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).
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 28th 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.
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.
Looking forward to Afreeka!
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