“Chariots of Fire”
August 2, 1981
My father would often sing to us in the carriages, it was my first experience of the core aka of the bard, the ability to create lyrics on-the-fly which I also carried in the lineage
When I began shaping this episode, the title Chariots of Fire came into my mind with the peculiar clarity of something arriving in its proper timing. At first it seemed to name the obvious things: the horses at Belmont, the ancient chariot imagery beneath the modern race, and the fire of my father’s temper moving through the day. But the title kept opening. It carried the memory of the film, with its parallel between worldly ambition and sacred purpose, and beyond that the older resonance of Blake’s Jerusalem, the chariot of fire, and the ancestral language of my Jewish lineage. The title did not merely describe the episode. It revealed another layer of it, arriving through the Akasha at the moment I was finally ready to see how the personal, ancestral, mythic, and historical threads had always been moving together.
“New York city is a magical place” said Peter. “Full of layers of lives in constant motion.”
As a child, I saw my father as a king. Around him I felt a field of power, charisma, danger, and largeness that seemed to extend beyond the ordinary man before me. At the racetrack, especially, he could appear expansive and sovereign, laughing easily, speaking to everyone, filling the space with warmth and confidence. Yet that same presence could turn without warning. His energy moved through sudden manic surges, anger, accusation, and emotional attack, transforming the atmosphere around him into a storm I could feel before I understood it. The king and the tempest were not separate figures in my experience. They occupied the same body, and part of my childhood was learning to read the subtle weather around him, never knowing whether I was approaching the generous ruler or the fire beneath the crown.
Yet my relationship with the horses was very different. They were deeply empathic, deeply intelligence beings, and I sensed their presence the same way i’d encountered the deva of the storms and the land. There was something there – something beneath the hustle and bustle of the races.
Something noble.
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