16. Story Six
You have over one hundred hits on your story about meeting Mr. Press Reynolds when you were five and with your grandfather. Your heart notes it even as you are focused on editing Chapter Six for Grandma E. – Ms. Havisham.
1212. I am getting ready to start as this is a long story and may need more editing. I do enjoy working on the book this way, though – more relaxing. We have to stop by and give Kim and Gayle a bag of Ghirardelli chocolate squares – Kim gets the dark chocolate assortment without peppermint squares and Gayle the one with the peppermint square assortment. 1223.
Sitting in the car next to Gayle's place in north Clintonville (Columbus), you are contentedly waiting for Carol, who is no doubt chatting with her sister. You just completed your editing and are ready to drop the work into Grammarly Pro at home for artificial intelligence inspection and commentary. – Ms. H.
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Here is Chapter Six; perhaps we should title these "Story Six" rather than Chapter? – Grandma Earth
Mr. Orndorff, what do you think? – Ms. H.
1642. Account Six might work, or Anecdote Six rather Chapter Six, or even Chronicle Six -- we could just use the numbered notes in red as titles without chapters. Titles should have a contextual sense to them. Nothing seems to fit. Perhaps Grandma Earth can come up with something. 1725.
What about simply using a written number used in Diplomat's Pouch and have Grandma Earth introduce the stories as anecdotal and let it go. – Ms. H.
1731. That sounds good.
* * *
SIX
Grandma Earth begins. Destiny resides not in queens and kings or drones, for that matter; destiny resides in the species as a whole. Human beings need to rise up and become what they are, more humane. People come built with brains to survive. People come made with minds for compromising.
It happened long ago on the large Isle off France's coast not far from where Canterbury town would rise in the later Celtic territory. Rolling hills and woods and streams and the beach not far away, not more than a day's walk at most. An apprentice shaman sat attempting to discover who he is while deep within, he is where the shaman must dance. Consistency isn't his hallmark. Bracc has long black hair with roughly built limbs and a log like trunk.
He has neither a comfortable stage-like appearance nor an unusual one such as a mask or prop that would benefit him in his storytelling. In those days, everyone knew storytelling demanded an authenticity that was so deep the person becomes someone or something else while sharing the story. The question afterward is usually, 'who was telling the story, who had the shaman become?'
Sometimes it is a bear, a fox, an ant, or a butterfly. Every so often, a story was told as if it one of the Dead of the tribe who had come back to say it. Everyone knew about ghosts and hauntings. Spirits were in all things living or not. People even whisper about an old legend that the stones move within themselves. Some said the larger stones have people frozen in them, particularly those large stones standing in the great circle at Salisbury Plain.
Young Bracc has the goal to tell a good story, but he does not know a unique narrative. The principal shaman understood the young man's problem and set a meaningful way for the young man to take a journey and return to tell his own story. The old man would watch and see how Bracc would do with an experienced audience, expecting to hear and demonstrate a useful and unique narrative.
The shaman takes young Bracc aside and says, "I will give you a project, and a story will come from it that is entirely your own. The elders are expecting a story sometime this year, but they don't know when."
Bracc's face lights up, "I am ready, Master. Give me the project, and I will test myself."
The Master speaks. "You must make a wooden frame, a small rectangle as you have been taught. Trim and tighten the four corners first with the binding of tin, then reinforce this with hemp. You will need three naked arrow shafts, crossing them near a center of your choice but make sure the six outer points can set outside the naked of bark framework."
"Yes, Master," says Bracc.
The Master continues, "Eye-set each outer point equidistance from the other so that it appears a six-pointed star. Before you attach the naked arrow shafts, dress each of them with four rounded and speared disks of straw, each two-finger knuckles in diameter. The disks must be able to move up and down their respective staffs."
"Yes, Master.".
The Master continues. "The vertical shaft will have a blue, then a red, then a white disk below, and below where the axis crosses the disk will be green. The top right diagonal shaft will have a green, then a yellow, and then a brown disk above the axis and a blue disk below the axis. The top left diagonal will have a cross disk, then orange, then a yellow above the axis, and a yellow disk below the axis. Three sliding disks above the axis and one sliding disk below on each shaft."
"Yes, Master," replies Bracc diligently.
The Master adds, "Here are the directions. On the vertical middle shaft, a blue disk is placed about a knuckle down from the top. The red disk below with two knuckles between it and the upper blue disk, then two knuckles down from the red disk, is the white disk's placement. Do the same to begin the other disks, so they are similar in distances on their respective shafts.
The shaman's apprentice, Bracc, loops the twine-like cord around and in and out around the bottom corner piece of the framework the Master had instructed him to prepare. He did not know what it was for, but he was happy that he was on his own to put it together. He would show the Master he could do things for himself.
He took the cord and rolled it out from his left hand across his chest to his outstretched right hand. Three lengths, then he cut it, tied it to the piece he had already wrapped, and continued looping and tightening the cord to hold help hold the corner piece together. He had already taken tiny strips of tin and hammered them in the corners to keep them, but people liked the cord, not the metal.
Bracc looks over the frame. It was a little more than an arm and a half in length and width, but it was a bit longer than wide. He had followed the Master's instructions to the letter. It is not a square, he thinks. It is not supposed to be a square like I thought it would be. He thinks his Master wants me to arrange them with six equally spaced outer points and have the shafts cross at the center.
Bracc takes twelve straw humped disks he had made following the instructions. He sets out to coat each disk rim the color specified. He takes his brush of horsehair on a stick and dips it into one of several small clay thumb pots of paint. On one disk, he paints Moon white, then he paints three Suns yellow. He mixed the yellow with Mars red and, after several tries, settles for a pale orange, better that than pink-orange, he thinks. From orange, he paints one disk rim red. He cleans the horsehair and dips a blue thumb pot, and paints two disk rims sky blue. "I am in the sky," he says.
Green is the next color. Again, a change of horsehair. As he colors the disk, some of the green touches the disk's center. At first, he is upset but then concludes the green was supposed to touch the center. He then painted hills on both green trimmed disks. A change of horsehair, and he paints one disk brown like a Spring flood. One disk is painted white cloud. Bracc begins wondering which is making this device, his heart, or his mind? He has one color left and does not bother to change the horsehair as it is the color of night-black Death.
He watches the disk soak up black like black soaks up the day. This is too strong for me, he thinks. Of all the colors, I am the bluest color. I am in the sky.
I will be color my skin blue when I tell my first shaman story by the fire. I will call myself Skye and be Bracc no longer. I will be blue and free of all but Grandmother Earth. She and I will be one in my mind. I will be one of the best of the storytellers with Grandmother's help. I will become a Master. My Master will be satisfied. Grandmother will be satisfied, and the listeners will be happy. That will be my goal at the end of each story. I will do my best to always end with everyone satisfied before the fire dies down, and we all sleep peacefully and soundly. May Mother Nature help me, he prays.
Then Bracc suddenly realizes the machinery will speak from the Dead's invisible place. The machinery I have created with the Master's direction shall tell a story that I am sure – will be a Revelation. This story engine is a Destiny Shaper for the audience. I, Bracc, am ready to tell my personal story.
* * *
Bracc's Story to his First Audience
"We are each individual in our own way. As we are set up to be unique, we are free within the bounds of our own shells of skin and bone. We touch one another because touching is our destiny. Destiny is for our tribe. We are cousins to those in other tribes nearby, and they are cousins to those in other tribes nearby them. We know others of our tribe live far, far away from here through our stories."
Bracc took time to point the cardinal directions, North, East, South, and West. It was then he surprised everyone. He also pointed up and then down. He continues, "Mother has given us a full moon tonight. Tomorrow we hope she will provide us with full sun. The moon moves across the sky in parts from nothing to complete in twenty-eight days, a moonth. The sun moves across the sky wholly, yet we know from stories that it also can move in parts when it wants to do so. When it does, the day sky becomes night before human eyes. The stars are seen. Then the moon marches on in opposite parts until it is whole again. This all happens within the four seasons that we have. This is a mystery of Mother Nature and Grandmother Earth."
People understood. They were shaking their heads and even smiling at the prospect. Mother is very wise, that is always their conclusion. The Dead must make way for those yet to be born.
Bracc begins again. "The Living are touched by the Dead in many ways. We are handled by the Dead inside our earth, our bodies, as they feel our Mother outside when they die. The Dead's world cannot be seen, but it can be known by the Dead themselves. I have a short story that one of Dead told me in passing.
People were suddenly amazed young Bracc would attempt such a complicated story. People had told them before, and many were horrifying. Others were pleasant enough to want to go there. It was confusing as to how it was to be dead. They sat, waiting to hear what young Bracc had to say. Most were skeptical because he was so young, and the young death seemed far away even though it struck them with surprise, sometimes sooner than any expected.
Bracc pulled his engine from the camouflage of green foliage and balanced it upright in his left hand. "What do you see?" he asks the elders.
"I know this," said one elder. "It is a story engine that the old shaman had you construct."
Bracc smiles. "It is a box of six sides," replies the elder.
"We only see one side of the box," says another with a joking though friendly banter in the audience.
With that, Bracc holds the device closer to the fire yet higher with both hands. The colored disks floated up the center shaft, he pulled the fame away slightly, and they would slowly fall down the center shaft. He did it again and again as he had practiced—warm air up, cooler air down. The disks appeared to magically dance on the center shaft.
Even the diagonals seemed to dance slightly as he turned the framework to tilt those shafts to vertical. How do the disks come to move? Are spirits moving the disks? Bracc suddenly stops and stands between the structure and the fire. He says, "It is the Dead who stay still. The disk dances because we dance. We tell the stories, and the Dead quietly listen."
"What do the Dead listen with?" shouts one disbeliever.
They listen with all their heartansoul, so they do not forget what it was to be alive. We must be quiet when we attend the burial places to listen to the birds and all the other sounds of Nature. If they want to hear the Living, they listen through our ears as we will someday listen through the ears of the young. We are the framework I show you here. We have independent movements so that we may dance our own dance.
The machinery, the framework, suggests the other five sides are invisible. We have to imagine the sides through our senses. The Dead use this as their frame of reference, you see. He held it up. We are the other five sides to the Dead. In these six senses of the framework, we can touch the Dead, and the Dead can touch us. We know they can feel us. Many do, in our dreams and memories.
Our framework is in our heads. We are in our bones for the present. When we are dead, we are free of this framework, but that which is invisible in us, our hearts and our souls, will be visible on the other side. This is the reason the six points stick out from the frame and move into the air. It is not just to tell a story. It is to show a truth about our Nature, our invisible Nature.
"We have heard this all before," shouts the disbeliever.
Bracc stands, suddenly realizing the man was right. There is nothing new in what he said. The gimmick, the trick, was using the rising hot air to move the disks so that people thought it was magic like the Dead were moving the disks, which they weren't. It was nothing but hot air. It was a travesty.
I am a travesty, he thought. He felt his skin give up before he did. A storyteller I am not, but I shall be. Bracc flusters an honest face and, with a calm smile, replies to the entire audience, "It was the hot air that made the disk to rise. When I took the framework away from the flames, the disks slid down the wooden shafts. It was simple. I was trying to make a point, to show the Dead are still here. Now, humbled by the truth, I understand what it is to be one of the Dead."
With that, Bracc collapsed and died right there. He died of shame and embarrassment. He died because he ran out of imagination.
The tribe learned a great lesson that day. Storytelling had to be correct to be real – no more stories about the Dead. We want only real tales in our tribe; this is what they proclaimed. Real stories are what the tribe heard from then on.
The elders decided that since Bracc had told his story just before he died, it shows the truth. The story was told by one who was closer to death than he or anyone else thought. People in the tribe understood a truth within themselves.
When the elders told the rest of the tribe what had happened, many wondered about Bracc's story engine for a long time. Were there really six sides to the frame when they could only see one? No one knew. No one alive will ever know. This is what they rationally concluded.
The tribe kept the one side they could see and touch. An appropriate empty space was left around the frame among a small grove of Oak in case, Bracc's hand-built story engine really did have a six-sided structure. The open area surrounding the frame Bracc built became a sacred space. The storyline that came from nothing but imagination could still be something. It requires deeper understanding -- a mind that is next to nothing.
This is the end of Bracc's story. Today we have heard all of these things on thousands of different levels, but Bracc's was one of the first. Some of you Readers were there and heard it first in real-time. The thoughts are in your genes, you see, both the storytelling and the listening. That's the way it is. Who am I? Grandma Earth, your earlier earthy Nature, I am your DNA ever moving forward into this world. Next to nothing, who else would Grandma be? Gray bones beget more gray bones.
* * *
Can nothing be something Nature sent?
Nothing quite common is nothing enchained.
Where else in the world is nothing time-bent?
This profane nothing is mind's cathedral contained.
From Grandma's white well-dentalled gums,
This next-to-Nothing story's conclusion comes.
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You finished the story. Run it through Grammarly Pro one more time, then drop it in above. – Ms. Havisham
2315. I feel this needs more work, but that's for later—time to move on.
I agree. Ms. H. - Let's publish as-is.
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