“Once I traveled far above the earth. This beloved planet we call home was covered with an elastic web of light. I watched in awe as it shimmered, stretched, dimmed, and shined, shaped by the collective effort of all life within it. Dissonance attracted more dissonance. Harmony attracted harmony. I saw revolutions, droughts, famines, and the births of new nations. The most humble kindnesses made the brightest lights. Nothing was wasted.” ~ Joy Harjo
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“The child in each of us / Knows paradise. / Paradise is home. / Home as it was / Or home as it should have been. // Paradise is one’s own place, / One’s own people, / One’s own world, / Knowing and known, / Perhaps even / Loving and loved. // Yet every child / Is cast from paradise— / Into growth and destruction, / Into solitude and new community, / Into vast, ongoing / Change.” *— Parable of the Talents (Octavia E. Butler)*
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Sending love near and far to all suffering from the effects of wars past and present.
Recently, a friend mentioned that she had found an unusual book on the "free" table of the apartment complex where she lives. The book turned out to be Grapefruit, Yoko Ono's square yellow book of instructions and drawings first published in 1964, before she met John Lennon. I remembered looking at the book 50 years ago and expressed that I knew of the book and hoped she would enjoy reading it. My friend has written poetry since childhood, and the book caught her attention because she saw Yoko's instructions as poems of a memorable nature. She was born too late to experience the Beatles firsthand. I'm not sure how much she knew about Yoko Ono when she picked up the book.
Last Sunday in a socially distanced masked visit with my friend, she brought it out and asked if I would like to borrow it. (Given my growing awareness of the alarming surge in COVID-19 cases in our county since my visit with her, I have decided to refrain from any more socializing during the next few months.)
It may have been in a bookstore in Santa Cruz in 1970 that I eagerly looked through Grapefruit, Yoko Ono's small book of instructions and drawings, for the first and only other time. The book had evolved from her 1964 limited edition version (500 copies), with an added introduction by John Lennon and new instructions including pieces such as "SKY EVENT for John Lennon," which ended with:
"Do not talk loud or make noise, as you may scare the sky"
and was followed by:
"SKY event II
(IMAGINARY SKY EVENT - refer to SKY EVENT for John LENNON)
Do the sky event in your mind
THEN go out into the street and take photos to document the event
If the sky event in your mind takes place in another city,
ask a friend in that city to take photos for you."
My recollection is that I was delighted by some of the instructions and disturbed, dismayed, even horrified by others. I didn't buy the book and blocked out the instructions that upset me. Reading the book in its entirety this week, I remembered some of the instructions as if I had read them yesterday, some even more delightful, some even more upsetting ("ON RAPE"). The following set of instructions intrigued me, but I had only a vague recollection of ever reading them before. In 1970, of course, I didn't have Google Translate and would have puzzled over the German word, only able to guess what it might mean in the context of the instructions.
CARD PIECE I
Walk to the center of your Weltinnenraum.
Leave a card.
CARD PIECE II
Cut a hole in the center of your
Weltinnenraum.
Exchange.
CARD PIECE III
Shuffle your Weltinnenraums.
Hand one to a person on the street.
Ask him to forget about it.
1964 spring
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Google Translate:
Weltinnenraum: Diesen Raum der Erfahrung, der sich in der Präsenz ereignet auch zwischen Mensch und Welt nennt der Dichter Rainer Maria Rilke Weltinnenraum
Weltinnenraum: The poet Rainer Maria Rilke calls this space of experience, which also occurs in presence between man and world
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The photo at the top of this post caught my attention because, coincidentally, I had made similar marks on one of my recently completed mandalas.
The marks were based on a drawing in India ink that I made in 1967 or 1968 during my freshman year at UC Irvine. I titled it "God." The drawing was made on an 8-1/2 x 11-inch piece of paper and was a single line that went up and down in small varied increments across the center of most of the page, which I had placed horizontally. I had not thought of the drawing for years but when it came to mind, I decided to incorporate the idea into the mandala I was working on this week. A college acquaintance had expressed that she loved my "God" drawing, and so I gave it to her all those years ago.
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I've continued thinking about the concept of Weltinnenraum. George Harrison's song, "Anyroad," came to mind early on:
I keep traveling around the bend There was no beginning, there is no end It wasn't born and never dies There are no edges, there is no size Oh yeah, you just don't win It's so far out - the way out is in (am's italics) Bow to God and call him Sir But if you don't know where you're going Any road will take you there
I'm almost finished working on Mandala #54. Maybe I'll finish it today. Maybe there will be a 2021 calendar with 12 mandalas after all. These mandalas may well be Weltinnenraums. Thank you, Sabine and Robin and Ellen, for your encouraging comments.
For some reason, in the context of "weltinnenraum" that poem came to mind. During my early years of counseling for PTSD, a Gestalt counselor I worked with for several years quoted this to me, changing Rilke's "man" to "woman":
Winning does not tempt that woman. This is how she grows: by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings.
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If I understand the word correctly, I sense that COVID winter is opening up weltinnenraum.
"... One single space pervades all beings here: an inner world-space. Silently, the birds fly through us still. Oh, I who want to grow, can gaze outside: a tree will rise inside me ..."
God is a concept By which we measure Our pain I'll say it again God is a concept By which we measure Our pain
I don't believe in magic I don't believe in I-Ching I don't believe in Bible I don't believe in tarot I don't believe in Hitler I don't believe in Jesus I don't believe in Kennedy I don't believe in Buddha I don't believe in mantra I don't believe in Gita I don't believe in yoga I don't believe in kings I don't believe in Elvis I don't believe in Zimmerman I don't believe in Beatles I just believe in me Yoko and me And that's reality
The dream is over What can I say? The dream is over Yesterday I was the dream weaver But now I'm reborn I was the Walrus But now I'm John And so dear friends You just have to carry on The dream is over
"... I'd like to live to ripe old age with Yoko only, and I'm not afraid of dying. I don't know how it feels at the moment, but I'm prepared for death because I don't believe in it. I believe it's just getting out of one car and getting into another ..." (John Lennon, 1980)
"... if there is a God, we're all it ..." (John Lennon)
"... I'd like to live to ripe old age with Yoko only, and I'm not afraid of dying. I don't know how it feels at the moment, but I'm prepared for death because I don't believe in it. I believe it's just getting out of one car and getting into another ..." (John Lennon, 1980)
Believe it or not, after I published this post and then turned to the tiny bundle of cards that sits next to my laptop and has quotes from around the world -- quotes that I read on most days -- the card that was uncovered for today had these words from Chief Seattle on the subject of death:
"There is no death, only a change of worlds."
Then I discovered that Chief Seattle also said in the same speech:
"... Your time of decay may be distant, but it will surely come, for even the White Man whose God walked and talked with him as friend to friend, cannot be exempt from the common destiny. We may be brothers after all. We will see ..."
It was startling to learn that the experience of reading Gone With The Wind in the Warsaw Ghetto gave hope to Jewish children who could not have known from reading that book that the lives of African American people during the American Civil War were much more complicated than that book portrayed and who certainly would have empathized.
The picture is complex.
With a little bit of Googling, I found another Jewish perspective, the perspective of a white woman on re-reading the book as an adult, a perspective from the Irish Times, and an African American perspective. As far as I know, the world of Gone With The Wind contains absolutely no mention of Indigenous people or any of the formerly invisible people of the U.S.A, non-white and white, who now have voices. It is a work of fiction, of course, written from the perspective of a white woman from the American South, presenting a strong and ambitious fictional woman, Scarlet O'Hara.
Helen Fagin's story is moving in that it does show that a dream world, with all its limitations, had something to bring to young and vulnerable Jewish children.
From Helen Fagin's story from Warsaw Ghetto times:
"... I had spent the previous night readingGone with the Wind— one of a few smuggled books circulated among trustworthy people via an underground channel, on their word of honor to read only at night, in secret. No one was allowed to keep a book longer than one night — that way, if reported, the book would have already changed hands by the time the searchers came.
I had readGone with the Windfrom dusk until dawn and it still illuminated my own dream-world, so I invited these young dreamers to join me. As I “told” them the book, they shared the loves and trials of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara, of Ashley and Melanie Wilkes. For that magical hour, we had escaped into a world not of murder but of manners and hospitality (am's note: It confounds my heart that a work of fiction could erase so much and thus create a dream world that gave respite and "new vitality" in another terrible time). All the children’s faces had grown animated with new vitality.
A knock at the door shattered our shared dream-world. As the class silently exited, a pale green-eyed girl turned to me with a tearful smile: “Thank you so very much for this journey into another world. Could we please do it again, soon?” I promised we would, although I doubted we’d have many more chances. She put her arms around me and I whispered, “So long, Scarlett.” “I think I’d rather be Melanie,” she answered, “although Scarlett must have been so much more beautiful!”
As events in the ghetto took their course, most of my fellow dreamers fell victim to the Nazis. Of the twenty-two pupils in my secret school, only four survived the Holocaust.
The pale green-eyed girl was one of them.
Many years later, I was finally able to locate her and we met in New York. One of my life’s greatest rewards will remain the memory of our meeting, when she introduced me to her husband as “the source of my hopes and my dreams in times of total deprivation and dehumanization.”
There are times when dreams sustain us more than facts. To read a book and surrender to a story is to keep our very humanity alive.
I keep thinking about the complexity of perspectives that converged at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on January 19, 2019, and the innumerable perspectives of those throughout the world who witnessed those events due to the power of cell phones.
I am reminded that there is a book that no one can write -- a book that shows the world from all points of view.
Suddenly I hear Bob Dylan singing:
And she winds back the clock and she turns back the page
Of a book that no one can write
Oh, where are you tonight?
The truth was obscure, too profound and too pure
To live it you have to explode
In that last hour of need, we entirely agreed
Sacrifice was the code of the road (lyrics from "Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat), 1978)
Interesting that whoever posted that Bob Dylan song used images of Edgar Bergen (Scandinavian) and Charlie McCarthy (based on an Irish newspaper boy) from the 1950s to accompany it.
Speaking of dreams:
Coincidentally, this began playing directly after the song above:
"... You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one ..." (John Lennon and Yoko Ono, lyrics from "Imagine.")
How can I be useful, of what service can I be? There is something inside me, what can it be? -- Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890)
Welcome to "37TH DREAM (RUMORS OF PEACE)".
The photograph currently at the top of my blog was taken from my porch before sunrise on October 29, 2023.
"OLD GIRL OF THE NORTH COUNTRY" (the earliest name for my blog -- http://oldgirlfromthenorthcountry.blogspot.com
) came to life in early December of 2006 so that I could post a 42-year retrospective of my paintings and drawings and through that action, create a new relationship with the day the man I loved returned from Vietnam in December 1970. For a while (sometime after spring of 2008, which is when he died) my blog was "TALKING 37TH DREAM WITH RAINBOW (RUMORS OF PEACE)". For a number of years, it's been "TALKING 37TH DREAM (RUMORS OF PEACE)." As of April 12, 2017 my blog was titled "37TH DREAM / TALKING 37TH DREAM (RUMORS OF PEACE/LOOKING UP)". Somewhere along the way it became 37TH DREAM (RUMORS OF PEACE).
To begin viewing the retrospective with narrative, scroll down to December 8, 2006, on this page:
I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. -- Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)
All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware. -- Martin Buber (1878-1965)
It is only a little planet, but how beautiful it is.
-- Robinson Jeffers
The true end of a war is the rebirth of life; the right to die peacefully in your own bed. The true end of war is the end of fear; the true end of war is the return of laughter.
-- Alfred Molano
Enjoy every sandwich -- Warren Zevon (1947-2003)
Not in God's wilds will you ever hear the sad moan, "All is vanity." No, we are paid a thousand times for all our toil, and after a single day spent outdoors in their atmosphere of strength and beauty, one could still say, should death come — even without any hope of another life — "Thank you for this most glorious gift!" and pass on.
-- John Muir (1838-1914)
Philip Henslowe: Mr. Fennyman, allow me to explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. Hugh Fennyman: So what do we do? Philip Henslowe: Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well. Hugh Fennyman: How? Philip Henslowe: I don't know. It's a mystery.
