Sweet Delight

The theme of the day announces itself as we enter the Petit Palais:

I await my turn as Richard’s photography bag is scanned.

A woman pushes between us, and puts down her purse.

“Excuse me,” I say. “We’re together.”

She mumbles something in French, and elbows past.

A long line to buy tickets. I photograph the two busts of an African

couple with glowing eyes, one in a turban, gorgeous against the

marble wall. Richard finds a vent in the floor where cool air rises.

He’s always hot, a bull. One man at the counter and twenty people in line.  

I listen to the man offer a tarif réduit[1] to the woman in front of

me. She doesn’t look senior enough, forty at the most. I see in his

eyes his intention to insult. He holds up his hand awkwardly, two

plastic caps—or condoms?—on finger and thumb. Two more

euros.

The exhibition’s downstairs. The ticket taker tears my ticket half

with the images of a duchesse and a tigresse.

“Ohh,” I exclaim. “I wanted them for collage.”

He looks puzzled. Tickets are for tearing.

We gaze at Blake’s poems and etchings of Dante and Chaucer,

The Canterbury Tales, The Inferno and Paradiso, Songs of

Innocence and Experience. History is a perpetual fight between

tyranny and liberty, said Blake. That’s the struggle in all countries

and families. Some oppress. Some are oppressed. Some bolt for

freedom.

As a child, Blake saw "a tree filled with angels, bright angelic

wings bespangling every bough like stars." Later, he blasted

slavery, child labor, and the oppression of women. Some called

him crazy. Would that we all were crazy like Blake.

Look at his drawing of the Recording Angel! This is what it is to

be an artist: to write in the book of life one’s experience while

alive, rather than waiting to read it in the Book of Judgment after

death. Blake saw visions of the truth behind the veil.

One museum guard has a wooden leg. So naturally, he’s the one

they assign to move around from room to room. Like a noisily

clumping Ahab, making it hard to focus.

In the last room, a Jarmusch DVD plays. Johnny Depp tells an

American Indian named Nobody that his name is William Blake.

Nobody quotes Blake,

“Every night and every morn,

Some to misery are born.

Every morn and every night

Some are born to sweet delight.”

I see the dark-haired woman who was in front of me in line.

“You don’t look old enough for a reduced ticket,” I say in French.

She looks surprised.  "No, I'm not."

“The ticket taker was rude.”

“Yes,” she concedes, “but what can I say? I’m a woman, and he is a man.”

“You could protest,” I say, thinking of Blake’s defense of women.

She shrugs, docile.

We emerge into the air, hop on the Métro. At the next stop, a group

of dark-haired young women gets on, and yells at each other.

One stands against a pole and sneezes twice, spraying Richard,

who sits right below her. Everywhere we go today, this leitmotif:

humans being animals, artists being angels.

[1] reduced rate (for senior citizens)

Paris Encounter

How she intrigues me!

With her orange hair,

a fringe of ragged bangs

high on her forehead,

‘90s punk rocker style,

she sits in a corner,

leaning against the window,

gazes out at me

with such intelligent eyes.

She doesn’t look away;

she blinks, still holds my gaze.

What is this look?

I wouldn’t call it happy,

nor is it sad. Just aware.

Thoughtful. Musing.

She doesn’t seem to mind

my standing close to the window

talking to her in a low voice, enchanted.

She touches the glass with one horny finger.

Her breasts are gray over several folds of belly.

A shaggy orange cape, draped

over her shoulders, covers her long arms.

She grins wide, shows her sharp teeth,

and turning towards the glass, kisses me.

She glances up, looks away, shy,

gazes back at me.

There are giant branches of driftwood, dead trees,

thick rope and black tires in her house,

but none of that interests her.

She sits by the window, yearning.

I’d like to take her home, but everyone would object.

The gardienne would throw up her hands in horror;

our good bourgeois neighbors would be alarmed,

call a special meeting of the syndic[1];

even Marley le chat would be incensed.

Anyway, our ceiling is too low. In her native land,

she sleeps in a nest of branches she builds

65 feet from the ground, sometimes with a roof

to protect her from the rain. She’s a solitary

acrobate des arbres[2], athlete of the air.

[1] Syndic de copropriété, a board that oversees common property in an apartment building in France. Like a Coop board.

[2] Acrobat of the trees

Mama Said There’d Be Days Like This

At last! After a week crowded with workmen in the apartment, Giovanni painting, Marcus re-plumbing the shower, Richard’s first week of French lessons at l’Alliance Francaise, and the rush to meet our journal deadlines, tonight we have a date. Going to the Sufi dancing and dinner last week was so pleasurable that we decided to make it a once-a-week ritual.

Marcus will be here at noon to finish up the shower in Richard’s office. It should only take a couple of hours. But where is he?

I make a late lunch, omelette with onion, tomato, zucchini and mushrooms, with steamed broccoli and spinach on the side, and raisin toast, olive oil and almond butter. Just as I finish cooking, at 1:45 Marcus arrives, almost two hours late. He has brought his brother, Christian, who helped us the week before to unpack our boxes.

I want Christian to have a copy of our journal, The Numinosity of Things, since he is mentioned in it, so I print it out. The printer runs out of ink. It’s new, an unfamiliar Canon, and I don’t yet know how to put the ink in. Richard is out.

Just before Marcus and Christian finish their work, Richard returns. He replaces the ink in the printer, and I try again. It prints out half the pages and stops. Marcus and Christian wait, but we cannot figure out what’s holding up the pages, and we don’t want to hold them up.

Richard studies his French homework. I answer e-mail. Then we’re free to saunter over to the Jardin des Plantes[1]. Every once in a while, we crave the company of animals, lots of them, and there’s no place in Paris with a more wonderful assortment from around the world.

It’s so warm outside, 75 Fahrenheit and humid, I don’t even need a cardigan.

“Spring is really here,” I say.

Richard knows a short cut, past La Baleine Café, into the Jardin des Plantes.

And then we see—the combination of its being a weekend day and the first really warm day of spring has brought out half of Paris.

We pass the wallabies and stop.

“Look! They’re hopping around with babies in their pouches.”

“It IS spring,” says Richard.

At the entrance to the zoo, there is a line of at least 100 people.

We glance at each other. “Too crowded.”

“Let’s go to the Natural History Museum.”

But there, too, the line is too long. We meander into the gardens. There is the first display I’ve seen this spring of a uniquely French way of planting flowers, long beds of taller, bright flowers, in this case, pink and purple tulips in one; yellow, orange and white poppies in the other; alternating with long beds of lower flowers, small and white. The French pay attention to beauty, and this is truly beautiful. Couples lean down to get close to the tulips and look them in the eyes. Men and women take close-ups of the blooms. Richard joins them.

At the end of the long beds are flowering cerisiers[2], and a large tree with dark pink blossoms. Pelouse interdite[3] say the signs, but no one pays attention. Children laugh and run on the grass. Tourists and natives walk up close to the trees to look and to take photos. One cerisier is so thick with white blossoms that dozens and dozens of bees dally inside its branches.

We meander down rue Mouffetard. Let’s go check out a new restaurant a Parisian friend recommended, Dans les Landes, I suggest. We turn around and walk in the opposite direction down rue Monge. We pass Violette’s flower shop, and there she is, looking like a red-haired Colette, out in front, talking to friends.

At the restaurant, we find seats outside. The waitress asks us what we’d like to drink; we ask for the menu.

“Oh we don’t serve food,” she says. “Not till 7 p.m.”

It’s 5:00. Thierry, an excellent furniture maker and antique seller who sold us an armoire last week, highly recommended this place, but it won’t work for our date tonight. We cross over to rue Mouffetard.  

Here’s a health food store that might have the vitamins that we’ve run out of. A trim French woman helps us find the best prices for each thing we’re looking for. We usually speak French with the French, but sometimes, when it involves looking for things like turmeric or 5-HTP or Ester-C, we revert to our native tongue. Better to be sure of getting what you want than to practice French for five more minutes.

A man wearing black leather and shades, a solemn caricature of an American film hoodlum, waits to speak to this woman. He begins speaking English, and we hear that he’s mocking us, as if we’re the kind of Americans who never bother to learn the language. I’m surprised. It’s not like a French man to be this openly mocking. Grouchy maybe, but not this style of rude jeering.

After the woman has finished helping this man, we have one more question, whether there’s a better buy of Ester-C capsules than the one we chose.

“Oui,” she says, and zips over to another shelf.

“He was mocking us, wasn’t he,” I say.

She nods. “He’s Belgian,” she says, as if that explains everything.

The man passes us on his way to the cash register.

“Blagueur. Moqueur[4],” I say.

He doesn’t respond.

At Delmas, where we usually have the best galettes in town, we sit in a corner. It’s early and there is only one other table of six young Italians near the door. We don’t need to look at the menu. We wait.

And wait.

And wait. No waiter appears. Finally a group of four men, dressed like Mafioso, come from another part of the restaurant and sit down to eat. One seems to be the owner or manager.

We tell him we’ve been waiting 15 minutes. He turns to go look for a waiter, but we say, “That’s all right. We’ve waited long enough.”

Everywhere we go today there seem to be obstacles. This is beginning to intrigue me. Some Saturnian spirit of obstruction seems determined to block us at every turn.

So let’s go to Picard Surgelés. This is a store that we passed often when we first started coming to Paris. It’s one of those words that is misleading for English speakers. Like traiteur, which sounds like traitor, but means “catering,” surgelés sounds medical. We’ve cleared that up, and heard from numerous French people and Americans how exceptionally tasty and high quality the French version of frozen food is.

The store is simply rows of freezer bins, well marked: soups, pastas, fish dishes, desserts, as antiseptic as a hospital. (You probably could perform surgery here). We stock up on pastas and soups, and leave.

Walking down rue Lacépède, Richard accidentally bangs my heel with the bag of frozen food. It feels like the back of my foot has been scraped off.

“You have no spatial sense,” I say. “I’m walking behind you now.”

(We are well-matched, we agree, he without a sense of space, I without a sense of time.)

He says he’s sorry, but it sounds perfunctory to me, a “man apology,” which by female standards, sounds like no apology at all. I’m in pain!

I, wanting a sense of empathy from him, ask for same. A small matter of tone, which women recognize instantly; men, not so much.

He gives a positively grudging apology. Now it sounds like self-defense, as if caring he’d hurt me was the last thing on his mind.

Being a woman, I point this out.

He begins to sing, "I'm Sorry," an old Brenda Lee hit.

It sounds like mocking to me.  I say so. “Just say it like you mean it,” I ask.

He, being a man, explodes.

I shrink from his yelling in the street in horror. Sacré Bleu! Quelle horreur! In my family of origin you don’t shout in the street. You don’t shout, period.

Without a thought, without making a decision, my feet lead me straight across the street, as far as possible away from him. The date, it seems, is over.

But I want a date. Hmmm, who can I go out on a date with? Someone who is good company, someone who won’t yell at me. I know—me! What would she and I like to do tonight? Dinner? Or a movie? Well, why not both?

I meander down rue Monge to rue Lagrange, and Blvd. St. Germain, then right on Blvd. St. Michel until I come to Place St. Michel. There are French break dancers performing on the sidewalk in front of the fountain where Saint Michel vanquishes the dragon. I wish I could vanquish my own dragon, this passionately allergic reaction I have to what I perceive as callousness.

To me it seems so easy: you hurt someone; you didn’t mean to; but at least you can communicate to the other that you’re sorry. Nothing is more instantly soothing. And for me, nothing is more galling than when that generosity isn’t given.

I check the theaters along Blvd. St. Michel and Blvd. St. Germain. I’ve seen “Les Yeux de Sa Mère.” The others are lightweight French concoctions and heavily violent American killer-thrillers and action flicks. I muse on the question, “Do violent films inspire violence?” Of course they do. Wherever callousness is acted out or depicted, it increases the acceptance of unkindness, lack of empathy, cruelty.

I keep walking. Maybe that theater on rue Serpente will be showing a good film. Yes, they are, but neither starts for an hour. Do I want to see a Spanish film about a photographer who sees the picture of a woman who died before her marriage and who then falls in love with her image (yawn), or The Fighter? I’ve heard raves about the latter, so even though it won’t give me my daily French lesson, that’s my choice.

I walk around the rue St. André des Arts area, looking at menus. Nothing appeals. Back on Blvd. St. Michel, and there is a Boulangerie Paul.

I order a tourte chevre courgettes[5] at the counter.  The Asian proprietor heats it up.  I take it to a table outside.  The tourte is half cold.  I don't want to take it back to be re-heated, or I might miss the movie.  It's one of those days. 

Five minutes later, the proprietor is outside, shooing away a group of three women who are seated, eating. He noisily stacks the chairs while people are finishing their meals. This is so un-French I’m shocked. I know of no other country where it is a national right to sit in a café, having ordered only a café crème, and read, write and converse for hours without being pressured to leave. He hurries a young African-American woman away from finishing her sandwich. I’d spoken with her at the counter and learned that she was from New Orleans, and yes, the town is healing but it still has a long way to go.

I gobble down my tourte and leave.

At the theater I buy a Perrier.

I find a theater seat, but all during the previews everyone is talking as if they’re in their own living rooms.

Finally, the film starts, and it’s worth watching. Christian Bale is such a strange actor. A former boxer, now addicted to crack, he plays the role as a charming, self-destructive fuck-up.

I’m thirsty, but the bottle of Perrier won’t open. I almost break my hand trying to open it. It’s that kind of day.

After the film is over, I ask the guy at the concession stand if he can open it. After a struggle, he does. But don’t I want a cold one? He fetches a key and opens the drinks machine and puts a hand around several until he finds one that’s cold. Oh, how sweet is this gesture!

Having walked a couple of hours, I head home down Blvd. St. Germain. I begin to think about this weird day.

All we wanted was to go out together and have a good time. And all day long it’s been one obstacle after another, an unusual number.

At home, the lights are off and Richard is asleep. So is Marley.

I remember what the psychiatrist, C. G. Jung, used to do when he was baffled by the seemingly insoluble problem of a patient. He would cast their natal horoscope to see where the knots were. Not to predict anything, rather to see what the pattern of stars were at their birth. He did the same for moments and periods of time.

This makes no rational sense whatsoever. But the synchronicity of far and near, (or as the ancients said, “As above, so below”), is perfectly understandable from the perspective of intuition.

I open our astrological calendar, and look at the position of the planets. Oh, of course. It’s the New Moon today, with Sun and Moon in Aries. That’s action. A day when you want to go out and experience life, walk around, go somewhere, spend some money. Or it can be anger. Aries is the warrior, the fighter. Yes, the day had that kind of energy. And what better film to see than The Fighter?

There are two more aspects and they couldn’t be any more difficult. The moon in Aries is square Pluto in Capricorn: Anger. Volatility. Blow-ups. Pluto, the god of the underworld, the dragon.

The moon in Aries is opposite Saturn in Libra: action, anger is fighting with obstacles in the way of keeping one’s balance. I think of Athena, goddess of Libra, and her Medusa shield of snakes. She is usually the one with the cooler head, allowing peace to prevail over war. But with Saturn in Libra, there are obstacles to this peaceful approach.

“Mama said there’d be days like this, there’d be days like this my mama said.” And maybe they’re written in the stars.

[1] The Garden of Plants

[2] Cherry trees

[3] Keep off the Grass

[4] Joker. Mocker.

[5] Goat cheese and zucchini pie (a small tart, really)

The Circle of Ecstasy

 

A curtain of deep night; the lights,

diamonds in darkness.

This man beside me breathing,

breath sweet, arms hot.

Three men at the front of the stage

look like the Three Magi: dark, stout,

(no necks!), high gold hats, white robes,

gold scarves over their chests.

The voice of the first sounds like a muezzin

calling us to prayer. The second is higher, but still

deep. The third fights to hit the notes;

he makes us tense with worry.

The men turn, take their seats

with the singers; three play

a red tambourine,

a flat drum, a flute.

I know before I count that they are twelve:

Twelve Apostles. Twelve months.

Twelve Greek Gods and Goddesses,

though there are no goddesses here.

The obsessive turn and return of the singing is turning

into fever, the fervor of voices building.

Two men at the left begin to touch their chests,

their heads, their knees, in rhythmic gestures.

The men gather their long white skirts and stand.

The older man moves to the right of the younger.

They bow to the singers, bow to us. And facing us,

they spin. Counterclockwise, straight as tops, they spin.

The younger man has a sculpted face,

high-bridged nose, a taut, graceful form.

A Syrian Sean Penn.

We look for just a second.

The older man, in his sixties, is shaped like a pear,

the magenta sash around his waist twice the size

of the other’s. His face is lined. His face is plain.

You wouldn’t look at him twice in the street.

And you cannot take your eyes off him. He spins

in his white skirt like a lily, like cream poured

in the shape of a bell. He spins,

hands carving sacred gestures in the air,

over his head, touching his shoulders,

open in offering, folded on his chest.

He is fused with the god for whom he dances,

his face infused with prayer.

And he is beauty.

We cannot turn our eyes away. Five minutes, ten.

No one can spin in circles that long without fainting.

He spins and spins in perfect time to the drum.

He spins as the men sing the poems of Rumi.

All evening the only word we know

is Shams[1],

the teacher who lit the ecstatic fire in Rumi.

The singers wear red fezzes[2]. The frenzy of their music

changes what we see. The hats become tall red flat-tops,

the light and music changing them to flame.

Their heads seem on fire with devotional ardor.

The spinning lilies turn and turn.

Beauty is a frenzied thing, stilled into devotion.

My love, beside me, knowing what attracts me,

weeks ago bought tickets to this cercle de l’extase[3].

Arm in arm, we walked two blocks

to l’Institut du Monde Arabe[4],

I touch his cheek. We burn with devotion.

This is how we live, as if on fire.

[1] Rumi, born on the Eastern shores of the Persian Empire on September 30, 1207, was a charming, wealthy nobleman, a genius theologian and a brilliant but sober scholar, who in his late thirties met a wandering and wild holy man by the name of Shams. In Rumi's own words, after meeting Shams he was transformed from a bookish, sober scholar to an impassioned seeker of the truth and love.

Rumi and Shams stayed together only two years, but the impact of their meeting left an everlasting impression on Rumi and his work. After Shams was murdered by Rumi's youngest son, Rumi fell into a deep state of grief and gradually, out of that pain, poured out nearly 70,000 verses of poetry, which include about 2000 quatrains. They are collected in two epic books named, Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi and Massnavi (Mathnawi).” 

Today three countries claim him as their national poet: Iran, Turkey and Afghanistan. 

--After Shahram Shiva 

[2] The fez (Turkish: fes, plural fezzes or fezes^[1]), or tarboosh ( Arabic: طربوش), is a felt hat either in the shape of a red truncated cone or in the shape of a short cylinder made of kilim fabric.

[3] circle of ecstasy

[4] The Arab World Institute

The Numinosity of Things

Celestine

Great wars of liberation are being fought all across North Africa and the Middle East. Lesser wars of liberation are being fought in France, too. Here in the fifth arrondissement of Paris, we battled the forces of French bureaucracy to liberate our household goods from Le Havre customs.

We valued most of the fifty boxes at $50 each. Many contained books, writing supplies and journals. Many contained art. How do you assign such things a dollar amount? Customs was suspicious. ALL were the same value? Were we smuggling precious objects to sell in France, without declaring them, so we didn’t have to pay taxes? Or forbidden items?

The struggle to release our stuff took forty e-mails, twenty phone calls, 300 euros and three weeks, but we triumphed.

One week ago, the boxes were delivered to our door. The man who drove the truck three hours from Le Havre carried some of the boxes down to our cave[1], most of the boxes to our apartment, and with the help of a Romanian worker named Christian, he carried my maternal grandmother’s heavy wooden trunk up five flights of stairs, since it wouldn’t fit in the ascenseur.[2]

The truck driver, a shy, florid man in his 50s, who looked as if his favorite pastime was eating, seemed ready to pass out as he entered our living room. Christian, younger and fit, was smiling, unfazed.

The driver accepted a glass of water, but would not take a tip.

Christian stayed all afternoon, helping us slice open boxes with sculptures and paintings inside. He broke down the cardboard boxes for recycling, while we greeted beloved works of art as if they were old friends who’d made a long journey across the country by covered wagon, then a voyage by slow ship across the Atlantic, only to be held unlawfully in jail for nearly a month.

Are objects alive? Of course. How else to explain the numinous quality, the spell cast on us, by the things we unpacked?

These things spoke to us! They told us stories. Sometimes one would break into song.

Time or space won’t allow me to tell you every single story we heard in the several days of unpacking, but here are a dozen:

1) The trunk. The big, round-backed, dark brown wooden trunk belonged to my Norwegian-American maternal grandmother, Esther Moe Heimark. Esther was a poet and playwright who also bought antiques, which she sold in the small Minnesota town where she lived with my grandfather, Julius, and their three children. This trunk is the perfect size to contain the following:

i) My grandfather’s accounts of his parents crossing the United States by covered wagon, farm life in Minnesota, and leaving the farm to become a doctor.

ii) Copies of my uncle Jack’s Heimark family history, with photos.

iii) Genealogical books about my Kitchell family ancestors, Puritans who fled religious persecution in Kent and Surrey, England, and arrived in Guilford, Connecticut in 1639.

iv) My own oral history interviews with my parents, transcribed and bound as a gift to my family. How strange and heart-breaking to read it and hear how lucid my father was, just a year or so before his dementia began.

 2) A bentwood chair, also of dark wood, from my grandmother Kitchell’s apartment in the Sequoias assisted living apartments in San Francisco, where I and my cousins Kit, Mark, Liza and Hank visited her often in the two years before she died. She was always warm and nonjudgmental towards my then-boyfriend, Gary, a wild and wooly bohemian painter. An American blueblood herself, I never saw one instance of snobbery from her.

3) Dana Point, a painting that Gary painted, shortly after we left the schooner, The Flying Cloud. We had lived on it for two years, renovating it to go around the world. The painting has three levels: landscape, woman’s body and bird. It is surreal, like the work of Salvador Dali.

4) Celestine, a papier mâché bear and two tree branches that my sculptor sister, Jane, made to honor our father. I first saw it in her art studio in Boulder, and bought it half a year before her nearly sold-out art show at my brother, Jon's, and his wife, Leatrice’s, art gallery in Phoenix, Arizona. Celestine stands in the non-working fireplace of our living room, leaning forward eagerly, just as my father did in life.

5) The soft wool blanket with bears and men and women holding hands that my mother knitted and gave to me. I told her I repaired a couple of holes Marley had made in it while kneading me as I read in bed.

“Oh, that was the worst thing I ever knitted,” my mother said.

“But it’s beautiful!” I said.

“I mean, it was the most difficult of anything I ever made.” 

6) A painting by Kathleen Morris, Shrine for Couple #3, from my Santa Fe years when I earned a living as a traveling art dealer, which brought me to Los Angeles. I stayed in a suite at the Chateau Marmont in the late ‘80s, a very good time for selling art. I began to find the excitement of the city more appealing than living in the country in Santa Fe, and moved to Los Angeles in 1990. And there I met Richard.

7) Books by friends. Richard and I met at a 1994 poetry reading at a bookstore, Midnight Special. Later, with three friends, we started a poetry reading series at the Rose Café. It lasted three years, and exposed us to all the rich work of the poets of Los Angeles, and later, from other parts of the country and beyond.

8) The photo of Carolyn Kizer reading her poems at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. She was the first person to read at our series at the Rose Café, and became my poetry mentor and friend. Later, we bought the Paris apartment she and her architect husband, John Woodbridge, owned.

9) Prayers to the Muse, the cross that my sister, Jane, made for me when I received my M.F.A. in creative writing at Antioch University, Los Angeles. It is made of red leather book end papers and dry wall mud. Antioch gave me more friends than any other experience I’ve had in my life. Six of them joined me weekly for a fiction reading and editing circle at our house in Playa del Rey for years, which continues now with us Skyping between Los Angeles and Paris.

10) Charlie the marble. I opened a well-wrapped package and out tumbled Charlie. Charlie, a photographer, was married to my great friend, Polly, with whom I lived in two communes in Berkeley in the late ‘60s. Richard and I loved visiting Polly and Charlie in their warm, art-filled Berkeley home over the years. Charlie died several years ago after a liver transplant. A glass artist whose work Charlie photographed took his ashes and made 300 glass marbles out of them as gifts for his friends. Richard and I each have one, which we keep on our desks and play with. Richard wrote a sonnet to him. We talk to Charlie. He’s so pleased that Polly’s painting and sculpture are being shown in various galleries, well reviewed and selling well.

11) My sister, Jane, made a modern Kachina, The Minotaur, for Richard. He is a Taurus. It captures his Bull spirit, and now raises its arms in the goddess salute of ancient Crete in the nonworking fireplace in his office. (We were married in Crete, since our personal myth originates there.) The heavy stone at the base made it very difficult to ship to Paris. But we found an art packer, Jorgen, at Box Brothers in Santa Monica, who devised an ingenious way to keep the stone from breaking away from the papier mâché figure, and this totem figure arrived intact.

Page 113, The Red Book

12) C. G. Jung’s The Red Book. Richard and I saw a show at the Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles of this magical book of mandalas that the great psychiatrist, C. G. Jung created as a vehicle for his own healing. This may be a universal method of healing; drawing a daily mandala was my way of healing, too. For my birthday last year, three of my siblings, Jon, Ann and Suki, gave me a book certificate. I bought this book with it. It is so numinous that I can’t read it yet. But at the right time, I will.

[1] Storage units in the cellar of the building for each apartment owner. The caves are ancient, eerie and cold. You can imagine Edgar Allen Poe setting one of his stories here.

[2] Elevator.