Demeter at the gates of Hades, amidst a windstorm of sand and billowing hooded cape of aubergine, falls down upon the entrance door
Our gods are immortal. Their fables misconstrued but they endure the lower minded replicas of them who run around for a time on the game board
The stories have many turns and many many reinventions
Quite by accident, to my surprise, I recently discovered that I still think in Dutch.
You know, it triggered a domino effect in my mind when this realization tripped up upon me as I was in the process of looking for that touchstone; keystone ….of humankind
you know that part of our evolutionary history where we sat upon a precipice. The species were hunted. But that changed. And then there was time for wars. But what happened in between. What about the status quo quietly puttering on the edge of society which cradled them in the means to survive.
In all this to of course find my need for answers. Why I’m different. Who did I come from. What mystery do I need to find? What of those people I never got to know but I am a scion of; I’d really like to know ….who they were
So I found myself deep in piles of handwritten notes— the Charlemagne age, the Romans, the Greeks, the Celts/Gauls, the Minoans, the Vinčas and naturally I had to search out movies next— keep in mind Quest for Fire was my favorite film when I was eighteen, so it’s all about the wonder of the caveman walls and those notes they left behind
my fascination (via Elan’s past life with Vikings) with Frisians after extensive studies of the Scandinavians dragged me further towards others of the Germanic common lines, beyond the Jutes, Angles and Saxons because of the dark horse of a mystery that is my other half of mixed but old aristocracy (on the wrong side)
That was how I stumbled on Redbad and went in search of what films might be on him; so engrossed in the pagan scenes it was fifteen minutes in that I realized it was all in Dutch. But I’ve not been around any Dutch people for years. How can it be possible to immediately know the words
I had a moment of pause as I thought about language. How so many words all originated from the same place. I thought of Proto/Indo/European (PIE) and how they are all connected.
And that DNA memory theory again
What if it is as part of the human dna as the genes like thst sleeping dragon still in the blood even as so many revolutions have past. Wasn’t it Socrates who said we are all re-membering? That we already contained all our knowledge but we go through life trying to recall it from past lives.
you know it was the most strangest of things, yesterday that I saw —it was something almost mythical.
right after the storm, the snow is all powder white, it crunches quietly because the sky is full of snow
so it was this way, a bare skeletal tree at first caught my eye
then suddenly the sounds of wild ravens hawking loudly
when I got to the house there it was! Covered in black ravens, dozens!!! A yellow house covered in ravens all flying around —then up in the trees behind in the bare branches —all filled with ravens.
They circled me as I walked by the house and shouted at me flapping their wings
and I wondered walking away—why is it only thst one house?
the odd incongruence
of a shatter of golden ochre autumn leaves
upon a near foot of white snow
illuminated under the lamppost
I suppose I must have got lost in thought staring into the vastness of the street, how fast things move— don’t they?
why must they?
Josef shocks me out of my fugue by appearing suddenly next to me. The Viking ambush again. But he holds a cup of coffee and offers it to me,
“sorry, it’s not instant, he’s dragged out the French press, but there’s honey in it, you see I remembered—and some of the almond milk I saw in there, but—no, Jörn made it for you.”
I don’t look at him right away. I feel guilty and smile and take the cup…. Folkmoot ….? I get that feeling again …. Like that time—the first time in Jörn’s kitchen; he handed me the cup and ….I felt it…. that sense of an overlay of ….lives…. Josef ….he was there —then ….that’s what ….it was that day at the barn house—I forgot I saw it then too
I shudder but manage to suppress it and sip the coffee and look up at Josef
“We never had that conversation,” he tells me in that wise old voice which he exaggerates because he can’t resist the drama
“Which one?” I ask him
“You have been angry at me,” he says this as if no time passed since he’d last said it
Had I forgotten?
His eyes, when his twinkle, are not the same as Jörn’s —Josef has a more Father Christmas about his whereas Jörn’s twinkle is always —well, noir ….
“Because you pretended to like me and it was just to get me legally hitched to your son for your opera house,” I tell him this without any drama at all. I state it because this is what happened.
I hear Jörn laugh from the coffee pot as he brings two more cups over to the table; he places one in front of Josef who has settled himself at —the head of the rectangular table. Of course. Folkmoot, I think ….
But blurt,
“Jörn, did Gerald tell you I was back?” turning to Jörn as he—presumptuously— sits beside me on the kitchen bench that parallels the full length picture window
But now it is Josef who laughs and says,
“you think he needs a psychic to tell him you’re back when he’s an international spy?”
“I’m an ‘intelligence decipherer’ not a spy, papa —is that what you went by?” Jörn replies
Josef laughs,
“I’m a respectable symphony conductor, that’s what it says on my tax papers….pass the socker.”
