Bryan Merck

Deux Contes

 

 

 

Quantum Swami, Quantum Bones

 

Benny, the homeless street prophet,  announces : “The thought Nazis are out and at it. The domain between the ears is no longer sacrosanct. Forget about private opinion, consider re-education by force of public opinion, being shunned and talked about badly— think like us, agree with us, bless us. We are young and feckless.”

 

 Swami Brahamanda, lately of the Brahmin Sapera snake- charming flock in the mother country, a holy man, champion of many things, basks in the spirit around Benny. Our Swami wears a neon lime turban. Ecstatic, he decides to reach out and touch Benny, who is a dynamo, just now, of palpable esoteric energy. He lays a hand on Benny’s shoulder. Benny fixes our Swami with a resolute gaze.

 

“Don’t even go there,” he growls.

 

Our holy man is not insulted. He considers Benny a spiritual idiot savant. Swami returns to a bench beside the big fountain, the one with, according to a gaggle of local Evangelical pastors, new-age satanic elements.

 

Swami Brahamanda still operates in an Eastern paradigm. He does not see a demon behind every bush. He hasn’t a clue why a bronze-green man with a ram’s head, seated near one point of a star, with a book in his lap and a staff in his hand, telling a story  to toads and rabbits and turtles and a dog or two, has an arcane resemblance to the satanic baphomet goat. The sculptures were put in the fountain by the local Arts Council.

 

Across town, at the William J. Diamond Church of Jesus Christ With Signs Following, Reverend Pete and Reverend Bill Diamond himself carry a rattling and hissing plywood box containing several canebreak rattlers. They set it down near the pulpit. These are new snakes lassoed at a recent Wetumpka Rattlesnake Rodeo. They are magnificent specimens. They were destined to become chili meat before the reverends redeemed them.

                                                                                         

Miracles follow the life of Swami Brahamanda . Some of them are unruly. Just now, as he is seated by the fountain at Five Points, he suddenly finds himself in the company of Pete and Bill and the malignantly rattling and hissing plywood box. Our Swami has experience in the mother country charming cobras. He is also, at the same instant, seated next to the contentious fountain. This is due to his newfound ability to bilocate, or be in two places at once.

 

Pete and Bill cannot see our Swami. He is travelling in the realm of spirit. This ability is neatly explained by quantum physics. It has more to do with entanglement than with anything spiritual.

 

Mr Bones, a hyper dimensional being, appears next to our Swami on the bench by the fountain at Five Points. Brahamanda knows of the robust nature of the spirit world. He is not puzzled by Bones in the least. He has no fear of the spirit realm. For him, there is no ongoing battle between satan and God underlying and imperiling all of life.

 

Bones is quick on the uptake. He shoots over to the snake-handling church. He is also invisible to all but our Swami. Bones is a skeleton in tie, tails and top hat. The Swami, a classic film buff, expects him to break into a bleach-boned rendition of “Puttin’ on the Ritz.”

 

Brahamanda, at Five Points and snake-handling church simultaneously, and seeing Mr Bones for the first time, at least in the waking state, is frisky with excitement. Greater things are coming.

 

For some reason having to do with the universe being situated soundly in spirit, Mr Bones suddenly becomes visible to both reverends; they see him and then they see our Swami, too. This is somehow due to the observer phenomenon.

 

Bones and Swami and Pete and Bill move into a vortex of intention. An ecstatic mystery steam seeps into the edges of their shared reality.  Bones settles into a wonderful softshoe and our Swami beams brightly and extends his hand. Reverend Pete rebukes them both soundly in Jesus’ name, Reverend Diamond likewise. Both reverends repeatedly banish them to outer darkness. This is a fundamental Christian rebuking and banishing exercise commonly known as “spiritual warfare.”

                                                                                                                    

Swami Brahamanda and Mr Bones are confused by this attempt at exorcism. They exist in the expansive realm of spirit, of God. Reverends Pete and Bill exist in the midst of a very treacherous all-encompassing spiritual war. This existence itself is treacherous and a fate  to be escaped from. When we push on the ether, it pushes back in kind.

 

Brahamanda simply relocates. Mr Bones follows. Seated in the shade around the fountain, now, Bones has lost his visibility to all but our Swami. Bones begins to investigate the contentious fountain. Brahamanda settles into a peaceful nap. In the aforementioned church, Pete pumps a fist and drops to one knee. Bill Diamond yells, “Touchdown!” and they high-five each other.

 

 

 

The Stillness of Only Being

 

One night, late, I heard a strange commotion skyward. A loose formation of turkeys putting forth triumphant gobbles passed across the face of the moon. It took me decades until, in these days of the waning of the internal combustion engine, I could believe that Jesus loved me.

 

One morning, I found Thomas Byron in ecstasy on a seat in his rose garden; amidst a bevy of hybrid teas, he, a recent and reluctant child of God, and I, no less a child of God, sat together. We commiserated:

 

“If it got any better I could not stand it,” he said. “’Normal’ is a setting on a washing machine.”

 

“I am not only the poet of storm and stress,” I said. “I want to lead creation in a grateful song of being, a chthonic chant near the limits of experience, here.”

 

We each smoked a good cigar among the rose fragrance. Hummingbirds levitated around the Mr Lincolns. Monarch butterflies and honey bees also assisted in pollination. A choir of early morning crickets worked in a nearby grassy expanse.

 

Only to be so wholly adequate for a given task, an obvious life’s work, to be designed for it.

 

“You have a god-given capacity for indolence,” said my chorus. They massed among the Tropicanas.

 

“I will be completely taken up by something greater, transcendent, other,” I said. “I will advance with the kingdom of God.”

 

“You are weak; you cannot handle the common reality,” said my chorus. They are six grungy old men, two semi-hot women, and Jeanette, a project-dwelling cynic.

 

“Growth can come by other means than suffering,” added Thomas. “I bless you,” he said.” We can do that, you know.”

 

And so on.

 

I once bathed in the Ganges River and its presence in the lives of the people of India. Down the street, here, beyond the levee, the Mississippi  carried its traffic in silence, with only an occasional horn from ship or barge and the exultation of the men on deck.

 

Mark Twain was a boat captain further upstream. Further still finds a gateway arch yet beckoning all the same. Further still finds a river whose crossing meant freedom for slaves. Further still finds a point of origin, Lake Itasca in northern Michigan.

 

The Ganges begins in the Himalayas. At Benares, pyres are constructed for the dead, simple stacks of wood, and their bodies burned. It is fortunate to die there. The ashes are joined with the water, water already heavily silted with mortality.

The dust of rendered flesh and bone flows to the sea.

 

I had a niece who was cremated and her ashes spread from the nearby river bank. Water has a soul, ancient and unchanging. I must return on the amniotic tides. Time.

 

There is a common source, a baptismal sluice, something that pores itself out in a profligate flood of being. It sends forth Thomas and me, brimming, overflowing. Are we cheapened by the passage, its edification?  Do we ever grasp its purpose?

Need we?

 

One morning in the rose garden, Thomas and I knew all this, too. In our individual silences, then, we moved beyond words. We took up again the storied and acclaimed rhythm, life. We joined dogs, cats, pelicans, sea gulls, hummingbirds, butterflies, bees, and the newborn of every species in the mighty opus, the stillness of only being, equanimity, of a genteel  day along a river in time.

 

 

 

Bryan Merck has published in DM du Jour, America, Eunoia Review, Kentucky Review, Pleiades and others.  He is a past winner of the Southern Literary Festival Poetry Prize and the Barkesdale-Maynard Fiction and Poetry Prizes. He lives in south Georgia with his wife Janice. He is at bryanmerck@gmail.com.