I recently returned from a mostly lazy week with the Art Monastery Project in Calvi dell’Umbria, Italy. I met one of its founders, the irrepressible American tenor and theatre director Christopher Fülling, at the Metageum conference last year in Malta, and was fascinated by his attempt, along with his visual artist and synchronized swimmer wife Betsy McCall and a host of other fascinating people, to create a retreat for art production and community in a former Ursuline convent in the rolling hills of Umbria.

The monastery itself, located in the charming town of Calvi, is still in the process of being readied for occupation. Meantime, the project folk have taken to running a gorgeous nearby agriturismo, Casale Santa Brigida (check out the view above).

The tumultuous storm on the night of my arrival—the apparently untypical climax to the previous week’s baking weather—afforded some astonishing panoramas of dark lightning-threaded horizons, and eventually brought us all to the realities of rural living by wiping out the electricity supply with its torrential downpour. In retrospect it also heralded the sundry events that were to thread through the day-to-day of this rural idyll: the delightful sparks of meeting new people in evenings of convivial feasting, and occasional force majeure mishaps.

Everyone seemed to roll with the punches and rise to the occasion—be it a workaday mission to get pasta or a gathering for barbecued local meats—with the kind of panache you might expect from such a bold bunch of pragmatic dreamers.

Marriage seemed to be in the air, suspended as we were between Christopher and Betsy’s spectacular “Atlantean” wedding at Burning Man and their upcoming festivities in Calvi; and two of their friends passing through got engaged on the Santa Brigida terrace before dinner one evening.

The bountiful fig tree provided a culinary bass note for our ever-tasty meals; the burgeoning olive grove around us constantly gestured towards the upcoming olive harvest. Besides the nascent art activities, such on-site manifestations kept in focus the Art Monastery’s integration of ideas of localization and sustainability into its vision. The locals, the Calvese, have welcomed them as one of their own, and they’re aiming to give to the local community the nourishment of their art and performance much as the local soil will nourish their bellies. One of Christopher and Betsy’s old friends who visited recalled his reaction, years ago when their idea for the Art Monastery first came up, of thinking them a little crazy. Of course, such a project needs a healthy dose of madness; but as we watched the global economy begin to crumble during the week I was there, these goals of community and localization stood out as eminently sane.

For the most part I relished immersing myself in a few juicy books. A couple of notable visitors certainly added to things, though.

Medieval song and classical music specialist Wolodymyr Smishkewych (aka Vlad) peformed his reconstruction of part of the Lay of Igor, an old Kievan-Rus epic, playing his swan-headed lute, as part of Calvi’s San Pancrazio festival. I missed the story—the original Slavic being translated in projections into Italian—but Vlad’s performance, dipping into engaging narrative speech and soaring into emotion-laden song, was great.

And it was fantastic to meet journalist and archaeologist Christine Finn. Known for her archaeologically-minded trip through Silicon Valley—the book Artifacts—she’s currently working on a biography of the controversial, poetically-minded archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes. Christine seems to be heading towards the art departments in her academic studies, finding them more amenable to the increasingly creative approach she’s taking to excavating the past; we certainly had enough in common in our attitude to studying archaic cultures to make the brief time she was there nowhere near sufficient to exhaust our connections.

The Art Monastery’s one of the more compelling and promising projects I’ve happened across recently. Any artists or creative, interested people should certainly have a look at how to get involved.

If nothing else, if you’re thinking of taking a break in Italy, I suspect there are few more fascinating venues for sampling rural Italy and international creativity than the beautiful Casale Santa Brigida. Say ciao from me to Pipo (Italian for “goofy”, I hear) and Josie…

First off, why no air travel? Carbon emissions, of course. Jim Bliss, my ex-engineer friend whose head for maths makes me dizzy, on moving to Dublin last year, sat down to work out how much worse it would be if he flew to London rather than taking a coach. Turns out it’s about 31 times worse.

Merrick just did some more DIY carbon calculations, and worked out that – using aviation-friendly estimates – “every minute you’re on a plane is the same as a day’s worth of your electricity”.

If we can make our way briskly past the noxious climate change denial industry (and associated amateurs), accepting that this stuff is actually happening and that our actions have consequences, we usually come to the arguments for “tech fixes”. In many arenas, this is a fair argument – at least, it’s worth engaging with, even if you disagree with it.

Not so, unfortunately, with air travel:

… every other source of global warming can be reduced or replaced [...] without a serious reduction in our freedoms. But there is no means of sustaining long-distance, high-speed travel.

The industry claims it can reduce its emissions by means of new technological developments. But as the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution points out, its targets “are clearly aspirations rather than projections”. There are some basic technological constraints which make major improvements impossible to envisage.

George Monbiot

The singular nature of air travel in this respect means that we just have to travel less by air. Personal sacrifices in a matter like this, some may argue, are as nothing without widespread limits enforced for all. There’s a truth in that. Yet my general experience is that this argument is usually trotted out by people who (1) would be the last to support widespread enforced limitations, and (2) use it as a rationalization for totally disregarding personal morality.

The people I know who dedicate a great portion of their waking lives to campaigning for such limits also apply this sense of collective morality to their own actions. I think this is known as “integrity”. (Of course, no one’s perfect, and hypocrisy is the result of high ideals as well as a lack of integrity.)

What about offsetting? Surely if there’s no other way we can buy our way out of this one? Well, due to several important practical considerations, the short answer to that is, “No – deal with it”.

My trip to Malta may inevitably end up entailing air flight, if for no other reason than no ferry services seem to operate in November (I’m a good swimmer, but not exceptional). But it may be possible to include a pleasant jaunt through Italy as part of train travel most of the way, and discovering the best way to do this is made all the easier by this brilliant website:

The Man in Seat Sixty-One

The hobby site of “career railwayman” Mark Smith, it details concise and helpful information for anyone who – for whatever reason – wants to travel without flying. It’s geared towards British travellers, but does include information on travel within other countries that people originating elsewhere may find crucial. Most travel agents and other sources of information are insanely biased towards air travel, so sites like this are hugely valuable.

Mark is clearly someone who would be doing this with or without an impending climate crisis: “Many people would rather not fly, or like me, simply prefer a more civilised, comfortable, interesting, adventurous, romantic, scenic, historic, exciting and environmentally-friendly way to travel.”

Yet again, the philosophy of reduction, of intelligently scaling back some of the excesses of capitalist industrialism, is often more than it appears when forced through the growth- and speed-fixated filters of consumer economics. Frequently painted as a passé form of hippy “hair-shirt” self-mortification, reduction is often the path of choice for the true sensualist.

The fact that this philosophy’s most famed branch, the Slow Food movement, itself began in Italy as a reaction to fast food makes me even more inspired to take my time getting to Malta. See if I can find the perfect Pizza Napoletana…

Well, I probably should have learned from travelling in the States last year: travelling just doesn’t inspire me to post much. Combined with the ease of digital photography these days, it’s true for this trip as much as the one to the States that my Flickr photostream pretty much earns that title of “my travel journal”. It’s much less revealing, in many ways, though, than a written journal might be. Travelling alone, the images tend to be more of things than people (with the occasional self-portrait and friend I hook up with). Plus, when I hit my more-than-occasional downers, I would be much more likely to winge when writing than grab my camera and take a picture of myself with a frown. (Though I did actually attempt an expressive use of an image to make sure people were getting some indication of my grey rubble downs as well as my blue sky ups.) But, combined with the descriptions, title and notes that Flickr allows, that’s been the main place to track my progress.

Progress? I’m not sure I’d use that word about this trip. I’m less than two weeks away from my flight back now, hoping that these grey Greek skies are going to buck up and fuck off to give me a little of what we English come here for—sun!—before I head home. Ups, yes; downs, yes. But no clear line forward. If that’s really what I was looking for, or even needed. Maybe the sense of being adrift and uprooted is actually all about cutting up that straight rut we get channeled into as city-dwelling workers.

I was seeking some sense of re-affirmation, and I think it arrived, albeit very discreetly, with a wry grin and bitter wisdom instead of blazing fireworks. I got up one morning and thought of all my seemingly half-hearted plans I’d made in England before I left, for when I got back, thinking, maybe the trip will explode these seemingly half-baked ideas into something different, something inspired. And I thought, quite simply, “I know what I’m doing, even though it doesn’t feel remotely like it. When I get back I just need to carry on with the plans I made.”

There’s still time of this drifting left, so I’m not drawing any final judgements. Plus, I’ve found that any “effects” of a trip (in any sense in which you care to have a trip), are often unforeseen until well into the return to “normality”. For now, I’ve been thinking a lot of my late-teen literary idol, Samuel Beckett, whose centenary this year has provoked many festivals which I’m currently missing. The final novel in his bitterly heroic trilogy, The Unnameable, whose final sentence runs for sixty odd pages, ends with a succinct expression of his bleak yet resolute vision:

… I can’t go on, I’ll go on.

Granada

A wonderful city, nestled between the snowy peaks of the Sierra Nevada and the surrounding near-deserts. The Alhambra is a spectacular must, but also well worth a visit is the little museum up Sacromonte, the hill just opposite the one dominated by the Alhambra. It preserves cave dwellings in use by a famed flamenco dancer and her family until floods in the 1960′s, and houses art left by artists who visit the village in the summer.

Barcelona

Arrived in the morning after an all-night train from Granada. I’d gathered from Flickr’s graffiti tag page that Barcelona’s a modern graffiti hub, but nothing prepared me for the cascades of the stuff adorning the railways sidings, even from many miles outside the city.

Hit a bit of a downer here and didn’t fully appreciate it. Another time. At least the squid ink paella was amazing.

Galicia

A gruelling 18 hour train journey from Barcelona landed me in Santiago de Compostela, the city famed as the alleged burial place of Saint James, and the (near) end-point of the pilgrimage route named after him. I stayed in a good little place called Meiga (“witch”) Hostel on Plaza Galicia. I asked about the witch thing—seemed strange that such a Christian place would be so overflowing with witchiness, to the point of there being performance artists dressed as witches in the square in front of the cathedral. Well, apparently it’s just a local “thing”. Rural Galician villages are supposed to be full of the wrinkly old spell-casters, and tourism has fully capitalised.

Got slightly cornered here by the Easter holidays (my planned drive through the Pyrenees suddenly became very expensive due to rocketing car hire prices), but also by my wish to just go somewhere quiet, camp, search for rock art, and reflect. I spent most of the time here at Camping Ancoradoiro, a great campsite on the end of the peninsula near Muros. It seemed to be run by two brothers, very friendly guys, one of whom ran the campsite while the other ran the adjoined (rather swish) restaurant, and mowed the grass.

I was blessed with some highly unusual (for Galicia in the spring) blistering sunshine, but cursed with a combination of a highly inaccurate “Mapa Topografica” (the closest Spain has to Ordnance Survey maps) and some impossibly elusive rock art. I spent one whole sweaty day getting scratched to shreds by gorse, and found not one of the eight rock carvings I looked for. Oddly, I wasn’t pissed off—the walk through the hills was wholly fulfilling.

A couple of video curiosities. Walking up through a village towards some rock art, I happened upon a little cat with one of those sharp, unmistakable “I been a bad pussycat” wide-eyed expressions. I couldn’t tell whether it had just eaten a lizard or just scared the tail off one, but the tail remained on the ground, squirming with reflexive life (via YouTube). And, walking down a path made out of boulders from a hill behind a monastery, I stopped when I heard a regular drawn-out hissing noise, followed by a thick bubbly sound. It sounded like a massive viper poised for attack in the company of a savage wild boar snuffling in the mud. It actually turned out to be some odd thing going on with the water underneath the path, which I never fully worked out. Watch the seething little pool with awe! (via YouTube)

My time in Santiago convinced me that I want to walk the Camino (the pilgrim’s route) at some point. There seems to be a prehistoric lineage to the route that has some interesting associations—at least from the tidbits I picked up. It being the burial place of Saint James, together with the fact that the route heads westwards towards the Atlantic’s setting sun, obviously associates the pilgrimage with death. What’s more, many pilgrims carry on past Santiago to what they regard as the real end of the road—Finisterra (also called Fisterra), right on the coast. It seems the Romans thought this was the westernmost point in Europe (it isn’t quite), and it’s hard to know whether the correct translation of the placename is the familiar-sounding (and hence less resonant) “Land’s End”, or the more deathly and grandiose “End of the World”. There’s also an etymology of the city’s name that derives “Compostela” from the Latin for “field of the star”. Supposedly Saint James chose his burial place according to a star that hovered over the city. However, if it could be taken as “star field”, or even as having come from a plural, “field of stars”, something more interesting arises. Apparently, the Camino itself has often been referred to as “the Milky Way”, a reference usually casually associated with the sheer number of pilgrims being compared to the density of stars in the galactic band across the sky. However, I (as ever) wonder… Could the association be more to do with the Milky Way’s almost global reputation as the path that souls take after death?

This is how I reasoned from the scraps of information I picked up. Obviously I’ll have to do some proper research to flesh things out. I just found a piece about Galicia that ascribes the “star above the city” myth to someone discovering James’ tomb. Interestingly, that author also refers to Charlemagne having a dream of “a shining path of stars above the Milky Way which led to Compostela”. Also mentioned is the fact that the coastline north from Finisterra is called The Coast of Death. I’d gathered that this was from its long reputation as a shipping hazard, from ancient times through to modern oil tanker disasters. But it’s always worth spreading your net wide before you sort through your catch when fishing for psychospiritual gems in a landscape…

Oddly, and very sadly, death become real at the end of the Camino for a Danish woman I met in the hostel. I was talking with her in the kitchen about a friend of mine whose father is planning on walking the Camino, and about the fact that I’d gathered his wife had some concerns about him doing it due to his recent ill health. The Danish woman said she thought a wife should never stand in the way of her husband doing something, even if she’s extremely concerned for his health. She left the kitchen for a minute, then came back streaming with tears. She’d just found out on the phone that her husband had just died. She said he’d wanted to walk the Camino with her, but was busy with the work he loved so much. Of course she was devastated, but also wracked with a multiplied sense of inexplicability. Why did this sudden, unforeseen tragedy commemorate her completion of this sacred route?

Florence

Impossibly beautiful, everything it’s said to be and more. I instantly loved Florence, and even the hoardes of tourists totally fail to dampen the atmosphere of the city. The famed Uffizi Gallery, home to a staggering array of medieval and Renaissance art, is well worth the two-hour-plus queue (though obviously it’s better to plan ahead and book).

Val Camonica

I’d long been interested in this area through studying rock art in Britain, especially near Ilkley in West Yorkshire, and especially the Swastika Stone—which has a near-identical double here in alpine Italy.

The carvings here are radically different from Britain, though. For a start, the rocks are different—exposed outcrops that dwarf even those in Kilmartin, Scotland—and are made distinct by the sinuous glacial erosion. Interestingly, there are next to no cup-and-ring designs here, which are common in Britain and Galicia, where these cup-marks surrounded by concentric rings often occur near large natural basins in the rock. One carving in Galicia seemed to combine the natural basin and the concentric rings, leading me to wonder if the basins formed some sort of inspiration for the cup-marks, as natural flat-topped hills may have inspired Silbury. There are no basins in evidence in Val Camonica, but the lack of cup-and-rings seems to be more down to just an entirely different tradition than due to a lack of natural basin inspiration. The carvings themselves are very “light”, made with little pecks into the rock rather than deep grooves—possibly down to the hardness of the rock. And most glaringly, even though Galicia’s art sports numerous animals and some people, Val Camonica is in a league of its own regarding representations. Huge chaotic sprawls of carvings depict hunting scenes, ploughing, fighting, dwellings, animals, people, as well as a host of more abstract and “religious” imagery.

If you visit, head for the town of Capo di Ponte and look for signs to the museum or the Naquane park. There are many other sites nearby, but this is the place to start off. My time there was marred by a stunning bout of allergy suffering, my first since I left England. Now I’m back out of the Alps, I’m fine again. Such a shame to be allergic to nice places!

Books I’ve been reading

I spent much of my time chilling in Galicia avidly reading Steven Mithen’s fascinating book The Prehistory of the Mind. It’s a bit old now (1996), but it’s one of the best coherent theories of the evolution of consciousness I’ve read. It’s based on the recently popular concept of “mental modules”, where the mind contains specialized areas (perhaps, but not necessarily, corresponding to neural regions) that deal with major cognitive functions, such as those related to tool use, socialisation, and language (perhaps some invisible debt here to Leary & Wilson’s 8-circuit model?). Mithen argues that proto-hominids evolved these modules, but the extra “something” that made Homo sapiens so special is the ability to apply ideas from one region to another, which he terms “cognitive fluidity”. It basically rests human consciousness on the slippery foundations of capacity for metaphor and analogy. It’s immensely frustrating, though, to read a hefty tome that bases its theory of consciousness on the development of such “fluidity”, that makes no mention whatsoever of psychedelic plants—not even to dismiss the idea that they contributed in some way to the evolution of consciousness. I can hear Terence McKenna turning in his grave, albeit with a wry “What do you expect?” grin on his face. How these people can claim to be doing their job sometimes staggers me. Maybe Mithen will at least tell us why he avoided such an obvious topic (for those who have read the relevant literature and been to the relevant all-nighters) in his more recent work.

For the train ride to Florence and beyond, I picked up a copy of Jared Diamond’s Collapse. His Guns, Germs & Steel had been recommended to me, so his latest, looking at why societies in the past (Mayan, Anasazi, Easter Island, Norse Greenland) and present (Rwanda) disintegrated, seemed worth checking out. It is indeed an excellent book. Even though Diamond started the project aiming to look exclusively at ecological reasons for such collapses, he was forced to avoid “environmental determinism” and take into account other factors—most notably social values, and responses to environmental crisis—as well. What results is a fascinating, detailed lesson (or rather, course) in history, ecology, sociology and economics. Diamond treads an individual enough path to have both strident environmentalists and “eco-sceptics” in sharp disagreement with certain points, but his message is clear: global society is in grave ecological danger, and if we don’t start living within our means pronto, what will result is exactly the kind of nightmare scenario that, in order to dismiss calls for action as “doomsaying”, the sceptics love to attribute to environmentalists. He saves the best until last: a brilliant, scathing and largely unarguable dismissal of the most common “one-liner” dismissals of environmental concerns (such as “Environmental doomsayers have been wrong in the past” and “Technology will save us”). Read it, weep, and get off your arse.

Las Fallas, Valencia

Every nationality we met during this sprawling, wild fireworks festival—English, Italian, American, German—had the same thing to say: “These Spanish are crazy!” The Mediterranean reputation for being laid-back is, at very best, a gross simplification. Las Fallas (alongside the Spanish overuse of the car horn) testifies to this.

(However, there does seem to be a relaxation in their intensity. We saw rockets careen into tightly packed crowds a couple of times, with no apparent damage occurring, just loads of shouting. In a more tightly-wound nation, such events would probably have caused a panic that would certainly have ended in tears…)

Ages are spent constructing the sometimes massive, always loud and exhuberant “Fallas”, street sculptures ranging from Disney cuteness to contemporary satire that manages to weave subtle ideas across the city’s plazas even with the broad brush and bright paint characteristic of these pop art marvels.

I say “pop art” with no thought of Warhol et al. It just struck me hard how such a city-wide art event would be impossible to imagine in England. On top of the fireworks, Las Fallas is indeed a communal art event. Corporate sponsorship—from beer companies to Nestlé—abounds, probably necessitated by the obvious hunger for vast, expensive explosions day-in, day-out as much as by the obvious tendencies of the modern west. But there’s no mistaking—from my English perspective—the sheer scale of enthusiasm for this riotous celebration of aesthetic creavitity, right in the streets.

And the tradition is so free of preciousness (or, is just so pyromaniacal) that on the last day of festivities, all but one of the Fallas are burnt to the ground. The only comparable tradition I’ve heard of is the Tibetan “butter sculpture” tradition, where intricate sculptures are left to melt in the sun as a reminder of impermanence.

Every day during Las Fallas, which lasts from the beginning of March to St. Joseph’s day (March 19th), fireworks are going off everywhere. At least during the final week, everyone gathers in the Plaza del Ayuntamiento for mascletà. Being daytime fireworks, their main appeal is the noise. And the shock waves felt through the feet and in the gut. We missed the final day’s mascletà, partly because we were still reeling from the crazy crowd-crush and utterly apocalyptic racket from the previous day, when we made an effort to “get down the front”.

Then at night, in the dried-up river that now serves as a long, curved park, mostly a hang-out for the Peruvians and feral cats it seems, everyone gathers for the visually spectacular fireworks. Every night beats every firework display you’ve seen. It made sense to find out that the people who do the displays for Rolling Stones tours, plus London and New York New Year events, are local guys. This is their homecoming gig, every year.

And if you weren’t already mad with noise and sulphur, from drinking and crowds, from little kids throwing stupendously loud bangers at you… a clanging, stomping brass band marches round the streets every morning at 8am to wake everyone up.

Actually, the brass bands proved to be a highlight. We caught one late at night which, after its rather solemn procession past the Virgin made of flowers, broke into ‘Stand By Me’ – which in turn broke into a hectic jazz version of the same number down an impossibly drunken alleyway.

Andalucian snippets

In search of the Indalo man

A while ago my mum brought back a trinket from Mojácar for me—a porcelain stick figure with an arch from one arm to another, over the head. She said it was a local good luck charm there, said to originate from prehistoric cave art in the nearby hills. I tried to see the original, got close, but failed. It’s in la Cueva de Los Letreros, a cave just south of Velez Blanco. But no one nearby speaks much English at all, and apparently the person on the other end of the number you have to ring to get access doesn’t either. It just didn’t work out.

Antequerra

Julian Cope said before I left that if I visited one prehistoric site in Spain, it should be Antequerra. The keynote of the local landscape is undoubtedly the huge face-like hill that dominates to the northeast of the town. Driving in from the east, we noticed an astonishing tendency towards anthropomorphic images in the Andalucian hills even a hundred kilometres before Antequerra, but when this hill looms into view it’s a different event. There’s no pointing at it saying, “Doesn’t that bit look like a face?” It’s just there.

The town itself was like a fresh breeze after the chokingly Anglicised tackiness of the Garrucha and Mojácar coastal strip (there was even a supermarket called Spainsbury’s, and none of the English residents seemed to bother even with “hola” or “por favor” when talking with shop cashiers). Close to the town are three Neolithic dolmens, two right next to the town (la Menga and la Viera) and one (el Romeral) a little further out. Romeral’s highlight was the genuine touch of the Neolithic goddess given by the small swarm of bees seemingly guarding the entrance to its inner passage. If you’ve got the bandwidth, check this little Romeral bees video clip (via YouTube – some background bird chirping nearly overwhelms the sound, but there’s plenty of good bee action). Menga dominates, though. It’s stupendous in scale, giving both Lee and myself a “how the fuck did they lift these stones?!” shock far surpassing Avebury and Stonehenge. And when you look out of the massive inner chamber, Cope’s argument about the “hill face” being integral to the thinking behind this necropolis seems irrefutable. Maybe it was seen as some primal ancestor, maybe an earth-bound godform; in any case, its physical relevance is plain.

To the south of the town, way up in the hills, sits El Torcal, a truly awesome, alien landscape unto itself. Bizarre rock formations, that totally obscure the horizon as you explore this dreamlike topology, give you the impression that archaic people reaching this place must have felt like they had reached some level of the sky-bound heavens. Frisky wild goats, alternately fucking and fighting, completed this surreal treat.

Cabo de Gata

The southeastern most point in Spain hides the least overwhelmed beaches of its Mediterranean coast. We spent a great sunny day in San José before we had to drop the hire car off at Almeria airport and Lee had to head back to grey old London to direct a production of Aleister Crowley’s The Ship. I’d checked with a tourist info place in San José about the closest campsite that was open (many don’t open until April), but buses there from the airport seemed to be a problem at weekends, so I splashed out on a taxi there. As long as I got to a campsite near some beaches, I could chill for the week.

As the taxi turned down narrower and narrower dirt tracks, through bleaker and more desolate wastelands of the local tomato industry, my gritted teeth tried to hold on to the hope that we would eventually burst through onto a picturesque coastline. But Camping Cabo de Gata turned out to live bang in the middle of this grim agricultural landscape. Rows and rows of English and German tourists and semi-permanent caravan dwellers, a bland restaurant, and a swimming pool under construction.

I was told the bus to Almeria went from the road 1 km away, every few hours or so. Even if I wanted to go further up the coast, I’ve to go back to Almeria to get another bus. The campsite proprietor told me it went from the other side of the road to the campsite entrance, next to a “plastic house”. (This puzzled me until I got back to the main road. Of course, the “plastic house” was one of the hundreds of fields of tomatoes that dominate the landscape here, covered in plastic greenhouses.)

When I left, there was no one at reception to take my payment. So, not wanting to miss the bus, I just left—no one had bothered to register me anyway, so I thought they couldn’t be too bothered.

I’ve still yet to find a good sun hat—the Spanish seem not to really want or need hats—so I’m reliant on a bit of sun block to save my shaved bonce from frying in the already searing heat. Imagine my horror, then, when the Almeria bus turned up, and drove right past with an unpitying shrug from the driver. Two, maybe four more hours to wait in the midday sun. And even then, how could I tell where the bus stopped, if it stopped here? Almeria was about 15km away, certainly unwalkable in the sun. My nerves began to fray and splinter.

The concrete wall for the campsite sign afforded some shade, so I thought I’d crouch there and see if I could hitch a lift from someone coming out of the site. An ambulance turned quietly into the road to the site; several cars left, but none stopped. Then the ambulance reappeared, and its siren and lights sprang into life as they approached me. I saw some movement in the back, and as it swung round onto the main road, I saw a pair of feet against the back window, the legs, probably the whole body, seized by violent spasms.

One of the infrequent cars coming out stopped just short of me being able to see the driver, and hovered there for what seemed like an age. Finally it crawled forwards, and I stood to put my thumb out. I quickly realised there was no chance with this guy—it was the campsite owner. He shook his finger at me like an admonishing teacher, and drove past. He’d obviously recognised me and realised I was leaving without paying. Why did he stop? Was he wondering whether to get out and harangue me? Maybe weighing his desire to do this against some urgent business—maybe a customer, friend or relative in the ambulance? Whatever the case, my insecurity rocketed now, realising I couldn’t really go back to the campsite if I was stranded here, and that waiting here seemed to contain the danger of the owner reappearing to harass me.

Finally I decided to walk in the opposite direction to Almeria, to Salinas, the nearby (how near?) town I remember being mentioned as the bus’s previous stopping point. But almost immediately I came across a small bar that seemed to be close to opening. The barman was cleaning tables, and with my phrasebook I was able to get details from him about where the bus stopped (barely 200 metres from where I stood before) and when he was serving food.

Sat under a tree feeling a bit better (but still pretty vulnerable at the thought of the campsite owner lurking in the region), I was approached by a shambling oldish guy who emerged from a simple house behind the bar. He spoke no English, but soon came out with one of the Spanish words I’m most familiar with: “Cerveza?” He walked to his house and came back with two cans of beer and his sweet, shy dog. We had one of those broken conversations that consist mostly of gestures, which at least confirmed the fact that the bus did stop here, and would be here in another hour or so.

His amigo turned up with a bag full of mostly green, knobbly tomatoes. He’d explained that he was a farm labourer here, but these looked like their own private crop rather than the perfectly round, supermarket-ready breed underneath the plastic houses. (They turned out to be the juiciest, most flavoursome tomatoes I’ve ever had.)

When the bar opened, he took me in and brought me more drinks (always refusing one in return). His amigo, like the man himself, was pretty sozzled already, and as I sat between the two, his wild gesticulations constantly threatened to hit my face. He leaned towards me, the bar stools gradually slipping in front of him, with the kind of apparently barely-concealed aggression common to real drunks. It invariably turns out to be a twisted overflow of intoxicated friendliness, but it’s always difficult to tell if it might take a turn for the worse.

In the end, the drunks saved the day, getting me pleasantly tipsy to soothe my nerves, and getting me safely on the bus to Almeria (even though I did have to insist I went to catch the bus and not have another glass of wine).

Not wanting to risk more misadventures in remote regions without transport, however tempting the deserted beaches, as soon as I got to Almeria I decided to take the friendly drunk’s advice to visit Granada. The wave of grimness and bad luck seemed to have not only been broken by these booze-addled amigos, it had been reversed: at Almeria station an old French woman immediately divined my intentions at the ticket desk, and quickly stepped in to order my ticket for me, and literally walked me to the right bus bay, from which a Granada bus was departing in five minutes. I soundtracked the ride in the still-roasting sun up past the Sierra Nevada with some expansive Jane’s Addiction and rambling Johnny Cash, and wept with relief after this strange, strange day, and at the beauty of the magnificent Andalucian landscape.

Painted Cave Road

The first thing that caught my eye as I scrolled northwest from LA on Google Maps was the Chumash Painted Cave Park just north of Santa Barbara. Michael had told me before I slept on the hill in Topanga Canyon that we were at the border between old Chumash and Tongva territories, and I’ve been fascinated by archaic/traditional rock paintings for many years now, so it seemed like a good first stop on my journey back towards the Bay Area.

I wasn’t quite sure of where to turn off the 154 snaking north into the Santa Ynez Mountains, but when I saw that the name of the unassuming turn-off I was approaching was “Painted Cave Road”, I thought it was a good bet. Frequently reduced to the width of a car, this road wound up the steep mountainside in ever-tightening twists and turns. The actual cave – just tucked away slightly above a stretch of the road shaded by small trees – was fronted by marvellous natural honeycomb-like formations in the rock. Surely, I thought, a wonder that attracted the people who decorated the cave to this site in particular. It seemed no coincidence to me, either, that just a short clamber down from the road next to the cave was a babbling stream, flushing sparkling fresh water through this parched landscape (many rock art sites in Europe are also oriented in relation to water features in the landscape).

The paintings themselves lurked in the upper rear reaches of the shallow cave, the mouth of which was sealed off with iron mesh. It was only on inspecting photos that I could discern the obvious reason for this protection: pointless contemporary initials and other doodles etched into the original paints. The paintings themselves were crowded clusters of crosses, serpentine figures and circles with all manner of decorations suggestive of solar connections. One curious figure stood out as slightly anthropomorphic, with its apparent waving hands, odd triangular shape and strange top hat-like summit. Well worth visiting, as much for the stunning natural frame as the enigmatic art.

Pacific Coast Highway

Heading north past Lake Cachuma and on towards Santa Maria and the Pacific coast, I jammed the personal stereo adapter I’d picked up in Burbank into the car’s cigarette lighter socket and tuned the radio in to the weak FM signal it started broadcasting my MP3 player on. A nifty little solution, but not necessarily ideal. I pegged Sonic Youth’s blasted guitars as the best soundtrack for the blazing heat and semi-arid hills, but every now and then I’d pass a break in the enclosing landscape and some energetic Latino pop would take over for a minute. A surreal occasional taster of the airborne culture around me.

Morro Bay heralded the start of the breath-taking coastal drive, and by then I’d decided that I would press on to reach Big Sur before the end of the day. So, armed with a huge bag of nachos, some passable salsa, and Spearhead’s bouncing funk, I followed the setting sun northwest.

Big Sur

My main association with this place before arriving has always been the Esalen Institute, a centre for the “human potential movement” whose list of occasional teachers reads like a roll-call for popularisers of modern spirituality who are canny enough to avoid the tacky marshes of the New Age (think Terence McKenna, John Lilly, Colin Wilson, Alan Watts, Robert Anton Wilson and Stanislav Grof, for starters). Heck, Hunter S. Thompson was once the caretaker-cum-security there.

Well, I noticed the “by reservation only” sign for the centre’s 120 acre grounds in passing; Big Sur’s associations with people I’m influenced by were quickly swamped by the mind-stopping beauty of the place. Low, almost perpetually cloud-capped mountains rise to the east, the Pacific waves crash on the craggy shores, and in between Route 1 wends its way through stunning redwood forests. I felt like having a soundtrack, but nearly everything seemed out of place against such a swell of natural grandeur. Early Spiritualized instrumentals eventually fell into place as the perfect accompaniment. (It’s no coincidence that Sonic Youth, Spearhead and Spiritualized are in alphabetical order. As just skipping tracks is a damn sight safer than browsing through my music folders while driving, the fact that the perfect soundtracks for the series of landscapes through which I drove that day were by bands following each other alphabetically was a grand blessing of serendipity.)

I spent a night at the Fernwood motel, reading Michael Ortiz Hill’s book Gathering in the Names, occasionally unable to hold back a tear or two as I drank ale at the Redwood Grill. Co-written with Augustine Kandemwa, Michael’s “spiritual twin brother” in Zimbabwe, who initiated Michael as an nganga (healer), it charts the intertwined course of these men’s lives up to and past their meeting and mutual initiatory experiences. Michael’s experiences as a nurse in the UCLA Medical Centre, tending to the terminally ill, trying to comfort those with hideous facial cancers, dealing with the often cruel practices his job required of him, became the core of his attempts to ground his Buddhist commitment to compassion, via the African tradition of water spirits he had recently taken on. It’s sobering reading.

The nearby Henry Miller Memorial Library is well worth a visit, for books, sculptures, coffee and donation-based net access. (Miller said that Big Sur was the first place he learned to say, “Amen!” That’s quite a claim given the life he’d lived until he moved there, but then, Big Sur really is that stunning.) Of the local state parks, the Pfeiffer had the most humbling redwoods, though the Andrew Molera – with its meadows and big beach – ended up seducing me for the longest time.

After my second night, in a cabin by the redwood-lined Big Sur river, I was refreshed and ready for my last burst of the Bay Area before flying home via New York.

One last night with New York

I was glad I left a night and a day spare between my flight into New York from the west coast and my flight back to London – it gave me a chance to catch up on the whole trip with Gin, a new friend I’d only managed to briefly hook up with on my first pass through the city. It was hot, but not roasting in the extreme as during my previous heatwave-plagued stay, so it was nice to experience the place without nearly keeling over. We ended up bar-hopping in Williamsburg, catching a fantastic thunderstorm just after midnight, getting utterly soaked in gorgeous cooling rain. The next bar had a black-and-white photo booth, so we captured our merry, sodden selves for posterity.

Gin got really excited at the prospect that we might not have missed the free pizza at a bar near her place, but it was past 3am by then and it didn’t seem likely. Happily they were serving until 3.30. Half three in the morning, buy a pint and you get a good, free pizza. I’d not had pizza in New York so far; seemed like a good way to start, at the end.

I woke the next morning to Gin ragging me about London having won the Olympic bid. The proposed construction’s threat to the Lea Valley had left me lukewarm at very best regarding the 2012 Olympics in London, so I couldn’t even muster some playful boasts of nationalistic victory. We just headed over to Union Square to enjoy some cake from the farmer’s market and some stupendously good iced green tea smoothies.

Welcome home

My flight was from JFK at around 6pm, to land at Heathrow on the morning of the 7th July at around 7am (which would be around 2am by my barely-catching-up-with-New-York body clock). I decided to coast through the next day on caffeine and not crash until the next evening as a way of dealing with jetlag, so I drank some beer in-flight, watched National Treasure (my review: piece of shit!), and generally kept awake.

I was on the Piccadilly Line heading into London by around 8.30am, but the train kept stopping every now and then due to some sort of signal failure at Caledonian Road. By the time more delays were piling up – due to “power surges” – as we approached Zone 1, I was wishing I was back in New York with their air-conditioned subways (which I don’t know for sure are more reliable, but the “grass is greener” effect was kicking in as everyone on the tube started cursing London transport under their breath).

My aim for Finsbury Park as my place to switch to the Victoria Line was scuppered by Leicester Square, where the Piccadilly Line service was completely cancelled. I lugged my bags over to the Northern Line, and managed to get up to Warren Street to switch to the Victoria. Any hope of getting straight home was lost by Euston, however, where the tube just sat there.

It’s odd in retrospect; at the time, I was just increasingly irritated at London Transport, my whining Englishness just flooding back into place. Sat with about twenty other people in a tube carriage, doors closed, we listened to the repeated calls in the station for everyone to leave Euston as our driver repeatedly apologised for the delay.

Eventually the doors were opened and we were asked to evacuate the underground station. Up above at the main Euston rail station, it was pretty hectic, people asking staff in exasperation what was going on with very little information forthcoming. I decided to just grab a pastry and some water, go outside and rest for a bit.

It must have been around 9.45am when I was walking away from the continental pastry shop in Euston, when alarms sounded and a call was made for the whole station to be evacuated. It was a minute or two later, as I stood amidst the chaos of people wondering whether I should get out of this mess (still in my dazed mind something to do with transport inefficiencies) or just sit at a bench with the young Asian woman who was tucking into her sandwich, that an almighty BOOM startled us all.

It seemed to me to come from the direction of the station itself, with a muffled quality that suggested it was underground. In the next day’s slightly confused reporting, it seemed that the tube bombs had gone off in a haphazard staggered sequence, and I thought it was perhaps the Russell Square blast echoing back up the tube tunnels. But learning that all the tube devices went off together at 8.50am meant one thing: the bomb I heard was the Number 30 bus to Hackney, just round the corner in Tavistock Square, the sudden boom muffled and deflected by the buildings between it and where I stood at Euston.

My first reaction was to head for the nearest friend’s home, which was Lee’s place off Tottenham Court Road. But as I streamed with everyone else who was heading west along Euston Road, watching the police cars and motorbikes amass, aware of the helicopters above and sirens everywhere, still not really thinking too much about what might actually be happening, I at least thought: “Heading further into central London probably isn’t the best thing to do.” As it happens it seems Lee is currently out of the country, so that would have been a fruitless journey anyway. I was just desperate to be somewhere familiar where I knew I could crash out if necessary (this was around 5am by my time now!).

I headed back past Euston station, looking for signs of smoke from the station itself to no avail. No one was really panicking. Many people were milling about talking on their mobiles, some joking about the chaos, most queueing impatiently for the still operating but gridlocked buses or just walking away. I saw one young woman in tears on her phone. I just walked. Exhausted by lack of sleep and my ever-heavier rucksack, I slipped into the first green space I found, Oakley Square. I used “Oakley” once as a warm-sounding pen name, one that would reassure people that I was an affable old folklore researcher, not a red-haired druggie occultist. Maybe that echo of warmth drew me in, I don’t know. I just took my rucksack off, drank some water, and finished the last few pages of the book that I’d not managed to read on the tube. Sirens blazed down Eversholt Street.

I rejoined that road going north, and decided Angel was my best destination. There’s buses going my way there, the Victoria Line if it starts again, plus a company I do work for, someone familiar faces at least. I bore right, following my nose. A little way down this road, I overheard a girl on her mobile talk about some “gas explosions”. Hah! I chided myself for the panicky torrent of fears about terrorist attacks I’d built up by now. Gas explosions! Of course! (Hindsight note: gas derives from the Greek for ‘chaos’.)

But then my new-found clarity was derailed as the building I was passing became intensely familiar. What was this place? Where did I know it from? The realisation gradually arose out of the swirl of confused familiarity that I’d been here a few weeks before my trip to the States, to attend a Social Dreaming event themed ‘Living in Contemporary Times’. The idea of Social Dreaming is basically free associating between each other’s dreams, sticking to the dreams themselves, to gradually, and collectively, divine the landscapes of dream that we share, that reflect our social, global concerns rather than just our personal peccadilloes. The blurb for the event began:

Contemporary times are suffused by tragedy. Natural tragedies, like tsunami, cannot be avoided, but human tragedies can. AIDS, poverty, genocide, ethnic cleansing, terrorism, threats to democracy, totalitarian-states-of-mind, Holocausts, Gulags, corruption, wherever they occur in the world, are now part of our conscious awareness because of mass communication. They cannot be denied, or wished away. And there is the unintended, silent, looming tragedy of global warming, which may end all civilization. Will the human spirit allow us to survive?

That day was interesting, but not exactly revelatory. Much more existentially shocking was this moment, realising I’d blindly wandered to this spot again. As I turned around to survey the area, I was boggled to see, just across the street, the other end of Oakley Park. It was this park that myself and Jeff Gormly (who invited me to the Framemakers symposium in Ireland) had briefly retired to during the dreaming event to stretch our legs. I’d not recognised it at all when I wandered in from the other end.

Of course, by now I realised I was actually heading for King’s Cross, so I thought maybe I would catch a bus there. However, I bumped into a small group of people on Pancras Road saying, for a start, there’s no way I was getting to King’s Cross, and, what’s more, this really wasn’t about gas explosions.

We were all pretty “up”, all set on getting to Angel whatever transpired, chatting happily to the overwhelmingly helpful people who directed us along the canals towards Angel. None of us really knew what had just happened – we just helped each other on our ways home. Forget “The Blitz Spirit” – this was just people thrown into nervous excitement by having their mostly dreary routine demolished, their weary crusts cracking open to let natural kindness and communal goodwill through.

I got on a 73 bus at Angel, still with no real idea what had happened. Approaching Newington Green, though, a guy got on with a little radio playing for all to hear. It’s strange and unnerving how events take on the hue of “reality” when you hear about them in mass media for the first time. Something between our need to share and collectively validate experience, and the many forms of bastardisation that modern politics and commerce have subjected this need to. In any case, the woman on the radio was talking about explosions on the tube network, plus an apparent bomb on a bus. People were probably safest in buildings, as there had been no warnings and public transport was being randomly targeted.

I wasn’t the only person to get off at the next stop.

I then realised that my MP3 player had FM radio, too, so I stuck that on to see what more information I could gather. It was only as I approached my friend’s hair salon on Stoke Newington Church Street that the reality that people had just lost their lives sunk in. I choked back tears, and arrived to meet the first familiar face of the day.

As I said, the whole series of events in London on 7th July have been very slow to sink in. Thankfully no one I knew was involved in any way – which left me pondering just how close my brush was. Some news sources, like the BBC, seem to have the ill-fated Number 30 heading towards Marble Arch before its diversion, even though the wrecked destination sign in all news images plainly says Hackney. Those going with this as the destination have the bus calling at Euston and then being diverted south towards Tavistock Square. There’s still confusion over the bus bomber’s actions. It seems obvious to me that the destruction of at least one above-ground target would serve the terrorist’s image-motivated purposes, giving us a clear picture of devastation for our fears to totemise. Even so, the speculation that the fourth bomber had caught the Victoria Line south from King’s Cross, only to get off at Euston when his bomb failed, catching the bus there and detonating late… It all inevitably conjures that “alternate timeline” of personal nightmare, where I don’t go to get a pastry, and decide to get on the first bus outside Euston going northeast.

Equally inevitable is the necessity of not dwelling on this, and trying to digest the realities of what happened. Especially, the reality of suicidal bombing attacks happening here and now in the city where I live. I’ve been tremendously encouraged by some of the reactions from Londoners. The refusal to be swept into knee-jerk reactions has been much stronger than I’d hoped – but then, the aftermath of 9/11, and the Iraq War, have really lowered the bar for hope.

I’m doing jury service at the moment, and it’s odd that I’ve had the opportunity of having dinner every day with a group of Muslims (among the rest of the east London cross-section in the juror’s canteen) in the aftermath of this event. Their response is pretty strong and united: why are these extremists wrecking decades of effort at integration in Britain? One woman was denouncing them for claiming support from the Koran, arguing that if it’s advocating murder, it’s not religion by definition. Part of me looked down on this as a bland state of denial; part of me wondered if she’s speaking from the heart, and would argue the case for loving religion in the face of every one of the billions of examples of horrendous violence committed in the name of a higher spiritual power. In all, I just felt it was good to have this close one-on-one contact with Asian Muslims in the wake of these attacks, an experience my routine never gives me. Even if they’re saying the same things that are flashed past you on the news, actually talking with people usually makes a huge difference. (Well, not the greatest revelation, but I need reminding sometimes, OK?)

With talk of laws against “indirect incitement” rumbling around Westminster, my heart sinks. I wonder if British people are feeling each report of bloody deaths due to suicide bombs in Baghdad a little more keenly now we’ve had a taste. It seems it’s only by extending our sympathies (think a little about that often trite phrase) more globally that we might have enough collective insight to unpick this nasty historical tangle we’re in. We already have enough laws to lock up pretty much anyone presenting the slightest danger to society. Passing new ones just looks like a political façade at best, a theatrical display of apparent “action”; at worst, we’re tying our own shoelaces together, setting ourselves up for some serious falls a little way down the line.

At a time when honest, open, fearless dialogue is merely the starting point for moving forward, new laws potentially restricting publishing, art and journalism would be disastrous. Extending our sympathies, in the widest sense, to everyone caught up in this brutalising cycle of oppression, dominion, pride, fear and revenge, requires much more than lip service to today’s victims and the frequent use of the word “evil”.

It’s Independence Day today. I thought I might feel like checking out the local parade here in Palo Alto, but actually my lack of connection to the whole thing, together with everyone else’s immersion, creates the ideal sense of dislocation in which to take stock and reflect. The thumping parades have died down, so I guess everyone’s tucking into the barbecues now. Where shall I begin?

San Francisco

A wonderful city. The air is clean, fresh and bright, and the feeling permeates. Well, it seemed to permeate pretty much everything except my skin. The expression “hitting a funk” bubbled up at the time as the best description of my state. Some combination of the mounting length of time without real personal space, and the contrast between some ugly feelings this brought up and the prettiness around me… all conspired to conjure a less than ideal introduction to the city.

There were good things, of course. I caught Erik Davis doing a reading from his new book on Led Zeppelin in a bookshop on Haight Street, which was a blast. Erik and his wonderful partner Jennifer Dumpert graciously let me crash at their splendid place for a few nights, and the bits of their social whirl that I hooked up with were great. Had some great chats with Erik’s fiery, freaky friend Wef, and met a bunch of great DJ/artist friends of Erik’s. Sadly, my dancing feet weren’t around for the night these guys put on. By then, Erik’s sage recommendations from his arcane, extends-to-every-room library had possessed me, a channel to cope with the dark clouds gathering over my head.

James Hillman is an author who’s been looming over my horizon for a while now, and his Dream and the Underworld immediately started hitting home, crystallizing some of the vaporous thoughts and feelings I’ve been having relating to this Dreamflesh journal I’m planning. Even more potent was Michael Ortiz Hill‘s Dreaming the End of the World: Apocalypse as a Rite of Passage. Published in 1994, the year I started a zine about dreams, the year before I started a journal concerned with apocalyptic themes, it’s one of those books that you can’t believe you haven’t discovered sooner – and yet in a way, you’re glad you didn’t. In short, it comes at just the right time. Michael’s sophisticated yet heartfelt analysis of themes and patterns in people’s dreams of nuclear and ecological holocaust resonated deeply with my own perspectives, feelings, and yes, dreams. What’s more, the brief biographical details in the introduction – mentioning his period of homelessness and his work with the dying as a registered nurse – underlined his “effort to understand the path of compassion during a tumultuous age” with something more than mere credibility. When he talked of sneaking in to lectures by Norman O. Brown while he was homeless, to listen to this oft-neglected curiosity of classical scholarship colliding with the millennial fervour of the 1960′s, the connections deepened (Brown was a key influence on my thinking during the 90′s, and I had as yet failed to come across anyone else standing up to claim him as a key source). So I tracked Michael’s email down, and got in touch. I’d left the last week of my stay here open for “what may come”, and it seemed like Michael fit the bill. Over the next week I gradually planned my trip to visit him in the Santa Monica mountains.

Before leaving San Francisco, my funk came to a head, and Erik’s prize cactus bore the brunt. In one of those accidents that immediately feels like psychic steam forcing its way out any which way it can, I knocked over a Tjuringa board that in turn toppled the cactus that was well over a foot high. It’s now considerably shorter. Sorry, Erik.

Garberville

So I was in kind of a state on the Amtrak bus north up to Garberville in Humboldt County. Initially, my fragility wasn’t helped in the slightest when, just as the landscape started to kick in with beauty and majesty, a few of the other passengers lobbied to get a video showing. The gaudy teen-flick vibe of Orange County‘s opening half-hour sent me reeling into a profoundly stressed space between America’s good (outside drifting by) and bad (inside being loud at me). But, the film turned out to be kind of interesting and pretty funny in a goofy-but-intelligent way. Jack Black has a very-much-in-his-element turn as a drugged-out loser, and there’s some great supporting roles filled by Lily Tomlin, John Lithgow, Chevy Chase and Harold Ramis (doing a great scene as a Stanford dean getting spiked).

As we hit real redwoods-and-windy-rivers country, I was thrilled and privileged by my first site of the Eel River: an osprey plunging straight into the waters and emerging swiftly with a fish in its claws. I was in love with birds of prey as a kid, and this is one of the archetypal scenes of such a love. My jaw dropped. When the first really fucking big redwood trunks slid by, a tear threatened to drop from my eye. There are no words for such impassive, undeniable presence.

I was in Garberville at the invite of a friend of a friend, Scott, who met Merrick while he was at the protest against the extension of the Manchester Airport runway. Scott lives in an Airstream trailer (while he builds his cabin) on some land way up in the hills near Garberville, and works with the Trees Foundation, a charity helping grassroots groups to preserve the ecological integrity of the Pacific Northwest. The week I arrived he was working with some other people preparing to do a fund-raising Thai noodles stall at a festival that weekend. Unfortunately the festival itself clashed with the dream conference I’d come to attend in Berkeley, but it was gratifying fun to muck in a help paint signs and such like for the stall.

Scott was – like pretty much everyone who’s extended their hospitality to me over here – a gracious and generous host, and we put up a groovy tent (actually more of a grandiose mosquito net) for me to get some up-close-with-nature time during my stay. Connecting with Scott that first night was great. Feeling more and more ecological ideas weave themselves forcefully into my thinking for Dreamflesh journal, I found myself hitting the classic writer’s guilt about not doing enough practical, hands-on work. If the environment’s so screwed, shouldn’t I be learning permaculture and agitating instead of waxing philosophical? Naturally I’m never much of an either/or person, but I do manifest an imbalance… But then here was Scott, someone devoting so much energy to pragmatic activism, and yet, at least that night when I arrived, he felt starved of perspectives, ideas, inspiration. So between Scott’s responses to my loquacious musings, and my lending a hand to Scott’s stall construction efforts, we seemed to find exactly the kind of fruitful meeting and exchange we both needed. Cool.

Sadly I was stricken with flu and allergies the next day (and for over a week from there, in total). One of Scott’s first, fatal remarks to me were, “Oh, I’ve got a bit of a cough, but don’t worry, it’s not catching.” But despite the hacking and sniffling, I couldn’t not appreciate the humbling redwoods in the Humboldt State Park, on a daytrip with with Scott’s girlfriend Joan, and her friend Matt from New York.

The strange little town of Garberville, I soon learned, is renowned for its dope-growing. Oddly, I missed out on sampling some while I was there. But knowing this, the hemp shop and the fantastic organic bagels and smoothie shop fell right into place, as did the wiry Latino guy called J-Bird who approached me about ten minutes after I arrived asking if I wanted to smoke some pot with him. I also remembered a great little film called Homegrown about dope-growing in northern California, and realised where the region depicted there hooked up to the place I was now in.

On my last night there, I checked out the tiny cinema to see Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. It’s an essential film for our times. Seeing it in California – especially such an environmentally-conscious area of the state – added some force to it, given those infamous recordings of Enron traders as they create California’s rolling blackouts for blatant, ugly profit. And yet more Dreamflesh concepts resolved themselves into sharper focus; the Enron saga seems to be as crucial as 9/11 for understanding what’s going on in our world now, and it seems to me there is more than a little uncanny cosmic resonance in the fact that CEO Jeff Skilling resigned a week before the World Trade Center was destroyed.

Berkeley and the Dream Conference

The tail-end of my flu kind of smothered my engagement in the Association for the Study of Dreams conference in Berkeley, but it was definitely worth my while. I loved Berkeley itself. Being the old stomping ground of Philip K. Dick and Terence McKenna, among others, it had strong associations for me, and it didn’t disappoint. As pretty in its way as the hipper parts of San Francisco, but lower-lying and less assuming, seemingly more at ease with its run-down aspects, it exuded a relaxed kookiness evident in its wildly diverse religious communities. Curiously, the evident Indian and Pakistani community – I grabbed some very passable samosas on University Avenue – made me feel quite at home, having spent most of my adult life surrounded by transplants of these cultures in Leeds and London. Yet more warm hospitality came in the form of Antero and Sylvi Alli, whose place was the picture of esoteric Berkeley homeliness.

The conference opening didn’t bode well. A woman had been invited to initiate proceedings with a song. She explained very sincerely that she had done “a lot of research” on the internet about dreams, songs, and the current world situation, but when she started her backing tape and some terribly standard pseudo-soul session music issued forth, I braced myself. She launched into some sub-’Ebony and Ivory’ lyrics about dreaming of a better world, and asked us to clap along and sign the word “dream” in the chorus. My ice is often reluctant to break with these things, but break it will, given enough seduction through humour, intelligence, or just plain charisma. Sadly none of these showed themselves, and I half-heartedly suppressed my smile as I wrote, “… this is California. I have arrived.”

It was good to see some of the “big names” in consciousness research – Charles Tart and Stan Krippner being the most prominent – but as is usually the case with conferences, it’s the impassioned people with less of a standing that make the most impact, that and the social connections. Texan Bitsy Broughton‘s talk on manifesting connections with dream animals, entwined with working with ancestors and a vision of dream animals’ relevance to our ecological crisis, set a chorus of bells ringing for me, as did the brilliant Jeremy Taylor‘s lucid, gutsy approach to dreamwork and social justice. The panel on dreams and spiritual practice could – given the tone set by the opening song – have been pretty uninspiring, but Anne Hill and Rose May Dance (both from the Bay Area witchcraft group Reclaiming) gave us some righteous, open-minded, grounded perspective from their work with dreams in group rituals and solo retreats, and Jungian psychologist Meridith Sabini managed to bind her own thoughts with Jung’s and conjure a palpable sense of spiritual common ground in the room.

I met a couple of great people: Brian Mills MacGregor, a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed artist from Savannah, Georgia, and Clare Johnson, a fellow Limey who researches lucid dreaming and creativity. We drank to our common achievement of having managed to avoid regular working hours for most of our lives.

On the Sunday night, there was the Dream Telepathy contest. Someone concentrated on one of three previously unseen images that had been especially posted in, and if people felt their dream that night connected with any of them, they put their dream in an envelope next to that image. The closest match wins. Clare had actually won the year before. Stories abound of people in previous years having gained lucidity in their dream to go searching for the image being transmitted; I hadn’t been dreaming much at all on my travels, so I didn’t hold out much hope of hitting any connection.

Well, before the contest, of course, we had to establish some form of personal connection with the “sender”, so we all lined up to give her a hug, which was great fun, reminding me of those Indian gurus who go around do gigs at arenas where everyone lines up for their hug-dispensed prana. I did a little affirmation to dream before crashing, and dozed off in a red wine haze. I was pretty shocked to wake up the next morning with the vivid memory of becoming lucid in my dream and going, “Oh yeah, there’s this contest on. Where’s that woman who’s sending the image?” I ran around looking for her, finding one woman, deciding it was the wrong one, then moving on a trying to find another, and so on. Well, all this feminine contact seemed to veer off in a direction that derailed my lucid awareness of the situation (dreams aren’t much different from waking life in many respects), and before long I was introduced to an especially beautiful young woman naked from the waist down. Things became, how shall I put it… predictably personal. Suffice it to say, I had zero success with the telepathy thing.

Mulholland Drive

By now I had booked myself a flight to Burbank and a hire car for me at the airport. The plan was to visit Michael Ortiz Hill in the Topanga hills west of Los Angeles, then take it easy driving back up to the Bay Area along the Pacific coast.

Hitting Burbank was interestingly crazy. I’d driven a bit up in Garberville and was pretty used to driving on the wrong side of the road, but the LA freeways are something else. I decided, given my intense love for David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, and as a huge stretch of that mythic road took me to the region I was heading for, I just had to go that way instead of saving a bit of time of the madcap, choked freeway. So, brushing past the Hollywood Hills, down through Coldwater Canyon, really digesting Lynch’s comment about the optimistic quality of the light and quickly absorbing what I could of the intense cultural emanations of this area for me (Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jane’s Addiction and Fishbone – all locals – were my three favourite bands as a teen), I joined Mulholland and headed west. Actually I missed the turning first time, giving me a little taste of things to come. You see, Mulholland Drive is impossibly twisty. I knew Lynch built on this quality in his labyrinthine, tricksy narrative structure in the film, but I wasn’t quite prepared for the in-the-flesh insight I was about to get into that story. There was one bit where you had to kind of join another road and rejoin Mulholland, but as far as I felt able, I kept heading west.

Then I saw some traffic lights approaching. The junction looked familiar, but I didn’t recognise it. Suddenly it hit me. I was at the very junction where I had initially joined the road, only now heading out of it in the other direction. Such a spatial flip really hits you on a gut level. I could comprehend making a wrong turning – but doubling back on yourself, maybe two miles along then two miles back again, and only clocking it right at the end? The moebius strip quality of Mulholland Drive‘s plot seemed to now be etched into my brainstem. I gasped and reeled (and cursed), and meekly headed for the freeway.

Topanga Canyon

Michael’s place is tucked away right at the end of a tiny road in the Santa Monica mountains near Topanga, a fantastic area ripe with the bohemian overflow from Hollywood, where the semi-arid hills ooze displaced Chumash myth and entrenched hippy dreams. Michael has been initiated into a Bantu tradition of healing by his mapatya (spiritual twin), Augustine Kandemwa, and, together with his humbling (for him and for anyone who reads of them) experiences as a registered nurse at UCLA Medical Centre, he comes across as someone engaged with compassion and spirit to the utmost degree. A Liberian guy, whose peacemaking efforts Michael is involved with, dropped by soon after I arrived. Michael told me of this guy’s brother, who was tortured to death during the civil war, and how this event forced him to a place where he knew he could take the path of vengeance or peace. It’s a realm of moral choice I have zero experience of; but it’s so heartening to meet people who have been there and braved such impossible forks in their paths.

I did a brief interview with Michael, then he read my tarot cards and performed a little ritual for me to get healing dreams when I slept up on the hill behind his house that night. Offering tobacco to a Buddha that Michael had once buried under the site of the first nuclear bomb explosion in New Mexico as part of an intensive ritual for peace, I gingerly smoked some too. (I swore to never smoke tobacco under any circumstances again about 6 years ago, but refraining here didn’t seem right. Any connection with the indigenous traditions of the Americas pretty much involves this highly sacred plant.) Michael sung his prayers in Bantu and Spanish (he’s half Mexican), and deposited me under a tree on the hill.

No dreams as such really came that night, but, as I was braced for something “real-seeming” (my strong dreams sleeping out are usually of things that seem to be there, very real), a certain event became my “dream”. I’d asked Michael for a blanket in case the night got chilly, but later he’d decided to bring up a duvet just in case. He said I was snoring when I came. My experience was a half-conscious fright as something brushed against my body and a light flashed above me. I lay motionless, terrified of looking around to see what had touched me. I was actually warm enough at that point, and before I got the courage to investigate, the warmth of the duvet soon had me sweating profusely. Of course I felt pretty silly when I realised a very mundane duvet had been benevolently placed on me. I could pull off some of my shiny sleeping bag and huddle up with the duvet’s softness. Michael took this as hugely symbolic, a feeling he saw confirmed in his I Ching reading for me over breakfast. My coin throws brought up the K’un (The Receptive) hexagram, with the middle line of the lower trigram changing it to Shih (The Army). I don’t know my I Ching, but Michael was pretty struck by how positive it all looked. The chili and cheese omlette tasted better and better as we discussed the reading.

[Final installment soon...]

Only now, breathing the (relatively) fresh air of the tree-lined streets of Palo Alto, am I digesting just how hot and hectic New York was. It’s like the pressure of the thick, stifling humidity and the legendary pace and attitude radiating out from Manhattan left little room in my psyche for reflective appreciation. I loved New York, but another visit, more time, and less heat will be necessary for me to enjoy it all fully in the moment.

Before I left, I had a few intense experiences to round off my stay. Visiting the psychedelic gallery of visionary artist Alex Grey, his Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, was awe-inspiring. No other art display I’ve seen more sharply emphasizes the gap between the experience of the actual works and any high-quality reproductions you might see in books. The space is a lovingly crafted frame for the paintings as a whole, definitely veering towards the hippy side of things, but with this potentially off-putting vibe undercut (or rather, focused into richer whole) by Grey’s Tibetan-tinged passion for embracing the messy, painful and despairing shades of being alive, pulling them with compassion and clarity fully into his vision. The image of a woman giving birth (in his customary energy/flesh x-ray style) brought a tear to my eye, as did some of the Joe Coleman-esque details, tiny panels of suffering and pain, in his stupendous mandalic visions of Gaia and the Cosmic Christ. You have to visit this place if you visit New York – and if you catch a full moon here, I’ve heard the parties thrown in the gallery at these times are one of the best connections to the current psychedelic scene around.

Then there came what I guess was an obligatory New York subway nightmare. After a wonderful night of sushi with my new friend Gin, then drinking in the balmy back garden of the Brooklyn café where she works, I hopped onto the G train to get back to Queens where Jason Louv lives. Only, the Queens-bound track was out, with both directions running from the same platform – and I absent-mindedly jumped on the train going the wrong way. It took me a few stations to clock what had happened, and was a little disoriented when I got off, meaning the fact that trains going both ways had the same destination on them left me not knowing which direction to catch. I asked the one guy on the platform, on his way home from working on the other track, which direction to take. My only guess is he couldn’t be bothered to think for this limey jerk at 2am, because the train he told me to get on was going deeper into Brooklyn. By this time I wondered whether Jason was still up, as I’d told him I’d be back by 1am. I tried his mobile from a subway phone – no reply. When I finally got the north-bound train and made it back to the station I’d started from – nearly an hour later! – I guessed my best bet was to call Gin, who lived near Nassau station and had told me about her insomnia (oh, sheesh, was that one of those feminine hints I miss all the time?!). So, I call Gin. No reply. Jason again. Nothing. Zilch. Nada. As they say here.

Sitting next to a payphone in a vaguely dodgy neighbourhood in Brooklyn at 2.30am, on the off-chance that one of your probably sleeping friends will call back, watching black-windowed vehicles cruise past slowly, trying to look nonchalant (and probably failing abysmally)… well, it’s not my idea of fun. Still, I try to be shamanic about these things. To me they’re an essential part of traveling: intense experiences of dislocation and uncertainty that gradually shake those encrusted pillars of daily routine out of their foundations. It’s all part of the trip, man.

The flight over was great. Window seat, a row to myself, my first taste of genuinely heart-racing turbulence, Bj�rk in my ears with her soaring refrain, “this state of emergency / how beautiful to be”… The in-flight movie, Hitch with Will Smith, was vaguely passable romantic comedy (i.e. crap), but it was fascinating to see a film that foregrounded the glamour and romance of Manhattan having just been there. Or did it just seem like it foregrounded it, my awareness of its realities suddenly highlighting its presence – like a fish suddenly registering the water? In any case, don’t bother with the film unless you’re on a 6-hour flight.

Traversing the whole country by air was deeply fascinating, on the small scale of spotting landscape oddities across the mid-west (what were those circular fields about?), and on the large scale of just registering the crazy expanse of this ostensibly united country. Chasing the sunset west (by now my MP3 shuffler had pulled Tom Waits out to sing ‘Goin’ Out West’ from Bone Machine), the beauty of the angled solar rays delicately brushing and shading the fluffy carpet of clouds below us was drawn out exquisitely through the whole journey. It was dark as we hit California, the half moon just picking out snow on the Sierra Nevada mountains, its reflection gracefully sliding over the black surfaces of lakes. The lights of the towns, cities and freeways as we neared San Francisco were jaw-dropping, like profane crystalline hallucinations of jeweled alien metropolises.

I marred my arrival slightly with a bit of a mix-up at the airport which left Jim’s old schoolfriend Philippe circling the nearby roads for close to an hour (sorry Philippe!). But the contrast from New York – the drop in air temperature matched by a tangible increase in warmth emanating from the people and surroundings here – made for an entirely pleasant rush of satisfying arrival. Philippe lives – with his wife Elizabeth and charming kids Evan and Sophie – in the very wealthy suburbs of Palo Alto, close to the heart of America’s tech industry, and the spacious streets, wonderfully designed houses, and general ambiance of comfort and creativity give the impression of a community of people who know how to use wealth well, to make life better instead of just gaudier and more hectic. I’m sure there’s a flipside (there always is) but so far I’m soaking it up happily. Lemon trees, fruit markets, coffee shops playing The Life Aquatic soundtrack, even details like the marvelous curved sidewalk curbs and the elegant push-button restroom locks – all add up to a very nice place to be.