WE TOO SOON FORGET and so tragedy's lesson is never learned_Ghost of Mark Twain

"It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man,

all unprepared,

can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live.

There is but one reasonable explanation of it.

The intellect is stunned by the shock

and but gropingly gathers the meaning of the words.

The power to realize their full import is mercifully lacking." 
- Mark Twain.

All the talking plastic faces from your fancy television screens seem to want to have their say on September 11th today. 

I ... I almost could not bring myself to speak on it. Not on this day.

The dark winds of the Shadowlands are filled with the wailing of the lost souls remembering the horror, panic, and fear of their dying.

The shadows will soon be quiet. 

I look about the land of the living and know most will have shrugged off the remembrance aside by tomorrow ... if it has even occurred to them today.

Old news. Bills to pay. Lives to live.

There is too much tragedy each heartbeat of each day for us to hold onto any one moment of keening for long ... especially if it is not our own pain.

No pain is so easy to bear as the other fellow's.

Yet the world is drowning in tragedy.

The rain forests are still burning, and our attention span has turned off the smoke detectors.

An African child's emancipated face wails on our TV screen, and we change the channel.

The Twin Towers were gutted by planes filled with screaming passengers.

And into today's camera lenses, faces are screwed and fists are shaken in hate, 

as America is berated for its bigotry by those whose faith was shared by those terrorists.  

We have learned nothing.

Each day we pass individuals who are struggling with their own private 9-11, 

and we hurry by, perhaps irritated by their slow pace or distant, inward directed eyes.

We honor the valiant, the orphaned, and the murdered of 9-11 when we remember that tragedy has a very long shelf-life

and act with compassion towards each person we meet, knowing that everyone is having a harder time than they appear.
***

TRAGEDY HAS A LONG SHELF-LIFE_GHOST OF SAMUEL CLEMENS HERE_ ON 9 - 11

{"It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man,

all unprepared,

can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live.

There is but one reasonable explanation of it.

The intellect is stunned by the shock

and but gropingly gathers the meaning of the words.

The power to realize their full import is mercifully lacking."

- Mark Twain.}

All the talking plastic faces from your fancy television screens seem to want to have their say on September 11th today. I ... I almost could not bring myself to speak on it. Not on this day.

The dark winds of the Shadowlands are filled with the wailing of the lost souls remembering the horror, panic, and fear of their dying.

The shadows will soon be quiet. I look about the land of the living and know most will have shrugged off the remembrance aside by tomorrow ... if it has even occurred to them today.

Old news. Bills to pay. Lives to live.

There is too much tragedy each heartbeat of each day for us to hold onto any one moment of keening for long ... especially if it is not our pain.

No pain is so easy to bear as the other fellow's.

Yet the world is drowning in tragedy.

The rain forests are still burning, and our attention span has turned off the smoke detectors.

An African child's emancipated face wails on our TV screen, and we change the channel.

The Twin Towers were gutted by planes filled with screaming passengers.

And today a mosque for the faith whose zealots masterminded the mass murder has been erected right by the site.

Each day we pass individuals who are struggling with their own private 9-11, and we hurry by, perhaps irritated by their slow pace or distant, inward directed eyes.

We honor the valiant, the orphaned, and the murdered of 9-11 when we remember that tragedy has a very long shelf-life

and act with compassion towards each person we meet, knowing that everyone is having a harder time than they appear.
***

MY SONGS WERE ONCE OF THE SUNRISE ...

My songs were once of the sunrise:
They shouted it over the bar;
First-footing the dawns, they flourished,
And flamed with the morning star.
My songs are now of the sunset:
Their brows are touched with light,
But their feet are lost in the shadows
And wet with the dews of night.

Most of us know INVICTUS or at least the famous refrain of it.

But do you know its author, William Ernest Hemley?

From the age of 12 Henley suffered from tuberculosis of the bone which resulted in the amputation of his left leg below the knee during either 1865 or 1868–69.

According to Robert Louis Stevenson's letters, the idea for the character of Long John Silver was inspired by his real-life friend Henley.

Stevenson's stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, described Henley as "..a great, glowing, massive-shouldered fellow with a big red beard and a crutch; jovial, astoundingly clever, and with a laugh that rolled like music; he had an unimaginable fire and vitality; he swept one off one's feet".

In a letter to Henley after the publication of Treasure Island Stevenson wrote "I will now make a confession. It was the sight of your maimed strength and masterfulness that begot Long John Silver...the idea of the maimed man, ruling and dreaded by the sound, was entirely taken from you".

His literary acquaintances also resulted in his sickly young daughter, Margaret Henley (born 4 September 1888), being immortalised by J. M. Barrie in his children's classic Peter Pan.

Unable to speak clearly, the young Margaret referred to her friend Barrie as her "fwendy-wendy",

resulting in the use of the name Wendy, which was coined for the book. Margaret never read the book; she died on 11 February 1894 at the age of 5 and was buried at the country estate of her father's friend, Harry Cockayne Cust, in Cockayne Hatley, Bedfordshire.

When he died in 1903 at the age of 53 at his home in Woking, he instructed his ashes be interred in his daughter's grave.

But let us remember him for his fiery love for his wife:

Between the dusk of a summer night
And the dawn of a summer day,

We caught at a mood as it passed in flight,
And we bade it stoop and stay.

And what with the dawn of night began
With the dusk of day was done;

For that is the way of woman and man,
When a hazard has made them one.

Arc upon arc, from shade to shine,
The World went thundering free;

And what was his errand but hers and mine—
The lords of him, I and she?

O, it’s die we must, but it’s live we can,
And the marvel of earth and sun

Is all for the joy of woman and man
And the longing that makes them one.

{Image courtesy of the gracious Leonora Roy}

TRAGEDY HAS A LONG SHELF-LIFE_GHOST OF SAMUEL CLEMENS HERE_ ON 9 - 11

{"It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man,

all unprepared,

can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live.

There is but one reasonable explanation of it.

The intellect is stunned by the shock

and but gropingly gathers the meaning of the words.

The power to realize their full import is mercifully lacking."

- Mark Twain.}

Everybody seems to want to have their say on September 11th today. I ... I almost could not bring myself to speak on it. Not on this day.

The dark winds of the Shadowlands are filled with the wailing of the lost souls remembering the horror, panic, and fear of their dying.

The shadows will soon be quiet. I look about the land of the living and know most will have shrugged off the remembrance aside by tomorrow.

Old news. Bills to pay. Lives to live.

There is too much tragedy each heartbeat of each day for us to hold onto any one moment of keening for long.

The world is drowning in tragedy.

The rain forests are still burning, and our attention span has turned off the smoke detectors.

An African child's emancipated face wails on our TV screen, and we change the channel.

The Twin Towers were gutted by planes filled with screaming passengers.

And today a mosque for the faith whose zealots masterminded the mass murder is being erected right by the site.

Each day we pass individuals who are struggling with their own private 9-11, and we hurry by, perhaps irritated by their slow pace or distant, inward directed eyes.

We honor the valiant, the orphaned, and the murdered of 9-11 when we remember that tragedy has a very long shelf-life

and act with compassion towards each person we meet, knowing that everyone is having a harder time than they appear.
***

WHAT IS LOVE?

Don't forget to vote for my entry in Tessa's OUTSIDE THE BOX blogfest :
http://tessasblurb.blogspot.com/

I told two of my friends at work of a scene from FRENCH QUARTER NOCTURNE.

They asked if I would post it here so they could read it in its entirety.

They both said the way I spoke it was magical. With a compliment like that, how could I refuse them?


All of us fall in love. Some with danger. Many with lust. Less with romance.

A mad few with death itself. Samuel McCord does it with all of them -- and all with one woman.

Meilori Shinseen, empress of a people exiled from another plane of existence.

Samuel's love for his wife, Meilori Shinseen, is as undying and epic as a Greek tragedy.

It is known all throughout the Shadowlands. As it is also known that his great love for Meilori will be the end of him.

And if Sam could hold her just one more time in his arms, he would face that end with a smile.

And here is that ghostly encounter from my novel that my friends wanted to read.

{FRENCH QUARTER NOCTURNE is a speculative Noir thriller. An alternate history, if you would,

of what could have happened after Katrina but didn't --

in a plane of existence where the supernatural exists. And who is to say that it doesn't exist in this one?}

CHAPTER TEN

A REMEMBRANCE OF SHADOWS

The week that followed my visits to Bush and Nagin was a blur of too many demands and too few hands. But Renfield and I managed.

Swartzkoph, the new head of FEMA, came steamrolling in, busting heads and butts.

He left me alone, and I wisely kept a low profile, keeping to the shadows, trying to make his work easier not harder.

But considering the labors of Hercules he was attempting, he was finding the Big Easy anything but easy.

And I went about my work in the shadows.

But now, after a whole week, he had sent for me. He had picked an odd meeting place : the Tulane campus. It was a mess but relatively dry considering Katrina.

Renfield insisted on going with me. He was worried that I was pressing myself too hard and my senses were dulled by fatigue.

But in an odd way, it was the exact opposite. Weariness over-rode the unconscious filter I put on what Rind's blood mingled with mine showed me.

With the soft voice of twilight, ghost music sang in my memory.

It was accompanied by the chorus of the whispers of the wind from the listening sky. I closed my eyes.

New Orleans was timeless, especially to me with the blood of Death in my veins.

My transformed eyes only told me the truth, and the truth was not what I wanted to see. So I closed my eyes, and for a moment the truth was what I wanted it to be.

Meilori was back in my arms, supple and vibrant, the peach velvet of her cheek nestled against mine. She pulled back to murmur "Beloved."

Slanted eyes looked up into mine, seeming like jade quarter moons waiting to rise.

Her smile was a promise of wicked delights to come in the evening hours before us. And my heart quickened.

Her hand lightly squeezed my gloved one. Her head bent forward, and soft lips tickled my ear. And we were dancing, dancing as if our bodies were the wind given life.

It had taken me a hundred years, mind you, but I had learned to be a damn fine dancer. The firm body in my arms had been ample incentive.

Some moments lose their way and grope blindly back from the past into the present. Such a moment swept me up now. Meilori and I were dancing across this very grass.

I had paid a prince's ransom to pry King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band out of Tulane's old gymnasium to play out here under the stars.

In my mind, I could hear young Louis Armstrong on cornet, see the pleased faces of the other dancers stepping lightly all around us, and hear Meilori's low laughter.

How amused she had been at being flirted with on the front porches of Jelly Roll Morten, Buddy Bolden, and Papa Jack Laine earlier that day.

Those same houses had somehow survived Katrina, though not without damage. I made myself a promise I would see those places repaired.

Renfield rasped beside me, "Sam, are you doing this?"

"What?"

I opened my eyes and went very still.

The speechless shades of a long-gone night whirled and wheeled all around us. That long-ago evening was replaying itself before our eyes.

Renfield and Magda were laughing as they danced beside Meilori and me.

Outraged dowagers bent heads together, their silent tongues wagging at the sight of a priest and nun openly dancing under the watching stars.

Renfield sighed, "I'd forgotten how your face looked happy."

I looked at my ghostly double, envying him the sheer delight in his eyes. "I'd forgotten how it felt."

The sound of my words settled an old score with truth, and the evening shades slowly faded from sight. I shivered.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Renfield look wistfully at the disappearing Magda in his own double's arms. I sighed. Some truths were best seen only by starlight.

Renfield shook his head. "Remember the last dance of the night, Sam?"

I nodded. "Yes, I remember. Don't understand it. But I remember it."

"Why did Meilori shush you off like that to dance by herself -- as if someone invisible was dancing with her?"

I sighed. "Haven't a clue. But it was a sight. She was so graceful, so full of sad love."

Renfield frowned, then nodded. "Sad love? Bloody Hell, you're right. I could never pin down the expression on her face until now. But sad love says it all."

"All. And nothing. I still don't understand the why of it. Just that she was so hauntingly beautiful as she danced."

Renfield made a face. "She could have been washing clothes on a rock, and you would have found her beautiful."

"I may have many sorrows, Padre, but the memory of Meilori is not one of them."

Renfield was about to say something, then looked off to our left. I followed the path of his eyes. I smiled. Swartz. Not that I called him that to his face, mind you.

He was a career soldier, full of discipline and respect for tradition and position. He was striding purposedly and brisk towards us. He smiled grim at me. I smiled back.

He stopped abruptly right in front of us. I smiled even wider at his clothes.

No insignia or rank on his uniform of desert combat khaki, but it was starched and pressed as if just out of the cleaner's.

The smile dropped off his face as if too heavy for the moment.

"Next time, McCord, you see me about to be killed, let me die. I do not want to go through something like this ever again. Dealing with bureaucrats is like being nibbled to death by ducks."

{Swartzkoph tells Samuel that he will be leaving FEMA and New Orleans in two weeks, not being able to follow orders given him by President Bush. Sam tells him not to worry, that his jazz club will be open by then.}

Swartzkoph raised an eyebrow. “Hardly a priority, McCord, with all the hurting people in this city.”

“You misunderstand, General. I’ll be able to start my pay-per-view internet concert of the jazz greats. The profits from that non-stop concert will funnel into a Katrina Relief Fund.”

Swartzkoph seemed doubtful. “I don’t know how much money that will pull in.”

I smiled wide. “Worldwide? Quite a bit. When you factor in that most of the jazz greats playing will be dead ones.”

I called upon Elu’s and Rind’s blood within me and misty shapes began to form all around us. Young Louis Armstrong, cornet under his arm, slapped my shoulder.

“Be glad to be there, Sam.”

Dizzy Gillespie shimmered beside him, his trumpet sparkling in the starlight, his beret set at a rakish angle.

Jelly Roll Morten, his eyes dancing with “Spanish Tinge,” laughed at Swartzkoph’s startled jump.

Charlie “Bird” Parker winked at me, holding his saxophone tight.

Cigarette hanging from his lips, Duke Ellington drawled,

“You provide the piano. I’ll provide this old body. New Orleans is our mother. And we aim to be good sons.”

Swartzkoph looked a haunted question at me. He wanted to know who these spectral visitors were. And the hell of it was that I didn’t rightly know.

Just because I had summoned them, didn’t mean I knew.

Were they my friends drawn from my heart’s memory when they were young, or could I reach out into the night and bring them to a remembrance of shadows?

Think you know the shape of death? I did once. I was wrong.

I thought it a dark tunnel at the end of life, whose end was blazing light.

I found it to be a cloud that filled the horizon with flickers of black light and scarlet winds. Thickly it spills over ocean and land, sweeping up all in its billowing path.

And even that glimpse is misty, flawed with things my mind cannot contain.

I spoke softly to them. “Give me two weeks, and we’ll put on a show like none has ever seen before.”

Louis mopped at his forehead with a white handkerchief.

“Time ain’t what you think, Sam. Nor is the reason we’re here. You open those doors. We be there. Now, you owe someone a last dance.”

He turned to the others. “C'mon, Boys, we’ve got us an empress to play for.”

There was a movement of shadows to my left, and my heart hollowed out as Renfield breathed, “Dear Lord above.”

Meilori’s shade danced open-armed in front of me.

What does love look like? What is its color?

A white flash of fright. A billowing wave of warmth, its reach beyond the microscope and further than the length of hope. Is it a jewel sparkling in the night? Or a whisper murmuring within the corridors of the heart?

Once more Meilori danced across the velvet grass, her empty arms beckoning to me. Her soft voice carried like a specter in the dark. Her words brushed by me and into my soul.

“Beloved, one last dance.”

And I finally understood her dancing empty-armed that magic evening so long ago.

She had seen me, as now I saw her. Perhaps she thought me the ghost of a future me, dead and searching for her.

And not understanding completely, still she took me in her arms.

As I, not understanding completely, now took her in mine. She smiled, brushing soft lips against mine. And my jazz friends began to play in a heart-clasp of sound.

Love is not a shy beast to be caught but a rare moment to be treasured. It burns within each cell, a living seed of hope. Its rays invisible to most, seen only by the searching heart.

Meilori was in my arms, and her love was a sheath that kept me whole. She lightly kissed me. I almost felt it. We danced through the embrace of shadows. And for a very short moment, I was home. Home.
******************************************

TRAGEDY HAS A LONG SHELF-LIFE_GHOST OF SAMUEL CLEMENS HERE_ ON 9 - 11

{"It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man,

all unprepared,

can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live.

There is but one reasonable explanation of it.

The intellect is stunned by the shock

and but gropingly gathers the meaning of the words.

The power to realize their full import is mercifully lacking."

- Mark Twain.}

Everybody had their say on September 11th yesterday. I ... I could not bring myself to speak on it. Not on that day.

The dark winds of the Shadowlands were filled with the wailing of the lost souls remembering the horror, panic, and fear of their dying.

The shadows are quiet now. I look about the land of the living. And most have shrugged the remembrance aside.

Old news. Bills to pay. Lives to live.

There is too much tragedy each heartbeat of each day for us to hold onto any one moment of keening for long.

The world is drowning in tragedy.

The rain forests are still burning, and our attention span has turned off the smoke detectors. An African child's emancipated face wails on our TV screen, and we change the channel.

The Twin Towers were gutted by planes filled with screaming passengers. And today a mosque for the faith whose zealots masterminded the mass murder is being erected right by the site.

Each day we pass individuals who are struggling with their own private 9-11, and we hurry by, perhaps irritated by their slow pace or distant, inward directed eyes.

We honor the valiant, the orphaned, and the murdered of 9-11 when we remember that tragedy has a very long shelf-life

and act with compassion towards each person we meet, knowing that everyone is having a harder time than they appear.
***

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY

It's Mother's Day. My own mother's spirit has long since traveled to that Land which knows no shadow. I know she waits for me there with Sooner, the wolf-dog that once roamed the hills with Mother when she was a young girl.

When Mother visited the harsh home from which she had been taken to spend years in an orphanage, she was surprised her beloved Sooner was still alive. No other human could approach her.

But when Mother kneeled in front of her, Sooner laid her big head in Mother's lap. The wolf-dog finally felt the soft fingers stroke her that she had waited years to feel again. Sooner let out a long, slow sigh. And then, she died.

In my worldview, Sooner went to where she sat in that Land Of No Shadows with wagging tail until Mother walked up to her to kneel once again and hug that big head.

Yes, it is Mother's Day. What do I give? And to whom? I am a story teller. And so I give to all of you a story Mother told me as my double pneumonia grew worse, and the winter shadows deepened in our basement apartment without power. It comes from my Native American/Celtic fantasy THE BEAR WITH TWO SHADOWS. But the teaching tale is my mother's.


The adult Hibbs looked at the pond beside which Estanatlehi, the Turquoise Woman stood. She looked at him expectantly. What was she waiting for?

And then, Hibbs smiled. He knew that look. She expected him to remember. And with that very thought, he did. Time once again reached out from his mind and drew the bear back into his wondrous, seemingly endless, days as an innocent, ever curious, cub.

In the crisp memory, whose embrace swallowed him whole, he was kneeling on the sandy bank of the Snaking River, deep within the deadly wilderness of the Valley of the Shadow. And once again he was staring into the reflection of his river face and wondering if it lived its own life deep underneath the silver glass of the still waters.

Suddenly, a rock was tossed into the middle of the river-face, blurring it in spreading ripples which pushed out one after another, and Hibbs heard the soft voice of GrandMother.

“Always in circles. Never in squares.”

The startled cub bounded to his furry feet and turned around, happiness quickly replaced by nose-wrinkling puzzlement. “What?”

Tall, regal, Estanatlehi walked with the grace of the wind itself given form right up to Hibbs. “The ripples, Little One. You have never seen a square one, nor will you ever. Why do you think that is?”

Hibbs’ nose wiggled in hard thought until, right shoulder hunched up a bit, just in case he was guessing wrong, said, “B-Because that is the nature of ripples?”

Estanatlehi sighed, “The story of your life, O Slow of Thought.”

“Huh?”

She laughed soft. “You are both right and wrong. The nature of Life itself is a circle, Little One.”

Hibbs’ mouth dropped. “Truly?”

Long, icy fingers ruffled the fur atop his small head as whisper-soft laughter swept along above him by the breath of the winds themselves. “Truly.”

“Look up to Giizi, the sun. And remember my moon? See younder the rainbow, half hid by the tree-filled horizon. And think back on our trip to the StarMountain Olympus, where you saw my world in all its beauty and majesty. All are round, like the great hurricane you rode over in my arms last moon.”

Hibbs shivered at the memory. “S-So the circle is the way of Life?”

Slender fingers tweaked his nose gently. “Wiser than you know. From childhood to childhood are the days of all Two-Leggeds. The winter flows from spring to summer to autumn back to winter once more. As my world is a circle, so is all Life.”

Cold lips kissed the top of his little head. “Mystery explained.”

Once more back in the present, Hibbs sighed deep, his muzzle wrinkled in a smile of happy remembrance. "Mystery explained."

Estanatlehi stiffened, her own eyes going back into the mists of the past, finding both solace and loss in the journey.

*********************************************

May all of you find solace in your memories today and in the days to come.

Roland, a grateful son.