Farlop Finds His Way - Prologue (BEGIN HERE)

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Farlop Finds His Way

by Perry Grandwell

[Photo by Herm Card]

Prologue

“I am the son of God,” he wrote.

“But then again,” he added, “so are you.”

“So is every living human child, male, female, non-binary, and any otherwise engendered individual, as well as every animal, creature, and every last drop of water, stone, tree, or blade of grass however formed.

“That God part connects us all.

“However, that which we call divine is not a friendly nor a fearsome creature in a supposed heavens looking down upon us.

“What we might recognize as divine is whatever the ongoing force within us that gave us life from the very beginning of the spontaneous creation of this universe and of all other universes that came from it.”

He began to type furiously on his keyboard, nary sipping the water at his desk.

“As scientist Carl Sagan said, we are, indeed, star stuff. We are made up of atoms and who knows how many smaller elements within each one of them. All of them could hold more universes which may have even more infinite universes within each of them.

“And our nearby outer universes could very well be infinitesimal parts of infinitesimal atoms of even bigger universes. We cannot ever know, but we can be sure of one thing: whatever force that created life as we know it, and life as we do not know it, was not something we can call ‘Lord’ in any sense.

“It was, at most, the force that exploded existence out of nothing because nothing cannot exist somewhere without something to oppose or house it.

“And we are still part of it and ever shall be. We are all the multimillion years detritus of that explosion and nothing more.

“But also, nothing less,” he emphatically typed.

“Existence itself is our divinity, and the mind we were lucky to have been developed in our bodies has and will allow us to understand much more than early story tellers,” he typed and took a long breath.

But he was far from finished.

He leaned his stiff back on the chair and pondered more about what he should say in this journal to try make sense of the difficult life he had lived after being brought up by a fearsome parent so pious and a mother so oppositely sweet that he was forever torn between good, evil, and between the pounding fear of experiencing too much of either.

He resumed his Tueday morning screed. He often journaled on the mornings he didn't have to go to work until noon

“That life force we share means we are driven to become the best or worst possible humans out of this unique situation of living we are in. We, who think about this humanely, hope our behavior follows what is called our better angels before evil actions and the dangers of misunderstood concepts of infallibility implode us out of existence.”

If from his own experience of both severe alienation and ultimate belonging in his young life, he figured, his story might help others choose to work for the betterment of life now and later without any fear of damnation or injustice involved.

Especially, he considered, he wished to lead them toward acceptance of diverse minds and bodies such as his without the fears and demands of the damnation under which he had suffered for having both.

In his childhood and youth, he endured not only religious oppression from a zealous parental overlord, but two dozen years of extraordinarily painful disability that was not, as declared, punishment from a vengeful God for sins he had never knowingly committed.

And though over ten years of that disease’s resulting severe deformity of his skeleton was followed by a return to a more active life through medical science, both his unusual body and mind were scarred for the rest of his life. He adapted to functioning with both by putting on at least a pretense of normality to work with others.

Something within him in those years away from his small town Ohio home allowed him to carry on just as if he was not bent over like a question mark with his head permanently facing the ground throughout his twenties through several trials at college. But physically he was in that odd off-putting shape and could not change it until he became the “first man to go to San Francisco to become straight,” at the University of California Medical Center, San Francisco.

Through some kind of magical inborn talent for writing and the theatre while he was bent over, he still acted on stage and led others in productions, some of which he had written. People may have been put off upon initially encountering him, but within seconds his full humanity came out with an attitude of “F  ‘em if they can’t take a joke” and he was accepted into friendships with other considerate actors and thoughtful students who saw beyond his obscured physicality.

Some of them had become lifelong friends with whom he still shared social media jokes, art, and always good wishes.

Later, after surgery restored him to full height again, and after a three-year stint as an academic recluse in never ending PhD studies of information, public policy, and the history of books and libraries at the University of California, Berkeley, he finally became a reference librarian at the Berkeley Public Library and loved nearly every minute of it.

But however delightful he found the work of answering and guiding patrons’ questions about anything and everything hour after hour, his still stiff bodied condition through those years had left him without much likelihood of a romantic relationship such as he had earlier enjoyed before his deformity took over his physique.

Single still in his early thirties, he both mused upon and regretted memories of the woman he thought he would marry at age twenty before the deformity came upon him.

He left her, he frequently recalled through his fantasized memory, either for the fear of his upcoming deformity and the effect it would have on her, or because she began to get into both magical and religious beliefs that would be anathema to his then too practical mind.

Now, a bit older and wiser, he realized that the fear he once felt resided in his own impractical mind, not necessarily caused by anything outside of it. Many days he had longed to forget the artistic, talented woman, but too often he wondered what she had become. Was she a professional actor or an artist both of which she was when he lived with her, or new age guru or a cleric, as she seemed to be training herself for before he walked out on her?

As a reference librarian he often had searched for Genise online but never found a trace of her, not as artist, performer, nor in any church or holistic congregation list. He could not stop thinking of the day he had met her on the Ohio River when he had left his spiritually imprisoned home in Clocksburg at eighteen.

The was the day that that judgmental blue heron flew in from nowhere and saved them both from murderous crows. But then it began to follow them while they were together and later trailed him alone across New York State and even out to California. Now it sat on an oak tree limb which gave it a constant view of him through his office, bedroom, or kitchen window.

That damned bird.

It was still there. It was always there. Wherever he was for the past twelve years. If only it would stop staring at him at home, or the university, and at the library in which he now worked.

Always lurking with the stupid look on its face with deep, discerning eyes. Judging him? Hounding him?

It was not a dark raven such as Poe wrote about, but was a silly looking great blue crested heron that had appeared at the very moment that he had met the only woman he thought he was meant to love.

Telling him he was supposed to reclaim something he had forgotten?

He left the soul murderous type of religion, found love, and then left that, too, feeling that might damage his soul even more.

The pains of his tortured soul followed him when he ran away from oppressive religion to assuage his discomfort that seemed to be replicated in his body’s pains. But even after the disease eventually burned out, the memory of that unmelodic disharmony of ill-used religion lingered, still swirling in his head.

The pains of his heart from having lost his one-time love also still fluttered daily like the wings of that damnable, sometimes screeching bird he thought for sure she had sent after him.

She must have sent it, he often thought. Did she send it after him because she had become a witch just like she said her grandmother was?

And every time he had that particular thought, he dismissed it vehemently. There could be no such thing as witches, only women who were wrongly considered to be.

He knew it was his own fault that he lost Genise and there was no such thing as magic or any reason to belief in spirits, demonic, angelic, or otherwise.

As much as religion had got the better of him as a youngster, he was not going to allow the combination of religiosity and spiritual hokum to cause him more psychological and attendant physical pain.

Suddenly, but as often had he ever longed for her and searched for her, the angry part of his brain began to turn against the dreamy half, and he stopped his momentarily reverie. He set himself up at the keyboard to type further.

The great blue crested heron gave him one of those looks, he saw out of the corner of his eye, which was on a head that could not move sideways

He sighed, long aware of the sullen grimace of that heron’s look. He lifted his hands from the keyboard and turned his swivel chair to stare out the window to make a face at the creature. He silently demanded answers in angry unspoken words as if the bird could really hear him.

The heron shook or nodded its long-necked head in faux response which the writer could never interpret.

Does it ever eat, he wondered? Does it fly down to the Bay to fish daily when he does not see it around?

But it is always there. How does it go wherever he happens to be? From one side of the country to other? At home, at his work? Why did it appear when it first did and has not lost sight of him for more than a minute or two?

What does it want of him?

Does anyone see it besides himself, he wondered for the millionth time?

The heron flapped its wings and jerked its body as if in laughter at that thought.

The journal writer uttered a loud “Aargh!” and turned his chair back toward the varied height table he needed to use to work at his desktop. He took a sip of water and began to type again with renewed thoughts and vigor.

“One once wrote,” he went on as he tried to clarify the complexities of his mind, “of the lost voices of the gods and said that hallucinatory images in one half of the mind communicated with images and the bare beginnings of language to the other half. But, the psychologist said, only schizophrenics and some under the influence of drugs still hear from those hallucinations that all early humans once shared.”

He doublechecked his Google page to be sure of a quotation from that work.

“’Those voices, assumed to be divine, gave rise to all religions,’ he copied from a Time magazine article in 1977 that he had found online about Julian Jaynes’ book that he had read with great interest years ago called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.”

He was aware of his two half minds, but was not schizophrenic in any way, just torn, he said to himself.

He admitted he was torn between being good and being bad, as all humans probably are, depending on conditions. But perhaps, he admitted, the disparities he too often felt seemed stronger in him only because he was overly sensitive by nature. So far, the good side of him had won nearly all the time. He knew he no longer feared pain as he used to, because he barely felt it anymore.

But he often feared how very strong his pain resistance was by this time. He wondered if the pain had really stopped or had he merely stopped feeling it because he used up all a human's ability to do so. It had been so constant before

Was it still there? Sometimes his right arm and left leg ached whenever he got tense, so he had trained himself to overcome it with exercise to bring down the uncalled-for tension that just appeared from time to time. It never lasted long as his mind often was able to shut it down. It was not like his teens and twenties when he was a prisoner to pain all the time.

To be beyond pain should feel almost euphoric for one who had lived so long with no surcease from it. But he did not take any joy from that lack of feeling. He was with two minds about it.

He had one mind aware always of reality, and the other one aware of things beyond such as his experience as a person with a lifelong disability combined with a creative spark that took him often away from either reality.

If he owed the world anything, he felt, it was to use the experience of his own dual nature to provide ways for others to get beyond whatever their pain and suffering was from the injustice of misapplied religiosity, even when used unwittingly.

Through this writing, of a journal or book he hadn’t decided yet, he wanted to find a way to help anyone else find the goodness within themselves without the need of insidious religious injustice which could destroy any part of their lives.

Through kindness maybe? He wanted to bring that out. Meant to.

But when he thought about such things, it was all he could do to refrain from the murderous anger he felt toward the death and disfigurement of many millions of lives that religious oppression and misapprehension have historically caused in the world. Would anyone seeking a path of kindness not be incensed by that?

Hate the sin, not the sinner, he told himself to bring down his amped up feelings. But the paradox of tolerance stymied him for fear he had no answer for that.

It is natural, he pondered, that people found community, a sense of togetherness and golden rule mutuality through helping others that came with the best of well-meaning religious groups.

But does that togetherness, in the worst groups, require hatred of those who do not feel or at least profess the same in their hearts? What about those who despise kindness? How can we curtail their damage to humankind and nature by merely turning the other cheek to them?

And then his anger rose at what just happened when the country had turned, just days ago, into an authoritarian theocracy because unknowledgeable people, people who specifically did not want to know what they were doing, and had solidified their anger at all liberal minded thinkers, voted to promote fascism in the United States which would destroy the tenets of democracy itself.

“It did happen here!” he growled as he recalled Sinclair Lewis’s prescient scary title of the same plot in the 1930s. And he recalled that one third of the nation’s eligible voters refused to vote or deal this time with any politics at all, allowing this destructive future to take over their lives.

The thought of so many White Christian Nationalists successfully able to take over the country’s government these days to put in a psychologically mad dictator wannabe made him livid. To realize that billionaires. charlatans, and foreign bad actors had successfully conned the less educated and Fox-blinded populace to ignore all reason, and that potentially World War Three could follow, caused his blood to boil.

He began to breathe hard, clench his fists, and his right arm began to pump the air.

That hand seemed to be the seat of his righteous anger and through the years he had struggled to keep it from controlling his body and sending it into actions he could not control. It was as if that appendage had a mine of its own.

At this point, the great blue crested heron shrieked loudly and flew toward the window where it hovered threateningly outside the pane with its wings flapping wildly. It had done this before whenever the librarian got excessively riled.

To push away from those thoughts, the writer turned his chair to look at what seemed to be a doleful expression on that stupid bird outside the window.

It merely opened its beak a bit as if to respond with a judgmental sound of a half honk.

The writer began to slow his breathing and mentally brought his arm to a standstill. He came back to normalcy and swiveled the chair back toward the desk. The desktop keyboard clacked with the forceful energy of a human on a mission.

He sighed and wrote, “Another recent author wrote in his book, Nexus, that stories were the glue that allowed socialization of early humans but the precepts of the presumed divine texts written by men quickly were considered infallible. Unlike the constitution of democratic societies which included amending possibility, this concept of unquestionable truths led to invasions and wars between otherwise amenable groups. Another author recently wrote that Stories Are Weapons to show how bad actors have manipulated mythological concepts to promote destructive beliefs.

“Religion is a story and those stories that created an anthropomorphic image of an authoritative being overseeing all of us were made by those who wanted to put themselves in that position over others.

“The stories they created, and the intentional deletion of other stories of a humanistic nature that they threw away, were designed to keep people and societies in control. The Bible, the Koran, the Veddas, and others, were created and codified then declared infallible in many cases. The power of religion, as much as good intentions endure, is such that even justice-loving democracies have become anathema to the strongest believers, and to the slickest manipulators that engage religious believers for their own selfish sake.

“God, however,” he insisted on his desktop screen, “is not some invisible psychopathic bully who demands fealty and worship the way a sick narcissistic needy overlord, like a fascist dictator, would demand. The very idea of prayer, especially kneeling to do so, positions persons as beggars rather than upright fellows of existence. Frequently called “Master” or “Lord,” the ideas of an almighty God that most religions profess are invented constructs.

“The part of divinity that you and I share is merely, but importantly, the life force within us that began all the universes and that led up to our randomly but not necessarily unique existence. We are charged with its energy to carry on. Faith should be the feeling and responsibility of our connectedness to all that exists such that we and all else continue to exist through togetherness and mutual support as we further develop the world usefully.  

“What we are made of is what should unite not divide us.

“There is no such thing as evil that lives outside of us; there are only evil acts that we do or think of,” he demanded through the keyboard. “Goodness is not a grace only divinely inspired; it is an adjective that defines our actions, thoughts, or behavior in how we act with each other, within ourselves.

“And, blessings, other than those that come from our good deeds toward others, do not come from outside of existence. They come from our active behavior.

“We want to be good, to endure collectively whatever painful disasters, personal or societal, that confront us, and to work together with the life force within every one of us to make the existence we share a positive one for us all. Excessive greed and improper use of power leading to violence over others are more than individual failings, they are what the word ‘evil’ should properly describe. They do not come from some strange demonic force outside of us but from within ourselves which only recognition of one’s responsibility to the many could prevent.

“It is not the inventions of Heaven or Hell we should seek or fear, as our atoms will recycle somehow into new constructive uses within this universe once our life ends, but we should seek to honor our charge of life so that life beyond ourself continues without unnecessarily turning our universe into a black hole.

“How can we choose to be good for each other, to ourselves, to all living things? Is there justice in individual and collective belief that goodness can overcome the evils of greed and nihilism? Can we create an economy, a capitalism, as they say, as if people matter? Can we live lives as if humans and other living natural beings matter?”

He removed his hands from the keyboard and looked at the book on the corner of the desk he intended to bring up in summation. It had come to his attention in a graduate seminar on special collections in UC, Berkeley’s Bancroft Library when students were shown a large display of some of the rare items and ephemera the library held. Everyone had left the table at the end, but he, being slower to rise, caught sight of a small newspaper from the 1890s that was left near him on the surface of the table.

He could not remember whether he picked it up to read it or it somehow just blew toward his hand as someone closed the door to the room with a bit of gust. But he brought the two sheets to his unmovable face and began to read. What he found in its idea became somewhat of an obsession.

The small newspaper was called The Altrurian and it was the local newsletter that had been printed in 1894 in the town of Altruria, California near Santa Rosa in Sonoma County, during the two years of that utopian experiment of a community in which people, rather than money, mattered. He began to explore among the Graduate Library bookshelves what was behind it.

The idea for such a place came from a series of articles written by William Dean Howells for his Cosmopolitan Magazine in the Gilded Age of the 1890s when extreme wealth and power elites dominated American commerce. They were collected later and published as a book entitled A Traveler from Altruria in which the character from a fantasy island showed elite Americans how to be kind instead of superior in every interaction. The author put to the test the engrained belief of the wealthy Americans' superiority over others hidden by false civility within their elaborate fashion without regard to those below them.

These moral fantasies and ones following it, published as the Altrurian Romances, were produced in quick succession. The ideas in them took progressive America by storm during the Gilded Age.

Soon there were Altrurian Clubs formed across the land in smaller cities where people met, along with the Chautauqua reading circles which introduced culture through reading, to discuss ways to become kinder in every social endeavor. This culminated in the Santa Rosa Altrurian community which was created by a Unitarian minister from Berkeley. People came to it from all over to begin to live altruistically. They sought to share the labor and grow produce to sell in a market they created in nearby San Francisco.

Their utopian dream failed within two years, of course, because all utopian plans do, he reminded himself. It failed because human nature cannot be fashioned by regulation toward an ideal. This is any religion’s problem, too, as adherence to principles can never fully overcome the psychological behaviors of greedy and sociopathic individuals within and without power. Actually, wealthy bankers finished them off because of the weakness of some of the members.

How can people become kind in all things, he wondered. without becoming fools and tools of the cynical world of ambitious amorality that operate unabated in the real world?.

It is probably reasonable to act kindly in personal and business affairs, he reasoned, but to be kind to a fault in institutional affairs would obviously weaken law and justice forces which are intended to prevent abuse of unkind behavior. Are we to just turn the cheek while democracy is destroyed or can we fend off that destruction before it happens?

And worse, he figured, any such thing as a required intended kindness forced into a  utopian society would turn human beings into tongue-in-cheek totalitarians. His two minds began to war against each other again.

And then his sardonic, mean side took over and he began to question every bit of his positive prose, as he all too often did once he put it down to text.

He knew that for everything he had suggested in his writings every single point, could and would be challenged for rationality and for naivety. Though his hopes for understanding came from his sincere belief in humanistic logic, the experience of the world through history shows such values considerably fell apart when confronted by the worst aspects of psychologically evil manipulators that plague commerce and authoritative religions. Faster and farther with their story twisting skills, they would outweigh his hopes of sharing his ideas beyond just a choir of similar believers.

The tension inside him grew and he could feel his empathic body tearing itself apart again. Though unlike the physical pain of his adolescence and twenties, this constant throb of conscience versus ideal within him seemed never to leave him as his gruesome disability had once done.

Though so far, his good angels had always won, but he despaired that he had to fight against that strange evil within him from taking over completely. He was always aware of this duality and while he used his intellect and good nature to forestall it, the struggle, when it arose, ever kept from fully realizing any hope.

He had written enough in this beginning of his digital book to the world. He did not know whether it be an essay or become a full volume of thoughts. It was time to go to work, so he saved his work and closed his computer.

He got up and prepared to hoof it in his usual slightly awkward way the ten blocks to the Central Library from his North Berkeley apartment on Martin Luther King, Jr Way at Rose Street.

However, when he stepped outside, with the great blue heron’s wings billowing above him, he was immediately accosted by the tiny weird robed man his library colleagues had dubbed, “the Little Wizard.”

The staff all assumed he was simply an antic unhoused person who had recently shown up around the library like so many others around the Shattuck Avenue civic center over the last two decades. But he was always in character with his bearded, long-haired head above a white robe and he carried a gnarled walking stick at least two heads above his short stature. He had performed simple little magic tricks which entertained them and the patrons, especially children.

Here in front of the librarian’s home he somehow managed to place his walking stick horizontally in the air so that it appeared to float with no support of any kind.

He signaled to the great blue heron, and the bird flew almost amorously around the floating walking stick and then rested lovingly atop it. Both the little fellow and the heron then looked upon the librarian with questioning eyes.

“That’s quite a trick,” said the librarian. “How did you do that?”

“It is not a trick,” said the Little Wizard. “It’s magic.”

The librarian laughed sarcastically. “Sure,” he said. “Excuse me, I have to get to work.”

He started to walk past them on the sidewalk.

The Little Wizard waved his hand and the librarian was unable to move further.

“What the ...?” The librarian struggled but could not move.

“You need to take the bus,” said the Little Wizard who made the librarian turn his whole body around so that they could face each other.

“No, I can walk. It’s only ten blocks.”

“Not a city bus. It’s the Berserkeley Bus. It’s due in a minute or two.”

“Never heard of that,” the librarian protested. “Does it go where I want to go?”

“It goes where you need to go.”

“Hah! Where is that?”

“To rediscover the magical precepts that you abandoned when you left your childhood home.”

“Magical precepts? Why in heaven’s name would I need that or those, whatever they are?”

“Ah, so you believe in heaven, then?”

The librarian huffed. “I believe in idioms. There are too many in the language to discard them all on intellectual principles. I don’t actually believe in heaven nor in magic, if you must know.”

“Shame. Magic believes in you,” spoke the Little Wizard.

The librarian scoffed at the tiny man.

“You have Magical and Altrurian heritage, just as I do,” continued the Little Wizard person. “It has come time to become the wizard you were meant to be. You are sorely needed to help the charges in your part of the world to ease off from the cliff so many might fall off because of what’s happened now. It is every good Magical Wizard’s duty to the Regulars around you, Farloppini.”

The librarian was dumbstruck.

“No one has called me that since I was a child! My mother shortened it to Farlop. I let everyone call me Farley. How did you …?”

“Because I and my wife named you in the tradition of our family of wizards and performers. Our family goes back to the Commedia Del Arte in the Renaissance/ Well, probably farther than that as Magical genetic traits go.”

“No! My grandparents named me. Grandpa Barney and Grandma Drew.”

“Barnoballini and Drusilla, actually,” chuckled the Little Wizard.

The librarian wondered how he, over six feet tall, was progeny to someone barely five feet tall. “Good heavens!” cried Farlop, as he realized he was speaking to his long lost grandfather.

“There is that idiom that comes out of you again. Put there by your almost father, Otto Pickering, no doubt. He threw us out when you were three. Wouldn’t let us near you.”

“Is that why I didn’t recognize you?”

The Little Wizard nodded. “Your mother gave in to him. She feared her Magical powers had been tainted by your birth. She turned away from magic but not her Altrurian side. You have plenty of that, too, I imagine.”

“Tainted by my birth? What are you talking about?” Farlop was livid.

“Do not allow yourself to become angry. You have much to discover. Much to reclaim. Even persons you have thought you’ve lost but haven’t.”

Farlop felt his right arm gearing up to move angrily but the Little Wizard’s gentle arm touched it softly and it settled down.

“May I move?” Farlop asked as he realized he had no control over this situation.

“Of course,” said Barnoballini who waved his Magical arm toward him. “You know, you have the power to overcome this spell, but we haven’t got all day to let you figure it out. The precepts will help get you back on track.  Look, here comes the Berserkeley Bus now.”

Farlop took a breather, moved around, and gathered himself for the journey to wherever.

“I suppose that bird will follow me, eh?”

“Of course, it shall. It is your familiar. It has protected you from the day you ran away from your childhood home. And, by the way, its name is Ardae Blue. It is an Etherean creature.”

The great blue heron reacted with exuberant joy at finally being named and described to the librarian.

“Etherean? What does mean?” asked Farlop.

“Neither human, nor animal, vegetable, nor mineral. Ethereans are Magically made by both good Magicals and bad Magicals. They can exist in many forms. You created this one to rescue yourself with your own inborn magical powers when you first needed it. You never realized that?”

“I thought the girlfriend I left behind sent it after me. She said her grandmother was a witch,” revealed Farlop. “I think she was training to become one.” The thought struck him. “I bet she is one now,” he said with a scoffing attitude.

“No, not yet,” suggested Barnoballini. “But she does have traits similar to yours and mine, from another Magical Altrurian family. Not as powerful as you can be, but when you find her, she will discover her traits as you have.”

“When I find her? Do you know where in God’s name Genise is?” Farlop stumbled. “In your Magical philosophy, I mean.”

“Yes, but there are more things in our philosophy than heaven and earth, Farloppini. You need to find out much more than what you have imagined so far,” replied the Little Wizard. “Here it is. Step aboard.”

The crazy, magical, steampunk, open double-decker Berserkeley Bus pulled up to a stop in front of Farlop’s apartment house.

Or tried to. Its driver had trouble bringing it in to the stop.

Farlop still had trouble coming to terms with all of this.