Member-only story
The Nagasaki Maidens — Second Cut is the deepest
08.09.2024
by Raymond Eddy BSc., M.P.H., REHS, CP-FS 🗻
“We want you to remember.” The voice is a whisper, female, young, and the experience is unnerving though not terrifying, or even seemingly sinister. I do not actually hear it because I am not awake, but deep in slumber, not yet aware that she is not real. Déjà vu… again. I wait. She comes, “the great injustices. You, Stani, and Amiko must make reparation.” I am sense-scattered; my surroundings are obtuse, simultaneously composed of ultra-contemporary western design and ancient Japanese styles, now swirling into a yin-yang magatama before me. I cannot focus as she comes again, “If they will not listen, then you must make them hear, make them know.”
“Know what please?” I demand softly, still without fear, but in imbalance between my senses and surroundings.
“That individual injustice is equal to the crimes against nations.” I dig into my training, control my emotions, breath a dreamy deep breath from my mouth and exhale the surreal slowly through my nose, trying to grasp my reality — focused on this new message, “tell me more please.”
Demand ignored; the child does not come again.
I must remember, I think to myself. Are these spirits, ghosts, neither, more? Something clicks into my thought, like a single frame from a movie reel: “dream-phantoms” from CARUS, 1910; an iteration of quantum mechanical logical types presented by SOLTAU, 2013, the man who believes that time does not exist, only our subjective memory of our experience as we doggedly believe that we linearly evolve through the Cosmic Cube-like static “block” of past and present, Everett-style. Am I going mad? But now I recall that Carus worked with DT Suzuki in Japan: the Zen genius who translated the German’s Gospel of Buddha to a combined Western and Eastern welcoming, as the frame-by-frame iteration takes continuous form. I “see” a scenario, a diorama like a Kurosawa movie set unpaused as it materializes fully. A woman wearing full traditional kimono, sits at her children’s bedside, reading to her daughters before sleep. I stay quiet and watch carefully. I must mentally record and re-record everything that I witness. I must remember…
