“Protectors of the Illumination Stream”: The Trout of the Bardo and the Tennis Trophy of Freedom.
Draft 1, Part 1 September 2014
Due for publication September 2034.
After my mother died, just a couple of weeks later, my uncle, who evidently had been appointed executer, came to me at my favourite fishing spot by the river. It was no secret in the family where I could be found late every weekday afternoon. He sat himself down on my little 3 legged stool, as I was in that moment casting a line from the rocky shore out into the current. He was silent for a few minutes, conveying an air of understanding the art of fishing, and as I backed myself up the slope he announced “Stu, you need to relax your knees more. The fish can feel your intention.”.
I laughed. He knew as little about fishing as I do. I just throw it in and wait. Don’t even know if the worm is correct for this kind of water. I just don’t want to know. Seems to me that after a day of messing in the chemistry lab the last thing I need is another science to bone up on in my free recreation time. I ignore all the advice I get. It just goes in one ear and out the other. One of these days I might even catch a fish.
I said, “Uncle Brian, what brings you down to my little piece of paradise?”
He replied by pulling a box from under his duffle coat. He passed it to me. I took it and frowned at him. He just murmured, “I found it hidden under your mother’s wardrobe when the removalists came to take the furniture to the Salvation Army. It was wrapped in an old pillow case and tied up with multiple strands of wool. There was an embroidery patch on the pillow case that spelt out, “For Stu after I am gone. I unwrapped it from the pillow case but I have not opened the lid of the box. Here….” he reached into a pocket and pulled out some white material. The pillow case. He handed it to me.
I took the pillow case and the box and sat down on the bank of the river. I stuck the fishing pole into a handy little niche in the rocks. I read the words on the embroidery and for sure they announced this is for me. I looked at my uncle. “I already got my share of the inheritance at the reading last week.”
My uncle nodded. “Yes, I am mystified what made your mother wrap this up for you. I consider it something private between you and your dear ma, so I will be off before you open the box. He tapped me lightly on the shoulder as was his habit, and turned on his heels. I watched him for a few moments as he ambled up the path to the carpark.
I put down the pillow case beside me and held the box in both hands. It was a very old mahogany box, the sort of box that as children we would have called a pirates chest. A square of deep burgundy velvet was attached to the top of the lid. There was no lock, just a simple loop clasp. I loosened the clasp and tentatively opened the lid. I am more than a little superstitious and did not want any of my mother’s spirit to suddenly be unbound and find itself lost in the great outdoors.
I peered inside. There were 3 objects.
One, a little black diary with the words “Poems for a Better Day” stencilled on the front.
Two, an A3 manilla envelope, which when I opened it contained 17 South African Ruberand in little clear plastic holders.
Three, a tennis trophy with the inscription “Monash University Open Winner, 1991”, and underneath quite faded, I could make out the name Rachel Fr….. The text faded away.
I was bemused. My mother did not play tennis and as far as I know she did not write poems and she had no connection with South Africa that I knew.
Her middle name was indeed Rachel. Miriam Rachel Green, was her maiden name and once married to my father she became Miriam Rachel Thompson.
What was my mother gifting to me. My mother had one trait that I admired and perhaps some who came into her life found a little irritating. She found meaning and symbology in everything. Nothing was just as it is, everything had a message to tell.
What was the message in the box that my mother had set up for me to decipher?
I stared out into the river. I put the box down on the rocks. I picked the fishing pole out of its niche and at that moment I felt a hard sudden tug on the line. I reeled in a huge trout; the first one I had ever hooked.
I set the trout down on the ground next to the box and took out my mouth organ. I began a rendition of “Smoky Days”, and allowed the imagery of the gold coins, the book of poems and the tennis trophy, to filter into my subconscious mind. The sound of my mouth organ seemed to float off down the river to some land where people are free.
After 10 minutes I picked up the pillow cover and the box, placed the trout in the little silver bucket I always brought with me, just in case, and headed up the hill to my bicycle. I treadled home through the soft light of dusk and when I arrived I found Myrtle had already left for the day so I prepared the trout myself, skinning it and gutting it, and then I fried it with the juice of a lemon and the sting of a bee, and watched the soccer on the TV until I fell asleep in my favourite comfy chair.
The burgundy-topped box sat on the the little occasional table next to me. I slept deeply and dreamed of a huge copper coloured trout which flew into the sky and carried in its fins a golden trumpet. It blew on the trumpet and a thousand or so little people floated peacefully from the clouds to land at an amusement fair. They ran off shouting in glee to buy popcorn and claim a ride on the big dipper. The copper trout watched wisely from above grinning at all it saw, until it faded away and there instead was a box that opened slowly to reveal a mirror that when I looked into it showed an old woman brushing her hair and humming the tune “Smoky Days.” I woke up with a start. My mother always encouraged me to take my music practice seriously. She herself was totally off tune. The old lady in the mirror in my dream sounded as rich and robust as one of the classic and classy Jazz Singers whose name I could not recall. She did not look at all like my mother.
I looked a the clock; it was just on midnight. I took the pillow case and the box; went to my bed and laid the pillow cover on my pillow and laid my head on the pillow cover and rested the box next to me. I went back to sleep very soon, and this time I dreamed of a war where children were used as slaves to push ancient cannons around a huge war arena, and one by one they were killed and each floated up into the sky and disappeared into a burgundy box.
In the morning as I awoke I determined to find the meanings ensconced in the box. And suddenly I thought to ask myself, “Why did my uncle untie the wool that held the pillow case around the box and take the box out of its pillow case wrapping? The sign said it was for me!”. My uncle always smoked his pipe quietly, if you get what I mean. I sprung up off my little single bed and picked up the burgundy box and with it poised under my arm headed off into the kitchen. Myrtle was already there cleaning and mopping. I said “Good morning dear, is there some trout left for my breakfast?”. She grumbled and seemed to say, “Men! All they think of is the next piece of trout.” I had to laugh. She might have a point.
After Myrtle had set the remains of the trout on the breakfast table, and a muffin with a duck egg, and a flagon of bitter black Columbian coffee as I had taught her to prepare, she marched off into the living room to vacuum and dust. I looked around listfully. Then it came into my mind. “Why did not Myrtle ask about the box? I was carrying it so protectively into the kitchen and she must have seen it yet she did not mention it, only focusing on the trout.”
“Hmmm”, I whispered to nobody in particular, “the mystery deepens”.
My mother had a secret. Nobody knew but me. She had told me many many years ago as we camped together in the Diamond Snake Valley, on one of our Mother and Son bonding weekends. We were five hours solid walk away from any other human being as far as we knew, and ravens flew above us, and the spirit of the Diamond Snake was felt by each of us to be all around. We did not mention that to each other, but we could see it in each other’s eyes and in the way we each treaded carefully as we walked along the path. We had pitched our two little stockmen’s tents by the side of a little stream and we had built a fire and roasted some vanilla beans and prepared vanilla bean soup with water from the stream. My mother was quiet for some time as we sat under the blistering stars. I never interrupted the quiet of my mother so I sat waiting for her to speak.
Finally she began. “Stuart”, and I knew this was something important as she usually did not use my formal name, “a long time ago, well before you were born, and even a long time before I met your father, I took a solitary journey into the northern wilderness. I walked alone for a month or three, and lived on acorns and caterpillars. I saw my mind become as crazy as a cow about to be slaughtered. My sanity had disappeared. I felt the darkness of the everlasting night press against my soul even in the middle of the day; but I remembered to let the stream of bitter sweet consciousness pour out of my lips as I sang the Bardo Traversing Songs of my predecessors as they had learned from theirs.”
She paused. Well aware that I did not know the word “Bardo”.
I reached into her mind to find the meaning of it, but she refused to allow.
She smiled at me. She tickled me with her mind a bit then suddenly announced, “I became a Master of the Bardo on that walk and the Protectors of the Illumination Stream ordained me deep in the northern wilderness and I made a pledge to Serve that Illumination for the rest of my mortal days”.
I was used to my mother telling me stories, but I did not quite know how to absorb this one. Was she speaking of a literal hike through the mountains or was she being poetic. And did she believe in these “Protectors of the Illumination Stream”, and were there wolves on the trail?
So I just replied, “Were there wolves on the trail?”
She said “Honey lamb you just better believe I met my fair share of those wolves.”
Even I got that one and squirmed in embarrassment.
But I recover quickly from these indiscretions. My mother had hinted before that she had not been entirely chaste before meeting my father. I considered it none of my business and had always deflected any offer to pursue the subject further. I did so this time too. “Mother,” I began, addressing her formally as she had addressed me, “I wish to know more about these Protectors and about this, what was it, Gardo thing.”
“Bardo”, she smiled, but she was still refusing me access to the part of her mind where the knowledge of that was hidden.
I stirred the flames of the fire with a willow stick. The end of the stick began to glow and caught alight. I waved it around in the air and my mother began intoning:
The sacred spirits are beyond us now
And yet there is no beyond,
We flame the desire of this dreaming
And they listen to us without reproach
The journey is but a stumbling
The heart is already free
The mountains of grief are empty
And it is time for a cup of tea.
She began to laugh in her “Wicked old witch” manner and I took the old iron billy and poured some water from the jug that we had filled from the stream and I put it into the centre of the fire. I collected the spider webs that we had draped over our tents to dry and threw them into the old iron billy in the flames. I took a packet of Wild Duck Feather Essence from my top pocket and threw that in as well. I stirred it with my finger knowing that the heat of the water could not break through my inpenetrable shield of innocent faith. Finally I took the Glass Eye of Distant Frog Nature from its little hessian bag and dropped it into the brew for 7.5 counts of the magical eternal liver gland. Quickly I scooped the glass eye out before its powers were irretrievably dispersed and I put it back into the hessian bag and placed the bag back into the Next Dimension where it always belongs. I closed my eyes and countered my mother’s intoned claims:
We have suddenly entered this land together
A land we know so well
And yet we never found ourself in this before now
And the mystery of the portal is behind.
I grope in the dark for my cane and my cone
I throw caution to the wind and announce my return
You smile at me sweetly
And I offer you this tea.
This all came as an immense surprise to me. I had never imagined anything like this before. I began to think my mother had dropped some Hyota into the water. Or did I mean LSD?
The dark spirits began to gather. They were hissing and honking and steaming and grinning at me. I gripped my belt. I closed my mind. They found their way in to that mind I considered my own and I thrust my cane towards them. They merely groaned in apparent parody of the effect I had on them and gathered their forces into a display of even more might. My mother had disappeared. I was alone in a clearing in the dark northern mountain; the fire had gone out; my legs were both broken and a howling was coming closer and closer. I shuddered. Was this the Bardo of which my mother had spoken?
“Yes, indeed my lovely young lamb”, came back a disembodied but familiar voice in reply. “You entered it swiftly, much more swiftly than I did when I was your age. Now you must journey through it alone. I am not existent here; I just project this voice into your solitary world because it is clear that I can.”
I took this in. It was all new information to me. I gathered this Bardo thing was not something to be taken lightly. I groaned now. I asked, “How to proceed?”
No answer.
I awoke, sprawled around the fire still glowing from the night before. My mother was walking around stretching her legs. She looked at me and just said, “I cannot help you, as no-one could help me. Keep in the light while there is light and keep in the dark when there is dark. Eventually you will see through them both and eventually you will be fr…..” Her voice faded. Or had she spoken at all.
She walked towards me. She asked, “What’s wrong. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
I mumbled, “Bad dream I guess.” She did not look convinced, but she got some bowls from her rucksack and put a vita-brit in each and mixed some condensed milk with the water from the jug and gave me one of the bowls with a spoon and a tissue. All seemed back to the normalcy I relied on. She ate her own breakfast in silence. I wondered if there would be more Bardo today. As it turned out there was not. We began to hike back to civilisation and I had just about forgotten the incident of immersion in the Bardo – if it be that – until now.
Now, as I leave the house after eating my trout and duck egg muffin and getting through half the flagon of bitter black coffee. I head into the campus towards the Organic Chemistry Department where my office is situated. I try to put the mystery my mother has left me out of my mind. Basically as a Permanent Adjunctive Research Fellow I am free to structure my paid working days as I wish to, but I do try to keep my personal life a bit separate. I hum as I cruise though the campus garden paths, trying not too obviously to look at the pretty girls. They never look at me so do not notice me looking at them, but you never know when one of the department colleagues will suddenly appear and smirk at me as I admire a youthful young lass. I have an image of maturity to uphold, at least somewhat.
In the office attached to the organic chemistry research lab I sit and collect my thoughts. I have the paper on “Structural conflict reminiscent of Cellular Division in the Australian Labour Party” to progress, or the grad student seminar on “Metaphors of Biological Collectivisation in the Dialogue surrounding the work of Stephen Hawkins” to prepare. Or I can keep trying to document the emotio-lingusitc connections between the studies to date into the Spider Habitats in the Deep valleys of the Blue Mountains and the poetry of the Vietnamese Post War recovery period. The department is well used to my eclectic mind and values me stretching the boundaries of the chemistry discipline as I will. Most of the others are happy to remain focused on DNA and Testtube reactions, while I plod around on the far edges. They see it as a bonus to have an eccentric breathing and dispensing the same air as them. And besides, years ago the contract I signed gave me complete freedom in my academic pursuit and no way for me to be retrenched before I hit 85. That’s still many years down the track. And my publication record is impressive. Many of my papers are hardly understood at all even by other experts in the field. I like to keep it like that. The downside is sometimes I don’t understand what I am writing either. But when asked to explain I just turn the question back on the enquirer as if we are engaging in progressing the ideas further together. Then perhaps later I write those progressions down to be incorporated into the next paper. And so it goes on; and so it has done for these last couple of decades.
I lean into the sunshine gracing me through the office window. My door is closed tightly and nobody in their right mind would dare to knock when it is so pointedly closed. Suddenly indeed, a knock on the door and it is not a hesitant knock at all. A confident knock, it be. I consider remaining in silence until someone goes away but my intuition steps in and I call out in as brash a voice as I can manufacture, “Yes, what is it?”
A gloomy but sweet voice returns, “Nothing much, just some information about your eternal soul”.
This does stop me in my tracks. I was expecting perhaps a young innocent requesting my perusal of their thesis. It took me a moment to coagulate a reply, “Then you’d better come in and sit down for a bit”. The door handle softly turned and the door began to open. I leaned away out of the sunshine and tried to present a demeanour of no concern.
As the gap in the door became wider my visitor became apparent. A young woman, perhaps only 30 or so, the kind of young woman I would take an especially long glance at if I were to see her walking along a campus path. Her face was as solemn as her voice had been but this did not prevent me gasping inside at the utterly sweet radiance of her subtle inner beauty. I have this thing about women you see. They get me where nothing else can. And this one was a getter, for sure.
She began to mould herself through the doorway and stood impassively in front of my desk until I asked her to please sit down. I looked at her form and beyond and I felt that familiar sense that behind the veil of apparent reality we are actually spirits of love and delight playing together in heaven even now. I try not to explain that feeling to people too much these days. They seemed to haven gotten rather bored with the concept. I keep it to myself, and when it arises especially prevalently in me I silently thank the Protectors for their Grace.
She sits there demurely, her skirt quite politely hovering just above her knees. I seem to be the one needing to progress the conversation we begun rather tentatively through the door, so I offer, “what do you know about the eternal soul, Miss…?” I leave open an invitation for her to reveal to me her name. She takes it. “Marian, professor, please call me Marian.”
I let her continue. I wonder if she likes me. I seem to have not outgrown the lustful young lad who exists in my stream of being. I don’t try to. I quite enjoy it. I carefully look into her eyes for a moment to let her know I may be interested in more than a conversation. She deflects my invitation for the time being. But she does shuffle her fingers around on the hem of her skirt in a way that might get me aroused. I deflect that inclination. It can wait. But I do wonder how long we can continue this game of deflection. She is a woman; I am a man; who cares about the eternal soul?
“I did my doctorate in the nonalignment of men’s and women’s notions of the journey of soul in the world this side of the veil” she whispers. I hardly catch the words but it seems she has a direct connection by now into my mind and her meaning is absolutely clear. I know at that point I will not be alone this coming night. She seems to nod her head slightly as if to agree. Her face though is still taciturn and this makes me even more randy.
“Oh?”, I politely offer, “Did you enter at all into the aspect of communal beingness communicated by the ancient Taoist misfit monks of 500BC?”
She deflects this too. Quite a master of deflection I begin to observe, “Professor I stay on track, it may be good if you learn to as well”.
I grinned like an idiot. I hate it when I do that. But she got me fair and square in my achilles heel. I reach down to scratch my foot and she curls her lips up slightly as if she is going to laugh but in the final moment deciding against it.
“What leads you to that opinionated stance, young lady”, I murmur. Best to let her know who is the elder in this conversation, because there is a possibility it is already going astray.
“I saw you at the river bank last afternoon, professor, and I saw the box the other man gave you and I saw the trout you caught and I suggest you are very very careful from now on, for the sake of your eternal soul.”
I would have gasped but I held it in check and instead said “Miss… um,… Marian… whatever do you mean?” This is the same question I ask my colleagues when they ask me a question about an enigmatic discourse I have presented, and need the time to recollect what I just said.
She sat there giving no answer. I sat there not asking again. I looked into her eyes again and that sensation of time being a cosmic joke took me away and I knew the depth of her soul. She was naked in there. More naked than I had ever experienced the soul of a woman before. No wonder she keeps such a long face, she is so vulnerable she protects her naked eternal self the best she can. I smile to encourage her. Her expression does not change. But her fingers are again playing with the hem of her skirt and even as I watch she slowly but deliberately raises that hem a few centimetres up her leg. She does not avert my gaze. And I do not relent. I can feel the heat in my groin and I can see the light in her soul. One plays on the other and I no longer care which. I caress her energy boundary with my own and she agrees on another level of consciousness to proceed. I silently offer my manhood into her womanhood if she is inclined to agree. Again she nods her head a fraction, and I have no doubt what she means. I like this girl. Marian, I whisper, under my breath and she purrs like a kitten and I see a vision of romance and the deep blue sea. Marian, I repeat, under my breath and I realise this is the quickest I have fallen in love for at least the last year.
Marian stands up as if to go. I put out my hand and offer “Very nice to meet you dear, are you free this evening for some Chinese Pork Dumplings and some chat about these things, and others?” I’ve tried this line before quite a few times on attractive young ladies and only once a long time ago got a yes so I am indelibly pleased when she just beams back at me – the first time her face has broken its solemnity – and says, “Yes professor, I am free. I thought you would never ask.”
She puts a sweet flowered calling card on the edge of my desk. It just says “Marian, at your service”, and a mobile phone number. I take it in. She leaves hurriedly without even giving me a chance to usher her out.
I lean back into the sunshine and anticipate the evening of dumplings and chat.
Then I remember my mother’s gift. I need to work out what it all means. Perhaps Marian has been sent to help me in this deciphering. I must not ask for her help too bluntly tonight as blunt energy usually rebounds on me. For the same reason I must refrain from taking her hand over the dumplings and placing it on my upper thigh. The last time I did that, perhaps seven years ago, the girl slapped me, tipped the bowl of pork dumplings into my lap and stormed off into the night. I was embarrassed and having to eat the remaining dumplings from my lap did not help in that. I google, “How to be circumspect”. Google asks me if I mean “How to be circumcised”. I tell it where to go.
For the rest of the day I read about circumspection, detection of soldier ants, relentless erotic pursuits of the noble classes in seventeenth century Britain, the masks of ignorance in the Theatre of the Absurd, the reaction of phosphorous and copper in a wooden container, the splitting of wood chips as an activity of transcendence in the Zen communities of San Diego and Trompanso. I rest for lunch and go on. The Goal of Delightful Self Awareness, the poverty of immigrants to Australia in the post second world war period, the training of Geese to cover the noise of the slaughterings in the concentration camps of Poland around 1943, the secret healing ingredients of the Shamans of Southern Peru, and the sexual habits of gay dwarves in San Francisco.
At 4pm the bell sounds through the department and suddenly I hear steps in the corridor and know the afternoon Meeting of Staff is underway. As usual I don’t attend. The minutes will be under my door in the morning. I call the number on the sweet flowered card. It goes to voice-bank. I assert, “7:30pm my dear, at Auntie’s Excellent Dumpling Palace in Main Street.” I take my cane from the holder and leave, locking my door behind me. I stroll to the bicycle shed and take a silver bucket from the locker. I ride my bicycle serenely down the back lane ways to the river. My fishing pole is still there hidden in a thicket of trees. I sit myself down on the three legged stool that was also hidden in that thicket. I wonder if I will catch another trout today.
I didn’t.
But my mother’s spirit came to visit me in a way I cannot deny. She hovered around behind me making me feel rather uncomfortable before she took up a position above the river at the point where my fishing line angled into the water. She seemed to be in no hurry. Neither was I. Eventually I clearly heard her voice in my mind. “Stu, lad, you are doing fine.”
This to me was more precious than the biggest trout in the land. My mother’s confidence in me had always given me the inclination to keep going. She had encouraged me to stay at university when it all seemed so hard and I wanted to leave to work as an Interstate Semi-Trailer Driver. I had kept on with my undergraduate degree only for her, and later she whispered me into my masters and prodded me further into my Ph.D. She had sat proudly in the hall when the Governor of the state had handed me my doctorate parchment for “The symbology inherent in the ingenious ways that patients and nurses shared sexual expression in the hospitals of the displaced romance pilgrims of the late Patriachial Period in Sudan” The governor looked a little confused when the chancellor read out my thesis name. But he extended his hand warmly and murmured, “Well done, we are grateful for your scholarly insights”.
Now my mother was encouraging me again. I am doing fine. Fine with the mystery she had left me, or fine with the girl? She caught my wondering and I heard a swift movement in the air above me. I looked up. A hawk had just caught a starling and the starling was kicking in its beak and the hawk was circling and slowly dropping itself to the ground. I could not deny that my mother had answered my question in her own enigmatic way. I wished I could fathom what she means. As I said before my mother was the Symbology Queen.
Later I treadled my bike back home, troutless. Myrtle had gone again so I took a long hot shower with the bathroom door wide open and then dressed myself in my best yellow silk suit. I rang for a taxi because I did not want my suit to get spotted by the grit of the city if I walked. The driver was an old scotsman and refused to take my $50 note for the $7.25 fare. I rustled around in my shoulder bag and found enough coins. He drove away with a look on his face like he thought I am queer. I am not. I sense that Marian knows that already.
I walk into Auntie’s and am greeted kindly as a regular. There is the girl sitting at a table for two at the back of the main parlour. She looks at me without blinking as I walk slowly towards her, accentuating my limp on my cane. I am not sure why I want to give that impression of very slight disability. Perhaps so she is re-assured that she can run away if she wants to. She seems not to be inclined to do that and as I sit in the chair opposite her she murmurs “Good to see you again professor, you and your eternal soul”.
She is a strange one, for sure. But I never really connect up with the ones who are not strange. Something in that, for sure.
She dives straight in. “Professor, I am serious when I warn you of the danger of what lies ahead. The box is a demon. The box is for sure a red hot demon. Bury in in the countryside a long way away and forget it ever existed.”
I nodded. I wanted her to feel I was open to her. But I was thinking, “Her hair is so long and straight. I like that. I want to fold it around my fingers”
I may have imagined it but she kicked me suddenly under the table. “Professor, listen. I know what I am talking about. The demon once confronted me you see. And I turned it into that box.”
I had to take my attention away from her gorgeous sexually alluring and love enhancing hair at that point and I looked in her eyes. Yes, still absolutely naked in there and her words were embedded in a psychic seal of truth. This much was clear.
Finally I opened up to considering her message.
“Please tell me your story, Marian. I am all ears.”
“A long time ago I lived as a trout in the icy waters of far country Tibet”, she began, and metaphorically I pulled my chair up closer to her. “I am the only trout who ever managed to live in that cold stream,” she continued and I must admit I was impressed. “The other creatures in the stream avoided me constantly because they knew my magical powers were unbeatable, even by the monks who came to the bank of the stream to challenge me. The eel hid under the rocks when I slivered by. The small dainty fishes swam away swiftly and never looked back. The turtle raced off up the bank of the stream in a way that would convince you that nothing – nothing at all – is fixed in this world.” She paused, as if to let her message set in.
I repeated, “Nothing is fixed in this world”. She stared into my eyes without blinking and suddenly I knew I was hypnotised by this girl. She had me already under her power. I recognised her at last as the spirit of the trout I had eaten last evening. I gulped. She nodded her head slightly in the way she apparently loved to communicate and just said, “yes, professor it is I.”
I felt a slight sense of guilt arise in me. I had eaten her. Then I was confused. She was sitting there across from me waiting for me to order the pork dumplings. How could I have eaten her?
She caught my drift and beamed at me in the way she had when I invited her on this date. “Professor I am very grateful to you for catching me and eating me last evening because now I am free of that bodily form. I saw my trout body being put in the silver bucket by you and my spirit soared into the sky and was away for a long long time and when I came down again I was embedded in the body of this girl and walking along the terrace of the cafe above the part of the river where you were fishing. It seems a few centuries had passed in my soaring through the astral worlds, and i have no recollection of that time, but it would seem that only perhaps five minutes had passed in this realm. I sat down at a table and watched. The man came to you and presented you with the burgundy topped box. My memory flood gates were opened and I recalled the lifetime before when I lived as a trout. And then I began to recall the lifetime even before that”
“And later that afternoon I wiggled inside my soul as you ate me so deliciously. I felt it all in my girl body that I have now. At that time my girl body and my trout body were still energetically connected and I could feel every movement of your tongue over my flesh, and every digging of your teeth into my naked white meat.”
I must say she had my attention totally. I did not even remember to mitigate my randiness in her presence. I reached out to take her hand but she refused. I found this a let down after she had told me how much she had enjoyed me eating her. I focused on her story. A strange story to be sure. But strangeness does not make a thing to be untrue. And it seemed to me that the story she was telling was already known by me. Perhaps it just needed to be re-established in my mind. The sexual part of our agenda together could wait. This was a new inclination of me. I leaned into her story like I had leaned into the sunshine pouring through my office window earlier in the day.
She went on, “Before I was a trout I was a shaman. Don’t ask me if I were a female or male shaman because I could take the form of either gender according to my fancy. I was what we might call nowadays a white shaman. I tried my best to help people find the way to communion with the All. I used plants and shadows and reptiles and notions in people’s minds like you use reactants and containers and pressure machines in your lab. I was good at my art. Very very good. That is the reason why, when I became a trout – I will come back to how that metamorphosis transpired – I was the most powerful trout in the stream. I kicked a mean energy laser when I needed to. The monks sometimes collapsed on the bank when they got hit by that beam. Anyhow, I was telling you about the lifetime before that; sorry sometimes I mix things up a bit.” She paused again.
I just said “I can relate to that.”
Again she continued in her sweet but muted voice. “I was tasked by the community one year with ridding the valley of a Demon who had come to consider the whole thing as his own personal domain. He took no nonsense and no prisoners. Folk would be minding their own business, he would roar in like a whirlwind and before anyone could call the Emergency Shamanic League Number, their heads were rolling across the carpet or the glen, depending where they had been at the time. We just got sick of this. People were marching in the streets with placards, “Down with the Demon”, and “Shamans need to do their job”. So, I began to watch and wait. I got a turtle and a finch and a pile of old rubber bands. I put them all in a cage on top of a molehill. I cast a spell of loveliness around it all. And I played a blues tune on the harmonica while I sat naked on a three legged stool. I knew this would attract the demon; how did I know? I just knew; that’s what makes me shaman; I just know.”
I picked up the reference to the harmonica and the blues tune and the three legged stool. This was getting interesting. Not that it hadn’t been before.
“Sure enough in the middle of the morning the demon came pompously along. He – I know it was a he because he thrust himself forward like a rhinoceros parting a way through the middle of a patch of jungle, when there is a perfectly cleared path going around it. – he did not seem concerned. He did not at all imagine he was being lured into a trap. He only wanted that finch. The rest of the cocktail was just trimming. I knew that – I just knew. The finch had to be seen to be not just perched there waiting and the extraneous elements made that seem so. He came closer and closer to the cage. He reached out his pointy smelly little hand through the bars of the cage and was about to grab the finch when, … I let him have it. Not the finch, the full force of my power energy beam up his little .. snout….. He grimaced. You don’t often see a demon grimacing like that, even in the trade of a shaman. I felt it was working. My plan.
But then with a powerful might of demonic effort he thrust himself up and turned in the direction of the power beam. And at the origin of that beam, of course was me. So the demon suddenly became aware of me. Which broke the finch lust spell I had cast out immediately of course because he had a new more powerful object of desire, namely to eat me.”
I saw the connections again. This young lady keeps attracting beings who want to eat her. I for sure wanted that again. When she was a trout she was delicious. And big enough for a dinner and breakfast the next morning. I remembered the feeling of that trout in my mouth and the taste of the ocean she bled into me. I know she had never seen the ocean, being a river trout and all, but somehow the saltiness of the deep blue sea had permeated her flesh and I became enraptured in the saltiness of her being. I began to want that again. Here she was sitting right opposite me. Why not grab her hand and put it on my thigh? That should give her the right idea. I slid a psychic bag over the bit of my mind that was about to go in the direction of that lust, again remembering the last time I tried that, and I settled myself again. I listened to her go on. I reached into my mind to settle it again. The thought of eating her just would not go away.
“So this ruddy little demon wanted to take a bite out of me. And I could see he would not be satisfied with one bite, he would want to devour me down to the toes.”
She looked down at her toes, and smiled. She looked back up into my eyes and whispered “I know you did that to me too; but you did it in wonder and grace, the demon wanted to eat me with anger and resentment of not being a human like the people of the valley. He looked at me. I could see he was not quite sure if I were such a human or not. And I was never sure either. The shaman always lives on both sides of the line. He opened his mouth and I saw his big teeth. They could do with a scale and polish I thought, but then he was coming at me. I had no choice in the moment but to begin incanting the last resort metamorphosis spell and no preliminary consideration of what to turn him into; I just had to begin. I cast the beam of transmutation at him and called out to the beam as it left me, ‘Go to the one who is seeking the transformation from the formed energy of this moment into a…’, I almost fluffed the whole thing as it took me almost a tenth of a second to find the thing to turn him into that would bind him for as long as need be. If I had prolonged the gap any longer he would have deflected the beam of transformation back onto me and I would become something other than a shaman. But keep listening… the demon was not the kitten I had imagined him to be.”
I stared at her. This young woman might be crazy. I glanced around. I was surprised the staff had not yet come over to take our order. But then I saw there were no staff. In fact there was no restaurant. The girl and I were sitting on two logs deep in the forest and a demonic feeling was in the air. A cage was perched on a molehill next to us and in it were a finch, a turtle and what looked like a pile of old rubber bands. I turned to look at her. She caught me staring in horror at her. “Yes, she said, the demon has called you from that world where I came to your door and then went on a date with you, and his power has brought you back to this moment when I must transform the demon or else be transformed myself. He is offering you to me as a bribe to let him go free. The sneaky little thing. He knows I cannot resist a man who is brave enough to wear a yellow suit on a date with a new girl.”
I stared at her again. Not that I had stopped staring. I just went on and on. I began to think perhaps it is not the girl who is crazy. ‘But if not her, who could it be?’ I wondered out loud.
She called into my mind soundlessly, you are not crazy Stuart Granman. You are in the Bardo again.
And then she was speaking in an audible voice, “A quarter of a second has now passed in this realm and I have no more time to waste before I decide what I will turn the demon into. It is possible his own beam is already coming at me, and if those beams meet in the middle we each will be turned into what the other intends us to be. I am sure you realise I don’t want to turn into what is in the mind of the demon. I only ask, if you do feel the beams about to colide that you immediately remember your power of instilling a refactoring beam into situations like this and soften the intent of the demon so I turn into something a little bit reasonable.”
I grimaced. I had no idea what she was talking about. I have a power? A refactoring power?
She was going on almost in panic now, “Yes, I can feel it, I have a millionth of a second in beam time to come up with what will hold the demon for a long period of time”.
I was quite a bit worried by now. My mother had said she would not be able to help me in this Bardo caper, so no point calling out for her. I looked around. No other being anywhere. Above only sky. I began to form an image to go out with my refactoring of intent beam and in the moment that suddenly happened the girl called out to the demon, “You are an old wooden box with a velvet burgundy top and you contain a set of symbols that hold you inside yourself until those symbols cannot be resolved by the one who comes along to intend the solving. He must intend for longer than a month before there is a possibility of resolution either way, and if in that month he can just forget this whole mystery you will return to demon land and we will never see you again but you will be able to demonise a whole lot of other people, and if he – the one who comes along to work out the mystery of the symbols – succeeds you are in the box forever and if he fails after that first month of grace you are free to inhabit human world as a demon forever and can eat us both, and slowly slowly devour all the others as well”
Phew I thought. How did she fit that into a millionth of a second. Must be part of the shaman training.
But almost immediately I heard a raspy evil voice call out, “Demon Wife. You are demon wife.” And I could feel the beams of intention about to collide and I knew in that moment it was all up to me. And God knows I did not want this pretty girl to become a demon wife. I wanted her for myself.
“Trout”, I called out, with the first thing that popped into my mind, “she is a trout!”.
And there, and then, for a brief moment I saw the demon transmute into the pirates chest box that my mother was going to gift to me and I could not for the life of me work out if that gifting would occur in the future or had in the past or is happening right now.
And then I saw a huge trout swimming away upstream in a wide river that just happened to be suddenly flowing between the two logs.
In her last remnants of almost human voice she – the girl who had been a shaman but was now a trout – was calling out, “Eat me Stu, eat me.”
I cried out in anguish but she was suddenly gone and here I was sitting by the river and my uncle was coming towards me with the velvet covered box in his arms and he was grinning like a demon himself and in a bucket next to me was a still squirming trout, and as I took the box from my uncle I heard the sound of a clearing throat and here I am suddenly back in the Dumpling Palace and the waitress is repeating “Pork or Prawn” and the girl is nowhere to be seen. [And is this now or did it happen before?]
The waitress looks a little concerned when I don’t answer. She just says, “Pork it is sir, I saw your friend as she headed for the ladies and I could tell she would succumb to you better on pork than on prawn.”
She winked at me and I was as embarrassed as when my mother had mentioned the wolves in her past. Why was I so transparent. Did everyone know my intention with this girl? I looked around. I am sure in that moment two dozen heads suddenly looked down into their dumpling bowls. And Marian is ambling back from the ladies.
I must say this Bardo thing is not just a cup of tea. But it does seem to be something I cannot avoid. Did my mother get me into this? What can I depend on any longer? It seems things just continuously morph into other things. People too. And trout.
[And past becomes present and vice versa and for all I know all this did not happen yet]
Marian sat down again opposite me. [Or am I there with her in the dumpling palace right now?] She seem[s] totally unfazed by the digression into a parallel dimension – is that what it was? – and I have to wonder if perhaps to her all of this evening is just a normal man woman date thing. I decide to check that out.
“Marian”, I blurt out, and don’t even wait for her to say “Yes?”, “Is this a normal man woman date thing we are on this evening?” I cringe. Did I really say that? It sounded a perfectly reasonable thing to ask when it was still in my mind but now it hovered above the table between us – so to speak – it seemed like crazy talk. I peer into her eyes again. Yes, still naked in there.
She replies carefully. “Professor. Again, I insist, it is best to stay on track. Don’t look right, don’t look left, just keep on track.”
“Ah”, is all i could reply. I had a slight sense of having heard those words – or a close approximation of them before. Where? When? In this lifetime or another? I shuddered. I could see I was beginning to take this transition between lifetimes and as gospel. I had to laugh at my analogy. My uncle had taught me enough of the gospel for me to see the paradox here. I felt a slight unease as I thought of my uncle. What role was he playing in all this?
I must have looked a bit pre-occupied because Marian was kind of pulling on my hand. I came back with a start. Did she want sex already? Again I cringed. Myrtle was right. Men only want that next bit of trout. But Marian took her hand away when she could see she had me back in the room again. I tried to smile at her. She mumbled something and I asked her to repeat what she said, “Forget the box, professor; just dump it.”
I remembered she had told me this before and it certainly fitted into her story about the demon and the conditions applying to him being turned into a box. I began to wonder. Why did she put that long stream of conditions – almost a legal contract – onto a simple transformation of form intent. I reached over and as non-sexually as I could put my hand on hers. She pulled her hand away and again I got the sense that she was ready for me but not quite willing to admit it. I took the plunge. I was about to suggest we go home now to my place when,
a. I remembered the dumplings had not arrived yet, and
b. I was about to ask her about the conditions of her transformation intent spell.
“Marian”, I said, giving up on the holding her hand bit for now, “you know you put a whole lot of conditions and terms on your turning the demon into a box. It was quite complicated. Why didn’t you just call out. ‘You are a box. And you are a box forever.’. Why all the curly words?”
She smiled. One of her rare smiles. She has good teeth. “well, professor, that is because if it were so simple, just “i turn you into a box’ the demon would be immediately entitled to call back “No!” and that would be that. The spell would be rendered impotent. But when I wrap it in all those terms and what ifs, the demon gets confused… just for a split second, but you understand it all happens in those very short time blips — the demon gets confused and calls out “No! What?” and I hit him right back with “Which bit of the contract are you negating and which bits are you accepting, that is not perfectly clear in your no.” Then the demon has little choice but to turn into a box. That’s just the way these things work. I know you have only a shimmering of understanding about this. But I know it all. She looked pleased with herself and this made me hot again. I cannot resist a girl who seems pleased with herself.
I was relieved that the waitress turned up then with a bowl of steaming pork dumplings, a saucer of soy sauce, a saucer of vinegar and a saucer of chopped chilli. Ah, something that makes sense at last, I thought. But perhaps actually I said it rather than thought it because the girl with the long hair sitting opposite replied “Indeed, and lets keep it like that”.
We ate the dumplings in silence. I noticed she did not touch the chilli and I ate it all.
The Bardo seemed to behave itself. We ate those dumplings like it was the most normal thing in the world.
Until suddenly, the lights went out. I felt a cold wind under the table and a man’s voice said “Giddyup you old mule”
I was whisked away in the cold wind – a bit like Dorothy in the wizard of oz – and I found myself in the body of a mule and I was being beaten by what looked like nettles attached to the end of a stick. I was being goaded up a steep mountain path. Eagles hovered overhead and my master, for assuredly that was who he was, just kept hitting me on my rump and telling me to giddy up. I felt quite a disconnect. Somehow the rest of the Bardo had fitted one thing into another in some sort of sequence – a strange sequence for sure, but somehow all interconnected – and now there was nothing but me as a mule and a painful journey up a hill. No trout.
Just as suddenly I re-established my essence in the restaurant and it was if that lifetime as a mule had never happened. The girl seemed to be able to read my mind for she said plaintively, “Finally you are catching on, professor, .. just keep going straight ahead.”
At that moment my mother came along. This surprised me immensely as I had been at her funeral only a few weeks before.
i don’t mean I felt her energy arrive. Her body arrived. She walked up to the table and reached out her hand to Marian and said “Hello, I am Stu’s mother. I am glad you found him. Take care of him and don’t believe any of the weird stories he tells you.”
Marian politely replied, “Pleased to meet you Mrs, um… Professor.”. My mother laughed. She did not offer her surname though. She glared at me. “Keep your hands off her for awhile. Promise me that.”. Marian was checking her phone and did not seem to hear. I replied “Marma. You know me. My hands are as trustworthy as the rest of me.” Again my mother laughed. Don’t you pull your professor enigmas on me young man, just slow down your urges, OK?”
We’d had this conversation before. When I was a teenager I was well known for always being in the company of a girl. Not the one girl. Quite a few. My mother had said even way back then “Give it a slow pace, Stu, lad, girls who are thrust into it disappear as quickly as they arrive. If you lead into it gracefully you will build up the momentum for something wonderful to happen.” My mother was a wise woman. But I am a poor listener perhaps. I still feel a need to get the iron in while its hot. But it seems my mother has not given up on me; here she is – back from the dead? – trying to help me along with this girl. My mother seems undecided whether to pull up a chair from the next table and sit with us, or be on her way. Marian turns to her, and asks, “Mrs Professor why does your son seem to believe everything I tell him?” My mother leans over and whispers something in the girl’s ear. I can’t catch it. The girl giggles and blushes and my mother begins to take her leave.
She stops. She turns back towards us and says to me “Don’t forget to honour the Protectors of the Illumination Stream.”
“Be good Stu”, she calls out as she trundles away, “But if you can’t be good, be careful”
And with that she was gone. And Marian was sitting there at the table in the Dumpling Palace as beautiful as can be.
And I was overjoyed when I felt her leg under the table closing up to mine and she smiled and said “Those dumplings were good. Got any more hot ideas?”
End of Part One.
JDSaward 