the teacher. (extract The Blue Lotus)

I spoke often with the teacher. When evening came and the light would fall we sat by the hearth in the cabin.
If before I asked thoughtlessly, now I asked with care. The teacher, himself had said the question is more important than the answer.
"Student pay attention to the question," he said. "It is the thought put into the question that solicits the better answer."
I no longer asked him to speak of the Blue Lotus. Instead I asked that he tell of his journeying in the mountains.

Then he would speak of his days when first a wanderer. His eyes would warm and he would tell of the Palace. Of setting off one morning through its great doors. How he sat first before his Master. In a room with walls hung with tapestries of fine worked silk. Where a fountain rose in the courtyard. The sound of its water ever running. His Master sat before him and spoke softly.
"Cherished friend you leave us now. Go wisely. Bring with you all you have learned. Hold fast all you have found in this Palace. The Blue Lotus will always be with you. You carry its mantle. Therefore its words are your words. Live simply, think greatly."
My teacher rose and left. Telling how he walked through the marble hallways. Of the lawns and gardens. The great groves of swaying pine under which he had often sat. That morning he went through the gate, the gate through which all seekers must eventually walk; blue-shining, its glazed tiles sparkling in the sunlight.

Or I would ask him tell of the masters that are said to wander the mountains, that are said to visit the coastal cities or cross the sea. Then he would speak of coming to the Palace, of the prophet that came from the west, of the masters who have lived long, who have bodies that die and yet never die. Masters, it is said, whose bodies are light.
"Those are the Masters, who choose to stay," he would add. "They embody the secret of the Blue Lotus. They are the living breath of the white spring blossom."

In those dark winter nights he asked often of my thinking. Delving into each answer I gave. Some nights I slept, thinking his silence to contain reprimand. For I would feel myself to pour my heart out at his feet. Then he would rise and say he should sleep. I would be left staring into the dying flames of the fire as though an empty vessel.

One night as the flames leaped high and the snow fell thickly he spoke of my reason in searching. Holding me in his gaze, he asked when first I heard of the Blue Lotus, how first I found in me the longing to know its wisdom.
I recounted my meeting with him by the well, my hearing of stories and reports from strangers. Yet he persisted. I recalled my dreams, my love of poetry, the discussions and knowledge of the Vizier's court. He was not satisfied. Then, leaning forward, he struck me gently on the heart. Speaking low, yet with the force of a thousand drums, he said, 'look within'. In my mind I saw myself as though in a dream. I stood in a grove; a boy. The pines of Amrihiza swayed about me. The sun burned in an evening sky. The clouds were violet and gold-lined. Before me stood a messenger. A fiery being of light. I saw that I listened. I heard what I heard. 'You have come to find your wisdom. It is time to journey home. For you have been long without the fold. You must travel east. You have come to understand a great mystery.'
The teacher lifted his hand and I knew I had always been travelling. For in the dream I saw I was both boy and man. The man was of light as was the messenger. I looked into my teacher's eyes and understood that before the boy came the man. The man was the light-body, the soul body of the boy. It was into this body I would grow. Into this body I would flower. The man was the fruit of the tree of the soul.
Indeed I had come to travel. I had come to find my mystery. This messenger had appeared to remind me. He had implanted the seed of my longing within.

That night the teacher explained a secret to me. Such longings are often planted deep in memory. The pointers along a pathway are not of coincidence. It is not a happening that somehow turns the seeker from one pathway to another. In the soul is the seed that looks for its flowering. It is a r woman's or man's own soul that brings them to their pathway. Parading their pathway before them in the form of events that speak to their inner longing. Yet such is the world that many have forgotten their soul. Some confuse it. They mistake the mask for the actor. The actor for the role. And yet others already deny its existence.
My teacher spoke often of the need for strength.
"The way of many is appeasement," he would say. "Yet can one appease darkness? If a man or woman knows a thing to be incorrect should they remain in its presence. If you should see the goal ahead, should you turn from the path upon which you walk. One step away is one step back. A thousand steps away is a thousand steps back. A seeker must learn strength and perseverance. A seeker must learn to consider. Careful consideration is the root of wisdom. A seeker cannot be wise until he or she has learned to consider all before them. To drift is to miss the opportunity for learning. The seeker who does not also consider the wrong path, the way of darkness has not learned to discriminate. This seeker does not recognise and know how to interrogate wrong-doing. For if a false messenger is to come, will it come and claim to be a messenger of dark. No! It will claim to be a messenger of light. It will attempt to weave about it an aura of greatness. Wisdom and careful consideration are needed to separate the true from the false."

Often the teacher set me a test. He would try my will or ask of me some difficult task. He would not answer a question and then observe me plunged into doubt. He would negate all I knew and say to me that learning was of no value.
"Words,"' he would say, "are useless, let us do away with them. Thoughts are of no meaning, let us cease to think." If I protested he would walk from me.

Soon I learned I was expected to refute these sayings. I was expected to search within me for an answer. That I was to use my learning, all he had taught me against him. This he considered correct.
When I would ask him to explain, he would say to me.
"I will not always be here. If you should need to have me as support then you will be tied to me as a child is to its mother. What should you do if challenged and unable to answer. You cannot demand my counsel always. Your pathway is to find your mystery. I will make you ready to be its servant. In this I am your teacher. Yet no teacher is greater than the teaching. The teacher who ferments unnecessary dependence in his students is not a true teacher. The true teacher is but a mouth for the teaching. When you feel the power of your own wisdom within you, then my work is done. When the teaching is as a sun within your body then you will be the instrument of your own shining."

In those winter days I learned endurance. Evenings in the cabin were warm. We sat often by the fire. Yet days we walked in the mountains. There was work to be done.
The teacher tended his goats and sheep. When the snows fell life was harsh for them. If the snows were deep they were unable to find food. Then some died.
Though we had stock-piled wood for the winter, still we gathered brushwood from the forest floor. We walked on the slopes nearby. Looking down upon the lake, its pale sheen, its ice coated edges. I would be wrapped about in the sheepskin coat or one of those worn by the shepherds of the foothills and steppe. On those walks I learned to breath deep and keep my body heat, to endure as the teacher endured.

The teacher showed me the things of the winter. Showed me the beauty of the frosted pattern by the lake's edge. Woke me and bade me rise early to see the mist frozen about the bare branches of the larch and birches on the slopes. I saw too the great power of winter sunset in the mountains. When the thin and frozen air turned the golden disc into crimson fire. Falling through the turquoise as though being swallowed by the mountains themselves. As though the earth upon which we stood was a cave, a womb into which the light sank in order to be reborn. A method through which the sun's great energy fused itself with retreated life.

Copyright (C) Peter Millington 2007

elephant and castle. (extract)



When I open the door the room smells stale. There is a metallic, green light falling into the hallway in shafts, rainy and wintry. The walls are cold.

I move in quietly, trying not to make a sound. Something inside me says he might be here, he may have doubled back. He could be behind a door or waiting the other side of a wall a blunt instrument ready. Or that small revolver he carries with him.

It was co-incidence I saw him. Stepping off the Underground train onto the platform and among all those people. His back was unmistakable. Its scrawny shoulders and that tight hair cut and the way he walked, as if defiantly striding somewhere. Forceful but a walk that had something not quiet true to it. I thought he glimpsed me, because he turned and seemed to be looking through the crowd, around the faces of sleepy commuters or unknowing faces and I was not sure if he quickened his pace then. Either way I began to walk that little faster, bumping into a girl in front of me, almost knocking a bunch of red carnations from her arms. And it seemed he disappeared faster and then was around the corner and I knew he must be on the short stairs and heading for the lift. It was then I broke into a light run, feeling an increasing anxiety, sweat coming out on my brow. Suddenly I was aware, if I was on my way to see her, then he could be too and those threats he had once made to me in a doorway, on a freezing cold night backed up against a wall in St Petersburg could be true. There was no reason to believe he would not carry them out. I had learned since he was capable of many things and that his was a mind that worked only on ends, on strategy and accomplishment and that he was capable of making the most calculating of decisions.

Then I was taking the steps two at a time. I came around onto the lift and elbowed my way through the waiting crowd, my raincoat open, my eyes now frantically scanning every face ahead of me until they met his eyes, grey and inscrutable, angry. The set forehead, the nose short and the straight line of his mouth. He was already in the lift, locked in closely among the bodies and backs of heads. Then he gave one of those wry smiles, his almost milk teeth dull in the underground light and lifted his hand in a half gesture of recognition before the doors were beeping and shutting over with sinking solidity. "Damm it" I shouted, "damm it - damm this" and turned, wondering if the three hundred and fifty steps of the stairs were manageable and then bolting up them, my breath coming tighter in my chest, the sweat beginning to come out on my brow and under my arms.

I reached the top and pushed forward, ignoring the objections of an old Indian man, whose grey hair and melancholy eyes looked at me with some sort of reprove about speed and manners and who called after me that I would get there one day, that we all did in the end.

I ran out onto the street, just missing a car and could not see him and knew if he was going where I was going he must be moving fast now. I cut across the open court-yard and up the stone steps until I was on the balcony, heading for her door and gasping to breath, my heart thumping and tearing in my throat.

*

I step into the flat. I let the door close quietly behind me. Every part of me, every nerve and cell wants to call out her name, see her suddenly appear in front of me and smile questioningly at me, her eyes asking why I am out of breath and what the problem is. But the atmosphere is quiet; too quiet. Catching my breath, I feel the hairs on my neck rise. I am aware that every muscle is alert and that somewhere deep inside me I am expecting something to happen, something not pleasant.

A thin sliver of light is coming from under the living room door and I walk toward it. I notice the smell of stale cigarette smoke on the air and then again as if by instinct, my memory searches out her perfume or the remains of cooking. There is nothing. Only this second-hand smell as if the rooms were empty of anything other than the greenish winter light and impending threat.

The living room is empty and I see that the furniture looks all in place though over by a steel tulip-shaped lamp, there is a pile of fashion magazines lying untidily on the floor.
I turn back into the hallway, going down toward the bedroom and then I freeze. It is as if the floor is giving way beneath me, the walls are collapsing and pressing in on me and all I can do is stop, stand immobilised and just about prevent myself retching up on the carpet.

Through the doorway of the bedroom I can see a leg over the floor. It looks the way a leg would be if it were stretched out and the other was loose and tucked back under the body and the body was lying inert. And it is a leg. It is unmistakably her leg. The sandal-like shoe, the black leather strap across the instep and the way the ankle tapers up and onto that thin, elegant calf and I know then her knee and her soft thigh. I am momentarily paralysed. I feel myself being assaulted by a sort of anger and confused despair. Suddenly I no longer feel inside myself. I am floating away, becoming part of the greenish light that in fact is not greenish but white and then a sort of ash grey. And I am putting out my hand to steady myself against the wall.

For a moment I have forgotten him. He has gone from my mind. Through the spinning, the tears stinging up into my eyes, I am aware only of her leg. Wanting not to think of what I will find if I push open the door.

Then I hear the long dry sigh. The lips being moistened. The almost priestly exhalation of breath. Eerily benign and mockingly threatening.

The door swings open slowly and he stands there. His legs astride her stretched-out body. I want to run at him. I want to beat him with my bare fists until he falls in a heap. I want to take any instrument I can lay my hands on and strike him, strike him till there is not a whisper of breath left in his being. But he holds the gun. The small silver revolver. He is smiling. Strangely. His clouded eyes narrowing.
"She's not dead yet," he almost whispers. "Not dead yet.........?"

*

He waves the small silver revolver at me, motioning me to raise my arms and back into the living room.
"Sit," he says, and indicates a sofa. I look at him. He must see the anger, the bitterness in my eyes; the desperation.
"If I don't want to," I say.
His arms tenses. He lifts the revolver somewhat, bearing it on my chest.
"Sit I say. I hold the gun."
I sneer but sit. He backs, cautiously into an armchair.
"Now take of your raincoat - slowly - and throw it at your feet. Then turn out your pockets. No sudden movements or I shoot."
I do as he says. Peeling off the raincoat and turning out my pockets, keys, wallet, change, old receipts falling onto the sofa. All the time he holds me in his gaze. His grey eyes curiously searching.
"One more thing," he says when I have finished. "One at a time, roll up your trouser legs. To just below the knee."
Then he leans back and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. He throws it to me, saying,
"Smoke if you like. Because I want you to talk."
I look at him, angrily.
"You want me to talk?"
He leans forward.
"I want you to remember."
"Remember?"
"Remember where this all started."
"Why?"
He motions with his head to the open bedroom door.
"Her life depends on it."
'Go back,' I think. 'Go back - go back.'


Copyright (C) Peter Millington

extract from The Secret of the Blue Lotus (a novel in progress)

The sun arcs above us and sinks quickly to the west. Now there is only sea. Where Amrihiza was there is but a haze and the last crimson remains of day. In the ship the men are quiet, each preparing for himself a bed of a woven blanket and a light straw mattress.

I too have such a blanket and mattress. It lies rolled in the stern of the boat. Yet I am not ready to sleep.
Perhaps it is the peculiar exhilaration of the journey. Or maybe it is a hidden anxiety. For I do not know what lies ahead. I have only the words of a stranger by a well on a spring morning to guide me. Only the dream of an autumn night to assure me. It is my heart that speaks to me of the emptiness I must fill. Here, on the sea, crossing the Cirpassian on this the first approach of night, am I not still the tree whose leaves have fallen. Is there not yet the pathway behind that is as a stone sinking beneath the waves? I can still drown in the confusion and pride of my past.

The captain comes to me. He wears a maroon hat. Wrapped about him is a heavy woollen robe. His face is lined with a hard-won wisdom. It is learning fired in the creak of the timbers of a trading-ship, the flap of a sail, the shift in the wind, the cooling of the breeze. In his eyes are a great many sea-going days and nights. He has eyes that are burdened with the sadness of numerous sunrises and sunsets. His hands are rough and calloused, worn into tenacity by the surge of waves, by the loyalty his mistress, the sea demands.
He speaks.
‘It is well to sleep now. For the night comes and soon it will cool.’
‘Yet,’ I answer, ‘I watch the stars appear. They are like the foam of a sea greater than this the Cirpassian. The wave of some distant shore breaking upon the edge of our world.’
‘Indeed,’ he replies. They are like dust sprinkled over the sleeping faces of those who travel.’
‘They are fire-flies of the sun, sparks of the light that floods our mornings and afternoons.’
‘I will fetch your mattress,’ he says, rising.
He returns, his rough hands shyly offering me the mattress and a heavy woollen robe.
‘It is wise to treat night upon the sea with respect,’ he says. ‘Here there is no shelter from its mood. If it should choose it will become cold as a winter morning. The heat of the day is no guide to the dress night wears.
‘Though,’ I say, ‘its beauty is to be admired. I am held in its two great hands. Above me a sea of dream, a coat laced with the finest of jewels, a profusion of diamond light. Below me she weaves her magic in the swell of the waves, in the unending rise and fall of her flowing. Who knows what shores these very waves we ride, break upon. What child runs in the sand they wash over. Driftwood worn smooth by their action. Here, their darkness and depth, there, their flow, foam crested and turquoise.’
He presses on me the mattress and robe. Then smiles.
“The poet of Sin-Alnar.” he says softly.
“Captain,” I say, I am no longer poet of Sin-Alnar. For that is an honour I have relinquished. With our great Vizier’s acknowledgment, I journey now to Pushnahar in search of wisdom.”
“Poet,” he rejoins, “your words cannot be so easily taken from the position they have wrought in hearts. There are many who still bow before their fineness.”
“Captain,” I answer, “your compliment is noted. Yet a man must follow the promptings of his heart, must listen to that inner voice that urges on him the furthering of his pathway. The search for a wisdom deeper than the wisdom one knows should not be shunned.”
“That is in itself great wisdom,” the captain sighs. “That I should so understand.”
“Captain,” I reply. “I place myself in the hands of your wisdom. For if my wisdom is to be furthered then is not your wisdom a means to that end. Here, upon the sea, it is you who are the poet. It is you to whose heart-strings the sea plays. You are the one who knows her secret language.”


Copyright (C) Peter Millington 2007