Falling Falling, a short story William Henderson Holley stood and lifted her hair, it blazed black in the wind. She felt the expanse of the ocean cliffs free her, she became intoxicated with feeling, she was young, she had the courage for escape. She beckoned her friends to explore; unconsciously they followed, attracted, dependent, consumed by the spirit surrounding their friend. She had been touched by the source of something, life was in her wake, ocean depths, water parting; inside her, the key was not locked. She knew it herself, and she dared with this knowing. She was the one who dared, and she was bold, even arrogant in her movement. She was channeled by an awe for life, for the sea, the wind, the mystery, the source. The source she recognized without words in her head. She had been told once that she was Sophia: goddess, seer, hunter, finder of lost treasures; the ninth muse, the muse of wisdom. And she bled to become wise. Reality is flat with edges you can fall off. The white light must not be looked at directly, but alluded to from the myriad of colors in life’s prism. Or prison? Or is it a prison, this construction that we live? Over the years Holley had let herself become chained. The key that turned in her latched her insanity and her spirit. She had gone to the edge too many times; had camped there, paced the length of it, the white light meeting her, her mind chasing the white light until she ran out of sanity. The sanity of the prism. The prism, the off-the-shelf life, was it friend or foe? She didn’t know. It mattered less now. She had chosen a happy medium, a compromise, a capitulation. She had entered university. She was becoming an institutionalized artist, her degree would be her treaty with the prism. An allowance to explore beyond the bounds of primary colors. To think in purple and emerald-green and aqua-blue, but never white. There is no culture dressed in white, black yes, black of the uncertainly principle. Science, certainty, and reason clothed in black, black of the void. Stirred by chaos we are urged to believe that the void bears colors. Out of the void came galaxies, DNA, boutiques, and culture. And when she says it’s more natural that colors come from white light, the programmed heads shake and exhort the rhetoric of black. The green diamond water. Holley glided with the dolphins. Twelve dolphins she counted in pairs. Four below her, scarred by the sea and men. Diamond sea light, on their backs and on the sand. Quivering light in diamond patterns within emerald sea. She left the sun-blue glass surface and kicked her flippers until she was deeper. She was deep within them and they spoke to her. They did not speak as the scientists would have them in a language code decipherable. There were feelings carried through the mutable sea. Feelings known. Emerald connections. Diamond bodies flickering white light into colors of brilliant knowing. An infant dolphin, the cutest thing, ventured to her facemask. Around her body the smiling eyes swam. From this one's rapport she tried to find words. “You’re here! You are here! You are not from here, but you are here!” Where are all the dreamers? What happened to the revolution of the dreamers? The Romantics who’s dreaming flooded the desert of the material world. Floods of Friedrich’s,Turner’s and Gericault’s. Words in spirit whirlpools from Dostoyevski and Bront’e. Resurrection of the suffocating fish. The trapped Gods. The Romantics knew we were Gods and they tried to show us. Now as postmodernism boils the last drops we drink sand and love forgets us. I am here. Holly knew these were profound words. Out of them the question can be answered. Only from them can the search begin. “I” am here. The “I” in her head that imbues the body. The “I” that is more than the sum of her parts. To be conscious of being conscious of her own mind is the real freedom. A plane of awareness autonomous from functionality. An existing entity not bound by feared determinism or the machine. To think, and then to step back and be aware of herself thinking was all she needed to be free. Holly had practiced this state of mind for years. To do it she had to slow down the words in her head to a stop. Shushing thoughts. Clearing the crystal mind. White awareness in a diamond body. Seeing the reflective spectrum of the self before the secret world. The secret world that connects, touches and moves the mind into an intensity of knowing feeling. The realm of the real solid soul. The secret of the world and its source. The soul and the source are one. To reach the soul is to reach the source. This is what Holly reached. It is what drew her into the seclusion of her mind. A refugee at the edge. At first she could only notice it out of the corner of her mind. When she noticed it she froze and did not dare blink. She used all her power to hold her mind where it was, to hold her eyes on the dark patch of rain eclipsing the horizon that revealed the secret. The feeling – indescribable as a feeling – something outside getting in, something profound and simple and awesome in its gentleness. The self escaping, breathing, quickening over the ocean. The hint, the quietest hint of something beyond the horizon calling. The crystal tears, the dangerous longing, the desperate need to find out what it is… to get there! “What…who are you?” She wished to die with this feeling than to live on without it. What shall I tell you? How should I speak? Should I speak in your words that are of the limited language? The language that structures your thoughts. Thought structures that float and cannot dive to the depths you need. The beautiful words of poetry and song. How can I tell you you must give them up? That outside thoughts constructed out of language is the call of the silent thunder. Mobious thunder that turns the inside outside. Evolution has brought us out of the biogenesis mud. Your thoughts you can evolve yourselves. Mental evolution that has come out of primitive simplicity into complex language must now go forward into meta-simplicity. To use the shapes and forms that language has built in your minds, but clear of words. The shapes and forms can reach the source. The storm had risen wild in the night. It was in her eyes still, in the next morning’s tutorial. The wind had battered the trees. She fled her apartment. She drove. She drove into the darkness, away from the darkness in her eyes, into the peninsula. Tires on the dirt road growled to the blackened world. The headlights and her mind intense, a fire of life amid the miles of deserted space. Alone. Alone out here. Lonely till I get there. She had get to the edge of the wilderness. The signs said, “DO NOT ENTER”, “DANGER”; she drove. Teacher and students expounded postmodern theory. Deconstruction of anything meaningful. Amputate the writer from the words, the soul from the music. Forbid the artists their mindful heights – elitism! – squash them back into the canvass where they die with those they could otherwise have saved. Holley sat in thundering silence, seeing the earnestly of the moving mouths, but her mind was still waiting at the edge. The howling of the black trees, moon grass flattening, hair flung through the night sea as she sat amid the propriety of a university classroom. How could it just be her that has this chasm inside where a storm can rage? She was raging. She wanted to scream out: “DON’T YOU KNOW?!, DON’T YOU KNOW ANY FUCKING THING?!” The teacher noticed Holley’s silence and asked her a contributory question. She answered softly, just under her breath, as the storm died horribly within her, “Drain the water from the ocean and kill all the fish.” Love. Death. The angel’s flight. We love and we die. Love forbids death. Without love what is life? Without love death is painless. What is the origin of love? What is love? What is the source of love? What is love? It has been psychologically dissected and defined. It has been called dependence. But is need dependence? How does that song go? – “I say love, it is a flower, and you its only seed”. It is love that makes life worthwhile. Life worthwhile in spite of the pain and the torment it can hold. Only love. Only love can save us from complete despair. Love saves us from self-destruction. What is the source of love? Love defies materialism. Anyone who has felt love deep knows. After love has faded they may explain it away, but in the midst of love, in the center, in the moment, they know! Love is not the source, but it is from the source. In love we are the source. Not God. A God with laws that define us. No God. God is not an answer. The answer, if there is one, must have a point. There must be a point to it all. There must be a point in our suffering that is worthy of our suffering. We must understand this point, this reason, because it is our suffering. Now we can have the words that answer the question. The question deemed unanswerable, or outside our human comprehension, which is still no answer. Read them well: What makes life worthwhile in spite of suffering is the same as makes a universe exist that contains suffering. The pale moon and the night. Time had ceased under the opaque moon. Time ceased as past, future and present united. Her mind moved. Her soul moved. The past was on the horizon where her mind moved. Centuries drifted through her. Damp castle air, dark-chanting clouds. Winding trials and losses and the longing cries of human souls. The future at her back would repay the loss. The future would know why. This was important. The screams of the living past longed to be reconciled. The answer would come. The answer that joins the circle, and through the center the truth’s soft caress whispers to those broken, to those lost, to the tortured, to the barren lives, to the crippled and thwarted love. Through thousands of years of souls the answer whispers, and their tears are not wasted. In the future the circle is connected and the hands are joined. Shivers of knowing. The profound respect and recognition for all those who live on the continuum of longing. Holley knew the answer. The future that knows, did they learn it from her or another? Holley knew the answer, but the words had not crystallized for her to say it. The source that called to her from the dying gold at the rim of the valley was like a lonely child, eyes wide with tears it could not hide. Holley would whisper, “what?”… The source tried… “what?” It was profound and simple… “what?” It was hard to hear through the pain of humanity… “please, what is it?” The lonely sad breeze kissed her as the source sank below the hill. Entrenched scientists laugh at the naked soul. The soul retreats in infinite directions. The soul is weeping, it only wanted to give. Abandoned now it can no longer give and it is dying. Floating through disinterested meat and bone its presence still transforms matter, even though it could make even the small and mean alive beyond bounds. The soul is felled by the world and the world is falling, not knowing why. The soul disguises itself as the moon and to some there is still hope. Hope is centered on the moon by human eyes that refuse, but cannot help feel. A moon that cannot contain all that the soul is, fragments. The fragmented soul sings in wordless songs. Accepting the moonlit felt night we contradict our denial. The soul is an atrophied limb. The limb we cover with gold bracelets. The soul is dressed in icons of greed that it is forced to animate. Fair Ophelia, what did your madness drown? How the deep water pulled you and the sweet reeds did crown. Was love your loss or did love lose you? She was falling. Her mind fell. Reality was a construction of human beings. Structured out of necessity. Humankind’s toil to survive had occupied their minds since the species evolved. Minds still even now structured around survival. Now more freedom to roam, thanks to the machines; or did the machines take more of the mind? Attention to the machines! The machines have human parts. Did an agricultural primitive have more possession of the mind without the machines to attend to? Was their mind free to engage in the mysteries around them; within them? The modern mind is educated. It has more reflection. But what does it reflect upon? On text? On reference? Everything is text in the postmodern world. What if this power of reflection was taken away from text, from the machines, from history, and applied to the void? Turn it to face nothingness with a question: “is something there?” Holley had taken her mind from the machine. She had deprogrammed it through studying how it had been programmed: words, reason, materiality, quantum physics. She stared at the void with her power of reflection. The void stared back. The void was singing. She followed the music. She left the edge of reality, left the sane machine mind. She lept from the edge. She trusted what she felt and she felt a source, the source of everything. She flew. But falling seems like flying until you hit the bottom. The white light must not be looked at direct. Keep clear of the edge. There is no reality beyond human. As she fell pieces of her broke away and fell with her. She saw that she herself was a prism. She was falling in swirling crystalline pieces of emerald-green, aqua-blue and gold. She saw that some lies are truths slightly out of phase. And in the time it took her to hit the bottom she discovered something. She discovered that her fragmented self refracted the white light so that it could be seen in its entire splendor. She bled to become wise. W.H. 2002