Читать книгу Anna and the Black Knight: Incorporating Anna’s Book - Fynn - Страница 10

The Bible at home was one of those huge brass-bound books. It was from this that Anna read or was read to. Seated at the table she worked her way through some of the passages of the Bible. At school and at church she was told which passages to read; at home she was free to read whatever she wanted to. This meant that she was often puzzled as to the meaning and I had to do my best to help her understand. Trying to understand that Adam knew Eve was not the same as Anna knew Fynn, or that God asked Adam, ‘Who told thee that thou wast naked?’ and caused her many problems.

The more she read the more puzzled she became. Often she was presented with passages that simply did not make sense to her, passages that seemed to contradict other passages. Like Luke 2:23 – ‘Every male that openeth the womb shall be called holy to the Lord.’ And Luke 23:29 – ‘Blessed are the barren and the wombs that never bare.’

It seemed to Anna that the Bible was sometimes a bit muddled and that it asked more questions than it answered, but whatever its shortcomings, it was beautiful and since for her beauty was all important, there was no reason why she should not add her own idea of beauty to it.

Perhaps the most exciting thing about Anna was how she always managed to put together to her own satisfaction various ideas that in the normal course of education would have been frowned on. On one occasion she glued together shadows, mathematics, God and sundry ideas, to my delight and her satisfaction. It happened like this –

One evening I had been explaining to Anna how to tell the time from a sundial. Early next morning I took her to see the sundial in the local churchyard. I pointed to the part that cast the shadow and said this is called the ‘Gnomon’. As usual, I had to write this word down on a piece of paper. Later that day the word Gnomon had to be looked up in the dictionary. The definition read ‘That part of a parallelogram left over when a similar parallelogram is taken from its corner.’

This idea was passed over for about a year until it became another idea to work on. What excited her was the fact that it came from a Greek word meaning ‘Indicator’.

As she carefully wrote this down on her piece of paper, her eye caught the next word ‘Gnosis’ – knowledge of spiritual mysteries.

This bit of information made Anna search for all the words that started with the letters GN, which you must admit is an odd combination. All these words were carefully written down – gnarled, gnash, gnat, gnathic, gnaw, gneiss, gnome, gnomic, gnomon, gnosis, gnu.

Anna felt that these strange words which all started with GN ought, because of their very strange beginnings, to have something in common. And then – on the same page, was the word GOD. I did try to explain to her, but it was no use, she had found her clue, the GN words now made sense.

Serendipity is the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by chance.

On one evening we were scribbling numbers and ideas on pieces of paper. I was trying to explain to Anna the mysteries of the binary system by asking the question what is the fewest number of weights and what is the value of the weights that would enable you to weigh anything up to 1,000 lbs in steps of lib; after a little while she grasped the idea of how to ‘do it’:

1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512.

It was then quite clear to her that these 10 weights could weigh up to 1,023 lbs. This was certainly one of those beautiful things that had to be written down and treasured.

All this was nice and organized, but things are not always quite like you work them out. The greengrocer in the market didn’t do things quite like that. Anna took me to the market place to show me this new miracle. On our workings out we had put the article to be weighed in the left pan and the weights in the right pan, but the man in the market place wasn’t doing this, for he seemed to put weights in either pan. It certainly looked as if the man was cheating, so we went back to working it out again. In the first case we only put the weights in the right-hand pan, and in the second case you could put the weights in the right-hand pan or maybe the left hand or sometimes even both, and the numbers we had found for the first case certainly didn’t work in the second case, so I had to explain how to work out these other weights, and they turned out to be 1, 3, 9, 27, 81, 243, 729.

This is a story about the very very first..Mister God is very very old, but a long time ago he was yung and before that he was only a baby and before that he was not even born and their was not a world and their was not a star and there was not anything.

But there was Mister God’s Mummy and Daddy. But you could not see them. And you could not see them because they were so big.

If you have a very little thing, you have to go very clos befor you can see it and if you go far away, you cant. If you have a montain wich is big you cant see the top if you are clos, but you can if you go far away and this is like Mister God’s Mummy and Daddy. You cant go far away from them, so you cant see them. If you go too far away, you can see them but you get very lonly, so you cant. So you have to stay very clos and you know they are there but you cant see them, so that is why they had a little baby.

Well, you see, when the little baby GOD was getting redy to be born he was in his mummy woom, that is were all the babys is made. It is very dark in there. When the baby GOD was born, then he must have some light and when his Mummy and Daddy had a party to selebrate with all the angles, they put lots and lots of light in the sky and made it look pritty and this is stars. The Mummy and Daddy are very polite and teech the little baby GOD to be polite too and to say ‘If you please’ and ‘No thank you’ and thing like that. The little GOD have all the thing he want. A gold spoon and a gold plate and a gold chair and everything and then he want a ball to play with, so his Mummy tuk a lot of dirt and spit on it and roll it into a ball and this is the world, so you can see how big the little baby GOD is.

All the thing was very pritty. And because the little GOD was very polite and kind he want to share all the thing, so he told his Mummy and his Mummy say I cant make you a little brother and sister because it take such a lot of time. And the little GOD said ‘Oh dere what shall I do’? And the Mummy say ‘I have got a good idea’ and she tuk off the table a looking glas and say ‘What can you see?’ So the lit-tie GOD look and say I can see my face, it is a reflekshun. And Mummy say ‘Can you play with yor reflekshun?’ and the little GOD say ‘How can I share all the pritty thing with my reflekshun? That is greedy’. And it is too!

Then the Mummy say ‘Do you know where you come from?’ and the little GOD say ‘Yes, I come from yor woom’ and the Mummy smile a big smile and say, ‘Yes, but first you come from a pictur in my hart and the picktur in the hart come true if you love them enogh. What is the picktur in yor hart little one?’ And the little GOD say ‘Ther is a picktur of people and animal and I want to share all this pritty things and you and Daddy and all the angels with the animals and people’.

In the night time all the picktur come true becase the little God love them so much. And all the people and animals come out of the little God’s hart. And you know your hart is not very big, so you can see for milions of people and animals to cum out, they must be very tiny and so they were. Well, at the very first everybody was happy and the little GOD teech the people to talk and play musik and make things and everybody was happy because all the people could see him.

But when the little God grow up, he got so big that nobody could see him and all the people tuk the pritty things and say ‘This is mine’. Of corse, they wasnt but that is what they said and then they got greedy and greedy and then start to hit each other and throw stomes and make boms. Because the little GOD grow up and got so big that they culdn’t see him and they neerly forgot him.

So a lot of people make a statoor of GOD small enogh to see and then another lot of people make another statoor of GOD and then they fite to see what statoor is best. And they make boms and guns and a lot of peple is hurt and it is very silly because Mister God is much bigger than statoors.

Well, Mister God luvs peple very much, so he says ‘I know what, people cant see me because I am too big, so I will send my little baby boy who is the rite sise’. So he send his little baby boy who is called Jether to a lady called Mary to luk arfter and Mister God say ‘That is all rite now, Jether is just the rite sise’. And you would think that was the end, would not you? Arfter all the trubble Mister God tuk, woodnt you? But it wasn’t, Oh no!

Anna very rarely used the name Jesus; she preferred the name Jether, which she found in the Concordance. This is the next name in the list of proper names in the Concordance. Its meaning is ‘He that excels or remains; or that examines, searches: or a line or string.’

It was the idea of ‘line or string’ that so attracted Anna. We had often spent hours lying on the deck of a deep water sailing vessel, listening to Niels’s explanation of what all the ropes and gear were for. The fact that every rope had a place and a purpose, and that Englishmen, Frenchmen and Germans, every nationality, understood where the rope for a certain sail was to be found, was sufficient for Anna to rename Jesus as Jether. Kurt, a German sailor, told Anna she was ‘wider sinn’, that is to say, ‘against the sense’.

When Jether was a man, he started to tell all the peple about Mister God, but a lot of peple didnt want to here because first Mister God was too big and then he was too little and peple are eccasperating. They dont know what they want. And Jether keep on telling the people ‘You have got to becum little Or you wont know’. And they want to be big alredy, And you cant, becase Fansy being born full sise! Then a lot of people cort Jether and put nales in him and stuck him on a tree and stuck sords in him and then he was ded. All because he wasnt big enogh. Some of the people nearly know him, but not qite and like the statoors of Mister God they was rong. So they had another fite and this time a . worse fite called a war and this time with tank and aroplane and peple keep on fiteing because they dont know what sise they are and they are silly, becase Mister God and Jether and Vrach and all the angels are so luving. So I will tell you sum story about them.

Vrach was Anna’s own spelling of the Hebrew word Ruach, meaning spirit or breath, which was used in the Old Testament but linked with the Holy Spirit of the New Testament. I was surprised these words – Vrach, Jether – were so important to her, but felt that she had to find her way, in her own words, in her relationship with Mister God.

If you dont know what Mister God and Jether and Vrach look like I will tell you. Now I will tell you about Mister God first. He dont luk like me and you. He has not go no arms and legs and no face and no body like me and you so you will know he luk diffrent but he luk very luvley all the sam.

If you go for a walk you see a lot of things and you think a lot of things in yore hed. Well one of the things you think of is going home. So then you think it is a long way away and all the thinks is insid you and yore home is outsid you. So when you go home, all you think cum out of you and yor home go insid you, you see. Wen I am not with Mummy I have a lot of think in my hed, I think I wish I culd hold Mummy hand and I wish I culd kiss Mummy and I wish I culd tuch Mummy, but it all stay in my hed. But when I go home, it all come out of my hed, becase I do it. And when I do, Mummy go insid me and I go insid Mummy. If I dont go insid Mummy, how can I luk at me because I luk the wrong way. So when I luv Mummy then I go insid her and luk out out of her eye and see me and see how much Mummy luv me and this is very nice and thriling.

If someone luv you they let you cum insid. But if they dont luv you, they dont. Well Mister GOD is like that to. He let you com insid and see yourself, but you got to let MISTER GOD cum in too, becase he want to luk out to see himself. You see, MISTER GOD dont like no reflekshun and if he dont luk out of peples eye, how do he know what peple think of him? and this is the only way MISTER GOD can see himself. If you luk in a luking glas and see yor face reflekshun and then wink yore rite eye, the reflekshun wink the othre one, but if you see your reflekshun wink its rite eye then you know it is not a reflekshun, but you.