The Lost Riddle

I call this "The Lost Riddle" because I lost it and found it in some old papers the other day. It is a different sort of riddle than so many of the others because the answer isn't exactly an object. And that's all the help I'm gonna' give on this one.

The first signs of spring

I'm a guy and all, and guys don't usually do flowers, but having lived through my first winter back in the USA after missing three of them in a row in a land of perpetual sunshine and warmth, I was feeling rather ready for spring, so you can imagine my thrill at seeing these things pop up in my back yard. I've never exactly thought of flowers as a sign of triumph before, but that is exactly what they are.

Mary Ann McCray

Taking a break from riddles this week and I thought I'd put together a ghost story. I wrote the words to this back in the 90's for a poetry class with the poet, Jared Carter who seemed to like all my poetry, and I, in turn, rather enjoyed his class, though others hated him because he could be pretty straight with the punches. I and a few of the other students went out for beer with him a few times and he cold talk. I remember him saying that after the end of the cold war, we would see a shift in our attention to having wars in the Middle East, since presidents often need wars to distract people from real issues at home. He may have been right about that, but he was also a big talker, with lots of opinions. I don't mind that with people as long as they laugh at themselves when their baloon gets popped, and as long as they are willing to tolerate other people's view points.

Anyway, I love a good ghost story--this one is kind of ambiguous as ghost stories go--I left it a bit unclear wheter Mary Ann McCray was really a ghost or not. She may never had died and may have been simply assumed into the court of harest maids. The Harvest Queen is a kind of Diana/Demeter goddess. The idea being that old gods and goddesses hide themselves in rual areas and have resorted to stealth in a time when people no longer believe in them except for certain times of the year when something in us remembers full moons and ancient festival days in spite of ourselves. I wrote this because my class was in the fall and Halloween was coming up. It is a time of year when my mind always turns to James Wibcomb Riley and "Little Orphant Anne" (the spelling is his). I've often thought we need more like them for the season, so I wrote one in a differen vein.

Riddle #13: Berry Lynn McCavender

Riddle # 9: I am old

I am old...

on a handle that you cannot hold.

And the sailor who is lost at sea

must stop and think and turn to me.

Around and around they go, the bear

and the woman in her rocking chair

The cross, the goose, the crown

All but I go spinning round

for I must keep my place

and let all others race.

The Ghost in the Cloud Chapter 14: Paradise Lost

I discovered the “Stats” menu on my blog site the other day and was surprised to find that I have quite a few more visits to my blog that I had thought. I was also surprised to find that people were listening to my Ghost in the Cloud series. In fact, the most frequently visited posting on my blog is Ghost in the Cloud Chapter Ten: Truth and Falsehood. I was also surprised that I have a small following in the Netherlands. Who do I know there? How did they ever find my blog? Here I thought that perhaps only four or five people ever even took a look at it.

At any rate, I decided to go ahead and keep writing and narrating my graphic-novel-without-the-graphics-part. It is a bit crazy, I admit, and meanders all over the world as part sci-fi, part fantasy, part philosophical/spiritual dialogue and part comic book. Myth, theology, philosophy, science, and the provocation of life in a postmodern world are all the clay that I’m toying with, and the story is a journal of thinking, and reflecting. I cannot say that I have worked out a systematic philosophy of life. I cannot say that I want to. It seems to me that once a philosophy becomes a system it becomes static and the mind closes and a personal systematic philosophy becomes nothing more than yet another fundamentalist system.

That said, I will say that Love is my prime value, however poor or imperfect I am at being able to Love, my code of ethics is based on the question: What is the response of Love? Right and wrong cannot be codified. There is no rule book, only Love. I cannot imagine any criminal court operating on the basis of the Loving thing to do, but what if it were? What if all law were thrown out and we made our judgments based on Love rather than law? At first glance this must seem like extreme idealism and highly unrealistic and that such thoughts ought to be relegated to the trash can marked “Utopian Foolishness” But I think it might make a good discussion all the same. What would a society look like if it really were based on Love—not Law, Greed or Self-interest? What I propose would involve considerable use of imagination—applied imagination! Now there’s a new concept. It is the use of imagination to dream and then make the dream a dream no more. It is to put flesh on a dream—to share the mind of God in this way—to dream a world and then create it.

To refresh the reader of the basic plot, after nearly—what—about a year or so? One of the main characters is a girl called Angelina, who, at this point in the story, is on a father quest and has gotten as far as Holyhead Island off the coast of Anglsey, Wales. She is visiting with an ages old Druid who wants to help her, but a druid who also wants to be done with his role as the keeper of the sacred ancient stories by imparting them to Angelina whose nanocells have given her the ability to remember everything perfectly, virtually forever. These Nanocells were given to her by an AI called “Jack” when she was a girl. Jack has been a kind of father to her in the absence of her own father who mysteriously vanished when she was a girl. She remembers him as a loving father and feels the need to understand what happened to him and why he left all those years ago.

Riddle # 10: Two Monsters

Found in the Earth

Here’s Riddle #7. You may have noticed that I’m not going in the original order that I created back in the 80’s when I was working in that art department making silk screen posters and running the old PMT camera which is now old tech. I couldn’t get the artwork to come out right so I made it into an animated video. Leave a comment if you think you can guess it.