# [D23:5M] Vision: [[The Hermit and the Whore]] Hexagram: [[Twenty Third Hexagram]] Trials: [[Twenty Third Trial]] Archetypes: #monk #historianofdreams #sheep #two #yellow #sheperd #fire #smile #body #floatinginspace #wolf #ears #night #hermit #whore December 15th, 1404, 1910 1. The Monk asked the Historian of Dreams to picture some sheep in a field and to count them. "There are two near me and at least a dozen more spread out across a yellow hillside in bloom." "What hides in the scene?" he asked. "I remember riding a bicycle through the Salento countryside when I was young.  Often, we would pass by the same shepherd and his flock." “A memory hides in the scene." "It's your scene." "It's your memory,” said the Monk nearest the fireplace.  He tended it and the room warmed. “You said yesterday that nothing hides except in plain sight,” said the Historian as she watched the firelight flicker along the vases on the mantle. “I wonder, do you think of memory that way too? As something which hides in plain sight?” “If that's what a memory still is when it’s found, yes." "What else could it be?” she said.   She heard her own voice defensively mistuned in the question.  The fire cast many of his shadows upon the walls of the great library. 2. A version of the Monk from among those behind her said, ”You said _we_. _We would pass._” The Historian of Dreams turned her glass in her hand but not herself in her chair.  "I was with my husband,” she said, “and two of our friends." “Husband,” said the Monk. She took the last drop of whiskey. "I had tried to leave him before attending the academic residency that had brought us to Italy." "Why?" "I wasn't in love with him.  I hated his laugh. When he laughed I could see his skull," she said. “He looked deranged and I no longer recognized him.  I had just ended an affair.  I’d wanted a new life." “Nothing remains hidden.” She turned in her seat then. “Why is this of interest to you?” “Perhaps I have an interest in history as well," he said. “Should we have another?” “You know, it’s not really about the rosary,” she said.  “Only the beads.  What they were said to contain." “Something hidden in the beads.” “Yes. The Dreams that formed the world.  Legend has it.” “Care to guess what I'm going to ask next?" "Where in the beads do the Dreams hide?” The Monk smiled, the one of him nearest her, and poured for each of them.  “No.” he said, “Where in the Dreams does the world.” 3. "An Historian," he said, "wants to trace things to their origin.  Add it all up and see what it amounts to." "A good historian," she said, "knows this is not truly possible. You begin to gather things up from one world, and every little question about every little thing leads to yet another world altogether, still to be discovered.  But all these worlds, they end again and again, and once they are gone, they cannot be simply summoned.  One thing might look a little like another, but how can you know for sure?  You want a theory but the only basis for its success is how well does it compete against other theories?  Theories in lieu of answers.” 4. "Imagine God," he said. “Why?” “Try it." “The image is absurd.  I see a body of a man like you floating in space." The Monk laughed.  “I guess if I start floating, you’ll know.” “What about you?” she said. “The only God I know is a god of opposites, simple things, a sheep and a wolf, say.  And when they can be spoken of as equals, they can be spoken of in joy.  God is nearer then.” "I take it you don't actually pray to sheep and wolves though." "I ask to be made aware of what I've ignored or only noticed in passing." "Can you ask the sheep and wolves about the glass beads next time you should happen to chat?" "Your sarcasm possesses a haunting innocence.  A fear of being known, but also a desire to be.” 5. “Doesn’t joy have an opposite?” asked the Historian of Dreams. “Like wolves and sheep?” The Monk said, “I’m not speaking of the happy and miserable events of the world, but of the joy of absolute presence in the world. Not the delusion that all things bring joy but the reality of the availability of joy in all things, including misery.  The only God I know is in the simplest and often smallest object in the field of awareness, which is also the source of that awareness. Let’s say my heart grieves a great loss.  The joy I speak of is in the awareness of simple things, of birdcall, say, not as a distraction from some awful sorrow but as the confirmation of my own heart’s resonance with what breaks it.  My God is the song in the air on which that present sorrow drifts.” “You explain metaphors with metaphors,” said the Historian.  “You use beauty to obscure your meaning.  God is a song, you said.  But what’s real in the metaphor? God or the song? We appeal to a song to explain God but we don’t need to appeal to God to know what a song is.  That’s one way to know that what we hear is a song, that we don’t need to point to anything else for our ears to hear it.  In historical terms, your habit is a form of infinite regress. Your god is a god of the gaps. You have as much verse and metaphor as you need to fill in missing links in the chain, but finally, there’s no god you can point to at bottom that holds up all the other gods of metaphor.”   “God is not the gap between the wolf and the sheep, but precisely that, both.  The song and the silence. The presence and absence.” “A wolf in sheep’s clothing, maybe. A song which is only sound.  A presence which is only absence.” “A wolf in sheep’s clothing is only a wolf, yes.  But the wool confirms the sheep, or there would be no need to dress in it.” “This is not a kind of symmetry.  Wolves devour sheep.  No need to stalk and seize. Dressed as a sheep, it simply waits for sheep.” “It advertises, the wolf, with it wants.  The wolf will appear as whatever is necessary in order to receive what it craves.  When the wolf goes around like this, he is like a common night walker.  He says, ‘look at me, you sheep, you hillside hermits, and come this way.  So ready is the wolf whore.” “And this play they put on, this is your god?” “At first the hermit thinks, ‘I will steer clear of the whore and hide if anything suspicious should come around here.’ So fearful is the hermit. He hides, or so he thinks, up here in the hills.  Yet, like anything, he cannot hide, so obvious to the whore is his fearfulness, dotting the hillsides, exposed and begging to be devoured.” “The lure.” said the Historian. “Yes,” said the Monk. “The lure.  The bleat of the sheep calls to the howl of the wolf.” “It takes a whore to lure and a hermit to die.” “The hermit’s secret is that he wants nothing else.  When at last he is cut into pieces and swallowed up, the whore goes out of business.” “And when the wolf goes starving?  When the hermit is extinct?  What’s left then?” “Neither remains.” “The death of your god.” “The continuous birth.”