IN SEARCH OF FREEDOM a novel by STAN I.S. LAW

Even before the last Dominus vobiscum the sweet smell of incense began to clear. What remained was a halo suspended in a luminescent haze around the glittering Monstrance.

"Et cum spiritu tuo", echoed a murmur of the still sleepy voices. Then the final dismissal: "Ite, Missa est." The mass was over.

"Deo gratias" Marvin affirmed automatically.

The old priest, the tall boy carrying the censer and two serving boys in short surplices left the altar. As the fragrant mists slowly dissolved, Marvin's eyes focused on a little red light guarding the sanctum sanctorum. Ite, missa est... Once again it was time to go. The lad who had been carrying the censer came back to put out the candles: six perfectly steady flames in the perfectly still air of the chapel. Then, only the tiny red light remained.

"Mr. Clark?"

The young lady held an open file with documents. Two letters and a memo.

"Yes, I'm coming sister," Marvin whispered. He wanted to dally a little longer, drifting on the last vestiges of incense soon to be supplanted by the musty smell of the eternally damp stone.

"Sir?"

Marvin Clark blinked repeatedly. Then his eyes focused on the red dot of the smoke detector protruding from the suspended ceiling before turning towards his secretary. The musty smell, the incense, the candles were gone, hidden behind thirty years which separated Marvin from the orphanage of the good Soeurs Grises. Gray Sisters in a gray convent, passing time by sauntering the long gray corridors of their monotonous lives.

Marvin took the documents, glanced over them, signed the front copy of each and returned the folder to his secretary.

"Is that all Miss Gascon?" He was now fully in the present.
"Yes, thank you, sir," she said as she left Marvin Clark's office with a proficient deference. It was her very first job. She wanted to make a good impression.

It was the third time this month that Marvin's thoughts had taken him back to the orphanage of Sainte Geneviéve. He wondered why. He was sure he had long ago put behind any morbid recollections of his youth. Morbid? Perhaps just empty. There was so little to remember. Except the loneliness.

Marvin remembered very little, but he had the letters. The sad letters his father had written to his mother when looking for work. All over England. His mother had saved them. The letters were Marvin's only tangible link with the past. What he hadn't read, he imagined.

Marvin's parents had emigrated to Canada from a small town in the north of England. They had had little choice. The local munitions factory, the only local employer, had become obsolete - another casualty of the ravaged Empire. England found it difficult to adjust to the post-war economy. "Move a mile, move a thousand miles..." his father had written. Marvin imagined a mixture of anger and sadness on his father's resigned face. "A thousand miles?" Marvin knew his mother would rather be poor in England than rich across the ocean. "No good would come of it..." She knew. His mother had known. Women know such things. She was getting on in years. It was time to start a family, or they would be spending their old age alone. England did not seem to offer any future to her intended offspring - but a thousand miles...? The war had left them with little to pack.

Marvin was born on the first anniversary of his parents' arrival in Canada. Two weeks short of the sixth anniversary his parents had been killed in a traffic accident. Murdered really. A youth with more beer then he could handle had run them down, ignoring the red light. Marvin celebrated his fifth birthday at the orphanage of Sainte Geneviéve run by the Soeurs Grises. They gave him all the love they had to offer. Love without affection. Cool, competent, perfunctory love. Sterile. The nuns, soeurs as they preferred to be called, had never been taught how to communicate warmth.

Marvin's recollection of his early days in the orphanage were very vague, tattered. No more than snapshots. At the time, he did not speak a word of French. What little sentiment the sisters attempted to exude from beneath their pale-gray habits must have gotten lost somewhere in the translation. Ultimately it was thanks to the belles soeurs that Marvin grew up perfectly bilingual. It proved useful, expedient, living in Quebec.

It was then, in those early days, that Marvin had learned to escape the perpetual gray reality of monastic life into his private imaginary worlds of light and color. Later, years later, he found he could invoke old memories by lighting a solitary candle. Upstairs, in his attic, while staring into the flickering light, he would drift into the reclusive world of his childhood. He would feel himself kneeling, his aching knees pressing against the worn step of the hard oak pew in the austere gray chapel. He would sense, then see, the distant inaccessible shimmer of the perpetual light at the altar. Sometimes a single lingering whiff of incense would tickle his nose. Then, even as years earlier, his nostrils would flare out hungry for the shimmering warmth of the candlelight, for the forgotten fragrance, there, up front, beyond his reach. With practice, from beneath half-closed eyelids, little Marvin could see himself at the altar's very steps, red carpeted, soft against the hard marble... He would feel himself embraced by the reassuring flames of the six majestic candles. There, up front, and only there, he felt comforted, secure.

Marvin remembered feeling left out. Excluded from the faint heartbeat of the convent. He had never been allowed to serve at the altar, to assist in the Bloodless Sacrifice of the mass. Not that he understood its meaning. How could he? The mass had been celebrated in Latin. Only later in French. By the time he had learned the latter, he had been considered too old to serve. Marvin had learned early to rely on his own inner worlds for warmth, for light and colour. For escape.

Two years after Marvin had been interned at the convent, at the age of seven, he had started having music lessons on the organ. All boys had been "tested" for signs of talent or ability. Marvin had been among the five deemed worthy of Soeur Angelica's efforts. It had meant spending more time in the chapel - the birthplace of his inner dream-world. He practiced playing the organ with passion.

So many years ago...

if you enjoyed it so far,you can enter Marvin's enchanted world in the book...

To sleep, perchance to dream...

There were moments in Marvin's life when he could not truly define his state of consciousness. He could swear that he had merely dreamt of a particular event. He felt sure that he had dreamt of it at night in his bed, or as he traveled - in the transcendent capsule of his unbridled imagination. The problem was that while he could not pinpoint the event in his wakened hours, he witnessed the results of his dreams, or imagery, or travels, in the very solid world of objective matter. The effects of an intangible dream-event had been manifested in the tangible, objective reality.

Marvin wondered which phenomena could be defined as objective. He thought that the definition had to be per force limited to such events, incidents or experiences as could be shared with or perceived by other people; or at least one other person. Yet what of the creative process? What of the scientists, of the great masters of canvas, of the immortal composers? The results of their labors had been and continued to be shared by millions. But at the time of conception, at the actual moment of creation of their later famous efforts, they could not share their image. They could not share the sublime essence which only later became translated into an objective existence. Must the creative act therefore remain for ever subjective? It so, then by analogy, all objective reality has its birth in an individual subjective state of consciousness.

"We are gods!"

A frightening postulate yet the only logical conclusion. Or at least the only practical working premise. Marvin wiped his forehead.

The next question which bugged him were the generally established concepts of reality itself. Is reality only that which could be perceived by our senses? Or, to turn the scales, is that which is perceived by our senses - real? By such definition all the creative processes were destined to remain unreal. On the other hand, a mirage perceived by a desirous pair of eyes is.

So much for the established concepts!

Now dreams, Marvin accepted, were obviously subjective. Were they therefore unreal? Certainly! If reality is only that which not merely can be, but actually is perceived by another person. Dreams unreal?

"Nuts! On occasion they had given me a headache. A very real headache!"

Marvin's logic rebelled against such stringent definitions. Could there not be a sort of latent objective reality in all our thoughts, our emotions... perhaps a mixture of the two in clearly prescribed proportions? And by that token, did the dreams have any substance? Or was it just that the substance, the essence of dreams was from a realm where objectivity is measured by a different set of dimensions, judged by totally different rules? Are all the dreams of all people, perhaps even those of the 'lower' forms of life, measured by those same, different, yet consistent standards? Can one share a dream with another, willing person?

To sleep, perchance to dream...

Marvin adjusted the angle of his command chair. As he leaned further back, his angle of vision became limited to the convoluted realm of the Delicious Monster. What of his, or is it her, reality, he wondered?

The prophets of old had been proficient observers of dreams. Reputedly, they could interpret the potential or intended reality of those ancient dreams.

Marvin smiled. Over the years he had become a truly doubting Thomas.

In that sense dreams were, or at the very least, could become objective, rather like the music first heard on a subjective plane of an attuned composer. Then what were the rules? Why were the dreams, at least in the old days, invariably cloaked in some incomprehensible, symbolic jargon? What good were dreams to us if we could neither understand them, nor control their passage, evolvement or outcome? Or could we? Could we at least all learn to understand them without the dubious aid of the long departed and extremely dead prophets? Carl Jung had intimated as much. So did others....

Marvin rejected the imposition of such limitations.

He adjusted his armchair again. The stream of ideas flashed through his mind at such a rate that he could hardly attach symbols, words, to the whirling concepts. He sat up and closed his eyes.
To understand the dreams was just one thing. But it wasn't enough. Not nearly enough. We spend a third of our life in bed, a lot of that time in dreaming and, on the top of that, we seem to dream most of our waking hours. We dream of a car, we dream of a house, a wife, a dozen children, money, success, position and possession. Some strange (judging by the majority rule) deranged individuals even dream of giving! None of us, we never, never stop dreaming. Yet only some dreams come true, only some become solidified, set in an objective reality. Set, like Jocelyn's sculptures, in a physical reality. Concepts reduced to fragments of space and time. The other dreams go by the wayside...

Why? What are the rules? Surely, there are always rules.

Or could it be that the True Reality would forever remain subjective? Could it be that the eastern sages had been right? Could it be that all objective events, things, material trappings, physical manifestations were no more than transient, ephemeral illusions? Mere reflections of True Reality for ever destined to remain subjective?

Perchance to dream....

Some four hundred years ago the bard of Avon dreamed of nearly forty plays. He dreamed and he slept, perhaps in a reverse order, and that which had been born of his subjective reality, had become - for our sake - objective. Could that be the coveted, ever shrouded secret? For our sake? For the sake of another?

"But surely," Marvin shrugged, "dear ol' Willy retired with a modest fortune..." Then he looked at his watch. "And if I do not go down to dinner, I shall retire with an empty stomach!"

continue sharing Marvin's dreams in the book...