Frank Lloyd Wright Designs a House for Edwin Cheney; Has Affair with his Wife
And ruins his career when he goes off with her. His Buffalo client Darwin Martin, however, remains a good friend. Wright completes the Martin house in Buffalo and the Larkin Administration Building (also in Buffalo, destroyed), in 1904.
My Guru's in town. Can't sleep. Up every hour, and finally I get pissed off and turn on the lights and it's 4 am. There was a time when I would have dismissed the thought that spiritual matters affect the physical. Please, there was a time when I lived back east I would have been horrified at the very concept of a Guru. Or anything remotely to do with the 'spiritual life.' Now it doesn't seem strange at all. It seems like everybody's got one. It seems like they're all coming to town, too. Mother Meera was at UCLA back in April. Now Amma's here. They put up banners again on LaBrea. They look nice. We're going to the morning program today and tomorrow too.
Jeff reminded me of Bridey Murphy, who didn't have anything to do with 1904, but he wrote a book report on her ("The Search for Bridey Murphy") in fifth grade. She got a lot of things wrong, but she got some things right. My opinion is, the jury's still out on whether she was a legitimate past life or not. You decide. In any event, belief in karma helps when it comes to the whole hypnotic regression thing, I'm just sayin'.
"To see God everywhere you have to have special eyes, otherwise you cannot bear the shock." -- Neem Karoli Baba
How does a man suddenly sabotage a career like Wright did? That's the kind of shallow question I get in my head in the middle of the night that keeps me awake. Seriously. He did and he didn't, in fact; I mean, he went on to do some of his greatest projects, after he ran off with Mamah Cheney, but you know what I mean. Plus the insane servant who took an axe to her and her children later and burned down the house Wright built for them. Talk about karma.
But I also think it means something when I look at a digital clock and it's all the same numbers. Like right now: 5:55 AM.
We impose meaning, don't we. Whether it belongs there or not. (And my alarm just as I typed that went off and freaked me out.)
Totally gray marine layer out there. You can't see the Hollywood sign or anything past the row of palms on 5th Street. This is the best time of day and year in this town, to me. It's so cotton-wool in the ears quiet but you can still hear all the birds.
Now I'm either going to recite the Thousand Names of the Divine Mother to get in the mood, or walk up to Larchmont for a Starbucks and maybe pick up a diet coke so I'm completely wired and my adrenal system's blown out. It's not quite the same thing as spiritual ecstasy, but it comes close. Nothing like propelling yourself past the depression with lots of cafeine and aspertame. There was a time I could sit on the porch and drink coffee and smoke cigarettes and feel like I was having a busy day.
I miss that sometimes.
My Guru's in town. Can't sleep. Up every hour, and finally I get pissed off and turn on the lights and it's 4 am. There was a time when I would have dismissed the thought that spiritual matters affect the physical. Please, there was a time when I lived back east I would have been horrified at the very concept of a Guru. Or anything remotely to do with the 'spiritual life.' Now it doesn't seem strange at all. It seems like everybody's got one. It seems like they're all coming to town, too. Mother Meera was at UCLA back in April. Now Amma's here. They put up banners again on LaBrea. They look nice. We're going to the morning program today and tomorrow too.
Jeff reminded me of Bridey Murphy, who didn't have anything to do with 1904, but he wrote a book report on her ("The Search for Bridey Murphy") in fifth grade. She got a lot of things wrong, but she got some things right. My opinion is, the jury's still out on whether she was a legitimate past life or not. You decide. In any event, belief in karma helps when it comes to the whole hypnotic regression thing, I'm just sayin'.
"To see God everywhere you have to have special eyes, otherwise you cannot bear the shock." -- Neem Karoli Baba
How does a man suddenly sabotage a career like Wright did? That's the kind of shallow question I get in my head in the middle of the night that keeps me awake. Seriously. He did and he didn't, in fact; I mean, he went on to do some of his greatest projects, after he ran off with Mamah Cheney, but you know what I mean. Plus the insane servant who took an axe to her and her children later and burned down the house Wright built for them. Talk about karma.
But I also think it means something when I look at a digital clock and it's all the same numbers. Like right now: 5:55 AM.
We impose meaning, don't we. Whether it belongs there or not. (And my alarm just as I typed that went off and freaked me out.)
Totally gray marine layer out there. You can't see the Hollywood sign or anything past the row of palms on 5th Street. This is the best time of day and year in this town, to me. It's so cotton-wool in the ears quiet but you can still hear all the birds.
Now I'm either going to recite the Thousand Names of the Divine Mother to get in the mood, or walk up to Larchmont for a Starbucks and maybe pick up a diet coke so I'm completely wired and my adrenal system's blown out. It's not quite the same thing as spiritual ecstasy, but it comes close. Nothing like propelling yourself past the depression with lots of cafeine and aspertame. There was a time I could sit on the porch and drink coffee and smoke cigarettes and feel like I was having a busy day.
I miss that sometimes.
Thirty years ago, back east, you recommended I read "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" by Annie Dillard ~ everyone's favorite nature mystic. Was it the style or the content? I rather imagine a bit of both. By the way, don't think I didn't notice the font change.
When it comes to style and content, isn't it always a little of both? And thanks, I hoped you'd notice the font change; you're the one said there was some tweaking to be done. Verdana is really a tad more elegant, yes? Or not? I defer to you, Mark Nolden, in these matters. You're the artist.
God, I'd forgotten Annie. I'm not sure I could read her now. Like Emily Dickinson in the Woods. On the other hand, I just got home from this spiritual gathering and I'm feeling so kind of stoned and in love with the world, so that Annie's great, Emily's great, it's all great and so fantastic feeling this way that I want to shop, eat junk food and masturbate all at once.
Let me think about that and get back to you. You adorable guy, you.
LATER:
Now that I've settled some, a few more thoughts, my dear old friend. First of all, thirty years ago, [as you may recall,] I was teaching at the girls' school Annie Dillard graduated from, so recommending her work was part of the job, I suppose. Plus, it was in large part her intensity, her purity of feeling I was responding to (in other words, Style), not only because I was surrounded by it (the intensity and purity of all those young girls) and also living it (I mean I was thirty years younger myself). I'm too old for her now, I think; it'd just be too painful -- Emily Dickinson painful, if you know what I mean (and I think you do).
However, in terms of style versus content, at the end of the day I'm willing to err toward Style over Content because it's not the What that's really interesting in the end; it's the How. What a mystic -- what any person of faith -- believes is so easy to belittle, parse, pick at, dismiss. But How they get to it? How they express it? Oh, I think that's what makes it all worth talking about. It's like that scene at the end of Blade Runner, when Rutger Hauer says, crouching on the rooftop ledge in the rain, "If you could see what these eyes have seen..." and you look into those mad doomed crazed blue eyes, and whatever you might imagine he means, he doesn't need to tell you, because you're seeing -- experiencing -- How it's shaped him, created him, destroyed him, formed him.
Does that make any sense? Of course, it's not an either/or situation, but what I've been trying to write about lately, in the last book I just finished, and in some stories lately, is how to talk about the mystical experience, how to talk about miracles, how to talk about what happened today, for instance. And what, of course, I come up against is exactly what Kierkegaard talks about: the man of faith is indistinguishable from a mad man. Doesn't matter what he believes in, because what he believes in is madness to anyone who doesn't believe.
If you could see what I've seen, old friend.
See?
An acquaintance here, Craig, just got back from New York. He was introduced to a woman at a gathering on Perry Street (remember when I lived on Perry STreet?). She asked him where he was from. Craig said, "Los Angeles." And the woman said, "I hear all the people in L.A. act so spiritual and they're all faking it."
And Craid replied, "That's because all the people in New York think it's all about finding the right self-help book."
I guess you can't win.
So. It's my turn to reply after some time to think a bit. I actually went back & read the first pages of Dillard's book.The tomcat. The blood. The roses. The hot mirror & sacrifice. It's definitely the style that hooked me. I'm a bit more cagey now & not so easily caught. There's too much Old Testament in there for me & it sticks to your clothing like smoke. The bit about the mocking bird diving straight down in free fall ~ that still resonated but not, I suspect, in the way she intended. They (mockingbirds) really do that; I've seen them while waiting for the bus in my gritty, blue-collar town. One need not flee to the isolation of Tinker Creek To experience the fearful symmetry of nature. All that's required is a sharp eye & the knowledge that it's out there to see, if one wants to.
RE: your friend's Perry St. encounter. The difference between LA & NYC is mostly a matter of geography. LA is on the Pacific, closer to Asia. India & Japan. Shiva & Buddha. NYC is on the Atlantic, closer to Europe. Freud & psychotherapy. Spirituality or the self-help book. Simple geography.
I'll finish with an author recommendation. Are you familiar with Roberto Calasso? If not you should give him a try. "The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony" & "Ka". The first is my favorite but I suspect the second will be more interesting to you right now. The problem is that he writes in Italian & so I have no choice but to read him in translation. I suspect that, no matter how good the translation, one is not quite getting the full effect. Yes, it's THAT kind of prose. I feel the same way about contemporary Japanese prose, Hell, any Japanese prose.
M
Yes my darling I adore Calasso, esp KA and also THe RUin of Kasch. ANd yes, in translation, so of course we can't totally know the full effect but there you are.
Don't get me wrong: Annie was a profound influence once upon a time, and I still respond to that ardent Christian passion, esp the conviction and the intensity, but I like it better in writers like Muriel Spark or Flannery O'Connor, that the Holy GHost will come on you in a blaze of fire in South AFrica, or the devil will still your wooden leg and leave you in a hayloft.
HOw are you about Mishima? TAnizaki? Comrade Loves of the Samurai? Much fertile ground here for future discussion.
Flannery O'Connor & the wooden leg. Oh, yes. I almost peed in my pants with laughter when I read that story.
Tanizaki's "Makioka Sisters" is in my top ten. Do you have Phillip Lopate's "Art of the Personal Essay"? there is a lovely nostalgia-driven essay in there called "In Praise Of Shadows" that was my into to Tanizaki.
M