Two Perspectives

(An impish journalist gets the opportunity to enter Hieronymus Bosch’s infamous triptych, “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” for an interview with two of its inhabitants. Here is what the inhabitants said.)

I

I can look rather inquisitively at paradise and, by knowing fully well the games it plays with time, hum little verses to myself, day in, day out, without ever getting tired of my own voice. Because a verse after all is a play on all the choral cries I hear around me, here in the commodious fields separating Bounold and Ramspitz. The voice, on the other hand, is something I cannot really sequester from this stupefying divine mayhem. It is embedded into the greater picture. Thankfully, the greater picture is something I can never get tired of either.

I know what you are thinking. You are sitting there contemplatively, staring into a void, and asking the empty air, “Does narcissism exist in paradise?” Well friend, it certainly does. It is more rampant than forbidden fruit. Why just yesterday I caught a mermaid flop out of a halcyon pond, squirm over to a deserted spot, brush the excess water off her emerald fin, and proceed to regale in her own conceit. Hours later a flock of fools wandered past her and asked her about the depths of the ocean. In response she said, and I hazily quote, “See my beauty as being greater than the hermaphrodites, the crystalline lakes, and the halcyon pond I bathe in on lazy days. Worship me, and then, just maybe, I shall grant you a story about the depths you seek.” The fools, being the naïve twits they are, prostrated to the arrogant half-breed, and then lifted her on their bony shoulders. One man even did a handstand in order to hoist the mermaid up on his feet. I regret to mention that this befuddling activity lasted until the next golden dawn.

What’s that you ask? You are asking if I am conceited? You are asking me if I am a rambler, a hedonist, and a polygamist? Well, of course I am, but no negative connotations can be tied to these personality traits amidst this divine mayhem. You must be using mortal inferences to pin me down, when in reality, all of the inhabitants are well on their way to immortality. Perhaps I should explain to you a couple of things before your presumptions delude you, and most certainly before you refer to this all as nothing more than mythological balderdash.

As I mentioned a few moments ago, the commodious fields between Bounold and Ramspitz are where I spend a majority of my time. I travel around naked, climb inside vacant clamshells, watch contorted copulations, partake in contorted copulations, float around in transparent orbs, and drink peacock juice. Is it paradise? Yeah, I would say so. The peacock juice keeps me inebriated and so does the casual sex. I don’t really need anything else. However, I must state it again because I sense you have ambiguous feelings about me: rambling, seeking pleasure, and carefree sex are great, and I regale in them to the utmost. Please don’t get stuck on the whole morality thing either. It will impinge upon your development.

So, what else do you want to know about this bustling place? What? No. I didn’t hear you. Speak up. You mumbled something. Say it again.

Oh, so you want to know about our history here in paradise? Sure I can tell you about that. I must mention, however, that my casual sex partner Leonolda would be more apt for the task. She references history in every second sentence, or at least history as she sees it, which is obviously highly biased. Not biased in a draconian or herodotean sense, mind you. It is a history shot through the lens of a kaleidoscope. I am not even being metaphorical either. Leonolda literally has kaleidoscopic vision. But, as you can tell, this is a digression and I apologize. I will tell you about our history as best as I can.

About two thousand years ago, Bounold and Ramspitz were non-existent cities. All that existed was this place and its humbling milieu; grassy knolls, naked picnics, zany towers, crimson tepees, critters, colossal birds, artichoke-like hedges, et cetera. But then, for some reason never explained to me, two factions formed and started feuding in this populous space. One faction, led by a cauldron-wearing pirate with a beak, moved to the east and started Ramspitz. The other faction decided to move out west to develop an even greater paradise. To make up for this drop in population, we had sex like crazy for one hundred years. Night after night, orgiastic rituals were held in the highest regard, and the halcyon ponds soon were collection areas for bodily fluids of all kinds. The hermaphrodites impregnated themselves, of course.

What? You believe I am being too vague? Regarding what? Look, a nefarious bird took his discordant band and slaves over to the east, and an albino giraffe decided to craft an even more prestigious paradise than this one. There is nothing else to say, okay?

Yeah. Yeah, okay. I can tell you about the albino giraffe. I overheard him once say, “The truth is tantamount to neither pleasure nor pain, neither Bounold, Ramspitz, or the spires on the zany towers. Once you realize that there is nothing that binds you here, you will realize that you have never been fettered by anything. All of this is a dream perpetuated by blindness, and, in extreme cases, obstinacy. I have awakened because I never picked sides.” I overheard this when he was talking to a nymphomaniac floating in a transparent orb. And yes I was being nosy! I couldn’t help it. The albino giraffe is revered in these parts.

On the other hand, the dreaded pirate of Ramspitz is feared by all of those who cross his path. The cryptozoological weirdo, with hypnotic black eyes and vases for feet, sits on a horseshoe-shaped chair and eats all the pale maidens who wandered too far from paradise. I have heard stories of the cannibalistic pirate not even chewing the nubile meal; he just swallows until the victim reaches the stomach acid, and then shakes his body so the stomach acid splashes around, drenching the poor soul in the most painful of caustic fluids. But this is not the most despicable of things that occur around his throne. I hear there is hole in the ground beneath his throne where the wicked go to purge. Brownish bile, yellow nuggets from bronzed butts, tears, and more abominable things are emptied into it everyday. Once a month, when the bad vibes septic tank is filled to the brim, I hear the sludge is collected and used in a ritual. Don’t ask me what for. I just know that the bad vibes are re-assimilated by the denizens of Ramspitz.

Okay, I guess there is more to this story, but I am reluctant to tell you about it because it gets quite complex. Plus we don’t like to tell many outsiders about our arcane history. Once foreigners hear of our domestic problems, or past blemishes on the face of our idiosyncratic community, everything gets blown out of proportion. The news media from all over the distant lands come to probe the jubilee songstress by the livestock melee, for example, and you know, our stories and songs are tainted by outsider opinions. This we don’t want, I assure you. We basically just want to eat enlarged fruit, ride pinkish antelope, enchant one another with soliloquies, and, on occasion, climb the zany towers like they’re play structures. I hope you understand.

No. Put it away. I cannot accept money for a tale. What need do I have for money here in paradise anyways? The soothsayers advice is granted once you give him or her some peacock juice, and entertainment is always unfurling before your eyes. Nope you are going to have to try harder than that. I am not easily persuaded, you know. Leonolda doesn’t call me The Stubborn Versifier for nothing.

Hmmm. Yes. Keep going. Oh, oh my, that’s an interesting proposal. So let me get this straight: if I tell you the whole story behind the two factions and the mysteries of this paradise, you are going to tell me about a land where people actually wear clothes to work, and where people are actually monogamous? The next thing you tell me better not be about monotheists controlling the geo-political structure of the planet. Oh, they do? How horrible. How do you stand living in such an environment?

Very well. I will not continue with my semi-apocryphal tales any longer. No more partialness will broadcast from my mouth. As long as you will trade a story that is qualitatively pleasing, I have no problems telling you about the true origins of Bounold and Ramspitz. Can you promise me that? Yes? Okay good. Then I shall continue.

About two thousand years ago, Bounold and Ramspitz were non-existent cities. All that existed was this frolicsome field of infinite possibility. I say infinite possibility because anything could happen at any time. A centaur could have decided to tame a griffin with the intention of eventually flying one. While in the sky with the tamed griffin, he could have used a deciduous tree branch as a pen. And then, wham; you got these beauteous yet invisible stanzas written on the cerulean backdrop. Or the griffin could have swooped down and picked up a hapless critter scurrying about by the artichoke hedges instead of allowing the centaur to finish his evanescent task; or, then again, maybe not. Perhaps the centaur rode the griffin because he wanted to head over to a spire and place the deciduous branch where it was once not. I certainly do not know. I do know the field of infinite possibility allowed everything to mingle with everything else without hindrances. This is what life was based around: commonwealth, limitless expression, and no short-term goals.

But then something changed. Our minds started to warp. We all became aware of the duality that arose when you pinned everything against everything else. It was like everything and everything else became two mirrors dancing with each other. Seeing as what everything saw was what everything else saw, and what everything else saw was what everything saw, there was eventually a judgment imposed upon our innocence. We didn’t believe that the judgment had come from on high, but we started to break things down into two primary camps: The Self Camp and the Other Camp. The Self Camp became the primary mode of understanding and the Other Camp became the secondary mode. Then—

What is it now? You are a little confused as to how the two mirrors judged each other? Okay, I will clarify the mirror analogy before I go any further. First off, we define a judgment as that which exists between the two mirrors. Think of it as something liminal; something traveling rapidly between everything and everything else; a degree of perception that both everything and everything else take on, if you will. Once you are able to fully see everything as one mirror and everything else as the other, you are able to comprehend the fact that you are a judgment. You see? Do you see that you are nothing more than everything and everything else coming together to create a transient blip in time and space?

NO! Are you like the fools who hoister up salacious mermaids? Come on! This isn’t that difficult. Just think of someone like Leonolda and someone like me. Now Leonolda obviously sees the world differently than I do because she sees duplications of things when there is really only one thing. The kaleidoscopic vision, remember? Now imagine Leonolda and I, Braster the Bard, groping each other in shallow water. Can you see it? Good. Now imagine us locking lips. Now, quickly, imagine looking through the eyes of Leonolda at my lips. What do you see? Yeah, that’s right; eight eyes, four noses, and four pairs of lips rotating around in almost-hypnotic patterns. Now look through my eyes. What do you see? A stunning beauty with blackberry breath. Yes! Exactly. Now piece these two perspectives together and you got the judgment holding the Self and Other Camp together. Voila! Can I continue with my story now, please?

As I was saying, our minds started to warp when we came to the realization that we were judgments looking out into a field of infinite possibility, when before it was only about infinite possibility meandering about, aimlessly and innocently. This led us to another conclusion that stated that because we could judge what was Good—for example, fruit, clamshell beds, livestock, and free speech—we could also judge what was Bad. Because we didn’t know what Bad was, we started to imagine what it could possibly be. Some said temptation was bad. Some said decaying fruit was bad. Some even said that allowing the menagerie to roam wild was bad because it enabled the beasts to defecate anywhere, even in the untainted halcyon ponds. Eventually every possibility in the infinite field had a different idea of what was bad and what was good. This was right around the time our paradise became aware of the notion of order, thank god.

Order was at first a very dangerous concept. All of the denizens of paradise took it very lightly. What can I say: we were all used to passionately doing whatever we wanted to, with anybody we wanted to. It seemed like no consequences for our actions were bestowed upon us. But the wretched alteration to our minds at the hands of evolution changed it all, and what was dangerous was necessary. Evil, good, proper conduct, and treatises written on clamshells all seemed like logical things to the eye of order; even though this alleged “eye of order” appeared to be a relative phenomenon that everyone said was absolute only in communal circumstances.

The eye of order did many things. It even caused us to clothe ourselves for a while. With petrified raspberry buds around the private parts and sutured grass clippings covering the chest and buttocks, we walked around and conducted ourselves after the new dress code. At this point in our history communication with the opposite sex became awkward, because before there was nothing to hide. Those milk-tinted breasts perkily hanging on all the gorgeous women, those flesh mounds as smooth as the anomalous material used to build the zany towers, looked lifeless under the grass tops. As sad as this may sound, the golden rule of copulation turned into the golden rule of progress.

What kind of progress? Well we dedicated our time to inventing banal things of course; stables for the livestock, treatises for the few literate souls out there, shelters out of hollowed crustacean shells, et cetera. God, we even had lifeguards by the crystalline lakes to watch over the throngs flopping about. Blackberry rafts were built to transport giant bird feathers from one grassy knoll to the next. Just so you know, these giant bird feathers were used to tickle the livestock into submission when they got grumpy behind the fences.

As the warped mind feeling lunged forward, we knew that something was going to try and stand in antithesis to the eye of order. Leonolda, the albino giraffe, the pink antelope with a shiny black butt, and even the humungous butterfly could sense impending changes to our psychological aggregates. How, you ask? Through epiphanies, through fear, through ontological disruptions, we were slowly mutating, that is how! But don’t get me off track here. I am about to explain to you the true story behind Ramspitz and Bounold, finally.

So, just when everything seemed kosher and stable, just when the eye of order was presenting us with a grand road to progress, an unpredictable element entered into all our minds simultaneously. We thought, “If the field of infinite possibility can be ordered through judgment, and if we can maximize our multifarious abilities by pushing them towards a goal, can we then do something to things so they don’t exist as goals or possibilities?” As you could well imagine, this question fell upon our populace like a boulder that has fallen from the heavens into a waiting pool of conundrums. Soothsayers floated around in transparent orbs in desperate search for an answer. The woman who fantasized about being an imperatrix climbed a doric column, ripped off her flimsy clothing, and said aloud, “this unpredictable element in my head is driving me to the edge! What is it? Please lord, what is it?” Then, after thirty agonizing days, the answer came to us: we could create impossibilities with our warped minds, and we could call these impossibilities fictions.

Oh how we celebrated upon discovering how to reconcile the need for progress and innocence. Because all of us came to this discovery simultaneously, and because this discovery gave the eye of order a jolt, we ripped off our clothes and copulated with the person standing next to us. For some it wasn’t even a person at all. I remember a man french kissing a centaur while pinching every nipple in sight. Now I know you think this type of behavior seems too hedonistic and frenzied in comparison to your puritanical upbringing, or something, but we thought the invention of fictions was oh so joyful. Hell, we even celebrated in the orgiastic fashion for days and days without ever letting up. Eventually we did let up though, and the eye of order stabilized things once again. That is everything expect for the clothing part. We decided to never wear clothing again after the orgy of the century.

Yeah. Yeah, I know. Go figure.

I believe it was Leonolda who said to the man distilling peacock juice, “Fictions will alter the course of history, but how do we use them?” The man, carefully tending to his work, looked at two dried cherry bowls and said, “Eureka! Do you know what we could do? We could invest our time into an experiment. A grandiose experiment, but an experiment nonetheless. Hear me out: we could write two books—” A crowd interrupted him, “Books?” Then, miraculously, Leonolda carried on where the peacock juice man left off: “Yes, Books! Books will be like the treatises we write on the clamshells; only the books will point to fictitious places and events, and not just fact gathering. Just so you don’t ask what ‘fictitious places and events’ means, I am going to say it means a distortion of the judgment.” The crowd let out a big, Ahhhh, realizing her words were materializing in their warped minds as well. I, staring into those noble eyes of Leonolda, even proclaimed to the crowd, “The distortion of the judgment means we can all make fictions for ourselves! We can decide what is Bad and Good, Everything and Everything Else, and then just let the words fly onto a surface, or the air, whatever, I don’t know exactly.” My words then fomented the total merging of the possible and the impossible. In other words, people began to create imaginal worlds out of twisting and churning thought. Thought, judgment, order, progress, everything, and everything else were elements that made up the bigger element known as fiction. Fiction soon became paradise, or at least tried to emulate it.

Did you get all of that? I know. I know. Quite a doozy of a story, I agree. What is that? Sorry. I didn’t here you again. You were mumbling. What? WHAT? No. Heavens no. My story wasn’t fictitious. Don’t you get it? Bounold and Ramspitz are the fictional places I made up. One is ultra-paradisiacal and one is hellish. Remember? The judger can decide what is good and bad and then distort them, or make a pastiche out of jumbled information in the brain. It doesn’t matter because fiction is the predominant element at work in the mind, okay? Ughhh. I don’t know. What? I referred to my home as a commodious field separating Bounold and Ramspitz before? Did I? No, certainly not. You are mistaken. If anything I was being metaphorical. What is that you say? You can see sweat running down my forehead? What are you insinuating? I am not a liar. I invented those places. No. No! I am not an exaggerator or a fibber. No. No! Please don’t go. I have more stories to tell. Why are you leaving? I am Braster the Bard, dammit! Wait…what about your tale?


II

I am so glad you made it. Come on in. I understand you were just conversing with Braster the Bard about paradise. Oh, and the issue of Ramspitz and Bounold. What did he say? I see. Well, Braster is a person who would contradict himself, but why did you leave so abruptly? I see. He noticed your news media photo ID. Good thinking in that case. Braster doesn’t like the thought of outsiders, especially prying journalists, hearing about our land. In fact, I bet if he noticed the news media photo ID halfway through his conversation with you, he would have started to make things up without consulting his eye of reason, and he would have started to put up a cantankerous front. How does the eye of reason work with the eye of order, you ask? My dear, they’re simply allusions. We use allusions to explain the psychological aggregation system set in place in our minds, which seems to be complexifying as we evolve, obviously. And yes, Braster is apt at using allusions to his advantage. All the denizens of paradise are.

My story begins rather tragically. Abandoned by my parents at a very young age, I was forced to crawl around the grassy knolls and artichoke hedges without any guiding light in my life. I was an orphan, plain and simple. I ate the fruit scraps all the careless mermaids left behind. That is until some cordial hermaphrodites found me curled up next to a giant philosophical egg. Thankfully, the hermaphrodites got me real food and took me in as one of their own.

It was strange growing up with hermaphrodites. They didn’t act like bards, centaurs, or hedonists. They lived according to their own codes and credos. Another strange thing about hermaphrodites is that they raise you in shifts. Seeing as any one of the hermaphrodites could teach me fully about the masculine and feminine aspects of our divine nature, it just took one hermaphrodite to raise me at a time. Their feminine sides told me about the importance of holding a child near the heart during the initial stages of life. Their masculine sides told me about the importance of chivalry and the art of becoming a warrior. By the time I was ten years old, I think I was doing pretty good.

Yeah. You are right. I was among good, supportive company.

When I was twelve years old, the hermaphrodites explained to me that they have a different way of seeing the world, and that they could show me how to see like them if I cared to know. “The world to us rotates around a perception point, and from this point the world takes form,” said the hermaphrodite clan. “The point itself is the light of the infinite field. All potential exists in this light, yet all potential cannot and never will crystallize as the rotating world around the point. If the light happened to crystallize as the rotating world, the rotating world would cease to exist.” I remember feeling befuddled when these words hit me like lightning bolts striking a clamshell’s pearl. I asked my guardians, “How come I see the world as a flat surface with naked people walking around in it?” They responded, “Because you were born like the apple pickers over there. Their vision tricks them into believing that an object is either inanimate, or altogether singular. In reality dearest Leonolda, the object is always rotating around the infinite field in plentitude.”

I told them that I cared to know how they saw things kaleidoscopically. So they took me back to where they first found me—crawling around a philosophical egg—and they asked me to start an open-eyed meditation. “Just look at the white shell, Leonolda,” the clan said. “Don’t let the wayward gazelles distract you. Don’t let the zany towers distract you. There is just this egg.” I responded, “But the egg is so boring. The group huddled around the strawberry deity looks way more interesting. Why can’t I focus my attention on them?” Looking at the group of virile men talking to a strawberry deity, the hermaphrodite clan responded, “Although the idiosyncrasies transpiring around that plump and speckled fruit god may seem captivating, we assure you that the philosophical egg is a canvas you can poignantly focus upon. Good luck.” They then walked away and promised to come back for me once the kaleidoscopic vision wasn’t just a notion I was trying to grapple with.

As you could well imagine, distraction got the best of me. Sunbathing nudes jumping off loggias into crystal clear water, lovers chasing each other in the artichoke hedge maze, you name it; it all distracted me. Every time I happened to stare at the philosophical egg, I found its presence to be paltry and humdrum. I couldn’t reasonably accept my guardians’ assertions when it came to the shell. After all, it was just a shell, and a shell just sits there and looks lifeless.

Things changed after awhile though. The distractions became boring and the shell’s simplicity became an intelligent life force. Its whiteness seemed to speak to me when everything else was empty and meaningless. Actually, the whiteness seemed like everything and the distractions outside the shell presence seemed like everything else—superfluous images that the eyes didn’t necessarily need for a good time. When I fully allowed my vision to drop the preferences and distractions that consistently kept it clouded, the philosophical egg reveled a deeper structure of nature to me; one modulating with intense profundities and visual textures. The whiteness started to swirl inwards. Then I found myself actually following the swirl into the egg. Finally, the inexplicable happened; I merged with the egg. The hermaphrodites were right about the point when they said that it’s the infinite field holding all potential. I became the point. No. I correct myself. I have always been the point. There was no becoming it. The point has always been the suchness in everything.

After the intense experience, I moved my head away from the egg and immersed my sight in other things. To my surprise the events and objects around me weren’t seen as disparate or ambiguous. All was clear. All was a multitudinous expression of the singular point that gives birth to everything. I realized death wasn’t something to be despised, but rather something that allows for one to return to the infinite field. At that moment, as I looked out into the world with kaleidoscopic vision, the panorama I saw around me caused me to break into tears of intense resplendence.

The hermaphrodites found me a day later. I was in the artichoke hedge maze just frolicking around like a normal twelve year old. “You see truly now, Leonolda,” they said, synchronously. “You see space as a joke and time as a trick. You see the way we do. Please come and follow us to the colossal tulip. We are going to have a picnic.” Heeding to this invitation, I joined my guardians in the red tulip, and watched as older women cleaned themselves in a halcyon pond. I was smiling. I was loved.

When looking out from the shade of the tulip, my eyes stumbled upon a boy my age frenetically running to the pond. “Get it away from me,” he was yelling. “Get the strawberry fly with the spiky tail off my back.” The boy dove into the halcyon pond and scared all the carefree maidens dipping their butts and golden locks into the water. He flailed his limbs, screamed, and floundered in the water until the livestock circumambulating the pond looked over in astonishment. I think it was a chap riding a camel who said, “The strawberry fly only goes away if you remain still.” But the boy didn’t listen; or perhaps, because the holy clamor around the pond was too deafening, the boy couldn’t hear such a meek voice attempting to establish contact. So he kept on trashing and trashing, crying and crying, until I decided to do something about it.

I left the shaded area and went down the moderately sized hill to the pond. Because I was still getting accustomed to the kaleidoscopic vision, I found it difficult to swerve past the multicolored horses and the blackbirds. Everything seemed to approach me at nauseating velocity. Livestock hooves and claws swirled around the infinite point, the grass swayed in nefandous coherence, and maidens pushed their fingers through their hair without any concern whatsoever for the distraught boy. I remembering saying, “Don’t put up such a fight. The strawberry fly was probably just startled by you. Did you try to squeeze it in order to check how ripe it was?” The boy, still flagellating the water and swatting at the air above him, nodded and looked as though the most mortifying of nightmares had come true for him. “I was in the alchemical tower studying the fifty foot funnel when I mistook a fly for fodder,” he said, shortly before he fell underneath the water again. As I peered into the water I could see small bubbles rising to the surface. He was trying to communicate to me. Alarmingly, he was trying to speak while crystalline water rushed into his mouth.

Eventually the strawberry fly became attracted to the onrush of bubbles rising to the surface. In one daring dive, the strawberry fly, clearly a timid yet playful creature, managed to pop one of the bubbles with its spiky tail. But then a big bubble came from beneath the water; carrying with it a sound slightly more baleful. Upon hearing this flatulent gurgle, the strawberry fly got scared and flew off to a grove to the east. Shortly afterwards the distraught boy breached the thin line separating water and air, panting and smiling.

He looked at me naively, plugged his nose and blew hard, and then continued to tell me about his latest adventure. “As I said, I was in the alchemical tower. I followed a hunch, what can I say. Did you know that the alchemical tower is filled with strawberries of all shapes and sizes? I didn’t until I heard from a man sunbathing in a clamshell that there is a stockpile of something really tasty there. So I get inside and see the biggest food mountain I have ever seen. Let me tell you, it looked so yummy. I couldn’t resist myself. Then the strawberry fly started attacking me, so I ran here. What is your name, by the way? Why are you looking at me so peculiarly?”

As he was telling me about his tortuous adventure with hunger and a playful fly, I must have been trying to come to terms with my kaleidoscopic vision witnessing such a charming face multiplied around the infinite point. The boy was handsome. I had to admit it. His cheekbones were well defined. His eyes were brown and wildly intoxicating, and the fact that stranded maidenhair was plastered to his face in the shape of a moustache made him all the more adorable.

“That is quite the tale,” I said, as my blushed, naked body slowly started to resemble the colossal tulip on the hill. “What is your name?” While getting out of the water, the boy proudly said his name was Braster, and that his parents were training him to become the best bard in the land. “Braster the Bard,” I commented. “That is so cute.”

By wiggling his eyes around in their sockets in an exasperated fashion, I could tell right away that Braster didn’t find my comment to be in the least bit amusing. Brushing off the golden moustache, Braster looked intently at the camel rider lounging in his ultraviolet leaf and, furthermore, probably wondered what all the inhabitants of paradise thought about his latest incident with the strawberry fly. “The bardic tradition isn’t something cute. It is noble. Cute things die when they grow old, but bardic wisdom always manages to revivify itself throughout the ages,” said Braster while combing his hair with a crustacean shell remnant. “What is your name anyways, and why have you taken an interest in me?”

I could tell Braster was brainwashed into thinking bardic credos were more important than gallivanting about in life like a golden-haired maiden. But because I didn’t want to seem too forward and call him on his fettered linguistic skills—for example, using a passed down language skill from his ancestors for personal pride—I told him my name was Leonolda and left it at that. Upon hearing my name, Braster once again tried to free the burdensome streams of water from his sinuses.

“Leonolda, Leonolda, Leonolda,” Braster kept saying, almost as though he was trying to create a poetic rhythm with just one asinine word (I can even admit that my name is too unorthodox to take seriously). Then he stopped and saw a stork doing a moonwalk towards the pond. “For me, Leonolda is a pretty name. Ah yes, it has some alchemical power to it.” I thanked Braster for the compliment and asked him if he would like to come back to the tulip shade and talk. “Perhaps some other time Leonolda. I am going to go back to the tower and take a dive down the oblique funnel into the unlit athanor. Fun times. It gives me a sooty bum.” At this point I wanted to say cute, but realized Braster would have taken offense. Instead I opted to simply say, “Hopefully we can meet again sometime.” Braster then nodded and pranced away. Little did I know that it would be years before Braster and I would see one another again.

It was at the celebrating the Goddess potluck dinner five years later where Braster and I fell in love. At this point in my life I had full control over my kaleidoscopic vision. The nausea associated with seeing the world as an exploded prism was nominal at best, and I was really honing in on the ability to turn the images around in my mind’s eye like a ferris wheel. Braster, on the other hand, was going through some rough times. He was in a poetic slump, he was a little dissociative, and he hadn’t brushed his teeth in weeks. Rumor had it that he was expounding to many concerned pink antelopes that reality is like two mirrors making a judgment, or something equally as strange. But that all changed when the albino giraffe addressed us from a doric column at the potluck. Amidst all the other denizens half submerged in water, listening to the magnanimous giraffe speak about the greatest of divine archetypes, Braster and I shared our first kiss.

The albino giraffe said this in regards to the Goddess, as we all gathered in the water below: “An alert aura of immutability surrounds her eyes. The interminable beginning of that which can never be whispered is her muse. She vows to herself a sacralized promise, which carries with it the penumbra of her soul and the multifaceted topography of her mind. Although many will know her in the way a reader of the world knows the contours and contrasts of the terrain, no one will ever be able to penetrate the vow of her goodness. It is enthroned so deep in her being that only the prying eyes of the blessed ones can watch for what will unfold from within it. To speculate on what she keeps in her consecrated promise would be cataclysmic to the contents of her cosmos. It is fair to say that the only way one could correlate with it would be to reach the upper echelon of her dominion, which by its very nature is the seed planted before the immeasurable worlds; the worlds constrained by the gravitational, electromagnetic, and cellular-perfunctory forces. Until that time she will blend into the landscape, unseen by the analysis of the vulgar and the diaphanous ones who are precarious in their understandings of her. She will fulfill only what needs to be accomplished in order to implement change into the conventionality of that which is at her circumference; or one could mysteriously proclaim, her process. Alas, many will never catch sight of her fervent compassion, but we cannot spuriously assume it is not the plenary of her existence. We, for lack of no thorough understanding of her visionary dilemma, must trust her stories like they’re those of all our unresolved dreams. Maybe then we could peer into the thoughts beyond her humanness, and the thoughts beyond her soul, into the true light of her Art.”

As pink antelope thrashed in the water, half enthralled by the giraffe’s words and half petrified of the water itself, I turned to my right and saw an insouciant Braster staring at a giant butterfly clapping on a mermaid’s fin. Right then and there I decided to come up behind him and frighten him. Furtively dashing past quasi-submerged centaurs, dog paddling by an enormous duck, I eventually reached his shadow in the water. I took a dive. Just as my arms were about to connect with the back of his head, Braster turned around and moved three inches forward. My arms draped themselves over his muscular back, and his naïve hands groped my butt. “Leonolda,” he said in astonishment. “Why am I holding your fanny?” I, finding his wet hands touching my milk-tinted butt titillating, just stood there without an answer. Then I planted a big one on his semi-parted lips, hoping he would reciprocate in the most amorous of ways.

The kiss unearthed something in Braster’s exploratory, yet girl-shy being. I could sense the love-spirits telling him, even though he was probably not aware of it, how to handle the situation. His eyes glowed with unprecedented intensity, and his heartbeat felt seismic moving so close next to mine. When he finally gathered the courage to take the manly course of action, Braster grabbed me by the shoulders and dipped me into the water. On the way down he inserted his poetic tongue into mine. He connected with my teeth. Ever since then we have been inseparable. Oh, Braster the Bard…what a loveable kook.

You have to go? Okay, I understand. Take it easy. Hopefully the information I have disclosed helps you with your journalistic endeavor. Next time I will see if I could get you an interview with the albino giraffe. Namaste.