Mind over Mantra

Mind over Mantra

 Certain art and literature keeps surfacing. Something clearly wants my attention. So I do some thinking and some writing.

The Goya etching; El sueno de la razon produce monstruos - (The sleep of reason produces monsters) first came to my attention when teaching Gothic Literature more than a decade ago. In it, a man of his time, of the scientifically minded and cerebral Age of Enlightenment, sleeps in his study. A dark host of ghoulish creatures, bats, owls - a watchful lynx - swarm about him, a metaphor said to sum up the attitude of many Gothic writers. Behind scientific endeavour lies the shadowy reaches that the inquiring light has not managed to quantify, categorise and explain. Who knows what manner or wonderous, magical and powerful aspects of life lie outside of our comprehension?  Reason has its limits- the wild, the archaic, primitive and mysterious remain forever fascinating and forever ready to trip and test the confidence of humankind to measure and chart her world. I remember reading too, of what the drawing had to say of the futility, nay, the danger of repressing unconscious psychic forces. The more you push Jack back into his box, the greater and more forceful will his eventual eruption into the sphere of consciousness be- perhaps with threatening and dangerous consequences - as macabre demons of the depths circle in merry havoc, turning the clear mind black with beating wings. 

For some reason, the etching has sprung back into my mind, although I had not thought of it for years. I studied it with fresh, cynical eyes. Clearly, the drawing suggests that all kinds of superstitious, nightmarish and threatening thoughts possess us when our ability to reason fails. Surely it suggests the folly of superstition which exists outside of the world of logic and knowledge. Historians have shown that outbreaks of social unrest- witch hunting, riots -the outbreak of mob violence that has swept the country this summer - often correlate with cataclysmic environmental disasters - droughts, famines, wars, economic hardship. Superstitious fear erupts when the foolish are threatened. Thus, the supremacy of reason is not called into question, rather the artwork illustrates the chaos that ensues when reason is superseded by a base instinct such as terror.  However, Goya included the following caption to his work; “Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and source of their wonders”.

Click. Bullseye. Eureka! 

Imagination, instinctual drives, the subconscious is not positioned in a direct dichotomy to reason, and therefore to be subordinate and distrusted. Rather, the two aspects of our intelligence united is the source of artistic inspiration, insight and personal actualisation. 

For days, in my dreams, my analysis of visionary ayahuasca journeys, song lyrics, daily events, the sudden re-emergence of memories, artworks, a message has been repetitively chanted. Embrace this inner work, the subconscious has much to teach you! I believe I have been suspicious of inner or visionary knowledge for a life-time, preferring a more materialistic, linguistic and aboveground  perspective; the midday sun shining boldly on the flat, firm ground. But the patterning, the chiming together of ideas, creating resonant, rich sounds and meaningful associations has been so constant and convincing in the last days I am no longer prepared to ignore it. This experience feels mystical. My mind feels alive. I follow the flicker of subconscious ignis fatuus through the mist and find myself not called to folly, but drawn to interconnected flashes of epiphanous truth.

Even now, as I write this, Blake’s painting of Newton springs to mind. The Romantic positions the scientist, a massly square of flesh, twiddling a compass whilst his fanatical eyes burrow in narrow-minded focus into his scroll. The wonders of his body, the infinite mysteries of the sky are lost to him; his purely intellectual pursuit, his earthbound world view render him as lifeless as the rock he appears to grow out of. I remember standing in wonder at the sculpture drawn from this work in the courtyard of the British Library, where Paolozzi’s freestanding artwork deepens Blake’s imagery through the inclusion of eye-glasses. As the Scientist strains to magnify his materialistic worldview, his paradoxical blindness is emphasised. Newton’s alienation from self-hood is rendered through the bolts, plates and rivets forming his machine-like, frankensteinian body. 

And next, a quote recalled from my reading of Jung’s own ‘Memories, Dreams and Reflections’ swims up and waves at me; 

“The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity”

The inexorable downward pressures of gravity, of patriarchy, of 21st century ideology, of materialism, of purely conscious perspectives on the world are losing their absolute hold on me. However, my mind is still battling with the concept of trusting in the power of the subconscious, of intuition, of inner rather than external knowing. Let it. Each skirmish allows inspiration to be sieved through the intellect, guard dog at the gates, and therefore any realisations can stand with surer footing on the other side of the Stygian bank. 

About a week later, my reflections continue. I delve much deeper and excavate further into memory concerning my relationship with ‘spirituality’.

Another piece of artwork that has been repetitively flashing, like a speck of dust before my inner eye, is the frontispiece to the early printed edition of Christopher Marlowe’s play, Doctor Faustus. The initial reason it impressed itself upon me - though my thinking and personal associations have subsequently burrowed deeper into mind and memory, was due to Jung’s discussion of Goethe’s Faust in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. The precocious little Carl’s reading of this fable had delighted him due to his boyhood dissatisfaction with religious teaching, including his father’s inability to explain the more esoteric mysteries of the Christianity he had hoisted upon his young son. The fable evoked great fascination and sympathy for the little Devil Mephisto in the child. Later, Goethe’s tale, which I have not yet read, was interpreted as a literary exploration of Faust’s attempts to navigate spiritual and psychic waters towards wholeness.  In the climactic redemption of Goethe’s Faust, all live happily ever after. Faust achieves metaphoric integration with the denied and ignored parts of himself (symbolised through his heavenly reunification with his erstwhile girlfriend and Mother Mary to boot). 

Kit Marlowe’s play, however, is a completely different beast - one that refuses to lie down for a tummy tickle or tamely take up its place by the fireside. The tragedy’s conclusion ends not in redemption, but eternal damnation. Not in psychic integration, but bodily mutilation, as some bit-part scholars return to Faustus’ study, where we the audience have just seen the bad Doctor strut and fret through his final hour on earth, before being dragged by fiery hands through hell’s hungry mouth. There they find Faustus’ “mangled limbs” draped across chairs and hanging from olde worlde light fittings, his bones, muscles “All torn asunder” and viscera splashed across his beloved bookshelves. Ironically, while the figure of the Alchemist was a symbol of spiritual transformation for Jung, this scene is based on the fate of the historical Johann Georg Faust, whose alchemic experimentation ended in deadly detonation. An explosive accident scattered his body parts about his rented rooms.  I would hate to be the mop-woman who had to clean up all that hubris of a Monday morning.

My mental tendrils keep reaching back to Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. I read it at A-Level, at sixteen years old and after, relished teaching it to later generations. I was thrilled by this play’s poetry; the pinnacle of earthly achievement in its rendering of the depths of human despair.  Judging by the work he created in his youth, Marlowe may have been greater than Shakespeare, had he not taken a mortal dagger to the eye socket before he reached his third decade.  Rumoured to be a spy, a swaggering boy lover, an acid-tongued atheist, he was to me a literary rock-star, dipping his quill into his heart and scribbling verse across the clouds on his self-destructive flight into the sun.  The other teenagers could have Kurt Cobain - Marlowe was the man for this little dork. 

Marlowe appeared a punk rocker, tearing up the rule book, or indeed, the bible itself. Although more mature study suggests Marlowe’s famous atheism probably equated to unorthodox or so called ‘heretical’, indeed, burn-at-the-stake-able inquisitiveness as opposed to all out disbelief in the divine, I was mesmerised by his venomous Christian-baiting. Salacious contemporary report claims Marlowe stated; "Religion was only to keep men in awe" and "Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest". Even that "St John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ”. Was it Marlowe speaking when one of his characters says "I count religion but a childish toy"? Indeed, Faustus’ refusal to bow to the dictates of an oppressive heaven, to “Despair in God and trust in Beelzebub” and subsequent revelry in the blasphemous and profane was read by me as anarchic rage against the ideological prison of religion. Of course Faustus fries for this. But his tragic comeuppance and eternal relegation to the infernal inferno, was seen by me not as the playwright’s moral reassertion of God’s ultimate power, more an ending which satisfied both generic convention and the censors, and vitally, the only one which would allow the wordsmith to quite literally avoid the rack.  

Faustus’ wish to reach the outer limits of human experience, his pledge that “Appetite thou art my god” resonated powerfully.  Having rejected Christianity, adventurous sensation seeking rushed in to fill the vacuum left in my tiny teenage mind and soul. Luckily, unlike Faustus, I did not have to literally sacrifice my eternal jewel as blood-price for my rebellious antics.

I was incandescent with rage at the unjust God of my childhood. Why venerate a god of weaker morality than myself? I had a greater capacity for pity and suffering, and lesser need to be worshipped all of the time.  I found the cosmic sadist’s moral degeneracy nauseating and vowed to plant one on his nose in the unlikely event of ever meeting him. I decided I must sever all remaining ties with the eternal egotist and ‘his’ debauched church, therefore I made the serious decision to seek excommunication. The Catholic Church claims power and relevancy through a register of numbers Christened, as if the poor mites had any say in proceedings! I believed it was politically important to detach yourself from the flock. In days of yore, flaccid, cassocked men would waft their plump gold-ringed hands in the air and with that, condemn political enemies or sexual subversives to eternal damnation. Contrastingly, excommunication must be rigorously pursued in today’s world and involves writing successive letters to one’s bishop detailing your demands. Finally, one will receive an official notice of excommunication, though the downwards pointing thumb and flame emoji appearing as postscript may be a figment of my febrile imagination. It was only picturing the trembling lip on my Irish mammy, during one of her ‘I-know-you’ll-come-back-to-Jesus-one-day’ speeches, that prevented me from acting on my decision. 

It is only now, through writing about Faustus, that I remember the force of the rage I felt or still feel for the Christian god. Having torn my heart and soul away from the universe-explaining and universe-expanding story of my youth, I realise I stand before the battlefield, jealously guarding the scarred no-mans-land before me. Territory so hard-won must be defended.  

I’ve gained much from exploring Buddhism, but not before establishing that it is not a religion, but rather a philosophy, and rigorously cross-examining a surprised monk or two over the current patriarchal power balance within this school of thought. I’m sick to my soul of seeking spiritual guidance from a hierarchy of men in dresses. But then again, I cannot accept the more mystic tenets. My beliefs cannot embrace reincarnation, and I endorse Thich Nhat Hanh’s practical explanation of karma; “Every act has a result. That is karma. And no act, nothing can be lost. It continues always. The chain of action continues.”

Back to Faustus: and that picture that insistently appears before me. What is my subconscious trying to tell me, or more to the point, where is it trying to lead me when bringing this illustration to mind? Initially, I felt like that man in the magic circle, symbolising the not-very-far-reaching of my rational understanding and spiritual belief.  I am optimistic that the circle may be enlarged through a combination of study and experience, however, I currently resist anything that is peripheral to my familiar island of established fact. The squat demon lingers outside of my comprehension. If the little devil-dog’s presence can be explained satisfactorily by my thinking mind, so be it. If it cannot, I conjure it away and dismiss it, thrusting my head into my hands and waiting for morning. Is this action motivated by impatience, disbelief or fear? With honest self-evaluation, my thoughts surrounding many of the more abstract spiritual concepts are that if I can’t see it, it doesn't exist. Do I tread the same ground as the book-blinded Faustus, who, face to face with a Mephistophiles summoned straight from Hades, declares with audacious stupidity; “I think Hell’s a fable”. I am not unaware that both my and Faustus’ mode of thinking is flawed. Do I have to have directly experienced something, or read about it in all of the societally approved books in order to accept its existence? So called facts are so often called into question as societies flow and ebb. The heart-felt beliefs of dead and dying cultures are held as flawed and primitive in our own. Might future worlds see these centuries of scientific rationalism in the same light? As towers, seemingly reaching the clouds, but built on shifting sands? 

The truth is, when I read or discuss other people’s spiritual and supernatural experiences, my brain simply doesn’t know what to do with them. Some souls are gifted or cursed, depending on the cultural reception of their experiences, with the ability to experience spontaneous visionary states, without the help of medicines swallowed or smoked. Eckhart Tolle’s overnight enlightenment, William Blake’s visionary dreams or Jung’s childhood hallucinations, of course these things make sense. I can appreciate such mystical states or spiritual epiphanies as a chemical change in the gifted brain. But when it comes to certain types of unexplained phenomena, I am silent and solemn. When a blemishless knife split in Jung’s drawer, or a heavy piece of furniture was sundered, for example, I am incredulous. My mind is a fortress of disbelief. If I admire the teller of such events and find them wise, I believe they must be mistaken. There is some other explanation. If I have none, I am stumped. If I think the person is silly, then they are making it up, delusional or attention seeking. 

I am trying, I am really trying - or I am being led to try to destabilise the veneration in which I hold the world of logic and fact.  I tried to read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason - but ironically, only hit the wall of my own mental limitations. My little mind couldn't steer me through the first paragraph.  Indeed, the shortcomings of my intelligence, combined with my attention span, failed to tackle even the Wikipedia summary.  However, perhaps using thought to examine the limitations of thinking in relation to the numinous world is as futile as throwing a bucket of water on a man drowning mid-ocean. Perhaps I need a different way to approach the situation. Sadly, I feel the conceptual framework of my mind has foundations that thrust deep into bedrock. The culture that incubated my mind has no sympathy for the mystical or the magical. 

When people meet Mother Ayahuasca as they follow the white rabbit down the hole of their souls, I don’t quite think they have been conversing with Santa Claus (afterall, when did he deliver me a trove of such sparkling delights?). Part of me clings to the edifice of the power of the mind in explaining this phenomenon. Yet part of me so desperately wishes to believe the contrary, that some fairy godmother exists within a plant, ready to rescue us from the caves of darkness with a wave of her crystal sceptre and a sprinkle of shamanic dust. 

Yes, I have experienced a state of oneness with the universe, where rainbows unfurled themselves from my forehead, softly danced into the sky, into a universe filled with pulsating love. Yes, I have felt a state of love sent by whirring motherships, crafts of iridescent mercury gliding around and through me as the sunset unveiled a divine sky of peach and strawberry and soft as Summer those rays light a world of pure compassion.

But ain't it just the drugs? When they're gone, it's gone. Leaving not a rack behind…except perhaps a dry mouthed longing and a shade of a shade of a shade of that feeling of gentle dissipation into the warm soup of creation. But then it's back to earth with you little mortal. Bump. 

When we see the way the brain responds to psychedelics, the interplay and connectedness elicited by the medicine-molecules, the sensual explosion, the thousand-fold increase in activity, like a motor engine on rocket-fuel, should we be surprised that we can trace the clouds and shoot into the stars aided by this seemingly extraterrestrial process? This is not to say that the lessons do not hold sacred gravity. The mental shackles hammered in the furnace of societal laws and childhood conditioning can fall away, leaving us feather light, flexible and ready to run, climb and dance where we will.  This still seems like a miracle to me. 

But doubt pulls at my collar, growls in my ear. What if you are missing out on magic and meaning, the marrow of existence, through an inability to embrace a sense of transcendence? What if this spiritual detachment is blocking your relationship with the full potentialities of the medicine? A wild and wise friend of mine, much admired, suggested that my cynicism to the spiritual qualities of the medicine may be an exertion of control. An inability to let go. A refusal to entirely freedive into the dark-depths of being. Perhaps then, I am like Jung’s tadpoles basking in shallow waters, unaware of the sun’s heat and the imminent danger of becoming stranded on the barren terra firma. 

Most insistently, I wonder whether religious or spiritual belief is a vital lie. A half-truth without which we cannot thrive. An aspect of human existence which is essential but unreal. The jewel encrusted cup of meaning lifted to parched lips. If I believed I sang the sun up every morning, and my dancing feet called down the rain, if I believed my existence was interwoven with the rhythms of the universe and my prayers were answered by winking stars then the lamp of my soul would be lit. 

But how can you make yourself believe? The awareness that you are willing yourself to believe in the conjurer's trick undermines the magic, and the bunny pulled from the hat elicits nothing more than a slow hand clap. 

I would dearly like to redraw my map of belief. But I don’t know how. Maybe a stronger dose of medicine will do it, or maybe the experiential pearls I find in the fathomless depths will simply be classified, analysed, filed or hidden by a cynicism which feels simultaneously like a factual boundary of reality and barrier to the seductive wilds.

Finally, I read this poem yesterday and put it aside. Was it meant to fall into my hands? Or is finding interesting things simply the nature of algorithms created when browsing the internet? Do they feel particularly resonant because of the chemical effects of the medicine on my brain, or is a synchronicity at play?  The final lines resonate with deep truth.

When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer

                               By Walt Whitman

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

I quickly analyse the poem in light of my thoughts at this moment. The world of noise, egoic striving for “applause”, renown, logic, learning and science makes the speaker “tired and sick”. The subject leaves the claustrophobia of the “lecture-room” where peers, culture, and conditioning oppress. Even this act gives him grace and life. He is evolving or “rising” and “gliding”. His new found freedom is expressed as he “wander’d” and his embracing of self-generated meaning can be seen by the fact he is finally “by myself” rather than in a world where he has “heard” and “been shown” the exhaustive “proofs”, “figures” and “diagrams” of man-made reality. He finds himself in the evocative “mystical-moist” air. Not only is the reference to mysticism antithetical to the stifling, queasy world inside the academic room, but perhaps the moisture calls forth an image of fertility or rebirth, a world in which we may flourish and grow. The “perfect silence” he experiences here feeds his soul as he connects with the universe in veneration and wonderment, a place where the busy clamour of the world fades away and becomes transient nonsense. His silence suggests he is enraptured by what he sees - an infinitude of shining beauty that the astronomer, for all his mental burrowing into dogmatic calculations has missed. Paradoxically, there is an ineffable, unquantifiable truth which the astronomer can never know - indeed his very act of grasping for knowledge has eclipsed this truth under sheaves of musty “calculations” and “columns”. The speaker has left the world of knowledge and gently surrendered to the majestic void of the night sky in all of its majesty and mystery. The stars shrink us. They remind us of the smallness of the worlds we exist in within our human skulls as limitless universes stretch away from us through space and uncountable millennia. Perhaps the poet is saying that we overload our minds with our attempts to understand the dark and light mysteries of the universe which will ever elude us. So perhaps we need to accept and stand open jawed and humbled before the sheer shadowy beauty of it all, with a fire in our hearts to mirror, in our best but humble way, the vast fire of the stars. 

Perhaps I would do well to remember, in relation to my cynical materialism, that when Faustus declares “hell’s a fable”, Mephistopheles replies, 

“Ay, think so still, till experience change thy mind”.

Family Picnic

 

Family Picnic. 

Boy. Boy,! Quick now!

His stout little legs tripped over themselves as he scuttled down the wooden ladder apace. He stands to attention beside Sister. Her eyes are red-rimmed. A convict afore the black-capped judge. His little hand shoots into his pocket. There; the smooth, ivory pebbles. He strokes them with the tips of his pink fingers. 

‘Tis cold abroad. Wrap thouself in this. 

About his neck, with perfunctory care, Step-Ma looped the skin of a stoat. Rescued from long hibernation in the bottom of the family chest, where, despite the long seasons of breath-snatching cold, this battered skin remained buried.  The smell of dust-mites and futile tears.

A family stroll it is to be today. Stick close, lest the ogre eats thee for his dinner. 

Sister’s face; impassive. Yet, behind a tightly curling lip do we espy just a flash of tooth?

Out little Sis goes, the flash of fox fur a momentary challenge to winter’s tyranny. With a shunt, and a squeak of displaced snow, the boy joins her, his rag-wrapped feet already snow-swallowed. Step-Ma’s next, and the door slams behind, as if to say good riddance to you all.

In a corner of the hovel’s empty room, a spider’s husk swings then grows still on its empty web. Under floor-board the infant mouse nudges its pale snout into its dead mother’s flank. The chain-gang of famished ants shoulder away their fallen soldiers. The bare cupboards ache. Another layer of dust settles over pots and pans. The stools vainly attend the cold ashes of the hearth. 

Get on with thee now! Mush.

Step-Ma’s tongue lashes them on, and no mistaking. Pa’s out front. An iron silhouette, aloof. Stalking through the granite trees he ploughs this way then t’other. A labyrinth of skeletal giants, above, the fierce wind makes their claws dance. Denser, the forest grows. The boy believes the darkling air is accursed. So say the old tales of these woods. The girl’s feet are blue and benumbed. The cold they say, can freeze the very marrow of your bones. The cold can stop your heart and make your tears fall as diamonds. 

Flanked by Step-ma and Pa the kinder are harried deep down, far down through the forestland. 

Step-ma’s voice croaks out a story. Once upon a time, there was a wicked little boy, and he had a little sister, just as wicked. 

Pa’s hand tightens on the handle of the axe aswing at his belt. 

For hours the woody maze flashes by. Then, a clearing. A family picnic? Meagre hunks of bread pushed into frozen little palms. No, there’s no milk to sop it, your majesty! Sit here, little madam and you there. Ma and Pa’s got to piss. Wait. Heed us or else. Stay.

Frozen with both cold and fear, the little pair huddle together, each the other’s raft in arctic currents.  

Of course Ma and Pa are gone. Their footsteps covered by fresh snow. 

But hark! The boy’s pocketful of stones! Yes, he followed the plan they had concocted. Yesternight; their hot, wet cheeks pressed together under the rough blanket as they eavesdropped on their parents’ scheming. 

Plop, plop plop. Every few strides. He’s scattered the stones. They’ll shine us back like guardian angels. You’ll see!

When they dared, they searched. Not even the headstone could be unburied from the snow. Abject, near frozen in the cold and the dark, they crawl into the hollow of a tree, to nestle

‘gainst the strengthening wind. 

Then morning. Sweet miracle! 

Snows melted. Bone dry! Sun high in cloudless sky.

Swift work then, to trace the gleaming white beads back ‘cross the rugged land to the hallowed ground of home. Oh how clever we will look! Quick, pick those frozen berries. There, there! A squirrel, dropped quite dead from his branch. Bag it. Bring it. Wild garlic, stiff but still plenty green. Oh ho! My belly smiles! 

Their hearts aflutter, their heads full of bliss-sweet dreams of welcoming arms and penitent tears, the babes march homeward.

Dare they knock the door? No one attends the shy little rap. The doorknob too high for their outstretched little hands, even when the boy clambers atop his sister’s back.

Should they cry out?  At  that very moment - the door swings back and there stands…

Step-ma. Clenched teeth, yellow against her pallid face.  Bulwark at the gates. Filling the doorway, she’s all sharp-cheeks and hungry-eyed. Her mouth hangs open like a dying dog and ‘tis about to transform into a ravenous snarl, but then - 

Little arms stretch forth, loaded with the riches of the forest.  Enough for a hearty soup, you’ll see!

The frozen lips on the Step-ma melt a little. She steps back into the bare dark, where father, slope-shouldered, stares into the chimney’s ashes. 

Days pass. Snow falls. 

Barren. Frozen. Bare. 

Midnight. Shaken awake, shook into their furs, shoved over the threshold, with shrieking at their backs. Again, the forced march into the impossible dark. Unsuspecting, the boy has no cache of stones. He pats his empty pockets in ghostly hope. There! A tiny hunk of dry bread, stashed away through blessed foresight. A torn crumb here; tramp and tramp, and tramp. And here. With a faux trip, another piece is planted. And right under Step-Ma’s beady eye! 

The girl’s heart fails when, aware of her brother’s plan (little vixen that she is) she spies a crow land on a marked spot. It cocks its head towards them - is that incredulity in its black eyes? With a click-click, a dart, then a snap, the breadcrumb is gone.

The map is torn. The compass altogether crushed!

Unbeknownst to the boy, old man crow hops along behind them. He bolts back the bread, eating their pathfinders right up!  Soon its brethren are onto the game. They swarm down, a plague of beating wings turning the sky a deeper ink.  A crow pecks the breadholder’s eye out. Beaks clamp bloodied beaks. A cascade of black feathers fall. Step-ma’s stick swings right to left, but only when supper’s done, are the crows done. With an eruption of caws, the onyx-eyed, adamatine-hearted fiends disappear in a puff of ebony smoke. 

The slow-brained boy shovels the last of the bread into his frozen mouth, and chokes on tears.

They wake alone, from nightmares into incarnated nightmare. The morning sun refuses to face them - poor orphaned waifs - but lingers ashamed behind the gloomy cloud. 

The little ones know they are as irrevocably lost as the shade of memory. As unreachable as a feverish old pirate’s dreams of sunken treasure.

The little ones know that this was their elder’s design.

Heavy of heart and weary of limb, the hungry little ghosts wander through thickets and swamps, through cold days and terrible nights, through dark valleys and darker agonies of the heart. Their bones protrude the skin. Their eyes protrude the skull. Teeth loosen in gums. Vultures settle in their wake to silently observe their limping progress.

Then - for the first time in weeks - can it truely be - a house?

Through blinking hunger-weakened eyes, swims the vision - Christus! Salvator meus - a house! And what a fine house! A feast for the eyes!

They quicken their pace. They trot fast as their starving limbs will trot. The homestead appears so pleasant. A rich house of wide orange brick, with, oh by our Lady, a second story! A cherry red door. Sun softly tumbles upon the roof, illuminating the eaves of yellow wheat. The window shutters an apple green. White smoke blows from the chimney. Could that be the sweet smell of baking? Yet their jolting steps, and their feverish hunger knocks their vision askance. The dwelling strangely distorts before them, and the rainbowed sky flickers as if wakefulness was pulling at the threads of a dream. No matter. Forward they lurch, stumble and scramble. Insane-sweet dreams of welcome propel them.  Fancies of outstretched arms, of warm chairs and bowls of steaming broth.

A few paces from the door the girl stops dead. She sinks to her knees. Her hand brushes the pretty pebbled pathway. She snatches at a white stone. Quick as lightning, she deposits it in her mouth! Her face snaps toward her brother. Sweet bread! The path is very bread! 

On hands and knees she shovels the soft white morsels into her mouth and swallows with hardly a chomp of her poor, sore teeth. She snatches more. With her cheeks full as pillows of duck feather, she turns to her brother, rigid with wonderment;

Eat! Bread! So tender-soft. The best bread you’ve ever…

and round and round she chewed and mashed and swallowed. Her eyes close in bliss. Her face that of a tortured martyr who glimpses heaven’s gates. 

The boy stumbles, falls, steadies himself on the gate. A slat of wood comes off in his hands. His brain cannot comprehend - yet his stomach asks no questions - how what he is holding can be a plaited loaf. In it plops and down it goes. Staggering to the house, he snatches a flower basket. Ravenously feeding on the petals, his senses explode with the taste of variously flavoured marzipan, each bud more delicious than the last. Only when he licks the remnants of the consumed basket from his fingers, does he seek Little Sis. Her legs are in the air and her head’s down the well, lapping and sucking and guzzling it dry. She glances up, and with a giddy squeal of delight burps forth- CUSTARD! Her dripping yellow chin providing firm proof of the pudding. Her fingers dig into the brickwork! Bread Pudding! Scrumptious! 

Peals of laughter erupt from Little Brother’s mouth. The sugar sends his soul shooting skyward! He spins joyfully and tumbles to the ground. He thrusts his tongue between the bright stonework, his tastebuds exhilarated with jam, jam, jam. He bites and groans and moans as he consumes the paving-loafs and the pancake stairs. He crawls towards the masonry of the house and claws at it, stuffing ginger-bread pieces into his famished maw. Please, never let me wake from this heavenly dream! Forever let me dwell in this heavenly place! 

Meanwhile the girl is plucking toffee apples from a nearby tree. One bite, then over her shoulder it goes. Too busy is she, to see what crawls from the felled apple as it withers and decays behind her. Possessed with pleasure, she snatches the next and licks with a soft moan. Her little frame shudders. She can’t fill her mouth quickly enough. Never have her senses been so illumed! She wishes she could stick the sweet fruit into her ears, her eyeballs, Oh for a hundred mouths and still not enough. A thousand years here and I would never sicken!

Yet, that very moment, her distended stomach begins to churn. Then it seethes and sickens. Torrents of vomit plume through her lips, a deluge of sticky liquid from her nostrils. Thrilled at her humiliation, yet nauseated by the sight, her brother’s belly-laugh is interrupted by his own river of puke. The girl’s sickness abates and after the requisite fraternal mocking, she reaches again for the food, elysian food, food to feed her soul! She gnaws at the chocolate bark of the toffee apple tree, as her brother gnashes down on the thick meringue of the window pane. And so they would have stayed, for ever and ever and ever -

-If the soft voice did not sing out. The voice as soft as nursemaid’s hands. As gentle as mother’s love.

Children? Oh my poor children! You haven’t tasted anything yet. Come, come, come inside. Why not? My poor angels. 

Whose was the sweet voice? The cherry red door stands ajar.

Filthy and ashamed, the pair tiptoe into the house.

The crackling fire is framed by cushioned chairs of deep velvet. Their eyes dance over sideboards bursting and shelves a plenty, all filled with fine things. Foodstuffs, provisions, vermillion-bound books and jars - jars of all sizes. Some full of preserves, hanging red shapes imprisoned within. Some with funny labels, of a language unknown. Bushels of drying herbs, cooking sauces, preservative oils. Statuettes of various animals, toad, hare, with marble eyes aglint. Shining cooking implements, knives and long forks hung from the walls, and a magnificent collection of saucepans, enough for a grand feast, by my right eye, and then some!

The door creaks closed. There stands the most beautiful woman the girl had ever seen. The boy’s cheeks blushed bloody.

Oh kinder, sit. By the fire, so. You look frozen solid. Let’s get you good and piping hot.

The boy flops into the seat with a joyful sigh. The girl hesitates, one hand on the armrest, the other pinching her muddy dress between her fingers. But the woman’s radiant smile encourages her to surrender. Verily, who could resist? 

She floats around them, conjuring soft lamb’s wool blankets from here or there, which she lays upon their bony legs. She tuts faintly, and shakes her head, her beautiful locks tumbling this way and that.  Like a pebble thrown into the centre of a crystal lake, shock and concern ripples over her sweet face. Oh my boy. How you have suffered. We’ll put flesh back on those bones. We’ll fill out those juicy cheeks and charm colour back into those scrumptious lips. She turned away, exotic perfume in her wake. She did not see the crimson colour that flushed across the boy’s face and neck. But the girl did. She sniggered, and gave him a sharp kick. 

The woman flitted this way and that, chattering gently and humming sweetly, ladling meat from a stout barrel into her pot, which she set on the fire, adding all manner of fair-seeming things into it. The boy’s eyes grew heavy under the homely spell of warmth and peace. The girl’s eyes lighted on a box. It was full of tiny pairs of lederhosen and patched pinafores alike her own. A trunk beside yawned open, piled high with children’s bonnets and caps. Another crate contained small winter boots, and clogs such as children their age wore once upon a time. 

The girl’s mouth opened, but the woman of enchanting beauty spoke first, as if she had read her thoughts.  

Ah! You are not the first lost children to find your way to my gate. So I keep clothes fit for every child, be they frail or hearty, tall or ungrown. The winters are too harsh to send little ones upon their way with the wind whistling through their rags. I feed them up. I truss them up, that is, in shirts and silks. Then I send them on their journeys.  It fills me up. My emptiness inside. You see, I was lost in the forest once too. But I was saved. By the help of a wise woman who helped me  just like I have been tasked to help you. And here we lived together for a long, long time. 

The girl’s eyes widened. She should like to stay here forever! 

The woman gave a sad smile and her eyes sparkled strangely. Then she rose. It was time for bed. No stories - whose soul needs to fly any place, when the hereabouts is such a dream? Tell your brother there to crawl into that wooden crate. Just so. There be a mattress of fresh straw.  And my sweet little one, you shall rest here, warm and snug. The stove’s still giving off a goodly heat. 

I’ve work afoot aways from here.  My sweet ones, sleep soundly. No strangers ever bother us, no, no, never. We will meet again in the morn, and get acquainted, truely. With that, she was gone, a gust of wind in her wake. A black feather, no doubt blown in from the cold forest, circled in the warm  air and came to rest. 

In dreaming realms the girl chased foxes through tunnels barricaded by bone-gates; guarded by slavering fangs. In eerie dens she wrestled wolves. She raised her father’s axe to fell the beast, but after the dread thump of iron through bone her brother’s skull rolled, cleaved, about her naked feet. Her roar was answered by the boy’s fright-filled squeal.  The scene shifted; fresh night-bane. She was back in the house; brother’s little hands shook iron bars; his sleeping box transformed to a sturdy prison. His naked body a quake and doubled upon itself, a rat in a boot. His face, three holes of abject terror; two stricken eyes and juddering mouth; dire black.  She lurches forward, her little arms, her drowning arms, reaching forth. 

At one and the same time: a sharp leg pain, and the deeper, cruller pain in that space atwixt her small ears. 

This ‘tis no dream.

Heavy manacles, rust-toothed, bite into the girl’s white ankle.  

A voice murmurs from some unhallowed corner; I have feasted you, my pretties. Now one here must pay in turn.

The babes turn to see the woman, rocking in the corner. Her mouth a-growl and hair a streaming, eyes hollow and hungry as the horseman of famine. She points a white finger to the cage. That wicked little knave shall be my supper, days from now. Girl, if you stuff him full, like a sack o’fat gold pieces, I’ll spare your skinny hide. 

The frozen little statue wants to shake her head.

Fuck that little runt. He’s dead meat. Help me cook him, and you're off the meat-hook missy. Maybe you can be my little apprentice. Pocket wages are paid in sweetbreads. 

Labour she did, dragging chains round the house, clinking when she swept and clanging as she scrubbed. Up and down she rattled as the boy sobbed. Five times a day she lifted the heavy ladle and filled the wooden bowl with the thick, foul soup, mud-red.  If his quivering hands would drop the bowl, she fisted his hair and bit his cheek and had him lick the floorboards clean.

Once, whilst peering into his horrid dish, it peered straight back. An eyeball of brightest blue, bobbed up, like a pig’s bladder from a stream. It gazed fixedly. As his mouth opened to scream, the girl popped the eye right in and clamped his jaws tight. Then the boy too, stared in unblinking shock. 

One day, the woman decided the boy had outgrown his cage. Time’s up. Wench. Fetch the wood. Heat the oven. 

A braised hand, the flesh of one finger yet unpicked to the bone, dropped floorwards from brother’s astonished mouth. Sure, he had fattened in his habitual cell, but he was still such a small one, puny and boney, surely a fine lady of the woods should banquet on riper fare? 

The roar of the oven silenced his pleading. Little sis stacked the wood and stoked the flame. 

From the corner of her eye, the girl saw the woman, her arms knotted tight, The cries of a wraith of a forsaken säugling could not ring more mournful. Up one leg and down its twin, across her arms, her heaving breasts, shone bloody bite marks. Twas as if a pack of unceasing hell-hounds had supped on her, perpetual. 

The girl clenched her tiny fists and spoke. Grant me one boon afore we do the deed. Answer me; you live surrounded by plenty. This very house could sate an army through winters untold. Yet why then must you feast on flesh?

From her entrails the women answered, through a groan of coffin air; 

I can’t eat the sweet stuff no more - look at my teeth!

Behind those rosy lips now wobbled jagged rows of rotten, rancid grinders. Yellow and sticky. Dripping as though she had guzzled a bowlful of cherries. Blood red!

Now open the oven. Time to post the piglet.

The little fox thought fast - which way to dart? Which fork in the trees is the surest route to the safety of my lair? 

She threw both rag-wrapped hands around the heavy oven handle. She tugged and she heaved and she grit her teeth in vain. With sweating brow she turned back to the women.

Frau, bitte! The door is fastened tight. My meagre strength can’t shift it. Ope the door for me, do!

With a grunt and a short and a shake of her head the woman flew to the handle and gave it a tug. Open, the door swung, light as a feather! Ya! My weakling girl, she began to snarl…

…but before the words could gallop out of her mouth, the girl gave her a terrific boot up the arse, sending her a tumble into the flames.  

Quick as a flash, she slammed the oven door to. Snap! Went the neck of the woman. Her golden bangles rang against the floor, as her arms groped this way and t’other.  Her head sizzled, and fizzled and finally popped! The boy shook his bars and whooped. 

Then on a sudden, the woman’s form shuddered and shrank. Her arms became frail twigs. Her strapping legs, those of a little bird. Her silken clothes melted away in front of their very eyes! All at once, there lay the body of a ragged child. A little, forlorn ghost of the forest. Her soiled bare feet ceased their twitching and grew still.

Outside, the eaves dripped sugar and the sweet walls melted. The delicious pathway dissolved and the lickable delights ran down the apple tree. The honeyed fruit plopped from the boughs. The house remained. But plain wood and hard stone it now was. 

A skeletal finger, of the hand rescued the broth, turned the lock on the boy’s cage. With a swing, the  barred door opened. Little brother did not move.  

They lived well enough, that sister and her kin. A search of the house had revealed crates full of small jewels wrested from rings. Minute earrings of pearl. A matchbox of small gold teeth. A Drawer of paper-thin bracelets, tarnished with age and dull necklaces of gold plate. 

 

T’was enough for provisions. And firewood was aplenty, though they never strayed far into the forest. They had little stomach for rich food. 

They would rise early and work. In the evenings they would together, sit. They disagreed often. But seldom did the pinching turn to scratching, the slapping to thumping. They mostly kept their teeth to themselves.

And when the lost children would come to their door, they would give them a place by the fire. They would clothe them and give them blankets and shelter for the night.  When they put food afore them, brother and sister would watch the children eat, and lick their lips.

But in the morn the kin would give the farmer a groat to ferry the children to town on his donkey. God knows how the castaway babes would fare ever after. Between the cruel schoolmaster and the flagellating nuns, the path is tough for little ones. 

But then again, life, tis no fairytale. 

And perhaps one early spring, when snowdrops might be sprouting from hard ground, not falling from the iron sky, the kin may pack cloth bags with bread and wrap cloaks about themselves.

They might return to the door of the hovel and boldly knock upon the door. No matter if they receive no answer. They can reach the doorknob. It turns. Though the door is stiff, it may open. The skeletal figures may be glanced sitting on dusty stools by the grey fire.

Though Pa’s eyes may flicker, and fail to hold their gaze. Though Step-ma’s eyes may not soften. The grown girl will light the hearth. The grown  boy will spoon warm food into cold mouths. They will break bread together, and sprinkle a coin or three into the empty chest.

Then by the fireside, they will sit, for a while.