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

BURNING BUSH
Indian summer fades to Dorian gray.
Another generation has gone astray,
another stone will roll away,
A new day will dawn.

Witness here at the foot of this stage.
Another congregation to bow and pray, another
temptation takes us away,
Thy will be done.

I climbed a mountain
and there was nothing left to see:
Falling rocks, burning bushes, barren trees.
Balanced on this ledge,
one moment of freedom
I climbed the mountain,
once buried by the sea

Bible belt turned to combat zone,
another john on the telephone,
another deal to keep us all stoned,
thou shall not sin,
thy will be done
Descend now the chosen one,
another wing in the melting sun,
another prophet on the run,
On earth, here in heaven,
on earth here in heaven . . .

I climbed a mountain
and there was nothing left to see:
Falling rocks, burning bushes, barren trees.
Balanced on this ledge,
one moment of freedom
I climbed the mountain,
once buried by the sea

I climbed the mountain,
oh the highest mountain
Went searching for my spirit,
I went searching for my soul
Oh God, I climbed the mountain,
once buried under the sea

I am the fossil,
I am the mountain,
I am the sea

The burning bushes,
falling rock,
The barren tree . . .

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 Seventeen

You, Tania, are my chaos. It is why I sing. It is not even I, it is the world dying, shedding the skin of time. I am
still alive, kicking in your womb, a reality to write upon.

-- Henry Miller, "Tropic of Cancer"

                                                         SONG OF CECILIA: Book of Revelations

God continued to call Cecilia from time to time in her new home and in her new life with her new husband, but Cecilia
simply resorted to an old tactic learned from her past mistakes -- she just hung up the phone. This time, she just couldn’t
change her number or her address, because it was not truly hers to change at all. She felt exposed to the world,
stripped bare once again by the God that kept Mario writing and writing and writing about love; by the God that kept
calling him to keep calling out to her, in song, in poetry, even in fiction; and real life was catching up all the time, with
Mario running around naked, too, but not giving a damn who was looking on, prancing about without using any fig leafs
to cover up his private parts.

Even east of Eden, Cecilia couldn’t escape all the pacts she had made with the dark side before in her life as a
martyred lover, before she even began reaping the harvest of Mario’s garden; all of the broken vows she’d taken
before God, all of the fruit she had eaten from the tree of knowledge and wisdom in the name of love, and all the love
she had consumed in the name of marriage. This time, she vowed, she was not about to return to a God she feared had
been fully seduced by Mario’s words and songs. She figured God must have been attracted to him just like she once
was, especially since he was running daily like a tanned Tartan bull of an angel, singing praises into the sunset, looking
mighty fine in his 54th year on earth.

Every time she turned to God, God kept throwing her own words from the past back into her face, such a jealous God
was she. Cecilia figured God was jealous she actually once loved Mario with as much passion as God herself.

I guess you could say you are responsible for my revelation of things. You make me feel like everything I’ve
always tried to be, hoped to communicate, the energy I’ve tried to consciously speak, a constant positive
force has been realized, come true, brought to life by its recognition.”

-- Cecilia in a 1989 letter to Mario

Fearing God would never intervene in the writing with such evidence lingering in the past, especially when Mario was
living a fully celibate life for the first time ever and praying like a monk in the present, Cecilia decided to take another
bite out of one of the wormy apples that kept falling at her feet in Apple Valley. Immediately, it put her into a swooning
toxic trance, sort of like the time she ate shellfish on the first Thanksgiving they spent together while he was on
assignment, writing about the floodwaters in the Skagit Valley and eating at the best restaurant in northwest
Washington.

Everything was dizzy like the vertigo she felt climbing the old “Codger Pole” in Astoria above the Columbia River, or the
time she just blacked out at Jimmy and Patti’s home in Sacramento, or the time she passed out in the hospital after
recovering from the radical mastectomy.

When the blackness overcame her, she was in a world that looked much like the black and white television shows she
used to watch as a child before the invention of color TV. Most of the faces were black, however, so she really couldn’t
tell one character from the other, like it got hard in her mind over time to tell one husband from the other. They all had
white wings, but they were tarnished and tattered and singed, like feathers that fall into flames only to be blown back by
the heat of the fire.

One of the figures came out of the shadows to greet her as she held up the apple, which gave off the only true light in
the place, and she was astonished to see that it lit up a face that looked amazingly like Mario’s -- same devilish scowl,
same penetrating look of disdain, same air of superiority in the raised forehead, same angry presence, same eyes of
fire.

“What can we do for you this time, Ms. Angelique?” the voice echoed into her soul, beckoning her to follow him deeper
into the darkness. “Are you back for us to get you out of yet another pact with God?”

Cecilia stopped short. Suddenly she began to wonder if maybe Mario hadn’t been seduced by the Devil, too, maybe
even was the devil deep down in his soul. After all, she thought, she was supposed to be a martyr according to the myth
of her namesake. What if Mario was an Angel, but he had become a dark Angel, instead? It just seemed like no matter
where she turned, there was Mario.

“What’s the matter? You took the bite of the apple, Ms. Angelique, you can’t really undo what you’ve already done. By
the way, how’d that last plan we worked out in your mind work out? You do remember, don’t you? The one where you
locked Mario out of the house, filed for divorce for his snoring, and took away his entire life after his daughter ran away
from home and tried to commit suicide. I heard God gave you cancer again after that plan was put into action. Too, bad,
but why don’t you follow me down a little deeper this time and we’ll see what we can do about that, too.”

Cecilia began to throw up. It felt just like the chemo, like she had a toxic dose of cancer-killing drugs run through her only
to leave her so weak that she couldn’t see straight and couldn’t think at all. Why did the cure always seem worse than
the disease? Why did love always seem like death to her and not life? Her heart seemed to stop. She began to stumble
and realized all her hair was falling out, just like Mario’s bald head. She could only see his evil smile as his finger kept
calling her to come toward the black hole, her eyes now so puffy and her body shaking in convulsions.

When she awoke, Cecilia was in a pool of sweat, lying in bed next to a snoring Mr. Clay, who slept with earphones in
his head whenever his wife started having those fitful sleeping nights where the hot-flashes and the nightmares took her
places he could not understand or comprehend.

“What is it dear? Another nightmare about Mario and his letters?”

Cecilia was crying, something she did a lot of for no apparent reason, but something she rarely let anyone see. “No,
dear, it’s not a dream, not a nightmare anymore. I’m just crying because I am so happy that you love me.”

God, meanwhile, was busy, too. She had just read through Mario’s rough draft, even his newer additions, and she was
pleased to see that he had truly gotten the story right and the point made perfect sense: God IS love, and love IS God.
The cycle fully complete, and the story told from beginning to its endless conclusion. It was finally time for God to let
Mario release the story and reveal a few more of her plans in the present through revelations Mario never fully realized
in the past. She reminded him of a couple more songs of his she thought might be good to include, too.

Like she often did, God came to Mario through music on his long runs along the beach, when Chris Isaak’s “Wicked
Game” came blaring into his iPod headphones. It was Cecilia’s favorite song from when they first met, a song she had
given to Mario on the first tape of music she ever made for him. God used to come to Cecilia through music, too, but it
was harder to reach her anymore since she never learned to play an instrument and never really sang other than under
her breath or in a trance -- although, when she did sing her voice sounded like an angel. Mario remembered her singing
to the song, drifting away into the words and the hauntingly sad melody:

The world was on fire
No one could save me but you.
Strange what desire will make foolish people do
I never dreamed that I'd meet somebody like you
And I never dreamed that I'd lose somebody like you
No, I don't want to fall in love
[This love is only gonna break your heart]
No, I don't want to fall in love
[This love is only gonna break your heart]
With you . . . With you
What a wicked game you play
To make me feel this way
What a wicked thing to do
To let me dream of you
What a wicked thing to say
You never felt this way
What a wicked thing to do
To make me dream of you
And I don't wanna fall in love
[This love is only gonna break your heart]
And I don't want to fall in love
[This love is only gonna break your heart]
Nobody loves no one . . .

Mario used to think of that song in his own perspective, that she had given him such music to speak to what he would
feel like now in his present loss of the love of Cecilia. But suddenly he realized that the song was her song, all along,
that it was meant to represent her perspective in a wicked game that she fully believed in, that had haunted her love life
up until the point she met Mario, and now continued to haunt the myth of her life even now. She was playing the same
wicked game and she knew it would only break another heart and he was playing right along by still listening to the
same siren song 20 years after being seduced by it in the first place.

So what does that tell you? God knew she could let Mario figure it out for himself.

Mario began to see that Cecilia had embraced a dark side of love even before he showed up to shine his light of love
on all the beauty that she tried to keep hidden or deep within her soul. No wonder she saw so much within him that he
even failed to see himself. She knew he was living in the light, loving in the moment, that he was an angel who could fly
from the darkness and that he came from a family of God, someone who believed his soul was saved, not doomed, that
his love was strong, not just some wicked game he played. He could play games, for sure, but love was something he
took as seriously as religion.

God also began to show Mario through his own writing of the past how consistent he had been and how it wasn’t him
who had broken all the promises, as Cecilia once claimed. Here’s one reply he made from a huffy letter Cecilia had
given him at work in 1988, questioning his motives and pulling away from him like she would finally do 15 years later:

       “I can’t promise you anything anymore. You know all too well exactly who I am. I can only try to keep the
promises I’ve made to myself and hope that in the end, the truth will win out. It’s a self-defeating game, this thing we
call love. Your life has been an example of that and I had hoped to change the outcome for you once and for all
time. Love is most manifest in patience and forgiveness; not sexual pleasure, not wedding rings, neither separation
nor marriage changes that. It’s not a light switch, my love. You can’t just turn it on and off only when you want it to
make things brighter in your life.

      “I sit in the dark, empty photo frame on my dresser, a blind incantation to the goddess of love. I gave you music
and hope and pulled you back into the sunshine. Now it’s me who lies cold and broken in the heat of the afternoon.
Now I want to write you out of my life, purge the memory and the promise and share the last living documents of
another failure floating on the wind. I really don’t think you will magically appear tonight, especially after reading my
handiwork of the past few days. I don’t really think you are brave enough to confront me in this mood, nor your own
feelings at a time when so much has suddenly been put at stake. I write in times of crises; you seen to turn and hide.

     “I don’t want to hide myself on more than one occasion from you and the fragile life I have created. I get silently
disgusted, mad, angry, feeling a lack of respect, and walk away to retreat on my own. Self-discovery sometimes only
comes from self-sacrifice, I know. But just look at all the things we truly could have discovered together. Maybe we
just reached our limit. I know I haven’t reached that point on my own.”

By that May, years and years in the past, Mario recalled they had somehow landed back together and the words had
bridged the gap. Mario was soaring and snoring back in Cecilia’s home again, and the tone of his words returned to
music and poetry and the language of love:

     “5-10-88; “I am the sun that rises in your eyes when you part the curtains each morning on the outside world. I am
the midnight fire smoldering at your bedside, an ember of hope, the coal of desire. I am the radiant beam that
illuminates the path of righteousness, blinding light of love. I am the sensuous lighthouse, a siren through the
treacherous fog of frozen passion. Hear my voice.

     “See me shine in your house, glowing brighter, growing stronger, scattering seeds, planting flowers, tending your
garden, sampling your fruits, reaping the harvest. You have the tools in your hands, the power and the beauty. A
rake to weed out the past. Needles to stitch together the future. Nuts and bolts and fancy contraptions to build
strength. A foundation where everything is stable. And I am the lawn mower. I am the housekeeper, provider,
protector. I am the shelter, the bread of life we offer up to each other on silver platters. No blood, just wine.

    “You are my intoxication, the cool breeze in my face, the temperate zone, my moderating influence. You replace
everything and hold me in balance. You are gravity setting my orbit, taking me in. You are the fuel for my fire, the
pillow for my dreams and schemes, the reason behind my resolve. You are the scientist whose theories become
reality, the logic behind what I’ve been calculating all these years, the alchemist who has always longed for more.

    “You are home to my innermost fantasies, the visualization and equalization of universal free love. The
culmination of a lifetime of inhibitions that come alive in the night with you by my side, with you on for the ride, with
me inside. I am your athlete, your champion, the marathon man just entering the long race. I am the body builder,
you are the perspiration, the inspiration. I am the phone caller, you are the receiver. I am the songwriter, you are the
song.”

Cecilia never did write songs herself, although her poetry had a lyrical grace that Mario eventually would put to music for
her and later for himself and for God. He saw that in her absence, God was leading him to write songs to counter all the
ones others had written that kept her spinning around in myths of martyred love, failed love, lost love, hurt love, fractured
love. He didn’t want her to wait in vain. He didn’t want her love to be consumed by another wicked game. He didn’t
want to her love to consist of broken arrows and bottles of rain. He didn’t want love to leave her with a dull, empty pain.
He didn’t want Rhiannon to keep showing her evil face.

So he went back to the guitar he learned to play as a child, the guitar he’d been given by his first wife as a birthday
present, and began composing songs to raise and praise her soul into the heavens.

The first was appropriately titled, “Lost.” It was about how he’d been floating through life when Cecilia found him and
“laid stars at his feet” that he barely noticed, only to realize that the stars had set him free. It was written in the same
period when he had first left Cecilia to live alone and contemplate his fate in life -- to continue to try to love Cecilia or
continue to try to rebuild a marriage that already appeared in ruins. Back then, Cecilia had taken him back and set him
free to live a life where choices no longer mattered at all.

There was a lady, laid stars at my feet. There was a lady who taught me to see. One step closer and we’ll be free.
Now I wait, for you. . . Lost, without you.

He learned to like being lost, believing he always had Cecilia to help show him the way through the galaxy and God to
lift him up into heaven. Until, that is, the apocalypse happened and she just vanished.

Mario began to drift back into God’s arms and he realized he was now fully in the arms of his first wife Lori, who loved
him much the same way Cecilia came to love him – and leave him. Once, when he was in the spiral of love after Cecilia
left him the final time upon recovering from the second round of cancer care, and Mario began chasing after other bad
and wicked love, Lori told him a story that he still treasures as much as the words of Cecilia.

“Haven’t you heard about the story of the frog and scorpion trying to cross a river?” Lori asked him incredulously,
treating him like the fool he always was with their love. “Where the frog and the scorpion agree to help each other cross
the river, with the scorpion riding high and dry on the back of the frog. But when they get to the other side safely, the
scorpion rips into the frog with its poison pinchers. As the bewildered frog starts to die a slow, painful death, it asks the
scorpion why it could so such an evil thing? ‘What did you expect?’ it says. ‘You always knew I was a scorpion.’”

As he ran without any direction or course in mind, Mario recalled that little parable of life, only he began to look at it from
a different perspective: that he was the scorpion who had ridden on the back of Lori’s love and then, again, Cecilia’s
love, across the rivers of life to finally get to the point where he could show his true colors as a writer.

When Mario returned from his run, sweat was pouring from his body like a river from the seven miles he’d covered in
his trance of music and sand and surf and crystal blue air pulsing through his veins. He felt like it was a good day to
reach out to Cecilia again, that he was near the end of the book and he wanted to share all the wisdom he’d found
along the beach of his dreams. What the hell, God seemed to tell him, she can always hang up on you if she doesn’t
care to hear what you have to say. Just like a TV show in black and white, you can always change the channel and find
something to watch in color if you can’t stand the way the picture looks.

He dialed her up in Yakima. Much to his amazement, she actually answered with the sweetest, most sincere and even
happy hello, as if she was expecting a call all along.

“Good afternoon Cecilia,” he blurted out. “This seems like as good as day as any to talk again . . .”

Click. The receiver went dead as it always did.

“She would exact the ultimate toll from my love and poison all that life I had shined into her black world. Looking
back, it’s no wonder her favorite album at the time we met was by a group called Black. It seemed to be a metaphor
for her spirit, and it became her soul. It consumed our light.”

-- Mario in his notebook, June 2005, upon getting his final, final divorce papers from Cecilia.

POSTSCRIPT: As in everything I write to you Cecilia, I think this must be the final chapter, even if it does echo back to
chapters previously written in another version of the story that makes no sense. In fact, I think it is the chapter I have
been holding back, figuring readers will understand the story as it is without embellishing it further with more visions of
God and of the evil ways of love. Again, I apologize for taking huge fictional liberties with our lives and the life of God,
but then I know that both of you have given me such permission and such freedom in my writing over the course of time
and history. I find it much easier to talk to God and to you than to write about it, but until there is a way to bridge that river
of silence on the other end, I can still swim and live to tell about it for an old frog that’s been twice bitten.

I am an idealist who believes in reality, and who, therefore, in all I write and strive to read, tries to keep both my own
feet and my feet of the readers on the ground so that no matter how high we dream our dreams will be based on
reality.

-- Jack London, 1915, from his home in Glen Ellen, where Mario bought “The Portable Jack London” on his 2000
journey there with Cecilia.

Blood on the Stem

There was a man, walked tall in his shoes.
Talked of salvation and carried the news.
There was his love, knew all the right poses.
Wind in her face, entangled in roses.

Now time runs on. You live and you’re gone.

There was a lady, who followed behind him.
Barbs in her side, blood on the stem.
She dressed in black, no one found them.
There was a man, there was his friend.

Now time runs on. Run to stay strong.

There was a boy, heart like an angel.
Ran with the wind and all sorts of danger.
There was a day, like no other.
One with his father, two with his mother.
Three with his daughter, four with his son.
Nowhere to turn, nowhere to run.

Now time moves on. Nothing lasts this long.

There was a lady, who traded her life.
Talked of commitment, of black and white.
There was a time, when she wanted much more.
But she married a man with a crown of thorns.
There was a runner, holes in his shoes.
She offered him roses, the blood it was useless.

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