Magic mirror in the hay, thanks for showing me the way #0

Here are my memories of when I walked the maize maze. Maybe they’re accurate, maybe they’re blurred. Maybe they’re from the real realm or maybe the dream realm. Maybe it’s me, maybe it’s you, maybe it’s all of us, dancing in the mirror. Are you ready to take this journey? Believe me or believe me not, érase una vez un laberinto, where the journey was about to begin in the Kan ya Makan, the land of the edge of me, au fil de l’autre, au fil de l’eau, the land of il était une fois et puis une autre pas, suivez mes pas... Follow me...

Mid-afternoon, there is such a beautiful light, a nice smell of freshly cut pasture and warm temperature. They say it’s too warm for the season. I know that, my mind agrees with that, but my skin can’t help being selfishly grateful for the messed up weather that gifts me with this extended recess from the cold. Here I am at Los Poblanos Field. I step out of my grey “pony” that I leave in the parking lot to cross the wooden bridge over the acequia that leads to the magical grounds. Here is Mr. Scarecrow who welcomes me with his open wooden arms covered with a grey sweatshirt. He partially hides behind an orange fence that matches the color of a row of 14 pumpkins stacked on a hay edge. Oh, what an appropriate number, it reminds me of my birthday, April the 14^th… Who says I have to wait till next spring to celebrate my new growth on this earth walk? Actually, if you’re asking me, I remember that, once after Halloween, back in… 2014, I heard a crowd (yes, not yet a crow) singing “Happy Birthday to you” in Spanish. I took it personally and mentally thanked the singers as I came out, actually smiling, from a 3-day and night ride.

I step over the hay edge and enter the World of the Hallow Evening. As I take a closer look, I notice that the scarecrow has helpers in his welcoming committee: three pumpkins at his feet, their invisible neck wrapped in a shining red tonsil, ouch, no, I mean tinsel, although I love this Cornmaidian slip. No, this time of Harvest this weird mispronunciation is not a mistake. Freud ain’t the one who whispers to me in my sleep, I don’t let him because I have decided that he would not understand my dreams anyway. Corn Maiden is the one… hence the adjective “cornmaidian”. Yes, it sounds like “cornelian” (it is, sometimes), or “co-median” (it is, often) and actually Orwellian too, this is why I love this maiden’s puns so much because she’s the one who humorously pours them in the thirsty bowl of my sleep… Back at the scarecrow’s invisible feet and the pumpkins’ invisible throats, though. The first one of the Jack ‘Kins family is laughing its kitty smile (or is it a bunny?) while singing “always pump up your kin!”. The second one looks at me through its rose-colored flower-power bright shades while laughing its toothless farmer’s grin, asking me if, by chance, I kept its missing teeth in a farmer’s coat pocket. “Not that I know of”, I say as I observe the third pumpkin, which gauges me from a silently zipped pirate pucker of a smirk.

Tire la chevillette et la bobinette cherra! They suddenly say, inviting me to pull the red tinsel that covers their neck. Oh wow! They know the old tongue of fables, that’s so cool! I loved how Perrault put these magical words together in his Contes du Temps Passé… Pull the bobbin, and the latch will go up! So be it. My south paw grabs an extremity of the tinsel and pull it three times, because “Three is a magic number”, to let me discover this strange universe.

-Heeheeheeheeheeheeheeheehee! The pumpkins spin as I pull, and they laugh like three fées clochettes, Tinkerbells of October who tell me to keep warm as I wrap their Christmas scarf around my ears and throat. I leave their orange world.

As I proudly sport my new Little Red Riding Hood look, I reach the second gate of this particular universe. “Welcome my pretties” call out two Mary Poppins purple boots that have each other’s back but still meticulously avoid looking at their second half, as if lost in some kind of cosmic pouting although they laug.

I chuckle as I remember an old trick I had thought of to remember the difference between “concave” and “convex”. As I looked at the two different shapes, I had thought that the one with the curved face inside à ) looked like the gaping mouth of an open basement, “cave” in French, where one keeps old, silly (“con” in French) stuff and food supplies, so it was very normal to call it “con-cave”. Then the other one, bowed like an angry cat straddling a moon crescent à (, reminded me of the French verb “vexer”, to offend, so this shape was the one “that one offends”, “qu’on-vexe”/ con-vexe. Convex.

-Ahem… the merry-go-pouting boots are clearing their leather throat to take me out of my ever-wandering mind that always longs for the unique boots that will stand its ride. Back in the here and now, I politely thank the boots and give them half a smile, since their plural greeting to some “pretties” leads me to think that I wish I was not alone in here.  

-This is the meowst stupid thing I’ve heard today, meowahahaha!!! laughs a psychic black kitty straddling on a hay wall as he peers into my thoughts… Just look around, lady, if you need a reminder that no one is ever alone! He says.

Oh! True… I notice elements that have always belonged to my symbolic world.

This witch definitely likes kittens, and hats, and doors… Ooh, and old keys too!

-Well then knock on the door, says the black cat.

I approach the door and as I knock, it knocks out the hay stack and I’m headed for a fall on the ground, head on, to run into a creation from my past, built out of bits creatively stolen here and there…

-Oh yes, I remember this. What does it mean now, though? I’m the one afraid? Nope, I’m willing to enter this color maze that called me through a flashing wire… I think it’s the way for me to be at the heart of where home is, and see how homecoming also means home and heart coming to ME, oui!

I get up, I take off some of the straw that stuck to my clothes and the red tinsel, and I go on looking around the witch’s den. The black kitty agrees, saying:

-It sounds good, to knock fear out, so if it’s really the case, don’t be afraid or ashamed to roll… ¿your eyes? around ze hay, heehee… Aren’t we all peeping tom(-boys (and girls)) at ze end of ze day?

-Haha… You’re so funny, kitty… Oh but you’re right, there’s something else I love in here. And it’s a mirror.

-Holy Cat it took you some time to notice, sighs the feline ally, my hay cat.

As I approach the mirror by the kitty to take a cute selfie, some visions arise from my circular self.

-Aah! What are these red spider hairy legs around my neck? I ask a bit confused.

-Why, it’s your tinsel scarlet scarf, have you forgotten already? asks kitty.

-Oh right. But look how strange it is, I am also seeing myself as Little Purple Peeking Hood, taking a pic of myself while Frida is looking, and the scarlet scarf is upside down. 

-You haven’t forgotten about the Me-We Gate, have you? asks Frida. I paint, you take pictures. And you also let signs speak to you. See, the virtual grid has turned its emoticons into so-called scary profiles in honor of the thin veil. What does it conjure up to you?

-Well, I say (not too befuddled by this tête-à-tête with Frida, if I may say), when I look in this mirror I think that it invites me to dance under the mirror ball of an emotion room, where it sometimes makes me feel angry at the grumpy poppin’ pumpkins that want to put me to the test, or it makes me feel sad because of my once broken Frankenstein, then it also scared me at least once because of some ghosts, then it makes me laugh like a mischievous witch till I’m purple in the face, then it makes me fall in love again and even deeper now that we’re in the fall, and it makes me feel good, just good, powerfully good.

-Good indeed, since you read it in the right order. You’re ready for the mirror ride again, muses Frida as she fades into nothingness. 

-I’m ready, I whisper back.

Then I take a closer look at parts of the witch’s den and definitely dare to dive through her damsel’s shelves, where Dalí himself greets me, or at least his soft clock, together with a huge golden key by herbs and skeletons locked in glass jars…

I feel as if the clock was coming to life, and pulling me into the oh so famous painting, like had happened already the first time I was about to cross the Me-We Gate, only that now I know how and why I got into that picture. Cartoons gave me the clues…

As Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck were fleeing Elmer the Hunter, they leaped into the masterpiece where they started to feel in their flesh and blood, or in their hare gray hair and black duck feathers, the relativity of what we deem certain when we don’t take the time to press ‘pause’ and really look and listen. Stop! Oar Eye’ll Fire (as you paddle around in a ring of fire or over a frozen river surface)… and so I stopped, and then time also froze, exactly what Dalí had intended to convey with this brilliant soft clock where, personally, I see a big blue tongue pulled at people’s linear thinking regarding time, space and memory.

Without really noticing any motion in my body, I find myself facing the third gate, in an all blue setting, like in the revisited painting, and I am facing a piano.

I sit on the hay stool and start to play, with one finger, a melody that had been haunting me. It’s called L’Oiseau, the bird.

La Sol La Re Sib La Sib La Sol Fa Mi Re Do Do La Sol La Sol Fa Fa Re Fa La Sol Fa Mi Re Re Mi Fa Mi Re Mi…

-What the heck is that? shouts the kitty from his purple room. Can’t you give me normal names for your notes?? Plus it’s sad as hell, Meooooooooooowwwwwwwwwww he shouts in such a high-pitched tone that the gentleman’s picture above the piano starts to spin and replicate and turn into a skull.

I was ready to study with kitty the correspondences between the musical notes throughout the world, together with the lyrics of the song…

But his extremely loud complain drilling my ears knocked me down and my forehead heavily falls on the ebony and ivory keyboard (oh Lord why don’t we…) from which a disharmonious sound comes out as I start seeing and hearing scenes from The Cat Piano, this horrendous device where a nail was hammered in a new cat’s tail every time a different key was struck. But still, love had prevailed and made the he-cat so brave that he had saved not only his beloved, but the whole cat city from the musician torturer.

But before reaching the healing end of the cat piano nightmarish visions and sounds, I hear questions arising from the keys “What is it the white she-cat holds in her paws?” “Is it a mike or a hand grenade?” “Is it GMO corn cob or a piano cord turned into a woolen baling ball?” “Is it a hookah plume or a notes snake?” “Is it a phonograph or a meat or corn grinder?” “Are they cats or also humans?” “What does Red Riding Hood owes to Robin Hood?” “What does a red hue mean for blue?”…

I shout from and to the piano: “Tell the voices to stop or else I will emulate the cat who in turn felt like emulating Van Gogh’s mutilating act!!”

-Emulate, Mutilate, not too far from each other, and Act is Cat in another order… says the skull. One sometimes needs the piano to gather memories in the wicker basket of our life threads: Panier Piano Papier - Panier Piano Papier - Panier Piano Papier, (Basket Piano Paper).

-Ne pas nier ni tomber dans le panneau (never negate nor fall into the trap) of the Basket Maker, Bastet Master, Pied Piper … hammers the black cat who plays with those French tongue twisters from a long time ago taking them to a whole new dimension.

So as if possessed by the spirit of the past, I start chanting “Un, Deux, Trois Piano”, facing the keyboard as I pound with both hands six times, six as the syllables contained in '1-2-3-pi-ah-no'. And then I turn around in the hope of seeing my game peers unfrozen, like when we would pound on the wall of the schoolyard that we faced while our school mates would go forward to touch our wall without being seen. If I don’t really see anything in the here and now, I hear the suffered meowing notes slowly switching to something smoother, and way more fun.

Ev’rybody wants to be a cat… mi sol la si la sol la sol si sol mi…
Sorry, kitty, I’ll keep my French way of calling them notes, because you did not want to talk about it and I still don’t really control your American notes system, plus I remember a song from a musical… The funniest thing is that it was supposed to take place in a Germanic country where edelweiss grow free, but Germany uses your letter system for the notes. Anyway…

I hear laughter all around, and the Aristocats take turns around my head to pound the piano keyboard with dancing paws. So I take out the flute that for some reason I had decided to carry with me for this visit to the maze, and off I go… in another dimension, into the land of long shadows, towards the maze. 

Like the seven dwarves but in reverse, singing as I go “au boulot” instead of coming from it, from home to work I go, but really to go home I know, because I dig digging the ground of my psyche to unearth the treasures of who I am, so I sing along high he high yo, hunting high and low and switching to the sun, el sol, mi amigo:

-Sol la mi, soleil l’ami, la mi la, l’amie là, c’est Amélie… I see in my mind’s eye a young woman jumping from key to key on the black and white keyboard that I’ve just left there by the blue piano. She plays “Comptine d’un autre Été” as she jumps, paying a tribute to the soundtrack of Amélie of Montmartre.

Ah, Paris, Paris, Paris… siempre nos quedará París, wherever we may be, it is as if it were always three miles North from home. Just when I pronounce those words, one of the Aristocat-muse-icians comes playing his concertina by my side, as I walk towards the maze. I have a feeling of déjà vu, it is as if Kokopelli himself was accompanying me, like in the opening credits of the movie “The Milagro Beanfield War”… Actually, yes! The ghostly friend of Amarante did play the concertina!
La mi mi la la#

When I tell you that we’re in the Land of Enchantment, it’s not just a metaphor, amor… We hear geese before seeing them grazing ¿huh? in the fields, and cranes fly over our heads. I smile at the orange cat and he smiles back at me as he gives me his music making box.

Oh but it seems that I was mistaken, it is actually a piece of folded parchment, with colored dots on it, and as I play with it I realize that it urges me to remember the image of a dam, huge grey accordion deployed in the land of my Belgian roots, where ads for a Halloween (Hall of We/Oui, N…) Party were posted all over the castle area, the castle of Reinhardstein, the fox stone. But of course! This is why an orange cat, looking pretty much like a fox, had to be the one giving me his air piano, made of invisible bellows and buttons, so that the bellows would unbutton, as they breathe this sweet cosmic breeze, my belly button, to make me reenter the womb and remember my cosmic origin… and be… a-ma(i)zed… Ready? Let’s go!

 (To be continued: here)