Memoirs 1: Lithographs from 1985

For my Father, and Time (1985)

 "Who has twisted us around like this, so that no matter what we do, we are in the posture of someone going away? Just as, upon the farthest hill, which shows him his whole valley one last time, he turns, stops, lingers--, so we live here, forever taking leave."

Rainer Maria Rilke, "The Eighth Elegy", Duino Elegies (translated by Stephen Mitchell)

I have been thinking lately that this Blog is beginning to form itself into a kind of "scrapbook of memoir". Sometimes I have thought that I've basically said everything I have to say, and now it's more about looking back, as well as finding ways to say it again.  In our world that relentlessly seeks "the new" I give up, I stop along the road, take a drink of water, and look back more and more these days.

 Perhaps because I have had a few encounters with mortality this year, including open heart surgery in July and now preparing for removal of a tumor (which I am assured is not life threatening).......perhaps because of that I look back on the road and notice old beauties.  So, having stated that, I think this new year will see this Blog often becoming Memoir.  And I give myself permission to repeat myself!

Songs the Rain Sings (1985)

I was looking through a "lost" collection of lithographs I worked on in graduate school in the 80's.  They were all made the hard way on  litho stones (and it's mindboggling to think that that is how newspapers once were produced).  I used old photographs mostly.  The photographs were from a box of family photos I inherited, or sometimes old photos from "the Warehouse" artist studios where I lived in  Berkeley in the 70's.  Some of those old photos became magical windows for me, icons that  "time travelled" into fantastical worlds.  Like, for example, the small lithograph above, which is from a 1920 snapshot of my mother. 

I often used images of my mother as a child at the beach.  I didn't know it at the time, but I think they revealed the mystery of  time for me.  The recuring child that my mother was is ever the Observer. And of course, there was The Beach............Perhaps that child-and-mother represented to me that part of ourselves that lives and sees outside of time, outside of the dramas of our lives, outside of the polarties - the creative, innocent Soul before the great oceanic Oneness we came from, and eventually return to.

Not all the photos I played with were old family photos:  among my finds were  photos of friends posing as models (at that time people always it seemed had to be painted in the nude).  I think of that time and place, a young artist in Berkeley in the early 70's,  as the "Halcyon Years".  

"All Aboard!" (1985)

"Sybils" is a strange image.  One of the definitions of "Sibyll" is:  "a woman in ancient times who speaks  the oracles and prophecies of a god."  Thus, a  Sibyll would live, at least in part, outside of time, hence the bones. And yet the pregnant Sibyll...........perhaps I was thinking of life ever renewing itself, the circle.  And of course, there is my mother, on the Beach, observing.

"Sybils" (1985)

A photo I found of my grandmother Helen, who died before I was born. I don't think she had a happy life, being buffeted by a controlling and even cruel mother, and an unhappy marriage.  Although my grandfather was a well meaning man, he was domineering and no doubt emotionally explosive.  My mother married the same kind of man. 

Here I envisioned this unknown grandmother, who I only knew from old photos,  as an observer,  watching me across the generations as I rest with my cat,  Pumpkin, somehow aware of her presence.  

"Ancestral Visitations" 

Here is the Observer again, and this time she ventures into the world of myth and archetype, a place I love to go.  We all know the sad fate of Icarus, who flew with his wax wings too close to the sun, causing them to melt and he fell to his death.  But what if he had a sister, a sister who did not make his mistake, and flew joyfully wherever she wanted to go, escaping gleefully her captors?  Like most of the accomplishments of women throughout his-story, she has been erased.  But here I, and the Observer, bear witness to her exhuberance as she flies far and wide.  Perhaps she went to Crete, or even Egypt, where she finally landed, had a lovely nap and lunch, made some friends, got a job, met a guy she married,  and lived to a ripe old age.  Why not?

"Icarus Had a Sister" (1985)

Here below is one of my favorites from the series, Leda and the Swan.  I guess this is about as close to erotic art as I ever got.  Yes, Leda was seduced by a God.  But she also brought to that encounter her passion to fly, and thus loved this numinous, winged creature, flying with him for those few hours.  I am sure, in their pleasure, he took her to some beautiful visionary heights.

"Leda and the Swan" (1985)

I think I'll stop here, and bring the other Lithos into another post.  I am glad to share them here, they have been chirping for exposure in my closet for many years, some of my "lost children".  I still love them.

 All artwork and text unless otherwise specified is COPYRIGHT Lauren Raine 2024

Remembering 9/11: "On the Beach"

 

"I call you back, girl, I call you back.

I am at the other end of this life now

yet your footprints touch mine beneath the sand,

I follow them.

On the beach your sand prayers

ring here still,  the Earth

is my witness."

I wrote this poem on the beach at Mendocino, California, exactly a month after the twin towers fell in New York on September 11th, 2001.  It was a beautiful day, children were playing in the surf, seagulls calling overhead.  And there I sat, while I felt a great cloud of death and destruction gathering far away, a cloud that would soon affect all our lives.  And so it was:  we saw a 20 year war in Afghanistan, and the invasion of Iraq.  Millions died, mostly civilians.  All for what?  

As I sat there I remembered a famous  1959 movie with Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner,  based on the book by Neville Shute  "On the Beach".  Written at the height of the Cold War, it was about a radioactive cloud that had destroyed America and Europe and Russia as the aftermath of a nuclear war,  a doom that  was slowly moving toward Australia.  The people of Australia had just a year  to wait for their own demise, and the film depicts how they do that.  

Since then a new Tower has been built, Afghanistan has returned to the same tyrants that controlled  the country before 9/11 and George Bush's wars,  the dead are mostly forgotten, and a whole generation of young people view the whole thing as ancient history.  What remains,  then and now?  Gaia. 

ON THE BEACH (Oct. 11th, 2001)

One month after the world ended

The little island world we,

the privileged few, could pretend

was safe, forever, and righteous

The fallen towers, fiery messengers

of unfathomable destruction yet to come.

Tourists walk barefoot on the familiar beach.

They came here, I imagine,

as I have, not to forget, but to remember.

To remember driftwood and high tide -

a red dog and a yellow-haired child

as they enter the water -

their cries of goodly shock and honest forevers

always new, always cold,

always blue.

A white heron,

balanced in perfect equanimity on one leg.

Wave forms overlay my feet......

transparent hieroglyphs of infinity.

Her way of speaking.

Gaia.  Her manifest, unspoken words.

A brown man lies beside the mossy cliff,

spread-eagled between sky and sea and land.

Sand sunk, leaf-molten,

blackberry thorn,

into the green:  

toes, fingers, flesh

reaching into the green

redeeming Earth.

He is rooting himself.

He is taking himself back.

I lie down in grateful imitation,

a stranger in companionable human proximity

sharing this rite of remembering.

I  see her now,  I see a girl

walking on this very beach.

Yesterday, and 40 years ago.

Sourcing, she is 

sourcing the one who lives here

a river Goddess with no name.

She has made a mermaid offering

of sticks and sand and seaweed.

Companions arrive, offer shells,

and return to Berkeley.

To Vietnam, the Cold War, the Berlin Wall,

the war, the wall,

the war, the walls.

The war,

and the summer of love.

("the revolution will not be televised")

A generation to end war, raise hell,

raise consciousness,

raise Atlantis,

and raise the new and Golden Age

("the revolution will not be televised")

How did we get here from there?

I call you back, girl,

I call you back.

I am at the other end of this life now

yet your footprints touch mine beneath the sand,

I follow them.

On the beach

your sand prayers

ring here still,

The Earth

is my witness.

Lauren Raine (2001)

from APHRODITE IN BROOKLYN and Other Mythic Voices 

The Rune of Ending

I see now that posting poems  from APHRODITE IN BROOKLYN and Other Mythic Voices  has become a means for me to explore my memoirs as well as my poetry.  I find it good to see where these poems came from......they are all touchstones along the way.

This one was an Obituary for the end of my second marriage.  I wrote it shortly after the divorce was finalized, and just before I left my home and the community we shared  on the East Coast and headed West with my cat and worldly goods in my van,  for destinations  unknown.  I felt very much that I had to begin a new life at that time, and I had to give honor to the life that was over with the divorce.  Which included grief, anger, and remorse for my own unconscious  and sometimes abusive behavior.  Sometimes the end of a relationship is as much a gift for growth as the beginning.  

Eventually I ended up in California, back in Berkeley, where I had started from more than  20 years before and a whole new adventure began.   But that is another story, fraught with synchronicities and creativity.  But first I had to grieve and praise.

I have never done marriage well, and I bear my ex no ill will, indeed, I think of him with affection.   I doubt he shares my opinion, which is ok.  At the end of the day, are relationships really "failures" when they end?  They last however long they last.  Or don't last.   What we take away, be it friendship or enmity, memories kept or discarded,  is experience and growth.  At the time I wrote this poem he had just met a woman who, I believe, he is still with, and I am glad that he found a partnership I could not give him. 

 

The Rune of Ending

 What can be said, now

when all words are spent

and the word has finally been spoken: 

we go now to our separate houses

relieved.  At least a course has been named.

 

Our lives are severed, our story is told.

We will each surely tell that story, and strive and laugh

and talk late into the night, and kiss lips salty

with tears and love;

but not with each other, not again.

 

Here the tearing ends, here ends remorse and reprisal,

here end dreams and plans.

 

We will not travel to Scotland,

Walk together among ancient monoliths

in the white mists of our imagination.

We will not walk, again, on a warm beach in Mexico,

toasting each other with margaritas.

That was once.  It has to be enough.

 

I will not call you mine, husband.

You will not call me yours.

And our cat is now your cat, our teapot is now my teapot.

I touch a potted plant,

remembering its place on our breakfast table.

We divide the spoils, humane, courteous, fair.

 

A canyon has opened between us, we are each old enough

to know its name, to view its depths without passion.

There is no bridge to cross this time.

 

Beloved, I must now forgive myself as well as you,

cast my stone into this abyss

and bless the woman who has not yet come

to stand by your side,

wave with grace from across this canyon's lip,

then turn,

and walk my own path.

(1997)

from APHRODITE IN BROOKLYN and Other Mythic Voices