The Light, and the Dark

I know you can still hear me, the voice was saying. Remember. You must remember everything. Remember what we agreed.

What does remember mean?

All our work here, the voice was still talking, softly, close by, somewhere, all your own research with The Earth Council. You must remember everything. Remem…..

Dark.

Peter, love… Oh, my love… don’t leave me…. You must let… go….

Has he gone?

My love. Rebecca. Ah, Rebecca.
And for a moment he stirred, struggled towards her voice. But the effort was too much.

Dark.

There was a slowly increasing crushing sensation. He jerked awake, panicky. His body was crushing him.
Remember. Leap for the light.
He remembered, but this sensation was not on the list. No one knew about this. Crushing inward. He held on, as they had agreed, held on, and held on. He was panicking now. The crushing grew to a frenzy of noise; it was like a screeching, as though his whole body was screaming out.
He held on, held on, until it reached top pitch… then let go.
He was flung out. Into the light, the light streaming in.
It was overwhelming.
From crushing, to release. From frenzy, to peace. From  noise, to silence.
Overwhelming.

And coming towards him, out of the light, he saw old comrades, his parents, his infant son. None had aged, all were just as he remembered them. All did… exactly as he expected them to do. He’d dreamed this, so many times. And now here they were… doing… just exactly what he… dreamed.
Through their bodies the light was still bright. He looked towards it, looked closely. And looking took him there.

He was bodiless.
All was so familiar; more familiar than his living state.
He was memory, and knowledge. He was awareness.
And before him was the world of spirit. With all its endless rebirths.
Knowledge, though, that was of a different nature to what he knew: the research, dissertations, theories he was to remember. Knowledge was the body’s own.
And he’d left that. His body was gone now, and he felt its essential knowledge fading.

He felt the power of life now, undiminished, no longer filtered through his senses, through the switchback structure of his brain, his mind, and the world.
This and that, this and that, always this play of the world and its effects on him.
But the real knowledge was fading.

The aim of their higher research at the Earth Council was to focus the minds’ energy back into the earth, to replenish it, heal it. That had been their life’s work.
But the world of spirit was not like that. The world of spirit was all about rebirths.
And all the previous births, lives, now came to mind, to instant recall, were no longer caught up in the thick webs of the body.
But each life, he saw it now in the fading knowledge, was a stumbling, fumbling, inching towards learning.  Many times he had not made it all. His last one… his last one….
The only brightness in it was Rebecca.
He felt a strengthening, the knowledge pulsed again a moment. She was the life and the light in all that clumsiness. And he had leapt away, and was now lost here, without her.
Lost, and back on the rebirth treadmill.
She had been his chance. To stay with her, to return his life energy to the earth properly. To die in his body, and return all he owed back to earth.
In the dark grave.

At last. An end to the treadmill.

That light – was his body tearing open, before it?
Is that what had happened there? Or was that the serene glow they had tried to tell each other it was? An evening pathway leading to peace?
A ragged intrusion, or a blossoming? And the screaming out, wasn’t it more a kind of sigh, as his cells released their energy?
Oh, language, language lies so easily.
Each new life, rebirth, was not as they had tried to make it, a building on previous experience, attainments – no, each life was always from point zero again.
Older hands at this rebirthing had dragged bits with them into next lives, memories lingering, as they rushed into it all over again.
There are always these anomalies, and they have no particular meaning or use to anyone.
The memories that lingered were never the ones with any importance, those were taken up, absorbed,  into one’s deeper self. Into the body. The ones that still fluttered about were wisps of no interest.

 

And the facilitators had now noticed him. They were coming over.
He had done this himself in previous leaps, gently coaxing the bewildered back into births.
Less trouble, that way: a wandering lifeforce  – always in the way of the flow.

But that is not how the earth is healed!
He saw it in that pulse of knowledge that memory of Rebecca had released in his fading body.
We heal it, by returning everything to it.
He looked around, sensed the great busyness.
If we’d all gone back into the earth, the dark of the grave, then, rather than depleting the earth, denying it the life energies we take into the light…. We’ve denuded the earth; we’re constantly weakening it, leaving it unreplenished. And all to feed our own sense of self, with all these lives.

That is the problem with that crucifixion. The death in the sky, that life into spirit. That leap was out, and away.

She has been five years buried in my illness with me, and now released.
I took her away from her friends, and her family; now she can find them again.
I gave her a marriage of sadness and the loss of our only child.
All that blame and recrimination; now she can let it go.

The light in her hair, though; I will never forget that.
This is what I should remember. These things are what matter; what I should remember.

And the facilitators guided him away from the body he continued to hover within, from the wife who wept.

What does… memember… mean…?

 

 

Spring

‘No, no, no,’ he was thinking as he was waking.
‘Too early. Damn birds. Damn, damn.’
His protestations lacked the vigour to drive him up and doing. He pulled the covers over his head. But he lay there tense.
He knew; that was enough. Too much light. Too much… busyness. It was in the air. And it was stifling under his covers.
‘Someone turned on the heating? I’ll kill… the bills!’
But it wasn’t that. What it was, he knew, he had to shell-out for a new mattress. Sticking into his back again.
‘Memory foam. Not one one of these….with metal bits sticking up into you….’ But at least this got him up and dressed.
‘Something… was it King Albert? Edward? Someone who shoulda known better, died through … tetanus… septacemia… from a bed spring?’ And that had him washed and dressed, and presenting himself downstairs.

A cheer as he walked into the workshop. Sarky lot, he groused. He looked at their beaming, lively faces.
‘Come on granddad. Get this down you.’ A mug of strong tea. Too strong, His constitution… there’s a word from his younger days, when he had the gift o the gab…. Well, his stomach could no longer take it. They meant well. He looked at them again, felt a warmth for them. A part of him whipped out, ’Infectious.  Infectious good-will.’ And that part of him knew that bode ill.

And then they brought out the chair. The wheel-chair. He froze. That anger felt good, he felt better. Slightly. But he couldn’t sustain it. To his shame, and yet… relief, admit it… he slipped into it, as if into a made-to-measure suit.
He thought about it, his old wardrobe, those suits up there. Maybe he could donate them. The styles, well. They same it all comes round every twenty years or so. So….

They were all looking at him. Their young, eager, and innocent expressions. It was an unhurried, but expectant look. Does that look have a name? He no longer cared… cared to follow through, find the lost connections. Is youth an expression? It’s… an age… thing…..

‘Let him rest,’ they were saying, looking over to him. Benevolent, he thought, that’s it. That’s the word.
He’d slumped. They’d left him near a window, and it was too bright, too hot.
‘Has one o yous put the heating on?’ But he couldn’t get the tone right. It came out like a snarl. Had he upset them now? But the bills…!

‘Come on, old man.’ They were saying, gently, like to an old pet? No, there was respect in their faces, their manner. His students. And suddenly he felt proud of them.
‘Just this one last job, eh?’ ‘They wheeled him to the engine room, lifted his hands to the iron wheel.
‘Easy, now.’ they soothed, ‘Just one last slow, steady push. Then it’s all over, eh. Plenty of sleep.’
‘Those daisies don’t push up by themselves, Mr Winter.’

 

http://www.inkpantry.com/

Ingeborg Bachmann Reprise

https://michael9murray.wordpress.com/2011/11/10/darkness-spoken-the-collected-poems-of-ingeborg-bachmann/

There was a loud rat-a-tat-tat on her door. It was a warm Rome night; she looked up from her work – That time?
She tutted at the interruption, at the time, at another night without dinner. Was she really tutting at her own forgetfulness? She turned back to her work, the old manual typewriter.

The door was knocked – banged – again. With great annoyance she stood but sitting so long had not been kind to her hips and she stumbled, hobbled, towards the door, holding onto her old, scant furniture.
She became aware of the noises around her for the first time, noises from the other apartments she was housed among. There was the next door radio again, and the other side the harassed voice of  mother of two little girls. Upstairs for once was quiet. Odd that, she was thinking. And then the door banged again.

‘Who is it?’ she called in her still-inflected Italian.
‘The Police. Open up please.’
Still she paused, the particular emotions this roused racing through her like long-lost family. She opened the door a crack, then more as she recognised the older man’s face.
‘Hello again,’ he smiled sardonically.
‘Upstairs?’ she asked. He nodded. Without being asked they walked in. They looked round the small, cramped apartment.
‘You would think,’ the younger of the two men was saying, ‘with all these papers, books… they’d sound-proof.’
‘Sound, like hot air, rises.’ The other motioned to the ceiling above, still strangely quiet.
‘This is the third time your neighbours have complained,’ the older man said, not unkindly.
‘I have to work.’ she said.
‘I know, I know….’

‘We need to see your papers.’ It was the younger man, he did not like the way his older officer was being easy with the perpetrator. There must be respect for the law.
She showed him her passport, permits.
‘German ?’ He was unsure now, the old enmity was still alive
‘Austrian!’ She was suddenly very much awake.
‘The older man moved in front of his comrade, gently returning her papers to her.
‘It is late, though,’ he said, ‘people need to rest after a long day.’
‘But I need to work,’ she repeated; or I’ll go mad, was running through her head.
The younger man was trying to claw back the ground he’d just lost,
‘What are you working on?’ His tone was a little too authoritative; he realised it and could not keep eye contact.
‘Just… just some poetry, a novel.’
The younger man was leafing through her papers. She looked anguished. The older man sighed, tired and in need of some cooler air after the stuffy room.

‘It is such a… little thing.’ the younger officer said, holding up the poem she had typed out already. He looked disappointed. They were moving towards the door at last.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘such a little thing.’

 

Based on a real event.