༺ Thesium ༻

Voyage

Theo grimaced as he turned over in bed. He had grown so old everything hurt. It hurt all the time. Settling back he gazed at the big picture he had hung so that he could do just this, gaze and wonder. The gondola he had flown over the icecaps was caught in the first gleam of sunrise. Root had helped him put the picture together and it had really gone well he thought. He could make out his own figure and that of Maya’s, peering through telescopes, and thought it amazing that so many years could have gone by already. It seemed only months ago that he was a young man going on an adventure. That had been one of the best times with Maya. He heard her pottering in the other room. What a jewel she was. What a treasure she had always been.

Back then he had wanted to see for himself the wonders of the planet they had settled. Political wrangling and bickering had got too fierce for him and he had badly needed a break. Lordy but why couldn’t the people just enjoy their fabulous good fortune? They had gone through so much strife to get things to where they were. The opposing camps had only got more hostile and he was fed up with them. The same arguments repeating and repeating.

At the time the picture was taken he was actually deep in thought. The phrase attributed to one of the old master artists of ancient Earth, Pablo Picasso, had set him on a long series of musings. What was it? Something like ‘computers are useless, they can only give you answers!’ something like that. He recalled a conversation he had had with Root about it.

“Root, what do you think this Picasso meant by that?”

“Some thought he meant that creativity springs from curiosity. Answers tend to be like full stops whereas questions can open up new avenues.”

“So it can be a good idea to pursue the right questions rather than the right answers. Mmm, that really is interesting. What cultures have followed that line?”

“Chinese and Japanse cultures in particular, had many generations of sages, both Buddhist and Taoist, who delved deeply into it.”

“Oh right, let’s see some of these questions. On screen please.”

He had read through some lists of what were called ‘koans’. He couldn’t make head nor tail of them. “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” for example. After a few pages Root had listed some ‘huatou’. They were much shorter little phrases, all questions designed to be the focus of contemplation. He stopped dead at one though. “What is love?”

Even now it had an eerie effect on him. It just stopped him in his tracks. He had returned to that question again and again during that period of strife. His trip over the icecaps was secretly prompted by his need to give the question more time. Just like the Picasso quote, his first reaction was to brush it off with something flippant, to take it as a kind of joke, but there was a sense that great mysteries lay beneath the surface, unseen.

That long, serene trip, floating quietly with the lovely Maya, had helped them both settle into a deep quiet. As he brought her a blanket he thought ‘what is love?’ When she spooned against him in bed he thought ‘what is love?’ When she laughed at one of his stupid jokes he looked at the crinkles around her eyes and felt a great surge of tenderness, ‘what is love?’

Gazing once again at the picture, he sensed anew the opening that had happened for him there. Drifting silently over the awe-inspiring mountains that errupted out of the ice he suddenly found the question had sort of inverted itself. He had been thinking of ’love’ as something he had or didn’t have, as some evanescent attribute that belonged to him, or not, some romantic thing. All of a sudden he had the strongest feeling that it was the other way around, that HE was an attribute of IT! It was a vast feeling and it was this that was always evoked by the picture. This ’love’ was at the largest possible scale and he felt himself to be just a tiny aspect of it. It was that way all the time. When he was more aware of it was when he had ‘fallen in love’. The times of depression were when he had just forgotten this connection. It was something much larger than any personal relationship or any individual orientation.

At the end of their trip they had coasted lower to the landing site. Maya pointed and said “Oh look, they’re all waiting for us down there, see?”

“Oh God, here we go! Half of them want to worship me as some kind of deity! The other half want to string me up as a false prophet. Damn it, they’re looking to me to resolve it all. I don’t have any answers.”

That was his first inkling of how he was going to handle it. Yes, yes, he wasn’t going to give them any answers at all!

Theo couldn’t help but smile at the memory. Now that he was an ancient sage himself he knew that he didn’t have long. All these years he had waited for the right moment to give them THE QUESTION! Now it seemed it was going to be on his death bed, in his very last words, that he’d do the best for them that he could think of. His eyes crinkled up as he chuckled at the thought of how cross they were going to be with him. It was a question that they all needed, something to prise them out of their assumptions, their dead-end answers. Yes indeed…

What is love?