Words and Music

After retiring from a long career as a paramedic, I lived in the old German city of Nürnberg. Most of the town was destroyed in a fire storm during World War II, and when Nürnberg was subsequently rebuilt, Katharinenkirche was maintained as a burnt-out shell. Rather than a neglected war memorial, however, the townspeople still to this day use this Church of St. Catherine as an open-air theater for concerts of all musical genres.

The walls of Katherinenkirche still stand, though bare. When fire burnt away its roof and hollowed it out, the church’s sanctity was released to the heavens. Its remaining skeleton evokes a memory from the opposite end of my career, an hour in which, as part of my training to become a paramedic, I was called to witness the autopsy of a woman in her late twenties. Although she’d died of a cancerous liver, her body showed no external signs; her face was lovely and her figure the ideal of a woman. I think of her now as Catherine, in recognizing her likeness to the ruins of the medieval church.

St. Catherine of Alexandria, ‘the pure one,’ is the patron saint of scholars, philosophers, and apologists. St. Catherine was a beautiful, privileged and well-educated woman who tried to convince the Roman Emperor Maxentius to end persecution of Christians. Maxentius called pagan philosophers to debate her, but she converted them all. For that, and surely also because she refused the emperor’s seduction, she was martyred.

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, St. Catherine was a devout intellect who “declared to her parents that she would only enter into marriage with someone who surpassed her in reputation, wealth, beauty and wisdom.. Her intercession was implored by theologians, apologists, pulpit orators, and philosophers. Before studying, writing, or preaching, they besought her to illumine their minds, guide their pens, and impart eloquence to their words.”

Part of her legend (not embraced by the church) is that, upon her own conversion, Catherine was transported to heaven in a vision and betrothed to Christ by the Virgin Mary. This story comes from a time in which people believed that the body is a burden to the soul, and that truly holy people rejected all worldly things, and especially fleshly love.

Within the medieval walls of Katharinenkirche, where there are no windows to the world but the roof is open to the sky, one can imagine St. Catherine’s male counterpart as Sir Galahad, the purest knight of the Table Round, who pursued the Holy Grail in preference to everything earthly. The day after Sir Galahad was made to accept a kingship, Joseph of Aramathie appeared to him and offered him to drink from the holy cup. When he did, Sir Galahad ascended into Heaven in the company of angels, freed forever from his mortal burden.

Only the shell of Katharinenkirche still remains. And of the woman I know as Catherine, I have only the memory of her autopsy. I felt it a blasphemy to dissect her in the cold basement of the hospital, and yet this was an academic necessity in my acquiring the knowledge with which I could bring healing to my community.

St. Catherine and Sir Galahad left their mortal burdens as virgins; I can’t know whether my Catherine did, but I remember her as a promise unfulfilled. How dearly I would like to have known her as she went about her apartment singing love songs, or joining in with folk tunes on the radio while driving about our city. But the love she might have inspired in me was multiplied in every patient I touched throughout a long career, through the knowledge she imparted to me.

St. Catherine converted the pagan philosophers, not by refusing their arguments, but by engaging with them. She revealed something beyond the laws of logic, of nature, and of moral living – the love of a personal God. Remembering the concerts I heard in Katharinenkirche, it’s fitting that the shell of her church still reverberates with music even when the words of gospel are no longer preached therein; I’m reminded of Pythagoras, the Greek philosopher who’s study of mathematics was preliminary to and fulfilled in the Music of the Spheres.

The medieval mind understood Pythagoras’s musica universalis (music of the heavenly bodies) as one of three branches of their concept of musica; the other two are musica humana (music of the human body) and musica instrumentalis (music of instruments and voices.) Hindus (who were aware of Pythagoras) expressed this theme as Shabd (the Word made flesh) – a near identity with divine meaning and sound, tones which can be heard with ‘the inner ear.’ The idea is that of John 1:1 – “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Indulge me an exert from my novella, The Beautiful Fountain:

“The universe was approaching clarity - expanding with Aristotle’s vocabulary and contracting with Plato’s nameless Beauty. But, though these two sages were restored by the Orient, Pythagoras was returned in tatters. The monks were extracting the Music of the Spheres and discarding the harmony. Their thesis was a dictionary - a circular argument, words sustained only by each other, and without a theme.”

A friend – my fellow blogger, Moriah Joy – danced around these ideas in speculating what heaven might be like, especially in her intuition that Heaven has much to do with the intellect, as she remembered God’s charges to Adam before the Fall. In the first creation story, God gave man rulership of all the fish, the birds, and the beasts of the earth, and in the second, more detailed creation story God paraded all these creatures before Adam to see what he would name them.

Naming the things of the earth is beginning to take rulership of them. Naming things is forming concepts of them, but rulership is more – it becomes co-creative by organizing them intellectually in a specific way. As there is more than one language, there is more than one way to understand the world. And, for that matter, each speaker within even a common language will have a unique understanding of his own tongue, formed of both natural and accidental associations of terms within his dictionary. The history and legends of St. Catherine are in the public encyclopedia, while Nürnberg’s Katharinenkirche, the autopsy, Sir Galahad, and my association with Pythagorus’s music are additional elements in my personal lexicon of Catherine.

Having names for things gives one the focus, the power to master them intellectually, with something comparable to using variable names in algebraic equations or logical expressions. The word, “dog,” for example, is an abstraction for rather a wide variety of beasts – knowing the features common to dogs gives one knowledge of how to interact with all, but the generic word obscures the unique characteristics of each. We achieve a certain clarity in the use of language, a recognition of the structure of our world, but we want always to remember that our dictionary is an approximation, a thesis comprised partly of what is given to us and partly an extension of our own minds.

But the structure is a skeleton – it lacks something which gives it life. What I wanted during Catherine’s autopsy was her life restored. Her body had fallen out of harmony, and life had left it. It’s necessary to exploit language, to say that what was missing in her flesh was her music, because there is no really suitable English word – and if one were invented it would soon be martyred by academics, if the emperors of the flesh didn’t first turn it to their use.

In communion service we eat bread and drink wine; bread is a universal symbol for knowledge, but, again, there is no satisfying word for what the wine represents. One thinks first of “life,” but this doesn’t capture the immediacy, the human passion that is wanting in the intuition. For this we want music. The bread is broken – separated into parts – and then the wine follows; the words are written, then revealed in music.”Music begins where words leave off. Music expresses the inexpressible. If there is a Kingdom of Heaven, it lies in music” ( Edward Abbey.) Though the words are written first, the music is the alpha and the omega; if one changes the music it expresses a different passion – it’s a different song – but if the words are changed it’s only another stanza.

Much of Richard Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” was set within the city’s Katharinenkirche (before it was burned.) Wagner’s opera is the tale of a naturally gifted musician who struggles against the rigid rules of the music guilds, so that, by winning a competition, he would win the hand of the woman he loves. But the musician, Walther, has a competitor named Beckmesser. Walther has composed a song for the event, and the local master, Hans Sachs, arranges that Beckmesser obtain a copy and believe it to be Sachs’ work. But Sachs anticipates correctly that Beckmesser will utterly fail to understand the spirit of the song, and when Walther follows and sings it in a way to reveal its inner beauty, Walther wins the prize and thus also his paramour.

The words were the same, but where Beckmesser was a master of the craft, Walther bested him by expressing the passion within the words. As one who understood the rules, Beckmesser was an academic, an intellectual musician, while Walther was a poet in love.

Within the text of Le Morte d’Arthur, Sir Thomas Mallory often mentioned that he was translating the history from the French, but when he spoke of the Holy Grail he almost always retained the French word, Sangreal. Consciously or not, Mallory was communicating the meanings both of san greal (cup of Christ) and also sang real (royal blood.) Sangreal incorporates a mix of ideas (which our unconscious mind tends to do); depending upon the legend, it may be a platter, or the cup which Christ used in the Last Supper, and which Joseph of Aremathie later used to catch Christ’s blood in the tomb. Sangreal captures the sense of the full dinnerware of communion – most importantly, the vessel containing the wine, but also to a lessor extent the tray containing the bread.

When the Sangreal appears, it is carried by a maiden, and in some stories that maiden is thought to be Mary, mother of Jesus. But one may also recall the revived story that Mary Magdalene carried the daughter of Jesus; what is downplayed in The Da Vinci Code is that the legends assert not only Christ’s bloodline through French aristocracy but also through them to Scottish nobles, and so to Uthur Pendragon (King Arthur’s father.) Literalists would not be happy with this connection to the legendary King Arthur. But the power of myth is not in its historical accuracy, rather, in the spiritual intuition that is honed through the retelling from generation to generation, including ours.

The myth expresses the heart’s yearning for the divine feminine (”God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them” – Genesis 1:27.) Too often, and especially in Arthurian times, the church becomes a political power in the world. What is done in public is masculine – it is the outer world, law, authority. But if the church is the bride of Christ, what it does is private, and intimately personal. The quest for the grail is our unconscious yearning for a personal union with God, unmediated by any clergy. It is our feminine instinct to find and submit to God, to take him into ourselves, to fill our senses with the Spirit as wine heats our blood, to make of our own hearts the cup of Christ.

St. Catherine was prepared for this with a good education and a fine intellect. But, like Pythagoras’s study of mathematics opening him to the music of the spheres, this was only preparatory to betrothal to Christ, to Sir Galahad drinking the wine. This is a metaphor for the union of the masculine and the feminine. We can fill our senses anonymously with the lights dimmed and our eyes closed, but taking the bread before drinking the wine symbolizes our learning the law and then discovering the love; it’s coming to know our partner so that we can kiss with our eyes open and looking into those of our beloved, learning the words before our hearts burst into song.

The Arthurian legends have it that on many occasions the Sangreal was present but could not be seen; nonetheless its presence healed both physical wounds and injuries to the soul (it cured Sir Lancelot of a two-year madness.) Many Arthurian tales depict a lady healing a knight of wounds or poisoning, and nurturing him back to health. The maiden bearing the Sangreal is the ultimate fulfillment of this feminine virtue.

God prepared Adam for rulership of the earth by awakening language within him. After the Fall, Adam was separated from God, and had to learn both natural and God’s laws to survive. Through Adam, mankind becomes masculine, but through Christ the feminine is restored.

Wagner’s Beckmesser is like Maxentius’s pagan philosophers – intellectuals, masters of both natural science and moral law. In communion, we partake not only of the body (the bread, the truth) but also the blood (the wine, the passion) in expressing our union with Christ. Walther is like St. Catherine, having not only an intellectual understanding of God, but also that inarticulable something of a heart in love.

On the opposite side of Nürnberg’s central river from Katharinenkirche stands a world-class music school, where students who are naturally gifted must go through the academics, the autopsies of music before they can become masters of their craft. In like manner, our intellectual grasp of God’s order in this world is a step in preparing us for our place in the divine symphony, our part in the Music of the Spheres. Bread and wine – words and music. Heaven is not plucking a harp somewhere in the clouds, following notes on sheet music, but rather the co-creative expression of our own hearts in love. In this way we are keepers of the garden. This garden.

Perhaps we shouldn’t bemoan the Fall overmuch. Now we are in the academy, mastering language, mastering our world, but seeking the music – the passion, intent, the meaning. The autopsy is a necessary step in learning what the music is about. And in recalling that Walther’s paramour was named Eva, I am reminded that Adam’s wife was not named until they were expelled from the garden. Neither did I have a name for my Catherine until the close of my career. By study, by intellect, we come to more clearly see whom we love. Beauty is, after all, an intellectual perception. Love is our heart’s response to it.

Dreams of Candles & Kittens

The image of your candle flame is burned into my mind. I still see it flickering on your forehead like a third eye looking back at me. Even behind closed lids I see it, feel your gaze.

I should get up soon, go to the sewing kit and stitch my costume for the day. The basket lies open near the bed – some dusty spools are mine, but many more are yours. The ghost of the flame still lingers, fitting the shape of a needle’s eye. I stare through it, knowing it to be a portal through which time will resume as soon as a thread is chosen and is passed through. Just a moment for my pulse to slow to the rhythm of your breath, those deliberate waves that draw me deeper into the blankets.

Cruel, cold floor – the slightest touch of my foot against it would connect me with this house, the entire estate, and some role it demands I play. A map of our villa is in a drawer somewhere in the room – a tailor’s pattern, a blueprint, an unfinished dream. I recall sketching lines on the parchment, but now it seems much of the handwriting is yours. You’ve made everything new, novel, perennially under construction. And yet under the blankets, where you turn to nuzzle your back into me, all seems timeless and familiar. On paper, in sunlight, every line was straight and square, correct. Too correct. Now, under moonlit shadows, the geometry is organic, conforming to each of your curves.

My thoughts have disturbed a ball of yarn in the basket. It tumbles out, and the kitten gives chase. I don’t recall your having a cat, but there she is, the mighty hunter toying with her prey. Her forehead is branded with the candle flame in my mind, like an Egyptian hieroglyph of the All-Seeing Eye. The kitty is even more Eastern than that – Siamese, I should think, judging from the turquoise and emerald of her eyes, matching the satins and sequins that wrap my love.

The fuzzy ball escapes through the balcony door. The cat pursues, after glancing back to confirm my attention hasn’t drifted. But I’m not anxious to fling open the blankets and release nocturnal warmth. I can follow her, anyway, in the theater of my mind.

Pussy is in my studio, where I spent so many years sculpting my hopes of you, my fingers penetrating deep in moist clay, my nostrils filled with the scent of earth. My hands delighted in anticipating your shape. Busts fill the shelves, statues line the walls – the stove eyes still glow atop the oven where I baked my models. Every one came short of you, though, draining of life as it dried. It must be the eyes. I sculpted a hollow in each to catch a shadow – it works, but only if I stand a little distance away. What’s that about cakes – why can’t I hold my love and look at her, too? My ceramic faces look through me to you, and crack, disenchanted now with their artist.

Feline fur whispers through the door. She’s become larger, a lynx. Though she doesn’t turn to demand I follow, it’s no accident that her tail is flipped so high. She’s in the gardens. The estate is studded with them – the baroque, the labyrinth, the orchard – and I’ve strolled through every one, though they seem to shift about and are impossible to embroider on my map. The bouncing ball has disappeared, lost. Or has it multiplied, become the fruit dangling in the branches like your delicious ideas? The lynx poses beneath the trees, waiting for me to choose one and give it a toss. The puzzle is to pick which citrus is yours and which mine, but I know the trick, and sniff for that with the sweetest, juiciest breath.

I’ve won the game but disturbed birds roosting in the trees where the fruit had been – they flutter out in a blaze of Amazon colors, the lynx watching with more than interest. I could swear she said, “Aye, sir, I’ll try you in the labyrinth next,” and she pulls my arm round her shoulder to carry me there.

The flickering wings settle as torches to light lush halls of tall hedges that are decidedly yours. A flame meets my eye wherever I turn, and lures my hand irresistibly to pierce inside. Its soul feels as wet on my skin as it does warm.

The lynx prowls on, but I stop before each corridor to listen. The wind rustles twigs into the clacking of a million little spider legs knitting their webs, and if the way is blocked somewhere around a bend the breeze is trapped, and resonates with whistles and hums of things you shouldn’t have to tell me, that I should just know. I’ve learned to avoid such paths, and choose instead the quiet ways, those you’ve forgotten were open or don’t know so well, even if all these halls are yours. The passages house thieving bunnies which take caution against the lynx, and sometimes darker, grumbling shadows and stains. Well, a few little beasties haunt my own caverns, too, and it’s best not to pester such creatures, to trust another day’s sunlight to burn them away.

So I escape your labyrinth, though leaving groomed green paths for dark jungle seems more going deeper than emerging. The torches spark and disperse as prisms woven into a veil of mist, shimmering in vines that smell of my angel’s hair. Having grown to respect my triumphs in her tests, the cat has matured more potent, a jungle feline, though before I can tell what kind she disappears with two graceful bounds into the bush, a fading shadow daring me to find her. I do still sense her behind the chaos of birdcalls, screaming insects, and alien cries that fill the forest; she’s there as surely as the sun is somewhere beyond the fog.

I choose the one constant – the song of a river threading through mangrove roots. Its chorus gradually increases to a crescendo at the base of a waterfall. A thousand eyes push me up its channeling rocks, the cascade washing my back so clear that my heart is revealed, throbbing like a red sun. Easily I claw to the summit – our balcony overlooking the rainforest – and notice your kitten-paw slippers beside the bed. Somewhere under the mound of blankets is the spring, the source of all that moisture.

The sewing kit still lies open. I squint through the needle’s eye, deciding which uniform, what version of me best says to you, “It is I.” But animal magic begins to reveal the moon whole under the shadow of its crescent, and my lids open full. I find your eye peeking over the pillow, flickering the scantily coded message, “Need you get dressed just yet? The candle is still lit.”

Lost Dove

A dove should be nesting at this late hour, but there she is, flitting about as if crazed by the full moon. Like a moth drawn to a candle, she tries to reach the silvery orb, only to drop exhausted from the sky – the reflection is farther away than it appears. Again and again she falls from light into shadow, till I see her no more.

I’ve lifted my own dove in this very same glow, produced by blue gels over stage lights, when dancing a pas de deux with Lacy, my ballerina of many seasons. But that was in the past – I’m on duty now, in the back parking lot of a church in urban Atlanta.

The police are tidying up their report just a few blocks away. Next of kin known, but disinterested – the little crack-whore is destined for the paupers’ cemetery which runs downhill from the prison, just above the landfill. Her drama will soon be covered over by the light of the moon. I think of it as a hunters’ moon – I avoid claiming that it actually contributes to lunacy with the pragmatic observation that the bad guys can simply see their targets better. It’s just risen above a branch of that oak against the fence, as if the tree were raising a lantern to reveal the world for which I am responsible.

I seek to recover strength behind Israel Baptist Church, sitting in the cruiser assigned to me as EMS lieutenant for the southern half of the county. The child around the corner is dead, beyond recovery. As I approached, the cop had lifted pencil from clipboard just enough to indicate the door to a toolshed – a sure sign that his most pressing concern was to avoid contaminating a crime scene. The moonlight that could penetrate the one greasy window took a moment before revealing a little black girl collapsed over her knees like a Muslim at prayer, her forehead to the concrete. I had no real hope that the dark pool running from beneath her to the floor drain might be oil. Her skin was the temperature of the night, and my fingers discovered only the wound in her neck – the heartbeat had gone out with her blood, it had been a while since her last sigh.

I wanted to do more for her – at least give her the dignity of pulling her pants up from around her knees. But once death is confirmed it is indeed a crime scene. The medical emergency is over – just cancel the ambulance and fire crews who are en route, and disturb nothing for fear of cheating CSI technicians of their booty. I’ve no more duty to her – only to the file cabinet, providing a medical report to supplement the police documentation. The cop knew her name, having picked her up a few times as a child out too late and loitering at the wrong corner.

The church parking lot is empty, save for me. A few hours earlier it had been filled. They call it choir practice, but at an urban gospel church on a Saturday night surely throats were filled with the same passion and joy as will be shared with the congregation in the morning. Worship that waxes and wanes as does the moon – their song will rise again with the sun. It’s a hot night, but the cool blue of the moonlight makes everything in this world gleam as if from a light within, a landscape under a summer snow.

The peace belies the neighborhood. Somewhere in the shadows nearby is the monster who thought her life worth less than the coins she’d asked for her service. I don’t know that devil, though it’s easy to recognize others – I can diagnose a patient’s drug of choice by the personality of the demon who’s taken him over. There’s a corner suckling at liquor, a whole block loiters with marijuana and hashish, but the nearest intersection is the haunt of crack cocaine, her pushers and her whores.

The girl was fourteen. Her skin had become ashen upon releasing her dove, no moisture left in her body to give it a sheen. Her voice is silenced forever, her dove flung into darkness, with only my prayers to lift her to the light. Maybe that’s why I think of Lacy – she was about this age when I first danced with her.

My virginal Lacy – she danced the Snow Pas de Deux clad all in white and glowing in the stage lights. I appeared in white, too, when I danced with her, my partnering an act of worship of Beauty become corporeal. During this dance our legs grew cold from the dry ice machine rolling a heavy fog over the stage – I can imagine how that felt to the snowflake dancers when they finally found order, forming two columns and bowing deep into the mist. Approaching the final crescendo, I carried Lacy overhead in promenade between them, and paused at center stage. I could feel her leg stretch just a bit higher above me in arabesque, even feel her wrists pulse the last waves of music before the curtain. Nothing so lovely could be real, but there she was, living, perched on my hand as if I’d plucked her from the heavens to present her almost within reach of the first row. As the music receded I could hear the audience draw in the vision with their breath.

Movement in the shadows under the tree catches my eye, but it’s only a breeze stirring dead leaves. Where in the debris has that dove fallen? I would brush away the ashes of the world into which this little spirit was born and, like that oak lifting the moon above the shadows, present her to the heavens, asking God to receive back this child. I can’t save them all – I know that. The choir must rest its voice in the stillness before sunrise, but I search for the prayer that could find the lost dove. No words come – what rises from my heart is a vision of Lacy circling cautiously till she takes my hand, and trusts me to lift her into the lights. I have touched Beauty. I am ready for the next call.

Flaming Ice

The cartwright’s wife had no wood left for the fireplace before which her guest could warm his limbs as her dinner had warmed his stomach. Her visitor, a hermit who had settled just beyond the city walls to bring the message of Christ to Nuremberg’s poor, told her to fetch icicles outside from the eaves and cast them into the fire. Obedient to the missionary hermit, she was soon astonished to see her icicles blaze as if oaken tinder.

The hermit, Sebald, who was later recognized as the patron saint of Nuremberg, visited this same family on another occasion, and expressed a taste for fish. Unfortunately, the lord of the city had just passed an edict that no one would be allowed this dish until the castle was first provided. When it was discovered that the cartwright was in violation for the sake of his guest, the lord had his eyes put out. This ruler should perhaps have considered that the breach was for the sake of Sebald – all the town knew of a man who had once heckled the hermit while he preached, knew that Sebald had called the ground to open and swallow him whole. But no such punishment came to the lord, as it was not the gospel in Sebald’s mouth to which he objected, but only the fish in his belly – the hermit simply restored the cartwright’s vision.

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I learned this lore of St. Sebald while living in Nuremberg, where a gothic cathedral fixes him in the city’s memory. His body rests in a silver casket within an iron shrine built by Peter Vischer, east of the altar. Like all such churches in Europe, the exterior of Sebaldskirche (the church of St. Sebald) is darkened by the modern city air. Stone saints imbedded in its walls cast stern eyes on the world’s corruption, and demons trained as gargoyles hold others of their kind at bay. The cathedral doesn’t seem meant to bring a presence into this world, but rather to carve out a protected space inside. Its inner skin does show some stain – the graffiti of privileged families hawking their names, resembling the faded tatoos of once nubile women whose concepts of beauty have been profaned by the world. However, in from the walls, the holiness of the place is palpable.

I felt instinctively that Sebaldskirche is the spiritual heart of the city, even before learning of the patron saint. I was thus excited to notice a placard one day which announced an Angels’ Choir Concert to be held in the early evening. I’d absorbed much of the instrumental music that flows continuously throughout this city, but very little choral work.

And sundown is the perfect time to be in the sanctuary. There are two rows of pink sandstone columns which branch at the top, creating quite the sense of a woodland clearing with its canopy of tree limbs. The sandstone is quarried from Nuremberg’s own bedrock, and catches the sunset from the west window perfectly. With the rosy glow augmented by flickering candlelight, one feels himself to be at a timeless forest campfire – as all these stone cathedrals are cool like the earth beneath the frost line, it’s a welcome, warming impression.

I learned at least one architectural term that evening – it seems that an Angels’ Choir is not a collection of heavenly voices, but rather the balcony high up in the west between the two towers. The music was actually a string quartet, the performers positioned against the railing. The audience, too, was required to ascend the spiraling staircase and take seat in the balcony, which was much deeper than would be imagined.

It was well worth the climb. Before I had only known Sebaldskirche from a perspective on its stone floor. The columns, statuary, alcoves – all enhance the sense of forest clutter, in which the space marked as one’s campsite fades indefinitely into the woods with the bonfire light. But from the balcony high above one sees the perfect order of the architect’s vision of sanctuary. I had not imagined this space held so much light.

I had already realized that it was time for me to move away from this medieval city when I saw another placard at Sebaldskirche. Something about a meditation – the sign’s language was too complex for my skill – but again I anticipated music of a very gentle sort. After all, Pachelbel himself had once been organist in this very church. But I’d forgotten how literal the Germans are – this was indeed to simply be meditation. A score or so drifted into the sanctuary alone or in pairs. The host acknowledged each arrival by striking his hand-held chime, its voice a crisp, wintery tone inviting each to take a seat for silent prayer.

The feeling of Nuremberg leaving my heart became increasingly like a placenta pulling itself away from the womb, cramping in my gut so hard that I moved from my pew to sit on the stone floor, my back against one of the columns. No sunset light, and what candles there were barely lit the space in which I sat, above and around me only darkness.

But the host insisted I move my limbs – we were to take our meditation to different stations throughout the church. Like a stray dog, I followed the line of native citizens up the spiral of the south tower, endlessly, so high that many were winded. The weight of my own legs increased with every step as if affixed to a cable, hauling more and more flagstones up from the floor below. We finally halted on a tower platform, and with the thinness of the air everyone easily recovered the meditative state. All but me, my feet still objecting to stepping away from the town I’d come to know in these past years, to walk into an unknown future.

We were ushered through a door onto a narrow rim around the outside of the tower, high above the old city. Familiar streets, the river, restaurants where I’d met friends so often – I had drifted above them, separated, it seemed, forever, as if I were already in the airliner that would be taking me away. Again we paused to meditate. No words were ever spoken – our guide used his chime to announce the beginning and end of our movements. Nonetheless I felt I had only a migrant’s understanding of the language used in this place.

Evidently our pilgrimage was timed to bring us here on the hour, for the bell in the opposite tower began to dong. So massive a sound, the north tower found a harmonic with which to sway, and in a moment the ledge which suspended our legs so high above the cobblestones began also to weave. It was here I realized that my grief was visible to others in the group, that they were allowing me distance for the wind to clear it away. A human touch might have drained my heart straightaway, but this was not forthcoming.

Not until the tones rippled away were we allowed to leave the ledge and partially descend the tower. I’d left much behind, was lighter because empty. Our host showed the entrance to an attic – I hadn’t known that this space existed between the roof and the sanctuary ceiling, but it was quite large. We found our places along wooden walks for this station. The ceiling below appeared as rows of cement dunes – odd that from heaven’s perspective the holy sanctuary looked to be under primitive burial mounds.

A pilgrimage always ends where it began, the place changed not in what is there but in who we have become. And so we returned to the sanctuary to embed the experience in our souls. My heart felt blank, but light enough to smile with the hope that what I’d given to the air outside the tower hadn’t added to the pollution darkening the walls of Sebaldskirche.

How like a church is the human psyche, separated from heaven and buried in the earth below. And yet within the walls there is a sacred space full of light, the seed of Deity. Little deaths and big, yet always I emerge, empty but restored, ready to go through those doors out into the next world. The meditation was at end, and I grew restless. The past life finally surrendered to winter, its icicles in my heart have flickered into flames – the hermit’s gift warming me in remembering Nuremberg.

The Voyeurs

The two aged scientists were alone in the observatory. It was quite late, although the hour was irrelevant when using the uplink to a telescope suspended in Earth orbit. Perhaps they were too old to change their ways.

“Let’s see - 11:15 PM. What would that be in sidereal time?” Steve asked.

“17.32156 hours, today.” Joyce checked the orientation of the telescope, clicked a bit on her computer, and called out the rotation figures.

Steve fetched champagne glasses from a drawer while they waited for the telescope to execute the command. They turned their attention to the monitor. The planet was so far away that it took almost twenty years for the light reflected from it to reach the lens and be transmitted back to Earth. But their equipment snapped pictures so quickly that they were effectively watching live video of the planet’s past.

“Focus in at that lake in the northeast quadrant,” Joyce instructed. “There…”

Joyce and Steve could see what was obviously a group of living humanoids enjoying what appeared in every respect to be an old fashioned Sunday afternoon picnic.

“Here we are,” said Steve, and popped the cork. “We’ll make history on this day.”

“Teens at a lake shore,” Joyce observed. “Yes, I can hear the news vans filling the parking lot now, come to beg for our footage.”

“What a handsome boy standing there underneath the tree, proving our theory. You bet. MTV will probably pirate this video and make a rock icon of him.”

“They will want to wash him up a bit first. What – is that chocolate smeared all over his face?”

“Give the kid a break, Joyce. He’s wiping it off.”

“Oh, and his species has discovered napkins, too. I had feared for his sleeve.”

“When he’s fixed his eyes on that pixie over by the table? Oh, she is a little darling, isn’t she? Were you ever that skinny?”

Joyce pushed at his chair with her foot, but only caused her own chair to roll away. Steve cautioned her, “Careful, dear – I don’t know how well our insurance covers hip replacement.”

Joyce returned to the monitor. “She is cute. I don’t know, though – is he studying her, or the food set out behind her? Look how he’s wolfing down that cake – I don’t know how he can even taste it for worrying about what’s still on the table.”

“He looks like a clever young man – he may be trying to decide if she knows how to bake.”

Joyce said, “I don’t think she made the cake. Aren’t those crumbs of chocolate on her plate, too? Look – there’s still a slice left on the table. Is that devil’s food?”

“Devil’s food? The girl or the cake?” Steve asked. “Oh, it does look good. If that frosting were any thicker it would just slide down onto the platter. Uh oh – look, he’s turning to her. I think he’s making his move.”

“My turn to ask,” said Joyce, “His move on the girl or on the cake? Look how he’s stepping between her and the platter.”

“He wouldn’t bother to wipe his mouth if he were after more cake.”

“He is talking to her. But I don’t know,” she said. “A smooth operator like him would know that a girl could never take a second slice with someone watching her.”

Steve said, “Oh, but there’s always someone watching.” The two astrophysicists exchanged knowing smiles. “Look – what’s he saying to her?”

“Like I can hear from halfway across the universe. Well, I’ll try to read his lips. Hmm… something… look at him motion to the sky with his arm – do you think he knows he’s being watched?”

“He’s telling her that their love is written in the stars,” Steve said.

“Every boy tells every girl that,” said Joyce. “Look, she’s dropping her chin to hide a grin. She’s not buying it.”

“You’re interpreting the data too quickly. Would disbelief make her pink-up like that? Such a pretty face. But a girl who wears white to a picnic – does she look like a young rocket scientist to you? Look, look – he’s reaching for it.”

“For the cake, I hope, and not her,” said Joyce. “He’s going to leave chocolate fingerprints on anything he touches. Oh, look in the eyes of that hungry beast – he’s frightening.”

“Come here, let me put my arms around you. I won’t let that monster get you.”

“Wait,” she said, “No time for kissing. What’s he doing? See – he’s picked up the cake knife.”

“What do you think, Joyce? Are her charms so wanting that he’s taking the last piece for himself, or will the young gentleman serve it to her?

Suddenly the voice of the observatory director broke in from behind them. “Are my two senior scientists making history again.” Studying their monitor, he said, “Hmph. Billions of dollars of equipment – so powerful that it can look back almost to the beginning of time, back to the Big Bang itself – and you two use it to watch your own courtship reflected on the lakes of Vulcan.” But, seeing that there were only two glasses for toasting their success, he turned for the door.

Joyce whispered to Steve, “Oh, if we’re going to watch the Big Bang, we’ll need to recalibrate, and switch to infra-red.”

He replied, “Our theory is proven – every stolen kiss is recorded in the heavens.” As the director pulled the door to, Steve slid the drawer open again and pulled out a box of cherry cordials, adding, “Every secret chocolate, too.”

Robert C Flanders

all rights reserved

Dragons & Virgins

Dragons and virgins belong together in the Western mind. The images as we have them developed together through the Dark Ages. Dragons are quite solitary creatures, usually referred to as ‘she,’ and they have an appetite for virgins.

It’s different in the East. Asian dragons are rather high up in the hierarchy of nature spirits, rather like embodiments of the Greek’s primitive elements of fire, water, earth, and wind. Should nature get out of balance, Asian dragons make catastrophic adjustments to restore harmony, but they are normally more benign than in the West, and serve a natural purpose. The ideas of balance and harmony is captured in the traditional Buddhist symbol – an abstract rendering of two dragons circling each other facing outward, each holding the other’s tale in it’s mouth. The image encapsulates Taoist philosophy of the interplay of Yin and Yang.

Post Roman Europe went quite the opposite way, however. Rather than seeking balance, we incorporated polar extremes in our world view. Dragons and virgins are among these.

When Constantine made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire, there were about four fundamentally different interpretations of the faith. The religion and its moral code finally became standardized through the ministry and writings of St. Augustine. He had immersed himself in various understandings of Christianity before finally fixing himself on the idea that we humans are utterly corrupt and unworthy of redemption, and totally dependent on the mercy of God, who inexplicably loves us. In particular, Augustine condemned our desire nature as emblematic of our original sin, defying God’s will. And so he preached the ascetic life.

Northern Europeans had dragon myths from pagan times. As these people became Christian, dragons absorbed the quality of being among the last fading remnants of the previous age of earth, a time of magical creatures and sorcerers. Once Europe was Christian, however, the dragon became increasingly reptilian, connected at least unconsciously with the serpent in the Garden of Eden. In association with the serpent, the dragon became the subconscious archetype for Eve’s desire nature. The dragon handed down to us is the female libido.

Not all early interpretations of Christianity recognized Jesus as divinity, as One of the Three Persons of God. Augustinian Christianity did, and so Jesus could be perfect, even though men are fundamentally corrupt, because He was God made flesh. That gives support for the hope that at least men are potentially redeemable, but women are different enough that they need a model for holiness, too. Meeting this, Christianity found increasing importance in the virgin birth of Jesus, admitting that in Mary’s likeness a woman could be pure enough that God as the incorporeal Holy Spirit (not the personified Father) would come to her.

Many ancient religions included tales of immaculate conception, varying from visitations by the One (as in Buddha’s conception) to impregnation by any of a family of gods. Alexander the Great is said to have been conceived by a god coming to his mother; being half mortal, half god handily accounted for Alexander’s incredible military and cultural accomplishments, though the legend may have also been a political device to remove the implication of patricide in any complicity he may have had in the assassination of his mother’s husband, the king.

However, the virginity of Mary took on great significance to the Christian world. No element of sex or desire was involved in Jesus’s conception. Had lust played any part, that stain would have been passed on to Jesus in the same way that original sin is passed on to us, and as perfect man, Jesus could not be stained. In this context, one might cast a Freudian eye on what Augustine writes about his mother, and his subsequent adult relationships with women, then consider how the original sin of disobedience to God became fixed to Adam, while at least subconsciously (where it actually has more power) Eve’s sinfulness became identified with her desire nature. Surely the first shame – recognizing that they were naked – became dominantly linked to Eve in Augustine’s thought as he struggled with asceticism.

In the Dark Ages, only first-born sons of the nobility inherited the titles and estates of their fathers. The church hierarchy became the place for other, disenfranchised sons to find a place with many of the trappings of aristocracy. The church became a worldly institution, and reflected a male-dominated feudal culture. The political and social repression of women was extended into religious doctrine, too. The stain of our desire nature was even blacker in the hearts of the lesser humans, women, and could only be redeemable within the bonds of marriage. The ideal for a woman is to be like the Virgin Mary, her passion only for God, and by remaining innocent to be desirable to God.

Feminine passion can be restrained, but not destroyed. Our unconscious sense of it is contained in the dragon. Fittingly, our dragon rests in solitude underground, and can only be approached through a narrow cave opening. Heros can’t resist approaching her, however, because she guards a treasure. That treasure is sometimes said to be precious jewels of the earth, sometimes her own eggs. Our dragon is scaled because of her association with the serpent. We can’t admit she is warm-blooded, and so we recognize her fire as coming from a furnace where a heart should be, and the flames released under pressure as a weapon, rather than any civil use of fire. Yet her fiery breath is not the greatest challenge to the hero-thief; never mind any aversion we may have to reptiles, he finds her hypnotically beautiful, her voice intoxicating.

The virgin and dragon are polar opposites of the mortal aspect of women. The virgin is seen as holy because she hasn’t had worldly experience. That, however, is only Augustinian interpretation of the virgin birth. The simpler is that immaculate conception is evidence that something comes into this world through a woman that is not of this world, but rather of Deity. According to His purposes for us, God sends the heavenly, the divine in the person of a man who walks among us, whether we understand this to be His Son, Jesus, or as in another culture the warrior Alexander. Virgin birth speaks to the heavenly origin of the child thus conceived, not to whether Deity condemns the desires we mortals have for each other.

It’s revealing that the first great dragon story of the Dark Ages, St. George and the Dragon, is almost concurrent with Augustine’s ministry. As Augustine’s preaching of ascetic living spread, a dragon crawled from a well, quite close to Augustine’s homeland in North Africa. The local king tried to placate the beast with livestock, but eventually found himself having to offer his own daughter in sacrifice to save his kingdom. Giving his virgin daughter to the beast would be her death. This image expresses the paternal, Augustinian concept that freeing a woman’s libido leads to her damnation. And the image draws from a father’s emotion that the idealized romance with his daughter is changed forever when she marries.

One needn’t study the legend of St. George and the dragon overmuch to recognize the erotic metaphors. There’s a message in that George declined to marry the princess and moved on to fight other dragons because he had already quieted the flames of her beast outside wedlock – never mind that he introduced himself to the dragon as “a man of pure heart.” The legend encapsulated Dark Ages attitudes toward the feminine libido, and became the standard for dragon lore.

European dragons are evil because they are the feminine libido repressed. This is not to underplay the significance of a woman’s virginity – only that suppression and condemnation of any passion whatsoever in a woman creates an untamed and corrupt monster when it finally does find release. And in the polarized view of the feminine that developed in the Dark Ages, the dragon is usually provoked by men who attempt to steal her treasure.

Sexuality is external to a man, internal to a woman. Our coming together reenacts the divine mystery of the meeting of soul with spirit. To say that Augustinian condemnation of a woman’s passions should be corrected by unbridling the dragon is to invite unknown evils of the opposite extreme, to remold women in the likeness of men. There is a balance to be found. Ideally, when George took the maiden’s belt to tie her dragon’s neck, he should have handed the leash to the princess herself, not to her father. Then the dragon’s beauty could be made manifest to us above ground, expressing her spirit in its natural harmony in this world..

Tiger Milk

There were no windows which opened to the outside world anywhere in the prison, yet even there one could sense that the sun was setting. It wasn’t as easy to block the sounds of the outside community, too, but the warden covered them with elevator music, playing interminably throughout the sterile halls. Intentionally so or not, the hollow music also served to dilute the passions of the inmates. It was the evening prior to Jacob’s execution. This was a twenty first century city, governed by a benevolent aristocracy, and Anna and Brian were there to see to the proper performance of the customs and rituals of the event.

 Brian was Prince of the City. His office was all but fulfilled, his lieutenants having identified, captured, convicted, and imprisoned the monster Jacob; only the execution itself remained. Princess Anna had an equally important function to perform in her capacity as High Priestess. The condemned were offered a last taste of relative freedom and a few hours of normal human experience - as much as could be obtained within the confines of the prison grounds. Indeed, Anna probably originated this tradition; the unity she brought to the city would have been less genuine if it didn’t extend even to death row, and such was the depth of her vision that even the most heinous of human monsters could find no darkness to shield them from her loving gaze.

Whatever the custom’s origin, the damned were indulged their liberty by the temporary transfer of their spirit into another body, and such a thing could only be accomplished with the presence of the Priestess as catalyst. It was more than trivial symbolism that, just as a corrupt soul could be transferred to a healthy host, even so barbaric a thing as an execution could be given a humane skin. The officials and the representatives of the community and the media gathered in the lounge adjacent to the warden’s office before going to meet Jacob for the rituals. The forms of routine were there, but tension betrayed the city’s need for reassurance that the monster had in fact been destroyed.

Brian remarked to Anna, “We’ve never had anyone like Jacob here before. Do you really think the transfer is appropriate for him - I just don’t believe there’s anything human about him at all. It seems too risky.”

Anna answered, “If we don’t reach out to everyone, it’s a little less sincere when we extend to anyone. It’s not ours to judge whether our efforts do or even could bring any good results for another soul.”

 Brian observed that the golden aura about her face gave her a remoteness akin to the Sun - seemingly small in the distance, and yet her light defined everything in the room. Even her eyes were of so transparent a Mediterranean blue that it didn’t always occur to one that they had sight - unless they were caught directly in her gaze and found themselves within the clear depths. The group proceeded solemnly to Jacob’s cell.

Jacob was a serial killer. He wasn’t the ordinary murderer - someone who’s character was weaker than his passions. He wasn’t even the ordinary serial killer. The profile of such monsters is that they’ve sustained some great injury to their psyche, resulting in an emptiness which craves satiation with human blood. They feel a profound lack of intimacy with others, and some demon within them translates that into an issue of Power - never mind that intimacy is of the essence of Beauty. Such wretched souls usually carry some shreds of a normal psyche; it’s voice is too weak to confront their demon directly, but will find some way to signal others - help the police - to recognize their devil and stop him. Jacob didn’t fit the profile. In his late thirties, at first glance one would take him perhaps as a member of some academic community. He had that look of a researcher. In another time he might have found his way into an administrative role at a concentration camp, where he could conduct his experiments of terror on a helpless population. His was no perversion of the beast, but rather of an intellect too abstract, too detached to appreciate any distinction between the hypothetical and the lived experience of his victims. If one found grounds in his particular fascination with doom and dread to speculate that there had indeed been some ancient horror done to a child Jacob, the rational machine which thus developed in compensation was in complete command of the adult psyche.

 And there was only the most remote chance that some fragment of common humanity within him set the wheels in motion for his identification. More likely, he simply got careless, choosing at last a subject with whom he could be connected. Jacob had been administrator at a health club. He’d also taught a yoga class there. In that capacity he’d selected his last target - to all appearances, a healthy, sincere young woman. Master at psychic manipulation, he’d used her fantasies about yoga masters to first tear down her self esteem and then make her utterly dependent upon him to reshape her. With cult-like logic, he’d brought her to willingly participate in a satanic ritual of her own death. The detectives had interviewed Jacob about her simply while gathering background on this latest victim. When they learned from others in her yoga class that she’d had a much more involved relationship with the instructor than he had divulged, they began to examine him more closely, and soon enough became certain that they’d found their killer.

When the prison party approached Jacob, they could see no trace of anxiety in his face. Not exactly amused by the sobriety of the group, it seemed more that his curiosity was aroused by their attitudes, that his intellectual fascination with the human reaction to mortal dread could even include himself as a specimen.

Anna addressed him, “Jacob, you have been condemned by the city. Yet we offer you one last opportunity to live for an hour like a normal man. Do you wish to accept the transfer of your soul into another body?” Anna had that indefinable beauty some few women accomplish which makes it impossible to assign an age to her - she appeared to have the wisdom it takes fifty years to develop, yet there was also something adolescent in her eyes. She makes no demand, yet people behave more decently than their norm in her presence, perhaps because her gaze makes them feel more decent, more beloved.

 Such charm had no effect on Jacob - it doesn’t matter how lovely one might be if another simply lacks the organs of sight. He blinked away his contempt for the word, “normal,” by quipping, “My soul? You still believe in those?” He smirked at the group’s indignation for his disregard of ceremony before confirming, “Yes, I look forward to the transfer.”

 Following protocol, the group walked Jacob to the room where the transfer would take place. Brian showed an inclination to walk ahead, to lead Jacob like he would a whipped dog, but Anna quietly touched his hand, drawing him back to walk alongside the condemned as though he were a peer. Jacob took note of the influence which body language had, both that of Brian and Anna. The procession began, the monster Jacob managing to lead by half a step, Brian to his left, Anna to his right, and the others trailing behind.

The other prisoners lined the corridor outside their cells, witnessing that the damned was indeed receiving his promised right. Normally the hallway had that clean, anemic brightness of whitewashed concrete block, but the thick rows of convicts on each side darkened the passage, giving it the atmosphere of a decaying tunnel beneath some ancient castle.

Passing Winston, Jacob said to him in a matter-of-fact tone, “Look out for strangers - once I’m in the other body, I’m going to seek you out and cut your throat.”

Winston was just another inmate, and had probably done nothing to earn Jacob’s disfavor, or even his notice. Jacob simply selected him with the randomness of a researcher taking an arbitrary rat from a cage on whom to study the psychic effect of impending doom. Winston was quite a large and powerfully built black man who had always possessed confidence in his ability to defend himself. But all the populace knew that Jacob was no ordinary felon, that if he made a threat it was certain to be fulfilled. Even as they shuddered for Winston, they felt personal relief to be passed over.

Anna ushered Jacob into the room where the ritual was to take place. The one who’d offered to be host body was alone in an adjacent room - it offered some measure of privacy to the volunteer in so intimate a procedure that the damned didn’t meet his host prior to the transfer. Brian, the other officials, and the reporters walked around the corner to the observation room on the other side.

 Such was the authenticity of Anna’s priesthood that the damned would usually enter their trance as soon as they stepped into this room - the mere suggestion of what she would accomplish was credible enough of itself to accomplish the task. But, developed and hardened personality that he was, it took longer with Jacob. He looked about the room, noting the feminine taste in the burgundy chair and matching divan. Lavish as they were in so ascetic an environment, they were appropriate to the service of the Priestess, and her furnishings somehow always fit naturally in their setting. After Jacob elected to assume his place reclining on the couch, she took her seat. With a final glance telling her that he was choosing to submit to her spell rather than succumbing to it, he closed his eyes.

 Anna began to chant. Her voice was gentle, timeless, and crystal-clear. It filled the space between them. Imperceptibly, his heart adopted the pace of her tambourine. There was just an anxious moment in which he drowned in the air which had just left her lungs, and her melody dissolved into his bloodstream. Her golden silhouette became orange through his closed eyelids. Jacob entered trance.

Opening his eyes again after an eternal moment, he knew that he had successfully transferred; he was now in the adjacent room. He felt heavy at first - clumsy while his will settled more completely into this host body and learned its coordination. Oddly, his host had been lying on his stomach during the transfer. He felt the presence of his host’s personality, contained and sleeping in a corner of this foreign psyche. The presence was more distinct than Jacob had anticipated, but he dismissed it as simply part of the alien experience. In Anna’s city there was always some altruistic soul with a sense of civic duty and tradition sufficient that he would volunteer to be host. Not a trait which Jacob respected.

 Brian led the gallery back around to Jacob’s door once they’d witnessed the transfer, and opened the door to usher Jacob back out into the hallway. Anna joined them to walk back past the other prisoners who were still in their ranks along the walls, witnesses now to the completion of the rite. The procession maintained the ceremonial dignity of silence, and Jacob hadn’t yet tested his voice in this new body. He took note that the reverence the prisoners accorded Anna now had a touch of awe, a murmur even of fear, seeing what she had accomplished.

In a movement so swift that Brian had to take a second look at its consequences to be certain of what he’d seen, Jacob turned and slashed Winston’s throat as he passed him. As though they’d already accepted the inevitability of this, other than the initial shock there was only minimal reaction among either the procession or the inmates. Winston dropped to his knees, his moan muffled in the gurgle of blood in his trachea.

 Brian motioned silently to a pair of guards to take Winston to the prison clinic for what care could be provided. Anna took note of the depth of Jacob’s darkness. There were no guidelines as to how to respond to a criminal act by someone during the hosting. The transfer was to be of such short duration, and confined within the prison compound, that such a thing simply wasn’t anticipated. It didn’t even evoke Brian’s police instincts. Winston was just an inmate, after all, not someone with citizenship and its concordant rights within the community. In any event, the demands of ritual during this time kept any reaction suppressed - Jacob was in his evening of liberty and would be indulged.

The public formalities observed, the prisoners were for once anxious to return to their cells, and the procession left Jacob alone in his liberty. Had the damned any family or friends, he would be allowed a visit - even a conjugal visit - but Jacob had no such connections, and was free to just prowl about the prison grounds as he wished.

Brian waited in the lounge for Anna to spend her moment with Winston. When she returned, he said, “We’ll never agree about capital punishment. I understand your perspective, that all belong to the One Spirit, and all are valuable to Her in a way that we mortals can’t understand. But surely Jacob is the best example yet that, if indeed we are all One, such an element as he within the Spirit surely contaminates us all, and shouldn’t be suffered to live.”

Anna answered, “I understand your perspective, too, that the ideal should bend its knee to the sometimes harsh realities of this world. I have no argument in defense of his life. It’s not Jacob, but rather the next to be accused who concerns me. Practical justice is decided by men, and so long as that’s true there will always be room for error and corruption to slip in, for the spoken legalisms to conceal mortal judgements based on personal malice, envies, politics, or prejudice. Whatever you argue is accomplished in the execution of the guilty, it seems impossible to balance the death of ten corrupt souls against risking even one innocent. Yet, even if we disagree, I don’t compete during the performance of your office.”

Jacob was acclimating to his host. He began to appreciate the power and grace of this body, and entertained a certain respect for the host who’d developed it. He’d never intended to surrender the body back to its owner. Others among the damned may have also had such fantasies, but their relationship with the body would soon begin to deteriorate - within a few hours they would feel it as a growing sleepiness, and when they awoke they would do so in their own bodies, to wait out their final moments. Such was the cohesion of Jacob’s personality, however, that he had the strength to sustain his integration within his host, probably even through sleep.

It hadn’t occurred to him that the attributes of his host might affect him, and yet the very style with which this body seemed inclined to move impressed him that the influence of body and soul could be reciprocal. He’d intended to resume his old way of life once he’d taken possession of his host. And he would be free of the legal system because the penalties of law applied to his old body, not this, and there’d never been occasion for the government to prepare a response to the theft of a host body.

But he recognized a primitive attitude at some instinctive level within his flesh that he realized would make him different in some way. It wasn’t the personality of his host - he could sense that safely bottled up by the mysteries of the Priestess. No - Jacob began to appreciate that consciousness was bidirectional. There was indeed some spiritual something which could form an affinity for a body, yet was independent of it - not just his restrained host, but Jacob was himself obviously some such thing which had been moved from his old body to this. But there was also that consciousness of an entirely different character which rose up organically from his new genes. As he was only just now integrating within this body, it was quite noticeable to him - an instinctive and powerful awareness, clearly indued with the passions and the motivations of life. In some ways his host body was like himself, except that this flesh had none of that abstract curiosity with which Jacob had so perversely toyed with his victims. No, this consciousness was immediate - too primitive to be self-conscious, but distinctly aware of its own internal needs and the relevance of what it sensed in the environment through which Jacob now strolled. And it felt good to walk - as though it were his feet grabbing the Earth’s skin which powered the planet in its daily spin.

Acutely aware of this unexpected element in the transfer, it was thus less startling that it might have been when Jacob’s thought, searching through this flesh, realized that his host was a tiger. No - a tigress, because she - they - were pregnant. He felt the fetus within himself, felt the instincts which developed and nourished it. Of course he’d assumed that his host would be a man - not that much was ever said or written about the liberty of the damned, but in fact he’d never heard it specified that the condemned would be indulged his freedom in a human body. Past the initial surprise, Jacob felt a wave of respect, even admiration, for the choice the Priestess had made for him. Now he had a label for the instinctive consciousness of his new body. The High Priestess must understand him quite well to blend him into a creature of such power and majesty that she was a law unto herself, that morality was at last dismissed as simply whatever interested him. In the end, his diabolic experiments with people had left him dissatisfied - people bored him with their preoccupations with yesterday and anxieties about tomorrow, with the petty worries about their ties with others - family, friends, work. Now a tigress, he was Nietzsche’s Superman, and all reality was defined in terms of his thought, his fascinations.

 Brian was becoming restless in the lounge. “The transfer should have been over hours ago. I warned you that Jacob was like no other we’ve ever imprisoned here. I don’t think he’s going to surrender his host. It’s past time - we should go find him.”

 Anna said, “The tradition doesn’t allow us to interfere with his liberty.”

 ”And yet the hour of his execution approaches. What will be the consequences if he does not return?”

Anna answered, “The time and your duty are clear. Your law makes no allowance for these circumstances.”

 And so the execution was uneventfully performed on Jacob’s comatose body at the appointed time.

 Jacob stretched out atop the wall next to a guard tower. He looked into the streets below, into the rough, decaying neighborhood around the prison. It occurred to him that he would need to find an abandoned house - somewhere he could deliver his cub, safe from the neighborhood dogs during his hour of vulnerability. He thought contentedly of the days and weeks ahead, of nursing his cub, the life flowing from his breast to its hungry mouth. He looked about for a route down to the street, realizing that he shouldn’t take the leap the tigress would normally accomplish quite easily, for fear of jarring the developing cub too violently.

That last protective impulse jolted Jacob back into a more familiar sense of who he was. He couldn’t resist these maternal instincts, yet they repulsed him even while coursing through his mind. His old self wanted to continue his experiments, to dissect life, yet now he also hungered for experience, and to live. The self-giving instinct of this animal consciousness was something Jacob could not abide. Life had become important - not specifically his life, but life itself, now flowing through him into another. The attitude inhered in the flesh itself, in its genes, and could not be driven out so long as it comprised a living organism. Jacob could not endure becoming such a creature, and so while he still could he chose to let himself drift away, drift to sleep and surrender his host. His revulsion at the feelings that were becoming his outweighed even his certainty that his own body no longer lived. Jacob found it preferable to resign himself and dissipate into nothingness. As if this spirit of darkness could choose to ignore the first rays of sunrise penetrating him at the last.

Brian had stayed with Anna throughout the night, anxious about the outcome of Jacob’s transfer. At dawn they walked to the cafeteria together for breakfast. He said, “As worried as I was about the transfer, it made the execution itself that much easier - my staff was spared having to look into the living eyes of the man they were strapping to the table.”

 Anna had been notably quiet throughout the night. She had probably remained linked in some way to the transfer, so long as it was sustained. Now that it was over, Brian noticed that her skin was becoming luminous again. How lovely she was. Wishing to change to a less formal, more personal conversation with her, he said, “What are you drinking, anyway? You seem to be really enjoying it.”

 Her eyes sparkling and lips straining to conceal wisdom’s mischief, she replied, “Tiger milk.”

Robert C. Flanders

all rights reserved

Gender

The first nickname that firefighters gave me was ‘Guru’ – not because I showed any symptom of wisdom, but because they learned that I studied yoga and even rented a room at my instructor’s home. But an hour after the first firefighter learned that I danced classical ballet I became known across the county as ‘Tutu.’ As long as they imagined that the name irritated me they wouldn’t search for another because we all adhered to the warrior principle, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

I’m too nice a fellow for such games. Ok, mostly. There was the time I was assigned to a station where the fire lieutenant had genuine doubts about my sexual orientation. In so perfect a setup I felt compelled to follow him into the restroom to stare at him whenever I saw him go. I suppose I could have explained my life-long quest for beauty to him, and if I’d simply introduced my yoga mistress to him he would have seen how close I was. But what’s the karmic penalty for giving a man prostate problems compared to providing the rest of the crew a long-running laugh?

One of my grandfathers, Clay, was an Atlanta police officer, and the other, Jimmy, was a Southern Baptist preacher. One influenced what people did by his power, and the other changed what they were by his beauty. I am simply the stuff of these two men and their families. How their natures combined in me to form a soul is an accident of the time and place in which I live, but the spirit descended from them was determined before I was born. No one at my parents’ wedding could have foreseen that the union would produce a paramedic. But seeing me in uniform with the authority of the county in my badge, charged to the ministry of rescue and healing, one could look back and say, “Of course – that’s Clay and Jimmy.”

We are all a combination of the masculine and the feminine. Not a stagnant blend, but a fluctuating balance of the qualities. If I happen to be an extreme example, happily so, because it makes it easier for me to notice the differences.

Even the routes by which I came to the vocation of paramedic and avocation of danseur express the difference. At a very young age I lost a marriage at the same time that I was laid off from my job in printing. My wife’s parting gift was to tell me that the county fire department was expanding and hiring. I would have never considered such work, but my expectations of this life had been destroyed and I was helpless to create a new reality. By accidents, then, the world called me to be a firefighter at just the time the county was developing its Emergency Medical Service. I stumbled blindly into EMS training, but once assigned to an ambulance crew I realized I’d found my calling.

One evening during that training I attended a performance of the Pennsylvania Ballet at the Fox Theater in Atlanta. Seated there, about halfway through a piece, I heard a strikingly clear voice say, “You should be doing this.” I’d never heard this voice before, nor have I since, but it was instantly familiar. I’ve always heard that the ‘still, small voice’ calls one to a ministry, but this call was secular, to the arts. I don’t know why, but the purpose is not mine – it is Deity’s. Even now that my careers both in dance and in EMS are completed, it’s still evidently not for me to know what purpose was served. Well, so be it. At twenty one, I was too old to begin dance classes, but there was no doubting this voice.

So, both pursuits called me. One via a series of external accidents which could theoretically be explained away in a chain of cause-and-effect. The other was an internal, mystical event – Deity taking an instant to reach into this world to give me a direction. It was of course the same Deity working in opposite ways, one to expose me to the chaos of emergencies in the physical world, and the other into a realm where every step is choreographed to music. Can I help it if God loves me best?

So what are these ‘masculine and feminine’ attributes? European languages assign gender to all nouns, according to their speakers’ sense of the object named. In German, the moon is masculine and the sun feminine, while in Italian, for example, the moon is feminine and the sun masculine. If there is an essential truth, a whole people have it wrong.

I’ve no doubt that there is an absolute truth, and if we each were perfect we would be compelled to comply with the attributes of our gender absolutely, both externally by force of law and internally by our very nature. But wait – I’ve already acknowledged that I have a feminine side.

Masculine and feminine are attributes of consciousness. They aren’t two things, but rather two faces of one. We may as well look at the tricky concept right up front. It’s impossible for a physical object to be two different things at the same time, and it’s absurd to assert a logical principle which has mutually exclusive developments. Consciousness, however, is precisely this. It is a natural development of an organism’s sensitivity to its environment, and it is the a priori intention which brings that organism into being – it is both the chicken and the egg. Material and logical objects are things of which consciousness is aware — consciousness itself is a different sort of thing.

The masculine mind is individuality, and the feminine unity. One wants to see the world as an extension of himself, and the other to see herself as inseparable from all. One wishes to own, the other to belong. The masculine mind is the soul, and the feminine mind is the spirit. But soul and spirit aren’t two different things – they are two faces of one.

Power is masculine, beauty is feminine. Power is the capacity to bring about change, and beauty is the eternal unchanging. Power is unfolding drama, beauty is the intention behind the drama. Power is the movement from one frame to the next in a film, beauty is a single photograph that contains all its meaning. Power is actual, beauty potential, one is right now, the other is always. One is law, the other love. And each is the fulfillment of the other.

Because psyche is simultaneously two different things its analysis is ripe with paradox. For example, the spirit is eternal and the soul temporal – one thing, psyche, which has mutually exclusive attributes.

The method by which one analyzes psyche will itself be either masculine or feminine, and the choice will bias one’s conclusions. Feminine thinking sees relationships, while masculine eyes see each thing as distinct – one sees the forest and the other the trees. As soon as one begins breaking psyche into constituents the analysis is masculine, and yet the thing being considered, consciousness, is an inseparable whole to the extent that it’s feminine. One sees the bark of a tree or the skin of an animal and recognizes that as the extent of its being, while the other sees it within the balance of an ecosystem.

Let’s have a closer look at mortality. Western religion teaches that we each live only once, then go to another state of being permanently. Eastern religion, however, has it that our state of being is cyclical – that we continually reincarnate in a form consequential to our previous lives. There is the potential for escape from the cycle by reaching enlightenment, but this is described as surrendering one’s individuality and merging with Deity. That’s the pure feminine state. And there’s a psychic trick one must accomplish – achieving the desire to become one with Deity requires the surrender of personal desire. In the West, existence in Heaven (or Hell) is masculine because we retain our individuality – God is a separate personality, often conceived as the Lord of the Eternal Realm.

But the West has the paradox that “the Kingdom of Heaven is within,” meaning that Deity is somehow at the core of our being, a nucleus, or a seed. This hints at our duality as both spirit and soul – one with Deity and yet distinct, both feminine and masculine. We earn admission to Heaven by believing in the Christ within ourselves. Churches differ in stressing whether that belief is only to recognize Christ, or also to “accept Him as our Lord and Savior,” that is, whether the knowledge itself is sufficient, or whether trying to live according to that knowledge is required evidence of genuine faith. In any event, if we meet the condition we will each upon death be transferred into a perfected body (or all of us at once, at the end of this world) and live eternally in Heaven.

Eastern religions do not always suggest that we all aggressively seek enlightenment now, but that we will each eventually reach it through a series of lifetimes. We form a soul from the mulch of the earth, live out our lives, and return to the soil, either directly by psychic decay or indirectly by ascending into the heavens as a vapor and descending again as rain. Yes, there is a vagueness inverse to that within Western thought in how the spirit retains sufficient individuality that someone’s next life is determined by the last. The two systems are not so different as they may appear.

Westerners believe that the individual soul is the essence of our being and that spirit is entirely distinct from us, an ‘other.’ Easterners think that the spirit is the absolute truth, and that our own soul is ultimately an illusion. My position asserts the paradox – that we are both spirit and soul, masculine and feminine, consciousness both eternal and temporal, one with all and each distinct.

This discussion probably implies that I find the feminine perfect and the masculine corrupt. It should only reveal how I yearn for beauty. Again, the separation of the psyche into its attributes is partially artificial. Both soul and spirit have desires – the soul for sensations and experience and the spirit for understanding. Sins of the soul are quite familiar – indulgence and self-interest. Sins of the spirit involve failure to understand or respect the individual (perhaps even including oneself) – lack of empathy or the use of others to satisfy intellectual wants. The archeologist who violates the tomb of a pharaoh on the grounds that the pursuit of knowledge overrules the obvious will of the deceased commits a sin of the spirit. And there can be strange intermixing of the masculine and feminine – Dr. Mengele’s adherence to the Nazi principle of the ‘master race’ was masculine, and the inhuman experiments on prisoners which that allowed expressed coldly detached feminine curiosity.

Dreams often represent our own psyche to us as a house. The soul is in the basement, and the spirit is in the attic (dream attics are often open to the heavens, either via windows and skylights, or simply by being incomplete in construction.) The attic stores ideal things – hopes, aspirations, potential – while the basement holds more mundane things which have been used and stored. New-Age names for these rooms are the superconscious and the subconscious. One can see a certain generality to one room and universality to the other; the basement is sunk into the earth, and the attic open to the heavens. The difference between them is primarily that one is self-aware and the other is not. In gender terms, the masculine is instinctive and the feminine intuitive; both are connected to sources of knowledge beyond their physical senses, but one as animal consciousness and the other as spiritual consciousness. Again, we are each our own balance of both. And our lives are conducted on the floors in between.

It’s quite cliché that authors write about themselves, and I’m no different. In my novel, The Beautiful Fountain, one character is Dove Warrior because my own guide has revealed herself to me as the Dove. Yes, I’ve seen her, even before I heard the voice. It was at Atlanta’s old Municipal Auditorium during a Simon and Garfunkel concert. I knew that she was a spirit creature, and sensed my identity with her. No, it wasn’t a pigeon, and yes I was cold sober – this was before concert halls filled with illicit smokes. Live performance arts again – as with the ballet, the music had opened me to the mystical. You probably have experiences which you could compare. Anyway, my former wife made a portrait of me as a dove, which she called “the voyeur” – the watcher. This was without my telling her about the dove, but there was no need because she has the eyes of an artist. Pity that we didn’t work and play well together.

My book offers two versions of the myth of the dove descending to earth and becoming the turtle. There is the hope that the turtle will eventually become the eagle and return to the heavens, but my story didn’t lend itself to developing that point. My focus was on the dove forming a shell around herself to become an individual. This world is masculine. But dove and turtle yearn for each other’s gifts – the dove wants to experience and the turtle (when he eventually begins to awaken) to understand. She wants to immerse herself in this world, and he to see it from above.

These cross-purposes can be found in the mythology of the Navajo. Women form villages, but men tend to wander off into the forest alone. Only desire for each other motivates them to make the adjustments necessary to come together and form a nation. The feminine knows what should be built and why, the masculine knows what can be built and how. The Navajo creation story of First Man and First Woman differs from the Biblical account of Adam and Eve in that the conflict of wills is not between man and God, but between man and woman; and rather than being cast out from Eden, men and women separate from each other. The myth doesn’t shy away from the erotic nature of their desire for each other.

The current Western world-view is scientific – everything can theoretically be explained within a chain of cause and effect. This is masculine thinking, as opposed to the medieval, feminine view that all things in this world express a divine intention. The masculine mind induces laws from observed phenomena, though it can never reach an ultimate cause. The feminine mind deduces phenomena from an intelligent purpose, though she can never account for why it takes one form and not another. Plato is feminine, Aristotle masculine.

Our current, material perspective is grounded on the philosophy of the German, Immanuel Kant. He theorized that we could not know anything (any object, or even ourselves) as it truly is, but can only have indirect knowledge – a concept formed in our minds by our limited and fallible set of intellectual processes applied to the data provided by our equally limited and fallible set of physical senses. That defines the psyche as a biological computer, equipped with a specific instruction set that is applied to the datum of its input/output devices. Kant did not doubt that there is a real world beyond our senses, or even that God exists – only that our capacity to know either is quite restricted. We are minds condemned to solitary confinement within our skulls, trying to interpret noises in the hall.

Kant’s is an extreme masculine view, fixed by his resolute assumption that we are each finite in every way. We can’t really know God because Deity is an infinite being, and a finite mind cannot contain an infinite concept. Kant’s logic is inescapable, but if his premises are true then the Kingdom of God cannot be within. Kant saw us as objects – essentially animals with sophisticated minds. The religious view conflicts with this, arguing that we are subjects, having some sort of identity with Deity. Scientific proof of either the material or religious view is impossible because only objective evidence can be valid. And logical proof is inappropriate because it’s a paradox to assert that we are both soul and spirit.

We can, however, refer to the philosopher who paved the way for Kant – the French mathematician, René Descartes. In his Principles of Philosophy Descartes was seeking the sort of knowledge about which he could be absolutely certain. He recognized the fallibility of the senses, as well as the possibility that he could misunderstand things in one way or another. His meditation led him to the conclusion that he could be mistaken in every concept he held; however, he could not doubt that thinking itself was going on. And so, eureka, Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am.) Descartes then embraced his concept of the world as being reasonably accurate, if not perfect, on the grounds that God has our best interests at heart and so would not deceive us.

Kant developed Descartes’s insight into rather a sophisticated account of the interplay of mind and senses. He made the one assumption that we are finite. Descartes made two: like Kant, he never questioned the reality of God, Who has the positive characteristics generally held by Western religion; and he never examined what the “I’ is that is doing the thinking. In his philosophy, “I” is the soul, the individual, finite mind, and God is the ‘other,’ an infinite and distinct personality.

These two philosophers shifted the balance of Western thought toward the scientific, masculine world-view. Needful, and there have been magnificent developments, but neither addressed the concept that “the Kingdom of Heaven is within.” The feminine is ignored, our connection with Deity is forgotten. There can be no purpose in life, and meaning can only be the fulfillment of biological and psychological needs.

According to Kant, even though God exists, our idea of Him is an empty concept – a vague placeholder in our minds. Since Kant’s time, other philosophers have undertaken the search for what we mean by the word, “I” – what is the self – and many reached the same conclusion, that this, too, is an undefined, empty reference. Neither God nor self can really be known, and in the extreme view are not real things.

The balance point is the paradox that the infinitely small is identical with the infinitely large – that “I” refers to the same thing as God but with different characteristics, where one is Deity individualized and the other is Deity unified, the soul and the spirit, the masculine and the feminine. The two things that Descartes didn’t examine are two faces of one; and Kant’s assumption of our finitude is an error reflecting and contributing to our shifting balance from a religious to a material world-view.

Descartes’s own Cartesian Coordinate System happens to be a lovely model for the balance. As a mathematician, he saw space as sort of a continuous substance which can be defined in reference to an arbitrarily selected origin. Though he didn’t apply this to his philosophy, so too, as spirits we are a continuous substance upon which souls are drawn, each with its unique perspective of all. Don’t push the model too far – as is the Creative Word itself, this is a metaphor.

The medieval religious view was feudal – even if spirituality is feminine, God is masculine, a Lord distinct from us Whom we can only contact indirectly through a church hierarchy. Protestant reformation modified this view, capturing more of the sense that Christ is within each of us. But it could be clearer still that this is not other than us – it is our own feminine selves, our own spirit.

One of my paramedics took me serious when I told him that most people outside work call me Bob, but my girlfriend had to call me Lieutenant. Snicker. Anyway, the point is that people evoke a slightly different personality in me depending upon whether they call me Bob, Robert, Mr. Flanders, rookie, or Lieutenant (Guru and Tutu, too). The name they use reveals how they see me and our relationship, and I generally respond to that, though there times I choose to assert something different.

Within us (you, too – ‘us’ is not used here in the regal sense) are personalities with different world-views and different perspectives of ourselves. Pop psychology has it that in extreme cases some of these personalities are unaware of or in conflict with each other, but for the most part we sense the general unity. The psyche is fluid in this way. As above, so below. The cases of which I’ve heard (and one whom I knew personally) reveal that when the schism between these personalities becomes clinical, the individual personalities develop so slowly that they never mature (and are implicitly incomplete.) The masculine mind – the soul, the turtle – develops over time through experience in this world. When personalities within a mind are isolated and compete for dominance, no one of them has the time to develop.

But our dreams represent these personalities to us symbolically, as they do our beliefs and our emotions – for the healthy as well as the injured soul. Sometimes we identify with a particular character in a dream, seeing things from his perspective and feeling what he feels. And we sometimes shift that sense of identity from one to another character. Sometimes we don’t identify with any of the actors – we’re simply an audience – and sometimes our role as author comes to the fore as we rewrite and replay a dream sequence when something just didn’t seem right with the previous version.

As souls we are simply players in the divine dream. We need the feminine to connect us with the Author, else this life is but a tale told by a madman. I know my power – I’ve been a paid professional hero – but I hunger for beauty. Seeing her once has given me a glimpse of eternity, certain knowledge. And I have not only seen her – when I carried my ballerina overhead in promenade the audience saw the dove perched on my hand in as clear a light as she can express in this world, and I could feel when they recognized her. So be my little metaphor and I will be yours, and together we can enter the realm of suspended disbelief.

Robert C. Flanders

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Sultan’s Döner

Sultan’s Döner
Balabar put his finger to my forehead, thumb raised in likeness of a cocked gun, and demanded, “How would it be if I shot you right now.” I’ve never seen such deadly, focused fury in a man’s eyes. And I was in a foreign land, still learning the ways of the people around me.
Friday evening began as did many in a Turkish restaurant in Nuremberg. The staff and the regulars were friends, or so I’d felt. Guli reached to clear my coffee spoon from the counter, and looked startled when I snatched it away. She couldn’t ask why, nor I explain, because the lovely young woman didn’t speak a word of German and certainly not English, nor I a syllable of her native Kurdish. She gave me a quizzical look, then returned to the booty of dinnerware she’d successfully collected in the sink behind the counter.
Guli (pronounced ‘Goo-Lie) has an unfortunate sound to English ears, but I’m told it means ‘Rose Moon.’ Working in her uncle’s café while visiting from Turkey, she obviously delights in shopping in Western stores, as she is always dressed in a manner befitting her name and not the duties of a dish maid. Cautiously I pushed the spoon across the counter toward her till a reflected sparkle caught her eye. She didn’t raise her head, but her nose twitched. When her quarry was hopelessly within range the kitten pounced, and my silver mouse was doomed to the dishpan.
Casim came in to begin his shift – a man who loves the ladies. Eight to eighty, it was all the same to him – he would hold them in conversation till they finally saw how precious they were in his eyes, and only then release them to go on their way smiling. I couldn’t wait to tell him, in the hearing of as many who could understand my German, about the lady I’d met way across town. I had a table outside a coffee shop, and because it was so crowded a Turkish woman of about our age asked whether she could take the seat opposite. Conversation eventually drifted to telling her about my café, and I showed her pictures of my friends there. When she dealt through the deck to Casim’s photo her eyes lit up and she exclaimed, “I know him.” From this day forward I will never miss the chance to call to Casim, Ich kenne ihn!
In greater numbers than usual the evening crowd drifted in, filling the tables with Kurdish men anxious to discuss politics. There was plenty to talk about because in just the past few days my country had invaded Iraq on the claim that it gave safe haven to terrorists. This café was my own haven in Nuremberg. I was always subliminally aware of being a foreigner – an Ausländer – in Germany, as were the Kurds. And nobody understands what that means as do they, made foreigners even in their own homeland in regions of Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. Having exile in common with me, the Kurdish community had adopted me. But the café council was conducted in their own tongue, and my German was too slow and awkward to thrust into the day’s urgent matters.
I didn’t care. I was preoccupied with Guli, wondering whether she would toy with her mercilessly cleaned prey by returning the spoon to me for the chance to reenact her triumph. ‘Rose Moon’ – the guys probably told the truth on this one, since it fits her so well. Still, I remember their teaching me sounds to parrot to Akan before he came in one day. Not that I would ever indulge in such a prank myself, but I knew not to repeat their message until the counter was between me and Akan. Fortunately he turned on his laughing comrades rather than me.
The debate behind me sometimes swelled enough to intrude on my game with Guli. Who needs language when a man’s eyes can tell a lady how lovely she is, and hers how she enjoys discovering she’s an international delight? I was only dimly aware that Balabar had become very drunk. Were my attention not diverted, I would have realized how out of character that was for him. Though he was young – about thirty – he normally had such dignity that even the elderly men listened when he spoke.
But Balabar finally commanded my attention, coming to the counter and demanding whether I thought war was a good thing. Frankly, I was happier thinking of Guli than of the current events. Still, the Kurds were our allies in the conflict, fighting shoulder to shoulder with us against the regime which had committed atrocities in their villages. I answered, “Maybe not good, but I think this one is necessary.”
I would have returned to the more pleasant diversion, but Balabar shouted something to the council in Kurdish, and gestured as if he had identified the Devil himself. He placed his finger to my forehead and demanded, “Good! How would it be if I shot you dead right now – would that be good?”
His comrades circled us – there were so many that it made the café seem dark – but they gathered him back to their table and were able to quiet him. Guli looked indecisive whether to stay at her post for my comfort or retreat to the kitchen. Mixed German and Kurdish words from Balabar’s table – no chance that I could understand the charges leveled against me. Had I lost my name and become the unwilling representative of America in this alien court? But if I left now I could never return to this little café.
In time his comrades’ balms failed Balabar, and he returned to demand the same answer from me. Again the fleshly gun to my forehead, again the mortal question. But this time several of his sturdier comrades moved my trial to recess by escorting Balabar out the door and away into the darkened streets.
On Monday I returned to the café. Not eagerly, but I recalled that the week after the World Trade Center was destroyed my parents (in their seventies) ended their debate about whether to visit me in Germany, and grimly bought tickets for the overseas holiday. I could at least venture down the street.
Casim was the only one there in the late afternoon. I asked him whether Balabar was dangerous, and received a delayed shrug which said Casim only knew that he damn well could be. He left me alone to drink my coffee quietly.
And as if paged, Balabar came in. He took a seat at the far end of the counter and talked quietly with Casim for a long while. Just when it became obvious I was the subject of their conversation Casim returned to me. He said, “Balabar wants to admit treating you unfairly, and wants to know if he can buy you a raki.”
Raki is a Turkish liquor, much too strong for my taste, but this was not a drink to be turned down. Casim set the glass before me, and when I accepted it Balabar came to take the stool beside me. He said no more than to repeat that he had treated me unfairly the other night. When I offered my glass in solute he touched his to mine.
We each made a long, minute study of the counter before us. Finally I tested, “Have you lost someone to the war?”
“My sister. ” His answer did not come easily. “She was killed in a bombing on Friday.”
The knowledge and the raki burned in my throat. I let the minutes eliminate the question of which side had dropped the bomb. Instead I asked, “What is her name?”
“Nesrin.”
The liquor was going to my forehead. I returned to my examination of the counter, allowing the dignity of privacy for his wet eyes. Guli came out from the kitchen. Had she been carrying anything it would have been dropped when she saw the two of us drinking together.
Though neither Balabar nor I was fluent in our intermediate language of German, I managed, “What is she like?”
“She leaves children behind.” He seemed to be replaying a film in his mind, but finally told me what he saw, “She was always finding something to laugh about.”
How could I share his pain without the insult of stealing it? All I found to say was, “I will remember Nesrin.” I have no picture to offer in honoring this promise, but this is how I remember her cousin, Rose Moon:

The names in this history have been changed to honor my friends in their own language, remembering that only recently Turkey repealed the law that had made it illegal to give a child a Kurdish name. It is, however, impossible to substitute any other for Guli’s name.

Robert C. Flanders

The Sinkhole

The Sinkhole
When I walk from the locker room to the exercise floor in my gym, the whirlpool always catches my eye. After finishing the first half of my routine in the weight room I go to the cardio floor to use a couple of machines there, and for the motivation of seeing the ladies on the treadmills. Today my eyes brushed those of a woman I haven’t met before, the contact exchanging invitations for conversations of introduction.
But before we could blink, the radio station being aired broadcast an ad for a cream which ‘enhances the experience,’ and is available at a local adult store. The communication between our eyes was immediately rendered coarse, and vulgar.
Not for the first time, I go to the front desk to ask them to change the station. Well, you either understand the objection to public indecency, or you don’t. I think of the scene from ‘Apocolypse Now’, in which Chef expresses his horror at seeing hundreds of pounds of prime beef being dumped into a vat and boiled down till it turns grey. Georgia’s governor’s office confirms that broadcasts are beyond local control, and my congressmen have all written me that the standards are regulated by the FCC, implying that they have no say, either. Helpless anger in seeing the power of modern communications reducing women to a consumer product, the media teaching generations of girls that forming a family is incidental to their personal fulfillment. No doubt the civilization which replaces ours will deal with this in their turn – it’s happened before. But I’m angry for all, and angry for the damage being done to the woman I would love.

I carry the frustration to my bed. In a dream I see a man’s eyes close to this world, his light disappear into the darkness of an underground river. I have saved her, but not him. His life was in my hand, and I let him slip away.
My role in the dream is the same I played during my career – an EMS lieutenant. I was charged to coordinate the efforts of paramedic teams at several stations scattered around the county, and to that end spent most of my time in the cruiser assigned to me, listening to radio communications and responding to alarms where I deemed it appropriate for an officer to be present.
But in the dream no alarm had been given. I was simply driving newly opened streets to familiarize myself with its landmarks; a strip mall was being built atop the left bank of the road, and an exotic dance club had already opened. But just as I approached the shopping center, a geyser burst out of the pavement directly in front of me. I turned my car sideways and stopped, flipping on the strobes to warn anyone on the road behind.
With amazing speed the asphalt dropped away, seeming to feed an increasing roar. And even while I radioed the dispatcher about the sinkhole, I saw a car approaching from the other side. It’s brakes locked down, but not in time. The car teetered on the edge for a moment as if indecisive, then committed itself to the maelstrom.
Fire Rescue was given the alarm, but their station was several minutes away. What a luxury it is to have time between receiving a call and arriving on scene to get mind and body focused. What a joy it is to feel the power course through me during the emergency run. Assigned responsibility for my fellows, I have the authority, too – the scene and all the roadway to it are mine to command. I absorb the power and responsiveness of my cruiser during the run, and upon arrival the blood has filled my flesh and flushed my mind of all but the task before me. But not this night – I was thrown into the disaster cold. Trained, but not braced for an emergency.
Thankfully it was late night – no other headlights in sight, less chance that others would follow the car into the vortex. Soon enough the police would have the roadway blocked, and be dealing with drivers irritated to have their routines interrupted. Street lamps from the parking lot on the hill gave some illumination, but the bursts from my strobes rendered the scene surreal.
The pavement continued to crumble, the hole broaden. It would be derelict to run onto unstable ground recklessly, so I took the time to fetch the rope from my trunk and tie one end around my waist. Making a loop around a fire hydrant which appeared far enough away from the sinkhole to be secure, I fed myself line, and approached the precipice.
A huge water main had burst, and was spraying toward the opposite bank. The car had sunk to its windows, but I could see a woman being pushed out, helped onto its roof by a man inside. She crawled face down and grasped at the opposite side, struggling to stay atop the slippery roof. The man quickly climbed up beside her.
The torrent had apparently washed itself an outlet under the mall – a whirlpool was becoming defined. A mixed blessing – the water was leveling out in the hole, but the vortex was tugging at the car.
The couple could not hear my shouts over the roar, but as the man scoured frantically around the pit he spotted me descending its side, and tapped the woman’s back to show her that help was at hand. I was near the end of my rope – enough to play out and get me to the car, but no extra.
Looking about for options, I could see several security guards standing on the hill above. They should at least be preventing people in the parking lot from getting too close to the danger, but their backs were to the crowd – they were more an audience to the scene than participants. A cat sat on the curb in front of them, and my glance took in a dog, too, who paced anxiously, as if he already felt the pain from sirens too distant for me to hear. I had no means to gesture for help, as both hands were needed on the rope, but it didn’t matter anyway – the guards couldn’t get from their balcony box to a position to aid any sooner than the firefighters who were on the way. The car was clearly moving toward the whirlpool – all was up to me.
I rappelled away from the wall and thankfully landed hard across the two victims. They grasped my arm just as the car slid away from underneath us. I watched it circle deliberately in the whirlpool and vanish. There was nothing left on the surface but the two people facing me, clutching my right arm. I felt the water pulling their feet toward the whirlpool, turning us all. The free end of the rope was still in my left hand, at the rapelling position behind my back. With just that arm to work with, I struggled to make several turns of the rope around the loop at my waist, all the while trying not to move jerkily, lest I shake the victims loose from the other arm.
I couldn’t hear, and could not turn to see, but I felt the rope being pulled from behind, away from the whirlpool – I knew and trusted that Fire Rescue had arrived. Now I could do no more than serve as the final length, the hook at the end of the rope. Surely a firefighter was securing himself to another line, ladders were being dropped, and we would soon be joined.
I had locked onto the woman hand to wrist, with the man clinging on, but his hands were slipping down my wet arm – he was obviously exhausted. If another rescuer didn’t arrive soon.. I ached to let go my left hand’s grasp on the rope at my back and reach for him, but my body refused, seeming to know that the knot would slip if I did, and I would lose them both.
A bump to my leg told me that a firefighter was behind me, so I finally flung the left arm around to the man. He saw, and plunged for it, but so lethargically that he reached my hand with only one of his own. My fingers were hooked, cramped in their curled position from the rope, but he didn’t have the strength to lock his to mine against the pull of the water. Before the firefighter could lunge for him he slipped away. All that tied me to him were his eyes, and when his feet reached the whirlpool the lids closed in surrender, and he was gone.
Another firefighter reached us, and the two quickly got a line around the woman and worked her up a ladder, getting me out soon after. The woman was walked to my EMS crew at their ambulance. Her hair and clothing were tangled and soiled from the filthy water, but she has survived. Her partner did not.

Robert C. Flanders
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