Aubrey’s blog

"And behold, and lo," it was said.  And thence came a creature empowered with seven horns, seven eyes and seven Spirits.

And there were seven seals.

The first seal...

was Conquest:

Boyfriend had an excellent day of surfing at Asilomar Beach.  I couldn't tell:  there were dozens of black wet-suited figures in the water.  But all I could tell was that it was early, I was hungry and I wanted to go to the Monterey Aquarium.

The second seal...

was War:

I chased Boyfriend down on the bumper car rides at the boardwalk in Santa Cruz.  Always hug the curb, friends, and then attack from the inside.

The third seal...

was Famine:

I was so hungry on Saturday.  Fortunately there is a place on the Santa Cruz wharf that serves a dish that is built thusly:  a slice of sourdough bread is covered with a mix of crabmeat, shrimp and mushrooms in a cream sauce and then topped with Monterey jack cheese. 

The fourth seal...

was Death:

Something, that is, that I wished on Boyfriend and something I believe I narrowly escaped after he insisted I ride the Hurricane rollercoaster on the boardwalk.  And yes, the website is correct:  I did not notice the beautiful ocean views.

The fifth seal...

was a Vision of Martyrs:

On Halloween, Boyfriend and I saw the original 'Night of the Living Dead' on TV.  I'm not sure - is the story here a little martyr-like?  This was my first zombie film, so there were many things that confused me.

The sixth seal...

was Earthquake:

There was a 3.7 magnitude earthquake on the Sunday that we left for home.  The earthquake was in Central California.  We were in Central California.  I don't think I need to explain further.

The seventh seal was the Trumpets of Angels and the end of the world:

On Sunday we went to the Monarch Butterfly Habitat.  The butterflies fluttered like gilded angels.  The migrations forced upon them are tremendous, and many do not survive.

Boyfriend and I have made this trip every year that we've been together:  a considerable time.  We stay in Pacific Grove, visit Monterey, spend the day in Santa Cruz.

We haven't encountered anything yet to make us change our plans.

 

 

A couple of years ago, in late October, I wrote a post about the many incarnations I assumed for Halloween.  I have photos as proof of the kangaroo, the gladiator, the geisha and gypsy that went from house to house on October 31, many years ago.

One year, I wore a pair of scarlet japanese pajamas.  It was 1958, and I was almost one and half years old.  I believe I looked three.  In this particular photo, I am attacking a bowl of candy with great single-mindedness and with both hands.  My cheeks could be envied by either a Gerber's baby or a squirrel, but either way I am obviously fattening myself for the upcoming winter months.  Here, it looks like my little rayon/taffeta top is a little tight around the middle.  

But such afflicted inches go unpunished when one is young.  Mother fed me prodigiously.

Now, in recent years, Mother has been in the habit of giving me things she comes across...old photos, scraps of interesting fabric I might be able to use - with sequins, metal threads, rosettes, many and sundries - catalogues, comics she'd like to share with me, comics she'd like me to explain to her.

But the other day, I received something else.  A pair of tiny frogged pajamas, embroidered and apricot colored.  The passage of fifty years had degraded my Halloween suit from crimson to pastel. 

But not a single hand embroidered thrread was ripped - not a flower in that wearable garden had been uprooted.  But my pajamas had been folded many times over the decades, so a puzzle of creases covered them:  tiny fields puckered over a rayon landscape.

I couldn't believe my good luck - that my mother had seen fit to return such a dear memory to me.  I'm sure I didn't wear my pretty pajamas many times after that faded Halloween, but still they have an air of weariness, of a tiny perfection, that assures me that for those few times they were worn very well, indeed.

The rain kept me awake the other night, galloping through the gray air like nervous horses.  The water exploding against the ground had the sound of muscular hoofbeats and I couldn't close my eyes without seeing their wild, sparking eyes.

In the morning it was quite dry and I could see by the sky - high and bulking in varied silver metallics - that the horses had been caught.  The clouds shifted restlessly, and I knew that the stormy animals were waiting to be set free once more, for another mad dash towards a sleepless earth.

 

I know how they used to visualize her.  Weak and erotic, pliable and romantic, vaguely Eastern - she lay hidden in a locked room heavy with silks and thick perfumes.

Her arms were flung about her head, lush and weak, and her body curved like a sated serpent's.  Her eyes gazed into the distance, into faraway Oriental skies the color of peacock feathers, a rinse of tinted shadows.

Although a creation of Victorian boredom and sexual whimsy, she actually did exist, and she was called an odalisque.  She served the concubines of the harem, washing their feet, rinsing their hair with henna.  She crushed flowers - ginger, lilies, orchids:  the gifts of an Ottoman garden - to create new fragrances and brushed her mistress' wrists with the scented oils.  She was a living woman, with exquisite skills.

But thousands of miles to the west she had become an art trend, and her name became a body writhing at the base of a lamp, or carvings that struggled against symmetry and the placid yoke of equilibrium.  She defined the curling enamels on cigarette boxes hidden in a man's pocket.

Comfortably exotic, she was willing to share tea as well as a water pipe with the discerning Victorian gentleman.  Weighed down with tassels and fabrics like a middle-class drawing room, she sighed across her couch, waiting.

She could be a child, crowned with flowers and glowing with false jewels and a brothel's promise.

She could be an exhausted icon.

To the Western mind of the 19th century, she was foreign but still accessible, genteel but still with the look of a concubine's apprentice.  It was an inaccurate vision, but this manageable fantasy was the Victorian way.

But I have my own vision, too. 

This woman is Josephine Baker - who danced with shameless joy and sang like a crystal bird.  I look at this image, and think 'surely she is the odalisque, more so than those posed, upholstered women'.

Perhaps.  Here, no bed or couch is evident - she seems to have stepped out of a bath of pure light.  The length of glistening fabric she holds is the merest decoration, as are the rivulets of pearls pouring from her hands.  Like Salome, she dresses in veils and jewelry and is a source of torment.

She does not look away into an imaginary horizon, steeped in pastels and mosques.  Her eyes stare straight ahead, daring and demanding.  Dark and feverish, cloaked in charcoal, they reflect a dangerous grace.  She stands straight and sleek, with the soft indentations of bones and muscles noticeable throughout her feline body.

This is not a vision of weakness from the 19th century, but one from the 1920's, when women were learning about their own appetites, instead of satisfying the hungers of others.  Still exotic, but with a bite.

Whose ideal was closest to the truth?  No one will really know.  The keys to those rooms, hung with tapestries both feminine and mysterious, were thrown away long ago.

The tiger was weary.  All night it had been on the prowl, weaving past the wolves, dogs, bulls, lions and bears that lived in star-like reticence in the black sky.  It forded rivers that spanned galaxies, startling the sleeping dragons whose scales glittered like the brilliants in heaven's parure. 

It had stumbled once or twice, knocking some stars loose from the plush firmament.  Some fell, causing considerable excitement on a planet many light years away.  But some stuck fast in the tiger's hazy bones, a promise of the starry silhouette that was to come.  The tiger tried to shake itself free of the sparkling irritants but was unable to - its cloudy body merely changed shape across the twilight sky.

But now the air was changing color.  Threads of lavender, amber, sapphire and gold glimmered in the vast fabric.  Running from the iridescent light, the tiger found a cloud and wrapped itself in a bed of fog and rain.

For a brief time the tiger slept soundly.  Unfortunately, it snored a little, bending the air currents into angles that the smaller birds found hard to navigate.  Suddently it was awake.  There was a noice - incessant, droning, loud and endless.  The tiger looked:  beneath it, smelling of oil and dirt, was a flock of steel crosses.  It raised a cumulus-swathed claw to bat away the annoyances, but stopped.  On the sides of these metallic bodies were inanimate red jaws and white, arched teeth. 

This was a confusing sight, yes - but familiar too.  So the tiger, out of consideration for these shrill relatives, pulled back its thunderous paw.

And the tiger went back to sleep, to dream of lingering adventures in silent, peaceful skies.

It was not a true one.  The blood was not thick and full of escaping life.  The body did not remain on the ground, finite and still.  It was not a real death.  Yet it was the finest kill I have ever seen.

I saw it in a movie.  Now, I don't discuss movies very oftten.  But this act of destruction was so unexpected, so grand, so sweeping, so shrouded in unanticipated grace, oh and by the way, so deserving, that I applaud it ever time I see it, which I do often.

The name of the movie is 'The Brotherhood of the Wolf', ('Le Pacte des Loups').  Any attempt to describe the plot would, I fear, induce a chain of seizures in either speaker of listener, so I will refrain.  Suffice it to say, it is an irresponsible combination of lust, violence, fear and elegance.  It is a horrible, beautiful painting.

Now - this thrilling kill.  It came at the end of the film.  A woman, a howling gypsy - earthy and snarling with a feral femininity - is finally on the run, after making a complete annoyance of herself for almost two hours.  And it looks like she is going to escape.  What a bother!

Until she is stopped by another woman.  This woman is the most exclusive, most artistic, most dramatic of ladies.  She is a mystic.  She is dangerous.  She is also an employee of a most inspired brothel - structured like a decadent, naughty poem.  She knows the landscape of darkness as well as that of light.  She is not to be trifled with.

Oh, and did I mention that this all took place during the 18th century?  Wow!

Anyway, both women face each other.  The first pulls a dagger from her filthy corset and brandishes it, sneering like a wolf.  Suddenly she staggers back, with several slim, red stripes running across her throat.  The divine whore stands still, and then slowly folds the dark, lace leaves of her fan.  Each rib of the fan is a black stiletto knife, delicately tipped with her opponent's blood.

And that, my friends, was the finest kill I have ever seen.

 

Her dress is woven from the nacreous shavings of oysters that lie skinned and dying on distant shores.  All the colors from their interiors - the iridescent and curling skies - now covered her poised and snobbish body.  But her dress still moved and rippled in rebellious currents that called back to the raided ocean.

One arm, softened by society's atrophy, is extended like a fragile decoration, her elbow a tiny dimple winking from the pale and watery flash.  But in her other hand she holds a Japanese fan.  Lacquered and enameled with Eastern symbols, it is the color of poppies and carries the scent of opium.  She will rest its folds beneath her eyes and look down on the frozen kabuki dancers and the kneeling geishas.  She carries the delicate calligraphy with her and lets it speak for her.

A single feather is wrapped around her forehead and sweeps upward; a plum-colored pinion that mimics its breezy and deceased flight as she nods and tilts her head.  She swathes herself in the finest that other creatures have to offer, creating a strange, foreign silhouette.

When she was a little girl, she used to stare in horror at the maid's bleeding fingernails as she pulled at the laces of her mother's corset.  The harness crossed her waist like an iron cat's cradle.  She wondered when she would become a lady too, and feel the whalebone carving her future into her skin.

But she was an adult now, and she had her saviors - Poiret, Pacquin, Doucet - artists who had freed her from such reminine aggravations.  And miles below the sea, the whales were musicians, and luxuriated in the ribs that pounded like drums against their skin.

Soft and dangerous, she is a coiled animal reclining in a seraglio the color of spices - cayenne, sumac, mustard, curry.  She has her diverse freedoms, yet she still feels the tug of the leash.  She has stolen, and she will be punished.  She wears her exotic persona like a painted skin, and she will be smothered by a perfumed glove.

It is at this time of year, the final third, with the three-syllabeled months and early shadows that predict the quickening of its domain, that I feel its presence.  Like the tides that feel the pricking of silver hooks in their watery skins, I am pushed and pulled and reminded that now is the time.

During the warm months, it is a jealous, white shadow, hanging in the humid, seductive sky.  Its cold women, crescents dangling from their ears, stars melting into their hands, are content to wait.

Until now.  And the hooks in my skin tell me also that the wait is over.  The moon - call it hunter's, harvest, blood, corn, barley - has returned, its chilled ascendancy sharp and frosted in the evening sky.  It shines with a metallic light, a cloth of silver that charms the heavens so much that the nights become longer, so that the lively fabric could be enjoyed that much more.

When the equinox rides high in the sky, climbing the burnished galaxies, the harvests below emerge from the mothering earth and her erupted, buried seeds.  I can smell the flavors and colors in the hard, cold air.  I shiver with the wet, vermillion leaves, the early shadows and the piercing breezes, heavy with rain and living things.

I see an orange moon brushing darkened fields, a white moon chilling the constellations, a yellow moon that warms autumn's firmament.  Autumn carries in her arms the produce of busy populations, leaves that crackle like fire, grains that are woven into loaves of bread.  She wears bracelets and ropes of pearls, but only a single pearl rests on her brow - a symbol of her most perfect jewel.

The border that separates Scotland from England runs harsh and ragged like a bloody spine.  Many castles straddle that sorry backbone - a testament to the populations unable to look each other in the eye unless the steel glove of war pushes them forward.

There was one castle that was built on the east coast, spilling into the cold, granite sea:  a dark, shadowy building - ominous in its simpliciity.  It was strong and defensive, a masculine silhouette that punctured the cloudy sky.  It always rained.

But this castle was also a home.  In 1592 Alexander Seton brought his wife to live there, expecting from her the type of physical obedience that would break the body as well as the spirit.  He wanted nothing from her but sons - annually, if at all possible.  A male hierarchy to surround him and to plant his name throughout Scotland.

Four years passed.  Each year Lady Seton retired to a private room with her ladies, wetnurses and maids to await the terrible pain.  Each year a nurse emerged from the room carrying a female child.  As each daughter grew to adulthood, they became aware of their father's disappointment, their mother's fear.  He ignored them, and their mother's shoulder became wet with their tears.

In the fifth year Lady Seton, in a final, gallant effort, produced a remarkable child.  Female, yes, but dainty and beautiful.  Her features were clear, and her skin was as fair as the flower that was placed in the Virgin's young hands.  She was named Lilias.

She grew up gentle and distant, a golden thread weaving through the shadows of the household.  Such a jewel was kept hidden - for dowries and contracts beckoned, and in time she would have to sign away her obedience, as her mother had.  For nearly 20 years her potential made her a prisoner.  Through iron-clad windows she watched the Cheviot Hills across the border change color with the breath of each season.  The smell of the earth and grasses spoke to her blood and she would feel them crushed beneath her feet.

She was lonely.  When she looked through her window, who stared up into her radiant desparation?  No one knew his name.  Or, more likely, no one would tell.  Perhaps they were envious of her pretty secret, and they guarded it as selfishly as if it was their own.

How the two of them met, where they went - the details of their furtive escapes became a myth of the family's shame, closeted away by Lilias' parents.  Scoldings, reprimands, would not make her reveal her lover's name.  She was slapped until her pale skin became livid, like a white and burning sky.  For nine months she was starved, for guilt is a very thin food indeed.

When Lilias retired to the dark, confining room she was given all the simple preparations for the frightening time.  She could smell the raspberry leaves and the boiled seaweed.

And when the time did come, her flesh pulled and rebeled.  The castle shuddered under the weight of her agonies, before the proof of Eve's punishment.  Lilias grew weak - but before she lost her awful consciousness, she heard the loud, hungry cry of a healthy baby.

When she woke up, it was a different day.  It was windy, and the sibilent breezes lifted her hair and curled it around her shoulders.  The angle of the sun was different, and she saw things she hadn't noticed before:  a pair of slippers she had embroidered, a corner of a green, woolen dress winking from the darkness of her closet, a comforting memory.

But there was no child in her arms.  It was then that Lilias noticed her mother seated beside her,  The baby, Lady Seton told her in a frightened whisper, had been born dead.  And she wept on her daughter's shoulder, begging forgiveness. 

Months passed.  Lilias walked the swirling staircases of the castle towers, the chilly hallways; her lovely face lingered by the window of her room, waiting.  No one stared up towards her mooon-like sadness again.

Then a discovery was made in one of the rivers that bound the estate like a silver ribbon.  A body - beaten to death, unrecognized...a nobody.  But there was one thing that had escaped the attackers' notice:  a chain the victim wore around his neck, bearing the image of a beautiful, pale woman, wearing a green dress. 

Centuries passed.  Time - which did not care - buried the tragic family, and let its name evaporate.  The castle stumbled and fell, its lines no longer straight and sharp - no longer a threat to the horizon's delicate under pinings.

But people still do visit the castle's grandiose delapidation.  And many have claimed to have seen a white face at a tower window, disappearing into the cold vapors of the castle's interior.  Some have seen her outside; her arms clasped as if they were holding something - yet always quite empty.  Whether the day is still or not, her hair is always stirring around her verdant body.  She is young and cold, sad and patient - a lady in green waiting for justice.

 

I have been reading an article on Aberdeen, a dour Scottish city that is nourished on rain and ghosts.  Its silhouette is harsh and medieval, and it rides the eastern coast of Scotland like a battalion of granite knights.

There was one ghost in particular whose bittersweet life was as toxic and romantic as poisoned wine.  Her name was Dame Lilias Drummond.  She married Alexander Seton in 1592 and was unimaginative enough to give him five daughters.  Disgusted with her chromosomal betrayal, he hid Lilias away in the stony bower of their castle, where she was starved to death.  Whether she died from a lack of affection or food is not known.  All during this wasting time, Alexander was carrying on an affair with another noblewoman, Lady Grizel Leslie.

He married the Lady Grizel six months after the death of Lilias.  The morning after their wedding night they saw, 50 feet above the ground, the letters D. LILIAS DRUMMOND carved into the wall, in ethereal rebuke.  Today Lilias can be seen walking the halls of her home, Fyvie Castle, lonely and patient - a lady in green waiting for justice.

A sad, pretty story.  One that made me research The Green Lady's life further.  Until I found out one singular detail.  It never happened.  Their marriage, in fact, was a happy one.  A bouquet of daughters was not a sin.  The Dame's death was from natural causes.

That, I thought, was that.  Yet why should it be?  Doesn't this instead open up wide mythical vistas?  The green Lady of Fyvie Castle doesn't exist.  So couldn't I come up with my own?

Well?