brown. Happy: bright flashing yellow-green. Sad: heavy and endless brown. Friendly: bright yellow-green, nearby. Fearful: deep swirling brown. Calm: pale yellow-green, some distance away. Angry: pounding brown all around.
The truth of red.... Loving: bright pink all around. Hating: deep dark churning red. Happy: bright flashing pink. Sad: heavy, endless dark red. Friendly: bright pink, nearby. Fearful: deep dark swirling red. Calm: pink, some distance away. Angry: pounding red in darkening depths.
When I completed the truths—from white through orange and purple to blue—poundgrayly said with pale yellow precision:
“No doubt you see the simpler pattern of the truths, so why did you not express them more simply?”
“There is power in repetition,” I answered.
“There is also insanity in repetition—for the aged and for wild souls.”
Poundgrayly was correct, and so I found the simpler truth....
Light pleases the eye, and pleases the soul behind it. Darkness pleases no one, as it gives birth only to fear and chaos. The brighter colors—whether they be bright yellow or bright blues—are the currents of contentment, as their blood is light itself. But when darkness threads a color, making it dull or gray or black as eye’s night, only dark feelings can be felt....Yellow offers happiness when it is pure, and disturbing feelings follow when it is touched by colder hues, or by black’s distant depths. Red is the color of violence, and its touch strips other colors of their pleasantness: red touches green, and brown pounding follows—red touches blue, and purple swirling is felt. Red itself carries joy only when washed in light, giving birth to the pinks of familiar tinglings....
Neither I nor poundgrayly was able to catch the whys of colors’ truth. A truth needs no familiar reason to be a truth. It is, and that is enough.
I continue swimming, and the truths of yellow and red, black and white end their comforting touch. I begin to slip down into personal days, and the truth of white becomes gray, and gray becomes the shiny scars on Father’s back.
“No....”
I flee from screamdeep in the only way I know. I take him, take one small memory of him, and use it for another summing, another truth to lighten my soul.
“See it: The day Father told me with fatherly feelings that I was his son and always would be.”
He told me, and later when I thought again and again about the power of his telling, I realized that the act of talking—one soul’s act upon another’s soul—has four discernible parts, interwoven as one, in the flow from soul to soul.
The lighter lip of screamdeep’s soul spoke to me with precise pictures, visions which were—it seemed—without feeling in themselves: “You (smaller, fishsinging depths, from waterjoyup’s depths: are and flow: from Me (larger, deepscreaming depths, now and also before).”
The wider face of his soul spoke to me at the same time without precise visions, but with colors which wound around the pictures, or gave them a surrounding hue, or gave them a blended shade: “Bright white, bright blue, pale rushing white, bright yellow (yellow-brown): line of bright white, pale mist: orange and pink and brighter red....”
The deeper flesh of his soul was adding feelings to the visions and the formless colors, giving them the truest meaning: “Near, needing love, loved by me, from the previous near—needing-love-loved-by-me: happy living: from this loving-hating-sad-happy-fearful-friendly-angry-calm me.”
And all of these things from Father’s soul were making a rhythm: Lum, ba da da, lum bum bum, lum, ba da da, lum bum bum, lum, ba da da....
So this was the fourness of talking, divided—
No, there was a fifth part—not of the soul, but a part that spoke as meaningfully as the soul itself did. The body....
As screamdeep’s soul gave its colors and pictures and feelings and rhythm, so his body surrounded them all with gestures whose meaning sprang from the depths of soul’s sharing. He put his arms out toward me, opened his hands, spread his fingers, moved his hands apart, and stared at me with his face’s eyes; then he spread his arms slowly, tightened his tails together, and tilted his head back; then he pulled his arms in, coiled one tail around the other softly, and touched his chin to his chest briefly.
But what do I have now, with my fourness plus one? When I blend them together, still keeping them visible as a fourness plus one, do I really have the truth of my father’s love, of his words that day?
“You (lum), in the love (ba) of brightest (da) white (da)”—he moved his arms toward me—“you (lum), the smaller (bum) always (bum), bright white (lum) of nearness (ba) needing (da) protection (da)”—he spread his fingers—“you (lum) of fishsinging (bum) blue-white (bum) happy (lum)”—he moved his hands apart slowly—“you (ba) born of Her (da) of waterjoyuping (da) depths (lum) of once-bright-yellow (bum) but of now-sad-yellow-brown (bum)”—staring all the time at me with his face’s eyes—“you are (lum) and living flowing (ba)”—he spread his arms apart—“in calm white mist (da)”—he tightened his tails together—“of even white lines (da)”—he tilted his head back—“born of me (lum) of red-orange (bum) friendly (bum)”—he pulled his arms back—“born of me (lum) the larger (bum) giving protecting loving (bum)”—he coiled one tail around the other—“born of me (lum) here and now (ba) then and there (da) of calm loving-hating-sad-happy-fearful-angry (da lum bum bum)”—and he tucked his chin to his chest.
“No,” I say to my own embarrassed soul, “that is not the real truth of Father’s talking.... The fourness—and all things like it—is a game for the lonely soul....”
I swim on, thinking, “A day’s swim....And today is one of the longer days, twice as long as some days, tiring in its persistent half-light and half-darkness—”
In that moment my soul’s mumbling is interrupted.
“Eohmmmah...rakk....”
The familiar voice makes my soul jerk in purple annoyance.
Murmursome swims into eye’s range, continues his yellow affection and begins circling me.
I stop swimming, look into the simple soul of the simple ayom—look at the hairy body, the slick flat limbs, the long curved whiskers on the face—and say “No” and resume swimming.
“Aooowahammmm? rakk!” The affection is persistent.
“No!”
(Murmursome left me alone six days ago, and I want to return the hurt. So I choose to ignore him. “And besides,” my soul tells me, “this day is too important to be wasted in the foolish games an ayom always wants to play.”)
But murmursome’s soul continues its offer, its confusion at my rejection, its request that I stop to play.
And when I listen deeply to the ayom’s voice, I find something new and odd in murmursome’s murmurs.
“Eoomahh (soulove) rakk rakk mooow (deatherenow) rak rak (go)....”
...As if the dumb ayom had suddenly learned to use the clear images common only to the souls of euyom and my own kind.
No, the images are not very clear, their forms too faint, so I explain them away as simple echoes of my own soul’s depths. Such echoing is not uncommon, and the lies it tells are frequently confusing.
(“After all,” I tell myself, “my soul has been disturbed by the coming of the bigshinegray—and is therefore an easy prey to tricks and lies of the inner eye.”)
“No,” I repeat, concentrating on the direction of the nearest female in the euyom line to the island.
Murmursome refuses to give up. He darts around me, nearly brushing me, trying to catch my eyes’ attention.
I close my eyes and do not pause in my swimming.
The ayom pretends to shiver in soul’s flesh, but fails