THE CRUCIBLE OF MEMORY - Gesture to the Infinite & A Chagallian Moon

Champignonnière (Mushroom bed) from D M I spectacles -  Michala Marcus, Odille Pellissier, Charente, Fr.

Vidéodanse - Eglise de Rauzet*

ALERT:  Tonight, another full MOON - it always brings a soupçon of madness...


"I am out to induce a psychic shock into my painting, one that is always
motivated by pictorial reasoning, that is to say a fourth dimension." -  Marc Chagall

"Waters of Life" - Painting by Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall

"Most people consider Marc Chagall a painter.  He was in fact a human transistor. His brush on the canvas completed a circuit that began in his soul, traveled through a mysterious cobalt otherworld, zigged across his mind and zagged into our reality plane. The unusual frequency Chagall tuned in is timeless. His floating farmers, loving brides, flying fish, fiddle playing goats and vignettes of shtetl life long ago cover the mind like a nighttime January snowfall - quietly...steadily...gently."  - Jaime Martorano, Photographer, Digital Artist - Triphoney.com

He Had a Lifelong Taste for Flying

                                       

                                      ...figures

more often lovers than beggars

sometimes peasants:  here a woman

floats in the night sky above a Russian town,

head and body myseriously separate.

A workman falls through a fractured sky

dangles below a parachute that looks

like a handkerchief folded into a triangle.

Angels, fishes, goats and rabbis,

but it's Bella I return to, Bella of the flowers

who lifted his feet and bent him backwards

for a kiss; Bella, who rose above the picnic

like a balloon, and almost flew away for joy

as if the bird in his hand had given her its heart,

As if her heart was the bird in his hand.

Penelope Cline, The Wild Green Chagallian Tarot

The Moon, The Wild Green Chagallian Tarot

A dear friend sent me this lyrical tarot deck by Penelope Cline, who used the whimsical figures of Marc Chagall for inspiration.  Twenty-two major arcana cards painted in gouache on heavy watercolor paper. "Poetry in Paint" - www.figtreepress.co.uk

I've laid the cards out under a moon beam.  The Perigee moon in July is also known as the Buck Moon & Thunder Moon.  Young male deer will be sprouting their antlers as the first of three visible supermoons makes its appearance in 2014.

My brother Mark -  San Rafael, Ca.

Meanwhile, back in California, digging with a pick and shovel through his storage unit - amidst the six chess sets and 35,000 books - my brother found this Polaroid photo of Kev & I on the Sonoma Train, circa 1985.


We seem improbably young. We had just bought our first home in Forest Knolls, on the edge of Papermill Creek.  We had to beg, borrow - stopping short of stealing - to get our foot through the door of California real estate.  We were taking a chance on this house, situated on a flood plain. In 1982, a 100 year flood had swept thru Forest Knolls & the surrounding towns and counties.  I was living in Fairfax, Ca. at the time, but had gone to Scammons Lagoon in Baja, Ca. with a bunch of kayakers to explore the largest Gray Whale nursery in Baja. The mothers & baby whales came right up to the kayaks; I had the privilege of touching a baby whale.

On our way home from Baja we stopped overnight at a hotel in L.A., turned on the news and discovered that West Marin, Ca. had been declared a disaster area, the National Guard called out. The water was so high in the town of Fairfax that boats were being used to get around the village and residents were kayaking down Bolinas Ave.  Who knew we didn't have to go all the way to Baja to kayak?! 

Neighboring San Anselmo 1982 historic flood

Since the house had flooded before and there was the likelihood of it happening again, no flood insurance was to be had. And we probably could not have afforded it even if there were.  And sure enough, a few years later, the rain, she came, and the waters started rising again.  I wrote a poem about it, "On the Edge of Papermill Creek".  One of the illustrious literary lions from our writing group, Mike R. kindly sent it off to the Coastal Post, where it was published in the May 1, 1995 issue.  But by then we were living ON the water in a houseboat in Sausalito on Issaquah Dock.  

Issaquah Dock, Sausalito, CA.

When it began raining non-stop in France in November, each day became another soggy Groundhog Day; a répétition of rivers rising, memories "flooding" back. I looked for the poem and badgered my poor old writing pals to see if they could conjure up a copy, but alas, nada, & unless there was a hard copy somewhere the only other record was on an old hard drive in a computer bone yard somewhere.

Then in May, back in California, one of the moldy storage boxes coughed up a copy from the Coastal Post - dingue! (unreal)

On The Edge of Papermill Creek

It will never stop raining in this town.

Everything is sinking,

roads, spirits, bank accounts.

Only the creeks and reservoirs are rising,

Papermill, Lagunitas, Nicasio.

We should have put our house on stilts,

like smart birds, 

and planted Weeping Willows along the banks

to stem the erosion (those ladies love 

to get their feet wet.)

Instead,

we made love in the sunlight,

under an archway of oranges

In the moonlight

behind a slumbering pear tree

at dusk

while a blue deer captured 

our garden.

In the dark, wet morning,

while houses slide slowly

down the cheekbones of hillsides,

I am awakened by the sound of your hands

insistent as wild Madrones 

against the French doors.

I watch you stream barefooted 

to the deck

and arc breadballs to the baby steelheads,

leaping and shining as the sky splits apart,

and rain pours down like quicksilver.

It will never stop raining in this town, 

but I know somewhere out there 

in the Cadillac desert

an Ocotillo is on fire. 

Now here's where it gets kind of spooky, fourth dimensional, Twilight Zone-ish.

Jacques Henri Lartigue, 1931 - Renee Perle

I woke up in the middle of the night to the dark, rushing sounds of Papermill Creek spilling over its banks, closing in on the house.  From my bed I could see trees ripped from their roots, amputated branches caught on boulders - all spinning in a wild vortex, an unstoppable maelstrom.  I did not leave the bed, but could see the water mounting the deck, covering the kitchen floorboards.  A line from Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" was running thru my head:  "I Sing the Body Electric".  I felt my body to be electrified & some grander portion of myself split off, rose above me, floating out over the creek where I opened my arms and with all my strength & all my might, I "pushed" the waters back. 

Marc Chagall - Stained glass window from a little church at Tudeley in Kent

"I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul." - Walt Whitman

Picasso Painting in Light - 1949

Yeah, I know it sounds crazy, but that's my story and I'm sticking to it.  Our adjacent neighbors, a harpist and guitarist from the group Platero, had their house on stilts, so they were ok, but everyone else along the creek flooded...except for us.  Much later I found out the 100th episode of Twilight Zone was titled, "I Sing the Body Electric".

Toni Frisselle - 1939

We all have these unexplained events in our lives.  How do we know what we know? Hotpockets of knowing -- we call it magic or a sixth sense. And taken to another level, sometimes we can impact outcomes. 

I love this piece below my brother wrote in response to the Tarot forecasting I did of my friend Annie's moment of passing when I got back from California.  I think it applies to all of the esoteric arts and that which we cannot see, but know is there, like the invisible hand that supports us.   

Eerie about the cards. I've heard many stories like that and it is a reminder that we are all entangled at a quantum level. Did you know that there is no such thing as a true physical touch? Our atoms have fields that repel the fields of other atoms as they approach. There is never any physical contact between the nuclei of atoms (except in the extreme case of neutron stars, which are the dead and eternal corpse of the largest of suns). We can never really surpass our physical manifestation. And yet, at the subatomic level, we are forever interacting with each other. Experiments have shown electrons separated by vast distances suddenly changing their spin to match that of a sister electron artificially altered. How little we know and understand about the unseen. The cards are a gesture to the infinite. Is it any wonder that such a vibrant invisible reality must be in some sense available to us?   Mk

Annie & Bill - Geocaching Triumph - Abbaye de Boschaud - May 2013

Blog dedicated to Ann Duvall who graced us with her presence - Feb. 1, 1948 - June 15, 2014.  I feel you all around me. 

Anna Oneglia - annaoneglia.com

pining      requires

            every green chassis brushes a sunny dominance
dog ghosts the garden          merrily absence boasts presence

gesture upon gesture, sans discussion, the body of love rises
         splashing cool water       in the smooth chamber

        beneath the climbing vine, the mound of earth has settled
grief requires a body and someone looking back

             faraway whistling,              hips rusting


                                    Stephanie Marlis from Fine

Be alive in this moment; be conscious of your treasures. Be spontaneous with your joy and thankfulness. Show your gratitude. It's time to fall in love again.-- Lazaris

*Photos from the Eglise at Rauzet, a couple of miles from us where a dance collective
did some posing in the upper reaches of the Nave.  Beautiful to see the human shapes against the stone.