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mysticmarlowe-blog · 5 years

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ACIM and the Fallacy of Twin Flame Ascension

As a psychic, one question I get asked a lot is: “Why would God bring this man (or woman) into my life, only to snatch him away again? He must have a sick sense of humour!” There is certainly a very strange experience out there to be had in the world, common amongst my clients, both male and female, gay and straight. I would estimate that one in every five of my psychic readings addresses a scenario not far away from the following: My client is busy getting on with life, asking for nothing, troubling no one. Suddenly, out of the clear blue sky, someone drops into her lap. This mysterious person stirs an ancient memory in her, reminds her of something she had long forgotten. And now she realises that this is what she had been searching for her entire life. Everything now makes sense; all the pain and anguish and loneliness of the past are healed in an instant. A connection of indescribable depth and resonance now unfolds with the promise of a deeply committed relationship. She has finally completed the long and winding road home; she has reached the promised land. Hallelujah! God is good after all. Thank you, God! And then, within a year or two, sometimes even less, the mysterious person is gone again, without so much as a bye-your-leave. And my client, who was perfectly fine before all this happened, is now left feeling that she cannot go on, and that life has lost all meaning for her. One long-term client of mine described her experience as like “being eaten alive from the inside, without being able to do anything about it”. So, does God have a sick sense of humour? Does he enjoy seeing us writhe around in unbearable suffering? Surely, he must be, at the very least, as pitilessly indifferent to our plight as nature itself? A scientist would explain that physical attraction is a biological function essential for the perpetuation of the human race, and in accordance with nature’s template, it arises, persists for a while and then dies away. There is no God, and no mystery either. There is only the destruction, decay and death that is essential to creation’s flourishing on both a micro and macro scale. Charles Darwin, once a devout Christian, eventually lost his faith in God by studying the macabre habits of the wasp: “I cannot persuade myself”, he wrote, “That a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars”. According to Richard Dawkins in “River out of Eden”, it was the digger wasps that really put the spiritual lid on it for Darwin. He read that a female digger wasp not only lays her eggs in a caterpillar so that her larva can feed on it, she also paralyses the caterpillar with her sting without killing it, in order to keep the meat fresh. The caterpillar must therefore be literally aware of being eaten alive from the inside but unable to do anything about it. This really needn’t have been the end of the road for Darwin though. In “Dialogue on Awakening” by Tom Carpenter (a record of a conversation between the author and Jesus, the Awakened Christ), Tom explains how Jesus had confronted the same paradox with a very different result. “Always curious as to how Jesus’ awakening had unfolded here on earth, I asked how this had occurred. The answer was very interesting.” Jesus, it seems, was baffled by a single question: If God created the world, which was the accepted belief, and if He was all loving, why could he find no evidence of that in the world? And so, he began to meditate, at his favourite place “beside a small stream in the nearby hills”. In Tom’s words: “It was as he focused on these issues which his perception could not fathom that he first broke through the boundary of that perception and became aware of a Presence within his mind; a source of knowing unrelated to anything he had experienced before. He “heard” an inner Voice say to him that his perception of a loving God was correct, but he was looking for Him in the wrong places”. So, this is how Jesus learned how to become a Christ. Through the practice of meditation. He learned to become so silent, that the whole turmoil of his mind disappeared, and he tuned into the still, small voice of God within him. Jesus learned to be a listener, a receiver, to allow his own thinking mind to disappear so completely that something totally different could arise. The Beatitudes and Sermon on the Mount were not thought up by Jesus, they were received by him in the stillness of his own silence. He was merely the vehicle. This is what the spiritual path is all about. Learning to identify the voice in your head as ego, and learning to still that voice, and enter silence, so that another voice will arise. My years of study on non-dualistic thought systems such as A Course in Miracles, Sufism and Buddhism have taught me that the natural world, where all things die, is not governed by the laws of God. God did not create a world where creatures are aware of being eaten alive from the inside and unable to do anything about it. This natural world arises from an erroneous belief in separation from a loving God. “You do not realise the magnitude of that one error. It was so vast and so completely incredible that from it a world of total unreality had to emerge. What else could come of it? Its fragmented aspects are fearful enough, as you begin to look at them. But nothing you have seen begins to show you the enormity of the original error, which seemed to cast you out of Heaven, to shatter knowledge into meaningless bits of disunited perceptions, and to force you to make further substitutions” (A Course in Miracles, T-18.I.5) This sounds very wordy and complicated, but all it is really saying is that once, before we got here, we had a belief that we had separated from God. The course calls it the “tiny mad idea”. And from that one idea came the entire belief in the cruel and indifferent natural world of death, destruction and decay, of being eaten alive from the inside. God is neither cruel or indifferent, He wants us to come home, to wake up from this illusion, to end our suffering and to choose life. This is what Jesus achieved at his favourite place, “beside a small stream in the nearby hills” and what Charles Darwin missed, as he was too engrossed in his study of the Ichneumonidae to suspect the bigger picture. Oftentimes, my client will tell me with the upmost certainty that that her now-departed lover is her twin-flame. Sometimes this is a neurotic, fear-based attachment, but just as often I sense the wisps of memory of an ancient melody behind her words. Twin-flames are not a New Age farce; the idea of one soul occupying two bodies was written about extensively by ancient Greek philosophers and the concept is frequently referred to in the Gnostic Gospels, such as those of Thomas and Mary Magdalene. Yet, because we humans haven’t yet mastered the simple art of stilling the inner-voice, we make an idol of the twin-flame phenomenon and ignore the radiant truth that shines behind this idol. We try to slice and dice and merchandise a mystery that cannot be pinned down, and therefore cut ourselves off from the true immensity that a twin-flame connection signifies in our spiritual lives. We worship the finger that points to the moon. As a result, a multi-million-pound industry has exploded. Twin-flame master-teachers are emerging from all corners of the internet, and people gather around them to exude hosannas and deploy palm fronds. New terms like vibrational alignment and heart activation are being bandied around on dedicated Facebook groups. You can purchase services such as energy cleansing and Akashic Record clearing for several hundred dollars, and for several thousand you can enrol in a twin-flame college where you can graduate to “ascension”. There doesn’t seem to be complete agreement between twin-flame master-teachers as to what ascension is, but it certainly has something to do with self-realisation or awakening to the truth of who you are. But the road to this ascension seems to be scattered with food for the ego to chew on. Thirty- or sixty-day programmes are available, as are courses of ten or thirteen or a hundred modules, covering diverse topics in and around the subject of awakening. “Ten signs that reunion is about to happen”, “The meaning of 11:11”, and then, almost as an afterthought, “Letting go of your attachment to your twin-flame”. Warning the self against the ego, we can hope to be of some effect, warning the ego against itself, we are surely addressing the wrong object. Stilling the mind and letting go of everything you think you are is the only way forward. The lighter you travel, the easier the journey. Remember poor Darwin. Furthermore, this ascension business seems to be considered as a means for reuniting with a lost lover, rather than an end in itself; the ultimate end of returning home to God. From a unified perspective, this is rather topsy-turvy, upside-down thinking. When you do realise your own true nature, as love itself, you have no needs that a lover would fulfil. These twin-flame institutions need demystifying, as the worst of them seem to be no more than places where narcissists and co-dependents can seek each other out. Last week on YouTube I caught sight of a feet washing ceremony take place; of a garlanded and enthroned twin-flame couple, in reunion and therefore, presumably, ascendancy. I am reminded of a story a Buddhist teacher once told me: Maya the evil one was walking along the road with his attendant when ahead of them appeared a man whose eyes were transfixed to a spot on the ground. His face was lit up with a radiant light. “What is he looking at?” the attendant asked Maya. “Only a piece of truth”, Maya replied. “Aren’t you worried?” the attendant asked. “No”, replied Maya, “If it gets serious, I’ll organise it”. So, if the purpose of twin-flame union isn’t the uninterrupted joy of the union for its own sake, then what is its purpose? I believe our twin-flame is our divine helper, our mighty companion on the winding road to the real world. Like an Abraxas rooster before the dawn, he chants out the clarion call to remind us of our connection to the Light. It is only by his running away from us in the world that he is drawing close to us in spirit, helping us develop, like Jesus, a faculty of interior hearing. This faculty is developed by turning the soul from outer things, whether material or psychological, and turning inward to the centre where lies the divine spark, the Spirit, the Self. Herein lies the key to freedom from twin-flame misery. Be willing, if only for a moment, to recognise in this connection something so much more immense than the possibility of being together in this crazy world where all things die. Be willing, again if only for a moment, to see the utter cosmic irrelevance of this much idolised concept of “reunion”. Instead, develop a daily practice of following your twin-flame into that intermediate space between the natural world and the spirit world; to the imaginal world, where he is beckoning you. Here is the space where Mary Magdalene met Jesus after his resurrection and came to understand the nature of his love for her. Here is the space from where she wrote her Gospel. “Lord, I see you now in this vision” And the Lord answered: “You are blessed, for the sight of me does not disturb you” (Mary 10:12-15) Gradually you will come to see how much more real the imaginal realm is than the natural world, just as Mary came to understand how much richer her meetings were with Jesus here than in Jerusalem or at the shore of Galilee or by the well. You will come to understand how much more you are learning about yourself here than in the world of bodies, form, fear and attachment. And believe me, only then will you be able to let go of your attachment to reunion. A twin-flame connection is so strong, it is quite impossible to let go of without realising this. I have never seen it done by acquiring more knowlege, or by willpower alone, and I doubt I ever will. Then, and only then, will your twin-flame runner come back into your earthly life. I’ve seen it happen so many times. Miracles have a way of being simple whilst keeping faith with the complexity of life experience. The process is utterly extraordinary, but it is also reliable. Not everyone I know who does this has reunited with their twin-flame already, but they have all, without exception had weird stuff happening almost immediately. Stuff that they couldn’t make up if they tried. Human beings are on a windy road, and love is only found by walking it. For a psychic twin flame reading contact [email protected]

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larryland · 7 years

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by Gail M. Burns

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) earned his knighthood by writing what used to be called “ripping good yarns,” many of which still hold up well today, mostly notable his sixty Sherlock Holmes stories written between 1887 and 1927. In fact Holmes has such a rabid fan base that there are some who believe that – like Jesus, Elvis, and King Arthur – he will come again to save the world.

Indeed, Holmes did “return from the dead.” The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901) marked his first appearance in print after his “death” in the 1893 story The Final Problem. The novella is one of Holmes’ more popular adventures, and unique in that the great detective is absent from the narrative for long stretches, leaving his companion, Dr. John Watson, alone on Dartmoor to solve the curse of Baskerville Hall.

I don’t need to tell you that Holmes and Watson are incredibly “hot” right now, with TV series and films and plays portraying and reimagining their adventures lurking around every corner. Award-winning farceur Ken Ludwig has joined the throng with Baskerville (2015), a retelling of the famous story as a comedy for five actors – two playing Holmes and Watson and the other three playing all the other 46 roles.

There is a three-actor comedy version of The Hound of the Baskervilles by Steve Canny and John Nicholson of Peepolykus that I saw in 2009 and 2011 at Shakespeare & Company and just loved, so I was concerned that Ludwig’s version might pale in comparison, but there really is no comparison. That version is all about the laughs, while Ludwig actually wants to tell the story along with showing you a good time.

The chatter before opening was all about director Jen Wineman’s decision to cast a woman, Liz Wisan, as Sherlock Holmes. Wisan has appeared in this play before, in the “woman track,” 15 roles performed here by Caitlin Clouthier, and comparing the two opportunities I am puzzled that she would think playing Holmes was the superior opportunity. As mentioned earlier, Holmes is apparently MIA for most of this story, leaving all the work to Watson, here delightfully played by Dave Quay. Offered a chance to play any role in this work, I would have chosen Watson over Holmes.

But there she is, a woman playing Sherlock Holmes. Wisan is not playing Holmes as a woman, nor is she pretending to be a man, but sadly she is also not playing Sherlock Holmes, or at least not the Holmes I am familiar with. This is a comedy, but Holmes is neither a funny man nor a man with a lot of humor. Holmes should be the straight man, the calm center in the farcical storm, where Wisan plays the role as a jolly fellow along for the fun. For me, it didn’t work, and that has nothing to do with gender.

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Because Ludwig actually wants to include the entire plot of the mystery, the show gets off to a slow start with much exposition, but by the end of Act I and all through Act II the hilarity is moving at high speed. Quay and Brian Owen, who plays a wide variety of roles, are tremendous physical comics. Clouthier and Raji Ahsan are no slouches either, but Quay and Owen, who has performed these roles in an earlier production in Cincinnati, are stand-outs.

While it is a short book, The Hound of the Baskervilles is a big story, bouncing from London to the moors of Devon and back again. Scenes take place on moors and mires, in trains and carriages, in stately halls and hotels. In his notes on the style of the play in the script Ludwig specifically says “There are no sets needed or called for.” And yet here Wineman and set designer Alexander Woodward have built a humongous set, towering bookshelves filled with every prop in the Dorset collection and then some. It is impressive to look at, but it is barely used, other than as an impediment to be scaled on occasion, because, as the playwright said, this show doesn’t need a set!

What this show demands are piles of costumes and a backstage crew of dressers well-versed in the art of the quick change. Hats off (and on and off again) to costume designer Aaron Mastin, stage manager Sarah Perlin, and all those unsung heroes behind the scenes for their impressive efforts. Owen, Clouthier, and Ahsan do an excellent job of defining their multitudinous personae through voice and body, but the costumes and wigs really seal the deal.

While the set is superfluous, it is handsome, and it, and Wineman’s direction, are greatly enhanced by Michael Giannitti’s superb lighting design. Jane Shaw’s elaborate soundscape also adds much to the fun, but sadly she misses the most important mark, providing snarls and growls more leonine than canine and no bone-chilling howls for the title character.

For die-hard fans of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, this show may be disappointing, but anyone who loves a good farce is in for a treat. This is a show that you can take grandma and the kids (8+) to and everyone will leave with a smile on their face. And it is an excellent way to encourage young readers’ appetite for a few of Doyle’s ripping good yarns.

Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery by Ken Ludwig, directed by Jen Wineman, runs July 13-29 at the Dorset Playhouse, 104 Cheney Road in Dorset VT. Scenic design by Alexander Woodward; lighting design by Michael Giannitti; costume design by Aaron Mastin; sound design by Jane Shaw; stage manager Sarah Perlin. CAST: Liz Wisan as Sherlock Holmes, Dave Quay as Dr. John Watson, with Raji Ahsan, Caitlin Clouthier, and Brian Owen as everyone else.

Single tickets and subscriptions for the 2017 Summer Season are on sale. The box office may be reached by calling (802) 867-2223 ex. 2 Tuesday through Saturday 12-6pm (8 pm on performance days.) For more information, or to purchase tickets and subscriptions online, visit Dorset Theatre Festival’s website at dorsettheatrefestival.org.

REVIEW: “Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery” at Dorset by Gail M. Burns Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) earned his knighthood by writing what used to be called “ripping good yarns,” many of which still hold up well today, mostly notable his sixty Sherlock Holmes stories written between 1887 and 1927.

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dream-love210 · 7 years

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In 1933, Prince Charles was eighteen and Disa, Duchess of Payn, five. The allusion is to Nice (see also line 240) where the Shades spent the first part of the year; but here again, as in regard to so many fascinating facets of my friend’s past life, I am not in the possession of particulars (who is to blame, dear S.S?) and not in the position to say whether or not, in the course of possible excursions along the coast, they ever reached Cap Turc and glimpsed from an oleander-lined lane, usually open to tourists, the Italianate villa built by Queen Disa’s grandfather in 1908, and called then Villa Paradiso, or in Zemblan Villa Paradisa, later to forego the first half of its name in honor of his favorite granddaughter. There she spent the first fifteen summers of her life; thither did she return in 1953, “for reasons of health” (as impressed on the nation) but really, a banished queen; and there she still dwells.

When the Zemblan Revolution broke out (May 1, 1958), she wrote the King a wild letter in governess English, urging him to come and stay with her until the situation cleared up. The letter was intercepted by the Onhava police…

Eventually he managed to inform her that he was confined to the palace. Valiant Disa hurriedly left the Riviera and made a romantic but fortunately ineffectual attempt to return to Zembla…She flew back to her perch in a mood of frustration and fury (mainly, I think, because the message had been conveyed to her by a cousin of hers, good old Curdy Buff, whom she loathed). Several weeks passed and she was soon in a state of worse agitation owing to rumors that her husband might be condemned to death. She left Cap Turc again. She had traveled to Brussels and chartered a plane to fly north, when another message, this time from Odon, came, saying that the King and he were out of Zembla, and that she should quietly regain Villa Disa and await her further news. In the autumn of the same year she was informed by Lavender that a man representing her husband would be coming to discuss with her certain business matters concerning property she and her husband jointly owned abroad. She was in the act of writing a letter...She looked up--and of course no dark spectacles and make-up could for a moment fool her.

Since her final departure from Zembla he had visited her twice, the last time two years before, and during that lapse of time her pale-skin, dark-hair beauty had acquired a new, mature and melancholy glow. In Zembla, where most females are freckled blondes, we have the saying: belwif ivurkumpf wid snew ebanumf, “A beautiful woman should be like a compass rose of ivory with four parts of ebony.” And this was the trim scheme nature had followed in Disa’s case. There was something else, something I was to realize only when I read Pale Fire, or rather reread it after bitter hot mist of disappointment had cleared before my eyes. I am thinking of lines 261-267 in which Shade describes his wife. At the moment of his painting that poetical portrait, the sitter was twice the age of Queen Disa. I do not wish to be vulgar in dealing with these delicate matters but the fact remains that sixty-year-old Shade is lending her a well-conserved coeval the ethereal and eternal aspect she retains, or should retain, in his kind noble heart. Now the curious thing about it is that Disa at thirty, when last seen in September 1958, bore a singular resemblance not, of course, to Mrs. Shade as she was when I met her, but to the idealized and stylized picture painted by the poet in those lines of Pale Fire… I trust the reader appreciates the strangeness of this, because if he does not, there is no sense in writing poems, or notes to poems, or anything at all.

She seemed also calmer than before; her self-control had improved. During the previous meetings, and throughout their marital life in Zembla, there had been, on her part, dreadful outbursts of temper. When in the first years of marriage he had wished to cope with those blazes and blasts, trying to make her take a rational view of her misfortune, he had found them very annoying; but gradually he learned to take advantage of them and welcomed them as giving him opportunity of getting rid of her presence for lengthening periods of time by not calling her back after a sequence of doors had slammed ever more distantly, or by leaving the palace himself for some rural hideout.

In the beginning of their calamitous marriage he had strenuously tried to possess her but to no avail. He informed her he had never made love before (which was perfectly true insofar as the implied object would only mean one thing to her), upon which he was forced to endure the ridicule of having her dutiful purity involuntarily enact the ways of a courtesan with a client too young or too old; he said something to that effect (mainly to relieve the ordeal), and she made an atrocious scene. He farced himself with aphrodisiacs, but the anterior characters of her unfortunate sex kept fatally putting him off. One night when he tried tiger tea, and hopes rose high, he made the mistake of begging her to comply with an expedient which she made the mistake of denouncing as unnatural and disgusting. Finally he told her than an old riding accident was incapacitating him but that a cruise with his pals and a lot of sea bathing would be sure to restore his strength.

She had recently lost both parents and had no real friend to turn to for explanation and advice when the inevitable rumors reached her; these she was too proud to discuss with her ladies in waiting but she read books, found out all about our manly Zemblan customs, and concealed her naive distress under a great show of sarcastic sophistication. He congratulated her on her attitude, solemnly swearing that he had given up, or at least would give up, the practices of his youth; but everywhere along the road powerful temptations stood at attention. He succombed to them from time to time, then every other day, then several times daily--especially during the robust regime of Harfar Baron of Shalksbore...Curdy Buff--as Harfar was nicknamed by his admirers--had a huge escort of acrobats and bareback riders, and the whole affair rather got out of hand so that Disa, upon unexpectedly returning from a trip to Sweden, found the Palace transformed into a circus. He again promised, again fell, and despite the utmost discretion was again caught…

What had the sentiments he entertained in regard to Disa ever amounted to? Friendly indifference and bleak respect. Not even in the first bloom of their marriage had he felt any tenderness or excitement. Of pity, of heartache, there could be no question. He was, had always been, casual and heartless. But the heart of this dreaming self, both before and after the rupture, made extraordinary amends.

He dreamed of her more often, and with incomparably more poignancy, than his surface-life feelings for her warranted; these dreams occurred when he least thought of her, and worries in no way connected with her assumed her image in the subliminal world as a battle or a reform becomes a bird of wonder in a tale for children. These heart-rendering dreams transformed the drab prose of his feelings for her into a strong and strange poetry, subsiding undulations of which would flash and disturb him throughout the day, bringing back the pang and the richness--and then only the pang, and then only its glancing reflection--but not affecting at all his attitude towards the real Disa.

Her image, as she entered and re-entered his sleep, rising apprehensively from a distant sofa or going in search of the messenger who, they said, had just passed through the draperies, took into account changes of fashion; the Disa wearing the dress he had seen on her the summer of the Glass Works explosion, or last Sunday, or in any other antechamber of time, forever remained exactly as she looked on the day he had first sold her he did not love her. That happened during a hopeless trip to Italy, in a lakeside hotel garden--rose, black araucarius, rusty, greenish hydrangeas--one cloudless evening with the mountains of the far shore swimming in a sunset haze and the lake all peach syrup regularly rippled with pale blue, and the captions of a newspaper spread flat on the foul bottom near the stone bank perfectly readable through the shallow diaphanous filth, and because, upon hearing him out, she sank down on the lawn in an impossible posture, examining a grass culm and frowning, he had taken his words back at once; but the shock had fatally starred the mirror, and thenceforth in his dreams her image was infected with the memory of that confession as with some disease or the secret aftereffects of a surgical operation too intimate to be mentioned.

The gist, rather than the actual plot of the dream, was a constant refutation of his not loving her. His dream-love for her exceeded in emotional tone, in spiritual passion and depth, anything he had experienced in his surface existence. This love was like an endless wringing of hands, like a blundering of the soul through an infinite maze of hopelessness and remorse. They were, in a sense, amorous dreams, for they were permeated with tenderness, with a longing to sink his head onto her lap and sob away the monstrous past. They brimmed with the awful awareness of her being so young and so helpless. They were purer than his life. What carnal aura there was in theme came not from her but from those with whom he betrayed her--prickly-chinned Phrynia, pretty Timandra with that boom under her apron--and even so the sexual scum remained somewhere far above the sunken treasure and was quite unimportant. He would see her being accosted by a misty relative so distant as to be practically featureless. She would quickly hide what she held and extend her arched hand to be kissed. He knew she had just come across a telltale object--a riding boot in his bed--establishing beyond any doubt his unfaithfulness. Sweat beaded her pale, naked forehead--but she had to listen to the prattle of a chance visitor or direct the movements of a workman with a ladder who was nodding his head and looking up as he carried it in his arms to the broken window. One might bear--a strong merciless dreamer might bear--the knowledge of her grief and pride but none could bear the sight of her automatic smile as she turned from the agony of the disclosure to the polite trivialities required of her. She would be canceling an illumination, or discussing hospital cots with the head nurse, or merely ordering breakfast for two in the sea cave--and through the everyday plainness of the talk, through the play of the charming gestures with which she always accompanied certain readymade phrases, he, the groaning dreamer, perceived the disarray of her soul and was aware that an odious, undeserved, humiliating disaster had befallen her, and that only obligations of etiquette and her staunch kindness to a guiltless third party gave her the force to smile. As one watched the light on her face, one foresaw it would fade in a moment, to be replaced--as soon as the visitor left--by that impossible little frown the dreamer could never forget. He would help her again to her feet on the same lakeside lawn, with parts of the lake fitting themselves into the spaces between the rising balusters, and presently he and she would be walking side by side along an anonymous alley, and he would feel she was looking at him out of the corner of a faint smile but when he forced himself to confront that questioning glimmer, she was no longer there. Everything had changed, everybody was happy. And he absolutely had to find her at once to tell her that he adored her, but the large audience before him separated him from the door, and the notes reaching him through a succession of hands said that she was not available; that she was inaugurating a fire; that she had married an American businessman; that she had become a character in a novel; that she was dead.

No such qualms disturbed him as he sat now on the terrace of her villa and recounted his lucky escape from the Palace. She enjoyed his description of the underground link with the theater and tried to visualize the jolly scramble across the mountains… But when he began to discuss the political situation (two Soviet generals had just been attached to the Extremist government as Foreign Advisers), a familiar vacant expression appeared in her eyes. Now that he was safely out of the country, the entire blue bulk of Zembla, from Embla Point to the Emblem Bay, could sink in the sea for all she cared.) That he had lost weight was of more concern to her than that he had lost a kingdom. Perfunctorily she inquired about the crown jewels; he revealed to her their unusual hiding place, and she melted in girlish mirth as she had not done for years and years. “I do have some business matters to discuss,” he said. “And there are papers you have to sign.” Up in the trellis a telephone climbed with the rose. One of her former ladies in waiting, the languid and elegant Fleur de Fyler (now fortyish and faded), still wearing pearls in her raven hair and the traditional white manilla, brought certain documents from Disa’s boudoir. Upon hearing the King’s mellow voice behind the laurels, Fleur recognized it before she could be misled by this excellent disguise. Two footmen, handsome young strangers of a marked Latin type, appeared with the tea and caught Fleur in mid-curtsey. A sudden breeze groped among the glycenes. Defiler of flowers. He asked Fleur as she turned to go with the Disa orchids if she still played the viola. She shook her head several times not wishing to speak without addressing him and not daring to do so while the servants might be within earshot.

They were alone again. Disa quickly found the papers he needed. Having finished with that, they talked for a while about nice trivial things, such as the motion picture, based on a Zemblan legend, that Odon hoped to make in Paris or Rome. How would he represent, they wondered, the narstran, a hellish hall where the souls of murderers were tortured under a constant drizzle of drake venom coming down from the foggy vault? By and large the interview was proceeding in a most satisfactory manner-though her fingers trembled a little when her hand touched the elbow rest of his chair. Careful now.

“What are you plans?” she inquired. “Why can’t you stay here as long as you want? Please do. I’ll be going to Rome soon, you’ll have the whole house to yourself. Imagine, you can bed here as many as forty guests, forty Arabian thieves.” (Influence of the huge terracotta vases in the garden.)

He answered he would be going to America some time next month and had business in Paris tomorrow.

Why America? What would he do there?

Teach. Examine literary masterpieces with brilliant and charming young people. A hobby he could now freely indulge.

“And, of course, I don’t know,” she mumbled looking away, “I don’t know perhaps if you’d have nothing against it, I might visit New York--I mean, just for a week or two, and not this year but the next.”

He complimented her on her silver-spangled jacket. She persevered: “Well?” “And your hairdo is most becoming.” “Oh what does it matter,” she wailed, “what on earth does it matter!” “I must be on my way,” he whispered with a smile and got up. “Kiss me,” she said, and was like a limp, shivering ragdoll in this arms for a moment.

He walked to the gate. At the turn of the path he glanced back and saw in the distance her white figure with the listless grace of ineffable grief bending over the garden table, and suddenly a fragile bridge was suspended between waking indifference and dream-love. But she moved, and he saw it was not she at all but only poor Fleur de Flyer collecting the documents left among the tea things. (See note 80).

When in the course of an evening stroll in May or June, 1959, I offered Shade all this marvelous material, he looked at me quizzically and said: “That’s all very well, Charles. But there are just two questions. How can you know that all this intimate stuff about your rather appalling king is true? And if true, how can one hope to print such personal things about who, presumably, are still alive?”

“My dear John,” I replied gently and urgently, “do not worry about trifles. Once transmuted by you into poetry, the stuff will be true, and the people will come alive. A poet’s purified truth can cause no pain, no offense. True art is above false honor.”

“Sure, sure,” said Shade. “One can harness words like performing fleas and make them drive other fleas. Oh, sure.”

“And moreover,” I continued as we walked down the road into a vast sunset, “as soon as your poem is ready, as soon as the glory of Zembla merges with the glory of your verse, I intend to divulge to you an ultimate truth, an extraordinary secret, that will put your mind completely at rest.”

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