(Part 1), The Pruning - A Work In Progress

Rachel had a bad night, sleeping in snatches, the intervals charged with the residue of nightmare visions. Now, lying in bed, she chases the fragments of her last dream, doing everything she can to salvage the pieces. She keeps her eyes closed. She lay, as still possible. She even focuses on one image at a time, hoping it will be the link by which the whole chain of the narrative can be retrieved. But, despite her best efforts , all she is able to retain is the abridged, but vivid memory of a single episode. In it, she accompanies a friend to the house of a poet, a woman who Rachel guesses to be about twenty years her senior. Although she feels as if she is only tagging along, when they arrive, it is Rachel who enters first, and her friend, whose identity she no longer recalls, disappears.

Before they even speak to one another, Rachel feels the poet and she will make an important connection. The older woman looks at her knowingly, and from their silent communication, Rachel senses that this person has divined some special use for her. Eccentric in appearance, the poet is like a carry-over from the avante-garde of Berlin in the 1930's. Her hair, which is swept around to one side, is cut in a bizarre Sassoon-like wedge, with a pointy tip that stabs the air when she moves. She speaks to her at length, but Rachel has no sense of what is being said. She only knows that there is something Germanic about her, a certain brusqueness of manner, tempered by a studied graciousness. And, though she is cultured in an Old World style, her body suggests peasant stock.

The word 'art-struck' springs to Rachel's mind as she enters the house. Every wall and bit of floor is adorned with paintings and sculpture, mostly European, from the 19th and early 20th centuries. All of the pieces are first rate, but owing to its placement the most prominent of the decorations is a potted tree. It is an exotic genus resembling a Mimosa, and stands almost in the middle of the main entrance, allowing only a minimun of space to walk around it. The entire length of the tree's slender trunk is pruned clean, except at the top, which is heavy with pendulous foliage, that reaches just below the lintel of the doorway.

The unidentified writer points to a strange crucifix hanging in the vestibule opposite the tree. Remarkably intricate, it is made of finely wrought silver threads in a folkstyle of indeterminate ethnicity. When Rachel approaches the cross, it begins to undergo a series of subtle transformations. The traverse beam moves down to the center of the upright, and the upright shortens until all four arms are of uniform size. Then the arms become the petals of a flower. The petals, in turn, become the blades of a pinwheel. Still another mutation can be seen morphing up through the surface of the pinwheel . . . a more skeletal form that seems reluctant to emerge.

As the rest of the dream slips back into the fertile void, Rachel opens her eyes, only to find an after-image of the eccentric poet floating in the air before her. It lingers for an instant then disappears as her blonde coiffure melts upward into the white expanse of the ceiling.

Baffled by the dream, Rachel thinks about its meaning. The fact that both the older woman and she are poets seems significant, and she wonders if the dream contains a message about her writing. Although her poetry has been well received, secretly, Rachel feels like an imposter. The cerebral quality of her poems belies the depth of emotion that fuels her creativity. She longs to break through the smart surface of her work, and expose the anonymous source of her passion, but a wall stands between her conciousness, and a mysterious self that seems, forever, to elude her. Unwilling to imitate what she has already written, she has been unable to complete a single line of poetry in months.

Still tired, Rachel contemplates getting out of bed. It is the start of a tug-of-war, a daily ritual in which guilt, and vague threats to her security - should she give up vigilance for sleep - win out. So she gets up, pretending that wakefulness is her personal choice, and that she is free from the dictates of nameless fears.

Her feet hitting the cool floor is a cue that sets her on automatic pilot, and she beats a path to the kitchen to boil water for coffee. The clock over the sink reads 6:37 a.m. She thinks,

How will I weather this day, with so many hours ahead of me, and feeling so ragged?

Waiting for the water to boil, she empties the dishwasher, then wanders outside on the lawn. A line of trees wearing the pale leaves of early spring, screen the house from the busy street. Sleek black crows sweep through the green. One calls out. She counts the caws: one, two, three, four. In her personal system of numerology, it is a warning about the day. It suggests that she should turn inward, and shun the world, and its business. If she does , there is the promise that something of consequence will occur.

To be continued.

Personal and Confidential

Jazmin, I hope one day when your surfing the blogosphere you'll stumble upon this message. This blog is for you, my dear mentor, you who used your considerable, feminine, wiles to trick me into doing things I never imagined I could do. It is you and you alone who can take the credit for my third career. (We won't discuss the second career. Those were difficult times. One does what one must do to survive, as you know only too well - GISELA - my comrade in sin.) Ah, ha! You didn't think I'd ever learn your real identity -Did you? You see, I too have connections. So, GISELA, are you still masquerading as Jazmin, or are you using some other alias. There's still much I have to learn about your checkered past, but let me tell you what I do know about you. You were born in Villaneuva de la Jara, Spain - a charming village famous for its mushrooms. Your mother's name is Magdalena del Peso y Henao. When you were two months old your father Fernando, ran away with Miguel, the groom, a brooding twenty-three year old with a gambling addiction. At age fifteen you were given into the care of the Poor Clare Sisters whose convent was in the norther part of Spain. For three long years, you struggled to suppress your lusty impulses. Finally, when you could no longer endure the constraints of convent life, you began to plot your escape. Then, one stormy, moonlit night in December, while gale force winds lashed the ancient walls of the convent, you and Antonio, the dashing, young, Jesuit you defrocked, slipped out of a second story window, and lowered yourselves to the ground on a rope made from the love - stained sheets of your bed. Fulfilling a childhood fantasy, you moved to Java to live at the edge of a lava pit. You and Antonio married there, and had two darling children, Catalina and Javier. Antonio made a good living running a trendy spa whose clientelle consisted mainly of stressed-out, execs working on Wall Street. You, GISELA, became a painter, and a fortune-teller. The accuracy of your prognostications made you something of a local celebrity.

On the last of several visits to your native, Spain, you decided to make the famous, 500 mile pilgrimage known as El Camino de Santiago. As you made your way - one bloody knee at a time - to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, dressed only in a burlap sack tied with a bit of string, you were spotted by a gypsy prince. Unable to erase the image of your smouldering beauty from his mind, he returned in the dead of the night, to the place where you lie sleeping under the stars between Antonio and your beloved children. For hours he watched under cover of darkness - his flaming loins a declaration of love for the dark-eyed GISELA. Then, a miracle occured. It was the chance he had been waiting for. You awoke in the night to answer the call of nature. As you entered some bushes at the edge of your campsite, the prince snuck up behind you. You turned around with a look of surprise, but before you could react the prince held his outstretched palm in front of you, and blew some magical, gypsy powder into your face. In an instant you were rendered unconcious. The gypsy prince then placed you in the back of his gypsy wagon, ( a tour de force of design, and a superb example of gypsy folk art), and sped away through the mountains into France.

Little is known of your life during the years immediately following your abduction, for there the trail went cold. However, I was able to ascertain, with certainty, that you were indeed, the infamous - Min, of Jazmania. As to why the adjective 'infamous' was always affixed to your name, noone can say, or rather, none dared to say. Whenever inquiries were made about you, the people responded by grasping their amulets, and making strange hand gestures which they tried to conceal behind their backs. Apparently, whatever threat you made to the Jazmanian peasants to guarantee their silence, worked. We also know that for a period of roughly two years, you passed yourself off as Min of Minotopia, the charismatic, medicine woman who hid her face behind a black veil. Your specialties were painless midwifery, fertility, and wart removal.

Many gaps remain in your biography, but I know that you eventually made your way back to Java as a stowaway aboard a slow boat returning from China. When you got to Java you learned that Antonio's business had gone bankrupt, and that he was forced to accept work in the United States. A week after arriving in Java, you travelled to Connecticut where you were finally reunited with your family. It was during your first year of living in Connecticut that you and I met at a class you were teaching in gypsy dance. For the next couple of years we were inseparable friends. But, then one day, (I remember the exact date because it was Michaelmas, and I had gotten my second chest hair), I went to visit you at your home. When I got there you and your family were gone. Your entire house was emptied of furnishings. As of today, it is a year and one month since you dropped off the face of the earth. GISELA, what caused you to run away, and why did you conceal your identity? What was the meaning of all those aliases, and why didn't you return, immediately, to your family once you had escaped from the gypsy prince? Most important of all, when my dear, when, if EVER, will you return? GISELA, if God wills that you should find this blog - I beg of you, Please! Please! Contact me.

Your devoted friend, and grateful student,
Glen