Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness

The Nonexistent Robe

The Nonexistent Robe Great minds against themselves conspire, And shun the cure they most desire HENRY PURCELL, Dido and Aeneas Until recently I couldn't have told much ofwhat Nola did the summer of 1967. I didn't know about her married Irish/Jewish lover, Martin, until my mother sent me letters from Nola to Martin and to my mother, and ofcourse, Nola's memoir. Likewise, I couldn't have said what Nola saw in the Middle East and Europe and how she viewed her trip as a kind ofpilgrimage, how two years before she was first hospitalized, she was not only open to spiritual transformation, to visions, she actively yearned for these experiences . Did her sickness come, in part, from this spiritual fervor? As she writes in her book, Isaac Singer told her that a preoccupation with the spiritual is unhealthy, and this was what caused their friendship to sour. Or, did her sickness come in spite ofher spiritual yearnings? Or was it sickness at all? Yes, it was sickness-it was destructive and made Nola into someone miserable and lost, something she had never been before. But just because someone sees visions doesn't necessarily make them sick-it doesn't, unless one puts all one's faith solely in the physical world, and faith, in any case, isn't really needed for that kind of commitment. Ofcourse, it's the physical world that is often as brutal and irrational and absurd as even the wildest visions ofthe most dubi0us seer. What I'm saying is that the fact that we don't understand something doesn't make it irrelevant to our lives, the fact that some people lose their reason, lose their sense oflogic, shouldn't make their truths less important. Until recently, I could have admitted none of this. I would merely have had a few innocuous memories: the photo ofme wearing the psychedelic kibbutz hat Nola brought back to me from Israel, on which Jonny pinned a button with Timothy Leary's famous phrase, "Turn on, 106 Nola 107 Tune in, Drop Out," (a completely unthreatening and amusing slogan to my mother, undoubtedly, since her children were consumed by their educations, both traditional and spiritual) and I pinned on another, "Make Mine Marvel," with drawings of all my favorite superheroes . Or, the Irish harp that Nola brought back, and which she learned to play, that my mother still keeps. Or the fake newspapers, which I loved, reporting Biblical happenings in the style of modern journalism: Reuters reporting on Moses dividing the Red Sea, a UPI story on Jonah being swallowed by a whale. Fragments. Souvenirs. The physical possessions one keeps or loses or cherishes, whose value only increases over time, over which there can only be one dispute: Who owns it? Not, did it ever really exist? Ayear after my father died, we were in some financial need-my mother had gone back to school to earn a master's degree and wasn't bringing in much money. My father's insurance wasn't stretching very far. He had died with a lot of debt, and there wasn't much for us to live on. But Ida came to our rescue. The summer Of1967, she paid for Nola to go with aJewish youth group to Ireland, Israel, and Greece, and for my brother and me to go to Camp Blowing Rock in the North Carolina mountains. My mother paid for her own return to Mexico to work on her writing. My mother didn't go back to Casa Heuer in 1967, but to San Miguel de Allende, where she spent a good portion of the summer worrying about us, especially Nola who had the good fortune to land in Israel on the heels ofthe Six Day War, and who spent much ofher time in a kibbutz near the front lines. My mother wrote to Ida inJuly: I don't know why they keep those kids so near the battlefront . . . I'm not cra: