>>>but just then a bolt of lightning came down from a storm cloud and blasted him on the foot and left him crippled in that leg forever after....
I reckon that that's probably what comes of being too damned good at what you do...<<<
Man o'manacles.
Jeez.
Seems that way, doesn't it?
It is an odd feeling to read that.
You know I've been working in the garden, which is a specialized garden, the last few weeks, when I can. One can easily tell from the plants and trees, that it was worked on for a period, and then abandoned for a period. This makes it strange to work on. Leaves you wondering about the owner.
"Who puts that kind of work into a dynamic system, that kind of planning and order, and then abandons it?"
It's like I bought it this way, from someone else. Someone who got too old, and couldn't take care of it, and is now dead, or ".....in a nursing home."
Gardens have to be cared for constantly. They aren't natural. Inside the word "garden" is the human "tender;" the hands and tools and protection. The element that if you remove, the Garden collapses. Reverts. Which is fine, but it is a different function/condition.
Reverts like Civilization.
Do you remember the pictures the French archaeologists took last century of Angkor Wat, when they discovered it, overgrown, in the jungle? Entwined with 700 years of trees? They are some of the neatest pictures in the world.
Angkor Thom; The Bayun.
[They claim there are more carved and decorated stone blocks in the Angkor temple complexes than all of the squared blocks of the Great Pyramid.]
There are always going to be traces of this confused period, detectable, here, I think. Things that don't match the intelligence of the rest of it. "Mistakes," that don't seem to be explained.
That's okay; who cares.
I mean, "what you gonna do."
It's going to take about three years to put it "back" together. "Forward," together.
There is a lot of mystery with it, however. A lot of interesting wondering. Strangeness.
The back porch used to be on a different side of the house, and was mostly enclosed. You could stand in the doorway of it, like a fiddler, and lean against the jamb and stay dry; in the Spring; when the rain would pour down. It was a pretty exotic spot, because the flowers and stones were all around. And exotic. Very, very, nice.
I was working on some kind of mentally spectacular projects at the time. We'll skip detailing those, but it was very interesting stuff. I was good at it. I didn't have to work on anything else, really, so between the building of the garden and the projects, I was getting pretty far afield in the poppies.
I got sick the summer before I moved the porch, in August ~ I think I was 33. Got pneumonia that wouldn't respond to biotics and nearly croaked. Was a bit shocking. To me. But I got better, and thought I was past the incidents. Sometime in there, I'm not sure where, maybe after the first illness or even before it, I remember standing in that back porch/garden doorway for one of the prolonged thinking periods I would stand there. For say an hour between the rain fronts.
I would consider all the stuff I was getting to do and the beauty of new generations of american gardens coming down the way, at us, with the advent of all these exotic new plants and species ~ and also new ideas and aesthetics ("machines"), propagating. (I had a lot of background, a very strong sense of Japanese aesthetic history here, and of other cultures.) Anyway, I would stand there and realize how odd and different the future could be, with this kind of power.
My nerves were very ramped up, as creative things often do, to some people. I couldn't talk much about what was going on, because people wouldn't understand it. The only way they would, would be to demonstrate it; which is what I was trying to do. (And, imho, succeeding.)
Esoteric. It got esoteric; with a capital E.
But functional!
I looked out the doorway, pleased with how effort and the collection of skills and mental tools was beginning to synthesize.
"This is.....power. Torque. Torque. Like a turning lathe."
The images of invisible lathes, controlling almost anything, and everything, began to stick in my mind. I would look for them. In rooms and houses and systems and gardens and along the line of Time.
"I don't recall ever being this powerful, before."
"It is going to lead to Completely New territories."
"Sitting on the verge, the edge, pulling the curtain back, making the invisible visible, pulling a rabbit out of a hat, making a sow's ear out of a silk purse."
Creation.
~
"I am at the beginning, of the peak of my powers."
"Here I can feel all my capabilities gathering together to boost me into a new realm.....I wonder if other 'artists' (workers) feel this way too, at certain Times."
I also got a strange sensation, just then, of a pulling or tugging, between two or more parts. One pull was to put my hand into blank space and churn it into creation, and the other was to step back. As though the ability alone, the power, was enough to prove the point. ALL points. And this power might not be so perfect; it might pay to consider its Dangers. (What dangers?) I don't know...... (Crap, I just got here.)
I felt like a soldier in a battlefield, or a king, or a mentat, or a manifest intelligence. (Hee hee!) But I also got a strange sensation of deja-vu. "Been here before? Confronted this before? Gambled here? Did I think back to here, from the Forward Places, before?"
"How can you have deja-vu in a moment/state you've never experienced?"
So strongly?
Wow.
Caught me zippy.
What the heck? "That way lies Roads, New Roads. That way lies Discovery. (And entanglements, says a Function.) (And stronger ego, and self interference.) Why should I be afraid? I refuse to fear what I can't identify. (Oh dear.)"
"(What if I won't be allowed?) Won't be allowed? Won't be allowed?? (What if, because of the decision I make, perhaps a repeat of Error, a repeat of Experience, I am withheld?) 'Withheld?' What do you mean ~ withheld. Who can withhold? Who is 'there?' (What if I am made sick?) Made sick? ......What?? (What if to protect me, or deny me, I am made sick?)"
Where is all this dialog coming from? Who are these newer voices?
I am not a superstitious person.
I am not an easily frightened person.
~
That was the last time I remember that discussion. I think I approached it a few times, but that was the clearest. Because of standing in the doorway to the Bright Garden in the rain.
And in August, I was showering with my girlfriend, when she discovered a bump, under my arm.
"What is this?"
~
It's been fourteen years now, I've been sick.
I might be getting well, but who knows. Who will know. Who knows.
But if someone wanted to remove a peak period, this would just about do it.
~
What is superstition, and what is real?
I don't know. |
