Song of Cecilia -- The rock-novel chapter2

All original songs, writing and real-time performances

BY ANGELO M. BRUSCAS III
Copyright 2009, Real News Network and AMBIII Publishing

FREEDOM
Into the void of the howling wind we rode,
silently searching
Through a heart of darkness we strode,
reaching and crawling
Without true love and hope at our side,
timelessly drifting
Until the toll of freedom twice chimed,
our souls uplifted
She once lost her way, looking away from the light
of day;
True love will never go astray,
freedom to choose, freedom to stay

Into the fate of endless time we arose,
dreaming, believing
Through the clouds of dissent we chose,
seamlessly releasing
The past that would fall away as we climbed,
spiritually seeking
Until the toll of freedom twice chimed,
the bells so revealing
She gave into the flames,
ablaze as night turns into day;
True light shine golden rays,
freedom to heal, freedom from pain

Into the shining light of joy he smiled,
openly knowing
Through all fear of failure he'd rise,
reflecting, showing
The path to the bell tower of time,
relentlessly returning
Where the toll of freedom still chimes,
endlessly enduring

She saw life in a series of lies,
never really learning how to cry;
True hearts are so, so alive,
freedom to live, freedom to die
He stood by his soul and believed in his heart,
that love could conquer
All that would fall and all that would fail,
he never would stumble
Into the void of the howling wind he'd fly,
an angel awakening

Until the toll of freedom twice chimed,
forever forsaken.

Song of Cecilia is a literary journey of love and a lyrical joyride
into the triumphs and depths of marriage and divorce through
these ever-shifting sands of economic, moral and social turmoil
– a novel about the mythic and mystical music two lovers create
when they begin to believe and then shatter the myths they adopt
for their lives.

The contemporary mystery-romance storyline of 112,000 words
unwinds as a modern twist on “The Divine Comedy” with
obvious similarities to “The Great Gatsby” -- told through the
eyes of a writer in the maze of a major life transformation; the
spiraling economy has put an end to his newspaper, sparking a
renewed search for personal redemption and reconnection with
the lost love and the lost music of his life. His lost love has taken
on the myth of St. Cecilia, martyred for the love of God, sacrificed
for the music of angels.

The central theme is the universality of love, the endurance of the
love of friends and family, even the love of God, through the love
of writing or rediscovering the love songs within us all: That joyful
noise of life.

The story is highlighted by the “language of love” crafted by the
central characters, Mario and Cecilia, in letters, songs, poetry,
factual experience and fictional expression, assuming and then
consuming their namesakes in the myth of an angel and the
myth of the patron saint of music .

Song of Cecilia
Chapter Twelve

True communication is communion -- the realization of oneness, which is love.

-- Eckhart Tolle, “The Power of Now”

                          SONG OF CECILIA: Unbound Before God and Oprah

Unbeknownst to Cecilia, God did begin to intercede on her behalf to see if she might influence the nature of Mario’s
storyline a bit. She came to Mario in a dream when he was snoring to beat the Devil, the only time God could truly
arouse him from the endless writing and running he would do all day and into the night since losing his job as an editor
upon the untimely death of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Even a beautiful, sensual, alluring God has a hard time
keeping the focus of a writer like Mario when he’s simply in love with the writing and little else in life.

“Look, Mario, I’m beginning to think you are more in love with writing to Cecilia than you are with God, and God can be
a jealous God when she’s ignored or abandoned for some other deity.”

Mario rolled over and embraced God, pulling her into his arms and chest, nuzzling up to the nape in her neck with his
smiling lips.

“How could you think such a thing my beautiful Goddess?” he muttered sweetly. “Love has no degree of restraint. The
love I have for God, the love I have for writing, the love of music, is the same love I have for Cecilia -- it‘s all the same
love you gave me in the first place when I was born into this world by my mother and from my grandmother. All I can do
is give love back. Now come a little closer, snuggle up and let me give God some of that good loving she truly
deserves.”

Mario began to wander his hands around God’s alluring and inviting body of forbidden fruit.

“Okay my Angel, down boy, down -- just checking on your priorities tonight,” God said, putting Mario’s hands back on
his hairy chest. “You need to keep a balance there in your love for God and your love for life. But before we get too
serious and go any deeper, I just want you to know that you are flirting with words and writing here that you will have to
live with for the rest of time to come. Are you prepared to endure the consequences, for you and for Cecilia, too?”

Mario began to snooze off into a snoring stupor again, and God just shook her head. Why were men so difficult? First
they wander around the planet thinking with their penises and their survival-mode competitiveness, then they become
babies all over again in love and lose their focus entirely before they can finally learn how to stop acting like -- and start
Being -- men. Then once they become men, they often get so set in their ways that they forget about God altogether,
unless they happen to see something on TV or in a dream.

God knew that Mario wouldn’t stop writing or loving no matter what she did to him anyway, which was why she loved
him so much even if it produced a hard love to follow or his words seemed hard to swallow for Cecilia. God loved them
both equally, and she had a far better plan for their love than either of them could ever know, leaving Mario to fall fast
asleep in his own dreams and visions.

Stranded with visions of paradise,
I was standing at the mirror of life
Surrounded by an aura of serenity,
I had a vision our love was so alive . . .
Reflecting into the vision of reality
I was gazing into the depths of your eyes
Seeing my life unfold so haphazardly
I had a vision that love never dies . . .

Mario awoke in a daze with Babe licking his face and wagging her tail to the break of daylight. Sitting up in bed, he
realized he’d been in a deep dream, where the pieces were just starting to fall into place.

In the dream, he was dressed in his wedding tuxedo and sitting on a couch next to Oprah, live on Cecilia’s favorite late-
afternoon TV show, with Oprah’s chief spiritual superstar, Eckhart Tolle, stoic in his spiritually impeccable clam-colored
suit, at his right side. He had his guitar and his just-published book in his lap.

“We’d like to introduce our enlightened audience today to a writer from Seattle who has just published the provocative
and highly spiritual new book, Song of Cecilia, dedicated to the long-lost love of his life,” the talk-show Diva began. “He’
s here to play us a song, read from a chapter titled Making Sense of Love in a Senseless Time, and answer your
questions about love and God with our spiritual expert, Eckhart Tolle. But before we get past the introductions, we have
a special surprise for our author. Sequestered in another backstage studio is the subject of today’s story, Cecilia
Angelique, who has been kind enough to come out of seclusion to hear what her former husband has to say and then
give us her side of the story, too. Even better, we’re going to let the audience and Eckhart Tolle be judge and jury -- sort
of play God here, if you will -- so ya-all get ready to vote on whether we think the two of them should ever get back
together -- or not – and whether such a book should ever see the light of day. You viewers out there can already vote
online starting now. But first, let’s hear from Mario as he reads a passage from Stop Making Sense of Love!”

After the applause sign flashed on and off and on and off like a strobe, a nearly blind Mario began hesitantly to recite
from his book, but he couldn’t read a word he had written with the lingering flashes in his vision: “It makes no sense for
you not to love me . . . It makes no sense for you to, ah, . . . It makes no sense. Oh Christ, screw the book.”

Mario rose to his feet, slung his guitar over his back and tossed the book into the faceless audience, ripping his shirt as
he tore off the microphone pinned to his heart. He stripped off his tie and tossed aside his coat, ripping off the rest of
the white shirt and cufflinks to reveal his favorite tie-dyed Neil Young and Crazy Horse T-shirt underneath. It had a
rainbow-colored peace sign on the back.

“I didn’t write this God-damned book to be on a talk show with some blowhard do-gooder and I don’t give a fat fart in
hell if anyone on earth thinks Cecilia and I should be together or not,” Mario bellowed into the overhead speakers. “I
came here to make a statement about love and God and hope and faith and joy and truth and happiness, and this is
about as far as you can get from that. ”

He walked over to a camera, looked it straight into the lens and smiled.

“Hello Cecilia, that’s all I want to say. I love you and always will. I hope you have a great time in Chicago. Thank you for
inspiring me to truly love God and you and the love of making music and of writing again. Still rocking, still writing, still
running in the free world.”

With that, Mario turned and walked out on Oprah, leaving the crowd gasping and Cecilia stranded in silhouetted
isolation. Of course, the polling online was overwhelming -- more than 10 million viewers voted that Cecilia should never
take Mario back, and another 4 million voted that the book should be banned unless Mario changed the names and the
ending, which really was no ending at all. Tolle abstained at first, and then voted NOW instead of No, and YES instead
of No Opinion.

After the dream show ended in chaos, Cecilia slipped out of the studio and noticed Mario in the distance dancing about
on Michigan Avenue with his guitar and his dog Babe wagging her tail and drawing a crowd, singing on the sidewalk for
spare change. She stopped at the cab stand on the busy boulevard and heard clearly that it was a song written for her:
I’m still singing my song, for the love of Cecilia.

I’m going to live by these words, so that she will believe them.
We are still, we are free, we are, we will always be . .
Just you and just me.

Hiding under mirrored sunglasses, Cecilia took out a pen and a $20 bill from her wallet and in her impeccably perfect
handwriting wrote: “I love you, too” around the edges. She handed the bill along with another $5 tip to the valet hailing
cabs. “Put this in his case for me, please,” she said, pointing to Mario, who was lost in the song as a big yellow taxi
arrived for the ride home to obscurity. “Tell him a Raven dropped that for an Angel.”

After the taxi pulled away, the valet began whistling to the tune, pocketed the $25 cash, hailing another cab for Eckhart
Tolle who was watching over the entire scene from a bench . . . and Mario suddenly jumped up in bed, fully awake and
back in the present.

Dear Cecilia,

As of now, I have settled on my new subtitle for this chapter of the story -- Making Sense of Love in a Senseless Time --
for the writing formerly known as The Real Story, and the real story now is that the revised and edited version is about
ready to be offered up to the world at large. I think it’s the kind of title that could get me on Oprah or Dr. Phil (I pray that
dream is never truly realized!).

Each chapter is pretty much as you have seen of late with some revisions and full chapter headings, using lyrics from
the songs I already have written and recorded to provide a bridge between the connecting segments, which proceed
from the most recent letters to one you have yet received that I already have written to the new love of your life. I have a
new Web site already designed where the book can eventually come out one chapter at a time and then continue on in
real time with interactive features that allow readers to experience the story in its full presentation, with all consideration
to the fictional and artistic elements and not the personal ones this time. Yes, the names have been changed as have
some of the places to protect those who feel the need for protection, even if the emotions and the situations, the
memories, the letters, the songs, and the love are all real.

The end, of course, is left up to the reader’s imagination or begins a new beginning, depending upon how you look at it
and which one I finally choose under better editing direction. So far, the response has been remarkable, touching,
illuminating and no one who reads it has yet to miss the point in its entirety, which makes me think I have finally told a
story of pure truth rather than pure fiction or pure bullshit.

Just as I write this, the phone on the other side of the house rings and it’s James leaving a message to call him back.
Yes, I still have the dreadfully old phone from our kitchen that is so painfully shrill to leave a message on. The sadness
and hurt in his voice is unmistakable and obvious. Breaking from the writing, I immediately call him back. He’s been
interviewed for two jobs, one in Seattle and one in Chicago, and he was asked to choose which one he would prefer.
He told them Chicago, since it is a higher-level executive position that pays more with more challenge and more
prestige. It’s the kind of job that would set him up financially for the rest of his life.

His new love of his life, however, is upset he chose Chicago, even though it’s a job she once encouraged him to apply
for. She sees it as a major threat to their budding relationship, which caused James to become angry and even more
confused about his decisions in life. He began to list in an email to her all the issues -- she termed them his list of
“grievances” -- that they were having trouble overcoming in his mind. First, that he felt she was afraid of intimacy since
he wanted more. Second, that she never invited him into her home or introduced him to her children or made him feel
comfortable about her past life. Thirdly, that he drives too fast, which she said shows a lack of character? Finally, that
she shouldn’t make him feel guilty about the best job he could possibly get under the current economic circumstances
with the death of newspapers sweeping the country.

“Have you tried explaining your decision to her?” I asked. “Certainly she can understand why you want to take the better
job.”

“That’s not the point. Why should I be made to feel guilty about a decision that could be one of the most important
decisions of my life? If you love someone, you support their decisions, don’t you? You don’t make them feel like this.”
“Well, how do you feel? Do you still love her?”

“Well I thought I did, but there are some big things that we need to change here. What does it matter? She said
goodbye to me and I guess that’s it for good. I’m going to send another email and tell her what I think. This is no way to
treat someone you say that you love.”

I began to think in light of my love for you, Cecilia, and how many times I made the same mistakes, failing to truly
understand the needs and the desires, the limits and limitations, even the depth and the character of the woman I love
most on this earth. And, since I am in a week trying to think more like a Virgo, I urged James to take a different tact with
his email.

“I don’t think airing more of your so-called grievances is going to do anyone any good,” I said. “Instead, why don’t you
send her an email listing all the things you truly love about her. Then explain that even if you go to Chicago, you’ll still
love all those and much more to come, with new adventures and a new city and new destinations for your love to
blossom.”

By that time, I could tell I had already lost James’ interest.

“Yeah, well, maybe. But I don’t think I could do that right now. I can’t believe she would want to end it just because I
make a choice to take the Chicago job. Lots of people maintain strong relationships from a distance. If you truly love
someone, it shouldn’t matter. Doesn’t that make sense to you?”

Of course, I agreed with that thought, but noted that in my case, my love, my true romantic love, is sustained now through
writing and we don’t even have a relationship to speak of other than one of total silence and past memory, but a love
that survives in me despite all our regret or guilt or sorrow. To find pure love from that, I tried to explain, is even harder
still, or it makes you stronger still, depending on how you look at it.

“Yeah, but you had the love of Cecilia in her prime, and she was certainly one of the most beautiful women I have ever
known, too,” James said, drifting off into his own memories of the days they used to play softball together or feast
together for Christmas or Thanksgiving, when they all worked together at the newspaper and Mario and James were
both drawn to her beauty. “She didn’t hold back on intimacy, at least not from what you bragged about. She married you
and supported you and at one time probably would have gone anywhere in the world with you.”

“That’s my point James. Remember what you love or loved about the people you love and not what they might say or do
under the stress and strain of daily life. We all say and write things we probably never think are hurtful and they turn out
to the most hurtful things on earth. Of that, I am fully guilty in how I responded to Cecilia’s love and that ruined it for me
forever. It was the hardest lesson I ever learned. Hell, I did the same thing to you and we’re better friends now than ever.
I guess it just doesn’t work that way with women.”

At one time or the other, particularly during the newspaper strike, I said some very hurtful things to James – one of my
dearest friends for almost 30 years -- that caused us to end our friendship for nearly a year. It was something like a fake
vision of him going down in a plane crash on his way to the Paris Air Show while we all suffered on the picket line.
Because of that, we stopped playing golf, tennis, sharing books and sports and journalism, we stopped inviting each
other over for special occasions. We avoided each other in the newsroom. Then one day I realized what I had done,
mostly because by then I had likewise done the same thing to you, Cecilia. I had to seriously look at what in my makeup,
my personality, my attitude and my interactions with the people I love, what things I had said – what I had become and
what had turned me into a truly un-loving lout. I wrote James a long belated note of apology, an email that
straightforwardly addressed my errors in judgment and went on to list all the great aspects of James as a friend, a
mentor, a colleague and a man. We have closer since that day than we ever were before, even if he can still beat me in
golf or tennis.

Why can I not achieve such a state with similar understanding and wisdom with you Cecilia? I know you still count
James as one of your friends in life, too? He misses you, and so does Tom B., who often asks if I have ever talked to
you lately (the answer is always the same) and so does my mother and so does everyone ever connected to us who you
once truly loved, too. They felt your love and knew your smile and basked in your laughter, just like me. It makes no
sense for me not to love you like it makes no sense for me not to love my mother, or James or Tommy or my son and
daughter. Can’t you say that the reverse also is true for you: that it makes no sense not to love me like it makes no
sense not to love yourself or the ones who love you, each and every one of them?

Maybe the more sensible realization is this: If I can find pure love in my love for you without you being here with me,
even if you are remarried, then maybe you can find it, or already have found it, in the same way too.
Now I’m thinking like a Virgo and actually starting to make some sense here. Maybe you love me exactly like I love you,
only with far fewer words, or knowing that you need no words at all to convey your love. You’ve just been loving right
along while I have been catching up with love. Love sometimes is far more powerful when it is better off left unsaid or
unsung or left to running on its own accord. You need love like I need love, and have love like I have love -- maybe even
too much love, and know that love has to be handled carefully and in its own time or you might be left with something
that has no resemblance to love at all.

This makes infinite sense. We already loved each other so of course we love each other, past or future, it’s all the
same. If we loved each other in the past, we love each other now. Maybe you don’t, but I do. It’s a vow I took for life and
one I take seriously, not just repeat to make others happy. It’s not some dream or some wicked game. You don’t go into
it thinking love is a crime even if you have a partner who keeps that delusion alive all her loving days.

I tried to explain to James my theory that space and place and even time make no difference to pure love, the idea that
there is a black hole of love that can defy the elements of earthly life and create possibilities in a wholly different
dimension. But again, I lost him in the explanation and had to go back to an older letter I wrote you about a year or so
ago, trying in vain again to get you to reconsider spending a birthday with me like that sensually naked and alive one we
shared in the past at Port Ludlow and so many, many others in our time together:

It is pointless for me to waste time on anything else in the world when the one thing that matters most is the love I
have to give. I know that is my life principle now, and finding small ways to make it possible -- even profitable
enough -- to sustain such a vision is truly the goal of my work outside of journalism. You know how well I can focus
my writing and adapt form to theme and plot, whether it is fiction, newspapering, songwriting, even letter writing. If I
approach any of that without some full sense of love in my soul, then I want nothing to do with the work because I
know it will prove to be false and completely misunderstood.

I would never waste your time or my time with something that is not true to the bone. I will never, ever come to you –
in writing or in person – with anything but love and peace, joy and understanding.

I smile so widely, so angelic, right now thinking this thought: I am truly soaring free to love you in the purity and
spirituality and whole soul that you probably always deserved to be loved. I laugh. How did you get me to understand
so much about what it truly means to love? How could have I not realized this wholeness sooner?

Maybe that wholeness of soul and spirit came from my Grandmother Copsey, for sure, and from my mother, too, but
there is something much more that I have learned now from you -- and thanks to you. Maybe you will never be with
me in body and mind again, and that would leave me truly humble for the rest of my days on earth; but I know now
what it is to be whole and sure, honest and real with my love. I know what I feel, and how it may be interpreted or
misinterpreted no longer matters in the least.

What I feel right now is the sensual, lingering memory of your naked body, the lines of incisions healed and our senses
aroused by a warm bath of soothing water, jet-spray joy cleansing our open souls at sunset in the hotel along the water.
What I feel is the magical Buddha stones of wonder and the natural laws of the universe and the peace of a thousand
ages and the spirit of my ancestors and the time of the future all coalescing and converging into this simple fact of love,
a simple act of love. Writing to you always begins with a simple thought, like the moment I saw a newspaper ad once
upon a time in pure love with you and thought what a great gift that birthday trip to Port Ludlow would be to celebrate
your beauty and the essence of who you are; and even now, the journey only gets better and better all the time. To have
loved you like I did, to be loved by you, is the pleasure of a lifetime. We will always have that to share, on your birthday
and every day I‘m alive.

I think the dream now is a recurring one, a communal one, one that can be fully communicated and interpreted strictly by
the love under which it was born and with which it is written.

Is the dream real, does the love truly make sense amid senseless actions and reactions, or is it all lost in translation?
Eckhart Tolle, Oprah’s spiritual guru, has the last word, here:

"Love is a state of Being. Your love is not outside; it is deep within you. You can never lose it, and it cannot leave
you."

Unleashing the power of un-leaving love,

Mario

POSTSCRIPT: Cecilia, I do believe I am in a groove of writing that is simply the best I could ever have hoped to strive
for. The true fear and pain I have is that the more I write, the less likely you will ever truly love me in the present tense. I
want to take you to a joyous, wondrous place, a place of total love and certain forgiveness, where you know your story
will be one that is true and courageous and noble and literary and poetic and full of amazing life and fearless love, just
like you and just like me. I am getting there, I know, but at what cost? To me, the time spent writing could be far better
spent loving you in person, in action, in reality. I can’t do that if you won’t let me, so I continue to love you the only way I
know how -- with the love of God and the love of writing. In many ways, I am trying to pull out all the stops here -- to draw
on all my influences, from literature to music to poetry to philosophy to family to religion to you. That’s pretty much the
linear traces of my inspiration, and the circle that comes around fully is the love we share. Before, when I wrote of what
happened to us, I foolishly made you into the protagonist and I the tragic hero. There is no tragedy here. The only
protagonist is time and the inability to write it all right before time runs out.

On my run today, using my new Virgo thinking mode, Robbie Robertson’s “Unbound” came on, probably the most fitting
song of all for us given its history in our collection and the true music of our love.

I used to think of his words as meaning free to love, something positive and uplifting, liberating; but in the song, he
always sings like he’s a “moth to a flame,” bound to the light, bound by love.

He opens with the harrowing voice proclaiming he is “drawn to her” and then repeats “I am lost. I am lost.”
Even more ominous -- “nothing is forgotten, or left behind.” And wherever he is, “she leads him down” even though he is
“unbound.”

Chained to love with no chains to bind him. I used to feel free hearing that song, and now I hear it differently today.
The paradox is that he finds a love with “no borders, no fences” and yet cannot break free of the love that binds him
even if he is “unbound.”

Just like your love, you never fully appreciate or understand some songs until years and years later, even if you hear
them day after day after day.

If you’re listening without really listening, like I would do so long, so often in your presence, you might get the wrong
impression and never know it at all.

With eyes of fire; No one can see
The smoke from the sweet grass
Covers me
I am drawn
I am drawn to her
Like a moth to flame
She leads me down
Unbound
I am lost
I am lost
Has anybody seen me
I am lost
Oh nothing is forgotten
Only left behind
Wherever I am
She leads me down
Unbound . . .
No borders
No fences
No walls
Unbound . . .

-- Robbie Robertson, “Unbound,” from the rich music of Mario and Cecilia

VISIONS OF PARADISE
Stranded with visions of paradise,
I was standing at the mirror of life
Surrounded by an aura of serenity,
I had a vision our love was so alive . . .
Reflecting into the vision of reality
I was gazing into the depths of your eyes
Seeing my life unfold so haphazardly
I had a vision that love never dies . . .
I was stranded in a vision of paradise
I was swimming in the ocean of my dreams
I had a vision I was standing in paradise
Where everything is exactly as it seems . . .
Standing at the edge of reality
I was stranded in the eye of your storm
Hounded by dreams of lost anxiety,
I awoke to open a new door . . .
Stranded with visions of paradise
I was standing in the mirror of your eyes
Stranded with visions of paradise
In a place where love never dies . . .

Song of Cecilia soundtrack player:
Control chapter music selection here