Through the communicating window like the one in a restaurant that the chef puts orders on, only lower, I could see James put down his morning coffee, which was in a large stainless steel pitcher and make the sign of the cross. He was in a closed off room all to himself, a very serious guy, drove a green Lincoln to work and lived with his mother. Never smiled, didn't like to talk even if it was possible, which it wasn't, over the din of the hydraulic cutters, four of them, chopping away eight times a second over on our side. I guess that's why his room was closed off, now that I think of it. So he could concentrate. He operated the taffy pulling machine. It was not like the nice little one you might have seen in the window at the boardwalk. This one was eight feet high and took an eighty pound piece of taffy and in a motion as simple and tricky as rubbing your stomach and patting your head, pulled the taffy so air got folded in and it got soft and chewy. There were two arms that worked around a post shaped like a rhino horn. It would be as if you had that bar coming out of your stomach and were stretching the big band of taffy over it with sticks in your hands windmilling against one another. Simple... if you were the machine. Confusing, if you are attending the machine, rather like trying to tie someone else's tie,... suddenly awkward. It was mostly benign except for one part of the pass where it wanted to break your arm. The taffy was soft, warm, basically a slow moving liquid and when you flopped it on the horn you had to be careful not to get caught in it because that arm was coming and you needed to be outside it's arc and ready to guide the taffy on to the arm. Timing was everything. When it came out of the bin it was too short to get picked up by the arm so you had to let it stretch out. If you let it get too long it would turn into a candy rodeo, with multiple efforts to guide it onto the arms, more chaos, more danger and a chance it would break and flop on the floor. My job was to put the candy stripes on, flipping this eighty pound hunk, getting in nice and close so I'd leave an imprint of the buttons of my [ nice clean ] shirt that they issued. This was also a race because the taffy never stopped spreading. You had to go just shy of as quickly as possible or it got to long and floppy to carry over to the roller machine which turned it into a six-foot long cone ending in the inch or so size of the finished candy which was chopped and wrapped faster than the eye could see at the end of the machine. In this din, so loud I could not hear myself singing at the top of my lungs, honestly, and so loud there was no point yelling in someone's ear, sat four dreamy middle aged woman with feather dusters and a box of corn starch, dusting away as needed to keep their strange giant rotating, seal babies from sticking to their cribs. Thats what it looked like. They were lost in their own serene thoughts, rarely taking their eyes off their charges. "We're going to make a Candyman out of you." They were training me on all the machines, some where as old as the plant and would have looked at home on Jules Verne's Nautilus, all copper with brass clad doors. Others, like the chocolate tank [ as big as an above ground pool ], that fed the entire place heated chocolate through a system of stainless steel pipes, were more Willie Wonka. The pride of the establishment was a Candy Center Machine. It made the centers for their version of Junior Mints. It was the size of a carwash, cost a million dollars and was painted that pastel chlorine green you see in Russian space capsules. A rack came down and pressed indents in the corn starch laid out in 18x24 inch trays. Then another rack came down with corresponding hoses and filled the indents. Then they passed through a cooling area and were spat out on a stainless steel mesh conveyor belt and delivered to trays. My job was to catch them on the trays and stack the trays on rolling racks. Sounds easy except whoever designed the million dollar thing had calculated very accurately where the upper limit was in terms of speed. The tricky part was when a rolling rack was full and need to be moved and replaced. It could get very Lucille Ball here if you didn't concentrate or one of the racks had a weird wheel and wouldn't cooperate. It was twenty minutes on and twenty minutes off while the machine made up a fresh set of trays. During one of the down times I rolled one of the centers into a ball and sent it down the conveyor belt. It bounced down at just about the same rate that the belt was moving it back up. Nice and mesmerizing in a silly way. Time to do another set. It was all about getting in a rhythm, I decided. So I tried a mantra. Om Sri Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram Om Sr Ram Jai Ram Jai JAi Ram. A year and a half before this I had taken initiation in the Sufi Order. I found out my son was deaf and felt this this huge rush of energy come to meet the problem. "Oh Shit, I better do something fast or I am going to end up in the hands of the Christians or worse." Suddenly I needed some answers. I saw an ad in the paper "Come see Sufi dance..." I had seen pictures somewhere of pretty girls in white dresses dancing in a circle. Hmmm, how bad could that be? I suspected, like at a magic show there might be calls for volunteers from the audience or, as it happened, no audience, just complete participation. This was in Florida. I was by myself, my little family splitting apart and coming together, chasing each other to Upstate New York and back before a final split which left them in Manhattan of all places, on account of the school for the deaf and me up outside of Boston at a Sufi Khankah. I got a job at the Howard Johnson's candy plant. I did another set with the mantra. I was getting buzzed. It was definitely helping. Then on the break I sent another center down rolled in a ball. "Now, with my third eye, I will capture the little ball and draw it to me!" I was goofing. The candy which had been almost hopping in place doing it's Down the Up Escalator thing, bounced a little closer. And closer. I popped it in my mouth. Another candy and back to the Swami act. "I will now Repel the candy!" It skipped nearly to the bottom. I released it from my Powerful Tractor Beam and it made it's way back up. "No! back down Candy Ball. I glared at it. Down it went. Just when I was starting to freak myself out the supervisor came over, "Hey, stop playing, don't do that." "OK" I was actually a little relieved. Nevertheless I took away that play could be as effective as 'trying" or "intention." I never did figure out what sitting meditation was about til years later when a girlfriend showed me. "Oh is that all? Like bubble rising up." It had always been described in such serious terms, emptying, posture, don't think, concentrate, Don't Think about that Elephant!
This was at Hudson State Mental Hospital where I worked as a Rec Therapist until I switched sides, so to speak. It all got too much for me. I was 21, so green... didn't know what bad fortune could befall you in this life. I hid in a big wooden box that held the sand they sprinkled on the ice. This was in the county highway department truck yard across the road from the hospital. An entire checker cab car load of aides were after me. "Come here, we won't hurt you.." Gee, why didn't I believe them? This doctor said I needed to go to the Quiet Room...I had really bad, crippling, claustrophobia at the time, made me feel like I was going to pass out or worse, so this was unwelcome. Then I realized we would have to pass by the front door on the way there. I, cut to the left when we got to the door and ran faster than I had before or since. I still remember just the very tips of my toes touching the ground and although I could tell I was running faster than ever, it was effortless, viewed from slightly above with everything slowed down like in a car accident.
I went down to the highway and stood in whichever lane had a car and raising both arms. For some reason this didn't work and when the checker car came and emptied like a clown car, I lit into the woods and to the truck yard. Then hid in the box, waited. I heard voices around me in the yard talking quietly because it looked like I had vanished.
When I thought it was safe I got out and walked to the highway and hitched to New York city. My Father found me at friends within days. I thought about repeating the escape scenario but when we got outside I saw he had brought help. He was in the CIA at the time and his 'helpers' stood out in the beat neighborhood we were in. I had been up for so many days [ years ago we were still figuring out the dosage of certain things. We must have got it wrong in my case. I was up for a scary number of days (10) and then, if I played piano, I would "go up" again. This went on for about two months]
I was worried about burning out my friends and still so high it didn't matter where I was, I told myself, and so I gave in and decided to go with him......at least it was to a Nice Place (cough) where they stashed Marilyn Monroe, Robert Lowell and others. Didn't really work out, put me off therapy for twenty five years in fact. I ended up on the last study for Lithium before it became the snake-oil of the Seventies. It did nothing for me. Well it made me nauseous for a couple of hours after I took it, which was four times a day. We had to be isolated from the rest of the population so they wouldn't ruin the study by slipping us a candy bar or something. We ate the same food, well two menues, day after day. Once I dropped a pea. The nurse who watched during meals leapt from her chair, grabbed it and ran from the room. A few minutes later she returned with an identical pea, weighed on a gram scale, in a white pleated pill holder. Ah, their precious study, never know What that pea might have picked up from the floor. This did not prevent them from giving me twice the maximun dose of thorazine, however. And when a friend came saying he'd heard they were going to put me in a long term facility, Pilgrim State, grim and endless like a row of bookshelves, I knew I had to escape.
I decided I could get away during the evacuation from a small safe fire I would set in the bathroom, say. I pinched a pipe from one of the patients in the middle of the night and made it look like he had forgotten it in the bathroom by some toliet paper. My plan didn't work. They put out the fire and then accused him of setting it. He was a very crazy very intelligent doctor with some unified theory of everything that he tried to tell me about. He got permission to go home a few days later and killed himself in some way that they couldn't figure out. Then they came to me and tried to lay it at my door. I didn't think that was a very grown-up approach and set another fire in an ashtray in the TV room. I made a timer out of a cigarette stuck in a matchbook so I could be seen elsewhere when it started. What I didn't count on was being seen seeing the column of smoke come down the hallway and having to rush and put out my handiwork before it could cause an evacuation. So that didn't work either.
I was completely shocked when they came few days later and asked if I wanted to leave. I guess their study was in jeopardy, I don't know. Within minutes I was out of there, all my stuff in a giant Kotex box, the air around me electric with unreality, was this really happening??, was it going to be snatched back?
Mostly I remember how distorted everything outside looked at first. I had been on the seventh floor for three months, used to seeing cars from the front, side and top evenly. Now down on their level the front looked enormous, like in a forced perspective drawing. Big toothy grills, very loud and rushing toward me. Like learning to walk again my body had to relearn what was safe. I prickled all over like a leg that had gone to sleep only not that bad. That was the lithium coming out and the Thorazine. I never felt so much like celebrating but it wasn't really the kind of news you could share....Hey, I just got out of a mental hospital using only fake arson attacks! No. that wouldn't play. I got a job doing the Census for 1970 and made my way from there. The Census Bureau temporary offices had an Alice in Wonderland quality in that, except for the folding chairs, everything was made of cardboard, the room dividers, desks, files, all of it and everyday it would be arranged differently to accommodate the teams that were formed pick-up style like a game of dodgeball. We had one training class. It was pretty straight forward, common sense. I looked to my left, there was someone I couldn't place right away slouched way way down in his chair. It was time to think fast, "Michael, is that YOU?" It was an aide from the hospital. "Yeah, I quit my job, I couldn't stand that place." How had they found me? Why were they pretending not to follow me? And behind that thought, gee, it's a good thing I'm not paranoid, this could be a problem. So now I was caught in a bit of theater out in public and it felt like there was a lot riding on what I said next. I decided to play along "Yeah, it's pretty bad, huh?" My heart was pounding, two bad actors facing off. Definitely a 'who's crazy now?' feeling to it though. And what do you know but Michael ended up being my partner going door to door. Some coincidence.
Enfilade
For the Adoptee , "what if" is the first in an enfalade of prosceniums separating you from the surface order, what gets called Real, as in my "real Mother", only implying that this other person is , what? Unreal? Only one of the see-through Russian Nesting Dolls of selves, Regret not a sign of something that didn't happen but a tensile member of the basic architecture, something that did indeed happen. Is that one my sister? Is that one my Mother? No one can say.
After I found my birth Mother, I noticed that when I went in a public place or when a bus went by, I didn't scan all the faces like I used to. I just thought, as an artist, I was interesting in faces. Apparently, I was looking for someone.
I WAS ALWAYS WORRIED SOMETHING LIKE THIS WOULD HAPPEN TO ME. For several years dogs would charge me on sight. I have no idea why. It happened so often it became a routine part of bike riding. I got good at pedaling with the off-side foot. Once, when I was unemployed and at loose ends, I was walking in the Berkeley hills, partly wondering what I was going to do and partly trying to put it out of my mind. Suddenly out of nowhere I had one of those rare contentless moments where it 'ALL' made sense. I was buoyant, my body, the light, the earth were made of variations of the same living thing. There was a scratching sound behind me and then what sounded like the jingle of a dog collar, then a terrific jolt on my back. A dog had taken one look and set off, without a bark, and landed on my back and then run off. I guess there were no Zen Monks available to smack me with a bamboo stick.
Year's End
now cresting the top of the year the air crystal, buoyed up like an updraft lifting a canopy, not so much looking back as pulling away from the earth so you can see the entire curvature. Then on the exhale feeling the year inside, it's sadness quieted as the last piece of the year's frame comes into place new promises appearing at it's death. Do we still remember the many years when it was strictly on faith that we felt safe the food would last? At the very top of the year where the firmament pulls apart like an iris, the surface no longer there, open, and a shaft of light reaches down to June now upside down impossible like Australia.
Joan
moon shivers in the pool at your feet, the chandelier falls through a thorn tree.. bark glistens with dew. Joan, who can't sleep, rakes lizards from the tree in the courtyard. In the morning, the dog is missing, a record still spins on the turntable, ticking.
Chris
in that gleaming, that morning light, when I am open I reach for your memory, sure that you are safe now.
And then I am back, the river of shadows sweeping you away, I was certain it would happen, but years from now, not so soon.
When you left, all the places we met were closed, burned or even, like the road in the cemetery, dug up and carted away.
I did not know what sign it was , hoping it was good a sign, a sign of the new life you were making
Far away by the lava fields, so grey and bewildering, petrified, cast off hallucinations.... the volcano that gave birth to them barely smoking.
Heidi Visits
Florida 1976: We Always Knew When Heidi Was Coming to Visit. Eli, who was two and a half, would line his Hot Wheels up on the threshold of the screen porch. This was an extremely painstaking operation that could go on for forty-five minutes or more as each cars was metered perfectly to compensate for every speck of sand and the worn-out grain in the wood. We weren't that close with Heidi's mother so the visits were sometimes months apart and at Heidi's request. Heidi had lived in the house before us. Heidi was deaf, we didn't yet know Eli was deaf; he was somehow able to psych things out enough so that our theories about his 'spaceiness" never verged on deafness. How he could guess what we were saying accurately enough, I'll never know. It was certainly with a kind of spooky joy that we recognized that that was really what was happening; he never lined the cars up at other times, she never failed to show when he did.
from Rumi
Do you know how the moments perform their adoration??Waving its row of lamps, the universe sings in worship day and night,?There are the hidden banner and the secret canopy:?There the sound of the unseen bells is heard.
Rapture wells forth, and all space is radiant with light.?There the Unstruck Music is sounded; it is the music of the love of the three worlds.?There millions of lamps of sun and of moon are burning;?There the drum beats, and the lover swings in play.?There love-songs resound, and light rains in showers; and the worshipper is entranced in the taste of the heavenly nectar.
Travelling by no track, I have come to the Sorrowless Land:
There the sky is filled with music:?There it rains nectar:?There the harp-strings jingle, and there the drums beat.?What a secret splendour is there, in the mansion of the sky!?There no mention is made of the rising and the setting of the sun;?In the ocean of manifestation, which is the light of love, day and night are felt to be one.
Here is something I left out: five years before I made the organized search I was in Albuquerque getting ready to drive my mother-in-law's car back to New York. She had just died and it made me nervous about the promise I made about finding my mother. I did something I had never done before which was 'place' a prayer/promise on a certain spot on the moutain behind Albuquerque. Ten years later when I found her, it turned out her kitchen window looked right at that spot!.....................
I SPENT THE FIRST EIGHTEEN MONTHS OF MY LIFE in St' Ann's Infant Asylum. There is a picture of me in the garden mentioned in the quote. I have the sense that I wasn't let outside in bad weather and that there were seldom any men there. Cold water falling from the sky was "new" "aberrant" might be a better word. Men were dubious curiosities, with there frightening chest voices, and penchant for throwing me up in the air. The Sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul did not do a lot of throwing in the air. I went mute for six months. I'd never been in a car, seen feminine women, lipstick, perfume, fur, the list was endless. Anyway here is an account of the previous owner of the building. [ note the implication that the children in St. Ann's were poor "bare-footed" foundlings. In fact it was where middle class and well to do Catholics went. We were dressed in Irish Linen]
"The first Minister to represent Queen Victoria at Washington was a Mr. Stephen Fox. That he was most eccentric there is no disputing, if Washington's social history, founded largely on gossip,is true. In a large house facing Washington Circle, he led a single and singular life, caring nothing for the company of the ladies, but prone to giving large stag parties to men of convivial taste. Night was as day in his great house, and it was long past noon when breakfast was served at the British Legation. Somewhere in that strange, stormy soul of his had been planted a seed of sentiment,and it grew into a fine passion for flowers, chief among them roses ---- and the roses which grew in the Legation garden were the talk of the city. They say he never sent flowers to the ladies,but with his own hands often pulled blossoms to give to the poor children who,frequently barefooted, passed his garden to and from the wharves not far distant.And so consistent is Fate sometimes it was decreed that in years later this estate should become the property of St. Ann's Infant Asylum; and foundlings took their airing in the old garden which the eccentric British Minister loved." from The Records of the Columbia Historical Society
Mr. Stephen Fox was the nephew of Charles Fox, Prime Minister and leader of the Incroyables
Once , when a romance was unraveling I brought home a lobster for my sweetheart. She wasn't there. I put it in the deep side of the sink that was covered by the drainboard. I went out. I call much later, she was home now, screaming THERE IS A DEAD LOBSTER IN MY SINK! The water had drained away. How sad for my misguided love offering. I was overwrought, it was a sign a bad sign. I wrapped the lobster in foil, it took on the shape of an Egyptian mummy.I felt guilty about letting it die, didn't want to chuck it in the garbage. Only burial would do. But where? I took it to the roof and sailed it off to the garden below, then went and began digging in the spot where it landed. I went down almost as far as I could reach and then hit something...a small box! Inside was an Anhk and a tiny Hekmet charm.Then up came bones... for a moment my mind went to dreadful possibilities and then...of course, someone had buried their cat here. I put everything back and then added the Lobster-Mummy.Two weeks later when I departed for the last time my Sweetheart threw a bowling ball after me which bounced once and then crashed into the neighbor's door cracking it in two.
THIS WILL PROBABLY ONLY HAPPEN ONCE.October 1991 Golden Gate Park. A white carnation fell at my feet. While I was guessing how this could happen, I was distracted by a noise I couldn't identify, very deep, building and approaching. I had just slipped away early from a memorial concert for Bill Graham and was still getting my bearings. Then another flower fell and another. I looked up, a herd of Bison were stampeding directly toward me! The next moment stretched out of time, back to my childhood, TV,...THAT'S where I heard that sound before! STAMPEDE! (quick, in case of Bison stampede...?) The Bison wheeled away. More flowers and more flowers fell, tens of flowers, twenties of flowers, all straight down at the same stately rate. The Bison definitely seemed freaked out by them, running around and around in a jerky circle in their pen. I didn't blame them really. It wasn't frogs falling from the sky but still, flowers fall out of the clear blue sky when? Oh, wait a minute. I looked back to the concert ... the Otis Spunkmeyer DC-3 was over the crowd and a gazillion carnations were getting shoved out the cargo bay. Bill Graham Presents up to the old tricks. Fooled me this time.So it resolved, the beautiful, the improbable, stubborn, headlong, charging in a hail of flowers Bill moment.
When I was little there was a hunchbacked, near dwarf with a club foot that would come through the neighborhood once a month ringing a bell and appearing to stagger under the weight of a giant grindstone that was in a stand with a foot pedal on his back. You could hear the bell from far off, uneven, ringing then clattering his arm more busy with balance as he lurched to the right with each slow step. I clung to the bars of my window waiting to spy him cross the top of the alley. He was crouched over like Blind Pew. He seemed to come from the past and because he was barely taller than I was at eight,, from some world in between childhood and the adult world.
In my mind the ringing of his bell is coupled with the jingling harnesses of the mule team as they went down the street to mow the hillsides in the park and the sound the tire chains made on the old milk trucks that the milkman drove standing up ( a feat worthy of the circus I thought). The milkmen were the first ones out on the road and if they needed chains it was a sign that it MIGHT be a Snow Day from school. The other Dickens/Robert Louis Stevenson element in the neighborhood was a school for the deaf in the next block. You could hear and occasionally see an instructor ring a bell and shout the same word over and over to a student. When they went to the park across the street they all put one hand on the shoulder of the person in front of them like in a chain gang.
Years later in Florida when I tried going door to door with a bench top grindstone offering my serves it didn't seem to have the same charm. I got the idea pretty quick that this wasn't going to work at all (what was I thinking ) I remember the first women who came to her door being very nice then very tense and her hand unconsciously flicking toward the lock on the screen door
first rays of light
from a green-gold moon. The storm on the way is
only a gold crown around
the moon tonight. Here, when I was twenty-one, for
my birthday I set out
a hundred candles in a star pattern. Immediately a
Hudson Valley Summer
rain came and dashed them out, pouring straight
down in long drops that
strung together, soaking us as we did a
trying-not-to-spill-the-Champaign run, into the
barn.
Here, from this
same tree with it's twig ends nodding and with a
droplet like glass on
each end, here you learned to fly, the joys of
having a Father who is
only nineteen, pushing you around high off the
ground at the end of the
rope swing, hanging on with your strong two year
old hands til you got
that look that said Better get over here
quick...I'm about to fall off.
We lived by the edge of a field three hundred
years old going back to
Dutch times. It was nice and long and rolling like
the flanks of a
beautiful woman lying on her side. Arms, hair,
little forest and the
River so regular and straight, the broad old
mountain by Woodstock
always there, changing every day. Sometimes when I
mowed the field it
felt as if the tractor and I were a still point at
the center of the
world and the field was being pulled steadily
under us and then pivoted
at the corners, the tractor and I always moving in
the same direction,
the Earth drawn, approaching and then pivoting
again.
At the end of the day, when there was only a
little patch left in the
middle, it would be crowded with field mice and
who knows what else,
driven there by the noise. I didn't know this at
first and wondered at
all the "dancing" mice when I mowed it.
On the frozen River in Winter, you reached for the
bridge two miles away
and for a second it was possible to see it with
your child’s eyes, a toy
bridge perhaps four feet high and just out of
reach.
In the ice boats, huge contraptions, some of them
from Civil War times
that Ricky would bring out when the ice got thick
enough, something like
that bridge illusion would occur. Because there
were no markers, It felt
more like falling when the wind caught us, more
like falling than
accelerating, nothing but flat white ice evenly in
all directions and,
too, no resistance only steel blades on ice.
If
you stood by the bowstay
so you couldn't see the boat at all, it made the
illusion of flying:
continuously and gently raising up like in those
dreams where you float up elastically when you breathe in, suspending
yourself at the top of
your breathe and then glide forward on the exhale,
concentrating a
little to steer, all the while part of your mind
going, 'Oh right, I
remember, of course I can fly, I'm just a little
rusty, that's all."
When this happens, I sometimes make a note, saying
"I must remember to
do this when I wake up"
Why do we all share this elastic quality of flying
in our dreams, if not
because it is 'real'. Or to put it another way,
why are the things we do
when we are not in our body, not 'real' ? When we
go into a room, we can
tell right away if someone is there and are
startled if we are wrong.
When I worked with old people, time and again I
would go into a room to
get them for an activity and think they were not
there. Then the sheets
would start moving, they'd been under the covers.
I could feel them come
back in and see them too of course, but I mean see
their body light up a little like someone turning a rheostat up a few notches .
This was
usually a sign that they were away on extended
visits to the next world,
arranging things, I suppose, getting used to their
new home and that they wouldn't be here much longer.
Because I was
anxious about when
exactly this would happen, I made a meditation to
chart it, which went
like this.
There would be a boat at a wharf, a
gangplank, a pile of trunks, their belongings for the journey,
memories, impressions.
The
ship would be made ready in stages, the trunks
boarded, sails set,
gangplank drawn up and so forth over a span of
days or a few weeks and
then they'd be off.
Although it wasn't accurate to
the hour or anything,
it helped me gauge and pace my response when it
looked like things were
heading that way. And with one person a week
making the trip, it was a
big help.
Anyway, I only mention it because our
bodies do such a good
job of convincing us they are "Us" and yet our
bodies are so easily
fooled by simple illusions like the bridge for
instance. They, our
bodies, quickly start to look like something made
out of Instant Mashed Potatoes when we leave for good.
In sleep when we
leave just for
overnight they look like 'us' only younger.
I really wonder sometimes what we see when we see
a friend for example.
The first time I met Sally we danced all afternoon
so presumably I got a
good look at her. Then when I went out to
Inverness to visit for the
first time it turned out she had a very different
figure than the person
I met at the dance. She was beautiful just way
more buxom than I
remember. Had I needed that extra push, her
looking closer to my body
type, to get past the shyness and ask where she
lived and everything?
Who is in charge of making these changes to our
perception anyway? I
like to think we at least get to sit on the
committee that decides these
things and then hide the decisions from our daily
self so it will be
convincing and fresh.
This could be part of the 'why do ghosts have
clothes question?" Or why
artists keep trying to create that astonishing
world of our first year
when only a handful of things have names and yet
there is some other
kind of knowing, of unity, unity almost constantly
punctuated by wonder
and discovery that such and such is not so big,
just very close or no,
we are not moving, it is those things out the
window that are moving.
In the little house by the side of the field ,
there were hardly any
windows. They used to evaluate the taxes according
to how many windows a
house had, so the thrifty types who built the
gardener's cottage left
them out as much as they could. There were none on
the North side, only
the one in the kitchen door, on the West side, the
view of the field
down to the River and the Mountain stayed fresh
because of this.
Upstairs in the bedroom the window was so small it
made the room into a
camera obscura. A coke bottle on the bedside table
didn't cast a shadow,
it cast an image of itself on the wall.
Here is a picture of a Gypsy grave. At the other end is a dresser, chair, table with Cognac and glasses for guests.
Texas
I see your steady gaze through the twilight. Was that a phantom smile I saw or just a passing curl of smoke at the corner of your mouth? Rain beats on the glass door obscuring the rustle of your robe as you reseat yourself and lay back even further. Why do simple gestures like this get earmarked for no reason and come to signify an entire time in our life? Is it their being unattached to the events around them that makes them eligible? When I found you alone at night sitting on the edge of the roof looking like a beautiful silver gargoyle, that was one of those times. Sitting in the car waiting for you to say goodbye to friends was another. I even knew at the time that that moment was being preserved in this way, that this empty park with no structures, the grass half scrubbed off, was being set in amber. How long is it between lives? Is that where we go when we sleep, to tend our memory, finish those conversations in our previous life, while we have already started a new one? Sometimes it feels like we have traveled many miles during the night and feel our nerves still humming with what went on in another place. When we had made it almost to your Mother's house and it was the middle of the night and there was no traffic no one to give us a ride. We stood by the pasture fence preparing to sleep by the side of the road. Gradually and then building quickly a low sound formed in the darkness, our hearts creeping to our throats as it grew, our eyes still not adjusted to the pitch black and ears still ringing from the terrific din of the Bobtail truck that just dropped us off. And then out of the darkness a white stallion rushed our position at the fence, blazing white, eyes and nostrils flaring. He stamped in place looking us up and down and then torn off again just as fast. We shared a nervous laugh certain that it was your Father dead only a week, come to inspect us.
When we got back from that trip, crazy hot Texas, your friend fresh out of prison
throwing rocks at the streetlight because it was making a bad buzzing sound, your Aunt's face oddly slack, still trying to keep the secret that she was your Mother, not your other Aunt as you were told, crazy Texas where the cop swore at us, get the fuck off the road, and kept driving, on that trip when we had made it nearly home and were on the raised highway that ran through the beat industrial part of Syracuse and the quivering of the road every time a truck past scared you and made you want to get off and we got off onto the empty streets below, me thinking we were going to be stranded for hours but so tired I didn't care and you just glad to be away from the unreasonable fear that the road was going to fall down, it was then when we got to the bottom of the ramp that we smiled to each other because we saw a white Plymouth Valiant just like our friend's car at home only seventy more miles away and then in eery disbelief and joy saw that it WAS in fact our friends who had just driven a hundred mile an hour to the airport, dropped someone off and then got lost on the way back out of town. Much rejoicing, the circumstance so unbelievable that our friends looked slightly unfamiliar for a moment while we double checked, could this be real. What a poor word coincidence is at a time like that. Is it easy for the Powers That Be to arrange things like this or does it take legions of Angels with Clipboards and Walkie Talkies speeding up and slowing down traffic across the whole country, arranging the motive for the trip to Syracuse, the only one in the three years we all lived there and getting you , who are not afraid of anything so jumpy about a little shaking?
Now treading the last waters of consciousness, the figures from Dreamland poised around me like players in a game of Red light Green light, ready to resume, waiting for my attention to shift a little more. On a silent cue we all exhale and take up the Play again. I am in a theater or club. It looks like a fancy house from the 1840's that has seen better days , slightly frayed red damask walls, gas light fixtures. Upstairs everything is smaller, the ceiling only as high as a man can reach, like in early times. I am expected somewhere downstairs but I 'm not sure where, I am not familiar with this place, still discovering it. There is a sense of foreboding, anticipation. I go out onto a balcony that wraps around three stories of the lobby. There is light, activity, I hears voices. I go down. There, around a long table sit my Grandfather and, on his right, Ben Franklin and then James Madison and perhaps eight or nine others. I'm so distracted trying to keep acting normally and process "Ben Franklin?" "people from a different centuries?" that I don't register who the rest are. My Grandfather welcomes me very warmly like a much favored Grandchild. I feel about eight years old in this company. I am a little taken back because I never knew him in this life, he died before I was born. There is a large document on the table, parchment, they are planning something. There is one of those moments where it is silently and quickly translated from unknown to known, but only the vague outlines. I'm asked what I think. "Yes, yes" I silently ascent, although I have no clear idea to what. Inside I am busy on two tracks. One, that we might still be involved with this world, even planning new things for this world after we die [ hardly seems worth it to call it dying then ] and two, that I am so warmly favored by my Grandfather, really that he even knows me. He was always reported to be formidable, distant from my Father who in turn was reserved, distant from me, I just assumed that I would never be accepted into the fold on that side of the family. This dream , this encounter really, was a right of passage for me, a rite of acceptance. Rather shaky ground to base this on I know but my only other contact was putting a cotton beard on his portrait at Christmas time. When we went to see the painting on a trip back to Washington with the family, something told me it was venturing too far into the past or was untoward to move the memory of his painting to such a public place, I couldn't really tell and anyway couldn't see the harm. We finally locate where the painting was hung, it was in the National Portrait Gallery, it was done when he was Secretary of Agriculture in President Wilson's Cabinet, anyway when we locate the gallery and turned the corner, there we were met by an entire blank wall of milky plastic taped off all around, floor walls and ceiling. The gallery was undergoing renovation. In the Art of Memory, the technique for remembering things by placing them in a familiar place or temple, it is perhaps untoward or at least disruptive to go back and see that the skeleton of your memories is completely reordered. I had the same feeling when I went back near my college, and was opening lots of old doors. Well, again, what's the harm, when was I going to be back again anyway now that I lived in California? I headed over. Half way there the road was completely blocked by a pile of dirt ten feet high. I think they must have taken out the bridge or something to go to such measures. I turned back, I didn't go around the other way.
Washington is great for places that stay the same year in and year out. The National Gallery, where it is always the same temperature and humidity as well, hit me full force, seeming to neatly gather up all the visits going back to when I was twelve and in such a way that I was reseeing everything with eyes of a now forty year old. At twelve it was "my" collection and I took it for granted that like the movies that came to town two months after they opened in New York, a little behind. Now there were Masterpieces looming from every wall. I got Stendahl Syndrome. Embarrassing, I thought it was fictive, an affectation or an artifact from a more refined time of fainting couches and smelling salts. Stendahl Syndrome, overcome by an excess of beauty, turns out to be about as much fun as car sickness. Like a carnival ride going too fast my stomach got queasy and the power started to drain from every limb. I had to get out of there, fast. Literally shielding my eyes from an entire roomful of Velasquez on the way, I found my way to a side door and sat down. There beside me was the date the building was erected , MCMXL, 1940, only seven years older than I.
I see your steady gaze through the twilight. Was that a phantom smile I saw or just a passing curl of smoke at the corner of your mouth? Rain beats on the glass door obscuring the rustle of your robe as you reseat yourself and lay back even further. Why do simple gestures like this get earmarked for no reason and come to signify an entire time in our life? Is it their being unattached to the events around them that makes them eligible? When I found you alone at night sitting on the edge of the roof looking like a beautiful silver gargoyle, that was one of those times. Sitting in the car waiting for you to say goodbye to friends was another. I even knew at the time that that moment was being preserved in this way, that this empty park with no structures, the grass half scrubbed off, was being set in amber. How long is it between lives? Is that where we go when we sleep, to tend our memory, finish those conversations in our previous life, while we have already started a new one? Sometimes it feels like we have traveled many miles during the night and feel our nerves still humming with what went on in another place. When we had made it almost to your Mother's house and it was the middle of the night and there was no traffic no one to give us a ride. We stood by the pasture fence preparing to sleep by the side of the road. Gradually and then building quickly a low sound formed in the darkness, our hearts creeping to our throats as it grew, our eyes still not adjusted to the pitch black and ears still ringing from the terrific din of the Bobtail truck that just dropped us off. And then out of the darkness a white stallion rushed our position at the fence, blazing white, eyes and nostrils flaring. He stamped in place looking us up and down and then torn off again just as fast. We shared a nervous laugh certain that it was your Father dead only a week, come to inspect us.
When we got back from that trip, crazy hot Texas, your friend fresh out of prison
throwing rocks at the streetlight because it was making a bad buzzing sound, your Aunt's face oddly slack, still trying to keep the secret that she was your Mother, not your other Aunt as you were told, crazy Texas where the cop swore at us, get the fuck off the road, and kept driving, on that trip when we had made it nearly home and were on the raised highway that ran through the beat industrial part of Syracuse and the quivering of the road every time a truck past scared you and made you want to get off and we got off onto the empty streets below, me thinking we were going to be stranded for hours but so tired I didn't care and you just glad to be away from the unreasonable fear that the road was going to fall down, it was then when we got to the bottom of the ramp that we smiled to each other because we saw a white Plymouth Valiant just like our friend's car at home only seventy more miles away and then in eery disbelief and joy saw that it WAS in fact our friends who had just driven a hundred mile an hour to the airport, dropped someone off and then got lost on the way back out of town. Much rejoicing, the circumstance so unbelievable that our friends looked slightly unfamiliar for a moment while we double checked, could this be real. What a poor word coincidence is at a time like that. Is it easy for the Powers That Be to arrange things like this or does it take legions of Angels with Clipboards and Walkie Talkies speeding up and slowing down traffic across the whole country, arranging the motive for the trip to Syracuse, the only one in the three years we all lived there and getting you , who are not afraid of anything so jumpy about a little shaking?
I
The sun is jealous when you smile, remembering when it was young. When the stars come out, they wink back behind a cloud, crestfallen and seized with stagefright, trembling at the shimmer of your glance. Your magnificent voice bells forth, a momentary hush falls, flowers checking their posture. The light sways in your sillage, seeming to create space within space. My stomach is solemn, my heart dances, my throat is on tip-toe. And then you pass, the sky turning in procession, and the day begins again with transfigured eyes.
Il sole è jealous quando sorridete, ricordandosi di quando era giovane. Quando le stelle escono, sbattere le palpebre indietro dietro una nube, crestfallen e grippato con stagefright, tremolante allo shimmer della vostra occhiata. Le vostre flange magnifiche di voce avanti, un hush momentaneo cade, fiorisce controllando la loro posizione. La luce ondeggia nel vostro sillage, sembrante generare lo spazio all'interno di spazio. Il mio stomaco è solenne, i miei balli del cuore, la mia gola è sulla punta dei piedi. Ed allora passate, il cielo che gira nel procession ed il giorno comincia ancora con transfigured gli occhi.
TRANSFIGURED EYES
now cresting the top of the year the air crystal, buoyed up like an updraft lifting a canopy, not so much looking back as pulling away from the earth so you can see the entire curvature. Then on the exhale feeling the year inside, it's sadness quieted as the last piece of the year's frame comes into place new promises appearing at it's death. Do we still remember the many years when it was strictly on faith that we felt safe the food would last? At the very top of the year where the firmament pulls apart like an iris, the surface no longer there, open, and a shaft of light reaches down to June now upside down impossible like Australia.
Now treading the last waters of consciousness, the figures from Dreamland poised around me like players in a game of Red light Green light, ready to resume, waiting for my attention to shift a little more. On a silent cue we all exhale and take up the Play again. I am in a theater or club. It looks like a fancy house from the 1840's that has seen better days , slightly frayed red damask walls, gas light fixtures. Upstairs everything is smaller, the ceiling only as high as a man can reach, like in early times. I am expected somewhere downstairs but I 'm not sure where, I am not familiar with this place, still discovering it. There is a sense of foreboding, anticipation. I go out onto a balcony that wraps around three stories of the lobby. There is light, activity, I hears voices. I go down. There, around a long table sit my Grandfather and, on his right, Ben Franklin and then James Madison and perhaps eight or nine others. I'm so distracted trying to keep acting normally and process "Ben Franklin?" "people from a different centuries?" that I don't register who the rest are. My Grandfather welcomes me very warmly like a much favored Grandchild. I feel about eight years old in this company. I am a little taken back because I never knew him in this life, he died before I was born. There is a large document on the table, parchment, they are planning something. There is one of those moments where it is silently and quickly translated from unknown to known, but only the vague outlines. I'm asked what I think. "Yes, yes" I silently ascent, although I have no clear idea to what. Inside I am busy on two tracks. One, that we might still be involved with this world, even planning new things for this world after we die [ hardly seems worth it to call it dying then ] and two, that I am so warmly favored by my Grandfather, really that he even knows me. He was always reported to be formidable, distant from my Father who in turn was reserved, distant from me, I just assumed that I would never be accepted into the fold on that side of the family. This dream , this encounter really, was a right of passage for me, a rite of acceptance. Rather shaky ground to base this on I know but my only other contact was putting a cotton beard on his portrait at Christmas time. When we went to see the painting on a trip back to Washington with the family, something told me it was venturing too far into the past or was untoward to move the memory of his painting to such a public place, I couldn't really tell and anyway couldn't see the harm. We finally locate where the painting was hung, it was in the National Portrait Gallery, it was done when he was Secretary of Agriculture in President Wilson's Cabinet, anyway when we locate the gallery and turned the corner, there we were met by an entire blank wall of milky plastic taped off all around, floor walls and ceiling. The gallery was undergoing renovation. In the Art of Memory, the technique for remembering things by placing them in a familiar place or temple, it is perhaps untoward or at least disruptive to go back and see that the skeleton of your memories is completely reordered. I had the same feeling when I went back near my college, and was opening lots of old doors. Well, again, what's the harm, when was I going to be back again anyway now that I lived in California? I headed over. Half way there the road was completely blocked by a pile of dirt ten feet high. I think they must have taken out the bridge or something to go to such measures. I turned back, I didn't go around the other way.
Washington is great for places that stay the same year in and year out. The National Gallery, where it is always the same temperature and humidity as well, hit me full force, seeming to neatly gather up all the visits going back to when I was twelve and in such a way that I was reseeing everything with eyes of a now forty year old. At twelve it was "my" collection and I took it for granted that like the movies that came to town two months after they opened in New York, it was a little behind. Now there were Masterpieces looming from every wall. I got Stendahl Syndrome. Embarrassing, I thought it was fictive, an affectation or an artifact from a more refined time of fainting couches and smelling salts. Stendahl Syndrome, overcome by an excess of beauty, turns out to be about as much fun as car sickness. Like a carnival ride going too fast my stomach got queasy and the power started to drain from every limb. I had to get out of there, fast. Literally shielding my eyes from an entire roomful of Velasquez on the way, I found my way to a side door and sat down. There beside me was the date the building was erected , MCMXL, 1940, only seven years older than I.
I see your steady gaze through the twilight. Was that a phantom smile I saw or just a passing curl of smoke at the corner of your mouth? Rain beats on the glass door obscuring the rustle of your robe as you reseat yourself and lay back even further. Why do simple gestures like this get earmarked for no reason and come to signify an entire time in our life? Is it their being unattached to the events around them that makes them eligible? When I found you alone at night sitting on the edge of the roof looking like a beautiful silver gargoyle, that was one of those times. Sitting in the car waiting for you to say goodbye to friends was another. I even knew at the time that that moment was being preserved in this way, that this empty park with no structures, the grass half scrubbed off, was being set in amber. How long is it between lives? Is that where we go when we sleep, to tend our memory, finish those conversations in our previous life, while we have already started a new one? Sometimes it feels like we have traveled many miles during the night and feel our nerves still humming with what went on in another place. When we had made it almost to your Mother's house and it was the middle of the night and there was no traffic no one to give us a ride. We stood by the pasture fence preparing to sleep by the side of the road. Gradually and then building quickly a low sound formed in the darkness, our hearts creeping to our throats as it grew, our eyes still not adjusted to the pitch black and ears still ringing from the terrific din of the Bobtail truck that just dropped us off. And then out of the darkness a white stallion rushed our position at the fence, blazing white, eyes and nostrils flaring. He stamped in place looking us up and down and then torn off again just as fast. We shared a nervous laugh certain that it was your Father dead only a week, come to inspect us.
When we got back from that trip, crazy hot Texas, your friend fresh out of prison
throwing rocks at the streetlight because it was making a bad buzzing sound, your Aunt's face oddly slack, still trying to keep the secret that she was your Mother, not your other Aunt as you were told, crazy Texas where the cop swore at us, get the fuck off the road, and kept driving, on that trip when we had made it nearly home and were on the raised highway that ran through the beat industrial part of Syracuse and the quivering of the road every time a truck past scared you and made you want to get off and we got off onto the empty streets below, me thinking we were going to be stranded for hours but so tired I didn't care and you just glad to be away from the unreasonable fear that the road was going to fall down, it was then when we got to the bottom of the ramp that we smiled to each other because we saw a white Plymouth Valiant just like our friend's car at home only seventy more miles away and then in eery disbelief and joy saw that it WAS in fact our friends who had just driven a hundred mile an hour to the airport, dropped someone off and then got lost on the way back out of town. Much rejoicing, the circumstance so unbelievable that our friends looked slightly unfamiliar for a moment while we double checked, could this be real. What a poor word coincidence is at a time like that. Is it easy for the Powers That Be to arrange things like this or does it take legions of Angels with Clipboards and Walkie Talkies speeding up and slowing down traffic across the whole country, arranging the motive for the trip to Syracuse, the only one in the three years we all lived there and getting you , who are not afraid of anything so jumpy about a little shaking?
The Gate of Horn and the Gate of Ivory
By the Gates of Sassafrass where the Emerald Waters spilled into the Hyacinth choked Cove, we hide the boats of Ormilou and Amber, their Scalloped Ivory Oars resting in their locks ....and like Hylas who was turned into an Echo by the Nymphs, to hide him when they had ravished him , we were lost to ourselves shedding and donning the attributes of strangers and companions without even a moment's audition, secure that none of it mattered as much as the simple fact that it was moving and in moving gave every promise that it was part of a greater dance and that it rippled out to shores where we might never go, but influenced and were, in turn, influenced by them, in this fragrant, echoing cove, in this sparkling company, riveted by the the same unspoken questions and in the grasp and thrall of the same appetites.
Hylas, Hylas! who went to fetch water and was never seen again. Aesacus, who threw himself into the sea for the love of Hesperia who died running from him, bitten by a poisonous snake, Aesacus who continued to dive into the sea even after he was transformed into a bird by Thethys to save him, becoming then a diving bird, carrying a perfectly even covering of air below with him so he appears brilliant quicksilver under the waves. Thus were we.
The face of a cliff descended in the far reaches of the Cove and in it a tall entrance, the water beginning a fall over round rock in a narrow stream to an underworld lake with a ceiling that sparkled Amythes, Labradorite and Gold. Then another opening with tympanum and archvolts seeming to writhe with figures now animal, now man, now plant, bird, gem, tuber, root, tooth and eye. Here the waters were calm transparent fading into depths with alcoves, waving moss. In the center, The Goddess as round as a large Oak and tall as a house, Green, Jewel-Beetle Green, Malachite Green, Bright Algae and Velvet Green, a robe, soft and permanent, round shoulders, a gathering look.
My little boat made it's way past this sight, pointing to it like a compass and drifted to a stone stairway cut into the side of this chamber and leading to a small rough opening.
Outside the stars were shining now. Time had slid in some way that I could not follow. The Goddess figure was so silent, I expected her to impart more but Her blessing was unsegmented into words, an envelopment or mantle for the journey ahead, a Mother's farewell, really. I went up the stairs and found myself on a ledge, halted just when I'd felt that this was the beginning of a journey. I took in a vast black valley, no, steeper than that , a chasm, the far side only a stone's throw, the river below no more than a scratch on the bottom of a pewter bowl. My breathe stopped. Across from me, addressing me only with his gaze, a naked, burned-black and starved-by-fasting figure sat, robes open to the weather and unravelling, falling into tatters from time, wind and rain. How long had he been sitting there ? I could see every rib and veins standing out as they crossed his ribs. The figure, content, holding some moment waiting for a promise, a condition to be fulfilled before the Sun could rise in this cold place.
Almost out of sight in the distance, to the right and what I took to be the East, I could just make out the entrance, the tall opening in the cliff face. The monk continued to gaze ahead, an eagle rode a steady updraft between us at shoulder height and then pivoting to look away to where the entrance in the cliff face was. I could think of no way to get there. This is where sleep took me, not even sure that that was my next destined place to go to.
Between the Park and the town a river of ice had broken down the bridge and carried it away, leaving two jagged abutments and then broken free of the dike, ripping the earth open, cutting through to the steep downhill direction it had been yearning for, everyday since the men came and fended it to the North.
In the terrific roar that it made, I could only see the lips of your family moving. They stood on the other side, a few yards from where the road was broken off . I could not hear what they were saying. They stood in a tight group, I could not read their faces either. On my side the ground had thawed on top, slippery mud on still hard ground, not good for running. Desperate to find you and confused and angry that your Grandparents and Aunt and Uncle on the far bank, the other side of the cataclysmic fissure that deepened steadily as I watched, continued to stand there facing this, not moving to act, although admittedly there was nothing they or anyone could do now, still their very acceptance grating on my frantic nerves. I turn and start to run back to see if you are by the road, knowing you aren't but unable to stand and look at the terrible water, full of branches rocks and fresh soil ripped from the banks and unable to accept that that is where my search has led, to this dead end, with these numb unresponsive people, grave, seeming to know or expect something terrible like this to happen.
The Oneiroi, the sons of Hypnos, god of sleep, passed through one of two gates . The first of these, made of horn, was the source of the prophetic god-sent dreams, while the other, constructed of ivory, was the source of dreams which were false and without meaning. The term for nightmare was melas oneiros, black dream. The Oneiroi passed through one of two gates . The first of these, made of horn, was the source of the prophetic god-sent dreams, while the other, constructed of ivory, was the source of dreams which were false and without meaning. The term for nightmare was melas oneiros, black dream.
Hesiod, Theogony 211 ff (trans. Evelyn-White) (Greek epic C8th or C7th B.C.) : "And Nyx (Night) bare hateful Moros (Doom) and black Ker (Violent Death) and Thanatos (Death), and she bare Hypnos (Sleep) and the tribe of Oneiroi (Dreams). And again the goddess murky Nyx, though she lay with none, bare Momos (Blame) and painful Oizys (Misery), and the Hesperides . . . Also she bare the Moirai (Fates) and the ruthless avenging Keres (Death-Fates) . . . Also deadly Nyx bare Nemesis (Envy) to afflict mortal men, and after her, Apate (Deceit) and Philotes (Friendship) and hateful Geras (Old Age) and hard-hearted Eris (Strife)
Down that same hill to the creek I once saw a deer drunkenly dancing showing off for his mate taking great slap-happy leaps , his hind legs rotating woozily in mid-air to regain balance. We would see neat little deer chomps out of the Aminita mushrooms, the Fairie mushrooms of witches flight fancy which do indeed make a blast of aether go through one for hours, me by then clutching a pillow in the attic. Over the hill and half a mile away you could hear the bell by the back door, the one made from a welding tank sending it's columns of notes marching up the hill. We were caught out past twilight so it was comforting to have the direction marked for us.
A Gift for It
A Gift For It
My Mother was a great gift giver, great in a special way....she didn't so much hit the bullseye as simple knock the target down. Her last present to me was a pair of pink Madras Bermuda shorts with a pink polo shirt! Truly stunning. Before that was what I called the poodle pelt sweater [no poodles were harmed ] it was made in a giant criss cross puffy cable knit pattern, each puff about the size and texture of a teacup poodle...it inhabited it's own spot in the left field of aesthetics, not so-bad-it's-good, not camp, too ugly to be gay even, a stand alone item, very alone. One Christmas she sent an apricot colored sweater...hmmmm. I was wearing it to a Robert Raushenberg/Tricia Brown event and took it off. At the end of the piece, which involved dancers climbing around on a big web, they brought out a pile of used cloths and there was some kind of audience participation bit. My sweater got caught up in it and was never seen again, somewhat to my relief because I knew I'd wear the thing, telling myself it was somehow 'subversive' to mess with people's expectation. I just needed cloths was more like it. Anyway when I told Robert, thinking it was funny how involved I'd gotten, he apologized up and down and invited me to his loft for dinner. While I was at the table, I noticed a groove in the molding about half an inch from the floor. A minute later a turtle came out from behind a sideboy and very, very slowly made it's way across six feet of open area and disappeared behind a chair. Twenty minutes later it made the return trip. And then back again, over and over all evening. Eventually I had to ask about it. "Oh, he's blind . That's where he lives now. His shell has worn that groove in the baseboard." In my memory the turtle is paired with the beaver in the Central Park Zoo who made a dam endlessly. It was terrible place run on the notion that if it was a children's zoo it was OK to have 'children's size' enclosures for the animals. So the result was one beaver in a seven foot wide concrete pool with ONE piece of wood, a piece of a branch about a foot long that he would take out of the water, carefully arrange, take back into the water, return, arrange "next" to the ghost of itself, back in the water, arrange again and so on until he had a dam you could almost see, and all with only one piece of wood. Back to my Mother. I thought of her recently when I got a little loose at a Sunday-Go-to-Meeting clothing store the other day and became the owner of a pair of pistachio color shoes. I got them to go to a costume ball. The Art Deco Society has different twenties, thirties and Forties dress up events, you'd be surprised the guys are all straight and the girls are detail perfect...it's kind of spooky for me actually, the hair everything, they look like people I knew who would be 95 years old today. I am sort of the walker for one of my friends who became Gloria's play Auntie, that's how I end up at these things. Having lived through it once, that is come home from school to a stack of invitations to dances where, guess what "DAD" has hired an orchestra that sounds like Mitch Miller, and it's now 1963...I'm not that taken by the scene perhaps it shows and contributes to the looks I get, equal parts bewilderment and consternation.
BERKELEY 1983 HERE IS ONE I'M NOT SURE I BELIEVE. I went to see Willard Fuller . He was billed as the man with the gift of healing teeth. I didn't even know how to be properly skeptical of this claim, how do you 'heal' a tooth? Well, Willard did it by telling corny jokes [....so Baptist even the creek in the backyard was Baptist ] to loosen up the New Age audience, who you could tell were a little nervous bring in the same room with an honest to God Christian. Then he said, as he did every night, "I feel such enthusiasm here tonight, I'm going to ask ALL of you to come up and make a line." We did and one by one he put his hands by our jaw and said a phrase [ In the name of Jesus be thou every whit whole ] I felt a nice cool vibration, that's all and sat back down. There were about a hundred of us so this took a little while and then here and there you could here people exclaiming quietly and there'd be a little stir as others gathered around with flashlights.... right, flashlights and mirrors, not your usually equipment to bring to a seminar, and yes it did feel weird going to look in a total strangers mouth. SURE ENOUGH gold crowns were appearing in peoples mouths. One woman from Finland had healthy teeth or gaps where one had been removed, no fillings.......and one great honking new, mirror finish GOLD CROWN that looked like it had been fashioned by Brancusi, an Angelic Art Deco abstraction of a tooth, four forms, gathered in a rectangular pattern meeting at a shallow dome, top center. The woman was wide eyed, in a calm daze. The New Agers were kind of frowny, puzzled, asking great questions like 'you sure in wasn't there before?" No one was especially happy or having a conversion experience. So much for miracles, wasn't working visible on this crowd. Nothing dramatic happened to me. TWO MONTHS LATER I am in bed trying to go to sleep and my wisdom tooth is killing me. I am in no mood, very irritated, "oh fuck I gotta go to the dentist no money', that space. Go to sleep.Next morning..... No tooth!. GONE. My tongue is fishing around for it. Nothing. No soreness or any evidence that it was ever there. Now it was my turn to be puzzled.... I had experienced healing before but it was of the "my back feels much better after that massage" variety. I thought it was funny that it happened even though I was so crabby and slightly miffed that my reaction was mild shock and 'what-the...???' I haven't even told that many people This story is kind of a conversation stopper.
I
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