In the Great Annals of the Welfare Womb of the North, it is told that after much hard work and progress, the Great Father created the womb out of his sweat that soaked the earth. Thereafter, the Great Mother unconditionally embraced and nursed all of the womb’s great children, giving them endless opportunities for growth and prosperity—until they, after a long, happy, and productive lifetime, travelled to the Great Heavenly Womb. So when the Great Father suddenly died and the great unity between him and the Great Mother thus was broken, all the children of the womb were left with a numb feeling of emptiness, as a crucial part of themselves had passed away. However, the Great Father’s greatest son, known as the Great Dane, felt nothing more than a profound indifference, since the father–son connection between them had long been missing. This sent the Great Dane on a journey through his mental landscape in search of the remembrance of his father.
The Great Father’s Last Thoughts
In the middle of the night, the Great Dane woke up next to his favourite mistress, haunted by a feeling that something terrible had happened. It was less than a month since he had returned to the Welfare Womb of the North after his great adventures in the outside world. Yet he had not become accustomed to the comfortable and secure lifestyle that characterised the womb. He often felt an insidious anxiety reaching out for him.
His first impulse was to reconnect the neurotransmitter that the Great Mother of the Womb had implanted in his head as an infant to ensure that he behaved and always had her in his thoughts. As a standard safety procedure to prevent mental overload, he first checked his thought buffer while keeping the main system on standby. There was a loud hissing as the neurotransmitter synchronised with his nervous system. Then the interference was displaced to the background, and pieces of information began interrelating into well-known patterns of thought, shaping a meaningful mental landscape.
“What’s wrong with you? Show some responsibility. Think of Mother.” It was a thought from his little, but still great, sister. He sensed that she had directed the thought to him two hours ago, around midnight.
There seemed to be seven thoughts stored in his buffer. However, some of them were already in a fatal state of disintegration, probably caused by the strong emotional turbulence he sensed in the whole system of the womb. Or was it merely himself he sensed? Since birth, he had constantly been picking up various emotional impulses from the womb. He found it somehow difficult to separate them from how he felt himself, which put him in a state of permanent alert, as if he were constantly under emotional attack.
“Don’t be so selfish,” his sister thought furiously. “Mother needs you. Reconnect with her at once or …”
He experienced a darkening of his mental landscape. In an attempt to shake off the growing feeling of bad conscience, he quickly went on to the next thought.
“I hate when my thoughts end in someone’s buffer,” his sister snarled. Then she disconnected.
“Please, come home. It’s Father … he …” It was the Great Mother of the Womb. Her thought became an incomprehensible whisper. Something tore his stomach open. The pain almost caused him to lose consciousness. He looked terrified down at his stomach, expecting to see his guts dangling out. There was, however, nothing unusual to see. His stomach was fine. The pain disappeared.
Maybe his neurotransmitter was malfunctioning. It had done so repeatedly since his mental breakdown earlier this year, when he tried to free himself from the womb by travelling in the outside world. Somehow it made his imagination run wild, as if he had lost all perspective and reason, and reality was now dissolving. He should remember to have the womb’s engineers look at it. Until then, he would have to extend his daily meditation and physical exercise in an attempt to stabilise his mental landscape.
On his way to the bathroom to pour some cold water on his face, the stabbing feeling in his stomach suddenly came back. It filled his mental landscape with dark clouds pouring down blood-coloured rain. Someone inside his head screamed violently:
“Remember … you must … remember … deep inside the womb … follow the … remember to follow my … I’m waiting there to …”
A computer-generated female voice announced that the connection had been terminated due to a system overload categorised as Extreme Emergency Level Five.
Aunty Is Here
After he had taken the main neurotransmitter system off standby, he only once thought about the Great Mother of the Womb—then he felt her omnipresence. The familiar pattern of her thoughts repressed all other thoughts inside him.
“The Great Father has died. Just after we had our evening coffee and cake,” she thought, trying to sound calm. He had some difficulty determining her true state of mind. Her thoughts fluctuated under the pressure of what he guessed was a furious struggle between her need for control and the oppressed feelings of the womb. “I tried to send his last thoughts to you, but I couldn’t get through. Something must have happened with the entire system of the womb when the Great Father passed away. It was a terrible shock for me. I wanted you to know straight away, so you could come …” she hesitated. “You have so many troubles of your own, I know … I … I didn’t want to disturb you … but I was so afraid. No thoughts of yours were to be found anywhere. I thought I also had lost you.”
A series of thoughts erupted in his mind: flashes of a boy smiling proudly while standing on his father’s feet, his father walking around the living room with him; the same boy yelling furiously when his father one wonderful summer day brought him the wrong ice cream; and the boy standing in a dune surrounded by Lyme grass, only wearing home-crocheted underpants, crying because he had diarrhoea. A brown watery substance seeped out through the folds of the pants and down his legs. Next to him, his father was about to throw up. The boy sitting on the living room floor in joyful silence, watching his father resting in his armchair while he smoked a pipe of tobacco and drank a glass of whisky. Then the boy was a teenager, lying in bed under the duvet, motionless, his face clenched with worry, his mother crying and his father shouting that he had to pull himself together and get on with his life. The boy was himself, but the thoughts were his mother’s. He was seeing himself with her eyes.
“Fortunately, Aunty could come,” the Great Mother continued. “She didn’t want me to be alone in the Womb’s Inner Sanctuary where the Great Father had just had his death struggle. What I would have done without Aunty, I don’t know. When she arrived, the pixies of the Great Heavenly Womb had already been there and taken the Great Father to prepare him for his journey to the Great Heavenly Womb. You know how strict the rules are about such things, even for a great being such as the Great Father.”
The exchange of thoughts with her son stabilised her pattern of thoughts. He knew that she both logically and emotionally was trying to reorganise her mental landscape so she could find some consoling meaning in the experience that had shaken her so profoundly.
“The strange thing is that just the other day, while the Great Father pruned the old apple trees, he suddenly came in and said that he didn’t wish to end his days slowly being eaten away by age and sickness. A quick end was what he wanted. He must have known something was catching up with him.”
For a moment, the Great Mother’s omnipresence dissolved into a feeling of hopelessness. It left inside him a gap that threatened to swallow him up. Then she was back, filling him up with repressed feelings. His body trembled, and he was on the verge of crying.
“And that’s what he got,” she thought anxiously. “His struggle—it ended so quickly. I tried, I really tried to help him …” When she continued, her thoughts were short and hectic. “We had just finished our usual evening coffee and cake. Then suddenly he burst out with a terrible cry. Yelled to me that there was something wrong with the cake while pressing his hands to his stomach. Before I could send him any thoughts of relief, he collapsed in his armchair. I had never seen him like this. With his mouth wide open in terror, as if he had taken on all the pain of the womb—all by himself. Then he was gone. But how could he find peace when his mouth still was wide open? Screaming, now silently with eternal pain. I tried to close it, but I couldn’t. The collective pain of the womb should be visible to us all. That, I believe, was his last thought.”
She paused to pull her thoughts together.
“The pixies from the Heavenly Womb said I couldn’t have saved him. His head artery had ruptured within seconds, and all the blood gathered in his stomach. The stomach tells the truth. Always. What a mess it all is. What a mess. What would I have done if it hadn’t been for Aunty? She made me some supper. Although I told her I couldn’t eat anything, she wouldn’t listen and made it anyway. She is so stubborn. So kind. She also explained in plain words the meaning of what the pixies from the Heavenly Womb had told me. She knows so much about everything. You remember, Aunty once was a pixie herself, taking care of the sick and dying in the womb, before the accident in the Great Hall of Rolling Balls …”
“Mother, I can take a cab and come home at once.”
“No, no, try to get some sleep and then come tomorrow when it suits you. Aunty is here. Everything will be fine.”
The Frozen Projection
They made a halt outside the Great Mortuary of the Womb so the Great Mother could catch her breath. On their short walk from the car, she repeatedly rubbed her legs and the lower parts of her back, thinking: “Oh, my dear, don’t worry, everything will be just fine.”
Even though the Great Father had passed away almost a week ago, the Great Dane sensed that he continued to struggle for the future of the womb inside the Great Mother, making her mental landscape an ongoing battlefield that exhausted her body.
With an uneasy expression, he looked at Aunty, hoping she sensed the same and knew how to comfort the Great Mother.
“I’m not dying. I can walk by myself,” the Great Mother thought before any of them could react. Then she pushed them away and opened the door.
In silence, he followed Aunty and the Great Mother into the mortuary. The cold air inside made him shiver. When they entered the central room, all his thoughts had frozen to the ground of his mental landscape, making it impossible for him to create any coherent pattern of thought. In front of them, the Great Father lay outstretched on a table. Only his face and hands were visible; the rest of his body was covered with a white sheet of cloth.
“The pixies have made a great effort to prepare the Great Father for his journey to the Great Heavenly Womb,” thought Aunty with great sensibility. “For most children of the womb, death is not an easy sight, even though it is what makes us all truly equal. Therefore, consider carefully which thoughts you want to accompany the Great Father on his journey to the Great Heavenly Womb. It will help secure the eternal connection between heaven and earth for all of us.”
For a while, they stood around the Great Father, sharing thoughts about how they wished he should be transcended and remembered.
“I’m so glad that they managed to close his mouth,” thought the Great Mother in relief. “It seemed wrong that he alone should carry all the pain and burdens of the womb. Look how peaceful he is. This is how I would like to remember him leaving for the Great Heavenly Womb.”
The Great Dane tried to summon a projection of the Great Father that would live up to their mutual expectations, but all efforts seemed to be in vain. He could not stop wondering if there was something wrong with him. Ever since the Great Father died, his mental landscape had been barren and desolate, as all its inhabitants emigrated to another, more fertile land.
The Great Mother sighed.
“We have been here long enough. Our thoughts will not bring him back, and my legs are telling me that they need to rest.”
Aunty squeezed the Great Mother’s arm.
“I have some cake at home, and can soon have coffee on the table.”
“Oh, Aunty,” the Great Mother smiled. “I don’t know what I would do without you.”
As they began to walk out of the room, an impulse made the Great Dane touch one of the Great Father’s hands. It was cold as ice. All warmth had left it. An intrusive feeling of anger overwhelmed him with such violence that his frozen thoughts shattered into an infinity of crystals that covered his mental landscape in a white blanket of snow. A young boy came skiing out of a dark forest and stopped at the foot of a snow-covered hill. He was exhausted, his hands cold and numb. In what felt like an eternity, he had been travelling through the mental landscape in search of his father. Now more than ever, the boy wished his father would rub his hands to give them warmth, as he so often had done in the past when they were out skiing. He had, however, long ago lost track of him. All memories of his father seemed to be hidden below the snow.
“Don’t worry. It is quite natural to experience a frozen projection when someone dies,” thought Aunty with a sincere look that made him turn away, afraid that she would discover his lack of feelings towards the Great Father. “To be alone with the deceased can sometimes help you to find a way into the projection. We will wait for you outside.”
The Great Dane could not remember when he had last been alone with the Great Father—just the two of them, the Great Father and his great son. Probably not since he had been a child and the Great Father took him deep into the nature of the womb, where nobody could disturb their father–son connection.
While looking at the lifeless body of the Great Father, he felt that he was standing in front of a total stranger. There was an absence of something that he could not quite comprehend. It gave him the urge to leave. To pay his last respects, he lowered his face down to the Great Father’s forehead and kissed it.
Further ahead, the young boy saw an armchair standing in the snow. It was his father’s armchair, where he used to sit and smoke a pipe of tobacco and drink a glass of whisky. With his last bit of strength, the boy reached the armchair and sat down. This was where his father had felt most comfortable at home. Now it just stood there, abandoned in the snow. Never had the young boy felt so alone in the world as he did at this moment. He pressed his face into the back of the armchair and began to cry. As his tears wet the soft cover of the chair, a somehow familiar smell rose, and he felt the presence of his father.
The young boy smiled. In front of him, his father’s tracks had reappeared in the snow, leading away from the armchair and up the hill. It filled him with hope and renewed strength. Maybe his father was waiting for him on the other side. As he began climbing the hill, he heard a rumbling sound coming from far above, and the ground began to shake. He froze in terror. A great avalanche of repressed feelings appeared at the top of the slope. It came rapidly down the hill, swallowing the tracks of his father. He knew that the connection to his father once again was lost.
Of the Womb, Thou Art Come …
The church was as overdecorated with bouquets of flowers as it was overcrowded with friends and relatives, many of whom the Great Dane had never seen before. That the Great Father had known so many people, he would not have imagined. Before the funeral service, many of these strangers came up to him to give their condolences. It made him feel awkward because they all seemed to have been a part of the Great Father’s life of which he, as his Great Father’s great son, was not aware.
An elderly, broad-shouldered pixie, with hands as strong as if they were welded in iron, presented himself as the Great Father’s old babysitter. He thought that the Great Father had been a great and loving man who had meant something great not only to him but to the entire community of pixies in the womb, helping them to become more than just strange inhabitants of people’s imagination. Then the Great Father’s old babysitter took a step closer and thought:
“Before the Welfare Womb, I remember that your father always loved to …”
The old babysitter tried to continue his thought, but could not hold his tears back. He cried silently as he walked away to make room for the many others who wanted to give their condolences. There came a woman with her face withered in sorrow, who thought that the Great Father each year, on her birthday, wrote her a cheerful poem.
“And who,” she thought, shaking her head resignedly, “should now lift the hearts and spirits of the womb in troubled times?”
All of those who approached him expressed the same heartfelt emotions: that the Great Father had been a great and loving man, a great friend and companion, a great listener—someone who had left an indelible impression on them. All this utterly surprised the Great Dane. He remembered the Great Father as being a very reserved person who seldom expressed feelings. How often had he experienced the Great Father become quiet or go outside to smoke a pipe of tobacco when someone began to talk about their feelings? Likewise, when he wanted to hug the Great Father, the Great Father would hold up a hand between them so their bodies never met. And when he tried to share his dreams and desires with the Great Father, the Great Father would ignore him or begin to tell the same old trivial stories about nature and old times in the womb. As if a wall of opposition always existed between them, so they were unable to reach out to each other and have a shared and equal experience. Thinking about it made his stomach hurt.
The Great Dane did not remember much about the funeral service itself. Throughout the service, he was absorbed in thought, following the young boy through his mental landscape, searching for something indeterminable that could lead him closer to his father. However, when the pixie pastor solemnly thought that only someone with a misguided mind could not unreservedly have loved and respected the Great Father of the Womb, the young boy bent his head in shame and disappeared quickly back into the dark forest.
To the Womb, Thou Shalt Be …
After the funeral service, there was, true to tradition, coffee and cake for all the attendees in the Great Remembrance Hall of the Womb. In this marvellous hall, they all shared memories of the Great Father. The Great Mother’s famous sugar cake, known as the Great Placenta, helped them to excrete all bad memories and feelings about the Great Father, so only the good and healthy ones remained. Later, while the Great Dane was doing the Round of Thankfulness to show his appreciation to all the attendees, a powerful wave of thoughts seized him, making his body shiver.
“You, the Great Father’s greatest son—now you are the Great Head of the Womb.”
When the Great Dane followed the wave of thoughts back to its source, the young boy was met by a pair of black, piercing eyes hovering high above his mental landscape.
“The responsibility of holding the womb together … The responsibility of making the womb prosper … You, the Great Father’s greatest son, have inherited the responsibility for all the children of the womb.”
The wave of thoughts suddenly changed its direction. A feeling of great anxiety seized him. His mental landscape began spiralling out of control, pulling the young boy upwards from its surface and straight towards the piercing eyes. Screaming with despair, the young boy tumbled into the most horrible place in his mind: the Home of All Expectations. From here, he knew that there was no way out.
Everyone in the Great Remembrance Hall seemed to have turned their attention towards him. They all wanted to know what would be his first great commitment as the Great Head of the Womb. The black, piercing eyes hypnotised them all, so they now expected him to follow in the Great Father’s footsteps to secure their safe and prosperous lives. But how could he, when he did not even know what he wanted for himself?
Something broke the connection to the piercing pair of eyes, and the boy was thrown back into the forest. Next to the Great Dane, Aunty gently held his arm.
“Don’t be afraid. We are all filled with doubt about ourselves, since we are ruled by our cravings for indifferent things.” She gripped his arm harder, as if she were afraid of losing him. “You are always welcome to coffee and cake in my home. If you need some greater insight and advice about your future role as the Great Head of the Womb, send me a thought. I can feel that the womb is preparing something very special for you …”
A strong animal odour captured the Great Dane’s attention, interrupting the thoughts by which Aunty tried to change his state of mind.
“I need to talk with you,” said the Keeper of the Womb in a sharp voice that pierced all the thoughts surrounding them to the walls of the Great Remembrance Hall. The Keeper of the Womb was an old cousin of his, and he despised any forms of communication through thoughts. He believed that people too easily were led astray by their thoughts, preventing them from being truly present.
“When the Great Father died, I was out wandering in the nature of the womb. Suddenly the forest and meadows went silent, and the waters became calm, as if nature stopped breathing and turned inward in sorrow. Then I heard the Great Father’s voice. It came not from a single point but from everywhere, as he was speaking through nature itself. The Great Father told me about all the great things you have done and how you had chosen to live differently than most other people in the womb. ‘Tell my great son how proud I am of him,’ he said to me. ‘Remember to tell him.’ That I promised.”
The Keeper of the Womb paused for a moment, then he stroked his great beard and said:
“I just got a new boat. Let’s go fishing, have some beers, and you can tell me more about your plans for the womb. Taking over after the Great Father is a great responsibility, but the signs nature has shown me are promising. You resemble the Great Father of the Womb.”
After the Keeper of the Womb had left him, he tried to distance himself from all the thoughts of expectation which continued to fill the Great Remembrance Hall. Why had the Great Father himself never mentioned that he was proud of him? Why should he hear the Great Father’s thoughts through someone else? Why had there been this great distance between them, so he never felt good enough to him? It was time that he had a serious talk with the Great Father—a talk just between the two of them.
Of the Womb, Thou Shalt Rise Again …
It was a sunny day when the Great Dane entered the Dead End of the Womb to visit the Great Father’s grave. He brought the Great Father’s favourite whisky and tobacco, and his oldest pipe. The Great Dane’s dearest memory of the Great Father was of him smoking one of his pipes. He loved the smell of the Great Father’s tobacco more than anything else in the womb: a fragrance of floral essences and wild herbs. Seeing the Great Father sitting calmly with a glass of whisky and his pipe in his armchair, he would sneak close enough to be shrouded by this familiar atmosphere that he associated with the Great Father. Today he had also brought a pack of liquorice pipes. He saw it as a statement, telling the Great Father that he, his great son, also had a passion of his own, and that being together should be on equal terms.
So he sat down at the Great Father’s grave, poured two glasses of whisky, lit the Great Father’s pipe, and placed it on top of the headstone. Then he synchronised his neurotransmitter to the Great Father’s preferred pattern of thoughts and began sucking on one of his liquorice pipes like an excited child waiting for something of great importance to happen.
However, not much happened. After half a bottle of whisky and several liquorice pipes, he began to feel dazed and rather sick. The great union between father and son that he had yearned for so long failed to appear. The Great Father was as restrained about his inner thoughts and feelings in death as he had been when he was alive. It was as if the Great Father was hiding his true self in a distant place where he could not reach him.
isappointed, the Great Dane stared with great anger at the headstone. The only sign left of the Great Father in this world was a plain and simple stone with the Great Father’s name, day of birth, and day of death—nothing that would stir up people’s feelings or attract too much attention. It gave him a heartfelt feeling of indifference. Maybe they both would be better off if he just walked away and let the Great Father rest in peace. Wasn’t that what the Great Father had been striving for all his life?
“Don’t think such harsh thoughts about your father,” a voice roared furiously from deep below the grave. “There’s so much you don’t know about him. As always, you only think of yourself.”
The voice resonated with such intensity that the neurotransmitter in his head overloaded and caused his pattern of thought to implode. Memories, fantasies, and desires blurred and intermingled together in an ongoing stream, eating their way through his mental landscape. From somewhere, the young boy heard heavy footsteps approaching. He began running in the snow, in pursuit of himself. A heavy wind peeled off the boy’s face and carried it away. For the birds in the sky, he would now be easy prey. His only chance to survive was to find a safe place to hide. While climbing up the hill, his mother’s stomach expanded exponentially until her womb burst with a terrible outcry, and his little sister tumbled down towards him, laughing with joy at being alive, while she slowly got strangled in her umbilical cord. Then everything began to dissolve into a dark mist, and he knew that he finally was about to lose his grip on reality. If only the Great Father were here. He would have known what to do. But he was on his own.
His hands were shaking. He did not deserve to feel like this. The bottle of whisky touched his lips. He wanted to be happy and do great things. A feeling of warmth flowed through him. It came, however, not from within. In amazement, he looked at the Great Father’s grave. The headstone was glowing with pure and almost painful light. Another voice, soft and tender, carried with it the familiar smell of the Great Father’s tobacco.
“Your Great Father had a fondness for the untamed nature in the womb. The wildflowers that grow in the roadside ditches and the untrodden paths, the meadows with their untouched nature, and the contorted trees standing alone on the windblown fields. Many people have tried to gain access to your Great Father’s sacred land to exploit it, but he refused them all. There should be, he believed, a sanctuary for all living beings where they could find peace from the threatening and ever-changing world. It was here your Great Father felt at home and truly lived.”
The light from the headstone began to fade, and the last smoke from the Great Father’s pipe spiralled upward toward the sky with a hissing:
“Ssssso longggg ssssssssson …”
Thereafter, it was as if the world around him came to a halt. Even the Dead End’s caretaker stopped mowing the lawn nearby.
Exhausted, the Great Dane closed his eyes. Wonderful illuminated clouds of smoke floated over his frozen and snow-covered mental landscape, bringing it back to life in all its splendour. The young boy held his father’s hand as they wandered through blooming meadows, intoxicating him with the scent of his father’s tobacco. Slowly, his mental landscape once again settled down. Somehow he felt that everything had changed, even though he did not know what to make of it.
When he opened his eyes, he saw that something had been engraved on the headstone: a tree standing alone on an ancient burial mound, while a flock of birds flew above it towards a yet unknown horizon, and beneath, a pair of wildflowers grew undisturbed. He wondered if this could be the true picture of the Great Father’s sacred world. Was it a message to him from the Great Father’s Great Spirit before it travelled to the Great Heavenly Womb?
In deep thought, the Great Dane tried to embrace the meaning of the engraving. Then he poured the rest of the whisky onto the grave and placed his last liquorice pipe on top of the headstone.
The young boy stood next to his father on the top of the hill, overlooking the mental landscape, while the Great Dane calmly left the Dead End of the Womb.
© sa@enuk.dk – Steen Andersen
Illustration by Wild Sally