Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness

The Shiva Notebooks

The Shiva Notebooks One winter I became a prophet. Over Christmas 1970, we went to my grandmother's beach house in Long Beach, New York, where we always gathered for holidays and vacations. Forever interested in documenting my family's odd comings and goings, I commemorated this holiday by painstakingly creating a newspaper with a letterpress kit someone gave me, and running off copies for the relatives: FLASH THE RISING SON WEEKLY JOURNAL COPYRIGHT 1970 ABOUTTWO WEEKS AGO ELAINE HEMLEY HADAPAIN IN HERTOOTH.SHEWENT TO A DENTIST BUT HE DRILLED THE WRONGTOOTH.INFURIATEDSHEWENT TO THE SO-CALLED BEST DENTIST IN TOWN HETOOKX RAYS OFHERTEETH ANDTHENSHOWED HERA FILM OFHOW TO TAKE CARE OF HERTEETH WHICH COST HER 65 DOLLARS. THEN SHE WENT TO HER BROTHER ALAN GOTTLIEB WHO FIXED HERTEETH. BY ROBIN HEMLEY DEAR EDITOR I HAVE A CRAZY BROTHER. WHAT CAN I DO ABOUT HIM DESPERATE DEAR DESPERATE FIRST EDITION GETACRAZY SISTER. WRITE TO ROBIN HEMLEY SMARTALECK COUSIN SNOWBOUND PHILLIP HEMLEY WHILE STAYING OVERNIGHT AT IDA GOTTLIEBS HOUSE FOUND HIMSELF SNOWBOUND HELP r84 Nola There's that word: crazy. Get a crazy sister. I suppose, in an odd way, Nola and I took this advice. Seven months earlier she'd written to her yoga teacher, telling him ofthe torment he had supposedly caused her, and here we were joking about her being crazy, about both ofus being crazy. I remember asking her to help me with my advice column. I insisted that she ask me for advice, not because I thought she needed my advice but because I needed to have an advice column if! was going to print a newspaper, and I was quite serious in my intentions to publish a family chronicle, week after week. The fact that we used the word "crazy" so blithely makes me think that none of us really believed anything was wrong with Nola. I had grown up with her, and ifshe saw a few more fairies on an average day than she had a year earlier, who was I to tell her she was hallucinating? She was Nola. Still Nola. And she wasn't going around holding conversations with imaginary beings, or not many. And she still had a sense ofhumor and recognized us and recognized hersel£ What I didn't write about in that first and only edition ofthat little newspaper of mine is far more interesting to me now than what I thought was interesting then. My snowbound cousin Phillip, for instance . That winter while we were all snowbound, he taught Nola and me automatic writing. We took a pen and a piece of paper and were supposed to empty our minds and allow the spirit world to guide our hands. Phillip impressed us from the start. He seemed like a great mixture ofentrepreneur and bon vivant and spiritual supplicant. He had an export /import business between the United States and India. He became one ofthe Dalai Lama's associates. I remember when the Dalai Lama first came to this country, picking up a copy ofthe New York Times, and seeing Phillip quoted as one ofthe few Westerners to be allowed into the Dalai Lama's circle. I haven't seen Phillip in years, but according to another cousin who writes books on sexual addiction, Phillip has a band now, lives somewhere in the West, and calls himselfPhil Void. My hand-printed newspaper failed to capture my family's divided attention or imaginations. (How could it? The newspaper was so sparse and was remarkable only because it took so long to produce so little. I could have written the newspaper in longhand much more efficiently .) My attempts at automatic writing, by comparison, were a stunning success. How mundane a newspaper was, my family seemed to be telling me, recording events precisely, baldly, and without elaboration , yet leaving out so much. How wonderful to open yourselfup to Nola a mysterious and questionable source and let the words fly, the facts scatter like victims from a bomb. That's how automatic writing worked, according to Phillip. You just took a pen and opened up your mind, resting the pen lighdy on a piece ofpaper. For our family, it was a parlor game, but we also wanted to see it work. It didn't for Nola. She just wrote squiggles. My mother commented that the French surrealists had practiced automatic writing. She, never fond of games, perhaps too impatient with them...