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Ben’s Bit, part 14 – A Pruning of Normality
by Steve Tanham
“Tell us about normal, Ben?” asks Dr Grey, looking like a man rejuvenated, as he glances sideways for approval from the silent Governor. “In your own words, of course…”
I try to stay calm. The three people in the room are transmitting a mixture of emotions at me. I’m very sensitive to that. It’s probably what led me to study spirituality. You can’t always trust feelings to represent the whole truth, but they always transmit a certain level of power.
Dr Grey, for example, is radiating resentment at me. He shouldn’t be, given that his superior in this situation is giving him some very strong backup. The Governor is leaning back in his black leather executive chair, its gleaming metal sub-structure bent at an impossible angle to accommodate the stretch created by the heels of his calf-leather shoes being on the far corner of the interview table. The Governor is not radiating resentment; he’s projecting the feeling of impending revenge at me. Quite why this is coming at me, in such thick waves, is a mystery. I’ve known him less than a week, yet I seem, already, to be an enormous irritant.
Is he, perhaps, as trapped as I am? It’s an interesting thought… If I could just find out what frightens him I might stand a chance. Such drivers as revenge are always a sign of something much deeper at the level of fear. My blazing knife flashes white in my mind, having mentally carved ‘I will not crumble‘ on my left arm, in a carefully staged psycho-drama the previous night, though now I confess to being a little ashamed of it…the mental ritual, not the resolve.
“Ben?” I return my gaze to Dr Grey, angling my head, obligingly. “We’d like an answer, please…” he says, reasonably.
“Of course–sorry!” I sneak a glance at the Governor who has decided to pick his elegant nails in disgust at my inability to focus. “Normality…in my own words, yes?”
“Yes, Ben,” Dr Grey says. “You’re an intelligent man. Tell us your view of normality.”
“In my own words?” In the flicking of nail on nail I can hear the Governor snapping one of my fingers in his mind; but he says nothing. The chair, however, has stopped wagging from side to side. Its occupant is rattled. What is it?
Time to change the tempo, I think to myself – one of my few weapons. “Normality is a subjective thing!” I say with gusto, leaning forwards to speak so they can see my enthusiasm as I place my hands on the pock-marked black plastic surface of the table and spread out my fingers in a deliberate copy of the Governor’s handiwork. The clicking of nail on nail ceases and I don’t need to look at the man to know he is staring at me with a particular intensity. ‘..shorten all this by shooting you in the back of the head…‘ is the fragment of a sentence I actually hear in my mind.
This is new… I don’t recall ever doing that before–actually reading someone’s mind in a literal sense; but then, perhaps no-one, not even Yellow Eyes, has ever hated me this much… and perhaps I’ve never been this frightened before, even if I’m not showing it.
Without looking at the man holding my life between his well-manicured fingers, I continue my exploration of ‘normality’.
“We can subscribe to another’s code of normality, but I believe the question is directed at a deeper level, so I will not insult you all with a veneer of an answer.”
Dr Grey is actually leaning forward with his hands on the table, too. He looks delighted that his pet madman is actually using the language of a psychologist. I wonder if he knows what danger he’s in? Not from me, of course, but from the ex-mercenary in the corner who has now clocked the fact that I have led a series of gestures to which his stooge has subscribed.
Time to press the advantage, then… “Normality is something we adopt, the product of a pain-reward system that society imposes with differing degrees of severity…” I blast the last word, mentally, into the room, knowing it will bounce of the psychic walls and cause havoc. “You can’t blame society, of course,” I say quickly and apparently apologetically. “We can’t have a civilisation full of individuals or we’d have no Saxon crosses left…”
Dr Grey’s head drops and hangs between bitterly disappointed shoulders. He pushes back from the table and takes a breath to speak, but the Governor cuts him off. “Do you think we use severity in here, Ben?” he asks, in a voice that is precise and terrifyingly soft.
I turn to look, conscious that a wall of rage awaits me, but what I see is unsettling beyond any attempt at composure. From his suit pocket, he’s taken a pair of surgical nail clippers and is holding them up in his right hand, pretending to use the inset nail file to smooth his manually-torn nail edges.
It’s not a question. Its not even something that Dr Grey is capable of responding to, though he begins to mouth a weak response into the carefully crafted and deadly silence generated by his controller.
It is a question that an elegant lady in very smart heels can answer; and she does so with the most perfect gesture I could think of. Miss Goodnight – miss Golding the golden one, my grateful mind sighs, as the tension leaks from my knotted fingers, has got up and, stealing centre stage, reaches into her handbag to take out a ladies’ disposable nail file. She clicks across the few feet between her former seat at my left and the extended circular base of the Governor’s arse and slides it to him over the polished surface of the table.
“Here,” she says. “Try this…you’ll find it’s much more appropriate…”
<See index below for other parts of this story>
———————————————————–< to be continued-
Ben’s Bit is a continuing first-person narrative of the character created by Stuart France and Sue Vincent, which may bear some relation to the author of this story, Steve Tanham, their fellow director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness. In the latest of their books, Scions of Albion, Ben is arrested for his overly enthusiastic part in a mad escapade, and the other two are nowhere to be seen . . . For more, enjoy their Doomsday series of books, and the new series (Lands of Exile) of which the first book, But n’ Ben, is now available.
Index to Ben’s Bits:
Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven, Part Eight, Part Nine, Part Ten, Part Eleven, Part Twelve, Part Thirteen,
Sue Vincent describes her and Stuart’s perspective on Ben’s imprisonment: Part One, Part Two
The Doomsday Series of books and the new book, But n’ Ben by Stuart France and Sue Vincent
The Silent Eye School of Consciousness – a modern mystery school.
All contents ©Copyright Stephen Tanham, 2016
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Nine Deadly Sins with Coffee, part 53 – Two Rivers
by Steve Tanham
Nine Deadly Sins with Coffee, part 53 – Two Rivers
.Alexandra.
It was still dark, though the light from the East was streaming into the cold, blue, air. The two take-away cups of coffee looked disappointing. Not because I could already seen their contents, but because they weren’t from Rose’s cafe.
“Last week we were flying over North Lancashire and now the edge of an old market?” I said. My halo was slipping… The previous week’s extraordinary events had left me on such a high that I wanted my local magician to conjure up something wonderful and life-changing, again.
“Down to earth with a slump?” He smiled at me, looking very tricky. “Do we only find the life-changing up there?” he waved his coffee cup, perilously, at the sky.
Behind us, Sid, the local fishmonger, was hosing down the outside of his stall. People travelled from miles around to buy his fresh fish, bought off the dock and brought up here before dawn each morning from one of the local fishing ports. In Winter the stall was sold out by the time the sun came up. I looked at the assorted organic debris, being flushed into one of the market’s wide grids, and fought hard not to pull a face. I loved fish…but the sight of the dead bits did nothing for me.
“Of course not,” I said, chided. “I shouldn’t be sulking.”
“Quite natural, of course,” John replied. “One of the dangers with such a ‘high’ as last time is that it releases a lot of energy that feels like it belongs in that upper realm and not down here…” he tapped a booted toe near a discarded fish head that had escaped from a one of the stall’s plastic bins. “…with all the yucky stuff!”
I watched the water hose cleanse the concrete, directed in well-aimed jets that marked out a single whirling motion. “I can see the connection, though,” I responded more positively. “The eleventh Labour of Heracles–the Cleansing of the Augean Stables.”
“I don’t imagine they smelled very good either…”
“Not after thirty years of accumulated dung…no wonder everyone else had failed and people were dying like flies…”
“Heracles was disappointed, too – with his landing from the heights of Capricorn’s mountain, freshly lighted – but he rolled up his club and got on with it!”
“I looked down at my pin-striped legal suit, the expensively heeled shoes, and shuddered. “You want me to clean this fish stall in my business clothes!?”
“Not for now…”
My mind screamed, in your dreams fella! But I kept quiet. Not for now implied a breather before we got there. I flipped the fragile top off the cheap cup, burning my hand with the inevitable spill onto my skin. I suffered in silence, not drinking while I cursed.
Sid had an old assistant who was rather infirm. Long years of working in cold conditions, and collecting fish while the world slept, had taken its toll on them both. But Tony was bent and frail, yet, once again, as every day for the past thirty, he came out from behind the tattered, stripey flap and picked up the second hosepipe, ready and willing to conclude the day’s business.
“Never a change to that routine,” John said, over the steaming coffee, which he, too, had yet to drink. “They are quietly famous – as is the quality of their produce. Day in, day out: drive for fish, sell fish, clean stall, sleep while the world lives…”
Even John looked sad, his eyes filled with compassion at the plight of the elderly man having to work out his life in this never-ending hard and cold labour.
Sid, much younger and fitter, and still unaware of our study, took his own look at Tony and reached for an old flask. “Here, ‘Tony” he said, pouring the older man a plastic cup of hot tea. “Have this, before you freeze in that water!”
“What is it?” asked Tony. “Not bloody tea, again. Don’t you ever make coffee?” His voice was rough, like gravel. I supposed it went with the life, but there was something of great hardship and pain in the man’s demeanour.
“Lost his whole family in a fire many years ago,” whispered John, quietly. “Was unhinged for a while, but Sid brought him back and kept him alive… They’ve shared this brutal existence ever since; day in, day out…”
“I’m confused about why we’re here? How could spirituality change the life of someone like this?”
“Tony?” asked John. I nodded.
“Very easily…” He waited, looking at me as the growing light of the dawn brought our features into clear relief, there in the shadows. “Be with him,” he said. “Feel his pain… Bear witness as you would for a brother or sister. Remember Aquarius is the great leveller…and we can’t begin to know the nature of the energies that will be flowing into the conscious life on Earth in the years to come.”
He stood back, looking at me, waiting for the moment… “You could change his life right now,” he said, softly.
Something hit me then. Wave after wave of compassion poured out of me as I took in the two market workers, rubbing their hands in the cold light. I could feel John nodding as I walked the short distance to where Tony stood, holding out my coffee to him. “It’s okay,” I said into his startled face. “Just a little something for you… and, may I?” I took the hose from him and began to work the spiral patterns of cleaning, just as he had done. For a while I was somewhere else, just watching the water do the work for me, noticing that only my fine shoes were getting dirty from the splashing. The sense of a new state was overpoweringly wonderful. The simple act of helping had liberated me from the expected and into the real.
When I looked up, John was holding the other hose, which he had just taken from a smiling Sid. The younger man also had a new coffee in his hand. For ten minutes, we cleaned the back of the market stall with our waters. As we were leaving, Sid gave me a peck on the cheek, looking as though this happened every day… But I knew it didn’t.
We were about to cross the road and back to the seafront, when a gasping man limped up behind us. I turned to see Tony standing behind me, wordlessly holding out a fish wrapped in a single piece of newspaper. I didn’t care how much it would mess up my suit; I took it from him with tears in my eyes and kissed his cheek, running my fingers through his dirty hair.
John said nothing as we collected my luggage from the boot of his car at the station. As I was turning to board my London train, he spoke, “We’re nearly there…funny thing about giving to those who have nothing – you always end up getting more back…”
With that, he planted his uncle’s kiss in the customary fashion, but the hug spoke more loudly that any words could. “Welcome to the world of the lunatic…”
Nearly there… the words ran round my head most of the way to the City. Were we? and where had we been headed all this time?
———————————————————–
Nine Deadly Sins with Coffee is usually published on Thursdays.
©Copyright, The Silent Eye School of Consciousness, 2016.
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The Druids Bringing in the Mistletoe, by Edward Atkinson Hornel & George Henry
The west of Europe used to be full of Celtic temples. In every settlement, every holy grove, every mountain top and ring of stones that held any import for the peoples of old there would have been some structure marked out as holy, a place to connect the people to the spirits who lived alongside of them. There were statues of gold and idols of stone, rings of trees wreathed with cloth, wells encircled by the swirling patterns of the art called La Tene. A vivid, distinct and technically accomplished culture did as all such cultures have done; piled up in its holiest of holies the greatest achievements of its civilisation, to honour the gods that it worshipped.
The afterglow of their achievements still hangs on the horizon. The illuminated gospels of Ireland, the giant carved stones of the Picts…
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Image: MyLot
It is a long story, but suffice it to say that for the past year I have been trying to move to a smaller place. My current home has more bedrooms than I need. A smaller place makes sense.
It is not what you’d call a big house, not if you consider that it housed seven at one time; it’s just your average English semi-detached. Even so, the quantity of ‘stuff’ that has managed to build up in it over the years doesn’t bear thinking about.
When we first moved south, we didn’t bring a great deal other than the furniture. And the books. There wasn’t much…apart from the books… as it was only a handful of years since we’d moved back from France. At that point, all our worldly possessions including the books had fit into one large packing case.
But the boys were growing and…
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In response to Sue Vincent’s Photo Prompt.
“It’s not complex, it’s just dense!”
“Dense?”
“Yes, dense, like ‘buried’ – way underground, but very much a part of everything!”
“How’s that?”
“Think of roots – can you see them?”
“Well, not normally, no…except if you pull up the plant and lose the flower.”
“Quite! So you wouldn’t inspect the roots that way, would you?”
“No.”
“You’d trust that the roots had produced the bud that was blooming before your ecstatic eyes?”
“That would be the natural way of things.”
“And do the roots expect acknowledgement?”
“They don’t get it, do they?”
“Seldom..”
“The flower shines in the sun, but the light it greets with its life is the same light woven densely into the darkness… because the soil was necessary to bring the flower that kisses the sun in joy.”
“But, I’m still glad I’m a flower..”
“Who said you were a flower?”
“Nnnnn… Oh, damn…”
“Other people, yes?”
“Sod it, yes…”
“But a root, growing in the right soil, knowing itself, in the dark light of densely woven joy, can become one, can’t it…”
In response to The Tunnel – photo prompt
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I was driving home; the fog had begun to lift and pale sunshine was dancing on the daffodils… so I have no idea where the thought came from. There was nothing to spark the train of thought.
“I wonder if that was really her name?”
In modern parlance, it was one of those OMG moments.
I don’t even know where their names surfaced from. Faces I always remember.. names? Not so much. And it was a long time ago.
When I arrived home, I went rummaging through the few old photos I have of my childhood.
Somewhat over half a century ago, and for a few short years, my two best friends were Penny and her brother, Said. My paternal grandparents worked with children at the local orphanage and these two were the closest to my own age at the time. I still have two photos of the three of…
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Some lovely and pithy humour from Sue…
I loaded up his dishwasher… it isn’t mine, you see,
But every Friday morning piles of dishes wait for me.
The night before sees lads at play, and men who like to dine
The dishes are all theirs, of course, the haute cuisine was mine.
*
I never had a dishwasher, I never had the space…
I just had hordes of teenage gannets mulling round the place.
No matter what I cooked or baked, it went at lightning speed,
I never really knew how many mouths I’d have to feed.
*
Right from the start their friends would come and knock upon the door,
It started with just one or two, but soon came many more.
They’d smile up, looking hopeful, saying, “Missus, have you baked?”
I’d let them in and feed them, then they’d run off duly caked.
*
But then they grew, instead of looking up they now…
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Nine Deadly Sins with Coffee, part 52 – A Descent of Fire
by Steve Tanham
Nine Deadly Sins with Coffee, part 52 – A Descent of Fire
.Alexandra.
When I was younger I did some flying lessons. They began as ‘Try Out Day’ gift for one of my birthdays, and developed into an expensive hobby which I had to give up when I took out a mortgage on my midweek apartment in London.
As soon as I experienced the sheer joy of the Carnforth Flying School’s venerable Cessna talking off from it’s old grass strip near our home, I was hooked. Climbing, steeply, into the air and seeing the landscape falling away, below, was like entering a new world – one quite different from a trip in a commercial plane: scrubbed nicely clean and sanitised…
Tightly buckled into the small cabin of the Cessna, with my instructor next to me, sharing the intercom link in the headset, was a magical experience.
That was many years ago. There was no coffee in the cabin today, though. And my instructor was no stranger…
“I didn’t realise you had become a pilot!” I shouted above the noisy but vibrant engine. “Did you know I had done some flying, too?”
“Yes–you told me, once – many years ago.” John took his eyes off the altimeter and smiled across at me. My headset cracked with his voice. “Didn’t you stop just before you were due to do your first solo flight?”
I nodded, conserving my throat. There was sadness at the memory; a thing not finished, a road not taken…
“I did some student flying in my thirties,” said John, “But it got very expensive; too expensive for our young business to support,” he nodded at the memory, his eyes also somewhere far away. “Went back to it when I retired from the IT world. Recently qualified as an instructor!”
“So what’s all this got to do with Prometheus, the Hound of Hell, and Heracles?” I said.
John looked down through his side window. We were levelling off from our steep climb and turning Westwards.
“Notice how the worlds change; how ‘lived in’ become a ‘map from above’?” he said, ignoring my question.
“You couldn’t have a coffee with someone up here in the air!” I laughed, getting his drift. “Unless you were in the same plane…”
John smiled at that. “I’ve brought a flask, but I’m saving the coffee for something special.”
I turned to look at him, but the ironic smile on the lips said that there’d be no more for now… I decided to elaborate on what I knew to be an important connection between the scale of things and their realms, “But down there on the ground, where the view is much more local and small-scale, there are people drinking at Rose’s Cafe.”
Morecambe was just coming into view on the horizon, the early sun catching the tops of the taller buildings, making golden shards out of the faded glory of the old seaside town. It was beautiful…
“Which way then? Your choice!” asked John, levelling the plane off at our cruising altitude, somewhere over the small town of Kirby Lonsdale. Far below there were a multitude of tearooms, I thought, smiling to myself, but we wouldn’t be visiting them, either.
He never wasted an opportunity. I knew the choice of direction was a metaphor. “Pick what to do…a bit like Cerberus, then – the three headed dog? The one that guards the entrance to Hades?”
He laughed at my artifice. “Three heads, three choices?” he said. “And I like ‘guards’. Go on then…the enigma of the three headed dog that stops dead people leaving?”
“One of the central issues of our lives – the trap of Desire!” I said over the resonant boom of the engine and its whining thrum-thrum.
He banked us slightly left, taking us onto an easterly course. The line of the distant ocean was a field of gold, lit from the dawn sky behind us. “And the other two heads?”
“The left is sensation, the right, ‘good intentions’. They all have snakes wrapped around them…symbols of Illusion, I believe?”
John nodded. “Very good,” he said, levelling us off with the shining gold dead ahead. “And does Heracles attack the Sensations or the Good Intentions?”
“Neither!” I laughed, over the whining notes. “He strangles the middle one – Desire, itself, with his bare hands,” I’d had another flash of inspiration and added, “and thereby frees himself…and all the other dead people, if you think about it…”
“Like Buddha, then – he attacks the cause, not the symptoms…” John was smiling so much, his teeth were catching the gold of the sun, too. “Wonderful stuff! All yours, then…”
He sat back and let go of the controls. The Cessna’s nose began to dip, slightly – he hadn’t trimmed for level flight; probably deliberately!
“No!” I screamed into the dawn. But my hands reached out and took the controls as the old memories and skills came back to aid me.
“The Carnforth field is on 120 degrees, over there.” He pointed into the golden air. “You can set her down on your own–you can fly us to the underworld…”
My mind was shouting, but strangely, there was a sense of calmness; of purpose, there too. “Where’s the wind?” I yelled into the mike.
“Coming straight off the sea, I would say, right in line with our approach to the strip… you’ve been blessed with the perfect approach!” He looked around us then clicked on his radio link. “Charlie-Victor-Delta-Hotel forty-two…final…”
“Roger Charlie-Victor-Delta-Hotel forty-two.” Crackled the almost instant response.
Were they all in on it? I wondered.
“Damn you, uncle John,” I muttered, loud enough to be heard in his headset.
He chuckled. “Very appropriate that… besides, you seemed keen to take the controls.”
I was about to object, violently. when I realised he was talking metaphorically. Yes, sod it, I had pushed to take the ‘controls’; and had obviously seemed ready to go ‘solo’ even if he was next to me in the cabin… I wondered… Maybe one was never alone in the cabin of life, just not used to conversing with a loving intelligence that always sat next to us…
The landscape was getting bigger, houses and churches were becoming clearer, below, in all their detail. I recognised the height, the speed, the distance… I was doing it right…
About a half mile out from the small grass airstrip, which I could now see, there was a sudden flash of red and gold below us. I looked down and, for a second, I’ll swear I could see a tiny shadow of the plane in the gold-licked metal of the Glasgow to London train as it flashed by at a huge speed.
Then there was no more time to think, just to act. “Flaps to twenty,” I said pushing the the throttle back in, and trimming the plane as we coasted over the edge of the field and seemed to hang in the air, sinking very gently to land with a noisy series of bumps.
The Cessna quickly lost her speed on the grassy runway. With a simple, “I have control.” John upped the revs and taxied her off the runway and onto a remote part of the boundary, while I sat, numbed and looking straight ahead, silent and happy in a way I could not find words for.
I came to in the now silent cabin, at the smell of coffee being poured from a flask. The aroma filled the small space, along with another, less expected smell. I turned round to see him holding a steaming plastic mug out to me. In his other hand, he had a miniature bottle of cognac.
“The cognac’s for my cup of coffee,” he said with a wily smile.
“Why?” I whispered, feigning outrage.
“Because I’m preserving your liver,” he said, chuckling…
(Image – Prometheus and the return of the vulture)
———————————————————–
Nine Deadly Sins with Coffee is usually published on Thursdays.
©Copyright, The Silent Eye School of Consciousness, 2016.
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Stunning photo from SmackedPentax.
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Running Elk and Sue conspire…
Sun in Gemini 
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