Stories

The Gates of Horn and Ivory - 2.2 Charming Dionysus

“Good morning, princess!”
Dionysus entered the room, surrounded, as always, by a large posse of obviously impaired maenads and satyrs. 
He never went anywhere without them, and sometimes Persephone wondered if he’d ever been alone.
Huge Etruscan amphorae filled with wine had been brought to the room for his visit, a welcome escape from the white on white decor, even though the god himself barely partook, since he drank nectar like the rest of them, to restore his beauty and youth.
Persephone admired his graceful demeanor as he approached her, a vaguely androgynous countenance, with long flowing hair, braided with wild vines, a beautiful figure who looked deceptively young, his gait as light and carefree as the spirit which shone, childlike, in his eyes.
He smiled at the goddess, who was close kin, and with whom he shared the gift of walking between worlds.
‘How did he keep so fit?’ Persephone couldn’t help but be amazed, ‘when he was constantly engaged in this self-indulgent lifestyle!’ 
It obviously took its toll on his entourage, the satyrs who, she assumed, had never experienced sobriety, and the maenads who roamed the forests drunk and out of control, acquiring the strength and ferocity of wild beasts from the substances they consumed.

The Gates of Horn and Ivory - 2.1 The Healings of Epidaurus

It was almost midnight when the goddesses and their suite reached the temple, where they were welcomed in complete silence by the priests, who took them to the Thollos and retreated respectfully, content with the privilege of watching the ceremony.
Persephone parted the veil between worlds, allowing the denizens of her kingdom safe passage to the land of the living.
“Merry meet, Asclepius,” she welcomed the famed doctor with a smile.
“I carry glad tidings from your husband, mistress, and all his love. I will be happy to return and reassure him you are well.”
“What dreams you bring, my friend? Will the afflicted receive welcome news?”
“I bring healing for some, and comfort for others, and news from the ones they have loved in this world. The portal between worlds is open and we await your command, my queen.”
With that, he bowed deeply and moved to her side, to control the flow of healing dreams to the patients, who were fast asleep, curled up on the stone floors of the temple.
“Who is coming forth to seek guidance?” She uttered the first words of the ritual.
“It’s Attalus, goddess, son of Cassander.”
“And what is your need?”
The sleeping soul gave her the full measure of his ailments, while Asclepius listened keenly, occasionally nodding.
When the patient was done talking, the doctor thought deeply, then scribbled a recipe for medicine in light, on a parchment made of air, and handed it to the sleeping soul, to remember upon awakening.

The Gates of Horn and Ivory - 1.3 The Haunted Caves

They saw it from afar, as they were traveling among the clouds in Helios’s chariot, the strange city of caves, carved in the soapstone of a cluster of spiky cliffs, sometimes by nature, sometimes by man, displayed amid the arid landscape like a giant sculpture, maybe an artifact the titans left behind, before his love of humankind landed Prometheus his penance.
A huge human beehive it seemed to be, where the diligent workers moved about through hundreds of holes in the stone cliffs towards the innards of the place, dug deep into the earth: the huge underground metropolis that marked the beating heart of Anatolia.
A large delegation welcomed the goddesses, with the traditional sheaves of grain and prolonged orations, and when it was done prostrating, the group surrounded them like living water and carried them down stairs and ramps through large subterranean chambers and hallways, past people carrying on their mundane activities, past carved galleries and alleys and arcades, public spaces and ventilation shafts, temples, tombs, and sanitation systems, stables and wells and water reservoirs, all the parts of a flawlessly functioning city, miles beneath the earth’s surface, illuminated only by Prometheus’s gift.

The Gates of Horn and Ivory - 1.2 Praise Olympus!

The sun woke her up the next morning, the memory of her dream still fresh. She was picnicking in her orchard, eating pomegranate seeds at dusk, while Hades, who sat beside her, watching, brought each seed to life with a light of its own as her lips touched it, just to amuse her.
A group of nymphs burst into the room, giggling and shoving each other, and suddenly grew quiet when they found themselves in the presence of the goddess.
A prolonged monotonous droning of odes and praise ensued, a spectacle Persephone listened to with patience and appreciation, like a good immortal would, secretly relieved when it finally ended and it was proper for her to get out of bed.
The darn thing was massive, placed atop of a stepped marble platform to loom over the also enormous room, which would have been a better fit for a ballroom than a bedroom, and whose glistening white portico opened out to the sights above the clouds.
Far into the distance, the peak of Mount Olympus poked through them, a vision in rose and lavender, halfway between dream and reality.

The Gates of Horn and Ivory - 1.1 Spring

Persephone had a secret, one she could never tell her mother.
She had never enjoyed the gossip, the pointless aggravation, and the churning of vanities and ambitions that surrounded her life in the living world, the daily rehashed dramas of the nymphs’ latest trysts, the self-centered empty dalliances of the male gods, the petty envies of the spurned minor goddesses, the closed-minded expectations of the powers that be, the gaudy, useless pomp, the empty rhetoric.
When tall, dark, and handsome walked her way, she had rolled her eyes at first, in exasperation of having to endure yet another episode of the over-inflated male ego, and was determined to evade his attention as soon as feasible and with as little damage to her eardrums as possible, but he turned out to be nothing she expected.
He didn’t tell her who he was, of course, out of fear he’d be rejected before he had a chance to speak his woo, and by the time they got closer, he had even more reason to keep his identity quiet, grateful for the miracle of her and worried not to lose her love.

The Blue Rose Manuscript - Rose

Rose Brecht had an enchanted childhood, rendered even more so because she’d been born blessed with a vivid imagination. 
Her mind made up worlds and stories, so complex and filled with detail that even the grown-ups had trouble telling them apart from reality some times. 
Though they got her in trouble more often than she liked to admit, these worlds inside her mind felt very real to her, even though she couldn’t share them with anybody, not without being scolded.
Throughout her childhood this imaginary world shared the landscape of her mind with the real one, and she allocated equal importance to the two to the dismay of her family and friends. 
When time came for her to go to college, she shocked her loved ones by choosing a discipline deeply grounded in science, replete with experiments, fact finding and extensive research,  a choice they had difficulty believing at first, used as they were to her wild flights of fancy.

The Blue Rose Manuscript - Only Echoes, Endlessly Repeating - Local

Local: Denoting a variable or other entity that is only available for use in one part of a construct, relating to a particular region or part, or to each of any number of these.
My beloved child, there are so many things I wanted to teach you! We all live in a subset of reality that only reaches as far as our minds and our senses. We occupy a small room inside being, and in that room we’re like the orange that falls off the side of a wagon and upsets every other fruit in its path. We get a sense of our surroundings based on immediacy and adjacency; we rush to the familiar to solve problems and favor the most recent things we did when we look for quick ways to tackle something new.
Our minds economize when they take in the world, we keep our trusted standards to the forefront of our thinking, so we don’t have to do any more of it than necessary.
We can only experience things that are available in our corner of the world. Just because something does not exist where we are, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist in general.
Here is a simple example, we only know what snow looks like because we live here, where it gets cold in the winter. If we lived in Egypt, we could go through our entire lives with no knowledge of it. Everything that hasn’t dawned on us yet does not exist. There may be states of being stranger than words, time crystals, solar winds, condensates of reality itself, but they are all unavailable to our perception, because we can’t live inside the conditions that define their worlds. 

The Blue Rose Manuscript - Only Echoes Endlessly Repeating - Fractal

Fractal: A complex geometric pattern exhibiting self-similarity in that small details of its structure viewed at any scale repeat elements of the overall pattern. 
 
[This observation is unrelated to the manuscript, but it refers to an event so unusual for the climate of this region I thought it would be worth recording. Today, July 24, at four in the afternoon, it snowed.
The large and very cold snowflakes signaled to us that the wind currents that made this strange weather event possible drew precipitation from the clouds in the higher atmosphere faster than they could adjust. 
Snow in summer is rare, but it happened before in this area, as the weather records from 1816 indicate. 
The snowflakes melted quickly, because of the heat embodied in the earth, but not before we had a chance to immortalize their delicate array of intricate shapes, no two alike. 
Because this event was as short lived as it was unexpected, it didn’t affect the library grounds, which have been a haven for many rare species of historical plants for the last two centuries. 
All the vegetation, from mosses to succulents and from herbaceous perennials to trees shrugged off the late chill, all but the ferns, whose fiddlehead growth will probably be delayed by a month. 
The cool and humid weather encouraged the proliferation of snails, to the great distress of the groundskeeper and to our unexpected amusement. 
Their shells dazzled in a broad variety of colors, patterns and shapes, which, for some strange reason, remind me of the illuminations of the manuscript.]

The Blue Rose Manuscript - Only Echoes Endlessly Repeating - Scale

Scale:  The relative size or extent of something.
The first thing you should consider when you ask yourself how something works is at what scale. A grain of sand is the same as a rock or a planet, it is our specific experience that renders it minute. Our sense of proportion, rooted in our own size, makes some processes obvious and others obscure, we can only perceive things based on our own scale. Our mind has a broader view, but it too is limited. We are range bound to the things we can observe, either through our own senses or through the use of instruments. There are things in existence we can never see, not even when given all of time and when eliminating all of the limitations of space: things from before the universe began, things that wind up so tight that even time and light can’t escape them, things from places that are not reality, if they exist.
The reason we don’t know the last fact for sure is that the scale of the thing we are observing, existence itself, makes it impossible for us to see outside it.
We live in a flatland of perception, where things, speeds and concepts that are very large or very small do not exist. Take, for instance, our perception of time: things that move at speeds faster than of our range are invisible and things that move at speeds much slower than it we consider still. Nothing is really still, even the North Star moves. 

The Blue Rose Manuscript - Always and Forever - Clarity

Clarity: The quality of transparency or purity; the quality of being coherent and intelligible.
[Nowhere in the document is the fact that somebody arranged the pages out of sequence more clear than here. The writing is neat and correct, but labored, betraying a hand still striving to achieve full control of its fine motor functions. There is no doubt the scribe is the same, the markers of the handwriting clearly indicate it. Even the rose seal looks tentative, as if a child had gotten permission to use it and felt overwhelmed by the responsibility and afraid of making a mistake.
This page is illuminated to a much greater degree than the others, a task made easier to accomplish due to the sparseness of the text, which is restricted to the center of the page. It looks like there have been temporary lines to demarcate a box for the content, maybe to help the young scribe maintain clean text edges; there are also lines to keep the writing straight, and the calligraphy clings to them with tormented intensity.
The experience of reading the content of this document presented in the handwriting of an eight or nine-year-old is surreal.
The more I advance into the manuscript, the more this question weighs on me: who was this person who wrote it down? 
She was a woman as far as we can tell, but there are no traces of her passing through this world, outside the conversations included in this manuscript.