The Wonderful Ugly Cloth
Time were tough, so blind Ilona figured she couldn’t just give away a dozen eggs. The last litter of piglets was runty, every one. The milk cows had eaten down all the grass on their pasture and, by the taste of their milk, had begun on the milk-weeds. Even the cat, who lived on field mice, had grown thin and scruffy, and had taken to spending a lot of time in the catnip patch. Times were hard.
So, when a deep-voiced stranger (Ilona thought it was a man but, being blind, she couldn’t be certain) came to the little farm asking for eggs, Ilona said plainly that there would have to be payment.
“We have only six hens,” she said, trying to sound apologetic. “It takes them four days to lay a dozen eggs.”
“And I don’t want a dozen,” growled the peculiar deep voice. “I want thirteen.”
Ilona cocked her head slightly at the voice. With her staring blind eyes and thin face, this always made her look a little like one of her hens.
“Even so,” she shrugged and spread her hands apart. “We have mouths to feed. Children.”
“Ah.” The voice faded slightly.
He turns to his mule, thought blind Ilona.
She knew it to be a mule by its hoof beats as it had come up the cobbles. But by the same senses she was unable to guess the size of the stranger, only that he or she wore soft shoes and shuffled rather than stepping. An old person, perhaps? The voice seemed to come from everywhere; it was hard to judge height by it.
“I carry no money,” continued the stranger. “My gold I had to leave with the customs men. I am not fond of your iron coins. Will you take goods in trade?”
“That depends,” replied Ilona drily. “Books, for example, are of little use to me.”
“I have books that even you would treasure.” There was laughter like the faltering of an organ. “But one such I would not trade for many thirteens of eggs. Perhaps a tin pot?”
“Alas, we need no pots,” sighed Ilona with elaborate regret. It was true: her brother-in-law Piotr made all their tin-ware.
The voice faded again. “Something else, then.”
Ilona flared her nostrils to sniff the air. A man smells one way, a woman another, even a very old woman. Suddenly there was an overpowering sweet smell.
“Here is perfume from the islands,” ground the voice like the stone of the water-mill. “It is very dear, and this is a very small bottle. Just for you.”
It was lovely and it reminded Ilona of a night long ago when she and her sister Alana had picked thousands of wild blossoms for the king’s anniversary parade. She did not stretch out her hand for it.
“I can’t expect the family to suffer for my indulgence,” she sighed wistfully.
The lovely scent faded.
There was a grunting sound, as if the stranger was lifting something ungainly from the mule.
“Here is a bolt of cloth,” growled the voice, like distant thunder. “Strong, soft.”
A cool boney hand took Ilona’s calloused hand and thrust a fold of fabric between her fingers. With a gasp she took hold of the cloth with both hands and fondled it over and over.
The cloth was strong, yes, and thick, but it was as soft as a chick. She wrapped the cloth around her hand. It was warm. It was as warm and comforting as the nest under a hen on a cold morning. Without thinking, she held the cloth against her face. It SMELLED warm and soft. It smelled like new hay.
“I cannot pay you what this must be worth,” she protested, continuing to fondle the cloth.
“Oh, no,” chuckled the stranger. The voice was like stirring a bucket of gravel. “Thirteen fresh eggs is all I ask. The cloth is old stock.”
“Then you may have your eggs,” agreed Ilona, still clutching the cloth.
The stranger placed the bolt of cloth in her arms and she stumbled it into the kitchen. She laid the cloth on the heavy wooden table and felt for the egg basket.
Carrying the egg basket out to the gate, Ilona called out:
“You understand that some of these eggs are two days old. Only a few of them are really fresh.”
“They will do, thank you. Here is a basket to put them in.”
Ilona counted the eggs carefully from basket to basket.
“Brown eggs! Very good,” grunted the voice.
“I’m glad you approve,” replied Ilona with a wry smile. “They are all the same colour to me.”
She stood in the gate, egg basket in hand, until the mule’s hoof-beats faded around the hill. Then she went to feed the hens.
By the time the family arrived, the children from school, Alana and her husband from the fields, Ilona had worked up a fair excitement about her trade.
“Come! Come and see...,” she gestured them into the kitchen. “Such cloth for a dozen eggs! And so much of it!”
The family followed her, laughing with her enthusiasm.
“Here! SEE?”
There was a confusing moment of silence. Ilona cocked her head to hear.
“It’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen,” said young Ilsa frankly.
“That colour...” whispered Joan. She sounded ill.
“What a pattern!” hooted Janosh. “It looks like the chickens pooped on it!”
The children collapsed, laughing. Alana gently took Ilona by the shoulder.
“It really is the ugliest cloth. But how were you to know? There is a lot of it. We can make grain sacks of it.”
“Grain sacks, yes,” agreed Piotr. Ilona heard him turn to leave.
“Grain sacks? No!” protested Ilona. “Piotr, here! Close your eyes and feel this cloth. Feel it!”
Bemused, Piotr closed his eyes and took a fold of the cloth in his huge, hard hands. A small exclamation escaped his lips. He lifted the cloth to his face.
“That smell...” he murmured. “Alana, it smells like your hair after a rain.....”
He wrapped a fold around his hairy arm.
“So soft. As warms as...as...it’s like the straw where the milk cows have lain. Feel, Alana.”
Alana dubiously felt the cloth, tested it between her fingers, tugged it briefly. She held it to her face and closed her eyes.
“No...it smells of warm milk, fresh from the cow. And it feels like...like the smooth hearth stones while the fire burns. Oh, Ilona! It’s wonderful cloth! But so ugly! What shall we do with it?”
Ilona laughed a rivulet of relief.
“Ask the children!”
The children had left off their laughter at the look of wonder on Piotr’s face. Ilsa stood and pressed her face to the cloth.
“It’s like a new lamb, dry and warm!” she cried with delight. “And it smells like my favourite quilt after Ilona freshens it outside. MMMMMM!” She took Ilona’s hand and tugged eagerly. “A nightie. Make me a nightie of this. In the dark, who cares what colour it is!”
Joan gingerly caressed the bolt as if it might leap at her.
“So thick, and so soft!”
She closed her eyes and bunched the cloth in both hands. She held it to her lips.
“Like the sweet breath and soft nose of our good horse,” she sighed. “It will make the loveliest petticoat. Ilona, please? No-one will see this colour, then. What wonderful, ugly cloth!” She wound the cloth around herself in a delicate pirouette. The family laughed at the incongruous combination.
Janosh was standing quietly to one side. He stepped forward to unwrap his sister. He hugged the swath of cloth to him and bunched it around his chin.
“And you, Janosh? What shall we make for you?” teased Ilona. She could not see his shining eyes.
“Just put a length aside for me, for now,” he muttered. “I’ll decide later.”
Something about the roughness in his voice stirred Ilona. Why, he’s almost fifteen, she realized.
“Well, I know what I want,” said Piotr. He lifted his sister-in-law in a bone-crunching bear-hug. “The lining of my cow-hide jacket is wearing out. If you could replace it with this cloth, that would please me.”
“And I, for one, am not going to hide my portion away,” announced Alana. “I’m going to make an apron to wear about the house, so I can brag about the amazing bargain my sister made!”
Ilona was pleased to be able to handle the cloth, to cut it and stitch it into loving patterns for her family. The cloth seemed to bend itself to the scissors no matter how she cut it, and the thread slipped through it as easily as a cat through the grass.
After Janosh’s portion was set aside, and Ilona had made Ilsa’s nightie, Joan’s petticoat, Alana’s apron and Piotr’s lining, there was enough left of the cloth for a pair of sheets for Ilona’s bed. There was enough left for a belt, which Alana embroidered and gave to Janosh. There was enough left for a small bed for the cat. There was enough for a blanket for the horse.
The family came to love their special items, as much for the fact that Ilona had made them as for their remarkable properties.
Ilsa claimed that she only had nightmares when her “ugly nightie” was in the wash.
Joan reported that the boys were uncharacteristically polite to her when she wore her favourite petticoat.
Janosh wore his embroidered belt to school on the day of a test.
“I can’t imagine why I ever thought mathematics was difficult,” he remarked at the end of the day. It was the beginning of a change in his school work.
Alana wore her apron extravagantly around the house. Devastated when she spilled coffee all over the front of it, she was delighted to see the stain rinse out with cold water!
Piotr took to wearing his jacket in all weather, and often Alana would look to the fields to find her husband and locate him by the flash of the lining where his jacket lay thrown sprawled across the fence. The farm began to prosper, and even the cat became fat again, although it gave up sitting in the cat-nip patch and took to sleeping constantly on its new bed.
Ilona only smiled at these stories. In her dreams, on her soft, warm sheets, she strode the multi-coloured hills of memory and laughed to see the birds flying in the dream-sky.
Janosh courted and married a pretty girl from the second valley. At their engagement he presented her with his portion of the cloth. She was as enraptured with it as he had been. He did not tell her that he had previously broken off with two other girls based entirely on their reaction to the cloth!
There came a time when, quite suddenly, Alana died. The house continued under Ilona’s hand, with the help of Joan and Ilsa. But a sadness lingered. In the years that followed, old Piotr would sometimes bury his face in the lining of his old jacket and be comforted by the smell of his wife’s rain-soaked hair.
In the end, time takes even the most durable thing. Ilsa inherited Ilona’s sheets, which frayed and were made into favourite nightgowns for Ilsa’s children, who made them into blankets for their children to hug. Joan’s petticoat became a stuffed horse for her daughter’s daughter, who swore that it smelled like new clover.
The cat’s pillow became too soiled to clean and, when the cat died quietly at an extreme age, the pillow was thrown out onto the midden. Birds used its threads in very ugly nests and sang beautifully of home and family.
But at the last, after only a few generations (no time at all by the ticking of the great clock of the Universe) not a scrap remained of that bolt of cloth.
Or can even that be truly said?
At the confluence of the rivers that flow from the three valleys is a cross-roads known of old as “Ilona’s Dozen” or “Ilona’s Bargain”.
And when the villagers there want to describe a thing that is better than it seems, they call it “wonderful ugly”.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Forest Fable
The little girl awoke in the deep dark forest. I could tell you that she was pretty and blond, or homely and mousy, or black and sassy but none of those details are relevant. Your imagination must suffice. She was adorable in her way, with bright eyes and two braided pigtails, and a blue pinafore dress that was mildly soiled from her having been lying on the deep humus of the forest floor. Her tiny feet were bare and she sat for a while wiggling her toes in the leaf litter until a big red centipede ran over her left foot.
Then she leapt to her feet with a shriek and a shudder and climbed up on the exposed roots of a big maple tree. Most of the trees were white pine, with a scattering of beech and maple and the occasional oak. It is the sort of forest one finds where mountains are giving way to foot-hills, and the evergreens of the high altitudes are mingled with the deciduous trees of the valleys. This is also good country for finding hungry wolves and bears. The girl was just old enough to remember hearing warnings in school about going into the dense dark wood alone. So she stood trembling, knees slightly bent, balancing on the massive root, gripping with both tiny hands the trunk of the maple tree for several minutes before she looked more carefully at her surroundings.
The sun was still high over the trees, and the little girl could see blue jays and robins flitting from branch to branch in the leafy canopy high overhead. She remembered that blue-jays often follow big hungry animals and screech at them, alerting the forest citizens that a predator is among them. The birds were making their regular noises, so it was possible that no danger was close by…there was a deer path just to her right, thickly upholstered with soft aged pine needles, so she padded off down the path looking for some clue as to how she ended up alone in the dark wood with no shoes.
Though the sun was still bright, the silence and dim depths of the forest began to play a soft marimba glissando of fear up and down her spine. The occasional bee buzzing past her head caused her to duck and swat and spin around more vigorously than she might have in a manicured garden with flagstone walks and the comforting nearby presence of a house. She hurried a little bit and began looking frequently behind to see whether something might be following, say, out of sight just behind the curve of the path. So it was that, looking behind, the little girl caught her small toe in a rootlet and fell face down on a rough old pine log. She was nursing her skinned hand when she noticed that the birds had all gone silent. In fact, she could see a little warbler sitting absolutely still in a bush not a meter away, its eyes glistening with hidden emotion.
The little girl looked ahead on the path. Two enormous wolves stood side by side, huge shoulders shaggy with winter fur in mid-shed, yellow eyes watchful. Was that a trickle of saliva dripping from the horrible jaws? The wolves did not move, did not take their baleful yellow eyes off of the tender, tasty girl on the ground before them. She sat on the soft pine needle tuff, her heart in her mouth, too terrified to think even of the harm that surely attended the whim of the dire wolves. The wolves’ attention shifted to a point beyond where the girl was sitting. Reluctantly the girl turned her head away from the hulking beasts and glistening fangs to follow their gaze. Behind her, about three meters away, stood a small furry red bear.
The bear stood up on its hind legs, waved paws equipped with the deadliest-looking needle-sharp black claws and uttered a surprisingly deep and resonant roar. The two wolves blinked, turned silently and vanished into the underbrush alongside the path. The red bear dropped back to all fours and stalked, stiff-legged toward the wild-eyed little girl sitting by the old pine log. The bear snuffled busily all around the log even to the feet of the terrified little girl. As the girl was preparing to be the bear’s dinner, the bear stood once more on its hind legs, twisted sideways and grew up, up, up into the forest canopy to become a gigantic man with red hair and red beard. He was dressed in a sleeveless vest of red fur and trousers of the same material and he carried a spear the length of his body with a deadly-looking point of white crystal.
“I do not think the dire wolves will be bothering you tonight,” he boomed in a pleasant baritone. “Are you injured?”
“I - I skinned my hand….”
His enormous freckled hand reached down from an impossible height and gently turned her little hand as he bent to examine the bruised palm.
“There is a clearing nearby with a stream running through it,” he suggested. “You could wash the dirt and bark out of the scrapes on your hand.”
The red-haired giant led the way through the forest, treading noisily with much snapping of twigs, until the two came to a very pleasant sunlit meadow full of blue and yellow wild-flowers and tall grass. The hum of bees visiting the flowers was not so menacing here as it had seemed in the dim green of the dense forest. The sun was bright in a pale blue sky, and a delightful breeze wafted through the meadow so that the flowers nodded and danced in the sun.
The giant stopped near a large flat rock.
“Here is the stream,” he said, pointing with the butt of his spear. “The water is very cold, but you can wash your hands if you are quick.”
She knelt in the sand at the edge of the stream and dipped her hands in the flowing water. The cold water did feel very nice on her skinned palm, When the little girl had cleaned her wound, she went and sat with the giant on the flat rock. After the cold water, the sun-warmed boulder was very pleasant. She felt out nooks and crannies in the warm stone with her toes. Bird song rippled out of the trees and across the meadow.
“Would you like a snack?” asked the giant. Without waiting for a reply, he reached into his vest and pulled out a flat object wrapped in muslin. It was several slices of home-baked bread, buttered and carefully wrapped face-to-face to keep the butter from smearing. The two sat side-by-side on the flat warm rock and chewed their bread in silence.
“Why are you being so nice?” asked the girl, munching the fresh bread gratefully. “People say giants are mean and selfish.”
The giant shrugged, like a land-slide on a mountain.
“Once I had a daughter,” he rumbled softly. “She and I used to have picnics in the forest. I miss those chats. Children have a different way of looking at the world.”
“Did she go somewhere?”
The giant sighed, a melancholy wind through the tree-tops.
“She grew up,” he said. “She lived a long life, had children, and got old, and died, long ago.”
“She got old and died?” asked the girl, bewildered. “But you are not old….”
“I am very old,” sighed the giant. “I live long, very long. My curse, not growing old. ”
"Why is it that you are sometimes a small, red bear," asked the little girl, eyeing the giant carefully. The two sat sharing the bread and gazing at the meadow.
The great red-haired giant shrugged his massive freckled shoulders again and picked up a stick to draw in the sand at his feet.
"What letter is this?" he asked.
"M," replied the little girl promptly.
The giant wrote again beside the M.
""What letter is this?" he asked.
"W," replied the little girl, after a pause. "But you have written it funny."
"Yeah," agreed the giant, "the points are curvy, because it's an upside-down 'M'. See? And if I write it sideways…"
"Number '3'!" replied the girl.
"A lot of magic is like that," said the giant soberly. "It depends on who is looking and from where. If I were to take the number three and turn it so you could only see the right side of it, what would you see?"
The little girl thought for a minute,
"Just a straight line?" she ventured.
The giant laughed with delight.
"Yes!" he boomed, filling the forest with laughter. "or some might see the number '1'."
"So I see a kindly giant because it is me seeing you now ," said the girl thoughtfully, "but a taller person worried about bears might see me sitting beside a red bear."
"Exactly so," nodded the giant, sombre again. "One must be careful in these woods not to get stuck with pointy things, given that most people in the woods ARE worried about bears. It is most inconvenient."
"Are you really both a red-haired giant and a small red bear," asked the little girl, crossing her eyes to see whether she could see him as both, " or are you something else? And you just look like these different things?"
"You mean, could I really be the number '1'?" the giant was amused, “That is an excellent question”
"Yes," said the giant finally after a period of silent reflection. "I am something else. I am a forest guardian. My true aspect is sort of like a spider in a web.."
"Ew…" said the little girl drawing back ever so slightly.
"but I am NOT really a spider," he continued as the little girl relaxed, "it is just that magic shines out from me and tells me, the same way a fly landing on a spider web warns the spider, when a person of a particular type comes into the forest."
"Like me?" the girl was becoming apprehensive.
"Yes, especially like you." sighed the giant with mild regret. "I have been on the watch for you ever since you blighted the apple orchards at the three valley gap.”
“That’s a mean thing to say!” cried the little girl, her eyes brimming with sudden tears. “I did no such thing!”
“Oh but you did,” replied the giant, gravely. “And worse, I imagine, on your way up-river. News travels slowly when the birds are on their way north. But your signature is all over the apple-blight.”
“Do you mean to say that I am also something different from what you see?” asked the girl, her eyes flashing indignantly.
“Oh, yes,” nodded the red-haired giant. “Everyone is something other than what we see. Some very nice people with whom one might frequently have a friendly conversation can be horrible monsters with a cellar full of human heads.”
“UGH!” cried the girl, with genuine horror.
“Or,” continued the giant, “others, like the troll of the hollow tree by the cross-roads, are hideous to look at (unless one is also a troll) but perform selfless acts of constructive kindness. Everyone has an aspect that cannot easily be discerned. Even sweet little girls who mysteriously find themselves in the green dark forest. I have been enjoying sitting in the sun and having a snack with a small girl-child, but that is only the form you took when you first entered my forest, a sort of instinctive protective colouration."
"But I don't remember being something else," protested the girl. "I've always been who I am."
"Do you remember the winter of the blue snow, in the Clear Mountains?" asked the giant idly.
"Do I ever!" responded the girl fervently. "I nearly froze my toes in the great blizzard before I found the cave!"
"That was 10000 years ago," smiled the giant. “And yet, here you are, apparently no more than eight years old. You remember that, because it happened to you, but your protective instinct forces you to remember mostly only that you are a little girl lost in the forest. In reality you are an elemental, an immortal creature with a rapacious hatred for all that lives."
"But I remember going to school! I remember my mother and father! My mama kissed me good-night just last…" her voice trailed off uncertainly.
"Well, it is possible that at one time you had parents who loved you," replied the giant sadly. "But immortal creatures eventually become estranged from normal life. Their loved ones die, again and again over the centuries, and eventually immortals either create a bulwark against normal human emotion or they go kind of crazy or they become angry and destructive to all they touch."
"Hold on!" replied the girl crossly. "That’s silly! If I can't die, why do I hide from other supernatural creatures by becoming a little girl?? Surely I would have nothing to fear!?"
"There are worse things than death," said the giant. "Most elementals resist being trapped for all eternity, even in the nicest traps."
Instantly the girl leapt to her feet and ran pell-mell to the edge of the clearing, exiting down a deer path only to immediately re-enter the clearing via an opening on the opposite side. She uttered a shocking obscenity and twisted in on herself to become a ferret racing across the meadow. The ferret dived down a ground-hog hole and reappeared out of thin air, falling toward the greensward. The ferret spread out like a pancake and became a merlin hawk. The hawk winged up and away toward the trees ringing the meadow, only to reappear in the air on the other side of the meadow. After rapidly crossing the skies of the meadow several times, the hawk uttered a piercing scream and dissolved into a whirlwind of snow and ash. The whirlwind sprouted arms and legs composed of vortices of dry bones and rotting wood. The creature of death advanced menacingly on the red-haired giant. The clearing was immediately encased in ice and the blue sky was replaced with a grey overcast from which sleet fell in blinding sheets.
The giant smiled gently through the frost caking his red beard, leaning casually on the shaft of the crystal spear.
"My webs are very strong," he chuckled, although he did not sound amused or happy. "You might eventually escape, but time passes differently in here than it does outside. By the time you DO escape, the world will be very old indeed, and long past any harm you can do to it."
The whirlwind resolved again into a forlorn little girl with braids and a rather soiled pinafore. The sun came out in a soft blue sky and the snow and ice melted rapidly away to reveal a carpet of wildflowers. Birdsong echoed from the woods beyond.
"So long as you maintain your chameleon form," continued the giant in a rather severe tone, "the sun will shine, the birds will sing, the posies will kiss your bare toesies. The fruit trees will even bear fruit that will taste sweet and fresh every time you choose to indulge. As soon as you take your elemental form, winter will return and bring famine as it has wherever you have settled your curse upon the earth. Your choice…."
The giant stood erect, twisted sideways and inside out, shrinking and compacting into a small furry red bear. The bear ambled to a gap between two oak trees, two remarkably similar oak trees, two identical oak trees and squeezed between them. The last glimpse of the bear was its black snout as it turned to look back, as if to confirm that the prisoner was still in the trap. Then the two trees merged into one with an audible snap! And, except for the occasional wintry temper tantrum, eternal spring reigned in the clearing in the deep green wood.
Then she leapt to her feet with a shriek and a shudder and climbed up on the exposed roots of a big maple tree. Most of the trees were white pine, with a scattering of beech and maple and the occasional oak. It is the sort of forest one finds where mountains are giving way to foot-hills, and the evergreens of the high altitudes are mingled with the deciduous trees of the valleys. This is also good country for finding hungry wolves and bears. The girl was just old enough to remember hearing warnings in school about going into the dense dark wood alone. So she stood trembling, knees slightly bent, balancing on the massive root, gripping with both tiny hands the trunk of the maple tree for several minutes before she looked more carefully at her surroundings.
The sun was still high over the trees, and the little girl could see blue jays and robins flitting from branch to branch in the leafy canopy high overhead. She remembered that blue-jays often follow big hungry animals and screech at them, alerting the forest citizens that a predator is among them. The birds were making their regular noises, so it was possible that no danger was close by…there was a deer path just to her right, thickly upholstered with soft aged pine needles, so she padded off down the path looking for some clue as to how she ended up alone in the dark wood with no shoes.
Though the sun was still bright, the silence and dim depths of the forest began to play a soft marimba glissando of fear up and down her spine. The occasional bee buzzing past her head caused her to duck and swat and spin around more vigorously than she might have in a manicured garden with flagstone walks and the comforting nearby presence of a house. She hurried a little bit and began looking frequently behind to see whether something might be following, say, out of sight just behind the curve of the path. So it was that, looking behind, the little girl caught her small toe in a rootlet and fell face down on a rough old pine log. She was nursing her skinned hand when she noticed that the birds had all gone silent. In fact, she could see a little warbler sitting absolutely still in a bush not a meter away, its eyes glistening with hidden emotion.
The little girl looked ahead on the path. Two enormous wolves stood side by side, huge shoulders shaggy with winter fur in mid-shed, yellow eyes watchful. Was that a trickle of saliva dripping from the horrible jaws? The wolves did not move, did not take their baleful yellow eyes off of the tender, tasty girl on the ground before them. She sat on the soft pine needle tuff, her heart in her mouth, too terrified to think even of the harm that surely attended the whim of the dire wolves. The wolves’ attention shifted to a point beyond where the girl was sitting. Reluctantly the girl turned her head away from the hulking beasts and glistening fangs to follow their gaze. Behind her, about three meters away, stood a small furry red bear.
The bear stood up on its hind legs, waved paws equipped with the deadliest-looking needle-sharp black claws and uttered a surprisingly deep and resonant roar. The two wolves blinked, turned silently and vanished into the underbrush alongside the path. The red bear dropped back to all fours and stalked, stiff-legged toward the wild-eyed little girl sitting by the old pine log. The bear snuffled busily all around the log even to the feet of the terrified little girl. As the girl was preparing to be the bear’s dinner, the bear stood once more on its hind legs, twisted sideways and grew up, up, up into the forest canopy to become a gigantic man with red hair and red beard. He was dressed in a sleeveless vest of red fur and trousers of the same material and he carried a spear the length of his body with a deadly-looking point of white crystal.
“I do not think the dire wolves will be bothering you tonight,” he boomed in a pleasant baritone. “Are you injured?”
“I - I skinned my hand….”
His enormous freckled hand reached down from an impossible height and gently turned her little hand as he bent to examine the bruised palm.
“There is a clearing nearby with a stream running through it,” he suggested. “You could wash the dirt and bark out of the scrapes on your hand.”
The red-haired giant led the way through the forest, treading noisily with much snapping of twigs, until the two came to a very pleasant sunlit meadow full of blue and yellow wild-flowers and tall grass. The hum of bees visiting the flowers was not so menacing here as it had seemed in the dim green of the dense forest. The sun was bright in a pale blue sky, and a delightful breeze wafted through the meadow so that the flowers nodded and danced in the sun.
The giant stopped near a large flat rock.
“Here is the stream,” he said, pointing with the butt of his spear. “The water is very cold, but you can wash your hands if you are quick.”
She knelt in the sand at the edge of the stream and dipped her hands in the flowing water. The cold water did feel very nice on her skinned palm, When the little girl had cleaned her wound, she went and sat with the giant on the flat rock. After the cold water, the sun-warmed boulder was very pleasant. She felt out nooks and crannies in the warm stone with her toes. Bird song rippled out of the trees and across the meadow.
“Would you like a snack?” asked the giant. Without waiting for a reply, he reached into his vest and pulled out a flat object wrapped in muslin. It was several slices of home-baked bread, buttered and carefully wrapped face-to-face to keep the butter from smearing. The two sat side-by-side on the flat warm rock and chewed their bread in silence.
“Why are you being so nice?” asked the girl, munching the fresh bread gratefully. “People say giants are mean and selfish.”
The giant shrugged, like a land-slide on a mountain.
“Once I had a daughter,” he rumbled softly. “She and I used to have picnics in the forest. I miss those chats. Children have a different way of looking at the world.”
“Did she go somewhere?”
The giant sighed, a melancholy wind through the tree-tops.
“She grew up,” he said. “She lived a long life, had children, and got old, and died, long ago.”
“She got old and died?” asked the girl, bewildered. “But you are not old….”
“I am very old,” sighed the giant. “I live long, very long. My curse, not growing old. ”
"Why is it that you are sometimes a small, red bear," asked the little girl, eyeing the giant carefully. The two sat sharing the bread and gazing at the meadow.
The great red-haired giant shrugged his massive freckled shoulders again and picked up a stick to draw in the sand at his feet.
"What letter is this?" he asked.
"M," replied the little girl promptly.
The giant wrote again beside the M.
""What letter is this?" he asked.
"W," replied the little girl, after a pause. "But you have written it funny."
"Yeah," agreed the giant, "the points are curvy, because it's an upside-down 'M'. See? And if I write it sideways…"
"Number '3'!" replied the girl.
"A lot of magic is like that," said the giant soberly. "It depends on who is looking and from where. If I were to take the number three and turn it so you could only see the right side of it, what would you see?"
The little girl thought for a minute,
"Just a straight line?" she ventured.
The giant laughed with delight.
"Yes!" he boomed, filling the forest with laughter. "or some might see the number '1'."
"So I see a kindly giant because it is me seeing you now ," said the girl thoughtfully, "but a taller person worried about bears might see me sitting beside a red bear."
"Exactly so," nodded the giant, sombre again. "One must be careful in these woods not to get stuck with pointy things, given that most people in the woods ARE worried about bears. It is most inconvenient."
"Are you really both a red-haired giant and a small red bear," asked the little girl, crossing her eyes to see whether she could see him as both, " or are you something else? And you just look like these different things?"
"You mean, could I really be the number '1'?" the giant was amused, “That is an excellent question”
"Yes," said the giant finally after a period of silent reflection. "I am something else. I am a forest guardian. My true aspect is sort of like a spider in a web.."
"Ew…" said the little girl drawing back ever so slightly.
"but I am NOT really a spider," he continued as the little girl relaxed, "it is just that magic shines out from me and tells me, the same way a fly landing on a spider web warns the spider, when a person of a particular type comes into the forest."
"Like me?" the girl was becoming apprehensive.
"Yes, especially like you." sighed the giant with mild regret. "I have been on the watch for you ever since you blighted the apple orchards at the three valley gap.”
“That’s a mean thing to say!” cried the little girl, her eyes brimming with sudden tears. “I did no such thing!”
“Oh but you did,” replied the giant, gravely. “And worse, I imagine, on your way up-river. News travels slowly when the birds are on their way north. But your signature is all over the apple-blight.”
“Do you mean to say that I am also something different from what you see?” asked the girl, her eyes flashing indignantly.
“Oh, yes,” nodded the red-haired giant. “Everyone is something other than what we see. Some very nice people with whom one might frequently have a friendly conversation can be horrible monsters with a cellar full of human heads.”
“UGH!” cried the girl, with genuine horror.
“Or,” continued the giant, “others, like the troll of the hollow tree by the cross-roads, are hideous to look at (unless one is also a troll) but perform selfless acts of constructive kindness. Everyone has an aspect that cannot easily be discerned. Even sweet little girls who mysteriously find themselves in the green dark forest. I have been enjoying sitting in the sun and having a snack with a small girl-child, but that is only the form you took when you first entered my forest, a sort of instinctive protective colouration."
"But I don't remember being something else," protested the girl. "I've always been who I am."
"Do you remember the winter of the blue snow, in the Clear Mountains?" asked the giant idly.
"Do I ever!" responded the girl fervently. "I nearly froze my toes in the great blizzard before I found the cave!"
"That was 10000 years ago," smiled the giant. “And yet, here you are, apparently no more than eight years old. You remember that, because it happened to you, but your protective instinct forces you to remember mostly only that you are a little girl lost in the forest. In reality you are an elemental, an immortal creature with a rapacious hatred for all that lives."
"But I remember going to school! I remember my mother and father! My mama kissed me good-night just last…" her voice trailed off uncertainly.
"Well, it is possible that at one time you had parents who loved you," replied the giant sadly. "But immortal creatures eventually become estranged from normal life. Their loved ones die, again and again over the centuries, and eventually immortals either create a bulwark against normal human emotion or they go kind of crazy or they become angry and destructive to all they touch."
"Hold on!" replied the girl crossly. "That’s silly! If I can't die, why do I hide from other supernatural creatures by becoming a little girl?? Surely I would have nothing to fear!?"
"There are worse things than death," said the giant. "Most elementals resist being trapped for all eternity, even in the nicest traps."
Instantly the girl leapt to her feet and ran pell-mell to the edge of the clearing, exiting down a deer path only to immediately re-enter the clearing via an opening on the opposite side. She uttered a shocking obscenity and twisted in on herself to become a ferret racing across the meadow. The ferret dived down a ground-hog hole and reappeared out of thin air, falling toward the greensward. The ferret spread out like a pancake and became a merlin hawk. The hawk winged up and away toward the trees ringing the meadow, only to reappear in the air on the other side of the meadow. After rapidly crossing the skies of the meadow several times, the hawk uttered a piercing scream and dissolved into a whirlwind of snow and ash. The whirlwind sprouted arms and legs composed of vortices of dry bones and rotting wood. The creature of death advanced menacingly on the red-haired giant. The clearing was immediately encased in ice and the blue sky was replaced with a grey overcast from which sleet fell in blinding sheets.
The giant smiled gently through the frost caking his red beard, leaning casually on the shaft of the crystal spear.
"My webs are very strong," he chuckled, although he did not sound amused or happy. "You might eventually escape, but time passes differently in here than it does outside. By the time you DO escape, the world will be very old indeed, and long past any harm you can do to it."
The whirlwind resolved again into a forlorn little girl with braids and a rather soiled pinafore. The sun came out in a soft blue sky and the snow and ice melted rapidly away to reveal a carpet of wildflowers. Birdsong echoed from the woods beyond.
"So long as you maintain your chameleon form," continued the giant in a rather severe tone, "the sun will shine, the birds will sing, the posies will kiss your bare toesies. The fruit trees will even bear fruit that will taste sweet and fresh every time you choose to indulge. As soon as you take your elemental form, winter will return and bring famine as it has wherever you have settled your curse upon the earth. Your choice…."
The giant stood erect, twisted sideways and inside out, shrinking and compacting into a small furry red bear. The bear ambled to a gap between two oak trees, two remarkably similar oak trees, two identical oak trees and squeezed between them. The last glimpse of the bear was its black snout as it turned to look back, as if to confirm that the prisoner was still in the trap. Then the two trees merged into one with an audible snap! And, except for the occasional wintry temper tantrum, eternal spring reigned in the clearing in the deep green wood.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Filling the Cosmic Disk
It seems counter-intuitive that the Universe, infinite in Space, is finite in Time.
Now that we know that the Universe is expanding, creating Space as it goes, and that all the energy in the Universe will eventually be transformed into heat and get colder and colder, Mankind is forced to admit that the Universe will eventually end. The process of everything becoming heat is called Entropy, defined as the tendency for things to uncomplicate, fall apart, decay and unravel, right down to the very atoms of matter and the protons that hold them together.
We also know, from repeated attempts to create the Perpetual Motion Machine, that you can't beat Entropy. It is the ultimate City Hall, a cosmic bureaucracy so rigid in policy and practice that, although you might be able to side-track the process long enough for life to evolve, intelligence to exist (so as to comprehend Entropy) and civilizations to arise, ultimately Entropy will reassert itself and everything will continue on the downward slide to the cold-dark-universe model.
The question is, philosophically speaking, WHY does Entropy always win? Why does time only run in the direction of decay and darkness? Why was God able to create this whole fantastic wonderful profusion of glory simply by speaking it? The answer lies in some very complex and uncomfortable mathematics. I won't insult you by pretending I actually understand the mathematics...I am trusting that the baffling equations do in fact say what people claim they say!
Entropy can be described mathematically. Alas, the equations which define Entropy also define the accumulation of information. In Mathematics, things that are mathematically equivalent are the same. Entropy = Information. Therefore, systems that are running down are also running up. Greater simplicity in terms of energy = greater complexity in terms of information that could potentially be extracted from that system.
This has a great deal of support from recent research on noise in the measurement of periodic phenomena. If you are measuring a repeating phenomenon, a heart-beat, or the price of cotton stocks, occasionally values sneak into the data set that are so confusing as to appear random. Played over a speaker system they would sound like noise, a hiss or a howl, like feed-back or the electron hum from alternating current. There is now available an equation that allows one to compare the "relative entropy" of the noisy bits with the "relative entropy" of the other clearly-defined sections of data. If the relative entropy of the noisy bit is high, that means that there is information hidden in that data set of which we are not yet aware. Using more sensitive equipment may extract the information. If the relative entropy of the noisy bit is low, then it truly is random fluctuation or decoupling of the measured phenomenon from the main function of the system.
So, if our universe is undergoing entropic run-down because of an accumulation of information, where is the read-head, and who is watching the monitor??
And another thing: If we could reduce entropy throughout the aging universe to make it younger, wouldn't that make it dumber, too??
Now that we know that the Universe is expanding, creating Space as it goes, and that all the energy in the Universe will eventually be transformed into heat and get colder and colder, Mankind is forced to admit that the Universe will eventually end. The process of everything becoming heat is called Entropy, defined as the tendency for things to uncomplicate, fall apart, decay and unravel, right down to the very atoms of matter and the protons that hold them together.
We also know, from repeated attempts to create the Perpetual Motion Machine, that you can't beat Entropy. It is the ultimate City Hall, a cosmic bureaucracy so rigid in policy and practice that, although you might be able to side-track the process long enough for life to evolve, intelligence to exist (so as to comprehend Entropy) and civilizations to arise, ultimately Entropy will reassert itself and everything will continue on the downward slide to the cold-dark-universe model.
The question is, philosophically speaking, WHY does Entropy always win? Why does time only run in the direction of decay and darkness? Why was God able to create this whole fantastic wonderful profusion of glory simply by speaking it? The answer lies in some very complex and uncomfortable mathematics. I won't insult you by pretending I actually understand the mathematics...I am trusting that the baffling equations do in fact say what people claim they say!
Entropy can be described mathematically. Alas, the equations which define Entropy also define the accumulation of information. In Mathematics, things that are mathematically equivalent are the same. Entropy = Information. Therefore, systems that are running down are also running up. Greater simplicity in terms of energy = greater complexity in terms of information that could potentially be extracted from that system.
This has a great deal of support from recent research on noise in the measurement of periodic phenomena. If you are measuring a repeating phenomenon, a heart-beat, or the price of cotton stocks, occasionally values sneak into the data set that are so confusing as to appear random. Played over a speaker system they would sound like noise, a hiss or a howl, like feed-back or the electron hum from alternating current. There is now available an equation that allows one to compare the "relative entropy" of the noisy bits with the "relative entropy" of the other clearly-defined sections of data. If the relative entropy of the noisy bit is high, that means that there is information hidden in that data set of which we are not yet aware. Using more sensitive equipment may extract the information. If the relative entropy of the noisy bit is low, then it truly is random fluctuation or decoupling of the measured phenomenon from the main function of the system.
So, if our universe is undergoing entropic run-down because of an accumulation of information, where is the read-head, and who is watching the monitor??
And another thing: If we could reduce entropy throughout the aging universe to make it younger, wouldn't that make it dumber, too??
Sunday, July 26, 2009
The Gods Must Be Thirsty
In a Naples grotto narrow,
Is the shrine of Saint Genarro
Where a flask well sealed with lead
Contains a powder rusty red.
When shaken by the proper priest
A foaming fluid is released
And, fresh as from the living marrow
Flows the blood of Saint Genarro
Apt iconoclasts declare
The miracle is far from rare:
A gel made from hydrated rust
Will duplicate the trick in just
The way the priest performs.
Alas, though this gives rise to storms
Of rage and disappointment
Naples has not lost anointment
In chapel niches ‘round the globe
Stands Mary, dressed in royal robe:
The Queen of Heaven, carved in rock,
She doesn’t move, nor breathe, nor talk,
But those who faithful vigil keep
Have sworn they’ve seen some statues weep.
When human lives are cheaply priced,
Fresh flow the tears of the Mother of Christ.
When the Madonna’s tears are caught
And analyzed, there’s often not
A hint of water or of salt
But this discovery does not halt
The veneration of the stone
Virgin standing there alone
Her marble cheeks, it now appears,
Wet with manufactured tears
From Montreal to Uttar Pradesh
Are statues of the god, Ganesh:
Protector of the Hindu home
Enricher of the Hindu loam.
Whom would the elephant god adore
Milk on his stony feet may pour
But see! Through some arcane device
Ganesh now drinks his sacrifice!
It’s sadly true that money haunts
The halls of God, and in response
To Ganesh drinking up his milk
Profits soared for merchant ilk
The merchants claimed, with shameless fraud
That milk is now fit for a god.
While children starve with stomachs shrunk
Ganesh has milk shoved up his trunk.
What lack of faith or hope or vision
Would drive someone to a decision
That God would want his folk misled
By simple sleight-of-hand, instead
Of truth, and joy and wonder?
So demagogues from pulpits thunder
And Saint Genarro’s blood flows fresh
As milk poured out before Ganesh.
Christ, whom many folk revere
Made Yahweh’s policy quite clear
When asked to give a demonstration
Said:”A wicked generation
Asks to see a wondrous sign
To prove the Son of Man divine.”
Yahweh to Himself suffices:
He needs none of our devices.
Is the shrine of Saint Genarro
Where a flask well sealed with lead
Contains a powder rusty red.
When shaken by the proper priest
A foaming fluid is released
And, fresh as from the living marrow
Flows the blood of Saint Genarro
Apt iconoclasts declare
The miracle is far from rare:
A gel made from hydrated rust
Will duplicate the trick in just
The way the priest performs.
Alas, though this gives rise to storms
Of rage and disappointment
Naples has not lost anointment
In chapel niches ‘round the globe
Stands Mary, dressed in royal robe:
The Queen of Heaven, carved in rock,
She doesn’t move, nor breathe, nor talk,
But those who faithful vigil keep
Have sworn they’ve seen some statues weep.
When human lives are cheaply priced,
Fresh flow the tears of the Mother of Christ.
When the Madonna’s tears are caught
And analyzed, there’s often not
A hint of water or of salt
But this discovery does not halt
The veneration of the stone
Virgin standing there alone
Her marble cheeks, it now appears,
Wet with manufactured tears
From Montreal to Uttar Pradesh
Are statues of the god, Ganesh:
Protector of the Hindu home
Enricher of the Hindu loam.
Whom would the elephant god adore
Milk on his stony feet may pour
But see! Through some arcane device
Ganesh now drinks his sacrifice!
It’s sadly true that money haunts
The halls of God, and in response
To Ganesh drinking up his milk
Profits soared for merchant ilk
The merchants claimed, with shameless fraud
That milk is now fit for a god.
While children starve with stomachs shrunk
Ganesh has milk shoved up his trunk.
What lack of faith or hope or vision
Would drive someone to a decision
That God would want his folk misled
By simple sleight-of-hand, instead
Of truth, and joy and wonder?
So demagogues from pulpits thunder
And Saint Genarro’s blood flows fresh
As milk poured out before Ganesh.
Christ, whom many folk revere
Made Yahweh’s policy quite clear
When asked to give a demonstration
Said:”A wicked generation
Asks to see a wondrous sign
To prove the Son of Man divine.”
Yahweh to Himself suffices:
He needs none of our devices.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
That Fading Glory
People call it doubt
But it feels like disappointment
When knowledge of the way of things
How things work
How they happened
Winnows away frivolous doctrine
And only unarguable truth remains
People call it wisdom
But it feels like weariness
Having lived long enough to see
Transcendent bliss revealed as neurosis
While real wisdom is ignored,
To painful to be spoken, or believed.
Is it corporate worship,
Or mass hypnosis
When sentiments are repeated until
They become Canon
When music is programmed for effect
Not according to the guidance of God;
When grief hides in shame behind a smile?
I have seen genuine joy give rise to dancing,
Genuine obedience result in healing
Genuine knowledge give fruit in contrition
Genuine worship refresh the anguished heart.
Discomfort with liturgy is fleeting.
Genuine communion is eternal,
When it happens.
But it feels like disappointment
When knowledge of the way of things
How things work
How they happened
Winnows away frivolous doctrine
And only unarguable truth remains
People call it wisdom
But it feels like weariness
Having lived long enough to see
Transcendent bliss revealed as neurosis
While real wisdom is ignored,
To painful to be spoken, or believed.
Is it corporate worship,
Or mass hypnosis
When sentiments are repeated until
They become Canon
When music is programmed for effect
Not according to the guidance of God;
When grief hides in shame behind a smile?
I have seen genuine joy give rise to dancing,
Genuine obedience result in healing
Genuine knowledge give fruit in contrition
Genuine worship refresh the anguished heart.
Discomfort with liturgy is fleeting.
Genuine communion is eternal,
When it happens.
Minister
He does not mind
That fellow-workers use up his peanut butter
Though he provides it out of his largess (which is not large)
And they are better off than he.
He does not mind
The coarse language of the workshop
Nor the demeaning labour of humility (which is humbling but not edifying)
Nor the lack of recognition
His love for them
Though it flows not from his heart
But through his heart from God
Compels him to smile
To laugh at their poor jokes
His compassion
Which arises not from his understanding
But from his submission to the will of God
Compels him to listen
And to murmur encouragements
Not that the doors of his heart
Do not swing almost shut
On the colder days
And not that his small pride
Does not sometimes raise the hope
That one day his incorruptible corpse
Will smell of violets.
That fellow-workers use up his peanut butter
Though he provides it out of his largess (which is not large)
And they are better off than he.
He does not mind
The coarse language of the workshop
Nor the demeaning labour of humility (which is humbling but not edifying)
Nor the lack of recognition
His love for them
Though it flows not from his heart
But through his heart from God
Compels him to smile
To laugh at their poor jokes
His compassion
Which arises not from his understanding
But from his submission to the will of God
Compels him to listen
And to murmur encouragements
Not that the doors of his heart
Do not swing almost shut
On the colder days
And not that his small pride
Does not sometimes raise the hope
That one day his incorruptible corpse
Will smell of violets.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Larry the Lemming Finds Christmas
Larry the Lemming was sick of the dark. He longed for the lovely green light of the fair grassy tunnels in which the Lemming family conducted their business safe from foxes and owls. He missed the sunny warm rock where he used to bask all comfy and toasty. He even missed the dangerous bright sun-filled open spaces where an unwary lemming could get scooped up by a hungry wolf. He missed the long red Arctic sunsets with the sun playing midnight peekaboo and the stars just barely visible overhead. Even the thought that midwinter feast-day was soon upon them failed to raise his spirits.
The midnight sun had set weeks ago, and even the dim twilight that passes for noon in the Arctic winter had mostly been obscured by heavy clouds and falling snow. The snow had piled up night after night, layer after layer, until the green-lit tunnels were cold, shadowy grey-blue corridors that smelled too strongly of stale lemming.
“It’s OK, though” thought Larry the Lemming, “Many lemmings become despondent at midwinter feast time. It’s probably just un-met unreasonable expectations...”
A fruitful summer had meant a lot of scurrying after seed heads and dried berries, a lot of digging and storing and building of compartments. The fruitful summer had also meant a time of great fertility, such that many, many baby lemmings were now reaching maturity. Larry the Lemming missed the sun, but he also missed his privacy. Despite the long summer of expanding the lemming-lair, it was impossible to move about without stepping on toes, squeezing furry bellies against walls or happening on embarrassing intimacies in darkened corners. It was frustrating. It was distracting. It was depressing. It was hard to even sleep, even though lemmings unlike marmots only sleep for part of the winter. There was just too much snuffling, and grunting, and squeaking and poking. There were, in fact, too many lemmings.
And yet, thought Larry the insomniac lemming, staring into the squeaky-stinky dark, there seemed to be fewer of some animals than usual. The foxes had seemed very few, and rather threadbare when one DID see one. The owls had been very busy, but their predations were far between. It was one of those winters that Ptosis the old ptarmigan had spoken of, when some animals did extremely well and others seemed not to benefit at all. Weird...he drowsed off with his little front paws crossed over his plump lemming tummy and dreamed of his sun-warmed basking rock.
It was the warmth more than the noise that awakened Larry from his nap. It was VERY warm, even though he could still feel cold snow at his back, and the air was heavy with moisture and a stench that he only later identified as extremely concentrated lemming, and rancid lemming at that. Larry the Lemming could tell by his reduced girth that he must have slept for several weeks. His fur felt grimy, as if hundreds of lemming toes had tweaked and trod on him while he slept. The corridor outside his sleeping den teemed with lemmings.
Lana Lemming hurried by, her cheek pouches fetchingly distended with seeds.
“Lana!” called Larry, scarcely daring to venture out into the noise-some crowd., “why is it so warm? What’s that awful smell?”
Lana shifted her burden to clear a path to speak past the seeds.
“Have you been asleep all this time?” she shouted over the din. “It’s all this body heat. There’s been a third litter. The burrow is bursting with lemmings. We’re all going to go insane if something isn’t done...” She stopped to pick up some seeds she had accidentally spewed from her distended cheeks, and was carried away by the flood of rodents.
But what was there to be done? It was midwinter, and lemmings have no social hierarchy, no leaders to take charge on behalf of lemming-kind. Mole rats, thought Larry the Lemming, would not have such a problem. He thought about the situation for a while, but finally he could not be distracted from the burgeoning crowd streaming through the once-spacious and sweet-smelling tunnels. His heart sinking within him, he made a decision to burrow up through the snow-pack and away from these crazed and fetid fellow-creatures, up and into the danger zone where foxes and wolves could pick out a lemming from the protecting snow. He didn’t care. This was torture. He needed to be alone. He needed to curl up and nurse his sadness. Larry morosely cast his fate to the blizzard winds and dug upwards into the dimness of the snow pack, his mind filled with dark and comforting thoughts of oblivion.
When his questing whiskery nose poked through the frosty crust into the biting cold air above the snow-pack, Larry was dismayed to smell the odour of hundreds of lemmings even up here. He shook the snowflakes from his beady eyes and stared around at a scurrying hoard of Lemmings, mostly of his own generation. A black lemming with a white streak over one eye nearly ran over Larry’s head.
“Lucifer Lemming!” said Larry, “I haven’t seen you since elemmingtry school! What in the world is going on?”
Lucifer Lemming rolled a wild eye in Larry’s direction.
“We all came up to get away from the crowd,” Lucifer gasped, his breath seeming to freeze in great clouds around his head, “ but the crowd is up here, too. I have to...to...”
Lucifer broke away in a wild run, streaking off into the pearlescent twilit noon. Several other lemmings saw him and broke into the same frenzied scamper, following Lucifer Lemming into the unknown. More and more lemmings followed, and Larry could see others that he recognized, Lucy Lemming, Lois Lemming, Lance and Link Lemming, several members of the SouthSide Lemming Lynch Mob, Professor Laroquette Lemming, all streaming pell-mell hell-bent toward some goal none could define nor even visualize. They only knew that they must run.
“Wait a second,” called Larry the Lemming as Lothar Lemming tumbled by in a flurry of flying feet, “the lemming migration is a myth, an urban legend perpetrated by the Disney Corporation for their TV series on the North. No...wait...where are you going?....this is madness!”
“Yesss,” cried the fleeing crowd, “Madness! Terrifying, empowering, fulfilling lunacy! Can you not feel it? That drive to escape, to flee from the burrow, to abandon child and mate and home and flee into the wilderness? Ah, peace! Peace! Shall we not find peace?!”
“But...” Larry could indeed feel the twinges of a terrible hope that somewhere in the darkness there was a place where the air did not smell of left-over lemming, where the sounds of the burrow were soft and comforting, where the edge of madness did not lurk just beyond the next outburst of temper. He began to run, but the madness did not propel him carelessly through the dark as it did his classmates. He ran to keep up, to warn, to see what would happen next. And as he ran, the dark seeped into his tiny lemming soul. The sadness became a burden too great to carry, his weariness became a palpable weight on his little lemming back..
Larry the Lemming slowed to a trot and then to a brisk walk, and was about to stop when he saw that the lemmings at the vanguard of the migrating mass were beginning to disappear. It took Larry a few seconds to realize: the crowd of lemmings was running over the edge of a cliff!!!
“No-no-no!” shouted Larry. “This simply does NOT happen. Lemmings do NOT migrate to their doom in the Arctic Ocean. Such a thing has no evolutionary advantage! It’s a myth! A legend! A pile of crap!”
He paused to take a breath, and, seeing that his words were having no effect shouted one last salvo: “You are perpetuating a meaningless stereotype!!”
But the hoard of lemmings continued to disappear over the icy edge of the cliff, to make little ripple-less dents in the heaving salt-water below.
Larry watched in dull grief as the crowd dwindled, every little rodent wildly flinging itself into the dark water below.
“And why not?” sobbed Larry eventually, thinking of the dank and stinking warren that had been his family’s cozy burrow.. “Who could go back to that wretched hole?”
He gathered his resolve and followed his generation over the edge of the cliff, twisting and tumbling through the bitter air.
He came to a sudden stop on a very cold, wet and slippery but solid surface. His feet tingled with the force of the landing and it took Larry a while to get his breath back. Then he realized that the surface was moving through the water at a considerable rate. He had fallen on the broad head of an enormous fish, swimming at the surface of the arctic waters below the cliff.
“Excuse Me!” cried Larry, embarrassed. “I did not mean to land on your head.”
“Not at all, “ replied the fish pleasantly. “When I saw your brethren falling into the salt-chuck I determined that I would save at least one, and apparently that one is you!”
“I am Larry the Lemming,” said Larry the Lemming.
“Of course you are,” laughed the fish. “And I am Crispin Carp.”
“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” replied Larry.
“Oh, I doubt that,” chuckled Crispin. “I have thwarted your spectacular end. Were you not just now trying to take your own life?”
“That is a baseless stereotype,” replied Larry the Lemming, a tad sharply. “Lemmings have NEVER really taken part in the Migration O’ Death. It’s a myth straight out of ‘White Wilderness.’”
“Nonetheless,” said Crispin Carp, very seriously, “Your friends simply ran off the edge. I saw YOU stop, look, consider and then fling yourself over.” He bubbled his gills a bit in the freezing salty water. “Suicide is a mortal sin, you know. Suicides go straight to Hell.”
“At least the glowing Hell-fire coals would give off some light,” retorted Larry. “I am so sick of this eternal darkness!”
“That’s no reason to end your own existence,” reproved the carp. “The darkness is NOT eternal. Spring will return, and sunlit days, and fresh seed-heads and blessed dew.”
“I suppose...” mumbled Larry. “I’m just so tired...and the burrow is chock-a-block with lemming pups, and lemming teenagers, and retired lemmings trying to sell Amway products...a lemming can’t get a moment’s rest. And this time of year is hard on some people.”
“What? Midwinter?” cried the astonished Crispin Carp. “Why this is the best, the very best time of year. It’s a time when people have leisure to consider the blessings that have taken them through the fall and winter safely, to remember family and friends, to give of our abundance to help others. It’s the heart-warmingest tradition of them all.”
“I see....” said Larry the Lemming. “Tell me, Crispin Carp, of what abundance will you be blessing those less fortunate? You don’t seem to be carrying any luggage.”
“Ahhh...” replied Crispin Carp, “I have the honour of the best charity of all.” He was silent for a bit as if cherishing the holiness of the moment. “I do not live in this arctic bay. I am swimming half-way around this great Earth to the Black Sea. There I shall be caught by a fisherman, beheaded, eviscerated and boiled, to provide nourishment to a large Croatian Orthodox family.”
He paused again as if contemplating.
“I shall be their Christmas Eve dinner,” he said quietly.
“I beg your pardon?” cried Larry the Lemming incredulously. “Beheaded? Eviscerated. BOILED? You are swimming half-way around the earth just to DIE? On PURPOSE?? How is that different from me flinging my sorry self off a cliff? Dead is dead, don’t you think?”
“Well,” replied Crispin, kindly, “No, because your death would have been despairing suicide, and mine will be Joyful Sacrifice.”
“It is a fine point of differentiation,” replied Larry uncomfortably, “and you are creeping me out. Can you let me off at the next flat rock?”
Crispin Carp angled through the icy water to a relatively dry flat stone and waited for Larry the Lemming to hop off safely.
“Do give some thought to our conversation,” said Crispin, easing away from the shore. “Service to others is much more fulfilling than selfish escape.” He turned and churned off into the foaming black. “Farewell, little lemming. A blessed midwinter to you.”
Larry waved his paw to the receding back of Crispin the Christmas Carp and turned to make his way inland. Perhaps he could make a new, clean burrow, with just a few friends and family for company. Of course, they would need resources, food -
Larry the Lemming’s musings were cut off abruptly as a pair of white-fanged jaws snapped his neck, tossed him into the air and swallowed him down. The rather threadbare fox then made his way back up the cliff-face to where a squat musk-ox stood gazing out at the sea.
“Thanks, Musky”, said the threadbare fox. “I wouldn’t have looked there on such a night, but there WAS a fat little lemming down by the beach. YumYum!”
“It is a Midwinter Miracle,” said Musky the Midwinter Muskox mysteriously.
The threadbare fox carefully picked his way through the crusts and banks of snow to a small cozy den. Inside the den were waiting a painfully thin vixen and one tiny pup. The male vomited the partly-digested remains of Larry the Lemming in front of the vixen.
“Oh Mummy!” cried the pup, rapturously. “Christmas came, after all!”
The midnight sun had set weeks ago, and even the dim twilight that passes for noon in the Arctic winter had mostly been obscured by heavy clouds and falling snow. The snow had piled up night after night, layer after layer, until the green-lit tunnels were cold, shadowy grey-blue corridors that smelled too strongly of stale lemming.
“It’s OK, though” thought Larry the Lemming, “Many lemmings become despondent at midwinter feast time. It’s probably just un-met unreasonable expectations...”
A fruitful summer had meant a lot of scurrying after seed heads and dried berries, a lot of digging and storing and building of compartments. The fruitful summer had also meant a time of great fertility, such that many, many baby lemmings were now reaching maturity. Larry the Lemming missed the sun, but he also missed his privacy. Despite the long summer of expanding the lemming-lair, it was impossible to move about without stepping on toes, squeezing furry bellies against walls or happening on embarrassing intimacies in darkened corners. It was frustrating. It was distracting. It was depressing. It was hard to even sleep, even though lemmings unlike marmots only sleep for part of the winter. There was just too much snuffling, and grunting, and squeaking and poking. There were, in fact, too many lemmings.
And yet, thought Larry the insomniac lemming, staring into the squeaky-stinky dark, there seemed to be fewer of some animals than usual. The foxes had seemed very few, and rather threadbare when one DID see one. The owls had been very busy, but their predations were far between. It was one of those winters that Ptosis the old ptarmigan had spoken of, when some animals did extremely well and others seemed not to benefit at all. Weird...he drowsed off with his little front paws crossed over his plump lemming tummy and dreamed of his sun-warmed basking rock.
It was the warmth more than the noise that awakened Larry from his nap. It was VERY warm, even though he could still feel cold snow at his back, and the air was heavy with moisture and a stench that he only later identified as extremely concentrated lemming, and rancid lemming at that. Larry the Lemming could tell by his reduced girth that he must have slept for several weeks. His fur felt grimy, as if hundreds of lemming toes had tweaked and trod on him while he slept. The corridor outside his sleeping den teemed with lemmings.
Lana Lemming hurried by, her cheek pouches fetchingly distended with seeds.
“Lana!” called Larry, scarcely daring to venture out into the noise-some crowd., “why is it so warm? What’s that awful smell?”
Lana shifted her burden to clear a path to speak past the seeds.
“Have you been asleep all this time?” she shouted over the din. “It’s all this body heat. There’s been a third litter. The burrow is bursting with lemmings. We’re all going to go insane if something isn’t done...” She stopped to pick up some seeds she had accidentally spewed from her distended cheeks, and was carried away by the flood of rodents.
But what was there to be done? It was midwinter, and lemmings have no social hierarchy, no leaders to take charge on behalf of lemming-kind. Mole rats, thought Larry the Lemming, would not have such a problem. He thought about the situation for a while, but finally he could not be distracted from the burgeoning crowd streaming through the once-spacious and sweet-smelling tunnels. His heart sinking within him, he made a decision to burrow up through the snow-pack and away from these crazed and fetid fellow-creatures, up and into the danger zone where foxes and wolves could pick out a lemming from the protecting snow. He didn’t care. This was torture. He needed to be alone. He needed to curl up and nurse his sadness. Larry morosely cast his fate to the blizzard winds and dug upwards into the dimness of the snow pack, his mind filled with dark and comforting thoughts of oblivion.
When his questing whiskery nose poked through the frosty crust into the biting cold air above the snow-pack, Larry was dismayed to smell the odour of hundreds of lemmings even up here. He shook the snowflakes from his beady eyes and stared around at a scurrying hoard of Lemmings, mostly of his own generation. A black lemming with a white streak over one eye nearly ran over Larry’s head.
“Lucifer Lemming!” said Larry, “I haven’t seen you since elemmingtry school! What in the world is going on?”
Lucifer Lemming rolled a wild eye in Larry’s direction.
“We all came up to get away from the crowd,” Lucifer gasped, his breath seeming to freeze in great clouds around his head, “ but the crowd is up here, too. I have to...to...”
Lucifer broke away in a wild run, streaking off into the pearlescent twilit noon. Several other lemmings saw him and broke into the same frenzied scamper, following Lucifer Lemming into the unknown. More and more lemmings followed, and Larry could see others that he recognized, Lucy Lemming, Lois Lemming, Lance and Link Lemming, several members of the SouthSide Lemming Lynch Mob, Professor Laroquette Lemming, all streaming pell-mell hell-bent toward some goal none could define nor even visualize. They only knew that they must run.
“Wait a second,” called Larry the Lemming as Lothar Lemming tumbled by in a flurry of flying feet, “the lemming migration is a myth, an urban legend perpetrated by the Disney Corporation for their TV series on the North. No...wait...where are you going?....this is madness!”
“Yesss,” cried the fleeing crowd, “Madness! Terrifying, empowering, fulfilling lunacy! Can you not feel it? That drive to escape, to flee from the burrow, to abandon child and mate and home and flee into the wilderness? Ah, peace! Peace! Shall we not find peace?!”
“But...” Larry could indeed feel the twinges of a terrible hope that somewhere in the darkness there was a place where the air did not smell of left-over lemming, where the sounds of the burrow were soft and comforting, where the edge of madness did not lurk just beyond the next outburst of temper. He began to run, but the madness did not propel him carelessly through the dark as it did his classmates. He ran to keep up, to warn, to see what would happen next. And as he ran, the dark seeped into his tiny lemming soul. The sadness became a burden too great to carry, his weariness became a palpable weight on his little lemming back..
Larry the Lemming slowed to a trot and then to a brisk walk, and was about to stop when he saw that the lemmings at the vanguard of the migrating mass were beginning to disappear. It took Larry a few seconds to realize: the crowd of lemmings was running over the edge of a cliff!!!
“No-no-no!” shouted Larry. “This simply does NOT happen. Lemmings do NOT migrate to their doom in the Arctic Ocean. Such a thing has no evolutionary advantage! It’s a myth! A legend! A pile of crap!”
He paused to take a breath, and, seeing that his words were having no effect shouted one last salvo: “You are perpetuating a meaningless stereotype!!”
But the hoard of lemmings continued to disappear over the icy edge of the cliff, to make little ripple-less dents in the heaving salt-water below.
Larry watched in dull grief as the crowd dwindled, every little rodent wildly flinging itself into the dark water below.
“And why not?” sobbed Larry eventually, thinking of the dank and stinking warren that had been his family’s cozy burrow.. “Who could go back to that wretched hole?”
He gathered his resolve and followed his generation over the edge of the cliff, twisting and tumbling through the bitter air.
He came to a sudden stop on a very cold, wet and slippery but solid surface. His feet tingled with the force of the landing and it took Larry a while to get his breath back. Then he realized that the surface was moving through the water at a considerable rate. He had fallen on the broad head of an enormous fish, swimming at the surface of the arctic waters below the cliff.
“Excuse Me!” cried Larry, embarrassed. “I did not mean to land on your head.”
“Not at all, “ replied the fish pleasantly. “When I saw your brethren falling into the salt-chuck I determined that I would save at least one, and apparently that one is you!”
“I am Larry the Lemming,” said Larry the Lemming.
“Of course you are,” laughed the fish. “And I am Crispin Carp.”
“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” replied Larry.
“Oh, I doubt that,” chuckled Crispin. “I have thwarted your spectacular end. Were you not just now trying to take your own life?”
“That is a baseless stereotype,” replied Larry the Lemming, a tad sharply. “Lemmings have NEVER really taken part in the Migration O’ Death. It’s a myth straight out of ‘White Wilderness.’”
“Nonetheless,” said Crispin Carp, very seriously, “Your friends simply ran off the edge. I saw YOU stop, look, consider and then fling yourself over.” He bubbled his gills a bit in the freezing salty water. “Suicide is a mortal sin, you know. Suicides go straight to Hell.”
“At least the glowing Hell-fire coals would give off some light,” retorted Larry. “I am so sick of this eternal darkness!”
“That’s no reason to end your own existence,” reproved the carp. “The darkness is NOT eternal. Spring will return, and sunlit days, and fresh seed-heads and blessed dew.”
“I suppose...” mumbled Larry. “I’m just so tired...and the burrow is chock-a-block with lemming pups, and lemming teenagers, and retired lemmings trying to sell Amway products...a lemming can’t get a moment’s rest. And this time of year is hard on some people.”
“What? Midwinter?” cried the astonished Crispin Carp. “Why this is the best, the very best time of year. It’s a time when people have leisure to consider the blessings that have taken them through the fall and winter safely, to remember family and friends, to give of our abundance to help others. It’s the heart-warmingest tradition of them all.”
“I see....” said Larry the Lemming. “Tell me, Crispin Carp, of what abundance will you be blessing those less fortunate? You don’t seem to be carrying any luggage.”
“Ahhh...” replied Crispin Carp, “I have the honour of the best charity of all.” He was silent for a bit as if cherishing the holiness of the moment. “I do not live in this arctic bay. I am swimming half-way around this great Earth to the Black Sea. There I shall be caught by a fisherman, beheaded, eviscerated and boiled, to provide nourishment to a large Croatian Orthodox family.”
He paused again as if contemplating.
“I shall be their Christmas Eve dinner,” he said quietly.
“I beg your pardon?” cried Larry the Lemming incredulously. “Beheaded? Eviscerated. BOILED? You are swimming half-way around the earth just to DIE? On PURPOSE?? How is that different from me flinging my sorry self off a cliff? Dead is dead, don’t you think?”
“Well,” replied Crispin, kindly, “No, because your death would have been despairing suicide, and mine will be Joyful Sacrifice.”
“It is a fine point of differentiation,” replied Larry uncomfortably, “and you are creeping me out. Can you let me off at the next flat rock?”
Crispin Carp angled through the icy water to a relatively dry flat stone and waited for Larry the Lemming to hop off safely.
“Do give some thought to our conversation,” said Crispin, easing away from the shore. “Service to others is much more fulfilling than selfish escape.” He turned and churned off into the foaming black. “Farewell, little lemming. A blessed midwinter to you.”
Larry waved his paw to the receding back of Crispin the Christmas Carp and turned to make his way inland. Perhaps he could make a new, clean burrow, with just a few friends and family for company. Of course, they would need resources, food -
Larry the Lemming’s musings were cut off abruptly as a pair of white-fanged jaws snapped his neck, tossed him into the air and swallowed him down. The rather threadbare fox then made his way back up the cliff-face to where a squat musk-ox stood gazing out at the sea.
“Thanks, Musky”, said the threadbare fox. “I wouldn’t have looked there on such a night, but there WAS a fat little lemming down by the beach. YumYum!”
“It is a Midwinter Miracle,” said Musky the Midwinter Muskox mysteriously.
The threadbare fox carefully picked his way through the crusts and banks of snow to a small cozy den. Inside the den were waiting a painfully thin vixen and one tiny pup. The male vomited the partly-digested remains of Larry the Lemming in front of the vixen.
“Oh Mummy!” cried the pup, rapturously. “Christmas came, after all!”
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