The Danger of Sought Things

A group of tourists in a dream was visiting a small germanic town for its abundance of curiosity shops. To seek oneself in a place elsewhere was a mere pandemic practice in our time of displacement. In their case even, the banality of buying memorial tokens transformed, if not very obviously, into a processional discovery of the self. In other words, the thing sought wasn't a memento but a totem of self-voyage of every member individually. To put one's whole self-conception in a commodified embodiment is a work for the whim though. One tourist, who was an ardent surveyor of her own self, revealed that she was looking for Monalisa — for whichever semiotic means she couldn't comprehend herself. But for the case a word does often stimulate the believers' performance of approaching things, she didn't mind that absurd, impulsive suggestion. There could be something to unravel between that archetype and herself. The young tourist went into a shop owned by an old asian pair, brimful of curiosities from the far east stapling carelessly on top of another. The good lady but sent her away for the daybreak before she managed to find a thing. Perhaps on that very instant she managed to cultivate a poetic thinking which conceived Monalisa as something experiential instead of materialized, she was convinced that its finding might be somewhere other than any of those shop.
From then on she was no longer a tourist but traveler, even if the latter is not particularly less naive than the former, as her ritual of self-finding turned into a disoriented odyssey to investigate the mystified womanhood. Now this traveler took a bike and wandered about the town, encountering a friend from the past to whom she explained, 
"It's convenient that we mostly find our antique soul in the plentiful options of capitalism, or when being spontaneous with second-hand curiosities. But I used to call God with a word and my quest shouldn't feel different. My travel will be confused between the cardinal points but since this is a dream, I won't get lost."The friend, whose curiosity was only bewildered, followed her. She even celebrated the traveler's quest and spread the spiritual endeavour to passersby that, as the fascination quickly went contagious, more and more people were joining. There was a discrepancy of verve, a gap of interaction and consent between the traveler and her numerous followers. She didn't wish to sell her insight for any prestige so it was easy to keep going further and ignore everything behind her. But indeed guilt was accumulating from this very act of ignorance and she was only holding it down. A woman was seen by the side of the road among people who flocked about her as if in great attachment, and everyone behind the traveler greeted her eagerly. She had a beauty that is humble and in no need of any justification. Her figure was tall and lean, dark skinned and without hair. She was graceful in her moves, honest in how she gazed and strongly magnetic that it haunted the nape of the traveler's thoughts.
The road soon came into a slope and the slope ended in a hilltop. Three walls were standing firm side by side making an open construction where a tall window was resting in the middle. Venturing towards it, the traveler found a ghastly sight of an event whose dimensional relationship to the space she found herself previously in was rather illogical. It was never clear how it became a castle under her feet, the hilltop was at once an interior of a tower which was as though cloud-high. The ground from which it was erecting was too far below to be caught the glimpse of. An identical tower could be seen across it, a knight appeared by its window. He was exploding in delight as if drunk, getting amused while holding a blindfolded woman into the open air. The misery of the weeping woman in his grasp wasn't enough to stop him from sending her into a great fall downwards, into an instant death, and he only light-heartedly came back by the window with another victim. He teased with her for a while, then, instead of letting her fall, he hung her on one of the strings stretching between the tower and a balcony not so faraway. Several other victims had been hanging blindfolded on the strings and, similar to the previous two, were clothed in ecclesiastical robes and headdresses, women and men altogether. The mixture of expressions woven on their faces was the most disturbing, because you couldn't tell from the covered eyes whether they were enduring fear and the exposure of naked sun with the defence of dignity and composure or they were none other than tortured. Perhaps both were the same thing at all. Then there were also both merry voices and disappointed shouts coming from that balcony, spectators of the inhumane show who were the castle elites. The whole thing was in fact a mere entertainment where these elites would gamble whether each person in the clothing of priesthood shown to them was valid or a disguise. The laypeople who were always in disguise would be thrown away, the ecclesiastic hung in the sun to be humiliated. It was called the Christ-Hanging.
Terrified, the traveler left the window but she couldn't find the hilltop she was at before. She went into a room nearby to find another window. Across it was another set of strings stretched and two nuns were hanging down. They strangely had no blindfolds, the boldness of their misery was thus unveiled to the viewer. The traveler recognised one of them from another time in her past, she had always been particularly observant of the person's eyes in that case. Her big eyes that promptly bulged the moment the traveler moved her lips to pronounce her name. Stopping her before a name could be called, she went on,
"Never mention our names! If the knight hears I would be sent into the death fall! And not only us who are being hung for sun-ful hours, be careful not to mention the existence of that woman within the castle, for like all of us who are being hung for humiliation and revenge, a harm would follow her fate!"
"Who is she?"
"She was our wise Empress, her personhood is a charm. But her nobility was seen ill and disadvantaging for the political sake of the greedy elites. She should continue living peacefully among humble people who love her."
The traveler left the room perplexed. The crowd who was previously following her due reverence was seen untroubled by the savagery running on the other side and even inattentive towards her presence. At that sudden turn of moment she only recognized a sense of security rather than any minute heartbreak. A sense of liberation that, though to her displeased guilt-conscious nature, required detachment and the selfish fight for such. Eventually she would understand perhaps about the danger of sought things.

The Conundrum by the Gypsy Port

One night she was barely surviving a moment of confused intimacy. This is the tale that happened after her prayer, as she found a port whose air was gruesome and its sky never less than rainy. In this seaport lived a strangely harmonic constellation of sea-gypsies and their colonists together, even when those foreigners had been trading silvers and coppers for their slavery. The reason to this calmness was as following: the gypsies had been inheriting an ancient riddle from the deep sea that had been growing through storytelling and endured many generations. That it existed only as an oral history, no empirical research could ever be done and there was never any written detail to explain the physicality of this great legacy. This had caused many disputes among themselves throughout the history but the diverse opinions, shared or not shared, would always terminate in one single conclusion. Whichever form the great legacy should have, it would undoubtedly grant them salvation against poverty and misery. A sad man made melancholic by his worn out life cried at the dock, calling the future of his people foolish and dark. If only the mystery of the deep sea would only end this evening, wept he, clouds would stop gather above them and let people be healed deeply. A cynical old woman, who lost her husband to the night wind, shushed him and said it was only naive  to feign indifference towards nature's well-covered, yet ill autocracy. She believed, like the majority of the port people did, that the legacy would worth a grail brimful of golds. The foreigners of old heard about this too and the lure of such exotic splendour was too much to ignore when they knew the gypsies themselves had been struggling enough to solve it alone. So they feigned help while at once exploiting them off their land, and then the legacy itself eventually. The gypsies were themselves no less opportunistic regarding the political deal, their idea was to take advantage of the help even if sacrifice would be necessary, then outwit them at the right time. The woman realised these people were almost like her own refraction, perhaps she was a part of that town herself, perhaps their deep sea was also hers since she was trying to decipher a mystery like they all were. She might be not looking for gold but a kind of soothsaying to her own enigma. So if their sea was hers too, they might be essentially after the same thing. 

A group of travellers arrived in town, they were three lads who seemed to be those in love with the Beloved. Each of them started the journey by himself until devotion brought them into an accidental companionship. Though they were not especially friendly to one another they nonetheless shared a mutual concern. In the love they held they believed the legacy would neither be of gold nor solely for the port people. It should be, according to their tended cosmo-hermetic language, a wisdom vital to the universal secret, a salvation for the great earth indeed. Thus before anyone could wrong it they had to get themselves involved. I was rather uncertain whether they were thinking of the Beloved or the uterine membrane beyond their celestial reality in this case, but surely they did love something so finely. The woman recognized one of them, whom she had often seen in her past dreams and who, perhaps not so much surprisingly, resembled no other than him who slept next to her — his hair, his eyes, his corporal feels upon her. Yet at the same time they weren't at all the same person, she understood it because she called him with another name. It was a lovely nostalgia, she loved that imago no matter what skin it took, even though the feeling was quite new. He had always been everything suspicious to her during the time she was learning him image by image and coming into terms with her notion of him.

Not a single group was unaware of their competitors, now there were four of it in total: the young woman who was dreaming it herself, in the experiment of finding an augury for her confused ego, the unfortunate gypsies hoping for the promised prosperity, the colonists hunting for exotic treasure and the travellers devoted to divine altruism. Even so no one was less clueless than the others, this put their competitiveness at ease.

That one evening was particularly very stormy by the port. Ships on the water quivered and a big quake followed, a revelation then loomed out of it. A gigantic statue made of brass was emerging, it depicted a sea god with three heads, three sets of upper limbs and trunks conjoined into one monstrous body. The middle figure was holding on its chest a small instrument like a harp, sometimes also a flute. The apparition of the statue was majestic but neither the port people nor the occupants were impressed. A riddle after a riddle only humiliated the never ending waiting and devotion they had borne all this far, so they left the charming statue standing unwavered between the sea waves. Feeling betrayed they turned careless of its presence if not at all even oblivious to it. 

The aftermath of the first revelation still did leave keen impatience on the town people. The inhabitants suggested a ritual to be enacted in order to please the unknown godly entity, and its execution no later than soon. All women of the town, the gypsies and the non-natives together, gathered in one big circle by the port. The ritual was ceremonious with symbolic gestures and chants, sometimes a dance with tablecloths too. However nothing made the slightest sense in the practice. The occupants were instantly sinking into the ecstasy of imagined golds while the gypsies took advantage of the moment to steal from them. The performance went on completely insincere. A clamour followed when the gypsies' foul play was found out, tantrum and condemnation were thrown between both groups. "There was no mischief to begin with in our case!", defended the gypsies. "Injustice is always on the palm of the likes of you, splitting us from the welfare of our soil and sea! The opulence you cover yourselves with was our sweats of sacrifice, our rightful merits thus! This is merely the other side of justice, to take back what should belong to our people however much your political play has transfigured every sense of things!" A particular woman turned uncontrollably furious while deploring many things that went amiss in the fortune of her people. In her wild rampancy she also mourned the thievery concerning their land and sea's sacred symbol as told by her ancestors — something about flute. That everyone might as well appear too lunatic to each other during such commotion, no one seemed to mind her words. But the woman who was dreaming the whole thing was alerted, she thought just a moment ago there was a kind of hazy apparition before her echoing the word 'flute'. It stroke her consciousness like a flare of inspiration, she kept hearing the echo in her head that said, “Steal the God’s flute!” 
She went exuberant in the way she could not understand it. Deciphering celestial enigma is almost an effort to disclose God by the means of being in love, but stealing from him would only seem as though one is overcoming His supremacy. That  instant thought sent furious chill all over her skin, as much how she loved and had benefited much from Him, she was only fascinated to requite the occupying shadow beneath her. It was as if she had been the gypsy herself, if she had been not before.

She announced the travellers about her whispered revelation and the man of imago ran towards the sea. Sometimes she could not really find herself apart from him, perhaps he too was the woman herself. What she could understand was the harp-flute of the statue being obtained through his hand. This didn’t escape everyone’s attention who at once dispersed from the ritual stage to go after him. He was immediately surrounded and threatened with peril in case he should win the contest. Just then he did something rather beautiful; he turned himself into a man made mad by the curse of truth, holding the flute and violently shouting ecstasy as though his mind was torn apart. His performance managed to deceive the port people to believe the curse was taking its toll. It turned out to be quite relieving for them, they were finally liberated from the obsession.

The sky didn’t get particularly brighter but later in the night had it for the first time turned pleasant without rain and storm. Its dark blue looked indeed more confident, under it a grandiose ship was set on sail where people and lights were beaming in gold, a small feast for the long night. The flute was safe in the hands of the lad and whether the secret was solved no one seemed to understand either. The ship sailed on until it disappeared by the end of the dream, as if leaving a sweet after-whisper. The unfortunate revelation was however, that the imago with whom the woman was smitten remained transient only of course.