CHAPTER 1
When Melody Beaucello was born she came
trailing clouds of Glory from God. All babies do according to
Wordsworth. Unlike all babies, however, Melody Beaucello didn’t
relinquish the Glory clouds, she retained them and they found space to
develop.
As Melody grew, nobody suspected that she was
a miracle child. In a world where prose dominates nobody looks for
features or qualities or states of being that can only make sense
through the medium of poetry. When a particular state hasn’t been
experienced before it can only be understood through comparisons with
states that are known and if no poet is around to supply the metaphors,
the new state or dimension slips by unnoticed.
It must be recorded then, and it’s sad to
have to do it, that nobody expected to find anything special in Melody.
Even her name, which should have suggested the quiet serenity of a
single cello playing, was the stuff of comedy among the pupils of the
little one-teacher school she attended. They ridiculed her and her name
because she looked different. Nobody else at the school was all over
freckles and nobody else had eyes that didn’t seem to know where they
were looking or hair as red as a hot setting sun.
The children couldn’t see the inner beauty of
Melody, the winning charm of her unfettered spirit, free as the air
itself. Children see the world as physical only, or if they have the
imagination to enter the metaphysical realm they don’t relate that
experience to the real world outside their own head.
So it was that because of her physical
difference from all of them, they took every opportunity to be cruel and
rude to her often chanting an obnoxious little rhyme that Cedric Danvers
had made up.
Melody Cello’s really dumb.
Her eyes are turning
and her hair is burning
and freckles cover her stick out bum.
It is little wonder that Melody kept to
herself, closing her ears to insults and losing herself in her own
thoughts and the real poetry that her spirit produced to begin shaping
for her the meaning of life.
Her teacher didn’t know what to do with
Melody. He promised severe retribution for anyone maligning her with the
repugnant rhyme that had been brought to his attention by a parent, but
he knew that the chanting would continue when he was out of earshot. He
even tried once to seat another student at the same desk as Melody so
that they could collaborate on a project, but he was met with a
particularly defiant refusal from the girl he tried to move and a
general uproar from the rest of the school.
‘I’m not going to sit near her!’
‘Melody’s got to sit by herself.’
‘No one can sit near her, sir.’
‘Yeh, she stinks,’ Cedric Danvers called out
with malicious glee.
Cedric Danvers was made to stand in the
corner by the irate teacher, but the teacher knew that his show of anger
was as much directed at himself as at the boy. He knew that he couldn’t
do much about the unpleasant odour that hung around the unfortunate
girl.
Melody’s father kept pigs, many pigs. He was
a diligent pig farmer and each morning early he made the trip into
Karlsberg to transfer the scraps from the bins behind the cafés and
hotels into the battered but commodious receptacles on the tray of his
truck.
Children would hold their noses when the
Beaucello truck passed, but the smell of his bins was nothing compared
to the smell of the pigs that wallowed in the mud of their pens and
slobbered and grunted deep into the mess in the troughs.
To the refuse from the town was added a
quantity of skimmed milk from the little dairy that Mrs Beaucello looked
after. The skimmed milk left the old Alpha cream separator to flow down
a wooden drain to the pig troughs and by the time it completed the
journey it was well and truly soured by the residue of all the milk that
had flowed down that drain before. The pigs didn’t seem to mind slurping
up the disagreeable slurry or even lying in the trough to cover
themselves with the sorry malodorous blend, and the three human
inhabitants of the pig farm didn’t seem to notice the smell. They were
used to the odour impregnating hair and clothes and penetrating the
epidermis of each to reach the dermis below.
The teacher saw Melody as a problem to be
solved. Far from being alienated as the children were by her freckles,
her unusual eyes, her flaming hair, the shape of her bottom and even the
ubiquitous pigsty odour his compassion was aroused by her hermetic state
at school and he was determined that her education would not suffer
because she was rejected by her peers.
The teacher had been surprised by the way she
took to reading and he’d kept up the supply of books so that now she was
reading well beyond her classified reading age. The compositions she
wrote never ceased to surprise him. They were imaginative in a way that
he couldn’t believe. At first he thought that her imagination was fed by
what she read, but he perused all her reading material and there didn’t
seem to be any correlation. He knew that there was no computer or TV in
the Beaucello household which cut off two more sources of material for
her. What she wrote seemed to focus on what people were thinking and
feeling rather than what they were doing. Children of her age usually
wrote in the monotonous format of we did this then we did that and then
we did something else, but not Melody. She presented thoughts and
recorded conversations, and not just conversations with local people.
She seemed to have contacts all over the world. How could a little girl
who didn’t leave her father’s pig farm except to go to school dream up
conversations with people from the four corners of the earth,
conversations like that last one with the boy from the little village of
Bielenberg near Hamburg in Germany. And there was a place called
Bielenberg. He’d looked it up on a roadmap of Germany.
I went to talk with Wilhelm last night. He
was so happy, bubbling over with happiness like a well-fed brook. He’d
decided to be happy he said because there was so much to be sad about.
‘When you visit me,’ Wilhelm said to me,
‘nothing else matters, nothing else exists.’
He said that he told his mother that there
was a voice in his head and she freaked out. Wilhelm told me that his
aunty used to hear voices and they ruined her life.
I told Wilhelm that I wasn’t a voice in
his head. How could I be? He doesn’t speak English and I don’t speak
German. Spirit can speak to spirit without the need of language. I told
him that languages are made up by men and like the physical things in
the world they won’t last.
What strange stuff from a little girl the
teacher thought. He wasn’t a religious man and his world view never
strayed an inch beyond the pronouncements of the scientists and he would
have rejected most of what Melody wrote as fanciful rubbish had it come
from an adult pen, but where does this child miles from anywhere with no
TV and no Web get her ideas from?
There was something strange too about her
Mathematics. She presented herself as both a Mathematical brain and as a
person with no mental stamina at all in that subject. What puzzled the
teacher was that Melody just couldn’t work out how to set out and arrive
at answers to the addition, subtraction, multiplication and division
questions and the problems that involved these processes set out on the
arithmetic cards he distributed. The other children seemed to enjoy
finishing a card and going on with the next one, but not Melody. No
amount of coaching and drilling in the processes got her on the right
track.
The teacher was quite prepared to accept that
a student brilliant in English could be struggling in Mathematics, but
what bewildered him was that when it came to Mental Arithmetic her
mental stamina surged to the very mountain top. She never failed to
record the right answer. She could apparently, without the aid of pencil
and paper, add, subtract, multiply and divide with ease and work out the
solution to a problem as quickly as he could himself. He knew this
because the procedure in Mental Arithmetic was for him to give the
question, the students would work out their answers in their heads and
when they had them, they would put their hands on their heads. At his
signal they would all pick up their pencils and write their answers in
their exercise books.
The teacher noticed that Melody was always
the first to put her hands on her head, soon after he’d worked out the
answer himself. He enjoyed maths and always did the calculations with
the children to keep his brain active. He tried a trick question with
them once giving them only ten seconds to record the answer. ‘What is
the number that comes one before the one after seven’ he asked them.
Melody was the only one to write down seven, the correct answer.
Cedric Danvers was particularly riled by
Melody’s performance in Mental Arithmetic. He was the top maths student
in the school and he just couldn’t accept that the ugly freckled-faced
girl could beat him in Mental Arithmetic. He suspected that there was
something clandestine going on between her and the teacher, like the
teacher giving her all the answers before school. The thought put a
fair-sized chip on his shoulder and raised his persecution of Melody a
notch or two. The teacher was often puzzled by his lack of co-operation
in the classroom. He had everything going for him. He was very bright,
yet his behaviour was standing in the way of him reaching his full
potential.
Melody didn’t suspect that she was different
from the rest of the human race. She knew that her appearance was
different, the other children made sure that she knew that, but what she
didn’t realise was that her spirit was unusually dominant. She assumed
that everybody’s spirit was free and everybody had access to the minds
of everybody else.
It wasn’t pleasant to drop in on a hostile
mind that dominated the spirit so she stayed clear of the other
children, but she knew what her parents were thinking and she always
read the mind of her teacher. If she’d known that it was cheating to get
an answer in the way she did she wouldn’t have done it, but of course if
other people had known that she was reading the teacher’s mind they
would have been so overawed by such a miracle that they wouldn’t have
noticed the cheating.
And so Melody progressed through primary
school doing her best to understand an alien world. Her world, the world
of the spirit, was no mystery to her. That it was infinite, but at the
same time un-extended because it wasn’t material in any way, was just a
given that she accepted, as others accepted the air that they breathed.
The spirit has no length or breadth nor any space and time. It has no
need of addition or subtraction, multiplication or division. She knew
instinctively that there is only one spirit of which she is an elemental
part. She is part of her father and her mother and the teacher and the
boy in Bielenberg and everybody else in the world and they are all part
of the one infinite spirit. Melody knew though that she was a very
humble and limited part and that she differed from the universal spirit
in perception. The perception of the universal spirit is infinite and no
bars blocked the unfolding of its infinite powers.
Melody explored her world through the medium
of poetry using images of the physical world to capture the reality of
her spirit. She perceived herself as a leaf in a forest, a forest that
couldn’t be extended because it is everything that there is. It took her
a few years of her childhood to conclude that because of the bars
limiting their perception other people were hardly aware of the leaves
around them.
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