Fairy Tales: The Magic of Black Tea 3 🧚 Kunming

Yunnan Gold & the Madeleine

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Marie-Hélène Breillat

This was the type of nonsense Baldric’s father warned him about. It could be summed up in one word: French. But Baldric was starting to wonder about his father’s view of the French.

The fragrance of fermented black tea, mingling with the sweet dissolving madeleine on the tip of his tongue, made him feel close to Claudine and her French family, her Poitou ancestry, and all the workers and artists from Talence to Combray. Baldric was looking dreamily into Claudine’s eyes yet he also felt like he was still on the rickety stairs of the cafe, climbing higher and higher into a self-discovery which linked him to Claudine’s friends and family, to everyone in the cafe, and to all of humanity.

Looking into her dreamy face, Baldric was reminded of a TV show he saw once on the French station: Claudine, based on the four early novels of Colette, starring Marie-Hélène Breillat. His father said that the TV station ought to be banned, because no red-blooded Albertan should be subjected to the depraved propaganda of the French. Baldric suspected his father was mistaken, especially when he remembered how Claudine stood up to her teachers, how she flirted in the communal showers, and how she looked as she sat on the side of her bed in the girls’ dormitory.

Claudine’s eyes were as dark as her hair, strands of which swirled downward, mingling with the swirls of steam drifting up from the Pure Yunnan Gold tea. The fragrance of the tea was unpacking itself in the air, from the tight box of rich flavours into the wide world.

Baldric also remembered Ragor’s words about a staircase and the long winding road downward into the past. Back then Ragor seemed to him like a crazy loon, but now he wasn’t so sure. Like Alice on her journey down the rabbit hole, he at least understood that he didn’t understand what was happening to him. And yet his mind had inklings of some quantum change, some understanding that was hitherto impossible to conceive. He was ascending to a point of view where he could see a wider world, and yet at the same time he was descending into the complexities and obscurities of the past, which rendered the world as opaque as ever.

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The Magic Ball

Sitting in his jacuzzi on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, Ragor looked into what Maria called his magic ball. Ragor insisted that it was called an orb, but Maria insisted it was just a fancy computer and searched all around it for an Apple logo. Ragor insisted that apple was just a metaphor for all the knowledge in the world, yet Maria insisted on looking for Adam, Eve, and a snake.

Ragor zoomed in on the centre of Yunnan Province, on a dormitory of coloured lights, and into Baldric’s body that flickered and hummed as it lay sleeping there. Ragor knew from the brainwave patterns that Baldric was experiencing the double flux, which Blue Dreamers define as the expansion of the mind that contracts the self. The double flux is initially sporadic (double spots in time or Blumadhi), yet as doublefluxers aged, the process became inevitable, until the self disappeared completely (the irreversible bluflux or Bluvana). Although Baldric didn’t know it, he was doomed to disappear.

And yet Baldric didn’t feel like he was disappearing. Quite the opposite: he felt that his heightened vision of things was making him take these things all the more seriously. He was hoping that his elevated vision might make the world seem like an illusion, something he could slip beyond or fly around. Yet it was quite the opposite: the world took on an almost impenetrable toughness, a hardness that he would never be able to break. Instead of being liberated, he was trapped by everything he saw yet couldn’t understand.

The higher Baldric climbed, the deeper he understood the intractability of the moment, fixed as it was deep in the ground. Ragor knew this to be the initial shock of the double flux. It was the moment when the doublefluxer realized that their concepts of the universe had very little to do with the knowledge they were acquiring. It wasn’t just that the more they knew, the more they knew that they didn’t know; it was also that the more they knew, the more they knew that everything they knew would be superseded by a knowledge that would dwarf their ego and then destroy it.

The first step was a brutal one, because it showed Baldric that he had no power over this crushing dialectic. He could go to his grave with or without it, but it would supersede anything he imagined his life was about. It was the very nature of Nature. As Marcus Aurelius wrote two thousand years ago, the only way to conquer this knowledge was to abandon all thought of conquering it: “Nature gives all and takes all back. To her the man educated into humility says: ‘Give what you will; take back what you will.’ And he says this in no spirit of defiance, but simply as her loyal subject” (Meditations 10:14-15).

Baldric felt like he was climbing the branches of a tree reaching into the sky, and yet he also felt like he was climbing down the roots of a tree that was clinging to the water and dirt, to the bottom of the planet itself. He felt like he was struggling with a divided, obstinate, mysterious Mother Nature. At least this was the gist of what he heard all around him, as if the sound came from invisible wavelengths in the thin air. He was correct in thinking this, although he couldn’t have said why.

The song was emanating from the tracker Ragor had placed in his DNA. It was the final song on the playlist “The Garden of Eden,” which was on the music app of Ragor’s magic ball. The song was familiar to Baldric, since it was by the Canadian prairie band, The Guess Who. It was called, “No Sugar Tonight / New Mother Nature”:

It’s the new splendid lady come to call / It’s the new Mother Nature taking over, / She’s getting us all.

A fan of cross-cultural mythology, Ragor knew that this splendid lady was one with all the other splendid ladies, from Mary to Saraswati to Guanyin — with the proviso of course that Mother Nature was tough as nails and not quite so forgiving. She never hid herself in the clouds of unknowing, or seduced her followers into thinking they were going to get a free ride. Unlike the bodhisattva Guanyin, she hadn’t come back from some other world to save our souls. Unlike Mary, she hadn’t come to save us from ourselves. And unlike the goddess Saraswati, she wasn’t that concerned about the rhythms of Om or the beauty of sculpted rhyme.

Unlike this otherworldly host of benevolent matriarchs, Mother Nature only had one point to make, one story to tell: survival; breathing; growing in the air with the roots in the soil. And yet each soil had its own story to tell. Over time, these stories wove an antique tapestry deep into the substrata of DNA. Ragor knew this, but Baldric didn’t — nor did the primitive quantum-neurologists of 2018.

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Next: 🧚 All the Tea in China

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