Prodigal Angel

By Lou Marzeles

Angel is troubled. He seems to have been inserted into a world he didn’t know and very certainly didn’t want. He keeps asking for the paperwork behind his arrival on Earth, but no one seems to know where it is.

To all appearances, Angel is a “normal” human—or is he?—whatever that really is. But with no sense of belonging, no family, no friends, his early life is a shambles. Soon he’s in the grip of the Great Ache. If it weren’t for his invisible friends, plus a strong dose of humor and music, he’d be a goner.

A string of extraordinary occurrences (some might call them other-worldly) leads Angel to question to nature of his reality—actually, reality as a whole. Lucky for him he remembered his previous incarnation as the Roman Emperor Arugula, which led him to his teacher, the revered Baba Ghanoush, who taught him about enlightenment and also how to make a nice eggplant spread.

With wit, whimsy, and powerful insights into the nature of consciousness, Prodigal Angel explores Angel’s journey from pained beginnings to profound fulfillment.

Lou Marzeles is a protégé of his invisible mentor, Dr. Lucius Marzipan. He (Lou, not Dr. Marzipan) is the author of The Promise of Purpose and Life for the Reality Impaired and several very clever puns that seem to be funny only to his cats. Lou lives in a part of Washington State that isn’t a megalopolis where he works, if you can call it that, as an editor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lou Marzeles
• Release date: Dec 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463542941

Lou Marzeles

Lou Marzeles is a protégé of his invisible mentor, Dr. Lucius Marzipan. He (Lou, not Dr. Marzipan) is the author of The Promise of Purpose and Life for the Reality Impaired and several very clever puns that seem to be funny only to his cats. Lou lives in a part of Washington State that isn’t a megalopolis where he works, if you can call it that, as an editor.

Book preview

Prodigal Angel

Lou Marzeles

Prodigal Angel

Copyright © 2019 Lou Marzeles.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without express written permission from the author except for brief quotations in a book review. Any violations will be reported to the author’s invisible attorney, Dr. Lucius Marzipan, and you do not want to hear from him.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

ISBN: 9780463542941

Written in Novlr (Novlr.org).

Published by Artnova SPC at Smashwords

Goldendale, Washington

December 2019

Contents

1 Preamble

2 Postamble

PartOne

3 Dialogs

4 Who’s There?

5 The Ant Holocaust That Didn’t Happen

6 Information from Elsewhere

7 What’s Up, Doc?

8 A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Enlightenment

9 April in Florida

10 The Great Ache

11 The Call

12 Coyote Counsel

Part Two

13 Karma Therapy

14 Epilog in the Middle of the Book

15 Scars on the Universe

16 On Purpose

17 Love Versus Truth

18 The Plot Thickens

19 Destiny Rides Again

20 Right You Are if You Think You Are

21 Son of the Future

22 Foreword

23 About the Author

24 People You Should Know About

25 Dessert

1 Preamble

It’s not often I’m asked to write something for a new book. But then it’s not often an imaginary friend gets asked to do anything in the so-called real world, so I’m happy to defy tradition and reason and take a shot at it. It’s in this spirit that I write a few words about Prodigal Angel.

I’ve been Lou Marzeles’ imaginary friend for, oh, I want to say as long as I can remember, but Lou’s memory does the heavy lifting for us, so I’ll let him field this one. I can say, in total honesty, it’s been a while.

He calls me Dr. Lucius Marzipan, probably because I told him that was my name. Now, the thing with imaginary friends is, we’re assumed to be a phenomenon of childhood, something that occurs in those early years when the budding consciousness is still enveloped in very low brain wave states where everything is simply absorbed without analysis and you can’t tell the difference between marmalade and gravel and there is little distinction between real and imaginary. Lou and I, though, have had a much longer relationship. Lou was best man last year at my wedding, and his toast before the imaginary crowd of a hundred or so guests was very touching.

But I digress. I’m here today to say something about Lou’s book, Prodigal Angel, which you’re about to read.

I guess I could begin by saying there are some special features about the book that make it unusually pleasant. For example, the pages have been consecutively numbered for your convenience. The book has gone through several editing stages, including a pass by my own editor, also imaginary, who tidied up several of Lou’s references to the physical world that probably would go unnoticed by all but the most physically knowledgeable, such as actual people. From the perspective of those of us in the imaginary world, Lou is really more one of us than he is a denizen of Gibbers. (What’s Gibbers? you ask. You’ll learn the answer to that later in this book. This is what we in the literary biz call read-bait.)

So one of the first questions that arise when people hear the title of this book is: Is the prodigal angel a real angel or is the term metaphoric? The question begs at least a cursory conversation about the nature of reality in a broader sense, and here I must wax poetic, something imaginary people do especially well.

The border between the real and the imaginary has been examined closely over the ages. Millennia ago, Seneca pondered if human worry was based on actual events or pure imagination. There was Shakespeare’s metaphor of human life as something merely acted out on a stage. In recent memory, the musical Man of La Mancha posed the question, Could too much sanity be madness? The fantastic and the factual have been juxtaposed innumerable times in art and life, in innumerable ways. In his life Lou has been deeply fascinated and affected by the interplay of real and imagined, to the point where he has often wondered which world is the more real, which necessitates the consideration of what real actually means. If it’s some standard of measurement in human consciousness, where does the standard come from? Out of what contexts can the notion of real arise? Who or what decides that? Is reality in the end purely subjective or is there some basis of immutability and the absolute that supersedes all other notions of reality? If that is so, how does there come to be so many expressions of what can be called real? Or if reality is inherently and only subjective, how does any notion of reality on any collective basis come to be? And in the face of only the subjective, how can anything actually be called real?—for surely in that case the term loses meaning except as a passing frame of reference in any given human minds.

Whew! Okay, take a break. Smoke ’em if you got ’em. (For you physical beings, that’s just an expression.)

In Lou’s mind, these questions are very real, to use the term in that context. As you will discover, Lou was born into a kind of unreality and has lived in and out of that state pretty much ever since. The several questions just raised have been fairly constant for him. He’s come to a point finally where the ostensible opposites of reality and imagination merge into a comfortably resolved paradox. I can’t say this is entirely what this book is about, but it’s a major component. I can address the question of, is this book about a real or metaphoric prodigal angel, by saying the answer is a clear and unambiguous—sorry, could you repeat the question?

I might add that, as Lou’s imaginary friend, I like to think of myself as his muse of humor. I personally have absolutely no sense of humor—no, wait! I do! I just left it in the glove compartment! Lou often marvels at how he gets funny thoughts out of thin air, like when he was writing a humor column for a national magazine, wondering where they come from. As I explained to him, and to quote Leonard Cohen, I’m your man.

You may be wondering, who is Lou and why should I read this book when I don’t know him from William Katt? After all, Lou read Kelly Notaras’ informative book The Book You Were Born to Write, wherein it was explained that if people don’t know who you are, you’re not likely to draw much of an audience for a memoir book, which this largely is. And, she wrote, if you have no platform (that means gobs of followers on social media and the like), good luck trying to get a mainstream publisher to touch your book. (It’s an interesting reflection on the book publishing industry, that in recent years it relies so heavily on built-in marketing by the author based on the quicksand that is social media. Lou visits social media pretty much only when one of his sisters needs to hear from him, though I keep reminding him he could hire me to write a blog.)

True, Lou is not a household name, though for a stretch he did interview and write about dozens of household names while an editor at a mighty newspaper. And while he doesn’t have a platform, he did once own platform shoes, God help him, and his byline was nationally recognized through his work both in the newspaper and his humor column, for which I received zero credit. He also worked and studied with and lived next door to a man with a name very familiar to students of human consciousness. Some will recognize Lou’s name from his music, some from his work in astrophysics in a parallel universe. Frankly, I’m writing this to help Lou’s visibility for this book. As an invisible friend, I like to think I have a snappy prose style that instantly pulls readers in.

Listen, I’ve got to go; I have a speaking engagement in Xanadu. What you read in the rest of this book is by Lou. He doesn’t like me saying this, but I like to think of him as my imaginary friend.

2 Postamble

You and I are sitting in the classroom, and I just slipped you a note while the teacher wasn’t looking. You’re reading it now. Don’t get caught with it—I don’t need detention!

Well, actually, now that I take a closer look, there is no teacher in the classroom, not yet anyway. One will show up, I suppose, but maybe we’re not ready enough. In the meantime, we’re just kind of horsing around at our desks. We’ve been here a long time—I still owe Diogenes two dollars. Guess he’s still looking for that honest man.

This is a big classroom, and thankfully it doesn’t have standardized testing. It’s all project-based learning here, and there are no tests, not in the sense of some grader checking our work and awarding us letters between A and F. In here, we make the grade on our own. We establish our own curriculum and pace. We decide what we’re going to study and why.

I passed you this note because there’s something I need to tell you. I should introduce myself, but I don’t really know who I am. I kind of like not knowing. Seems crazy, I know. I mean, I have a name that I answer to and a life on the linear plane that can be described, but that doesn’t really tell me or you anything. I do know that I’m certainly not this thing that walks around and talks and does stuff, not to get too technical. Identity—a pretty strange concept, actually—has always been a slippery notion for me. That’s part of what I want to tell you. I wrote this note because I have to. I don’t know what to call what moves in me to share this, but something does, and it’s too strong to ignore, even if I wanted to.

I move between lives while in this single one. In one of them, I’ve been a wimpy dunce, a slave to ego and endlessly afraid to move permanently to the other world. In that other life, I’m knowing and certain and clear and powerful, able to offer and act on love effortlessly. It used to be that I slipped into that latter place, Life 2, accidentally, leaving it quickly as if afraid I’d be found not to belong there. These days I get there more and more by ready volition and can stay much longer, though the ancient terrors that prey on the world of form try to maintain a gravitational pull to Life 1. Now I can see when that happens, and the seeing opens a doorway out. Sometimes it seems like I’m ambushed by yet another mystery terror, but then I realize terror achieves its nature in no small way through mystery, remaining occluded from the awareness that it’s monsters from the Id in Forbidden Planet, surviving only because we continually give it energy. That’s my coursework this time around, coming to that awareness and coming into fuller being. I’m close to getting my PhD—I have my Ph; I’m pretty alkaline. I just need one more letter.

Beyond the terror lies an entirely different landscape. There, I sense the origin pull of some Heart that shapes reality—the real one, not the phony semblance of it that we commonly take to be our lives—behind it all, a Substrate of Life/Love that infuses all existence and lifts me to an enthrallment beyond words. Yet here I am trying to use words to describe it. The best one can do is to use language as a poetic pointer. That’s what this note is, and that’s why I’m passing it to you. We’re all in our places with bright shiny faces. We have so much more we can do besides wait for recess.

To me, the biggest question out there as a starting point for any curriculum is: How is it we don’t know what we don’t know? That is so counterintuitive, that we don’t know. It just feels weirdly askew, out of place in a natural order of things. And there is a natural order of things; a natural order of things just feels weirdly correct, organic, intuitive even in the face of so much that seems to suggest otherwise. I want to know what’s before what’s before. Not in an intellectual way; reason can’t find its way out of a paper bag sometimes. It’s not sensical understanding I want. It’s awareness.

Here are a few things to know about this note:

First, it’s in two parts. I