Coming Home to Story

I sit alone, drinking Margaritas,
wrapped in a blanket to keep out the cold,
as dark clouds gather over San Miguel.

The bustling streets below are empty now;
turistas shelter from the coming storm
in heated restaurants and cozy bars.

A peal of thunder silences the bells
of La Parroquīa; the world stands still
as lightning arcs across the moonless sky.

Fat drops of water parachute to earth,
then harder, faster, bouncing off the ground,
a slick curtain of rain to hide my tears.

They’re for the time we had together here.
I’m sick and tired of crying on my own,
it pleases me to watch the city weep.

San Miguel de Allende
15 June 2016

I’m staying in Casa Duende in San Miguel de Allende where Chris and I once spent the best part of a month together, working side by side. Casa Duende means House of Spirit (in many senses of the word) and Chris and I certainly shared a joyful, passionate, and intense time in this glorious house, tucked away in the old part of town.

Chris got here a week before me and greeted me at the gate when I arrived with huge excitement and a very large Margarita. She painted every day under Leigh Hyam’s watchful gaze and I wrote several chapters of my first book while we were here. It was such an enjoyable and productive experience that it came to symbolise for us the honouring of our creative lives as artist and writer. Later we sometimes put a week or two aside to “do a Mexico” at home (including the Margaritas).

I knew after Chris died that I had to come back here to remind myself of that period and of the place that had so nurtured our creativity, and to leave some of her ashes here in the garden. Leigh Hyams’ daughter Gina who owns the house graciously agreed and made it possible for me to stay in the house while I’m here. This afternoon, I found a quiet spot close to the studio in which Chris painted and with as little disturbance of the soil as possible, I mixed a few handfuls of ash into the loam at the foot of a tree and replaced the large stone that had covered the spot.

I bought the little clay figure in the picture earlier today from a craft shop in town. Death is celebrated as part of life in Mexico and the dead are made welcome in our lives at all times, not just during the three-day festival of La Dia de los Muertos. After the brief ritual in the garden, I left her to commune on Chris’s behalf with the spirit of Leigh who lived here and died three years ago.

Although this place has much to do with Chris the artist, today I chose to say farewell to Chris the enthusiastic enabler and supporter of other people’s creativity. When we got married, her first vow to me was: I will encourage, support and dare you in your creativity – so that you grow fully and magnificently into yourself. I’ll be your best cheerleader.

She was and she still is the best supporter I’ve ever had.

Thank you, sweetheart.

See you around !

Chris came to Esalen a couple of times, to paint with her beloved teacher Leigh Hyams. What she learned there was the foundation of her identity as an artist and I returned this week with our dear friend Chad Morse who used to be in charge of the gardens there. It took very little time to find the perfect place to scatter the ashes we’d brought with us.

Hot Springs Creek runs through Esalen along a steep-sided gully. Chris would come to this spot by the bridge sometimes to draw or to make her way under it to the meditation hut overhanging the stream. The entrance to the track is marked by a threshold with the mantra Be Free inscribed on the concrete lintel. Tibetan prayer flags fluttered in the breeze as Chad and I made our way to the water’s edge and put several handfuls of Chris’s ashes into the fast running water.

It was thrilling to watch the current take them away downstream to the Pacific. Chris felt very present and I loved the idea of her swimming freely in the deep currents of the ocean with the whales that patrol these coastal waters. Afterwards, I went to the circular meditation hut and sat in silence for 40 minutes, saying farewell to Chris the wild-woman artist.

Then I walked to the famous Esalen hot-tubs perched on the cliff a few hundred yards away, stripped off, climbed into the slightly sulphurous water, and stared out to sea for a long time, imagining Chris’s essence spreading to the horizon.

Later that evening, I met Chad at Nepenthe, a one-time hippy haunt and now fashionable restaurant where, according to her great friend and fellow artist Kathy Skerritt, they had once “laughed [their] asses off while eating cheese and drinking wine.” Chad and I sat outside for an hour until our table was called, taking in the view that Chris and Kathy had enjoyed.

Chad had organised a bed for me at a friend’s place in part of Esalen nicknamed New Yurt City. I slept well and was up early for a 7.30 hot tub and massage before hitting the road. Chris had told me that the massages at Esalen were “out of this world” and she was right. It’s 24 hours later and I’m still feeling relaxed which is a miracle considering that in the interim I’ve driven 8 hours along the Big Sur coast and then Route 101 to get to Los Angeles!

It seemed as though every other car on Highway One was a Ford Mustang, so I was pleased in the end that Alamo didn’t have any left by the time I picked up my car (which I upgraded to an Infiniti QX70 with a sunroof, just for the hell of it). I’ve loved every minute of my time in California, even the rather tacky Holiday Inn last night and the nail-biting drive through dense traffic this morning in the hotel shuttle bus.

And now it’s time to move on. I’m writing this in the departure lounge at LAX waiting for my flight south for the next stop on my peregrination with Chris’s ashes: San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

It’s a lie of course

They might last a thousand years
but in the end, even the mighty Sequoias
unplug their roots and fall

Nothing lives for ever

When our borrowed time expires
we die – and thus repay the debt
that we incurred at birth

Except for love

Body and bark return to the soil
shape and substance disappear
all that’s left is love

And stories

Willow Creek, California
[10 June 2016]

8 June 2016

Several years ago, our friend Garth took Chris for a day out among the enormous Redwoods in Mendocino County, north of San Francisco. She loved them, of course. Today Garth and I retraced their journey looking for a suitable spot to receive some of her ashes.

We left the city early and stopped for breakfast in the community of Boonville before making our way to Hendy Woods State Park. By mid-morning, the sun had burned off the overhanging cloud and the sky was clear and bright blue. We parked the car and followed a footpath into the woods.

The giant trees gathered us into their thousand-year-old domain. The air was still and silent apart from the caw of a solitary raven. As we walked, we were both drawn to one particular dead tree. It’s vast bole lay straight and true, undisturbed since the day it had come away at the roots and crashed to the ground. Now it rested gracefully amongst its living companions, lightly covered in a shroud of fallen leaves, returning to the earth.

I clambered up onto the trunk and very slowly walked along its whole length, 89 paces, from top to bottom. I lay down on my back for a few minutes, supported by the tree, gazed up at the sky through the leaf canopy far above and thought of Chris and her passionate concern for the planet. Here, in the words of Wendell Berry’s poem The Peace of Wild Things she could truly rest in the grace of the world.

Garth and I explored the ground near the base of the tree and found a deep den-like hollow. At the far end, tucked right under the bole there was a hidden chamber lit by a single shaft of sunlight. It was obvious to us both that this was the place.

We crumbled some earth into my hat (the only container we had) and I mixed in several handfuls of the ashes I had brought with me. Then I tipped the contents gently into the sunlit chamber. We pinned a photograph of Chris near the entrance, decorated it with a sprig of leaves, and said farewell to our mighty, darling girl.

Yesterday afternoon, I spent a glorious couple of hours rummaging through the overstuffed shelves of San Francisco’s City Lights Bookstore. Founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1953, it was a favourite hangout for the Beat Generation of writers and poets. It’s still a pretty cool place.

I restricted myself to two slim volumes: a nice modern edition of Aristotle’s Poetics and The Palace of Books by French critic Roger Grenier. The former appealed to me because it goes back to the source of literature and the latter because the title seemed particularly apt in that setting. In hindsight, I realise that I should have bought a copy of Ginsberg’s Howl and regret that I didn’t.

Immediately across the street from City Lights is the equally famous Vesuvio Café. On the outside is a mural with the inscription: When the shadow of the grasshopper falls across the trail of the field mouse on green and slimey grass as a red sun rises above the western horizon silhouetting a gaunt and tautly muscled indian warrior perched with bow and arrow cocked and aimed straight at you, it’s time for another martini.

Who could resist?

Not me.

I went inside for a couple of beers while I sat at a table with my laptop open and imagined myself in the company of poets. This was the result of my labours (it’s not exactly Ginsberg but at least I won’t be prosecuted for obscenity, though I do mention the gods so I suppose a trial for blasphemy is always on the cards).

A blunt knife cuts as deep

No revelations, no grand words,
nothing but the daily task
of living in the void.

The keen edge of loss has dulled
to life-denying numbness:
the ache of absence.

Brute grief prefers a ragged blade,
a rusty dagger not a sword,
to do its dirty work.

A blunt knife cuts just as deep;
serrated, bloody wounds
that never seem to heal.

The gods, jealous of earthly love,
send a purblind butcher
to hack off their due.

They laugh, but they don’t know
how small a price this is
for loving you.

Saturday 4 June 2016

Tomorrow afternoon I fly to San Francisco on the next stage of my peregrination with Chris’s ashes. I’m really looking forward to it but I’m exhausted after two months non-stop work and can’t wait for the 10 hour flight when I can sleep, read, and rest undisturbed by emails and phone calls.

Each time I’ve returned some of Chris’s ashes to the earth (in Crete, Italy, and Africa) I’ve felt incredibly close to her and it has been profoundly nourishing. I hope this leg of the journey will help to heal the symptoms through which my body seeks to give voice to my grief.

Chris loved California and made many trips there for work and pleasure. I’ll be staying with friends in San Francisco and Sonoma and then making my way down the coast to Esalen, where she went with Kathy Skerrit to paint with their beloved teacher Leigh Hyams.

After that, I’ll go to San Miguel de Allende in Mexico to visit the house owned by Leigh’s daugher Gina Hyams, where we once spent a memorable month. Chris painted a dozen fabulous canvases and I wrote a substantial chunk of Coming Home to Story. It was an iconic experience of living, loving and creating alongside each other which inspired us for many years.

Then it’s on to New York and Long Island where Chris often swam in the fast-running waters off Southold with our friend Karen Karp and where we stayed on our unmarried honeymoon in 2002 and last visited together in 2010 after our Black Bear trip to Minnesota.

Please hold us in your thoughts from time to time over the next three weeks, as I say farewell to Chris the intrepid traveler, extraordinary friend, and fearlessly creative artist.

Last week, I was looking on Google for a picture of Kingscote Woods and when I clicked on this image, it took me straight to Chris’s website, where I discovered that she had uploaded it! She walked there year-round for the two decades she lived in the nearby village. Ted and I go there most days to stretch our legs and take in the sights and scents of this modest patch of Cotswold woodland.

He loves to run free, chase the pheasants, and snuffle in the undergrowth while I tramp along the footpath, remembering Chris and our shared delight in knowing the seasonal cycles of the wood so intimately.

Snowdrops, celandine, primrose, bluebells, wild garlic, dog-violet, and honeysuckle take it in turns to blossom among the ferns and mosses that carpet the ground on either side of the paths. Song birds call in the trees, squirrels play hide and seek, and badgers burrow beneath our feet.

In a quiet, understated way, the transience of life is very apparent here: flowers bloom and fade; new saplings reach for the light while old trees fall and rot; blackbirds and thrushes nest and fledge; a scattering of bones and fur marks the demise of some small creature. Life and death are intertwined, two sides of a single coin.

Novelist David Malouf writes beautifully about our inherent mortality in Ransom, in which he re-imagines the meeting between King Priam of Troy and Achilles, the Greek warrior who killed his son Hector. As in The Iliad, Priam enters the camp of his enemy to plead with Achilles for the return of Hector’s body. The old man is wise in his understanding of the world and eloquent in his grief:

We are mortals, not gods. We die. Death is in our nature. Without that fee paid in advance, the world does not come to us. That is the hard bargain that life makes with us – with all of us, every one – and the condition we share. And for that reason, if for no other, we should have pity for one another’s losses. For the sorrows that must come sooner or later to each one of us, in a world we enter only on mortal terms.

For every living creature, life demands a ransom.

Chris has paid hers. Mine is to come.

I think of her and smile.

As I gradually sort through what remains of Chris’s papers, I’m finding some hidden gems. This is one of a pair of red leather-bound notebooks that she bought in Switzerland. She gave one to me and kept one for herself. It is unmarked apart from one page on which she has pasted the lyrics to Peter Gabriel’s The Book of Love.

I treasure it because she arranged for some lines from the song to be inscribed on a piece of pottery that our friend Kathy Skerritt commissioned for us as a wedding gift. Kathy had asked us to let her have poetic messages to one another to decorate the bowl. I chose a line from a poem I’d written for Chris and she chose these words:

THE BOOK OF LOVE IS FULL OF FLOWERS AND HEART-SHAPED BOXES AND INSTRUCTIONS FOR DANCING AND THINGS WE’RE ALL TOO YOUNG TO KNOW. AND I LOVE IT WHEN YOU SING TO ME, AND YOU CAN SING ME ANYTHING.

When I first saw the words on the bowl, I thought they were beautiful but didn’t know where they had come from and didn’t think to ask. I knew that she didn’t mean them literally because my singing voice is very poor. It was a declaration of love and unconditional acceptance.

I was very moved by the words when we unwrapped the gift and I wept again when I found the words of the song in the notebook and saw how it ended.

AND I, I LOVE IT WHEN YOU GIVE ME THINGS. AND YOU, YOU OUGHT TO GIVE ME WEDDING RINGS. YOU OUGHT TO GIVE ME WEDDING RINGS.

The picture above shows part of a much larger artwork about 120cm tall and 22cm wide that Chris made. She loved working in mixed media, and integrating text into an image. The picture hangs beside the fire in the sitting room at Folly Cottage. I’ve always loved it and have decided that I will get it framed.

It’s inspired by a beautiful and enigmatic Emily Dickinson poem:

That Love is all there is,
Is all we know of Love;
It is enough, the freight should be
Proportioned to the groove.

We might ask what it means for the “freight” to be “proportioned to the groove.” The metaphor is resonant but the meaning isn’t clear; perhaps it was more obvious in the railway age in which Dickinson wrote, when freight was literally borne on tracks and grooves. Literary critics argue about how the lines should be interpreted but the poet certainly seems to imply that whatever love is, it’s a weighty matter.

Rather than explore the poem semantically, Chris made a picture and filled the “groove” with a collage of images: mosaic eyes; hands preparing food; a man holding a dog; some pendant jewellery; city lights; a copse of trees; a young woman; a hand holding syringes; several yurts; and some origami flowers.

Chris was always more interested in the aesthetic gesture of an image than its semiotic representation. If we had asked her why she chose those particular fragments to collage, she would probably have said that no significance was intended beyond the shape, colour, and form they contributed to the overall picture. Similarly, by including specific words in the picture, she located it in the world of the poem, but it’s the form of her script – flowing, weaving, repeating, melding, shifting – that really shows what it stands for.

Making the picture was both an artful exploration of Dickinson’s poem and an act of love in itself. Perhaps that’s why Chris loved the process of making art so much. It was what happened in the doing rather than the final product that fascinated her. One can imagine that it was much the same for Emily Dickinson, who wrote so many poems but published almost none of them in her own lifetime.

That Love is all there is,
Is all we know of Love;
It is enough, the freight should be
Proportioned to the groove.

Whatever else the poem means, it’s the love song of an artist.

Just like Chris’s picture.