Snow

Tags

Candles, Christianity, Christmas, Feast, Festival, fire, humour, religion, Saturnalia, Snow, solstice, tree, victoria, Winterfest, Yule

Some stories demand attention.   Any writer can find them – or rather, they find him, eagerly salivating little gangs that pounce each time he opens his laptop and switches on.  Headlines, oddities, issues that invite comment, or exercise a turn of phrase.  Stories that beg to be told.

So here I am, staring at the keys.

Christmas stares back at me.

Christmas makes it abundantly clear:  it does not beg to be told.  All it wants is to be put back in its box.   Its greatest hope is to be left in peace.   Over the centuries it has been written about incessantly; it has been turned over, forensically examined, boiled down and put into test tubes, sculpted by the greatest, depicted by the painty-est (yes, I know it’s a new word – I just invented it) and sung without mercy.

There is nothing about Christmas we do not already know.

We know that St. Nicholas began a legend when (allegendly – another new one, do you like it?) he dropped bags of money down the chimneys of a deceased friend’s daughters to save them from penury.  We know the first Christmas trees were religious symbols Eastern European people hung upside-down from their ceilings (or medieval equivalent) as appeasement to evil spirits, just as ‘decking the halls with holly’ dates back to days when the dark woods were never far from our doors, and we needed to be sure our friendly sprites and fairies would feel at home when the party started.

We are aware our celebrations are intrinsically pagan, and early Christians hung their own festival of Christ’s Mass upon them for convenience, because it was easier to get converts if they didn’t try to impose additional celebrations on people whose winter resources were limited.   They understood even then that Jesus was not born on December 25^th:  they argued about His actual birthday from the very beginning.

So where is the new angle?  What startling revelation can I bring?

I have seated Christmas on my window sill, hoping a little cold air will wake it up.  It just stares at me, blankly.  Beyond the glass, Washington Irving’s rotund red fellow ho-ho-ho’s at me before fading away; heading back, presumably, to his inhospitable den at the North Pole.   How the hell does he cover Australia in midsummer from there and still get home before dawn?   Albert and Vicky smile regally from their cardboard portrait, the first Christmas card, before disappearing into an envelope to be despatched by a postal service that hasn’t been invented yet, making me wonder – was it an ill-advised penchant for adorning our Christmas trees with lighted candles that stimulated creation of a national fire service?

“No.” Christmas assures me.  “Insurance companies created the first organised fire brigades.  Nicholas Burbon initiated one after the Great Fire of London to protect properties he insured.  The first organised municipal brigade was probably Edinburgh’s, in 1824.”  It squirms in a weak attempt at enthusiasm.  “That’s something new for you!”

“But nothing to do with Christmas.”

“Oh, well then.”  It appears to be dropping off to sleep.  I give it a prod.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, WHAT?”

“I want a new angle.”

“There isn’t any.”

“Just something – anything – a bit different?”

It tucks its chin into its chest, adopting the shrivelled appearance it always has just before twelfth night, when nearly all its needles have dropped off.   “Snow.”  It mutters.

Snow.

Snow, of course, is the great enemy in Eastern Europe’s icy winter heart.   The Germanic peoples of history knew all about snow – the white blast that drove them to huddle within their huts, sealed up and buried, for the winter of the year.   It was an enforced hibernation, a somnolent wait for the coming of spring, and a habit as old as time.

Equal in tradition was Yule (the Nordic houl), the time of the hunt.  It began once the harvest was gathered in, and, just like the harvest, it culminated in a great feast – the feast of Yule.  Carcasses kept frozen by frost could be stored, so as to provision the months of incarceration.  Given a good hunting season, whatever was left over was consumed in feasting, sending celebrants to their hovels with full stomachs and hopeful hearts.

The Yule Festival – kept more formally by the Romans as ‘Saturnalia’, equally an occasion for seven days of self-indulgence – had added significance, for peoples of early times, as the winter solstice; important for those who relied so heavily upon the mood of the sun, and therefore a religious occasion:  of course, wherever there was a religious occasion the witches could be expected to put in an appearance, so it was a time of superstition and fear, too.

Perhaps it was that weak underbelly of terror that the Christians, four hundred years after the time when Christ is said to have lived, latched onto in the spread of their gentler creed; but it took all that time before Yule could be reborn as Christmas.

So there’s my angle.  It isn’t really new, and I’m sure you knew it already, but I thought I should just remind you that whenever someone laments Christmas’s ‘commercialism’, and insists upon the ‘true message’ of Christmas, it is you who has the moral high ground.   It is the time of the solstice and it is a feast:  the Romans gave gifts at Saturnalia, and so should you.

Christmas looks at me archly.  “Can I go back in my box, now?”

“Yes, of course.  Until next year, at least.   Oh, and thank you for ‘snow’.”

 

f

God of the Rocks

Tags

evolution, faith, fear, god, humanity, mercy, myth, Power, Prayer, religion, story, superstition

They said of him that he would be watching.   They said he would see the last of them to their graves, and the world itself would spiral down into infinity, before his eyes could rest.  He brought to them the seasons, the sun and the rain, and he taught them dread.

They said he was a god.

They worshipped him.  They beseeched him often, in their times of peril or of pain; sought in vain for his solace, begged fruitlessly before him that he might forgive their sins, because even though they could not explain the meaning of sin, the gift was not theirs to understand.  And although they believed they heard his voice, he never answered.

Enthroned upon his mountain-top among the frozen rocks, his immortal flesh scoured by wind and ice, he was a king, at least, of all he surveyed:  his eyes always open, his ears filled by the knowledge of man, unsleeping, watching the ages pass.  And he learned.

In his time he was accused of many things, at once feared and admired for his indiscretions.   He took the innocence of a king’s beautiful daughter they said; came to her disguised by the night in a cloak of swan-down to give her a son she would raise to be his intermediary with the people – but no-one saw, or had word of the child.  Time brought rumours of many sons, to whom were accorded the powers of minor gods, and daughters too.   He divided his responsibilities among them, his subjects claimed – for childbirth, for death, for fire and fertility – children unseen, with powers never proved.

The people prospered.  Their numbers grew.  They lost their fear of him, spurning the myths of his children and turning their prayers to the mountain less often, yet they committed greater and greater enormities in his name, and still they had no understanding of their wrongs.

He had left the mountain long before the first bold feet ascended to his high watchtower, left no trace of his presence among those merciless rocks; so they allowed themselves to laugh, perhaps a little nervously, at their primitive notions of his existence.  But he was watching, just as before.

There were some who knew his presence still, and many who pretended.   They made proclamations, they wrote laws they said that he had written, and words they said that he had spoken.  Some said he lived within each one of them, others believed him to rule from somewhere beyond the sky.  Few knew the truth; for the truth was that his home was where it had always been; beneath their feet – that he was the ground whereon they walked.

In all the world there were none who suspected, or truly understood his mind; who could fathom his relationship to man.   They sought his guidance when he had none; prayed for his favour when he gave none, but because they had shaped him into a loving and merciful image in their own minds they were sure, despite all evidence, he must be righteous and just.

With time he grew tired of learning about the imperfect mortals that moved about him.  He resented the barbs they plunged ever deeper in his flesh.  And he recognised signs of a transformation in himself, because of all the lessons he had acquired from the human infestation one stood tall – they had taught him emotion.  Their unnatural agriculture used chemicals to burn his skin and their treatment of beasts that truly were his own creation moved him to tears; and where he wept new waters sprang, and where he vented his fury he sent fire into the sky.  Now, at the last, he would prove worthy of their prayers.  Now at last, far too late, they had reason to fear him.

Knowing these creatures could never be true custodians of his world he was not yet moved to their destruction, though his impatience with them grew.  He shrugged his shoulders, sending their dwellings tumbling, more and more.  He charged the air with fire, he turned oceans to ferment, ice to rain.  Yet he did not dispatch them.  They vexed, but they did not infuriate.  Not yet.    Why?   Well, there was yet something in his aged world to gladden his heart.

He had seen her walking by this river before, a girl with pale cheeks and features that were perfection; whose dark blue eyes were filled by the mystery of the waters and whose soul was clear of mortal sin.   She walked with a man, another human, but this did not deter him, for no mortal could withstand his presence.   He had seen her, and he had wanted her.

“I think,”  said Nadia, as she crouched on her heels by the riverbank, reaching to dabble her fingers in the water;  “You should leave the poor fish alone.”

“Do you?”  the young man laughed.  “So you would consign the most popular pastime of all to the dustbin of incorrectness at a stroke, would you?”  He baited his hook.

“No, Ben, but I don’t see the point.  You entice them to bite on those horrible barbed things of yours, terrify them by hauling them from their natural element, then rip their mouths apart before you toss them back in.  Why?”

“Fish can’t feel pain.”  Ben shaped to cast his line.

“Are you sure of that?”

“It’s been proven.”

“Not, I take it, by a fish.”  Nadia sighed.  “Oh, look at the swan, isn’t it beautiful?”

“It’s a bird.”  The young man’s baited hook zipped over Nadia’s head on its way out into the torrent.  “If you don’t like fishing, why did you come?”

“I like the river, and I like you.  Ben, is it me, or is that swan swimming towards us?”

“Maybe it thinks you’ve got some bread for it.  Give it a sandwich.”

“I’m sure you shouldn’t….”   Nadia’s voice faded into silence as she found herself gazing into the eyes of the swan, which were the most thoughtful and visionary eyes she had ever seen.  They were eyes  of knowledge and destiny, bearing a message for her alone.   It was all she could do to remain where she was upon the riverbank, because the bird’s stare was mesmerising her.  It wanted her to join it, to give herself to its embrace.  Reflected in shimmering white upon the water, the noble creature glided ever nearer, dipping its head to nibble at a temptation that skipped by on the current.

“It’s taken my hook.”  The young man shouted.   “The bloody thing’s taken my hook!”

“Oh no!  Do something!” Nadia rushed forward, plunging to her waist into the river to reach for the swan, all her instincts screaming that this bird must be protected; must be rescued.   For a few dread filled seconds the swan’s powerful wings churned the water as it thrashed wildly against the line, then, as suddenly as it had been taken, it was gone.  Running with the current on desperate feet it gained the air.   Graceful yet crippled, its neck crooking as it tried to cough the metal hook free, it ascended,  and all Nadia could do was watch it depart.  She rounded on Ben.  “I could have got to it.  Why didn’t you wait?”

“I cut the line.   I couldn’t hold it, I’d have lost the rod and everything if I’d tried.”

“You let it go.”  Nadia wept bitterly, for she had seen in the space of a second everything the world had missed.  “You condemned it.”

She turned from Ben to walk home alone.  As she walked the world grew cold and a different darkness fell.

#

“Another one?”    Baldai asked.

“The third in this cycle.”  Procator affirmed, as they watched the screen.  “Most regrettable.  It seems this is the critical evolutionary phase.  The statistics for this galaxy are quite damning, I’m afraid.  We’re having some success, but almost entirely with acquatic solutions.  Land-based life forms are simply too fallible.  It’s almost as though the stock is corrupt.”

“That is possible, of course.”  Baldai admitted.  “However, there’s nothing to be done.  Is he recovering?”

“To a point, I suppose.  Avian disguises are particularly difficult to treat, and he had been in a river for three weeks before we could bring him up.  The physical recovery is good, but…”  Procator made a gesture of futility;  “his psychological makeup has completely burned out.  He has expressed a wish to retire to his galaxy of origin and I think that is probably best.”

“And that?”  Baldai waved at the image on their screen of the bereft planet:  “What shall we do with that?”

“Oh, dispose of it.  There’s another eligible candidate closer to this sun-star, if you think we should have another try – but I would be inclined to emphasise the oceans, this time.”

 

© Frederick Anderson 2016.  Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from the author is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Frederick Anderson with specific direction to the original content

 

 

 

 

 

A garden Universe

Tags

birds, blackbird, Hardy, insect, living, Nesting, religion, Season, sparrows, time, Universe

I steal an hour beside my garden table; hard wooden upright chair and book, watching sparrows to-and-fro from the dense forest of hedge to my left; that which I have named Leylandii Hotel.   Some have their bath-towels slung over one wing as they head for the bird-bath, some are involved in passionate discussion, others have beaks stuffed with detritus to embellish their comfortable beds.  Everything with wings is engaged in breeding  – the pleading of hungry children punctuates the silence warmly; an almost-melody only broken by paranoid blackbird fury.  He loudly insists the entire garden is his.  I’m sure the sparrows tease him mercilessly:  in their place I know I would.

A tiny fly, a fraction of an inch in length, settles upon the table and I half-notice it, absorbed as I am in my reading.  At taxiing speed it heads purposefully towards the table edge.  It clearly has a mission; a plan. It does not stop, or even pause, until it senses it has my attention.  Then it freezes, ready, I suppose, to fly.  Yet it does not.

Rightly, it does not.

In its tiny head is a clear objective, for one moment set aside.  Yet the look that has startled holds no malice – does it know?  A few seconds of wariness then it crawls on, leaving me, admiring, in its past.  It reaches the table edge and is gone.

Immaculacy.  No other word could describe that slender thorax of iridescent blue, wings of powder-fine lace, the minute white dots behind those tiny cellular eyes or the sinuous dance of its feeling hands – fibre-thin antennae so fine as to be scarcely visible, but sentient nonetheless.  So neat, so faultless that I cannot help but marvel at the natural god whose creation this is.

I am struck dumb sometimes by the slow intelligence of those who claim to understand the relationship that exists between time and size in this great universe, who seem to dismiss the brevity of a tiny life as of no importance. Do we imagine this miniscule miracle of nature perceives its life to be any shorter than our own?  Do we think it sees its span to be a mere moment, or a full and rich lifetime?  In that same scale, how short are our own lives, and how much slower is the rhythm of the planets, the movement of the stars?

Within a head little more than microscopic to my eyes there lives a brain no greater or lesser than my own:  a mind capable of decision and scheme, aware of danger, equipped for its defence.  To say it is no more than a basic life-form, that it is there merely to breed and then die, is to acknowledge a state not dissimilar to my own:  for what else, when all’s said and done, is our function?   Yet I would not accept that as a full assessment of my life and its worth; and no more should I dismiss the life of that small creature.  For inside its head I am sure it worries, and thinks, and dreams just as I do.  The secrets of the earth and the keys to the universe may lie within that little brain.

And so it is, in that much greater mind above us, with the stars.

In Memoriam – Cecil the Lion

Tags

blood-lust, Cecil, creation, cruelty, guns, Homo sapiens, hunting, lion, murder, punishment, religion, self justification, self-deception, species, sport

image credit: Brent Staplekamp

I imagine if you were to lay Homo sapiens out upon the anthropological slab and dissect him as a species you would come up with a number of anomalies. He is an ape, yet not – we can’t be sure. He has a large brain, yet not the largest. The brains of several less versatile species are larger. His opposable thumbs have been cited incessantly as explanation for his dominance, whilst that is as likely to be explained by his upright stance and his strong tribal leanings. In large measure these are traits shared by all the greater anthropoids – the chimpanzee, the orangutan, the gorilla, and so on.

I am not an anthropologist, and this first paragraph is merely stating the patently b****ing obvious. It needs to be said, though, because apparently it is not obvious – not to a substantial slice of our kind. That strange, developed brain of ours is capable of endless self-justifications and delusions; the most poisonous of which insists that none of that first paragraph is true.

Poisonous? Well, yes, because we put that argument, in most cases, to toxic use. If we say we did not evolve naturally into our present state, but were created somehow by a superior being who – guess what – looks just like us, we can justify slaughter without conscience. We can divorce ourselves from the rest of the inhabitants of this planet and plunder their species, torture them, then finally drive them to extinction without regard to morality. ‘Thou shalt not kill’ only refers to another one of our own, doesn’t it? Animals are ‘beasts’. They have no value.

Thus it is perfectly possible to reconcile religious and moral rectitude on Sunday with a hunting expedition on Monday which might involve shooting a lion, whether or not the shooter is hungry for its meat. We can self-justify, describing the process of slaughter as a pastime, even a ‘skill’, when all we are really doing is satisfying a primitive blood-lust. Some go further; they describe this barbaric trait as ‘Sport’.

We don’t seem able to rid ourselves of a ghoulish urge to destroy. In establishing our dominance we became omnivorous. We learned to eat animal flesh when fruit and berries failed us. That was reason enough to treat a hairy mammoth like a pin cushion to bring him down, before beating his brains out with rocks, but those times are long gone. We still eat our fellow species, we still treat them in an unforgivable way. We have made some improvements, even made token gestures towards mitigating their death agonies, although, intriguingly enough, we explain our reasons as ‘improving the quality of the meat’. In the interests of ‘Sport’ though, all rules are suspended.

‘Sport’ is unique, in that it has created its own societal structure. The social elevation of the blood-thirsty is enhanced by its kill tally. Apparently a perverted status attaches itself to the trophy, to the photograph of the killer standing triumphantly over the victim. It is often considered a rite of passage. The old need for self-justification creeps back in to insist there is some sort of equality in the battle with the lion, or the charging rhino, or the mighty buffalo. Equal battle? A battalion of beaters standing close by? All those guns against a set of claws and a sense of outraged privacy is hardly a fair fight, is it, especially since we picked it in the first place?

Long ago, we as a species became lords of the earth. Infestation though we are, only Nature can unseat us, and at the last she surely will, but while we stay here we have a duty to remember we share our world with its other rightful tenants, and we should respect them, because in a time to come we may need their mercy. They would be wholly justified in showing us none.

A curious apparatus, that Homo sapiens brain. Somewhere inside it there lurks a streak of supreme arrogance that will, eventually, provide the fuse for its own destruction.

 

A Word in Passing

Tags

adult, age, animals, church, control, cruelty, death, ending, Euthanasia, passing, philosophy, piety, religion

There are two places in my world where I would wish to be.

The first is a seashore, a mile of firm wet sand beneath my feet, a spray-loaded westerly gale in my face, and white-caps marching in military file upon the rocks. To stand before the might of nature and feel her snatching at my toes: to be for an instant at one with the primal power that speaks to us all, had we the ears to listen, these are the sights and sounds and sense of glory for me.

The second place within my heart is a quiet wood, among placid deciduous trees where tiny sunshine sprays of summer heat slip in between the leaves and birds provide quiet music to a percussion of breeze-stirred leaf and twig. A different perfection this, to sit upon some ancient bench beside a tripping forest stream, watching time drift past me into nothingness.

In either place, alone – for at the last Nature is our one true friend – I would gladly meet my fate. If I could my quietus make from earth to oblivion with such an image imprinted in my soul I would pass through the gate without fear.

When I watch the brief lives of our smaller cohabitants on this planet pass before me, expired in little more than a season, or a year, or ten, I reflect that the one true advantage we have gained over them all is comfort. Churchmen may sanctify life, politicians may play with it, but we normal mortals gain only by having food on our table, a place away from the snow, and the ability to express and resolve pain: and yes, it is right that we should bestow those gifts upon our brother species, and it is charitable to do so, where we have the means, so even when we feel the need to satisfy our carnivorous appetites we afford some dignity to the hordes we kill. If we count ourselves as ‘civilized’ we try to make death quick and painless, for every species but our own.

Somehow we have allowed ourselves to be persuaded by an argument that human life is different to that of the other animals that are forced to co-exist with us; that we are made ‘in the image of God’ and therefore a special case. We have taken the simple truth of death as an ending and made a science of an improbable land beyond it; and from that science derived a plethora of reasons why we should delay and protract our own death in a way that, if we observed it practiced upon an animal, we would denounce as gross cruelty.

I have my views about religion. It has been responsible for the genocide of millions yet we still espouse it in one or other of its forms, whilst I regard it as the greatest perversion of thought to be visited on mankind. Our greatest gift, on the other hand, is not a theoretical, but a real victory over death. We can end life, terminate it without pain. We should feel free to reject the sorrowful protestations of the former and joyfully sanction the latter.

If I wish it, and of course only if I freely wish it, I should be allowed my final hour without pain, dreaming of that seashore, or resting in that wood. Rejecting all peripheral arguments about family pressures and financial complications I should retain that essential right. By simply gaining agreement that medicine is primarily about mercy, at a stroke I would save treatments and bed-space needed for those with hope, rather than wasting them upon my losing battle. The timing would be mine. I would give my relatives peace, and leave my life as I have lived it.

I believe that, given a vote, an overwhelming majority would agree with me, and at last even the great and the good seem to be coming round to acceptance. After all, we take willingly all the other benefits medicine can give us – why not bestow the freedom upon us to use this last one?

I am Charlie

Tags

free speech, freedom, Fundamentalism, Islam, judgement, murder, Paris, press, religion, shooting, terrorist

Allah is your God, my friends.  We all have our God, if we believe we need one, and He is, if He is, probably one and the same:  only the name is changed, only the way we express our devotion is different.

Are there some things on which we can all agree?  Is our God a God of all creatures, did He make our world, is He a God of Mercy?

Or is He a fierce, unrelenting deity who may strike our sinners down?

Allah is your God, my friends, and He may, in your eyes, be a vengeful God, but justice is His to dispense, not yours.  You should know this, because one day you will have to meet Him and explain how you were so arrogant as to believe yourselves His instruments.  Your reward will not be paradise, it will be judgment.

Whatever our religion, we serve with humility.  We bow to humor as a just criticism of ourselves, because even if we find it unpleasant at times, we learn from it.  You alone consider yourselves above learning.  You alone consider your earthly prophet, human as he was, above reproach.

I do not speak to all Muslims, because you are not Muslims.  Muslims are gentle, charitable and kind, you are not.  Muslims do not treat their women like cattle.  You do.  You are monsters, aberrations:  you murder the vulnerable and the weak.  You have no place in civilization.

Charlie Hebdo Magazine, Paris, January 7th 2015.  Rest in Peace.

I AM CHARLIE

The Morning Visitor

Tags

#longform, Charity, Christmas, Frederick Anderson, legend, Marketplace, Peter, religion, saint, Sinterklaas, visitor

The knock on my door comes as something of a surprise.  I’m in the habit of rising early, and since December 23^rd is already generally regarded as a holiday, I don’t expect to have to deal with visitors at 7:00am.

He’s a man of some maturity and very little stature, though he has plenty of self-assurance as compensation for his lack of height.

“You haven’t left your shoe out.”  He says.

It’s an odd way to start a conversation.  I decide to ignore it.

“What do you want?”  I try to sound a little bit hospitable.  “It’s sort of early, isn’t it?  To come calling, I mean,”

“The sun’s up.”  He has a point.

“Only just.”  So have I.

“Well since you ask, young man, I have encountered a problem with my horse.  Not to put too fine a point upon it, he’s run off.  He tried to take me with him, but I fell out of my cart in time.”

Horse and cart?  “Have you hurt yourself?”

“No, not really.  The problem is I’m rather behind schedule.  I do have an assistant but he won’t arrive until later, you see.  And it’s my busiest time of the year.  Very vexing.”

I invite him in.  It seems the least I can do.  The door leads into my kitchen which I make warm as early as possible for one of our late breakfasts.  His hands are blue with cold, so I suggest he put them on the radiator to warm up, at which he looks at me rather oddly, but complies.  He stares about him.   “What’s that?”

“That’s the dishwasher.”

“You keep her in there?”

Now I don’t know why, but up until now I haven’t actually noticed how he’s dressed: the weather’s cold, I suppose, so I would expect him to be wearing a cloak, and brown leather doesn’t seem too inappropriate because whatever else he is, he isn’t poor.  There’s an impressive lump of gold on his finger.  “That’s a nice ring.”

“Do you want to kiss it?”

“Well no, not specially.  I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be – few people do these days.  Sign of the times, I suppose.”  He sinks wearily onto one of the hard kitchen chairs.  “Fortunately the cart was almost empty because we’d finished the deliveries.  I was on my way back to the depot.”  He shakes his head.  “Truly annoying.”

A peculiar little knot is forming in a corner of my brain.  “I suppose you have a lot of deliveries – around now, I mean?”

“Well yes.  Things used to be quite quiet and manageable, until poor old Ludwic passed on.  A great friend of mine, you see, Ludwic, but oh, the gambling!  The profligacy!  The waste!  Nothing left when he died; not a penny!”

“And this is why things got busy?”

“Sort of.  His three girls, you see:  he left them without anything; just no money at all.  Without a bit behind them, I’m sure you can imagine, life would be impossible.  They’d have ended up on the streets, I’m sure they would.  Anyway, I had this idea…”  He leans forward, confidentially, so I can see the enthusiastic sparkle in his eye.  “I wanted to provide for them, didn’t I?  I’ve got a few bob, it isn’t important to me; but the problem was I knew they wouldn’t take anything from me.  Proud, you see?  So I made up these three bags of cash, one for each of them, and what did I do, my dear?   I got up on their roof and I dropped the bags down their chimney.  Complete anonymity, you see?”

“How about that!”

“Ah, but that isn’t all.  Wait until you hear this bit!  These comely – oh, yes, they were very comely – where was I?  Ah!  Girls!  Stockings!  Yes, they had each washed their stockings, you know, and hung them up over their warm hearth to dry.  Overnight, sort of thing.  And what happened?”

I shake my head.  “I’ve no idea.”

“The bags of money fell into the stockings!”  The old man slaps his scrawny thighs.  “What do you think of that, eh?”

“Amazing!”  I am able to say with honesty.  “That could definitely go viral!”

“Exactly!  It did.”  He spreads his hands.  “And now – busy!”

Suppressing an inward groan, because the poor old chap is obviously as mad as a box of frogs, I offer coffee which he refuses, with elaborate decorum, saying he must find the local town because his assistant is sure to want to meet him there.   I explain the town is six miles away, but that doesn’t seem to daunt him so I watch (not without some sense of guilt, after all it is the season of goodwill) as he labors out into the cold once more.

“Wait!”  I call impulsively.  “I’ll take you in the car!”

He is clearly nervous of cars:  in fact, his first reaction to seeing mine emerge from the garage is a rapid step backwards; but he calms down fairly quickly and plants himself stiffly in the passenger seat.  I keep the driving extravagances to a minimum in deference to his obvious nervousness.

“You haven’t asked me my name.”  He says through gritted teeth.

“I think I know.”  I decide to humor him.   “Can I call you Nick?”

“Must you?  My name is Nicholas.”

“They made you a saint, you know.”

“Did they?   The darlings!  I met a few of the Papal States crowd at some conference thing a few years ago.  Nice people, mostly.”

We enter the town.  I am seriously troubled, because this old man is clearly deluded and quite possibly ill and I am unsure whether my destination should be the town centre, as he asks, or Finchfield Psychiatric  Hospital on the hill beyond.  But Nick is suddenly invigorated, sitting forward in his seat as his eyes, ignited by that manic spark I have seen before, dart about him, watching the crowds of shoppers converging upon the Market Place.

“Today is a farmers’ market.”  I explain.  “We always hold one at this time of year.”

“Really?  How delightful!  Look at all the blessed little children, see how happy they are?”

A screaming brat is hauled past the car window as I park, its impatient mother castigating it in choice terms that should make any saint blush.  Once again my misgivings come to the fore.  “I would be careful of becoming too familiar with the kids, Nick, if I were you.  Old men ogling children tend to get into trouble, these days.”

We walk through the market together, drawing odd looks occasionally, but Nick is far too entranced by the merriment and color to notice.  Instead, he picks out several of the stall holders.   “Why are they wearing red and white?  What is the reason for the false beards?  Have they some reason for disguising themselves?”

“They are all imitating you, Nick.”

“Me?  Merciful Heaven, why?  I never wear red and white, or fur.  It’s far too hot, where I come from.”

I tell him about Washington Irving’s avuncular version of him which took New York by storm in the nineteenth century, and about Coca Cola, and all the time my own eyes are following the squawking brat with its poor frustrated mother, as they make their way through the throng.

“Coca Cola.  African fellow, was he?  Speaking of which, here’s my chap!  He comes from the Africas too.”  Nick waves enthusiastically to a man at the far end of the square whose skin betrays his African origin.  “Peter, dear boy; over here!”

Peter sees us, responding with a cheery wave and a white smile that has some sort of evil mischief behind it; then, with one swift movement of the same hand, reaches down to snatch the brat from its mother, throwing the child into a sack which he has been carrying over one shoulder.

Our bustle of Christmas commerce is stilled as the market place plunges into stunned silence.  The mother starts to protest; murmurs of riot gather volume threateningly.  From somewhere a neighing and a clatter of hooves and the crowd scatters as a sleigh, drawn by a white horse, rushes towards us….

My alarm bell blares, jarring me into wakefulness with the unwelcome news that it is, in fact, morning.  For a few minutes I lie still, to let early light seep into my brain and memories of my dream fade.   Everything is as it always is; I can be sure I will not really witness a child’s abduction from the Christmas Market, or hear an early knock upon my front door.  It was just a dream.

Yet as I dress, listening to the morning chorus of birds, from the road outside I think I might just be able to hear the approaching rhythm of horseshoes…

 

Firefly

Tags

age, Euthenasia, Frederick Anderson, living, loved ones, medicine, memories, quality of life, religion

Once there was a world of bright air and conversation; once there was a house, its rooms filled with laughter. There was a woman whose arms were soft and consolation swift; a melee of children, a barking of dogs, a cat that would lay across his knees, singing to him.

Once there was a bed where he might wile away hours in sleep and dreaming.   He no longer sleeps.  The mist that has closed upon his mind has drawn a veil across his memories – all are faded, all gone; wilted like the last rose until only the naked briar is left.  There is a cold wind in the briar.

Now there is just a chair and a room, and beyond it there is silence.  Through the watches of the night he sits nursing his pain as he has done for countless nights, contemplating the chasm beyond the walls.    Somewhere out in the ether sits a firefly of change, but it will not dance yet, not until a darkness deep enough to glorify its light has descended.  As dawn smolders into the flame of morning it withdraws once more, waiting.

He also waits, knowing (or is it hoping?) it is there.  Hoping it will come to him as it did the summer he died, five years ago.  When his heart gave notice, that warm green afternoon, it danced for him, and though he felt welcomed by its light, he could not follow where it led.  Jolted back to existence, he was prevented.

When he asked the man with shining skin and smiling stare why he should be made to stay the man spoke of a higher plateau where the hibiscus of his youth would grow again and the sweetness of forgotten scents, the smell of woman and the cry of wheeling rooks was eternal.  The open path where he walked once, that person said, was waiting, but he might only earn his place there through suffering.

Are you suffering, shining man?  Do you really know what suffering is?

The window curtains are grey with morning.  Soon ‘Twice Daily’ will come to draw them, to wash the humiliation from a body which although attached to him is no longer his.  There will be food and pills and she will leave.  For the hours until another night his rebellious heart will keep beating.    He will struggle to catch each fleeting breath, reaching within himself to tear out the gossamer strands that clog his lungs, his instinct for survival denying him the final rest his head cries out for. 

But oblivion will not come to him – not for another day, and then another, and so many more; while all the time the firefly hovers just beyond his grasp, patiently waiting.

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Just recently a lady I knew well ceased to breathe.  I could not grieve for her passing because to me, to all of us who knew her, she died four years ago.   She died the night her heart surrendered.  She was eighty-two.

Once, upon what some would say was a less civilized time, she might have lingered a few hours, or perhaps a few days, then passed with her family around her.  Everyone would remember her for the light that shone from her before she was stricken, and the world would move on.   Once.

Instead, those who loved her cried for help.  Instead, she was revived.   Her chest was cut open, a pig’s valve was sewn into her heart and the tubes that had been clogged with the years of living were replaced.   Her body was returned to life, and life became her prison.

Did she live longer?  Certainly, yes.   Was the time valuable to her, an active, practical woman who loved to go out, to tend her garden, to keep house, to walk?   When she could no longer do any of these things, did she live longer?  

I cannot say that any but the very best of intentions brought her back from the precipice, or that we should not stand in awe of all that medical science has achieved and can do.  I would be wrong to question the motives of any who strove to save her and give her those few extra years; but I do wonder whether we fully understand a cliche we use too freely and too often:  ‘the quality of life’.

Somewhere along the way, in our ardor to progress, to make advances in medical science, something has gone wrong.  A balance has failed, we have tipped over an edge of reason into an abyss of our own creation.  It is time to step back and look again.

It is time to consider, since we now have power over life and death, how we should use it.