Book 1:5 - Tangiers 1

Destination of My Dreams

POSTCARD FROM TANGIERS

 Dearest Mama,

Surprise! I’m travelling in Morocco. Now don’t worry, I’m with Tom, a surfer friend.  Left B with K on Formentera. We have to sort out a few problems, so I’m having a couple of weeks away. Thinking time.

Now in fabled Tangiers, can hardly believe it. 1,001 Nights come to life!

Staying in the perfect riad in roof pavilion – all Moorish tiles, stained glass, filigree brass lanterns & inlaid tables. A fountain in the palmy courtyard. Views over Straits to Gibraltar. Clean and airy. You’d love it too.

I’m dancing again, it’s been too long since I was able.

Off to Marrakesh in a few days & then we plan to walk with a donkey down the Atlantic coast from Essouira looking for waves.  
How I miss good surf. .

Think of you often.

Love A.

Twirling, leaping, spinning round & round in my new silky caftan bending, stretching, reaching, hair flying, pirouetting in shafts of sunlight rainbow streaked and dappled blue, yellow, green and red from stained glass chemmasiat. Dancing again. It had been too long since I’d been able to unleash my inner Isadora. Tom’s seductive flute driving the rhythm, letting my voice loose in soto dolce gentle intonations as I circled the splashing fountain, trailing my fingers in the water, sending a whoosh of diamond shards to catch the light. At last I was free again. Free to sing, dance, celebrating my love of life in sheer ecstatic bodily expression. The dance of the butterfly.

Morocco ignited my latent sleeping muse, firing up whole new regions of my imagination, helping to ease the pain of leaving my family with an overlay of sensory intensity. A country can be many things, how each of us experiences it is an individual thing. Here some might remember the heat, flies, sand, others might have had a gastronomic affair with the food, or, not. For me the first impacts were the colours, the infusions of light, the intensity of the dyes, the beads. The lilac sunsets and indigo night skies. The sounds of the music. The pace of life. 

Old City

 Camels and donkeys, the soft shuffle of babouch-clad feet in narrow dusty lanes, the muezzin calling to prayer. A street musician strumming the stringed lotar to a gentle soft drum. Loose clothes that let the body move freely. The wind moaning in the crenulations of the turrets and towers and snaking, rustling, down the narrow alleyways. Mint tea in a hole-in-the-wall 4-seat shop. A brief glimpse of hooded figures at end of a tunnel alley disappearing under an arch – gone in a flash. All this created a magic. I was entranced.

However beyond the inviting exterior I saw there were aspects of this culture, as all cultures, I needed to understand better. The way men and women related, religions, manners, class and caste, how the money worked, the treatment of animals – all these were embedded and part of the whole and if I was to move in this country I needed to be aware and have respect for customs or suffer consequences, some of which I knew could be horrific if I got it wrong. Communication was the key - time to brush up my rusty French and learn Arabic.

Tangier was beyond my expectations. I hadn’t really much idea of what it would be like, just knew it was an exotic destination that had attracted a lot of creative people over the years. Anton’s retinue had given it the thumbs up with “cool baby, it’s the scene, go meet Brion Gysin, Bowles, the Gettys, such FABulous people there now” Hmm. I had my own agenda, but Tom’s interest was spiked at the mention of scenes and names. I also knew Tangiers, by reputation, had a seamy side and I’d have to be careful. But what I found over the next days was wowowow outa sight!

We walked up from the ferry into the Medina and immediately fell under the spell of all things Moroccan. Suddenly I was in a land where everything around me inspired and ignited my imagination. I felt travel-worn and dirty, confined in my clothes, longing to be in something loose and free inspired by what I saw the people wearing and of course Tom’s free Indian cottons. Emotionally exhausted I felt a deep need to just stop moving and sit quietly, away from other people in a secluded place where I could unwind and contemplate the last week.  I didn’t want to stay with Tom’s friends again, nor get a hostel room. I wanted to cocoon and self-nourish in my own time, then to emerge, really immerse myself in the Moroccan ethos. Anton had given us directions for a riad he said would answer all expectations at the top of the Medina. He'd even rung ahead and booked us in. Fingers crossed he had it right. But first we flopped down in a tea shop stop for a first taste of mint tea. Then we shouldered our baskets and headed up the hill into the Medina’s maze of narrow streets & alleyways, taking it all in with an ever-increasing sense of wonder. Somewhere in all this Paul and Jane Bowles held court with other literary legends and wrote their hearts out. But those kinds of expat Beat Generation influences that had initially attracted me here no longer seemed important. Tangiers itself was now my muse.

As we passed one hole-in-the-wall shop I saw a beautiful simple white caftan wafting on its hanger in the sun, screaming “Buy me, I’m yours”. I bought two and another in the men’s style for Tom.  The storekeeper brought out a dramatic burnt red hooded burnoose  and I saw how useful it would be, not having a warm coat. Tom wanted one as well, in black, so we left the shop with very satisfying booty. 

Me & my burnoose setting out in Tangiers '68 - gotta larf

Then we entered the labyrinth that is the Medina, leading to the Kasbah up the hill. Narrow twisting high-walled lanes with doors that gave little away as to what lay beyond.

Kasbah canyons

  After a few wrong turns and asking directions we found Anton’s favourite place, a riad owned by friends of his. Through an arched old door leading off the narrow lane we left one world and entered a piece of Paradise, so unexpected that I gasped. We were in an elegant sahn courtyard, open to the sky above, surrounded by an upper riwaq balcony. White walls reflecting the light, geometric zellij tiles spreading in from floor up walls, everywhere. Columns supporting a surrounding upper balcony, potted cumquats and palms, a large central hexagonal sparkling fountain that refreshed the air and gave a tinkling sound that merged with the soft drone of Arabic music coming from one of the chambers set back under the balcony. Once the private palace of an old Moroccan family it was all Anton had promised and so much more.  Luxurious, clean and with beauty everywhere I looked. A world away from any hotel or pension I’d ever stayed in. I decided that even if I had to sleep on the side of the road from now on, I had to have this one experience of this kind of luxury. I had the money, for now. It was to be my treat for us both and to show my gratitude for Tom’s care of me in Spain.

Pockets of Paradise

similar styles to the riad we stayed in

We were given a pavilion on the roof which had views out over the hazy Medina to the distant port and the intensity of blue sky over the Mediterranean. Through French windows and  voile curtains wafting in the sea breeze, the long cool white room was a shady cave, foiling the heat and glare of the hot mid-day sun outside.  Geometric tiled floor, bright Berber carpets and a curtained divan set in a filigreed arched wall niche. Brass lanterns and tiny tables. At the far end through a low arch I could see a white bed strewn with jewel-coloured silky embroidered cushions under a canopy of white lacy netting. Heaven! At last I could come to rest where I could think, assess what I had done and was doing in a safe place, away from all the people and the pressing needs of the road.

I ordered lunch then took myself to a nearby hamam . I felt filthy after all the travelling and no real baths. I stripped off my dusty old clothes and immersed myself for an hour, letting the steam and delicious waters deep-cleanse my body and soul. After a massage I slipped into my new white silky caftan and emerged a new being. Tom was playing his Indian flute near the fountain as, light as a feather I almost floated back to our suite, the music sending me twirling and spinning, the houri unleashed. It had been nearly three years since I had danced in this way and the release as I found this neglected part of my being was like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon and I flew, laughing, singing, in my re-found freedom pursued by my Pan god, up the stairs to our piece of Heaven.

Over a late terrace lunch, lazing back on huge cushions under the shade of a billowing cream silk parachute canopy, we took in the view infused with an hazy apricot late afternoon light, feasting on vegetable tagine, khobz bread and fresh fruit. Tom was in good form, raving on about a tea shop he’s found. 

It's still there- the Cliff Cafe is a Tangier Legend that has survived!

 While I’d been in the hamam he’d gone out exploring, following the twisting canyons of the Kasbah maze lanes right up to the cliff edge where Café Hafa was perched on a series of terraces that dropped off sheer from the cliff. Not many people there, he said, and mainly young Moroccan men but also other travellers and a few foreign expats. He’d clicked with a Swedish couple, Ute and Sven, musos with a band based in Majorca but living in Tangiers in a rented riad for a month or so to sorb the Moroccan vibes. They’d been touring in California, had been in Haight Ashbury for the Summer of Love and had just been participating in a seminar on Tao and Nature with Allan Watts, Gary Snyder and other spiritual gurus of the new age at the Esalen Institute, Big Sur . Authentic Self was the lesson learned apparently. They’d arranged to meet up with us tonight to play music at a café called 1,001 Nights. Of course it was! What else!

I looked at my amazing man, this crazy exuberant wild hippy preacher, eyes afire with enthusiasm, his blond hair bouncing and the motor-mouthed beard trying to charm me, high as and all ready to rock n roll…..and I wilted. Exhaustion had set in. These sounded like great people to meet and sure, tomorrow, but all my Authentic Self wanted was to veg out. To doze and drift and maybe catch up with my diary notes of the last few days on the road.  This idyllic eyrie was too beautiful to leave and I wanted to watch the light changing as sunset swept across the city and the Straits from nowhere else but the bed, or one of the terrace cushions with a long cool drink to sweeten it all. No way was I going anywhere.  So I let him down gently and told him to go, to enjoy, to get in the groove, find what he would find and tell me about it all later….much much later.  He probably needed a bit of time out from me anyway. Never a slow man he understood, scooped me up, carried me to the bed, stroking me, saying all the things I could ever want to hear from an ardent caring lover, pulled a silky sheet over me, lowered the net curtains around the bed and blew me kisses as he shouldered his basket with its drums and flutes, threw on his burnoose and flitted down the stairs into the Kasbah twilight.  Within minutes I had dropped into oblivion.  Dawn was streaking the sky when he crawled in beside me, nuzzling me into wakefulness, whispering that he had so much to tell me, later, snuggling in close and sexy, spooning his long lean body around me, then dropping instantly asleep like a cat.

I slipped out of the bed and wrapping myself in my new burnouse, called down to the kitchen for coffee while I had a quick wash. Tom was dead to the world and going to be that way for hours I figured, so when the coffee arrived I took it out onto the terrace to watch the sunrise. I may have missed the sunset but now I was fully charged and was not going to miss a second of this next day in Tangiers, starting with a spectacular unforgettable light show over the Straits. Somewhere far away I heard the Fajr dawn prayer being called. Wriggling in sheer delight I started unwinding my body with yoga and some basic dance exercises then, as it rose though the haze to the east, did the Salute to the Sun.

Book1:4 - A Bit of Backfill

Before I take you into Africa I should introduce myself. 

Watching a bio docco of Woody Allen has inspired me to bring this blog briefly into the present. I realised that altho I have presented a few impressions of myself and my companion of the road, Tom, I’ve not really introduced myself.  From the previous posts you will have understood that I was married to a brutal abusive husband and we had a baby daughter. But I haven’t given you a view of myself except as a damaged confused wraith fleeing Love’s betrayal on a dream quest for the Truth, first stop Atlantis to test the validity of that myth, and hence the destination Morocco.

If this stuff it isn’t to your taste, well just go to the sidebar and find a post more to your liking, or surf away to other sites. But for those still with me here below is a thumbnail sketch of what you need to know about this protagonist.

At the start of “Manhattan” Woody uses an effective stuttery comic device  when he tries to immerse us in to the book he is writing, but pulls up repeatedly, saying his approach was too corny, romantic, preachy or angry, before finally launching into it in his inimitable way and giving us a laugh.

I may fail to strike the right note but, paraphrasing, I’ll take his cue, I do like to laugh. 

How’s this:

#       Tough and romantic as the planet I love with the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat in my gorgeous goddess surfer’s body……

#       Earth is my planet, as it always would be…….

#       The essence of art is to provide a work-through, walk-through situation so we can get in touch with the feelings we didn’t know we had.

#       Talent may be luck but courage is what is important.

Will that do the job? Inflated delusional ego is always good for a giggle. 

Thank you Woody.  Let’s GO!!

In my earlier posts I just jumped straight on in, romantic, preachy, corny & all. Writing not in anger, but in sorrow. After my last post I went into a soggy depression, reliving the pain and despair, bemused by my naivety, in an agony of doubt as to whether I should go on. I thank my good neighbour(s) for reassuring and resuscitating me - restoring my joie de vivre. So yes, I will continue. It is the Phoenix rising, not the sky falling. I do have a story to tell.

This woman does prevail. She does find what she was looking for on so many levels. It involved a very long walk among the various cultures she found on the way and what these peoples showed her in their lifeways, belief systems and behaviours. Finally deeper truths, like “who are we, where did we come from and where are we going” are revealed once she establishes a core belief that stands immutable after all the tests. 

A picture is worth a thousand words.  I hope you’ll find the following useful. 

   

This is me, the bright-eyed new mother, 1967 in London.

About to leave for Formentera in Spain, 

still sporting my Greek headscarf from our sojourn on Kastellorizo - 

a Greek island some 50 miles east of Rhodos in the Dodecanese, 

of which you will learn much more later.

This is me in 1968 with Tom on the road, both of us in Moroccan caftans.   

As I have to protect his identity I have (badly & obviously) Photoshopped another face on him 

to rather strange effect, but otherwise the picture is as it was taken. 

Yes, that’s me, 28, waist length glossy mane, besotted by my Nordic godling.   

No doubt you will read what you will into it.

So who is this dreamer, this truth-seeking damaged woman?

I had a family back in Sydney, Australia.  I won’t regale you with the details of what was basically a good childhood with a relatively happy family. We had our share of problems, but many had/have it worse.

I left school early at 16 and had good day jobs, starting as a model, then moving behind the camera in advertising agency production work. I went to Art College at night.  I wrote and liked to draw, I read prolifically and saw as many films, especially non-Hollywood foreign films, as I could. 

In those years physically I was an avid rock climber, runner, walker and surfer, body and health conscious, a vegetarian. Intellectually I tended towards the Bohemian, hanging out with a large group of people who questioned and challenged the mores of our time, were collectively known as The Push, and included well-known artists and intellectuals like Germaine Greer and Brett Whiteley. We were activists, out to change the world and we did.

But I loved to be out in the surf at sunrise when most of the Push folk were just downing their last drop of red before bed.  That set me apart, but I still embraced the passion for the revolutionary changes of the times, universal human rights, equality and the overturning of feudal class systems still so embedded in our lifeways then (and now, some would say).

I married my architect surfer husband when we were both in our early twenties. He shared many of my values, or so it seemed to me then. Avid for adventure we started travelling, firstly surfing all the best surf beaches up the New South Wales coast & up into Queensland, then taking ourselves to tropical far North Queensland where we worked in the Cairns region, always saving for the Big Exit, our dream of overseas travel.   We eventually left in 1965. I was 6 weeks pregnant and looking forward to living on a Greek island where I could bring up my child in ways free of all I was repelled by in Australian society and fulfil dreams of writing, inspired by the likes of Lawrence Durrell and Charmian Clift.


Greece was all it promised, but proved less than ideal for giving birth, so we took the Orient Express to London, stopping in Zagreb, Venice, Switzerland, & France before finishing the journey in London. After just a few days of bleak grey foggy February there we longed to see the sun so, with my due date immanent, we took ourselves to Devon where we lived on a sheep farm on the banks of the Tamar, looking across to Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. My husband worked as a shepherd and I gave birth to our beautiful baby girl, grew vegetables and later worked on a cider farm. 

1966. Happy new mother and her weeks old baby in Devon

 looking across Tamar River to Bodmin Moor in Cornwall beyond

After summer was over we returned to London and all it offered. We moved into Brett’s Ladbroke Grove old studio, one big room with French windows that gave onto a miniscule balcony and looked over the street below & across to Portobello. I took menial temporary day jobs that allowed me to have my baby close as I worked and himself worked in the Tropical Palm House at Kew Gardens, resplendent in his canecutter’s blue shirt inside the glasshouse while overcoat-clad Londoners passed by outside, hunched and shivering. At night I worked in the National Film Theatre, filling my data base with seasons of Mae West, French Film Noire & Nouvelle Vague, Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and so much more while he minded our baby. We had to recoup our savings to travel more.

Then came the ’67 Summer of Love and what was working well for us turned pear-shaped.  I would come home from work around midnight to find my husband hosting parties of drunk & drugged people in the studio and our baby wide awake. Or find another woman in the bed when I crawled in in the dark, dead tired after the long day.  Then came the 13 -year old LSD tragic who found my husband irresistible, knocking on the door at 4 am ringing her little tinkly bells, looking for the servicing she was obviously getting. That’s when I threw him out. Told him to pull himself together and find out if he was a husband and father or wanted this other life that seemed so attractive to him.

I had another agenda and what I wanted, above all, was for us to be a united loving family in order for us to make it happen. It involved simple living and high thinking, not this decadence I was surrounded by, the perpetual alcoholic haze and smoky dopey mindless feckless people. After London our plans had been to leave for our long-held dream destination, the Marquesas Islands. This originated in far north Queensland which had instilled in us a love of the tropics. Especially the Big Blue clean Pacific Ocean with its clear light that enhanced and saturated tropical colours, the Polynesian culture with its’ freedom, laid-back living and food. After reading  "Aku Aku"  by Thor Heyerdahl we had been enchanted by the whole ethos of the Marquesan lifestyle and we had hoped to live there until our daughter reached puberty.

I determined that we had to do this to save ourselves from the threatening destruction.  So I met with him in a park, letting go the hand of our precious beautiful toddler when she saw him coming towards us across the grass so she could run to him, hoping to show him what was really important. We sat and watched her play and I told him I was prepared to put the last months behind us if he would stop drinking and smoking drugs, pull himself together and get real about what love meant. He agreed and we decided to leave London asap. However it wasn’t quite as simple as that. 

One night in his absence I had left my little one in the care of a trustworthy neighbour and went to a poetry reading where I read a few of my recent poems. And met Luca, an Italian American poet also reading that evening. It was instantaneous folie d'amour - worlds in collision. …a mind-meld. I felt I’d met my soul mate, the man I could spend the rest of my life with. With Luca I experienced a passion I’d never thought possible – I was shocked to my core.  But I knew I had such a situation around me that this “love”, no matter how demanding and satisfying on so many levels, could never be ours to keep. So I turned away and set my crushed bent heart to saving our family and fulfilling our original dreams. Unfortunately Luca wasn’t going to give me up and came calling. My husband found out what had happened, and despite my protestations that it had been a brief affair, over now, he started drinking heavily again, which led to blind red rages. He threatened me but didn't hit me as neighbours intervened. They'd heard the ruckus and banged on the door until we let them in.  

But apparently sauce for the gander wasn’t to be sauce for the goose.  I saw my love as something pure, honest, unpremeditated, whereas I saw his behaviours as sordid, decadent, disrespectful and deeply offensive, especially as it all was in full view of our little girl in her cot in the same room. In his eyes he had the right to behave as he did whereas my affair was a total betrayal that branded me as unfaithful wife, punishable by her wronged husband. He was positively feudal. I began to see I’d made a huge error and should have left him when I could. Too late now, the die was cast. We sold everything we couldn’t carry and left London. Our ship to the islands was booked and we had a 3 month wait. At the Congress of Dialectics at the Roundhouse friends had told us of the gathering of like-minded people on the tiny Spanish island of Formentera. 

I never saw Luca again; altho when he found I had left my husband and was in Morocco friends later told that he did go there looking for me. I left London with a heavy heart, weeping, holding my baby close as the taxi took us to the train to Barcelona. Weeping for a love I was leaving behind, would I ever find a love like that again? Weeping in the fear I felt for our future. 

Ben, a Californian poet we had met in Paris and again later at the Roundhouse, travelled with us from London on the train to Barcelona and ferry to the islands. He had invited us to share his beachside hut until we could find our own place. We found our bearings and after a week rented a windmill on La Mola. At first Formentera seemed to be the saving of us, I relaxed and began writing.  We enjoyed the little expat community and the islander’s culture. The windmill was fun but the inside space was very confined, the only door opened onto a busy track and passers-by were always looking in, stopping to pass time of day or visiting. So there was rarely a moment alone. 

My sweet baby leads Ben out of the windmill on La Mola 

to show him something special.

When my toddler fell down the big stone steps that led to the upstairs bedroom,I knew we had to move to a safer more practical place with more room and privacy. We found an ancient crumbling isolated finca some kilometres north–east from El Pilar de la Mola, well away from the passing throng, which gave me good creative space and gave our baby plenty of room to exercise her fast little chubby legs. Himself had met a British architect who needed help building a stone mansion on the cliffs and was happily employed there doing work he loved a few days a week, away until evening.  Unfortunately they often shared a drink after work and he would stagger home drunk and noisy, usually looking for more and drinking until he became aggressive.

This situation turned from nightmare to snuff movie when, once again, the snake came into our garden in the form of the finca owner’s son, Juan, who came round after dark every other night, bringing sangria. Bull’s blood. A potent poison. He and my husband would drink themselves legless late into the night.  The jealous London rages returned. Juan would slink away as the ritual beatings began. 

After child-bearing, birth and the life in London I had not regained my former strength and could not defend myself as I might have a few years before. I also had a revulsion for the smell of alcohol and cigarette smoke. Ever since I became pregnant it had made me feel ill. That I would not join in the drinking sessions became extra fodder for his anger.

Thus alcohol, especially sangria, devastated our idyll and I was forced to flee the nightly brutality inflicted by my dearest one, transformed as he now was into a drunken beast. I did not think I would survive much longer and I hated my daughter witnessing such horrific tortures as he inflicted upon me, night after night.  Eventually he damaged me so badly that my thinking was impaired. I hadn’t quite lost it but everything seemed to be happening in a time warp, three stages removed. I felt I was in some nebulous dreamscape. Years later I found he’d dislocated my neck. The first time I had it adjusted it was like suddenly coming above water, suddenly everything became clear, normal. But I still have problems with it and have to get it adjusted to get relief.

And so, on my 28^th birthday on the Platja de Migjorn I made the fateful decision to leave. I could not risk another possibly fatal attack.  I returned to the finca, packed a few necessities in a shoulder basket, then with a leaden heart I kissed my sleeping little one and walked out into the blackness to meet the two am bus from La Mola to the Ibiza ferry.

Which is where this blog of my long walk to truth and sanity begins.........

But one last thing about me. One disturbing thing that I find doesn’t always compute when I look at myself and my belief that I now understand the basic Truth. I have a certain precognitive ability. It has happened too many times for me to brush it off as a fluke. I'll get a flash vision, for example of a balloon going up in flames. Next morning I turn on TV News to find it actually happened, 12 hours later in the Alice Springs dawn.  How to explain this? Paired with this is synchronicity, another recurrent phenomenon that frequently jolts me from my complacent dreams. I know I am not alone in experiencing these somewhat unnerving traits.  So if you want a spoiler just know that altho I feel I got to understand the truth as far as it can be understood by little me, that within that truth is the truth that not all is knowable. Russian dolls. Pass the parcel. Onion rings. Change is constant and every passing moment is a new reveal. So what? Nothing new here you say? It was for me, then, as I broke the moulds of convention and conditioning and starting thinking for myself, working towards enlightenment as to the nature of reality using an Orwellian empathy to understand how others lived as I travelled.

Here's a bit of ordinary magic - my daily dose of synchronicity: 
This day, July 4, 2012, we have been told of the confirmation of the Higgs Boson particle and the validation of the Standard Model , surely the most important long-anticipated bit of our knowledge jigsaw when it comes to the truth of explaining the existence of It All. They call it the God Particle.

That this, and the also just released very first image of the shadow of an atom, should happen just as I am about to launch into my saga of discovering the Truth (as I found it) rattled my cage somewhat! Spot-On, could not have planned it if I'd tried. Cruel nature confusing the physicists with coincidentals:  excesses of events in one place?

I feel the mysticism of synchronicity embrace me once again. I just love this co-incidence.....what a doozie!! How to explain that? I won't take it personally, co-incidence is never a meant-to-be. The universe is unfeeling. I am tho, been chuckling to myself all morning.

The quest, the carrot and a donkey called Maya.…off we go…yo ho ho....next stop….Tangiers.