Climb Down Every Mountain

When the lady with the whistling ears saw the box pews, she automatically thought of a library full of private-study carrels with only a sparse number of communal tables furnished between the carrels - tables which nobody seemed to use, presumably because the reading duties in this place were more than normally private and avoidance at all costs was required regarding any heads leaning too far over to pry into what someone else was studying. However, the church was louder than a normal library, because prayer meant more noise than the brain-wrinkled approach to literature or history or philosophy would otherwise entail. Even so, the lady with loud ears knew it was indeed a library. So, not box-pews but carrels after all, even though the students installed therein were high-necked with the garb of nuns or of a sisterhood that required the garb of nuns even if they were not nuns at all.

As she peered closer, by skirting a few randomly chosen carrels - the wooden walls over which she managed to snoop - she discerned that the books were not being properly read, but rather catalogued after only a cursory inspection of its pages, some stuck together with substances she did not care to imagine being anything other than unfixed foxing. However, she was soon noticed when one of her ears gave out a particularly unbecoming shriek. Like a prayer coming back to her.

The nearest nun climbed from her chair and propped her chin on the carrel wall: “What you doing, Madam? Do you need any assistance?” The shiny face scowled within the oval frame of her hood. The book she had lately been inspecting she clasped to her chest like a Bible she planned to defend at all costs. The Lady of Whistles tried to scowl back but was not sure whether she succeeded, because the nun evidently thought she had made quite a different facial expression. “You should not smirk. There is no entry here. How did you get in?”

Meanwhile, other shiny-faced nuns had emerged from their box-carrels and stood around like statuesque predatory birds. Each clasping the book they had been interrupted processing. The first nun to have been disturbed beckoned the man standing at the door to come out of the shadows and do his job: whether it be security or negotiation with strangers or punishment of interlopers or whatever his duties entailed. He appeared to be dressed as a circus clown, but only subtly so, as our Lady of Whistles was not quite sure whether this was the intended impression he intended to give. He however lost no time in opening his bright lips to say:

“I spend each day climbing a mountain. But they never let me come down. How can I climb the next mountain, I ask, when I’m still atop the previous one? But I still manage to climb the next mountain without having first climbed down the previous one. How do you think that is?”

His tone of voice seemed to indicate that he blamed the intruder for whatever his predicament happened to be, not the nuns who must have really known more about his situation than they were letting on.

The lady, adjusting the ear that had earlier shrieked, asked: “Do you jump from one to another?”

The clown grew flustered. “Dear Lady, how does that allow me to climb each mountain. My job is to climb mountains, not cheating by jumping from one to another.”

“Can you not climb down them, then.”

“Climb means to go up not go down,” the clown muttered, as if he himself was now questioning the nature of his own complaint.

“Hmmm… but people do suffer themselves to have climb-downs when they have been too precocious or premature in their certainties.” The lady said this while backing away from direct confrontation with the security guard.

He, in his turn, had drifted into deep thought. As if his whole claim to climb mountains every day would eventually entail such a climb-down as the lady with the noisy ears had suggested, in her subtle way of saying something without really saying it.

The next time he turned his face upward for communication to be renewed between them, his face was tear-stained into twin rainbows of eye-shadow. And he recited parrot-fashion a famous extract from an even more famous book – tantamount to a prose fable that, as was gathered later, indeed too late, was the passage the shiny-faced nuns had all day been seeking in the books they had been inspecting.

Sunniman the Scarf loved soccer. Most of his friends, however, were rugby fans and rather looked down upon Sunniman the Scarf for his interest in soccer. He dreamt of them strangling him with his own supporter’s scarf. Then they hung him from it in a large tree towards the edge of the dream, where the sun was a soccer ball in the sky – until one of the friends lifted a hand and plucked it from the sky and replaced it with a sun more similar to a rugby ball. Until God climbed down from Heaven as far as the sky and replaced it with something more suitable for Sunniman’s dream. This was a shiny-faced orange. But God was not alone in the sky. There was God, also. And God. And God. And, oh yes, of course, there was God. Which made God angry as he did not find himself in the sky. And he plucked God from the sky and replaced him with God. And God climbed down further to see Sunniman the Scarf in the tree, his arms becoming the very branches. And the sun grew hotter. This was God climbing even further down to watch the others in the dream kicking Sunniman’s head like a football. The Sun had not only grown a lot hotter, but a mad hatter, too. Got its hat on. Hip hip hip hooray.

The ears were piercing as she began to climb a staircase of jutting spines (or a single spine with individual juts) towards the next geometrically impossible staircase leading down where only sense would allow it to lead up. Tomorrow there would be another to scale. She clasped a large book to her chest. She did despair, however, of ever reading between its lines for the ultimate truth. And, flanked by various versions of herself, she cast yet another prayer like a pager shrike into the echo-chamber of death, a death she so dearly sought so as to ease the increasingly unbearable pain in her heavy unvented head. But nobody heard her prayers but herself. The clown was dead at his own feet.

(written today)

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Other stories in this series: HERE.

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Climb Down Every Mountain (2): HERE.

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STOP Press (24/6/06): GRASS (2) or MISSING ARROW (2).

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