THE DAILY TRAVESTY for February 17,
2000
Volume 1, Issue 33
Note: Thanks to the reader and his friend who
alerted me tonight that the short story published last issue is actually a
one-act play called "They're Made Out of Meat," by SF writer Terry
Bisson.
Reader comment: "And I know that all things sent to
you are regarded as potential DT
material..."
Editor: Not true.
The Mini-Gospel of the Mystic Paul
Freck
by Tucker Lieberman
Here begins the story of the
brief mission of the Mystic Paul Freck, son of mortals, ambassador to
heaven.
Men in
the cenobitic life frequently need to back up to the furthest cloister wall and
see the works of their days, their intangible howlings that have congregated in
corners rather than escaping through the chimney, and from these hard futilities
they must rationally assess their lives. This is how the Mystic Paul Freck
occasionally tried rationality: as a pretense to see the world from an
alternative view, and he had not a whit more reverence for the faculty’s
powers. He had his own powers independent of rational convention. He
was unsettled by people who turned the landscapes of their minds into positives
and then into normatives; like chaff in his sandals, he crunched over them, and
paid no more attention to empty, abused reason than to empty, abused
prayers.
We
first find ourselves in Our Mystic’s cubiculum, pondering his
canvas-bound journal. Thus reads his final epistle to
himself:
- Prayer is the snowflake catching the throat to wake you in hayfields
collected with frost, a sky full of gray clouds in question,
directions of four all at once. Not
a word that I speak consecrates so much as a handful of cinders for the Lord. Prayer’s for
the living, not for the god. Like fallen cloth gathered,
unraveled, reeled back, like a kite borne by the sun in its high incarnation, so is
the mind that is prayerful.
The monk pauses
with his pen to his lip. He daubs it in an inky mixture clotted with a few
stray filaments not unlike human hair.
- My brothers call me the Mystic Paul
Freck. I have spoken with the Holy of Holies but once. He gave
me no wisdom. What wisdom I have, I have gained on my
own.
- The cessation of pain is my power. I
turn arrows to feathers and headaches to dreams with the fat tip of my
finger. Fools think the power is God’s-- blasphemous curs!--the Lord
never had such a power, so how could He pass it to me? The Lord never
curses our bodies, but oh does He laugh at our frailty, yes, the Lord fails
to stop pain. The province of anesthetic holism is to be mine and mine
alone.
The
uninitiated may wonder why he was not branded a heretic. According to the
unfailing reason of the monastic brothers, Paul could not be a heretic, because
he had spoken with the Holy of Holies and therefore could not be mistaken about
religious matters. The actual dialogue between the Lord and His Mystic was
a secret but in any case there were no doubts as to its veracity, since all had
been present during noontime prayers when Paul was engulfed by a squall of
yellow light. When formally asked to receive the title of “Mystic,” Paul
claimed he had no special disaffinity for the word; the brother who proposed it
was humbled, and called him Mystic though he did not further pursue
coronation.
During
his blessed days with us, the Mystic Paul Freck performed two modest jobs for
the upkeep and the prosperity of the monastery: ringing the bell for
silence at the commencement of meals and curating the wine cellar. In his
famous Dinner Sermon, he told us: “To gain power over suffering, knowledge
of the nature of suffering must be poured out in proportion to the power you
would have.” Straightaway he rang the bell and there was silence over
potatoes for about half an
hour.
For the
next stage of the Mystic’s mission, we find ourselves in the wine cellar.
In a rare moment, he opens himself and shows the brothers the one who has been
helping him consummate his fomentation of pleasure-power. At first we see
nothing but the narrow necks of wine bottles that rib shadows as if they fall
from jail bars. The Mystic Paul Freck moves through the rows and picks up
a limp hand coated with dust. With his pen, he inks a moon, sun, and
stars, and a twisting flame that traces the nerve of her wrist. The hand
moves slowly like the dawn as she awakens, and the cellar is filled with her
sobs.
“God
weeps for her,” says a brother who motions to free
her.
“God
laughs,” says the Mystic Paul Freck. He lays his hand on the brother’s
head. Immediately the brother’s pains are cured, even pains he did not
know he had, and the woman’s wails reach upward with greater
sorrow.
No
further motions are made to free the woman. It is the thirteenth day of
her thirty-day transformation into pure healing
force.
There
were only two more people in the immediate vicinity of the monastery who could
be of use to the Mystic Paul Freck because of their auras. The yellow
auras were hidden to all but the one who could see, for it was his birthright,
his power, his domain; even the ones who possessed the auras did not know their
own power. They were not heretic-mystics. Their power was not theirs
to keep.
The
one in the cellar and the two in the monastic retreat accounted for three of the
necessary seven. The other four had to be sought beyond the walls of the
monastery. Thirty days for each, seven months in total, given that Paul
could find them in quick succession, the Lord’s will be done. There was
much rejoicing when the Mystic Paul Freck departed in search of the fourth,
fifth, sixth, and seventh ones whose suffering will bring us all eternal
liberation from pain in those hands that channel their holy essence.
On the night
before Paul’s departure, a brother was awakened by a scratching in the
kitchen. He witnessed the words “Save yourself” etching themselves into
the stone wall, bathed in a gentle yellow
light.
It
seemed that Paul had a vocation for eremitic life after all. The
journal-writer’s story-book sugarsnow road, a bottle of wine in his pocket, the
shrill voice of God resonating like bells swarming with bees. On the
travelers’ road he wanders in search of the other four who have the key to the
power that is rightfully his. When he attains it in full, nothing will be
inaccessible to us.
In the end, i
think the only solution is to be turned on by
jealousy, which is a way of embracing all
relationships
as momentary and all
people as autonomous, and life, as
we
now experience it, as transient experience of form.
No question, it is the path of fire. With no
promises.
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