A FABLE

Hailstorm pity of low coins dented the alms bowl with desperate scratches, thousands of mild affronts shaken off with benevolence, yet accruing as a jail cell patina that transformed its surface daily, altered its nature over time.   Years spent under siege drove the vessel deep inside its carrier, a man whose skin adopted the temperament of metal—dispassionate receptor incapable of retaining warmth even when the man waded through the torrid syrup of market crowds or lay down among rows of itinerant strangers to sleep.   Housed under his brittle tarpaulin erased of moles and pores, the ewer became an infected organ and ruptured.

Imploding bronze carved open soft tissue, killing its host, who fell within the property lines of a wealthy manor house, where he had gone to plead for alms.   Rejected by a servant tethered to kitchen ovens by a cord of tripe twisted with boiled root vegetables and blunted nerve impulses, the pilgrim left uncharitable grandeur and chose an overgrown path leading back down a forested hill towards the front gate.  Banyan roots spit the traveler out of tangled shade and into plumes of ochre dust that slowly abraded the cloth from his flesh as he crossed the farm yard and moved forward on eroding limbs.  He faltered and fell among the animals, dying level with forgiving beasts.  Facing twelve pink underbellies in a sightless stare, the man came to rest amid curious pigs, forced now to trot around the monk’s body, which transformed the surface patterns of the yard daily, altered its nature by orchestrating the movement of animals over time—since no one bothered to remove the corpse.

Eventually, the traveler’s remains haunted the pen as a cage of calcium lace, then sank into the ground and became part of the farm yard, as if he were conceived by a sow and destined to live in the mud of this sty.  Gravebound view was reduced now to cloven hooves pacing, old man clusters of hobbled tools convening, infested grain leaking from troughs braced by prison oak planking.  All that he had seen in a lifetime of journeys, cloistered knowledge imparted to no one, died with the closing of his eyes.

Purged of begging scars, only one piece of the alms bowl remained, bronze shard still lodged in his detached sternum, white sail which refused absorption and rose Flying Dutchman fierce from waves of earth.  Metal extricated itself from the mendicant’s relic and withdrew into a wrinkled fist, seed of anxious ridges that began to assume the properties of fledgling neural tissue.  It sat, untethered, on the ground, attracting particles of itinerant skin and animal hair with magnetic force, gathering airborne debris—mace head pollen and manor house ash—from a long row of ovens tended by servants roasting flocks of geese with rose petals and honey.  Disparate elements tangled, clashed, impaled, and finally softened into an orange pulp which clung to the bronze pit, spinning its meager paste into the seductive bulk of mature fruit.  The peach remained in the barnyard dirt, a place it would occupy for five seasons, untouched by animals even in the dead of winter, the day two servants fell ill and no one came out to feed them.  Instinct repelled the beasts from ripe fruit that had no scent.

Traveling under its own momentum deep into the teeth of summer, the peach rolled out of the pig sty and up a hill bordering the manor house; it could have rested anywhere, but chose a bramble bush, whose talons shredded the fruit’s delicate skin until bruised strips hung—parchment diffusing candlelight—from the pit, now roasted dry under the midday sun.    Flesh coils detached from the stone at withered ends twisted into spirochete points which snaked away from their point of origin in spreading planes.   Shorn peach skin relinquished spherical memory and embraced a new form, trimmed pages which rapidly assembled themselves as leaves in a book.

It was a violent tome of parables and admonitions scripted to inspire devotion through fear.   A single illustration appeared towards the middle of the book, a narrative plate rendered in obscure hues unrecognizable as any specific color, and painted with ambiguous brush strokes that defied comprehension, existing at once, above the page in neutral space, on the paper’s rough surface, inside its fibers as an untethered entity, and below the sheet as a spectral plane.  Central to the composition was a lone traveler at peace with himself, moving through hostile lands in a series of vignettes revolving awkwardly around the solitary figure.  The text was easy to follow, printed in martinet type with obedient letters running in crisp, exemplary rows, yet the image was painted by a flawed hand, which ran outside the prescribed borders to create disturbingly erratic margins.   Nothing depicted in the plate made sense, so readers searched for ready explanations, studying the volume faithfully, expecting the illustration to find its place, but there was no reference to its existence.  Millions would spend their lives reading the book in vain, hoping to find meaning in its pages after death.

Human eyes covered the body of a sage, who traveled beyond the stone vanishing point of the Nalanda monastery and out across India.  On the palms of his hands, soles of feet, across his chest and back were a profusion of eyes—single ocular units deprived of their mates—in foreign colors and shapes alien to the faces of local villagers.  The entire town emerged from ruinous dust, saffron drape, and banyan tree snarl to seek his judgment and follow his council.  Anxious cornea, embedded in the sage’s left shoulder, culminated in a pale blue iris which stared ahead as the man walked towards the market in the center of town.  Another haunted eye set into his back was downcast, focused only on where the sage had been, the pattern and direction of his footprints, all that he had taken in the menace of his wake.  One amber lens, a fiery brown only seen hundreds of miles south of this town, rolled wildly from side to side with the madness of a diseased animal that knows, instinctively, that it is doomed but cannot find solace in reason.

Villagers ran to his side, eager to follow him away from jobs and families, to wander the countryside seeking alms and illumination, willing to forsake whomever they had loved and trusted before him, whatever they had believed and cherished.  Scent of cardamom and galangal from a pot of stewing lentils turned acrid, claws of smoke that made the collection of eyes on the right side of his body wince and tear, as a cook left dinner to burn and abandoned home and children to pursue the sage.

In the minds of his latest believers, the constellation of eyes wrapping the man’s trunk and limbs could only signify his omniscient, sagacious, and benevolent nature—looking upon creatures across the strata of existence with wisdom and compassion.  Everyone was certain of great insight and prudence gleaned from his travels through an ignorant countryside enriched by his leadership.

The visitor walked past a bakery at the far end of town, beyond ovens of sustaining bread transformed by neglect to wasted black stones.  Dozens of new eyes   adorned the sage’s body, embedded in the grinding red of freshly mined skin; all the irises were of local hues so familiar to people blessed with radiant brown.  Dozens of villagers fell in his wake screaming.  Each had a hand clutched to their face, grabbing desperately at the empty socket where an eye had been, trying to save the blood, save their essence, as it drained away with the traveler’s late afternoon shadow.

Covered in the eyes of his worshippers, the sage roamed fresh lands striped in orange and violet, the shifting patterns of light and dark.   His followers traveled with him, trapped inside his slight frame, looking out from the cage of his ribs to arid land, cooled occasionally by the irregular snow of inviolate cows.  They saw only what he saw, the venerative world through his eyes, purged of their own thoughts and the burden of individual memory, spared the pain of living without the knowledge of absolute salvation.  They stared over the years as the sage conscripted new disciples, witnessed hundreds of crescent lips distorted by screams, more believers who could not discern a blessing of enlightenment from a curse of imprisonment.

Stripped of the heavy gold earrings that once marked his station, melted his lobes into slotted pendulums which faltered at punctuality and allowed time to slip through, the ascetic was rendered weightless.  Away from his father’s palace and the affliction of wealth, the man still bore remnants of gilded years, vestigial curiosities whittled down from a reviled life: a small depression in the middle of his forehead where precious stone once lived as a third eye, now a hollow collector of impurities drifting in from the homes of strangers; perforations from jewelry so profuse it left new holes, orifices, and apertures to violate, ingest, and inhabit—cavities that hosted seductive lines of courtesans who eagerly descended into his chest, inhabiting voids and rearranging organs, only to depart without even gazing back upon their ravages;  concentric trails of mucus welled around the scars tunneling deep into his scalp and telescoping out towards his followers, who only saw the possibilities of a snail’s infinite spiral in place of a sovereign’s line marked by long black hair.

Above his sandals hung a simple robe of graceless drape, unadorned mendicant’s garment which cast his body as a single pane of color that ran through fibers and into his face with the same ashen neutrality.  The transparent vestment allowed all those who approached him to feel superior, to gaze upon his debased nakedness with the invulnerability instilled by elaborate dress and high ornament.  One villager walked towards the ascetic to leer at the man’s exposed body, but saw instead the figure of a young woman, her limbs cut open.  He knew those wounds from the legs of a beautiful girl of low caste who had loved him in defiance of convention, recognized the noble carriage of her shoulders that labored darkly under an impoverished sun.  Evoked the touch of his smooth, uncalloused hands across her skin, always kept apart from his civilized life.   Remembered the strange lack of blood when the fishermen pulled her body from the water.

On his way to expel rogue hybrids and weeds from paradise, a gardener of great renown and conceit—skilled in the cultivation of predictable roses—stopped to stare at the hermit, to look through the window of his garment, delighting at the expectation of a hobbled, emasculated form beneath.  Pity, he rationalized, but knew it as something else.  No weathered human grotesque met the gardener’s eyes, but rather the calyxes and stamens of a wondrous plant.   Petals in asymmetrical clusters sprang from a single trunk composed of thousands of convulsing stems, grown together at random junctures.   Pollen spewed from massive stigmas with unnatural frequency, only to be sucked back into the organism by quivering tubes unlike anything the horticulturalist had seen in his gardens before.  Multiple rows of sepals, spiked and blue—the color of deoxygenated blood—rotated at the base of vividly patterned flowers, altering the structure of each blossom by clicks and turns.

The gardener was repulsed by this monstrosity, its jubilant imperfection and foul strength.  Ugliness was meant to cower, to hide from beauty, yet the hideous monolith danced and pulsated with fetal purpose and destiny.   Nausea of the cloaked familiar gripped the horticulturalist as he scrutinized the plant and began to pierce the arrogance of years, slowly recognizing fragments of the rogue hybrids and weeds he had expelled from his cultivated paradises.   Thousands of betrayals confronted him with the magnificent purity of authentic life, and the gardener sank into the earth.

Compassionate men abandoned a young boy with unsettling deformities to the providence of nature in western Tibet.  Born with a third foot which curled out of his ankle and twitched with vestigial impotence, the child was taken from his family and removed from the village with grim ceremony.  Three years of drought and failed crops were blamed on this abomination, this demon boy who was both an affront to life and harbinger of death.

Abandoned in a meadow dusted thick with wildflower pollen, the cursed child grew to adulthood knowing the exquisite, the benign, and the toxic—expanding in skin that bore the weight of petals, moss, and nightshades with equal gravity.   When the man rose from the field, his body was covered in weeping lines, engraved with fifteen different species of flowers, some edible and others poisonous, winding across his flesh.   He left the valley without prejudice, traveled to a distant town and walked its streets without judgment, so people hailed him as a guru and followed his teachings without question.  His speeches were brief and consequently popular, requiring only passing attention of those going to market or returning home from work.

Abridged wisdom suited the taste of his disciples, who considered themselves both intellectually sophisticated and spiritually efficient.  Faith blossomed until the master’s orations grew longer, requiring ever deepening levels of concentration that began to affect the population’s temporal gallop, demanding the resonant echo of seashell ears and a measured clock without hands.

During one of these discourses, the guru pitched forward violently, convulsed for several minutes and lay motionless in the dust; seven hours later, with gunpowder breath, he rose just as suddenly from the ground and lurched back to startled life.  Throngs of  disillusioned believers watched their master’s body die again and again, extinguished first by the lethal images of venomous flowers carved into his flesh, reborn later by virtue of the healing blossoms that shared his skin.  Wolfsbane struck him down, nasturtium led him back.  Hellebore killed, lavender cured.

From one moment to the next, the guru’s apostles never knew whether they were following the words of a dead man or a living one.  Mistrust made the villagers impatient, then angry, furious at worshipping ambiguous mortality—at once, vitality radiating from the human familiar and the tidal pulse of an animated corpse.   Men who had never before allowed thoughts of their own demise saw, for the first time, a luminous arcade to the final hollow.   Fear inhabited every shade that gathered to blacken their days.

No assurances were given by the holy man, so his believers dwindled. Yet with each rebirth the guru invented new words to map the evolution of his thoughts, assembled new eyes to record the nature of maligned life—clicking arthropods and mute bromeliads, constructed new organs to house fragments of every consciousness he absorbed from thousands of deaths running concurrent with his own.

On his purest awakening, stroke of acute iridescence, the master’s remaining acolytes lost faith in his council, certain that he would never possess the wisdom to understand their daily needs and worldly concerns:  Failed crops that could not be sold at market, unfaithful spouses gleefully violating sacred union, the burden of age and commitment, business partners stealing without remorse, dangerous children defying their elders, neighbors warring over ancient offenses.   A spectral man trapped in the purgatory between life and death could not assure them of salvation, could not even save himself.  Branded soulless by those who used to worship him, the sage was banished from the village without hesitation or sympathy.

Etchings of flowers both edible and poisonous became indistinguishable on the guru’s skin, as he left town under a rain of garbage dumped from highest windows, hurled at him from doorways and behind the safety of fences.  The road was treacherous with the slippery hides of rotten vegetables and desiccated fruit, but the Bodhisattva of Compassion never faltered.  He alone understood the fleeting and tenuous nature of their rage—living, always, in a state between waking, dreaming, and dying.

A child came to Edo wearing a man’s body.  Leaning on his staff to support anticipated weight, the seer moved awkwardly, with the predictive agony of arthritis that would not arrive for decades.  The other hand carried a ripe peach that bore no scent and quickly repelled the insects which flew instinctively towards it.  Clusters of gold buds were embroidered onto a tightly wrapped loincloth, his only garment, which still retained the bleached frost of new cotton.   Although he had never worn sandals and navigated the same distorting course as others, the soles of his feet were innocent.  Viscous shreds of a delicate plant clung to the sage’s toes and heel, placental remnants of a lotus flower still producing more offspring in a distant, cloistered pond.   Fine hair had been thoroughly shaved from a pliable skull still in transformation, but the stubble clung to his scalp with the scavenging claws of bracken fungus.  Despite weeks of travel under a hot sun, his skin was cool and new, without burns or blisters to obscure the intricate diagrams covering the entirety of his form.

Contentment preserved the seer’s features in the immaculate milk of youth—blameless gaze and taintless lips of the unfallen—and the people of Edo looked upon his countenance and saw themselves as children.  Citizens rushed out of their homes and stores to embrace him, to claw at absent innocence—long extinct and banished to the edge of memory by the serrated violations of compromise.  Regret brought each one back to a singular beginning before the erection of practical ramparts, abandoned possibilities resurrected in the prophet’s face, which relinquished its own delicate features to each stranger who gazed upon it and, instead, saw their own: a girl with potential to become a great scholar and painter, but forced to marry young and tend rows of dye vats at a textile factory, a woman’s intellect and flesh stained by the common hues of flat, unremarkable days; a discerning boy of remarkable insight, an apprentice calligrapher and passionate collector of surimono, who grew into a pillar of apathy as the wealthiest shop owner in the city, selling inferior woodblock prints to ignorant buyers; a child of striking duality, articulated by warrior’s vitality and innate honor, destined to unite two hostile factions, now translucent, cowering third assistant to the local minister of trade.  Multitudes awakened from years of blunted acceptance and bled anew, running greedy fingers over recovered ideals.

Possessively, they caressed every plane, stroked and then examined each grotto of the mandarin’s body for affirmation, a singular birthmark or eccentric mole to recognize themselves in the reanimated.  But instead, they began to notice the pale inscriptions crawling discreetly over his skin, directives that obliterated the promise of their rekindled youth.  Sacred letters and holy words spoke of illumination, ran in tight patterns over the seer’s torso, fragmented to verbal smoke that twisted down his appendages.  Promises of elucidation snaked along the sage’s collarbone, coiled into his armpit, slithered over the length of his body in a glorious map to enlightenment.   As the hordes fell upon him with the manic siphoning tongue of parched souls, each child’s face dissolved back into a single entity, the seer, who stared out across fever pitch throng in unblinking pity.

Zealotry inhabited the crowd, which seized the prophet one thousand hands strong, threw him to the ground and invaded every orifice, defiling with jagged fingers in the frenzied hope of discovering more consecrated passages, wrenched joints from their sockets to uncover the complete text, ripped off his fingernails to look for symbols hidden in the raw beds beneath.  Portions of the message continued to elude the masses, so they rose to violent swell and killed the seer, skinning him carefully to preserve the sacrosanct map.  But as they scoured the diagram through murderous eyes, the guru’s skin rapidly lost the serosity of animation and began to wither, shriveling with the arduous breath of a brutalized autumn.  Well past midnight and into the next day, the good citizens of Edo frantically scrutinized row after row of wasting phrases and images, trying to exhume wisdom as it curled up into an indecipherable knot.

Globe of shrunken skin opened into the petals of a lotus flower, which relinquished its soft howl of yawning pores for adamant bronze compression, transforming into an alms bowl, which yielded metal to scentless flesh and became a peach, which reformed arid pulp to manifest the enigmatic pages and solitary illustration of a book—whose faltering birth line was drawn into the faithless pitch of a sutra chest.

Between the god finger roots of a banyan tree, under titan shadows forged by a century of growth, a woman wrapped in thin layers of crimson silk veneered to black by sweat, held a small wooden box in her lap, idly running her fingers across its inlaid surface, stroking the contours of ceramic, gold, and lacquer as a distraction from months of oppressive heat.   Sweltering inertia was interrupted by a rejuvenating jolt of mild curiosity, which prompted the woman to open the sutra chest—only to find it empty—then drift back into the torpid acceptance of a domesticated animal expertly trussed and roasted alive.

Human eyes covered the body of a sage, who traveled beyond the stone vanishing point of the Nalanda monastery and out across India.

Copyright © July 1, 2003 – Julie Rauer