by Sierra Elizabeth Flach
When I was 13 I read a story by Mark Twain called "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven". It' was small and falling apart. I got it at a church dime sale. Fittingly, it was about a man's ascension to heaven—a long cosmic trip. On his way, he grows tired of the seemingly endless ride across the astral plain and decides to race a comet—just for fun. He loses and is showered in ethereal stardust. Unfortunately, this side trip eventually makes him late to his arrival to heaven. When he arrives, no one is there to greet him. He had missed his homecoming.
When he finally shakes off the disappointment of missing his grand entrance, Captain Stormfield begins to find things up in heaven different than he imagined. Everyone is not equal. He finds out that "prophets hold over the patriarchs" and "Adam himself has to walk behind Shakespeare". The captain can't understand the order of things.
He asks confused, "Was Shakespeare a prophet?"
Shouldn't the answer be obvious? Prophets speak of the future, they tell of a reality not yet known. Poets and Playwrights invoke and incant. They say all at once, across the spectrum of time, "Watch me now. Watch me wave my hand over this paper and make something appear."
They say, "Abracadabra."
+
Now this word, "Abracadabra" is an invocation. Invocation is word meaning a "petition (to God or a god) for aid or comfort; invocation, prayer;" or "a summoning of evil spirits,"
Originally from Latin invocationem, a noun of action from past participle stem of invocare"to call upon, invoke, appeal to".
You've seen invocations before. Homer begins the Iliad, calling on the "goddess" and the Odyssey with "Muse" while Virgil calls upon "Fate". They invokethem, dropping them in the beginning of the tale along with everything that they loftily imply. This word is both good and evil. Wreaking havoc as well as creating new life. There was dark and there was light—evening and morning on the first day.
Older than even the word "invocation" is a phrase we've all heard but most don't understand: "abracadabra".
Mentioned in the 3rdCentury in a book of medicine called the Liber Medicinalis, the phrase used to be written upside down and worn on the body as an amulet. It was thought to invoke good spirits and ward off disease.
The word itself is an enigma.
After all this time, still the linguists, etymologists, historians—no one can conclude what it means. The most common understanding is that it came from the Aramaic phrase "Avrah KeDabra" (or something similar) which means "I will create as I talk" taken on by magicians to mean "the word will create reality".
The words will create reality.
This is the heart of incantation/invocation. This is the secret to immortality.
+
Later, the angel showing the captain around heaven replies, "Of course [Shakespeare] was; and so was Homer, and heaps more. But Shakespeare and the rest have to walk behind a common tailor from Tennessee, by the name of Billings...Billings and Buddha walk together, side by side, right behind a crowd from planets not in our astronomy; next come a dozen or two from Jupiter and other world...then there is a long string, and after them, away down toward the bottom, come Shakespeare and Homer, and a shoemaker named Marais, from the back settlements of France."
The captain replies to all this, "But why did they throw off on Shakespeare, that way, and put him away down there below those shoe-makers and horse-doctors and knife-grinders - a lot of people nobody ever heard of?"
The angel replies (stay with me here, I'm getting to something):
"That is theheavenly justiceof it - they warn't rewarded according to their deserts, on earth, but here they get their rightful rank.
That tailor Billings, from Tennessee, wrote poetry that Homer and Shakespeare couldn't begin to come up to; but nobody would print it, nobody read it but his neighbors, an ignorant lot, and they laughed at it. Whenever the village had a drunken frolic and a dance, they would drag him in and crown him with cabbage leaves, and pretend to bow down to him; and one night when he was sick and nearly starved to death, they had him out and crowned him, and then they rode him on a rail about the village, and everybody followed along, beating tin pans and yelling. Well, he died before morning.
He wasn't ever expecting to go to heaven, much less that there was going to be any fuss made over him, so I reckon he was a good deal surprised when the reception broke on him."
Recap:
Heavenly justice. Rightful rank.
Billings, from Tennessee, wrote poetry that Homer and Shakespeare couldn't begin to come up to.
But nobody would read it. Nobody read it but his neighbors...and they laughed at it.
They crowned him with cabbage leaves.
I read this story when I was 13, and after I could never get the thought out of my head that Billings from Tennessee was the greatest poet who ever lived but no one ever knew it. Even now, every time I hear about Homer or Virgil or Shakespeare my mind pricks me "what about Billings"?
I get all blurry eyes and angry thinking about how his creations were never real because they were never spoken—at least in earnest. No one was ever truly listening. Twain is creating reality with his words. And showing how, on earth, words create reality. But then I recall that the story is fiction.
Billings was not real. But is he just as real as Homer was? Maybe just as real as Achilles or Aeneis.
What do we really know about these men?
+
There are three trailer parks in the small country town that I grew up in. Willow Brook, Stone's Mobile Manor, and Pine Haven. Two of them are right across from each other on the 9W in Upstate, NY and I used to pass by them on my way to work at the laundromat.
I couldn't shake the feeling that I had seen Billings before somewhere around there. She was my cashier at Shop n' Save, he was the guy with a cigarette who pumped my gas in the morning, he was the young garbage man I glimpsed at 6am, she was folding shirts under fluorescent mall lights, he was in the laundromat trying to get warm—watching the clothes spin. Yeah, I think he writing an epic poem in iambic pentameter up in his head somewhere but he was just too afraid to tell me.
Achilles, Odysseus, Aeneis—they were all just people—breathing the same air. I don't really know if they've done anything more qualitative or more triumphant than any foster parent or factory worker I've come across. They are only remembered because great poets penned their names. Homer and Virgil are the gods that truly gave these characters their immortality. Their words became reality.
"Abracadabra" said Homer. And we all saw that it was good.
+
Maybe if you could go back we might be surprised to find that Achilles worked at Shop n Save before Homer, a single mother, wrote "Rage — Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son."
And she also wrote the lines about Odysseus "Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns" to describe how she thought her son must feel still living with her in the trailer park.
And their neighbor Virgil, an old veteran who spent most of his life working at the plant. He regrets his wasted youth and laments: "Wars and a man I sing—an exile driven on by Fate".
They were created by words. Those words became reality. Â Thanks to Homer and Virgil and Twain. And it was all equally sad and beautiful. Balancing the scales of light and dark.
And now I'm creating here. Things spring to life as I type with everything bursting forth according to its kind.
Taking from the old stories and creating something new.
Each of these tales picked up what people had misplaced. These mages saw the potential for magic in the excess of the everyday, the meaninglessness of mundane life. They took them up off the ground into their hands and whispered an incantation over them. And made the characters disappear and reappear as demigods. Creating as they spoke.
+
What could it all mean? Homer and Billings, Aeneis and the man in the laundromat, Twain and I. We are all no one. And would remain so without words and invocations. There could be mind-bending poets out there that we'll never know. Beauty we'll never see. I can't sleep at night knowing this. Knowing of Billings. And creation is really recreation on top of recreation on top of recreation and sometimes fantasy. Knowing all this how can I deny that all things real and unreal exist but need to be written into existence, with "abracadabra".
And Twain explained: "blessed are those poets that no one remembers. The one's in the gutter, crowned with cabbage leaves for theirs is the kingdom of god."