Beginning the day with the usual mixture of non-doing and flagellating myself silently and subtly for doing so: this is my circular path at the moment. Henry James comes to my mind:

“Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!”

I really am trying to be one of those people. Next to my desk hangs a drawing by my daughter. It looks like a treasure map: there’s a path indicated by a dashed line, starting at the drawing of a temple like building (“Start in Hawii”). Somewhere along the way there’s a large key visible: confusingly, it’s turned upside down as if it was a key for a reverse door in outer space. This reminds me along this particular stream of consciousness of my penchant for androids and robots, and of my wife’s remark the other day I might consider introducing these artificial ones to death as the necessary price for humanity. Lately, I love this word: “humanity”. When spoken (and remember, I’m now speaking all my texts first), it feels like a breath of old air into a new, enormous room. (There’s another novel I’d still like to read: E E Cummings’ The Enormous Room.) Back to the treasure map: besides a wind rose in the upper right corner that points towards south southeast (why? What’s there? Spain? Greece? Brobdingnag? Balnibarbi? Unfortunately East and West are reversed in the compass image so that it’s not clear), the most prominent part of the map is the sentence:

“If you have found the treasure fine, beware the Titan’s curse can blind.”

My daughter must have been impressed by the Titan’s Curse after reading the Percy Jackson YA novel of the same title (I haven’t read it). The idea of having a treasure map at all appeals to me. As does the idea that the treasure is not something one should find, but rather a driver, a prodding device that would lose all its power if it would be found. The idea that the treasure itself is cursed and will blind you, is a gruesome bonus, quite typical for the original Greek mythology as for our fairy tales: only the double negative will do to intensify negation. Think Chaucer:

“He nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde
In all his lyf unto no maner wight”.

(“He never yet no vileness didn’t say / In all his life to no manner of man”)

Well aligned, my horoscope, brewed by Breszny suggests that I should get back to Gisela, to the historical heroine that occupied me splendidly all of last summer:

«I am getting a psychic impression that you will soon be drawing on the energy of one of your past lives.»

I had never seen it that way, but it does make sense: if I actually was Giselle, this would explain my obsession with her across the abyss of 1000 years. And now I’m off to Hawii. I’m getting a psychic impression that this is where I should start my Titan’s course.

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Gisela of Bavaria was a princess around the year 1000, who, only 10 years old, married the first King of Hungary, Stephen, and together with him christianized large parts of Eastern Europe. She is the protagonist of my flash novel “Gizella”, which will be published by Folded Word Press in 2013. Some of the early versions of flashes for this book are online.