I stepped back from this portrait and gasped, "Oh, my, she's LOOKING at me!" Laughing, because I'd been so startled, I had to capture her mid-process!

The correspondent says:

Feeling shadowy blue, I retreat deeper into those shadows stretching long over me. The sun a searing thing today, my faults would be too visible in its light. So I sink back to the untouched places. Maybe there is something I need to learn here.

I salvaged the best of the results for yesterday's entry. I still felt scummy by late morning. Laura suggested it was post-partum picture blues, and the best thing to cure it would be to do another drawing. But it should be a fun project, not something intensely challenging. I looked through some of my wildlife calendars, seeing if anything intrigued me. I found the bluebird I had scanned last year. Perhaps 'the bluebird of happiness' would inspire me. By the time I'd finished his head, seeing the life within him emerging, my mood lifted. I'd originally sketched the flowers in the foreground exactly as they were in the photograph, but decided as the picture progressed to redesign their order. By the time I'd finished Eastern Bluebird, I felt, yes, even happy!

... I feel very "transtemporally haunted" as if living parallel in several milieux, all interwoven in bands of light and shadow. My dreams speak of that, and the symbols are all anachronistic; mixed ... A young girl, addressed by her master as BEQA' , shows precocious ability in penning hieroglyphs, learning the art of the scribe. She receives a small slap for wanting to proceed too rapidly, at a pace faster than the master wishes to teach. The humiliation stings a bit, but she continues unabated in love of the written word, which truly holds the "soul" of the material things.

Part of her intuitively grasps the maxim of Confucius that "the beginning of wisdom is the knowledge of the names of things." Part of her is at home in the imperial courts of China (when the written characters looks different from their present appearance) and equally so in classical Rome or Medici Florence or Greek Constantinople or Uolusa of the Etruscans, and equally so in the dust of poverty, sickness, suffering, and warfare; the "Belili who always weeps" ... they all seem a part of my life experience, fragments of "impossible" memories, but with lessons learned (or not) just the same.

How did I come to be Julia? Just beneath the surface appear to be a number of Iulias, Giulias, and names similar and dissimilar. And there are fragments too from those places of uncertain name, realms where a huge reddish sun hangs in a dark starry sky; numerous tiny moons there. Maybe it's all from science-fiction film of childhood. But, say, the special effects were quite good: especially the fragrances! Aroma unlocks memories strongly for me. The smell of preparing henna to color hair... I recognized that fragrance!

And the smells of the Old City of Jerusalem, for example, and quite literally frankincense and myrrh. Frankincense evokes in me some terror as well as peace! I see the flickering oil lamps and feel "home" feelings, the sanctity of the temple, beautiful images of Resplendent Mother captured in veined marble, painted and adorned with warmth, beckoning. And there is a panic sense too.

The desert sky at sunset, tinkling of camel bells, the feel of black shrouded veils (feeling of comfort, actually), looking at the rough-stamped silver coins in my palm, inscribed in Arabic something to the effect of "struck in Tunis (?) in the year 681 (?)" Everything is all mixed up anyway, but at the core is a sense of devotion to that Mysterious and Divine Feminine, the path of remembering and forgetting as if cloth being dyed by repeated dipping and fading in the glare of the sun, until every fiber is imbued with rich color, indelible, eternal.

That, is what is there within me, if I let anyone past the gates to see my "museion". It's all housed in one time/place, accessed by a little walking between galleries. Even the numerous wretched hallways have a hint of beautiful aspirations, even the few splendid galleries are not without evidence of suffering, futility, melancholia, emotional pain.

And yet, I value the viewpoint of science, which rests in the provable, feeling this to be a good methodology for winning knowledge of the Cosmos. I admit that the spirit (whatever) does delight in soaring beyond the bounds of the proven and even the provable, and that is well too, for the experience of that informs and breathes in a life to the quest of understanding. It gives birth to curiosity concerning so many things, otherwise mere accumulation of data would seem to be pointless. For this, I delight in the liminal...

August 12, 1998

Laura's troubles, however, resulted when she tried to do something good for her health. Seeking more energy, she's been experimenting with various multi-vitamin preparations. She took a standard one-a-day vitamin, a Geritol vitamin pill, and a new prepackaged set of various vitamins. Monday, when my sinuses were most packed, she began the day feeling extremely weary. As the day progressed, her face and neck turned livid red, and she complained that she felt on `fire'. Later, an invisible savage spear shoved its way through her head and she was extremely nauseous. The thought of food turned her stomach. The mysterious ailment made her joints ache as well and she was extremely dizzy. We both spent the days mostly sleeping, to escape the relentless pain.

She couldn't remember when she felt so enflamed, except one time ten years ago when she tested niacin pills to see if they would help her heart. Sure enough, when I read what niacin overdose resulted in, the symptoms were identical to those of Laura. Each of these various pills contain a generous portion of niacin, so that she was getting 400 times the recommended dose. Not only that, but one of her heart medicines, atenolol, a betablocker, makes the effects of niacin even stronger. She's back to just taking vitamin E and C.

And I won't indulge in so many sweets!