News from the Muse: The Muse of Los Angeles

Gratitude
There are moments, if one is lucky, when the whole circuitous, confusing, maze of a life’s meander reveals its essential shape—Indra’s net is illuminated—everything is connected.  I had such a moment on a recent Sunday in April, at the beautiful book launching for Marked by Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way, sponsored by the Los Angeles Jung Institute.  My co-editor Patricia Damery and I were overwhelmed and deeply moved by the party Chie Lee, the President of the L.A Institute, had thrown for our group the night before, by the presence of almost all the books’ contributors (two by Skype) at the reading, by the generosity of the L.A, Institute which had gotten us a large hall and put out the word and ordered books and provided food. Patricia has written a beautiful blog about all this.  Check it out.

 

I stood at the podium, introducing each contributor, and felt the strands of kinship libido—the memories and associations that connect me to all those who had written essays out of the vital stuff of their lives—their soul stories, their inner landscapes—the fiery process of becoming themselves. Listening to the voices of these friends and colleagues, my heart resonated with their eloquent expression of so many themes that move me: the power of dreams and synchronicities, the dark confused and painful times out of which new life emerges, the twists and turns of fate, luck, grace and individuation that brought us all here together on this bright Sunday afternoon in the Social Hall of Temple Isaiah across the street from the Jung Institute.

 

[from the left: Chie Lee, Sharon Heath, Jackie Gerson, Naomi Lowinsky,

Karlyn Ward, Patricia Damery, Dennis Slattery, Jean Kirsch,

Robert Romanyshyn, Claire Douglas, Gilda Franz]

The City of Angels

In the midst of all this I found myself musing about my relationship to L.A. There is something about L.A. I had been trying to find words to explain it to my friends from the North. Is it the light? The colors? Is it the beach runners, walkers, skaters, cyclists, the casual but trendy dress—sensual and a touch wild?

Suddenly it hit me. Los Angeles is the City of Angels. A procession of angels have visited me in this town. Almost twenty years ago, back in the day when Northern and Southern California analysts worked together in the initiatory process to become an analyst, I was certified at the L.A. Institute. It is such a vulnerable thing to bring one’s inner life and one’s sacred work with an analysand to the eyes of the members of a committee. To be seen and understood is a blessing—a visitation by an angel. 

 Around that time Charlene Sieg, the managing editor of Psychological Perspectives—a fine journal published by the Los Angeles Institute, which describes itself as a “journal of global consciousness integrating psyche, soul and nature”— called me up and wondered if I wanted to be poetry editor. I thought: this woman whom I don’t know has just handed me my place in the community! I have lived there gratefully ever since, at the intersection of Poetry and Jungian Analysis. Charlene is one of my angels.

Dan and I have traveled to Los Angeles twice a year for the board meetings of Psychological Perspectives. We had family in the area for much of that time, and enjoyed our time with them. We made deep friendships and began the threads of connection which eventually led to Marked by Fire and to this event. Psychological Perspectives has itself has been an angel to me, nurturing and supporting my writing over many years, connecting me with a community of writers interested in expressing the direct experience of the unconscious. Robin Robertson, the General Editor, a wonderful writer on science, psyche and the arts, whose most recent book on alchemy and chaos theory is called Indra’s Net, mentored me through many years of wandering in the wilderness, seeking a publisher. He always said it would happen. He, too, is an angel. So is Gilda Frantz, co-editor of the journal and contributor of a marvelous essay in Marked by Fire, who has always given me the courage of my own idiosyncratic vision.

On the Nature of Angels

Speaking of idiosyncratic vision, you may wonder about all this talk of angels when I’m blogging on the muse. Are angels muses? Angels, according to someone named Walter Rigg, writing in Harper’s Bazaar in 1962, “are powers which transcend the logic of our existence.” I found this quote in Gustav Davidson’s Dictionary of Angels, an essential reference for anyone into angelology. Yes, indeed, you are walking along the known path of your life and suddenly an angel enters the scene and shifts everything. You’re invited to be Poetry Editor and it changes your life, transcending the old logic of your existence.

My take on angels draws from the Jewish tradition, which, like Islam and Christianity is chock full of angels—perhaps compensatory for all that monotheistic singularity. Just look up angels in the index of Tree of Souls, a marvelous reference on the mythology of Judaism, and you’ll see what I mean. For me, personal angels are powers connected with our souls from before we were born.  They remember who we really are when we have forgotten. They tell us, as Robin Robertson often told me, that it’s not my way to write the conventional Jungian teaching book—I needed to write as a poet.  The Sister from Below is the result of that wise counsel.

In my life angels often take human form. They are ordinary people who connect with something of your eternal nature, which seen, fills you with the light of your own essence. Sometimes they are beings of the imaginal world who show up in vision, dream or active imagination. They have our backs, stand behind us, pointing the way. Sometimes they show up with flaming torches and burn down the world as we know it. Sometimes they see where we’re going years before we do. And yes, sometimes an angel can be a muse.  

The Angel/Muse of Watts Towers 

Such an angel came to me in L.A. years before I’d even thought of being a Jungian—this was the angel and muse of Watts Towers. That angel/muse flew me to L.A. for the first time in my life, and into a larger vision of who I could be. I was a young mother, hemmed in by family demands, shaped by babies and kitchen and laundry. This angel whispered in my ear: “You’ve got to get out of here. Leave the kids with your husband and get away for a weekend. Remember who you are.”  “And go where?” I wondered. “Visit your friends in L.A.” the angel advised. And so it was I found myself in the home of dear friends whom I’d known when we were all in India together, associated with Peace Corps.

I had never been away from husband and kids for an entire weekend. It felt wicked. I didn’t know what to do with my hands. My hip felt empty without my baby girl. I don’t remember how that angel/muse spirited me to Watts Towers but there I was—a memory imprinted in my soul for life—contemplating the sacred space Simon Rodia, a poor immigrant from Italy, had created out of steel rods, cement and junk. I imagined him, wandering around in his life, picking up small pieces of broken glass and crockery, using them to create a mosaic in cement—his Sanctuario. Had he known about the Taj Mahal? I had been to the Taj; those small bits of glowing color creating intricate and glorious designs seemed to me to be part of the same artistic lineage.
 

I remember reflecting that if I could just be like Simon Rodia, picking up small pieces of glittering, broken fragments from my every day wanderings and gathering them into sacred shapes, I would be happy. It would be years before I could dedicate myself to that practice as a poet, years before I would write a poem about that visitation, but the angel/muse of Watts Towers had shown me my path.

how Simon Rodia showed me my craft

before I’d launched a single soul
or heard the cat call in my voice
some sanity insisted that I see
the joy leaps of your towers
                Simon Rodia
in flat exhausted Watts
where no tree grew
                I  
                twenty-six
                afraid of my life
                looked up at your craft

                a maze of spires
                cathedral of steel rods
                a  window washer’s labyrinth of tile
what wind had ripped you loose
of the gray grind?
motorcycles growled revenge
Spanish mothers prayed
their baby Jesus would survive
sixteen
cement  and broken dishes
your creation:  the ark
still pushes at the backyard fence
baptismal font awaits
the new born
and here a bench for sitting
in your Italian Sanctuario
inlaid with jewels from the garbage
are all the treasures of a boy:  blue of broken tile                  
green fire of soda pop
seashells from the bottom of your pocket                             
                ruby
                of broken wine decanter  
                and in my northern neighborhood
when no wind blew
and nothing happened in the house
              
I would imagine I had a craft
like yours              
                Simon Rodia
and every broken bit of color
that life washed up
would have a place in my design

the city fathers
tried to pull
your towers from their roots
                Simon Rodia
not even swinging cement balls
could shake your work
                I saw you
                riding your joy leaps over their upturned faces
                         
                your laughter
                ripped me loose!

(This poem is published in Adagio & Lamentation)

  

The Muse of the Jungian Way

Marked by Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way

(Available April 2012)

The Muse of the Jungian Way

What possesses people to leave collective consciousness—the comfort and security of the mainstream—and follow an arcane path in which they cultivate their dreams and visions, follow synchronicities, talk to inner figures, use ancient divining tools such as the I Ching, study myth and fairy tales, wrestle with their shadows and generally wander far away from the familiar worlds of family and friends?

There are as many stories of how this happens, as there are Jungians. In Marked by Fire you can read 13 soulful and gripping versions of the story. Here is a part of my version, which I didn’t have space to tell in Marked by Fire.

My story begins many years ago when my children were little. I was a lost young woman, severed from my deep Self. I had a frightening dream:

My baby daughter’s head was severed from her body. My mother’s voice said: “You’ll never get her together again.”

The dream spooked me. I thought something bad was about to happen to my child.

In a synchronistic event that changed my life my girl friend’s mother—who was seeing a Jungian in therapy—invited her daughter and me to a Jungian Conference called The Forgotten Feminine. I knew nothing of Jung and had no idea what the conference title meant, except that it tugged at me. I wanted to go.

The Handless Maiden (by Lucy Campbell)

At the conference I heard mature, wise, potent women—Jungian analysts—unlike any women I knew in my life—describe their work with their patients. This was the late 1960s. They told stories of women who were lost in their lives, who had forgotten their creative gifts, forgotten their souls, who had given themselves away to their men and their children, buried their deep natures and their wildness, severed their heads from their bodies. I learned that in the sanctuary of their Jungian analyses they found their souls, reclaimed their writing or painting or dancing, connected their heads and their bodies, found their deep selves. It was suddenly clear to me that my frightening dream was not about my daughter, it was about me. I was in trouble. I turned to my friend’s mother and asked her about that Jungian she was seeing.

That is how I tumbled into a Jungian analysis. It saved my life. I wrote a poem about it:

letter to a first analyst

I caught the dream
and rose dreaming
H.D.

you sat with me in the early years when it was all
coming apart my too young marriage that business of the donkey
in the basement the father whose eyes entered
me took what they would

you sat with me and I opened like a window
in a suffocating room whose drapes have been drawn for too long
now blinds snapped up smell of hot tomatoes
strawberries in the sun

i had been living in my body
as though it were an unmade bed for years the smell of decomposing
dreams under the bedside table crumpled kleenex bad blood spotting
the sheets the children were so little they wandered in
wanting their breakfast and me just waking from a dream of spitting out my teeth on the road or dream of using a contact lens for contraception it splintered
inside me what spirit led me to you after the terrible dream—my daughter’s head was severed from her body— my mother’s voice said: “you’ll never get her together again”

i write to tell you that i danced at that daughter’s wedding on a hillside in berkeley
not far from your house she was beautiful and i was glad
for all the years of catching the morning dream the hours you sat
with me through sandstone storms and backdoor me even death’s most yellow incarnation made a pass at my bed but you
who opened windows closed that door i remember

once you told me the story of a prince and a hairy wild man fresh out of the forest
they wrestled for a long time fought until each knew
the other’s body and mind until they were inseparable friends

(published in crimes of the dreamer)

Gilgamesh and Enkidu

Years later one of the women who stood on the stage of that conference on The Forgotten Feminine—Elizabeth Osterman—would greet me when I was a new candidate at the Jung Institute. She’d been watching me, she said. “You are a poet. You must follow your nature.” Though she was never my analyst or consultant, she was a powerful figure for me; I felt her support for my deep nature. When she died I wrote a poem called “Dirge” in which I looped back to my first experience of her. Here is that section of the poem:

You stood
on a university platform
in Wheeler Auditorium
where I had heard
many famous professors
but no one had ever told me

that a woman
writing down her dreams
can spiral inward
to her dark center
and come back out with flaming colors
and her own wild tongue!

(published in red clay is talking)

My story is not unusual in the Jungian world. In Marked by Fire, the collection of memoirs edited by Patricia Damery and me, there are many such stories. Sometimes it is a dream that opens up a person’s psyche, sometimes a longing, a difficult conflict, a terrible event like the death of a mother or a serious illness. The Jungian way involves noticing the small voice within you—your muse, your soul—that speaks from another realm; it requires attention to the world of dreams and synchronicities, an openness to the irrational and the awesome, an ability to see life’s pain and suffering as a meaningful aspect of one’s path.

These personal stories by Jungian analysts are about the direct experience of the unconscious—the fiery process of becoming ourselves. They are food for the soul.

Marked by Fire, available from Fisher King Press.

News from the Muse

The Spirit of the Depths forced me to speak to my soul, to call upon her as a living and self-existing being.

C.G. Jung in The Red Book

The Sister to Read at Books Inc

* * * * *

I will be reading from The Sister from Below as well as from my book of poems, Adagio & Lamentation at Books Inc. in San Francisco’s Opera Plaza, 601 Van Ness Ave, on Thursday March 29th at 7 pm.

I am grateful to Phyllis Stowell who will be reading with me, for organizing this event. Phyllis is a fine poet, and Professor Emerita of St. Mary’s College.

* * * * *

It has been almost twenty years since The Sister From Below first had her way with me. She came to me as I was sitting down to write a paper on a Jungian theme. Suddenly I heard an inner voice saying: “It’s time for me. I’ve been waiting long enough. You need to go back to the poetry you used to write.”

Now, understand, I had recently been certified as a Jungian analyst. I wanted to give a profound paper at a Jungian conference and impress my colleagues. The Sister informed me that she was the source of true profundity, for she is my muse, my soul. She and I had it out until we found a middle way: her voice would be heard in my work, so would the poems she gives me, but I could present our conflict in a paper for the Jungians.

In my Jungian training I had read about Jung’s technique of active imagination, in which one speaks to dream figures or to inner figures that just show up, like the Sister did. But until she insisted her way into my consciousness, I did not really understand that an inner figure is autonomous—a “living and self-existing being” as Jung puts it. Letting her into my life created a rift in consciousness—opened an inner space called the underworld by the ancient Greeks, the imaginal by archetypal Jungians, meditatio by the alchemists, transitional space by psychologists, make-believe by children. This is a magical transformative realm, the wellspring of my poetry and a place to heal and recuperate from life’s storms. When the Sister appeared she ushered me into this place, and forever changed my life.

When the Spirit of the Depths came to Jung, he discovered a whole world within himself, and recorded his experiences in The Red Book. Later in his life he studied the work of the alchemists, and found that they knew all about this magical place. They wrote of meditatio and imaginatio. In Psychology and Alchemy Jung quotes Ruland’s Lexicon Alchemiae which defines meditatio as follows: “The word meditatio is used when [one] has an inner dialogue with [oneself], or with [one’s] good angel.” He writes:

The imaginatio, as the alchemists understand it, is in truth a key that opens the door to the secret of the opus…It was a question of representing and realizing those ‘greater” things which the soul…imagines…

Here’s a poem from Adagio & Lamentation about Iris, the goddess of the rainbow and of writing.

regarding Iris

blue eyes are hers dark almost violet like the fierce
painter’s eyes of my mother’s mother and she slips off
her rainbow bridge making sense of the vision I had
as a girl of a being of light crossing over the water

she says she was there at my birth she
and her sea sister Thetis it was dawn
on a summer Wednesday far from the transit camp
Lag Westerbork where my father’s mother gave up

the ghost and Iris a small recently discovered
planet rose on the eastern horizon she the forgotten
goddess who carries a box of writing implements draws color
out of the glistening air is good at delicate negotiations between

those who belong to forever and those who are just
passing through gathered blessings for me from the sea
full of secrets full of wandering fish from the dead
who gave me sea horses to ride goat song

and shimmer my baby body was touched by the purple
of ghosts their blues their deep maroons and I was gifted
with every pleasure of voice of tongue of kicking feet full
of my mother’s sweet milk all joy to her who had longed for a child

and my mother’s mother painted my sea shell sleep and the red begonia
which glowed on the dining room table it was California and the yellow
hills stirred their big lion bodies and my hands reached out to touch
the light ah! I can see her face who is lilac and rose whose nipples

are apple blossoms who flings her green breasts at the dreaming sky
even now sixty years later as I sit on a wooden porch I can see
how she draws violet and orange out of trees words with their long
roots out of the seas and at the horizon she gathers me gold and silver
out of the summer air

News from the Muse: The Muse of Jungian Memoir

[from the Tarot of the Sephiroth]

When inner work is brought out into the world—a poem, a memoir—it’s as though something has been constructed in the soul. The inexpressible finds expression; the unsayable is said. I’ve been reflecting on this experience, which feels magical to me—transformative. It’s not just the writing down of inner experience, the process of tracking dreams or engaging in active imagination. It is how it feels to go public with it, to present it to a live audience, or to see its transformation into print. An imaginal space is opened up and something is created there—a temple deep in the woods, past the swinging bridge, or perhaps an altar by the banks of the river, a chupah for the sacred wedding, a teepee in the meadow. This is a holy place to which one can return. It is both an expansion of inner space and creation of something substantive. Is this what the alchemists mean by the Lapis? The Kabbalists by the “Work of the Chariot?” The Hindus by Shakti? The Jungians by the Subtle Body?

The Sister from Below, my muse, informed me that I was writing Jungian memoir when I was working on her book. She told me that Jungian memoir illuminates the inner world, follows the Jungian tributaries of dreams, conversations with inner figures, synchronicities. It is the grandchild of Jung’s great memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Its ancestors include the alchemists and the saints, whose spiritual autobiographies, like the Confessions of St. Augustine, connect us to the Spirit of the Depths, and to the Wisdom Traditions.

Since the publication of the Red Book it’s become clear how Jung’s direct confrontation with inner figures cracked open the walls of rationality and allowed the uncanny, the unfathomable back into western consciousness. Jungian memoir attends to those strange unfathomable experiences that shape our souls.

I was privileged, last April, to participate in a conference put on by the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, called C.G. Jung and the Jewish Connection. This was the swan song of our beloved Baruch Gould, who had been the creative and innovative Director of Public Programs for ten years, and was preparing to end his service. He’d been incubating the idea for the conference for years.

I was among a group of Jungian analysts and scholars approaching the subject from very different vantage points. There were historical papers, papers on Jung and Jewish mysticism, and papers I would call Jungian memoir, telling personal stories from inner lives. Several spoke as Jews struggling with Jung. I spoke as a Jungian struggling with Judaism. The Jungian memoir I wrote for that event has opened an important space in my soul, a deeper and more open connection to myself as a Jew and to Jewish mysticism—a Chupah for the sacred wedding of Tifereth with Malkuth— male and female energies in the Kabbalistic worldview—which Jung saw in a vision of the “Garden of Pomegranates” and described in Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

Now, thanks to the Jung Journal, all the papers given at the conference are available in print (Volume VI, Number 1). I hope you’ll take a look at them.


Here are some excerpts from my paper.

The Rabbi, the Goddess, and Jung

You cannot grasp these things unless you stumble over them.

The Zohar

Spiritual Exile

How does a Jew to whom God never spoke in a synagogue, who has wandered the world and the paths of other religions seeking direct experience of the sacred, stumble upon it in her own tradition? How does a spiritual exile, whose life was transformed by the Goddess, get past her issues with the patriarchal God of the Jews.

With Jung’s help…

This is the story of how Jung, or the Jungian worldview, helped me find my meandering way home to Judaism. As is my fashion I will weave in poetry, dreams, a journey and a conversation with a ghost.

I have always longed for myth, for mystery, for those moments when the world cracks open, when something uncanny, wild, awesome, enters. I have glimpsed it in Hindu temples, in Catholic churches, in Pagan rituals, in poetry, everywhere but in the Jewish world I knew as a child…

*******

The Ten Commandments of My Childhood

It was a proud thing to be a Jew in my family of origin; it was also a difficult thing. We Jews had responsibilities. We had suffered as a people. We needed to be eternally vigilant, on the look out for tyranny, oppression, discrimination— whether against us Jews or others. There were unspoken instructions for how to be a good Jew below the surface of dinner table conversations, and in social gatherings in the very Jewish neighborhood in post war Queens, New York, we lived in during the early 1950s. These are the commandments I heard:

I. Thou shalt vote Democratic.
II. Thou shalt take a stand against injustice and inhumanity.
III. Thou shalt believe in the innocence of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.
IV. Thou shalt support unions and the ACLU.
V. Thou shalt love Paul Robeson, Roland Hayes, Marian Anderson and the Weavers.
VI. Thou shalt sing folk songs, spirituals, and union songs with gusto.
VII. Thou shalt know all the famous Jews in the culture, and speak of them with pride, from Albert Einstein to Sammy Davis Jr.
VIII. Thou shalt love the state of Israel, but not forgive it its trespasses.
IX. Thou shalt know the stories of the Hebrew Bible, for thy father will tell them to you as “great literature.”
X. Thou shalt never forget “what happened.”


Upside Down Tree

I was given a gift of a dream. I am shown an image. It is an upside down tree—whose branches touch the earth, whose roots are in the sky. The tree is filled with Hebrew letters. I did not recognize what it was, at the time, though the image stayed with me, tugged at me…[It took me some time to realize that I had] been shown the Tree of Life—the symbolic expression of Jewish mysticism. I [had] stumbled into the esoteric aspect of my own tradition, which I had thought lacked a mystical, contemplative side.…

[Upside Down Tree of Life by Robert Fludd]

Black Fire Written on White Fire

It must be She, the Shekina, who is behind what happens next. In September of 2004 I find myself in Girona, Spain. My husband Dan and I have come here because it was a center of Jewish life and Kabbalistic thought before the expulsion of the Jews …

*******

I sit on the tiny balcony of our hotel room, and try to focus…despite the sounds of passing people, cars, motorcycles, water being poured, conversations in Spanish, Catalan, Italian, English, despite the bells of the Cathedral. I imagine the rabbis meditating—making contact with God amidst donkey piss and roosters crowing and children running about and bed pans being emptied.

*******

In my wanderings in the old Jewish section of Girona I happen into the Nahmanides Institute of Jewish Studies. I learn that Moses ben Nahman (nicknamed Ramban by the Jews, called Nahmanides in the Greek fashion of the day) was a leading Kabbalist in the 13th century in Girona. He was of the generation before the Zohar was written down, and one of those who influenced its writer, Moses de Leon.

[from Tarot of the Sephiroth]

*******

I am filled with the presence of this Rabbi. Later, in my readings, I will stumble upon a reference to a Jewish myth in which “the soul of a great sage who has died binds his spirit to one of the living in order…to guide a person through a difficult time of transition.” This spirit is called an ibur, in contrast to the malevolent spirit known as a dybbuk.

I find myself talking to him: Ramban, I walk the Roman walls of your city and your light walks with me. I walk the narrow streets of the Call de Jueu and the light you received from Moses at Sinai walks with me. You speak in my heart. This light, you tell me, is not of memory, not of the history of our people, not the word remembered and written down. This light is now…

*******

I wonder why it is you who have come to guide me, you who are at once a mystic and a learned Rabbi of the tradition. You say it is because I need to learn your teaching, that “Everything that is done in the mundane sphere is magically reflected in the upper region…” You say I listen too much to my fears. I need to open all my senses to the Shekina. You say I need to contemplate the mystery of “black fire written on white fire —the tension between the oral tradition and the radiance, between manifest wisdom and the transcendent. Because you want me to understand that the Goddess is alive in you, that The Sister from Below is your familiar, you tell me a stanza of your mystical hymn about the birth of the soul.

He radiated light to bring her forth,
In hidden well–springs, right and left.
The soul descended the ladder of heaven,
From the primeval pool of Siloam to the garden of the King.

You say our souls stand in eternity, they are forever, we spend our lives finding our way back to them, for we are in exile from our beginnings. You say the light is now, here in this place where we meet.

********

I wrote a poem for Ramban, who became a beloved familiar in the writing of this paper. Here is the last section:

God’s Singing Tree
In Two Voices

Ramban
you are old magic with goddess eyes
you are warm fire in the dark of the cave
you gather me back to the breath of that mother
in the long long line of my great grandmothers
who picked up her baby her sack of food
and walked out of Catalonia in 1492

the vessels shattered there was contraction
there was exile you tell me
this is the nature of creation

they who listen will hear
they who open their eyes will see
there is a tree it grows from the feet
of Abraham and Sara its leaves catch the light
on this balcony where I sit with you

remember my daughter
wherever you are the poem is
black fire written on white fire
God’s singing tree

Frontpiece from the 1516 Latin translation of Gikatilla's Gates of Light 

News from the Muse: The Muse of Sunset and Sasha

It was my friend Sasha who first put the idea into my head:

Birds do it: butterflies do it; Sasha did if for years. Why don’t we to go Mexico in the winter?

That was twelve years ago. Sasha, sadly, is gone. But her yearly ritual of two weeks in the sun by the sea in the slow grace of Mexico has become Dan and my beloved custom.

Sasha Hunter was an unusual member of our Jungian tribe. Unlike most of us, who tend toward introversion and reverie, she was a flaming extrovert who loved to dance and to boogie board. She could turn an earnest gathering into a party. Although we now visit a different Mexican town than her beloved Puerto Escondido, her spirit lives on in the sensual pleasures of our easy days, full of sun worship and ocean walks and margaritas.

Dan and I come to the little fishing village of San Pancho in Nayarit, have now for many years, and the pace of our lives drops down to that primal rhythm of waves, sun, moon and watching pelicans skim the ocean as they fly past. We partake in the sacred ritual of watching the sunset as people have since before we lived in houses.

So Sasha, this blog posting is for you. Your sunset came much too soon. We miss your extravagant spirit. Here are some sunset musings in your memory.

Sunset with Cuban Music

Where there is music in San Pancho you’ll find Dan. Were Sasha still among us she’d be there too, dancing. The lovely beach restaurant, La Playa, has Cuban music tonight. So even though it’s overcast, and a visible sunset seems unlikely, we’re here, having a drink, watching the scene full of dogs and their people.

A group of beautiful young Mexican women arrive, all dressed up—big hoop earrings, short dresses, lots of eye makeup. One of them is carrying a baby girl, maybe four months old—a pink bundle. Another has her two little girls, three and five, with her. The women chat and laugh and drink and pass the baby around, like a treasure. In San Pancho, it seems, girls night out does not require a baby sitter.

Suddenly the clouds at the horizon lift. The sun has already disappeared, but a band of fuchsia light glows on, becoming more and more intense. The young women and their children get up to dance against that stunning backdrop. A flock of egrets flies into the palm trees; the ocean sings her song; dogs bark; the baby waves and the beautiful young women dance with each other, with their babies, with the waiters. The world is awash in beauty and music and dance. Your spirit, Sasha, is with us.

Sunset from the Roof

We stay at Casa Obelisco, a beautiful B&B in San Pancho, full of hibiscus blossoms, bougainvillea, beautiful tile and arches, wonderful people. Sasha, you’d love it here, it’s always a party. From the roof we get a glorious view of the sea and the sun going down. I am always amazed at how various the sunsets are, and how glorious.

Some years ago Henry the Heron used to show up just after sunset. We’d watch him winging his way along the ocean, make a sharp turn right to our roof. He’d sit on a post and keep us company for five or ten minutes watching the colors intensity and fade and then he’d be on his way. Judi, one of our hosts at Casa Obelisco named him, or maybe it was Dan. He was with us for a couple of seasons, and then he was gone. We miss him.

This evening the sun creates a glowing path across the waters to the dark fronds of the palm trees silhouetted before us. There are a few gray and white brush strokes of cloud, but mostly it’s clear. A long strand of pelicans flies south. As the sun approaches the sea the waves seem to pick up energy, curling their white manes and galloping into the shore. What makes the light change, go suddenly gold while the sea turns a deeper blue? That divine alchemical painter is stirring things up again—color ricochets off the clouds; gold turns to orange casting light upward and suddenly the sun is gone but fuchsia and gold grow more and more intense in the clouds. The palms are so black and so still, in contrast.

Color fades—grays grow grayer, fuchsia and gold turn to pale pink—the sea sighs, the palms brood. We hear crickets; a gecko clucks. That red orange at the horizon does not want to let us go—it keeps glowing while everything darkens around us. We could be sinking into the center of the earth. Sasha, your spirit is with us.

Sunset with Turtle Hatchlings

It’s Dan’s birthday. We’re at La Playa celebrating sunset and Dan. Sasha, how you’d love these Mango Margaritas and this scene—the sea is ablaze with light and shimmer; two figures at water’s edge seem to merge into one, then become two once again; sun blazed figures carry surfboards along the shining sea.

A spontaneous party has happened. All our fellow guests from Casa Obelisco are here with us. We’ve heard that there is to be a turtle release on the beach just before sunset. And here’s Lauren, La Playa’s hostess, pointing our way down the beach to where a crowd is gathering.

We run across the sand to water’s edge. Tiny turtle hatchlings, no bigger than a baby’s palm, are toddling toward the ocean. One falls into a human footprint and struggles to get out. There are fifty-nine of them, hatched this morning in the special protected turtle nursery created by Turtle Frank and a group of passionate turtle protecting volunteers. They have raised consciousness in San Pancho of the decline in the turtle population. The problem has been people who believe that turtle eggs enhance male potency. Turtle Frank and his helpers educated the children about the magic of turtles. The children educated their parents. The turtle population is coming back.

Turtle Frank is speaking on the beach. He explains that they release the hatchlings before sundown so it’s not too cold for them, but dark enough so the fish can’t see them. Those who survive will swim eight days without stopping or eating; they need to get beyond the current. Some will make it as far as the Philippines or the Galapagos. Some of those (maybe two percent) will find their way back to the beach where they were hatched to lay eggs of their own. We watch as a wave comes, taking some of the babies. “Go for it!” somebody shouts. “Oh no!” Some of the hatchlings are upside down. Turtle Frank and his helpers turn them right side up, send them on their way.

We’ve forgotten about the sun. There it is behind a bank of clouds—a glimmer of glorious color not yet revealed—a golden globe emerging from the cloud—entering the sea like a great glowing mother turtle, checking up on her babies at sea. Sasha, you would have loved to see this. Your spirit is with us.


Here’s a poem I wrote that one year we were in Mexico together, before any of us knew you were ill:

We’ve Come South

for nothing much

but ocean, rocks and sun

for the squeal of a rusty pulley at dawn

for the bugles and drums of the 54th Batallon de Infanteria announcing sunrise

We’ve come south to see nothing much

but the mermaid riding a turtle over the early morning beach

where fishermen dock their boats

full of red snapper, yellow tail, tuna

We’ve come south to do nothing much but walk barefoot on sand

watch the flight of a frigate with scimitar wings

watch an old man ride his burro across the sand

return to our little hotel to see how far Simplissio

has gotten on his mural—

the village the jaguar the woman with the baby on her back

the skeleton the iguana on a tree the mountains the angels in the sky

We’ve come south to celebrate

the descent of the sun every day

pelicans gather

beer drinking northerners gather

children playing ball on the beach gather

to see how gold rims the edges of clouds

how red plunges deep into dark blue

and she opens her body to him and he

looks at her with the eyes of an old sea bird

he is pelican

she is iguana

stirred into the brimming cup

of nothing much

and we who have been together

life after life

know this in our bodies

We’ve come south to drink

our fill

News of Naomi

On the radio You can hear Naomi's interview with "Dr. Dave" about The Motherline at Shrinkrap Radio.

Online Naomi is a featured poet in the online journal PoetryMagazine.com. Check out her new work.

News from the Muse: The Muse of South Africa

Naomi’s essay “History is a Ghost Story” was just published in Psychological Perspectives Vol. 54 #4. Here is an excerpt:

Most Stony South African God

History is a trickster, a thief. It cheats us out of where we think we’re going, what we think we own, whom we love.

On the first day we arrived in South Africa in a jet–lagged haze, we were told we had to go to the mountain. This was Table Mountain, an imposing flat topped stony god that presides over Cape Town. It was a clear bright day. There was no “table cloth,” no cluster of clouds hanging over the mountain, obscuring the view. This we were told was most unusual—coming after days of rain—an opportunity we had to seize. So it is we found ourselves on top of the world, glorying in views of the wild coast, Devil ‘s Peak, the 12 Apostles. We meandered in a strange marshland filled with wildflowers. A bright green–necked orange–breasted bird flew by. I had not understood how much of the magnetic pull of Africa comes from the landscape. In Cape Town, everywhere you go the mountain dominates—pulls your eyes, your mind, from the business of the street to the high slow language of rocks and earth.

It was August, 2007. We were living in the shadow of the Bush years—had no idea as yet we were soon to have an African American president. We felt ashamed of our own country. At the opening reception to the conference I met Mamphela Ramphele—a tall elegant woman in black, something lacy at her throat. She embodies South African history. In her youth, she and her lover, Stephen Biko, were among the founders of the Black Consciousness movement of the 70s. I had read about them, read the poetry of that time. In the new South Africa she became the Vice Chancellor of the University of Cape Town—the first black woman to hold such a position at a South African University—and a Managing Director of the World Bank.

My father’s spirit leapt and glowed—he had always loved beautiful women, was a master of seduction. Was it he in me who went on and on to her about what a beacon South Africa was to our country? We had lost Martin Luther King and Malcolm X—we had lost meaning and direction, we felt lost in the current state of corruption and evil. South Africa had changed so dramatically for the better. It was an inspiration.

Was it the spirit of my father to which she responded, saying that my people were her inspiration, for the Jews had always valued literacy and education? That’s what the new South Africa needs. My father loves that kind of talk. I had been reading South African poetry, poems that told the unbearable stories…

On the next day Ramphele was our plenary speaker. She wore a bright red dress and shawl and shone throughout the hall. She was bold and her manner was fierce, her vision wide and political. She spoke of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which had been established by the post Apartheid government to facilitate recovery of the truth of what had happened. Hearings were held in public. She described it as a ritual of healing that helped the country find meaning. She spoke of its limitations, its failures. She spoke of the social engineering of apartheid, which destroyed families by separating the men, forcing them to live in barracks away from wives and children. Apartheid also blocked the education of young blacks, and the country was still suffering the consequences of a lost generation.

I felt touched by a world of experience I couldn’t articulate—but which moved me deeply. We began to lose our innocence, the spirit of my father and I, listening to her. We had wanted to believe that a new paradigm of justice and humanity was born out of Africa, and would lead us into the Promised Land. We wanted to believe that Mandela was Moses. It’s true he had walked out of prison because of his own great spirit and the wisdom and courage of then South African president F.W. de Klerk. Mandela had been elected president, there had not been bloodshed, but, as Mamphela told us, the terrible problems of economic inequality had not been solved. Whites still lived in privilege while many Black Africans were stuck in unbearable poverty. Whites complained that their children could not get work. Their talents were getting lost because they were emigrating…



I wrote a poem about these experiences in Cape Town:

MOST STONY SOUTH AFRICAN GOD

In Suffering, and Nightmare,
I woke at last

to my own nature.
Frank Bidart

Table Mountain
Knife Edge Mountain
Altar Mountain where the Sacrifice is made
Most Stony South African God

We see you

You follow us all over Cape Town—
where Mandela spoke to the crowd—
We see you

At the Afro Cafe in the alley
red roses on orange and purple oil cloth
black girl entwined with her white lover
We see you

On Robben Island
where the writing on the wall reads:
“Happy Days are Here Again!”
William says he’s still imprisoned—
can’t get a job besides this-—
being our tour guide in Maximum Security
We see you

At Langa, where Brenda and her sons
share six dark rooms, one stove, one broken toilet
with fifteen other families
You have our number

At the Langa Baptist church
held in the murmur of prayer

in Xhosa in English
we call you JESUS HALLELUJAH
Forgive us for what we have done
Forgive us for what we have not

Table Mountain
Knife Edge Mountain
Altar where the Sacrifice is made; You Saw

WHAT THEY DID
TO STEVEN BIKO
How the GIRL GOT BURNT
How the HEART SLUNK AWAY...
What did we know?
What did we not know?

O mountain
pull your cloud about you
gnash your teeth
You’ve got our number

Kitchen table mountain
sit us down with those
we’ll never understand
Make betrayer meet betrayer
Make us eat our own stories

WHEN THE MOTHERS
LOOKED INTO THE FACES OF THEIR SONS’
MURDERERS, FOUND THE HUMAN
CORD—
Where does it live?

Such Forgiveness?
What do we know
What do we not know?

Wise mountain
Dumb mountain
TOOTHLESS MOUNTAIN
GRINNING SKULL MOUNTAIN

Most Stony South African God
You’ve got our number
Follow us home…
(first published in Left Curve)



To read the entire essay you can order Psychological Perspectives, Volume 54, # 4.

Psychological Perspectives We are pleased to offer Psychological Perspectives, a beautiful journal produced by the C. G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles. The mission of both the Institute and journal is to promote greater consciousness by honoring and amplifying the psychology of C. G. Jung. Each issue contains a rich blend of insightful articles, poetry, book and film reviews, and artwork. Nancy Mozur, Bookstore Manager (310) 556-1193 ext. 228 bookstore@junginla.org

News from the Muse: The Muse of Musicology

The Muse of Musicology

My father, the musicologist Edward E. Lowinsky—a difficult and demanding character in my psyche—has been dead for over twenty-five years. Recently he made a major shift in my inner world. No longer is he a demanding and critical inner voice. Instead, he is a brilliant and tragic figure. I feel for him. How did this transformation occur? Not by dream, not by active imagination, not by the intercession of a spirit guide—none of my usual modes of imaginal work are responsible for this deep shift in feeling. It is thanks to an article by the musicologist Bonnie Gordon, recently published in the Journal of Musicology (Vol. 28, #3, Summer 2011) entitled “The Secret of the Secret Chromatic Art.”

I have always known that my father was a controversial figure in his field, a founding father of American musicology who believed that no art can be studied separately from its culture. But I have never understood his story in the larger context of his field. Gordon’s beautifully written, psychologically astute and compassionate portrait of my father helps me feel his influence in a less conflicted way.

Photo of my father by Nikki Arai

Gordon writes of my father’s first publication in America, a “strange but riveting book entitled Secret Chromatic Art in the Netherlands Motet.” It came out in 1946—just a few years after my family had emigrated from Europe, fleeing the Nazis. There is a great deal of difficult technical musicological material in Gordon’s essay, which is way over my head. But the gist of what I understand from her is that my father was convinced that there were secret expressions of protest and heresy hidden in Dutch motets of the sixteenth century. This, remember, was the beginning of the Reformation—the Protestant revolt against the hegemony of the Catholic Church and the Inquisition. On the surface, my father said, the texts and melodies followed the rules decreed by the Church. “Beneath that compliant surface” she writes of my father’s theory “lurked secret chromaticism and seditious meanings that remained hidden from the eyes and ears of the Inquisition.” She quotes my father: ”To the world at large it offers us outward form, reserving for the circle of the initiated its secret meaning.”


Gordon’s thesis is that my father “aligned Nazi Germany with the Inquisition.” She writes: “Beyond its engagement with music theory and cultural history his Secret Chromatic Art delivers a modern narrative of oppressed minorities, ‘authoritarian’ regimes, and the artistic triumph of the dispossessed.”

I know this part of my father. He loved Spirituals. We sang them as a family. The story of Black people and the story of the Jews was the same story in my childhood. As a child I learned that spirituals often hid secret meanings—communications about seditious meetings, information about finding the Underground Railroad.

I knew my father as eloquent and persuasive. I also knew him as arrogant and contentious. It was never easy to have a dialogue with him; he had to have the last word. I often heard him rant about his fellow musicologists. Gordon’s empathic essay puts this in context for me. His Secret Chromatic Art had not been well received; his theory was never accepted. I had not understood the depth of his suffering about this. Nor had I understood his influence on me. I have been obsessed with African American poetry, I have written about spirituals and their secret significations. I have been obsessed with the Inquisition, The Shoah, the Spanish Civil War, issues of tyranny and oppression. I see now how my obsessions follow from those of my father; many of my poems are expressions of his concerns. Here’s one:

YOUR PEOPLE ARE MY PEOPLE

I’m going to be just like you, Ma
Rainey…
& sing from the bottom of hell
up to the tops of high heaven
--Al Young

for Al Young

My people are the people of the pianoforte and the violin
Mozart people Bach people Hallelujah people
My people are the Requiem people Winterreise people Messiah people
who crossed the red sea Pharoah’s dogs at our heels

Your people are the drum beat people the field holler people the conjure people
Blues people Jubilee people people who talk straight to God
Your people are the Old Man River people the Drinking Gourd people
singing the Lord’s songs in a strange land

My family had a Sabbath ritual
We lit the candles sang Go Down Moses sang Swing Low Sweet Chariot
sang slave music freedom music secret signals in the night music
my father said you never know
when Pharoah will be back

I was young
I was American I thought
my people were the Beatles the Lovin’ Spoonful the Jefferson Airplane
singing Alice and her White Rabbit through all
those changes my parents did not understand

That didn’t last
That was leaving home music magic mushroom music
Puff the Dragon music floating off to Never Never land
now heard in elevators in the pyramids of finance

But Old Man River still rolls through my fields
Bessie Smith still sweetens my bowl
Ma Rainey appears in the inner sanctum
of the CG Jung Institute flaunting her deep black bottom

My father’s long gone over Jordan
and I’d hate for him to see
how right he was about Pharoah

but I want you to know Al

every Christmas
in black churches all over Chicago
the Messiah shows up
accompanied by my mother’s
Hallelujah violin

(published in New Millennium Writings)


Until I read Gordon’s essay I did not understand how profoundly my father felt like an outsider. Gordon quotes Edward Said:

Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unbearable rift forced between a human being and a native place; between the self and its true home; its essential sadness can never be surmounted.

Shortly after he arrived in America (years before the State of Israel was created) my father gave a talk in which he described the Jew as one with “no center of his own, he has no soil of his own, there was no landscape which would smile at him with the assurance ‘I am yours.’” My father had lost his native tongue, his professors at the University of Heidelberg who influenced his thinking and the academic future he had expected to find in Germany.

Until I read Gordon’s essay I did not know that among my father’s professors were Karl Jaspers and Heinrich Besseler. Jaspers was interested in mysticism, Besseler in esotericism. Gordon makes a connection between the secret oral tradition of the Kabbalists and my father’s belief in a secret musical mode of communicating forbidden ideas. So my father’s understanding of the world was influenced by German Romanticism and a fascination with Jewish and Christian mysticism; so is mine.

I did not know until I read Gordon how difficult it was for him to find a position in America. Gordon quotes a letter in which he writes of sending out eighty letters to colleges and universities before, with some help, he finally got his first teaching position at Black Mountain College. I did not know how impossible he found the burden of his teaching, providing for his family while trying to find time to pursue his scholarly work.

I did not know what the big fight with Joseph Kerman, who had been his colleague at Berkeley, was all about, though I remember hearing snatches of my father’s fury. As Gordon puts it:
The story of the secret chromatic art intersects with a larger disciplinary story of generational and ideological divides between scholars who were educated in Europe…and those younger scholars who wanted to “liberate American musicology from the stronghold of German influence in order to create a particularly American tradition.”

For Kerman, my father became the symbol of that conservative tradition. It’s the familiar story of the Prince challenging the Old King—the young buck taking on the old stag. From Gordon’s description I can see how my father’s character flaws deepened the tragedy we all have to face as we age—that we must hand over power to the younger generation. My father was not able to have a dialogue with Kerman. He fell into what my friend and colleague Sam Kimbles calls a “culture complex.” Kerman became a Nazi and a racist in my father’s eyes.

Gordon quotes my father:

Professor Kerman is playing a dangerous game with dangerous words that the older generation has heard before and fervently hoped never to hear again. Nor is Professor Kerman so young or so innocent that he can claim to be unaware of the twentieth–century use and origin of the terms ”alien” and “native” in matters of art and scholarship. One generation ago the Germans talked a lot about “alien” elements in German culture. They also did something about it.

Gordon’s empathy helps me feel for my father in this story. She writes: “The debate with Kerman…situated Lowinsky falsely, I would argue, as the enemy of progress…Lowinsky stood as a straw man.”


I did not know until I read Gordon’s essay, that when his colleague Howard Mayer Brown went to visit my father on his death bed he was still wrestling with the battle over his Secret Chromatic Art. I remember him in those last days, pale and wan in his hospital bed, in denial about his impending death. I still could not engage him in a dialogue: I couldn’t get him to talk about his life, his work, or our relationship. I did not comprehend the tragedy of his life.

Maybe he understood it better than I knew. What he did speak to me about was the opera Eugene Onegin by Tchaikovsky, which was strange because he had never liked Tchaikovsky—claimed his music was kitsch. Now he was telling me the story of Onegin and Tatania at the ball—how radiant she was, how full of love for Onegin. But he, self absorbed, paid her no mind. My father closed his eyes and said: “Onegin has forever lost his chance to love.”

My father’s birthday is coming up, Jan. 12th. He would have been 104 this year. I just received an e-mail, from Bonnie Gordon responding to my thanks to her for opening my heart to my father with her wonderful essay. She wrote me about her presentation of her paper at the AMS (American Musicological Society)…

[It] turned into something of a love fest for your father and his ideas. Former students and indeed former enemies seemed to have come to some sort of intellectual peace with his ideas.

Happy Birthday father.

Here‘s a poem for you:

daled for dad

you never were
a regular dad never
one of the guys
playing American ball
games such a formal
European father a scholarly
Jew you studied Catholic
church music sinned
against my mother
with your students

yet the Hebrew
letter daled is a door
way it is said and daled
was given me to
day your death
day I remember the deep
blue lake how
your delight found
words you gave me that

and the secret
chromatic art
of the Renaissance a music
that wandered
out the church door
into the lyrical
meadow this

one singing
voice
you left me

(published in Earth’s Daughters and in Adagio & Lamentation)

Note: According to the Kabbala each letter of the Hebrew alphabet has an image associated with it, and daled’s image is a door.