touch of soul that dispels loneliness, and I begin to whimper in fear.
I open my eyes, and for a moment can see again.
But before long the dimming returns.
“I cannot see!” I shout, scream with the gray to black of annoyance to anger. “Face’s sight is gone!”
My shadowed shout does something strange. The hordes of invisible little souls and bodies in the dryness around me hear me all too clearly—they die by the millions.
(I am surprised, then sorry, then proud, then afraid again....)
Lavender has no precise answer, and she chooses not to offer murky visions of the imagined or guessed.
“Where is your need of round eyes,” she says, “when your soul is able to touch with killing here? The many little ones now dead had never known deep slaps of darkness—my kind certainly cannot wield such slaps. They were unready; and now they are merely food for their own kind or other little ones.”
(“Your kind throws darkness uniquely,” poundgrayly once told me. “The souls of my kind have never lifted a scream as finely ribbed with teeth of blackness as your own fellow yom have.”)
The blindness persists. Face’s eyes begin to sting, tiny talons grating them.
In a moment I realize: again the work of dryness! Dryness hurts—would hurt my chest but for the hollow stem which brings the sea to me. Yes, my face’s eyes have no touch of the sea on them now.
I cup my right hand and into it exhale the next breath of water. Bringing my hand to my eyes, I wet them, and suddenly the forms in the dry world clear again.
(In clearness the forms are very strange. In strangeness they bring me a gray yawn of fear.)
Through my face’s eyes I see plants that do not sway like the yau or other gentle plants of the sea. The tallest of them are half as high as yau, but their stillness, stiffness, great thickness, their brown and gray skins which look as tough as an oio’s hide, and their unfamiliar souls make them seem larger than any plants of the sea, and as dark as a pack of ioe.
“I know them,” lavender says. “They have no means for hurting us—nor the will, nor the need to do so.”
(Still I bob in fear. I expected my forefathers’ memories to comfort me, to prepare me for sight of the living bodies and varying souls in the world of dryness.)
My soul feels the approach of a small nervous soul—not completely unlike that of a fish. The approach is not at my level, not on the dry land itself, but above me in the dryness.
I wet my eyes again and see the small dark body circling and hovering over me.
It comes down, touches a nearby dry rock, and remains there motionless.
I look and cannot understand the function of the strange form. The very thin black body lacks any form of tail familiar to me. The two pairs of thin, almost invisible fins are attached to either side of the body in a manner useless for swimming. The black head with its two large shiny eyes—each eye the size of the head itself—would make swimming difficult and slow.
In a moment the small soul grows anxious. The body lifts from the rock and moves away through the dryness more quickly than any body I have ever known.
I close my eyes and try to understand the impossibility.
(Such quickness should be impossible. The faster a body moves in the sea, the more the sea resists, pushing against it. This dryness offers no heavy pressure to push against my flesh, but it makes difficult the lifting of my arm, the moving of my body at all. But the small black body moved easily, swimming quickly through the dryness—how?)
Lavender hears my question, but offers no answer.
“You saw it?” I say impatiently.
“Yes, and many others like it,” she answers, never halting in her crawl.
“And you have never questioned their strange fins, their quick swimming?” I accuse quickly, reddening frustration.
“Your ignorance should restrain its red. I began questioning such things when you were yet unborn. But a soul must cease its questions where neither an answer nor a soul able to give one can be found.”
My soul slips to a pale yellow. “Forgive the red. The changes of a younger soul—”
“The unchanges of an older soul,” lavender says softly, “understand the youth of you. Understanding makes forgiving unneeded.”
(I do not understand her reef of euyom wisdom, but the touch of a lavender soul is enough to make me turn again with confidence to the expected moments not far ahead.)
Face’s eyes are dry again, and I wet them again with water in the hand of an arm that is as heavy and tired as my neck. But I lift my head to look again at the forms ahead.
“How do face’s eyes,” I begin to ask, “see so far in dry—”
A bright light suddenly strikes my eyes, and pain strikes with it. It is as if one of the twin lights high above me has fallen to my level and is among the stiff plants in the distance.
But the euyom does not hesitate, continues on, and in a moment the light becomes a bright spot on a smooth, tall and wide form that rises ten times higher than any of the stiff plants.
The form has a color, and the color is the color of the longest dream, and my soul becomes that color shouting.
I stare with face’s eyes. They dry, I lose their sight, but I continue staring with the eyes that blindness can never touch.
The bigshinegray is very near, and for a long moment I bite down hard on the hollow stem’s end and forget to breathe.
CHAPTER FOUR
Mal d’occhio! Have you ever had your own EENTs be untrue to you?
Mine are yours.
Is no good! Trinity is reduced to hermaphroditic tense, unhappy, imperfect Mamma, unperfect Goddess. Leaves you with only your Gianna and your Brainy Brain. Bad, bad, bad. I should know.
So now what? To assassinate time, Brainy Brain can babble ex post facto for eternity, or Gianna can pretend to weep, love and hate ex post corpo for eternity. Take your pick.
Weep, Gianna, weep! Feel, old woman, feel! Suns, plants, animals, laws!
“...Da milleni il sole ogni mattina sorge e da sera trammonta, sempre allo stesso modo. Cose, piante e animali ubbidiscono leggi precise....”
Babble, testa mia (testo mio!), babble! Facts, light, truth! Reactions involving beryllium and boron occur cum production of helium....
Sing, Gianna of million bambini, sing!
“Sopra il cassero dell’uomo morto
“Stanno quindici uomini, Yo-ho-ho,
“E una bottiglia di rhum!
“Il diavolo ha pensato al resto, Yo!
“E una bottiglia de rhum!”
Analyze, Brainy Brain! Analyze brain!
Stultification of understanding springs from the errant assumption that “archetype” denotes an unborn idea. Archetypes: typical behavioral forms which, once rendered conscious, become manifest as ideas and images, as occurs in the introduction of anything as a content of consciousness—
Add more, masculine brain, speak!
To the two-dimensional plane of the canvas must be added the illusion of that third dimension possessed by all matter. We term it what the Bible calls it, form: “And the earth was without form, and void: and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And God said: ‘Let there be light: and there was light.’ So does the master painter, out of chaos and darkness, create—”
Hah! Mannish brain, you know of chaos and creation?