The Cave Painter

       When we stayed in the Lot Valley in southern France, we visited the cave called Pech-Merle, and saw the hand prints, and the powerful images of dotted horses, bison and mammoths. "They've invented everything",
Picasso said when he visited Lascaux.

      Lascaux was closed to the public when all the human exhalations caused mold to form on the art. Chauvet, discovered in 1994, had art older than all the others. To protect the art, a steel door had been placed on the narrow entrance, and only a small team of experts would be allowed to enter. One of those experts came to Cal with slides shortly after the discovery, and the auditorium was filled. 
My friend Tim and I stood in back to hear him speak. The images of cave art he showed were startling masterpieces, and we thought we would only ever see these images in books or slides.     
 
    I read all I could on Chauvet, intrigued by this mysterious 30, 000 year old art whose origins and meaning might never be understood. Was it Tim who gave me The Mind in the Cave, by David Lewis-Williams, that remarkable book that claimed shamanism and initiation as the basis of paleolithic art? There was, Lewis-Williams claimed, a direct tie between the shamanic rock art of Australia and the ancient images on the cave walls. 

     In Lewis-Williams' earlier book, The Signs of All Times, written with the anthropologist T. A. Dowson:
  “The authors cited laboratory experiments with subjects 
in an induced trance state which suggested that the human 
optic system generates the same types of visual illusions, 
in the same three stages, differing only slightly by culture, 
whatever the stimulus: drugs, music, pain, fasting repetitive movements, solitude, or high carbon-dioxide levels 
(a phenomenon that is common in close underground 
chambers.) In the first stage, a subject sees a pattern of  
points, grids,  zigzags and other abstract forms (familiar 
from the caves); in the second stage, these forms morph 
into objects—the zigzags for example, might become a 
serpent. In the third and deepest stage, a subject feels 
sucked into a dark vortex that generates intense 
hallucinations, often of monsters or animals and 
 feels his body and spirit merging with theirs.” 
[Or maybe the spirits are contacted?]
           http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06
                               /23/080623fa_fact_thurman#ixzz1NidPi4EF

       
When we first read about Werner Herzog’s 3D film The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, we were very excited, and last night, when my back was sufficiently healed to sit in a the ater seat for the length of a film, we went to see it. Constant background music, eerily contemporary, kept us from experiencing the deep ancient silence of the cave, but the images on the curved and sometimes undulating surfaces were remarkable. Just a few lines, just a few perfectly executed outlines, (what Zen artists once strived for), and the animals of Aurignacian Europe, as though drawn yesterday, emerged from the rock face. Were they spirit animals coming through the porous rock from the underworld they inhabited?  Rhinoceros, lions, leopard, bison, aurochs and horses - a quartet of horse heads so beautifully drawn one thinks of Renaissance draughtsmen. 

       Herzog says it is as though the human soul awakened here. On a phallus-shaped  pinnacle suspended from the cave ceiling is the only picture of the human figure.  It shows a bison above and surrounding a woman’s sex. A fused figure, from a shamanic vision, perhaps. There is a bison-woman at Pech-Merle as well.

                           
      Recently we downloaded a film made by and about the Inuit people, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen. (http://www.isuma.tv/fastrunnertrilogy) At the end of the film a shaman must either give up the old religion or starve. He sends his spirits, who have always been with him, away. He tells them they must go, and they are sobbing, they are weeping and holding on to each other, and they finally walk away. They turn around after walking a few yards and look back, but the shaman repeats that now he must accept Jesus or starve, because that is the condition of the Christian feast another converted Inuit is holding nearby. He must eat the taboo animal organs that shamans must never touch. That will be his communion. He is crying. He is without choice. He has a wife and daughter and followers to feed, and he does not want to die the agony of starvation.

I think of the shamans of the Aurignacian, and the power of their visions. An archeologist in Herzog’s film says that perhaps Homo Sapiens is the wrong name for us. Perhaps we should be known as Homo Spiritualis.

  The Cave Painter         

And then
   suddenly
             to us it is sudden
              but not to them
        they discovered murder

the animals had been idolized terrors
but now     they had the spear 
when they woke up to what they were doing
it was not morning
killing came into their nightly seance
animal spirits invaded their dreams
carrying spears thicker and taller than cedars
and shredded carcasses
           washed down night’s river

and the dreamers were us
just as smart and no longer innocent
and they promised   they begged   they offered
and they couldn’t forget
and they made it the task of one man    one woman
to remember   to be remembering every minute
and he or she   make it she
went into the caves on hands and knees   snake belly crawl
touched her hand to the farthest wall
she knew   they all knew by now
    they were certain
           the spirits lived on the other side

Let her place the torch  on the bear-trodden floor
and press her hands against the shivery membrane -
She   the one with hands    the one with a body
the gods count on our hands     they use our bodies
the animal spirits see the future through cro magnon eyes
see the hills   the rivers   the forest   there were animals  yes
     but not them    not a one
      
so they send her their own true shape     
           and she grinds her colors   picks up charcoal
               and leaves us the auroch   the bison

Enter the caves
     and the ancient age
    of what you believe
                 we just invented
              will be shown to you
             
           and you will not be afraid
    
       

Red Book Mondays

                                                                  

        Monday is Red Book day. The reading of Carl Jung’s extraordinary book is a ritual, repeated weekly. I sit in my large chair with the huge book (12" x 16" and 9 lbs) across my lap, and my laptop balanced on the wide arm of the chair, and enter Jung’s mysteries, revelations, horrors, and prophecies. I begin with his words, some of which I copy, and then immerse myself in the paintings, which are not mirrors of what 

I’ve read, but windows into the psyche’s symbols. 

      I read one short chapter at a time

and I never look ahead.  I follow the book chronologically,  and of course I do not know what will come next, and neither did Jung when he wrote it. 

The Red Book is the record and self -interpretation of Jung’s journeys using active imagination, a journey where he encountered both the sublime and the sinister. At the beginning he is a scholar-scientist, egotistical, ambitious, and concerned with the world’s opinion. 

He reminds me of Dante, at mid-life, lost in a dark wood, his soul demanding a place for herself. When he finishes his very private, (finally published) Red Book, all that he encounters within himself, all of what he will call archetypes & anima, all the darkness he will name Shadow, the process he will call individuation, will appear in his written theories and consulting room.

From the beginning I respond to Jung by taking phrases from the Red Book that I find particularly inspiring or jolting and write short poems - expanding, denying, struggling, adding my own imagery to his. At first it felt audacious to respond to Jung - now it is simply what I do on Red Book Mondays.

“I am the holy animal that stood astonished and cannot grasp the becoming of the God”
How privileged and peaceful 

the dear ox and the donkey 

in the manger  Since animals are sinless  they may Witness
Sometimes   in ivory    oils   

or stained glass 
the ox and the donkey stand close  
smile down on the newborn   
Even the kneeling kings  the wise men  
step aside
 

The Image: The Opening of the Egg
He bows before the egg
the power    rises 
becomes a canopy  of fire and flametears
falling like raindrops
in the jadewalled chamber

“He who had been pressed into the core of the beginning rose up”
And so the universe might have begun
a collapsed black star  infinitely dense
exploding into a trillion holy suns

But if the soul dips into radiance, she becomes as remorseless as the God himself….
Margaret of Cortona   Christ-bitten  ecstatic 
starved thornwhipped body
She lies on the cold bare floor on Easter mornng
begging to feel His wounds
unable to Rise

Who Wrote the Song of Songs?

                                                                                  

Warm. In the Eighties. Sunny. These are words I don’t often use together. Where we live ‘foggy' and’ cold‘ are partners, and  can describe summer. “It’s been raining all week” is also common. It’s May, the roses are blooming. and the rhododendrons and the lilies. I’ve been working in the garden daily, planting, weeding. The Gardener in me responds to the season, and the earth takes over my week.
                                                                                                         

The Curious One did manage to sneak in today. Now that I’m not teaching, this inner voice announces herself with a question, and must have the answer immediately. Today I was thirsty, sitting on my writing deck with a hot sunbeam penetrating the treescreen, but the Curious One wouldn’t let me re-fill the glass until she received the possible answers to her question. You see, there is rarely only one answer in cultural history. You get “probably written in the  9th century B.C., “may have been written by a woman who was black”, “must have been written by a highly skilled bard”. Nary a fact to be found, and if one is provided, it is often overturned a few years later.
                                                                                                                     

                                                                                                                                                                                               
Finally, the question-compulsion and the possible answers dissolve into a poem. Before I finish the poem I return from 900 B.C. to my deck, and the sun finally reaches me. I stop and hear the birds. I listen to the birds. I walk over to the garden that Bill & I have created, and realize I have a blog post.

      
Who Wrote the Song of Songs?

Who wrote the Song of Songs?
Excuse me Rabbi
you want me to say
it was Solomon
and I say not Solomon

A woman says a woman wrote it   it was womensong
a dreamscape of love if love could be chosen   and this woman
is black  the woman says  a Shulamite from the village of Shulem
                     
A man says “an extraordinary talent (a him  a his)
created this Hebraic masterpiece of world literature
sometime in the 9th century B.C.”

Have you noticed that narratives never borrow
not “This came to us from Persia”   or  
“that was taught to us by African traders”?

How unwilling we are to admit
the cloth of culture
is woven from threads
handspun in a dozen places

I think of Persian erotic tales
the artful consummations of Indian Gods
and wonder if The Song of Songs was on loan
Is it  or is it not
a wonder
that hero sagas   chronicles 
warnings   exiles  
            &
613 commandments
were canonized together with
a Garden of Delight?

Sunlight and birdsong
finally reach me
I turn away from questions  
from answers
to the truth of this moment:
It is so good to have this song
Especially since the songliles
the roses  the apple blossoms
“have appeared
in our land”
and love    settles down beside me

"It Wasn't Paul Fernandes"

      
I’m absorbing this endless rain. It shows up in my poems - too many words like inundated, too many phrases like losing my bouyancy. I tell people I’m growing moss on my toes, webs between them.  I haven’t had a good long walk in days.  But the tulips, seen through the window, bring me to attention like the flag when they play the national anthem.  I stare at the pink and gold tulips, open to the rain and filling with water, and I wonder if a bird could drink from that cup. 

And then there was that music:                                    
I don’t know how the name Paula Fernandes got on my laptop journal, in 24 pt font and that Blue that says “Click On This and I’ll Take You To Her”.   I fell for that voice, even though she sings “Brazilian country music”, and I’m not a country music fan. (I hear my old friend Don Foss say there are only two kinds of music: Country & Western. )
  
It’s that fallen angel voice. And the guitar.  Since I don’t hold on to back in the day very well, she’s my new Emmylou, my new Judy Collins. Though all three have a propensity for cowgirl boots, and long, flowing hair,  Emmylou and Judy never showed up in a pink satin bustier, scarlet vest, and mini-cut-offs. Fernandes’ music speaks to some part of me that still longs & yearns. I don’t understand the lyrics, but I feel what she is singing, and fortunately I live in the day when translations of lyrics are all over the Web. To my delight, the title Pássaro de Fogo means Firebird, and I’m suddenly flooded (there’s that rain language again) with Ivan Bilibin’s magical illustrations of Russian fairy tales, and I hear Stravinsky’s music.  But Paula Fernandes is her own Firebird, begging to carry her lover away, and I decide that’s a young woman’s lyric. But wait. Where is it written that your passion ends when you finally cut your long, flowing hair?

 

               It Wasn’t Paula Fernandes

I clicked on the music icon and heard a faint wail
it wasn’t Paula Fernandes but Caltrain horning
its way into town    then the clickclack
of railroad cars on the track    sound travels  
but I live so far away  

 

The cat appears in my room  
white stuffed mouse in her mouth
carrying it like the kitten she’ll never have  
Outside the window the pinkandgold tulips open to rain 
tulipcup filling with water   I wonder if a bird
might drink from that cup

The cat stealthjumps  circles twice and cuddles in
the cup of me fills with comfort    the cat nudges
Old Lady Pain off the chair  

I had lost my buoyancy   slid down to the bottom
of a creek  the creek became a river
the river ran into the ocean   was I too
far down to bubble upwards  
there were no bubbles  no upwards
and then   the pinkandgoldtulips opened to rain
and I surfaced    once again

I wonder if a bird could drink
from the tulipcups
better yet   could I?

                                   

Dance/Trauma

                                                                  

                                                                                Halprin Dancers Workshop

       We stay up late because we love late nights and silence, and rarely set the alarm. Except for Thursday mornings, when I wake early because I’m going to Dance. On the Mountain. In the studio that has windows, not mirrors, so you look inward or outward, not at your reflection. Or, if it’s nice, we dance on the extraordinary deck among the Redwoods, where Merce Cunningham was once photographed leaping across the length of it.

       Once I wanted to be a dancer, but there was that injury, and lost extension, and then there was rheumatoid arthritis at 30, and only being able to walk to the corner, (which is four doors away), and the slow build up to two miles each morning.

       The dance class begins with a long, slow, meditative warm-up on the heated floor, and there's the music - the music! Last rainy, blustery week the Mountain was hidden behind a low fog bank, and wisps of cloud were snarled among the trees, and then it poured, giving us another rhythm to dance to.   Every week dance-mind and dance-body return to this aging one, but what is aging when your teacher is 90?
                                  
                                               “Aging is like enlightenment at gunpoint”. says Anna

    
    When I saw the film about Anna Halprin, Breath Made Visible; when I saw her dance the cancer out of her body, and dance Intensive Care after her husband had been there, and score the elderly in rocking chairs, I knew I would attend her Thursday morning class.

"When I was a young girl, I danced to rebel!

  When I was half a hundred, I danced for peace
  and justice.

  When I was seventy-two, I danced to understand
   the ants,  the insects, the birds, fish, the mountains,
   deer, the rolling hills, and the ocean.

   And when I will be eighty, I will seek to be a healer.

   And when I become ninety, I will dance the essence of things…"

      Anna & Larry. If the 60s & 70s on the West Coast were about changing models and embracing change, alternative life styles, and facing the fact of race, who were more innovative than the Dancer and the Architect? Collaborating on new forms of community, new ways to integrate the public into what Lawrence Halprin was designing, new forms of response, public scores, and unpatterned dance, choreographed from inside out. After a workshop I once took with the Halprins, I realized that the basis of community was myth, symbol and ritual, and no class I ever taught (except perhaps for Logic, but that’s another story), was complete without that realization.

      I am not one who looks back to the 1960s and 70s with pure nostalgia, since I experienced the shadow side of that era, as well as its creative expressions. But I think, in these traumatic times, when expectation and possibility seem to be shrinking, that Anna’s work is like a silk ribbon extending from an era when the words ‘human’ and ‘potential’ were often uttered one after the other.

                                       Dance/Trauma
               
                                                      for Anna
                   
                                                                    “I’ve searched my whole life to find
                                                                      a dance that means as much to me as my
                                                                      grandfather’s dance meant to him”  
                                                                                                      Anna Halprin

                                                                    "Trauma culture": bodies, morgues, 
                                                                     brain-bits, addicts, skulls, strife…….”
                                                                                                       John MacIntyre

Anna  how many dances have you made?   Was one most meaningful
or is it still to come?  I too have watched those rapt Hassids 
heads covered   bodies god-filled    I too have been overtaken  
flung lovingly upward     

Trauma culture arrives from the menacing side    how words and film revel
in our darkness now that Hell’s no threat   Have we made these urban
underworlds to feed us   blood and bone?    

You can dance death   skulls    strife     you can hip-hop drugs   guns
Anna how do you bear it?   not all dance    not all dance that brings release   
embraces life


                       

The Memory of Light

 

        Egypt. Another Uprising! Another nation of people fed up with with their immovable dictator. On January 15th the President of Tunisia had done what deposed dictators did - he’d fled the country - as the news sources say.  Who knows if Egypt’s 30 year dictator will finally step down or create heavier reprisals, using thugs loyal to Mubarak.  Today I read Thousands including families with children flowed over bridges across the Nile into Tahrir Square, a sign that they were not intimidated after the protesters fended off everything thrown at them by pro-Mubarak attackers . Many of us have cheered the protesters on, signed petitions, and joined virtual and actual demonstrations in support. And we resuscitate hope.
        In June 2009 Iranians marched against an illegally elected president. Do you remember the beautiful young university student?  “Her name was ندا Neda. It means voice or call in Farsi. She is the voice of the people, a call for freedom”.  She became the martyr of the revolution when we saw her fall to the ground, shot, and watched her die on video, some of us so privileged we’d only seen

people die of a bullet wound on-screen. Her death by thugs loyal to Ahmadinejad signaled the abuses of power and repression that would follow. Many of us had cheered the protestors on, signed petitions, and joined virtual and actual demonstrations in support.  And we resuscitated hope. 
     And we remember the 10 foot Spirit of Democracy, erected in Tiananmen Square in 1989, when there were 10,000 demonstrators, and how that spirit, (That Spirit!), created 300,000 more demonstrators in the following days. And millions of us saw the tank that pushed Her over - how  the torch struck the ground first, breaking off - as thousands were injured, and thousands died. Months later, without a single life lost, the symbol of all that was divided , the Berlin Wall, came down.
     The Berlin Wall had become synonymous with the Iron Curtain of my childhood, which I imagined as barbed wire suspended from metal rods like those that held up my mother’s drapes -but thousands of miles long. Behind the Iron Curtain, I imagined millions of people like Millet’s Reapers, who were permanently bent over in a rococo frame in my grandparents‘ home. These poor people labored in darkness,  and could never leave. We, on the other hand,  were Free, and heirs of a successful revolutionary war, (though when I was a child, revolutionaries were called Commies.)

      I have been reading The Discovery of Heaven, by Harry Mulisch. In it, Lucifer has recruited Francis Bacon, founder of the scientific method. Ultimately, technologized humans turn away from God’s laws, and develop the tools that make pollution, mass slaughter and the Holocaust possible. Like a discarded fiancé, God wants the tablets He gave to Moses returned.  Satan has won the final round of the bet that he originally made with God over Job.
     I did not like the Book of Job as a child. God allowed suffering and loss to befall Job, betting Satan that Job would not turn away from Him. When Job questions God, He answers by citing all the wonders of His Creation, all that He has accomplished, all the Powers He can call upon. What mere human could comprehend Him? But I couldn’t find evidence of Mercy or Compassion, and I had been taught that  those were His qualities. It was just God and Satan in a struggle for power -  just like Uncle Sam and the Russian Bear - and Job was the pawn. Yes But, you say - it is a struggle between Good and Evil. But what amorality and cruelty does Good resort to in its attempt to defeat Evil? What justifications?
     How many billions of us are still pawns of Power? Whenever there is an uprising, it seems as though some new light is shining in the world, and all the media turn toward this potential light and if it fails, there is dejection. The next uprising we cheer them on, sign petitions, and attend virtual and actual demonstrations in support. And we resuscitate hope. How do we hold the memory of light?
  
The Memory of Light

How rare when joy enters history
like fireworks  
and lasting about
as long

How rare when joy enters history
It used to arrive at war’s end -
I was maybe 3   parading
hitting a pot with a big spoon  all us kids and
The War Was Over and even if you
didn’t understood it was so good
to be banging that pot
but wars don’t end now

How rare when joy enters history:
November 4 2008   as soon as
the announcement came horns were honking 
strangers were hugging   we cried and
yelled   the young ones jumped up and down
a year later   anger   bitterness   fear

How do we hold the memory of light?

"Extinct Birds"

                                  

           Our annual New Year’s brunch at the Station House Café.
No hike since it was a greyfog rainfall day. I saw the year’s
first snowy egret, my adopted totem,in the mudflats along Hiway 1.
There were one, two, three, and more egrets, Great and Snowy,
plus willets and sandpipers, kingfishers and a blue heron.

Shorebirds  living on the border between
land and sea   inhabiting all three   
air and water  and earth 
Brancusi birds   slim scuptures of flight

I had been reading Janet Frame’s Toward Another Summer, where she discovers that she is a migratory bird,  a godwit perhaps, and knows she will return to her home in New Zealand, when I saw this headline:

                                                               “ Good godwit!
                                                     Bird flies 6,000 miles nonstop
                                                 for eight days to set new record”
                                                                       Minneapolis Star Tribune

No water   no food  nonstop Alaska to New Zealand 
Was it god’s wit to give
this pretty redfeathered waterfowl a bill that long           
appended like the beak on a carnevale mask

Godwit
I thought I would write
endlessly about that word
My new poems speak of
motherdark   seabreath
madchatter
Why say more?

“Extinct Birds”

       
        by Walter Rothschild
        illustrated by J. G. Keulemans
             1907
           
The violet macaw is beautiful
but the sounds of ‘spectacled cormorant’
the hard ‘c’s’ and rounded rhyming o’s
(say it slowly   c-o-r-m-o-r-a-n-t)
launch me into language
but
on every page

“No known specimen” 

I’m grounded  

trying to find the alphabet

of lost flight

“No known specimen”

The Great Auk and the Madagascar Hawk

The last ones 

                                                  died of indifference                                                    

Now the mere rumor of a remote

sighting would thrill us

                                                                       

                            
If we didn’t ignore
                                                 all but our own music                                                   
would the Carolina parrot
still be singing?

 The lyrebird  
can mimic any sound   perfectly
The call of kookaburra  currawong   
the fall of a branch  the click of a camera
Listen: his latest sound

a chain saw