Mirroring Magic

By S. Preston Chase

Mirroring Magic is a true tale of real magic, both high spiritual 'magic' and the more common supernatural of a lesser source. In the similitude of Miguel Cervantes, writing Don Quixote in an attempt to counter the fantastical tales of knightly knocking about so popular in his own day, I offer this true tale of real-life magic to the world in counterpoint to the many stories of fantastical adventure the world thrills to now, the difference being that this is real. It is the story of what this involvement with the otherworldly has been in my life and where it has led me. It is a window onto what my life has been, and is still being, now nearly seventy years on. Though not as action-packed as our contemporary works of pure fantasy, it might yet carry more actual and true interest, especially if truth is of interest, truth being of all importance, for the path of magic is founded in truth, not make-believe, in reality, not in the unreal, in real magic, not in magical thinking. At its heart this book is about truth, the very spirit of truth, and how truth is of all importance. Mirroring Magic spans three months from mid-March to mid-June of 2017, first in Spain, then England, then back in Spain on the Camino de Santiago. It is the companion volume to Forgiving Heaven, the furtherance of this most marvelous, fascinating, intriguing and delightful true story. And I do believe this true story is truly for the few. You might want to find out if you’re one.
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From the Introduction:
"Just as the Earth upholds the pyramids, upholds all the temples long reduced to their foundations of earth, upholds all the monuments still standing to God and to ourselves, so does Indigenous Religion and myth uphold all the subsequent religions that the Earth and its peoples have brought forth in the advancement of civilization. It is the true orthodox, to which all spiritual traditions owe their being, except perhaps the Kopomists, and whatever might have actually descended from the sky. It is the groundwork and baseline of my belief."
~S. Preston Chase, Devcriceo
Turtle Camp, Cooper River, South Australia
April 4th, 2019
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From the Foreword:
"I’ve probably known the author as long as anyone living. It might even be reasonable to say I’ve known him as long as he’s known himself. It depends on how one defines ‘knowing,’ it being one point of the greater consideration, the theme of knowing running the length of this book like a fault line, by turns keeping the mind both engaged and at bay. It occupies the uncertain world of the ad hoc off-balance, having a certain uncertain certainty, one foot holding center, one foot doing the hokey-pokey, though some might say the hocus-pocus, others might say the bunk, hogwash, bull and hokum. It’s a dance which a rhythm all its own, though some will recognize the cadence, the resolution of the syncretic conversion of a specifically abstract form into variations of the same aspect of understanding; pitching pennies against a line drawn in the sand, waves coming in to wash the slate clean, the next day the beach looking like it has never known water. You know you’ve arrived when you find yourself staring at the back of your head.
As I write this he is camped with me under a coolibah tree on the Cooper River in the outback of Australia. And though I probably know him better than anyone living, there are times when I feel like I hardly know him at all.
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~Mortimer Quigley McNaught
South Australia, April 5th, 2019

• Language: English
• Publisher: S. Preston Chase
• Release date: Mar 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9780991631506

S. Preston Chase

The author currently makes his home in Belfast, Maine, although he has been something of a ‘continuous traveler’ since 2008, as he says, one of the Paroichia People: “Strangers and foreigners on the Earth; loyalties radicalized by a faith propelling them on a journey to a home- land not of their making, across boundaries and borders that defied empires and tyrannies. ‘People of the Way,’ from the Greek ‘-paroichia,’ which could be translated ‘pilgrim people,’ likened to the quest of Abra- ham, setting out to find God’s country, having an inner conviction that the journey, as well as the destination, is a matter of faith, a trust that events are leading somewhere — those strange words burning in our hearts, leaving us hungry for the holy, the authentic and lasting, such faith leading to difficult choices.”

Book preview

[ PART I: SPAIN ]

I

Madrid

~In which we hit the ground stumbling, talking of this, that, and the other, tip the hat to Magic and magical thinking, as well as to Papa Legba, Keeper of the Crossroads, and to the exemplary example of that Gentleman of Arms and Master of the Art of Elocution, that crazy unwitting Coyote, the one and only Señor Don Quixote, the Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha.

Ithought it started with the coat. By the time I left Asturias I realized it started somewhat before that, three days before that, when I was robbed of my daypack that fateful first morning in Madrid, dominos lined up to England: London, Bristol, and Bath and circling back. It was that fateful first morning in Spain, trying to get out the door and hitting the ground stumbling, nose in the dirt and plowing up petunias.

At first, all I could see was the negative side of the equation. By the afternoon I had conjured it all up as an inadvertent sacrifice of a tall standing order and was offering it all up to Legba, asking only for whatever he would offer in return. It’s the way I’ve long related to Legba. I’ve never asked for the mastery of guitar or fiddle, cards or dice, not even the mastery of this chosen medium I’m working in now. All I’ve ever asked for is to by degrees get a handle on this scattered self of mine. All I’ve ever asked for is to someday coalesce into a more or less genuine person. Once again I didn’t have any expectation in approaching the big man, and now but one desire, that the theft not follow me around, that it not result in further consequence down the lost and found road. But I knew that if something was to give, if something were to come back, of necessity it would be considerable. And I’m still considering it as I write this, as the story continues to unfold.

This is the start of the story, and although I say I have a good idea how the book ends, I do not know how the story ends. It feels quite open-ended, and I like it that way. I feel like I’m living inside this story, walking in the open air of a storybook, anticipating the next turn of the page, and where I expect there will be some fleshing out of the story as I contemplate the skeletal structure, the bare bones of what actually happened, the planting of this flag of loss in the wind, this claiming of the black hole starting point of ground. I’ve been around long enough to know better, and I think it’s obvious this is headed somewhere, whereabouts as to what as yet unknown. The handwriting is on the sidewalk, and the lag is out there, a gauntlet waiting to be picked up in passing as time permits and nature warrants. When the book is finished I’m guessing the story and all it contains will skip on, with or without me in it.

To be clear, although I feel there are good reasons for writing this book, it’s the negative side of the equation, the reality of the stolen pack, that puts it over the top and up and out of the trenches. I feel it’s needful to get something back, something of a more tangible form from this sacrifice, something more than a mind held in hand story, something to show for it, something real, like this book, something real to replace that very realness lost. It’s a blank that needs to be filled in, an opening leading to another dimension, the dimension of whatever this is, this dimension of time unfolding. Or at least that’s what I’m telling myself, trying once more to make sense out of seeming chaos, to find meaning in what many see as only the random acts of the world. I have the feeling there’s more to this than meets the eye. I have the feeling I’d better get this down on paper as well as I can as it happens, although I realize so much has happened already, going back, going way back, going back as far as I can remember.

Yes, by turns of the wheel it all started to fit into place, at least the many and several beginnings, one backed on another, the full meaning of it all as yet to be determined. But it was then, on my tenth day in Spain, with the apparition of the gold breastplate and the wolf’s head, the grey wolf with shining grey eyes, lost in the woods all night, sitting and staring out into the darkness, it was there and then when I knew something was up and not likely to be coming back down anytime soon. It was then that I knew we were off to the races and I needed to stay in the saddle, with no idea where the track ran, still no idea where this is heading and what may befall. Where, as I’ve said, the bigger picture is an open-ended equation, stories within stories funneling down, backed on these concentric spheres of story stretching back, opening out into the past, the fine focus of what’s to become coming together, light gathered together in a magnifying glass in some pin-point conclusion, the starting of certain fire, the fire spreading, in the big picture so far only drifting smoke in this early morning Asturian mist. In this ancient mystic land, the dawning realization that past, present, and future have become one, rising with the sun, the realization that they always were.

But then, most stories don’t come to a resolute conclusion, just end somewhere, with death or marriage or at the end of the page when the author falls asleep, acknowledging the river having run out of water. Don Quixote ends with the old gentleman’s death, but one still imagines Sancho out there with his donkey and his flock of sheep, still drinking wine and eating onions. Everything goes on, at least in real life, goes on, goes in and comes out changed, changes back, changes and changes, and yet at its core remains unalterably ever the same.

.§.

This is a true story. It is not fiction. Fiction is its own animal. I don’t write fiction. I wouldn’t know where to begin. Making up a story seems such an effort when real life is lying around and up for grabs. I once had the idea of writing a novel where all the characters would slowly die off or drop out and be replaced by new characters a few times over while the plot wandered about aimlessly crisscrossing paths to nothing like anything resembling conclusion. I soon concluded that even entertaining the idea was a waste of time better spent actually doing something else. Now wondering on the metaphor given by the subconscious. The question is: is this concept the inherent reality of us all, all these nutshell versions of a tale told between the covers of a book, the covers of a life? Are they but snapshots of the ever-evolving motion picture of the most and only real dimension, the ever-evolving now? We pluck a fruit from a tree. We call it an apple. We eat it, core and all. We have an experience. We write about it, exit the house and leave the door open. We don’t go back.

We’ve all heard it said that truth is stranger than fiction, that the real is much stranger than the unreal, and it is, for all fantasy is but a representation of something much greater, and it is this reality that we should forever be seeking. Truth is stranger simply because it’s true. Fiction can be fantastical, but only truth can be truly strange, and only the unadulterated true story carries real weight. Adulteration is a cheat. For a true story to carry the full measure of the experience it must not be more or less than it is. The true history of Don Quixote would not ring nearly as true if charging at those windmills was merely an amusing anecdote, and where we must give some consideration to how he attributed a great many of his encounters to enchantments. There is this aspect of illusion; we are all part and participle to it. It’s best not to cast the first stone at the appearance of either sin or madness. When there is nothing to do, it is still something to avoid.

Illusion is all around us. It is the very ground we walk upon, Don Quixote showing the way, acting out the common dialogue, making the illusion visible, viable, uncovering the appearance behind the facade, laying bare the interior body of belief, exposing the rough and tumble lay of the land. Illusion is the birthright of us all, born as we are in a forgetting into a world that forgot. Don Quixote embraced illusion. He entered the looking glass and came out the other side, out the far side of known experience, in that shattering of glass forging the miracle of his own transformation, coming to know illusion by embracing the strong magic of his heart. For to understand illusion one must know miracle and magic. One must have miracle and magic in one’s life. The magic of Don Quixote’s life comes down to us today no less real and no less true than when Cervantes first conceived and birthed the old gentleman in his mind. Don Quixote is as real as we make him. It is but the illusion of illusion, and in this there is real magic. It is given to us to mirror that magic, the magical mirroring of heart and heart.

.§.

Many people have had strange experiences, often at a young age, generally not knowing what or why, things that can only be considered magical. I liken it tthose immortal lines of William Wordsworth: ‘Trailing clouds of glory do we come, from God, who is our home.’ Unfortunately, as he said, those glorious clouds so often give way to the shades of the prison-house walls closing about the growing boy, the growing girl. A child demonstrating a knowledge of coming events, and therefore the seeming ability to effect such, is not generally met with approval by the prison-house world. These abilities, if not outrightly attributed to the Devil, as they are by a good many, are generally considered to be a threat to the belief structure of the great grown-up contingent, so gifts are laid aside. We are taught there is no such thing as magic, that it is a fantasy of youth. And it is a wondrous fantasy, and fantasy is a very popular theme, even with a great many adults, often enjoyed but generally only accepted if it’s not to be regarded as having any basis in reality. Children can have the myth of storybooks, even Santa Claus, for a time, until it’s time to grow up. Then it’s just a nod of the nose, and with the sugar plums and the milk and cookies up the chimney it goes. Like Wordsworth, I believe we come to this Earth with a divine connection, a very real and tangible connection, a connection enshrined in the imagination.

Of course, many people don’t believe in the Divine, like they don’t believe in magic, just as many people do not have a verifiable connection to the imagination. Most of those who do believe in the Divine relegate the practice of magic back to the time of Jesus and the truly magical person he’s believed to be, at least as concerns the greater part of the Christian tradition. For, to my way of thinking, there’s hardly a more magical belief than claiming there’s someone who can absolve everyone who’s ever been born from all the ill effects of all the wrongdoing that’s ever been done just by believing on Him, just by believing He can do it, wipe the slate clean so it’s like it never happened, all washed away in a downpour of divine grace, the true believers riding out the storm in the holy arc of deliverance, the rest of the world drowned in that deluge of bright heavenly rain, a strong case of and for magical thinking if ever there was one: one hundred proof, fifty percent still in the balance, the subconscious now plowing up air, seeding clouds.

Which is not quite my belief, but I do believe Jesus set an excellent example of bearing your own cross, and I believe we all have a cross to bear; like it or not, this responsibility to ourself, to each other, and to the Earth. And it doesn’t work to transfer the ox’s load to the ass, as Sancho Panza said in that wonderful book of his adventures with the great Don, or maybe it’s one of the fifty-nine pithy slogans of Lojong, I can’t remember, but it still applies, and where we find the operative metaphor ever underfoot: how we are always at a crossroads, ever and always at the same crossroads. We don’t have to go looking for a real crossing of real roads to work that Legba magic. We’re at a crossroads every day of our life, wearing that Christian cross around our neck or not. We’re always carrying those crossroads around with us, like a kite loosely slung on our back, waiting on wind.

The Atonement’s purported annulment of sin aside, the Passion of Christ can be seen as a, or perhaps the quintessential story of the crossroads, where the metaphor circles back, reaches back to the example, the prototype, ‘the greatest story ever told,’ perhaps the greatest myth of our time, perhaps the greatest myth of all time: ‘myth’ here meaning a story harboring great meaning, in this case that meaning being a matter of great conjecture, this being one place where the imagination of the world holds full sway. One thing we do know of Jesus’s life is that his greatest suffering was faced alone in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before his crucifixion, when he chose to acquiesce to his death, to acquiesce and go on, the following day crucified on Calvary, telling his disciples that his was a necessary sacrifice, that he had to leave for the Comforter to come, this comfort of the Holy Spirit that would hereafter always be with them, this extraordinary story of a very difficult choice, at a most difficult crossroads, where the whole world was surrendered, where there was no assurance, no surety of anything, his spirit holding center, in a final testing, in a great gamble, in a final, and ultimate sacrifice of self.

.§.

There is something to be said about sacrifice: the inadvertent, as was the loss of my pack, when the universe just ups and takes matters into its own hands, giving you a nudge back into the square ring of life when you’ve sat it out in the corner a little too long; the ‘advertent,’ where you make the decision to lay the burden of self down, taking up the cause of your own cross to bear in the makings of ongoing creation, as was the high and lofty case with Jesus; and this unfortunate thing of the imposed, of the restriction of all grown-up distinction on the subtle framework of childhood, being the essence of limitation, where one is called to grow back through the unnatural tough love of the world. There is so often this common sacrifice of the divine connection of youth if one is to succeed in the adult world of known reason. It can be seen as throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but logic must be upheld, and whatever is in that basin must go to get on in this get-going world of straight-line on to finishing line logic. Still hearing: ‘Olly, Olly oxen, free, free, free,’ but nevertheless all the more so. It’s okay to come out of hiding. It’s okay to be free. It’s okay to believe in unfocused belief. It’s okay to believe in possibility. It’s okay to pick up the lag on the sidewalk, skip rope and roll the hoop on home. It’s its own resurrection, like relearning to crawl, how good it felt to finally be hitting the floor on all fours. And although significantly strange occurrences have happened and continue to happen in my life, at least compared to what I have to compare it to, when it comes to my upbringing in this world of common mores and its lessening of the influence of divine connection, my story is not much different, other than I tend not to look away from these experiences as so many do. I look to these things for significance. Giving these experiences significance is generally called magical thinking, and it’s not given high marks in the greater world of clinical psychology, where actual experience of paranormal activity is generally regarded to be the product of a dysfunctional mind and where actually embracing such experience is considered to be quite questionable.

And that is the greater context in which this story resides. I don’t know any better than the old Don about any of this supposed version of what we take for truth, and it could be that I’m just a bit odd and my life simply follows suit, follows me around like my shadow, only attached at my feet, most noticeably jumping about in a wild hopscotching, shades of Peter Pan taking his time growing up, taking his time learning to fly, one foot on the path, one foot right-angled to reason. Sometimes this life is quite interesting, often it is quite the aggravation, both to myself and to others. Don Quixote was like that, at least to others. He had a singularly self-possessed attitude about his rightness in life that I have not been blessed with, have not yet achieved, at least, not to that self-professed degree.

.§.

So often, when you hear a truly strange story, you hear the old refrain, ‘You couldn’t make this stuff up.’ You seem to never hear that about fantasy. Which is not to say I haven’t enjoyed pure fantasy as portrayed in the greater and lesser fine arts. I have a particular liking for the broad range of classic English children’s literature: Peter Pan, Winnie The Pooh, Wind In The Willows, Beatrix Potter, Dodie Smith, PL Travers, CS Lewis, Lewis Carroll, JRR Tolkien, Robert Lewis Stevenson and whatever and all else I’m forgetting. It’s my kind of fantasy, but it is fantasy. And I say again, fantasy can be fantastical, but only truth is truly strange. Alice In Wonderland is strange, but not truly strange. The truly strange is something you believe could actually happen to you. If you encounter a hookah-smoking caterpillar, the White Rabbit wearing a wristwatch or the Queen of Hearts playing croquet with a flamingo, you know the difference between the real and its likeness. You know how imagination takes form. It takes experience to believe in experience. It takes opening to the nature of reality to know the greater real. When you have actual experience of the other side of dimension all fantastical representations of the same become as toys put back in the toy box. Truth is not simply stranger than fiction; it resides at the very limit of the imagination and only imagined in the very experience of itself.

From what I surmise most people do not believe in the possibility of there being anything outside of their personal experience, their lack of belief limiting their receptivity to the broader spectrum of reality showing up, making a little walk-on cameo appearance. It is the old fear of the unknown, similar to the fear of people who are different, of other nationalities, races and cultures. It is the primary basis for the fear of migrants, immigrants. It is the fear of any and all things other. Most people simply don’t want to be exposed to anything outside of their known experience, on Earth, or in Heaven, fearful of what it might be and might entail. The unknown is regarded with great suspicion by most people, having more subliminal fear than latent curiosity. It’s an age-old fear, the fear of the tribe over the far mountain or across the wide plain coming to steal our women, our children, our acorns.

Homo sapiens are cursed with this. Few people rise to embrace the unknown, do not seek to suppress or destroy it. It is a large part of our human heritage, going back in an unbroken succession as far back as we go ourselves, the scales balanced by the other half of our history, our history of hearkening to the Spirit and trusting to the spirit in others harkening back. It stands to reason that most people don’t believe in the possibility of miracles, even among those who say they do, that thing of walking on water, turning water to wine, walking on water turned to wine, this inexplicable world and all that goes with it.

Again, most of those who say they believe in miracles generally believe there was a time when such things happened but that it’s long over and done with, which is about as illogical a supposition as I can imagine. I tend to believe in pretty much everything and anything as possible until I learn from experience that it isn’t. It’s easier that way. You’re not so surprised when the unexpected shows up, not as likely to be shocked into a state of immediate denial. As I’ve long said, and oft repeat, ‘always build your house bigger than yourself,’ and it’s handy; outgrowing that snail shell and needing an upgrade, ‘scuttling across the floors of silent seas’ and checking out the options. There is a world of wonder out there, and one might as well be open to it. There is a greater possibility to life than the two-dimensional flat plane of what we generally know as the round world. There is a whole other dimension operating in this world, that beautiful truth hidden seductively in plain sight. It just depends where your pleasure lies, ‘where your beard points tonight.’ It depends on love overcoming fear. And fortunately, there are the tantamount angels, and they do walk among us, and they do rise above, feet on the ground, head in a whole other sky.

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There was a time when I didn’t believe. I had no religious upbringing and saw no reason to believe in anything to do with God, fairies, or fairy godmothers. Then, at the age of seventeen, I had the realization that it’s simply more interesting to believe than not, and although this was an intellectual construct of relatively pure reason, it was based on a small but palpable hit to my psyche.

I was reading Franny And Zooey by JD Salinger, and there’s a scene where Zooey is watching his little sister Franny drink a glass of milk, and he suddenly realizes she’s just pouring god into God. In that moment that small epiphany was passed on to me. It made a perfect kind of sense: this realization that it’s all a oneness of being and that if there is any truth to this ‘god-business,’ then this was it, or if not the be-all and end-all at least somewhere to start. The light(!)bulb flashed on overhead, and it was suddenly clear to me that limiting belief in possibility would be a rather boring way to go through life. Believing in the possibility of all possibility was suddenly very exciting. There was this immediate entertainment value in just the very thought, and it has never ceased. That magical expansive feeling is as strong today as the first time I felt it. And it wasn’t like I suddenly came to a belief in or of anything in particular. I simply came to the awareness that it was possible there was a lot more going on than I was aware of, being this sudden recognition of my lack of recognition, and from which I’ve never looked back. And things changed after that. Things started to happen, open up, then went kaboom. And I came to the realization that much of what happens to us is restricted by what we perceive as possible, that in the limitation of what we believe to be possible is the restriction of possibility showing up, and all up for grabs. At which point this was no longer an intellectual construct; something actually switched. Maybe this was my schizotypal magical thinking kicking in, perhaps being something I had been denying but now decided to let out of the box, off the leash, let fly in its own makeshift sky. Maybe it was simply being open, open to truth, to the simple possibility of truth, nothing more than awakening in the morning and opening a window onto the closed world.

In two years I would experience the great glorious cascade of spiritual fire, of Heaven’s own fire, like a waterfall of pure power, like nothing else that I know, or know of, the physical manifestation of Spirit. And I believe whether such experience is considered to be externally induced or a product of the mind, it reveals the mind to be an enormously powerful institution. This is something that’s hard to deny. If you deny the power of your mind, your mind is not your own. There is an actuality behind the shadow, and the extent to which we believe in the power of our mind is just how much we’re alive, and I believe that goes equally well for when we’re dead. Fantasy has its place, it opens the mind to wonder, but truth puts you rather hard up against it. It involves a lot of questioning, those questions usually just as open-ended as the ending of most books.

I’ve heard it said that typically you will find the worst writing at the end of a book, that it’s much easier to start a book than finish it. Right now this book ends back in Madrid, getting on a plane, no death, no marriage, nothing much of significance, but then, as I’ve said, I’ll be surprised if there isn’t more to this story in the due course of leaping lagomorph time, that wild hare be-bopping on. I feel it coming from somewhere over the rainbow, where finding that pot of gold is its own movable feast, ever in sight and equally ever out of reach.

.§.

Yes, smokey Madrid. As it stands this story ends in an inconclusive conclusion in Madrid. Like a river dying out in the desert, it just sort of tails out and goes underground.

I saw just such a river once, in Nevada, just over the California border, at the base of Boundary Peak, in the austere and so very haunting White Mountains, a most beautiful little river. It comes down from that peak of small snowfall through the Bristlecone pines and meanders in a gradual dwindling out amongst the lower Piñons, with lush green grass growing three or four feet wide and narrowing either side of that diminishing stream. It just tails out in the desert. It doesn’t connect up with another river. It doesn’t reach a lake or the ocean. Not all rivers do. I occasionally think of that river and where it ends, how some things just tail out. They’re beautiful for a time and then go underground. I suppose it’s a good metaphor for life in general, for lives that go underground in a similar way, tail off in a similar way, eventually to walk on, as we all must, as all life must, walk on past our common ending to a similar but unique beginning. It’s certainly a good metaphor for this story. But then, just because something goes underground doesn’t mean that it ceases to exist. That river might connect to a deep underground aquifer, a subterranean lake of ancient and very pure water. There’s probably not a lot happening down there. Some say that’s a lot like Heaven. I don’t know much about Heaven or the subliminal nature of what goes on underground, but I do know about metaphor. It’s one of the hallmarks of the schizotypal personality, with which I am sorely cursed, and where there’s a metaphor, there might be a meaning, a long-lost and sought connection.

This is a magical thought. I have lots of magical thoughts. It is not fantasy, it’s a true consideration of possibility, and we want to point out the very clear distinction of the very real difference.

.§.

And just to be clear on this subtle point of nomenclature here at the outset: I do occasionally find myself using the pronoun ‘we’ for ‘I,’ and people have just as occasionally called me on it, asking if I am either schizophrenic or speaking for God. I say neither schizophrenia nor any aspect of delusion or psychosis showed up in my psychological profile when I undertook the three days of professional psychological testing, and as for ‘God,’ that’s a connection we should all be seeking. I see nothing wrong in saying ‘we’ for ‘I,’ as long as ‘we’ is not capitalized as ‘We’ and as such truly begging a serious differ. I do rather feel like an amalgam of selves at times, maybe because my astrological sun is in Gemini, ruled by those non-identical twins, maybe because I really don’t understand myself all that well. Not understanding myself all that well I feel like there must be more going on than I am aware of, both above ground and below. And although I embrace the expansiveness of this broad-based feeling, it can be a bit confusing, but then it just might be that in loosening up the identifiers of self there is something like the baseline reduction of the greater confusion of restricted vision by getting outside the confines of closed circuit identity, therefore outside the confines of this one way of seeing myself and in turn the outer world of strange goings on, or so I tell myself, by way of illustrating the general principle. Yes, I think for all of us there’s a lot going on that doesn’t always make good sense to our limited understanding, especially if we’re actually trying to understand. It could be that in limiting our awareness to the one-pointed aspect of ego there is the limitation of the arena of awareness itself. I like to keep a loose rein on that long-sought idea of identity and let it work out its own relationship to its position on the planet, let it work out its own place to stand among others, to find out for itself that in its own expansive diversity it only exists as it stands in stead to itself, to perhaps find that in the parting out of self there is the lessening of self, the surrogate ceremony of setting another blazing boat to drift on the outgoing tide. All that aside, it’s well known that two heads are better than one, with the added advantage of neither having to sleep next to the wall, once more putting our two heads together and trying to avoid locking horns.

So that will be the end of the story, or at least what’s written in this book, Madrid being the bookends to the story, Madrid being where it all started, the theft of the daypack being the first domino to fall, Madrid being where it all ends, where the ending is only another celebration of loss. It ends in Madrid because it really doesn’t end at all.

.§.

Now thinking back, I recall a quote that goes something like, ‘There must needs be a sacrifice, a great and last sacrifice, infinite and eternal.’ It comes from another book, another time, almost another lifetime, a whole other much longer and more involved story, but I think it moderately appropriate here as well, as in my limited financial circumstances this inadvertent sacrifice is rather infinite, and as the pack is not coming back it resides in some aspect of the eternal. And I have considered that, although significant, this sacrifice could have been much greater. Instead of me putting my metaphorical face into the ground nose first it could have been Ryanair meteorically dropping nose first into the ocean. But that would not be me making a sacrifice, but me being the sacrifice, the difference between Abraham and Isaac, so we thank the universe for small favors. I still had my clothes and my camping gear, being everything of actual significance should the apocalypse arrive while I finished my breakfast, and for which I put in a sincere and fervent request. With no apocalypse portending I was still grateful for the blessing of the remaining needful few euros in my front pocket. It was then, as the realization set in, that I thought of this loss as an inadvertent sacrifice, being the somewhat philosophical person I am, this sacrifice being something I would have never intended, the philosophy coming with the price of admission.

Over the course of the next one hundred days I sometimes wished the sacrifice hadn’t been quite so exacting, but I knew that only with a significant sacrifice can one expect a significant blessing, the kind where your cup runneth over and staineth the rosy toes of your feet. Telescoping backward the beginnings would go on forever, for all of us. For me it goes back to a life where I was born into a state of generalized anxiety and social phobia, into this mad schizotypal mind with its ever-attendant symptom of magical thinking, all mixed up with these experiences of what would appear to be true magic.

.§.

I’d flown into Madrid the evening before, and it was quite late by the time I lugged my bags from Plaza Sol to The Hat hostel. It’s not far, but I might as well have been backtracking in an aberrant maze opening out in all directions, with everywhere the center, but not the one I wanted, jumping hedges and only getting randomly closer to my goal, covering ten times more ground than was needed. I was still in the old flip-phone mode, and the map I had didn’t seem to have a single street on it that corresponded to the territory. I was tired. It had been two and a half days on the road between leaving the ground at Anchorage International to touching down at Madrid-Barajas. The trip hadn’t gone exactly as intended. In my endeavor to save money I inadvertently spent one night on the floor at SeaTac and another at a cheap motel in Newark, not getting much sleep either night. The whole plan was flawed. I set myself up for this fall as surely as if I’d planned it. My life has often been like this. Once again I had made the commitment to listen to the advice of others, and once again managed to outskirt it, to skirt around it, choosing to live on the abrupt edge that is everything such edges are.

I have always liked living on the edge, in the appropriated good graces of the universe. It’s that thing of trusting, which manifests as feeling like you’re being cared for when things go right, albeit abandoned when they go wrong, but either way it’s that long-sought connection to something other, be it there or not, walking a tightrope where only one side drops off. You can feel safe in the manufactured excitement, but it’s a little disconcerting when the next step is not underfoot. And this was to be working more or less without a net, maybe get lucky enough to have one of those clown shows running around down there with one of their trampoline things. There are times when the universe has a mind of its own, and for some, of which I’m one, there’s the intermittent short circuit of bare wires that makes the unwanted cross-connection when the road gets a bit too bumpy, legs casually entwined and feeling fledgling edgy, one of those tortured creations like the briar and the rose, thorns and thorns, one in flower, one holding back for the sake of economy and lack of commitment.

I knew I’d better not devolve into a matriculating matrix of open-ended subconscious metaphor or this book would never get written. I was doing it anyway. The schizotypal tendency to strange speech was nipping at my heels, nipping at my flesh. It always would be. My speech is often rambling aberrant, but it’s when I have a blank page seemingly being a singularly good listener that it falls into real disarray, reforming in some amalgam of the undisclosed new rock of the tabletop, the Earth doing its own recycling, the depths of this shallow mind not all that different. I also have the tendency to listening, not hear, to write poetry over the soundtrack and to careen down two tracks at once. There’s a trick to it. It takes a certain meld of mind, this one again shuffling the deck. This is just the way the old dog runs when let off the leash.

I knew that wasn’t a very good analogy, but there it was: the old dog sometimes a lone wolf, often a wily coyote, become an errant Quixote, following in the footsteps of that saint of broken lances and lost teeth, all yet to come together as the puzzle assembled. Now the old dog just happy to be let out of the house and romping about the Dogpatch, being the product of high anxiety let loose; anxiety being one of the very attendant accompaniments to the schizotypal brain, both generalized anxiety and social phobia, as I’ve said, repetition filling in the blanks, belaboring the point. Yes, I’ve entertained those conjoined fraternal twins in a long-standing constancy of conduct, brother and sister offspring of Mother Schizotypal and no known father. It contributes to aberrance and discontinuity of connection, where most anything fits the profile. It’s a frantic racing around smelling up traces of what little has been left behind in the artist’s conception of the astral, meaning this is kind of like what a dog does. Then it’s me once again pulling on my leash, trying to get on to something more meaningful, more in line with the everyday dog-walking mind, circling the block a few times before deciding this allegorical park bench is a good place to lie down, put the feet up, reconsider what I need to consider, see how far I get, this application of self-reflexive introspection being a bit difficult to long sustain.

.§.

So, yes, I finally found the hostel, The Hat, where you hang yours and where I lost mine. Dagnabit, done and doggone, screwed up once more, left my daypack lying on the floor unattended: laptop, camera, phone, iPod, passport, international driver’s license, five hundred dollars in cash and most everything else of importance, just left lying there and up for grabs. And it was. It’s all on camera. This young fellow comes in off the street looking like he fit the scene, right at this confluence of time so opportune, the lobby full of jolly young folk, backpacks everywhere, and where I fell into this cosmic, karmic trap, like a trapdoor to an oubliette of nothing but time left for my consideration, which not I, nor anyone could have engineered more devilishly, cleverly concise. I mean to say this was no ordinary accident, magical thinking and the chimes of midnight pealing bells. Now wondering on the confluence of conditions required for this auspicious disaster. I might as well have handed him the pack and said thanks.

If only I’d slept in a little longer, not been in such a hurry to get out of Dodge. If only I’d not woken up in a mixed dorm with startlingly clothed young women, wondering if I was in the right, albeit wrong, place. If only I’d taken that minute to think, just gone down to breakfast as the one-pointed occupation of the moment without the daypack, if only doing that foolish thing I’d not succumbed to some unconscious motive to take off the pack and place it on the floor when there was no need to, just to turn around to get a cup of coffee, cream, turn back around to find the pack gone, and no one running off in any discernible direction. A real live vanishing act, gone quickly, and so right on the mark. In hindsight it feels like I was in something of a hypnotic state, a trance. I tell you this with all possible clarity. This is not something I would ever do knowingly or ever knowingly do, but I did. I’ve traveled a bit in my life. I know the basic ropes of the square knot and watching your stuff not walking. It wasn’t even that I wasn’t thinking. It was like I was, or ‘we’ were, a puppet, or two, under the pulling of strings. And not only that, but in that almost instant moment the thief was right there, at this perfect crossroads of time and space, and didn’t hesitate making his decision, recognizing this as god-ordained and just doing his job, the angel of relinquishment in the deliverance of sacrificial goods, whatever God, demigod or saint it is that thieves pray to. There was the video on the security camera, black and white. It is of course like this in big cities much of the world over, a rampant snatching of the left snitchable. Where you have it, and I lost it, and there it rests, and will lie, this sacrifice I entrusted to Legba to lay down in a most conclusive grave.

As I’ve said, all I asked of Legba was just to let it lie, to let it be, to not let this loss follow me around, to let those lost ties be securely severed, concluding, as always, in the example of that exemplary and hallowed night in long ago Gethsemane, that other nightshade vision of the Don standing vigil over his armor to be knighted as one of the realm in the morning, and which will become so integral to our story: ‘Not my will, but thine, be done,’ and again waiting on Providence to pull back the hammer, the all-inclusive, non-restrictive, active principle that providence ever is. It works for all of us as a formative example, passed down like the Holy Grail from generation to generation, seeking its completion in the heart that mirrors that most divine magic, the heart of providence reflected back to the world. My opinion, all of this is only my currently favored opinion.

And I would like to be clear on this as well, here at the beginning of this series of boxcar rattling stops and starts, couplings and uncouplings, and again cite my ‘standard disclaimer of all certainty,’ as included in the introduction to this work, being that whatever I say in this putting forth of inveterate personal opinion concerning the workings of the world is but my opinion, and to be understood as such. I make no claim as to knowing anything of a certainty. I claim to have no sure knowledge of anything, the knockoff of knowing that all knowing ever is, in that knowing ever leaves a lot to be known.

And again, per my ‘first axiom of belief,’ it has long been my belief that all belief should be based on one’s personal experience, that experience taken under the wing of one’s own heart and mind-felt rumination, not on idle speculation, not on what one’s read in books or heard on the stray or strained ears from others, not on wanton whoopee and what blows up the skirt in on the wind, another scrap of newspaper finding a home at your feet. For me this even applies to such basics as the law of gravity. If you’ve only read about it and not been bonked on the head by the apple it’s lounge chair living. One might as well get out the parasol and turn on the tubes. Belief should be informed by experience, and I have a bit of experience with this belief. More than once I have caught myself coming round the mulberry backward, bumping heads. I have come to some small knowledge of the terrain, and the ground is usually under my feet, or if not, then it’s once again the old free fall and the inevitable hard lesson of a world come to call. I have come to some small understanding concerning my condition, some small understanding concerning the condition of the known world as well. It has taken a fair amount of roundabout effort to come to terms with the writhing snakes cut into bangs over those Medusa eyes, just as we have come to tolerate or even enjoy these seemingly random internalizations and interjections of the subconscious, although it is a conditioned response, a seizing upon trust, a floundering in the gutter-banks, a filling-in of the blanks with whatever’s handy — in the slow fading afterglow of loss still doing the topsy-turvy — still trying to find my feet, falling down the rabbit hole and looking for a soft landing, ever wondering what wonder comes next. Where it’s all poetry to take you home, by the hand, by the heart held in hand, albeit to a home of the temporary consideration, down a convoluted footpath to a quiet shanty in the rustic lost woods of Asturias, to a home that already no longer exists.

.§.

The daypack was stolen between the lines of awareness, between the lines of opposing forces in this no man’s land of unoccupied ground. And it might not seem of particular importance, but it is the one hinge upon which our story turns. The daypack and nothing of it are coming back, unless it’s some odd occurrence well after the fact, which is undoubtedly doubtful. It no longer enters into the story. It’s gone, the sacrifice conducted as unceremoniously as the occasion demanded, its only role being to leave a blank to be filled in.

Then there was just the dwelling and dealing with it, the trip to the police station to fill out the meaningless report, borrowing a phone to call the bank to turn off my debit card. No travel insurance, as I’ve never thought it necessary, my foolishness, my foolishness washing over the world. We learn our lesson, it being a long-lasting lesson in the making… Now wondering if this is all tied up in some sort of sorcery. That would put this in perspective. Yes, I think so. Thinking about it now, I think it was. Let’s say it was. Let’s put every possibility of sorcery, and the illusion of sorcery, into the equation, into the rest of the story as well. It does make it more interesting.

Yes, it must have been some sort of spell that I was under, I being so like Señor Quixote, who so often fell under the influence of some evil necromancer. It happens more often than one would suspect. I left myself wide open, and this young practitioner of the black arts seized upon the very narrow window of the wide-open opportunity. And just like the Don’s encounters with evil magicians, I imagine this young man to also be a most adroit and adept practitioner of the art, although still awakening to his latent abilities, a fledgling phantom set to soar, today a daypack, tomorrow a tricornio off the head of a Spanish gendarme, the world his oyster until he falls in the soup.

It’s well known that magicians aren’t just old men with staffs and magic wands, not just crones with their pointy broad-brimmed black hat, a sidekick black cat and a broomstick. They’re not usually in the likes of what is generally depicted, not in all of literature or lore, ancient or modern, not by any stretch of the imitative imagination. Like the angels said to walk among us, real sorcerers are most often to be found among those one would least suspect. It’s part of the sorcery itself not to appear as such, donning the cloak of a visual invisibility, seen but not seen for what they are. Some say natural sorcerers are born, not made, sleight of hand is learned, real magic is a gift, an alignment of the stars, and it’s somewhat true, but not quite. As it’s said, we all have our gifts. We come into this world with the gifts we’ve worked to develop in the past, be it sorcery or mastering the sitar, be it truthful and honest or in the makings of a natural liar. It’s not the stars that rule us; they are simply an indicator of whom we’ve become. We rule ourselves. The stars mirror us. Nature reflects consciousness, not the other way around. Although, in truth, it is all of consciousness, all conscious in the manner of its own description, and as such we mirror the stars just as they mirror us, where it’s all a manifestation of the one source, wheels turning within wheels, in this revolving house of mirrors, this funhouse that so often isn’t. And this particular ‘gift’ of sorcery can be as much of a curse as a blessing, generally more, as power is so easily misused, as this thief did, does, I imagine, on a fairly regular basis. Here they have him on camera, and he slips in and out virtually unnoticed — the eight a.m. daypack-stealing specter. I see it now. Yes, in hindsight, it was a warning to be on guard, to be aware of greater sorcery to come.

After the fact the many pieces of the puzzle fit so precisely into the place of understanding. In three days I would be taken for a sorcerer myself, as somehow embodying some aspect of the illusion, the picture coming roundaboutly into focus, the picture coming roundaboutly into play, the rest of the hand still to be played out: the needful trip to the consulate for a new passport, the trip to the gardens to invoke Legba to lay this lost burden to rest, calling on my son for rescue and arriving in Santolaya, in the Province of Cabranes, in the realm of Asturias the night of the day after.

Yes, what a difference a day makes, sleeping it off in the shanty, luxury primitive, I imagine the only shanty with a hot tub for miles around, maybe in all of Asturias: getting out of the unreal world of the big city, getting down to earth with baby goat and kitten, a simplicity well beyond Thoreau, where we double-clutch down, and shift gears into a much lower order.

.§.

II

Santolaya

~Being a prelude to entertaining anecdotes of life in the shanty, as well as the formal introduction of our exemplar, Don Quixote, the Q-man, along with sundry other topics of notable and descriptive discourse as they come forward and care to be considered.

~Monday, March 13th, 2017, La Casa Refugio

My son and I got to his shanty three days ago, late Friday night. It’s about an hour’s hike up from the sleepy little village of Santolaya to the shanty, and it’s not all what could be considered good trail. This was done hauling my rolling carry-on luggage case and a large duffel bag of clothes and camping gear. My son carried the duffel. I was able to drag the case about halfway until recognizable road ran out, then shoulder it. I’ve brought a fifty-degree down sleeping bag, ground cloth, and an inflatable air mattress for shanty camping. Also a backpack, hydration bladder and trekking poles for the Camino, the ancient Spanish pilgrimage route, properly called the ‘Camino de Santiago.’ The Camino is planned for the last week of this sojourn, in approximately three months’ time.

The shanty is another brainchild of my son, James, affectionally known as ‘Punch,’ sometimes ‘Puck,’ and good daughter-in-law Judy, being where the punch comes from, a source of constant amusement in the mixing of metaphor and meaning. It’s another Punch and Judy show, and the talking puppets are now talking in Spanish. It’s likewise a bit alternative in interpretation as there are no rolling pins or frying pans. Only so much damage can be done with hand-carved wooden spoons and their one lightweight cooking pot, their one request from the States being an MSR cook-set. It’s their wedding present, slowly working up to someday having an actual set of dishes.

They’ve built a series of shanties over the years of one description or another. James even built an actual homey straw bale hovel once, as always, on someone else’s land and where it defaults. This is a particularly nice shanty. But besides the hot tub, which is a pit the size of an overstuffed English bathtub dug into the ground and lined with foam and black plastic (having its own wood stove for the heating of hot water, made out of the top half of a fifty-five-gallon barrel, the bottom half of the barrel sitting on the top half and serving as a very large pot), there’s not a lot of amenities. It’s all pretty rough and tumble.

Out of necessity they’ve built a sort of stockade around the shanty from tree limbs that have been sharpened and pounded into the ground using a large wooden club, like something once used to hunt dinosaurs, and the interred limbs are interlaced with more tree limbs in a woven effect creating a very substantial fence. This is to keep the goat out. The goat, Roxia, or Mama Cabra, has a baby goat, properly called Corvelito, but more often called ‘Kid,’ ‘Jumbuck,’ or ‘Out!’ as appropriate and occasion demands. The baby goat was born on a day of great wind, the day before I arrived, and is already very active. It is also very cute, much cuter than Mama. Mama is a mad woman. All she thinks about is eating, and I don’t think she puts much thought into that. It’s a very basic goat mentality. She goes from place to place in some random pattern in a mad frenzy of defoliating plants, much like a very large ant, eating the best of everything before eating the next best of everything and then the third best, all the while clanging her bell. She is tied off to a substantial hunk of tree trunk to keep her from running off in a mad quest for the best of everything in Asturias.

The shanty does have its own wood stove, its essential feature, made out of a five-gallon steel can. My son makes these things, generally out of found materials. Even the stove pipe is a series of tin cans secured together in some ingenious fashion. Judy says they had to eat a lot of pineapple. On both sides of the wood stove is counter space, topped with baskets of food and other needful items. Apparently there is no problem with mice, rats, raccoons, skunks, or other critters of the night as everything is left out under cover of the clear plastic tarp of the shanty roof, which is pretty much all a shanty is. Otherwise, the food stores are unprotected. The large plastic tarp is supported by more tree limbs, bent to form the curved half-dome structure. From the looks of it they might be laced together with the sinew of roadkill. The front wall is empty space, and the master bedroom is the floor in front of the stove. The bedding is a step up from the old sheep skins and elk hides of earlier shanties and teepees. I don’t think there are any elk in Asturias, but there are certainly plenty of sheep. Guest quarters are adjacent to the master bedroom and separated by two large plastic totes. Firewood is close by, nay, closer, stashed around the bottom of the tarp and under the counter, actually holding up the counter, this latter apparently for emergency use only, as well as next to my bed. The wood must be cut quite small for the not-so-big stove. There is a sign over the grand entrance to the shanty inscribed La Casa Refugio, which seems no idle threat. Oh, and not to forget our other primary amenity, the toilet. It’s your traditional hole in the ground, but unlike the more primitive practice of two logs lain parallel across an uncovered pit, the hole is covered with hand-hewn boards fitted tightly together, with a lid sporting a handle to conveniently lift off said lid and do the necessary squat. No balancing act needed. There is absolutely no danger of falling in. Pretty spiff. And you can hardly smell it from the shanty.

.§.

The first day at the shanty we don’t do much, mostly sleep and eat, keep the fire going. I’m occasionally heard bemoaning my loss in Madrid, but more often just sitting in quiet contemplation of the same. Being March in the foothills of the Cordillera Cantábrica it’s rather chilly, drizzly and chilly. The heat from the wood stove radiates out in a diminishing return, like the effect of gravity, decreasing inclemently with distance but quite comfortable within a radius of two feet when fully stoked. It’s not only because of the theft of my daypack that I’m glad to be out of the madness of the city. My disdain for the city is what tripped me up in succumbing to the very circumstance of the theft in the first place. It’s all the people, traffic and noise, congestion, a confusion that can result in a choice of bad decisions, a confusion in which thieves operate undetected in the sorcerer’s cloak of invisibility amidst the camouflage of ignorance, the background of everyone ignoring every other, looking away, looking down, oblivious to everything but their own most immediate destination, cause and concern. I’m not claustrophobic, but I do like to have some space around me. I don’t like being hemmed in, especially by buildings fronting streets swirling people. I don’t like the resultant confusion of it all reverberating off a canyonland of windowed walls. To me, it is quite disorienting. It contributes to the thief’s way of being, doing their nasty, sneaky sneak thief business. It is a thieve’s marketplace in a vague hologram of illusional disorientation, an interface of conflicting interference. It is a confluence of great pressure. On the plus side, in many cities, such as Madrid, this pressure and heat harbor some jewels of magnificent and seriously precious art, along with the more clever and enterprising thieves who contemplate the precious and how to get it into their hands. It all goes hand in hand, and I find it all a bit much, including the queues circling the block and the general price of admission, clambering down into the mines in a dark spelunking. It is so different here in the woods, as different as war is to peaceful negotiation.

Yes, if nothing else is to recommend this spot, it is most peaceful here on the prado (pronounced ‘prow’ in Asturianu), simply being a small piece of undeveloped land. It feels like a peace to be reckoned with. But I take it this land wasn’t always so peaceful, as in devoid of habitation. There are the remains of many old homes a short walk in any and every direction. They are nothing but crumbling rock walls now. All traces of roofs are gone, the wooden beams and red tiles long ago carted off for use elsewhere. Not much point in moving the rocks as they are a mainstay of the landscape. The only structure of conceivable use on the prado is an ancient rock barn with a leaky roof covered