THEN & NOW

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Prologue: At the End of Our Stories

Now the tide has changed wiping the signs of human devastation from the sand, gone the needles and syringes, blood-soiled gauze, gone the plastic bags caught in the branches of trees, all signs of fragmentation and despair. Airplanes packed with absentminded tourists no longer crisscross the skies, leaving traces of jet fuel in the clouds that rain upon the trees. The beach is washed clean, sunlight and shadow play upon gleaming dots of mica. Restored the language of seaweed and the footsteps of sandpipers and seagulls. Long ago the earth shivered and shattered buildings, multiplex cinemas, pot bellied sports stadiums and crowded shopping malls.

Sea and wind wipe skin and muscle from skeletons dragging genetic memory down deep into salty amniotic liquid. In the warm biological soup form becomes something yet unseen. Time is words shaped into images that become stone, and then warn down again to powder blowing in the wind.

We have come to the end of our stories of superiority and human self-empowerment. No more heroes. We are a part of families of animals, intricate chains of organisms that share life on this earth. What good is rock and mountain without earthquakes and turmoil? The land reshapes itself; new stories about participation must be imagined to restore and remember the ecstasy of our daily life. Ants and spiders carry on, seemingly content with their cycles of existence.

Body, The Great Antenna

We humans are bored with the personal meaning we give to things, lost in endless dark tunnels of wasted words and images. Will we stop and change our metaphors? Listen there is a new song to sing, a sound that is as fluid as the light that ripples through the fields of wheat. The taste of bread begins deep in the earth. Perhaps language should return to grunt and squeak and grin, a free form sound of joy and pain, no longer assessed by the banality of mind. 

Body, the great antenna, both receiver and transmitter of sacred code, spaces written on skin, messages rushing through the thick sludge of blood, veins vessels of each life’s scripts. We are becoming extinct like elephants and whales only we are becoming redundant by being too many, six, seven billion humans spreading like cancer upon the earth, fighting for air and food. Half the species consumed by greed and envy, the other half grasping for a moment of survival. We spread our seed like devastating oil spills upon the ocean, coating the wings and paws of other species with the poison of our sick desires. The sound of guns and bombs, the sound of dying children, the sound of painful birth, the sound of tortured beings crying out from boredom and futility drown out the call of whales, the clacking sound of dolphins, the summer song of the cicada and the grief of the donkey.
We must meet and greet each other with fresh language; words bleached and washed clean of history’s curse.

Forget our consensual speak, let smile and tears be the end all and be all of communication. Let anger be the sound of power without demand.  Let awe speak to the worlds. Forget the shape of words, the stale boundaries of old talk. Beyond and before our separate small stories, there is a fountain of awareness full and empty, form and void, devoid, the silence, the tender link between sound and no sound.

Is silence no sound or the sound of nothing? Or again is it the intense roar of creation.

Why would I tell my stories one more time if silence were the key to wisdom, why would I describe mundane, passing perfumes and tastes and color? Well perhaps because the gases that form and dissolve stars are no more important than the smell of dog piss floating above the streets of Paris or the tuberose flower scent of my mother’s skin, perhaps because the comforting touch of the paper on which a book is printed is as important as the fabric of a changing universe.

Archibald Assassinated

I had a dog once, once only, when I was 21 years old, a black and white Spaniel with long ears softer than any words lovers might say to each other. I named him Archibald or Chibaldo depending on the whims of tenderness I felt for him. I left my first husband for a handsome Englishman who gave me the dog. Nicky slept with another woman when I was away, I was more hurt by the fact that her dog slept in Archibald’s basket than by her presence in our bed. Small things like that are the memories that become etched on skin.

Archibald jumped around in the grass with boundless enthusiasm his eyes filled with joy and extreme devotion. The swimming pool at my mother’s house in Spain was to him an English country lake where he chased invisible ducks and mystery birds fallen from the sky.

I played with my baby daughter and I loved my dog. They frolicked together next to large clay pots of white daisies under the blue sky of southern Spain.  Some times Chibaldo went out to inspect the surrounding houses and gardens. One night he did not return, the next morning Archibald had not come home. For hours I searched for him desperate to find traces of his small paws in the red dirt on the mountain of The Witch. No sign of my dog anywhere. Then under the pale light of the full moon on the side of a road a little ball of white and black fur, body cold and rigid under my caresses, no yelps of joy, no wagging tail only a lifeless body covered in dirt. I took him back to the house, gently nestled in my arms and asked, Jose, my mother’s gypsy driver, to dig a whole in the garden. In my rage and sadness I tore of all the daisies from the pots around the pool and buried them deep with Archibald’s lifeless body.

Someone had poisoned my dog, that happens often here in the mountains where the people, most all of them Catholics consider that animals have no souls and therefore are disposable objects. Archibald was a piece of my own soul, a part of my own vitality and will to live. Archibald’s soul still lives inside my heart, a memory of love unique, still fresh and innocent 40 years later.  I would never want to take the risk of loving another dog I am too good at rejecting what could be taken away in a fleeting moment.

A long time after Archibald’s life ended, I returned to Spain. I write these words from a white village draped around an Andalusia mountain, from my window I see two oceans merging in the distance, Mediterranean and Atlantic, this is the most southern part of Europe, the Straights of Gibraltar where Africa gleams and calls across the way. I have returned here after half a life away, more peaceful as the years flow by, I know so much less than when I was younger, I am no longer frozen by the fear of making mistakes. I have come to feel comfortable about my place upon this earth. Just like every seed that takes root has a right to rise and become tree or flower, Although I was planted in an unwelcoming womb, I have flowered in hard lands and sometimes beautiful conditions, now at long last closely related to the people I cherish, in awe of the passing clouds, mumbling at times the names of the mountains that seem to hold me here in their arms of stone, El Hacho and the Crestallina.

Childhood in Spain

I remember my first trip to Spain as 11-year-old girl; I have a photo of myself above my desk, from that time. I am seated on one of the stone lions at the Alhambra Palace in Granada. My mother, a dark beauty in her forties, with brown eyes a slender figure and high cheekbones, stands behind me in an elegant white “haute couture” suit. The one who snapped the picture, her driver, a Spanish man who was abusing me sexually relished the power that this horrible deed gave him over my mother, his abusive employer. That woman in the white suit could scream and act out her devastating rage like no one I have ever met since. Sometime in her own difficult childhood, she had learned that yelling obscenities and insults at the top of your lungs was an appropriate way to express her contempt, pain and disappointment at life.

We traveled from Paris, where we lived, to Andalusia in the turquoise and white 57 Chevy, a beauty with an engine that roared silently like the deep dark desires of it’s devious driver. Relegated to the back seat during the long haul I cheated boredom by counting the trees on the side of the road. No freeways in those days, just narrow highways cut into the lush countryside.
When in Granada, we visited gypsies who danced flamenco in the caves of Sacromonte, carved into the mountain, my mother slipped into drunkenness sipping sweet muscatel wine, amber smoke from her ever present Chesterfields cigarettes, curling up the white washed walls.

I sat alone on the steps of the bodega, facing the lights of the city below, knees folded under my chin, dressed in my boarding school uniform; warn even on holiday, because she did not want to spend the money on me. The unbridled passion of the gypsy’s Zambras and Lorquanas dances, rose out of bodies that moved like the olive trees on the side of the road. Even then these sounds echoed the sadness, shame and confusion of my prematurely awakened sexuality. In the caves at night, the men in black and women in whirling bright colored skirts, sang and danced their feelings in a way that transformed my own loneliness into a magic moment of belonging.

The gypsy fortunetellers told my mother’s terrible fate, holding her manicured fingers in their dark hands.

She believed it all because the predictions where tragic and dramatic like her own thoughts. She would not meet the ideal lover, she would never return to Granada in her lifetime, she would be unhappy and cursed to die fairly young of an incurable disease like the sublime victim leading ladies in the Italian operas by Verdi and Puccini she loved to listen to. At night I felt guilty because I wanted the driver to come to my hotel room, I did not like the heavy price I had to pay for his attention but above all I wanted to be wanted, to be desired and perhaps even to be loved. I had barely been physically touched in my young life. Hugging and kissing were not part of daily life. People shook hands and that was all, any other forms of touch were dirty, secret and sexual.

Marisya Ulam

My Mother, born into a prosperous Jewish family in 1918 had survived the atrocities perpetrated in her native country, Poland, during the Second World War, by fleeing to Switzerland. After the war she was left scarred, frightened and unable to control her own defensive violence.  She had become an eternal vagabond unable to return to the country where she had spent her childhood. She was the perfect victim, a charismatic helpless woman of the times, she had mastered the art of blame as a tool for manipulation, it was always someone else’s fault, and everyone was out to get her.

In her early years in Poland she had lived in luxury on her father’s estate. In those days people who worked for landowners making nothing but the bare minimum to keep their families alive, where called slaves. In 1919 slaves were given their freedom by decree but most of them stayed on their ex owners estates having no money and no place to go. Several times when I was a child my mother told me a memory from her own childhood. When a slave came up to see her father at the big house he said “ Master, Master you have not beaten me for a month, don’t you love me anymore?”
She had revered her father, who was an intellectual, an architect whose skills and talent were recognized and called upon by the Polish monarchy, Michael Ulam, came from a family of geniuses. His brother’s son Stan Ulam was to become, years later, the mathematician who invented the Hydrogen bomb.

Michael Ulam did not die in the war, he died of a broken heart, in 1938, at the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo, unable to live with the knowledge that his wife had left him for another man and that his daughter, my mother, was about to have a baby by the same man. Arpad Plesch now lived openly with both my grandmother and her daughter. I have gone to my real Grandfather’s grave, shocked to see that it is located in the part of the Monaco cemetery reserved for Jews, on his tombstone are written these words: Michael Ulam , architect for the Polish Government. Strange human perversion, that a man, who had been able to leave Poland in 1936, would be segregated in death on a hill overlooking the Mediterranean.

My mother was taught to serve the ruling patriarchy. Violence and fear are some of the most important tools of that dominator system. My mother was afraid of violence but she had to use it, as she believed it necessary to gain the control she craved against the emotional chaos prevalent in her life. To love was to be feared and to be feared was the key to power over others  .It has become clear to me recently that since the beginning of the industrial revolution some 250 years ago we have been generating entropy through bottomless greed. By the time I was born in 1946 my mother had become a self-generating propagator of entropy in all her affairs.  Negativity was the name of the game and she played it as well as she played bridge in the afternoon at the hotels she lived in.

No surprise, then, that I was born in one of the best hotel’s in the world, a refuge for the super rich or in other words the super exploiters, barely squeezing myself out at six and a half months from a the hostile womb of an anorexic victim.

Until she died my mother never ceased to reproach me “those endless 43 hours of pain” she had to go through to give me birth. It must have been quite an ordeal for me as well as I weighed 1 kilo 50 and measured 50 centimeters. I have often wondered why she kept me growing inside of her for so long but I think this had to do with her perceived helplessness and the need for a scapegoat to blame for her inability to feel any kind of  pleasure . She threw me in a draw and left me to swim or sink. Fortunately someone took pity on me and brought in a wet nurse, a normal Italian working class woman with breast milk to spare in exchange for money to support her own child. I suckled and nested in her large breasts, drinking in the elixir of life so I could survive the perils of my birth. My mother soon went back to her games of pitiful seduction in opulent salons sucking on her long black cigarette holder while she drank creamy transparent icy cold Polish vodka in Baccarat glasses.

Arpad Plesch

Marisya was her step-father’s toy, a victim of incest since she was a child at the mercy of her mother’s second husband. The man was a wealthy Hungarian Jew who had accumulated a dubious fortune during the war at the expense of less fortunate Jews who sent their money to him in Switzerland for safe keeping while they tried to stay alive in their home countries during the pogroms and exterminations under the madness of the Third Reich. This man Arpad Plesch who called himself an International Financier, created numbered accounts for his so called friends and then pitilessly ransomed them to the Hitler regime for a large commission on their fortunes.  As his former friends died in concentration camps the man became richer and richer, playing darker and darker games of evil and domination in a world gone insane to the point of using the hydrogen bomb twice without any regard for the delicate interdepence that characterizes our mutual survival on this planet. 

Much later, I was to learn that my family had a complete lack of values, their genetic memories of belonging burnt away by greed and hatred through the brain damage that occurs from not receiving the proper kind of care and loving in infancy. Generations of neglect by parents for their young had created a group of ruthless monsters that by the year 2.000 were to rule the world spreading famine and disease throughout the African continent, extreme poverty to South America while the other animal worlds disappeared at an alarming speed...