Study

This pic inspired the character, Iniga

Study has bogged me down while writing Adriane; my next novel. Adriane is a complex adventure that begins in 1998 with a forty year old French woman of Basque background. She is unaware of the heroics of her father mother, and Godfather before, during,and after the Spanish Civil War. It is a historical novel but I am no historian. I admit that freely but I have been studying the Spanish Civil War... reading as much as I can beyond Wikipedia. Orwell, Hemingway,and Neruda excited my first inspiration for delving into the past. But before these writers I had created Alesandro out of the idea that some of these Maquisards of the Resistance would go to the hills after fascism was defeated everywhere else but Spain. And, because the Basque language and culture has remained cohesive in Southern France and Spain despite persecution by Franco, I just imagined that there would be an Alesandro. It turns out that there actually was in likes of el Quito and el Cara Quimada. These continued the struggle for Basque independence 'til they were killed in the sixties.

While I studied these I learned of the practice of taking the children of Resistance fighters and adopting them out to conservative families. This continued into the 90's and it gave a contemporary touch to some of the story. 

All of that and more has been a pleasure to explore but might take longerhas delayed the progress on the novel. I do hope to finish it by the New Year. I am no Michener so it might take longer.

A sample from the first chapter:

Adriane: The Chaos of Desire

Cold… chills… sweats: she’d left a window open a couple of hours before she’d passed out on top of the blankets wearing light cotton pajamas. Off to the side from the window, over the garage, a light cast a glow onto the lawn from the servant’s quarters. Other than that light, the house was as empty. She needed to talk with somebody and Alesandro was... well, Alesandro. He had been more than the chauffeur to the family: officially her God Father, a guardian angel, throughout her growing up and awkward teens. He was there when her father, Marcel Fournier, couldn’t be after the tragedy of her younger brother’s lingering death from AIDS. He had rescued her from Rémy, her older brother. It only seemed fitting that she should find comfort in the company of this single-most dependable man in her life now that Marcel was gone.

 “Alesandro… are you awake? It is me,” she tapped lightly at his door.

The door swung open, “Of course, Adriane, please… come in.”

Her eyes adjusted to the loom of the light of dawn’s sun rising above the hills from the window of his small but comfortable room. She preferred the side of the house facing west because she rarely crawled out of bed before noon but she saw the majesty of Alesandro’s choice that morning.

 “So, this is why you didn’t take the guest house when Papa offered it.” Her father had remodeled one of the maids’ quarters and added it to the small chauffeur’s quarters above the garage especially for Alesandro. The window faced the open expanse of the horse pasture and forested hills beyond.  From the window she saw his need for the sunrise, a small sitting room, and a smaller single bedroom.

Alesandro was the family chauffer, of his own volition: he insisted on having a job as a condition for staying on. The family knew he had been writing something of a confession; of his years in isolation, his near solitary campaign against Franco; of ranging over and back across the Pyrenees, of his lost companions at arms and his imprisonment at Carabanchel. This was his real job and, he’d said when he allowed her to see what he was writing, he told Adriane; “I’m no writer. I don’t care whether anyone reads it either.”

She knew better about his insistence that he wasn’t a writer. After all, since before 1936 and into the fifties, he’d sat at tables and drank wine with the greatest luminaries of his time: Malraux, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Camus, Hemmingway, Neruda, Dos Passos, and Orwell. From what she’d read of his work, she could see that it was profoundly spiritual, with sense of serious history that didn’t depart far from the natural poetry of Alesandro’s humility.

She looked around the room. Her picture was framed on the wall above his writing desk. It was taken when she was fourteen; an innocent image, naked in the surf, with arms stretched above adolescent breasts budding skyward. He’d snapped that picture in better days before the incident with Rémy. Next to it was a 2 ½ x 3 ½ Kodak Box picture of Alesandro with an arm over her father’s, shoulder from the days before Madrid fell. They cut dashing figures, standing in Basque berets… boyish grins… like they were going to bite-off Franco’s balls. Marcel’s eyes were raised to the lean, taller, hardened veteran, as though he were a fan standing next to a film star even though they were both eighteen. Alesandro’s demeanor in that picture reminded her of an image painted by Orwell in his memoir, Homage to Catalonia: “a face of a man who would commit murder for a friend…” and Alesandro would have killed for Marcel. The two were together in Barcelona and when Madrid fell in ‘38. Marcel was a novice, free-lance, journalist there. Whenever she asked him of those times his eyes would dart away as he would modestly say, “I was little more than a Civil War tourist.”

“You are always up before dawn, even when no one is here,” she stood by the window. Under the glass of Alesandro’s desk was another picture she hadn’t seen before. It was a wallet sized, black and yellowed white, fading, crumpled photo of a young woman with fierce eyes under a beret cocked jauntily to the side barely holding down a cascade of jet black curls. Her cupid-bow lips kissed the tip of an odd-shaped knife she held in front of her face, “Who is that woman, Alesandro? I’ve never seen her picture before.”

“I will tell you about Iniga someday.”

“Is she the mother of the boy you wrote of that was born in prison?”

“Yes, she was a fierce angel…, guard your heart.” his eyes darkened and he turned away.

Disregarding his change of mood she asked, “Then you were lovers?”

“No,”

As though the subject was a secret he’d promised to keep, he motioned her to sit. She could see he was purposely evading the topic altogether as he moved some of his papers and books off the chair at his desk, “How are you doing, Moineau?”

 “Oh, I don’t know…” she blushed. Moineau, meaning little sparrow, was his name of endearment for her, “things are so strange. Rémy tried to take charge of everything. Mama was content to let him run all our affairs at first… what have I to do?”

“And this is not okay with you?”

“I can’t complain… I’m hardly ever here anyway. Rémy can handle all the lawyers and banks… the estate. I counted on being here for Mama, and that’s all. But Rémy swooped in like a hawk and scooped her up before I could do anything.”

“Yes, I’d heard you were back for a few days.”

“Just a few… to pay my respects,” She caught herself tearing up.

“You could have come for the funeral, perhaps?”

Anger replaced grief with this reminder, “Funeral services are nauseous for me.” It was a sore subject.

The bile always arose in her throat, if reminded of how the village congregation wouldn’t allow Eder to be interred on church grounds. Those memories had not faded in the least: of the fucking village assholes, so afraid of queers and AIDS; of Papa sitting with her in the priest’s office while Papa pled. Marcel Fournier, the powerful banker and financier and gracious donor to the very church whose office he was begging in, pleading in vain… that’s what brought up the taste… the bitterness of bile, from her gut. Standing before the mahogany desk, the priest cowered behind, she’d let the dogs out; “What are you afraid of Christian? That the dead will be… your good Christian corpses buried there…. will be recruited or infected by this queer?” She’d stormed out of the office, tearing past a secretary carrying a stack of files… pages fluttering to the tiles like fallen angels: it was the day she left the God Damned Church for good.

Alesandro had good instincts: he read her feelings, “You know, you are Basque. We always follow the church… with a candle or a club.”

Adriane laughed. It felt good to laugh with Alesandro. His quips relieved her angst.

“Understood, so, what is it you plan to do now?” he held both her hands. It was a comfortable gesture and a fatherly one she longed for now that Papa was gone. She loved her father… how badly could have she disappointed him. And then there was Eder. They had rebelled so thoroughly from father’s influence, yet his love was unflagging. It was as though Alesandro was an angel standing in on father’s behalf. Eder too was like a son to Alesandro. He was named after Alesandro’s father.

A Morningstar East Memoir

As I wrote my first novel: A Time Ago and Then; found at, https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/80267, I used a part of that fictional story based on my actual experience at the Morningstar East commune north of Taos. Risingstar was a thinly veiled name but I felt that the time I spent on the high chaparral above Arroyo Hondo was so magical it warranted it own telling. I contacted one of the original members of Morningstar East and West, Pam Hanna who helped me to fill in some of the glitches in my memory. This short memoir of 17,700 words is my best recollection of those people and this powerful vortex of my life that is Taos New Mexico:https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/368088.

Born Dropped Out: 12 Questions For Hippie Kids - A Documentary

Chapter Two: On to the Mesa

We awoke with sunrise and headed eleven miles north to Arroyo Hondo. Maggie knew the history of the town and how the Mexican and native rebellion shed blood in this little town a hundred years before: how mountain-men… so-called heroes like Kit Carson and others were part of battles in Arroyo Hondo and Taos: how the rebel leaders, Mexicans and natives from the local tribes, were all hanged after the army defeated them. She briefly told us about it all as the Volkswagen passed the general store, church and homes on the only street that headed towards a series of mesas stretching out like fingers from the mountains beyond the town. A dirt road led us up a winding path that held to the sides of an arroyo; switching from one side to the other; passing a geodesic dome and climbing up a series of S-curves to the top where a parking lot with a few vehicles sat incongruously. This was as far on the mesa as any motor vehicles were allowed.

At the parking lot was a fire pit where a few scrubby looking men sat passing a jug of wine. One of the fireside fellows hit us up for spare change towards another jug. I had a few quarters and dimes on me and gave them a couple. I took a hit off the jug but I can’t remember much other than what some of these guys looked like: no names come to mind. Maggie led us across the field to a newly constructed pueblo.

The buildings were arranged in a triangle and each held three or four living spaces. We went to the first that was occupied by a couple named Joe and Kathie. Joe was a trimly built native with long black braids and Kathie was a petite reddish-blond haired woman with bright blue green eyes. They knew Maggie and greeted us warmly. After a few friendly minutes Joe showed us the Kiva; a circular hogan building with adobe bricks a couple feet up from the ground around a pit with two tiers stepping up from the floor. A fifty-gallon drum burned wood to heat it. Though there were portholes of light from windows made of wine bottles set into the adobe, it was dark and only shadows of people could be seen until my eyes adjusted to it. This was where visitors or transients were able to have shelter temporarily as a kiva is traditionally a ceremonial communal meeting place and not meant to be used as a dwelling.

I put my gear down and, after getting to know some of the folks, I climbed out the hole in the center of the roof on a pole with steps carved into it for a ladder. I could see that the pole wasn’t a support for the timbers that radiated over the space below. The ends of timbers around the hole we climbed out of were notched; one was placed on top of the other so that the simplicity and strength of it was contributed to via their mutual support. I had never seen anything like it. To me it symbolized what communal living there would be all about. I was anxious to see how true this was.Then I was told by Jason how they had all worked together to put those timbers in place; standing under them in faith that they wouldn’t be crushed if it failed as each let go of their end… what a wonder!

My travelling partner, Norm, said he was going to keep going with Maggie and I understood. We’d had some adventures together and I had grown fond of him but I was glad he’d found a companion in Maggie. The Volkswagen left down the grade and that was the last I’d seen of either of them. So there I was, alone and on the plateau of another adventure that would positively affect my outlook on life from that day on. I've gone through my life in awe of the few moments decisions are made… most serendipitously… that are imprinted for a lifetime. 

A Morningstar Romance

Introduction

My time at Morningstar East in New Mexico was as well-spent as it was a short and powerful one. I was young, in my early twenties, and so were the others on the mesa. I don’t recall anyone there over thirty but there might have been. The prism of time distorts the memory but I was trying to sort out the memory of that period when I was writing the novel, A Time Ago and Then. As I wrote I became curious about the people and the place that was so crucial to my spiritual evolution. The vision I have retained and the compassion of that remarkable group of young people, whose creative vision put together such a remarkably courageous attempt at an altruistic and free-form communal living, is still with me today even though I have moved on.

     I didn’t even consider going to the internet when I wrote this novel as a fiction. I was recalling that experience as I’d seen it without any outside input. I have no regrets about that because most of what I had written was true with only a few adventures exaggerated in the interest of telling a story over a factual exposition. After I had written it, piqued by curiosity, I searched for pictures on the internet of the adobe pueblo and fantastic kiva to no avail. I wanted so badly to refresh my memory of the buildings these people had put together and to see pictures of the people that I had once been so fond of. I assumed, because I am getting older, that some of these people were getting on in years too; my chance of making contact with any of them was getting shorter as time takes its toll. I hoped a picture, or a name mentioned, would refresh my memory and that I might recognize someone I knew from those days so very long ago.

     I did find a website, the Morningstar Scrapbook, which had much of the history of the commune’s battles with Sonoma County and some of the people who’d founded Morningstar East in Taos New Mexico. After leaving a comment on Ramon’s site (one of Morningstar West’s original members), he passed it on to Pam Hanna because I’d mentioned the amazing roof of the pueblo’s kiva. Pam was the mate of Larry Read who’d come up with the design and made it happen. It was she who contacted me via e-mail correspondence. I let Pam know that my fictionalized, albeit thinly veiled, version of Risingstar was based on my experience at Morningstar.  But, that since it (A Time Ago and Then; published as an E-book at Smashwords.com.), is fiction, some of it, while truthful, was not factual. Pam expressed to me that her reticence about fictionalized versions of Morningstar was caused by T.C. Boyle’s use of “narrative skill to malign, characterize & misrepresent us”. I am happy to have her blessing and this inspires me further to call this memoir a Morningstar Romance. It will have insights about the place and the people I met on that plateau of my own experience in Taos. I hope to be as honest and clear about my own experience there and little more. 

Chapter 1:

The Adventure

I had just gotten out of the US Navy in the fall of 1969 and wanted badly to rejoin the San Francisco scene that I had left four years before. My experience in the Navy was mild compared to those who’d been sent to the front in Viet Nam but it was four years of a moral compromise on my part nonetheless. My first psychedelic “trip” had been taken while attached to the Medical Holding Company on Ford Island in Pearl Harbor while recovering from surgery on three crushed vertebrae. It was on the beach in Waikiki that I had gone through a powerful eye-opening spiritual transformation. Every lie I had ever told…lived… or otherwise convinced myself of, was revealed in stark detail. This was not a disturbing revelation because, after ceding to this spiritual void I had been living in, I was able to transcend guilt and shame to actually see a harmony and sense to it all… whatever “it all” was. It was one of those mountain-top experiences that so many people had undergone via the vehicle of LSD, peyote or psilocybin. I saw my alcoholism as a silly obsession… a diversion… a clouding… that kept me from living fully in the light of what I understood to be God… the creative energy… the Heart of Compassion… that was The Reality. It was like being able to see music… every note of an orchestra in the rhythms and harmony… colors and forms… patterns really… than it was a vision of God. But I saw God in “it all”.

     Having had that mountain-top experience, I hungered to find people to share it with. After I was discharged, I hung out in North Beach selling underground rags (the Berkeley Barb, Good Times, Berkeley Tribe and so on) at the hub of Columbus, Grant and Broadway, down the street in front of the topless bars. It gave me enough money to eat and enough contact with others, but the scene in San Francisco was going to the dogs: street dogs, runaways, heroine addicts, speed freaks, and those who preyed on them. The psychedelic revolution I’d hoped to become a part of had moved elsewhere and I had almost given up that hope when the Rolling Stones came to Altamont Speedway. That gathering turned out to be a fiasco almost directly opposite of Woodstock, even though it was touted as Woodstock West by the “underground” press. I saw the whole thing through the lens of LSD and it was not anything I wanted to have anything to do with. I stayed on there with a rag-tag group that had been foraging for whatever was left in the field… at first it was sandwiches and pot… later we were the clean-up crew and lived in the race-track tower. My experience there is covered with detail in A Time Ago and Then and I see no purpose in describing again those ugly details of that eye-opener here.

     I left there for Hollywood to see what that scene was about but it was decaying faster than San Francisco. It was depressing and, when word got out that there was a Free Land movement in Taos New Mexico, my road-dog buddy, Norman, and I put our thumbs-out. I was introduced to the magic of New Mexico on a ride that picked us up at a corner in Las Cruses we stood at for hours. A woman in her forties (which was an ancient age to us then) told us of the mystery and power of the landscape. She had been a Black-Jack dealer in Vegas who one day packed up and moved to Questa. She was familiar with the communes in Taos and encouraged us to find one we liked and explained the history and philosophy of each that she knew of.

I wish I could remember that wonder woman’s name; I think it was Maggie, but time has clouded the old muscle between my ears. I do remember being dazzled by her spiritual awareness as she drove that Volkswagen bus, weaving back and forth over the center line, gesturing with abandon and shouting over the rattle of the engine so affectionately, the sights and history we passed through.

We came to Taos where she had friends that were mostly musicians. I have no idea where it was or whose house it belonged to but we sat and talked, played music into the night as a pipe was passed around to the light of a small kerosene lantern common everywhere. There was no electricity and a sort of flatbread chapatti was, almost universally, cooked on the top of a fifty-gallon drum made into a wood-burning stove. Those drums too would be common everywhere.

One of these folks explained that New Buffalo and Morningstar were the closest and most open communes. However, New Buffalo, being the first commune in the region, was pretty much full-up and harder to get into. It was explained that Morningstar and the Reality Construction Company were on the same property owned by Michael Duncan and close by. Of the two, Morningstar was friendliest to newcomers and allowed anyone to join… if join is the right word… it was more like welcomed in. There was no visible leadership and the only rule was Love. It sounded like the kind of place I needed to air out in because I had enough of authority in the Navy… and seen street corner gurus of wild enthusiasm and conviction, cultish Christian preachers, and manipulators of every sort in Hollywood. The whole bit about Charlie Manson had gone down already by then and the wild chaos and disappointment at Altamont had sucked my soul dry of what little hope I still desperately held on to. I had to check it out. It sounded like the vision I had for the future on the beach in Waikiki. I wasn't at all sure but, if there was hope, perhaps I might find it at Morningstar.