Z TO A

Z - A

ZILLION
An indefinite large number, possibly derived from the mathematical
notion that z = an unknown quantity + million. There are those who
would have us believe that as many alternative realities exist for each
of us. All we have to do is to find our own doorway and have the corage
to cross whatever constitutes the liminal.

Y
the second unknown quantity. A measurement of our own fear to accept
the world as subjectively perceived. Perhaps.

Xenophobia
To Lewis all outsiders were foreigners. He'd chosen to live in an
isolated farmhouse, off a B-road, up a lane, down a cart track, miles
from anywhere. Each night owls called their loneliness across the
cauldron valley. Vixens howled their need in the grim woods. Stars
crackled and danced as the moon slid through the darkness. Morning
brought silence. Few birds sang. The sheep and cattle had long gone.
Sometimes, in the spring, around the time of her birthday, if she
listened carefully, she caught the sound of a lost cuckoo. The joy of
it lasted for days.

WYE
The ceiling was a precarious maze of flaking cracks and bulges. At
night she lay flat on her back, following the convoluted course of the
River Wye from its birth at the left hand corner of the bedroom by the
wardrobe until its final plunge into a ridged and puckered area above
the window which represented the stormy sea. It was soon over. The hand
on her shoulder. The hard-edged mouth to mouth signalling of his
intent. A perfunctory stocktake of her secondary sexual
characteristics. Coarse hands over the bruised flesh. A heave. A bump.
A stifled groan. Munbled assurances of whatever. The ceiling fascinated
her. Every crack and wrinkle radiated from that one place. All roads
mighht lead to Rome, but everything sooner or later returned to the
sea.

VACATE.
Leave. Cease to occupy. Make empty.
It was only a body, a shell. Ysgerbwd - carcass. One hundred and forty
pounds of seventy per cent water tenderised meat.
Most days it seemed like a good idea.

UGH
Uffern. Unigedd. Uffern.

TY COCH.
Yes. That was the name of the place. The Red House. Nothing red about
it. UNless it was shame. Grey, more like. The colour of misery. Of
quiet despair...
Still, rare visitors mooned over the place. Called it idyllic, lying as
it did in the lazy curve of the willow-flanked river. She knew
different. If ever maggots squirmed in the bud they did here. The place
festered wwith dirty, creeping covert things. Bits of rotting frog
spewed from the taps in spring. Blood-hungry gnats danced wild
figures-of-eight over the dank lawns. Crows dangled blow-fly warnings
from barbed gibbets. Rats everywhere. Under floorboards. In wall
spaces. Along rafters. Their grinning, mummified ancestors lurked in
every nook and cranny of attic and cellar. And everything always mildew
damp from the melancholy Welsh Marches drizzle, spreading blankets of
curdled mist over the unworkable heavy clay pasture.

SEVEN CROWS A SECRET
Was Lewis her real or her surrogate father?
We all know he was years older than her.
What makes women stay?

RATIONALISM
In all cultures versed in the use of supernatural metaphor the square
symbolises the earth of matter and rationalism whilst the circle
symbolises the encompassing world of spirit, heart and feeling. Each of
us tries to reconcile this duality in our own lives as we seek to
balance the demands of logic with the demands of the heart. Thus the
squaring of the circle was the architectural as well as the
philosophical pursuit of the ancient sciences of religion. The
geometrical squaring of a circle requires the measuring out of a square
whose perimeter is exactly the same length as the circle's, so that the
two figures are harmonized by containing precisely the same area. The
looking-glass itself was square. Its frame, being heavily hand-carved
and the work of an exceptionally gifted craftsman, was answerable to
no-one, but most people would have called it round.

QUO VADIS?
And where did she go?

PAN
WE are all schizophrenics. The lower part of us, like the allegory of
the Great God Pan, obeys the laws of biology. The upper half will not.
The rhythms of sacred order reveal themselves through dream and symbol,
myth and legend, but we close down our senses, ignoring them, allowing
them to shrivel in the fire of rational progress. We blunder on,
surrounded by worlds we cannot enter, colours we cannot see, songs we
cannot hear. We see as real what is only illusion. We refuse to
consider what IS

OFNADWYAETH
Dread. Terror. Never-the-less she had to do it. For a whole week the
house had been buffeted by violent winds crashing down over the Black
Mountains. Some slates must have come loose. A slow drip wept from the
frozen sea above the bedroom window. Bucket in hand, armed with a
stick, she edged up the narrow dog-leg stairs to the attic. A pale
gleam in a far corner reflected the finger of light sneaking in under
the rafters. Life was too full of sameness not to creep along the
unboarded cross beams and feel into the darkness. The looking-glass was
large, almost too big to carry, difficult to manoeuvre down the stairs.
When she finally got it onto the kitchen table she saw that the glass
was spotted and flecked with age. How long had it lain there? The frame
was filthy: clogged with years of muck and matted cobwebs, but even
that couldn't obscure its beauty. Someone, some master craftsman, his
hand guided perhaps by Pan Himself, had carved it into an intricate
pattern of leaves and flowers and sinuous coiling branches. Small
animals, birds and insects peered from behind, underneath and through
the twisting tendrils and contorting leaves of the wild woodland that
lay beyond the farmland. Its creation had been an act of worship.A
celebration. She looked into the glass and saw her reflection, pale
green and dim. Her hair, once so thick and vital, so brilliantly
copper-coloured, was scraped back from her face, deadened to a pale,
fuzzy ginger. The lines of fatigue and stress stood out more clearly
than ever. Old. Old. Old, before her time. Setting aside her
bitterness, she began to clean away the grime and it seemed to her as
she worked that the frame was alive, or rather growing beneath her
hands, because the more she cleaned, the more she looked, the more
there was to see. She straightened, puzzled by the impossibility of
such an idea, and glancied instinctively into
the glass, pushing back a few stray wisps of hair. And in that first
split second, still in the act off raising her head, she saw that her
reflection had turned away, looking at something over its own shoulder.
Then it snapped abruptly round and blinked hard before staring squarely
back at her.

NIGHT.
Four o'clock. Something had been nagging at the back of her mind with
such intensity that it had intruded into the muddled fabric of her
dreams. All night she'd tossed and turned, waking every half hour or so
to listen to Lewis as he broke wind and snored and muttered. Moonlight
shone directly into the room, dragging goblin shadows from under the
skirtings, setting the timbers creaking and grumbling. Pale moths
fluttered hopelessly at the windows. She crept from the bed and padded
silently downstairs to where the looking-glass leaned against the
back-kitchen wall. Her heart thumped wildly as she crossed the icy
flagstones. Her reflection slowly lifted its head and opened its eyes,
staring wide-eyed back at her. She felt the hair at the nape of her
neck lift and stiffen. Fingers of arctic cold reached for her. The
desire to run almost overpowered her. From somewhere she gathered the
resources to stand her ground. She risked another look. Then she knew
what had disturbed her sleep. There was no mirror image of the drab
room beyond her reflection. Instead, there was bright sunshine; a
flower-filled garden.

MOON
A dark cloud abruptly covered it. She fumbled her way back to the fetid
room and lay for a long while, shivering slightly in the matt
darkness.

LEARY, TIMOTHY
suggested that in a culture so heavily gripped by the world of
objective facts, so estranged from the experiencing self, little short
of psychedelics can loosen the shell, and it is LSD that will be
remembered as the sacrament of the Aquarian religion - the chemical
channel for the visionary conversion of a whole generation. At one time
or another the priests of nearly all religions have found in their
hands a new 'sacrament' - a substance which conducts power, and a
catalyst for renewed perception. For the Christian, wine. For Zen, tea.
Pan and The Goddess also provide.

KANT
The human mind can never grasp the ultimate nature of reality, of
'things-in-themselves'; these can neither be confirmed, denied, nor
scientifically demonstrated.

JUNG, CARL
Religion is nothing if not obedience to awaremness.
But was she aware of her own existence until she saw that she was
living the shadow?

I?
She looked directly into the glass. The reflection which was not quite
hers, gazed serenely back, blinking out of time, mouthing her name -
which was something she never did - waiting, expecting her to do
something. She wasn't sure what.
It wasn't her in the glass. It wasn't. It couldn't be. Could it?
Iesu Grist! How could it not be? A reflection had no independent
life.

HABIT
Addiction. The looking-glass drew her relentlessly towards it. She
couldn't keep away. Once there she found it increasingly difficult to
break eye contact. She developed a growing terror of being drawn down
into the depths of those all too familiar hazel eyes. Of being lost
somewhere unreachable. Out of normal sight. And yet. And yet. Look.
Look! That other self had retained her youthful beauty. Her vitality.
And she was happy. Day by day she blossomed.
And soon she began to hear her calling.

GRIEF
Lewis exhibited no obvious sign of grief. Just indifference.

FURY
Except when they brought in a JCB and began to dig up the water
meadows.

ENERGY
Brahmanic scripture speaks of two 'fires' - the spirtual energy which
descends from heaven, and the earthly aetheric energy which ascends
from matter. Their union, the union of polarities, is spirit wedded to
matter. I mention this because there had been a fire in the scullery.
Someone had burned what appeared to be a sizeable medieval carving. A
faint black circle, or was it a square?, surrounded the charred
remnants. This faded before it could be photographed. Curious, because
the scullery roof directly above was blackened inside and out as if
struck by lighning.
On reflection, it may have been a mirror that as burned. Molten glass
had fanned out, solidifying in droplets on the flagstones. Teardrops.
Prisms, collecting rainbow light from God knows where. The heat must
have been intense.

DRUGS
Traces of Amanita muscaria, the Fly Agaric, were discovered on the
kitchen table. This is the red and white spotted toadstool of
children's fairy story books. It is a strong hallucinogen and
intoxicant and is still used as such by the Lapps.

CARCHARIAD
imprisonment. She was both prisoner and chatelaine. Once a fortnight
Lewis drove her to a supermarket in the nearest town, some fifteen
miles away. He handed over a ridiculously small amount of cash and
waited in the carpark whilst she agonised over which essentials not to
purchase. She shrank at her own oddity. Other customers fascinated and
terrified her, especially young babies. Nobody, she felt, better
understood their alien howls. Growing consciousness brought the
realisation that they were trapped, netted, caged, encased, quenched -
priconers in their own diminutive earthsuits for upwards of three score
and ten.

BUT
Freedom did exist.
The voice that voice her voice not her voice their voice our voice your
voice my voice continued to call her into that sunny Other place.
All she had to do was to find the way in...
And fly, fly, fly.

ALICE
Didn't I say that her name was Alice?