Please welcome David Russell, poet, storyteller, visionary. Please tell us about your time-travel speculative work Pearlman.
Pearlman was inspired by a passage in the Spanish epic poem La Araucana, dealing with the struggles between the Conquistadores and the Araucanian (Mapuche) Native Americans, which I have translated.
A contemporary hero travels through time and space to the legendary times 0f 16th Century Chile. He meets a woman who turns out to be Auchimalgen, the Araucanian Moon Goddess. She seduces and enlightens him. This story combines romance with sci-fi and time travel.
Excerpt From Pearlman:
Her skill in undoing my armour was worthy of any trained white man. “We are supremely adaptable; we learn avidly from those we observe and oppose”, she whispered, her teeth gleaming in her smile. As I saw the chain mail and the cuirass lying there, discarded, I saw that the rust had all disappeared.
Deft hands tenderly peeled my sweat-ridden leather and cotton; it was lovely to be nursed without immediate wounds to distract from the exquisite sensations.
“You must be proud of your exertions!” she said. The power in her words was akin to a duelling challenge. (The time warp flashed me into my happy collaboration with that beautiful fitness trainer, when I imagined that lithe, toned form excelling itself at the Olympic High Jump as her prelude to our delicious consummation.)
I looked up towards her breasts, to see the matching metal, discs, chains, bangles – an array of gold, silver and jade; I sensed their resilience beneath their cover. She read my response with total ease; with a radiant smile, she whispered “do as you have been done by.”
My hands trembled a little as I delicately negotiated the pins and clasps, but I succeeded in making a harmonious pattern of them, like a crown at the head of my discarded armour. It was good to have gained intimate knowledge of those metallic treasures in the museums.
The face of a full moon, reciprocating its radiation on Tegualda’s face and eyes, beamed its glittering reflections, as if casting off a diaphanous robe, to reveal the perfect body of its illuminated rocks, bouncing back and forth around the elaborated grid of our variegated metalwork – steel, bronze, silver and gold – its luminosity almost suggesting that it would all come to life, radiant in the flames of their smelting, almost as two armies facing each other. In turn, the beams flooded our faces, giving an external flourish to our luminous vibrancy charged from within.
She took my hand, and made it caress her sealskin robe: “please do the honours”. I lifted it at the bottom. My hands reached up inside it until they could feel her firm but still slender waist. Repeating my earlier gesture, she raised her arms in surrender and conquest, the robe clouding into a transient veil over her noble features.
Then Tegualda cast off her gleaming white cotton camisera for me with all the challenging flourish of a toreador. She tamed me and fired me simultaneously with her lovely self-revelation.
The walls of my time-capsule were fractured. There glistened across the world, ricocheted back and forth across the centuries a composite of the world’s beauties, celebrated in poetry and song, painting and sculpture, melted, distilled and poured into one vibrant, impassioned, soul-suffused body. Egyptian and Grecian statues and mural figures melted into an array of Hollywood dream sublimities deeply embedded in my memory. This was a spiritual earthquake, embracing all history and culture, the distilled essence of all artistic striving poured into one giant goblet. My euphoria melted into a vision of our two peoples euphorically turned from war to love. I could hear a rumbling accompanying of us, similar to a distant earthquake but radiating benign, divine approval.
“We have at last met each other’s match. In our earlier lives, we were both adored, out of reach to so many, counterbalanced by our own unattainables. Now, through ourselves and each other, we can reach full, harmonious synthesis.”
Her pure teeth shone forth, near-iridescent. “You know our people’s trials of strength, the holding up of heavy logs. I believe some of your northern tribesmen call it ‘tossing the caber’. So now your strength must be poured into the font of love. A true, deep love will be the final honour to grace my widow’s mourning—a bonding with the agent of my widowhood.”
The upper lips echoed the lower lips; I saw a luminous giant conch shell, bright pink, in a nearby lake. I strained down to retrieve it and held it aloft.
As we struggled, competed in perfect harmony, the young mountains rose anew in our background. With a metaphysical rope, we had bridged the span of geological time, in the process going through a whole gamut of shape-shifts, embracing all the biological forms. We had willed ourselves and each other into unicellular status and then gone the whole gamut from amoebae to primates.
She squeezed my biceps and beamed with gratification. “Your muscles have grown to their full strength, but your strength is in harmony with tenderness.” Then her skin turned through tan and purple to the boldest scarlet to match the subterranean massage. With that flush of colour, her body also grew translucent, so that her inner organs and bones were revealed as in an X-ray. My own body embraced and then reflected her translucency; she flooded me. The reflections intensified the inner light. With an extra gaze, she said, “My redness is generally a harbinger of death. But now, through our sacred bonding, it is transmuted into an affirmation of life. My husband’s life will meld into yours.
“This completes my experience. One great step towards the development of my wholeness was my embracing of your Greek moon goddess Selene. Centuries ago, your ancestors plied the mighty oceans to reach and infuse my ancestors—with loving truths, not with fire and the sword.
Publisher: Bella Tulip Publishing (11 April 2018)
NB: Bella Tulip is no longer in business. The title is now under my imprint, and can be obtained from me directly)
Print: 89 pp
Heat Level: 3
Review of Pearlman on Goodreads:
“Pearlman,” by David Russell, is a novella of unparalleled breadth and a first rate work of speculative fiction. It also draws on scientific accounts as it considers various issues, including synchronicities between nature and history. The writing is lush, and it pulls the reader into the story. Myth, history, the earth, and science meet, mate, collide and get compressed and then decompressed into a panorama of the past, present and future possibilities for humanity….It is fun to read, stimulates unconventional approaches to knowledge and scientific inquiry, and is written in language that is a feast for the senses.”
See the rest of the review here:
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About the Author
Born 1940, David Russell is a resident of the UK. Writer of poetry, literary criticism, speculative fiction and romance. Main poetry collection Prickling Counterpoints (1998); poems published in online International Times. Eco poetry collection, An Ever River, published by The Palewell Press, 2018. Main speculative works High Wired On (2002); Rock Bottom (2005). Translation of Spanish epic La Araucana, Amazon 2013. Romances: Dreamtime Sensuality I & II: Explorations; Further Explorations; Pearlman, Self’s Blossom – all available on Amazon. Self-published collection of erotic poetry and artwork, Sensual Rhapsody, 2015. Singer-songwriter/guitarist. Main CD albums Bacteria Shrapnel and Kaleidoscope Concentrate. Many tracks on You Tube, under ‘Dave Russell’. Editor of online magazine Poetry Express Newsletter, produced by Survivors Poetry and Music.
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