After the Paris Massacres: Following the Clew

 

As I approach my writing café tonight, a lone clarinetist stands on the sidewalk, blowing a melancholy tune.

Inside, I savor coquilles St. Jacques, and listen. At the tables around me, everyone is French: three women; a couple; two men; a young couple with her parents. All are doing what the French do so well: fine dining and fervent debate. The words I hear are familiar: Charlie. Vincennes. Fear. Murder. Brothers. March. Terrorists. Muslims. Jews. Security. Police. France. Hollande. Obama. U.S.A. Iraq.

This chorus of voices is too multi-phonic to catch more than isolated words, plus, every conversation, though animated, is modulated, as the French do, only for the ears of those at each table. But they are all grappling with the same tangle of threads that Richard and I have been for the past week. What is the larger dimension? If we step back for a broader view, what larger stories, what myths, are being summoned?

Impromptu shrine outside Charlie Hebdo offices, 9 January 2015

There are so many threads, I feel like Ariadne in the labyrinth circling the Minotaur, the monster, trying to untangle the ball of many-colored threads—the clew!—to find the way to the core of the monstrous events of January 7, and January 9 in Paris. On January 7, two hooded men (cobras!) entered the office of a French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, and killed twelve staff members, including four noted cartoonists, and two police officers, with Kalashnikov rifles, shocking the western world as only September 11, 2001, did in recent times.

For the next two days, police in riot gear swarmed France, looking for the trail of the two murderers, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi. On Friday, the eleventh, the two jihadist brothers were found hiding in a printing house in Dammartin en Goële, near Charles de Gaulle airport. At the same time, another terrorist had taken hostages in a kosher supermarket near Porte de Vincennes. When the Kouachi brothers came out of the warehouse firing, they were killed by return fire from the police. Twenty minutes later, Amedy Coulibaly, the hostage taker, was shot, having earlier killed four of his hostages.

Spontaneous demonstration at République, 7 January 2015

On Sunday, January 11, Richard and I headed north from our home in the Latin Quarter to the Unity March at Place de la République. We passed l’Institut du Monde Arabe (the Arab World Institute), and gasped to see on the silver panels (like eyes!) of the Jean Nouvel-designed building, in giant red letters, "Nous Sommes Tous" in Arabic, “Charlie.”

That set the tone for a most moving day. An hour before the march was scheduled to start, the crowd was already thick crossing the Pont Henri IV, on foot and by bicycle. The streets were closed to vehicle traffic for blocks around.

We approached the Bastille, where we intended to meet a group of street artist friends. But a solid wall of policemen and policewomen were diverting everyone in a clockwise direction away from the Bastille, up Boulevard Beaumarchais. We spoke to a few policemen and were struck by the humanity in their faces, the complete absence of aggression in tone, expression and body language. The police in France are in the right relationship to their role, protecting the public, defending, not attacking, as is too often the case in the U.S.

By the time we’d marched three blocks up Blvd. Beaumarchais, there were so many people in the street that when Richard and I let go of each other’s hands so he could snap a few photos, and I glanced away for one second, I lost him in the crowd. In front of us we’d admired the banner carried by two men that said, “Je pense donc je suis Charlie.” I tapped the man on the left on his shoulder and gave him a thumbs up and a “Magnifique.” He grinned, and exclaimed, “C’etait mon idee!” (“It was my idea!”)

 

Richard called me on my cell: “Where are you?”

“Right behind 'I think therefore I am Charlie.'” He quickly found me.

Everywhere you looked there were “Je suis Charlie" signs, but other signs too: "Islam is innocent of terrorism," "I am Muslim, Terrorism Does Not Represent Me," "Blame Terrorists, Not Muslims," "I am Jewish," "I am a cop," "Respect differences and stand united," "liberté, fraternité, egalité," all implying the same thing: we are all connected, we are all united in empathy with the victims, against violence.

Aside from one sign that pointed a finger of blame—“Quatar finances terrorists”—not a single sign we saw was divisive. There was no shouting, no pushing (well, a little), and from the politicians, no speeches. Just silence, arms interlocked, dignified, a mood of gravitas.

Everyone there was aware of the potential for violence, and most of us were grateful for the dense presence of police and the helicopters overhead. The terrorist alert was at maximum, so the more than 40 political leaders from Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, were filmed on a roped-off side street, TV images of which moved me to tears later that night.

As block by block we surged closer to La Place de la République, it began to feel like a cattle yard. Richard, who has claustrophobia in crowds, needed to peel away onto a side street. I pressed forward for another 30 minutes, until I could no longer move. Enough. I turned onto a side street, rue Charlot, and passed a couple who live in our building, she American, he French, the ones who give the annual Christmas party for everyone in the building. (American warmth, bien sûr.) We greeted each other going in opposite directions.

Turning onto rue de Turenne, I passed a phalanx of police vans, and stopped to phone Richard. Surprise—he was right down the street taking photos. He’d just run into Sylvia Whitman and David Delannet of Shakespeare and Company. Richard waited for me in front of a small church, and we ambled to the Marais for galettes and conversation, returning to the question posed in “A Day of Mourning in Paris,” What turns a young man into a deadly cobra?

Impromptu shrine on Boulevard Richard Lenoir for Ahmed Merabet, a French police officer shot and killed near Charlie Hebdo offices, 9 January 2015

How to approach the question? At La Maison de la Poesie the other night, a friend and I heard Russell Banks (the author of Affliction, the best novel I know about the wounds inflicted on children by an alcoholic, abusive father) talk about what being a storyteller entails. When he’s telling a story, he’s trying to penetrate the mystery of what it is to be human. And he begins with one character. No one act depends on a single motive. A writer knows that no one does anything for just one reason; as humans we’d like to reduce acts to one reason, but it’s impossible.

And so, it might be illuminating to examine the roots of terrorism by looking at the character of just one of the three men who murdered 12 journalists and staff (cartoonists!) and four Jewish shoppers (marketing for Sabbath, their holy day!), the one about whom we have the most information: Chérif Kouachi.

What do we know about him? Thanks to a fine piece of reporting by the New York Times, we learned a great deal quickly. 

That he was the younger of two brothers whose father had died early, and whose mother died in 2004, when Chérif was 12 and Saïd was 14. They were sent to live in a boarding school for orphans and troubled children in the village of Treignac in central France. According to Mohamed Badaoui, a classmate of Saïd’s, Chérif was the more outgoing. Both brothers played soccer. Neither seemed to be religious.

They were Algerian-French in descent, with all that that colonial history implies. The Algerian War of Independence from France was fought relatively recently, from 1954 to 1962. The war was prolonged and bloody, with atrocities on both sides, and left psychic wounds that remain to this day.

(It seems intuitively obvious that the memories of one’s ancestors are in our DNA, and this is now being proven scientifically.)

According to Badaoui, their dream was to move to Paris, and this they did, when Saïd was 20 and Chérif was 18. 

The two brothers were raised in France, a country whose values are to some extent foreign to, antagonistic to those in Algeria: colonial vs. colonized; predominantly Christian vs. Muslim; democratic vs. older, more tribal North African.

In France, they were marginalized, lived in block housing on the Périphérique, the edge of Paris, in the Nineteenth Arrondissement, a working-class neighborhood full of Muslim immigrants from former French colonies in North Africa. Muslims make up seven-and-a-half percent of the population of France.

They lived in poverty, where the education provided did not seem to lead to the same job opportunities as more privileged and well-connected Frenchmen, where jobs were hard to find, in a setting and an atmosphere where hope was in short supply.

They encountered open or subtle discrimination, as lower-class, lower-income immigrants tend to do in France, and in most other western countries.

Impromptu shrine outside Charlie Hebdo offices, 9 January 2015

In 2003, after the start of the American Invasion of Iraq, Saïd and Chérif Koachi began attending prayers at a Mosque that no longer exists on rue de Tanger. It was here that the brothers met Farid Benyettou, a 22-year-old Muslim of Algerian descent.

Mr. Benyettou’s sister had been expelled from a Paris secondary school for refusing to remove her niqab. The banning of veils for women in France, which is an aggressively secular society, seemed to many Muslims nothing more than a sign of disrespect for their religion.

Mr. Benyettou taught a group of young men daily for two hours, inviting them to join jihad. Chérif Kouachi was among those, according to the New York Times, “sickened by images of American soldiers humiliating Muslims at the Abu Ghraib prison.” After Abu Ghraib, his doubts vanished, and he began training with assault weapons, gathering with other jihadist young men in  Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, and planned a trip in 2005 to fight in Iraq. He was stopped at the border and arrested, with his teacher, Benyettou, and both were sentenced to prison.

Graffiti at impromptu shrine outside Charlie Hebdo offices, 9 January 2015

In this prison, Fleury-Mérogis, 15 miles south of Paris and notorious for its bad conditions and Muslim resentment, Chérif met a radical jihadist, Djamel Beghal, who had trained in one of Osama bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan. In prison, his radical convictions hardened.

Imagine this as the apex of your ambition, your desire in life: to die a martyr by killing others and yourself so that you can become a bird soul in paradise surrounded by 72 virgins. (And how exactly would that benefit you unless these virgins happened to be female birds?)

This is male heroism completely untethered from the aims of life, the feminine, wisdom, Sophia. It is a loss of tender-hearted humanity, a descent into savagery.

The last time we saw such terrible extremism in the West was in World War II. The German vaterland (father-land) took male efficiency and testosterone-fueled aggression so far from Sophia, the wisdom of life, that perhaps it is no accident that Germans elected Angela Merkel as Chancellor of Germany in 2005, the first woman to hold the office. Women are needed to balance such primitive male warring impulses. It does not seem incidental to me that from the ages of 12 and 14, these brothers lacked a mother. Nor that both brothers kept their jihadist plans secret from their wives, who, apparently, were shocked by the savagery of their husbands’ acts. Nor that these deadly plans were hatched in mosques and prisons without women around to point out the insanity of this perversion of religion.

We need female heads of government around the world. The world is terribly out of balance. Without the feminine aspect given equal power with the male, men lose guidance towards life. If women headed more countries, there would be less war. (Of course, there are exceptions to this perspective among women, but not many.)

And looking beyond the tangled threads in France:

The record of the U.S.A. in Afghanistan. Russia understood the wisdom of withdrawal long before America did.

After 9/11/2001, there was a rush to war in the U.S.A. and Britain, fueled by a cynical stoking of fear for the purpose of greed. The invasion of Iraq was accomplished based on lies about “weapons of mass destruction” to cover the baser motive of greed for oil and money. Cheney and cronies gained billions from nepotistic contracts in Iraq.

Other imperialist western countries, France and Britain among them, rushed to join the U.S. at war in a country on another continent.

U.S. diplomacy failed spectacularly. Neither political leaders at the time, nor military leaders and soldiers, were trained to understand the culture they invaded, neither its tribal allegiances nor its complex religion.

Modern drone warfare wreaks collateral damage on a country’s inhabitants, killing innocent women, children, and men who are not affiliated with jihadism.

American torture, humiliation, and wrongful, illegal imprisonment further inflamed Muslim jihadist rage. Waterboarding, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib.

War creates an endless tribal cycle of vengeance. Of attack and counter-attack. If a man’s relatives, home, village, country are devastated by a foreign power, and he lacks money, power, artillery, but is filled with the rage to revenge himself, jihadist extremism might seem to be the only path.

If that path is legitimized by so-called religious leaders, their teachings provide a purpose for testosterone-driven lost young men, and an outlet for resentment at being treated as second-class citizens by the western world.

And then there is the anti-Semitic element in all this. Chérif Kouachi talked obsessively about attacking Jewish shops and Jews in the street. Targeting a kosher market was no accident. Was Israel’s war on Palestinians an element in this anti-Semitism?

The rage of jihadists seems to be aimed at the countries that are most imperialistic at the present: the U.S.A., France, Britain, and Israel. How swiftly the victims of one vast crime—Germany attempting to eradicate the Jews—become the bullies of another—Israel crushing Palestine. The terrorists demolishing the twin towers, followed by the U.S. invading Iraq. Where is the pause for reflection, for understanding, for action born of wisdom?

Finally, free speech. How far can it go when it involves mocking what is sacred to between twenty and twenty-five percent of the people on earth?

And where, you might ask, in all this discussion of the jihadist terrorists is my empathy for the seventeen murdered victims? It is deep and ongoing. In every conversation we’ve heard or read about in Paris, the sympathy for the victims is huge.

The central issue of our times is the monster in the center of the labyrinth. It is tempting to see him as a jihadist terrorist. But perhaps he is any religious fundamentalist, whether he appears as a Muslim terrorist in Paris or NYC; Christian fundamentalists in the U.S.A; American right-wing politicians lying about their reasons for going to war; Jewish fundamentalists in Israel, and Muslim terrorists in Palestine, murdering each other; Christian and Muslim fundamentalists in Nigeria terrorizing each other; Buddhist terrorists in Myanmar murdering Muslims. He is the one we need to try to understand. He is the least educated, the most medieval in his thinking, the most resentful, rageful and dangerous, the most violent in his actions.

Impromptu shrine outside Charlie Hebdo offices, 9 January 2015

In the myth of Ariadne and the Minotaur, it bears remembering that the bull man, Asterius, is Ariadne’s half-brother, no stranger. She must follow the clew to the core of the mystery, to free both the Minotaur and his sacrificial victims. Only wisdom, understanding can take us there.

In a sense, the Arab world is Sleeping Beauty. If we go back centuries—what learning, what intellectual genius and innovation!—in art, in science, in mathematics.

During the Crusades, when Christianity dominated in Europe, what happened to Arabic learning? What happened to the lively intellect, the scientific questioning, the wisdom? How did the intellectual tradition harden into reactionary dogma?

And what is the story between Christianity and Judaism? The myth of warring brothers; an antagonistic relationship of 2,000 years. You have only to look at caricatures of Jews, from low-level bigotry to literature, from the ghettos of Europe, the banning of Jews from many professions to the demonizing during the rise of Nazism, which culminated in the horror of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.

French street artist C215 gives away hundreds of stencils outside the 13th Arrondissement city hall, 11 January 2015

In the drama which unfolded in Paris during the last week, we saw three marginalized groups, the so-called “Muslim” French-Algerian jihadists, the Kouachi brothers; the four Jewish victims in the supermarket at Vincennes; and the African-French hostage taker, Amedy Coulibaly, born in France to parents from Mali.

Many of France’s Catholic majority of between fifty-one and eighty-eight percent of the population, and its ever-growing number of agnostics and atheists, along with Muslims, Jews, French-Africans, and many from other continents and countries, between one and two million people strong, all marched in Paris on Sunday, January 11, to the Place de la République. The overwhelming spirit was one of unity; another two million people marched in other French cities.

I’ll go out on a fragile limb and say, to me it looks like a new paradigm, a realization that we are lost if we continue to slaughter one another in the name of religion, fanaticism, revenge, greed for money and oil. The planet will not survive.

What is out of balance is the balance between masculine and feminine values. And the root of this is spiritual vision. If God is pictured as a man, solely a male, it doesn’t matter how far you go from that primary vision: you can go as far as doubting, or denying, agnosticism or atheism, but you’re still on the masculine track.

If your vision, spiritual and/or secular, can imagine a world where female and male values share space, that means a world in which war is a last resort. A world which cannot move too far beyond what’s healthy for humans, animals, the earth itself. A world in which we pay attention to visible signs like increasing cancer rates, and the increasingly alarming weather, disappearing animal species, and invisible signs like dreams, anxiety and dread.

If more women were allowed to lead or at least participate equally in governance, the sanctity of life would be the first consideration, not power. 

To clarify, all of us humans are androgynous creatures, with feminine sides (life and relationships) and masculine sides (power and work). Just as women are robbed of half of life if they are prevented from working, from circulating freely and independently, from self-governance, by their fathers, brothers, husbands, culture or religion, so men rob others of life if they blindly follow the will to power and war, as Cheney and Bush did in 2003 in invading Iraq, as the two Kouachi brothers did in murdering twelve staff and policemen at Charlie Hebdo, and as Amedy Coulibaly did in murdering four Jewish men in a supermarket in Paris. They are two sides of the same phenomenon, the will to power divorced from the feminine sense of the sanctity of life.

Sanctity: the sacred. Life doesn’t care what you believe in: whether it’s Mohammed, Christ, Jehovah, Shiva, Buddha, No One, or You-don’t-know-Who. Life is sacred no matter what you believe in, or don’t. And it has its male spirits and its female spirits.

When I did my own vision quest, I took apart all the parts of my psyche. And I discovered that there were twelve parts, and I gave them names. Later I discovered that these twelve parts had already been named long ago by the ancient Greeks, the names of their gods and goddesses. These re-emerging male and female divinities represent to me  the beginning of a crumbling of monotheism, a reawakening to the ancient truth that polytheism is what is needed for harmony and balance.

Impromptu shrine outside Charlie Hebdo offices, 9 January 2015

The gods and goddesses are no longer “out there,” up in the sky, beyond us, separate from us. Instead, they are the very structure of our psyches, the archetypes that make up our deep souls, and who speak to us in dreams. If we listen, we can begin to live in harmony. If we deny or ignore them, we are troubled by addictions, disturbed sleep, raging anger or greed or depression or loneliness and all the other maladies of modern life out of balance. We can heal ourselves, and the world, by listening to these innate sacred voices in ourselves, which are part of all of us.

We’re entering into Nietzsche territory here: What did this profoundly spiritual philosopher mean by "God is dead?" His sense of the old Homeric Greek gods and goddesses was vivid. He clearly meant the punitive monotheistic god, not the array of spirits Homer dramatizes as present in all human activity. Jung territory: all the archetypes of the unconscious are alive, and they are sacred. The gods are reawakening.

It will, of course, take hundreds of years. But it’s beginning. There is a way out of the labyrinth.

The Next Big Thing

 

The Next Big Thing is a blog-tag of writers answering ten questions about their next book/writing project. Thanks to poet Ren Powell for tagging me this week for my novel, The Book of Twelve. Her imaginative autobiography in formal and free verse, An Elastic State of Mind, was published in Norway in December 2012.

What is the title of your book?

The Book of Twelve.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

A bright idea by Hermes sparks the twelve Greek gods and goddesses to leave Mount Olympus for Mount Tamalpais where (drawn by the exuberant Dionysian energy of the late ‘60s) they feast on ambrosia and compete to see which of them can tell the best story about the individual members of a Berkeley commune—friends, artists and lovers—whose lives become wildly intertwined.

What genre does your book fall under?

Fiction: interlinked stories.

Where did the idea for the book come from? 

From Hermes, the god of bright ideas. My two great passions are fiction and myth, especially Greek myth. I keep looking for a novel that captures the wildness, exuberance and creativity of that tumultuous, transformative time in American cultural history, Berkeley in the '60s, and haven’t found it yet. So I set out to write the story I want to read. I also did a vision quest for thirty years and later discovered that my deconstruction and healing of my own psyche had a deep and surprising link to Greek myth. Could I capture, in one novel, the characters I knew, the outrageous performance art we created, and the nature of that vision? I finished what I thought was a final draft several years ago, and laid it aside. Now, having learned more craft (thanks to an MFA in creative writing at Antioch University, Los Angeles, and extensive study and reading of great novels and epic poems), I’m rewriting it one last time.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

Too long. And exactly as long as was needed.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

My muse.

Who will publish your book?

A publisher who loves wild characters, performance art, the counterculture, spiritual quest, love stories, and Greek myth.

What other works would you compare this book to within your genre?

I wouldn’t compare my novel to any, but my models for various aspects of the book are:

1)      Homer’s The Odyssey for the characters of the Greek gods and goddesses, as alive in that work as the human characters are.

2)      Dante’s The Divine Comedy for the unifying vision that informs the structure of the work.

3)      Boccaccio’s The Decameron, for the frame of many (ten) characters telling linked stories.

4)      Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, for the linked stories told by various pilgrims, which focus on character, in the vernacular language of the time.

5)      and 6) two modern examples of linked stories, Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son and Junot Diaz’s Drown, about characters in their 20s, lost and found.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

This novel would make a great film or TV series. I imagine the same actors playing dual roles, both the gods and goddesses and the characters whose story they choose to tell. I’d pick young actors and actresses with the energy of:

Aphrodite/Ingrid: Penelope Cruz

Hermes/Ariadne: Nicole Kidman

Daedalus/Daniel: Javier Bardem

Artemis/June: Meryl Streep

Apollo/Cheyenne: Jennifer Lopez

Demeter/Camille: Naomi Watts

Athena/Didi: Kate Winslet              

Dionysus/Angela: Maggie Gyllenhaal

Zeus/Fox: Joaquin Phoenix

Pan/Ring: Jim Carrey or Chris Rock

Poseidon/Lawrence: Willem Dafoe

Ares/Jesse: Russell Crowe

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

The writing, let’s hope. And the cover would include a photograph by my husband, Richard Beban.

***

Thanks, again, Ren, for tagging me. And here are my tags for Wednesday, February 20: 

·      Jennifer Genest (whose novel The Mending Wall is the story of small-town hero John Young, a stone mason whose sterling reputation is compromised after he finds the lifeless body of his teenage daughter's best friend in the woods.)

·      Susan Griffin (whose novel The Ice Dancer's Tale follows the artistic journey of an ice skater from childhood through a shamanic dance that shifts the energy of the planet.)

·      Tara Ison (whose novel Rockaway is coming June 2012 from Counterpoint Press--an artist exiles herself to a house in Rockaway, NY, for a summer that includes: a bizarre relationship with an older musician, emotional demons rearing their heads, an existential crisis spinning out of control. Beach fun!)

·      Cassandra Lane (whose memoir, After the Tree, examines the psychological, emotional and spiritual impact that a 1904 lynching has upon four generations of marriages.)

·      Eric Schafer (whose The Wind Took It Away - Stories of Viet Nam is a 15-story collection that examines contemporary Viet Nam as it struggles to enter the 21st century whilst clinging to traditions that are thousands of years old.)

·      Tori Warner (whose SantaFe, USA is an eye-opening novel about a buried treasure and a Hispanic land-grant family's struggle against America's aggressive take-over in the fervor of 'Manifest Destiny'.)

A Eulogy for Jane Winslow Eliot (9/27/26 — 7/31/2011)

9-15-11 

Time and space do not exist.

I heard these words as I washed the breakfast dishes this morning.

I was thinking of Jane Eliot.

It had been just over 40 days since she died.

I wanted to try in meditation to accompany her through the bardos.

But I couldn’t.

Maybe it’s that I do not experience death the way that Tibetan Buddhists do.

Or maybe to some extent I do, but I don’t have the inner stillness to stay on that journey for long.

Or maybe my sense is that Jane had already moved through a panoramic review of her life while she was alive.

I remember her deep honesty in her memoir, “Around the World by Mistake.”

9-19-11

It’s extraordinarily difficult to say who someone is, to approach describing their identity.

What is her effect on you? Is it lightening? Darkening?

Does he give you energy? Take it away?

Maybe we know others mainly through their effect on us, inspiring or disheartening.

Richard and I came back to Paris from the joyful celebration of our friends’ Loire Valley wedding, and heard from a mutual friend that Jane Eliot had died.

It often seems to happen this way. A great upsurging of joy, then sadness, sorrow breaking through.

I left out what happened at our wedding in Crete. Alex and Jane had encouraged our notion of being married there, because Ancient Crete was one of the last partnership cultures. 

During our wedding dinner, one of my relatives said to our friends that she wished their oldest daughter had been there. Both parents were storm-tossed with sorrow at her sudden death in her early 20s. Steve wept at the table. Rain ran into the nearest bathroom. Some of us followed her. Some of us comforted him.

And one of my family said, softly, “Oh, I wish they hadn’t ruined the celebration this way.” But no, I thought, and said, There are always these parallel channels of grief and joy. The day is richer for their tears.

And Jane Eliot? Her death was different. Her life was long and rich, fulfilled.

I’m circling and circling my memories of her.

Whatever you brought to her, she greeted it, surrounded it, examined it, enlarged it or lovingly tossed it away, laughed or seriously addressed it.

9-20-11

I’m circling and circling memories of her:

In the very first week of blossoming love between Richard and me, when we discovered that we lived only four blocks from each other in Venice, California, he invited me to a neighborhood block party at the home of his friends, Jane and Alex Eliot.

There was an odd symmetry to where they lived in relationship to Richard’s place. He and they each lived in a house on the same block of Paloma Avenue, each one house away from the end of the block.

The block party was the first social event, besides the poetry readings where we’d met, to which we’d gone as a couple. Jane and Alex, a generation older than we, instantly became the couple with whom we were closest.

What did we talk about at this party? Not the neighborhood. We talked about our love for myth. Alex had written a number of books on myth. We talked about the mythosphere, a term Alex coined for the place where myths live, where the stories of the soul dwell.

In those first days of our new life together, Richard and I discovered much about one another through the mutual passions we shared with Jane and Alex: mythology, especially Greek myth, Greece and the Greek islands, Venice Beach, poetry, art, a marriage of kindred souls that included lively spiritual and intellectual dialogue, writing, room for solitude for writing, as well as for romance, a contempt for mean-spiritedness.

We laughed at the same things, especially dumb, pompous human behavior and dismissed the same things as a waste of time.

We saw each other at our home for dinner and parties, and at theirs for the same. Jane’s specialty was a smorgasbord of meze.

We met at Figtree’s Café on the beach for breakfast, or the Rose Café for lunch or Lula’s for Mexican dinner.

During the three years that we and three friends ran a weekly poetry reading series at the Rose Café, I don’t think Jane and Alex ever missed a single reading.

When I think of Jane, I hear her laughing—a merry boisterous laugh which delighted in generosity, surprise and beauty, and had a touch of scorn for human idiocy. 

Jealousy? She understood that she was unique and so is everyone else.

Jockeying for power? She and Alex had been at the pinnacle of power in New York City and gladly given it up for creative freedom and time.

Greed? What does anyone need beyond food, shelter and time for love and creativity? And adventure!

Snobbery? She didn’t see people in hierarchical terms at all, much like my father. If you are really aware of each person’s uniqueness, how can you put anyone above you or below you?

Unkindness? A sure sign of unkindness towards oneself.

I called her Athena. She was a Libra, and shared that sign’s affinity for the goddess of peace, earthy intelligence, inventiveness and fierce strength. Nike!

Wherever you walked with Jane, she exclaimed over the beauty of her natural surroundings—birds, trees, the sea.

Well into her 70s, she’d walk down Paloma several blocks for a swim in the Pacific Ocean, which is colder on winter mornings than you can imagine. (Or so I hear.)

What Richard and I loved best to do with Jane and Alex was to sit at Figtree’s or the Rose Café (whose names, naturally, come from nature) and talk. Really talk. Talk that ranged all over the world—the earth and her creatures, humans they had known—Dali and Gala, Frida and Diego, for starters, or their noisy neighbors—and spirits of the mythosphere.

To Jane, the invisibles were as real as birds, as people. You felt relieved in their company to escape the tiny cage of rational materialism.

 

With Jane—and Alex—I could talk about the mythical vision I’d spent years discovering. When Richard and I shaped our combined mythical knowledge into a workshop at the C. G. Jung Institute, Jane and Alex were in our first class of students. (Oh, the irony, "teaching" these two masters of the mythosphere.)

Alex and Jane had lived all over the world, been top journalists in NYC. She had worked at CBS for Edward R. Murrow and at Time magazine; he had been Art Editor for Time, until his pension and a Guggenheim Fellowship allowed him to retire early and take his family to Greece. For four years they’d lived in Greece with their two young children, writing, home schooling the children, and exploring sacred sites.

There was only one respect in which they seemed to be bound by the conventions of their generation. Alex continued to write and publish books on art and myth, and now was working obsessively on a poetic memoir.

Yet she, when we first met them, was not as disciplined a writer as he.

She had published a book on children’s education, Let’s Talk, Let’s Play and written a highly original cookbook, Beyond Measure; A Cookbook for People Who Think They Can’t Cook, and published other books and journalistic articles in such magazines as The Atlantic, Smithsonian, Horticulture, Travel & Leisure.

But the assumptions of her generation mostly held: the woman would care for the home, children and relationships, while he worked.

Yet you could hear in the leaps of imagination, the sensory precision of Jane’s conversation that there was a longer story she needed to write.

And then she suddenly did it: created a studio for herself on the top floor of their duplex (so that was why she never managed to find the right tenant), and wrote, edited and published her memoir, Around the World by Mistake.

The title delighted us, containing all her qualities of humor, adventurous spirit, trust in serendipity, and largeness of experience. And the story itself unfolded in sparkling, sensuous prose, a vivid sense of weather and the sea, absolute clarity about others’ character, and the most brilliant example imaginable of how to inspire children.

 

The memoir tells the tale of how, in the summer of 1963, the couple, with their two young children, signed on for a trip around the world. The Yugoslavian freighter was scheduled to deliver goods from Yugoslavia to Osaka and back, a trip of seven months with sixteen passengers. But this is no ordinary trip. They discover that they are in extraordinary danger. But I won’t spoil the story, when you can order it and read it yourself. That’s Jane on the cover with a seagull on her head.

And then, Jane listened with great sympathy and understanding to my account about the last few years of my father’s life, his deepening dementia. She understood my longing to stay connected to his soul, beneath the dismantling of his rational mind.

And she rejoiced with us that my father was able to die at home, most certainly aware of his family’s love.

Jane’s mind, which was so alive, original, and warm—began to fade a few years after my father’s death in 2006.

By then, we had moved to Playa del Rey. In the sad way that driving distances separate people in Los Angeles, we saw Jane and Alex less often. They didn’t like to drive at night. One of us didn’t like to drive at all.

We’d bring dinner to Jane and Alex’s or meet at the Rose Café. Her mind wandered in conversation, but Alex, and we, assured her that it didn’t matter, she was still Jane.

And when we walked back to their house on Paloma, always, always, she pointed at birds, trees, the sea, with love and glee.

She was my wise woman. Magnificent Jane.

After the first sorrow, after the tearful call to Alex, a strange thing happened: I haven’t mourned Jane at all. It’s as if she hasn’t died. She is present, alive, vivid, much as my father continues to be.

Honestly, I don’t think we know a single thing about death. All I know is that Jane is still here, and oh, how we loved her. How we keep on loving her.

Wedding in Elounda Beach, Crete

This weekend we attended the three-day wedding celebration of two friends in the Loire Valley. Marriage ceremony in an eleventh century church, reception at a restored chateau, two parties at family homes. More on that in a later Paris Play, but it set us thinking about weddings. Here's how we were married three times in Elounda Beach, Crete:

Holed up in the Mirabello Bay hotel

the night before our wedding, we ask the gods,

What shall we do for our wedding vows?

When you summon them, how swiftly they speak!

We wake at three a.m., envision

a circle of gods and goddesses around us,

twelve of them, played by our guests

speaking our vows, which we will repeat.

We run to Ayios Nikolaos, find playing cards

with images of the twelve, dash home to write

and paste the words of the vows over the numbers,

diamonds, clubs, spades and hearts.

Crete is the shape of a woman with bare breasts,

belled dress—Ariadne, the Cretan Aphrodite.

We gather in the crook of her neck at the Elounda Beach hotel

at the edge of the Aegean sea.

My parents’ wedding gift: five days in white casitas

with curved walls, woven Greek bedspreads,

rooms open to sapphire water, June sky,

a horseshoe of mountains beyond.

Father, mother, sister, brother, sister, sister.

two nieces, and brother's fiancée.

Married friends of 30 years, their daughter.

Twelve guests are here.

Sister Ann brings the boxes with wedding rings

we’d given them to take from Arizona.

“We lost the gold ones,” she says,

“so we replaced them.”

I open the box. A smaller ring

with a yellow plastic duck, a larger one

with a red and black ladybug,

both lucky charms. We slip them on.

An hour before the ceremony

I sit with arms and feet outstretched

in white lace nightgown, with

lovely young attendants, nieces

who paint my nails, give me

my first pedicure. I feel like a queen.

“Now I must dress,” I say like a queen.

They laugh, “Isn’t this your wedding dress?”

My father comes to the casita, in striped peppermint shirt,

walks me to the chapel. My sandals are delicate,

earth-gold, worthy of Aphrodite, and hurt my feet.

I think of Yeats’s line about women, “we must labour to be beautiful.”

Through purple bougainvillea, shimmering heat,

we walk the path. My father says, “This man

is a treasure, a jewel. Treat him like one.”

I will, Dad. I will.

My father and I stop across the Dionysus courtyard

from Richard. He stands with radiant face

outside the east door of the chapel,

as Greek grooms do.

The hotel pianist noodles romantic tunes.

My father’s face is shining.

We wait. And wait. My brother snaps photos.

Two men dash across the grounds,

one with patriarchal beard and long black robe,

the other in the last madras shirt in the Western world.

Richard consults with them.

The hotel manager translates.

“What is your religion?” asks the priest,

“Catholic or Orthodox?”

“Neither,” says the groom; “we honor

the ancient Greek gods and goddesses.”

Father Ted looks confused.

The manager tries to translate.

“Which of the two are you?” he insists.

Again Richard states our beliefs.

Father Ted slaps his forehead.

“Pagans!” he cries. And then,

“I can’t take money for this—

it won’t be a real wedding.”

“That’s okay,” says Richard.

“We were already married legally at city hall.

We simply sought the blessing of a local holy man.”

The good priest grudgingly agrees.

The piano man begins the wedding march.

My father escorts me into the Orthodox chapel.

Saints and angels and whirling circles

are painted along the walls.                                            

My mother wears shell-pink linen,

and a necklace of many-colored beads.

Her face is tender and open. My father

places my hand in my beloved’s.

We tremble before the sermon

Father Ted bellows in Greek.

His madras-shirted cantor translates:

“You were born in sin, and will burn in hell!”

Is this a special Bible treat

especially for pagans? We float out of the chapel 

amazed, shocked by the spiritual violence,

gather in the Dionysus courtyard.

“Where did you find this jacket?” asks Suki,

stroking my sleeve. It is white silk ribbon with a labyrinth

design. “On Mykonos,” I say, remembering

my joy at finding it in the maze of shops. 

“The bride talks too much,”

the hotel manager says.

A proper Greek bride 

should be Orthodox and silent.

We walk to the stone jetty

that juts out into the Aegean sea.

It ends in a circle with canvas wicker chairs,

several hotel guests at the open bar.

A white sail forms a roof,

open to cobalt sea and sky,

and mountains like Arizona beyond.

Our guests form a circle around us.

The gods of water, Poseidon, Dionysus and Artemis to the North;

the gods of air, Hermes, Daedalus and Athena to the East;

the gods of earth, Hestia, Aphrodite and Demeter to the South;

the gods of fire, Ares, Apollo and Zeus to the West.

My mother, Betty, Artemis, opens her envelope, and reads:

I will protect and nurture you.

My niece, Bayu, as Hermes, is next:

I will strive to deeply understand you.

After each, we echo the vows.

My brother, Jon, as Daedalus, says,

I will guard your creative solitude.

 The gods and goddesses weep.

Jon’s fiancée, Leatrice, Athena, says,

All my resources are yours.

I will build a home with you, says Steve,

representing Hestia.

Aphrodite speaks through his daughter, Robin, 

I will walk in beauty with you.

Her mother, Rain, is Demeter:

I will nourish you and protect your health.

I will travel the world with you, says Ares sister, Ann.

Sister Suki, Apollo, says, I will live with you in harmony

and celebration. Sister Jane, as Zeus says:

I will be grateful every day for the gift of you.

Her daughter, Rachel, Poseidon, says,

I will protect your sleep and honor your dreams.

My father, Sam, as Dionysus, ends with:

You are the mate of my soul in life and in death.

Everyone cries except my mother, Artemis,

who dry-eyed says, “This should be a film.”

A young Greek woman approaches from the bar, asks,

“What is this beautiful religion?” “Yours,” we say.

We sit on the banquettes,

gazing around at the mountains and sea.

This is where we wanted to be married,

Ariadne’s island of beauty and love.

We walk in a procession to the Dionysus courtyard

for the feast. Long white-clothed tables form a T.

Red roses in glass vases. A menu of

Aphrodite’s Appetizers. Fillet of Fresh Fish Poseidon.

Lemon Sorbet Artemis. Rack of Lamb Ares.

Fresh Fruit from Demetra’s garden.

Hestia’s homemade chocolate cake.

Coffee a la Hermes. Dionyssos’s digestives.

The air is warm. We sit under the umbrellas of olive trees.

The sculpted white chapel where we were hectored

in sin is behind us. We sit with family and friends,

ablaze with love.

Three Short Stories

Story #1: 

Since we’ve been in Paris, we’ve met more than a few American women who’ve lived here longer than we. In response to our question, “What brought you to Paris?” we’ve heard more than a few answer, “I fell in love with a Frenchman. But we’re no longer together.”

Story #2:

We’ve also heard a few people say that they don’t believe in the inner world, the spiritual, the Invisibles, the gods, the stars, magic or myth.

Each of these is a story.

A story that someone has lived.

A story that someone tells him- or herself.

Story #3: 

Both these stories make me think of a third story, a story I lived, which is related to both these prior stories.

In 1994, I was living by myself in an apartment in Venice, California, with a view of the sea from Malibu to Marina del Rey. I had moved there during the Los Angeles riots of 1993. As I moved in around Halloween, I watched the terrible Malibu fires from my windows, an orange snake slithering along the black mountains.

In early 1994, the Northridge earthquake struck my building so forcefully that I leapt out of bed and under my pine dining room table before I was fully awake. I thought the building would collapse and that my life would end there.

And a love relationship ended there as well. I looked back on the two of us and wondered, What was I thinking? He wanted to live in the country; I in town. He wanted more children; I wanted none. He liked constant movement and social life; I liked a balance between going out and staying in. He rarely read; books are as real to me as people and just as important. He was a hearty drinker and smoker; I cared about health. He had no interest in his own inner life; I’d gone as far as I could in exploring my own.

We weren’t suited. Yet we’d stayed together for several years.

Didn’t I know who I was by now? Didn’t I know what I needed in a partner? I felt such weariness, despair, in imagining ever going through this entanglement and breakup again with another man, when anyone looking on from above could have told us: Impossible! Out of the question!

I needed some invisible being who knew all about such things, an expert in love, someone like… Aphrodite! Yes, I needed to have a serious talk with the goddess of beauty and love.

That night I wrote in my journal 100 things I wanted in a mate.

I awakened the next morning with the thought, “Too greedy. Narrow it down to ten.”

It was surprisingly easy. I wrote the following ten things I wanted in a mate in one steady flow:

* Mutual chemistry.

* Mutual adoration.

* Fidelity.

* Communication.

* Has done some serious inner work in healing childhood wounds.

* A reader.

* Preferably a creative type who is capable of being as much of a muse to me as I to him.

* Counter-cultural roots.

* Does not want children, or at least any more than he already has.

* Wants to travel the world.

I said to Aphrodite: “Please bring me a man with all ten of these attributes, or else, if it’s not meant to be, I’ll have the richest life a single woman can have.”

“In the meantime, I’ll work on overcoming my stage fright, and find a place to read my poems in public in Los Angeles.”

I then forgot about the prayer, and began focusing on poetry.

Three Fridays later, I went with an acquaintance to a reading in a Santa Monica bookstore called Midnight Special. (Like so many independent bookstores, it no longer exists.)

I saw a man in a white shirt and Levi’s in the far right of the front row. He looked familiar, but I wasn’t sure from where.

He, who was hosting, stood up halfway through the lineup and read three poems. One about horses, one about a former love, one about taking his dying father to Paris.

I fell back in my chair, barely stopping myself from falling over completely.

“What just happened?!” said my companion.

“I don’t know,” I said. But I did. An arrow had hit me right through the heart.

This is not a metaphor. I felt an arrow pierce my heart with such force it knocked me backwards.

After he read, this poet mentioned that every Saturday afternoon, there was a poetry workshop at Midnight Special that three poets took turns leading. It was free, he said, and all were welcome; he’d worked on his own poems there.

That night I wrote in my journal that I would marry this man.

The next day I awakened early and canceled several appointments. I opened my journal to a poem I’d written about driving through Navajo country in northern Arizona on one of my journeys to pick up paintings as an art dealer between New Mexico, Arizona and California.

I shaped and edited this poem for hours, then drove to the Promenade for the poetry workshop. It was led that week by the very poet whose work had knocked me out the night before.

I had had a better track record as a muse for male artists than I had received from them. So I was nervous when it came time to read my poem.

Richard—for that was his name—began talking about my poem as if he were an x-ray technician of poetry. He said that in the poem’s central metaphor, the unraveling of love being like the unraveling of your own DNA, I'd woven a braid between the three strands of the natural, human and spirit worlds. He then said something so humble that I found it hard to believe: “You’ve done something here that I don’t know how to do, that I’d like to learn how to do.”

Darling one, I said, silently, we have many things to learn from each other, and I for one, will be your glad and willing student and teacher.

There were other poems discussed that day, but I don’t remember them.

After the workshop, our ritual was to all walk down the Third Street Promenade to the Congo Square coffee house. When a group of poets get together, the stories fly.

He and I were startled to learn how many of the same places we’d lived, the same events we’d attended— demonstrations, rock concerts, art events—in the late ‘60s and early '70s in the Bay Area, and later, film and writing conferences in the '80s and '90s in L.A. How was it possible that in more than twenty years we’d never met? Yet this explained why he’d first looked so familiar to me.

Just as it took three weeks from the time I’d sent my wish to Aphrodite to meeting Richard, so it took another three weeks for the romance to burst into bloom.

One Friday night at a Midnight Special poetry reading, I showed him two poems and asked him which I should bring for editing to the Saturday workshop.

“Either,” he said, “Yours are always wonderful. Let’s go get some dinner.” He took my arm and we strolled two blocks to the Broadway Deli, and that was it for him.

Love came aurally for me. For him it came through touch.

In another three weeks we were talking marriage.

What does this story have to do with stories #1 and #2?

Story #3 happened because I do not believe story #2, that the Invisibles do not exist, and because I asked an Invisible, the goddess, Aphrodite, for a story that was not story #1, a story of infidelity and heartbreak.

Richard, it turned out, lived four blocks away from me, on Paloma Avenue in Venice.

Aphrodite is associated with the sea, scallop shells, dolphins, bees, honey, apples, pomegranates, myrtle, rose trees, lime trees, clams, pearls, sparrows and swans. And doves.

And you probably know that paloma means dove.