No rest for a prophet

Heaven is a pain. Not in general, just for me in particular and it gets worse every year. I never imagined it being thus but that is how it turned out.

I suppose I should start at the beginning. The name my parents gave me was Nathan. My father was a herder who looked after Lord Valentine's flocks. A task later entrusted to me. My uncle was a singer in the Lord's choir. That you may say was the seed of my present troubles.

One day, he took me to Lord Valentine's castle where he was to entertain guests. Lady Valentine, the grey haired dowager saw my skinny frame lurking in the corner and ordered some ale and venison for me.

The serving maid looked coldly at me and warned me against stealing any of her dishes. I was confused. I eyed the meat uncertainly. Should I take the dish to the servants' quarters? I picked up the plate, but then I caught the suspicious glare of the maid. So I sat there in the corner of hte hall. I looked at how Lady Valentine picked at her foo and did likewise. Cutting small pieces and putting them daintily into my mouth.

As the music ended, my uncle collected me. But Lady Valentine stopped us. "How well the boy holds his food, like a little lord. What do you do boy?"

I bowed, "Yer ladyship, I tends to the sheeps".

"A Sheep Lord then" she laughed. "You stay with teh sheep and you will become one yourself. Do you know the good book?"

"Books yer ladyship? I know no books".

"See, you are like a sheep already. Well young Sheep Lord, if you are to rule your flock, you must know how to sign your edicts".

I couldn't make any sense of this. What use were edicts when tending to sheep? But I could see her ladyship was up to something. I suppose she meant it as a kindness, or a joke. I was never sure. But from that day I spent an hour every day with the tutor, learning my letters.

This was even more unpleasant for the tutor than for me. I was clearly beneath his dignity. I was given a few sheets of reused parchment and an old quill. I was told to copy passages from the holy text. Then the tutor told me to write what I knew.

I told him I knew about sheep.

"Well little Lord of Sheep" he said. "Write about your subjects and don't bleat needlessly".

So I wrote.

The lamb cries out seeing the world and seeks the comfort of its mother. The Sheep Lord sees this and is glad.

The lamb walks freely in the valley of wolves for it is in the shadow of the Sheep Lord's staff.

And so on and so forth. I always wrote myself as the Sheep Lord.

One day the Lady Velentine visited the tutor when I was there. Shoe took and read my scribblings. I don't know if what she read offended her or maybe the joke had grown old, but she threw them in the rubbish and that was the end of my education.

That should have also been the end of everything. I went on to tend the flocks, marry a good woman and sire two strong sons till my sixty third winter brought me here. Yes, that should have been the end of it. But for one woman. A bloody archeologist.

If you leave rubbish long enough, two things will reach it. Flies and archeologists. Seven hundred years after I was gone and glad of it, the latter found my copybook. It must have looked strange, part high ecclesiasticism and part shepherd's fancy. That was where the trouble started.

You meet some of the nicest people in heaven. Well, you would think that would be a prerequisite. I met an Austrian named Jung. He explained the need of people to see patterns. To impose order in the form of primitive archetypes. I guess by now I am pretty primitive but I have no idea about archetypes. Anyway, the scholars started taking apart my writing and putting it back together in strange ways. Then a bored and heavily stoned post-graduate counted the letters in all my words, plotted them using an elliptic transform, subtracted the letters in one of the more arcane names of God, got a function whose Taylor series expansion around zero yielded the number 666.

I don't understand half the things I have said here even though Brooke Taylor who invented this mathematics has tried to explain it to me several times. But in some ways it is irrelevant. I was, as the student confidently blogged, clearly alluding to the antichrist.

The subsequent events were beyond anyone's imagining. Some of our newer joiners tell me the term used is "viral". For me, its spread was like a plague.

I was condemned from the pulpit, I was defended by aged eminent former scientists and philosophers. Someone wrote a book called "The Sheep Code" only to be refuted by someone writing "The Sheep Delusion". Sad middle aged, pot bellied people who couldn't find any other way of getting laid, chanted my copybook lines while dancing naked around bonfires.

Mercifully these last sort rarely make it up here. But I do have to deal with the devout and the scholars.

I have only one piece of advice "Don't Write".