I opened my eyes and there was a face, a spirit face, hovering inches above my face. It had no body, per se. Just a face and a long tail of spiritual essence that trailed off into nothingness.
So, in the late 1970s I became fascinated with the work of the poet Robert Graves. This interest was sparked first by watching I, Claudius on PBS. The series, starring Derek Jacobi as the Roman emperor Claudius, was based on two of Graves’s novels.
By the spring of 1982, fascination had blossomed into full blown obsession. I was living on East 7th Street at the time, a couple of doors east of McSorley’s Old Ale House.
To me, Graves had become an oracle. I became obsessed with his book The White Goddess. The book is both theory and guide to mythic origins and inspiration for poetry found in the Welsh bardic tradition. It is also a paean to the Divine Feminine in the form of a Mother Goddess, and the Muse. Over the decades since its publication, this tome has developed an avid, decidedly new age following.
Poetry was a holy endeavor to me then, and still is, I suppose. I was living across the street from St. George’s Cathedral, spiritual home for many in the local Ukrainian community. The little side street beside the church is named Taras Shevchenko Place, after that nation’s greatest poet. I remember how impressed I was that a street was named for a poet, and that I could see that street out my front window. (Writing this now, I am sitting in a room on Via Giovanni Pascoli in the remote, medieval mountain village of Sorano in Tuscany. Pascoli was an important Italian poet. My being here is a bit of serendipity, perhaps to be recounted in the future.)
Nowadays, the ground floor of 19 East 7th Street, where I used to live, is occupied by the Blackstone Collective, a high-end cult (their term) hair salon. They have the entire floor at street level. Back then it was divided into two storefront spaces/apartments. The photographer Don Hamerman – who got me a gig writing about sculpture for Smithsonian Magazine – lived across the hall with his wife Fern Galperin. I recently checked online and saw that an apartment in the building now rents for $4200 – ten times what I paid back then.
My apartment became a rest stop along the global bohemian highway. Jack Micheline once slept on the couch for a week or so. Max Scherr, founder of the Berkeley Barb and a mentor of mine, came to visit for a couple of nights not long before he died. Blind George, a legendary figure on Ibiza and Goa back then, stayed for almost 2 weeks, until two young hippie gal companions came to lead him on further travels. Eddie Woods from Ins and Outs Bookstore in Amsterdam visited. Stephanie, my wife at that time, and I held art exhibitions for the poet and watercolorist Irving Stettner.
My sonnets and other light verse were frequently appearing in The New York Times. Lawrence van Gelder was the first editor at the Times to publish me. Soon he moved on to another section of the paper. Glenn Collins took over and continued to publish my efforts for the next several years.
Such energy compounded my fascination with Graves and his theories about poetry and the Goddess in her various manifestations, especially late at night when I was awake alone. I would drink a little red wine and smoke some hashish to send the information contained in The White Goddess deep into my subconscious. That was my excuse anyway. In the Welsh bardic tradition, it was acceptable to ingest various substances to help one receive inspiration, called “awen.”
The time on the clock radio was 3:04 a.m. when I went to bed after an intense foray into Graves’s book one spring night. Stephanie was already asleep, as she had a day job at Harry N. Abrams — publisher of fine art coffee table books. I lay back and closed my eyes. Immediately I felt, or sensed, a presence.
I opened my eyes and there was a spirit face hovering inches above my face. It had no body, per se. Just a face and a long trail of spiritual essence. I started kicking, flailing at it. The face’s expression changed from curiosity to what I would call shock, or perhaps dismay, at my reaction. It immediately backed off and disappeared into its own essence. Poof, it was gone.
I looked at the clock and it was 3:06. Two minutes had passed. I hadn’t been asleep. It wasn’t an hallucination. Then I realized my visitor had Robert Graves’s face. The shock of an actual apparition frightened me, I suppose. Surprise at the unknown?
I got out of bed and wrote a letter to Graves saying what had just happened and that I was coming to Mallorca to visit him and to find out if it was true, if he had astral projected into my bedroom on East 7th Street. The hubris of youth: just announcing myself like that; the madness of it all: I went out and mailed the letter at dawn.
Stephanie totally accepted the story as I raved over breakfast that morning. She agreed to ask for a leave of absence from her publishing job. I managed to get a couple of magazine assignments before we left. Stephanie got into the whole idea. She had recently received a small inheritance from her maternal grandmother and decided to dip into that to help pay for the trip. At the time, I had quite a collection of Graves’s books, going all the way back to his first volume of poetry – Over the Brazier – and Stephanie suggested I bring the books to get them autographed.
So it was that I travelled across Europe with a mustard-colored Samsonite suitcase full of books. She and I had decided to fulfill a shared hippie-style fantasy as part of the trip. The acquisition of a Volkswagen bus in Amsterdam and our traipsing is a whole other story.
It was July 11, 1982, when Stephanie and I arrived in Deya on the island of Mallorca. In Madrid, Italy beat Germany to win the FIFA World Cup that evening. Stephanie and I watched the game on TV on the terrace of Hotel Es Moli, where we stayed. The locals were thrilled to see Germany defeated. I knew little about soccer but the sport made the date searchable for this.
The next day I walked into town alone. Stephanie wanted to come but quickly agreed it was probably better that I make the first foray alone. Graves’s home was at the end of the main road through the village, as I recall. Walking from the hotel down to the village center, I observed the landscape, terraced for agriculture, and a prominent peak named El Teix. It was July 12, 1982.
Along the main street, through every window that was open, I saw a different portrait of Robert Graves hanging on the wall. Some of the pictures were photos, others paintings. Quite a creative community thrived there with the poet at its center.
Notably, Nikki de Saint Phalle – one of the most important woman artists in history – had lived as Graves’s neighbor for ten years. That was before my visit. I am here in Tuscany right now writing a series of sonnets based on the Major Arcana cards of the Tarot deck. Nikki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden of amazing monumental sculptures based on the same cards, coincidentally, is close by on the way to the sea. The artist claimed the project was inspired by the Divine Feminine.
Beryl Graves, the poet’s wife, was outside in her kitchen garden as I came upon the house. She remembered my letter, saying she had expected me sooner. I explained that a case of bronchitis had laid me low in Paris. She invited me inside, saying as we went, “Robert hasn’t spoken to anyone in two years.” That was disconcerting, to understate, but I refrained from comment beyond a raised eyebrow and “oh.”
The kitchen was abuzz with family and locals. Graves’s daughter Catherine, from his first marriage, introduced herself. I declined a beverage, and Beryl took me on a tour.
She showed me the poet’s office. There was a shelf around the room with all his books, some of which I had back in the hotel room, in various editions and languages. Then Beryl asked if I wanted to meet Robert and say hello. Of course, I said yes.
Graves was sitting in a chair in a room adjacent to his office, dressed in a man’s night gown – like something out of the Nineteenth century, something you would expect Scrooge wore when the ghosts came to visit him.
Hello
So, there he sat, his head hanging down. His gray hair was long and hanging around his face. Beryl said, “Robert, someone’s come to visit you. A friend from New York.” He lifted his head, looked at me and his eyes lit up with recognition. He raised a hand in greeting and said, “Hello. You came. Welcome.” Then his head and hand both dropped back down and that was it.
There was no question in my mind that he had visited me in spirit form. His face was the face that hovered above mine. However, actual face to actual face, the only thing I could think was, ‘Holy crap, all this way and all I get is a hello?’ Beryl, on the other hand, seemed quite excited by his hello. She said, “Oh my” several times.
She led me back to the kitchen and offered a glass of lemonade, which I accepted. Beryl told everyone there, “Robert just spoke to this gentleman.” Juan, one of Robert’s and Beryl’s sons, descended from an upper floor of the house, introduced himself, and shook my hand.
Then I went back to the hotel. Stephanie immediately asked: “Did you meet him? Will he sign the books.”
“I met him and I don’t see this guy signing anything, now or probably ever.” I explained what had happened. Stephanie was clearly disappointed but was a good sport about it. That afternoon we walked along the main street of the village. We were going to have a coffee and figure out our next move.
Our VW van was at the airport in Barcelona. We were headed to Italy next where I was to write about marble and sculpture, and about the international community of sculptors that had grown up around the town of Pietra Santa (Holy Stone) in the Massa Carrara region of Tuscany. It was disappointing to not have experienced a true conversation with Graves. But hey – we were on the island of Mallorca and adventure awaited.
As we walked, this Englishman came charging out of a small stone house and stopped us. “You’re him. Robert went clear for you.” The man’s name was Martin Tallents. (NOTE: I could only recall his first name, until I recently told this story to my friend the performance artist-poet-playwright Penny Arcade. She had made a visit to meet Graves ten years before I did and knew
Tallents and told me his surname. Penny had stayed in Deya for several months. Thanks to the internet, I located David Holzer, who writes a blog about Deya. He filled in a couple of hazy details about the topography and buildings in the town, and he put me in touch with the artist David Templeton, whose drawings accompany this article, and who still lives there, next to the church.)
Tallents insisted we join him for a cup of tea. Inside, he told us that two years before, Graves had told “everyone” he was going to take magic mushrooms and go astral traveling and that he might not be able to come back. I had read Graves’s essay on using magic mushrooms, found in his Oxford Addresses on Poetry, and was there due to the poet astral projecting into my bedroom. None of this surprised me.
The community of expats around Graves, everyone in the village, according to Tallents, believed the poet had gone astral projecting. Now I was proof that it was true. This seemed to mean far more to Tallents than it did to me at the time.
Stephanie and I toured the island for three days. We saw the monastery where Georges Sand took Chopin one winter, hoping the composer’s tuberculosis would benefit. (It didn’t.) We went to the beach, looked around Palma de Mallorca. Stephanie got more and more disappointed daily at not meeting the great poet and wanted to move on. So, with the suitcase full of unsigned books, we left.
After a six week visit to Italy, it was back to the apartment across the street from the mosaic mural of St. George slaying the Dragon above the main entrance to the Ukrainian cathedral.
The poets kept coming to East 7th Street. I remember Stephanie painted a lovely watercolor based on the houses in Deya. Robert Graves’s books were back on my bookshelf. Our son Jesse was born the next spring. We moved to the country, as new parents often do.
Eventually Stephanie filed for divorce, dissatisfied with the financial ups and downs that often are part of youthful literary pursuits. I moved back to the East Village. I sold my Graves collection to the antiquarian Argosy Book Store, to pay my divorce lawyer.
For many years, looking back, I sometimes wondered if perhaps I should have gone to Graves’s house again and tried to communicate further. It didn’t feel right at the time. Whatever else, the man was obviously in his advanced dotage. My reason for the journey had been confirmed: Astral projecting is real.
And I got a pretty good story out of the experience. Sometimes, that has to be enough.
