispering voices of the sea.
They took themselves to the Ministry of Science and some very important people listened to what they had to say. They could communicate. But not through the conventional ways. They could speak – mind to mind. There was no need for words. They had discovered something that had been spoken of for centuries, but which they could prove. The implications were amazing they said.
But the important people at the Ministry frowned upon what they had to say. And they frowned and spoke of important evidence and of the centuries and centuries of learning that had brought them to the conclusion that this mind to mind communication was impossible. Centuries and centuries of learning by some very very important people who had established the way things were. How preposterous of them to suggest that they knew better! Telepathy !? What could telepathy tell us about how things are!?
Tonight the girls sit again on their beach watching the stars. They sometimes wonder if they are indeed crazy; if they are imagining they have powers that they really don’t have. Sometimes one girl goes to sit on the dark rocks and tries her best to block out any mind to mind communication with the other girl. She hopes she will succeed. She hates being this freak. She wants to be like the others.
Tonight the man sits by his telescope alone unsure what to do. He thinks of smashing the telescope. He thinks that maybe he is crazy too.
But telepathic thoughts travel faster than light across the universe, and somehow everything that needs to be connected is truly connected. And the man’s thoughts racing across time and space tell the girls: “Don’t give up! Don’t give up!” And the girls’ thoughts come like a flash of realization to the man, and all at once his mind is struck like lightening, like he has been blessed with divinity, with vivid, explosive images of billions and billions and zillions of stars.
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