Chapter 10 - in which I sift through the debris and discover beauty

I’m on my own really. Now that I’ve seen all that happened at Cnut’s beach party, and seen how it continues to this day – there’s no one I can turn to for help, as they’re all avoiding the goblin that’s standing before them, Dr Fenwick included.

Crash! The whole of my reality support structure has collapsed in one fell swoop. Nothing that anyone is saying or doing is going to make a blind bit of difference, coz they’re all avoiding the simple truth, they’re all players in Cnut’s drama whether they realise it or not. The only ones who are for real are the ones who’ve agreed to face their darkest fears and see the nasty looking goblin.

You know, I’ve been back to that beach more times than I care to remember, and I was wondering if the goblin is fundamentally evil – a demon of sorts – and yes – in 3D that’s how you’d see it, but in terms of what is – from Faery perspective it perfectly matches whatever we needed in order to enter the particular side branch of story that we call the “modern age”. In their natural habitat, doing what goblin’s naturally do – they’re no better or worse than anything else – though you’re going to find that exceptionally hard to believe the first time you lay eyes on this ugly brute. You see, in order to create this somewhat artificial reality – in order to create this deviation from story’s broadest channel, it was necessary to cross wires – and that’s bound to create disharmony and ugliness. So with the wires crossed, and humanity willing to go along with Cnut’s proposal, we find ourselves in a world where it makes perfect sense to amass wealth at the expense of fellow humans, where it makes sense to destroy the very planet you’re living on, where it makes sense to live in fear of death and ask what the meaning of life might be – what else would you expect when the wires are crossed.

Uncrossing them ain’t difficult – it simply requires you to face what is – unconditionally. Now, when I say “ain’t difficult” in a sort of stylised American slang, I mean it doesn’t require any advanced, technical or magicky knowledge. It’s all good old fashioned heart based soul yearning for what simply is, as opposed to what seems to be. Once I’ve had enough of all the lies and deception – and they’ll never end until I’ve really had enough and completely made up my mind to be done with them – why then it’s child’s play. A moment of crisis. A complete shift of perspective. A sudden awareness that nothing is as it seems, and then, shock horror, a grotesque goblin leering at me – doing everything in its power to get me to step back into the modern mind of “what matters”.

It’s a bit like the old folk tale Tam Lin – his pregnant bride-to-be can only rescue him from the Queen of the Fairies if she holds on to him through thick and thin, even when he turns into a lion, a bear, a lizard, a snake... When he finally turns into a burning coal she’s to throw him into the well, and then he’s hers – happy ending. Well, the modern mind is willing to try almost any trick to get us to back off. It’ll put the fear of God into us, give us panic attacks, make us see demons, whatever it takes to keep us in thrall to Cnut’s story amendment – but once you understand the process – that neither your mind nor the goblin nor anyone else can hurt you – then it’s all just water off a duck’s back. You face your deepest darkest fear – and find yourself exactly where you were a moment ago – only this is real and that was seem. Here your mind is your own and working in harmony with Story, whereas there, in seem, the wires are crossed and no matter what you do, or how hard you try, you always end up serving the very cause you most wish to oppose and defeat. That’s a paradox if ever I saw one.

So, are you ready to get REAL? Are you ready to face the simple truth, the isness of be. It ain’t hard though it’s going to rock you to the very core. Can you handle that, or are you a drama queen who’d prefer to die than to admit you’ve been living a half-baked lie, that you were complicit in this right from the very start – even though you like to think “they’re the bad guys” and you’re the unwilling victim.

“Er... Josh old man. I don’t mean to interrupt you in the flow and all, but how can you say that we were all complicit? That was like a thousand years ago. We couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with it – unless you’re being all biblical about this and saying the sins of the fathers are visited on the children?”

Oh, hi Gwyn, nice of you to join me. Yes, I do tend to get carried away with my tub thumping rhetoric, don’t I... now, remember that this is story so time as you know it doesn’t really exist. You see, in terms of story we’re in fractal territory. Nothing new is ever created unless you go back to the source, back to creation itself, and you can’t do that when you or your fathers have agreed to look away collectively, and enter a reality in which “what” –  “matters”. Unless you consciously choose to go back and deal with the issue, you’re nothing more than a subset, a fraction of your fathers. It means that, strange though it may seem, until you deal with the issue within yourself, you were there, present on the strand with Cnut, no less than your great-grandfather³⁶ all those years ago.

But that’s er...

Impossible. Yes. Precisely. It makes absolutely no sense to the rational mind which insists on thinking within the box of linear space-time. End of story. Don’t even bother trying to go down that road – it ain’t gonna work. Leave the rational modern mind of “what matters” at home to clean the dishes, and experience this directly if you choose to, consciously, if and only if you truly desire to get back to what simply is: the isness of be.

Er... so I have to just take your word for it – isn’t that what you’re saying?

No Gwyn, my main man. Take it with a large pinch of salt, or a vodka martini, or however you like – it’s entirely up to you. But if, perchance, you’ve noticed that nothing seems to be right in your world, and that try as you might, collectively, you just don’t seem to be able to fix it – you might, for a change, consider that this is precisely the way things should and would naturally be when you enter a conspiracy with sorcerer King Cnut to shunt reality from Story’s mainline quantum stream into a fetid sideline that promises the world but never quite delivers. It’s a mathematical certainty that your world will, and, can only collapse as it has an expiry date. Such is the nature of story. No illusion can last forever, like a bubble blown – no matter how hard people try to keep it going. Why do you think there was so much killing in the 20^th Century?

No idea.

Blood sacrifices – feeding the beast, so to speak. It was the only way to keep that reality from collapsing under the weight of its internal contradictions. But this, you see, is a kind of ponzi scheme that requires exponential increases to sustain its self-consuming appetite. In any case, there are a load of children coming into the world now who weren’t signatories to this agreement – which is making it even harder to sustain the so called “modern age”.

So how come you have children slipping through the net into this world if they’re not part of this story?

Well, that’s because Cnut and his followers were never able to completely cut out Faery. People went along with their version of reality unwillingly, under compulsion, but they carried on being human beings, inspired by nature, writing, painting, dancing, creating, and so they opened portals, gateways into this reality, which came to look like a swiss cheese riddled with holes.

So you mean that art really matters? It’s not just a pleasant distraction?

Yep – 100%. It was Dostoevsky who said beauty would save the world, and he wasn’t talking about a beautiful woman or landscape. “Beauty” is seen whenever we create something magical – for to do so we transcend the illusion of our material age, and rediscover Faery’s limitless...

Er... limitless what?

You can call it that if you like – Faery’s limitless “what”, though I prefer to give it no name whatsoever.

Listening to myself speaking with Gwyn and others it’s bizarre – I sound like I’m Faery’s greatest advocate, selling its produce and wares, but I’m the one who chose to shut it out, and the thought of going back to Gill and Roger’s world is still off limits - too much to handle.

So I’m in a kind of twilight zone – on the one hand I’m using Faery magic by activating my beetle mark. Doing so means I can see the wood from the trees and make sense of our cart-before-the-horse, wires-are-crossed reality. And Faery is growing bigger regardless of my resistance, for example, there’s what I call "hyperspace". It’s not quite the same as in Star trek – you don’t need a spaceship travelling at the speed of light because light doesn’t actually have a speed at all. Hyperspace, as I use the term, refers to space that doesn’t fit into our 3D box reality grid – what you call the matrix. The only trouble is you’re almost completely unaware of it as long as you’re stuck in the modern mind of “what really matters”. Once you start facing reality – once you’ve dealt with the goblin and his cohorts, yes, there’s more than one, but of that another time, you’re ready to see what is... and being multi-dimensional, it goes without saying that space-time is not going to be uniformly even. It’s like a river where the current varies, or a sea that is tidal and has currents flowing in different directions. It can also be like a website with pop-up windows and hyperlinks connecting with other sites. I tell you this merely as a teaser – to whet your imagination – to encourage you to consider the alternative to your flat Cartesian 3D reality.

I seem to be losing the battle as you can see. There seems to be no way back into the Matrix. I have no wish to deny the truth of what I have learnt, what is...

So, here I am, like King Cnut an age earlier, on the fast diminishing strand before the floodtide of Faery, yet feeling decidedly un-Canutish – more James the Second-ish – planning to make myself scarce, to flee unceremoniously, disguised as a woman if need be. I’m not proud. I’m not afraid to be the laughing stock of popular history. Sanity rather than salinity is my chief concern and “impending” is the operative word, as I sense the sickle sword of Faery slicing through the final threads of my lifeline to normality. But where to flee – I have as yet no answer.