Chapter 2Beginning to End

[the artist]

Chapter 2
Beginning to End

This is the story of my life. I trust that my words will create the pictures in your mind that will enrich my story with a reality that befits them. Picture me any way you will, but at least picture me wild, for in the beginning of this story I was wild. The end will come to pass in due course, along with all of its consequences, but for the time being, I must tell you about the very beginning: Oftentimes, the telling of an event – the story – is the only way to find The End.

Let me take you back to the start of this long, long life of mine, when I lived in a beautiful garden, inside a huge, hollowed-out oak tree, already two thousand and thirteen years old. I new the age of it because one very rainy season, my lover and I counted the rings.

Those were the days.

Everything we could imagine was ours. The sun would awaken us gradually and calmly and we would bathe in the pure light of daybreak as we made plans in the sandy soil, to find food together. We would draw pictures on the ground with our fingers, of the fruit trees that hung low over the waters of the lagoon, deep within the heart of the huge garden. As we journeyed on through dewy fields, thousands of daisies would be unfurling their petals to embrace us.

When we reached the fruit trees we would pick the ripest apricots and pears, put them to our mouths and the feast would begin as the juice trickled. We would share every last drop that fell by licking each other’s chins and necks. Then we would take the flesh of the fruit from each other’s lips, pushing it into each other’s mouths with our tongues- Or, sometimes, one of us would use their tongue against the face of the other to retrieve the tiniest bit of flesh that had strayed towards a cheek or an eye; the way a parrot takes a nut from its claw to eat.

I know now that this is what you, in this day and age, would call kissing.

And then we would begin to gorge greedily upon the fruits of our gatherings until juices of every colour oozed from every kind pleasure worth knowing. We would twist and contort our bodies, sometimes hanging upside down from tree branches in determined attempts to direct the flow of juice to the parts of our bodies which we wanted to be licked.

I now know that what we were engaging in is known today as sexual intercourse.

Every morning, for as long as I can remember, my lover and I did this together. Then we would bathe in the warm waters of the lagoon, staring long and hard into each other’s eyes- though, in truth, we thought of them more as mysterious jet-black, fathomless pools in which to dive deeply and become lost in a rapture of bliss.

I would often spend the early mornings rubbing my body with the juice of a lemon as it pleased me to see the fine hairs upon my legs and arms turn white gold in the sunshine. We discovered a plant that stained our skin with the most glorious russet and chestnut tones: Many mid-mornings were spent grounding the leaves which my lover had picked and I had dried beside me, into a fine powder: Whole afternoons drifted into sweet reverie as we created a paste, mixing the powdered leaves with fruit juices and oils from their rinds: We would mark ourselves, using fine sticks, with patterns which were born from the intense study of botanical skeletal networks that fell so abundantly at our feet and the cosmic constellations above our heads. The paste was also good for wounds and the artistic application was bravery’s anticipation as we ran headlong into every new day, grabbing at tufts of sharp grass and over-defensive brambles. Scars were part of the patterns of our existence.

Every evening, just before dusk we would gather sticks to make fire: At this time, we would often stop to pick up other objects for our silent study. Just what it is, to one in love with another, about pebbles and pinecones, is not easy to put into words, but there is a certain incomparable ecstasy involved. Perhaps it is in the act of finding and the gathering in complicit discovery that pleases the mind, though it goes beyond utility and touches the soul. More likely is that it is the holding and the caressing of these discoveries, the gentle and considerate turning of them, this way and that, which floods the soul with wonderment and turns these items, so usually trodden in the mire, into objects of desire; treasures of love. For do we not all desire to be stroked smooth like a pebble? Would we all not love have every facet of our mysterious being rotated on the pedestal of obsession?

All this we understood, although we never spoke. Although we did use sound as a means of expressing raw emotion, or to mimic the sound-effect of a certain discovery, our communication was mainly visual. I remember finding strawberry leaves, alive with colours of blood and fire, which I insinuated by rubbing sticks together until my fingers bled, then painting that blood onto the palm of my lover in the shape of the plant leaf. Unique actions, like this intense expression of colour and form became ritualised into a vast and deep language.

Once we found a swan’s feather. It was a new discovery to us: We had seen brown birds and black birds and collected dozens of their discarded feathers, which we were making into huge wings for ourselves, but a white feather was something else. It was large and it was strong at the quill and oh, it was so fine! My lover placed it in my hair and I spent all day trying to take off from the highest branches I could climb to. I slept well that night; dreaming of flying to the moon and back with the white feather in my hair.

At about this time my dreams began to take me away from the garden. There was something about that white feather that had made me wonder about the potential of untrodden lands. I would lie on my back watching clouds rolling by, wondering where they were rolling to. No matter how far we ventured, my lover and I had not found the place where the garden ended. Though I dragged him ever further into the densest undergrowth. Over hills and plains, inevitably we would need to return to familiar food and shelter. Yet however much I ate, at that time, I could not satisfy myself, feeling so full of desire that I would shake the branches of the various fruit trees insatiably; just to hear the frantic thud-thud beating of all that lusciousness upon the ground. I would laugh loudly, surrounded by the very objects of my desire and then launch myself at the scattered fruits, piercing through their skins until I could feel their juices yield to me. Sometimes, I would set my fingers to a bone-tremoring wriggle as my very fingerprints became ecstatic in the experience of that cold, dark interior turning to warm, overwhelming juice.

Then I would manically pull the fruit almost inside out; flesh, pulp, skin and all. I would cram the whole piece into my mouth and knead it with my tongue until it floated at the surface of the pool of juice that I would eagerly encourage to make a sweet and sour swamp of my mouth. I would swill it around my gums and all over my taste buds, mixing it thoroughly with my own secretions before filtering the heady cocktail back through the exhausted pulp, letting it trickle slowly down my throat and into my body. Only when I was certain that I had taken every last drop of moisture would I spit out the pith, ready to begin again with a new fruit, ripe and primed with the elixir of life.

And such were my dreams every night for a very long time. The strange thing was, that though I often dreamed that I was licking juice from my lover’s body, it was no longer his face that I saw. When I passed a piece of flesh into his mouth with my tongue, I would open my eyes to see a strange face.

At first, I would awaken with surprise and find my heart beating fast as I sat upright, gazing down at my lover, who would be sound asleep, unaware of my new experiences. But then, as I became more accustomed to the features of this stranger, I began to accept – without surprise or reserve – his peculiar presence. Indeed I found myself becoming tired at an earlier hour, often before the sun had begun to set. Often, I would try to find a place in the garden where I would be free to drift off onto a daytime slumber, away from all disturbances.

Even in the waking hours I would close my eyes and find myself imagining that my lover was the stranger, though I became more and more aware that he simply was not, whether I closed my eyes to him or not. I realised, somehow, that the problem I was facing was that my lover was familiar and not in the least bit strange to me. I also noticed that whenever my lover tried to push some of his own fruit inside my mouth, I felt reluctant to take it, or if I did, that I no longer felt any excitement at the prospect. Instead I would be longing to fall asleep so that I could meet the stranger in the place where dreams are made. I felt I could no longer lie beneath my lover, let alone stand the sensation of him pushing his fruit into me monotonously.
My dreams were becoming an inviting alternative to reality and I found myself lingering in them long after the day had dawned.

I made myself a mask from maple leaves, attached to each other with sap, which I moulded to fit my face perfectly and I covered my face with it before falling asleep in an effort to keep the light of day from reaching my eyelids and disturbing my precious dreams. There would usually be some sort of scuffle between my lover and I a little later in the day: He would return to the tree, after gathering since the early hours, with armfuls of fruit to break our fast. But I would still be writhing and contorting myself in the ecstasy of my extended dream-state and I would fight off his attempts to wake me, as I fought the sun. If he did succeed in waking me, I pelted him with his offerings and waited for the moment to arrive when I could slip away, to explore the further regions of the garden alone. I would run and run to tire myself until sleep came again.

My dreams would truly begin with tingles as I sensed the man that I came to know only as “The Stranger”, standing beyond the veil of my slumbering lids. He would bring me fruits I had never tasted before, manhandling each piece, allowing tiny droplets to fall around my nipples, making me plead for him to squeeze the fruit harder so that the juice would rain torrentially for a few exquisite moments. The Stranger could extract every last drop of juice from a grapefruit with just one hand.

His tongue was also highly skilled. He could use it flat to absorb the coating of juice that floated on the surface of my skin, or he could use it pointed, like a lizard, making it dart out from his mouth to target the bits of me that he so obviously liked tasting. Sometimes he would form his tongue into a bowl-shape, curled up at the edges and have me squirt juice into it from above.

For the first time, I began to feel the force of my own power, whilst simultaneously experiencing the will to yield it to another. I would have given every last drop of myself to the Stranger to drink. I wanted to trickle into his very being and dissolve slowly inside him.

One afternoon, when I was dreaming in this way, The Stranger turned into a huge snake before my eyes, writhing and coiling himself around my body. I found myself continuing to embrace him, though I was more than a little alarmed as his sleek body made its way towards my face. The sweetest of smells emitted from his scales as he passed his whole being over my nostrils. His tongue made its usual attempt to slither between my lips, but it felt so odd that I refused, even though it dripped with exotic juices. I grabbed at the snake in an effort to pull his face away from mine. It was then that I felt a terrible shocking pain in one side of my face.

He had bitten me! I opened my mouth to let out a scream, which was obviously just what he had been waiting for because he then stuck his whole head inside my mouth and began to wriggle down my throat. I felt the sickly fork of his tongue tickle my tonsils and I used this sensation as a prompt to retch, in an attempt to get him out. By this time my whole body was limp and I began to shake from head to foot, which only served to shift the snake further down into my stomach. The meagre amount of air that I was able to take in through my nostrils was stagnant with the knowledge that, through my own betrayal, I had been betrayed.

I awoke with a violent start, gasping for breath in some distant area of the garden, which I could no longer recognise. For the first time I was thankful that my dream was not my reality and I lay back in the cool moss, to contemplate the clouds in the blue sky and that’s when I saw them: Two strange white birds; pure white, they were, like the clouds, with the longest necks I had ever seen. I would have thought myself still in a dream, had I not been wearing that white feather. At last I had caught a majestic glimpse of where that beautiful feather had come from. But then I realised it must be a dream because there was The Stranger, standing a few paces away, within a very tall clump of grass that reached almost to his neck. Though I felt an uncomfortable feeling, which I now know to be fear, I told myself that this was a dream and that it was fine to reach out and embrace The Stranger in the tall grass. As I reached him, I felt for his feet amongst the thick grass and began to make my way up his legs, to his tremendous thighs until I found myself kneeling beside him, embracing his hands with mine and noticing that, for the first time, he carried no fruit with him.

I began to wonder what kind of dream this was: There seemed to me to be no purpose to a dream without fruit. I started moving away from The Stranger, back toward the comforting moss, distrustful of him, even in his familiar form and even more fearful that he might, at any point, become even stranger still. That snake had left a bad taste in my mouth.
I decided to check my coordinates, as I was not entirely certain if this were dream or reality. Sure enough, the pathways of the garden behind me, were all in their familiar places: I knew them as well as the lines of my own hand. I traced the most trodden path with my eyes, roving down along the valley that led to the hill, which ran down alongside the lagoon, over the open fields, through the brambles and the woodlands and back to the tree where I knew my lover waited for me. Then I turned to look at The Stranger once more but he was gone. I stood up quickly to see him running through the long grass that seemed to stretch on and on without end. He suddenly stopped; a distant man almost on the horizon, at vanishing point and he crouched down, hidden from view.

His reappearance took my breath, as he was closer again. He stood up in the grass and began to throw things in my direction. I tentatively found myself taking short steps into the long grass to try to find them, whatever they were. The ground seemed waterlogged, rapidly feeding the grass, which seemed to get even taller with every step I took. This certainly was a strange season, like no other I had yet experienced. I felt my feet sticking to the mud and I wanted to turn back, to sit a while on the soft moss and prise off the sods of orange clay that were stuck to the soles of my feet, making me stumble. But I could just see something shiny within the grass a few steps away.

As I reached the object, I saw that it was a large, red apple. The Stranger was still throwing them because I heard another thud behind me. I began to crawl about, this way and that, collecting the apples, holding them by their stalks, between my teeth until they pulled my face towards the wet ground. I could hear The Stranger breathing and I crawled towards the sound, dropping apples as I tried to reach him, then gathering yet more. He was still running, but at a more playful pace and so I followed, until I could crawl no more. At this point I looked up to see a huge tree on the horizon. The Stranger reached this tree and turned to face me, his hands on his hips as his ribcage lifted and sank rapidly.

It dawned on me that I had come a long way from the familiar territory of the garden. I turned in all directions but the dense grass forbade me from getting my bearings. I gasped and the apples fell to the ground all at once, like a peal of thunder. After a weary while, I made my way to The Stranger and the enormous tree.

He was reclining amidst the thousands of red apples that the tree’s canopy of branches had shed. A terrible foreboding enveloped my every sense and though I now realise that solitude was also an option, at that desperate time, when I knew only too well that there was no going back, even the familiarity of one so strange, was preferable to my fear of the unknown.
Such was his knowledge of me.

There was so much fruit for the taking underneath that tree that we didn’t move for weeks on end. I will admit that there were moments during that time when I experienced what I thought must be a new kind of happiness as I realised that the figments of my exciting dreams had come true.

I now recognise these experiences as false senses of security, somewhat like the prisoner who tastes all the delights of a five-course meal in his cabbage soup. I did not yet realise that one can be held hostage whilst still having plentiful supplies of food, shelter, companionship – and sex.

But a few weeks later it began to get cold. It’s true: There is a season for everything. The sky became a mass of suffocating gloom, pushing its dampness into my lungs and the sun had certainly not been painted with a clean brush. I had stopped looking for beautiful things and so there was nothing at my fingertips to caress and explore. What’s more, abundance was turning its back on us: The tree had dropped all of its apples and was beginning to shed its shelter of leaves as the winds grew in fierceness.

Then it rained. It rained relentlessly for weeks and the cold, rotting apples turned to brown, acrid sludge which eventually froze at our feet.

One rainy day I awoke to see The Stranger walking fast, away from the tree. I made loud noises but he would not turn back so I ran after him. He seemed to accept my company but I don’t think he would have minded leaving me behind because I had started to loose interest in licking putrid apple pulp from his body.

We travelled on and on through the darkest wilderness for endless days and nights. I noticed that my stomach had started to swell.

The Stranger continued to try to ply me with an abundance of fruit, sticking his fingers inside figs and wiggling them around. He poked his thumb in my eye once when I refused to lick fig seeds from it, but I cared not. There was thunder in my belly.
As time passed it had grown so huge that I wondered if it would soon burst open. Yet even considering this possible fate did not deter my curiosity to see the creature that I knew was inside me. It tossed and turned almost incessantly. I would watch, fascinated as my belly shifted itself over to the left then to the right.

The Stranger witnessed all of this but would not lie with me. It seemed that even the sight of me, bearing a fruit larger than a watermelon within my form, was too much for him to comprehend. He left me once and for all, in the dark of the night, when I was crying out loud because of the intense feelings I was having to endure inside my stomach. It was a pressing, heavy feeling as if there was a solid mass of clay turning slowly inside me. I screamed at the moon, hoping too, that The Stranger would hear my cries as he meandered over plains and wildernesses and torrents of tears fell into rivers of indulgent woefulness which flowed all the way to the part of me that was opening so cruelly to the cold night air. I realised that the man of my dreams had left my reality some time ago because I would no longer succumb to his fruity fingers.

As I bellowed loudly to the stars and the moon and all the creatures under them, my child was born and the pain was over. She was a miniature version of myself and I held her close to my breast, feeling her tiny heart beating its own rhythm over mine.

Two nights had passed since The Stranger had left me in my agony-ridden stupor. But by then, I felt glad that the fool had gone, realising that if he couldn’t see fit raise his eyes to meet my own, there would have been little chance of him raising any real appreciation for the creation that I had given birth to. Besides, I experienced a revelation of true love on the day my child came to me and know now that when love is present, there is no longer the need to dwell in what is absent.
Out came milk from my baby’s searching mouth and I poured all of my love into her being.

In the months to come there was no time for regrets as I busied myself with my child, gathering food for her, gently soothing her and loving her. I never did see The Stranger again: Not in his true form anyway, though I have met many snakes in the grass since.

As my daughter gradually became more independent, I found the time to dream again.

I dreamed that I was sitting atop a huge cloud, looking down into the garden at all the old, familiar places; at the boughs of the tree that was once my home; at my lover of old, as he lay idly on his back, asleep in the sunshine: Perhaps he was dreaming of me, I thought, as I realised how easy it is to take a body for granted when it becomes familiar to the senses. Now, his body was a treasure trove, golden, sparkling in the sunshine. My cloud drifted right over him until it came to a gentle standstill, completely blocking out the sun, which must have made my lover feel cold because he sat up, shuddering and rubbing his arms. His open eyes revealed a sad expression. Could it be that he was still suffering from the plight of my abandonment? A full realisation of selfishness washed over me. I had finally become a witness to the pain that I had caused in the life of another.

From my lofty position on that cloud, I saw my tears fall to the ground until they made small hollows in the soil. I peered over the edge of the cloud and saw that my lover was underneath, showering himself with my tears.

I called down to him. He looked up at me in disbelief. Then he motioned for me to jump down from the cloud. It was a long way down, but I was able to fly and made a soft landing right beside my lover. He took hold of my hand and led me inside our old home. Then he took the white feather down from behind a knarled root in the tree and began caressing my body with it. My eyes followed the rhythmic movements as my body danced with pure joy. Then my lover brought the feather slowly up and over my belly: Round and round my womb he went with the feather. He knew something was different. Then he brought the feather gently up my torso and neck until it was in between our faces. My eyes met my lovers and we had the deepest communication ever. That was when I realised he was the one true love of my life.

Then, all of a sudden, my lover crouched to the ground and made scratches into the sandy soil with the quill of the feather. He handed it to me and I did his bidding, drawing the story, which I have just told to you, in the dust for my lover. He studied the story of my life, wide-eyed, holding me to him when completed the illustrations with a soundtrack of my agony to signify the pains of childbirth. I also squeezed some of the milk from one of my breasts and put a drop of it to my lover’s lips.
As my breasts became full I noticed that the sun was shining brightly again and we left the tree, looking to the sky above our heads. We kissed gently and my lover placed the swan’s feather in my hair.

I could see that the dream cloud on which I had arrived was starting to rise and my thoughts leapt immediately to my child, who I sensed would be waking soon. I found myself running at the departing cloud and jumping at it with such power in my haunches that I was suddenly atop of it again.

There was no time to be lost in regrets: As I looked back down into the garden, I could see that my lover did not bear any hostility towards me, and just at that moment I returned abruptly to the wilds of my reality with an almighty bang. It was early morning and my child was awake.

As she ate the little hoard of nuts and berries I had gathered the evening before I gazed up at the distant clouds and the beautiful white feather fell from my hair.

This moment hold special significance for me because it was the first time I became conscious that I have been given the abilty to enter into other peoples’ dreams.

Are you sleepy now? Or are you asleep? There is always a lesson to be learned from the dreaming of a dream. A dream is the second telling of a story. So very much is lost in reality that we must have the concepts retold to us in dreams. We are able to reach up into the clouds and pull down the many things that have attempted to simply fly right over our heads. All I have to do is wait for you to fall asleep so that I can reveal more of my purpose to you. Switch yourself on to the ripples of knowing that I am permitted to transmit to you. I will tour you rhythmically around and around the wondrous story in which your receptivity is a key player. Let your soul drift towards those silver stars. Let me take you across the liquid moats of super-consciousness in my dreamboat as we head for that single drop of revelation that causes tidal waves of innermost joy. Sweet dream are made of this – and I will plunge you into whirlpools of heightened awareness until together we dream a new reality.