A Rowing Poem

In the late afternoon, (I don’t have much control these days / dissolving like a sugar cube in hot water)
this is what comes through when I paint
:  A male figure
in a tree, embraced by a female. 
Gods like two stars they spill over.
(Remember the dream of us as two whitenesses walking, making our way over a gold boulder like at the beginning of the world. But you aren’t here.)
White gold light sweeps with the wind into the garage, it frees my ponytail—
you are and you aren’t
here—my heart conjures you, or you leap; there is a bridge between us—this coveted more* (it is no dark garden, simple knowing boots out fear)
Like when a light crackles in your bedroom late at night, and you know it’s a visitation
So you shut your eyes super-hard.
It plays [in my hair], the light,
Along to the song on the radio. 
The stray cats, they come and go,
beautiful as the sun and lanky, now that I’ve figured out their favorite food: Whiskas.

A Blessing Poem via Rumi, On A Day Where It Seems to Matter

Don't hide. The sight of your face is a blessing.
Wherever you place your foot, there rests a blessing
Even your shadow
Passing over me like a swift bird 
Is a blessing
The great spring has come
Your sweet air, blowing through the city, 
The country, the gardens
And the deserts is a blessing
He has come with love to our door
His knock is a blessing.
We go from house to house asking of Him
Any answer is a blessing
Caught in this body, we look for a sight of the soul
Remember what the Prophet said:
One sight is a blessing
The leaf of every tree brings a message from the unseen world
Look, every falling leaf is a blessing.
All of nature swings in unison
Singing without tongues
Listening without ears 
What a blessing
O soul, the four elements are your face.
Water, wind, fire and earth
Each one is a blessing.
And once the seed of faith takes root it cannot be blown away
Even by the strongest wind
That's a blessing.
I bow to you, for the dust of your feet
Is the crown on my head
And as I walk towards you
Every step I take is a blessing.
His form appeared before me, just now as I was singing this poem
I swear
What a blessing! What a blessing!
Every vision born of earth is fleeting
Every vision born of heaven is a blessing
For people, the sight of spring warms their hearts
For fish, the rhythm of the ocean is a blessing
The brilliant sun that shines in every heart
For the heaven's earth and all creatures
What a blessing!
The heart can't wait to speak of this ecstasy
The soul is kissing the earth, saying
Oh God, what a blessing!
Fill me with the wine of your silence,
Let it soak my every pore
For the inner splendor it reveals
Is a blessing
Is a blessing. 

—Jalal-uh-Din Rumi via Andrew Harvey's The Way of Passion: A Celebration of Rumi

Culture Shock ~ An excised excerpt from My Beautiful Impostor: A Memoir of Persia and Lies

            I was born in Tehran.  I was only eight when we left, and had never been back.  Sometimes, after we had moved to America, when I would feel again like I had as a child, I would think, I will find our nanny in Tehran—Badhoom, that old woman with the vicious red hair, the realest face, and hennaed fingernails, the basket-weave, purple, plastic shoes.  The one who raised us, my brother and me, on crooked tales from Isfahan and Kashan.  I fantasized that that finding would again change the color of my longing, turn it into my seeing the world as home again, one soft golden blanket of love.

            I had been a California girl for so many years, and most of my mother’s side of the family lived within blocks of our Piedmont, California neighborhood.  We spoke Farsi at home and my parents regularly phoned Tehran, or had our Tehrani relatives visit and stay with us. 

            “You are Persian, don’t forget it,” my parents often said, as if that obliged me to present myself with regal dignity despite how I might inwardly feel.  “We raised you to have beautiful manners, to behave better than most.  To rise above bad behavior and insults—and, should someone perchance treat you poorly—beh rooyehshaan nayaareen, to gloss over things and put it all behind you as if you had not even seen.”  My mother would remind me of my father’s royal roots when she wanted to admonish me and rein me in, though Baba himself never mentioned his ancestry.  Still, the message was clear:  we were special, we were to be held to a higher standard. 

            I felt myself to be lacking in that I’d had neither the privilege—or the hardship—of being raised in Iran.  Their sense of wealth and fullness, riches, due to that, was incredible:  “We, we come from this other place,” they let it be known, as if simply coming from there made us better than others.  Those born there, whether colonels, students, or mothers, pulled rank, as if they were senior to me just by dint of having lived there; as if it gave them privileged information that in itself conferred seniority.  “You were raised here, in California, what do you know of the wonderful life we lived in our own country?” they hinted or directly asked.  “We lived under a set of very different” —and the implication was, heightened— “circumstances.”  And Maman would add:  “We brought you here like a mother cat dragging her kittens across a river.  We know some things you never can.” 

            And so I questioned myself all the time:  What did I know?  Who was I to say?  My parents were so sure about everything, from the superiority of the country from which we now lived (quite well) in (to them) exile, to the kind of person I should look, act, and sound like (modest, obedient, mannered), to the kind of man I should marry (hard-working, of good moral character, from a good family, sufficiently well-off, and so on).

            I had heard from my family and their friends for so long about the perfumed beauty of the country they had had to leave because of politics—a country they still mourned with a deep, yearning nostalgia, grieving the loss of the “true civilization” of the past.  Despite my blurred, string-of-light memories of the place, a child’s bright and dark impressions slipped under the radar of the grownups’ vehement discussions and certainties, I secretly looked to my birthplace as a haven for some time in my future, as the living treasure chest of all good things lost to our current life, of necessity left behind. 

            And so it was that I came to feel and see Iran as being truer than me, purer, more asseel, as we said.  It was a treasure chest covered with an embroidered gold, turquoise, and red cloth that held all the secrets of the world, the real secrets, the only ones worth knowing—and I had, by my fervent wishes and desires, my constant imagination and small fiercenesses—I had, by some twist of fate to do with my innate badness, I was sure, dreamt of living in America and then, like a card trick, it had happened and I had caused it and so, missed the opening of the chest, the meting out of its true riches, which those who came to young adulthood in Tehran had doubtless experienced.

            Now everybody but me knew what was inside the chest—the whispered knowings, from the first man or woman to the last—and it was exactly this grounded knowledge, this special information, that I would never have.  It was too late.  All the secrets ran by me, one by one—lost in the grass, in the wind, in the bald-faced sun—with me forever positioned outside the gates, a small and hungry outsider.  The mountain on the other side of the gate loomed grey and large.  I had only my questions in hand, and nobody was interested in answering those. 

            This was how it was between me and Iran, my country.  It was the most important book in the library, and the only one I had not read.  

*

    In the beginning, we lived in an apartment in Tehran, a three-bedroom unit that looked into the square courtyard of the building. 

            There, Maman did not want so much to be with me—this was a feeling remembered—though later she reminisced about reading to me for hours.  “You were such a doll!  I loved dressing you up every day and combing your hair into a center part with pigtails.  But even then, you did what you wanted.  Remember our walks in the park?”  I had to strain, and then I could remember glints of sunlight, white doves, the tip of a carriage.  Was this right?

            My brother and I rode our bicycles around and around that apartment.  I don’t know how my mother ever tolerated it, but it was so sweet in those days, to go around and around, singing lines from American cartoons like Tennessee Tuxedo and The Yogi Bear Show.

            The bakery on the corner was filled with marzipan animals and sunlight, the dentist’s office was right above.  Maman’s open purse was a good sign, and she stood looking on, waiting for us to choose, not rushing us but not involved either—and we chose, feeling on our tongues the matted sugar form of a pig, a cow, or dog as we walked out onto the sidewalk in Tehran.  “Happiness is an ice cream cone,” we sang, watching an empty carton of Tide, the remnant of a t-shirt rush past in the joob—the gutter, the water traveling fast and high. 

            Badhoom would be at the apartment, waiting for us.  Illiterate, she told us a gazillion bedtime stories from memory, mystifying us with strange tales of rabbits holding golden keys, giants who willed entire banquets to disappear, and always the brave little heroes and heroines who ran far and overcame breathtaking obstacles. 

            Badhoom made us hamburgers (which she called hamégerdeh, meaning “round all the way round”), played hide-and-seek with us, and let us stay up late to watch our favorite soap, Bittersweet.  She slept on the dining room floor on a straw mat in our apartment, next to the kitchen, no matter what the season, no matter how much we urged her to sleep in her own room.  She said she liked it that way.  I was pained by her sleeping on an old straw mat.  I worried about her elbows and knees, and kept asking her to move to my bed.  But she brushed me off like she had when she found me crying on the deep blue couch, after a visit from her grandchildren:  “Don’t you worry about them,” she had said, smoothing back my hair.  “They are tough little beans.”  I was crying because they had seemed so nice and their lives separate from mine and thinner somehow, as if their road to travel was already narrower and harder.  Without knowing why, I could feel their hardship to come.  I wanted to make everything easier for them, somehow, but felt powerless to do so.

            Much later, in my teens in America, I once ventured to tell Maman that my favorite childhood memories were of being held by Badhoom and drifting off to sleep on her stories of dragons and valiant peasants.  “You were always ungrateful,” she replied.

            As I grew older, with my parents gone for the evening or sometimes even in the middle of the afternoon, I would read Badhoom my English compositions (usually about magic carpet rides), inventing way beyond what was on the page.

            “But how long does it take to read one page?” she would eventually protest.  “You’re reading just this one, right?”  She would shake out her arm propped under her chin and set her gold bangles jangling.

            “It’s a complicated story,” I would reply, watching her pat her knees and gather her skirts, about to rise.  “And that’s a good observation, for which I thank you.”

            “Let me go, joonam (my dear), I have work to do.  Your mother will be home soon.”

            Then I would follow her into the kitchen or laundry room and talk to her about the stray white German Shepherd dog we called Barfi (Snowy) and her pups, whom we loved feeding every day.  We had things to plan, knuckle bones and left-over chicken skins to carry down to them in pink plastic bags.

At the Fridge at Midnight

My dog Chocolat and I are in my new rental studio, with both the fan and the ventilator on full-strength.  Chocolat, spent from her run at Point Isabel, sleeps on her candy-striped mat while I, an unlit clove in my mouth (as is my habit when ruminating in the studio) and a long thin brush in my hand, arms folded, walk around from painting to painting and then stop before one I used to call The Meadow. 

This studio is my sanctuary:  a soft, all-white space with clean-swept floors and lit by a skylight, 25-foot tall ceilings—a space I rented to be able to paint somewhere other than in my home studio because, frankly, I am a messy painter and like to let paint thinned with turpentine drip and spill all over the floors.  At home, no matter how engaged I am in the dance of painting, I still have side thoughts of, Let’s keep my new birch floors as clean as possible, and Oh, did I just splatter that white wall again?  Which doesn’t fuel the creative flow! 

Within days, I run out of space, run out, I tell Ross, our wonderful building manager, because I work on several canvases of loose linen simultaneously and they are all large (70” x 52”ish).  Ross is not only a deeply kind man, he also happens to like my work; to keep me happy, he suggests a pulley device whereby drying canvases attached to ropes (think of sheets drying on the line) can be lifted up onto the walls above, like theater curtains rising.  The empty walls would then offer me plenty of space to tack up more linen.

But before he can do this, my studio neighbor decides to leave and so—dream come true!—I will, within a month, have both spaces.

Today, I stand before what was once The Meadow, with 9 large and small angelic figures—and 2 horses meeting in a meadow.  As is often the reality with me, I had worked on it for over 3 years, on and off.  However, about six weeks ago, utterly dissatisfied with one section of it, I finessed it so much that I lost the thread of the entire painting.  This freaked me, because this painting and its inhabitants had been with me for so long, in different guises, in various layers. 

We had lived together, first here at my home studio and now in this new sacred space.  These figures consoled me and brought me a cheerful wisdom and frankness.  We went places together, traveled realms.  I talked to them as I painted them.  They helped me hold and open more into that heart-space net where the allowing happens, first sensing myself connected to points of light in the Universe and then stepping through the window to create. 

More than a window, actually, it’s a veil, a curtain on the other side of which lies total surrender, and in stepping through you have to leave your little self behind, your story, and just sail away, skate into…this other, the unknown, like an unknown caress sure to happen if you let go enough.  We were family. 

And now I had eradicated a huge portion of the top and middle of the painting.  Okay, the main figure.  The Mother Mary figure.  In some moment of Folly, I plumb painted over her.  Wow, now that did not feel good.  Ever since I had an intense experience of the Holy Mother in a meditation in December 2009, she has always been my guide and a main source of energy—either directly or behind the scenes—in all of my more developed work.  Mother Mary is my inspiration.  

Having now altered my main character to the point of no recognition, I felt at sea, adrift, and also like I had lost something.  But honestly, the painting was so troubling to me, I couldn’t figure out a solution, a resolution, an endnote, so I did something drastic, instead of just throw it out.  I rarely throw paintings out, but that night, soaking in an Epsom salt bath and scribbling in my diary, I wondered if I should start.  ‘Just let it all go,’ I wrote.  ‘Arms wide!  Leap!  Spin!  Dive deeper in!’

By the following day, I understood why I had lost my heroine.  All the lostness, the eradication, the destruction of the false image, if you will, was so the true image could come through:  What was the true image?  I realized there was yet another layer to The Meadow, which was actually, as it turned out, a painting spurred on by an image.  Who is it?  Ah, Gena Rowlands.

I recalled hearing someone—maybe it was in the documentary A Constant Forge: The Life and Art of John Cassavetes—speak of Gena Rowlands years ago standing at the fridge in her home at midnight, dressed in a mink coat and with a baby in her arms:  immensely glorious.

That is what this painting was really about, all along.  I worked through various layers to get to this image, which I was being guided by all along, I now understand.

Not the meadow, though the horses remain, and not the direct figure of Mother Mary and the angels before her, but glorious Gena at the fridge at midnight.

I tell my friend Jean this, about this painting.  Jean is really cool and kind and she was in Hollywood with her actor boyfriend for a couple of years in the ‘70s.  She met people like Steve McQueen, John Cassavetes, and Gena Rowlands.  Jean says, “I met John and Gena a few times!   We went to their house.  And Gena was very warm and genuine.  I think she was a happy and secure woman, and there weren't too many of them like that in Hollywood.  You could tell they had a great marriage.  They had a true relationship.  Once when we were over, he was sitting around with a bunch of his buddies watching football.  She stopped in and, briskly buttoning up the cuff on her beautiful blue dress and gathering her son, about age eleven, she said, “John, I’m going grocery shopping.”  She was dressed so elegantly to run errands.  What struck me was what a family they were.  John had buddies over to watch the Super Bowl and Gena was going out shopping for groceries and they lived in a very lovely (but completely unHollywoodish) colonial style two-story home.  I remember the long, lingering glance he gave her as she said good-bye and went out the door.  She was moving out the door and he was still looking.”  

I look at the Gena in my painting, still drying.  Perhaps she is only recognizable to me, but in her mink coat, she commands magic.  Before her and around her, angels—whom she seems to be the queen of, in this image—and a kind of hush. 

Gena at the Fridge at Midnight

P.S. For a better view of this painting and details, please visit my FB page at http://ow.ly/3pMaQ ~ Many Thanks!

Missing My Mother

First, I would like to borrow a line from dear Christine, who wrote, when her mother Kay passed away this summer:  Please forgive anything I ever said or did that was less than the love of Great Spirit.

Everything beautiful reminds me of her ~ every sunny, beautiful moment and how I can still see her arm in arm with me, as we crossed Union Square in San Francisco.  Like a ‘70s movie, bright and sunny and warm.

She had that ‘70s soft and golden aura about her.  She laughed easily. 

I’ll never forget this:  Once, after her divorce, she said—we were driving back across the bridge from the city— “Who can give me back my years?  Who?”

She also thought I would one day write a book about her.  It was part of her grandiosity, part of her illness.  In a way, she was very right.  My disappeared muse.

Maman jaan, this book is for you.  With all the love in my heart.

I have to tell you this.

I am sitting on the floor of my living room with sky blue walls and all kinds of French antiquey furniture, a few knick-knacks and many paintings abound.  It is too hot to light a candle this afternoon, and on the glass table in front of me, a cup of iced coffee and a cup of passion tea

Pink and gold tufted ottoman

A tuning fork holding an archangelic frequency, so I am told

Art books, Bonnard and Balthus, Goya’s

Something has happened, and I have to tell you

I was in Nordstrom’s department store in Walnut Creek, California last night.

I think I have missed her my whole life, even when I was fighting with my father on behalf of her ~ it was always a struggle, somehow

and then I lost her.

I mean, I lost her.  We all did, but I was the only one in the family who was utterly vocal about it.  Shrieking like a banshee.

What did we lose?

The classiest, most elegant, sunny woman ever.

That was my mother.

Is it true that she wants nothing to do with me since I hospitalized her? 

Perhaps.  Yes.  Most definitely.

But that doesn’t matter.

She had virtue.  A modern-day Joan of Arc, whom she greatly admired.

And an intense glamour, not unlike Vivien Leigh’s.  Or I. Magnin’s.

Hanging out with her was like visiting I. Magnin’s for the afternoon:  elegant, warm, infinitely chic, inviting and kind.

Never mind that she wasn’t always the kindest to me.  She wanted me to be a copy of her, which I resisted with all my might.  But I loved her.  Once I got past my resentments, I loved her more than I knew or could imagine.  With a huge kind of love that may, I see now, go totally unrecognized by her until she or I die.

For years, I cried in the bathtub almost every night over her.  I was crying because we were all losing her, and only I was seeing this fact and in anguish about it, or so it seemed.  Everyone else seemed more blasé, more this-too-shall-pass and saying things like, “Well, at least she has money.”  I was even accused by a relative—indirectly of course, via another—of wanting her money.  Then I was called crazy myself.

And then, seven years into her illness, I was called on by my grandmother, her mother, to hospitalize her.

The next year, trying again to hospitalize my mother, this same relative shouted—this time, to me, on the phone, “Your mother never loved you!” 

After year eight, something happened.  I was able to distance myself from her, to stop wanting her to be different.  I kind of gave up on her.  I gave up my anger toward her too.  I accepted.  And she became for me like somebody dead … maybe because it hurt too much to know she lived five minutes away and wouldn’t see me.  Even death was no longer taboo to me, she was such a great teacher.  I never thought such a teacher would ever crack.

Still—and this, according to my friend Janey, is right action—I sent her gifts and cards and called her occasionally, not wishing to disturb or distress her or fix or change her, just wanting to sob—and sometimes I have sobbed, as I did on Mother’s Day this year, into her message machine.  About how much I respect her, and how I see now, all these years later, how right she was about so many things.

When I realized how much of what she had said in anger against my father was actually true. 

And how blind I had been, how much of a kid inside.  

Wanting approval, wanting at least one parent to love me, wanting so much I would never ever admit to.

Until today.

I have to tell you this, because for far too long I didn’t think I needed to tell anyone.  I didn’t think I would ever need people in this way, and now I do.  Why?  Because my heart has grown so big and full and soft and round, and because we are all in this together and something in me is bursting to write this all down for all of you!

So I am following its guiding call by saying Yes.

It is Sunday, dusk.  I have just returned from an afternoon of thoughtful, slow shopping at Nordstrom department store, where Heidrun, my caring shopping consultant and someone who has come through at least one of my angel paintings, makes sure I have accrued all the triple rewards points due me for my knitted sweater and classic Ralph Lauren camel-colored dress.

I am crazy with grief and longing.

Though I appear to be a happy-go-lucky girl/woman in a sunhat and cute skirt, it is all I can do to stifle a sob, looking at the winter boots set out on table after table in the shoe department.  I find a tan, calf-length pair that fairly mimics what my mother, style diva that she was, would have worn.  The salesman is kind and remembers me.  I can’t believe I actually ask him if I can try on these boots—only because, with my back to the sales floor, I have already wiped away my tears.  I turn away as he hurries off, to look at more boots.  The high-heeled ones were the ones she would have chosen.  Since my car accident in 2002, I can’t wear high heels for any great length of time.  Still, I love to stop and admire.  I gaze at the Guccis, austere in their elegance, and sigh with a breath of recognition.

I linger over the boots—thigh-highs and calf-lengths and even the short scruffy ones.

I miss my mother so much, the feeling has no place in this world—it has taken over the world and expands right out into the galaxies, into the center of the cosmos.  Something irretrievable has happened, some horrid wrong step taken.  I never could save her, and nobody wants to stop and listen.  Grief this vast, unplumbed, can bury us all.  It covers everything in a blanket of blue and lavender.  I see it as a painting of soft grey-white edges, and a lavender/blue field in the middle.

After all, she is still living—so it’s not as if she has passed—rather, rather….

This grief fills my eyes, my stomach.  It takes me home to God, super early.

The boots, those tan calf-length Italian ones she wore, does she still have them?  I wonder.  No matter, I am almost a puddle on the floor.

Is it my grief?  Family grief I am handling? 

She has been gone from my world since 1999, and I just realized that is why I don’t go to department stores very often.

In the dressing room, each time I turn to look at myself, it is her face I see—it’s true, I look like her now—and so I often tell Heidrun, “No, not this cape—it’s so New York, so Paris, but too much my Mom.  Not the sweater, either, please.”  Heidrun gives me an understanding nod and quickly whisks them away, these pieces that bring me pain with their light beingness and a sheath of reminiscence.

She and my father once took a road trip up north.  In an antique shop in Mendocino, she saw a small golden horse that she gave me—I was a teenager and hulking around, out of sorts—as a good-luck charm for my writing, to bless it.

All these years, I took this horse with me from house to house—it fits perfectly in my palm and has been sitting, quiet and radiant, on every writing desk in every home over the years—but until recently, when I looked at it and remembered every detail, I had forgotten my mother’s words and her intention to bless my art.  I curl my fingers tighter around the little gold horse.  Now, I won’t write without it.  Some part of her comes back to me, her eternal belief in beauty, her sustaining that high note…

I used to think she was acting.  That was my biggest accusation to her.  “You’re fake!” I finally said one day.  “You’re not real!”

“How should I be?” she asked, in the nicest way.  “Tell me how to be, and I will be that.”

She said the same thing to my father every time he yelled at her.  “How should I be?  Tell me, and I will be that.”  I can still hear the sweetness in her voice.

But I was wrong.

She really was that sunny.

And I recognize now the courage it took for her to be that alive and bright in the face of my father’s constant barrages.

One day I stood in the center of my studio and said out loud, “Very well.  If you won’t see me, I will dedicate all my paintings to you.”

But today I see that nothing I will ever write will bring her back.  Or those sunny days. 

Nothing I paint either.

That I really do need new dreams ~ which I have been embarked on for so long, but now fully.  Having out of necessity turned to gently close a door I never knew was there, on my family.

I wasn’t easy, back when she knew me.  But I was standing for some crazy truth, out in the howling wind, or so I thought.  “I’m the family German Shepherd,” I would tell her.  “I will protect you.”

Yet it’s more twisted that that.  Perhaps more twisted than I can describe.  (You have to read my memoir, it’s all in there.  This is not a plug for the memoir either, not really.) 

Nothing happened out of the blue, all that family meanness and my playing into it and my resistance to it without being able to name it, thinking I was the problem, had its roots somewhere—elsewhere.

I miss her.  I wish somebody had told me, when we would go shopping together, that one day I would long for just these minutes I was cursing back then, thinking she was…what, superficial?

My heart cringes when I remember those moments. 

She is gone, forever gone.  I am so very afraid, into the deepest heart of the world.

A legend just by being.  A legend, having been.

I understood too late what she had been trying to say:  Heart.  You must Love the very people who will let you down and tear your clothes and set fire to your house.  You must Love.  To go through the eye of the Universe, to be a true daughter of Mine, you must Love.

All the while, she was looking at something else.  We never suspected.

Kind and lovely, sad and trapped.  Now lost and sad but happy.  She is herself.  She has arrived at herself.

We all eventually just yelled at her.

We all criticized, in one way or another ~ She was pretty soft, malleable.  In her own world.  We never knew. 

Update on Monday, October 25, 2010 by Katayoon Zandvakili

Dearest Friends,

Amazingly, this blog was picked up today by The Nashville Wire, which is now One Tribe Nashville, and published at http://onetribenashville.com/ ~ I cannot quite believe my good fortune *the day was like a dream* and am so grateful to Mr. Thomas especially for his wonderful support and encouragement.

Thank you all for your wonderful comments in making this post so memorable!

Yours in light & joy & gratitude,

Katayoon