To Feast Upon the Wisdom Fish

I awoke on the last morning of the year to a cloak of tepid December air and the hope that today I might find wisdom. The high breezes of the night before had scampered off, leaving the headland in quiet broken only by effervescent mutterings of the surf. I could hear them curling though the open window next to my bed. A gentle puff of air caressed my face. With it came the saline tang of seawater, undergirded by iodine and fish.

The hearth was barely warm. A fire of modest proportions I had lit the prior evening. Not much required between the unusually warm weather and the two fingers of single malt I had allotted myself for the night. Warmth, indeed.

My pens and notebook lay upon the table where I left them. In the white gold sunlight, silent and patient. Sitting up enabled me to see the scratchings on the pages, redactive testament to the autumnal fallowness of my mind. Sighing, scratching my head, I rolled out of bed before inertia could drag me back down. I closed the notebook as I made my way to the toilet.

I realized I should be hungry. Winter light has a vampiric beauty at times. Days leading to the solstice draining the very iron from the blood in my veins. This last day of the year, my belly is neither hot nor cold. It just is. Melancholy grips me at the memory of hunger, the lost clarity of ravenousness. In such a state of mind, eating had an air of penance about it.

But eat I would. I reminded myself that a full belly is not the sole arbiter of happiness, but goes a long way towards comfort. Three rashers of bacon and the last egg in the larder gave me a breakfast of Cartesian precision. Swallowing the last morsel made certain I would be heading to town soon, a journey of mixed emotions. I needed food, not company.

Not today. Not this morning. Standing on the porch sipping the last of the cold tea and fidgeting with the lighter in my pocket, the waves convinced me a long walk was in order. I struck off southward along the strand.

Under a cerulean sky thready with horse mane clouds I walked for what seemed miles. The sea lay subdued, languid iron-green breakers diffusing themselves along the olive-tinged strand. Odd, this hushed tone on the day. Manannán himself perhaps felt the tendrils of winter, muffling his voice here by the sea.

The quiet filled me with wonder and unease. The sea out here by the headland was normally restless, quite vocal. I think it, like me, awoke at the end of the year holding its breath, husbanding its energy. Was Manannán there? I paused to look out past a line of rocks. There was motion, I thought. Not sea gods but seals. Or selkies.

I drew a deep breath and started on. The sun rose in its slow degrees. A few minutes of arc later and I arrived at the mouth of a stream. It slithered over peat and rock to diffuse itself into tide pools before the sea. The tide was ebbing. The rocks a few yards away beckoned. Festooned with seaweed and samphire, encrusted with salt above the tide line, I often used the rocks as an impromptu seiza, my meditation bench on those days when I fancied myself a Buddhist monk. Climbing up, I sat. Sun inched its way up the bowl of the sky. I absent-mindedly pulled the lighter from my jacket pocket, flicking it open and shut with unconscious rhythm. I dissolved into the sea.

The waves. Unctuous flow of gelid green water. I float on my back underwater looking up at a quavering spot of light that I took to be the sun. Kelp wrapped my limbs in buttery bands. I did not feel I was drowning. I slept under the gaze of fishes and a pair of stern looking eyes watching me from a distance. Their refulgent opalescence lit me with a nimbus of pale green.

Minutes? Hours? When I awoke no idea what had passed, although the sun had moved little, it seemed. Thirst and hunger gnawed my belly. It may have been the ache in my legs what woke me up. I stretched and yawned. Manannán faded from my head. I stood up to return home. Stepping off the rocks, I splashed my way through a shallow pool. The pool breathed.

I stopped, not wanting to tread further. Water heaved and swirled at my feet. The billowing water resolved itself into a large fish which I took to be a salmon if my amateur ichthyological skills were of any value. It was trapped in the pool. I was agape. I considered carrying the hapless fish back to the sea. My belly made its hunger known again.

The last day of the year, and I stared down at the fish, wondering what to do. The wind had picked up. In it, my ears heard what may have been the hiss of sand. But my heart heard the ghost of Fionn Mac Cumhal, urging me to take the salmon, and eat. I gave in to the imperative, wrapping the fish in fronds of kelp. It struggled briefly but clearly was not much longer for the world. I started towards home.

The wisdom Fionn gained from his Salmon of Knowledge may not be mine to have in the coming days of the new year, but I sure hoped it so. It is the last day of this one, and if I would not be wise at least I would not be hungry. So said the sea.

Magpie Tales 136: Escaping The Deep End

 
Flying Down, 2006, by David Salle, via Magpie Tales

Rainer sucked in a lungful of bluish smoke, sighing it out through his nostrils as he rocked on his heels outside the gallery. The cigarette tip glowed like a tiny baleful eye, illuminating his reflection in the gallery glass. His reflection overlaid the poster he was eyeing, the rumples of his clothes giving texture where there was none. Sunken eyeballs, weed-whacker hair and sallow flesh looking ghastly in the sodden oyster light of a hangover Sunday morning. He belched quietly. The backwash in his throat a mixture of gin, diner eggs and something like regret which failed to fade no matter how hard he swallowed.

His head ached. His eyes twitched slowly in their sockets, lead balls in syrup. The mish-mash of images, the riot of color seemed to set up a resonance in his chest and belly. They fluttered in odd syncopation. The stirring in his groin caught him off guard. What the hell? he thought.

He found himself staring again at her ass. Slow realization trickled into his sludgy consciousness. It was her. Her. Again.

"Goddamnit, Morgan, leave me be. You with the look!" Rainer barked at the glass. Shame coursed through his mind, causing him to shiver. Six years, and she still yanked his chains. He rubbed a throbbing temple with a shaking hand. He knew she was still there, red hair and green eyes and that ass, Oh my god her body, those curves, face buried in her hair, hands desperate to pull off her sweater, JesusH she smelled like the ocean, she's a selkie come to drag me out to sea, again and again...

Rainer staggered back from the glass, the warm drops coursing down his cheeks mixing with the cindery rain that began to fall. He wiped his face with a dirty cuff. The bottle in his coat pocket slapped against his sunken chest. He looked down, mildly surprised, and pulled it out. Two fingers of gin sloshed around inside. Rainer swore he heard her voice in the beads of liquor rolling down the sides. His breathing stopped momentarily as he stared at the bottle, then back to the woman on the poster. Back and forth, a sluggish metronome. His trance was broken by a man approaching from down the sidewalk. He had a leash wrapped around his wrist, at the end of which an eager Irish setter strained forward, finding something interesting in Rainer standing there.

Rainer stood up a little straighter, pushing his hat back on his head. He tried to look jaunty as he saluted the dog and owner with the gin bottle. The setter sniffed at him with that goofy look all dim but happy dogs seem to have; the owner eyed Rainer suspiciously and barely nodded in return. He pulled hard, yanking the dog away in such a manner as to suggest they were not really trying to hurry away from the well-dressed hobo muttering into a shop window.

Rainer watched them walk away. The bottle was wavering under his nose, and the urge to open it was so strong his knees came close to buckling. Eyes watering, nose running, he turned back to the poster. He could not tear his eyes away from her face, her hair, her bottom. A loud sob burbled out of his mouth. He stepped back again, raising the bottle in a shaking fist. He drew it back, and flung it as hard as he could at the plate glass window, shouting "Leave me be, damn you!"

To his utter shock, the window burst into a million little pieces. The noise was like a rifle shot combined with the cracking of a bell. The shrieking of the alarm galvanized Rainer into action. He took off running as fast as his trembling legs would carry him, heading for home. Wheezing, coughing, and crying, he kept thinking that maybe, this time, today would be the first day of the rest of his life.

The Ondine Wore Chrysanthemums

Kieran stood on the Bridge of Sorrows, staring down at the black mercury of the water flowing sluggishly beneath the deck.  A new generation of bioluminescent lights along the harbor threw cold light, making the surface of the river alternate between sheens of oil and blood.  The water was cleaner now that the heavy industries had all but disappeared in the roiling chaos cloud of information age concerns in an unholy alliance with the rainmakers of biotech and genetic engineering.  The air still held mysterious and troubling odors, Kieran knew, but composed of different chemistries.

Kieran wept, the drops falling fatly from his nose to join the raindrops spattering the water.

The engineer raised a hand to wipe his eyes, forgetting the flower clutched in his fingers.  The fleshy softness of the petals caressed his cheek, causing him to flinch violently.  Their warmth felt good, shocking against the chill air, but they reminded him too much of fingers.  Her fingers.

He drew back his head to study the flower, as if really noticing it for the first time.  It was a chrysanthemum, brilliant pink, and would have cost a small fortune to the average layman.  Kieran smiled in a small way, finding perhaps for the first time in years a perk of being a gene splicer: he could get actual wild flowers, genetically pure and free of the taint of modern DNA splicing.  What with the prevalence of splicing and genetic drift and the inevitable escape into the "wild" of lab mistakes and experiments gone wrong, some of which Kieran's own company were deeply and shamefully responsible for, finding genetically pure anything living freely was getting difficult to impossible.

That almost every living thing was in danger of becoming an artifact ate away at his conscience, his soul.  Tonight, he thought, he was truly coming to pay for it, by losing the only person who had made him able to understand love beyond reason.  Even if she had been an experiment.

Kieran wiped his eyes again, careful to avoid the flower.  A memory came back to him of his first week on the job, a newbie full of more enthusiasm than sense sitting in a training seminar.  The corporate hack at the front of the room looked like a walking advertisement for DNA mods and enhancements, although the young engineer had not noticed at the time.  A well-groomed meatsuit intoning in a dire voice, telling the small group of gene techs that they "should always remain vigilant, and never fall in love with their 'products', ever".

Kieran shuddered at the recall. 'Products'.  The word tasted sour in his mind now, especially when he thought of her.  She had been his most successful creation yet, designed to live in low to mid-range undersea environments. A full functioning female-based 'humanculus' as those in the profession had dubbed them.  She was smart, the most important asset from the Company view; her beauty, while unconventional, had been a random effect of the genetic material they had started with.  It was Company policy not to invest resources and energy in eradicating traits that were 'output neutral' relative to the desired end result.

Kieran thought that maybe they should have.  His own bloodline caught up with him, he fell in love with the creature he began to think of as his selkie, his ondine.  He even brought her flowers once, chrysanthemums, and they both smiled at the absurdity of the gesture.  The Celtic blood in his veins came to life, and he started dreaming of her, swimming alongside her, making love in the aqueous jade ocean and paying homage to Mannanán.

His devotion to her, in the end, was not enough.  She began behaving erratically, falling short of the benchmarks the Company insisted on to certify their products.  She slowly withdrew and responded only to Kieran directly.  He began to hear whispers and rumors that the product would be 'withdrawn', a euphemism horrifying in its implications.  His heart couldn't stand it, and he resolved to let her go.

He personally opened the gates that led to the sea.  She watched him intently as he twisted valves and overrode the security locks.  With the sudden inrush of seawater into the holding bay, her eyes widened and she understood what he meant her to do.  She placed a palm against the thick quartz of the observation port.  That tender gesture nearly undid him as he placed his own hand on the cool surface.  She shook her head, and turned to swim out into the dark.

---

That had been a week ago. He knew her chances were poor, too many weaknesses in the splices.  He also knew about the terminator genes the Company typically tagged on to all their projects.  He could not contemplate her fate when those kicked in.

Kieran shook his head.  It was cold and the rain was turning to snow.  He needed to get out while he still could.  The pink chrysanthemum shimmied as he shivered.  It had become her favorite flower. 
He gently tossed the flower over the side of the bridge.  A few languid loops later it came to rest on the silky surface of the river.  Kieran watched it slowly disappear, turning himself away to trudge back to the capsule hotel that had become his new home.  His cheeks were no longer wet.

---

Below the bridge, the chrysanthemum spiraled in the current.  Emerging into the nacreous gray light on the downstream side of the bridge, a hand of milky-white skin and bluish nails plucked the flower from below.

But True Happiness Comes With A Side of Mash

Sometimes, these things write themselves.  Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls and those undecided, I pass along to you The Secret, courtesy of g.oog.le targeted ads in my sidebar:

 

 
Perhaps I'll change my handle to Irish Bangers...

Cattle Raiding In My Youth

I was visiting with Braja over at Lost and Found in India reading a delightful post on COWS yesterday, and as usually happens when I read her posts, it got me to thinking. I know what you must be thinking: Cows? Delightful? Come on, Gumbo, you must be yanking my chain.

I yank not your chain! I like cows anyway, so I may be predisposed to like reading about cows. In this case, though, the photos were so cute and so well done (especially considering they were taken with a cell phone camera), and the writing itself very engaging. I have to say it was one of the few times I was looking at cows without thinking of cheese, fine tooled leather or a pot roast. (Forgive me, Braja, I am still struggling with my animal nature.) The calf in the pics is also goshdarnded cute, too. What the pictures got me to thinking about was, instead, Irish folklore and my own childhood. Go figure.

It was the “Cattle Raid of Cooley” (Táin Bó Cúailnge) that sprang to mind, an amazing story from Irish (way, way back) folklore. I read about this many moons ago and the whole thing just stuck with me. ‘Cattle Raid’ doesn’t exactly scream ‘epic’, but the Irish have a knack (ahem) for storytelling, in case you hadn’t noticed. The gist of it involves marital jealousy, a pissed off bull and a tidy business arrangement undone by drunkenness. Somehow that escalates into a knockdown, drag-out battle involving magic, sex and mass slaughter. In other words, a typical day in the land of the Celts.

The hero of this story, who I sometimes wish was me, is Cúchulainn (pronounced ‘Cu-hoo-lin’. I know, it doesn’t make sense. This is Irish myth, remember?); Cúchulainn is the fierce-looking lad in the tricked-out chariot, pictured below:

Cúchulainn first big task was to defend the kingdom of Ulster from the army of the jealous queen Medb, who was out to get Donn Cuailnge*, the ‘Brown Bull of Cooley’ (the pissed off bovine I mentioned earlier). Brown Bull is a hot commodity, because he was, shall we say, ‘potent’. Potent as in, some sort of mega-stud that all the cattle-crazy Celts were quite keen on adding to their herds, cattle being the prime form of wealth. Cúchulainn, in typical lunkhead teenage boy fashion, manages to screw up his big task because he was off ‘trysting’ (i.e. getting’ his freak on) with some fair Irish lass**. So Medb and her army manage to waltz in and take Ulster like it ain’t no thang. (What’s Gaelic for ‘thang’?). Anyway, Cúchulainn does manage to get his breeches up and he makes a good effort to finally stops the invaders. Thing is, he fails to get his mitts back on our boy the Brown Bull. Half-assed attempts at redemption (heroic but unnecessary, because preventable) are endemic to teenage boys all over the world; a major reason I identify with the story.

The bull is also a central attraction for me in all this, and not because of my capacity to generate a fair amount of it, all on my lonesome! My association with bulls began many, MANY years ago, back when I was a little Gumbo biting the ankles of my blessed Mom. Back in the day, budgets were tight for my Ma and Da, so sometimes she would make her own baby clothes to save a few dead presidents. She made a little yellow shirt, like a tunic, stitched together with red thread. I don’t remember wearing the shirt, but by some miracle Mom had kept it for all the years since I was a toddler. I was delighted when I received it as a gift this Christmas:

Wow. That shirt is about forty years old now! Looking down in the lower right hand corner of the photo, you’ll see where she took a marker and wrote on it ‘The Bull’. The reason she wrote that is because supposedly I was a rather stubborn, contrary lad. (I know! Shocked, aren’t you?) And in my family, if one was being stubborn, that typically garnered one the epithet ‘bull-headed’. In my case I earned the title when I was quite the wee one. Hence, in honor of my clear identification with a heroic figure (big bull, a stud: a natural fit, yeah?) from Irish myth, Mom made this shirt as a memento. This set me on the road to a lifelong aspiration to be a hero.

My Ma and Da will tell you I was called ‘The Bull’ because I was stubborn and difficult. I prefer to think it is because I am perseverant, strong and virile. And hey, who are you going to believe, me or my Mom? (Wait, don’t answer that…)

* ‘Donn Cuailnge’ would be my Irish gangster boss name. Donn = Don. Get it? Ha! But only if I was an Irish gangster. Which I am not. At least, I wouldn’t admit to youse.
**In all fairness, I also probably would have chosen the lass over boring guard duty. That Cúchulainn and I, we like the ladies! See also ‘Goddess Belly: On Your Knees, Boy!’

Images courtesy of Wikipedia (Cúchulainn) and something I found on Amazon called
‘Shee-eire’ (Donn Cuailnge).