THE ADVENTURES OF STAGGER LI

George Breed, Ph.D.

This work is licensed under a

 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.

Copyright 2011

Flagstaff, Arizona

Suffer not woman and her tenderness to sit near him in his darkness. Banish the frailties of hope; wither the relenting of love; scorch the fountain of tears; curse him as only thou canst curse. So shall he be accomplished in the furnace; so shall he see things that ought not to be seen, sights that are abominable, and secrets that are unutterable. So shall he read elder truths, sad truths, grand truths, fearful truths. So shall he rise again before he dies. And so shall our commission be accomplished which from God we had, -- to plague his heart until we had unfolded the capacities of his spirit. -- Thomas de Quincey

Then his interiors that had been open into heaven were closed up, while his exteriors were open to the world; and when this takes place man is in light in regard to all things of the world, but in thick darkness in regard to all things of heaven. -- Emanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell

And this rogue is anarchic, a law breaker, knowing no bounds of proprium. Not criminal—no—but not moral either. – James Hillman (Re-Visioning Psychology)

PREFACE

Some of us still remember the emergence of Stagger Li.

I quote from an ancient document.

....he staggered into the new scape leaving behind a trail of dots and no discernible tears. In olden times a battered cardboard suitcase bound with rope would be his tote. Not now. Body cavities held his treasures all. Ancient winds blew wisdom in his ears. More recent winds blew out his pants without dislodging the gyrandic wonders held in time honored body tote fashion, wonders he would need if times did come. With wisdom in his ears and wonders in his butt, he staggered on.

Where he was before the trail of dots we do not know, nor why he used his body for a tote bag. We do know that he ....had exiled himself, put himself in quarantine, knowing inbred self-worship was the core cancer of his species, a peculiar genetic strain who cannibalized their mother while defecating in her ever-shrinking living room. Matricidal mouth-breathing nest-shitters, doomed to extinction. O well, almost all are gone now, he had muttered to himself as he resumed his eccentric pace.

To Stagger Li, life was a lick of honey on a razor's edge. His heart had been broken many times. The last time he did not even attempt repair, allowing the shattered heart shards to scatter through the universe."Heart scat," he called it.

He did not fear death or life. That is why mountain lions and wolves and other wild things often walked by his side. He said he made no such dis-stink-shun, that death and life are a fig mint of our image-eye nation. He plucked the fig and ate it and gave the mint to a roadside beggar.

Walking the path kept his edge. Ringing in his heart was the cry "Today is a good day to die!" Open to death at any moment, this moment, he was fully alive. Vorpal blade slung on his back, he staggered on, engaging life each moment in totally unpredictable unplanned responsing.

As you might expect, he was a fan of the drunken style of fighting. He had many years of training in the technical details of engagement, so all he had to do was turn himself loose. And nobody wanted to see Stagger Li become Stagger Loose.

His meeting with Wu Chi Ku and subsequent training restored his martial heart and brought him to new life. This made his meeting with Viola Trumpett a little less, but only a little less, edgy. This was new to her. She had met demonic forces, but had never encountered a Noirior.

Chapter One

Born With Vorpal Blade Unsheathed

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
  Long time the manxome foe he sought –

--Lewis Carroll, Jabberwocky

The encounter of Stagger Li and shrivel-i-zation is well known, replicated, duplicated, and triplicated in documentaries, cartoons, and talk show fodder for the shrivelized masses in their evening hypnotic state, such state sponsored by the same soul-sucking money-loving machine for which they do daytime work. Placated, they rest in their butt-sprung chairs and sofas, dreaming dreams of rebellious adventure that never come.

Stagger Li was born of Brooding Menace and Awesome Power. The coupling of those two and their wild thrashing round the landscape as each tried to become and overcome the other produced the wallow known as the Everglades. Their simultaneous orgasmic scream can still be heard in the swamp panther’s cry. Stagger Li fell out of that mutual shuddering embrace into the world full-blown, parental scream still echoing in the deepest realms of his soul. Alert, aware, ready for all encounter, born with vorpal blade unsheathed, he moved through the newly created swamps to the nearest Pic and Run.

As Stagger Li followed a spiraling path through the swamp, the winding helical shape of his staggering journey no doubt due to the cyclonic nature of his parents' mating, he made the acquaintance of all its creatures. They each knew immediately the depth and nature of Stagger Li's soul and adopted him into their clan.

With the humans, the two-leggeds busily absorbed in planetary destruction, eating the planet alive, it was a different matter. Not able to see souls at all, when Stagger Li's circumvolutions eventually led him to human domains, the two-leggeds reviled and rejected him with fear and force and passion.

Of course their reaction may also have had something to do with the reports by the Planetary Taming Bureau’s Transportation Section that destruction of a mysterious nature was happening with their heavy equipment in the swamp dedicated to building a six-lane freeway for the trucks needed for transporting the endless supply of pet food, toilet paper, pre-made burgers from yearling cows slaughtered by birth order, eggs from chickens who never knew the light of day or the happy chasing of insects or instinctive alarm at the shadow of a hawk, nuclear wastes, cosmetics, toupees, prostheses, dental floss, chewing gum, and icons of a weeping Virgin Mary holding the already crucified Baby Jesus in her loving arms.

The vorpal blade was tuned to slice any felt resistance with incisive ease. Stagger Li became aware of the earth movers, graders, rollers, scrapers, asphalters, and concrete layers first by the smell. The funk odor of badgers, pole cats, bears emerging from hibernation, and the breath of buzzards was nowhere near as offensive as these nose-infesting emanations of age-old ooze from rotting corpses of dinosaurs and wooly mammoths. He sneezed and sneezed again, his body hoping to eject the offensive smell. And then he saw the first one, sitting there in all its reeking yellow glory. Slice! went the vorpal blade, halving the monstrosity, then proceeding to take the others of its ilk into inoperable oblivion.

Stagger Li staggered on for his first encounter with a human, a Pic and Run convenience store employee named Zelda.

Chapter 2

Long Past Hope And Its Narcosis

If, then, one cannot achieve God and yet cannot and will not do without Him, from these two things there arise in such men tumult and restlessness, both without and within. And so long as a man is thus agitated, no creature, neither in heaven nor on earth, can give him rest or help him. (Jan van Ruysbroeck, The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage)

Lest you religious, who divide the world into the Saved and Lost and the Good and Bad, too readily try to force Stagger Li into the Lost Bad box, hold off! The world is more complex than you think.

The Noirior is a warrior moving through Hell. The lotus flower blossoming in the purest radiant Light simultaneously has its roots in the blackest muck. The Noirior knows how to outhell Hell partly through attunement to this higher Light. Though at times the attuning occurs only through the slenderest of filaments, the Light does not let go and neither does the Noirior.

This is the case with Stagger Li, a formidable force who is not cowed by Evil Darkness nor the grinding jaws of Hades himself. No matter the agony and seeming hopelessness of the situation, Stagger has a secret weapon. His laugh. A laugh of Light. But it is a two-edged sword, that laughter. Sometimes it gets him in deeper trouble before it gets him out.

Born of forces that fell from the heavens, then left alone to figure things out for himself, listening to no other human's explanation of his situation, resisting the comfort of a nest of believers, long ago dead to fear, no credit cards, no security plan, no insurance, no money in his wallet, no wallet, clinging to nothing in the human-created society some believed to be the sole reality, propelled by his desire for union with the One who birthed him, antagonized by his inability to do so, Stagger Li keeps moving, long past hope and its narcosis, stubborn, unyielding, a match for any demon of Hell, finding that his deep vulnerability is his best defense, his wounded heart his only recourse.

Chapter 3

Zelda

Waxahachee is certainly not the center of the universe, Zelda thought, as she prepared for the pre-dawn onslaught of construction workers, cops, and hitting-the-road-early tourists and travelling salesmen. She made three pots of strong black coffee, totally ignoring the decaf which all pre-dawners spurned. The honey-buns, cinnamon rolls, and jelly doughnuts in their sticky glueness were ready in the clear plastic case, and the cheese burrito makings sat solidly by the microwave.

A small town near the Interstate that funneled Yankee traffic (Yankee by local standards included anything north of the Florida state line, especially those Georgians who were so smug in their magnolia ethic), its only claim to fame as a speed trap for the unsuspecting and rambunctious had disappeared when its two-lane road had been supplanted by the humming highway. If no turn-off had been built, Waxahachee would have surely disappeared.

Zelda was a wild child by local and any other standards. She had read most of the books in the local library and taken most of the courses at the Junior College, but through her outspoken questioning and consequent revealing of the instructors’ realms of ignorance was not welcome there anymore. She used to be into hip-hop, hitching rides to Gainesville for that scene, but had now opened to a new style of party dancing (of which she was the only practitioner) she called mish-mash.

When the strangely attractive man staggered into the Pic and Run, she thought at first he was an extra from the movie shoot down the road, costumed and made up early for the day. He approached and asked for water and she immediately fell in love, fell into his deep blue eyes, fell like a sack of potatoes from a farm truck, fell like Lucifer from heaven shouting I Will! all the way. She gave him water. Their fingers touched and the next thing she knew they were so intertwined her libidinal brain fluttered into the awareness that slow-motion orgasm could be a way of life.

“Wait, wait!” she gasped, stumbling and staggering backwards to the Pic and Run office. Lifting her onto the desk, he gently entered her pulsing eagerness and the two spun off into nirvana. Days, decades, eons later, for time had melted and disappeared, she heard the chime that sounded from the opening of the Pic and Run door. They disengaged but their souls would never be apart.

“What is your name?” she breathed.

“Stagger Li. And I see your name is Zelda.” he said, glancing at her Pic and Run badge while drinking her in lovingly and deeply with his eyes.

“Zelda! Where are you?” called Horace, the local cop, who was almost as sweet on Zelda as the doughnut jelly was on his chin.

Stagger Li and Zelda emerged from the office. Horace was startled, his brain slow to put one and one together, but when it did his synapses fired and so too did his gun. But his gun reflexes were as slow as his brain that told him that this strange man was the saboteur described in the All Points Bulletin.

Stagger Li sailed right past Horace knocking his gun hand aside and Horace to the floor. He looked back at Zelda with love and frustration as he headed toward the door. “Stagger, wait!” She tossed him a silver necklace holding the coin, the infamous coin by which Stagger Li could be manipulated and trapped. They smiled.

Stagger Li went out the door and into the night, pausing only to slice the patrol car in two with one swipe of the vorpal blade.

Chapter 4

The Grandfather of Yin and Yang

T’ai Chi comes from

Wu Chi

and is the mother of Yin and Yang.

- Wang Tsung-yueh, T’ai Chi Chuan Lun

A warrior with a vorpal blade strapped to his back leaped into the passenger seat of Wu Chi Ku’s blue Eldorado convertible as Wu slowed for an alligator on the two-lane back road he was taking on the first leg of his journey home from an unadvertised gathering of top martial artists from around the world. Wu and Stagger Li looked at each other. Within a quarter of a mile, they were fast friends.

With Wu’s laughing but fierce influence and his ability to see the humor in most everything, Stagger Li’s ferocity did not lessen but became more contained. He was learning to become more human, and that though born of gods, humanness was his nature and his fate.

“Where are you headed?” asked Wu.

“Where are you headed?”

“Home.”

“Where’s that?”

“The Isle of Metaphorical Encounter.”

Chapter Five

Dancing The Wu Chi Ku

Thud!

Stagger Li opened first one eye, then the other. Flat on his back again! Good thing the sand was loosely packed. Though if this kept up, with his body as the pile driver, the sand would become as concrete as an orthodox mind set in its fixed particular form.

Wu Chi Ku peered down through the palm fronds and giggled. "Come on back up, Stagger! Give it another whirl!"

Stagger Li positively detested his teacher's giggle which only seemed to come during what Wu called "teaching moments," generally meaning when Stagger Li was rendered immobile and in some degree of pain. Like now.

Wu Chi Ku ran a summer training camp for his advanced students which Wu called Metaphorical Encounters but the students called Nursery Rhymes From Hell. The camp was on a remote island in the southern Pacific that hosted no one but Wu Chi Ku and his spirited associates.

Right now the Martial Training Metaphor (or hellish nursery rhyme) was Jack and the Beanstalk. Stagger Li's task was to climb the palm tree and liberate the goose that laid the golden eggs (played by one of the coconuts) without disturbing the sleeping giant (Wu). Thus far, the giant had been very much disturbed.

Stagger Li groaned, rolling up to a standing position. "You think this is so easy, Wu, let's see you do it!" Uh oh! Did he really say that out loud? He meant to only think it.

Wu laughed. "Sure! Come on up and be the giant!" Stagger Li swiftly climbed the palm, noticing the blue ocean gently waving toward the white sand beach. He settled among the fronds. "Okay! I'm ready!"

Wu Chi Ku called up from below, "So am I! I think your goose is cooked, Stagger my boy!" Wu stood with a coconut balanced atop his bandana-covered head.

Stagger Li sighed. Jack and the Beanstalk had yet to be mastered. And only Buddha knew what awaited him after that with Jack and Jill, but he was sure it had to do with fetching a pail of water.

Stagger Li would need all his training and then some after the numismatic message heading his way sliced into his life and landed with a thunk.

Chapter Six

Viola

And I gave my heart

to seek and search out by wisdom

concerning all things that are done under heaven

-- Ecclesiastes 1:13

Viola Trumpett was no vestal virgin. She had a cantankerous streak that could leap and burn an offending person like stabbing fire. One might think that as a spiritual criminologist, an investigator and solver of spiritual crimes, she would subscribe to a rigid code of ethics. But as yet there was no Board of Professional Examiners with its regulations, licenses, dues, newsletters, workshops, lawsuits, and required continuing education units. She was not subject to that kind of shrivel-ization. She free-lanced, with sometimes a strong emphasis on the lance.

Viola laughed. The nearby mountain stream wriggled and leaped with joy, on its return journey to its ancestral home. Viola’s cabin was not at all like those trophy homes built in Gimme Time. She fit in it as warm and snuggly as she had in Luther Huckleberry’s arms and he in hers. She laughed with pleasure at the memory but with even greater delight at being alone at last once again.

Her most recent clients, the members of a Baptist church in distress, struggling with demonic, angelic, and earthly forces, were gracious folk in their small town southern way, but a little too social for her tastes. Also, as a spiritual criminologist, Viola could see into people’s souls, a distinct occupational plus but sometimes a personal hazard, and knew the coiled and murky forces lurking within each person. Doubts, uncertainties, fears, hatreds, shame, guilt, jealousies, woundings were all interwoven into the simplest “good morning.”

In the Baptist investigations, she proved ruthless in getting the information she needed when dealing with folk stubborn in truth-telling. Part of her was a Trickster. But she got the job done. No one else was the worse for it. And if it put a stain on her own soul, as some might insist, she accepted it as a price to pay for uncovering lies and deception.

Though she did not think of it that way, at least until she met Stagger Li, she lived at the edge of Noirior territory.

She exhaled. Ex-hell-ing, she sometimes called it, forcefully and deliberately ejecting the negative energies that began building from such thoughts, sending them to infinity. She looked around. No people anywhere. Trees, mountains, deer, elk, eagles, bear, condors, cougar, columbines, butterflies, earth, sky. Her heart smiled. She felt stronger, more comfortable now that she was back on this side of the Mississippi. The Colorado River Plateau was a place of wild beauty and boundless freedom. Home! So good to be home!

She did not know that the gentle breeze that fluffed her hair was bringing the missive that would change her life forever. The message would not be delivered by human hands.

She went back in the cabin, suddenly hungry, ready for a cup of strong black coffee and a portion of her fresh-baked grits, eggs, and sausage casserole. Viola never had been one for persnickety eating. She regarded food as fuel and, in her shamanic body, it acted that way.

Chapter Seven

Notes From The Beyond

The bird fell from the sky and lay gasping at her feet as if it had been thrown from another dimension by some Invisible Hand. A neatly folded note on silken cloth was tied with scarlet string to the bird's leg. She took the note and laid the bird gently on the ground. "If you want to see your coin again, come here!" Her coin? Oh no! She looked down. The bird had vanished.

***

The arrow whizzed by, missing his right shoulder by an inch and landing in the tree trunk with a thunk. No one was around. He knew the arrow had been shot from a different dimensional realm, one he thought he had left behind forever. The attached note said "If you want to see your coin again, stay there!" His coin? A sense of loss spread through him he had not known for some time.

Chapter 8

Susurrations and Swirling Masses

~
Obeying the notes from the beyond, the one came and the other stayed. Following the dream she had that night, Viola took a flight from Denver to L. A. where she was met by a pleasant Hmong woman of strong build (just as she had appeared in the dream). Viola and Nu Pao took two more flights on increasingly smaller planes, then a private boat that brought Viola to the island of Metaphorical Encounter and Hellish Nursery Rhymes. After a relaxed evening in a thatched hut on an isolated beach with food and initial instructions from Nu Pao, Viola awoke to the dawn sounds of the island creatures and the sussurations of the lapping tide. She went outside and wandered the beach.

Just as the sun was two fingers above the horizon, Nu Pao appeared and led Viola through the island interior to its opposite shore. On the way they passed along the perimeter of the Metaphorical Encounter training grounds. She noticed an identifying sign posted in front of each training challenge (and they were definitely challenges, she thought, wondering how she would fare in resolving each situation) had its own ambiance. Shouts of laughter and waves of fierce exuberance poured from Knick Knack Paddy Whack. Quiet flexion appeared to be the order of the day at Jack Be Nimble, while total chaos reigned at Humpty Dumpty with a lone warrior in the midst of a swirling mass of men and horses.

She noticed that Nu Pao was leading her toward a large building that blended into the island ecosphere with its design and its decor.

Chapter 9

Wu With A Giggle

The Metaphorical Encounter Lodge contained various sites designed for indoor training.

Muffled sounds came from behind the closed doors of Little Miss Muffett, Where Is Thumkin, and There Was A Crooked Man, which were the only doors Viola was able to notice as Nu Pao introduced her to Wu Chi Ku and Stagger Li.

Nods of recognition. No words needed. They recognized each other's warrior qualities immediately -- calm and deeply centering grounding with simultaneous open awareness and flexible ease of movement.

The three sat at a small round table in the sunlit room of the Lodge, a fourth chair seemingly unoccupied. Wu said that is where Spirit sat.

"Your personal loss will lead to great gain, but not without trials and tribulation!" announced Wu to them both with a giggle.

"O Buddha no!" thought Stagger Li, not minding the implications of Wu's words, but recognizing the giggle from Jack and the Beanstalk as an indicator of immobilized helplessness and pain. Trials and tribulations were his forte', the only way of life he knew, and pain was simply a matter of endurance, but the immobility of helplessness he hated with his entire heart.

Viola had different thoughts: "Who is this guy? Some kind of oracle. A warrior, shaman, priest. But he looks so innocent, even endearing, sitting there with his giggle and grin."

Wu vanquished their thoughts. "Why don't you tell me and each other about these coins?"

Viola hesitated. Two sets of eyes, one set jet-black and oriental, the other a deep sky blue, pierced her soul.

“Back off!” she barked.

The eyes lessened in intensity.

Viola trusted the two, but had told no one of the coin’s story. A secret kept so long was not easily revealed.

Chapter 10

Viola and the Two Questions

Stagger Li sighed. He could see that Viola would not reveal the meaning of her coin until he opened his own heart. He told his story of emerging from the swamp and encountering Zelda. He spoke with passion and one could see love’s wounding of his heart.

After beginning to comprehend the depths of attachment Stagger Li had to his missing coin from Zelda, the three sat back in heartsore calm. Like augurs of old, they called for clear open space, the clarity of the templum, in order to see, to divine what would now arise.

They sat in silence.

Viola sighed and began to recount the story of her coin:

"She came to me long ago, just as she had to the generations before me, my grandmother and great-grandmothers. She said, There are only two questions, the first of supreme importance, the other secondary, but worthy of an asking. The first: What is it you are staking your life on?

That caught my attention, beginning the end of my long phase of addled essence.

She continued, Because whether you have thought of it or not, have or have not brought it to your awareness, you better believe you have chosen to stake your one precious life on something.

I was alarmed. The question burned itself into my heart. What was my answer? A husband and babies? A career? Stuporous zoning out? Emotional melodrama? Subtle intellectual stirrings? A house and car and furnishings? A moral code? A spiritual path? I did not know.

And the second question is does it bring you joy?

With that, she handed me a coin and disappeared.

The coin gave me my answers."

Chapter 11

Viola Continues

Viola went into lecture mode.

"The thaler given me by Sophia herself is the crucifixion coin showing Christ crucified on one side, the Serpent crucified on the other. It took me a while to puzzle it out and even now it speaks of mystery, a symbol performing its duty as a gateway to the beyond.

Christ crucified is, of course, a familiar image. Perhaps too familiar, since most everyone has its meaning firmly categorized and stored away. This coin however with its depictions blows away the familiar and opens the mind to new understandings.

For some, who have Christ firmly in a box and wish to keep him there, a crucified Serpent is blasphemous, a nuclear detonation of their icon.

Other more thoughtful, less reactive souls open to the understanding of the Serpent on the cross as a prototype of Christ, heralding his arrival on earth and subsequent crucifixion. The thaler given me certainly supports this view in its depiction of the scene (in the Book of Numbers) of the Serpent on the cross lifted up by Moses (at God's request, I might add) to rid the poisoned bodies of the Wandering Grumbling from the venom of the snakes sent by God because of their grumbling.

The theology can get complicated here, but it's like an action - reaction causal chain. God sends them out into the wilderness (part of a previous chain of events) -- they get tired and grumble -- God sends snakes to zap them -- they start dying and yell to Moses -- Moses says God can't you do something -- God says stick a bronze snake up on a cross and all who look at it shall be saved. So Moses does, and they do, and they are.

My missing coin, with the crucified Christ on one side, the crucified Serpent on the other, when spun, shows a constant cross with a rapid alternation of the two upon it. This is not the time for me to get into it, but it suggests that if the crucified Serpent is a prototype of Christ, then the crucified Christ is an outgrowth of the crucified Serpent. There is powerful transcendent meaning here, one which could vertically revitalize a linear horizontal Christianity."

(Viola, having founded and taught the discipline of Spiritual Criminology at Georgia State University and much on demand for consulting with various law enforcement offices for aid in solving puzzling cases, did her best to reign in her natural tendency to elaborate and explain that which others would never consider unless she did. But she was far from finished with expounding on the significance of her, now missing, coin.)

"Just as the technological cultures in their pre-modern phase decided to declare war on the dragon, so also did they on the snake. Not so for other peoples, for whom the dragon is a symbol of creative heavenly powers, and the snake a symbol of regeneration and transformation with its ability to shed its skin and become as new.

For example, the healer Asclepius wandered around ancient Greece accompanied by his totem, a snake, who assisted him in his healing powers. Both man and snake were welcome in people's homes.

Asclepius journeyed with the aid of a walking staff. Staff and snake are still symbols of healing as can be seen in the caduceus displayed today on ambulances, medical labs, and hospitals.

The crucifix coin with its Christ and its Serpent is a symbol of healing, of making whole and holy, of healing in the deepest and most cosmic realms.

Once I understood that, I knew my answers to Sophia's two questions. I am a healer. I stake my life on healing and, yes, it brings me joy. My coin has been taken, but my answers still ring true."

Stagger Li yawned. Man! This woman could really rattle on! "So what are you going to do about it?"

He could see his question really pissed her off. Stagger had never been to a shrivelized classroom a day of his life. His story of his Everglades birth and encounter with Zelda had been told through telepathic imagery. Viola Trumpett's story, told in well-enunciated English with its requisite shaping of breathed-out air by tongue, jaws, cheeks, and lips, had taken his utmost patience.

Chapter 12

Arrows

"I'll tell you what I'm going to do about it, buddy boy!" shot Viola. "Now that we've got our preliminaries out of the way, I'm going to solve it! Our coins are missing and I'm going to find out where mine is. Yours will probably be with it or nearby, so if you want to come with me, you can follow along."

Wooo-weee! Hot temper with a quick trigger! Stagger Li smiled. "Which way you headed, girly gal?"

Viola sat back in her chair, her irritation dissolving.

"Each of us received a message. And while it's true that the message is the message, it's also true, according to an old American prophet, that the medium is the message."

She turned to Wu Chi Ku and nodded toward the arrows on the table, the arrows that had borne the messages come here! and stay there!

"Wu, do you know anything about these arrows?"

"They come from Shambhala from a warrior shaman tribe."

Chapter 13

Nhat and Nunc: The Dorje and the Bell

The Warrior Society of Shambhala was THE warrior society associated with earth. Composed of warrior monks, their weapons were the dorje and the bell; the dorje -- the penetrating thunderbolt after which the simple but deadly yawara was fashioned; the bell -- the capacious opening to the rhythms of the universe and the all-embracing Void. The dorje and the bell were akin to the Templar's sword and grail.

Nunc and Nhat laughed. All the monks had a sense of humor, but these two seemed somehow to have understood the punch line of the Cosmic Joke. Friends since the beginning of Forever, they could be counted on to perform the most difficult missions with grace and laughter.

When Iblis invited Jesus to jump from the precipice and be saved by angels (Warrior Society members), Iblis would not have wanted to see these two come. They would have rolled him around in the desert sand like warm cookie dough in sugar. Jesus had that handled though. After all, he was a Commander of Legions.

Nunc and Nhat had shaped and fired the arrows that summoned Viola and Stagger Li to their own potential friendship, an alliance that would be necessary to recover their coins, and by doing so, to save the two children now held hostage.

Chapter 14

The Priest Hood

The priest in the chamber next to the two youth clung to the same promise for them as he did so desperately for himself. He knew his concern for them had a selfish base, but he saw no reason his own redemption could not be tied to theirs. They were his best bet for getting the hell out.

The two had proved a problem from the start. Someone had made an unforgivable error (would that not be, in Hell, cause for promotion?) in allowing the young boy and girl to don those coins dangling from their necks. Or were the two taken hostage already wearing these troublesome medallions? In any event, the effect was the same. An aura of protection surrounded those two even in the depths of Hell. The pair were contained, confined but no one could trouble them.

The Green Glow of Eternal Spring from his two new neighbors even now lit the gloom of his dismal chamber and kept him repeating the promise as a prayer, his only prayer of hope. For thou will not leave my soul in hell, nor suffer thy holy one to see corruption.

He knew he had forfeited any chance at holiness while on earth, but still he prayed the prayer. And by praying, a small glimmer of possibility began to form within his soul. Even while praying, however, his demonic voice was whispering, Those two may be my ticket out of here.

Things would not be as simple as he hoped. No one escapes Hell unscathed.

Chapter 15

Stagger Li Leaps Out

The dream of the two children came. Wrapped in each other's arms for warmth and bravery, buried in the bowels of Hell, their eyes looked deeply into his and called for help.

The Trumpett woman had wanted to make a plan. She had waited expectantly for his response. "You can't buy plane tickets to Hell." As he strode off, her logical mind ran through all the permutations of the meaning of his comment. That was her major deficiency as a budding Noirior. An enemy could slice her to pieces while she thought about the appropriate response.

His way was to travel alone. With no one's permission. And he certainly knew the way to Hell.

Stagger Li left the island.

He went searching for the Ox.

(What? You expected a dynamic duo here, a trail of scintillating repartee with humorous points scored for each gender, a Hepburn - Tracy deal, with crimes solved along the way, ending up back home with a tea cosy and fond reminiscing? She calls him Daddy; he calls her Muffins as he goes outside to work in his shop? No way. We are talking Stagger Li here. And Viola is just now testing her Noirior wings. Besides, when you jump into the jaws of Hell, you jump alone.)

Chapter 16

Viola and the I Ching

Viola was at a loss. Stagger Li had gone, telling Wu the children appeared to him pleading for help, and something about "searching for the Ox." Viola knew that was the beginning stage of the Ten Oxherding Pictures and their accompanying verses depicting the Zen road to enlightenment. She was not sure that was what Stagger Li meant.

In her training as a spiritual criminologist, Viola had dived into the world's religions, and surfaced with a more than usual understanding of their ways. The I Ching, or Book of Changes, with its Taoist and Confucian tones, resonated deeply with her heart, and had proven more than once to provide light on her situation and some next steps to be taken.

She sat quietly in the ocean-facing hut, composing herself for a reading. She tossed the coins six times, each time focusing on an aspect of her circumstances. Stagger leaving. The children. Her coin. The pits of Hell. Right action. Her own survival.

The hexagram was 43 / Break-Through (Resoluteness). The interwhirling wisdom of the universe spoke truth again.

"A break-through after a long accumulation of tension."
"As a result of resolute action, a change in conditions occurs."

"THE JUDGMENT
BREAK-THROUGH.
One must resolutely make the matter known
At the court of the king.
It must be announced truthfully. Danger.
It is necessary to notify one's own city.
It does not further to resort to arms.
It furthers one to undertake something."

"Fight without quarter is necessary if the good is to prevail."

While she noted the five "definite rules that must not be disregarded," she neglected in her haste to prompt action to properly attend to the commentary on her only moving line:

"Mighty in the forward-striving toes.
When one goes and is not equal to the task,
One makes a mistake."

(Author's Note: I sat quietly, tossed the coins as if I were Viola, and the above was the actual result.)

Chapter 17

The Ox

The Ox could be found at the center of the Maze first trod by virginal sacrifices then by the warrior Theseus.

The Maze, over time, with its tortuous no-escape passageways littered with bones and other human debris (dental and other prosthetic devices), had given way to the tamely Christian - New Age labyrinth with a deeply grooved tourist-trodden pathway and frequent map-signs that read YOU ARE HERE: X, producing the absolute trust and certainty that if you kept walking you would eventually reach the center where no longer the Minotaur who long before you reached your first map-sign would have sought you out and drunk your blood from your pulsating headless neck awaited you, but now The Ox which serves cool Guinness and Red Bull.

Chapter 18

The Gate of Hell

And therefore through this love
we are dead to ourselves,
and have gone forth in loving immersion
into Waylessness and Darkness.
--Jan Van Ruysbroeck

Stagger Li had not learned the lesson we all must learn, that an act of violence, whether of word or glance or a more corporeal form of brute force, produces no good effect. It simply binds us deeper in our hell, the self-created fires of vengeance and of righteous indignation in which we burn. More than that, it sends a piercing flame into the heart of our innocence that remains patiently waiting for rescue by our learning of love.

But Stagger Li had yet much to learn. As a Noirior, a warrior of and from the Dark, he had yielded to no other denizen of those Depths, had progressed steadily toward the Light, allowing the small beam of Light within him to be his guide. Eyes that could see such things saw an outcast Angel with one Dark wing and one Light wing slowly making his way toward Home.

Stagger Li strode into the Ox, releasing the captive children his burning aim. At the back was a little iron-grilled gate with Entrance to Hell in red-flame font. The tourists, like most on tour neither knowing nor wanting to know the grim realities behind their fantasy worlds, thought it was o-so-cutesy.

The two guarding the gate looked him over. "Where are you going, boy?"

Stagger Li did not believe in preliminaries. He wasn't the kind to hold a gun on a murderer while delivering a soliloquy on his greatest hits followed by where and when the murderer went wrong. He didn't hold a gun at all. Stagger Li followed Musashi's way of Heiho; in this particular case, Rule 9. "Do not engage in useless activity."

He did not even wait for the men to count to three for him to leave. Some say it was unfair for him to hand their balls to them on a bar napkin without following this age-old protocol. But Stagger Li is a Noiroir and when it comes to confrontation, Noiriors know no fair.

A third warrior appeared behind the gate. "Stagger! I might have known it was you!" He snapped his fingers to get the choking bulge-eyed newly created eunuchs some medical help.

"Take me to Vincent!"

Hell closed in and the children screamed with Stagger Li’s violent rage.

Chapter 19

Vincent

There was thing you could count on about Vincent. He was honest in his dishonesty. You always knew which side he was on. He kept the faith of no faith with no waiver and no waver.

As one of Hell’s gate keepers, he had worked his way up through the ranks. He knew all of Dante’s and Virgil’s friends in the lower and middle hells. He despised Beatrice. “That snooty dame,” he calls her.

He likes his desk job, but make no mistake, do not be fooled by his bureaucratic manner, Vincent has fangs and claw and knows the drawing of blood as readily as he knows his computer files.

Chapter 20

The Children Laugh

Stagger Li had become lost from love, at least in the usual conventional understanding of love. None, other than Zelda, had seen into the depths of his soul, and while their fusing in the Pic & Run had, by earth time standards, been only the time it took for Horace to drive up in his police car, get out, come in, and eat a doughnut, the joining of their souls was eternal. And now she was gone.

Love is right relationship and Stagger Li expressed love through right relationship with evil. He did not merely fight it; he sliced it and diced it. He withstood its tortures with a humor that evil could not comprehend. He drove its representatives mad with frustration. They could harm him but could not make him fear.

Vincent and Stagger Li had clashed long before Vincent's promotion from a Lower Hell minion to one of Hell's gatekeepers. Vincent had wound up on the ground with Stagger Li's boot on his throat and the vorpal blade carving a smiley face on Vincent's forehead. The stupid grinning face still burned its way into his fiendish soul but had long since been cauterized from any external display.

"You shouldn't have performed that testicular operation on my guards, Stagger! You made the children suffer."

"YOU made the children suffer. You slimeballs are the ones holding them hostage."

"Avoid responsibility all you want. Any violent move you make causes them instant pain."

"How about if I come over there and kiss you on your smiley face?"

Vincent blanched and involuntarily touched his forehead.

Stagger Li felt the children laugh within their cell in deepest Hell. They looked into each other's eyes with newfound hope.

Chapter 21

Abandon

In his rage at being born and then abandoned, Stagger Li had been at war with all around. At his core an icy calm, destructive forces whirling all round, he was a spinning hurricane, a power saw, slicing through all who dared to come against him. Now Hell itself with Its eternal gaping maw capable of swallowing entire civilizations, of marching in legions across the globe, chewing and spitting blood and gritty bristle into the eyes of angels and of God, was aligned against him.

How does one offend Hell, causing such crafty desire for Vengeance? One simple act. A refusal. And even Wotan has no fury like Hell scorned.

Stagger Li was born of raw and elemental forces beyond Hell's power: born of wild energies that coupled with such emotion and abandon, falling like mating eagles to earth, talon to talon, wings outspread, tumbling in a dizzy swirl of intermingling, but this time, this generative time, not pulling out of the ecstatic dive and splashing into the thin watery crust of what is called Florida, rutting in such a giving and receiving that the two no longer knew any bounds, spawning one likewise unbound, one required by cosmic forces to rebel against Rebellion, to raise hell among the Hellions.

Hell hated all forces outside its own domain. Hell’s agents would like nothing better than to cut Stagger Li off at the knees, rip his pulsing heart from his chest, and feast upon his blood.

And now Hell's plot (Operation “Get That S.O.B.!”) was unfolding, the two children were suffering and held captive, and Stagger Li's powers of quick destruction were being made harmless. Any violent move he made was like razor wire in the children's hearts.

Thus it was that Stagger Li was stripped of all his powers. His Vorpal blade morphed into a large and fearsome hawk rising above his head, ascending in an ever-widening spiral and disappearing from view.

He stood, fists unclenched, hands and heart open to the Hell awaiting him.

Total abandon. Abandoned by all and abandoning all. He stood naked. Defenseless. Vulnerable. In surrendering, he rendered unto God what was God’s and let Caesar make a salad of what remained.

“Take him,” said Vincent. Two twilit demons, hesitant to touch him, walked alongside Stagger Li, a dishonor guard escorting him to the core of Hell.

Chapter 22

Viola Prepares For Hell

The I Ching coins Viola Trumpett had tossed to give her some degree of guidance as to her part in the rescue of the children had been given her by a holy man, a Creek shaman, who claimed ancestry to those who walked across the land bridge to North America so long ago. The Chinese, Tibetan, Mongolian, and Native American cultures were closely linked and in ways not visible to the materialist culture that had swept the continent, the wasicu, the ones who would even eat the hooves of your horses.

Though many in the Baptist culture Viola had recently left (after a successful uncovering and at least temporary resolution of the spiritual crimes devastating that community) felt that anything like the Book of Changes was akin to witchcraft, Viola did not compartmentalize things in that way.

Break-Through / Resoluteness was the main message. "As a result of resolute action, a change in conditions occurs." The words were heartening and were tempered by "Fight without quarter is necessary if the good is to prevail."

If Viola was anything, she was resolute. All who knew her understood that once her mind was made up, that was it. She lived up to her name. Once she decided something, the sweet Viola music ceased playing and the Trumpett sounded until her charge was done.

But the I Ching's depiction of the current conditions and their resolution said something that caused her puzzlement. "One must resolutely make the matter known at the court of the king. It must be announced truthfully. Danger. It is necessary to notify one's own city."

She had already opened with attentive prayers to and with the Source, the Wellspring. So she knew "the court of the king" referred to something other than The One Who Breathed Her. "Elvis!" she thought, then giggled. No. Nor was it B.B., though that man could strike such guitar chords that the walls of Jericho would melt in ecstasy.

She knew her next steps. She had to go see Henry Wide Bear and then consult the King, otherwise known as Hell Diver. And she had to do it quickly. She was sure Stagger Li was already knocking at Hell's Gates. Whether he looked for it or not (it seemed not from his sudden departure), she was determined to help rescue the children and also regain her coin.

Chapter 23

Henry Wide Bear

Henry Wide Bear sat on his porch listening to the crickets and to the splashing of the beaver in the nearby creek – the creek that fed the small river following the easiest course in its joining with the last untamed stretch and flow of the Missouri. Henry’s cabin was small and solidly built, close to a hundred years old. The radiance of a peaceful yet powerful aura filled the place, reflecting the spiritual energies of his warrior-shaman ancestors.

Henry could hear Viola’s intent to come to South Dakota as soon as the intent welled within her. He was pleased to be in such close tune with her again.

Hearing of intent was not a common skill. Henry did  not know how to explain it to others. Even if they asked him. Which they didn’t. Henry heard with his eyes. The world spoke to him through his external and his internal eye-ears merging as one. Viola’s intent spoke to him earlier in the day. That intent was with him now.

Henry chuckled. Viola’s work as a spiritual criminologist had brought them together in the past in several adventures – most recently in small town Georgia where Henry had conducted a sweat lodge at Viola’s request for some nervous Southern Baptists. The sweat experience cracked open their consciousnesses and consciences like eggs. Another spiritual crime solved.

Viola is going to need more than a sweat for this one, he thought. Henry sighed. He sat quietly, releasing all thought, all imagery, opening for entry into the realm of the King.

Chapter 24

Energies At Play

Hell made a big mistake bringing innocence into its core. And a second one in thinking that innocence can be held hostage. Hell now had a quadruple threat resting in its belly. The two children reinforced each other's spirit, producing a small but powerful dynamic interchange of energy, circulating from child heart to child heart; an energy made more powerful by the coin hanging from each child's neck, the coins of Viola Trumpett and of Stagger Li.

Two forces and two forces only could defeat such energetic power. Fear and Anger. The children's fear; Stagger Li's anger. But what of Viola Trumpett? Her fears and angers were only momentary and thus not advantageous to Hell's victory. Viola has a trump card, her Uncertainty, which can be played in any direction at any time. Not even the Great Ah-Hoo-Ah-Hoo-Ah knows which way she will play it.

The children must keep conquering their fear; Stagger Li his anger. But we don't want Viola conquering her uncertainty. No, no. She is the Wild Card, the Joker, the Fool.

After visiting Henry Wide Bear and receiving direction, this Holy Fool in her uncertainty is now approaching a small encampment at the mouth of a South Dakota river, the encampment of King Fisher, sometimes known as Hell Diver.

Viola walked along  the  path to Hell Diver’s cabin in the trees. She saw his handiwork along the way. She smiled. Small hollows between adjoining tree roots entering the ground had been gently excavated and deepened, creating little cave homes that Hell Diver swore were inhabited by the sprites and pixies of the forest. Painstakingly carved wooden awnings jutted from each tree, overarching and protecting each tree home entrance.

Chapter 25

Missouri River

Viola gazed at the last untamed stretch of the Missouri River, a 24 mile meandering between South Dakota and Nebraska that had not been dredged into a drainage ditch by the Corps of Engineers.  Many Dakotans had been drowned there in its rapid and unpredictable currents. Prehistoric monster fish swam in its depths.

“How am I to get to Hell?” she wondered, then laughed at the thought that most would never pose such a question. But her innocence in the form of a child was held captive there, her thaler from Sofia hanging around the child’s neck.

She knew that Stagger Li was already upon his way and wondered how he was faring. “That boy has anger issues,” she thought. “I hope he doesn’t try to wage war on all of Hell.”

Viola sighed. I have to see Hell Diver! He can give me good advice or at least provide the atmosphere for my clearer seeing.

She walked upriver for a mile or so to one of the smaller rivers that emptied into the Missouri and headed inland on its eastern bank. She heard splashing sounds and small yelps in the distance. Hell Diver! She hurried closer.

A shaggy bearded man wearing only swim trunks was rolling and thrashing around in the water near the bank. The largest catfish Viola had ever seen appeared to be trying to swallow the man whole. Hell Diver’s left arm was shoved down the fish’s throat and emerged from one of its gills. Hell Diver’s right hand was firmly clamped to his left wrist. The catfish was not giving up easily, trying with all its power to dislodge this human hook attached to its jaws.

Hell Diver was pulled under the muddy river water heels over head, then emerged still holding to his catch, sputtering and yelling with delight. “Viola!” he shouted before the giant fish pulled him under again. Viola grinned. Hell Diver was worthy of his name. Fishermen of his clan patrolled the banks of rivers such as this one, thrusting their hands and arms into the large holes in the river bank beneath the brown water, never knowing what they might find lurking there but hoping it would be a catfish. His fisher buddies gave him his name because among them all he was the most fearless and resourceful.

“Be with you in a minute!”

Viola sat on a nearby log and watched. This could take a little longer than a minute.

Chapter 26

Hell Diver

King Fisher has limits to his powers. He is wounded. The current state of obfuscation on earth prevents him from free movement. These spiritual restrictions produced by the energy field of mankind’s confusion have their direct physical counterpart. His physical pangs are eased only by his immersion and prowess in the waters of the river, especially along its banks, a capability which has earned him his name, among the locals, as Hell Diver.

Because of his woundedness, King Fisher has had to empty himself of his self. As a direct embodying of angelic forces on earth, this capaciousness has served him well. It is his reaction to his spiritual wounds that has led him in the angelic direction. Rather than responding with anger and rebellion and becoming a demonic hells-child, King Fisher has chosen the path of yielding and surrender, the most powerful tools in any warrior’s armament.

No hells-child has the nerve, the courage to surrender (for what is cour-age but to live from the heart, the couer?). King Fisher knows well that spiritual sur-rend-er is exactly that, a shamanic experience of rending, of being torn apart and put back together in unimagined ways. Surrender to That-Which-Breathes-One, surrender to the Source, surrender to the Force that calls one into existence allows rebirth into a realm different from the Wal-Mart world.

King Fisher knows that as long as one is embodying, the pain of the wound goes on. But he also knows the flow of energy known as compassion, as love, as the life-force and its healing relief. In the Buddhist realm, he is known as a Bodhisattva, one who refuses to enter heaven until all go.

His physical exterior is not that of a saint floating on a cloud of holiness, but more like a weather beaten bum who owns nothing of value but his soul.

Chapter 27

She Who Takes All Forms

“The flame has seven licking tongues: Kali, the dark one;

the terrible; the swift-as-thought; the crimson one;

the smoky-colored; the sparkling one;

and Devi, she who takes all forms.”

--Mundaka Upanishad

Well into the pre-dawn of the following day, Viola sat in a small circle with her friends, Hell Diver, Henry Wide Bear, Phil Rock Boy and three others regarded as close spiritual kin.

Yesterday afternoon’s fish fry brought families from all around. Children and dogs romped and played while the adults visited, reminiscing and laughing about past adventures, renewing their energetic connections.

All had gone home or had retreated to their overnight tents. Only the seven remained, enjoying the warmth and light of Hell Diver’s night fire.  Communication was instantaneous among them, mostly without spoken word. The focus was on Viola and her impending journey to Hell. Their combined attention was not on if she should go, but how.

“Your coin will guide you. The coin on the necklace of the young girl child held hostage sends a beacon of light to follow.”

“Yes. It pulls me even now.”

“The coin itself tells you how to do this. It is a large leap. You may choose not to do it.”

Viola shuddered. She had an intimation of what this meant. Her coin was the coin of crucifixion, of dying and being reborn.  She remembered her words to Wu and Stagger Li: “The crucifix coin with its Christ and its Serpent is a symbol of healing, of making whole and holy, of healing in the deepest and the most cosmic realms.”

“Quetzalcoatl. You can ride on the back of Quetzalcoatl.”

“The Plumed Serpent. The Lord of the Dawn. The one who combines both heaven and earth with his bird (quetzal) and his serpent (coatl) qualities.”

“How is this done?”

“Spoken like a true warrior, one who is always how-ling instead of why-ning.”

All seven laughed and with the laughter joined forces.

Drumming began. Chanting of prayers moving from deep earth bass to high eagle soar.

Seven souls merged in the uplifting spiral of the fire. Only one continued, soaring out of sight.

The six sighed with thanks giving and release. Viola had left her body and was on her way.

Chapter 28

Hades

Hades was tired. As Warden of the penitentiary called Hell, in which no one was truly penitent, he liked to maintain order. “No Chance In Hell” was his motto which he firmly impressed upon his minions. Chance was an opening to creativity and belonged in other realms.

Hades was tired of the repeated refusal by the Diabolical Bureaucracy to fund the ancient prison with the monies needed for its upkeep and repair.  No matter how many times he appeared before them with his budgetary requests, they stonewalled him with their “appreciation for the fine job he was doing” and that “he must realize these are post-modern times and that priority funding must be given to more Diabolical realms than the mere keeping of tortured souls.”

Priority funding, hah! Hades knew that meant money was flowing like water to corporate endeavors, individual greed, lobbyists and politicians, and the ongoing destruction of the earth.

Hades had already down-sized Hell. He was tired of having to face pissed off demons who knew no other line of work than assaulting the crazed beings living in Hell. He was tired of the complaints of those still employed whose workload had doubled, even tripled. Torture needed exquisite use of elongated time for maximum effect and for the sadistic pleasures of the torturers. “It’s no fun anymore,” was their chief complaint as they hurried from cell to cell to fulfill the Torture Orders of the Day.

Hades was tired of Lucifer’s schemes, especially his current scheme. Though Lucifer was his supervisor and thus supposedly his boss, he and Lucifer had clashed before. Lucifer was forever plotting for revenge on Michael and Gabriel, the foremost Angel Warriors of Heaven, while Hades just wanted to do his job.

Like all of Lucifer’s schemes in the past, this one was also bound to end as fiasco, in complete and utter failure. But there was nothing to do but go through with it.

Hades knew that Stagger Li was already causing trouble at Hell’s entryway. And if King Fisher got involved! Hades groaned. He didn’t even want to think about it.

Hades was tired. He was tired as Hell.

Chapter 29

Ennui and Lassitude

Stagnation had set in – all come to rest: Jesus brooding in the empty nest of Hell, no fertile eggs to hatch, feeling of no purpose, his cosmic adventure over; Lucifer, in the predictable, thus boring, safety of Heaven, learning its bureaucratic ways of systemic order, studying The Manual of Concentric Hierarchy in which all the laws of cosmic behavior were laid down.

The Cosmos now was one Big Yawn, like any stretch and yawn feeling good at first after the Conflict of the Ages, but now settling down to a flatline decorum that bode no one well. Poets had stopped writing, all wellsprings dry and inspiration vanishing into an eternal peace that may as well be, and indeed was, death. Birds no longer flew, no opposition to their wings allowing lift. Laughter, formerly rollicking and galumphing through the land, had lost its steam, its oomph, its oompa. Exclamation points, no longer of use where nothing was ever claimed or exclaimed, lay in abandoned heaps, discarded piles of poles of a powerless power line.

Stagnation. Jesus no longer wept. He simply sighed. Boredom. Lucifer, who once bit the heads off the not-so-innocent and drank their blood, now sat in his suit and tasseled loafers at a long polished conference table, trying to make sense of sub-section iv, Premise 113, Principle 485.

The cosmos had come to a sorry matter.

Chapter 30

Four Become One

Someone had to press the Reset button.  But who? Only one free entity remained, a forgotten prisoner in the depths of Hell sharing a cell with innocence.

Stagger Li stirred himself. Both children were soundly sleeping. He heard no sound other than their soft breathing. “Something’s not right,” he thought. The usual frenetic kinetic energies of Hell had collapsed into potentia. A calm not even a calm (there was no anxiety to provoke it) infused Hell and brought all within its domain into a hypnagogic  state – a dream in which one is awake yet cannot move.

But why not Stagger Li? Why was he not frozen? The blood of his progenitors, Brooding Menace and Awesome Power, flowed through his veins, a dynamic cocktail always ready for and looking for quick release. Plus he had voluntarily surrendered to confinement with his lost and captive innocence.  And let us not hasten to forget that though only three could be seen by most eyes, four were in that cell. Viola’s fiery out-of-body leap in South Dakota  had led to her merge with the girl child of innocence.

“Please stay here,” spoke Stagger Li as he touched the cell door and it sprung open. “Not us!” they said and leaped into his heart. Innocent of heart, blood singing with Menace and Power, Stagger Li set out on his investigation of Hell.

Chapter 31

Two Warriors Meet

Stagger Li moved through the corridors of inner Hell until reaching its more open spaces. The torture pits, formerly filled with screaming souls, still stank of sulphorous suffering. Empty. No one anywhere. Discarded torture tools of fiendish delight lay where they fell.

“Lucifer’s throne is down here somewhere . Think I’ll pay him a call and beard that old lion.”

A staircase spiraled downward and led to a door emblazoned with fiery letters: LUCIFER, ANGEL OF LIGHT. Stagger Li pushed it open.

“Jesus Christ! What are you doing here?” shouted the startled Stagger.

“I never left, Stagger.” sighed Jesus. “They say I am sitting at the right hand of the Father. And I am, in a metaphysical sense. But I am right here, in the midst of Hell. I am the Light shining in darkness.”

“But where is Lucifer? I thought this was his office, his domain.”

“My brother?” Jesus slowly shook his head. “He is at our other home, in the midst of Heaven.”

Stagger’s brain cells did loop-the-loops. He wasn’t a theologian, didn’t even come close to going to Sunday School, but this didn’t seem right to him. His consciousness came out of its dive and swooped up to understanding.

“Oh, I get it. It’s like the line from that old song “Love and Marriage.” You can’t have one without the other.

Jesus looked around the room as if searching for something he could not find. “Bub, that’s what we in the family call him, Baal Z. Bub as he is officially known, and I traded places. The world was in unbearable tension before that. Good versus Evil, you know.”

“So it’s all over? No more conflict? No more cosmic dual and duel?”

“Afraid so.” said Jesus.

“Afraid? I’ve never known you to be afraid. For Hell’s sake, Jesus! You are a great warrior!”

Jesus sighed, tears of self-pity oozing from his  eyes. “This is my fate, Stagger. It’s the end times and I am in charge of a deserted useless Hell, which is sheer hell. At least Bub had a torture factory going, one in fine order and credentialed from the Above. I got nothing.”

Seeing Jesus collapsing before his eyes, Stagger Li felt a love for Jesus welling up within him, a love that could be expressed in only one way. “Jesus! Don’t make me come over there and kick your ass!”

Chapter 32

“No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven

unless its roots reach down to hell.”

(Carl Jung, Aion, p 43)

Reset

Jesus was startled. No one had ever threatened to kick his ass before. Not even Bub, though they had wrestled around some.

“You can’t kick my butt, Stagger! I’m Jesus!”

“Well, you better start acting like it, ‘cause here I come!” And with that Stagger Li launched himself across the room in all his innocence and menace and power.

Jesus quickly side-stepped but Stagger Li spun and delivered a kick to Jesus’ butt so hard it arced him  right up to Heaven. (1)

Lucifer was brought abruptly out of his dozing reverie concerning The Law Of Immaculate Incapability in the new Cosmos Operational Guide by Jesus crashing through the center of the conference table with Stagger Li in hot pursuit.

“Heavens!” exclaimed Lucifer indignantly. “What are you boys doing!?”

The two gave no answer as their momentum took them upward, soaring like rockets to the Above. Lucifer gazed up into the large hole in the heavens rent by the Jesus – Stagger Li shenanigans. He peered downward toward Hell. “Hmm . . .” he said. “Altercation leads to alteration! Conflict is the source of all creativity. Once they get settled down, I’ll remind them of that.”

Without further thought, regaining his maniacal yet shrewd  impulsiveness, he ripped off his stupefying doldrum attire, flung his tasseled shoes into the heavens, forming a new constellation, and leaped back into Hell.

Advancing toward the apex of their altercation, the mighty warriors slowed, providing the exact right moment and atmosphere for Viola, nestled within Stagger Li’s heart with her girl innocence, to burst forth like blossoming fireworks as the Eternal Feminine, the Creative Womb Matrix, encompassing and surrounding all differentiation with boundless inclusiveness.

Jesus, Stagger Li, and Lucifer were transfixed, astonished. They gazed slack-jawed with awe and appreciation at this wondrous and gracious room now available for new creation.

“We’re in the Game again, boys!” shouted Lucifer from Neo-Hell.

And life began again, a new kalpa emerging, and great new adventures ready to unfold.

(1) Whether Stagger Li actually kicked Jesus’ butt is a matter of theological dispute among those who like to split such hairs.  Some say Jesus is The Son of God and no one can touch his butt, only his heart. Others say that we are all sons and daughters of God, and therefore Stagger Li is as much a son of God as Jesus, exists in the same dimension, and therefore foot-butt contact is possible. I remind the reader, however, that all this is story. Story is meant to entertain, comfort , thrill. The story that does that for you is the story you will accept. Each of us is a character in the story we believe.