Occipital Mouse (eBook)

Calderwood Burnham (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
316 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3509-8141-4 (ISBN)

Infos

'The Occipital Mouse' is a literary novel intertwining the lives of complex characters grappling with themes of life, conflict, creation of essence, and grace. Through philosophical musings and symbolic storytelling, it invites readers to explore deeper meanings behind their actions while pondering identity, purpose, and transformation.

Calderwood Burnham and his wife, Amy, live on a river in the Rocky Mountains. He travels down to the Great Plains on occasion. His son loves home but is off to college, starting his adventures in life. Amy, a potter, painted the watercolors at the beginning of this novel.

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"e;The Occipital Mouse"e; is a character-driven exploration of life, conflict, creation, essence, and grace. At its heart is Sky, a young woman walking between two cultures, navigating education and contemporary struggles while shaped by her community's wisdom. Her journey intersects with other enigmatic figures like Kate, a survivor who embodies strength, and Charlie, a confused man seeking meaning from his past. The novel unfolds with symbolic resonance, exploring how individuals-whether raised in communal love or the harsh realities of war-grapple with identity, the consequences of their actions, and the unseen forces that guide their lives. Through the threads of these interconnected lives, the story delves into themes of spiritual growth, personal transformation, and the human capacity for both destruction and healing. Philosophical reflections permeate every chapter, offering readers a contemplative space to question and find solace, while providing difficult answers. Back cover:Bison Skulls are good. Their goodness informs all they touch. But the touch can be a mystery. Living tried to leave a bad mark on Kate. But after a rough start up to Lame Deer, there was instilled a goodness in this little girl. The rest of living found her leaving good marks on all the lives she took, and on the lives she did not take: A confused little boy, observing her blood on the grass; making a bad man good again; reminding Frank of a mare's way in his local remuda; earning Jay's respect; and showing John what family really means. Kate walked with grace upon Earth. That was Kate. She knew how to live, how to kill, and how to die. And thanks to Kate, Sky was not the limit. Sky was just the beginning of who knows what?We must wait and see. That'll happen when parts are missing; we must do what mystery tells us to do, and wait for those parts to come back. Kate knew the Law of Recognition, the Law of Blood, the Rule of Honor, and the Natural Rule; but most of all, Kate knew patience. Kate was good.

Textauszug

The Vishnu Schist

Michael rowed the boat ashore. Sky jumped down on the Vishnu Schist where none had ever stood before. She looked skyward into the turquoise self and could not see beyond it. Or could she? She felt like she was looking forever, but then why all the blue? It seemed to block her view. It was simply a matter of atmosphere.

The light was holding her vision back, like the leaded legs of an anxious running dream; where were the familiar freedom stars in all that color?

One night of starlight recalled, and she knew that during days, she would be blinded by the light. Sun’s own message on the atmosphere would bring Sky down to Earth; where lead could be found.

She knew more was out there, twinkling, sending other light that had not yet arrived. Such pending light could not be seen. Even at night, those stars were dark. But they were there and their light was coming. Energy was on the way; energy that would matter here upon arrival.

Now, down here, and having just arrived from River, Sky considered for a moment Water that had held her up; its buoyancy, its demand for presence. That one time she tried to reflect upon what she perceived as still Water, they had one-upped the atmosphere with Sun, demonstrating how reflection is really done; they nearly blinded her, not from matter, but to sight itself. Clearly, Water was a pro when it came to reflecting…what? What color is Water, ever? Only the artist knows.

So, she left the raging light of the rare still Water, and returned to the attention that rapids demand for a human to survive. There had been days of bouncing, flushing wet turmoil that brought her here. Here on this schist where she was allowed to stand and reflect.

Here now, Sky stood firmly on the past. On Earth.

She looked straight ahead at long ago. Then her eyes climbed stone-time, on either side, rising in relentless layered cliffs to a present she could not see. The walls bent backward beyond the elevated layers, to yet another distal twist on the tip of an extinct bison horn, somewhere way up, out of view, on the last step of a grand staircase. Somewhere up there, Escalante was the future.

This spot, down where she now stood, was like many others they had floated past. Hemmed in tightly, with River and a little horizontal beach, the resistance and give of Rock gave curves to the flow. Cliffs could thus be seen not only side to side, but also front and back. They were relentless, if not to River, then to her eye. If there were to be a flash flood now, the only escape would be a lifeless pitch and toss to the front, around a corner and gone in a torrent of mud, rock, trees, and the detritus of lands far back. Their future would be dead on arrival, under some delta on down.

The ongoing drought of years provided some stack to their little deck.

All the local height was further away than all the past which, at eye level, was revealing itself to her. Now.

It was at this point she was glad of the government author’s longhand. He or she could have written “One point seven five billion.” But the brochure was better. Knowing it was written for tourists, it provided instead, “One thousand, seven hundred fifty million years ago.” Sky liked that. She liked saying it slowly, emphasizing each word, knowing not even such writing could convey what was meant. But it was the best that could be done with simple words.

She liked to remind herself that way up there, beyond her view, around the vertical curvature of the cliffs, in the distant future, lay sixty-six million years ago when dinosaurs roamed Earth. And here she was, down here, so long before the deadly Star came down to Earth, taking them all away. So long before.

And to think, a short tens of millions of years were missing from the pages above her, below the dinosaurs. What could have then come and gone without a trace? What was she supposed to do with this knowledge? Especially down here? Maybe nothing.

Back to looking straight ahead, the just-arriving light bounced off these stone walls now. This light, allegedly from the past, might have been sent when this Rock was laid down. She did not know. The light that had yet to arrive would shortly bounce off walls, and other light would continue to come long after she had left. Could light not step on the same matter twice? Or is there an unperceived erosion that exceeds the speed of light? Is light itself erosive? She did not know.

Would light from the past make this old Rock a present upon arrival in the future? She did not know.

And what of the wall behind the surface of reflection? Sky presumed there was a pre-erosional past in there, unlit, unseen.

She stood before this giant wall of matter. Dark. Sky could see the staining of the rain, each storm stripping the surface of the cliffs, molecule by molecule; exposing newer past to the ancient present light. The cliffs, once light, then dark with desert varnish, to be light again, were tumbling to the ocean; today’s ocean tomorrow, and again. Could cliffs ever step into the same ocean twice? Sky did not know.

Sky walked across the schist, over to this calling cliff. She placed her left hand upon it. She asked Rock to speak to her. It did. It told her things she could not understand. It told her about the now. She had had glimpses of now in the past. But they were fleeting. She wished she could live in the present now. Self-sabotage kept her from living in the present. She would have to return to the violence of Water to achieve that sense of now.

Behind her left hand she was hiding a tiny portion of the past. She was hiding it from the light. Just as the sunlit surface of Rock around her hand was likewise hiding, temporarily, a past that lay a fraction of some small measure just behind its outer reaches. The light only hit the surface. All else was dark and unseen. The sunlit surface was its own hand, hiding something.

She considered that her hand, touching this wall, might be expediting or belaying stone’s movement toward the ocean. Her hand, casting shadow, wearing away that small measure, or laying a protective human oil, would bring new things, rock, or sweat, to light when she removed it. Either way, she had interfered with processes.

So, she pulled her hand away, not knowing if she had done a good thing or not. Rock assured her that all was fine. Dynamite was of no moment to Rock. So what? Sky even discerned a “thank you” coming from the spot where her hand had been. “I am on my way to the ocean, sooner or later now! Tarry too long, Sky, and I might see you in the delta soon! There we will build new cliffs together.”

Sky knew there were cubic inches, feet, yards, or even miles of Rock beyond her view. She wondered what it was doing there. Could it really be doing nothing? It was a secret.

If there is light, dark, matter, dark matter, energy, and dark energy, and if they can be converted from one to the other and back again, then what of time? A past, a present, a future? Maybe time can convert to energy, or matter, or both. And back again. For Sky, it seemed incongruous to carve out time as an exception to the privileges of those others. The speed of light is dark on time. Light only illuminates in time, when it stops, in the present, where the conversion occurs in matter.

Sky thought of the old geologist joke. Q: “What does a rock say?” A: “It’s your move.”

Sky was experiencing all this when Michael slapped a plastic paddle against her ass. They had been days on River, and had days to go. With the slap she was back to that. He told her to grab a rope along the gunwale and help him haul their boat further from the schist-cutting Water. This she did and unbeknownst to her, she found herself in the present; cooking, conversing with Michael, eating, cleaning, shitting, and peeing beyond human eyes, farting and burping silently by a fire. Only Earth was there for all of it. Michael for the tiny rest.

They swam in an eddy of the color red, climbed out and gathered wood, built another fire, and made something under the stars.

It could have been love, it could have been sex, or both, but they made something else. Having lost his seed inside of her, it was left to conflict with her, and with its many selves. There would be only one winner. Or loser. That One, destined to penetrate the egg, was itself partly the result of successful evolutionary work, over millions of years. But part of it was luck. Circumstance.

The egg itself had been released some days before, to travel a darkness alone, surrounded by Sky.

She lay there on her back, staring at the stars. The quivering had left her body an hour before. She knew something now; something science said she could not know. When circumstance would have it, there was a brief flash of tiny blue light unseen, and walls closed in around the gamete for a magic of compounding. Nine months or so of magic. Maybe. Vision twenty-twenty. Conception twenty-twenty.

The rest of his seed would end up here and there along River, by various conveyances, over a week or less. Each One providing something, somewhere. It would be good. Just as good for them, if not better for the “lucky” One. The One and the many would all give life, albeit different kinds. They would all be compounding cells, albeit different kinds. The provision of food provided by One might be delayed in a human, while the others sped the growth of some other consumer. They would all be eaten, later or now, and then again and again and again.

Now Sky saw the canyon walls, black below a starlit Sky. The light sent down now would not show the Rock of pages. The light she saw...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 2.12.2024
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• ISBN-13: 979-8-3509-8141-4 / 9798350981414