Allen's Text 64 - Part 1

©2006 – Allen Sutterfield

On the plain, bare, ugly brown covers of the Journal Volumes Winter had left him, Arthur had pasted various colored pages, each the exact size of the cover. The first of these was a Tibetan mandala from a tantric book he had long ago cut up.

Two bodhisattvas, one in either upper corner, extended benevolent hands, one left, one right, downwards towards the immense circular mandala that, Arthur guessed, was the world itself. The mandala was composed of five circles, each varie-colored; in the centre of all the circles was a square, inside of which were rectangles, inside of which were triangles. At the very center was another series of circles, three of them, inside the third of which was the nine-petalled lotus, the ninth petal itself being the exact center of the whole mandala. There were strange little umbrella-shaped objects, both surrounding and inside the inner circles, and one of these was at he centre of the ninth petal. He had no idea what they symbolized, they looked alternately like soft brushes and ceiling lamps. There were ten outside the square containing the inner three circles; there were five inside the square, four at the cardinal points, the fifth, top downward, in the center circle.

The picture’ bright colors were faded, scuffed by years of wear and tear, so that Brother Antonius could get only an imperfect impression of the original beauty. But as with all things once truly beautiful, enough of the original force remained to powerfully set off this journal among all the volumes. He had paused a long time before even opening it, the cover gave him pause, and seemed to open up a new dimension in this whole peculiar fixation Brother Antonius found himself unable to escape. The papers that had fallen to him literally from the sky, the two lives involved so erratically yet relentlessly, the strange power of what he assumed to be unpublished writings, which had given him such unexpected pleasure and pain, and which were eventually to led him far away from his desert retreat, came to represent, in spite of himself, a whole “other world” he seemed to have known but could not in any way consciously account for. Of course reincarnation immediately suggested itself as a possible explanation, but initially he dismissed this possibility as unacceptable, it was either romantic fantasy or the limits of ordinary logic.