The Reader Travels

Like Amy Tan herself, her main characters are Americans. They lack any insights into the spiritual world because their land is shiny and new, whitewashed and sometimes superficial. It is only back in the old country that we see spirits come to life, in a land with centuries of custom, tradition and ancestors who watch over their families on earth.

I’d like to keep traveling west from China, all the way to England, another place with a long, long history and their own connections to the new world of America. Although Henry James pre-dates magical realism, I can’t help but think of his novella The Turn of the Screw, when we talk about the fuzzy borders between the “real” and the spiritual.

Many a college literature course asks students to answer the question, is James’s ghost real, or is it simply a product of a disturbed mind? It’s funny to watch the different film adaptations of the book to see which took the ghost angle, and which was from the crazy school.

I like to think James’s ghosts were real, and here’s why. James was born in the US, but moved to England and claimed it as his home. An anglophile to the core, James would have rejected the shiny newness of his birthplace and embraced the fact that more people take their ghosts seriously in old England.

Who knew Henry James was a magical realist?

We arrive in China by way of San Francisco following Olivia and her half-sister Kwan in Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses. Living on a sphere, it is sometimes easier to travel West to arrive in the East; and halfway around the world is a further destination than all-the-way around the world.

East and West are worlds apart, yet there are always consistencies in the human condition. Kwan’s father had to leave her behind in China to start a new life for himself. He longed for her and wanted to give her the connection of family as he lay dying.

Many years ago, my own cousin had to give up her child when she was struggling just to take care of herself. The baby girl traveled west from Florida to Texas to California to the Middle East with relatives who would claim her as their own and love her forever.

Kwan has “yin eyes” — she sees ghosts and hears their stories. She sees more than the blood connection with her young American sister. She sees love and both the strength and the sadness of humanity.

When we left our travels, we were in Northern Mexico, skirting the border to the US. We travel now to New Mexico, where the people live north of the border, but share a culture with their family to the south.

We’ve been here before with Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima. Like Teresa Urrea in The Hummingbird’s Daughter, Ultima is a curandera. She knows plants, and she knows the spirits around her. She knows healing.

Life is hard, but for some it is unbearable. There is pain and sadness in every family, but most of us hold it together by sharing the burden with those we love. One peripheral character I remember from Bless Me, Ultima was cousin Lupe, who went to the war and came back with “war disease.” After the gruesome bloodshed of war, he would never be the same again. I have a picture of him in my mind, running wild through the arroya, the men in his family chasing behind to keep him from hurting himself.

I see this kind of war disease in some of my beloved friends and family members. For most it is not a literal war, but some gruesome life experiences they can’t seem to recover from. May they all find peace and balance in their lives.

The last time I was in New Orleans was three years ago, which was a year before Katrina blew through town. It’s still the city I remember, filled with family I’ve missed. But it’s also gravely wounded.

I’m here in mourning, and my new journal is filled with eulogies. I visited a cousin who’s been rebuilding her house, and living in it at the same time. My uncle is in a trailer until his house is livable again.

We drove out to my Aunt’s beach house and stood on the empty lot overlooking the broken piers that were once the Bay St. Louis Yacht Club. My niece sifted through the ground, picking out buried Mardi Gras beads and pieces of plates and glasses from the house, like it was an archaeology dig.

I’m here for a funeral, and the optimist in me can’t help but think about new beginnings. The day we arrived, they opened the new bridge across the bay between Bay St. Louis and Pass Christian, Mississippi. For two years they’ve been ferrying passengers across the bridge, but today everything is connected again. Sparkly and new.

San Francisco was named after the most beloved of all Catholic saints - St. Francis of Assissi. Now, whenever I think of St. Francis, I think of Bambi and Thumper and all the cartoon birds and butterflies of the forest, because he’s known for his love of nature and all the living creatures of the earth.

A couple of years ago, I went to an art exhibit that featured some paintings from Caravaggio, and I got a new image of St. Francis, and strangely enough, this one matches my image of San Francisco. It’s called Saint Francis of Assissi in Ecstasy.

Don’t you love it?

In Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Forest House, mushrooms are the drug of choice. In her poisoned haze, the high priestess can see the past, the future and the present. Like the Druids, San Francisco’s youth are also famed for their appreciation of hallucinogens, even if they do lack the sensibility and spirituality of Avalon’s priestesses.

In actuality, the priestesses don’t have any more sense than the trippin’ hippies of the ’60s. They’re still self important, immature and insecure, worshipping self destruction. But at least they’re not doing it because everyone else is doing it, like a bunch of sheep. They kept it to a few high-placed individuals, seers, who sacrificed their well being for their people.

It was okay when LSD was limited to people like Aldous Huxley and Carey Grant, mature individuals exploring the recesses of their minds, privately, like Plato’s philosopher kings. But the masses would only abuse this gift. “Hey man, let’s drop acid and go to Six Flags. Won’t that be righteous? Duh, huh.”

We can blame it all on The Beatles, right?

San Francisco started out as one of many Catholic missions established in California by Spanish priests. The priests and the natives of the land flourished together with the father, the son and the holy ghost for many generations. Then in 1834, the Mexican government smashed the mission system in an attempt to secularize the country. Priests were persecuted and the natives scattered like Jews in the desert.

The fogs of San Francisco Bay were mirrored by the hordes of people flowing onto the land in search of gold. People of all languages, religions and nationalities confused the religious landscape, made it difficult for the Catholics to regain the control they had lost. But they kept their presence in California, even when they had to hide.

The same sort of thing is happening in The Mists of Avalon. The Christians are taking over the land, persecuting the Druids, who must create a shroud of mist to hide the practice of their faith. Their actions are defensive, grasping in the fog to maintain control, to keep from losing their faith, when finally they realize that the Madonna is just another incarnation of the goddess, and She is eternal.

Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Avalon books brought me to world of pagan appreciation for the beauty and power of nature. Churches with walls and roofs are an aberration, for the beauty of god is not inside a man-made structure, but outside with the earth and the sky.

In Lady of Avalon, priestess initiation happens on an ocean cliff described as one of the sacred places where earth meets sea meets sky. I visited San Francisco shortly after reading this novel, and I realized that the northern California coastline is also one of those sacred places.

As I sat along the shore and watched the waves crash into the craggy rocks, I couldn’t help but gasp in ecstasy. The rocks are hard, but the water is persistent, patiently molding the earth, crash after crash.

Divine.

In Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Tom Robbins poses the question about San Francisco, why, when mother nature keeps destroying your city do you insist on rebuilding it? I’ll tell you why. It’s because despite the earthquakes, San Francisco is prime real estate. It’s gorgeous, and prosperous.

But what about New Orleans? Mother nature sends the hurricanes. Cleanup and upkeep are a nightmare. It’s a swamp, but it’s still prime real estate, a port of entry, fecund with commerce.

With their Roman Catholic origins, these cities represent strength in suffering, power through martyrdom. It’s all about perseverence in the face of devastation.

Some of the most awesome stories are those of the Catholic saints, these wondrous people who suffer beheadings, crucifixion, burning at the stake, piercing by arrows. The saintly cities suffer earthquakes and floods, and like the saints, they are eternal.

San Francisco is a prime destination spot. In the 1800s, people came for the promise of gold, adventure, prosperity. In Isabel Allende’s Daughter of Fortune, Eliza travels to California in search of love and finds herself among people from all over the world, all in search of fortune. And in this bustling, changing place, she finds her self.

Alice Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar brings us to places around the world, time tripping through South America, North Carolina, Georgia, England and Africa. But the end point is San Francisco, a place for the future, a place of rock stars, technology and knowledge. It’s a place where her characters can see themselves clearly, at the edge of the world.

So, even though Daughter of Fortune and The Temple of My Familiar show San Francisco at completely different times in the city’s history, the characters share the notion that this place is their final destination, their destiny.