Short Takes of Enlightenment and the Half-Baked

1. The Dragon Finds a Curious Object

The dragon draped himself over the couch. “Where is the strength?” he asked the fish.

“In case you don’t know,” he continued, “consider that once a man has located the entrance to this world through birth, he has drawn out of the waves of past incarnations a twin.”

The fish breathed a sigh of relief. “My friend, dragon, why chatter so much in the heat? Better you wrote the words down on a torn scrap of heavy paper and burned it like ill-gotten loot.”

The dragon, meanwhile, had chanced upon a flying lingam floating by at arm’s reach. He quickly undid the bonds that held him against the couch and lunged after the lingam. He caught it by its tip and pulled the extraordinary find closer for inspection. “I believe that this has come to us from a foreign country.”

The fish swam over for a look. “Was it used for prayer?” he thought.

The dragon went over his shelf and took down a telescope that he handed to the fish. “When you find Mars, tell me.”

He dutifully searched the sky for the red planet. As it was approaching noon and the sky was heavily gray and overcast, he momentarily despaired, but then checked himself, and applied with more fervor to his task. “O, for the blue sky devils to come to my aid!” he trilled.

The dragon had mounted the lingam on a table and lit some candles around it. Then he sat motionless on the ground directly in front of the makeship puja and prayed that Shiva would come. After an hour the lingam loosened itself from the table and rose off into the afternoon light. “But why?” he demanded raising himself from meditation. He lifted up onto his tiptoes. “I will leave this planet!” he shouted to the crowd of seekers who had gathered outside his window. The fish trained his telescope on the dragon’s silhouette and saw red bands of fire leap out of the dragon’s head.

“You played us falsely,” one of the seekers below railed.

“Are you seekers of religious truth?” he asked them.

That tickled them under the tips of their noses and a riot of laughter erupted through the three heavens above this one.

“I speak for all. We will follow your path to the end of this world.”

A roar of approval smothered whatever else he had to say.

The dragon held up his hand in mute testimony to the immanence of God.

The fish asked in the dragon’s ear, “What now?”

“I would like to eat.”

No sooner said than the fish offered his body to the dragon.

“My little dainty, please, retire to your home far away from my plate.”

But the fish insisted it was only her higher destiny to become part of the dragon’s spirit.

“Are you certain?” questioning the fish’s sincerity.

“Yes.”

“Then swim over to my couch and lie down for a few days to think it over. Life is sweet, dear fish.”

The fish bowed her head and swam over the couch and slipped beneath a cover. In a trice she was asleep.

“In what form will she awaken?” wondered the dragon. “Death has many forms.”

He sniffed the air for news. A loud knocking warned him of immanent and dangerous presence. He jumped over to the door and opened it.

A blue figure robed in a sky blue material stood before him.

“Who are you?”

“I was invoked by someone from this place. Was it you?”

The dragon ushered his guest into the house. “My Lord, Shiva!” He bowed deeply to the floor one-hundred-and- eight times before the blazing figure of his guest.

“You are mistaken. Rather I am a sky blue devil.” Then he rattled off a thousand and one identities he had assumed over the last several thousand years. When he finished this litany he smote the dragon across the chest so curing him of a dumbfounding ghost of a doubt that had subtly hindered the dragon’s incarnation since his original birth.

“Was it a dream?” He stared at the empty room. He buckled his gun belt to his waist and walked out the door to the neighborhood saloon. Would he meet benefactors or enemies? The road to the saloon wound randomly there. Some evenings the regular customers succeeded in cajoling the bar owner to move the base of his operations to other far flung locations. There was no telling where that might just be. The dragon toured the dusty and wind haunted neighborhoods without luck.

He stopped short, and a missile shot by his head.

“This is war,” he heard.

“What for?” the dragon asked. He lifted his powerful guns and shot into the air.

At once the street came to life. Merchants displayed their wares. Women sauntered past. Children chased shadows of dogs. Lovers whispered poetic images to each other. The dragon continued on his way. He kept his senses alert for another change of scenery.

A woman who resembled his former girlfriend from another lifetime handed him a letter. He opened it and read: Who appointed you sheriff of this town? The dragon cocked his pistols and held them at ready.

At the edge of town he halted. The people feared rightly to build in the marsh. He noted a wisp of smoke from a small fire far out in the marsh. He decided to find warmth there, and strode off in that direction. He found a stone hut and a naked man sitting by the fire.

“A magician,” the dragon thought.

The man idly stirred a pot of soup heating on the fire. “Like some?’

“Thank you. I am grateful for the hospitality.”

The man did not answer. They ate in silence.

“Fish?” the dragon pointed to the soup.

The man nodded only.

“Can I stay here for the night?”

The man touched the dragon on the forehead and a thousand images of Shiva flooded his sight.

“Who are you?” the dragon asked amazed.

“If not a mirror of the sun, then the sun itself.”

2. Porker

“Is it worthwhile being cremated?” the porker thought, a bit disgruntled after a day of microscopic accomplishments, teasers, halfblown possibilities, all provoking pools of sadness. “I must be happy. I will feel like a king today. And tomorrow?”

Now that the wife was gone there hung in the air decaying fronts of civilization, unknown dragons and their laws. “I must find her,” he whispered. “She’s been taken by captors to a room inside a set of other rooms in a city with unending winding routes. He looked into the vast ceiling of the auditorium and the silence gave him inspiration. He dipped his hands into a pail of water on the podium. “You see these hands?” he asked the audience of dragons calmly waiting for the speaker, the porker, to commence. “It is the sweat of Christ. I who have suffered and twisted in the fetid night airs of everlasting self-doubt and who nearly choked to death in bitterness have laughed and laughed, dragons, yes, laughed in marvel and wonderment, adorned by sweet love and banquets of delicious foods, finger meats and marmalades, flavors, sips, tiny bites, desserts and sugared breads. Then the wife I had loved for years turned cold at me. She longed for another guy who delights the ladies with his guitar riffs, wild beard and white face.”

“Shoot him!” a dragon roared, meaning the porker.

The porker ducked at a plate thrown at him. Insanity had broken through the gates. The wild chase had begun. He spun out the door onto the pavement and vanished. The dragons shrugged. “I’m glad he’s finally gone.” The others who were paying attention agreed, while others remain preoccupied within their own thoughts.

No one was following him. A boatman standing by a pole on the docks asked him, “Are you wanting to go off to a foreign country? Am I in Porkerland or not?”

He hadn’t seen a man for years. “Yes. You are here.”

“I can take you far away from here.”

He joined the man and they walked together down to the sea. But the man was death. The porker refused to step board on his ship, and went back.

3. Porker in Every Last Drop

The dragon rose to the table top and pounded on the podium with a great mallet crying aloud. “To Order! To Order!”

Abruptly the chattering dried up. The culvert of the winding river of talking of neither this nor that ran dry and the river bed cracked and the clay beneath it broke into a thousand grins. The eyes of the hundreds of dragons flickered momentarily and expectantly waited for the flow of words to begin.

The dragon banged his mallet again. “Thirteen lunations ago we last gathered in a seashell down by the ocean and we heard the story of the sea told by one of our brothers.”

A polite clapping erupted from the rear.

The dragon opened his palms in supplication to the audience. “Please. Brothers, on this occasion we have the porker here after a long absence back among us.

A loud cheer carried the porker up the proscenium steps to the stage where he turned around and looked at all the dragon faces staring up at him. ‘Friends!’ he burst forth. “I have risen as if from the dead. For am I not the last of my kind? All my other selves have vanished into thin air and met the eternal face. I am no swine. The crematorium lays empty. The man there once employed by End Theatres And Entertainments Inc. surrendered the keys to that vast building to the fire, and it burned turning to ash. None may enter even as visitants to the shrine. I shudder to think of it.” A wince creased his forehead. He drank from a cup of water as if slaking an enormous thirst. He continued. “What have I to report? I believe I am of no world, not of dragons, not of prawns, not of fish, not of men, not of women whether pink or white, not of royalty, and not of swine definitely. Of what? I don’t know the world I belong to since I was chased out and finally left.”

A dragon weary of this drivel climbed up on his seat to shout,”Who are you? An imposter?”

The porker shrank from the violence of the remark that echoed round the hall.

“I am an ancient papyrus, an echo chamber, and echo itself.”

The dragons began to hoot. “You are nothing, porker! Own up!”

The porker fell back, and wiped a tear from his eye. “The populus is so fickle.”

The dragon angrily banged his mallet. “Silence!!”

The porker took a bottle out of his pocket and dove into it. His whole being was gone inside of it.

The dragons were astonished. Never had they witnessed such a spectacle. Magic, it certainly was. But how?

A quick witted young dragon fashioned a stopper from some chewing gum and stopped up the mouth of the bottle. A loud guffaw lit the chamber halls. An unsurpassed joke this porker had played on them all. Whenever they wanted him again, they had only to unstop the bottle. Until then he was caught.

Only the porker had dived into the bed of liquid at the bottom of all bottles, the last sip, so to speak.

As the dragons merrily celebrated their meeting again after thirteen lunations, dancing until delirium, trysting one another in love, gazing into mirrors to find the secret eye, eating syllabub and dainty cakes, and downing cases of wine and champagne, a bit of the porker entered them all, one by one.

3. A Blue Tea

The dragon sent the invitations out to his friends and others not yet born. He had elaborately penned each one with a duck quill and signed each with a flourish truly born to one a dragon. The invitation was to blue tea. The hour slowly approached the mountain whereon the dragon lived. The appointed hour meandered slowly as might an ancient brook in no hurry to arrive anywhere. Some considered the mountain top impossibly high, too high to venture. The dragon had consulted a very old parchment covered in spidery print with names. He chose only some of them for the blue tea.

The dragon patiently waited for the replies to come by post to his manse. He sat on a stool by the stone gate and idly watched the clouds sailing just above his head. The afternoon was bright and boldly drawn by the one who designs each day. Far from below, the dragon spied a small dot coming up the way. The postman? The dragon exulted. When at last the post had arrived, the dragon had already noted the colors of the letters in the postman’s sack, pink for the Pink sisters, grey for the warrior, sea colored for the fish, various shades of green for the dragons.

“What should I wear?” Hortense petulantly asked Heloise. “I have nothing clean.”

She tore through her wardrobe. Occasionally a dress or a blouse seemed right, and she held it up against her to see in the mirror.

“We must look our best, Hortense. We haven’t seen the dragon in such a long time. I wonder what brought us all to his mind?”

“I think, Heloise, it has something to do with the invitation itself.”

“You know,” said her sister, “You look prettiest in pink.”

“So do you,” Hortense said.

The dragons arrived in noisy knots at the stone gate and pounded for admittance. The ones with the longest white beards and elongated earlobes shouted loudest. “Open the doors!” Their bejewelled collars and ear pendants glinted with fire in the sunlight. They shook the doors with all their might. The heaved its breastworks. They rallied forth with fiery arrows. The mountain shook with terror. The common folk down below attended the ranting of their priest. “God in the mountain is angry! Sacrifice the virgin. Find her in the temple.” They ran off to do his bidding. Long ago the law giver had laid down his sacraments and his decrees, and first among them was to keep God far from his anger that was deep and never-forgetting.

Heloise commented to her sister as they passed the village. “That ritual looks particularly gruesome, don’t you think?

Hortense parted the curtains of her palantin a bit wider. “That poor girl.”

The warrior who had let the sisters pass by was indrawn in contemplation. He noticed Hortense open her shade and followed her gaze into the commotion in the square. His heart leapt into his throat when he saw the predicament of the girl. He called out, “I am coming!” He spurred his horse into the center of the square parting the crowd. The hooded priest had set the faggots aflame. The girl tried to wriggle free from her bonds. The warrior dismounted, walked grimly through the flames and cut the ropes. He lifted her in arms and put her behind him on the horse.

Upon seeing her up close, the Pink sisters recognized the fish. They invited her to join them in conversation inside their compartment upon the great elephant they were riding up the mountain to the dragon’s blue tea. The warrior felt first surprise, then sadness, then a heartfelt gladness that he had saved the fish from being burnt.

Of course, the dragons had arrived at one o’clock, too early for proper tea, and the more so for blue tea. The dragon contrived to not let them in lest they eat everything and leave nothing for anyone else. At a little past two o’clock the elephant bearing the sisters and the fish with the warrior close behind rode through the stoney gate of the dragon.

The dragon poured the blue tea for his assembled guests. “I propose a toast to the blue sky from which this tea is drawn.”

“Here,here,” they answered, and drank.

4. Cooked and Not Cooked

The dragon put aside the book he was reading on salesmanship, the secrets to, realizing perhaps thoughts might interrupt his reverie of private dreams. Stacks of books climbed the walls and cluttered his closets. Time was a shipwreck. The families of dragons stretched back before the advent of calendrical time, records of royalty, archives denoted by hieroglyphics, or stone monuments. Yet all of them had lived. What was the use? Ancestors!

He heard faint sounds, more like impressions, directly below his own pinnacle. He looked down and saw a pair of hands waving or maybe it was two pairs. They enchanted him. “What can this be?” He hurried down his staircase winding and long hoping to see. Outside his door he found on the mat a teacup with a note left inside. “You are invited,” it was written.

The dragon maintained at great effort all of his appointments and contacts in exact order. All time consists of pinpoints of consciousness. He reasoned, a million right acts could lead one to the threshold of enlightenment. The mundane world offered the possibility of monetary success, success on the cheap, millions on the back of others yoked to privation. The dragon sought an exit not through death and its attendant ugliness, except that all else might turn out to be fraud, counterfeit, and perfidy.

The note intrigued him since he had not heard even the rumor of its coming. Yet there was no return address. He turned to his private eye sitting on an upper shelf between some tomes and covered with dust. He cleaned it and turned the dial to the middle way. He fixed it to his own eye and looked for hints, scattered evidence, or any other clue as to how this note had been brought to his door. The only connection he could uncover was the waving hands. Signs?

Whichever way he went the grass blew in its accustomed way. The flagstones leading out into the street sat calm and steady. The messenger had left nothing behind, not even the slightest shred of the ruse. A genuine practitioner of the middle way. The shape of the cup pleased him as he held it in his large hands. “It is uniquely feminine.” For too long he had been cramped in his study wrenching dimly believed mysteries from their pages, berating the authors for writing so, and asking why? Wherefore had night begun and day after day followed, as a parade under the command of a demiurgos. “Enough!” he swore. “I will seize the wheel of my own destiny and be damned the articulations of the ancestors.” He burned the invitation with a wisp of his own breath, and held the cup aloft. “I dare any demon to come forth to battle.” Snakes of fire erupted from his nostrils. The veneer of civilization melted away from the terrible heat. He roared.

The logician’s brain collapsed and in its place grew an interest in non-assimilable phenomena, the musing of the spirit, drafts of poetry and nonsense, yea, even the feminine form.

A spot of tea sloshed around in his teacup and burned his hand. He gingerly wiped his fingers on his silk jacket. Who?

Hortense punched him on his nose. “You silly dragon. The party is inside, not on the lawn.” She flourished her full skirts and led him into his house. “Would you like some more tea? She offered him a plate of little cakes. He had a fondness for chocolate. Oddly they weren’t chocolate at all.

Heloise sat immersed with a crusty old grandfather crying into his tea.

“What is the occasion he mourns?” the dragon asked her.

“Sincerity is the rhyme of this party, old snoutnose. The fish doubts you have the heart to say what’s on your mind.”

“The fish blasphemes. Is she in the soup?”

“No. These are fishcakes.”

The dragon tasted one. “My compliments to the chef.”

“Indeed. He is in the kitchen.”

The dragon ran to the swinging kitchen doors. Waiters held trays overhead with piles of steaming noodles. The warrior stood by the stove with a large spoon stirring the soup. He turned toward the dragon. “A bit more spice and then the sauce, voila!, a masterpiece.”

“Is It?” the dragon asked, pointing at the soup.

“Of course, it is fish soup. What kind of party would this be, pray tell, if it was crackers and cheese, or onion? Ghastly.”

The dragon sipped some off the spoon. “Very, very good.”

“The girls rented this restaurant, the entire restaurant, for tonight,” said the warrior.

“A birthday?”

The warrior shrugged his shoulders. “They didn’t say.” He looked down into the pot. “What have you put in the soup?” he asked the dragon. Then the warrior realized, “Bits and pieces of stories, all of the characters, some of the partial plots you created when half aware of what you were doing, maybe asleep, and some of the endings you never bothered to finish.”

The dragon tilted back his head for a belly laugh. A gust of fire flew out of his nostrils.

“I know an ayurvedic physician you ought to consult, dragon, for that wild kundalini raging in your skull.”

The dragon shook his head. “Nothing of the kind, nothing and no how. I don’t trust a doctor to deal with my condition. I think it’s only partial and not completed as yet.”

“You might burn up before you’ve reached the final inner state,” the warrior cautioned. He prodded and then poked a sharp fork into the dragon’s belly.

The dragon lost air like a punctured balloon. The warrior put him whole hog into the pot and shut the lid tight. “You were only half cooked.”

“Really a rather darling recipe,” said Heloise as she sampled the soup. “It’s one of your best.”

The warrior reddened. “It’s hotter than I expected. Still the dragon needed specific help in his quest for physical immortality.”

“Is the dragon slain or not?” asked Hortense.

“No,” he answered. He showed the Pink sisters his bowl. The dragon popped up his head out of the frothy soup and blinked at Manly who was eyeing him intently.

“Manly,” Heloise said tartly, “Are you tired of Hortense’s bosom?”

5. Bhagawan Dragon

A rasp behind the door broke the dragon’s reverie that morn. He turned toward the interruption and saw a folded paper pushed part way under the door. “I wonder who,” he thought. Then he smiled. Some pink writing graced the front of the envelope. “To Whom It May Concern:” it began. The dragon skipped the dry parts and started to read the verbiage below under the heading, “Dear Dragon.” His heart skipped a beat for it had been a long while since he had received such an invitation. “Please come at 7 o’clock.” He looked down farther, turned over the paper several times, searched the envelope where the return address was attached, but there was nothing. No location, no date, no manner of dress requested, if one should bring flowers or wine or chocolates, an impressive chest full of medals, letters of introduction, place of family origin, accounts of the last voyage into interstellar space.

The dragon pondered. “Am I a cipher?” A nearby tower rang its bells signaling the hour. Some pallbearers pushed a cart loaded with a coffin. “This is a curious event,” the dragon mused as he doffed his coat and hurried out the door. He threaded his way through the onlookers. Walking down the street he came upon two women waiting for a conveyance uptown, or so he thought. He overheard them talking about the significance of death. Finding that unusual if not strange, he paused. “Did you see the wagon laden with a coffin just a few minutes ago?”

“See what?” Mr. Pouter.

The dragon felt skinned and flayed. “Pouter? Rather Snarler or Furioso.” He answered, “I beg your pardons, madams.”

“Are you sad and miserable today? Did something untoward happen?”

The heaving of their bosoms and the flowing of their skirts overwhelmed him. “What is happening to me?” He curled up into a ball of dragon matter and began to roll slowly down the lane.

It was Hortense and Heloise. They laughed at their power to puncture or needle a man.

“His kundalini is certainly unruly today. Don’t you think, Heloise?”

She nodded.”Wild. Manly, go fetch that nasty dragon.”

He pulled himself out from between Heloise’s breasts and scampered off after the wayward dragon. After a while, Manly reappeared with the dragon grinning sheepishly in tow.

He began to offer excuses. “I miss my mother who…”

Hortense cut him off. “Manly, do you also miss your mother?”

Manly grew as red as a ripe tomato. “No!”

She blew him a kiss. “You’ll feel differently next to my bosom. Would you like to try?”

He hesitated for a trice. “Mm. I would.”

On the diagonal corner to where they were gathered was a cafe. Once the dragon recovered his wits, he offered, “Would you two care to join me?’.

As they sipped their hot beverages Hortense brought her two brows together, “Have you written any stories lately? I think not.”

Heloise murmured agreement. “Nothing?”

Manly came up from between and stuck out his tongue.

“You’d better take care, Manly. Your face might freeze like that.”

“He is far too sensitive a creature for that ever to happen, dragon,” said Hortense. “By the way, you will join us for the 7 o’clock soiree?”
“What is it all about? I could discern little from the invitation.”

“A gathering of advanced practitioners of various schools of meditation for this evening. We hope you will join us?”

A flame erupted in his belly. He gulped from the glass of water on the table. “Of course. Who are these adepts?”

“Some who posture as such, those in the making to be, and some old souls who once were.”

“All idiots,” said the dragon.

The two rose from the table. “Be there at 7. It’s at the usual place.” They climbed into a cab and rode uptown.

The dragon remained in his seat and read the morning paper. At last he also got up and walked down the street wondering what tonight might bring. To his surprise all was still and at stopping. It was a surreal occurrence not likely to be repeated. It occurred to him to light three fires like the ancients did to welcome the dawn, to honor the sun as it set, and to preserve the harmony of the hearth at home. He lit his three with inner illumination at an unprecedented height at the edges of his mind. He burned the last vestige of fear lodged there.

As evening approached he started to go uptown to see the Pink sisters and their guests, but then thought of something better to do. He switched direction and drove over the river. He rode past teeming hundreds of spiritual quizzants like a cowboy on horse going to the rodeo. “Dost thou see enlightenment?” he asked through a loudspeaker. It was the day of the parade to honor the dragon, and the city lit up, excited, jackhammered into liveliness and exuberant. The seekers pushed against the imaginary line that kept them at bay. “Tell us secrets!” they pleaded. The dragon reached into his vast pocket and revealed a pop gun that he fired into the air. “I am shooting water buffalos!” he claimed. “They are swarming and blocking my path.” The bystanders could only see the fireworks coming out of the dragon’s pop gun. ‘Oooh” they hummed. “So pretty.” The dragon gaily waved to them all, all the moms and pops and boys and girls and infants. The motorcade swiftly took him to the grandstand where the mayor and his adjundants waited for him. The air buffalos were becoming an awful and unexpected menace. As fast as he struck one with his pop gun, another more bothersome sprang into its place. Two parades were occurring simultaneously, his and the water buffalos. The danger was great and getting greater. He would have to respond.

6. The Dragon and The Warrior

“Are there any fish this far north in the midst of winter?” the warrior asked the dragon.

“What a curious question, my dear fellow. Under all this snow?”

The warrior looked out over the fields stretching far into the distance and concurred. It would be unlikely at best that they would come face to face with a fish.

The warrior unwrapped a present he had been carrying in his pocket. It had arrived at his doorstep by mail the previous day. He had been waiting for the appropriate moment to open it. The dragon watched and hoped it would turn out to be a chocolate figurine of a damsel.

“My heavens!” yelled the warrior. “I have a premonition.”

“What is it?”

“Do you have any living relatives?”

The dragon examined the query inwardly. “How far removed?” he asked at last.

“Does anyone know I am traveling with you?”
The dragon reviewed his last three hundred dream images trying to discern a meaning to all this. “Absolutely not.”

“Enough. I am satisfied, and besides, the figurine has confided in me.”

“Who sent you this present?” asked the dragon.

“A party unknown as yet, dragon. Do you think you have ever known him?”

“I don’t know.”

The warrior unwrapped the present so that the dragon could see. It was a sphere of perfectly smooth crystal. When the warrior touched the crystal to his forehead, it transformed into a sweet angel. She was small and well proportioned and beautiful. She flew off into the sky and did not return.

“A mystery,” the warrior declared.