Once again, a digression before I “attack” my subject head-on. Certain niceties must now come into play lest toes be harshly trod, and my words be blunted. Some things will just have to wait for the book to be done before they’re seen in print. Personal moments . . . glimpses into the private selves of people whose permission has yet to be given before they are named. Friends who trust me to not pull off their public masks….
In his poem, “On the Naming of Cats,” T. S. Elliot made an excellent point. Every cat, and for that matter every person, has three different names or (as it might be better put) three faces –
The first is a public name or face – the facade we put forward for strangers to see. The shadow of the private we allow the world to see. The face we feel safe when we are securely ensconced behind it.
The second name, or face, is the familial and most familiar one which most of our family and friends know as ours. It is not all of each of us is, but it is a comfortable old shoe we wear when more relaxed. It is the face in that photograph of each of us at our first birthday parties, and we are covered in icing.
The third name or face is private. No masks…and it is sometimes the face in the mirror that scares even us. Seldom does any of us allow anyone close enough to glimpse it. We don’t even like going there by ourselves.
Well, as always, ‘nuf said, just don’t be too surprised at some really odd names. Those named will know who they are . . . usually… and they’ll be free to laugh at themselves too … gently, and with no stinging barbs and arrows from tales told out of school …I will try to keep things on the #2 name level… but too strictly holding to that level all the time . . . where would the fun be in that?
Okay, back to my promise yesterday to tell you what happened next…
I told you that we had written the first article. And that it had been published by our editor in his regional publication. We were happily moving on to the next things on our never ending list of “to-dos” wrpped securely in that blissful ignorance of the newbie that ripples happen, and then they spread...
One day, we got an e-mail. Our editor had been contacted by “Irish” who wanted to get into contact with us directly. He was VERY interested in what we had written. And his friend “Quint” was too. Now, Irish is an American, but Quint is not. He’s Chinese, and has some remarkable connections back on the mainland.
To keep it simple, Quint knew about an international call for academic papers that had been sent out for a conference being held in Nanjing, China, in 2005, in celebration of the 500th anniversary of the sailing of a HUGE Ming Chinese fleet lead by a Chinese Muslim court Eunuch named Zheng He.
We were floored… to say the least … somebody out there in the big wide world was actually reading our articles… AND they were taking them seriously enough to suggest that we should write a VERY serious academic paper based on one of them…
Whoa, dude…
This was taking things to such a different level entirely…
And Irish, or at least Irish’s uncle, had caught a mistaken detail we had no idea we’d missed about Father Marquette’s description of the Piasa…
Translators usually said Father Marquette gave the creatures standard deer or goat horns. Horns like the ones on the Alton Piasa….
Father Marquette, as I said before, was a scientist, a naturalist, a Jesuit… he was NOT so generic in his description… he said “chevreuil”… and by that he was talking about one specific kind of deer...very specific … the same kind of deer that the first emperor of China took the horns from to make his composite Imperial dragon … it's the European version of what is known as the roe deer. And it had a very different set of horns. Horns that gave our piasa a very, very different look than the one in Alton. And connectied the piasa firmly to a very, very different point of origin...just like we said it had to have had...because there are no roe deer native to the Americas.
So there it was. We had a definite match. It wasn’t the absolute proof of what we had theorized in that first article… but it was an excellent start…
And it was now certain that things were about to get even more interesting …
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