Through Caverns Measureless to Man

  “I ask your forgiveness and I am a mountain tiger.” Then she whispered. “Ginevra de' Benci. Never again.” Ginevra de’Benci was a friend of Leonardo Di Vinci’s, and Di Vinci painted a portrait of her. She was apparently something of a poet. Of her poetry, only the line above survives.

  He had a multi-colored tail (red, yellow, green, white, black), a mane of pearl, scales of topaz, and eyes like the planets Venus and Jupiter. This description of Topaz Dragon is from an Islamic description of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, who is re-imagined as a camel. The only change I made was to substitute ‘scales’ for ‘hair’.

  She gave a Miranda shrug. “Well, all measurements are approximate.” And she took off down the tunnel after the Dragon. I followed after. This scene is patterned on a somewhat similar scene in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, in which it is decided not to wait, even though a wait has been promised.

  Like musk blended with ambergris. This is the final part of the Islamic description of the Camel/Serpent in the Garden of Eden. I separated the part about the scent, because it didn’t work well earlier, and I wanted to use it here.

  If Miranda had been a bloodhound, Cool Hand Luke would be drinking a beer in Cozumel right this minute. Cool Hand Luke – one of the best movies ever made. If you haven’t seen it, see it. It features a bloodhound chase.

  “Why, they’re rootabagas, of course.” He said. I love Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to talk about rootabagas.

  The road to Xanadu is wide open before us. So, let’s get this little parade on the road! Toot-toot! It’s interesting how certain moments stick with us, even when there is nothing particularly important or interesting about them. I was hiking in the mountains outside of Tucson with a couple of friends and for some reason I was in the lead and we were also lost. There was an argument about our direction and I snapped angrily “Do you want to lead this little parade?” And ever since then I’ve used various forms of that phrase whenever the opportunity presents itself, not just in writing, in life as well.

  The mind, it seems to me, is a fantasy machine. My father asked me to listen to a short audio of someone reading from a work by C. G. Jung. I did listen to it. It was mostly garbage, but it included this gem. The mind is a fantasy machine. And of course it is, most of our time is spent in fantasy.

  And Glittering Phoenix lay her beak on her chest, defeated, resigned. “Payah kun” she replied. And all the gods disappeared. This paragraph and the one above it include the Question “Kun?” And the response “Payah kun.” These come from the Rudyard Kipling book Just So Stories, specifically the story The Crab Who Played with the Sea.

  The nephew, was like a centipede or a salamander or something like that, with a lot of legs and a segmented body, so something insectoid or arthropodoid or at any rate he appeared to have an exoskeleton. This description of the nephew of Topaz Dragon is loosely based on a tattoo that I have on my left shoulder.

  We are in a willow grove. Off to my right, I can see a large river. Between us and the river are some flooded fields, that I assume must be for rice cultivation. All this description from the Willow Grove until just after we enter the city of Xanadu is based on the QingMing Scroll. An ancient Chinese painting that depicts, well, all the things in the story. My description is not based on the earliest scroll, but on a later painting that was inspired by the original.

  “Action nap?” I asked. I had a friend, many years ago, who used this term, action nap, to refer to afternoon sex.

  I was led into the gardens that surrounded the Pleasure Dome. We passed between the lilies and the loquats and the roses and the cannas and the heavy-scented ginger-plants that grew in the garden, until we came to great camphor-tree that was called the Camphor Tree of Suleiman-bin-Daoud. This description, with small changes, is taken from another Just So Story, namely The Butterfly that Stamped.

  Golden pillars supported an arched roof, inlaid with fragrant citrus and cedar woods. The walls were covered with silver panels, worked through with designs of animals and forest scenes. They were marvelously done and almost threatened to leap off the walls. The floors were set with colorful seashells and jewels. The description of the palace is based on the palace in Cupid and Psyche by Apuleius in his book, The Golden Ass.

  As I listened to Miranda, stuttering on about the ceremony that she was sure would keep the Dreamer dreaming forever, my hand drifted down and brushed the hem of the Dreamer’s robe. I use the hem of the robe here, because in Richard Bach’s book Illusions, there is a part about how touching the hem of the messiah’s robe cures people. At least I think so, I read it many years ago.

  “As I live and am a man, this is an unexaggerated tale - my dreams become the substances of my life.” This is a genuine quote from Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

  “You are a big disappointment, a soft spearman.” In the Iliad, Apollo refers to Menelaus as a soft spearman. It seems like the kind of insult that S. T. Coleridge would know.

  Anyway, in Ancient China, it was the custom for men to hire matchmakers to assist in the finding of a wife. This joke is an old Jewish joke, here repurposed as Chinese.

  “A man, falling sick, visited a doctor and promised to pay for the treatment, but only if he recovered. Later, when his wife badgered him for drinking wine while he was sick he said: "Do you want me to get better and be forced to pay the doctor?" This joke is from the world’s oldest know joke book. The Philogelos (love of laughter) which was written in Greece in the third or fourth century CE.