The Virtual Life of Fizzy Oceans (11 page)

“When my brother Orion was appointed secretary to the territorial governor of Nevada, I headed west with him. We traveled for more than two weeks by stagecoach across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains. These experiences became the basis for my book,
Roughing It
, and later for
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calavares County.
My journey ended in the silver mining town of Virginia City, where I became a miner for a time. When that endeavor thankfully failed, I found work at the Virginia City newspaper, which was where I first used the
nom de plume
Mark Twain.

“In 1867, I embarked on a steamship trip to Mediterranean Europe. It was on that trip that I met Charles Langdon, who showed me a photograph of his sister Olivia. Well, I fell in love with Olivia at first sight. A year later we met, and shortly after we became engaged. We married in Elmira, New York.

“Olivia came from a wealthy but liberal family—nothing like your liberals today—and through them I met abolitionists, socialists, and ‘principled atheists’, activists for women’s rights and social equality. We lived our first years in Buffalo, but we relocated to Hartford, Connecticut in 1871. In 1873, I began the building of the house where we raised our three daughters, and where we celebrated thirty-four years of marital bliss.

“I outlived Olivia and two of my daughters, Susy and Jean. In later life I grew lonely and depressed, and I longed for the grave. I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835, and I quite expected to go out with it as well. The Almighty had said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.’ And I died of heart failure on April 10, 1910, in Redding, Connecticut.”

Just as Mr. Clemens finishes the summary of his life, an emulation interrupts the lecture as she transfers, somewhat ostentatiously, into the room. The speaker turns his attention toward her, as do many in the audience. The emulation, blond and beautiful and waiting for recognition, stands momentarily in the limelight. “My God! It’s Paris Hilton!” someone exclaims a bit breathlessly.

“Good evening,” Mr. Clemens addresses her. “We’re very happy you could join us tonight.”

Paris’s EM looks round the room in confusion. “Thanks,” she says, “but where the fuck am I?”

“You’re at the Grand Opening celebration for Open Books in Virtual Life, and you’ve just interrupted Mark Twain’s first lecture in almost a hundred years,” says Crystal, a bit irritated by the intrusion.

“Mark Twain? How lame!” says Paris.

“I beg your pardon!” says Crystal.

“What sort of place is this, anyway?” asks Paris.

“Open Books is a publisher of classic literature,” says Crystal. “It is also a book store.”

“A book store, huh?” says Paris. “I wrote a book. Do you sell my book here?” she asks.

“What is your book about?” Crystal inquires, quite tolerantly.

“It’s about
me
, of course,” Paris humphs.

“Open Books is not that kind of book store,” Crystal explains.

Paris clicks her tongue and rolls her eyes. “I am
so
out of here!” she says.

And with that the emulation transfers away from Lit-A-Rama altogether. With her departure, attention is once again focused on Samuel Langhorne Clemens.

“Tell us about Tom Sawyer!” calls one of the guests in the audience.

“And Huckleberry Finn!” calls another.

Mr. Clemens smiles and resumes his lecture. “Of course
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
drew on my boyhood experiences in Hannibal. In fact, Tom Sawyer is me as a boy, more or less, with traces of my schoolmates John Briggs and Will Bowen. Huck Finn, who plays a supporting role in
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
is based on my boyhood friend Tom Blankenship.

“The truth about Huck Finn,” Twain relates, “is that it was the most difficult book I ever wrote—that is, it gave me the most trouble. During the summer of 1876, I wrote over four hundred manuscript pages of
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
, but I did not complete the book until seven years later.”

“That’s because you lost your nerve,” the emulation of Ernest Hemingway shouts out.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” says Mark Twain a bit indignantly.

“If you read it,” explains Hemingway, “you have to stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That’s the real end. The rest is just cheating.”

“A little respect for Mr. Clemens,” says the emulation of James A. Michener. “After all, the
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
is commonly accepted as the ‘Great American Novel,’ an opinion with which I wholly concur!”

“The main premise behind
Huckleberry Finn
is a young boy’s belief in the right thing to do even though the rest of society believes it is wrong,” Twain explains.

From the audience comes another question: “Mr. Clemens, in your time you became something of a political radical. What comment might you make about the politics of the present time?”

“Some of my critics said that my cynicism toward politics, and specifically the writing of
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
, marked the beginning of the end for me as a serious writer.” Clemens turns up his palms and gazes toward the heavens. “What is one to say concerning the wisdom of the critic? And who am I to disagree? I know one thing for certain, turning my pen toward the political spectrum of events all but financially bankrupted me. The
Tragedy of Puddinhead Wilson
was always misconstrued.

“When I finished Carlyle’s
French Revolution
in 1871, I was a Girondin; every time I have read it since, I have read it differently—being influenced and changed, little by little, by life and environment...and now I lay the book down once more, and recognize that I am a Sansculotte! And not a pale, characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat!

“What I know of today’s politics would hardly qualify me as an expert, but my cursory impression is that fast and easy money rules the game. What else is new, my friends? Yet, it seems that today’s politicians have raised greed to an art form, and they have successfully perfected every imaginable technique of extracting every last cent from the vulnerable to deposit it in the accounts of the well-to-do. Again, what else is new, my friends?

“That said, I too was once a red hot imperialist. During the Philippine-American War, I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific. Why not spread its wings over the Philippines, I asked myself? I said to myself: Here are a people who have suffered for three centuries. We can make them as free as ourselves, give them a government and country of their own, put a miniature of the American Constitution afloat in the Pacific, start a new republic to take its place among the free nations of the world (today that is called nation building, I’m told). It seemed to me a great task to which we had addressed ourselves. But I have thought some more since then, and I have read carefully the treaty of Paris (which ended the Spanish-American War), and I have seen that we never intended to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We went there to conquer, not to redeem. It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am now an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land!

“To demonstrate my conviction, I was twice the vice president of the American Anti-Imperialism League.”

“Mr. Clemens, would you call yourself a pacifist or a revolutionary?” comes an impromptu question from the audience.

“I am said to be a revolutionist in my sympathies, by birth, by breeding and by principle. I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolt.”

At this point in the presentation, Crystal Marbella intervenes to say, “As we are nearly out of time, Mr. Clemens, would you please tell us, before you go, about the origin of your very famous pen name?”

“Ah, yes… Mark Twain! How did I come to use this pseudonym as my primary literary signature? The story is a simple one: It came from my years working on Mississippi riverboats, where two fathoms, a depth indicating ‘safe water’ for the boat to float over was measured on the sounding line. A fathom is a maritime unit of depth, equivalent to two yards (approximately 1.8 meters); ‘twain’ is an archaic term for ‘two’. The river boatman’s cry was ‘mark twain’ or, more fully, ‘by the mark twain’, meaning ‘according to the mark (on the line), (the depth is) two (fathoms), that is, ‘there are twelve feet of water underneath the boat and it is safe to pass’.

“But this most famous pen name was not entirely my invention…

“Captain Isaiah Sellers was not of literary turn or capacity, but he used to jot down brief paragraphs of plain practical information about the river, and sign them ‘MARK TWAIN,’ and give them to the
New Orleans Picayune
. They related to the stage and condition of the river, and were accurate and valuable. At the time that the telegraph brought the news of his death, I was on the Pacific coast. I was a fresh new journalist, and needed a
nom de guerre
; so I confiscated the ancient mariner’s discarded one, and have done my very best to make it remain what it was in his hands—a sign and symbol and warrant that whatever is found in its company may be gambled on as being the petrified truth; how I have succeeded, it would not be modest in me to say.”

And with that statement, Samuel Langhorne Clemens finishes his first public address in nearly a century and leaves the Open Books’ stage to a deafening ovation. Applauding the performance with the most vigor are the so-called writers-in-residence, from the recently deceased to the currently living. Crystal congratulates Mr. Clemens on his remarks and invites him to receive the guests in a line that is already forming near the stage. He most graciously consents, but something in his eyes tells me that he may indeed have another appointment to keep. What might it be? And where? Truly, Virtual Life has hosted this unconventional return engagement, though it is obvious to some that Mr. Clemens is not particularly comfortable here. He may well prefer a different universe, even as he indulges friends and admirers in this one. After greeting each guest personally, he withdraws to a pre-arranged sanctuary in Lit-A-Rama, where he can transfer out of Virtual Life to wherever he currently resides. We in Virtual Life wish him well on his journey through time, even as we thank him profusely for granting us one last interview before finally assuming his infinite disposition.

IT HAD TO HAPPEN; it was only natural. What I mean is the re-emergence of the feminine principle. I’m not talking specifically about Western women burning their bras or crashing through the glass ceiling, though I suppose that’s a small part of it. Nor am I talking about emasculation (sperm counts in the western world are down significantly due to the amount of estrogen in food additives). What I am talking about is the eternal relationship between nature and nurturing. It’s been going on since the beginning of time as we know it; and it has always been the regenerative energy in our world, even when driven underground, and even when other influences, those initiated and dominated by men—forces such as war and commerce (and aren’t those really one and the same?)—have ignorantly, and often quite brutally, subjugated its rightful place, and silenced or tortured or even killed its practitioners and worshippers.

Though the Goddess goes by many different names—Dr. Adler, we remember, pointed out that the ancient Sumarians knew her as Ki, and he in turn appropriated the name for his theories about earthly interconnectivity—
She
serves the same function in virtually every culture.
She
represents the womb from which our world is continually reborn, and She is also the caregiver, the giver of sustenance, and the healer. Yes,
She
is all these, but She is so much more.
She
is the One standing behind the veil of
the greatest mystery
, the One offering prayers and rituals and magick to illuminate the side in each of us that is not brutishly physical, or intrusively manipulative, or literal. The One behind our dreams, her natural province is the moon;
She
works not in broad daylight, but within the world of shadows. Through ritual
She
sanctifies our earthly existence, yet when our time comes to leave this physical plane for another,
She
tethers us not to the flesh of corporeal existence, rather
She
releases us to the Eternal and bids us well on our journeys. What else is a Mother to do?

I have never discussed religion with Crystal Marbella, nor has she discussed it with me. Not that the subject is off limits or taboo, but we each seem to prefer (by omission) to leave spiritual matters within their particular (and more personal) domain. Nevertheless, we both enjoy visiting a REP called Pagan Morning. It is a beautiful and peaceful place created by two English witches, Adrianne Hardwood and Freyja Mumford (each of them, incidentally, work as university professors in PL: Adrianne teaches Computer Applications, and Freyja teaches Physics).

Crystal and I have been invited to attend a hand fasting ceremony that will take place at the Abbey located within the Pagan Morning REP. We both think that VL weddings are very special because they almost always occur between people (emulations) that have never met one another in Physical Life, which tends to ensure that the feelings they express to one another are based solely on intellectual and spiritual qualities rather than physical ones. Certainly, there is no guarantee that the person behind the emulation is portraying himself or herself authentically, but isn’t that the risk we take in PL too? Artifice and deception aside, anyone who knows Sly Sideways and Alegra Nevermore will attest to their obvious love, and to their commitment to one another. Seldom is one seen without the other being either present or nearby. Just as it is with couples who are in love in PL!