CHAPTER 40
AxZ was as glad to exit the Conundrum as she was to enter it. It drained a lot of her red glow, but she gained so much—more than her locale of Seekers could know, or if even knew, could care, for to care was so human. Ah! human…she surrenders Memory to replenish herself within The Well.
The Well. How she pleasured in the image, now, with her human aspect forever within her, having a knowledge of it, not just the image, not just being—wondering how it was that she had ever been without knowledge but just being? Laughing—which was the way of knowing this knowing way (Ah! The Conundrum’s conundrum! amuses her)…laughing as she loosens that side of the flesh which is boundary and slips into the fuller flesh, the robust body, which is eternality...feeling herself in The Well—sensing herself now as imagined by Others—Others who are her and not her...she as Darlm, now as he as Frak and so many of the stories she/he have ventured into—existence as rock, implacable, immovable, as she/he had been on Ferzo Aduba, in a stupor which was so pre-human and non-temporal that there was no identity, no expectation, no anticipation, like a Black Hole—collapsing, an innerness which was the coming into of everything, and as such being nothing...not he, not she, not even it—nihil.
In The Well there is bottomlessness and so a wellness—the exposure of every aspect of one’s presence, of every possible imagining of one’s presence, as such, ultimate creativity as one becomes nothing: creatio ex nihilo—exhaled, inhaled.
Imagining AxZ was, itself, the play of the unimaginable. For within The Well there was no Well. Of such an experience, discourse was empty. It was a mode of presence, which presence was, itself, unimaginable and so, in sum, all that could be imagined.
When enfleshed as Frank, then AxZ had mused upon such contradictions of thought, of such limitations to consciousness. How to be conscious of the collective unconscious? Truly, only laughing made the connection.
Laughing. How humans imagined. Created. Were created. Frank, Professor Frakes: “What are the Biblical Stories but straight-man lines?” AxZ appreciated that insight—its laughter stayed with him/her through many dimensional metamorphoses. In fact, it keyed several—ones which Frank, himself, jokingly approached only when tripping on acid: “psychic voyaging” Isn’t that what he called it?
“Imagining. It’s a laugh-er.” Dalores said that.
Dalores: “Marrying’s a trip, got it?”
“You marry. You have kids. You die. Isn’t that more of a plan? A map?”
“It’s a way some folks imagine. The Collective Conscious, to steal one of your favorites!”
“But The Corn—where did that get you all?”
Lonny: “An imagining which became a practice. We practiced being a different kind of fire. Maybe not just one kind, many kinds”
Janet: “Yeah. Kiln fire. Also hearth fire. Blacksmith fire. Gotcha.”
“But not my kind of fire, eh?!”
“Jesus, Frank, what an asshole!”
WxZ: “Truth? They didn’t escape? There is no escape?”
“Okay. Let me be the asshole. But where’s your cock?”
AxZ: “That’s what they had to imagine. Their cocks.”
SxZ: “But that’s all they had...cocks, right? Look at Friar Otto, all he found in Mother Dolor was his own cock, right? So didn’t they have to imagine their cunts? Not cocks? The Goddess, for they had the Father God, no?!”
Lonny: “Ejaculation. Have you given that much thought?”
Frank smells a trick question, here.
“Ha,” Dalores, “don’t corner him like that! Tell him your thoughts.”
“Okay. Each of us wants you. Each of us wants your hot cock. We sit here with our juicy pussies all slobbering to suck your hard cock and rocket your jack. But you can’t fuck all three, just one at a time. Why?”
SxZ: “The Zernilians don’t have this dialectical orgasmic split, why do the humans?”
AxZ: “SxZ, it’s time for you.”
With a sniff, SxZ becomes the answer...sniffing the reddening powder—the wafting scent of attar of roses—“Otto of Roses” Who knew this?
SxZ presents Friar Otto.
Friar Otto bends down on one knee beside her burial plot. There is still some sense of incompletion which nags at him. It is as if Mother Dolor is not yet fully dead. “How can this be?” flits through his mind, but it is a mind numbing itself so as not to form thoughts, rather to simply surrender himself to the being of the moment.
“Dark Night of the Soul”—so he has read, so he has judged his life up to this time. A travail. A passage. Vale of Tears. “The Lord is my Shepherd…”
“You gave me your all,” she says solicitously.
“I…I believe that.”
“You laid down your life for me.”
The friar shakes his head, unable to let the statement settle—he fears its truth.
“You gave me everything you had. All your hatred.”
“Forgive me!” wearied...near-sob.
“Forgive me! For what I have not, cannot give you!” Mother Dolor.
TxZ: “Did she know? What she had given him?”
SxZ: “Does it matter? He became Frantz. That’s what matters.”
Frantz—who upon waking from the hallucinating dreams the desert weeds induced—he, began to laugh. Standing up and surveying the desert all around him. Great ocean to his back. A hungering, murdering, freeing, unimaginable depth of wetness...yet taking him here to dryness: bone-dry. So many dead. How else would they phrase it but as the work of the Devil? The crew dying of thirst right here by the bottomless ocean. Frantz sniggles.
AxZ: “Did Frantz escape?”
There is murmur among them; throughout.
RxZ: “Everyone affirms.”
TxZ imagines Frantz—having slipped into flesh, as AxZ perceived, TxZ was eager for flesh...for Memory, for Story, for Time...a Beginning and an End.
Replenish! It is heard. It draws his eyes hither. It becomes who he is. Frantz sets off, leading the twelve, following the dream people...those who had come down from the mountains, up from the earth—Where?—silent people: cinnamon, speaking not, but simply knowing that he was to follow them.
Eastward, inland, high up into the highest of snow-peaked mountains, having trekked for several moons, they come to rest in a valley. Rest and wait. Halted: stopped, shut-down, confronted by the presence of a sorrow so great, so profound that they could not, did not move—a Lake of Salt...“Lot’s Tears!”
Waiting, as it was the time of the Grand Story of Tears. For the fulfillment—knowing it only as a fulfillment, and it comes—they drink the salt water: sacramental...scoring their throats with a Thirst as devilish as that at ocean’s edge...so they dream in deep sleep, trek high up to the highest mountain-top dreaming...with the twelve, and open to them is the vision of the Final Days—days of new beginnings, of escapes, of voyages across many oceans, dreamers of new dreams, dreamers of old dreams, dreamers without dreams, lay anchor, disembark in the East as the sun rises and raise up great cities, cut wagon rutted roads through the thick forests, set sail upon the flowing prairie grass with great schooners…like a simpering flame on a desperate wick within the darkest of moonless nights, so is all seen—Brightness and Shadow seen...escape into a New World, deliverance into a Promised Land...swelling sails into the American Dream...conflagration and fire and maelstrom—tornado of hatred and hope...hating the Devil: Red Devil—the slaughter of the Lost Tribe’s dream, holocaust (not knowing this tribe as their own: Adam’s scion)...then there appears he for whom King Benjamin has waited with such heartfelt anxiety... the Visitation—the presence of Moroni—the Latter Day Revelation…Frantz is there...Otto is there...Frak is there...all wait...for this is the Replenishing begun, so he knows, the Restoration, yet as it joins with them atop the mountain, as the voyages Eastward and Westward merge, so is all not yet Replenished, not yet Restored...for standing at the Lake’s
edge is Lot’s Wife.
Ah! this is an imagining which has been imagined before but a message, an interpretation once again denied, obscured, abandoned—here, only Frantz metamorphosing into Darlm...into Dagmar...into Dalores…he the first in a long line, not behind but forward...finding in the Replenishing the replenishment of his own no longer abandoned imagining...tremendous! magnificent!
SxZ: “This is supposed to make us want to imagine? To imagine flesh?”
TxZ: “I can’t begin to convey…”
SxZ: “Stop! You want me to imagine with you, right?”
There is a glowing cerulean sourcing out from TxZ.
SxZ opens to this: metamorphs.
“For this is My body…” Frantz accepts that of Friar Otto within himself. But it is Mother Dolor/Dagmar he metamorphs into, within.
Replenishing. That he has lost her so he knows, even as he dreams, sets himself down on the valley’s floor and exposes his mind for whomever or whatever will come and enter it, split it open, eat it…deep sleeping—watching Joseph Smith as he observes the imagining of the Golden Plates...a story merging with so many other stories of a time that is historic, mythic, astral of sundering...observing the psychic barriers cracking—spiritual identities shifting, darknesses demonic and angelic drifting outward and throughout…not just America but all on Earth...archaeology cracking past dreams...wars cracking isolated cultures, like eggs being cracked at a sprawling end-of-summer-camp breakfast cookout…so is the whole human race cracking.
Red Fox: “My people never limited sex to the body. It was a tribal thing. Men and women paired off for having babies, but what we now call Eros, eroticism, it simply pervaded everything. The earth was mother. The sky father. The corn magical. Birth and rebirth was all that there was. Dying was an embrace with the Ancient Ones. There was an afterlife...a happy hunting ground as it is comically phrased—but the scent of a fresh Trail…a soul’s journey—the voyaging of the People.”
“Are you sure?”
Hesitant: “Even if it wasn’t exactly like that, that’s how it is now—through me.”
Red Fox had been the first one to imagine Replenishment. “We need to eroticize each moment. We live in such a void—a word so abstract! It chills me...we need to reimagine the plenum, the fullness. We need to fuck just like those old monks Frank talks about so much! who prayed all the time.”
“Divine Office.”
“Yeah, Divine Orifice—get it!”
As Dagmar waits, high up in the Wasatch, waited endless moons, so eternity came—twelve sisters for the twelve brothers, each and all living in common. Embracing. Replenishing what was unimagined—the lost humor of Genesis. Laughing, they couple and bring forth the Family—Holy. Endless flesh. Imagining flesh upon every aspect of the earth, upon every aspect of every planet, upon every aspect of every imagining.
Family: Holy. SxZ: “Amazing! Astounding! Ungraspable! …How, how can I convey this to those who have not known flesh?” and s/he eyes AxZ and TxZ...an eyeing which is the laughing, which is the imagining.
“Frank, you’re just going to have to practice more!” Lonny guffaws.
“Yeah,” sniggling: Janet, “what more could a man desire? To die and go to penis heaven!” A round of laughter. Frank isn’t laughing...little boy with pants down caught playing with his weenie!
Metamorphosing. Dagmar realized it as something which had always been there. That Frantz had always been there. That Otto and Dolor had always been there, together—but not realizing it.
“For this is My body…” Amazing! Once imagined so does Dagmar/Frantz imagine robustly. Incarnating. For some, a coming and a re-coming: re-incarnating. Others: a moving on, to other spaces, to other times—into dimensions, species…into The Well...into the Conundrum. “What is, is Our body”—metamorphosing.
Frank: “I will faithfully pursue being as much of a dick as I can for each and every one of you at every moment you so desire until I become a total cunt!”
Frank laughs—his laughing consumes him: “Where did they go?”
SxZ: “Escape. The character Bertha. It’s what happened to her. Escaped from just imagining one’s self. A singularity. Right?”
Bertha: “Everyone is married to everyone else. No one is married to anyone else. When this is imagined, two or three or how many—who cares?—can be married. It’s really a matter of convenience. Who does the dishes. Takes out the garbage. Cooks tonight’s dinner. That’s the conundrum, not the marrying!”
Dagmar: “I’ve just one final thing. Sorrow. Biblical males, patriarchs, only imagine the female as sorrow. Mother of Sorrows. Stabat mater dolorosa. But it’s also the Shade Mother, her singularity: Mary, Mother of God! Suffocating her child, herself in sorrow. Pieta...Rabbis feeling sorry that women were not born males. Catholic priests feeling sorry that women can’t truly hang: Christ-like. Mormons being father gods but not mother goddesses. Just remember—and reimagine—this is a way of female imagining as well as male. Both need to be replenished.
Once you imagine that, then men can have babies.
“Do you understand, Jant?”