B.W. POWE

Where Seas
and
Fables Meet

Parables, Aphorisms,
Fragments, Thought

GUERNICA

TORONTO – BUFFALO – LANCASTER (U.K.) 2015

Living in Beginnings

1.

Here, parables and stories emerging from dreams... Aphorisms against numbing and fear...

Reflections and sampling in ecstatic moments, witticisms to give solace and smiles...

This, a book that gives permission to wandering...

2.

Your mind opens windows...

The noise and joys of life burst through.

3.

Living in beginnings, crossing over the energy threshold...

4.

There’s this for me now – these pieces and half-glimpsed tales have to come in their way. I won’t impose a unity on them. They must be like a live streaming so you and I can move freely together.

5.

The difference between the free and the powerful: the former rebels against orders, the latter gives them. The former follows inner directives, the latter wants others to subordinate themselves to directives. I’m striving to be like the former. It isn’t easy. But I think I’m getting there.

6.

You can walk a fine line between being troubled and being a troublemaker. (There’s a fine line between being difficult and being impossible, too.)

7.

The conflict: I try to fight the good fight, but I’m just not that good at it. Thought: maybe I’m not supposed to be good at it. It’s the intention that counts.

8.

“I may be on the side of the angels, but don’t think for one second that I am one of them.” – Sherlock Holmes to Moriarty in “The Reichenbach Fall” (BBC TV, 2012)

9.

I’m branching off already to begin somewhere else...

(Openings are subject to influence.)

I have no conclusions, only beginnings...

10.

You and I: working on liberations and the many dimensions of our realities. Hence lots of gaps, sudden evolutions. Take my hand. Here we go.

The War

There’d been good weather for the war. It had gone on for longer than most people knew. After a battle that took place on a beautiful bright day, two friends found themselves in a tent. They’d taken opposing sides in the conflict. Now, one was a prisoner, one was the victor. The winner had become the interrogator.

“What am I going to do with you?” the victor asked. He smiled at his friend. They’d known each other since they were children. But his smile was tight and regretful.

“You can say hello to me in the way you once did,” his friend said.

They shook hands, and they embraced.

Then they returned to the business at hand.

“If I release you, will you promise never to fight for your side again?” the victor asked.

“I can’t make that promise. I’ve already made a promise to myself. It’s to always fight your side I promised to carry this fight forward.”

“You made a promise to something higher than yourself,” the victor said.

The prisoner nodded sadly. He said: “I have to honour my promise. I have to fight you.”

“If you honour the fight, I’ll have to execute you.”

“I know,” his prisoner said.

“I can’t do that. You’re my friend.”

“I know.”

The victor thought for a time. Then he said: “What if I ask you to turn a weapon on yourself and die of your own hand?”

“Suicide goes against my beliefs,” he said.

“It isn’t against mine,” the victor said. “But I understand.” After he thought for a time, he said: “I want to set you free, but I can’t.”

“I know.”

“What should I do?”

A third man entered. He was one of the army’s most ruthless and courageous warriors. He’d been called a hero many times by his admiring troops.

“We have an impasse here,” the victor said. He was the warrior’s superior, but often feared his power. “This is my old friend. I’ve offered to let him go if he agrees to never fight us again. He’s refused. I can’t execute him. And he won’t die of his own hand. What should we do?”

The hero said: “He isn’t my friend. He’s my enemy. And I have no vows to keep except to win the war.”

After he spoke, the hero drew out his pistol and stepped towards the prisoner. He levelled the barrel at the man’s head. And he pulled the trigger.

The victor and the hero left the tent. They were splattered with the blood of their enemy. One left the tent with his implacability intact, the other left carrying the stains of blood and sorrow.

The next battle took place on a beautiful bright day, too. The war continued for many years, always with good weather, on a plane of light.

Openings

1.

It takes a lot of clear thinking to come up with something truly obscure.

2.

Find out what remains unrevealed in the silence.

3.

A key has to prove its worth by how many doors it unlocks.

4.

Here’s a new mythic incident:

at the crest of the road...

when the bell tolls...

in the moment’s heat...

in the confusions and rumours of distant forms and shapes...

You meet the Sphinx. The great beast rears in confrontation.

But the sphinx doesn’t know what it is.

It’s a riddle, even to itself. It can’t speak. The Sphinx waits for your questions.

5.

To keep going along the razor’s edge, without letting it cut you.

6.

Clinging to strands which keep fraying.

7.

Dangling over the open which can look like a gulf.

8.

The edges where you walk, with the oceanic rushing and wooing from every side...

And you: defenceless.

You: receptive.

9.

If you’re in the open, then you can’t predict the next move.

10.

Why pieces, cataracts, interruptions, shards of crystal? So that you may find the forms of the open.

11.

Pieces are like seeds. They allow a flowering in you, and in others. The humility of flowering: it may, and can, happen anywhere.

12.

If you have good will, and trust yourself, you will learn to see through walls.

13.

In the end, will it have been better to have been made of sound and words, of water and light, than of stone or steel?

14.

If you go into the open, take nothing with you other than your voice, and your ability to listen and see, touch, taste, and smell.

15.

Your tears are there to melt society’s stones.

16.

When tackling demons – negative energies – make your weapons out of light. This is the bearable lightness of being. If all else fails, then just shout: “Get out!”

17.

“The dreamer of the flame knows that the flame is alive.” – Gaston Bachelard

Behind the Picture

After his mother died, Sam took to gazing for hours at her picture. It was a small photograph that he’d pinned on the wall in his bedroom to remember her by.

He stared and stared at it.

One night he went up to the photograph and touched it delicately. He turned the picture over. And he spent a long time gazing behind it.

His father, Fredric, watched his son do this, and he wondered what he was doing. Then Fredric watched over many nights, how his only child – his beloved young son – would go up to his mother’s picture and turn it over. The boy gazed and gazed. Sam didn’t seem sad or lonely at all. It was his father who felt in his mourning a terrible sadness and loneliness.

Finally, one night, he asked his son: “What are you doing?” “It’s where mommy has gone,” Sam said. “When she went away for good, that’s where she went. It’s where we all go, I think. Behind the picture.”

His father smiled. Sam’s innocence, he thought.

That night, while Sam slept peacefully, he sat in the bedroom’s chair and stared at the photograph. Teresa smiled radiantly in it. She was there in all her beauty, in the promise of her youth. He stared at it until his eyes ached.

He murmured her name.

Sleepless, around midnight – it was the time, according to Sam’s small bedside clock, he rose from his chair and edged towards the picture.

He reached out to it and turned it over.

He looked at the blank space of the wall. He saw nothing but emptiness.

“This is where you’ve gone,” he whispered.

Destinations

1.

You want to jumpstart vision. You want to take the nerve- edge of solitude, the keen point of loneliness, and make it so sharp that it cuts away the veils, and leads you on into the greater teeming world-soul. Only by mutation, a break, can you hope to swerve out from under the traps you’ve made for yourself.

2.

You want to look back on loneliness like a voyager gazing over your shoulder at the departure point from the sea that has now become your destination. It’s important to get lost in the wilds once in awhile.

3.

Murmur this, to yourself and your friends: don’t confuse us with the facts. The light is on, experience is shimmered with light, all things are: candour is more important than facts.

The Clearing

He’d spent so long deep in the forest that, when he at last came to the clearing, he didn’t recognize it. He stood for an hour in that place.

Days went by. He ate berries and drank water from a stream. He slept under leaves. Eventually he stayed so long in the clearing that he saw it begin to be over-run by bushes and grass and weeds and leafy trees.

Over time it began to resemble the forest.

He thought he recognized it now: it was the familiar woods. He set off again in search of a clearing.

Memoranda

1.

To the Jungians: I’m not an archetype. All my dreams are on the surface.

2.

To the Freudians: I’m more than my drives.

3.

To the agnostics: I’m too sceptical to be an atheist.

4.

To the theosophists: I may not be the reincarnation of anyone.

5.

To the Manicheans: I’m not a person of an either/or.

6.

To conspiracy buffs (a): sometimes a coffee at Starbuck’s is just a coffee.

To conspiracy buffs (b): we can have coffee here today (Friday); no one is following us. Conspiratorial gatherings take place only on Tuesdays.

7.

To the modern Narcissus: beware of falling too much in love with this current version of yourself, because you will surely change.

8.

To the literalists: the book and the printed word are artefacts – part of our communications’ spectrum.

9.

To theologians: the spiritual imagination, like the poetic imagination, must submit to natural law.

To scientists: natural law has a limit, and that is the infinite imagination.

10.

To ourselves: the law of complementarity – the law in quantum mechanics that states there’s a yin and yang in all processes – implies we must stake our journeys between the twin poles of the imagination and natural law. The breach between imagination and natural law is false: each depends on the other and is the other’s boundary.

11.

“The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality.” – Samuel Johnson

The use of the imagination is to deregulate reality by mental travelling.

12.

To the yogis: if I only focused on the here and now, then I’d have nothing to look forward to.

13.

To the aesthete: he accessed splendour through the beauty of his sentences. Every day he strove to make a beautiful sentence. Just one would do. He guessed that, when he succeeded in making a beautiful sentence, he’d added something new to the world.

14.

To mystics:

Grace

Once there was a girl who liked to sit outside her home talking to the air.

This took place in the south of France in 1885. Her name was Grace. She lived in a small town with her family, and she loved to sit on the front porch of her home in good weather and smile and talk to the air and say: “All is well.” People passed by and asked her: “Who are you talking to?” Grace smiled and replied: “Mary. All is well.”

Her parents loved her deeply. At first they smiled at what seemed like a harmless eccentricity. But when it became obvious that their daughter wasn’t doing much but talk to the air they became concerned. She was their only child. Their concern was restrained by the fact that she helped around the house, cooking and cleaning, tidying up, washing clothes, preparing meals. She did this with a smile and the words: “All is well.” They had to admit that her conversation was limited. But they loved her presence. They smiled when she helped them. But when she wasn’t helping she sat on her wooden chair on the porch, or on a chair just inside the front door by the front room window when the weather was bad, and talked to what seemed like nothing.

Grace seemed happy when she talked to the air. She returned to her work around the house with a smile. Her parents began to wonder if she was an idiot. Problems like this didn’t run in their family, but her behaviour could have been the start of a fault-line. Their concern turned to fear. What if she was crazy?

One day her worried parents took Grace to their parish priest. The town had a fine old church. It had many statues of saints. The dominant one among many was one of Mary. She looked on people with her compassionate glance. At her feet people left flowers and gifts in baskets.

When Grace saw the statue, she said: “Ah.” And she smiled. It was a form of recognition. And the girl whispered a prayer. Her mother and father told the priest about their daughter’s behaviour. He was an old man, thought by many in the town to be wise, but whose primary qualities were patience and kindliness. He was gentle with the girl. He sat her down in the rectory office and asked her questions.

“Who do you speak to when you’re sitting on your porch?” he asked.

“Mary.”

“Does she look like our statue?”

“Yes. Only more so. She’s all in white. And she shines.” “Does she have a scent?”

“A what?”

“A smell.”

“Yes. Of flowers. I don’t know what kind. She smells very sweet.”

“What does she say?”

“She tells me of the world and its pain. She tells me about people. And she talks about God and about the saints. Sometimes she mentions angels. She says: ‘All is well... all will be well... all things will be well... all is well...’” “Does she tell you to go against your family?”

“Never.”

“Does she ever tell you to preach against the church?”

“Never.”

“Does she tell you to break the law?”

“Never.”

“Does she tell you to do anything you desire?”

“Never.”

“Does she tell you to make the weak and the poor of heart serve the strong?”

“Never.”

“Does she tell you to be afraid?”

“She tells me to be brave.”

The old priest nodded. He patted her head affectionately and told her to return to her home. Spontaneously he asked for a blessing. She blessed him and asked him for his blessing, too. This he did. Afterwards he felt very happy. The priest talked to her parents. He said: “All is well. She talks to Mary. There’s nothing to worry about.”

And he smiled.

“Please bring her to church more often,” he said.

Now her parents were even more alarmed.

Their daughter must be delusional – deeply sick. And the old priest couldn’t help them. (At least he could have performed an exorcism, or something suitably dramatic, to return Grace to a semblance of normalcy.) Maybe the priest was too old. Had he gone soft in the brain? They had to find medical help.

So they went to the psychiatrist who had begun to practice at the hospital. He was a representative of a new and growing field: the science of the mind. A young man, brilliant and dedicated, he expressed his concern for the girl. He offered to meet her and to observe her.

CONTENTS

Living in Beginnings

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

The War

Openings

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

Behind the Picture

Destinations

1.

2.

3.

The Clearing

Memoranda

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

Grace