How much about King Arthur do we actually know? Some authorities have treated him as a basically mythological figure, while, at the opposite extreme, others accept chivalric details found in Medieval and early modern sources at face value. The truth must lie somewhere in between, but at which end of the spectrum? This question, it seems to me, is germane to the claims of the authenticity of other books that purport to be based on ancient documents that are no longer extant.

Recently, in connection with a study group looking at Medieval Latin texts, I had occasion to consult an old edition of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s De gestis Britonum or Historia regum Britanniae which was compiled in the 1920’s to address controversies about Geoffrey’s sources and included parallel texts from Medieval Welsh chronicles covering the same historical episodes he covered. Historia Regum Britanniae, or history of the British monarchy, traces the Kings of Celtic Britain from Brutus, a refugee (like Aeneas) from Troy, to Cadwallader, a seventh century figure and the last non-Saxon to have any claim to be king of Britain. Historia regum Britanniae contains a long section on King Arthur; it is the principal source for what became Arthurian legend. There are earlier references to Arthur, a historic sixth century British military leader, but most of what later writers used concerning the details of his life and that of members of his court traces back to Geoffrey of Monmouth.

Geoffrey, writing in the 12th century, claimed that his history was based on a translation of a very ancient book. No such book is known, and the general consensus among scholars is that he relied on a number of sources, including oral tradition, and embroidered on them considerably. At the time he was writing, English forces of Saxon and Norman origin pressed hard against the Welsh kingdom of Gwynedd, whose rulers had some claim to be the heirs of the ancient kings of Britain. Geoffrey, who was Welsh, had a certain incentive to showcase Arthur and to ascribe to him chivalric deeds and attitudes considered admirable in Europe in general in the twelfth century. He ended up writing a best seller that has inspired countless subsequent writers.

Works of fiction set in the semi-legendary court of King Arthur were immensely popular in Medieval and early modern Europe, as they are even today. Besides being simply entertaining, this structure served to frame an author’s ideas in a way that was likely to be read, but not to be taken seriously by people – for example officials of the Catholic Church – who were on the lookout for heresy. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale, for example, is one of these pseudo-Arthurian romances which can be read as a plea to allow women more agency and also, when coupled with the prologue, an endorsement of the contemporary (and marginally heretical!) Lollard philosophy of respecting the practical theology and moral philosophy of ordinary people leading decent secular lives.

Turning to Miguel de Cervantes and Don Quixote, the structure linking the narrative to two texts, one extant and one hypothetical, is quite deliberate and could potentially mask a political or philosophical purpose in addition to being a literary device. Don Quixote the character derives his inspiration from a popular early sixteenth century “Arthurian” romance, Amadis de Gaula, by Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo. A few of his more outrageous actions are direct attempts to reproduce the exploits of the fictitious Amadis.

In chapter nine (immediately after the famous windmill episode) Cervantes makes the surprising and apparently absurd claim that the remainder of the novel is a translation from the Arabic of historian Cide Hamete Benengeli – that Cervantes acquired the manuscript from a scrap paper dealer in Toledo and had it translated by an Arab-speaking Spanish Morisco. The manuscript, whether it existed or was merely conceptualized as a literary device, could not have been “ancient,” because the narrative elsewhere refers to books published between 1570 and 1586.

Another very famous example of a putative translation from an ancient document is Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon, said to be a translation from Egyptian of a text engraved on golden plates unearthed in upstate New York in the early nineteenth century. Mormons, as an article of faith, accept this story at face value, while most non-Mormons consider it to be a complete hoax.

Geoffrey and Smith were clearly trying to lend credence to their messages by establishing a chain of descent from established authorities. Cervantes is more complicated, because his Cide Hamete, had he existed, would have been dismissed as unreliable or worse by authorities in charge of censoring printed material in 17th century Spain. Thus, the narrative structure looks more like another way of saying “not only is this fiction, but it is nonsense unworthy of the attention of the Inquisition”, in other words, disguising something by making it appear worthless.

Is there a common theme? The claim that any of the three influential works mentioned is in its entirety an accurate representation of a now-lost older work is extremely dubious, but that alone does not disprove the existence of the predecessors, or their incorporation into the final product. This has been most thoroughly investigated in the case of De gestis Britonum, but it may be worth asking whether Don Quixote, with its numerous subplots and digressions, contains material produced in Moorish Spain, or whether actual texts originating in Egypt in the early Christian era form the core of the Book of Mormon.

Photo Credit

Photo is from The British Library Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts

Oldest-known picture of the Pied Piper

On the 26^th of July, 1284, a mysterious piper, clothed in gaudy apparel, led 130 children out of the town of Hamelin, in northern Germany, whence they disappeared into a cave and were never seen or heard from again. A stained glass window memorializing the event was placed in the cathedral around 1300 and remained there until 1660; several transcriptions and a depiction of this window survive.  The inclusion of the plague of rats and the “pay the piper” moral of the story seem to be later additions.

There is little doubt that this was an actual historical episode, and a number of theories have been proposed to explain it. One much favored has it as a parable of the Black Death, which, however, only reached Germany in 1347. Thus, although the story of the 1286 disappearance and the massive mortality seventy years later may have been associated in people’s minds, the earlier story is not about the plague. Others try to link it to the Children’s Crusade (1212), too early and affecting mainly France. It has been suggested that parents sent the children away because of poverty, and then concocted the piper story to cover up.  More fringe theories suggest magic or alien abductions.

Could the Pied Piper of Hamelin have been a slave raider from North Africa?  Blond slaves, particularly girls, were considered highly desirable there in Medieval and Early Modern times. A hint at why this was the case is found in the “History of the Captive” episode in Don Quixote (1608). This subplot recounts the story of a Spanish prisoner of war in Algiers who escapes with the aid of a young woman, the daughter of a Slavic official in the service of the king. Cervantes, who as a prisoner of war had the opportunity to observe life first hand in Algiers, writes: “The whiteness of the hand and the bracelets we saw on it disabused us of the thought that she was a slave; then we imagined that she was a renegade [convert to Islam] Christian, for they are often taken as legitimate wives by their masters, who consider this good fortune, since the men esteem them more than women of their own nation.” (Don Quixote 1:XL. Translation by Edith Grossman, 2003). A similar thread is found in Othello, the story of a rich Moorish merchant in Italy married to a blond woman. The theme of European women held in Ottoman seraglios is a common one in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century fiction, for example Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio, Pushkin’s The Fountain of Bakhchisarai, and Shelley’s Frankenstein.

The reasons for the preference may be historical. North Africa, as well as Spain and Italy, was ruled by the Visigoths, a Germanic people, from the fifth through eighth centuries. Like many conquerors before them, the Visigoths supplanted the local aristocracy and major landowners but left the indigenous peasants relatively unmolested. During the spread of Islam, members of the upper classes who converted generally retained their positions. This left a legacy of association between a lighter skin color and high social status. A way for a man of humbler birth, who had achieved prominence through trade or military prowess, to ensure that his offspring looked aristocratic was to marry a European woman, the fairer the better. A boatload of German children, half of them virgin girls, would have been an exceedingly valuable cargo.

Poverty and hunger were very real in Hamelin in 1286. Northern Europe never really recovered from the abrupt temperature drop and subsequent famine of 1257-58. The promise of food, especially delicacies like dried fruit, would have been a powerful draw.

Here, then, is a possible alternate scenario: An apparent merchant vessel anchored outside of town, at a point where a passage connected a cave to the riverbank. The kidnapper, dressed in Moorish finery, appeared similar to merchants who put on a show to advertise their wares. He led the children out of town with the promise of food and entertainment, and they were promptly whisked aboard the boat by confederates who immediately weighed anchor. Ship and cargo were long gone before the townspeople knew what had happened.

According to the story, three children, one lame, one blind, and one deaf, were left behind, which also accords with the slaver hypothesis. 

Who knows. Perhaps there are people walking the streets of Algiers and Tunis today who are descendent of the lost children of Hamelin.

Image Credit

The oldest known picture of the Pied Piper copied from the glass window of the Market Church in Hameln/Hamelin Germany (c.1300-1633). Image source: Wikimedia. Public Domain.

Cervantes

I don’t tend to read a lot of fiction, but when I do, I try to engage in it. I find it helpful and illuminating, when approaching a literary work created in a culture and time frame quite different than mine, to try to suspend my own cultural assumptions in favor of something closer to the context of the author. For example, when I read Dante’s Divine Comedy in translation two years ago, I did so, as best I could, from the perspective of my persona in the Society for Creative Anachronism. That persona is an early fifteenth-century Italian artist. Assuming as a basis a belief in a rather mechanistic and rule-bound concept of Purgatory enabled me to see how Dante was challenging that concept in a way that was completely opaque to a classroom full of 20th-century American agnostics.

This fall I enrolled in a course in Don Quixote, taught in Spanish, at the University of Oregon. I enrolled because I had recently taken a volunteer position that required the person to be bilingual in English and Spanish, and had done so with reluctance, because I have not used Spanish in almost forty years. No one better qualified was willing to take the job. This specialized upper division course was the only one still open to a senior auditor, and the professor was willing to have me. Thus I found myself reading one of the great classics of world literature, in the original language, and trying to discuss it and write essays on it with marginal language skills and no background in Spanish literature. It was not too difficult to shed my cultural assumptions because none of them were of much use in approaching the task at hand.

Don Quixote is not easy to read if one takes it at face value, as primarily a satire on novels of chivalry, with a certain amount of social commentary thrown in. I had tried to read it in translation on several occasions, but had gotten bogged down in a series of improbable romances and the relentless ugly violence. Friends who are mindful readers have had the same experience. The basic plot line – a decaying, impoverished, deranged nobleman who imagines himself a knight errant getting into trouble and making a fool of himself, and incidentally connecting with star-crossed lovers whose troubles are typically resolved – does not require eight hundred pages to develop fully. One gets the feeling that Cervantes, like Dickens, was writing a serial and was paid by the word.

For the most part people today read Don Quixote because they are told that it is a classic, the first modern novel in any European language. Reading it becomes an obligation of being a well-rounded student of the humanities, and this cultural assumption stands in the way of engaging with the text. In contrast, people not only in Spain but in Europe in general in the seventeenth century found this text gripping. It was immensely popular and immediate. Could I access something of that immediacy?

Something about the text reminded me of the absurdist science fiction novels of the Russian dissident writer Andrei Siniavsky, who wrote under the pen name Abram Tertz. I had the good fortune both to read these in Russian and to meet the author himself, and to compare the complex multifaceted originals with bad translations packaged for American consumption, with a propagandist agenda. Siniavsky, who was a respected literary scholar, smuggled the originals out of Russia and had them published, in Russian, using the name of a historical Jewish gangster as an alias.

Cervantes, like Siniavsky, lived in a society where publications were rigorously censored, and where direct criticism of church or state invited the wrath of the Spanish Inquisition. He did not use a pen name, but, part way into the book, he claims that it is a translation from Cide Hamete, an Arab historian, an assertion as absurdist as Siniavsky’s ascribing his science fiction to a gangster who died in 1926. One recurring trope is an insistence that Cide Hamete is an extremely accurate historian, followed by a wealth of seemingly irrelevant detail about something which does not in itself seem essential to the plot.

Once I started reading these details as a subtext conveying dissident views and criticism of the status quo, the novel became much more compelling and immediate. I have probably overcompensated, but I am confident that Cervantes deliberately inserted much of the pattern I am seeing into the text, and that some of his readers recognized this.

I live in the United States, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, surrounded by a print and electronic culture that is ostensibly free of censorship. The censorship is, to be sure, far more subtle than that in either the Soviet Union or sixteenth-century Spain, but it is quite real, and the consequences of stepping over the bounds include job loss, loss of credibility in academic circles, and sometimes the threat of lawsuits. For example, if I, as an academically trained biologist, wished to publish research supporting a model of biological change that included intelligent design, I would do well to distance the statement from my academic persona, using a pseudonym and locating the research lab in a distant galaxy.

Judging from some of the very thoughtful and thought-provoking genre fiction that is appearing in the United States today, this is already occurring.

Image Credit

Cervantes (19th-century engraving). Public domain.

The Good Shepherd

I don’t often write poetry these days. I did as an adolescent, and during two periods in my adult life when I was prey to overwhelming and conflicting emotions. At times like that, the emotional dimension changes the whole structure of my experience, and linear prose seems woefully inadequate to describe what I want to express.

I am also  painter, and there is a similar phenomenon in the visual arts I produce. During periods of emotional stability, I paint what someone categorized as “creative non-fiction” —  landscapes that highlight what I choose as the object of focus, but without extensive manipulation. During periods of emotional upheaval, I paint elaborate, seemingly chaotic, surrealistic pieces, full of metaphor and unexpected connections. This takes the two-dimensional space, upon which I am skilled at creating the illusion of a third dimension, and adds a time element by linking it metaphorically with other works of art.

Painting in the Celtic Style, 1982

For the past seven months I have been studying Old English, the language spoken in Britain between 500 and 1066 AD, the language of Beowulf. This involves, among other things, trying to decipher and understand poetry in a language structurally very different from modern English, from a very different culture, intended to be delivered orally and for the most part transmitted orally. In other words, pretty much all of the assumptions are different.

I had as my stated goal becoming proficient enough in Old English that I could write passable texts in the language for the Society for Creative Anachronism. I’m not there yet. Yesterday I found myself wanting to write a piece synthesizing a cluster of observations that are related in my mind, and which are a source of personal inspiration. I have tried, and failed, to digest them into a piece of linear English prose that convinces anyone. I imagined myself expressing them in Old English poetry, to a person living in 1000 AD, and fancied (although this is probably wishful thinking) that he would have a better grasp of my message than a modern academic audience. 

My central idea involves a resonance between the years 535, 1315 and 1815 created by stupendous volcanic eruptions that cause abrupt global cooling, massive mortality and disruption of human activity, followed, after a significant time lag, by reorganization according to new principles. I wanted to look at the pattern, and its ramifications, from the perspectives of 535, 1315, 1815 and 2015.

The complexity of this framework defies linear organization. Trying to fit an exposition into an academic mold would result in a tome of unwieldy proportions, unlikely to be consulted, whose interrelated pieces were too far removed from each other to interact in the mind of the reader. To some extent that difficulty can be overcome by having the piece in electronic format and using a search engine, but search engines are extremely literal and fail to uncover metaphors. When I use a search engine, I only find what I am looking for. When I allow my human brain to range over the same texts, I see things I wasn’t looking for, some potentially of great significance.  

I resorted to poetry. I took as my point of entry the Old English poem Deor in which a bard who has lost his place relates a series of historical and mythical reversals of fortune, with the refrain Þæs ofereode,þisses swa mæg (That passed, this may well also). Using this refrain for each of the stanzas of my poem established a connection to the sentiment, not only as it might be construed in 2015, but also as it might have been construed circa 1000 AD. Repetition of words, imagery, meter, rhyme and alliteration creates resonance between the stanzas, integrating the hole, and also resonance with other pieces of poetry known to the listener or reader.

The other two literary/artistic pieces I specifically incorporated were the mosaics in San Vitale in Ravenna, in process in 535 AD , and Dante’s Paradiso, written around 1315 in Ravenna. I interpret Canto XXVII to contain a description of the atmospheric effects accompanying the 1315 eruption. 

The final stanza of my poem came as a complete surprise to me — I had planned to end the poem with

What poet now
In some virtual Ravenna
Or Florence by the Western sea
Gazing skyward, prophesies
Famine, war, pestilence
Another cycle grinding painfully
To new beginnings?         2015
Þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg!

But that became the penultimate verse, and rather than leaving the image of impeding doom as the capstone, I added an image from near-death experiences and made the poem more hopeful, if not for this world, for the next.

There is no man, who having tasted death
However briefly
Does not know Heaven.
Why then do we cower under darkened skies?
Þæs ofereode,þisses swa mæg!

Did the unconventional creative process generate this result, or did it somehow come from outside? Ultimately, does it matter?

Image Credits

Image #1: The Good Shepherd, mosaic in Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna. Wikipedia. Public domain.

Image #2: Original Celtic-style painting, by Martha Sherwood, 1982. All rights reserved.

Charlie Parker

When Charlie Parker died in New York in 1955, the doctor who examined the body estimated Parker’s age at between 55 and 60; the great jazz musician was 35.

Charles Parker Jr. was one of the most innovative and influential figures in the history of jazz music. He discovered the genre in high school in Kansas City, Missouri, dropping out of school in 1935 and spending the next few years practising the horn fifteen hours a day. A brilliant player, Parker, along with trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, is credited with creating the jazz subgenre “bebop” in the early 1940’s; bepop vastly expanded the melodic and harmonic possibilities for instrumental soloists and is a large part of the repertoire of many jazz musicians today. Parker composed such classics as “Billie’s Bounce,” “Confirmation,” and “Au Privave.”

Addicted to morphine as a teenager after suffering an injury in a traffic accident, Parker moved on to heroin as an adult. The addiction resulted in erratic and self-destructive behaviour, affecting his career, his health, and his relationships, and ultimately taking his life.

Was Charlie Parker following his bliss? Anyone who locks himself up for several years to perfect his art, who discovers and develops a whole new groove in jazz, and who composes tunes that are being played regularly in clubs and concert halls all over the world fifty or sixty years after his death must have been following his bliss. The pathway of bliss is a yellow brick road both filled with beauty and fraught with danger; Parker’s path was singularly fraught.

Consider the writer David Foster Wallace, “whose prodigiously observant, exuberantly plotted, grammatically and etymologically challenging, philosophically probing and culturally hyper-contemporary novels, stories and essays made him an heir to modern virtuosos like Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo” (New York Times). Wallace, best known for his massive 1996 novel Infinite Jest and recipient of a MacArthur Foundation grant, often referred to as the genius award, committed suicide in 2008, following unsuccessful treatment for severe depression.

The Times also called Wallace “a versatile writer of seemingly bottomless energy” and that paper’s book critic, Michiko Kakutani, said of him, “He can do sad, funny, silly, heartbreaking and absurd with equal ease; he can even do them all at once.” It seems, then, that Mr. Wallace too, despite his “troubled soul,” was following his bliss.

In a previous article I have cited others both gifted with great talent and afflicted with intense pain and wondered why “artistic brilliance is so often accompanied by such unfathomable emotional and psychological dysfunction and suffering that the star implodes and we are left with darkness long before we have been touched by all its facets.”

It seems there is an answer.

Scientist and literary scholar Nancy Andreasen recently published an article entitled “Secrets of the Creative Brain” in The Atlantic, in which she poses one of the questions that has guided her most recent research on “the science of genius”: Why are so many of the world’s most creative minds among the most afflicted?

Working from the so-called “big C” approach to defining creativity, which “usually involves selecting a group of people – writers, visual artists, musicians, inventors, business innovators, scientists – who have been recognized for some kind of creative achievement, usually through the awarding of major prizes (the Nobel, the Pulitzer, and so forth),” Andreasen called on the contacts she had gained teaching in the English department at the University of Iowa to recruit several well-known writers for her study, including Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and John Cheever.

Basing her hypothesis on what she knew of some highly creative persons (Joyce, Bertrand Russell, Einstein, for example), i.e. that “they had personal or family histories of mental illness,” Andreasen expected her subjects to belong to families in which some members suffered from schizophrenia. What she discovered when she began interviewing her subjects, rather, was that “80 percent of them had had some kind of mood disturbance at some time in their lives, compared with just 30 percent of the control group….” She also learned that “both mood disorder and creativity were overrepresented” in the subjects’ families. Further tests, using brain scans as well as an in-depth interview, revealed the most common diagnoses among her highly creative subjects to be bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety or panic disorder, and alcoholism.

It seems, then, that for highly creative people, following their bliss involves a constant uphill struggle against forces that are determined to permanently shut the creativity down; clearly, many, like David Foster Wallace (and Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Wolff and Sylvia Plath and Vincent van Gogh and others), lose the struggle. Yet, as Andreasen notes: “One interesting paradox that has emerged during conversations with subjects about their creative processes is that, though many of them suffer from mood and anxiety disorders, they associate their gifts with strong feelings of joy and excitement. ‘Doing good science is simply the most pleasurable thing anyone can do’, one scientist told me. ‘It’s like having good sex. It excites you all over and makes you feel as if you are all-powerful and complete.’”

We of the masses who consume or benefit from the products of highly creative minds and souls often have a romantic notion of the “tortured genius.” But we do not live in their world; one suspects that the subjects of Andreasen’s study do not see their lives as romantic but rather as a struggle to balance the extremes of mood disorder and creative bliss. Andreasen, a psychiatrist, does not offer any prescriptions for managing the darker side of genius, so it is likely that more Charlie Parkers and David Foster Wallaces will appear in the world, shine brilliantly for a time, and all too soon darken forever. We can only empathize with their struggle, appreciate the gift of their creative genius, and be grateful that, for most of us, following the path of our own bliss is less fraught with suffering and chaos.

Image Credit

“Charlie Parker, Tommy Potter, Miles Davis, Max Roach,” by William P. Gottlieb. Retrieved from Wikipedia. Photo in the public domain.

I

“You know how you’re always chasing the first one?“

“Yeah.“

“Well, I found it,” he said.

I chased it for forty years, I told him, and then like the old cowboys say, the horse died and it was time to get off.

“I found it,” he said again, a small lost smile on his lips, “and then the next thing I knew some paramedic was slapping the shit outta me.“

“Yeah, well, I guess paradise ain’t what it used to be.“

He didn’t look so good. Across the road the big trucks kept rolling in the winter rain, the running lights like neon dreams disappearing in the spray and blackness, like the nightmares that keep calling your name; all noise and spray and gone, as real as yesterday’s box score. But each one of them takes a little piece of you, doesn’t it? He keeps staring out at them like they could carry him to some better place, like deep down he truly believed there was a better place and my guess is he does.

I know I once did. And maybe there was; maybe any place was better than here, in Nowhere, Texas with the ravenous guilt, and the wife and friends who were clean and the end of meeting chatter and the “I can’t do this again” and all that useless remorse.

I almost died is what he was saying. But I didn’t. He wasn’t saying that. He didn’t have to.

I know something about where he’s been, about waking up under the glaring lights and figuring out that it ain’t heaven and that something went wrong. But really all that I could remember was that it felt good; no, it didn’t feel good – it felt like it feels when you come around the last turn and the hill drops away and there’s nothing left but down and air and everything speeds up and the wind picks up and then the air goes away and the silence comes in and wraps you up, the peace of it grabs you and maybe you’re alone or maybe not and maybe the feeling gets you in your nipples or your dick; suddenly you know that you have been coming here all your life, that all the nowhere games are gone and all the called third strikes and nowhere Saturday nights are over; they never happened. It feels like it’s all yesterday’s news; it’s quiet and getting a little cold because that air and that rush is starting to slow: you feel it a little and finally you realize that it was this moment you were looking for on the other side of the rainbow after the bluebirds sang and all the lemon drops were gone; just you and the endless cold beyond cold , death beyond death called life looking for more junk.

You ain’t done yet; it still looks like freedom and no junkie ever dies, not really, not in their deepest hearts and like the big rigs running in the rain it doesn’t matter where you go or how long it takes, you will still keep going because it’s still raining and there is plenty of road in front of you and there is still one more first time out there.

“Call me if it gets too bad.”

“Yeah, I will. See ya around.”

Jed wasn’t likely to call. At least I didn’t figure he would. He was too scared to ask for any real help. I didn’t know him but I knew a lot of guys just like him. I got high with a lot of guys just like him. Hell, I was just like him. Scared to ask for help, scared not to, paralyzed like always except when it came to getting high. That we could do.

“Yeah,see ya, Jed.”

Hope ya don’t die, this to my self.

I left the meeting and headed down the road, heading east back to the house. I live in a little place over by the river. If you look out the back door you can see the north fork of the Trinity, just a creek really, no fish or anything but nice enough to look at. The post oaks nearby give some shade in the summer and look austere in the winter gloom. Tonight it’s pewter gray and the rain keeps coming in from the southeast, up from the Gulf, maybe a hint of a winter storm in the air. The cabin is a renovated garage built of brick with red tile on the roof and windows all around. With a light on it looks inviting in the rainy night and it is, quiet and clean inside and big enough for one.

Inside, the place is wood-paneled with stained pine on all the walls, floor and ceiling. It has an overhead fan and is heated by a gas heater, so it has the aspect of an old-timey cabin with a fireplace in winter and a shack in the summer. It is easy to live in the one big room which has a bed and an armchair, several bookshelves and the big desk that I write at and use for a dining room table. There is a kitchen and a bathroom with a claw foot tub and a toilet with a wooden seat and sunset in the window. An easy place to live in and a refuge for a tired old hustler like me.

2

Folks here call me Charlie. It wasn’t always my name but it will do for now. I showed up here a couple of years ago with bicycle helmet and gloves, a blue backpack filled some lightweight clothes, a baseball glove and some poetry by a Vietnamese monk. I had meant to go to the coast of Oregon down near the California border, maybe Gold Beach, but it didn’t work out.

It seemed that a lot of things didn’t work out at the end and finally I just had to pack up and go. After twenty years in the same town there was a lot of packing up to do but when there is money owed to the kind of guys I owed money to and the deal is dead and there is no story left to tell, the last flight going east is a guy’s best friend. It felt like a forties movie but there is no romantic hero in this one, just a guy riding a mountain bike in the rain, with a head full of dope and a mouthful of lies.

It was time to get gone, get out of Dodge. No west coast sunsets, no rain forest, no swelling music, just the big sky and brown grass alongside the north fork of the Trinity on a rainy night in Texas.

Before it went bad for the last time I was running a stock deal, an Internet tech company with a couple of local techno wizards. Stan Forge and Jack Diller were a strange pair. Stan was poet turned businessman, a stocky brute of a guy who looked like your worst memory of the guy who terrorized you on the way home from school. Make that who terrorized me on the way home from school. He knew every book ever written or so it seemed and he made it clear that you were a couple behind no matter what the subject. He was physically threatening but inept and intellectually a bully of the worst kind. In other words, a perfect guy for the technology age.

His partner Jack was a professor at the local University who had created a program that mapped web navigation. Gentle in demeanor, he was the more difficult of the two since he was stubborn, fiercely protective of his design and a tenured professor, an impregnable combination.

Stan brought me in to get the money together to launch the company. I was good at that kind of thing. And it looked like it could be done pretty easily since tech companies were flying out the door every day it seemed. The stock markets were skyrocketing on the backs of technology stocks and tech startups were doubling, tripling their debut prices on a regular basis. It was the new national pastime to get rich on internet dot.com stocks and Stan and Jack were like every other dreamer out there. They knew they were smarter than everyone except maybe Bill Gates and he had been lucky; anybody was getting rich and since their stuff was really good they were a lead pipe cinch. All they needed was a lousy little million or two to get started, along with a little viral marketing, and the cover of Time was the next step.

I had met Stan years before when I was running a movie deal and in love with a poet. The movie got made although it turned out badly and the poet went home to San Francisco. I hadn’t seen Stan since. I ran into him again at a book store opening on a rainy Tuesday night when I was accompanying Peggy Macleod, an editor of a local magazine, known to one and all as the writer’s best friend. Since I was trying to get her to send my writing off to her publisher boyfriend the least I could do was take her to the opening when she asked. Her guy was out of town. He was out of town often so that Peggy and I slept together several times a week but so far no book deal.

The party was dull although the store was large and well lit and the liquor was plentiful and free. It had been a bad day at the writing desk as had so many in a row and the thing with Peggy was not showing my best side even to me. Tuesday meant that I was just about recovered from the weekend and ready to start the excesses for the upcoming weekend. Slick had called with good news about a new shipment and I was going to get together with him as soon as I could get free of my obligation to Peggy and the party.

I was looking at a Fitzgerald translation of the Odyssey when I heard someone suggest the Lattimore translation.

“It’s much more precise and in general, the one Blaser prefers. You know Robin don’t you?” I turned and there was Stan.

“Stan. How are you? I haven’t read the Lattimore. And yeah, I know Robin. I met him with Laura, back in the day. Same time I met you. How is …? Mitsuko?.”

“Fine. And Laura? Do you hear from her?”

“No, can’t say that I do.”

“Too bad.”

“Yeah. Well… Yeah.”

“What are you doing, you know, here, Charlie?”

And that was Stan, lord of all he surveys. Maybe it was just me, out of place everywhere I went.

“I came with Peggy Macleod.”

“Oh, Peggy. She’s an interesting girl. We do some work with her.“

“You do?“

“Yes, we’re on the Arts committee together.”

And so it went for a few minutes in which I found out that Stan knew everybody in town, worked with everybody, thought ill of nearly everybody, ran his own media empire and was in the process of taking over several well known technology companies. The thing about the Laura stuff was that she and I hadn’t spoken in ten years. I knew that they must have so I wondered what the game was. Stan did not to appear to have changed much from the arrogant guy he was years ago, so I was surprised when I heard him ask me what I was doing these days.

I heard myself tell him that I was doing some writing.

“Are you still making movies?”

“No, I gave that up a few years ago and went into telecommunications companies for a while.”

“And what happened?”

“I got married and moved to an island thinking I would live there forever and write the Great American Novel. After a while I remembered that the only island I really liked was Manhattan. It didn’t work out so here I am, no island, no marriage and no novel – you might say I’m traveling light, but hell, the liquor is free.”

I’m wondering what the hell am I saying since telling Stan anything is a mistake. Given what he’s been saying about everyone else it is a good bet that everything I have just said will be around sometime soon. I must be tired. He’s saying something about am I interested in talking with him about an idea he has for a company and he has a knowing smile on his face. “What is that, Stan?”

“I have an idea that might interest you. Here’s my card. Call me and we can talk about it.“

“What kind of idea, Stan?”

“An Internet idea that I have the rights to and I think you might be the right guy to help me put together. Look, I have to go. Call me and we’ll talk. You’re free, right? Yeah, it’s good that I ran into you.”

And off he went, nodding as if in conversation with a higher power, striding down the Classics aisle like Ulysses coming home to Ithaca, ready to take all that is rightfully his, everything that the gods have promised him.

Image Credit

Photo by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.

~

He understood why death and stillness were bound together. In stillness the inside was silent. The living conversation was at an end. Fingers did not move, the world was not painted into life, and the eyes, staring unseen, had lost sight of the gods of colour. When looking upon the face of a dead person, when looking into those flat eyes, he could see the truth of his convictions.

Now, this a curious little paragraph, since it seems on the surface only to reiterate K’s secondary thesis, the one about “nothing inside, nothing outside.” Why repeat it? But of course it’s not repeated; it’s actually slightly tweaked, as we move from “death” in the abstract to “death” in the face of a dead person. Hmm, why would I do that? Also, we now have another curious detail: the binding of “faith” to life, and its opposite to be found in the eyes of a dead man. Ever seen the eyes of a dead person? Take it from me: it can be hard on any kind of faith.

It was midday. The sun fought its way down and the gods fluttered, dipped and filled patches of brilliance amidst gloom and shadow, and Kadaspala sat on his mule, noting in a distracted fashion the thin wisps of smoke curling round his mount’s knobby ankles, but most of his attention was upon the face, and the eyes, of the corpse laid out on the ground before him.

So, back to setting, going so far as to actually repeat that opening line from paragraph nine. But now he’s not riding. He’s stationary. The sun’s still doing its thing (also in the second sentence, same as in paragraph nine). Revisiting the transition to setting in this way (in this first sentence and first clauses of the second sentence) reinforces that looping return I habitually use when constructing a narrative. But in that revisiting a few minor changes have been made. Where before, the sun’s light was passive in its “gifts,” now it’s fighting its way down. Also, having set up colours as gods, I feel it’s safe to transpose the two words, so that where “colours” should be in sentence 2, I use “gods” instead. This reminds us of our POV, among other things. The “fluttered, dipped and filled…” clause retains something of that melodic play, though less of the careful brush-strokes and more of a wilder “splashing” of brilliance. The painting hand has become oddly loose, careless. This is reinforced by the “distraction” described in the rest of the sentence. It might also suggest birds, as in carrion birds. Also, we now find out that he’s on a mule (recall that “plodding, stutter-stepping pace” earlier? Here’s why. It’s the pace of a man riding a mule down a narrow forest trail). And at the end of that long, disjointed, distracted, sloppy sentence, we see the reason for all that looseness. We also link straight back to the paragraph preceding this one. Death in the abstract to the body lying before K. and his mule. Another hint of discord is given in the mention of “smoke,” and that detail and mention of the mule’s ankles directs us to the notion that K. is looking down.

You can do a lot in one sentence.

There had been three huts on this narrow trail. Now they were heaps of ash, muddy grey and dull white and smeared black. One of the huts had belonged to a daughter, old enough to fashion a home of her own, but if she had shared it with a husband his body was nowhere to be seen, while she was lying half out of what had probably been the doorway. The fire had eaten her lower body and swollen the rest, cooking it until the skin split and here the gods sat still, as if in shock, in slivers of lurid red and patches of peeled black. Her long hair had been thrown forward, over the top of her head. Parts of it had burned, curling into fragile white nests. Recall the bird imagery. The rest was motionless midnight, with hints of reflected blue, like rainbows on oil. She was, mercifully, laying face-down. One rupture upon her back was different, larger, and where the others had burst outward this one pushed inward. A sword had done that.

POV: eyes register, mind interprets. There is fragile objectivity in the tone, but the gods of colour are present (even if in shock – but of course they’re not the ones in shock. Kadaspala is the one in shock, and part of his shock is to externalize his shock, setting it instead upon his imagined gods: classic disassociation). But it’s the colours that reveal those details, and so colours feature in every description. By this point, K’s POV should be absolute in the reader’s mind. He really is painting his world into existence.

We are in a postmodern world: even the Fantasy genre, for all its traditional tropes and innate conservatism (how many fucking medieval settings can you stomach?), can be tackled in a postmodern way. I tend to place what I call “ciphers” into my novels (or, in the case of my ten book series, the entire eighth novel was the cipher). These represent the key to a postmodern reading of the overall tale.

In this trilogy, Kadaspala is my cipher. The frame of the books is a poet telling the tale to another poet, but this poet has extracted himself from the tale. Kadaspala paints his world into existence, and this assertion will drive him to a terrible act, since the world he paints is one of horror. The poet narrator uses words to do the same. The two are linked in other ways, physical ways, but we need not get into that here, except to point out that those shared details confirm the linkage. Suffice to say, I always like offering up alternative ways of reading my stuff.

The body directly before him, however, was that of a child. The blue of the eyes was now covered in a milky film, giving it its only depth, since all that was behind that veil was flat, like iron shields or silver coins, sealed and abandoned of all promise. They were, he told himself yet again, eyes that no longer worked, and the loss of that was beyond comprehension.

For the first time, I throw in a linking clause: “he told himself yet again.” Why? We’re already tight in his point of view, after all. It should be entirely unnecessary. So why do it? Because what it’s saying is that he’s trying to convince himself of something he does not believe, or, in this case, does not want to believe. K. is an obsessive character. By now we should have a sense of that. How obsessive?

He would paint this child’s face. He would paint it a thousand times. Ten thousand. He would offer them as gifts to every man and every woman of the realm. And each time any one man or woman stirred awake the hearth-gods of anger and hate, feeding the gaping mouth of violence and uttering pathetic lies about making things better, or right, or pure, or safe, he would give them yet another copy of this child’s face. He would spend a lifetime upon this one image, repeated on walls in plaster, on boards of sanded wood, in the threads of tapestry; upon the sides of pots and carved on stones and in stone. He would make it one argument to defy every other god, every other venal emotion or dark, savage desire.

 This obsessive. A word or two on the language of this paragraph. One tends to avoid using passive future constructions, like “would,” in a fictional narrative, unless there’s good reason for it. In here, there’s good reason. K. is making promises, to himself, to everyone. He is making a vow, and he means it. So I repeat that word, each time, throughout the paragraph. Recall the use of “gifts” earlier. Recall the use of “lies” and “violence” and “venal.” Note also the media described and how they fit into the tech level of the setting (no acrylics here), and how “hearth-gods of anger and hate” evoke the cultures of Ancient Greece (chthonic cults), which was most assuredly a violent, brutal time and place. All of this seethes with rage. It sets out, in vivid language, Kadaspala’s state of mind. POV (it’s all about POV!).

Image Credit

Photograph published with permission of author

~

There was but one place and one time when the gods of colour withdrew, vanished from the ken of mortals, and that place, that time, was death.

From the previous paragraph’s describing the coming of death, we come to it directly in this one. It’s earned the right to stand alone, because in this section, death is very important to what follows. Without the natural progressions set up in the previous paragraph, this one would lose its impact. Also, in following syntactical rules (“one place and one time” to “that time, that place”) I reinforce, hopefully, my control over what I’m writing. What would happen if I inversed the second set: that time, that place? If I had simply included this line in the preceding paragraph, I would also risk a diminishment of its effect. What we’re looking at here is control of pace, making use of the natural breaks readers make moving from one paragraph to the next. But this is a different level of manipulating pace: the larger scale for this relates, as I’ve mentioned before, to overall sentence pattern. In general, the pace of this opening to this section is slow and measured despite its alarming content. Note also that we’re still not anchored in a setting, but there is something of the plodding to this pace thus far, combined with the occasional stutter-step. Bear that in mind (because, you see, I know what K is doing right now though I’ve yet to reveal it to the reader; I know where he is, and more to the point, I know what he is looking at).

Kadaspala worshiped colours. They were the gifts of light; and in their tones, heavy and light, faint and rich, was painted all of life.

This line concludes K’s thesis. If separated out from all that surrounds it, this paragraph sounds almost pastoral. “Worship” is a positive notion. “Gifts” are always welcome. And, since K is a painter, he uses his profession, his obsession, in his descriptions. Amidst everything else, this paragraph is an island of peace, and so it was meant to be. You need to draw a spiritual breath, away from the oppression established thus far. But of course, it’s a small island.

When he thought of an insensate world, made of insensate things, he saw a world of death, a realm of incalculable loss, and that was a place to fear. Without eyes to see and without a mind to make order out of chaos, and so bring comprehension, such a world was where the gods went to die. Nothing witnessed and so, nothing renewed. Nothing seen and so, nothing found. Nothing outside and so, nothing inside.

We leave the island immediately and return to “death.” Bound to religious belief there is fear (for K.), and here we are given the nature of what K. fears. Having merged internal and external landscapes, K asserts that, in effect, he (the cognizant mind, the seeing eye) is necessary to maintain the living world. The core of this is central to his greatest fear concerning the cult of Mother Dark, and the stealing of Light that it seems to promise. Note the last three lines and the balance of syllables in “witnessed/renewed,” “see/found” and “outside/inside.” Shifting the order would have imbalanced these three sentences as a unit. Once again, rhythm is established through repetition. This is a poetic device but it works well in fiction, too. The mind likes repetition. This paragraph offers up the terror of absolute negation, and as an argument, at this point it has nowhere else to go. With the last line, we’ve descended into oblivion. Accordingly…

Image Credit

Photograph published with permission of author

Kadaspala wanted none of it, and yet he was never as immune as he would have liked: even the pronouncement that he ever stood outside such things, was itself an illusion. He was not a believer in gods, but he had his own. They came to him in the simplest of all forms, eschewing even shape and, at times, substance itself. They came to him in a flood, with every moment – indeed, even in his sleep and the dream worlds that haunted it. They howled. They whispered. They caressed. Sometimes, they lied.

Having established his thesis, K. now rejects its precepts, but even as he does so he identifies his internal contradiction and then describes his own pantheon, but each time in metaphorical terms. This is description of the clay instead of the rock it covers: we’re getting to that rock. The first description of his gods evokes images of haunting, of nightmares. This is then reinforced by the four quick, short lines that close the paragraph. The pattern of the paragraph opens with complexity and closes with simplicity: 4, 2, 4, 4, 1, 1, 1, 2. But despite the complexity of the first half of the paragraph a deliberate rhythm is established by a repeated beat to open lines 3 and 4 (“They came to him” X2), and each clause is about a breath long. Sentences 1, 2 and 3 all emphasize the last clause, like a stuttered beat, sitting slightly outside the rhythm of the earlier clauses in each line. The repetition is then reduced to “They,” which is used to set up a blunter, shorter beat to lead up to the last line. As an experiment, close up “They howled,” “They whispered,” and “They caressed” into a single sentence. As another experiment, change the last line to “They sometimes lied.” What are the effects? What happens to the beat? What happens to the paragraph’s closing impact?

In this paragraph K contradicts himself, and then admits to harbouring illusions. The paragraph closes with the notion of “lying.” All of this invites the reader to edge back from K., to withhold trust in his POV. I need that. Also, these details note K’s admission of fallibility, leading to the confessional aspect of the next paragraph (for a character to convey uncertainty and self-doubt is a useful bridge to the reader’s sympathy, because we all share moments of uncertainty and self-doubt. It also marks an admission of honesty that makes the reader close even further the psychic distance with the character). Since the subject matter of this section is all about gods, it suits us readers that we get a hint of the confessional…

His gods were colours, but he knew them not. They bore heady emotions and before them, in moments of weakness or vulnerability, he would reel, or cry out, seeking to turn away. But their calls would bring him back, helpless, a soul on its knees. At times he could taste them, or feel their heat upon his skin. At times he could smell them, redolent with promise and quick to steal from his memories, and so claim those memories for their own. So abject his worship had become, that he now saw himself in colours – the landscape of his mind, the surge and ebb of emotions, the meaningless cascades behind the lids of his eyes when shut against the outside world; he knew the blues, purples, greens and reds of his blood; he knew the flushed pink of his bones, with their carmine cores; he knew the sunset hues of his muscles, the silvered lakes and fungal mottling of his organs. He saw flowers in human skin and could smell their perfumes, or, at times, the musty readiness of desire – that yearn to touch and to feel.

K’s gods are given a name and to us it is banal (colours). He then goes on (and we go with him) describing the sensory overload of the presence of the gods in K’s life. This is not a man who can escape into atheism. I make use of his most visceral senses: taste, touch, smell. And finally I make it clear that he has internalized his gods almost against his will, until their presence rules his world, inside and out. Because the notion of colours as gods is so unusual to us, the revelation is quick, the sentence direct and short. The first clause makes the pronouncement; the second clause his relationship with it. From certainty to uncertainty. The first clause is a slight jump back from the close psychic distance, to give the bald statement (which he would never have a need to entertain, but which we need to understand); but the second clause pulls us right back inside. Then I describe that relationship, emphasizing through the images K’s helplessness, his subjection before this pervasive, relentless presence; images of flight, of being driven to his knees, of being spiritually raped, his memories stolen away to be returned transformed, stained.

Then, if I am going to make colours gods, I’d better use some colours in describing the insidiousness of this pantheon. So we’re hit with “blues, purples, greens and reds…” but all are used for an internal description: his blood, the marrow of his bones, his vital organs. But all these descriptions evoke natural, external landscapes in their similes, reinforcing the loss of distinction between K’s internal and external landscapes. This hammers home the truly visceral nature of K’s communion with his gods. To add to the unease, once again the paragraph closes with something sexual. In fact, at the end of every paragraph thus far, we hit this subtextual bell (“vile fetish,” “god’s lap curled tight,” “whispered, caressed,” “desire, touched, feel.” Recall the looping effect I have talked about: this is one that proceeds on a subtextual level. The effect is to set a current running beneath everything else. I’m not ready to plunge into it yet, so it runs on, until the very next line:

The gods of colour came in lovemaking. They came in the violence of war and the butchering of animals, in the cutting down of wheat. They came in the moments of birth and in the wonder of childhood – was it not said that newborn babies saw aught but colours? They came in the muted tones of grief, in the convulsions of pain and injury and disease. They came in the fires of rage, the gelid grip of fear – and all that they touched they then stained, for all time.

More description of these gods and their overwhelming, all-encompassing presence. The first line punches the surface of the river of subtext, raises a splash, only to subside again, as we then return to “violence” not just of war, but also the banal, daily violence of living in an agrarian world: thus, a violence committed against nature. That such notions trip immediately after “lovemaking” is intended to underscore that hint of mysterious perversion set up in the last lines of all the previous paragraphs, linking lovemaking with violence. All of this is foreshadowing. Using repetition to reinforce the relentless element of this list (this entire paragraph is nothing but a list), covering the gamut of normal human experience, from lovemaking to the struggle to survive, to childbirth to sickness and growing old, to the anger and fear that mark the coming of death, we still have to return to the tactile reality of colours, to the “stains” they create. Rework this paragraph to reverse that life progression, or just mix it up. What is the effect? What happens when narrative “goes back in time” from dying and old age to birth and then lovemaking? Breaking Time’s natural flow in fiction is always risky, inviting disconnection or disturbance in the reader’s subconscious.

Image Credit

Photo published with permission of author

THIRTEEN

 Kadaspala was not a believer in gods, but he knew that belief could create them. And once made, they bred in kind. He had seen places where discord thrived, where violence spun roots through soil and flesh both, and the only propitiation left to those who dwelt there was the spilling of yet more blood. These were venal gods, the vicious spawn of a stew of wretched emotions and desires. There was no master and no slave: god and mortal fed on each other, like lovers sharing a vile fetish.

He knew that there was power in emotion, and that it could spill out to soak the ground, to stain stone and twist wood; that it could poison children and so renew the malign cycle, generation upon generation. Such people made of their home a god’s lap, and they curled tight within its comforting, familiar confines.

Kadaspala wanted none of it, and yet he was never as immune as he would have liked: even the pronouncement that he ever stood outside such things was itself an illusion. He was not a believer in gods, but he had his own. They came to him in the simplest of all forms, eschewing even shape and, at times, substance itself. They came to him in a flood, with every moment – indeed, even in his sleep and the dream worlds that haunted it. They howled. They whispered. They caressed. Sometimes, they lied.

His gods were colours, but he knew them not. They bore heady emotions and before them, in moments of weakness or vulnerability, he would reel, or cry out, seeking to turn away. But their calls would bring him back, helpless, a soul on its knees. At times he could taste them, or feel their heat upon his skin. At times he could smell them, redolent with promise and quick to steal from his memories, and so claim those memories for their own. So abject his worship had become, that he now saw himself in colours – the landscape of his mind, the surge and ebb of emotions, the meaningless cascades behind the lids of his eyes when shut against the outside world; he knew the blues, purples, greens and reds of his blood; he knew the flushed pink of his bones, with their carmine cores; he knew the sunset hues of his muscles, the silvered lakes and fungal mottling of his organs. He saw flowers in human skin and could smell their perfumes, or, at times, the musty readiness of desire – that yearn to touch and to feel.

The gods of colour came in lovemaking. They came in the violence of war and the butchering of animals, in the cutting down of wheat. They came in the moments of birth and in the wonder of childhood – was it not said that newborn babies saw aught but colours? They came in the muted tones of grief, in the convulsions of pain and injury and disease. They came in the fires of rage, the gelid grip of fear – and all that they touched they then stained, for all time.

There was but one place and one time when the gods of colour withdrew, vanished from the ken of mortals, and that place, that time, was death.

Kadaspala worshiped colours. The were the gifts of light; and in their tones, heavy and light, faint and rich, was painted all of life.

When he thought of an insensate world, made of insensate things, he saw a world of death, a realm of incalculable loss, and that was a place to fear. Without eyes to see and without a mind to make order out of chaos, and so bring comprehension, such a world was where the gods went to die. Nothing witnessed and so, nothing renewed. Nothing seen and so, nothing found. Nothing outside and so, nothing inside.

It was midday. He rode through a forest, where on all sides the sun’s light fought its way down to the ground, touching faint here, bold there. Its gifts were brush-strokes of colour. He had a habit of subtly painting with the fingers of his right hand, making small caresses in the air – he needed no brush; he needed only his eyes and his mind and the imagination conjured in the space between them. He made shapes with deft twitches of those fingers, and then filled them with sweet colour – and each one was a prayer, an offering to his gods, proof of his love, his loyalty. If others saw the motions at the end of his right hand, they likely thought them twitches, some locked-in pattern of confused nerves. But the truth was, those fingers painted reality and for all Kadaspala knew, they gave proof to all that he saw and all that existed to be seen.

He understood why death and stillness were bound together. In stillness the inside was silent. The living conversation was at an end. Fingers did not move, the world was not painted into life, and the eyes, staring unseen, had lost sight of the gods of colour. When looking upon the face of a dead person, when looking into those flat eyes, he could see the truth of his convictions.

It was midday. The sun fought its way down and the gods fluttered, dipped and filled patches of brilliance amidst gloom and shadow, and Kadaspala sat on his mule, noting in a distracted fashion the thin wisps of smoke curling round his mount’s knobby ankles, but most of his attention was upon the face, and the eyes, of the corpse laid out on the ground before him.

There had been three huts on this narrow trail. Now they were heaps of ash, muddy grey and dull white and smeared black. One of the huts had belonged to a daughter, old enough to fashion a home of her own, but if she had shared it with a husband his body was nowhere to be seen, while she was lying half out of what had probably been the doorway. The fire had eaten her lower body and swollen the rest, cooking it until the skin split and here the gods sat still, as if in shock, in slivers of lurid red and patches of peeled black. Her long hair had been thrown forward, over the top of her head. Parts of it had burned, curling into fragile white nests. The rest was motionless midnight, with hints of reflected blue, like rainbows on oil. She was, mercifully, lyying face-down. One rupture upon her back was different, larger, and where the others had burst outward this one pushed inward. A sword had done that.

The body directly before him, however, was that of a child. The blue of the eyes was now covered in a milky film, giving it its only depth, since all that was behind that veil was flat, like iron shields or silver coins, sealed and abandoned of all promise. They were, he told himself yet again, eyes that no longer worked, and the loss of that was beyond comprehension.

He would paint this child’s face. He would paint it a thousand times. Ten thousand. He would offer them as gifts to every man and every woman of the realm. And each time any one man or woman stirred awake the hearth-gods of anger and hate, feeding the gaping mouth of violence and uttering pathetic lies about making things better, or right, or pure, or safe, he would give them yet another copy of this child’s face. He would spend a lifetime upon this one image, repeated on walls in plaster, on boards of sanded wood, in the threads of tapestry; upon the sides of pots and carved on stones and in stone. He would make it one argument to defy every other god, every other venal emotion or dark, savage desire.

Kadaspala stared down at the child’s face. There was dirt on one cheek but otherwise the skin was clean and pure. Apart from the eyes, the only discordant detail was the angle between the head and the body, which denoted a snapped neck. And bruising upon one ankle, where the killer had gripped it when whipping the boy in the air – hard enough to separate the bones of the neck.

The gods of colour brushed lightly upon that face, in tender sorrow, in timorous disbelief. They brushed light as a mother’s tears.

The fingers of his right hand, folded over the saddle horn, made small motions, painting the boy’s face, filling the lines and planes with muted colour and shade, working round the judgement-less eyes, saving those for last. His fingers made the hair a dark smudge, because it was unimportant apart from the bits of twig, bark and leaf in it. His fingers worked, while his mind howled until the howling fell away and he heard his own calm voice.

Denier child … so I call it. Yes, the likeness is undeniable – you knew him? Of course you did. You all know him. He’s what falls to the wayside in your triumphant march. Yes, I kneel now in the gutter, because the view is one of details – nothing else, just details. Do you like it?

Do you like this?

The gods of colour offer this without judgement. In return, it is for you to make the judgement. This is the dialogue of our lives.

Of course I speak only of craftsmanship. Would I challenge your choices, your beliefs, the way you live and the things you desire and the cost of those things? Are the lines sure? Are the colours true? What of those veils on the eyes – have you seen their likeness before? Judge only my skill, my feeble efforts in imbuing a dead thing with life using dead things – dead paints, dead brushes, dead surface, with naught but my fingers and my eyes living, together striving to capture truth.

I choose to paint death, yes, and you ask why – in horror and revulsion, you ask why? I choose to paint death, my friend, because life is too hard to bear. But it’s just a face, dead paints on dead surface, and it tells nothing of how the neck snapped, or the wrongness of that angle with the body. It is, in truth, a failure.

And each time I paint this boy, I fail.

I fail when you turn away. I fail when you walk past. I fail when you shout at me about the beautiful things of the world, and why didn’t I paint those? I fail when you cease to care, and when you cease to care, we all fail. I fail, then, in order to welcome you to what we share.

This face? This failure? It is recognition.

There were other corpses. A man and a woman, their backs cut and stabbed as they sought to hold their bodies protectively over those children they could reach, not that it had helped, since those children had been dragged out and killed. A dog, lying half cut in two just above the hips, the hind limbs lying one way, the fore limbs and head the opposite way. Its eyes, too, were flat.

When traveling through the forest, Kadaspala was in the habit of leaving the main track, of finding these lesser paths that took him through small camps such as this one. He had shared meals with the quiet forest people, with the Deniers although they denied nothing of value that he could see. They lived in familiarity and in love, and wry percipience and wise humility, and they made art that took Kadaspala’s breath away.

The figurines, the masks, the beadwork – all lost in the burnt huts now.

Someone had carved a wavy line on the chest of the dead boy. It seemed that worship of the river god was a death sentence now.

He would not bury these dead. He would leave them lying where they were. Offered to the earth and the small scavengers that would take them away, bit by bit, until the fading of flesh and memory were one.

He painted with his fingers, setting in his mind where all the bodies were lying in relation to one another; and the huts and the dead dog, and how the sun’s light struggled through the smoke to make every detail scream.

Then, kicking his mule forward, he watched as the beast daintily stepped over the boy’s body, and for the briefest of moment hid every detail in shadow.

In the world of night promised by Mother Dark, so much would remain forever unseen. He began to wonder if that would be a mercy. He began to wonder if this was the secret of her promised blessing to all her believers, her children. Darkness now and forever more. So we can get on with things.

A score or more horses had taken the trail he was now on. The killers were moving westward. He might well meet them if they had camped to rest up from their night of slaughter. They might well murder him, or just feed him.

Kadaspala did not care. He had ten thousand faces in his head, and they were all the same. The memory of Enesdia seemed far away now. If he was spared, he would ride for her, desperate with need. For the beauty he dared not paint, for the love he dared not confess. She was where the gods of colour gathered all the glory in their possession. She was where he would find the rebirth of his faith.

Every artist was haunted by lies. Every artist fought to find truths. Every artist failed. Some turned back, embracing those comforting lies. Others took their own lives in despair. Still others drank themselves into the barrow, or poisoned everyone who drew near enough to touch, to wound. Some simply gave up, and wasted away in obscurity. A few discovered their own mediocrity, and this was the cruelest discovery of all. None found their way to the truths.

If he lived a handful of breaths from this moment, or if he lived a hundred thousand years, he would fight – for something, a truth, that he could not even name. It was, perhaps, the god behind the gods of colour. The god that offered both creation and recognition, that set forth the laws of substance and comprehension, of outside and inside and the difference between the two.

He wanted to meet that god. He wanted a word or two with that god. He wanted, above all, to look into its eyes, and see in them the truth of madness.

With brush and desire, I will make a god.

Watch me.

But in this moment, as he rode through swords of light and shrouds of shadow, upon the trail of blind savagery, Kadaspala was himself like a man without eyes. The painted face was everywhere. His fingers could not stop painting it, in the air, like mystical conjurations, like evocations of unseen powers, like a warlock’s curse and a witch’s warding against evil. Fingers that could close wounds at a stroke, that could unravel the bound knots of time and make anew a world still thriving with possibilities – that could do all these things, yet tracked on in their small scribings, trapped by a face of death.

Because the god behind the gods was mad.

I shall paint the face of darkness. I shall ride the dead down the throat of that damned god. I, Kadaspala, now avow this: world, I am at war with you. Outside – you, outside, hear me! The inside shall be unleashed. Unleashed.

I shall paint the face of darkness. And give it a dead child’s eyes.

Because in darkness, we see nothing.

In darkness, behold, there is peace.

Image Credit

Cover image used with author’s permission