The Myth of Merula

When the visions began to get more intense, they started out tame enough for me. I saw a big compost pile in the middle of Africa, as tall as Mount Kilimanjaro. Only it wasn’t made out of decaying vegetation. It was made out of people and animals. Dogon and Bozo, Fang and Tuareg, Bella and Zulu, I saw people from every tribe. Some of them lay rotting inside of half decayed elephants and hippos. I saw them rot and finally turn almost completely into dirt, with just a few skulls and fossils showing in the dirt. Some of the fossils were dinosaur skeletons.

A tree sprouted in the middle of the pile, its roots reaching deep into the pile, down into the Earth and into other planets all nested inside the Earth and one another. Its branches reached so far up into the skies that it looked as if the stars were the fruit on its highest branches. Some branches also hung low, reaching almost to the ground. Fruit began to grow on the branches, different fruit at each level of the tree, and it kept morphing into different forms. On the lowest branches, the fruit turned into algae. Just above were simple creatures of the sea like starfish. A little higher I saw birds, and little higher still were small mammals. About halfway up were men and women, with apes, dolphins and whales just below them. The tree slowly spun, and then I could see people and animals from every contintent of Earth. I couldn’t see what was on the levels above the people. It looked blurry. And wait. There were other beings besides people, and there were animals I couldn’t recognize. As I tried to focus and see the rest of the scene, Akyundo changed his song. As he did so, the scene zoomed out until I was behind Blackbird’s head. She was looking at the scene. She turned around and looked at me. She reached out a hand. As I took her hand, her whole body disintegrated into millions of gnats that swarmed all around me, clouding out my vision of everything.

The gnats were all over my skin. The buzzing noise they made was unbearably loud, and the crawling sensation was the most intense sensation I had ever felt. The itch I felt all over every surface of skin on my body could not have been worse if I had rolled naked in a lush patch of poison ivy for several hours. The thought came to me that if I would turn into a cloud of gnats myself, I would stop itching. As I spoke this thought, Akyundo changed his song again.

The itching ceased, and I became conscious of the cave again, but in a heightened way. It was as if the whole cave was beating like a giant heart. Out of the dark pool of water slithered a giant black snake. I could see that Akyundo easily rode it like a cowboy on his favorite horse. When it felt me looking at it, it expelled air in a surprised, quick hiss, and it riveted its head in my direction in less than a second. Somehow, it felt important to me not to look away from its eyes. I held its gaze. This seemed to anger it at first, but yet it also seemed to keep it from attacking me. Instead, it seemed to want now to intimidate me. It began to speak to me, although its mouth did not move. The speech was telepathic. I could hear Akyundo singing, but the Akyundo who sat on the snake did not move his lips. He simply looked at me with no expression on his face at all.

“You are eager to learn secrets. Why?” said the snake in a voice that was very low and quiet but seemed to vibrate through my body as if I were standing next to a large amplifier with volume turned up. I saw myself as the snake saw me. Visions of my undergraduate years in college were playing, and I saw myself busy with books and computers, words and symbols, grades and honors, certificates and papers. I saw children sickening and dying in other countries while I read my books. I saw people fighting in wars, dying in earthquakes, drowning in floods, and being buried by mudslides while I sat in front of computer monitors. I watched myself go about my business and compared the sight to various animals as they lived their lives. I felt that somehow the animals lived with more beauty and dignity, since what they did was almost always necessary, and they never stopped trying to do what was necessary, until they died.

I saw my own childhood with my own parents followed by a parade of other couples who could have been my parents, getting a sense of what my life could have been like, and how privileged I had been. I realized that I had never appreciated my mother and father. In fact, I had felt critical and superior, in spite of the fact that I had not yet had any children of my own.

I could not answer the snake. I heard myself whimper. As I whimpered, it shot its head toward me, and I knew that it was about to swallow me up. I imagined what its teeth would feel like as they pierced my body. I imagined being paralyzed by its poison but still alive for hours, traveling slowly down the length of its body, to be digested until I was a skeleton inside of it, maybe permanently, unless snakes of this kind eventually died. I imagined all of this quickly, before the snake bit me. Before it could bite me, the vision shut off. I heard myself whimper again. Or was that the baby? I was coming out of it now, and I felt too tired to move even an eyelid. I realized I was lying in my own vomit. I heard what sounded like a baby cry again. My next sensation was the red I saw from the rays of the morning sunlight shining on my closed eyelids.