October Tale
Well, my friends, it has been a long, unwished for absence. The wretched demands of necessity and physical exhaustion permitted little reading and no desire to write hurried thoughts lacking sufficient reflection. Yet the times require speech and story, and so I return, first with this brief tale, which is an October meditation upon ontological mysteries and the logoi that evade the narrow certitudes of our technological pride and spiritual apathy.
It had been a cool morning in that rural town just outside of nowhere. After the apocalypse, nowhere had become a popular, ever expansive space of spiritual geography. The cities bled, were abandoned, and became rubble and steel ghosts. After that, there were the zombie months, one of those ambiguous, hybrid seasons of transition, though the few survivors could only foresee isolation and wintry death.
We, by we I mean old Bob Coots, Jimmy Springfield, Mumbles, Pablo, and I, were sequestered in a cabin that used to belong to Bob’s Uncle Ned. Pablo was from Mexico, or what used to be called that when the old names signified. He first stumbled upon us after weeks of traveling the barren lands. He said he’d met up with a few Reasoners on the way. Most everything still with breath that used to go by homo sapiens had regressed. They were like Mumbles, the lean youth Jimmy found wandering the streets of Laredo, crying for his spectral mama. There weren’t no ID on him and the young man could no longer function beyond pointing and a kind of lyrical drift of mostly non-sense syllables that occasionally as if by accident shaped themselves into a forgotten word -- though in the old days, a mountain preacher might have taken the polyglot gibberish for glossolalia. Anyways, Jimmy was missing his dog, so I figure that’s why he brought Mumbles.
One of the Reasoners Pablo had talked to was a Dominican priest that served indigenous peoples. Pablo said the priest told him there were tribal folk scattered throughout the mountains, and that massive herds of buffalo were reported to have been discovered thundering across the empty plains.
Why we had come to this cabin was because it was obscure and defensible, with a source of clear water nearby. And also, because Bob swore he’d had a vision or encounter, something odd, in any event. So far as we could tell, Bob was still sound. He’d been a marine far enough back that meant something. Nothing fake about the fella. Bob was trying to hunt, though these woods are haunted maybe, because he’d had no luck, when he came upon a strange shape that appeared to be a Native shawl of some kind stretched over a rough hewn windbreak made from an ancient, gnarled tree patched with mud and wattle. You can imagine Bob’s shock when the scene shifted abruptly. The shawl turned, and the hunter found himself face to face with the Grandmother.
That’s what he called her, though she never did give a name. The way he described her, she had an aura, some luminescence of her own. Her body seemed real enough, but somehow both in and beyond the physical space of our world. She was very old, with young eyes. The paradox fascinated Bob, and he tried endlessly to explain the wonder of it, and became frustrated when we gave our dull assent to words unable to sufficiently convey the mystery.
Bob said they had a conversation, but not in words, which made no sense to any of us, though maybe Mumbles understood. The Grandmother promised healing or revelation, something that would manifest in that place. When you think in language, you need an artist, a musician or painter, to suggest the ineffable, and Mozart was lacking in our company. We’d been holed up for weeks waiting as our supplies waned into worrisome scarcity. A restless, irritable doubt harried us. Neither checkers, nor cards, nor the dregs of hard cider could assuage the spirit of captivity.
Dusk had given way to a somnolent blue-black sky adorned with a crescent moon. Pablo decided upon an evening walk. This was fool-hardy. We were some distance from the badlands where ghoulish monsters of our own devices awaited with savage avarice any creature dim enough to risk passage. Darkness, however, had regained ancient authority. Night had depths that brazen electric lights had caused us to forget. Pablo was probably brave, or maybe he was one of those men who are born indifferent, who stand openly before bullets and dare fate without emotion. Either way, he went out, walking vaguely in the direction Bob had indicated. The place where the Grandmother had appeared. Pablo made his way in the brisk night air, glad to be free of the men and their despairing cares. The longer he walked and the further he went, Pablo wasn’t sure he was going back. How much after that thought, he could not say, a gradual warming of the air announced the transgression of some invisible border. Soon, he found himself in a wetland refulgent with glittering starlight reflected back by the liquid mirror of a tawny pond.
From that specular vantage, a frog chorus assailed Pablo with an undulating, slightly off-beat syncopated rhythm, the bellows of their bulbous throats producing ranine chant that floated above a deep sustained bass baritone that echoed across the pond. The wild musicality of their insistent, fractious jazz pulled him up short. He wondered if this was new, or an old song that heretofore humanity had rarely attended. The more he listened, the more he felt a shivering, probably atavistic frisson, as if there were indeed a message in it, perhaps even aimed precisely at the anthropic stargazer. There was no reason to stay, really, but Pablo remained. It was almost as if his feet were rooted to that earth, whether he would leave or no.
And then he saw the trio coming towards him like verdant amphibian emissaries. The frogs advanced first with leaping intention, but somewhere between the pond and where he stood, they grew and transformed, until he was confronted by angels that might have walked out of an icon by Rublev. The angels appeared to take counsel and spake among themselves. And then they looked again into the face of Pablo, which was both amazed and aghast at the same time. One of their number approached him, and the human felt he must be crushed by some hidden weight of light that seemed to race through flesh, sinew, and bone as if his body were less than vapor.
The face of this angel was grave and solemn and his voice an impossible combination of liquid susurration attached to the boom of a bullfrog. The truth of it is that the angelic tongue is fire that dances from eternal flame. It has sequence, but not in the manner of our time, so that tenses are difficult to translate. Some of the enigmatic, koan-like fragments of Herakleitos suggest some aspect of its gnomic quality. In any event, the message went something like the following:
Masked, hiding, craven, yet arrogant. Unable to be supple, weak with lost humility. Betrayal named compassion, stupefaction knowledge. The City dies in exile.
Pablo could hardly reckon it. The words were different, but this was the meaning that he was able to bear in the translation. And something else: he felt as if he did not stand alone before the celestial messenger. There, caught in a net of blazing admonishment, he suddenly grasped that he represented all men, the wicked and the relatively good, and that the words were just.
The first emissary returned to the others, and a second stepped forth. This one was nimble, dancing with a wry smile that bespoke mirth and wit and convivial satire. The angel took Pablo in with a glance, and gave a kind of courteous bow that was nonetheless not devoid of a certain sting. The words were different: stately, neo-classical, firm, mocking, gracious all the same. Still, in spite of apparent lucidity, Pablo did not quite grasp them. There was a sort of metaphysical abyss that was crossed before the logos reached him. In the end, he was sure there was much beauty lost; the words left to him were terse.
You have chosen to seek power, your science a chattering gossip that mistakes information for wisdom.
In silent assent, Pablo acknowledged the cogent asperity of the claim. After this, the ambassador of light rejoined its peers. Then the last of them came forth, and Pablo was certain he must be dead. No mortal creature could endure such furious ardor. The remonstrance he had just listened to inclined him to anticipate wrath, and indeed, it was wrath, but stunning in its difference from what his imaginary had prepared him for. Absolute purity and innocence . . . the grace of the most lovely maid, a gentle dove, the softness of maternal embrace impossibly identical with virile rage against cruelty, against coldness of heart, and the duplicity of lies. Pablo sunk in horror at himself. Should the very hem of the angel’s garment touch him, Pablo knew that he would be reduced to ashes.
What happened next cannot be told. In a figure, Pablo discovered that his fear was behind him, already taken up in the angelic embrace. For sure, Pablo was dead as Jacob Marley. He was alive, too, alive with robust, impossible delight; so much so, he doubted if he had ever been alive before. The words were joyous, singing, filled with ecstatic surprise. They were also mournful adagio; enchanting, sad, but not sorrowing. There was an aporetic quality that could not be comprehended by finite, univocal modalities. Briefly, Pablo was at one with the Holy, whatever that means. Love was the only knowledge, the ground of Truth, victorious in ways thrilling and beyond comprehension.
And he knew that Creation was Gift, and that the meek shall inherit the earth.
Pablo stood gaping at the miraculous, radiant night until the vision faded, and there was just the pond and the strangely mellifluous drone of frog chant.
Aristophanes was having one of his jokes. Pablo came back in from his jaunt. There was a look half-way between hesitant astonishment and stubborn resistance at war on his placid face. Standing in the threshold, he tried to summon some speech to signify the barely articulable transcendence. Then he shrugged, not being a poet, and lit one of his stubby cheroots. Then he sat down in the ancient beanbag chair and peered at the rising smoke as if he were searching for mantic words. Nothing came to him, so he let the silence continue.
We’d all drifted off to sleep, so it was a message sent into dreams or deep enigmatic soul walking when Pablo spoke in his laconic way, though confident now, as if he had determined something more than hallucination had occurred. What he said was a simple declarative. “The frogs are not what they seem.” Whether there might be broader application to every humble creature, he could not yet say.