![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Of Gods who would be men
Jun. 4th, 2021 10:40 amIt is time to move forward. Sixth grade was traumatic for Glenn. It was, as much as possible for a child who may have been, as they say, a little bit on the spectrum, a sucky place. Rarely understanding exactly what the heck was going on, Glenn struggled to find meaning and depth in any sort of thing that the children and adults did at his school. He was lucky he had no friends, as his friends wouldn't have been friends, for sure and true. They would have been folks who found pleasure in humiliation, acquaintances who felt that his true purpose was to support them when they needed it, but to certainly be the butt of their personal jokes.
At least, that is how it felt to him, many times as he traveled his personal roads in life. Bitter much, dear Glenn?
Seventh grade, also known as Junior high, brought about many changes. Hormones for one. He was becoming a raging hormone beast, believing in one moment that he was in love and in the next that he was totally unlovable. In short, he was becoming a teenager. Yes, he was only 12. There is no law that says that you have to be thirteen to be a Teenager. Just as becoming an adult can happen through all sorts of means simply because life and experience pushes you that direction. It's a thing, you know? It happens and it's kind of a drag.
Seventh grade and Glenn found that he wasn't so odd that everybody was out to get him. Granted, back in Sixth grade, he had been a new kid on the block. When he started Seventh grade, so did everybody else, and everybody else was an alien too, so it just made more sense that he was not just the odd man out, but so was everybody else. Including the girls.
Girls! There's a concept. Glenn had a few friends who had been girls back in Indiana, and, although they weren't built like farm implements (yet), they might very well have been headed that way. He could remember exactly two, with remembering a lot fuzzy a whole bunch. Brenda Ritter and Betsy Barteau.
Oh, how he fell head over heals for Betsy Barteau. She made his little heart just pound in his chest and his head would spin around and about and not one single time did he know what this meant. There were moments when he wanted nothing more than to spend every single waking moment in her company and quite possibly some non waking moments as well. As he got older by four or five decades, he might have remembered her in dreams, as some of the characters he dreamt about were people he could not quite identify. They looked familiar, but then, in some ways he didn't quite understand, they looked totally unfamiliar.
Brenda Ritter was an across the street neighbor who would have tea parties with her dolls and dollhouses and invite Glenn and his brothers over. There was even one time when Glenn went. Brenda, like Glenn, was not from a well to do family. She was, indeed, from that rarity of the 50's; a mixed family. It was decades later when Glenn would wonder about her, wonder what had happened to her, and hoped her life had become like one of her tea parties. Perfect and innocent and way from pain and hurt.
Oddly, it was Brenda who Glenn would think of the most of all his childhood people. She was such a minor player, but somehow carried so much weight. It seems that almost begs the question of 'is there really such a thing as a minor character?'.
There were other 'minor' players, many and many. Two hands full of many, names somewhat faded with time, faces obscured by the clouds of memory, but still there, like a Greek chorus full of spear carriers.
Back then, though, he was a boy, with a boy's heart and a boy's head, often dreaming of kite flying and climbing the next hill and romance was... well, it was something else all together that he didn't understand as a boy. And yet. And yet... there was something in him that wasn't exactly a boy. Something that remembered things.
Sometimes when he was meditating in the bare bones dining room, facing away from the 100 year old dining table and focused on the one plank in the floor that could be pulled up so you could see into the basement, he would drift away, away, away.
He didn't know it was called meditating. Now, if the television show Kung Fu had been on, then by all means, he might have picked it up from that source. But no, that show didn't appear until 1972, and at this point it was only 1965. It may have come from his readings, as the books that he brought home frequently from the municipal library might have contained mentions of meditation, but his studies were more along the lines of Science and science fiction. It is unlikely that in any of the books he had read by Doyle or Heinlein or Bradbury or Einstein or any number of authors who had written about physics or science or mystery that the concept of mediation had ever come up.
There are, as there always are, possible exceptions. One could have been Sherlock Holmes, by the eminent Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, when he talked bout how to develop powers of concentration beyond those of mere mortals. There may have been some dabbling into the metaphysical realms with such authors as H.P. Lovecraft or Edgar Allen Poe.
Fifty decades later, two of Poe's stories would continue to be carried in Glenn's heart and his head. One, a tale of horror and death entitled "Hop-Frog; Or, the Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs", was about the red death, humiliation and eventual justice, in the form of revenge. Another was "The Cask of Amontillado", again a tale of justice in the form of revenge. There may be a pattern here.
Understand, young Glenn was indeed, young. Slights were big things to him. He often suffered beating from his older brother. He often was the victim of his youngest brother's accusations, and therefore recipient of beatings for youthful crimes he had not committed. There were a multitude of things done to him to twist his mind to thinking of dark thoughts, of revenge, of unsavory concepts.
It was a blessing when Glenn, in some form or another, came to find the concept of meditation, or perhaps the concept of mediation came looking for him. Regardless, they found each other, and it was not meditation as if you were just sitting there with your eyes closed. No, not this. This was the meditation of someone who was taking a deep dark dive into his own being, his own worth, screaming at the top of his non-existent lungs "Who am I? What am I?" into the eternal darkness that is inside each of us, deep, deep down.
Indeed, that is what his meditation was like. He would climb inside himself and just keep climbing. Deeper, deeper, down and down, through his head, down his spine, to the center of himself and deeper still. Once the center is found, where is the center of the center? And the center of that, ad infinitum?
Every time he went in, he went deeper. It was as if he was reliving his sick dream all over again, with out the nausea, without the mocking laughter. There was only darkness and silence, and then a deeper darkness and a deeper silence. As if he was peeling away the layers of black paint to find even more layers of even darker black, he continued in, and down, and in, not knowing what he was searching for, or even why he was searching, only that he was and it was something that he had to do.
It is possible that he was hiding from his life during those times of mediation. It was also possible that he was doing something just for the hell of it. Regardless of the reason, he did it, and not just once. There were many times he would find himself woken up by Mother, who was gently shaking him awake. As one who had carried catatonia all her life, perhaps she recognized, or though she recognized the symptoms and was felt her son had contracted the illness from her.
Farther from the truth, young Glenn was an explorer, a spelunker into the darkness of the human soul; his own. The final time, as a child, that he did a deep dive of this nature, he went to where he felt that he had met the very center of his soul. A complete and total darkness from which the only respite was just one tiny pinprick of light existed.
Such fancy and fantastic language, no?
But you see, this is the essence of magic. Sounds have frequencies. Frequencies are vibrations. Vibrations are the motors that moves the Universe and it is the Universe in which all things happen... except those that happen elsewhere.
But in this universe, the universe of Glenn, vibration is key, vibration is master... understand and harness vibration and, my friend, you will hold the key to Everything, with a capital E, in the palm of your hand. There are some caveats, which we shall get to in the bye and bye.
So, so, so and so. Back to Seventh grade we go. Hormonal and alone, carrying crushes like a handful of daisies and wishes. And crushes there were!
Janet, the crush de la saison, was his first long lasting crush. He worshiped her look, her style, the way she moved, the way she spoke. Pretty much everything about her. She on the other hand, had little to no recognition that he existed.
She might speak to him, but it was the passing sort of 'Christian' thing to do. She was very much a Christian. One of those folks who truly tried to do their very best, not because of a fear of a God, but because it was the decent thing to do.
She was slender, with long blonde hair and bangs so straight you could measure the earth's meridian with them. Narrow face and sharp visage, one could tell that she was intelligent right off the bat, even if she wasn't.
Glenn didn't know it, but it was Janet who would become his very first vibrational partner. This is not as dirty as it might sound. Follow please:
In all the universe, there is harmony and discord. That's pretty much it. Ying and Yang. Black and white, shades of gray or grey. I get those two confused. Regardless, there are really only two states of anything. There could be more, since there are greater than 27 dimensions, but you didn't hear it here.
Harmony and discord. Even in our own voices there are those two. Even in the smallest quanta there is harmony and discord. States of energy. States of vibration. Same, same, see? Vibration is energy. Energy is vibration.
It's completely possible that there may be more than just this, but this is just the hypothesis that currently works in Glenn's mind, so let's run with it.
Harmony is the state when things all move together, as one or close to one. Sometimes it just when things mesh and make for a calmness, be it music or trees or a crowded elevator. Or two people.
Discord is when things don't mesh, when things don't move together and instead crash around as if it was the bumper car ride at spring break. Do they still have those things, bumper car rides, or have mothers caused them to be outlawed due to the dangerous nature of the ride, and the possibility for whiplash?
Discord works with the grinding of diamonds, some forms of music like jazz or rap or punk. It works with war as in the Seeds of Discord. It works in politics. Basically, discord can be incredibly uncomfortable Be it war, or the grinding of diamonds or rap music. Or two people.
If you have ever walked into a room and felt an immediate attraction to someone, and not in a sexual or sensual way, but in a way that says 'I must meet that person', or even more subtle, so that you gravitate toward each other as if you were two celestial bodies pulled along toward each other's gravitational well until you find that spot of gravitational equilibrium or Isostasy. It is here where two people look at each other and think 'It is as if we have known each other for ever', and indeed, that might very well be the case.
Discord, on the other hand, exactly as one would expect, mirrors this. You walk into a room and you immediately want to leave. You see someone and you know, in that millisecond, that the possibility of friendship here is nil, non existent, nada. It is uncomfortable and you can feel the push of their gravity well shoving you far away.
Interestingly, this may also be the case where you have known each other for ever, and that is why you can't stand each other.
This is not a bad thing. This is not a good thing. This is just a thing.
Glenn found that he had started to attract and be attracted to the people who would nourish him, and in turn, he would nourish.
By nourish, it means feed the soul, the curiosity, the intellect. He found individuals, and on occasion, groups of people with whom he could discuss most of the things rambling around in his head.
"What is the nature of life?" "What is the nature of love?" "What is God?" "Why is God?" "Why are people, in general, so stupid?" "Why do I continue to question, when it would be much easier to just surrender to the numbness of whatever passes for a mind these days?"
These are some of the questions that young Glenn had. Of course, he also had questions like "What is a rainbow?". He was fairly typical of anyone of his age and generation. He had read a quote from Albert Einstein, one of the physicists that would stay with him all his life. That quote said, to paraphrase just a tad, "Never stop questioning."
And he didn't. Ever. All through his young life, starting in the 7th grade, where he realized he was alone in his thoughts even though he had begun to develop friendships and build relationships, he was always searching and researching. Later in life, he would say "There is no bad information. There is only information."
In truth, he was a nerd. A geek. That weird kid who would spend his lunchtimes alone, reading books. Reading was his constant companion and he did it wherever he went. He found that he was quite comfortable walking and reading as his peripheral vision was such that he never ran into anything. He would be found sitting in a park, reading. He would be found in his room, reading. he would be found... anywhere... reading.
And music. He had music in his head, he had music in his house, he had music on the radio. Music helped him think, helped him stay calm and not be so damn angry all the time.
When he turned 12, his family moved into a two story house. It was in a relatively undeveloped part of Broken Arrow, which was growing fast. It was a nice house, and his mother demanded that they buy the lot next door, so there would be some room to grow, and there would be no neighbors on that corner. This was done and that lot remained empty until after the divorce, when Father and his new wife, Hydra, decided to sell the land to a developer. A small single story house was built there and a new family bought it up quickly.
Life moves on, apparently.
There was, a few blocks away from the house, a small park, a creek, and a wooded area. It was a wild area, owned by the city, and during the year any number of children could be found there, playing, running trails, wading in the creek or swinging across it on long, thick grapevines, which grew in abundance. Tarzan yells could be heard echoing out of the wood, and no adult was ever seen there to put the world to adult order. It was paradise.
There was also a field, yellow with tall grasses and had small trails that the animals would use in their search for food or shelter. It was here that Glenn's life found peace, a place to meditate and relax, away from the noise of anyone else. It was here that Glenn's life changed for the mystical.
-*-
At least, that is how it felt to him, many times as he traveled his personal roads in life. Bitter much, dear Glenn?
Seventh grade, also known as Junior high, brought about many changes. Hormones for one. He was becoming a raging hormone beast, believing in one moment that he was in love and in the next that he was totally unlovable. In short, he was becoming a teenager. Yes, he was only 12. There is no law that says that you have to be thirteen to be a Teenager. Just as becoming an adult can happen through all sorts of means simply because life and experience pushes you that direction. It's a thing, you know? It happens and it's kind of a drag.
Seventh grade and Glenn found that he wasn't so odd that everybody was out to get him. Granted, back in Sixth grade, he had been a new kid on the block. When he started Seventh grade, so did everybody else, and everybody else was an alien too, so it just made more sense that he was not just the odd man out, but so was everybody else. Including the girls.
Girls! There's a concept. Glenn had a few friends who had been girls back in Indiana, and, although they weren't built like farm implements (yet), they might very well have been headed that way. He could remember exactly two, with remembering a lot fuzzy a whole bunch. Brenda Ritter and Betsy Barteau.
Oh, how he fell head over heals for Betsy Barteau. She made his little heart just pound in his chest and his head would spin around and about and not one single time did he know what this meant. There were moments when he wanted nothing more than to spend every single waking moment in her company and quite possibly some non waking moments as well. As he got older by four or five decades, he might have remembered her in dreams, as some of the characters he dreamt about were people he could not quite identify. They looked familiar, but then, in some ways he didn't quite understand, they looked totally unfamiliar.
Brenda Ritter was an across the street neighbor who would have tea parties with her dolls and dollhouses and invite Glenn and his brothers over. There was even one time when Glenn went. Brenda, like Glenn, was not from a well to do family. She was, indeed, from that rarity of the 50's; a mixed family. It was decades later when Glenn would wonder about her, wonder what had happened to her, and hoped her life had become like one of her tea parties. Perfect and innocent and way from pain and hurt.
Oddly, it was Brenda who Glenn would think of the most of all his childhood people. She was such a minor player, but somehow carried so much weight. It seems that almost begs the question of 'is there really such a thing as a minor character?'.
There were other 'minor' players, many and many. Two hands full of many, names somewhat faded with time, faces obscured by the clouds of memory, but still there, like a Greek chorus full of spear carriers.
Back then, though, he was a boy, with a boy's heart and a boy's head, often dreaming of kite flying and climbing the next hill and romance was... well, it was something else all together that he didn't understand as a boy. And yet. And yet... there was something in him that wasn't exactly a boy. Something that remembered things.
Sometimes when he was meditating in the bare bones dining room, facing away from the 100 year old dining table and focused on the one plank in the floor that could be pulled up so you could see into the basement, he would drift away, away, away.
He didn't know it was called meditating. Now, if the television show Kung Fu had been on, then by all means, he might have picked it up from that source. But no, that show didn't appear until 1972, and at this point it was only 1965. It may have come from his readings, as the books that he brought home frequently from the municipal library might have contained mentions of meditation, but his studies were more along the lines of Science and science fiction. It is unlikely that in any of the books he had read by Doyle or Heinlein or Bradbury or Einstein or any number of authors who had written about physics or science or mystery that the concept of mediation had ever come up.
There are, as there always are, possible exceptions. One could have been Sherlock Holmes, by the eminent Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, when he talked bout how to develop powers of concentration beyond those of mere mortals. There may have been some dabbling into the metaphysical realms with such authors as H.P. Lovecraft or Edgar Allen Poe.
Fifty decades later, two of Poe's stories would continue to be carried in Glenn's heart and his head. One, a tale of horror and death entitled "Hop-Frog; Or, the Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs", was about the red death, humiliation and eventual justice, in the form of revenge. Another was "The Cask of Amontillado", again a tale of justice in the form of revenge. There may be a pattern here.
Understand, young Glenn was indeed, young. Slights were big things to him. He often suffered beating from his older brother. He often was the victim of his youngest brother's accusations, and therefore recipient of beatings for youthful crimes he had not committed. There were a multitude of things done to him to twist his mind to thinking of dark thoughts, of revenge, of unsavory concepts.
It was a blessing when Glenn, in some form or another, came to find the concept of meditation, or perhaps the concept of mediation came looking for him. Regardless, they found each other, and it was not meditation as if you were just sitting there with your eyes closed. No, not this. This was the meditation of someone who was taking a deep dark dive into his own being, his own worth, screaming at the top of his non-existent lungs "Who am I? What am I?" into the eternal darkness that is inside each of us, deep, deep down.
Indeed, that is what his meditation was like. He would climb inside himself and just keep climbing. Deeper, deeper, down and down, through his head, down his spine, to the center of himself and deeper still. Once the center is found, where is the center of the center? And the center of that, ad infinitum?
Every time he went in, he went deeper. It was as if he was reliving his sick dream all over again, with out the nausea, without the mocking laughter. There was only darkness and silence, and then a deeper darkness and a deeper silence. As if he was peeling away the layers of black paint to find even more layers of even darker black, he continued in, and down, and in, not knowing what he was searching for, or even why he was searching, only that he was and it was something that he had to do.
It is possible that he was hiding from his life during those times of mediation. It was also possible that he was doing something just for the hell of it. Regardless of the reason, he did it, and not just once. There were many times he would find himself woken up by Mother, who was gently shaking him awake. As one who had carried catatonia all her life, perhaps she recognized, or though she recognized the symptoms and was felt her son had contracted the illness from her.
Farther from the truth, young Glenn was an explorer, a spelunker into the darkness of the human soul; his own. The final time, as a child, that he did a deep dive of this nature, he went to where he felt that he had met the very center of his soul. A complete and total darkness from which the only respite was just one tiny pinprick of light existed.
Such fancy and fantastic language, no?
But you see, this is the essence of magic. Sounds have frequencies. Frequencies are vibrations. Vibrations are the motors that moves the Universe and it is the Universe in which all things happen... except those that happen elsewhere.
But in this universe, the universe of Glenn, vibration is key, vibration is master... understand and harness vibration and, my friend, you will hold the key to Everything, with a capital E, in the palm of your hand. There are some caveats, which we shall get to in the bye and bye.
So, so, so and so. Back to Seventh grade we go. Hormonal and alone, carrying crushes like a handful of daisies and wishes. And crushes there were!
Janet, the crush de la saison, was his first long lasting crush. He worshiped her look, her style, the way she moved, the way she spoke. Pretty much everything about her. She on the other hand, had little to no recognition that he existed.
She might speak to him, but it was the passing sort of 'Christian' thing to do. She was very much a Christian. One of those folks who truly tried to do their very best, not because of a fear of a God, but because it was the decent thing to do.
She was slender, with long blonde hair and bangs so straight you could measure the earth's meridian with them. Narrow face and sharp visage, one could tell that she was intelligent right off the bat, even if she wasn't.
Glenn didn't know it, but it was Janet who would become his very first vibrational partner. This is not as dirty as it might sound. Follow please:
In all the universe, there is harmony and discord. That's pretty much it. Ying and Yang. Black and white, shades of gray or grey. I get those two confused. Regardless, there are really only two states of anything. There could be more, since there are greater than 27 dimensions, but you didn't hear it here.
Harmony and discord. Even in our own voices there are those two. Even in the smallest quanta there is harmony and discord. States of energy. States of vibration. Same, same, see? Vibration is energy. Energy is vibration.
It's completely possible that there may be more than just this, but this is just the hypothesis that currently works in Glenn's mind, so let's run with it.
Harmony is the state when things all move together, as one or close to one. Sometimes it just when things mesh and make for a calmness, be it music or trees or a crowded elevator. Or two people.
Discord is when things don't mesh, when things don't move together and instead crash around as if it was the bumper car ride at spring break. Do they still have those things, bumper car rides, or have mothers caused them to be outlawed due to the dangerous nature of the ride, and the possibility for whiplash?
Discord works with the grinding of diamonds, some forms of music like jazz or rap or punk. It works with war as in the Seeds of Discord. It works in politics. Basically, discord can be incredibly uncomfortable Be it war, or the grinding of diamonds or rap music. Or two people.
If you have ever walked into a room and felt an immediate attraction to someone, and not in a sexual or sensual way, but in a way that says 'I must meet that person', or even more subtle, so that you gravitate toward each other as if you were two celestial bodies pulled along toward each other's gravitational well until you find that spot of gravitational equilibrium or Isostasy. It is here where two people look at each other and think 'It is as if we have known each other for ever', and indeed, that might very well be the case.
Discord, on the other hand, exactly as one would expect, mirrors this. You walk into a room and you immediately want to leave. You see someone and you know, in that millisecond, that the possibility of friendship here is nil, non existent, nada. It is uncomfortable and you can feel the push of their gravity well shoving you far away.
Interestingly, this may also be the case where you have known each other for ever, and that is why you can't stand each other.
This is not a bad thing. This is not a good thing. This is just a thing.
Glenn found that he had started to attract and be attracted to the people who would nourish him, and in turn, he would nourish.
By nourish, it means feed the soul, the curiosity, the intellect. He found individuals, and on occasion, groups of people with whom he could discuss most of the things rambling around in his head.
"What is the nature of life?" "What is the nature of love?" "What is God?" "Why is God?" "Why are people, in general, so stupid?" "Why do I continue to question, when it would be much easier to just surrender to the numbness of whatever passes for a mind these days?"
These are some of the questions that young Glenn had. Of course, he also had questions like "What is a rainbow?". He was fairly typical of anyone of his age and generation. He had read a quote from Albert Einstein, one of the physicists that would stay with him all his life. That quote said, to paraphrase just a tad, "Never stop questioning."
And he didn't. Ever. All through his young life, starting in the 7th grade, where he realized he was alone in his thoughts even though he had begun to develop friendships and build relationships, he was always searching and researching. Later in life, he would say "There is no bad information. There is only information."
In truth, he was a nerd. A geek. That weird kid who would spend his lunchtimes alone, reading books. Reading was his constant companion and he did it wherever he went. He found that he was quite comfortable walking and reading as his peripheral vision was such that he never ran into anything. He would be found sitting in a park, reading. He would be found in his room, reading. he would be found... anywhere... reading.
And music. He had music in his head, he had music in his house, he had music on the radio. Music helped him think, helped him stay calm and not be so damn angry all the time.
When he turned 12, his family moved into a two story house. It was in a relatively undeveloped part of Broken Arrow, which was growing fast. It was a nice house, and his mother demanded that they buy the lot next door, so there would be some room to grow, and there would be no neighbors on that corner. This was done and that lot remained empty until after the divorce, when Father and his new wife, Hydra, decided to sell the land to a developer. A small single story house was built there and a new family bought it up quickly.
Life moves on, apparently.
There was, a few blocks away from the house, a small park, a creek, and a wooded area. It was a wild area, owned by the city, and during the year any number of children could be found there, playing, running trails, wading in the creek or swinging across it on long, thick grapevines, which grew in abundance. Tarzan yells could be heard echoing out of the wood, and no adult was ever seen there to put the world to adult order. It was paradise.
There was also a field, yellow with tall grasses and had small trails that the animals would use in their search for food or shelter. It was here that Glenn's life found peace, a place to meditate and relax, away from the noise of anyone else. It was here that Glenn's life changed for the mystical.
-*-
