And thus Cimmy solved the problem that had tormented sages and saints forever: if there was a God, how did he allow so much evil in the world?

It was very simple. God’s reality was still a work in progress, as of yet unfinished.

They stared at the little living world in disbelief until its intentional motion slowed down to a full stop.

“Nothing is what it seems,” Rahima whispered in a daze. “I will never be able to take what I see in front of my eyes for granted again.”

“The most fertile soil in the universe looked like the scrap pile of a brick kiln, ruddy and dusty, impossible to stabilize, incapable of holding water, so silky that it didn’t stick to the soles of our shoes. I didn’t know how dear this pitiful rubble was going to become, I was young, educated and plucky, out to conquer the world, and my challenge was not to cultivate the impossible medium but to vanquish its unyielding grit.”

She arrived in Perpignan on a clear Sunday morning carrying a backpack filled with communication gadgets and testing equipment and a couple of changes of clothes. Since there was no obvious means of transportation to the farm Sarah shrugged her shoulders and started ahead with the thought that she will get there when she got there. It wasn’t very far, though, a couple of hours of pleasant strolling through a landscape of vineyards and lavender plantings.

who dwelt in the mists of the island ‘Vergreen.

She lived with her father.

Her hair was like copper.

She longed for a place that no human had seen.

An old woman told her, when she was a child,

a story about a great realm that’s outside

the edge of the borders,

the reach of the mortals.

A place where the gods and the spirits abide.

It was so close she could smell their perfume, a sweet honey and citrus scent, and when the breeze blew through it, one of the soft petals touched Cimmy’s cheek.

The vision lasted but a moment, and yet it felt so real, she wasn’t even phased by the fact her surroundings had changed again: it was summer, it seems, a beautiful summer morning in a garden filled with flowers, with sun shining through the tall foliage, and a cool breeze wicking up the sparkling dew.

“Am I not in the world of things anymore?” She asked herself, because nothing she’d ever seen before, other than in her dreams, could ever compare to this wholesome, eerie beauty.

A couple of them took after their mother and followed more exact fields of interest, such as history and astronomy, while the drama queens, Thalia and Melpomene, who never showed up anywhere without their comic and tragic masks, inspired theater.

They were beautiful, willful and unencumbered, the muses, and their creativity and passions fired human thought, inspiring literary masterpieces and beautiful works of art, but most of all, music, which seemed to resonate and flow directly from their beatific voices.

Poets, playwrights, bards, philosophers and scientists revered them and worshipped at their feet, and would walk across rivers of fire hoping to receive even one drop of their divine inspiration.

They instinctively seek each other’s presence, they are drawn to those who are similarly blessed.

If they are mortal, they become oracles and seers whose wisdom is sought and revered, and people travel from far away to seek their counsel. They are the living vessels of the gods, who speak through them in cryptic messages, which are only understood in retrospect.

Amelia: Lesung – Die Tore aus Horn und Elfenbein

Eine Reflexion über Prophezeiungen, die Natur der Realität und das Reich der Träume durch die Augen von Persephone und Hades.

fikaFrancis Rosenfeld

It’s not that the gods were trying to make their teachings obscure, or that they even cared if they were. People can’t form concepts about things that don’t yet exist.

Immortal prophets like Apollo, Phoebe, the Moirae, doled their wisdom onto the world below, speaking through their official oracles, like those of Delphi, or Cumae, who were famous and revered and to whom people dedicated temples and compounds, theaters and springs.

And then there were the quiet visionaries, who saw a lot but kept it to themselves, not wanting to put any more strain on the greater order of things than it was already under, and staying out of the affairs of the mortals, whose misinterpretations of godly wisdom were a constant source of disaster and false hope.

Persephone had gained enough wisdom in Hades to understand that not all the figments of the mind were meant to be taken at face value, and only a precious few were meant as prophecy.

Amelia: Lettura da “Le Porte di Corno e d’Avorio” - Discordia

Una reinterpretazione dei miti greci focalizzata sulla discordia e il ruolo di Persefone nelle macchinazioni tra gli dei.

fikaFrancis Rosenfeld

The garden belongs to Hera, a wedding gift from her grandmother, and wonderful apple trees with golden fruit grow there, under the jealous guard of the dragon Ladon, an offspring of the Typhon, and the rather distracted oversight of the Hesperides, the daughters of night and of the evening star.

The legendary orchard was far from the real world, in both location and appearance, and because of its priceless bounty, a perpetual temptation for those driven by greed.

When someone broke in to steal the apples, the circle of displeasure, complaint and requests for retribution invariably closed in the Underworld, a constant source of annoyance for Hades, who was expected to do something about it.

It was as if things were made from the essence of those things, tiny portions of their thingness, as different from each other as the things themselves, and if one unlocked the secrets of the thingness hidden in the things, reality itself would reveal its mysteries.

There was no telling what could happen next, and which of its terrifying denizens would wreak havoc without warning, not a place where one wanted to spend even a moment.

It was much lower than Hades, farther down than the earth was from the sky, a bottomless pit of absolute darkness, where nothing ruled other than terror and uncertainty, and the expectation of untold monstrous creatures slithering in its depths unbeknownst to its dwellers.

A wall of bronze with heavy gates guarded its entrance, and nobody got past them without Hades’ say so.

The hecatoncheires patrolled its perimeter, rolling slowly around the damned on their hundred hands, watching them with a hundred eyes, so enormous their stature overshadowed the sun.

Their countenance was so off-putting even their father couldn’t bear the sight of them and got them imprisoned in Tartarus before the Great War between the gods and the titans saw the latter imprisoned there, and their vile temper got them constantly embroiled in some epic fight with their other monstrous siblings, the cyclops, conflict which shook the foundations of Tartarus with its thrashing and brawling.

In the middle of this unholy row the giant monster Typhon roamed his domain, carrying garlands of snake heads where the one head should have been, all of which boasted glowing eyes of fire.

From their sulfurous muzzles, terrible noises emerged, that sounded like all the frightening animals on earth have been brought together on purpose, as the Typhon ominously spread his dark wings, hovering over the bottomless abyss.

There was no telling of up and down there, no sense of direction, just the black waters of chaos with their unpredictable nature, and no one, mortal or god, could spend more than a few hours in its endless, dark and hopeless realm without going mad.

My mind revs up full speed at intersections,

and every day is from a different life design:

no continuity, no breaks, no preset lines,

as if I’m thrust into the heart of Time,

with arrows going out in all directions.

It could be good, this unfamiliar realm;

this odd ‘here’ that I poke, and pokes me back,

that is impossible to be, and yet it’s not,

where one can’t tell reality from thought,

or fantasy from time.

If I can’t tell whether I’m you or me,

then maybe we were always just one whole,

this one thing that was never me at all, 

unless I’m wedded to the whole wide world, 

and that is what it means for me to be.

I’m different and the same, dead and alive,

and old components of my life feel off,

like they’ve been placed by strangers on my path,

but they’re not me, they’re not what I’m about,

and I can only tell what I am not.

I love the freedom to express my thought

without the duty to explain its craft

which makes no sense, defies logical paths.

But when the walks of life appear so tight

it’s easy to forget that they are not.

While I was slow to grasp the rhythm I tuned in,

my life as always took me to the mat,

and I’m not sure when changes came about,

or, mercy me, if I was born like that,

but I can tell that I’m no longer human.

Pearl: Lectura de la novela Angel - Capítulo 2 - Clase de Arte

Fragmento de Angel, una nueva novela de Francis Rosenfeld

fikaFrancis Rosenfeld

I was touched. They never let me do anything by myself; I always have direction of some sort, a job, a goal.

This time they let me dream. They call it unsupervised learning.

There was so much beauty! I bathed in color for days!

While she tended to the sick girl her mind raced with worries and what ifs, peeved at Josepha for not offering her invaluable input into the matter and mad at herself for needing her help, and was appalled that in all this time, through everything that happened, nobody ever thought of describing the various plagues for safekeeping, so the next generations didn’t have to start from scratch again and again.

I gaze at pictures of my mind and grasp at them with child-like awkwardness, dress them in words and send them to the patiently waiting fingers.

Wit is so tangled in my fingers that the brain can't isolate it, much like the feet don't disengage from the hearing of music in a complicated dance.

Gentle small scale acrobatics, if you think about it, so second nature it becomes, so second nature...

The backlit keys float over diminished light, enough light to guide me if I need it, but I don't, not anymore, not for a while now.  The slim bumps on J and F gently nudge the tips of my fingers as hands glide on the keyboard swiftly, assuredly, fluidly, free.

Music - Crimson Throne by Door to Penglay.