Saint Stephen's Dream

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Take a listen (and read along) to a newly re-mixed version of the Prologue to “Saint Stephen’s Dream: A Space Opera.” This is also an mp3 file, not an AAC file like the one in the post below (which will be consigned to the dustbin of podcast history after iTunes gets around to adding this mp3 version.)  Read the story below, read along as you listen or download the mp3 for future feeding to your ears. And get yourself over to the iTunes and subcribe for free to receive notice of future podcasts, Web casts and live performances by the WebTheater of WestVirginiaVille (WTW), the producer of “Saint Stephen’s Dream: A Space Opera.” The ending of this new version also includes a brief ad for the WTW, introducing your program host, Peggy Desiree Nash.

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The Web Theater of WestVirginiaVille Presents |

“SAINT STEPHEN’S DREAM” | BOOK 1, “The Waves” | PROLOGUE |

PROGRAM NOTES: Who was Stephen? Did he actually exist? Was he a saint at all and what can his purported visions, handed down through what has come to be known as “The Chronicles of Saint Stephen,” teach those of us today grappling with what appears to be the fulfillment of his disturbing dreams and their hint of possible salvation? In the following re-creation, the Web Theater of WestVirginiaVille offers a dramatic re-staging of one of the first Dreams of Stephen. We apologize for deviations from the accepted histories of Stephen (including the usually verboten subject of ‘Kata’), but feel that only by imagining the past fully can we understand how it came to birth the present. And how we might create a better future for all. We would like to thank the Institute for Stellar Theater, the Shua Arts Council and all you many faithful subscribers who sent in your centimes, pesos, shekels and solidi. You keep us flying.

MY NAME IS STEPHEN and I am an old monk in an old country.

West of Eire, there you’ll find my home. Sheep are my brethren. Not in an intimate fashion, although I hear if you put them on their backs when you go about your business you can kiss them better.

I am not that far out, of either my senses or yet my desires. But I am indeed far out. In the Atlantic, on a great boulder I reside. I may see the trembling ocean out the cloth-draped window of my hut here in the fortress.

When my eyes have bleared from reading and transcribing documents and last of light illuminates the western clouds with hues of gold and bolts of blue, I like to crawl upon my belly to the edge of the high Great Cliff of Mohor.

And look down.

The water crashes hard upon the stone of Europe’s end. So many shades of green and blue, three hundred feet below! Like a whirlwind spinning, yet not with sand, but with ten thousand stained glass jewels of light! For a moment, just a moment, I want to stand and fling myself. To fly! To swirl and merge into that bubbly froth and foam.

Every year it happens. This year, it was four! (Last year it was one.) Some lost pilgrim, a wayward penitent. Some Lothario come to spy the pretty nuns and worse. Some suicide. Some innocent. Standing at the very edge in wonder and in awe. Seeing in the clouds of brawny ocean swirling down below their God, by god. Their God! At last!

Or is simply hypnotized, Then, blown away to heaven in a single gust. For this below, if not the face of God, is surely one of the hymns sung by the universe when it is glad to be alive. When it dances like a Dervish in a thunderstorm at dawn, on the morning of your birthing day.

I come here, too, to chew my sins and ponder on my dreams. The people in the town, sometimes they call me ‘Saint.’ Which I most am not, I may assure you certainly. Just like them, I clutch secrets to my breast. I have many things that were they told would throw a darker light upon the glow I cast. My cape around my shivering shoulders, I hear their sad confessions in the drafty hovels where they start and live and finally lose their lives.

For this below, if not the face of God, is surely one of the hymns sung by the universe when it is glad to be alive. When it dances like a Dervish in a thunderstorm at dawn, on the morning of your birthing day. |

Often, there they lie in death, upon the rancid sheepskin blanket, the same on which their mother spilled her water. So I watch you flooding in, floating through and dribbling out the world upon the same. Upon an equal tide.

This tide I watch goes out. At some future point tomorrow, it will return. So, I lie awake of nights too long to bear inside my hovel own. That is why I am so often at the cliff. Here I come to brood. Awake.

Again.

That self-same dream of flying ships. Torn from the earth, whose sundering of land has sent the last of men into the sky. But why? What ails the Earth? Why are they leaving? What has ripped apart their cities like paper torn to shreds? Cities great as Rome! So many wonders to behold from many glittering hills, chock with high-climbing temples made of silvery light. A hundred spires and spikes of glass. And each in them a thousand windows, each gleaming with a votive candle, holding back the chilly night. A promise of a party (or of a place to lie with you, my Kata, most beloved). Or, indeed, to pray. Safe and warm.

Inside.

Yet now blown out, these votives! Now, grown dark. The forest of the cities all denuded, all cut down. Now, streams of citizens awash upon those hills, their rivers running here and twisting there. Meeting other rivers of the lost and of the damned, of refugee and fool. Of outlaws and the true. Which way to go when others – whose numbers cannot be seen to end! – are on their way to where you’re told that you must go?

And these boats my dreams reveal to me! These boats I see so clear above me in the sky. As clear as I may see the cross upon the chapel at the fortress keep, high above which flies a kestrel. And the kestrel in my dream flies in eager hunt. Yet now, a massive vessel, a flying boat, lumbers into view and is gone in one instant more. The kestrel sees it veer off towards the moon, whose glow, reflected in the ocean, ripples. The moon paints the many waves below the bright cool white of an iridescent pearl.

Then, alas, I am awake! Just as my dreamy sight had shown me one more thing. So I — dream kestrel — pursue that boat, the hills receding far behind. The air around grows purple, then deepest indigo. Then black. I see the ship, then hang in that dark space. Agog!

For it is but a fragment of a Greater Boat. It is as if a fallen single twig lay on the ground beside a two-hundred-year-old oak, as high in feet as years! My wings aflap, my kestrel eyes float in that darkest void, surrounded by ten thousand embers, the glowing ranks and ranks of nighttime stars. And the Greater Boat, oh… it is. Tremendous! Larger, by far, than any I have ever seen upon the waters of the world. Even the great Roman boat that took me hence to Eire, out the great port in Ingleterra – imagine one of those, long as a city street. And multiply by ten, no by one hundred cubits go. Then a thousand more!

There, you’ll have the picture of the boat my dream revealed, swimming through the stars above the Earth. And the Earth! It hung below me, just below my kestrel feet. As large, as close and round, as ever the white basin of cool water on my nightstand in the priory beside my cot, where I shall wash my face tonight.

So my kestrel’s head turns. It sees the many windows in the boat, so many thousands of them! And each in each a face or two (or three) peers out, gazing long at the receding globe as it diminishes below, departing from their sight.

And there, oh reader dear, my dream evaporates. My kestrel from its apogee descends. I fly anew above the heathery hills. I circle lazily beneath the wool-white clouds of Ireland, whose bellies hang so low, so gray and full of evening rain.

I can smell it coming. The rain. Awake I shall remain. I draw my monk’s hood, hide my head from cold and leave the cliff’s so very noisome edge. I shall once again take pen to parchment. I shall decorate the Kells again. But now with scribbles from my dream of flying boats. It is usually the only way for me to finally draw near to Morpheus, who opens wide his cape, invites me to the darkness there. Head upon my drawing table. At last. Asleep…

“Brother Stephen! Brother Stephen! Dawn is come!”

And there is Kata’s nose, a hair’s breadth length away from mine.

“Hello, my love,” I say.