Olney Worked awhile with the Fisher Folk

Olney Worked awhile with the Fisher Folk

L. Edgar Otto      January 06, 2013

Too long waiting for the gates to open that he enter the walled city of Far Rock-a-bye another season to watch from outside as if he would never find the wisdom in that city, Olney worked awhile, to learn the trade and for the company of the fishermen, for he knew on his endless and unique journey on the endless beach he lacks the skill so easily live of the fauna and flora of the shore, how to catch and prepare them. 

There seemed to be no purpose or progress in the exploring anymore than in the waiting, that it made little difference if he set down roots or waited for the currents to bring him the rest and grounding from which to dream.

But he was the SphereDream, the fifth of the mortal spirit of this world, a lesser creator he thought in the lesser godhead.

He thought to himself he would not find what he wanted in the halls of wisdom, in the exploring the mind of the gods with their treasury and keep, their weapons of spinning blades, their demand for sacrifices that they maintain the fires or cured as best they could the mystery of disease.

Only at the end of this instar would he spread his wings to much greater dreams to find he was not unique and immortal, that others had dreams too, all worthy of the great book built before space and time, that the SphereFather so could preserve their spirits and the judgements in the private panorama of each their unique dreams that added to them.

The old fisherman, Eryle, took him as apprentice for the season.  It seemed so down to earth as if the primitive and course farmers their wives before the dry corn turned to salt water thirsty sugars that such real people risked the free but fickle winds that returned them to the sea as if a sacrifice as the city leaders sent forth the plans for silos to feed the sea cows extending the innocence as peace and a promised land of abundance for a new class and breed of hard working milk drinkers.

Yet in the benefits of sunlight and the strength of bones, those who grow too fat but their veins no longer scarred by the milk drank raw, they controled the vital gift light made as they put it into the always spring season thus in heat their machines of cuds and udders.

He tied the glass bobbins and wove the nets, learned all the family of knots.  Eryle referred to the sacred book the number that can hold most fish without the net breaking.  He showed Olney the smallest such net, called the Gossamer of Dreams the once and only 153 to take with him on his journeys by the shore.  So teaching him how to fish he multiplied the abundance of a few for the thousands, the wine and water not subdivided without purpose and measure all across the ocean reach until perhaps imprudently all fish harvested from the sea.

Olney had his own collection of bobbins he found here and there along the beach in his travels, some of them seemed to come from far lands with strange letters as if these were lost and floated blown everywhere, enduring longer than the broken or rotting fabric of the nets.  His dream gossamer for all its themes seeming so arbitrary functioned well if you looked beneath the chance design and random colors which many took as tourist shirts with the casual even lazy beach motifs to Olney's eyes but a variegated coat made of rags to which a partial and broken synaethesia hid the deeper parallels of logic of it all.  Not that a quilt of patterns put together in itself and all such patterns tried made sense either when one looked deeper at the choices of foundations.

One day Eryle sent him for more rope from the rope makers who had been making rope the way they had done since as far back as any nets of clay or ink kept records.  While on the way back slowly with the burden of the wheels of rope around his arms he thought as he was want to do, of the fundamental things, of theory and origins.  But only as the net of dreams found its focus over time did Olney try to write them down or even notice that in himself he wrote only between the tides some equations in the sand or that as a song came back to him most were lost in the winds thou real were the ground of endless walks past might-have-beens.

Clearer to him thinking this to himself, if we tie the braids and ropes there to hold up, suspend a bobbin set to spin, they wind too tight and spin it back, all stops to stillness again.  But if we hold them up by that magnetic reach that came before the stars, they as so my life path and heart of dreams can spin and embellish greater stories indefinitely.

Although the fear of the SphereFather was the beginning of wisdom, it was a truth of freedom after the origin so moving on from there and while we are alive uncertainty the answer if it is an end.  Eryle, as Olney said his good-bye, not many cycles left in this calendar before he could petition at the gate of his beloved city now seemingly seething in some plague so work with the gods of wisdom again, replied:

"O Father and O Son, your net is just a tool or an idol of the magic as your dreams you weave and for sure you will see me again as one who aids your quest and sometimes as the one you must fight and so fear next meeting in some cove half way thru infinity."

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