Guest post by Nathalie Bléser, part two in a series of 5
So let’s build the set. It’s Monday evening. Tonight the veil between worlds, between vivitos y muertitos (the living and the dead), is the thinnest. Magic already happens in the number of writers around the table: only three women have gathered in Jennifer’s casita for a “spooky session” of Monday Writers. You do remember that Mon-day comes from Moon-Day, right? Right… A perfect day for a women’s rite: honoring their right to write. We still needed a fourth woman to complete the symbolic representation of the moon cycles, and that night a ghost came tiptoeing in our writing prompts. As for the living, Jessica had told me about those writing sessions, and I am grateful for the opportunity I was given to attend with her.
Jennifer, our host, kindly welcomed me in her circle, and over the weeks she built my confidence in my capacity of becoming a writer in English too, although el inglés only occupies the third spot on the “podium” of the languages I speak. This may sound like a paradox, but an important thing Jennifer did for me was to encourage my tendency to let French and Spanish shoots sprout on my English stem while learning the delicate art of literary husbandry. I’ve always wondered why it’s called that way, by the way. Is wifery a thing too? The first time Jennifer and I met was at the Taos Summer Writer’s Conference, four years before the “spooky session”. Appointed the official reporter of the event, Jennifer immortalized the participants’ impressions through her videography. She interviewed us under the black and white gaze of D.H. Lawrence’s cardboard cut-out at the Sagebrush Inn; or at Lawrence’s Kiowa Ranch near Taos, where D.H.L. wrote The Plumed Serpent; or on the porch of Mabel Dodge Luhan’s house, close to the Rainbow Room. I see in its colored-latilla ceiling the giant bone breastplate of a flying shaman…
Maybe this Plume, where women writers share literary musings, was born from a feather escaped from the pages of Lorenzo’s dive into Mexican mythology… Did you know that this nickname given by his wife Frieda, a translation of Lawrence’s last name, is also the nickname of the Sun in Spain? On the Aztec calendar, my date of birth corresponds with that of Tonatiuh, the Fifth Sun, who bluntly sticks out his flint stone tongue to the world. Maybe the ghost of Lorenzo spoke to the seven-year-old that I was during the summer of 1978 in Vence, France, minutes away from where he died. I believe children are much more gifted than adults at listening to the whispers of the universe. They know how to take on the energies of spirits roaming in the cosmic awareness that vibrates when our Doors of Perception are left ajar. Vence conjures up memories of a delightful summer spent writing poetry, making pottery, painting and playing parts in the open-air theater of Célestin Freinet’s school. The noted French pedagogue had built his revolutionary school four years after Aldous Huxley bade farewell to Lawrence. However, Huxley went back to Vence at least two times in the fifties, to attend conferences on philosophy and parapsychology, and my mind’s eye plays the silent movie of an encounter between Aldous and Célestin. After all, the author of some of the best-known dystopian and utopian novels was the son of two schoolmasters, and he and Freinet shared their interest for the same philosophers… I have a feeling that, in that Freinet school, I may have broken into a different realm in time, where Aldous and Célestin rethought the world, just like David Herbert and Aldous Leonard had rethought it once in Taos, where I first met Jennifer.
After this time loop, I am back to Jennifer’s casita, where we celebrate a special Día de los Muertos session of the Monday Writers. The three attendees have dressed accordingly. Our host wears black kitty ears to honor witches’ favorite pets, guardians of night secrets. I wear my twin-wolves black and white leggings, a hint at the Cherokee story about the “bad wolf” and the “good wolf” fighting inside each of us: the one that wins is the one we feed. They remind me of my favorite multilingual etymology of [La Virgen de] Guadalupe: Oued al Lupi, ‘the river of wolves’, in a mix of Arabic and Latin. Jessica wears a calaca T-shirt whose colored skull on a dark background looks somehow angry, because despite the flowery fashion of Day of the Dead, if one descends to the Mictlán or Death Kingdom to face oneself in the black smoking mirror of eternity, it is not always a rose garden party.
Apart from our clothing styles and accessories, everything in Jennifer’s space invites us to dive into Mystery. A black widow has woven a delicate web in the upper corner of the kitchen window. The Arachnid Penelope is the perfect company for writers, since Grandmother Spider is the first storyteller of many Native stories. Resting in the sink, a cross-armed Mr. Spock stares at me from a mug swimming in a saucepan where a soaked pink sponge is basking. The cleaning item and Jennifer’s kitty ears remind me of the “pink pussy hat movement”. As though reading my thought as I lean on the sink, the sponge makes a slight move in its saucepan bathtub, sending a pink wave on Spock’s hands to invite him to do the Vulcan salute once again. Leonard Nimoy had chosen that particular Vulcan “salutation” out of a remembrance from his childhood times in a synagogue where he witnessed the call of the Shekinah or Female Aspect of God.
The hand sign represents the Hebrew letter ‘shin’, as in Shekinah; it also stands for Shaddai (the All Mighty) or Shalom (Peace). The shape drawn by all fingers but the thumb evokes a “V” as in Vulcan -Spock’s planet- or as in Victory, Vision and Vagina… I have this strange feeling that I am being asked, right here, right now, to cleanse something related to the feminine, but all is still Very V as in Vague! Back in the living room where I sit at the Halloween Writing Table, the romantic vintage mirror in front of me seems to come to life. Is Tezcatlipoca playing tricks on me? For a split second, the looking glass shows the open-air amphitheater where I played in Freinet’s school. But its surroundings take on an eerily cold bluish hue where the “Guardian of Forever” appears. I am facing the time portal from a Star Trek episode, through which Spock and Kirk once hopped to fix a timeline disruption which had disintegrated their space ship into nothingness. As I remember another episode in which Spock had to fix a new time line anomaly to prevent his own demise as a child, the invisible cat tail of Jennifer’s outfit ropes me back into the here and now, where the writing session is about to start. A quick look on my left reveals the inspiring presence of a magical typewriter, maybe as old as the one Dorothy Brett left in her Taos cabin where she would type Lawrence’s manuscripts.
(to be continued)