Diana At the Ides of August, Part Two

She's a Messenger, a standard bearer of a Message of Love. She's Love's unforgettable fruition and flower. With Her trusty hounds bounding along beside Her, She suddenly races ahead, crossing the beach, down to the surf. Her fair shoulder bristles with arrows --- ones truer and surer --- in their fur quiver. Every mother ever, every daughter, each child who is, was, and will ever be, Diana calls back to us: "You've missed it!" She says giggling with mock horror. Her blue eyes sparkle, as alive as yours or mine: "It's this Way!" Humbling in breadth and depth, the purpled, glittering, restive seascape is like a door: With a reassuring smile, Diana gently pushes it open: One simply and calmly walks through it to the other side. Through the gnostics' truer, surer religious, philosophical lens, what is merely Material fades away. Memories are conjured. They rise and fall unstoppably, changing all the while, like the waves before the Mind's Eye. At first barely formed and random, idle recollections soon give way to ones crucial, dearer than life itself, ones sacred and profane. Roaring, the dazzling, churning vista opens wider, the Heavens above brightening inexorably: From all those years ago, the reminiscences appear and then vanish, waves deepest and restless, returning to the shoreline, rising with echoes of those proverbial "best and worst" of times: Sound nestled in a great, overwhelming silence, at first faint in a deepening din: What became our shared memories manifests: ... Sleeker, faster race cars; glinting hot rods; strawberry-colored hula hoops ... Itsy-bitsy, teensy-weensy, yellow polka dot bikinis; Maltese crosses shining from sun-bronzed necks ... Carefree suburbanite innocents ... The booming shore; a forest of surf boards stuck nose down in the hot white sand ... Faint memories of constitutional and civil rights (Did they actually exist at one time? Were they only a figment of one's imagination?); blue love beads; the cowgirls in command ... The reminiscences insist themselves upon us: The sea flows on: Ban the Bomb! The End is Nigh: The unending horrors of the newest last, imperialist war to end all war, broadcast daily on the TV screen ... Monster Magnets. ... Adam West as Batman! Batman! Batman! Batman! Pow! Krash! Sock! ARRGGHH! Delightfully silly. Unforgettable. ... Nonetheless, our careless, merely consumerist, materialist, civilizational high point meets its own inevitable decline and fall.