CHAPTER 14
Friar Otto must die! The thought is less clear than is the beating of his heart—a heart which must stop...then beat again, all the time being the same while being different. It was clear to—Whom am I? He could only find comfort in his baptismal name, Frantz. It is evident that Friar Otto was a mask—a momentary memory of the Prior’s world, of Frantz’s monastic investiture where he was renamed. No! Re-masked!
It is all so clear in his heart although his head still reels. I have always been Frantz, will always be, but mine is a journey of masks. He smiles broadly and heaves a relaxing sigh as he realizes that all Gerald had given him was his next mask!
After he left the University, Frantz went up to the ancestral home, not to engage others of his family, no, he didn’t have a pressing need to meet any other von Fakkens in the flesh. Rather, he simply wanted to be imbued with its air—to float around the geographical site while moving through the astral plane. There, to deepen what the Um and Thum had endowed him with—the realization that She is everywhere.
What Frantz hears as he wanders is that the Hannover of Gerald von Frakken is not the Hannover of Hunnic lore. While it was a name on certain maps, it existed more fully as a spectral site for the gathering of higher souls, notably, those of the family whom he has come to ethereally identify as “Magi.”
Magi—who, before the wondrous story of Three Wise Men seeking the Child in the Manger became so much a nursery fairy tale—well before that time, the Magi roamed the Earth seeking. What or who they were seeking is told in many tales and many names. What was common to all, however, was the journey, the hunt, the voyage—chasing, following, being lost by some star, again, star being revealed more as a presence than as a thing, better grasped as a light, but one without a source, or at least a knowable source.
The voyage being upon an ocean, yet, not one just of water or even of land but of that which is fathomless, describing the venturing forth upon the lips of the unknown—whose terror and bliss could be made present through a slurp: sudden, oceanic swift lick sucking into soundless oblivion or in the blink of an eye crashing over the horizon and being cast forth into another dimension: a new land of strange people and creatures while being stranger as their mystical story unfolds. For the Magi tales are replete with a sense of the wild abandon of the universe, of a cosmos of and beyond the sky and stars. Stories are told of other worlds from which humans came, even some from inside the Earth, while others bursting forth from shooting stars. Ah, already Frantz is voyaging through numinous realities!
Yet, as is fitting, it is in a dream, just three days after Gerald left, that Frantz’s voyage began in time and eternity.
“Am I dead?”
“Dead to so many things. This is the only way to be alive!”
“I am dead.”
“Verily.”
“You know the world is round.”
He chokes back his reflexive, “Impossible!” More, “Stupid!”
“It is this roundness which is your new life.”
Nothing is making sense. Take me…Take me— who is there to take me?
“She was the Final Revelation. Do you understand?”
His face is frozen and blank: chiseled.
“She was Sin. As the Great Biblical Story tells it.”
Silence.
“But you rid the world of that Sin. You have issued in a new world, a new spiritual dimension.”
Incomprehensibility.
“You are Magus.”
vOYAGE: O’SIDE. When Frantz walked up the gangway, his garb tagged him as a passenger. Not as a child of wealth, but one of position: educated, more than likely, a burgher. The crew gives way, parts, steps aside with a deference he has truly never known, so now knew nothing of.
The Captain decorously crosses the deck to welcome his new “Geographer! At last, we can ship off!”
Sharp commanding sounds and fiercely slammed curses and hammered oaths soil the air as the first jerk of the sea came: swallowing him, drowning him, washing him away from wherever he had been just moments ago. Now to push, thrust—propel, impel, compel him out onto the boundless bowl of tears.
“Terra incognita,” the Geographer says to his fast beating heart—“Be brave, my heart. Be bold!” As he steadies himself Gerald’s words, his statement of a fact that had only been rumor to Frantz, now gives him the strength to not jump overboard and swim back to shore— “The earth is round!”
Looking back. Not at a spot. Not at something exact or specific. Just at some point off the upper deck, not even curious about all the things so strange and alien. No, just staring at what is writ large in the clouds—Friar Otto Mother Dolor…watching these words as the names and the body-mind-heart-soul attached to each dies—dissipates, dissolves as the sun hisses and boils and spits and gurgles as the moon rises.