Full Circle

By Frances E. Pope

June 16, 2004 on the one hundredth anniversary of her fathers famous walk around Dublin, Chellsia Bloom comes full circle as her own life ebbs. Shouting No! to her mother, Mollys YES! Chellsia is an unwilling warrior this night. Her extraordinary music as a professional cellist has filled her life spanning the 20th century. As she struggles in the dark hours she looks back over the century with a heroic eye. Her only weapon against a century of conflict is her art. And so she passes this her last night playing music and dreaming dreams.
She will not rest quietly and then be gone. Her playing will ring out and her cry will be heard in all its tortuous agony. It is the music of conflict and the cry of the dying who mourn. It is the dissonant voice of a century of grief, pain and anger.
She is one artist representing many; her epic struggle that of the poet, the musician, the painter, the playwright each participating in the confusion and seeming meaningless of life in the modern world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 16, 2005
• ISBN: 9781465332745

Frances E. Pope

Throughout public school education in Connellsville, Pa and Delaware, Ohio, author Fran Pope developed a passion for literature and writing from an early age. She graduated from The Ohio State University with a B.A. in English Literature and pursued further studies in Library Science and English at The University of Michigan, studying the works of James Joyce at both schools. She is a violinist with two community orchestras and founder/CEO of the non-profit Winn Academy of Music, www.winnmusic.org She makes her home with her husband, four cats, fish, a bird, and a confused Labrador retriever in the Pacific Northwest.

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Copyright © 2005 by Frances E. Pope.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

Preludium

Midnight

Canto I

Canto II

Canto III

Canto IV

Canto V

Canto VI

Canto VII

Endnotes

This work is dedicated to all artists especially cellists: Julia, Lauren, David, Sam, Mara, Terry, Valerie and all the other musicians who share their love of music, humanity, and peace with the world

Preludium

The Journey Begins

No. Because I won’t go gently into that good night. I will not lightly relinquish my existential being nor surrender to that all encompassing prelude of the night. I will fight by not fighting. The cunning warrior often waits his foe. Mine can wait. I here abide his siege. There’s been so much fighting already all guns and smoke and smell of death and what’s the point anyway? Sound and fury signifying the political power of arms peddlers and their toadying minions. Nothing. Nothing at all. Nada, nyet, rien, nichts. All to be not quite forgotten, but ground into the destiny of the innocent. Surely it must signify something though, this life? Pourquoi? What day is it? Agnes’ Day. Sagen Eyed. Day of wraithe. Corpus humanus—one body one soul so many never figured that out. Spiritus Monday. All working together. Ah sweet sleep to knit the raveled sleeve of this life too late like Ulysses’ wife tearing down the day’s work—all her accomplishments lost, but her goal achieved. I shall not sleep this night. I’ve dropped too many stitches already. A pearl here and there before swine. Age makes fools of us all.

And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased. And the epitaph drear: ‘A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East’¹

My precious music, my life’s work; where are you now?

The harp that once through Tara’s halls

The soul of music shed,

Now hangs as mute as Tara’s walls,

As if that soul were fled,—

So sleeps the pride of former days,

So glory’s thrill is o’er

And hearts, that once beat high for praise

Now feel that pulse no more.

No more to chiefs and ladies bright

The harp of Tara swells;

The chord alone, that breaks at night,

Its tale of ruin tells.

Thus Freedom now so seldom wakes,

The only throb she gives,

Is when some heart indignant breaks,

To show that still she lives.²

Mute, unyielding cello resting in the corner. My dear ship your sails furled, the rigging still strung on tightened ebony pegs of the main mast. Bow and bridge, bow sprit plying the stages in oceans of notes one hand moving to and fro, steadying the course of notes and guiding, pulling and plucking the waves of sound while the other charts the path with precise tension and stress, rocking back and forth coaxing the sound waves to their purest and fullest measure cutting through the mid crest as clean as a knife edged keel plying rough seas or slicing the calm with scarcely a whisper of elegant sanctified sound. You are too lonely there. We must take one last voyage together you and I. Here let me embrace you once more and tell me all is not lost in this sea of pain. Come, friend, let me grasp thee close. I have thee not and yet I see thee still. Sisyphus was not alone I see. These covers they are warm and deep, but I my instrument do seek and ere I play I dare not sleep and dare I play to stare the deep. Rest gently on my shoulder while I stroke you and our embrace will be a fond farewell to our life together. You my dear will go on for centuries to come. A new millennium awaits. Your maple once stood tall and filled with life through veins and cells.

I was living in the forest

the cruel ax did slay me

living I was mute

dead I sweetly sing³

Far more life than I for you came to life after you died and the music of the spheres in your cells resonated with the music of mankind and so you will continue after I have passed out of harbor this night. But what am I but a paltry thing a tattered coat upon a stick unless I, too clap hands and sing and louder play until this music consumes my heart away and frees it from this dying animal flinging it into the artifice of eternity? But after that?

What musician waits to play on my bones and sinews? I am food for worms. I doubt they’ll appreciate me any more than some of my critics in this lifetime—indigestion all around. Neither matters in the end for even now I close my eyes and see the stage lights and beyond the misty eyes of my darling thousands holding their common breath as runs and trills and flying fingers and bow flash like iridescent pike through herring before their eyes and seek out their very souls. But for now bones must play bones. C D E F G A B C/C sharp D D sharp E F F sharp G G sharp A A sharp B C

The building blocks of life Credo Domine, Ergo Fidelie Gloriam Aeternam. Away with you silk coverlet your scheming folds hold me prisoner here, your seductive royal purple a mockery to my weakness. Royal indeed! Though queen I once was. Now were I to appear on stage my public would weep for shame and pity. Even now they keep a deathwatch at the Times to run my obituary. Yet one’s public exit is not the same nor nearly so personal as the private one. I played so many farewell concerts, truly a financial grand finale to my career. The grand headlines, CHELLSIA BLOOM’S FAREWELL TOUR, Auf Wiedersehen Mein Blumen AU REVOIR NOTRE FLEUR, BYE BYE BOUQUET, ΗΕΡΟΙΧ ΕΝ∆ ΤΟ ΣΑΙΛΙΝΓ ΟΝ ΤΗΕ ΗΙΓΗ Χ Σ and the banal, CELLIST ENDS CAREER: A final note. Still, let me cloak my feet in dancing slippers and I’ll stand yet again upon this my private stage-the only one which really matters-and bow before my audience of angels and the cat as I make my way to the waiting throne guided by my wooden sailing ship. How I’ve more vibrato in my legs now than ever graced my instrument. Carved oak pillars of my deathbed bear me upward once more and hold me shaking back to the main mast lest I succumb too soon to the siren’s song. It’s not far now to Ilium. That part the surgery did not remove. Foul wind no longer. The goal is not beyond reach given a fair wind. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five four, three, two, one, the eagle has landed on her moon. She spreads her gossamer wings and folds them with gliding grace at her heaving sides. Rising and falling waves and currents racking back and forth as the tide ebbs. Come little ship. Carry a tune once more on swelling C’s. C G A D Christe Gloriam, Agnes Dei. Damn the thing’s out of tune. Plucked out of tune. I refuse to play my encore out of tune! Fork to bridge! Fork to bridge! Give me an A 440 the mystical 440. You others line up and we’ll dance a macabre night away.

Midnight

And so on the stroke of midnight June 16, 2004 one hundred years after her father set out on his Dublin Epic journey Chellsia Bloom resists setting forth on her own. Unprepared as she is, though for months now she knew this trip was approaching—its deadline undetermined yet pressing its inevitability all the same, like a condemned prisoner she is not about to assist the final moment just yet. Her appeals at an end, she still refuses to yield to the indignities involved in passing from the harbor. Death, if it dares come will find her full of life—her final struggle heroic if only because of the strength of its frailty.

Death has chosen this night a formidable opponent of proud lineage. Chellsia, came forth from Bloom’s pierced stem and swam upstream into the cave of fins two weeks after Leopold came home to Molly and drew her first breath in the one fragile moment of peace in a century of war. On the Feast of St. Patrick Molly’s cry of Yes! was drowned in a fear wrought unyielding tide of No! Gushing forth from the living waters, unveiled and unbroken, et continuo exivit sanguis et aqua, infant Chellsia was 22.7 inches long and 11.7 pounds.

The brief buoyancy of a new century’s chance to uplift the human condition death-spiraled to tides of greed, power, militant conspiracy all turning the flightwings of man into a machine of massive death in a place where little could survive unscathed and thousands of the innocent perished vaporized in a second on the 6th. And other young sky birds plummet in fiery doom their eyes glancing for one human moment of grief into the eyes of their assassin sealing an unspeakable bond.

Human love, though formidable, could not hope to prevail in such an environment. The most basic human relationship struggled to survive and many failed. Chellsia’s one poetic love, Stephen; Chellsia’s singly profound human love, Stephen Dedalus, became infested with incipient disillusion. And so the promise of the greatest artistic inspiration of the age soon turned bitter by the overwhelming inhumanity that was to become the theme of a century filled with unheard of cruelty. Chellsia survived to witness this century of grief, sorrow, pain and despair. Her journey in death did not begin this night, but at her birth when Molly had said yes to the earth once more that icy St. Patrick’s eve; when her blood and lust and life drained from her in the birth of her daughter and only living child. Fluxit unda cum sanguine.⁴ She had said yes joyfully as Chellsia burst from her swollen fruitful womb in a river of blood and water. Peacefully she drained her breast as the child suckled those voluptuous high-sculpted buds. A contra piéta. Bid adieu to girlish days⁵ Madonna Bloom as you peacefully suckle the child at your breast even as your own life ebbs away in streaming procession that defies all who in panic dare halt its inevitable race to join its blood with those who came before and those, yet unborn, who will fill the stream to near overflowing in the years to come. The waves of her breath came to shallow shores, each dragging life back to its source and then returning with one final ripple into eternity. For three days, Molly lay still in the parlor of the Bloom house its windows swathed in heavy drawn curtains and the door draped with black crepe. The house was hushed as mourners came bearing gifts to the pyre of food forming on the kitchen table. Luscious melon scented flowers, their sweet spices masking the elements of death stood in abundance in the hall and around the casket lit softly by the fringed rose shaded floor lamps. Molly, at rest and at peace the blush still palely visible on the odalisque cheek, lay nestled in her garland of rich dark hair spread around her shoulders and across the folds of her frosted ivory burial gown. Her pallid, motionless hands clasped her Bible and Rosary, though the fingers could not ever again move across its carved shamrock jade beads in time with those who came and knelt beside her with their own lively Ave Marias.

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan laid a single ruffled amber rose at her feet and wept. Blazes Boylan did not attend the viewing but later someone said they saw him behind a tree at the cemetery, though they could not really be sure because someone later said he was drunk at Kelly’s Pub absently ripping the petals one by one from his butter yellow boutonnière.

Bloom drifted about Dublin making arrangements with the priest and the meandering through the cobbled lanes to arrange for wet nurse, Mary Margaret for his daughter. He would need a housekeeper soon he thought and wondered hourly who Molly would trust to be with him in the house and take care of her things. He knew she certainly would not want some