My First Tentative Steps

My word become a thousand words for the day: Mercury. Word for both a planet (wanderer) and a god . Closest planet to the sun. Roman name for the messenger god, Hermes. Once considered by the ancient Greeks to be one of two planets which traced the same orbits about the sun. Hermes was the name for the elder evening manifestation and Apollo the name of the morning star. I wonder who chose to consolidate the names into Hermes (Mercury) rather than Apollo. Was the process gradual? A group effort which triumphed in the due course of time? Is there something essentially Mercurial than Apollonian about this planet? I suppose the manifestation at two parts of the day lends strength to the argument for Mercury (Hermes). After all, why would the god of light, clarity, order, harmony want to associate or habit a world which flirts with deep darkness? Perhaps because that world moves so perilously close to the source of all light and heat, Helios, the sun. Apollo's own light is Platonic tertiary real, bathing in the greater light of a sun itself the son of another sun...and so on. Is not the taste of pure light, sweetest bliss, worth the risk of flame? Maybe not. Where are you now, Apollo? Seeking wisdom from the usurped Pythian oracle?

Hermes (Mercury) is indeed light, swift, sure of foot, trickster God, slipping even out of his own name into another (Mercury). Neither intrinsically Roman nor Greek, probably not wholly the property of Egypt. He switches allegiance as the time dictates, and must have probably switched his name in the process. Where are you, Mercury (Hermes), today?

Surrealistic imagery unfolds: pine cones containing whole evenings within them, replete with constellations, space probes, and soft breezes...A brief trip out on to the web has not yielded me my prize: a picture that would transport the reader into my reverie. What artist would help me build my image? I haven't found the ideal helper, but I'm close to something. I envisioned a mountainous terrain populated by hardy trees, between the whorls of the hanging cones stars shining. I don't care to explore the symbolism, I will leave that to the Freudians out there. Rather, I would meditate on this profound idea of macro or large scale structures inhabiting the smaller spaces, smaller than the space of your cupped hands. Meditate, dwell, inhabit. I like these latter words...

Well, I think it's about time to go to bed. Good night!

I begin this post with a small memorial for my chidhoold friend who passed away. I shall provide you with his name: Kevin Farrell. I have this post used the word "friend", though I repeat that we were not very close-, we sometimes played together as children. Some invisible connection exists among people who have grown up with one another. I suppose this bond develops out of geographical proximity. The objects and experiences of a neighborhood embed themselves in the structures of our memories and perceptions and the imaginative projections of the future-past and future are then negotiated in the vortex of the present.

On the scale of the real, I am recalling wiffle balls, Charlie's crab apple tree, Mike's farm, his dog, Skippy, sunflowers growing on the corner plot, yellow buses visiting a corner with a stop sign, the lacework of branches running up and down the block. Within the matrix of associations, another child would occasionally enter, Kevin. I suppose our matrices overlapped. I certainly felt the loss the other night when I had first heard he passed away: 37 years old and dead of a heart attack. Not much more information, perhaps cholesterol was the culprit. Perhaps. There has been, there will be no official wake, no funeral. Kevin passes without ceremony into another existence; but he does not pass without my quiet and mournful reminiscences; he does not pass without my prayers for his safe keeping; he does not pass without my hope that he finds a greater and better existence. Certainly, John Donne writes profoundly when he compares loss to a permanent diminishing or lessening. Something has forever vanished from my life. Something it is which persists and continues...

For a reason not completely clear to me, imagery from C.S. Lewis' The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe appeared to me in relation to Kevin's passage. I do not wish to interpret the symbolism; rather I would convey my hopes, dreams, and desires about safe passage to a realm where animals speak and God presents himself in visceral, recognizable (though not expected) form. I often searched for portals to Narnia when a child. Before I even read the series, I wrote some stories with surprise passages to other places-, there where lay adventure, confidence, good friends, and noble causes, the possibility of defeat, the near inner certainty that all would be well, somehow work out in the end. I continue to search for those portals...