Book 1: 12 Kastellorizo Part 1

FINDING KASTELLORIZO

Kastellorizo (aka Castellorizo or Megiste), most easterly of the Greek islands. Note proximity to Turkish coast.

1965. The crowd at Barry Stern’s Gallery in Paddo wasn’t there for the art show. There was a frisson, a delicious sense of something very much out of the ordinary. George and Charmian were back from Hydra and the adoring sycophants were there in force.
  

Hydra today - still idyllic

We joined in shyly, trying to get closer in the crush around them when they arrived, but they were being mobbed and it wasn’t until everyone was quite drunk and ready to find the restaurant for the next stage of the evening that we managed to sidle through the ranks of the adoring and the voluble to try to tell them we had also been infected with the same call to the Mediterranean.

Hydra in 60's: Expat writers Charmian, George, Maryanne Ihlen & Leonard Cohen watch Maryanne's son learning to swim.

George Johnston and Charmian Clift  had just returned home to Australia after many years absence, living as expatriate writers in Greece.  We were leaving in just a few days for the same destination.  Leaving the dull conservative political climate still stuck in the post-war values and the restrictive society with its’ stultifying mental environment and seeking that lifestyle George and Charmiane, and others like the Durrell brothers, Freya Stark, Henry Miller and Rose Macaulay had extolled. It was a feeling like the passing of the baton - we would continue where they left off, somehow.  The inner call to those ancient stones beckoned; a well-trodden trail that led to mysteries that would be revealed in the magic blue-jeweled Aegean light.

In the 60's many expatriate artists and writers were living, alone, in couples, often in small colonies, on Greek Islands, the Levant, the Euxine, sorbing the ethos of the old stones and cool tombs.  Living simply in the tiny villages among the goats and the olive and fig orchards.  Feta and Greek coffee.  Mezés with retsina and ouzo under grape arbors looking out over the glorious Aegean sunsets.  Pilgrimages to tiny monasterios and hidden grottoes. I had been reading of their idyllic loves, greedy to be a part of this. 

l

Lawrence Durrell especially was the muse who entranced me, challenged me to write. For years I had been reading his works, feeling my inner magnet irresistibly drawn to his Mediterranean world. I even named my daughter for his character Klea.My fellow Ozzy expat blogspot mate William Skyvington gives good Durrell in his blog Antipodes - see http://skyvington.blogspot.com.au/search/label/Lawrence%20Durrell

My irreverent okka husband would tease me about this fascination I had for these far-flung artists' colonies. “Hand woven yogurts”, he mocked.  But he was just as webbed in to the dream as I was - no architect could deny the wonders of the ancient world.  

We left Sydney on the Roma late 1965. Seeing us off, a little bewildered somehow,  were Mama and father, my teen brothers and a clutch of friends . Departure  was delayed. Six hours later only my free-spirit good friend Jenny Powditch (Magrath)  with first-born Petra in stroller, was left waving from the dock as the Roma cast off. It was many years before we met again. As the Roma reversed out of Circular Quay in a swirl of roiling green waters I felt the separation wrench as Jenny's tiny figure diminished then vanished, like the life we were leaving. We cleared the heads in one of those fiercely lurid brazen Sydney Harbor sunsets.  I looked back at the glaring golden mirror with the Bridge and city black in silhouette on the horizon. Elation and fear conflicted in me as I faced the reality that I might never return.  I was six weeks pregnant. The world outside the old penal colony island called me into the Great Unknown..  

SS Roma

 “I am a writer” I cried into the pounding waves as I stood Titanic-like on the heaving bow as it broached the Big Blue and the planet swung into darkness.  I was leaving the petty minded North Shore crowd with their stupid moral codes and mating games in which nice girls didn’t and all the best studs had to drive sports cars and did.   I was off to a freedom they didn’t seem to have the mentality to even locate on their map of life possibilities.  Many of them made their pilgrimages I guess.  But they went to L.A. or London and after the Tuscany holiday idyll returned after a couple of years and set up advertising agencies, got married, commuted from creche enclaves in leafy suburbs to the city; ended up divorced and alcoholic in their 40’s.   Well quite a few did. 

But there were others. Crazy super stars. Like Brett and Wendy. Jenny Kee, Richard, Germaine...stars who put Oz firmly on the intellectual map with their flair and genius. Of these only one, Brett Whiteley, shared the "divine madness" of the free creative spirit that infested, drove and liberated me from the chains of mundane normality shackling even the most brilliant in this effete gang of Ozzy expats flying the coop at that time. Others, less flamboyant but possessed of the fire of the soul went on Saharan caravans with the Tuartegts. One I encountered had just walked from Vladivostok to Samarkand and down to Goa. Yet another disappeared into the Amazon to live with the Yanomani for years.Some were friends, many were acquaintances and many more moved in our circles. 60's Sydney and Melbourne were still small towns in that respect. We all knew each other in one degree or another. No surprise then to find familiar faces among the expats clumped in London when we passed through on our way to the West Country to find a safe place to give birth some eight months later.

I guess Tuscany and the Balearic Islands were the meccas of that Sydney elite set trek.  Ibiza and Majorca.  Sure, after Greece and the U.K. we followed the surge to those places as a couple, ending up in a windmill on Formentera.

Klea & friend - Formenteran windmill1967

On several sorties to the adjacent island of Ibiza I'd run into old friends at waterfront cafes in "Dr. Livingstone I presume" encounters. Such a meeting with Collette was fortuitous, She had connections with Oz magazine and took a bundle of my latest (post-Morocco) drawings back to London & years later I picked up an issue at the Yellow House, and there they were, my little flower power sprite artoons. What a buzz! But after I left Formentera on my own trek the only old friend I met was Jenny Kee in Marrakesh.  She was always an adventurer, not locked into the clique values. At that time we were both awakening to the extreme colors of psychedelia. I shared my first acid trip with her roaming the bazaars soaking in the colors and smells.  But after Jenny I met no one from my past on my journey across the planet.  Walking to India. 

Yes, after leaving Australia we did find our Greek Island.  I looked at the map and chose the most remote dot some fifty miles east of Rhodos and just one mile from the Turkish coast.  Kastellorizo.  Castello Rosso. Megiste. 

After five weeks on a bizarre trip in the Roma, a retiring migrant liner returning almost empty on its’ last voyage, we disembarked at Genoa. We made our way across Italy and down the boot by train, with a mind-blowing few days in Florence for a first real encounter with the wonders European culture held for us. The gardens, the art, the architecture, the whole city and its stylish inhabitants, was a full frontal astounding experience that rendered this colonial couple numb with culture shock. It was overwhelming and I knew I had to return and not for just a few weeks.  

Our journey was culture shock, unexpected, often in-your-face abhorrent, but mostly experienced in a state of perpetual wonder and astonishment. Passing through Italy the depth and richness of the culture started impressing itself on us.  Milan. Tuscany and Florence.  The art, the architecture, the landscape, the light.  The people! Behaviors and ideologies often quite alien to us, a language we struggled to interpret. Somehow we got to Brindisi intact, only to have to fight off three robber/rapists who tried to lure us to their lair. Puny lads, no match for us, both very fit, easily able to dispatch them. After that we became very cautious about friendly strangers with agendas.

Undeterred we boarded the ferry to Corfu. Italy was not for us. We had a further destination, the ancient marble temples spoke louder than Leonardo and drew us into the older culture to the east. Greece was our destination and apart from those few astounding days in Florence, we quickly left Italy. lured on by the Sirens' call. On Corfu we found it, that Greek magic, but we knew we wanted to get to the very heart of Greece and, after a blissful few days,riding bikes around the island, swimming, sampling tabernas,  made our way across to the mainland shore and on by local buses to Athens.  Of course, I had to get as close to the source as possible and so we immediately walked to the top street of Plaka under the Acropolis.   Here we managed to rent a tiny room, a narrow tunnel barely wide enough for the bed, burrowing right in under the foundations of the Acropolis itself. Our landlady’s name was Aphrodite. Of course she was! She welcomed us with figs and Fasoulia bean soup and for the 1st time since disembarking from the Roma I felt the travellers' tensions dissipate as I came to a full stop, sorbing it all.

From the front stoop of the house we had the view out over Athens,

View from Plaka with Athens spread below to the horizon

spread out as far as I could see in every direction, with the other hills at eye level. Every night under my fingers I touched the ancient stones of the Acropolis behind our bed as I dropped off to sleep; .  Mana.  Touchstone.  I felt as if I had finally come close to some instinctive destination and was being fed by some arcane ancient source.

Standing up on that last street below the Acropolis in the evenings looking out, the sounds of the city came through as an intense screaming rising above the background din.  Persistent.  A city in torture.  I was told of riots and tanks moving around the streets, but I didn’t encounter any such.  Just heard the screaming of the city’s heart.

We did all the tourist things.  Visited the museums and the ancient ruins.  Took trips to visit monasteries in the country and bars in Piraeus.  Ate every evening in Plaka at kerbside tables with charcoal braziers and the smell of rosemary kebabs grilling.  I sampled the retsina and loved it but my baby didn’t, so I just jealously watched as Colin soaked it up. I visited the Turkish hamam, or baths, and luxuriated in hot water and clean hair and clothes.  It isn’t easy for an Australian, so used to clean living and regular hot water and daily ocean surfing, to travel unwashed for days, weeks, only doing a top-n-tail routine. Not this one at any rate.  But I was learning.  Australia was a long way away and after all, we had left it forever.  Hadn’t we ?

Still came the call, the itch in the soul and we looked beyond Athens. We took a short trip on an inter-island ferry and disembarked on Hydra. I needed to feel the ethos of this place that had such allure for so many expat artists, writers, poets, like George and Charmian. We wandered the port, then explored  a narrow lane leading uphill beyond the houses. looking back over the harbor. I loved what I saw, but it lacked something. Perhaps it was too settled, too much of a village. It didn’t quite fulfill my needs, I wanted wild. Ruins. Grandeur. And I didn't encounter one of the fabled expat artists. Certain expectations dashed, we didn't linger. It was back to a few more weeks enjoying the life under the Acropolis in Plaka and then ...farewell Athens for now, as we boarded another boat bound for the Dodecanese. 
I loved every minute as we ploughed through busy sapphire waves across the Aegean in the stern of a ferry threading our way through the island mazes among louche Scandinavian backpackers, fit blonde godlings all.  Mykonos, Kalymnos, Lesbos. We sampled various islands en route, disembarking at whim, until the final destination: Rhodos, irresistible for the immediate impact, street appeal of its massive ancient fortress walls. 

Massive fortress walls surrounding Rhodos port town.

 Once inside the town I felt immediate affinity. This was more like it. I was entranced, locked in a love affair that revisits as I write. Such an amazing place.

Here, in a first “real” bath in a proper bathroom in months, provided by our intelligent and sensitive landlady, I felt my baby quickening.   Reality.   

Pregnant - a la grecque

Our child would govern our movements from now on.  Greek doctors I visited all seemed to think I was looking for an abortion.   I knew we would have to go to England before the birth.  I was not going to risk my child to unknown hygiene or language difficulties.  But first we had our remote island destination.  Kastellorizo. The boat to that remote island didn’t leave for a few days so we set out exploring Rhodos, visiting Lindos for my birthday and meeting a fey couple of Kiwi artists in their sculpture studio tucked in a tiny lane where we spent some hours enjoying travelers’ tales while feasting on figs, walnuts, yogurt and honey out of the mid day heat at a cool table under a shady tree.

Winter was now well established.  I had settled on a formula for travel clothes.  A brown corduroy tabard, or a mid-thigh length big man’s jumper, over brown ski pants or black tights, with good walking boots I had bought in a flea market in Florence.  A capacious comfy duffel coat over the lot.  Very beatnik. My bulge was beginning to show and I needed warmth and comfort.  Forget the fashion now woman, practicalities rule, OK ?  I covered my hair in the Greek style with a flowered cotton scarf. I wanted to blend, be a part of the crowd.

We had left the big suitcase bulging with my best linens and silks, velvets and crepe de chines, with Aphrodite in Athens.  Colin complained endlessly about having to lug it from trains and buses. Up to this point I hadn't quite made the transition to traveler, clothes-wise. The suitcase was full of the beautiful things I couldn't bear to part with,  chosen from years of working in Sydney as a model and in Advertising production. Really stupid choices in retrospect. When I returned to Formentera from Morocco, years later, My Dear One had extracted his revenge, dispersing its contents, my beautiful clothes, away to his harem of girlfriends.   Everywhere I went I saw the personal treasures of years of careful garment selection being worn by other women.  Someone buying bread, or disappearing around a street corner. At a party, or getting on a bus. Formentera was a small island.  But clothes were the last thing on my mind, then, when I returned after many months in Morocco...to find...but...read on.. we are still in 1966 coming to my Greek island idyll, making realization I had to travel light as we crossed the Aegean.

Still on we traveled.  Hour after lurching hour on an ancient steamer breasting sloppy choppy seas in driving rain to the east close around the Turkish coast. Finally, after nine gut wrenching hours out of the gloom materialized: Kastellorizo! The ship turned out of the vile weather into the tranquil sheltered harbor port and dropped anchor.  Gathering our wits and bags, very grateful for the safe arrival,  we climbed down into the tender and were taken the short stretch to the stone quay where we were greeted by the Mayor and several excited and effusive dignitaries who explained the ship's captain had notified them of our impending arrival. They took us to a tiny taberna on the quayside, the only place open and after about an hour of questions & hospitality, led us out and down the quay to a tiny house which was to be ours apparently, for the duration of our stay. One of many empty houses as I later found out as I pieced together the sad history of this devastated island.

The little house still stands on the quayside today. 

Thanks to Kazzigraphics for this recent pic

Freya Stark, that extraordinary traveler and writer recorded her impressions of Kastellorizo. In 1952, some twelve years or so before me,  she set out in the sail boat "Elfin" to explore our cultural origins along the Lycian coast following the trail of ancient Persian and Greek traders:  "We had sailed into the harbour of the little Greek Castelorizo without landing, and seen its stricken streets, which the fire ate when the people had been carried away to safety by British ships in the war.  The wounded little town on its eroded hills has painted and rebuilt its houses around the harbour. It shows that gaiety with starvation which one may call - in the Greek nation, as in the Arab horse - the "endurance heart".

I can never think of Castelorizo without a stab as if someone had hit me, for we visited it again a year later, and it still wore the same clean look among its ruins, but with more houses closed and fewer people, as if the ashes had increased and the spark grown smaller at its heart." The Lycian Shore: p137-8.

We stayed for some 3 months, much to the bemusement of the islanders who rarely had any visitors and who certainly had never had a visitor from Australia.  And yet six thousand people from these islands, who had been taken to refugee camps in Palestine during the Second World War, had afterwards been resettled in Melbourne without ever returning to the bombed out ruin their beautiful island home had become. Melbourne has the largest expatriate Greek population and the Kastellorizon community in Melbourne outnumbers all the rest.  Every one of the remaining one hundred and twenty people had a relative in Melbourne.  There was Australian money in the tills and Bex powders on the shop shelves.
I don't know what I had expected of Kastellorizo, but it certainly was not what I found.

Kastellorizo - the Point with Mosque and Turkish coast just 3 miles away beyond.

Next Blog #13 - Kastellorizo Part 2

Footnote - photos by David John at www.my-favourite-planet.com

In this blog I very grateful to David John for allowing me to include some of his images of 21st c Kastellorizo from his very comprehensive My Favorite Planet blog. I encourage interested readers to visit this site to fully appreciate the island  and all it has to offer the adventurous traveler seeking an ultimate Greek island experience.

The photo of Athens comes from

https://sabbatikos.net/2013/06/29/acropolis-and-the-plaka/

  with permission pending. Enjoyed this blog of a 2013 family trip through the Sporades. A good read with great pix and fun observations..

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Book 1:11 Marrakesh 2

When you come to the city, don’t enter the gate....

Jemaa el Fnaa
 image by Sam Rogers on Flickr

A few weeks passed beautifully exploring Marrakesh, sorbing the Moroccan culture, the colors, the patterns. Taking in this gateway to Africa and the diversity of people of so many colors, races & costume. The first week we spent most nights roaming the Jemaa el Fna  and mornings on the rooftop cafe where we met interesting travellers, often with tales to tell about the way ahead to the south. Dakar, Timbuktu, Tam Tam...the names of places once almost mythical, now so temptingly within our reach. The middle of the days we just chilled in our room, relaxing, all the time planning our trip down the Atlantic coast to the west. 

I felt loved, cherished, appreciated.  Tom seemed to be the ideal travelling companion and nothing happened to give me any second thoughts about going alone into a remote place with him.  My mind was far from my brutal husband, but the memories of my baby tortured me all the time, giving Tom a lot of reasons to comfort me more and more in the way he knew best.  Although he wasn’t always as nice as he could have been. His teasing was often too much for me, but then how could he have known the hell of torment and betrayal an abused wife, who has had to leave her precious baby to that abuser, goes through. I got through the walls of grief and pain in meditation, writing, playing music and yogic dancing. OK, I didn't get through, but that's how I dispersed the energy, turning the thoughts from negative to positive where I could.

Green memories of the sun merge into evening’s mauve veil.

Suffering the reality of your absence

the empty hollow of my shoulder

moulds again her small warm head

and in my shame your angry eyes keep me insane

Georgy Porgy rubs salt into the wound, laughing

Clever clever Georgy Porgy

But Tom too was growing.  He had had a few of his “Son of God” raves printed up and with all the tunnel vision delusion of the iconoclastic drug guru was now certain he was the coming Avatar.   

 

God's Eyes

He handed his raves out when he sold the God’s Eyes in the markets.  He became an “event’, part of the nightly circus in the Jemaa el Fna.  I’d often have to elbow my way in to get to him through the crowds he attracted.   He had to spread The Word about Love, Peace, Beauty and the Magical Kingdom of the Insighted Vision.  And how the Native American Indian Church embraced all cultures in Truth.  We had both become very spiritual, determinedly remaking ourselves.  We wanted the world to be a good place, not the war-ridden, destructive hell of lies and deception we found at all levels.  Deluded idealistic fools that we then were, we wanted Heaven on Earth, Utopia, Nirvana, Shambhala and the rest of the dreams of the dreamers that encapsulate the need to find a better reality, or escape this, since the cultures started giving us back our reflections, showing us our overview as a species.  We decided if it was to be, then it must come from within us and began that immense struggle of the mind, the soul, the spirit, to conquer the evil within in order to be the good manifest in the external world.

Above all I wanted enlightenment; I wanted to understand the nature of existence, who we are, where we came from, where we are going.  I didn’t, and don’t, believe in the God the Father myth, the friend upstairs, and Tom still did.  It was part of his whole scenario, in which he was the Christ I guess.

I understood both of us were reacting to the full 60’s revolutionary political climate as conservative forces tried to quell the free thinkers, of women seeking freedom from male oppression, of the Vietnam War, and to our own lives having “gone wrong”.  He had lost his mother and left home and been alone, unloved, and I had left a husband who thought love was some sort of slavery by females to males and if they didn’t “behave”, then you show them who is boss with the law of the fist.  (Somehow the fact that he was the misbehaving negative role model had escaped him). Tom and I had found love in each other in our joined wish for peace and non-violence, of the woman and the man as complimentary parts of the whole, the Yin and the Yang, always moving in interplay. We wanted to spread it around to those others who had seen the light, sensed the way or who wanted out from the hell.  There were plenty of eager takers of all nationalities ready to listen.

Looking back I think now he saw our proposed donkey walk as his "40 days in the wildness", removing himself from society to allow a certain introspection. Reculer pour mieux sauter. 

In the darkening twilight of our room, I would sit on the bed listening to the deafening evening call to prayer from the minaret next door booming out over all around, absorbing the intensity of it.  Normally I would have hated such a racket, but somehow, there, it was wonderful to me.  Even today I enjoy hearing the wailing  Allah akbar allah allah illah allah and the memories of so many wanderings in Muslim lands come flooding back.  That call to holiness, lifting the believers’ minds from the daily grind to a higher spiritual plane. The reinforcement of a mass brain washing.

The courtyard of the house with its’ fountain provided a communal gathering place for the occupants of the house and visitors.  There we did our cooking and washing and sat around sharing experiences while these domestic mundanities were attended to, waiting for water to boil, or someone to finish with the bathroom facilities.  The Danish women had a lot of friends and were always bringing new people in to meet us all.

One afternoon I returned to the riad to find an itinerant musician sitting playing a primitive stringed instrument, a guimbri; it seemed to be no more than a shoebox with a broom handle stuck in it with three catgut strings.  But the sounds he produced from this were magical.  I was intrigued. Then he played it for us and sang an ancient traditional, yet universal, folk song.
  

The great mendicant musician Omar Arafa 
with his guimbri

“When you come to the city, don’t enter the gate.

If you enter the gate, don’t drink the water.

If you drink the water, don’t talk to the people.

If you talk to the people, don’t accept an invitation to a house.

If you accept an invitation, don’t stay the night.

If you stay the night, don’t stay a week.

If you stay a week, don’t ask the daughter to marry you.

If you marry, don’t have children.

If you have children, don’t have grandchildren.

If you get old there, don’t die there,

If you come to the city, don’t enter the gate”.

I sat contemplating the message, having made the man a cup of tea meanwhile.   While he drank I smiled at him, vibing.  He was ancient, wearing faded patched robes, leaning back on a cushion made of a carpet rolled around his belongings.  In my twisted crazy mind I felt he was some angel messenger from the psychic otherworld.  With a message from the Gods, for me. He turned and brought out another instrument, a scaled down version of his guimbri,  from his carpet roll and handed it to me. He said was a lotar.  It was even more rudimentary, with only one string. I plucked it, surprised to find it come alive in my hands.  I sat playing it, coaxing music from its slow rather dull string and eventually started singing a song I had been turning over in my mind over the past weeks.

  “Drifting down the river, rising high on the tide, floating gently downstream on the mainstream of the river, on the river of my dreams”.

It suited the instrument’s basic sounds, a simple song.  He picked up my rhythms and played along with me, although I was more just the bass and he the melody.  Meanwhile Tom had fetched down his drums and our flutes and we passed an hour or so making improvised music until the light faded and the sahn became busy with others and their evening chores around us.

Wordlessly the old man thanked me for the tea and gathering his bags together, rose to leave.  I offered to buy the lotar and he was happy to part with it for a small amount of cash.  I took my prize up to our room.  It was my first "ethnic" stringed instrument.  A child could have made it.  But to me it was the beginning of a musical voyage of discovery which found its’ blessed isles when I began playing a sitar in Benares and beyond, in India.

I began to have problems with my periods.  Sporadic bleeding.  I didn’t have a proper period, just burst of blood in irregular spasmic events.  One morning after an unexpected early morning flood, I came down to wash my panties out at the communal washstand in the courtyard, feeling out of sorts and very self-conscious.  Strange how periods make a woman feel secretive.  You always try to conceal the evidence, like an animal will consume the umbilical cord after birth, so I would clean up every trace of blood and make sure no-one saw me in the act.  Why I never fathomed. We all have ‘em, so what’s the shame, the cringe?

Bia and two of her beautiful Danish friends were squatting behind me across the courtyard, stoned stupid, laughing and sniggering in Danish, behaving like silly girls. I couldn’t understand a word, but I just smiled and covering my activities with my back, went about washing the blood out of my little white panties.  I felt quite “queer”, very paranoid, very psycho.  I felt as if they were entering my mind, reading it, controlling my thoughts.  The blood revolted me and my thoughts were negative.  My baby - would the brute harm her - I felt lost, stretched with period tensions, uncomfortable, down.  Needing to curl up and cocoon in our quiet little nest. I finished washing the pants and heard Bia say “put it UP” and I found my hand take the wrung-out panties, as if on the command, and put them up on a pipe above the washstand as I bent to wash my face.

The cold water jerked me into conscious awareness. I straightened up and looked at the now clean pants as if they had the meaning of life in them. Blood, blood. I was shedding all my hunched defences, my fear, the nonsense that had been going on inside me, released. 

“Put it UP!”  I parroted, standing up to face the women, who had transformed back from the three alien superwitches of the psycho phantasmagoria of my tortured mind and now were just three giggling girls.  They looked a bit stunned.

 

I laughed and said it again and they laughed too. Yes, put it UP, I thought as I took myself back up to the room.  Put it UP.  High.  Elevate thoughts, don’t let low thinking interfere with the higher self in its’ search for Truth.  I must be objective if I was to overcome this subjective lower self.  I wanted to be high, to be free of the load of care and woe.  High was joy and bliss.  High allows me to see far and wide.  High was the key.  To get high I had to put it up.  My whole being embraced the Danish women in a rush of intense love and gratitude for having shown me my way forward.  “Put it UP” became a joke greeting every time we met after that.

Later, as I sat in this state of inner revelation on my bed looking up at the high snow-covered Atlas in the distance through the filigree window, I thought: “I don’t think they said it at all”.  I reasoned that I had invented it in my own mind, a sort of resonance on their Danish patter that transformed into some kind of message I needed at that time to rescue myself from madness.    I was going psychotic.  I kept hearing a strange “click” noise in my head. The stress of being separated from my baby, my period, the drugs, the strangeness of it all in this strange land.  So far from anyone or anything familiar. Mad Tom my only link to a world I once knew.  “Got to get a grip. Got to get a grip.”  I saw I had been locked in subjective inner reflections and had come out into objectivity.  It was a major coming to awareness of my workings and I held on to it like a lifebuoy whenever I felt engulfed by the mad episodes which consumed me again and again.  Objectivity was external reality and clarity, subjectivity was my inner world, turmoil, confusion. My task was to bring both into harmony. I realized my talk with the man who wrote The Divided Self had been my saving. The reactive psychosis of the battered wife syndrome.  Unrecognized then, but clearly seen now.  How many blamed and shamed women have succumbed to that madness and been categorized as unfit mothers by their aggressors crowing their victory as a defense for the droight de seigneur of the brutal husband.  Pushed over the edge and then blamed for being in that unfit state by the very one who did that to them.  Cute move eh !

Tom was still asleep.  He had a message, I thought, but he didn’t have the method of achieving the desired result.  His holy man trip was amusing and people liked to deride him but his comeback usually had them off skulking and biting their tongue in mortification, it rang the bell of their truth and opened their eyes to themselves and the nature of human compassion and togetherness.   The main thing was he inspired otherwise disempowered people to enjoy life and try to improve it, and of that I naturally approved.   Who wouldn’t!   Empowerment of the underdog is part of the democratic process.   We were both born of free democracies with a tradition of personal enterprise, so one thing we both agreed on was the right to personal freedom of ideas, speech, and lifestyle.   In Morocco that was tantamount to heresy for some. Of course now democracy has been revealed to be as open to corruption as any “system”, but then, in our naivety, we were believers.

But how were we to turn the tide of human self-destruction?  What was the recipe to save us from ourselves?  How do I, you, we, open the minds to truth and love and stop the brutality ? 

I felt I had found a starting point.  By elevating my own thoughts, not thinking bad thoughts about others, trying to be a better person, not lying, to myself or others, that would be my own personal start.  By being a “good” person I could change the world, I thought, I could create a world of goodness around me, into which no dark horrors could penetrate.  Ah yes, so naive I was then, so innocent.  But I was alone, despite my crazy companion/lover.  Alone and adrift in an empty alien world.  This revelation came into my sad, dark mind as if it had suddenly been flooded with light.  An awakening from a bad dream.  The force of it seemed so correct, so very “right”, undeniable, irresistible and it felt like falling in love, its’ warmth permeating every cell of my body with a nourishment I had never before experienced, a cosmic bliss. 

I found myself in meditation, sitting in lotus position on a cushion on the floor. I stayed there quietly allowing my mind to assimilate this experience, my first real enlightening experience, a coming to a higher awareness.  I felt blessed and accepted as a true aspirant of “The Way”.  From now on I would be defended by this aura, this shield of inner light.  Or so I thought, then, in the warmth of my new inner fire.

After this experience “turning on” had a different meaning to me.  Every time I smoked kif my mind automatically went into a mode of higher thinking.  All the small talk became like housekeeping, you did it to maintain the vessel on its’ journey, but in a Zen state of “work in no mind, no mind in work”. The real function of this mind had to be kept clear and high, away from the little time-consuming impedimenta of the mundane world.  The captain of my ship delegated responsibility to the crew in order to not be diverted from the captain’s job.  I was in control (the captain) but I was multi-faceted, polyschizoid (the crew).  When I wasn’t under the influence of the THC I kept myself as high as I could, meditating, sightseeing. But the stress of my personal problems made it hard, and I found myself locked in depression and distress, not enjoying the extraordinary life I found all around me. So I began to stay stoned on a full-time basis.  That, I now see, is the danger of this drug.  It provides you with a lalaland mindstate in which you can be happy, but the real problems of life slip past, compounding errors which should have been rectified, like leaving my daughter with a brutal husband.  But it was done, and I was an innocent, schizophrenic, a distressed abused woman entrapped by the philosophy of seeking and finding salvation. Turning away from pain and horror, seeking beauty, love, light, and peace in the only way I knew how.   Like so many like me who have reacted to the violent awakening from the beautiful dream and found the cruel despicable side of human nature the hard way.

Late one afternoon I was sitting in the rooftop café drawing, watching the people gathering for the evening craziness in the Jemaa el Fna below when someone touched my shoulder. Turning, I was amazed to be looking at myself!  A young woman so much like me in every respect I was completely stunned.  Speaking in a low vibrant accented English she said she was curious as to what I was drawing. When I recovered enough I introduced myself as Ayesha, as I now used that name all the time, and asked if she was aware how alike we were – mirror image twins! Altho now she was sitting across from me I could see some differences.  But the overall effect was still my first impression.

Talitha Getty with Paul 

courtesy Vogue Magazine

She said her name was Talitha and felt she had to meet me as she had been quite amazed to see her doppelganger. She said she was with some friends and indicated a larger table of about seven Western hippies, most of whom were wearing variations of Indian/Arabic/hippy drag and all so cool man. Talitha herself was a vision in a glorious saffron sparkling caftan with a red and white embroidered light burnoose thrown back off her shoulders.  Her lively eyes were heavily kohled eyes and her busy expressive hands were hennaed with a wrist to finger design. Each finger had a gold ring set with amber stones on it. This was a grand hippy of the rich international set, everything about her said style, glamor, money. I may have looked similar to her superficially, but when it came to “compare the pair” I was hand-spun cottage kitty to her palace panther. She murmured that she would love to get to know me and asked me to come to her house later tonight as she was having a soiree, as she put it, pressing a card with the address into my hand and squeezing it, radiating a genuine friendly warmth and irresistible charm. “There will be many people there, so bring friends if you like, and instruments if you like to play music.” And as quickly as she’d blown in she was up and off in a haze of sandalwood. I looked at the card. It said: “The Pleasure Palace”.

This was a large riad in the grand palace style. Latticed screens of intricate inlay divided the rooms with the patterns repeated on the high-domed ceilings.  A gentle warm breeze lifted the thirty-foot high white silk curtains away from the arched door leading on to an intimate balcony, beyond which a palatial garden of palms and jacarandas and a gurgling fountain could be glimpsed, enclosed by an ornamental wall. Delighted to be in such opulent surroundings we gathered in among about thirty or so other hippy travelers, reclining on cushions on a floor covered in beautiful carpets around some large brass inlaid bowls of kif, into which we all dipped our s’bubsi’s. Needless to say everyone became very stoned.  We played our flutes and drums and others joined in, clapping, dancing, and having a high old time, as they say. 

But I began to get very paranoid.  I began looking closely at my companions.  Argentinean twins.  A Negro dwarf.  And next to me, to my greatest stress of all, a man who was stick thin, about eight feet tall and albino.  I felt I had landed in Freak City.  It was a trial.

“You are one of us, we are all one” said the dwarf, handing me a cup of mint tea. But the probably well-intended smile turned into a sinister mask, behind which was an alien from the spaceship waiting to load me up so I would become a lab-rat, a human genetic experiment for breeding stock for a deep space asteroid mining camp. The effect of the drug had taken hold.  I freaked out. 

Of course, being “cool” I didn’t show it.  After all we were all “freaks”, it was the common argot of hippiedom, a positive affirmation of being a “head”, the confirmation that we had transcended “straight” and become one of the chosen.  But inside all my values were being challenged.  The reality of the word for those who had to live it in real-time all their lives struck home.  I was no freak in that sense.  How did I cope with the weirdos, the societal rejects, the ones who weren’t of the perfect mold?

I found myself locked onto the albino who seemed to be sucking my life-force, like some demonic Frankenstein.  The trap of politeness, I couldn’t get away, fascinated by this creature of a kind I had never encountered before.  I had to accept him if my values were to stand the test.  He fawned on me, telling me how it was to be him, a reject, unwanted.  He told me he was from New York and was never going back because he was treated so badly there. 

“Everyone hates me, help me.”  he sobbed, laying his unfortunate enormous skull head on my lap, trying to wrap himself around me like a demented octopus the long white skeletal limbs clutching at me, the octopoidal elongated hands seeming to encircle my waist three times around. From an initial revulsion my inner freak-out turned around and I located my inner sanctum. I was love.  Empathic.  Unconditional.  Healing.  Giving.  My whole being went out to him in this warm rush, letting my love flow, one being to another.  I held him, noting Tom, alarmed, intensely interested in our little scene, across the circle.  I signaled to him it was all right and just held this unfortunate man, rocking him to and fro like a baby.

 

Eventually he sat up and apologized and I told him I had no idea what it could be like to be him, that no one can take away the suffering of another, and that he had to find his own salvation, to find the Love within, his own source, but that if my physical cuddles could help, then I would give him my love on that level.   I suppose, as well as my own test, it was the test of the Doctrines of Tom.  Seeing if this Universal Love, coming from within, would actually work to transform misery in the world at large. And the test of whether my own recent illumination could rescue this sad creature from his pit and elevate him to the higher plane I sought to maintain.

Breaking the spell  I jumped up and started playing my flute and dancing, moving fast, twirling and whirling among the too cool, unsettling everyone as I passed, dipping and leaping, possessed with all the craziness of a houri. Others joined me, dancing, clapping, singing, as we put a lunatic overlay on a rhumba snaking all thru the riad and out into the garden, scattering the peacocks, splashed by the fountains, hilarious and out of it, ecstatic.

Later, outside, walking back under a moonless sky with the universe above sparkling, I looked up at Sirius, the Dog Star, wondering if there was some weird thing happening on another level, coming from that star. I was so stoned that my mind was fantasizing a channeling beam coming from some core of intelligence, of which Atlantis had been the earthly manifestation and which was now occupying my body in order to bring the understanding of the Greater Truth to a planet devoured by barbarism.  Bia saw me fixed on it and said something, I forget what, but I replied that I would get to that star and she said “Good luck, you’ll need it”, in a voice that seemed rejective to me, but I clung to her as we went back to the pensione, my world was upside down and I felt shattered, drained, adrift.  I was bleeding again. 

Marrakesh became a familiar place to me.  I met Luca, a vivacious old friend from Sydney, who had also been in London, working in Biba’s and among the antique markets.  She was there buying silks and carpets and exotic finery to take back to trade.  She had acid.  Luca, her guy Phillipe, Tom and I took the trip, my first.  Osley acid.  Little blue pills.  Pure LSD.  Nothing like the nonsense speed stuff the kids quaff back like Smarties these days. We took off into the mazes of the Marrakesh soukh, everything weird and wonderful. Color jumped at me from everywhere.  

Wandering the soukh

courtesy Joel, Flickr

 My senses sought and were saturated with the intensity of the colors I began experiencing.  And music.  I soon lost the others and went into a world of my own, resonating on music and color.   I wandered in an ecstasy of delight among the fascinations of the markets, looking at light changes through the filmy gauzes of beautiful colored scarves, reveling in exotic embroidered fabrics;  exploring the dye markets, saturating myself in the sumptuous piles of the strong reds, saffron and oranges, blues and greens; sorbing indescribably subtle tones of the high piled spices, fruits, vegetables.  I sat for ages just watching the metal beater punching out old cans and making beautiful filigree lamps, while his little four-year old son learned by his side.

 I returned via the sun-striped lanes to the Jemaa el Fna and found myself dancing to an imperative drum with a troupe of fierce white-clad, maraca-brandishing negroid dancers.  A cute French guy, who seemed very fey too, latched onto me after the drum diminished and introduced me to the art of eating snails.  Being a vegetarian it took quite an effort to overcome the initial revulsion, but I forced myself and convinced myself they were quite a valid food.

Wandering back into the soukh towards home base a squatting blond woman with a negro child looked up at me, offering me beaded necklets.  I sat with her, watching her skill as she wove beads onto nylon fishing line, the little boy passing her the bottles of the different colors.  Two red, one yellow, three red, two yellow, two blue, two red. The numbers of the pattern moved in my mind’s matrix, the intelligence stirring in my acid stimulated synapses.

I found myself weaving patterns and pictures in my mind’s eye.  2r3y2r4y2r2b2r.   A carpet, a tapestry, a crochet pattern, a planet.   Design.  The way we approach a chaotic jumble of disparate objects and find similarity, then we assemble like things together and produce a pattern by taking 2r3y2r4y2r2b2r and changing the next subset to  2b1y4r1y3r2b , then sequencing them until a picture of regularity emerges, pleasing to the eye, meaningful or simply decorative.  I thought of the Muslim religion and the patterns they used.  No other forms than plants and geometry permitted.  How it held them in a vice of limited expression. When the whole cosmos was the Divine Creation, by any reasoning of a Creator of It All, why limit the expression of it to the geometry and geometrically expressed botany?  To them it is a coda, the visual translation of an inner fixed universe. 

I saw how freedom of expression, so fundamental to the vitality of a culture, had been mine by birth right in the culture I was born and raised in.  I felt so thankful to be a free woman, not born to slavery and repression as these people were, to me, then.  But I wasn’t judging.  Was I more free, less of a slave?  There was no right or wrong here.  No “me better than them”.  It is all life process evolving on the planet and the reasons they lived in this system were far beyond any simple analyses on my part. 

I wandered further into the sun-striped lanes and found a bead-seller.   

 The skeins of vibrant strong colors were irresistible.  Cobalt, chrome, scarlet, orange, turquoise, black, white, viridian.  I bought a good selection and made my way back to our room in the riad.  As I sat weaving the colorful patterns into the Hopi Indian God’s Eyes, my own meditation coda,  the mullah mounted the next door minaret and I was saturated with the wailing Allah, Allah,  Akbar,  the Maghreb evening call to prayer .  Through the arched  Mashrabiya window with its filigree arabesques the sunset colors infused the distant snows on the High Atlas with apricot pink of the approaching sunset.  The half-moon and Venus sending messages to the faithful as they turned towards Mecca.  Mind myths and reality.

Later, lying back on Luca’s roof garden couches, dreaming as the dome above turned from violet blue to a star-filled indigo African night sky above the silvery Atlas Mountains, I again felt that inner call, that indefinable destination that had “Atlantis” on the cover, but which promised to be so much more. No longer a gentle whispering murmur, it was firming to an unsettling need, an itch I had to scratch…soon. It was time to be moving on, on to what, I did not know, except I knew It was calling me in. It was time to find Atlantis....or....not.

Marrakesh rooftop Atlas Mountains view

Next: Blog #12 Kastellorizo