I knew what I was seeking before I sought it. A compound; a component really. A rock more than a rock. A piece of heaven’s ore that plummeted to earth maybe a hundred thousand years ago, and holding within it, the bird and death of certain stars. Stars that were already the stuff of legends in the time of Pythagoras, and found in the lost works of Grunewald and Piero della Francesco. Works smuggled on ships and going down with the same ships. Works wrapped in oiled skins of sheep, never recovered and surely disintegrated as particles of pigment, thousands of leagues under the sea.Disembodied pigment just floating until some kind of savior raises his hand and mystically, they rearrange, reclaiming the true image of themselves. Giotto’s Saint Francis counting lost stars, or the field of shepherds on the lost panels by the Van Eyck brothers, shepherds supplicating to the sky as a massive and menacing meteor fall toward them, incinerating all in its path. It is said that remnants of such a meteor exists and the memory of all these moments are contained within its fragments. Knowledge is power, and what power it holds, lost sheep, lost art, lost shepherds, lost children, all of the lost.
Such a fragment, an insignificant though weighty object that one could hold in the palm of the hand, might lead me to the young scientist, the boy on a bobsled with not a care, until he stopped and looked at the world and saw nothing but greed and treachery and suffering and the horrors men inflict on one another, the terrible suffering of women, the desecration of rivers and all God’s creatures. He had finally snapped. He had gone awry and his father, Number 4, followed suit. Perhaps he found his son, but only by going way out, much further than any sane man had gone before.
2
One can still spill one’s thoughts without seeing. The words clear in the mind are produced erratically on the page. Perhaps they will rearrange in my sleep. I somehow misplaced my glasses and mourned them, but somehow know, that this too, is a test. They will reappear, just as the logic of random sentences written in the dark, pitch dark that is, will appear legibly at dawn.
A flat plain of invisible ink. Black as pitch, as a blackness experienced in the desert in Namibia. We were stationed in tents, white tents, and instructed not to go out alone at night. I went out late just for a breath of air, suddenly lost in a vortex of pitch. I stood frozen and looked up. In all my life never have I seen such a spectacle in the sky. The planets hung; the stars that produced no light upon the ground were like punctured wounds in the sky. As if all is brightness and the tarp of night covers everything. A tarp with a billion punctures that light pours through, illuminating the colors of the planets, and the rings of Saturn, and it was so breathtaking, so frightening that like Chicken Little I involuntarily cried out HELP.
I started thinking that this was a reverse lesson. That just as one must be prepared to navigate the complete night, one must be able to adjust to the opposite- brightness, white on white, white sky, white expanse, the same whiteness that Alfred Wegener tramped through with his guides on All Saint’s Day, in Greenland on his 60th birthday, only to expire, smiling in the snow.
I considered the bag of tricks Felix was carrying in my dream, my own bag from childhood filled with books of adventure. Pinocchio, The Shaggy Man of Oz, Nancy Drew and Freddy the Detective. But in reexamining the contents, I found entirely different things. A strange looking compass and very dark tinted goggles. I took them out and set them on the floor. Dawn was breaking and light suddenly flooded the room. The only thing absent was the rock, the fragment of the meteorite the size of a small fist. On the branches on the tree, you will find what you need. I picked up the compass and goggles and placed them in my knapsack. The tree is what you make it. It has branches composed of DNA, of blood, memory and imagination. I smiled to myself, my young self was guiding my aged self, and we were one in the same, on exactly the same mission.
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