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Le Dauphin
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So, down out of the heavens
the Book brought him, with one line.
... the wrinkled sea beneath him crawls ...
And down he came plummeting, down
toward the creeping wrinkled blue surface
that changed, as he grew closer and closer,
into a rearing sequence of great buffeting waves
- Susan Cooper
The Dark is Rising
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Louis de Lyon hit the raging crest of the giant, storm-driven, deep ocean wave at near terminal velocity. The impact spun his body around, bent, and twisted him. He tumbled limply like a child's doll. He had not given up, he was still fighting to live, but he was dealing with natural forces far stronger than any man. He was overpowered and overwhelmed. Louis tumbled through the foam of the crest and back out underneath, his rate of descent greatly decreased by the moving cushion of air bubbles.
The scale of deep-water waves can be hard for landlubbers to imagine, especially those whose experience with ocean waves is limited to places such as the Atlantic seashore of North America, where waves must be hurricane-driven to top a few feet in height. It’s not uncommon for waves in the deep ocean to measure sixty feet or more trough to crest. Louis dropped through this immense expanse of empty air for a few seconds before he impacted with the face of the surging wave. He did not fall into the wave, so much as the wall of water struck him sideways. This angle of entry saved him from death.
A spiritual person with poetic inclinations might muse the Ocean caught him in her loving embrace. A more rational mind would postulate the cogs of circumstance in our clockwork universe placed Louis in such a way that he escaped serious injury or death — at least for the moment — by chance. Paranoid schizophrenics would imagine a vast conspiracy designed to deliver Louis into this very scenario. Spiritual, rational, paranoid: in this instance, they would all be right. This rarely occurs outside of fiction.
Despite everything — the betrayal, his spiritual exhaustion, the desperate circumstances — Louis de Lyon was still resolved to survive. The spark of life, the will to live, is not so easily extinguished in some people, even when they are twenty feet below the raging surface of the Pacific Ocean. Louis de Lyon opened his eyes. He looked around quickly in order to take his bearings.
A small pod of dolphins surrounded him. Forgetting where he was, Louis cried out, The Head's warning about dolphin-rape swimming far too vividly through his imagination. Bubbles rose from his lips, his words trapped inaudibly inside.
The dolphins laughed — keekkeettee-keekkeettee-keekkeettee. The pod swam spiraling circles around Louis. One porpoise, showing off a bit, swam a rhombus — an inside-joke with the pod. All the other dolphins knew their podmate loathed Euclidean-Geometry, but also that the rhombus had a deeper meaning, especially for humans. Exaggerating for comic effect, the unusual porpoise slowed his movements to a small fraction of his normal speed and poked Louis with his nose.
Ssssslllloooowwwwpppppooooookkkkkeeeee.
The odd dolphin sidled in on Louis' left, and rolled slightly to present his dorsal fin and blowhole to the drowning man.
Dude, relax. Just grab hold and suck on this.
An air bubble shot from the blowhole and smacked Louis in the mouth. Louis gulped instinctively and then, finally, understanding dawned on him. He was being rescued. Louis did exactly as the dolphin suggested. He grasped the dolphin’s dorsal and pulled himself close enough to place his mouth over its blowhole. He accepted the life-saving gift.
The rest of the pod turned and sped away. Even carrying his human burden, the strange dolphin only needed a few, short strokes of his fluke to match their speed. Soon the mismatched pair was gaining on the pod, and in short order had rejoined the safety of the peleton.
From time to time, as his biological need demanded, he placed his mouth over his dolphin friend's blowhole and breathed in deeply. During one of these respiratory respites, Louis finally noticed the pattern tattooed on the dolphin's starboard pectoral fin: an eagle or similar raptor executed in the monochromatic and geometric style common throughout the more southerly Polynesian islands. Louis needed only a few extra seconds to digest the fact that he was being saved by a telepathic, tattooed dolphin. Are you familiar with the folk expression, "like rain off a duck's back"? In this metaphor, Louis isn't a duck; Louis is a loon, a water bird, swimming underwater; rain doesn't bother the swimming loon at all. And so, despite the shocking otherworldliness of the overall experience, Louis found himself asking a rather mundane question.
“Comment vous appelez-vous?”
Well, that's what he meant to say. Underwater, as he was, his words were barely audible and completely garbled and unintelligible. Air bubbles streamed away behind them. Louis realized his mistake immediately, and scrambled to put his mouth back over his friend's blowhole. The dolphin's staccato laughter was audible. His words were not but, in Louis' mind, the dolphin's words were as clear as the Voices' or The Head's.
Kee keee keekee! Don't try to talk, doofus. Just think clearly.
Louis focused on the one thought.
What's your name?
The Dolphin grinned approvingly.
My name? No human can say my true name. You may call me ‘Aquila’.
Louis thought of another, perhaps more important, question.
Where are you taking me?
Aquila smiled enigmatically as he thought to himself for a few moments. The dolphin's thoughts were a song of whistles, clicks, trills, and chirps – not unlike a porpoise's physical voice, but simultaneously deeper and higher pitched. Many of Aquila's thoughts/concepts were multi-layers and multi-faceted in ways that are unparalleled in almost all human languages and therefore untranslatable. To Louis these thoughts were incomprehensible, though he found them pleasing to his spirit. He felt like an illiterate admiring the pretty pictures in a novel or textbook. Finally, Aquila thought a word that Louis thought he understood.
Nowhere.
Louis tightened his grip on Aquila's dorsal fin and held on like his life depended on it, which it did. Aquila sped off laughing — keee keee keee —- leading the rest of the pod on a merry chase. A singular breath seemed to rise up from beneath the sea floor and also, seemingly impossibly, from betwixt the seams of time-space itself. A swarm of tentacles slinked out of a dark shadow, and slithered after Louis through the pod’s wake. Louis was too caught up in the adrenaline rush to notice their stalker. Aquila was well aware, but completely unconcerned.
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Jack could hardly speak, what with wonder,
and what with being out of breath
with traveling so fast through the water.
He looked about him and could see
no living things, barring crabs and lobster,
of which there were plenty
walking leisurely about on the sand.
Overhead was the sea like a sky,
and the fishes like birds swimming about in it.
- William Butler Yeats
Irish Fairy & Folk Tales
Through deadly sharp corals the Book sent him
swimming among strange waving fronds of green and red and purple,
among rainbow-brilliant fish that swam up to him,
stared, flicked a fin or tail and were gone.
Past the black unkind spines of sea-urchins,
past soft waving creatures that seemed neither plant nor fish;
- Susan Cooper
The Dark is Rising
Still he held hard by the Merrow’s tail, slippery as it was
- William Butler Yeats
Irish Fairy & Folk Tales
* The alleged ancestor of the Merovingians,
half man and half sea-creature.
And Enoch was: and he was not.
- R. Anton Wilson
The Widow’s Son
Merrow (from Gaelic muruch) or Murrough (Galloway)
is the Scottish and Irish Gaelic equivalent
of the mermaid and mermen of other cultures.
There are other names pertaining to them in Gaelic:
Muir-gheilt, Samhghubha, Muidhuachan, and Suire.
They would seem to have been around for millennia
because according to the bardic chroniclers,
when the Milesians first landed on Irish shores, the Suire,
or sea-nymphs, played around them on their passage.
- www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrow
Most stories about merrow are about female creatures; however,
some tales about mer-men do exist. In these tales,
mer-men captured the souls of drowned sailors
and locked them in cages under the sea.
- www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrow
Merovee* and Oannes were just myths, of course,
but why was it that no matter where you looked,
history and oral tradition always trailed off
into absurdities and allegories and impossibilities –
one king was half fish, and another was in France
and then he was in Scotland - I was in the Bastille
and now I am where?
- R. Anton Wilson
The Widow’s Son
in a flash Will was out of the tangle and blinking again
out of a page of the Book of Gramarye
- Susan Cooper
The Dark is Rising
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Louis lay on the hot, white sands of the beach, exhausted. A chirping from the surf behind him called him back from the edge of sleep. He rolled over – more like flopped, fishlike – and lifted his head. Aquila had raised his torso out of the water, balancing on his tail, and was staring back at Louis.
Farewell, friend. Do not sleep just yet. There is a stream close by. Find it and drink. D’Agon fhtagn.
Louis knew it was life-saving advice. Dehydration and the sun’s heat were a deadly combination. He could see a stream’s inlet a few hundred yards to his left. He struggled to his feet, dog-tired, and stumbled through the sand to the tree line.
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In another story,
told by Hyginus,
an egg fell from the sky into the Euphrates,
was rolled onto land by fish, doves settled on it and hatched it,
and Venus, known as the Syrian goddess, came forth.
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atargatis
Aphrodite (n.)
Greek goddess of love and beauty;
by the ancients, her name was derived from Greek
aphros “foam,” from the story of her birth,
but perhaps it is ultimately from Phoenician Ashtaroth
(Assyrian Ishtar).
- www.etymonline.com/?search=Aphrodite
The name appears as Attar (Aramaic), Athtar (South Arabia),
Astar (Aksum), Ashtar (Moab),
Aṯtar (Ugarit) and Ištar in Mesopotamia.
In both genders, Aṯtar is identified with the planet Venus,
the morning and evening star
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attar
aether “the upper pure, bright air; sky, firmament,”
from Greek aither “upper air; bright, purer air; the sky”
(opposed to aer “the lower air’), from aithein “to burn, shine,”
from PIE *aidh- “to burn”
- www.etymonline.com/?search=ether
In ancient cosmology, the element that filled all space
beyond the sphere of the moon,
constituting the substance of the stars and planets.
Conceived of as a purer form of fire or air,
or as a fifth element.
- www.etymonline.com/?search=ether
... A presence, analogous to the Aether, flows through Time,
as the Aether flows through Space.
The assumption of a Vacuum in Time
tended to cut us off from one another.
But an Aether sea to bear us world-to-world
might bring us back a continuity,
show us a kinder Universe, more easygoing…
- T. Pynchon
Gravity’s Rainbow
Foam is the only form
in the sea of meaning.
A great, unseen town
lies just behind
that curtain.
- Rumi, Just do it
Translation by Nevit O. Ergin
The Forbidden Rumi
And I got friends on the other side.
- Dr. Facilier in
The Princess and the Frog
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Louis knelt over the crystal clear pool, watching his face move and dance on the ripples. He felt blessed to be alive even though he wasn’t exactly sure he was. He needed time to think and something to drink. He cupped his hands and brought the life-replenishing liquid to his lips. His body craved pure freshwater. He drank deeply and repeatedly.
His most immediate need sated, Louis rocked back on his heels and simply stared into the water, reflecting on the splintered memories he still clung to like the wreckage of a doomed ship: The Right Honourable Reverend Doctor, The Brew D'Agon, Jonestown, Phoenix, The Head, the helm, the storm, the child, the fall, the pod, the island, etc…. His mind was a maelstrom; his memories, like so much swirling flotsam. He detached from his thoughts, and watched them spiral about in his brain.
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No man is an island.
- John Donne
Meditation XVII
I am only an egg.
- R. A. Heinlein
Stranger in a Strange Land
Thou art god.
- R. A. Heinlein
Stranger in a Strange Land
I am you
- Lenny Kravitz
Believe
I am he
as you are he
as you are me
And we are
all
- The Beatles
I am The Walrus
one.
Only one.
Forever.”
- R.A. Wilson
The Widow’s Son
Believe in yourself
- Lenny Kravitz
Believe
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