The people of Chiapas are falling into despair, victims of malnutrition and government-issue TB, crying for land and freedom, pulverised by poverty. ‘Money talks.’ But only the poor know what it says.
The Chase Manhattan bank issues a report calling for the Mexican government to ‘eliminate the Zapatistas’. The armies of the state flood the Lacandon jungle to capture the leadership, particularly Marcos, that most wanted man in Mexico. The soldiers didn’t notice that the moon (the insurgent moon, rebel of the night, first exile of the cosmos) had climbed the ceiba tree, slung her hammock between two branches and scooped him up, holding him tight, saying, ‘you’re one of mine’— and all that the soldiers found of him was his pipe, still smoking and warm.
Risorgimento
Still smoking and warm, the story is not ended, but the end is near. ‘I hope the exit is joyful,’ I said, for a messenger drawing a black angel flying up into the sky, ‘and I hope never to come back.’ But this death in this life is a death from which only more life can come. A different life, better, stronger and kinder, and I painted the Love Embrace of the Universe. I mother death into life, and life into death, my jingling skeleton got the giggles and fell off the bar stool, weeping hot and real tears.
I can hear the ringing of the copper bowl in the hands of Txati, goddess of breast and grave, whose bowl contains the souls of the newly dead and from whose bowl life is fed. I can hear the bells, the golden bells, of Coyolxauhqui, goddess of the moon.
When I died, they said he looked like a soul cut in two. He said of that day: ‘Too late now, I realised that the most wonderful part of my life had been my love for Frida.’ As my cortège passed, my mourners sang: ‘La Barca de Oro’, the ship of gold. (In the accident, all those years ago, I was like an icon, shining with gold, and now again I am drenched in it.) ‘This is goodbye… you’ll never see me again, nor hear my songs, but the seas will overflow with my tears.’ Half-right and half-wrong. He did see me again. As I was being cremated, the heat of the furnace made my corpse sit bolt upright and my hair was in flames, a death-halo around my head, my face in the centre of a sunflower—this end which I had tried to scratch out with a knife but which came to me anyway. The seas will overflow with my tears—well, that bit was right, too right.
My ashes maintained the shape of my bones for a few seconds before the softest whispers of air brushed them away. But those few seconds were long enough for him to take a sketchbook from his pocket and draw my silver skeleton. The pity of it. The tears of it. The death of it. But look again, my darling, look again, at the last painting I ever did, where I wrote in the colour of blood my most enduring faith: ‘Viva La Vida.’ Long live life, wherever and however she flows. (‘But all should know that I have not died,’ said Lorca.)
So fly me to the earth, and if he will create a new heaven there with me, I will find the wings for it. I do not know if he will, or if he wants to, my Diego of undying flight, so I make this as a votive painting, a prayer, a vow, a plea, painting to win him back to me. Always more prayers than artworks, my paintings were ex-votos, and if art is said to mirror life, then I want more—I want life to mirror art, so I will choreograph my images, infuse them with luck and seduction, with vulnerability and defiance, so that they might be a spell to ask for his hand. It was a magic charm, to draw a hummingbird around my neck to draw him to me again.
Start small with a seedling, a kitten, a pun, a note or a bucket of small water. Small journeys on small wings for a flight not small, for the soaring again of an old belief, oldly new, ancient and radical. Do not despise the small, the earthy, there is faerie in that, the glimmering knowledge of earth in whorls, the fertile mind of green, and a translucence of love when everything outside is also inside, green and growing.
Fly deeper into things, fly slowly, fly gently within yourself, for this is how flight becomes sublime and ecstatic. The mind’s flight is fire, inflaming and glowing, and I wanted to think with a streak of flame so I dared to soar with the fire of flight, where the perfection is in the tension of tangent, the aim, the furthering— the flaming arrow ever in flight, never wanting the target.
When I write to my friends, I send them scarlet feathers which whisper flight, especially in airmail envelopes, for flight, like love, is magnetic, irresistible and charismatic. All those I have loved the most have a quality of flight.
One whose quixotic flight was spurred by romance and honour, righter of wrongs, tilter at windmills, whose questing imagination gigantised the heart.
One whose soaring quality of flight was to believe in a symbol so powerfully that he became one, El Che, another journeyer, motorcycling the length of South America to find the story for his life, who refused to believe in the power of national armies and who could only be killed by trickery.
One whose flight was audacity on horseback, the political toreador, the original Zapata, taking on the bull of landed interests, seizing land for the campesinos, and who, like Che, was assassinated by a trick.
And then there’s Chico. I never knew how the human face could smile until I saw the smile of Chico Mendes. More facial muscles than anyone, a myriad joy, Chico lived like me in a Casa Azul, and he was assassinated in that Blue House. His flight too was a journey, the expansion of his love: ‘At first I thought I was fighting to save rubber trees, then I thought I was fighting to save the Amazon rainforest. Now I realise I am fighting for humanity.’
They all refused to believe that they were the size they were told they should be, and in this is heroism, through that belief we are all heroic, all those who fly.
One whose heart is so deeply winged I have not seen the limit of it yet. One whose flight is with birds in music as he played jazz duets with a lyre-tailed nightjar. One whose gift of flight is an animism of the ordinary—I’ve seen her take a glass of water and distil it by pure laughter into silver gin. One who causes daughters to flock to her, lost fledglings which she finds and helps to fly.
These are the loveliest aviators I know and their flights are all forms of rebellion, all ways of re-enchanting. For now the shamans are needed, the artists and everyone who lives by love. What is needed now is enchantment both magical and real; an enthralling both ordinary and ecstatic. And they are all there, on the sudden, a passion of poets, all of those through whom Orpheus lives: Yeats, Emily Dickinson, Auden, Rubén Darío, and César Vallejo, who fought with the anarchists in Spain. Neruda and Lorca sing a duet in Spanish for all the Romantics and Dylan Thomas arrives later and drunker than any, and leans against Whitman’s shoulder and sniffs his beard for butterflies while Whitman smiles so fondly towards the doorway that Ginsberg knows he has the welcome of the ages, and they held the moon and came in her arms and cried for her farways always farlove. I saw the best minds of my generating, for their minds were generated by moonlight, these nightwalkers on the song.
I would re-enchant myself with mankind, nothing less, I would put my head in your lap and lap your mist-touched lips which would tell me again what I once knew, that there is nothing lovelier than mist drinking sunlight and no time lovelier than the dawn is now, and in that now I give you all the words for sunrise, in all the languages on earth, and I will promise to find the god of new beginnings, on whatever sad shore. In our choreograph of love, we danced on a boat all the way from Mexico to New York, coming to the shore, as you are deep inside me, held, still, one moment longer. Love, my sweetheart, and I shout in tears, crying for how much I love you: so precious it is to love like this, so ordinary it should be, and you laugh and stroke my back.
I will lead you into the sweetest skies of silk, if you will let your mind linger again on the kind side and in this way we will begin again at the original benignity, knowing that every moment is that midsummer afternoon when you were immobilised by the depth and profusion of beauty, when you laughed because you loved each willow leaf as much as you loved me, when you knew, with the purest certainty, that love is the most necessary thing on earth, a re-enchantment between you and everything.
Love is not romance. Romantic love (the most that maybe I have managed) is the meanest love there is, that exclusive love of just two people. Mankind was made polyamorous, Pan-Amoric, loving many things, sometimes able to love everything. I love the forests and the flowers and I love women, too, increasingly, these days. But always at my core is you.
Can I re-light this votive flame? In the hearth of my own heart I know a re-devotion to my true lares and penates, the gods of earth and I require my mind to rekindle its exquisiteness, to re-fiesta every evening, to re-see every dawn, and in cursive love for the seasons to see again how the year nuzzles its nose under its own paw, this lion old in winter, young again in spring, turning in its bed of dry grasses. To tie the threads of thrall again, the re-thrallment of mankind to earth, the lovely tapestry of every corner of the world. The mirrored threads of Rajasthan, tying you to desert song; the faded threads of prayer flags tying you to the floating world; the silk of blue in Mongolia, each thread a skein of holy sky; the woollen skeins dyed in cochineal and indigo, the wool of Mexican rugs, the veins, the roots.
‘I am large, I contain multitudes.’ I am Frida, and I am not Frida. I am Walt Whitman and Dylan Thomas. I am, of course, Lorca. I am the insight of grief and I am the moon, hollowed out by remorse. My prayer is a novena, prayed nine times to Mary, mother of sorrows. My prayer is from the forests of Mexico, from the molten heart of the earth, from El Duende which charges art with power, El Duende, the mysterious energy, the life force in its demand for the dark, deep blood-sap. It comes from the strings of the blue guitar, Paganini’s violin, Orpheus’s harp strings, when veins are roots, drawing up ancient knowledge from El Duende, the spirit of the earth. It is unmistakeable, El Duende, deeper than politics, wiser than philosophy, to let knowing come from the soles of your feet, warm to the thinking earth, to let your mind be a flute for the moon to breathe through and write with blood as ink so you do not, cannot, falsify.
It takes courage even to say ‘blood’ in these days ruled by the bloodless: the metallic bureaucrats, the cultural assassins who mock the ‘others’ for having strands of politics woven into their art, those who sneer, their mouths full of nettles, who killed Keats and brayed about it afterwards, who would silence a Lorca without regret. Malice is in fashion and spite pays by the word. It takes El Duende, now, to find the courage for the flickering, self-sacrificial urgency of necessary insurgent art. The best artists are not found in the cliques of cold steel but in those who inhabit the warm world, who hear the blood of the moon humming in the seas and who know the dark sounds of the human body, hearing their own blood in their own ears.
And when there is a re-enthrallment and a re-enchantment, when there is grace in all eyes, there, then, scream the difficult birth, there, release true sky even out of iron.
Then, truly, let there be light.
In the brilliance of that light, all else recedes. There are galaxies reversing away from me at the speed of light, no walls anymore, neither you nor me, just the blinding light of blinding mind, you darling, you sweetheart.
With an uncanny instinct—and great sadness—Plato barred poets from his ideal republic, because they could stir the emotions of mankind. They will create revolutions, it is true; there are explosive devices in their metaphors and their diction is an act of guerrilla warfare. So fuselight and a hundred suns shine for the poet-revolutionaries of Spain and South America, all assassinated.
Liberty light to José Martí, driving out the Spanish colonialists, who killed him at the confluence of two rivers, and who would not cremate him for fear that his ashes would choke them.
‘My poetry is a wounded deer
Looking for the forest’s sanctuary.’
What light for Lorca? Only moonlight and always the moon. Franco had him assassinated, shot at dawn with two anarchist bullfighters. ‘But all should know that I have not died.’ And, when the sun on the fields is gold as onions, by that light, Miguel Hernández, goatherd, poet, revolutionary, you are remembered. Murdered slowly by the fascists after the Spanish Civil War, killed by mistreatment because you used your poetry as a flag of allegiance to goodness.
Rebel light to Victor Jara, who sang for his land against Pinochet’s brutal tyranny, creating the wideness of wild gentleness, his hands on his guitar were the horses of song across the rolling pampas. They tortured him and broke all the bones in his hands, they tore him to pieces before they machine-gunned him to death. ‘Oh my god,’ Neruda cried, ‘that’s like killing a nightingale.’ (Keats, another kind of nightingale, was killed by another kind of machine gun.)
A week later, Pablo, it was your turn, insurgent light to your barcarole. Not only a nightingale but an eagle, and the feathers fall across the oceans and rivers, each feather a tiny boat, punting its delicate immense significance to the stream where Marcos sits writing by candlelight the poetry of today’s rebellion.
Winelight to the sweetest poet whose sad and kind eyes are forlorn for me. I shine for you. Nothing is lost in light so lovely, my lovely, nothing can be. Turquoise light to the painter of moon scenes whose heart was so open you could see right through her. Luminosity to the composer whose mind has perfect pitch for the tones of the soul, whose bells and clarity ring so pure they transpose from the key of music to the key of light. Skylark light to all those who know time only in nature. One swallow, three, the merry wren. Glistening cuntlight to the one lover and keen cocklight to the other and liplight to both come kissingtime.
Kindlight, kindling light to all mothers, all who I mother. Mother of all kinds of light, how I mother, for my mothering is stronger than my exile, and my solo song to the cosmos is the risorgimento of an ultimate motherhood.
I had no child. So? I never liked the taste of bitterness; I choose champagne every time. I mother mothering, then, and I drink to it with all my heart. Without me, when would blood flow or ovulation cascade? Mother of tides, I am mother of generosity and generations. Mother of no meanness, no subtraction, no belittling or demeaning, for though I understand the fallen, I never was mother to fallen things: I am mother of the resurgence of their spirits, mother of flight.
And, yes, it is true that if I mother nothing else, I mother the most: I quicken imagination in my womb, I rock thought in my arms, I sing reverse lullabies, twilight songs of such tantalising vivacity that consciousness springs awake and vividly alive, and a curious child in any room will always look at me. A shard torn out of the earth, I was gifted perhaps (or fated) for no mothering except the ultimate, mother of mind.
For I am catalyst, yeast and trouble. I am trickster, coyote and change. I am chaos, tempest and turbulence.
I am mother of courage, mother of the heartroots of courage, of coeur and cor, the courage to follow your heart, mother of maenads and mischief and glitter, mother of the good joke and the glint, mother of poetry and paradox and fucking, mother of arse and eyebright, mother of passion and booze and friendship, mother of songlines and tribe, mother of Mexico and the bones, mother of Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror, and the night sky, mother of kindness, hope and ambiguity, mother of Odysseus and the spices of Madras, mother of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, mother of Los Desaparecidos and the victims of state terror, mother of circling, chortling and hissing, mother of purring, wiggling and cusping, mother of chuckling, howling and spitting, mother of caressing, kicking and sucking, mother of Zapatistas, rebels and freedom, mother of grace and vehement dreams, mother of saxophone and jazz, mother of Orpheus, the Fool and the flute, mother of wildness, the souk and the prayer wheel, mother of luck, the tightrope and the merry-go-round, mother of aquamarine, scarlet and tawny, mother of shadow and light, mother of time’s redemption, mother of moment, mother of rhythm and ordinary magic, mother of eternity, mother of now, mother of day in night and dark germination, mother of curiosity—of charisma—of charm, mother of the sanity of madness and unseen meaning, mother of the roots of words and the truth of metaphor, mother of the significant world and the inner verb, mother—in the end as in the beg
inning—of mind itself.
Where exile is only another choreography of my love, under a jaguar moon.
For their willingness to speak when others
wouldn’t; for their sense of compassion
beyond their own lifetimes; for their
vision of the Earth as comprehensive
as the Moon’s: this book is dedicated
to all climate change activists.
For their quixotic courage; for their
willingness to honour their land; for
their poetic knowledge that truth may
best be revealed masked: this book
is dedicated to the Zapatistas.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to pay tribute to Hayden
Herrera’s biography of Frida Kahlo, which
gives both depth and detail to her story.
My gratitude to Michael Heyward and David
Winter at Text for their belief in this book.
With love and thanks to those who influenced
this book like bright pigments of colour
in running water: David, Vic, Jan, Ann,
Thea, Marg, Bill, Gareth, Giuliana, Buz,
Thoby and, significantly, Penny Rimbaud.
Table of Contents
COVER PAGE
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT PAGE
CONTENTS
EXILED FROM CASA AZUL
A Love Letter from a Stray Moon Page 6
