PART ONE
A tormented and damned soul has crammed himself before a crack in the corner of a dark adobe bungalow where the only fissure of light creaks through.
Francisco’s isolation has left his mind in a mirage. His attempts to reach back to Spain have been fruitless for at least five years. A letter, he does not remember the occasion whence he had written it, given the smeared ink where the date should be and given his sinking into a solitude of decrepitude, has been tossed into the pile with other abandoned notes; where time is allusive and serves to play tricks upon soul and body. Francisco’s appearance of a priest is almost unrecognisable, with hair of an unkempt garden and his eyes are an infernal glare wherever they are darted, only blinking to keep the sweat away. The arms of his cassock have been ripped off by the shoulders to make a vest out of the smock. He reads the crumpled letter, realising in an encompassing existential crisis, that in this present state, his corporosity was not sagaciating O K.
Holy Catholic Cisairiane Majesty,
I have failed you. I have failed the Supreme Pontiff. I have failed my mission upon this black rock on which we were to build our church. I have failed our lord. I attempted to serve fully while travelling this new world, to find new discoveries where God our lord can be served, and the royal treasury increased but I have failed.
The natives here believe in their own primitive and antediluvian religion. One unlike any other we know. They believe us to be slavers, and bringers of disease and curses. It seems they have no trust in us in order to have faith in Him. My lord, I cannot linger here longer in this lost cause. I fear He is moving away from me, and I from Him. The perversion is, that I am encouraged to move further, for now I believe it is only MY thoughts that will take me onto My destiny. For His has let evil prevail into his foul-smelling earth prison designed to punish me.
Your loyal fervent servant and basilicas,
Brother Francisco Hernandez Anumez Campesidepaco
The caterpillar choses the fairest leaf to lay her eggs, so does the priest lay his curses upon the finest joys.
Francisco takes the sparse entering light as an insignificant aid for penning another farewell letter, with an erstwhile hope that has dwindled into a fever of disdain for hope itself. He reads over his words and condemns them. They are as emaciated as he is, starved of a salubrious spirit. Excreting in secret his sin, all around Francisco sees the dream of the divine that lingers just over the horizon. What could be but for his falling zeal, his failure as an evangelical, his slander as a Spanish slaver, his melancholic dissatisfaction and growing surliness towards the light that made him. Even the flowers, grass and good nature alike have withdrawn from him, leaving the beastly cocks, monkeys and serpents to join his companionship in the dark. For in the shadows where he creeps, he thinks only of himself, for himself.
He makes remembrance of the priests that made him kneel before the class:
“You hermit! Of the idlest there ever has been, you will see to repent! I warn ye, of the walls, thousands of miles long and thick, of eternal hell!”
An ague of panic and bodily unrest beset him. Francisco crumples his paper with an instant of a pugnacious anxiety. Those sorely smiles on the faces of the priest, he feels the red rush to his face, feeling the desert heat rise under his heavy cassock and the sweat pool up in the cavities of his body.
Francisco’s mind is set. His stool produces a terrible tearing sound in the plague of black he surrounds himself in and like a loose bag of wind, Francisco flees.
His atrophied legs stumble beneath him as he departs with a forgotten pace, moving with gaucherie from his rickety stricken illness of living in dark solitude, he limps to relieve the seal of the adobe egress – keeping day away, keeping night all the while.
Francisco pushes the door open and shields his eyes from the aureate desert-scape’s blinding light that brings pangs to his mind and migraines to his temple. He cannot look, miner’s nystagmus. He closed his eyes and saw high grass posing above his nose, thickets and twigs passing by, a sky of blue and fields of green, with a yellow country lane in between. A breeze laden with crystallised dew, blew upon his snout and cooled him. He yearns to graze upon these stiff weeds and thistles, pick the fruit and squeeze the juice until it ran down his lip. In this peace, he smiled with rictus freedom. He felt as though he had a tail that flicked fleas free of his tailbone. But as his eyes peek through frail pale fingers, the couchant sun of his foremost reality had sunk into the twilight sky, he looked behind and had no tail.
“This day is of death, of blurred crimson and black.”
Could he escape this desert? His mutterings seep under his skewed sanity. His blood felt thicker.
“Could I escape this stupor of mind that clouds my compass? I must.”
His ill body began to throe, letting go a groan trying to deny his own mutiny. Even his own thoughts were as irrational as rushing out of the dark straight into the light with eyes sternly widened to the sun’s sonorous beam.
“Like a lonely Moth.”
Francisco is bound to be swallowed by a big fish; and what a tight squeeze that would be. He chastises Him in an execration of fervour that sprayed out of his mouth with lacklustre spit that dripped off his parched lips and hardened in a sinful impenitence, lingering in a viscous puddle thick like ink. The slime of sweat quickly cooled over his skin to bring recollection of the chill that one summer where the weather turned into late autumn for only two days; and how refreshing they were - while the lasted.
Plagues of questions stretched eons in his mind: Where was he when the world that made him received none of his love? How had he not seen his soul begin to wander alone for forsaking his brethren and duty? He once had known His blessings were of His hand, but so were His curses, and that is His Tree of Life, but when had he begun to think that His way was to curse and test and to proffer censures to cure wickedness in order to exact a moral authority over right and wrong? He believed the latter wholeheartedly and wanted to know why.
A face that doesn’t emit light, will never be star.
Francisco turned the lights off long ago and he ached again from a cringed remembrance. The migraine of consciousness resumes between his temples. Realising his soul is ashamed of its shape, anxieties of the enteral pathways feeding doubt into his mind that make the adobe walls in that blackness squirm in awareness of his self-sentenced punishment - to be duty-bound away upon the unforgiving voyage, to be flushed out of that hurricane, to stagger ashore, to traverse these undiscovered worlds of wilderness.
He thought to cry. There has been a long unconscious history which preludes this catastrophe of Francisco’s Self. Isolated with the rocks and dust and the terror that crawls around him; beasts that take his shadow’s form.
Turning to the pit of black through the adobe door, the sun rays find that on the dappled desk his pot of ink had toppled unknowingly in his flight, dripping, and drying on the dirt. Francisco picked up the pot, noticed it’s dwindled remains, applied the lid, and threw it onto the wall and the ceramic pot smashed. Depleted, he glanced down to the shaded shadows of the sweat and heat and instantly he repulsed in introspection. The lessons are fully learned. He vowed to never return. He will climb the rock that rises to the Morning Star - He had an Indian guide who told him of the sorry tale of the children who were jollying about, feigning they fleeing from a bear, only to find that terribly, the child playing the bear had transformed into a real bear. And then, a voice is said to have led the fleeing child up a tree, and the tree elevated from the ground, out of the bear’s reach. Then the Indian guide relayed that child was from that moment born into the morning sky’s star that rests above the elevated rock, also that this had occurred long ago when dogs could talk -
Francisco, feeling himself chased, leers up the rock called the Devil’s Tower.
“I must climb, so all souls can hear my anguish and know.”
He began climbing the tower. He believes it true that with every inch he ascends, he climbs out of the grip of God’s inferno. As he inches towards freedom from feeling; inching out of the Thousands of Miles Long and Thick Walls that encased his eternal soul with demons of fire and brimstone and built with a conflagration of laws that bind men to chains.
His sandals slip off the waste rock. The vertigo must have happened outside his mind for fear never came to him. His psyche grew more confident before the firmament of the single star above. He felt in his heart elated and enlightened as he stood upon the precipice before the star. Francisco paused; his bubbling brain berated by contrition of what he believed to be a truth but was a lie.
For what has man to profit by having the world and his soul?
It was in this instant nobody heard:
“Take me! Let me be with the child. I will be a star!”
He screamed. Francisco’s adrenaline had tightened his skin, his heavy heart beating in syncopation with his heavy breath. And again he screamed,
“I am not a lost lamb, lord. Angus Dei... NON SERVIAM!”
And then in the ethereal came a transformation of the lonesome preacher’s execrations into quietude, for Francisco had been displaced through a transmigration of his soul. What is left on the tip of the Devil’s Tower, is a soul free of its own inflictions of terror and unbothered by its humanly judgement. For he, Francisco, the son of morning, has fallen to that which has a tail to rid himself of the fleas that gather on his tailbone and a little beard and horns to smarten his phiz; whose prayers one hears only as a crying bleat. What is left of Francisco is a goat on the tip of the Devil’s Tower on looking the sulphurous brimstone conflagration, condemned to condemn others that fall and err as Francisco had.
It was at that time a young Plains Indian girl was passing by, following an ancient road her ancestors described as a harrowing but fruitful journey through the Black Hills, where the Great Spirit and His Bears live. Slung over her shoulder was a canvas bag, bulging and heavy. She was carrying beautiful and precious stones and a wide array of beaded jewellery of pegmatites. The Indian girl saw the squalid adobe house and walked through the door. She saw the barren and decrepit solitude state of darkness with a sliver of light entering the crack in the corner. She saw around that light the small desk and the pile of crumpled papers of which’s symbols were foreign and unreadable. The Indian girl thought that if someone lived here, they were long gone. Only upon turning back to leave the dwelling did she see the dried saliva that pooled in the dirt and looked to be sparkling with diamonds. Her eyes came back to the desk where they saw ink dripping to the floor. She went outside and called out to for the owner, as she knew they must be nearby. Her calls were of no avail, the only tongue that answered back was the lost bleating of a goat, somewhere far away.
O woe that wan light
What reason has it to shine?
And yet it blinds.
Part Two
In the mountains of the Prealps, an encompassing morning of light and greenery blooming with primary colours, and Rimbaud’s rabbits preying to the retrospective rainbow, and the flowers of intelligentsia, awakening one who rises with youth and whose understanding of life deepens each day.
The Postulant ponders under a dazzling sunlight ray,
“Why, o with all, should one befall himself, for salvation comes from such insignificance at times?”
The thoughts disperse as he bounds down the steps leading to the monastery, abound his shoulder his strapped satchel hung, the day braced his bespectacled face, youthful and plumb, to the breeze that sweeps refreshingly past his tonsured hair. His sandals squeak and squish upon the dewy trail where thickets and weeds nestling comfortably on either side of the divide cling to his cassock as he goes by, but the thorns cannot keep his holy vestments in their grasp, for his stride forces the shrubbery to relinquish their claim on the passing man. The coarse cassock’s gossamer proves strong enough. Daniel often takes this pathway for his stroll.
He prays his want of attaining a novice stature will not result in an obsequious of servitude, but ‘sacrificing unto selflessness’ and serving as Yah did. It is a disposition that leaves him wondering if he is careerist and therefore self-serving and thereto denouncing himself a fool; for a failing fools’ falling is that he will not be considered a godly man. He recalled playing a game of cards, and though he now forsakes cartomancy, he did recognise the fool card was discarded from the game. Uninvited and unconsidered. Could he bring this forth to his erudite higherups, all that he concerns his mind with, would there come reasoning amid the stern stability of the Abbey? As he walks the path, autonomous tendencies control his gait, though his mind wonders infantile-like through infinity.
“Would not it be best to be naked and truly void of possession – but how that could lead to sexual proclivities…? Are we yet living in shame of the original sin in this regard?” He thinks.
In this perdition of thought, he feels the weight of all; his shoes, his satchel and his soul wearing a tad weightier, as though the load is heavier to bare than before. In moments such as, he grows closer to the fields, the bees and the horses flirting with the fluttering flees and the pesky flies – in that nature he feels Him stronger. He hears faintly the ordained calling hymns of the divine office, he feels tranquil.
O the Monastic life!
As he drifts from seeing what he was thinking, he was abrupted to think on what he was seeing, as with him now is a lamb, blocking the path before him. The tiny animal coated in a pale white that bore a similar youthful touch as he, making the child empathetic and filled with love as he hears the plaintive bleat of the lamb. He asks the lamb,
“May I take the road, my good Lord?”
He smiled at his jocose and went past the creature who kept its eyes on the prospecting Benedictine, watching over him.
Climb down your ladder and walk into day,
Where clouds and time sway ‘till the end of your day.
Climb up your ladder and onto a bed of night and into Yah,
All the while, waiting with His peace and wading in His presence.
POST SCRIPT
This thing about two converts in two parts, is about how irrational the mind is, how piebald our thought-to-be self-devised intentions are. How the urge to kick the bucket of human logarithms and truths because we prove not to believe what we once understood, comes upon us when the clouds move like grey icebergs in an ocean of black, and the feeling is to scatter our rationalisms oft somewhere in the wind, seek salvation in our dark hollows, to shatter the crystal place and undergo a new meaning of Him and It.
I felt like I was there
Popped off very well