So Long, Marianne

by Kari Hesthamar

in the truth of time

  in the truth of flesh

  I saw you with a child

  you brought me to his perfume

  and his visions

  without demand of blood

  On so many wooden tables

  adorned with food and candles

  a thousand sacraments

  which you carried in your basket

  I visited my clay

  I visited my birth

  and you guarded my back

  as I became small

  and frightened enough

  to be born again

  I wanted you for your beauty

  and you gave me more than yourself

  you shared your beauty

  this I only learned tonight

  as I recall the mirrors

  you walked away from

  after you had given them

  whatever they claimed

  for my initiation

  Now I am a shadow

  I long for the boundaries

  of my wandering

  and I move

  with the energy of your prayer

  for you are kneeling

  like a bouquet

  in a cave of a bone

  behind my forehead

  and I move toward a love

  you have dreamed for me88

  Marianne read this by chance many years later.

  AUSTIN DELANY

  Marianne had never fully reconciled herself to Axel’s abandon­ment while she was at her most vulnerable, caring for a newborn baby. Nonetheless, she bore within her the positive aspects of Axel. She had learned something about how great, and how petty, life could be. She had let love determine the course of her life and had gained an understanding of love that she carried into her relationship with Leonard. John Starr Cooke had once written to her that “to fall in love” was an awful expression in the English language. He thought that it should be to “rest” in love or to “lean onto” love. John believed that people have a fundamental fear of falling and being without support, and he couldn’t comprehend why people were dead set on falling in love.

  Slowly, weightlessly, the relationship between Marianne and Leonard collapsed, like ashes falling to the ground. There were no confrontations, few discussions. The periods of separation grew longer and longer, the distance between them lengthened. Both were striving to find their ways of living, Marianne with her child, Leonard with his writing and music.

  As her relationship with Leonard languished, she felt the urge to confide in Axel. Axel lived an unconventional life himself, and she knew he would be open to her thoughts. Maybe he could offer her advice, as he had continually done when they’d been together. Axel had left Lena and the children in Fredriskstad and moved into a fisherman’s shack on the coast of Helgeland, on the western coast of Norway, to write. Marianne and Axel, licking their wounds, exchanged letters from the northern and southern ends of Europe.

  It’s painful to read that you and Leonard aren’t making it together, and I don’t know what to say, I don’t know your relationship, know only that I have sprung a leak with Lena, and the ship is listing badly, maybe it will sink, and the captain is standing on the bridge and saluting. Around me the night is blue, everything is still, a bird screeches now and then, or is it a song? I am alone here and am working on Lem, the second volume of Epp, as I’m sure I’ve told you. I think it’s going fairly well, well, we’ll see. Now the birds are singing, yes, it must be a song, so much of the night has passed that it’s sliding toward day now. I live in a little shack, two rooms, cook for myself, when the water boils in the pot, my brain is often also boiling …

  Yesterday I plucked bluebells and daisies. The bluebells are standing in water on the writing table, they tremble when I type on the machine. What else? Small fishing vessels in the harbour, islets and skerries, cloudberries in the bog, tarns, woods, I could buy a cheap farm here, many acres of land, a little harbour with boat sheds, big house, barn, I could be a seaside farmer and be self-sufficient here for ten or fifteen thousand kroner, I’m thinking of it. Farmer and fisherman in the summertime and bookman during the dark winter, why not? …

  Dear Marianne, live well. Say hello to Little Axel, and give Leonard my regards. I don’t know what you should do. Send me a few lines when you feel like it, it would make me happy. The address is: Axel Jensen, Kirkøy, Vega, Norway.

  Think of me when you bathe in Hydrawater.

  Axel89

  Axel couldn’t provide Marianne with any answers. On Hydra she delved into Jung’s dream interpretations, which Axel had introduced her to as long ago as 1955. Jung had employed the Chinese divination book I Ching (Book of Changes) as a tool for self-discovery, and Leonard and Axel — both of whom had been preoccupied with the volume long before they came to Greece — used to discuss it when Marianne was still married to Axel. Marianne’s worn copy, which had a foreword by Jung, was heavily marked up with handwritten annotations. Rooted in ancient Chinese philosophy, the three-thousand-year-old work presents the meanings of sixty-four hexagrams, each of which stands for a life situation. To determine their hexagrams, Marianne, Axel and Leonard tossed three special coins into the air and let them land on the table. The two sides of the coins had different values, and when they had been cast six times the six lines of the hexagram were drawn. It was then a matter of deciphering the book’s explanation for that figure and extracting the answers they were looking for. The expatriates on Hydra dipped into diverse esoteric pursuits, sometimes using them to find solutions when they wound up in thorny situations, often because of infidelity.

  One day a man by the name of Austin Delaney arrived on Hydra bearing a suitcase full of toys. Delaney had saved his earnings as a doorman and bartender so he could train as a psychoanalyst at the Jung Institute in Switzerland. Before coming to Greece he had practised in India, where he’d observed how children reveal their internal troubles through their play. Marianne had recently had an intense dream in which she stood in a field, newly ploughed with deep furrows. She wore a faded orange shirt that belonged to Leonard. Looking down, she saw her penis falling to the ground and awoke with a start. The field had been one she had known in Larkollen; she’d earned pocket money there during the summer, picking cucumbers. Unable to get the dream out of her thoughts, she told Delaney that she wanted to go into therapy with him. He took her on immediately.

  Delaney had made a sandbox in the house he rented; around the frame of the box lay dolls, tin soldiers, matchboxes, candlesticks and a variety of other playthings and objects from his suitcase. He instructed Marianne that she could do whatever she liked in the sandbox. Marianne was at a loss. In the end she made a little altar in the sand, where she buried her ring and lit a candle. Austin said nothing and Marianne went home.

  When she came back for the next session, she admitted that she hadn’t been honest: what she’d really wanted to do was to pee in Delaney’s sandbox.

  “Now we can get down to work,” said Delaney. “When are you going to do what you really want?”

  Marianne filled several notebooks with descriptions of her dreams and met regularly with her psychoanalyst. She felt she was approaching a turning point in her self-understanding. After five weeks in therapy with Delaney she wrote to Leonard, telling him that she’d never before managed to shed as much light on her dreams as now. Delaney was returning to Zurich, she explained, but Marianne felt she couldn’t stop the work. She hoped to spend a couple of months — or however long it took — in Switzerland, continuing her therapy. Axel Joachim wished very much to be together with Leonard for a month or two during his summer holiday. It would be a great help to her and the boy if this could be arranged, Marianne said. She could take him with her to Zurich, but Axel Joachim strongly needed a father figure in his life now. Delaney had promised to help find her paid work in Zurich, and she planned to
take her car so she could stay in cheaper accommodations outside the city. She’d also been thinking of going to India, but she didn’t think she had enough money for that and, besides, the inner work had to be done here. Marianne told Leonard that she was convinced that she was on her way to becoming a whole person.

  Chapter 13

  * * *

  NEW YORK

  * * *

  Austin Delaney took his suitcase and went back to Zurich, leaving the empty sandbox behind on Hydra. Leonard hadn’t been able to take Axel Joachim for the long period Marianne had proposed so she dropped her plans to follow Delaney to Switzerland to continue her therapy there.

  To get away from Hydra, Marianne went to New York, where Demetri Gassoumis and his daughters — Axel Joachim’s schoolmates at Summerhill — were now living. Marianne’s friend from Montreal, Carol Zemel, was also moving to the city. Leonard was based there too. Paying low rent for a loft available through friends of friends, Marianne, Axel Joachim and Carol moved onto Clinton Street on the Lower East Side, one of the poorest parts of town. The loft apartment, which they’d taken over from a painter, had a kitchen and bathroom in one end and two bedrooms at the other end. In between lay a large, long room. Windows along the length of the apartment looked down over a big schoolyard.

  Carol was studying art history at Columbia University while Marianne stayed at home. Demetri and his family moved into another loft three blocks up the street, above The Puerto Rican Magic Store, where Marianne bought candles in glass containers adorned with images of the patron saint of hopeless causes. She and Carol were always burning candles, on the table or in one of the many windowsills facing the school.

  New York was a big city and everything was new to Marianne. The district of Manhattan in which they found themselves had once been the Jewish quarter of the city. Now it was Puerto Rican. The synagogues were closed and the neighbourhood was rife with poverty and alcohol abuse. People set fire to their apartments as a strategem to get better housing. Artists and musicians were moving into the old lofts that had once been tailors’ workshops and sweatshops of various kinds.

  At night, while Carol stayed home with Axel Joachim, Marianne and her French friend Jean Marc Appert earned money on 42nd Street by selling small cats they fashioned on the spot. Jean Marc was an old friend from Hydra who was staying with Marianne and Carol. He had come to New York from South America, where he’d paddled a canoe along great lengths of the Amazon River. The police gave them permission to peddle their goods on the sidewalk after the shops had closed for the evening. Feeling marvellously free, Marianne wondered what her parents would think if they could see her. The cats were modelled from steel wire and wool yarn and had whiskers and small felt eyes. Some had long tails — ideal for back-scratching, as Marianne told the curious nightclub, restaurant and bar patrons who passed by. Sales were good. This wasn’t the best part of town, and being a street vendor was a world away from the rustic domestic life Marianne had enjoyed on Hydra. Leonard felt she was too pure for this debauched existence in New York and wished he could shield her from it.

  Axel Joachim was nine years old and was enrolled in school along with Demetris’ two girls. Children of diverse nationalities attended the school, which had a rough climate. Going to the bathroom was not permitted without an escort and the older pupils inveigled the younger ones into taking pills and smoking hash. But Axel Joachim’s teacher, Mrs. Hawkins, cared for her charges and the boy was an apt pupil and soon settled in. The three Hydra children stuck together. They did their homework together and slept at one another’s homes. Axel Joachim’s best friend from Hydra lived just outside the city and the two of them often spent the weekend together. In his aeronautical phase, Axel Joachim decorated the walls of his room with his illustrations of the interior of a space ship. Surrounded by drawings of instruments and buttons, it was just a matter of sitting in the cockpit and zooming off into outer space.

  Being surrounded by impoverishment had its effect on them. Axel Joachim frequently came home with a new friend with whom he wanted to share his food and toys because the child had been beaten by his alcoholic father or his family was in disarray.

  Marianne visited Leonard’s sister Esther, who lived in one of the better neighbourhoods Uptown. Mostly Marianne socialized with Hydra friends. Central Park was their playground, where they gathered every Sunday with the children. Norman Peterson, a sculptor Marianne knew from the island, lived under the Brooklyn Bridge. On Hydra he’d collected empty tin cans and transformed them into art. There he’d lived in a windowless, doorless concrete shell known as the crash pad. On cold days he dragged a tree trunk inside, which he burned bit by bit. Before he came to Hydra he’d built a house out of driftwood on the coast of California; the sale of the house had given him the funds to travel to Hydra. In New York Norman again gathered driftwood, out of which he made exquisite furniture.

  Some days Marianne took the children to the cinema, where they often watched several films in a row. People used the movie house as a place to sleep and eat — it was a roof over their heads, for a few hours. One late night when she and Jean Marc came home from the Andy Warhol film Sleep — five hours of footage of a man sleeping — they were accosted by two men at the door to the apartment building. Jean Marc put up resistance until a large knife appeared from the layers of a folded newspaper. Marianne was scared stiff and gave them all the money she had in her wallet. Faint with fear, she heard her own voice saying mechanically, “Why did you have to frighten the shit out of me — why didn’t you just ask for the money?” There was silence for a few seconds and then one of the men said to the other, “This chick is cool. Let’s split!” The door banged shut behind them.

  It took a long time for Marianne to get over her fear of being robbed in her own doorway. She became afraid to go out in the streets alone and always asked cab drivers to wait until the door had closed behind her. She had once wandered the streets of New York with her head in the clouds, daydreaming. It was time to plant her feet solidly back on the ground and her head on her shoulders.

  Marianne embarked on a body-oriented form of psycho­therapy with the celebrated psychotherapist Alexander Lowen. A student of the Freudian Wilhelm Reich, Lowen had developed his mind–body method in the 1960s. Marianne had tried a variety of alternative therapies, including the sandbox on Hydra and Jungian dream interpretation. Now she learned that “the body remembers everything,” as they worked with a mix of breathing and movement exercises, along with conversational therapy.

  * * *

  Janis Joplin used to drop coins in a jukebox in a little bar near the apartment block where Marianne lived, and Bob Dylan bought shoes in a shop that belonged to a friend of hers. One day Marianne’s bus stopped farther than usual from the curb. As she descended from the lowest step of the bus, expecting to set her foot on the sidewalk, she pitched forward. The first thing she saw was a pair of pointy black shoes, then white trousers and a white jacket. Recovering her balance, she found herself looking right into Bob Dylan’s face. He smiled, still holding her arm to support her. “Thank you,” she said, and then blurted, “Oh, you look like Bob Dylan.” “It’s me, ma’am,” he replied. Marianne bowed politely and went on her way down the street. The store she headed to was run by a friend of the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. It sold everything from handcarved walking sticks to first editions and container finds. “Too bad you didn’t come a little earlier,” said her friend the shopkeeper, “then you would have gotten to meet Bob Dylan.”

  When the Hare Krishna movement arrived in New York, Marianne and her friends joined a crowd in Tompkins Square Park, where the spiritual leader Prabhupada and his disciples sat under a big elm tree and had their first “chanting session” outside India. It was October 9th, 1966 — the start of the Hare Krishna religious movement in the U.S. The crowd chanted for two hours. They danced and played cymbals, tambourines and other instruments. Marianne sang rhythmically: Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Kri
shna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare … The shared mantra and feeling of collectivity made a powerful impression on Marianne.

  Leonard took Marianne to a Janis Joplin concert in Madison Square Garden. The audience was wild and a young man in the first row managed to throw himself onto the stage and cling to the singer’s hair. Joplin swung him back and forth a few times before security guards came to her rescue. Marianne also went with Leonard to the Chelsea Hotel several times and met luminaries like Andy Warhol, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Joni Mitchell. But Marianne’s contact with Leonard was limited. He visited them on Clinton Street, but refrained from drawing Marianne and Axel Joachim into his life. “This isn’t your scene, Marianne,” he advised her.

  Marianne understood why he hadn’t taken them with him to New York when he first moved here. The Bohemian lifestyle — the dope and parties — was incompatible with an orderly family life. There were women who followed him wherever he went. Even before Marianne and Carol knew the number of the newly installed telephone in their own apartment, women were calling to get in touch with Leonard. Marianne didn’t know Leonard’s women or have any connection to the life he led when he wasn’t with her. Yet Leonard continued to provide for Marianne and Axel Joachim, paying their rent and the boy’s school expenses. For many years after they finally parted ways as lovers, Leonard would take care of Marianne and her son, putting himself at their disposal when they needed help.

  Marianne and Axel Joachim spent a little over a year in New York before returning to Europe.

  TIME TO TURN BACK

  After their stay in New York, Marianne and Axel Joachim divided their time between Larkollen and Hydra. Marianne found it difficult to settle down permanently in Norway after all the years she’d spent abroad. Norway felt almost foreign to her; she longed for the people and the familiar rhythm of life she’d known in Greece. As Leonard used to say, “When you’ve lived on Hydra, you can’t live anywhere else, including Hydra.”