The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Still from movie "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly", 2007

I'd like to thank the kind people who responded to the previous post with sympathy and wisdom. I genuinely appreciate your generosity. It is so good to know that there are kindred souls literally all over the world.

I may not be able to be consistent with blog entries for a while, as the demands of my family's needs press me. My mother is 91, and my brother has lived with her as her caretaker. They have taken him to Phoenix, which is a 100 mile drive from Tucson, so the visits are long endeavors. I'm working to get the insurance necessary to bring him to Tucson. What the longer term prospects are for him, I don't know. Glenn has had a brain stem stroke, and the prospects aren't good - it is hard, with such, to know what kind of recovery he may make, if there is to be a recovery. This is something my mother and other brother will not, or cannot, contemplate, and so I am also isolated in this. As it is, Glenn may have "locked in" syndrome, which means, he can perceive, hear or perhaps see, and cannot communicate.

I have tried asking him to blink, or to move his feet, but am unable to determine whether he responds with volition or not. I do not know what kind of therapy he will get in Phoenix. I am overwhelmed, frankly, with this situation. These circumstances leave me mute..........I do not know how to ease my brother's suffering, I also do not know how to come to terms with the aspects of myself that are overwhelmed with the needs of my family and my own needs. I will do my best, and the best I can do ultimately is to be aware. I will try to not deplete myself with guilt or the other emotions that follow.

I'm in T or C for a few days, a friend from NY will be taking the studio I just finished, which leaves me with a wistful feeling. In my imagination it is full of paints and canvases ready to become interior universes...........well, someday I hope, and the best laid plans of mice and men, etc................ here is a quote by my favorite author (who has created many, many universes that I've come to visit and occasionally inhabit). I put it on the inside door, alongside a yin/yang symbol. It will be a blessing for the fecundity of the place. Sometimes, I wonder about my obsession with painting and renovating rundown storefronts and motorhomes and rooms and yards and circles of stones in woods ........ I think I'm always running around making studios, theatres, sacred places, shrines........making creative wombs for the Divine to manifest, even if I can't be there to see it happen. Making containers..............

"To create difference - to establish strangeness - then to let the fiery arc of human emotion leap and close the gap: this acrobatics of the imagination fascinates and satisfies me as no other." ......Ursula K. Le Guin

I wanted to share something about an extraordinary book, and now a recent movie based upon the book by Jean-Dominique Bauby. This book would not have come to my attention had my brother's stroke not occurred. I take the liberty (and I sure hope I never get caught with all the liberties I take in this blog of copying the writings of others.......if I do, I hope there is some humanity in the publishing world that sees it is from admiration, and I am careful to give the credit due).........I take the liberty thus of copying below a review by Thomas Mallon, with links to the review. Also, should anyone want to purchase the book, here's how you can buy it from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Diving-Bell-Butterfly-Memoir-Death/dp/0375701214

"I can weep discreetly. People think my eye is watering."

Jean-Dominique Bauby

"I think you need to go into his world in order to get out of his world. And he said the only way he could escape his diving bell was through his imagination and his memory."

Julian Schnabel, Director The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

June 15, 1997

In the Blink of an Eye

---

After a devastating stroke, the author dictated this memoir using only his left eyelid

By THOMAS MALLON

THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY By Jean-Dominique Bauby. Translated by Jeremy Leggatt. 132 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $20.

A year and a half ago, following a catastrophic stroke and weeks of deep coma in that same hospital, Jean-Dominique Bauby gradually ''surfaced'' into a new existence as a victim of ''locked-in syndrome,'' mentally alert but deprived of movement and speech. Just 44 years old, his body useless but still painful (''my hands, lying curled on the yellow sheets, are hurting, although I can't tell if they are burning hot or ice cold''), he was forced to recognize that his former life in Paris as the witty, high-living editor in chief of Elle magazine had become as unreachable as the books and trinkets across his hospital room, where he now lived ''like a hermit crab dug into his rock.''

His time ''as a perfectly functioning earthling'' ended, one might say, in the blink of an eye. But it was blinking -- that age-old image of heedless speed turned into literal, concentrated labor -- that saved Bauby from becoming just another object in the room. By moving his left eyelid in response to an alphabet rearranged according to the letters' frequency of use, Bauby managed to write a book as moving as Job's and as expansive, in its way, as any composed by the wheelchaired, boundless Stephen Hawking.

Jean-Dominique Bauby was the victim of a stroke that left his mind and one eye functioning -- enough to enable him to dictate "The Diving Suit and the Butterfly" to Claude Mendibil before dying of heart failure. (Jean-Louis Sieff)

''It is a simple enough system,'' he explains. ''You read off the alphabet . . . until, with a blink of my eye, I stop you at the letter to be noted. The maneuver is repeated for the letters that follow, so that fairly soon you have a whole word.'' Fairly soon! Less soon when the amanuensis anticipates and makes mistakes: ''One day when, attempting to ask for my glasses (lunettes), I was asked what I wanted to do with the moon (lune).''

Bauby allows that his ''communication system disqualifies repartee,'' but it does beautiful service to all sorts of physical and emotional description. ''There comes a time,'' he explains, ''when the heaping up of calamities brings on uncontrollable nervous laughter,'' but in this strong, slim volume the author displays a writerly control equal to his honesty: ''One day . . . I can find it amusing, in my 45th year, to be cleaned up and turned over, to have my bottom wiped and swaddled like a newborn's. I even derive a guilty pleasure from this total lapse into infancy. But the next day, the same procedure seems to me unbearably sad, and a tear rolls down through the lather a nurse's aide spreads over my cheeks.'' There are scenes in Bauby's narrative -- his discovery, in a windowpane, that he is not just ''reduced to the existence of a jellyfish'' but ''also horrible to behold'' -- that one might be inclined to describe as unbearably sad, if ''unbearable,'' thanks to this book, were not a word one will never again use quite so loosely.

The diving bell of Bauby's title is his corporeal trap, the butterfly his imagination: ''There is so much to do. You can wander off in space or in time, set out for Tierra del Fuego or for King Midas's court.'' Childhood fantasies of war heroism alternate with elaborate dreams of cooking, in which his pantry is a previous lifetime's memories of smells, tastes and textures: ''You can sit down to a meal at any hour, with no fuss or ceremony. If it's a restaurant, no need to call ahead. . . . The boeuf bourguignon is tender, the boeuf en gelee translucent, the apricot pie possesses just the requisite tartness.'' It's as if he'd reversed the most famous moment in Proust and used memory to bring back the madeleine..........

The author cultivates strong feelings, especially anger, to keep his spirit from atrophying along with his limbs. But despite occasional sarcastic eruptions, the book's tone, in Jeremy Leggatt's translation, is dominated by a sweet, even humorous, lyricism. Bauby notes with pleasure how, in his reordered alphabet, ''T and U, the tender components of tu . . . have not been separated,'' and he recounts his practical distribution of all the prayers coming his way: ''A woman I know enlisted a Cameroon holy man to procure me the goodwill of Africa's gods: I have assigned him my right eye. For my hearing problems I rely on the relationship between my devout mother-in-law and the monks of a Bordeaux brotherhood.''

to read the full review

Waiting Rooms

Things have changed. My brother has had a devastating stroke, and has been lying in the Tucson Medical Center on life support for the past week. He is paralyzed - it seems that he can hear…….that he can respond by blinking his eyes, and possibly he has some control over his feet. It is terrible to imagine what he is experiencing, if he is fully conscious. I think of a book called The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. A week or so ago I was finishing off my studio and ordering paint. Now my day begins with going to the Intensive Care Unit to visit Glenn, dealing with insurance, then driving around Tucson unsure of where to go or what to do next. It’s strange. Yesterday I found myself at the Friends Meeting House downtown, talking to the woman there, but mostly just wanting to hang in the peaceful white room with the good energy, where they all meet to be silent together.

Here’s the deal. If grief teaches anything, and it is a GREAT TEACHER if you can stick around long enough to do some listening instead of running off in constant search of relief of the pain……(which is ok also)…….if grief teaches anything, it is that it levels away all the crap, and shows, unequivocally, that we really are one. One. One being, one world, one family, one humanity, one sorrow and story and beginning and ending. Energy that is consciousness moving in and out of form. Which is no consolation at all, when one is dealing with our individual lives, and all of the pain associated with simply being another finite animal on the breast of Mother Earth.

Glenn and I have been at conflict since we were very young, sibling rivalry that never resolved, just hardened and became more and more habitual. The truth is, he was the sensitive middle child, and became the family scapegoat, sustaining the brunt of my father’s abuse, and later, my mother’s dependency. As time went by, perhaps the only way he could survive at all was to wrap a thick, hostile wall around his psyche, with a huge “keep out” sign on the door. Every so often, he peeked out, but as the years went by, less so, and I never knew how to reach him. His anger and cynicism and the deeper depression was something I fled from, and in the past few years, absorbed and reflected in myself as well. Grief has a way of cracking the shell. All these years, trying to run away from my family, trying to sever the “ties”, and here I am. I don’t know how to help him. I sense that he’s getting ready to leave, and why should he want to stay in the body, with such a life?

Yesterday I sat by his bed and had a picture come into my mind – he was standing before me in his ridiculous hospital gown, waving at all the plastic tubes and bottles that are attached to his body, jumping up and down, as if to gesture “no more, no more, stop it”. But that could be my imagination as much as an actual psychic event………..I have, to be honest, no confidence anymore in my psychic abilities, especially where the concerns are personal. What is so terrible about this is of course the feeling of helplessness, that there is nothing I can do to make Glenn better, or to free him from his pain. I cannot speak for the desires of another, but I know that if this happened to me, I would want the plugs pulled, and release from a life that is no longer worth living.

Is this appropriate for me to put this entry into this Blog? I don't know. But it's the truth of my life at this moment. May the light of Grace come to Glenn.

I remember the good times, brother, we've travelled together in this family, seen some things together. I love you. I don't know what to do.

Yellow Leaf Press

Since I seem to be on a roll these days with the sheer delight of making (and finishing books that have been long in the process), I've decided to inaugurate (the timing seems good as well) YELLOW LEAF PRESS.

YELLOW LEAF will produce (along with Blurb.com) my 4 books - THE MASKS OF THE GODDESS, THE ARTIST'S ORACULAR COOKBOOK, A HOUSE OF DOORS, and SPIDER WOMAN'S HANDS. I hope that in the future I will be able to facilitate, design, or produce through my very humble publishing empire unique, beautiful limited edition books for other artists, poets, and innovators.

Even a decade ago the technology did not exist for people like myself to get their work published ....I know from experience, having had literary agents and submitted many proposals for books to publishing houses.........that it was a very daunting, and disheartening, process.

What I enjoy about the technology that is allowing artists to create professional, beautifully illustrated books through self-publishing is, well, that they can. We can publish on an individual order basis, rather than having to make a huge outlay for a quantity of books. We can market ourselves to our clients, collectors, and at the events we attend, as well as to bookstores and museum shops.

The disadvantages are obvious - the books are more expensive than a commercially printed book would be, and would not generally have the distribution of a commercially printed book.

Which is why they are unique, limited edition, special collectors books.

A House of Doors ~ open poems~

The deep parts of my life
pour onward,
as if the river shores
were opening out.

It seems as if things
are more like me now

that I can see farther into paintings

I feel closer
to what language can't reach.

Rainer Maria Rilke

















I feel enormously grateful to have finished  my 5th book, A HOUSE OF DOORS - my little collection of poems that span 40 years.   (update -  I have just made an EBook edition:  cost: $1.00)  (http://store.blurb.com/ebooks/360737-a-house-of-doors-open-poems)

Most of these poems are mine, but also included are "found poems", the collection of poetry by Joanna Brouk and Felicia Miller, with the illustrations I did for them back in the early '70's when we were young artists in Berkeley.

I have never been a prolific poet by any means...........I am a visual person first and foremost in my communicating and thinking processes. All of the poetry  worth sharing I put into this little book, and I'm well pleased, as I was to finally complete the MASKS OF THE GODDESS book. Honoring the Past, the Muse, the Friends, the Communities, Myself, and the Divine is what this 6 month writing project has been about, and with this book, I feel free to move on and give my attention to new projects.

 FOR THREE WEEKS

the cool moon
bound by occult cords
moves

through the houses
of memory and sleep

distills night in a bowl

But on the night 
of the full moon
what is mirrored

in a still pool?


Felicia Miller (1972)

AMAZONS IV.

At the river's edge

I laid my armor down

laid down my sword and bow

untied my hair

this I did for you

I approached you

lying in the grass

at the river's edge

your body brown

graceful as a tree

unshod

you waited for me

I approached you

with desire

O my enemy

Lauren Raine (1975)

                                                            light
                                                            light
                                                            light of morning

                                                            the fairest light,
                                                            the fairest light
                                                            has come
                                                            softly
                                                            gently
                                                            I feel its coming

                                                            night has given
                                                            night has given
                                                            a place to morning

                                                            breath returns
                                                            and moistens the grass
                                                            the bird's feather

                                                            no longer do I hide
                                                            no longer do I hide
                                                            gone into darkness

                                                            light has come

                                                          Joanna Brouk (1972)


  (5/2009)  As a footnote, because I published those poems on my website in 2006, Felicia found me on the Web, which resulted in us corresponding, and my finally going to Puerto Rico this August to meet her in person again. She's still a mermaid spinning stories about Undine, still the soul I remember well, still beautiful.)

(5/15/2015)  As a footnote to this footnote, I did indeed meet my friend Felicia again, near water as always (in Puerto Rico).  Felicia passed away  in 2010. I've written about her, and our meetings, in this Blog.   And I found Joanna again, in San Diego, in 2011, still beautiful, still making music and poetry, still a friend.  In fact here I sit at her kitchen table, visiting for the weekend.  Below is a pastel I did of her back in 1976.)

Truth or Consequences on Halloween

It's been a strange few weeks, since I moved to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. I will be in and out of Tucson, but I've rented a small studio here, and have bought "Lucy" to an old trailor park with a 1940's bathhouse (T or C is famous for its hotsprings), just a few blocks from the peaceful Rio Grande. Since I've been here I've kind of lost my sense of time.......what locals refer to as the "New Mexico Effect". Land of Enchantment indeed.

Here's something wonderful that is happening very soon:


Festival of the Cranes, at the Bosque del Apache wetlands. This is where the migrating cranes come.............so wonderful! An event attended by thousands, and drawing many artists as well.

I can't believe that I'm living now beside the RIO GRANDE ("Great River"), in TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES. There's some kind of metaphor in there. As the painter Alex Grey said to me a long time ago, "I don't know why I do these things. There's an internal logic that doesn't necessarily reveal itself at the time".

Here I am........I think, to heal, and to open. And that is what this place of ancient hotsprings is admirably suited for.

Legend has it that before the Europeans came, this place was sacred to a number of native peoples, and they had an agreement to cease all traditional feuds and warfare when here so that all could enjoy the healing waters. Geronimo came here. When the white settlers came they actually filled in the hot springs (I'm not sure why, but it certainly says something interesting about our cultural heritage). They were not opened again until decades later, when the "wild west" was much tamer, and "taking the waters" became popular, and the railroads made "New Mexico Hot Springs" (which later became T or C because of the game show host) accessible. There are many old bathhouses, some of them crumbling, from the 1930's and 1940's. There is also a building with the legend "Magnolia Ellis" on it, currently occupied by a chiropractor. Apparently Magnolia was a famous energy healer and medical intuitive who practiced here in the 50's. They say people would wait to see her in a long line whenever she was open.

My mind clears in the extraordinary brilliant high desert light of New Mexico, my spirit clears beside the peaceful river, my body eases in the hot waters that come right up out of the Earth here. The urge to paint, to just immerse myself in vision, is so strong here. Theres a community here of artists and mystics as well, living simple and frugal lives to pursue their spiritual and creative means..........I am surprised at not only their friendliness and the clear openess in the eyes I look into here, but their sophistication as well. I've heard some potent poetry at the (only) poetry group's meetings on Sunday at the (only) coffee shop, which is also a used bookstore. The same coffee shop I bought a copy of the Nag Hammadi Library from (a steal at $4.50).

This community, because of its isolation, poverty, and because, I believe, the spirit of place as well, fosters a feeling of fellowship and mutual concern. What use competition or judgement here? There's nothing much to compete for, no one to impress! I guess I've spent so much time in Brushwood because I crave the same small community good heartedness. I've been here barely 2 weeks, and already have a short stack of books people have given me, food, and (of course) lots of helpful advice.

The Universe provides.

I think of a movie I saw a while back called "Off the Map". It's about, well, a group of people who live "off the grid" in New Mexico, and the way the land itself changes them. I can't help but feel that Spider Woman is alive and well here..........after all, the logo of the state is Spider Woman's Solar Cross.

I finished finally the hopefully last edition of my "Masks of the Goddess" book, a rather massive undertaking. It features many beautiful photographs by Thomas Lux and Peter Hughes. Its available to view on http://www.blurb.com/books/400085.

I realize now that I've been so obsessed with finishing this book before Samhain because it was Samhain of 1999 when I began the project, and first saw that miraculous procession of living Goddesses emerge from the darkness of Ft. Mason Center for the Invocation of the Goddess at the Spiral Dance. That will always be one of the most wonderful moments of my life. Finishing the book is really my way of honoring the Goddesses, and the many people, as I now conclude and document my 7 year project. May this book keep the inspiration alive, and do justice to the privilege I was given.

This is what I found on the grid in the front of my motorhome, when I parked Lucy. I will take this as a little blessing for, once again, my new life.

The Feast of Samhain (2.)

PERSEPHONE'S FEAST DAY

I offer now bread, red fruit, red wine

To life:

To the dreamers, planters and gatherers, 

to makers and unmakers, the innocent and the wise.

To the inarticulate, lost, hungry, and fallen, 

to every transparent lover

wandering these grey bardos in their solitude.

Come to the table, all. 

Here is a rich conversation harvested from the last living garden.

A dappled pear, an apple, a pomegranate.

A butterfly in it's chrysalis, winged, moist,

the slow rebirth of color deep in the depths of this dream.

The weathervanes will turn again.

The wheat has new life in it yet. 

The blessing will still be given.

2005

The Feast of Samhain (1.)

"Skin Shedder" 1986

Where do the dead go?

The dead that are not corpses, cosmetically renewed
and boxed, their faces familiar and serene.
Or brought to an essence, pale ashes
in elegant cannisters.

I ask for the other dead,
those ghosts that wander
unshriven among our sleep,
haunting the borderlands of our lives.

The dead dreams,
The failed loves.
The quests, undertaken with full courage
and paid for in blood
that never found a dragon,
a Grail, a noble ordeal
and the Hero's sacred journey home.

Instead, the wrong fork was somehow taken,
or the road
wandered aimlessly, finally narrowing
to a tangled gully
and the Hero was lost,
in the gray and prosaic rain,
hungry, weary, to finally stop somewhere, anywhere
glad of bread, a fire, a little companionship.

Where is their graveyard?
Were they mourned?
Did we hold a wake,
bear flowers, eulogize

their bright efforts
their brave hopes

and commemorate their loss with honor?
A poem?
An imperishable stone
to mark their passing?

Did we give them back to the Earth
to nourish saplings yet to flower,
the unborn ones?

Or were they left to wander
in some unseen Bardo, unreleased, ungrieved.
Did we turn our backs on them unknowing,
their voices calling, whispering impotently

behind us
shadowing our steps?

Lauren Raine 1997

As Samhain approaches (Halloween to many), I feel a sharp kind of loneliness that has it's own brand of sweet melancholy. This is a new community for me, and I don't really know much of anyone to celebrate even profane Halloween, so I'll make my own Samhain remembrances alone. Although I do see some Dia de los Muertes posters, so the outlook for a celebration may not be that grim. I remember the Spiral Dances in San Francisco that I've participated in and created the masks for..............

Traditionally this was the time to celebrate the "Witche's New Year", the last Sabbat or sacred day (which is why it's called "Halloween", or "Hallowed evening". It is the closing of the old year, the last harvest festival, a time to honor the ancestors and all the events and gifts of the dying year as they prepared for the entry into the darkness and the long dormancy of winter. The veils between the worlds were very thin, and places were set at the banquet table for the spirits of those beloved dead who had passed on. You might see in any number of ancient Celtic communities people enjoying the last fresh apples, honey mead and beer, toasting and remembering the invisible ones, seated at the table, their plates heaped high as well. "Welcome, Welcome". Inherent in this celebration was a profound respect for the wheel of the year, always cycling, through human generations and through natural cycles of death and re-birth.

This, of course, is the real sacred origin and meaning of Halloween, which, although fun for kids to be scared and for adults to stage masquerade balls, has slid far away from it's sacred potency. Spirits, coming close to this world to join the feast, sometimes like to play tricks, hence, "trick or treat"..........it's not good, of course, to fail to leave a place at the table for Uncle Angus on such a high holy day! And of course, the skeletons and ghosts and witches................how funny it is to me sometimes that people love these things so much on Halloween, while they have no understanding of their origins or meanings.

Like the "Witch and her broom". The Broom is associated with many folk traditions of "sweeping away the old bad energies" - purification rituals for the home and Hearth (Heart).

Here is my gratitude to the year that is soon to pass away, and to all of those who have passed away from my life as well, people who have gifted me and created with me and evolved me - among them:

Peter Hughes, the photographer whose photos of my masks I am eternally grateful to.

Judy Foster, whose face became the mask of "Hecate", and who so magically gave me a home and community years ago, when my wandering spirit found its way to Berkeley.

Sequoia, fiery redhead activist I knew there.

Ilana Stein, who I met in my April class at Kripalu, and whose vision of the "White Goddess", and her poem and masks ....... was a true gift to all of us from the divine.

Dellie Dorfman - Cranky mentor and friend from my days as a psychic reader.

Bob Meyer - beloved friend from Vermont, who always gave me a couch and good advice.

and so many others: Here's lifting that glass of mead to all of you. A place is set at the table.

"So much in American life has had a corrupting influence on our requirements for social order. We live in a culture that has lost its memory. Very little in the specific shapes and traditions of our grandparents pasts instructs us in how to live today, or tells us who we are, or what demands will be made on us as members of society. The shrill estrangement some of us feel in our twenties has been replaced by a hangdog collective blues. With our burgeoning careers and families we want to join up but its difficult to know how or where. The changing conditions of life are no longer assimilated back into a common watering trough.

Now, with our senses enlivened – because that’s the only context we have to go by – we hook change onto change ad nauseum."

Gretel Erlich