#1 Magic Mirror on the wall, who on earth am I at all?

Life, Dreams, Teaching(s), Saint Nick and Zwarte Piet

On the first morning of December, the cold and mighty wind that swept across Sierra Nevada greeted my awakening, and it felt as if its strength was delivering me total control over my brain again, granting me a long-lost vitality, rebuilding parts of my soul that had been torn to shreds, shattered by an eerie whirlwind. Usually, when I wake up, I grab a pen and reach out for the notebook by my bed to jot down as many remaining fragments of the night images as I can, before they enter the labyrinth of the dream catcher’s cobweb to finally run down its long feathers and die in the first light beam that enters the room. It has been a year or so, since I started logging my dreams on a daily basis. I really feel that everybody should give it a try, to learn more about themselves. Last summer, my roommate in Albuquerque would do it too, and I knew that I shouldn’t bother her while in the process. She acted pretty much like a zombie when in that phase of her morning, but I knew that she needed to keep in physical touch with her dream realm while logging it. Seeing such habit practiced by another human being gave me a deep understanding of my own life journey and mental processes. 

As a teenager, my parents would always laugh at me at the breakfast table when I got up in that zombie mode; it irritated me, in the first place because I felt misunderstood, and also because it took me away from my subconscious… Now I know why I hated it so much when my mom would wake me up with a list of things to do when I was still in bed, barely leaving the dream. Not that I was too lazy, but I needed way more time to come back to what is called reality. She didn’t get it because she needs very few sleep hours and never recalls her dreams. But I want and need to recall them. To me, they’re as important as to remember how to breathe… 

On that particular December morning, as I opened my eyes in front of the snow-capped peaks of Sierra Nevada, I felt the urge to write something different, words that came from a nearly paranormal clarity, which definitely convinced me that our dreams grasp a reality way more profound than what we experience in the waking state. My soul had dawned to a new kind of awareness, turning me into a believer, who willingly surrendered to the now obvious truth: dreams do warn us, teach us, prepare us and heal us, and our unconscious world is way more alert than what we call consciousness. I didn’t recall any particular image or event of the dream, but I started writing down mental associations that were running amok from the pen, like a furious mountain stream spilling its fresh waters over the pages that were filling with words organized in triangles and connected through morphing letters and linking arrows. As I lifted my eyes from the notepad, I suddenly saw my surroundings in a different light, through a very Dalí-ish paranoiac-critical lens that gave a new meaning to my everyday setting. All of a sudden, my ‘irrational knowledge’ enabled me to reconcile dream and reality, and to finally listen to the messages waiting to be heard. Lakshmi, the Hindu Goddess of beauty, fortune and abundance, talked to me from her tapestry on the wall as she endlessly poured pomegranate seeds and golden coins in a Lotus flower. That flower grows in mud, a symbol of our murky state of mind where, nonetheless, true beauty can thrive. She recited the first lines of an old poem of mine that I had buried in oblivion: 

Comme la fleur éclose en eaux troubles ou dans la fange, 

tous tes tourments prendront bientôt la face d'un ange

To accompany Lakshmi’s message, Kokopelli the trickster played his flute in the center of a bright sun while looking at my Indonesian puppet who danced to his melody in a hypnotized mode, before a stuffed animals audience. All were moving to a melody whose silent lyrics told me to dare to comb the shadiest corners of my soul, because where there is darkness, there shall be light. They urged me not to let my dreams get sucked into the web of daylight time, because it would have meant falling prey to disintegration before revealing their deepest signs. Kol the raven puppet and his three raven brothers on a ladder in Pola Lopez’s painting, Espíritu the unbreakable horse, Wile E. Coyote the mind-tortured hunter, Shamchakra the mighty rattlesnake and Trementina the huge tarantula were all projecting flash images from my past to tell me to look for glimpses of knowledge in the real encounters I had had with their living incarnations. One might think that some of these animals are gloomy and strange creatures to have in a bedroom. I used to be afraid of spiders, and I profoundly disliked ravens, up until that summer day of 2011 when I was leaving Zuni Pueblo, New Mexico, where I had gone in search of Estebanico, the Black slave of the sixteenth century who had made the first contact with the Natives on behalf of the Spaniards. As I left the place, a raven had landed next to me when I took a picture of the Zia sign on a landmark post, and the bird had spoken, telling me that I would be back soon. As I started to drive back east, on the NM53, I abruptly hauled on the wheel to avoid a huge, black tarantula that had come from the middle of nowhere. Oddly enough, I was driving a black car, a Mitsubishi Eclipse SpYder, with a “Y”, as in “why on earth was I scared of SpIders!” The strange gratefulness I felt for sparing the arachnid’s life told me that New Mexico was inviting me to gaze at the eclipse of part of my former self.

 Back to my Andalusian room, I relived the scene in the black moon of my black cat’s pupils. I heard the crow cawing and I saw the tarantula crossing, as in Rudolfo Anaya’s novel, Randy López Goes Home. In the first pages of the story, a tarantula crosses the road to tell the character, in a cryptic mode, that he has entered another realm, between past and future, between life and death. I had to dive into my signs again. For a moment, I was not too sure if Sam’s amber eyes were actually his, mines, or those of a bird of prey. From the roundness of the black moon, his pupils had morphed into a thin vertical line drawing a strange interrogation mark, as if to say that all my existential questions would be answered after diving into the depths of unconsciousness. Their immensity reminded me of the mysterious Cat’s Eye Nebula. Its magnetic glow always makes me feel deeply connected to Cosmos, as if the immensity were staring at me and scanning my soul. Then, from the nebula, a huge pansy blossomed. That special flower takes its name from the French ‘pensée’ (thought) and is one of the few capable of flowering in winter. “The whirlwind, the whirlwind! The snowy earth comes gliding! There is dust from the whirlwind, the whirlwind on the mountain…” The words from the Paiute Ghost Dance song became the windy soundtrack of my search, encouraging me to browse through old photo albums and look for the “real me” in the mirror of time and in the clouds of my dreams…

Like Amélie of Montmartre, I need to dissect, examine, connect and reconstruct, feeling the urge, many times, to fix what or whom I sense is whacked or wounded, which may lead, sometimes, to put a gag to my own needs, as confirm the characteristics of my Mayan “astrological sign”: the fox. One day at the University, we had started looking for our “exotic” signs during a coffee break with some students, and my portrait said, among other things: 

“Los zorros en su versión femenina suelen tener vocación de médicas, profesoras o enfermeras. Su espíritu caritativo hace que a veces se olviden de sí mismas. Saben cómo cuidar y entender a la gente, son capaces de sentir la felicidad y el dolor ajeno como propios.”  

Teacher I had become, yes; empathic I was, yes, way too much, to the point of forgetting about myself, yes; feeling someone’s pain as my own, yes. So it seemed that Zorro/a (fox) I was… Maybe this is the reason why, on that special windy morning, I had drawn in my notepad a Z that morphed into an N... 

Maybe Z-Zorro, either the four-legged furry one or the Hispanic justice maker, Don Diego de la Vega, wanted to remind N-Nathalie to trust her instincts again, and to read the signs telling her to take care of herself. Many times, in my waking hours, I see how the clouds draw shapes that are perfectly attuned to the thoughts or circumstances that I feel. And sometimes I wonder if this feeling is mutual, if clouds actually stare at us. Somehow, I feel that I can stare at specific spots on the globe from the very same clouds, either in my dreams or through the eyes of the winged people, who are increasingly present in my world, maybe because of my new understanding of my “windy” spirit. 

On a beautiful summer day, as I sat on the edge of the Rio Grande gorge in Taos, New Mexico, a wonderful thing had happened. I felt lonely and lost, and I needed to reconnect with myself in my secret and sacred spot between water and sky, among dark boulders, basking in the powerful sun. After a few minutes of silent introspection, a Monarch butterfly landed on my toe, and stayed there for a long time. This unexpected winged friend had managed to dry the tear running down my cheek, and I started to attend, willing to read the signs drawn in the wind. Then a couple of hummingbirds came smiling, they were flying close to my face. Together we watched a couple of swallows looping and diving towards el río. I call those birds “sky dolphins”, because of their playful flight and cheerful sound. I felt part of their dance, I felt that I belonged again. Then I heard wings flipping right above me: a raven flew so close to my head that I could hear him breathe, and I saw his obsidian eyes looking at the southern horizon as if trying to reach an eagle spotted from a distance. What a huge blessing... But it wasn’t all. All of a sudden, a dark cloud covered the sun to rob me of its warm embrace and leave me in the dark. What I had mistaken for a cloud was the shadow of a hawk coming gliding from the North. Silently he soared. I was in awe and wanted him to stay with me, maybe because he’s supposed to be my sign in the “Native horoscope”. However, I knew that the presence was way more meaningful than that… The bird kind of felt my longing, and he came back thrice, circling the gorge before disappearing with a piece of my heart. When I left the gorge, the clouds had drawn a strange shape in the turquoise sky. It looked like two angels embraced in a deep sleep; it warmed what was left of my heart. Where had it gone lately? What strange force had been playing hide and seek in there?  

 

Three days after my “wind epiphany” in Spain, the postwoman brought a parcel from Belgium. I recognized the handwriting that had carefully copied the address: my godmother had sent her traditional colis de Saint Nicolas. Marzipan and hollow chocolate Santa sweets are classics never to be forgotten, but she always adds a little something that makes my eyes shine with joy. “Breathe for enlightenment” seemed to whisper the tiny Buddha on the box that contained my presents. “I’m breathing…”, I said in a nostalgic smile. Wrapped in a plastic pack, trilingual as my country and my thoughts, a LED-light Snowman greeted me with its pastoral staff. To tell me the latest news of her life (very busy lately with her newborn granddaughter -and second goddaughter- Alice), my godmother had chosen to write on a postcard decorated with two adorable foxes photographed somewhere in Belgium. The only caption was: “in the intimacy of fox cubs”. “Aaawww, ¡Mira qué zorros más tiernos!” I exclaimed.  I could not help smiling. The young animals on the postcard made me feel restored in my wholeness and balance. Apart from my Mayan sign, I was reminded of another fox that had appeared in a dream-like story that I had read a few weeks prior to that. In that story, a rooster named Zorro ended up dying, with its beak ripped off during a symbolic cockfight over a land grant. I was petrified at the cruelty of the image. The vision had rooted into my reality, and, in the death of that rooster, named after its own predator, I was seeing the silencing of “my” very own fox. What my guts had made mine, my brain needed to process. Was it just a symbolic death, a case of role inversion? I was not too sure… All I knew was that I felt like restoring the rooster’s legitimacy. The animal whose mission is to greet the sun with a morning song has a vital need to sing, even more so if another “chicken” has ripped off his beak to let a new owner settle in the “prized land”. I, personally, never believed in ownership, of any kind… In my analysis of the story, in lieu of two birds wrestling in a weird arena, the real fighters were the two proverbial wolves of the Cherokee legend:

An old Cherokee was teaching his grandson about life. “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy. “It is a terrible fight between two wolves. One is evil: he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other is good: he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you - and inside every other person, too.” The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?” The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

The two wolves fighting in one’s soul, can be dangerous to the point of tearing it apart for attention and recognition, their spiritual food. Have you ever seen those special wolves with two-colored eyes? They perfectly embody, to me, the inherent duality of our souls.

 

Personally, I hate competition or confrontations of any kind. I think it is childish and pointless to engage in a competition with another being. However, as I was reading the nightmarish story, a dark force was pulling me, against my will, into this fight for someone’s heart and essence; that mysterious someone was looking for keys to interpret their soul’s contradictory calls. Like Alice in front of the Cheshire cat, the person facing the wolf would have to choose: either the direction of the amber eye, reflected in the bright sky above, or that of the blue eye, reflected in a frozen pool below. Whatever their choice, only theirs it would be, as only mine would be the hearing of my own animal call. Through the rooster/fox’s wound, would come the healing words and the real understanding of who I am.

To my Celtic ancestors, the red-furred fox is like a torch that guides us through the darkest sections of the forest, which stands for the spirit world and our own soul, as in this D.H. Lawrence quote: “This is what I believe: that I am I; that my soul is a dark forest, that my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest; that gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back; that I must have the courage to let them come and go”. I was reminded of that quote every summer morning, when I had breakfast under the birch (or was it an aspen?), in a casita in Taos, lost in a sagebrush sea just in front of “the face in the mountain”. 

Many times, last year, when heading home at night, in Spain, I would “meet” a fox. He crossed the road right before my car, coming from a natural park where Federico García Lorca tries to rest, tormented by his own ending. In 1936 he was only 38, the fascist cowards of Granada shot him in the neck amidst pine trees and rosemary bushes. It was early morning. I believe it was six. Frozen at six... The fox would briefly stare at me as if uttering silent words of wisdom and recognition before disappearing into the bushes. I loved seeing him, but a sad day in June he had gotten hit by a car. I had saved his tail, severed from his body due to the impact, but I had cut my hand pretty badly when trying to make something out of it. Through his demise, the solar fox seemed to have punished me, not only hurting me but also leaving me without his medicine…  

A month later, I had dreamed of a wounded fox. I was taking care of him, nursing him, but then a black hole had swallowed him and introduced something new in the setting of my dream… I was left alone in my house, robbed of all my belongings, with a faceless man intending to hurt me. In lieu of my furniture were tens of spiders and mosquitoes… Many interpretations were possible. The disappearing fox leaving room for spiders could represent shape shifters; or my personality going astray; or false feelings lurking in the shadows; or vampire mosquitoes draining me of my blood; or a spider catching me in her cobweb to neutralize me, as it happens to bad dreams when caught in a dream catcher… You name it. I felt that I WAS the wounded fox that someone prevented me from nursing. But now his light has been given back to me through a picture of twin foxy babies for Saint Nicholas’ day. And magic was complete when, a few weeks ago, a new fox crossed the road before my car. Signs do illuminate our life path, on a daily basis, if we care enough to let them enter our world. Back to the parcel day, the fiery-furry-foxy presence was reflected in the brightness of the gifts chosen by my godmother: the flickering flame that I had lit inside the birch candle holder, and the Led light that I had turned on to discover a multicolor, chameleonic Snowman… 

When the object changed to pinkish red, I suddenly heard my godmother exclaim “Le ciel est tout rouge, Saint-Nicolas cuit ses spéculoos!“, a sweet expression that conjured up warm and cozy memories… Through that familiar sentence, I would definitely understand, while gazing at the red clouds of that special sunset, that what I had mistaken for an eastbound “cloud jet” or a sword, was actually one of Saint Nick’s spice (space?) cookies in the making.  

 Some argue that the word ‘speculoos’ comes from Latin: "speculator", which refers to a bishop “who sees everything”, like St Nick... Although pondering about this omniscient capacity, I preferred the second meaning: also derived from Latin, it refers to a mirror (speculum), since the images of the Saint are cut as a mirrored bas-relief into a wooden stamp. The Patron Saint of children brought them cookies in which he was reflected so that, I guess, the kids might think of him and remember to behave while eating their cookies. 

The parcel had arrived with an extraordinary synchronicity: the French language class I was to teach in the evening had to do with dreams and childhood memories. We had been discussing divinatory arts such as chiromancy, crystallomancy and oneiromancy, and I had planned to further our study of the dream realm with the illustration of a French expression related to sleep and dreams: “le marchand de sable est passé”, an idiom exemplified in a Belgian TV show for kids aired in the 60s and 70s: Bonne Nuit, les Petits (Good Night, little ones). Mr Sandman and a huge teddy bear would travel on a cloud to visit urban and rural kids. I had chosen an episode in which Nounours (the teddy bear) would pay the latter a visit. They lived in a horse-drawn caravan, made wicker baskets, knew natural remedies and shared their habitat with a mocking horse and a naive owl. Such a setting was closely related to old Gypsy ways, and I thought that it would be interesting to show it here in Granada, a city whose Gypsy population is quite large, and not free from being discriminated against. At the end of each episode, Mr. Sandman, in a gesture as elegant as delicate was the harp sound that accompanied it, would throw stardust-like sand from his cloud onto children’s beds, wishing them a good night and sweet dreams. 

 Apart from the sand metaphor, I was reminded of another French expression, “jeter de la poudre aux yeux”, literally “to throw stardust into one’s eyes” which means to try to dazzle -or fool- someone. As a kid, I was truly dazzled by the Sandman riding his cloud, and finding him on the Internet was a blessing that took me back to the wonders of my magical childhood world, a feeling of bliss that had been triggered as I opened my Saint Nicholas parcel. 

I had to teach another class before that one: Manifestaciones artísticas y culturales en Francia y los países francófonos. The underlying theme that I had chosen for the semester was the construction of otherness and identity through literature, movies, festivals and exhibits. We were studying, among other things, the impact of the Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show upon European understanding of ‘exoticism’.  We were busy analyzing an excerpt of James Welch’s The Heartsong of Charging Elk in its French translation (À la grâce de Marseille) when the session took an utterly different path than the one I had planned… The students had to recognize everyday life concepts in a Lakota man’s unusual descriptions, in order to understand otherness and the relativity of what is branded “normal”. But something curious happened when we were analyzing this precise excerpt:

Charging Elk watched the procession make its way slowly up the wide steps of the holy house, and he realized that the voices of the people were not loud, just constant. They seemed to chant the same things at the same time, all the while crowding around the statue and a man in a red gown carrying a gold cross with red fire glistening at its center. As the procession ascended the stairs, Charging Elk could see that the leaders were holy, with their golden robes and tall stiff hats. One of them held a long coupstick which swayed above the crowd. Two of them were swinging iron boxes that made smoke and caused the watching people to bob up and down and move their right hands over their bodies, just as they did that day in the dark cave of the holy house in Paris. (Welch, J., The Heartsong of Charging Elk, 2000: 66)

As we were still wondering whether the red gown was that of a cardinal or a bishop, one of the (Spanish) students identified the “gold cross with a red fire glistening at its center” as the Holy Ghost, and saying so, she swung her right hand over her skull to mimic the event that took place at Pentecost. One of her (French) counterparts asked her what she was doing with that hand. What was the “holy ghost” in the first place? What happened during Pentecost? What was Trinity? For a second, I noticed something in her eyes, maybe a sense of loss, since her question seemed to stem from a real longing for belonging… I suddenly understood that an education fiercely devoid of any spiritual aspect, as is the conscious choice of l’Éducation Nationale française, due to France’s longstanding tradition of secularism, could sometimes be problematic when dealing with the necessary knowledge about creeds and cultural references, but also myths and magical thinking... Meanwhile, another (Belgian) student jokingly identified the “men in golden robes and tall stiff hats carrying a long coupstick” as clones of Saint Nicholas… “Oh, I pleasantly agreed, because of the stiff hat / miter and the coupstick / crozier, right?” New bewilderment from the French section of the class… “What are you talking about? Who’s that Saint guy?” That was, for me, the starting point of a fascinating journey.  

It was relatively easy to explain to the Spanish students who this fairylike benefactor was, comparing him with the Magi. Just like the three Wise Men, St Nicholas leaves presents by the fireplace of every Belgian household in the night of the 5^th and 6^th, only that Belgium celebrates that day in December instead of January. “So he replaces le Père Noël?” asked the French students, still pretty perplexed. Well, yes and no, was the answer of the Belgian folks, of both Flemish and Walloon descent. We agreed to say that Saint Nicholas was actually focused on children, whereas Papa Noël was more of an “excuse” that people used to give each other presents for Christmas. I remember, actually, that my first Christmas Eve spent in Spain had been pretty sad, since I had brought presents for everyone, who looked at me in a weird way, all empty-handed… In Spain, presents only come with the Magi, at least by then, since nowadays a real battle is taking place between the three Wise Men and the man whom traditional Spanish folks see as an encroachment of a Coca Cola character under the ‘gold and blood’ flag: Santa Claus, or Santa Clos as his name is pronounced here… I took advantage of the “pronunciation thing” to explain that Saint Nicholas is called Sinterklaas in Dutch, which in turn gave ‘their’ Santa Claus to the United States citizens... I kept for myself, though, unwilling to get caught into the self-trap of my notorious digressions, the fact that the name shift was also a trace of the first wave of Dutch immigration to New York, called Nieuw Amsterdam by the settlers who “bought” Manhattan in 1624, from the Lenape Indians, for 60 guilders worth of trade goods. I silently thought of the two possible meanings of Wall Street: either an English reminder of an earthen wall erected to “protect” the Dutch settlers against incursions by the Natives and further colonial encroachment from the Englishmen, or a Dutch tribute to the 30 Walloon families who were also part of the settlement and had a street name dedicated to them: Waal Straat (the Walloon’s Street). 

As out of a desire to question real and virtual walls, the students and I went on stating differences between the Walloon and Flemish versions of Saint Nicolas / Sinterklaas when a character suddenly came under the spotlight: Zwarte Piet (literally translated into Black Pete). He is called le Père Fouettard in French, or Hanscrouf in my native Walloon dialect. The Belgian students lamented the fact that Saint Nick’s helper was being at the heart of a fierce controversy concerning the alleged racism behind his traits. 

 I had heard about the polemic, and I personally saw it as a positive thing to question Zwarte Piet / Hanscrouf’s features… This topic was particularly appropriate for our class since we had been discussing cultural stereotypes, racism, xenophobia, exoticism, acculturation, assimilation… and many other words ending in “ism” or “tion”… The interesting thing was that among the students who felt really hurt by what they saw as a false accusation that tarnished their love for a childhood icon, was a young woman who had brought a very interesting topic to discussion during the Halloween season: the U.S. campaign “We’re a culture, not a costume”. We had agreed to say that it was not respectful to sport an ‘ethnic costume’ for Halloween, even though the person had no intention (or clue) of being a racist. However now, a criticism towards Black Pete’s golden earrings, Afro wig, big red lips and charcoal-colored face no longer felt ok… Maybe such a contradictory malaise had its roots in a fear of seeing one’s identity vanishing into a globalized political correctness. The polemic brandished in our face an uncomfortable mirror projecting our country’s constructions of otherness and its colonial past in Africa. After our session, the student in question apparently kept thinking about the issue (as I did too) and posted on the wall of our Facebook group an episode of a TV show for kids, aired in the 90s: Dag Sinterklaas (Hello, Saint Nick) to show us the “official” Flemish portrait of Sinterklaas and Zwarte Piet.

This particular episode “explained” why Zwarte Piet is Black: “because he slid down the chimneys so many times to open the door to Saint Nick in every house they visited”. The student agreed with me, though, when I argued that the chimney thing failed to explain the earrings, wig and big lips… Furthermore, the mere existence of a fireplace was becoming more and more obsolete. In fact, a Walloon student had pointed out that, as a kid, she was afraid to be forgotten by Saint Nick because they had no fireplace at home. The first student concluded that, maybe, Zwarte Piet’s image ought to be revisited, but in a gradual way that would not kill children’s fantasies overnight. A very meaningful introspection was taking place. I myself thought that, if the “Afro” paraphernalia was taken out of the character’s appearance, Zwarte Piet’s blackness might just embody the dark side of Saint Nick, like a black hole where wicked kids would be compelled to throw away their naughtiness, hence finding back the light of love into their hearts. The thought reminded me of a spelling mistake that I had made as I wrote Black Pete’s Flemish name on the blackboard. Instead of “Piet”, I had spelled “Pit”. We’re not far from the black hole or endless well... Furthermore, “pit”, in Flemish, means either “wick” or “sap”. All of a sudden, I felt as if Black Pete was all those things: a black hole or a black well where one should throw negativity, the black wick through which light will come from the candle that is our soul, and the black sap released by the wax melting away, like bad blood leaving one’s blackened heart… Was I going too far? I had to find out, so during the weekend following our session, I started watching other episodes of the Flemish show, and was absolutely fascinated by what I saw… 

 Sinterklaas’s white horse, eating at his master’s table, reminded me of the other horse of “my” kid show, aired more than 20 years before this one. As I remembered the animal peering into the window of the Gypsy caravan, I thought of another difference between both versions, Flemish and Walloon, of the holy man: back south, we usually depicted Saint Nicholas riding an ass instead of a horse, which made him feel maybe less solemn, serious or powerful. The four-legged friend of this Flemish Saint Nick was a very special white horse blessed with the magical ability to canter on roofs with delicate hooves, led by Zwarte Piet who would guide both mount and rider into their nightly adventures… St Nick’s servant wore a Morisco outfit. This interesting choice made me think of the outcast condition of former Muslim citizens forced to convert to Christianity in order to stay in the “re”conquered (Catholic) Spain. Black Pete was supposed to live somewhere in Spain, all year long with his master, except in December when they would travel to Flanders and the (former Spanish) Netherlands on a steam boat. As I watched the series, Zwarte Piet increasingly appeared as the bishop’s “minion”, a kind of Oz-like flying monkey. However, he didn’t fear to criticize his boss for the systematic disdain with which the holy man treated him, and he also dared to describe the Saint as undecided and whimsical. Once, he had even mocked Saint Nicholas, dressing up and taking on his persona, a mischievous action that the holy man, after sulking for a while, had “magnanimously” forgiven, granting his servant the “privilege” of having the two of them playing the funny role-switching game once they would be back in Spain. This was getting psychologically deep… I was hooked!

In another episode, St Nick (who by the way was a sleepwalker) had had a fascinating nightmare that took him a step further into what I saw as a split personality. In an immaculate nightgown, stroking his beard before a huge mirror, he saw a strange, colorful Kabouter, a Flemish gnome. 

The elf had the holy man singing and dancing against his will before the mirror, and repeating crazy made-up words like "Speculaarsepeinstoomcadeauboot" (“Speculzipansteampresentboat” should be the “meaning”!). The Kabouter wore a tall, pointed red hat, and a red and green suit that reminded me of the New Mexican “official” question in any decent restaurant: “red, green or… Christmas?” Looking at this particular Kabouter, I thought that he really did look like a giant chili that had fallen from a “spicy” Christmas ornament! He also wore a yellow blouse, and the three colors played in my mind the lyrics of an old song of the 80s: “Karma karma karma karma karma chameleon, you come and go, you come and go. Loving would be easy if your colors were like my dreams, Red, gold and green…” 

How fascinating! St Nick’s karma was that of a man condemned to live forever, only to grant, once a year, all the children’s wishes. He had to adapt to each and every one of their fantasies in a magical, mirroring and chameleonic way. Forbidding himself to ever show his true colors -maybe because he didn’t even remember them in the first place-, he needed to fit in every child’s dream, “throwing stardust into their eyes”, and using an army of selves to perform his task. But it could be so draining and exhausting that he needed real servants to help him in his life as well. They ended up knowing so much of that life that they became too knowledgeable, and might try to steal Saint Nick’s soul. Such impersonators could be the Flemish Black Pete, or the tricolor Ka(rma)bouter who had jumped out of the mirror to face a livid Saint Nick turned into a poor puppet prey of the gnome’s goodwill, or even the Grinch himself, this cartoon creature aired on TV in 1966 and born out of Dr. Seuss’s dream world. Dressed up as Santa, the “green man” had fooled a little child of Who-ville while busy stealing Christmas… Our Flemish Santa, though, had regained his self-control after being briefly manipulated by his jolly-old-elf-self, and he knocked him dead with his “coupstick” crozier. The Kabouter collapsed and turned into a hollow chocolate Santa sweet that the old man ate after exclaiming “Serves you right, despicable shell!”… 

It is quite an interesting thing, to see one’s deceitful self as an empty shell, and to end up eating it! After his snack, Saint Nick feels better, safer, restored. He regains his appearance, exactly like a doll pumped up after being fueled with strange chocolate “self fodder”. Maybe he really did come from Spain after all, where he might have been influenced by visions of some paintings by Dalí, Specter of Sex Appeal or Autumnal Cannibalism, as he felt the urge to devour one of his own demons lurking from the hollow shell of his jigsaw puzzle persona… After all, one of the oldest (and goriest) children song related to Saint Nicholas tells how the wizard revives three little kids who had been slaughtered and cut in small pieces by a butcher who wanted to sell them as ham… Some versions even say that the butcher was… Zwarte Piet himself, who had been taken into slavery by Saint Nick so that he could work for redemption!  That is why the Black servant was traditionally feared. He would bring charcoal to naughty children, or beat them with his birch rod, or even kidnap them and put them in a wicker basket or a sack to take them back to Spain… Things seemed so much brighter to me now, facing the glow of my Saint Nicholas presents, a birch candle holder and a multicolor snowman. From Snowman to Sandman to Sackman, I was seeing the light! 

At this point, some readers may wonder if I’m high on mushrooms or something. Well, I’d be tempted to say yes, although I don’t need them: I have enough with my dreams whispering mysterious words amidst stardust clouds. Fairy literature has it that Kabouters live in mushrooms, exactly like Lewis Carroll’s caterpillar who greeted Alice in Wonderland, wrapping her in the hallucinatory fumes of a giant hookah as he asked her who she was… “Dear, dear! Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is, who in the world am I? Ah, THAT’S the great puzzle!” It was a tough question indeed for the little girl who had fallen in the endless trap of the rabbit hole, but this fall would eventually help her knowing and defining herself way better than if she had stayed in her false conscious state, up there in the British garden abiding by tea time rules... Because even though the caterpillar tried to confuse her for a while, she would learn how to behave in this crazy parallel world without losing herself in the process, maybe all the contrary, actually. Am I another Alice, trying to find my way out of the hallucinatory fumes in the labyrinth of my identity? I wanted to ask this question to the Kabouters, those Fairytale dwellers. Through shisha-hookah fumes, my eyes peeked into the legend of the wooden shoes:

In years long gone, too many for clocks to measure, the good fairies came down from the sun onto the earth where they turned into roots, then moss, then leaves, then trees. In dreams, the Moss Maidens told a middle-aged man that, in recognition of his love for the forest, he would soon walk on top of trees… To do so, he would have to prepare a load of birch wood. The man, who felt a deep connection to the earth, asked the tree for permission to cut off its branches, and then did as he had been asked by the fairies: he left two wooden logs on the kitchen table; they looked like two huge loafs of bread… He went to bed and, during the night, the fairies, in token of their gratitude, sent Kabouters to make clogs out of these logs, so that the man could always be connected to the trees and walk, in their essence, on the muddy soils of his land. 

So how does it feel to walk in Kabouters’ clogs? Here’s the big secret… Walking in someone’s shoes… To me, Zwarte Piet is also a Kabouter, or a Green Man who announces that, beyond darkness, spring will finally be back, shedding light on our real persona. Amidst the hallucinaStory fumes, I went on browsing my pictures and was reminded of a precious moment shared with a New Mexican friend of Flemish ancestry. She called me, when I was about to leave her casita kept by geese, dogs and a neighboring bear. She wanted to show me two elements that profoundly defined her identity: the “klompen” or wooden clogs on the main door of her house by the Acequia Madre, and an old doll whose neck hid a key to her family’s past. The mark under this little head had awakened my friend to a totally new facet of her identity, and I still have goose bumps as I recall the magical moment of her recounting such an epiphany… I don’t know what made her share her story with me, maybe the connection we felt through the remnants of our “Belgianness”, lived from afar and from the viewpoint of both sides of the linguistic border, like the two sides of the hallucinatory mushroom... Maybe there’s just one thing we need to do in order to “fit” in this world: to remove the veil between our dreams and what we call reality, and step over the borders that we draw between our real and projected selves, to let the true self breathe and expand its life. 

The question of one’s own existence was experienced by our Flemish Saint Nick. In another episode, he was tortured by the content of a letter he had received from a little girl: “Ik weet wel dat U niet bestaat” (I know that you don’t exist).

His reaction went from stupor, to panic and then symbolic death. He looked into the mirror, searching for himself, and fell ill, wondering if he really saw anyone in there. If a kid failed to believe in him, Saint Nick failed to believe in himself and therefore to exist; he had disappeared, vanished into the disbelief of a child. What was left of him was a dead envelope, a void shell like the one he had eaten after killing the Kabouter in the mirror. It was only when his “servant helpers” let him know that he had read the letter too fast that he regained his vital substance. In reality, the little girl had said: “Ik weet wel dat U niet in staat bent om alle kinderen persoonlijk te bezoeken” (I know that you won’t be able to visit all the kids in person). After an instant recovery, a relieved Saint Nick, a little ashamed of his self-made drama but totally unwilling to recognize it, decided to criticize the lack of writing skills of the little girl who had triggered his existential crisis, diverting all blame away from him and onto her so that it could only be “her fault”…

He really started to fascinate me! He was exactly like one of those very same children who adored him while still learning how to build their personality and to acquire social skills. He had many flaws. Honoring the initial letter of his holy status, Saint Nick was “S” as in scared, self-centered and stubborn. He desperately needed to inflate his own shell to try to forget that he doubted himself so much. Like Dr. Seuss’s Grinch, he was terrified to “feel” too much, or maybe to feel at all. The Flemish show tells us that maybe it is because the holy man had to bury his heart alive in a dry emotional desert in order to accomplish what he felt was his destiny of becoming a mythic icon, of having to wear Saint Nicholas’s mask for eternity. In the process, he had sacrificed his dearest desire on the altar of a self-imposed fate. This is what appears in the episode that reveals that once, eons ago, Saint Nick fell in love. Before telling his big secret, he answers his helpers’ trivial questions, the two of them being too scared to ask at once what they really want to know. Saint Nick talks in the third person, drops an aphorism or two, pouts for a while or throws a tantrum if his servants don’t seem to “buy” what he says… and then he finally gets down to the really interesting matter: Saint Nick lost his only love, or rather made up his mind to abandon her… The episode starts with Zwarte Piet reading a book about love, and wondering what it feels like to be loved, and in love. He never experienced it, or maybe he did, but he only felt it toward his toy rocket, yeah, that’s it, he can feel it now... But his friend Bart (who lives between the “real world” and Saint Nick’s castle) tells him that one cannot be in love with an object. Disappointed, the black servant prefers to ignore his own ignorance. He then puts on his innocent child’s grin to switch the attention to his boss, Saint Nick, saying that he wonders if he has ever been in love… “Ja, de Sint is alles een keer verliefd geweest; niemand weet dat; zelfs Zwarte Piet weet het niet” (Yes, the Holy Man fell in love, only once; nobody knows it, not even Black Pete…) was Saint Nick’s answer to THE question. He seemed annoyed that his faithful servant had never asked directly, waiting for their friend Bart to come from “the real world” to do so.

The melancholic strumming of a Spanish guitar accompanies the threads of memories of a fondness that blossomed like a fragile shoot of sweet mint. It permeates the air of the holy man’s northern castle with a hierbabuena fragrance, to honor Nick’s love for Zarzuela… Don’t get too excited though, the fairytale will unfortunately end up very soon, sucked into a black hole, pit, well or anything round, deep and dark. Sorry for the spoiler, I think reality checks are needed in any given lucid dream. So back to it… The holy man would meet the young Spanish girl every day on the plaza. She called him “amor”, and he called her “palomita”, maybe because he felt that the fragile dove (“paloma” in Spanish) was to give him the wings to fly towards a never-ending happiness. But he was brutally thrown back into his self-created reality, deciding that she was just a nice fata morgana in his dry horizon, a pleasant mirage that, for a while, he had allowed to be dazzled by, like a lone sailor lost at sea, irresistibly drawn by a sweet, mysterious heart song taking his ship adrift... Exactly like the ghost ship on which Saint Nick had once embarked, in the middle of a raging storm, in one of his sleep walking nightmares. 

Zarzuela is the name of a Spanish operetta. The first playwrights who adopted the new lyrical style were Lope de Vega in La Selva sin Amor (The Loveless Forest) and Calderón de la Barca (author of Life is a Dream…) in El Golfo de las Sirenas (The Gulf of the Mermaids). The titles of both zarzuelas seem to fit Saint Nick’s transient love story to a T! The genre takes its name from a Spanish Royal Palace, and more specifically from a hunting lodge where the first zarzuelas were sung. The place was surrounded by brambles, called zarzas in Spanish. Every rose has its thorns but you can always make marmalade out of roses… or at least this thought Saint Nick for a while. For his lover, Zarzuela had saved her best zarzamora (blackberry) pie, but after a while he tasted it unwillingly, and then refused to give it a second bite. How could he? He was convinced that his destiny was to roam the earth eternally, wrapped in a magical time warp that condemned him to bring presents to all the children of all times. So, even though he could call off his decision and turn it all around for the sake of his palomita’s true love, he let himself be guided by what he mistook for a survival instinct: to erase from his horizon what he saw as a love mirage. He then dug a huge ravine between him and her, pulling back the drawbridge that he had once lowered from the fortress of his heart, and asked the sweet dove to leave his castle at once. However, she had left feathers in the ditch, and the mighty wind of his self-built fate would bring them back under his window every night, together with many other birds’ feathers. 

The pressure always ended up feeling too strong for him, telling him it was time to take the jump and grow Pegasus wings to fly towards his wondrous childhood world and accomplish his magic. Oh yes, he can do incredible things, like delivering his holy essence in the form of presents for kids in all the households of a country, in just one night, but the only present that he really wanted from life, he would not allow himself to have. He was too afraid to have an earthbound connection. He thought that it would make him lose his ability to fly and the focus to fulfill his self-imposed destiny. It was easier to run. He had let himself get too close to his palomita, so he had to break free from her, stealing her white wings for the cloud-ride, using one of her feathers to write a farewell letter. He made it very brief, in an attempt to completely break her heart in the process, which he considered to be the best way for her to start anew… It made him secretly cry to see her throw the red rose of her hair into the cold water of a well. However, convinced that he had done what needed to be done, the holy man left on his horse, away from his own broken heart, to gallop among the clouds of his little dream world, landing on slippery roofs, playing hide and seek in dark chimneys, trying to burn his pain in the heart of warm fireplaces, and leaving every abode in search of a snowman to whom he could tell about his wicked sorrow, to let the little devil freeze to death in an everlasting December night, as cold as eternity…  

Not knowing too well how to comfort his boss after such a heart-wrenching story, Zwarte Piet concludes that now, the holy man is in love with him, his shadow, his minion, his better half… Every rose has its thorns as every blackberry bush has its fruit, a fruit turned black for living among a pain as dark as shadows… This, again, reminded me of the Grinch movie, and how the shadowy creature, dressed up as Santa, was caught off guard by a little girl who told him that even though she knew the Grinch was “mean and hairy and smelly, with cold hands that were clammy”, she still thought he was actually kind of sweet. The Grinch was moved to tears for a second, but soon pulled himself together, deciding that the poor kid really was a bad judge of character. Was she really?

I ask the same question to “my past me”. Was I such a bad judge of character when I was a kid? Because, now, I am “in like” with this particular Saint Nick, and I would love to tell him that, as a grown up still in touch with my inner child, I do believe in him, in a way that I never felt as a child. I think it happens now precisely thanks to these newly-discovered flaws… He fascinates me, very much so, he saddens me too, and I am sure that, when I was little, I would have felt way more drawn to him, had I watched the Flemish show… 

I must be 4 years old on the only picture of my visit to Saint Nicholas, in which I cannot hide my profound discomfort. “Mini-me” doesn’t look at him, because she feels, deep inside, that he’s a fake or a clone, exactly like the portraits gallery that appear in another episode, in which Santa imprisoned in his basement people clad in ridiculous gear who had tried to imitate him. The little girl that I am, in front of one of those impersonators, wonders when the pantomime will be over. She is as embarrassed as Bart when he was forced to play the make-believe game, the shape-shifting mimicry in which he ended up sitting on the lap of a Zwarte Piet dressed up as Saint Nick, to tell him what was on his wish list. Ay, the wish list, I’m glad that my parents never encouraged me to write such a thing, given that I wouldn’t have known what to ask for. Actually, this is what our Flemish Santa appears to like, as revealed in another episode: he opens a letter in which a little boy just basically tells the holy man that whatever he may receive from Saint Nick, that’s fine with him. A cheerful Saint exclaims: “See, Bart, I like it when kids are always glad, no matter what you give!” 

TO BE CONTINUED...(here :-) )