Extract from Maslow’s Stranger (a long short story)!

The stranger found himself back out in the dusty street.

The next house called him across to it, and this one felt right, though he doubted that he could trust his feelings any more. He was still shaking from the previous experiences. He was beginning to doubt himself and his own intuition.

Inside the rooms were empty apart from rows of huge vats. He looked at them with mounting trepidation, reining in his feelings and gathering himself back under control.  Past experience had caused great internal conflict. He was not sure he could he could trust anything again. He did not know if he could take much more of this.

He frowned to himself as he studied the vats. He no longer knew what to expect. This whole sequence of events was outside of his experience. There was no way of knowing what was going to happen next. It seemed that he was being led and all that was open to him to do was to follow, to go where he was pulled. Giving himself up to this new feeling of predestination he walked across to investigate. Each bucket was equipped with a huge spoon.

He peered inside the first and found that it was full of letters. Taking hold of the spoon he stirred the contents and watched in unexpected fascination as the letters first formed themselves into words and then the words arranged themselves into sentences. He peered into the layers and layers of swirling paragraphs forming countless stories, reading them, drawn into them until immersed. The stories spoke of such adventure and intrigue, lust, honour and imagination that they sent the soul soaring. With each new stir a new story appeared.

He was fascinated and continued to stir and read. When he stirred rhythmically the words arranged themselves into poems and danced with fun or illuminated feelings with metered insight. The words revealed wonder that transcended the limits of their inspiration. A lifetime could be spent in awe and fulfilment in the thrall of this magic; a lifetime peering into the magic of the characters, feelings and worlds conjured up by the arrangement of those words. He stopped stirring and they settled back into independent letters again, each a potential explosion of nuance waiting to be awoken.

His mind thrilled to the power of those words and urged him to once again dip and stir. But he felt the pressure of time. There was so much still to do, so great a gamut of experience, so many buckets to stir. It was time to move on.

The next vat was full of colour and when he stirred this images flowed before his eyes. They arranged themselves into shapes, beautiful collages, and spectacular scenes. The vibrant colours shone with aching intensity. The images spoke to him with emotion as they captured the scope of human experience.

The third produced sound and as he stirred the sounds interacted to produce music, and the music weaved its magic patterns to soothe his brain and then rose to jerk the passion from out of his soul until the tears flowed down his cheeks. He stirred harder and the music rose majestically to fill him with pride and resolve.

His spirits soared. It felt like play and he rushed from vat to vat stirring and delighting in what was produced.

He had ceased to be amazed by anything anymore. He had stopped having expectations and no longer looked for answers. For the moment ‘doing’ was quite enough.

For hour after hour, lost in time, he rushed from vat to vat excited to find what he could see. The rhymes, the rhythms and the shapes. The mysteries explored and the truths revealed. And every one of them new. Every one unique. Everything as no one had ever seen before and would never see again. And when he stopped stirring then everything was lost. Only he could create these new patterns, these forms, and these sounds. They all came out of him. They were of him and he gave them life. Maybe that was sufficient?

He ceased playing with the words, colours and sounds in the various vats and whimsically made his way back out into the deserted streets.

There were many other houses. Who knows, maybe he would find someone who could tell him who he was, where he had come from and how to get out of this place? There had to be someone to ask, some way of making sense of this experience.

The sun still shone intensely.

The dust devils played around him.

The stranger set off to discover more.