Swan Song: The Great Magical Unknowing Elegance

By Mali Berger

Swan Song: The Great Magical Unknowing Elegance emerged from a desire to write an inside story, an autobiography of the dream, muse and odd vision that never quite lets go of our memory. These inner senses from childhood to old age wanted a book, in fact demanded one. I recalled a story about an old, wisdom-woman in Ireland who each morning chose one of her lifetime journals, let it fall open to any page, and then spent her rocking chair days remembering that single day out of her years. Climbing a ladder, I pulled down twenty-five years of dated journals, stacked them on a wooden table, and proceeded to draw out memorable events that I used for Book One of Swan Song, created in New York City. It was becoming a novel with actual events that I had lived.

However, something totally mysterious occurred. I began to experience the strangest dreams of my life. Several times a week I would find myself in Medieval Galway, Ireland, in a poor tenement or slum in the loft of Brian. I was telling him that he and his love must leave because bad times were coming. Brian saw me, wasnt afraid, believed my words and made plans for himself and his love, Daniela, to immigrate to New York.

I dont want to tell readers anything else about the dreams or how they took over the novel and my life as I flew from JFK to Galway to dream the story on location. I have known for a long time that the inner senses control our outer, physical life. Not the other way around. We are taught that what happens during our awake days may become dreams. Wrong. Our dreams come first and regulate our physical days.

Many years ago I read a few of Jane Roberts, Seth books. Now, in the midst of Swan Song, his ideas flowered again. Thus, the autobiography, fiction and research novel took on a whole new life and my inside story truly became The Great Magical Unknowing Elegance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 23, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462868995

Mali Berger

The author of seven books, including three novels in the Irish Trilogy, Steenie OShea, Aines Story and Niamh River, that takes place in Galway, Ireland, Mali Berger has also published short stories, a memoir and a book for children. In addition, she writes bi-monthly articles for the Arizona Authors Association. Mali taught American Literature in Michigan and Chinese Universities as well as The Dalton School in Manhattan and presently balances life between New York City and Galway, Ireland with visits to Dublin. Her love for drama and the theater as well as bundles of books from Kennys Book Shop in Galway are mirrored in her stories.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

THE LIGHT WAS fading. Soon it would be time to click on the two stained glass lamps that lent a glow to the room. Juliette Penn scooted back into the deep maroon sofa, relaxed her feet on the low wooden table, placed hands together and closed her blue-gray eyes, blue when happy, gray when sad, Paul always said. Breathing slowly in and out, she felt her body relax as she slipped silently into memory of those long ago-days, into the changing episodes of her life. In swift movement, like a swan’s flight, she saw her first meeting with clairvoyant Gillian, the farm years when she began writing, the Taos years when manuscripts grew and the Arizona years when the published books piled up. All flowed in a blur as if drowning in the last moments of life.

What was she seeking in those memories that might result in another novel, her eighth? Falling more deeply into the past, images of the biggest change of all surfaced when she became a widow. The book club she had organized and held in her home for eight years. Pain crossed her forehead as memory returned to the abandonment of the women when she needed friends the most.

Opening her gray eyes, she shook her head not wanting to return to that time again. She had moved far beyond that hurt by forgiving herself for allowing certain conditions to arise, letting go and building a new life for herself minus the book club. Sighing, she stood and turned on the stained glassed lamps, smiling at the shimmering bronze, gold and rose colors that filtered across the room. She did love her apartment and life in New York City and Galway, Ireland that replaced the previous married years.

So what was wrong tonight? With that question spoken aloud, instantly she understood where her consciousness was trying to lead her. Yes, of course, it spirited her back to that summer at the cottage many years ago when she lost so much. Odd how the memory began with the book club members who couldn’t come to her aid when her husband, Paul, died and then connected to a similar ten days of abandonment by family members, the ones she loved so much. Why now? She had worked her way through that pain also. She felt cold and shaky. Did it mean another such event was heading her way?

She shuffled to the bookcases, climbed a small ladder to the top shelf and chose one of her journals, carefully moved back to the sofa and again, closing her eyes she let the journal open where it may. Ah yes, there it was. All the entries detailing those ten summer cottage days when she knew she shouldn’t have come.

The image of wildflowers took over her mind. How beautiful they were that summer; bunches of yellow blooms like bouquets had sprung along the high beach; white daises and pink florets carpeted the woods where sun shone through dense pines, and light green ferns had popped up everywhere. A basket of tiny white flowers, the Tahitian Bridal Veil, hung from a tree branch over the mailbox greeting guests as they drove up the drive to the garage and cottage.

She saw it all as clearly as if she winged above like a mute swan seeking a daily retreat at waters edge from sky view before floating with mate down the lake in proud anticipation. The lovely, elegant creatures had been arriving steadily that summer along with geese, ducks and gulls to decorate the green, blue, silky calm of Lake Michigan or to ride the contrasting rough, dark, billowing waves.

This was to be her last season on Grand Traverse Bay after 50 years of sojourns in Kewadin, Elk Rapids and Traverse City. Her swan song. At 81, four summers after her husband’s death, she knew in her heart that it was time to let go, gift the cottage to her family and never return.

Her regrets were few and she looked forward to the ten days with grandchildren, great-grandchildren, spouses and in-laws. Perhaps she could even be part of their families. She had come to terms with living alone by developing a new life for her self that included a writer’s studio in New York City. An on-location author, she wrote fiction, flying to areas where the stories took place: Stockholm, Sweden; Galway, Ireland; Groningen, Netherlands and Venice, Italy to name a few.

In early months of widowhood, she imagined family visits as kindness or pity but was grateful. Now, she was able to accept that the young came because they wanted to. She realized that questions demanding reassurance from family were tiresome, and that she need not enter into a mindset that because she was old and alone, she was no longer worthy of people’s time. Forgiving herself for previous behavior she had learned that contentment was not supplied by other people but was achieved only by letting go, by accepting that she could not control or force others in a pattern she wanted. By freeing others she became a recipient of a deeper love, and she learned to accept love and kindness without being choked with self-pity.

She rose from the sofa’s safety, uneasy with her journal reading thoughts to pour a glass of deep red Rioja that she balanced carefully on the low wooden table. Unwilling to return to the ten-day fiasco that turned her hard won future topsy-turvy she grimaced and held on to a dream image of nature substitute.

She recalled sitting in the old wooden deck chair facing the lake with a cup of coffee and seeing the ground still filled with dead winter leaves as new ferns peeked upward and large pinecones laid as they fell from the mighty pines. A robin hip hopped in front of her, a second one appeared. The brush trimmed last summer still massed a few feet to her right. Her husband’s ashes in the pine circle, now part of nature, were surrounded by several pots of flowers and a green chair where she sat to ‘talk’ to him each morning. It was sad to think of their life history slipping away but… enough of this she said aloud as she sipped the Rioja wine and turned to another page in the old journal.

Her gray eyes watered as entries proved that past and future events rippled outward from the double pain. Was her past created from her recent uneasiness? The odd thought grabbed her attention. Birth of a novel? She shivered. Pulling the warm multi colored shawl, a gift from Gillian many years ago, around her shoulders, she again sank deep into memory of those ten days.

An outcast in her own cottage, she had retreated into the study for hours each day where she had moved to a small bed, leaving the larger rooms and beds to guests. When she had become aware of the error in her thoughts, she returned to work on an article, spending hours alone at the computer and hiking three-to-five miles a day to keep out of their way. She swam alone to hide tears. She shared her existence with the squawking seagulls as they dove down in the water to pick up fish. She lay on beds of pine needles communicating with the singing birds and black squirrels.

Don’t go back there, she scolded herself, forgiving her self the miscalculation and interference with family vacations. The experience had reinforced her feelings that it was time to deed the cottage to her son and daughter. It was her last visit to the summer place, preferring her worldwide on-location travels to the hard work of maintaining the cottage.

As she relived memories from the journal entries she followed a pattern of past into present and… she blinked, shook her head side to side, but what if, she thought, in the act of creating a dream in the past, it slips into the future at once?

Leafing through her journal, she found descriptions of rough water, huge waves rushing to shore. The repetition of waves and small bubbles, each one breaking and reforming in the present, out of the past and into the future enchanted her.

Suddenly she jumped up, climbed the ladder and transferred all the journals out of the bookshelves on to the low wooden table, sorted them by year and stabled them with bookends. Something odd is occurring, and the secret lies in these private journals, she muttered to herself as she began to read her long ago words.

CHAPTER 2

I want to write a book about life that happens on the inside. I remember my childhood when Suzi Belle comes to play with me. I often sleepwalk and awake sitting on the kitchen black and white linoleum floor. Suzi Belle flies around me, touching my face and hair and hands with a blue light while I laugh and touch her fairy clothes and silver wand. She seems very special, something beyond sacred. Those visits are significant moments in my childish life. The sound of silence accompanies our play when instinctively I know another dimension exists, one that makes me smile.

~

I also recall lazy summer days when I carry a blanket and brown bag lunch along with pencil and notebook on a bicycle down the hill on Jackson Avenue in Flint, Michigan to what I call my hidden nest in the shoulder high grasses of open fields. It’s there that I create my first poems and stories among the rabbits and birds that live in the wild natural habitat. I still remember seeing those early creations in the Flint Journal and winning books for publication in the Sunday pages for children.

~

Then there is my grandmother, father’s mother, who walks with me in the dark of night and teaches me the names of planets. I seem to fly to those lovely sights of still moments within the safety of my grandmother’s arms, visiting Arcturus. We also make a scrapbook together out of a tailor’s two-foot square business book. Under pictures of multi-cultural children we cut from magazines linger traces of suit designs. I imagine stories about the ethnic kids.

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I call to mind my mother holding my hand on our weekly walks to the local library where she helps me locate Mark Twain’s stories for children. One of ten children, her parents and grandparents live in