Video Transcription:
Transcription
Touch the miracles.
How Audrey Hepburn gorgeously and brilliantly subverted humanity's worst narcissistic abuses
from the destruction of WWII to America's negligent reliance on narcissism as fame and power.
And by purposefully opening the masterful female author Willa Cather's precognizant feminine vision across a globe, Audrey was actually working in real elements of enchantment, not just Hollywood.
From Audrey's Roman Holiday that set love and freedom in the midst of culture and honor, to Willa's narrative Death Comes for the Archbishop that opens the transformation of Catholicism from Rome
to the American Southwest through the artistic and feminine for "the beginning of momentous things," my discovery of what Audrey did in her divinely humorous rebellious acts against subterfuge came from seeing what Willa had done before her . . .
in defying coercion and deceptive control for the realness she knew within herself that first and foremost is the grounding and formation of existence, and thus the life-grounded basis of culture, religion, politics, economics, education, and from which they most beautifully can grow and be truly alive and inspired.
Willa Cather's writing takes on the cultural foundations, the underpinnings of thought, and transforms them into the possibilities of different outcomes for the very definition of America itself, rooted very differently in the feminine, in immigration, in true cultural heritage, even transforming religion and politics.
Through her choices and actions Audrey was doing the transforming, and quite literally doing it by also reclaiming Willa Cather's works and expressing her own radiant spirit through her intuition and determination to set everything as right as she could.
How did this come to me? I was born to it. It came from the cosmos, the Spirit World, the Eternal, of which we are the wild artistic expression of life. And it happened in perfect, cosmic, identifiable order. From every angle you look at it, it all points to the actual play of the eternal in knowable evidence.
In the August 1912 McClure's Magazine (of which Willa was an editor) is Willa's wildly important feminine and immigrant story "The Bohemian Girl" of Clara Vavrika, the actual forerunner of Audrey's Holly Golightly,
who also comes from Willa's story "Coming, Aphrodite!" (1920) set in Greenwich Village, NYC, "on the top floor of an old house on the south side of Washington Square."
In "Coming, Aphrodite!" Eden Bower moves into the building where Don Hedger lives with his dog, Caesar III.
In the story, Greenwich Village is a cultural Garden of Eden, the story also known as "Coming, Eden Bower!"
Audrey knew this. It is likely that she knew the problem from the early moments of arriving in New York City and her friendship with the iconic photographer Richard Avedon, a colleague of Truman Capote's who had been published at Harper's Bazaar.
It was an on-going hidden darkness over decades, shadowing Willa Cather's work and following Audrey's every step. Most especially with the height and beauty of her fame, Audrey could not speak out and entangle with the ugliness that would ensue from the "victimized" battered ego with predictable forceful press sensationalism. That kind of "voice" isn't the most powerful one.
Willa Cather's stories and characters stand shoulders above in depth and breadth and effect resonating far beyond the limited self-aggrandizement and abuse, which is a mental obstacle to ultimate freedom of the spirit. Her treatment of romance is masterfully significant, opening culture in wild realizations and deeply reverberating answers.
Eden Bower is an opera singer before her international career. Don Hedger is an important painter. In this moment in this Garden of Eden their failure to recognize the Beingness of the other leaves them with their art, but without the realness of recognition to which art itself points. Which means that it points to that it goes further.
In Audrey's realness she is able to recognize that her role is bigger than just accepting the accolades of being a "star." It can be seen in her actions that what is more important to her is that the ramifications are much larger than cinema, the effects broader into life itself. With her wonderful high intelligence, wit, humor and light-heartedness she could bring back the focus from lies and press to the effects of the eternal literature that alters culture for the best for everyone--for all of life.
These are things that cannot be said, but lived, created, masterfully above and beyond and out of the hands of narcissistic control, and in ultimate taking care. Powerful art and actions are legends itself--gently flowing past the dark impediments that seem to be looming and forceful but are actually made of fear of nothingness (when all is actually sacred) and a willingness, even a malignant desire to hurt others because of that inner feeling of emptiness and desperation.
And when that (narcissistically guarded) forbidden door is surpassed beyond a culture based on those fears, the art brings humanity into a different realm with astounding life-affirming resonant realities. Taking this freedom actually opens a new spiritual dimension and life shifts.
Thus, in every frame and every line, Breakfast at Tiffany's is a genius exposure of where the art really comes from while light-heartedly showing the dark side of a posing 'writer' and 'voice of intelligentsia' in pop culture as mere self fame, and the movie done in brilliant, careful humor, reclaiming Willa Cather's works--that are from a deep, endless eternal well that flows gorgeously into and opens the unfathomable of life.
Truman Capote did not take it well. He reinforced his actions to take more of Willa's work and in hidden actions and their effects against Audrey, bully her cowardly out of sight, yet actually in full view, his use and weaponizing of his "power" and access of fame.
Malignant narcissists can't take truth or criticism. They believe it is their right to lie for their alternate reality in which they are the central focus and grand cause. Audrey did what she could do for culture in extraordinary fortitude and grace and never gave up on bringing that change.
She determined to take the art and humor further, too. She was no coward. If she could take on the Nazis for the Underground in the Dutch Resistance in her own starvation, deaths of her family members, and the destruction all around her, she could certainly weather Truman Capote and his open-door access to a non-discerning press that did not know or care about the difference or the outcome of art and lives--what she cared deeply about and gave her life to.
And here is where we can consider the effect, not just of her life and her momentous actions, but the elements of enchantment with which she was actually working from her own Beingness that opened the extraordinary further.
When one steps free from conditioned or coerced thought (required by a self-seeking, controlled environment evident since Hebrew Biblical times--and the twist at the root of narcissism in ancient Canaan), as Audrey necessarily did, the grounding can instead be with Beingness already at home in the eternal in the body, in all these remarkable forms we experience. This hearkens back further to ancient Greece and the "middle voice" which operates as an eternal voice because of the eternal truths and spirit it is operating within.
Ego is dissolved. Empathy, wisdom, and listening to deep intuition can be present. And within this what Willa saw about humanity and culture could connect with what Audrey experienced and saw. And then there is the miraculous at work--how did female literature itself ask Audrey to go to NYC and exactly to the photography studio where she would encounter the challenge of the literature being invaded against humanity? She was the exact Being for the gorgeousness of the pregnant situation, as the mother of humanity would be.
And oddly, even Dante's eternal art, in his Divine Comedy about the light of Beatrice and the writing of the truest poet—so similar to characterization in Breakfast at Tiffany’s in this way--shows that where there is this gorgeous eternal truth, fraud as usury and simony--the selling of sacred art--will always predictably show up and mimic it for fame, power, and profit as Truman did, not being the poet or source himself.
The difference is Beingness and bringing that into its most glorious expression, evading the threats from malignant narcissism that is angry and empty. What it hates most is this sublime expression coming through.
Dante's Inferno is necessarily full of those hurling insults and encroachments to intentionally inflict their own pain onto others as harshly as they can, grasping, clawing, and forcing, especially at Dante, the true poet walking through, writing in his—evidently—eternal voice, to write the truth and illumination in the poetry, and that illumination being/Being Beatrice--the feminine through art which can be divine through its source of Beingness.
Audrey continued to take it on and in even more humor and carried the daring theme of this into her following movies--which is actually the hinting at her own truer identity, as in Paris When It Sizzles when she is acting as if being "merely the typist" (what Truman actually was) of the screenwriter--who never actually writes. It is her character who brings the cinematic theory and style as well as plot and character and shining brilliantly all the while in the role in the delightful symbol-changing ruse--changing the nature of power and fame as she went.
Audrey was breaking the boundaries by being differently rooted in her Beingness, not from a grandiose sense of self-importance and entitlement. And because she was operating from that sense of Beingness, it was making all the difference. The art continues in illumination--the effect almost inenarrable on the human realm, as her actions have taken on what can be seen as her "true body" of work, her dharma body of her personal actions and spirit that are alive.
Willa's creation of a Bohemian immigrant girl and females whose effects are "momentous" were prescient before Audrey's arrival and her arrival from New York City exactly back to Rome where Willa's altering the formations of culture in Death Comes for the Archbishop begins. The year of her writing that is no mistake the same year she wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald (who was also copying her) about how no one had yet expressed that inexpressible, world-altering kind of resonating effect.
In 2010 when John Mayer and I knew we were falling in love with each other--and knowing there were worlds on the cusp--our paths met with Willa's in Greenwich Village, and oddly without me knowing the connection, I was telling John about a screenplay I had written about Breakfast at Tiffany's, having no idea in the face of the miracles unfolding that that held the sublime answer to what was happening and further.
A postcard of Alphonse Daudet's Lettres de Mon Moulin like my letters to John from my ranch in Texas which also had a windmill out my back path in the vineyard.
This resonance of Willa's writing and Audrey's presence and work has the dimension of an other-worldly plane with alive movement and grace past all would-be abusers--even with the truth being temporarily (over many centuries) veiled and shadowed. Their presentness continues to powerfully touch, move, express, and open and open beyond false boundaries and have that effect when it is recognized. What Willa was seeing as the necessary different groundedness for cultural blossoming, and the change in valuing life and heritage as in the erasure and abuses of immigrants in the Gilded Age, could not have been more illuminated but by a female who was truly Bohemian and free-spirited enough to take such daring risks.
My mother, always intrepid, in 1962 from the first photo she gave to my dad. My uncle told me that my mom and dad fell in love in the apple orchard behind my grandparents' house.
From a portrait of my brother (8) and me (4) in Amelia, Ohio, April 1975.
How these more true elements of the eternal operate in creation began as a child for me, the sense that self-hood, freedom, expression, and abundance were held back by a rigid society that disliked the feminine, the strong intuition I had that I would do something about it, together with an intense energetic combustion for expression.
And I always noticed the serendipity of the numinous coming through,
mixed with the highly-sensitive person tendency to collect knowledgable patterns of intimation and certainty, like solving an on-going cultural puzzle, piecing it together since I was a child.
Cincinnati, Ohio, 7th generation Austrian immigrants
That child immigrant, my great-great-great grandfather passed at the hospital, which was still a deaconess hospital, where I would be born five generations later.
Postcard of early 1900s, my great-great grandparents' Richter and Phillips Co. jewelry store, downtown Cincinnati, Ohio, where I was born at Bethesda Hospital, a mile from Eden Park and on the Ohio River.
And this is why I recognized it of Willa, that I first experienced it in my own Beingness, already having a glimpse into the creation of extreme beauty yet growing up in a strict religious environment, I knew how subversive it was. Even with a passion for books
and a strange compulsion of writing one thing on a page, wading it up and throwing it away and starting over and over until my parents were called into school. I was combustible inside classrooms, and yet would still go on inside (and inside those walls of academia for 30 years, desperate to get out every moment but paying the personal price to find it) in this desire to create the unarticulated way it all really works and to break the strangle-hold on life open.
The naturalness of breaking those boundaries held back by a culture closed to eternity, that hard and closed need to own and control the feminine, is that life itself, especially the feminine and the artist, are born larger than culture itself, as the gate into and out of eternity--not smaller than culture, but the wisdom and formation of it.
The mother, the genius artist,
are the visionaries, the nurturers, the
ones who open life to culture,
open culture to life itself.
The
power
and
intelligence
of
creation
or
narcissism
(the need to tear everything and others down)
And this
is done
by going
ahead and
poking holes
back through
to eternity,
of which
she and art
are always the door.
My name, Shiloh, is the prophecy of Genesis
in the Hebrew Bible, the deathbed words
of the father of the tribes of Israel and the line
of Jesus through Mary.
It means "Place of Peace" and is a reference
to both the god El's wife Asherah, the
mother of all living things, and
Eve who was cursed narcissistically
out of the Garden of life on her Earth--
her very own--sacred--Body.
Willa was writing about the same thing, the same thing Michelangelo had seen and was the basis of his art from the Pieta to his Sistine from wall to wall, across the ceiling. It is the eternal continuation through the feminine, the "Place of Peace" within that is also that of eternity.
By showing that the Cosmos is playing a role in human affairs in extraordinary exactness all along, that we are not at all separate in different worlds, "before and after," and are in constant co-creation to what is mind-blowingly possible, our hands of creation can be seen for how truly free, inspired, life-nurturing and life opening our dharma actions and wisdom can be. Art is that transport. When religion defies that to grab hold and strangle life, it is the clue that narcissism thinks it has control over life and love and eternity on earth.
Audrey's house and respite from public life was named "La Paisible" 'the Peaceful' or "place of peace" like the meaning of my name.
It is an inner state beneath
all the games of the mind
towards manipulation
of the outer world and
other people.
If one wants to know what this inner peace, love, and radiance looks like,
look at the face of Michelangelo's Mary
in his "St. Peters" Basilica in his
Pieta.
Or in Audrey's face in her art and in caring about children, for whom she gave her life.
It isn't like it is impossible to see, the radiance coming through, but it is forbidden--and that is a narcissistic guarding of the door to eternity for power, ownership, and control over the female body, her psyche, her Beingness, her own body, and the body of her life's work.
She IS
and that isn't "allowed,"
nor even allowed to be spoken,
let alone lived,
although it is.
Every single moment.
And through her sons
and grandchildren.
This is what the white fox, the white dog, the dog star of Isis, IO, on the walls of the Sistine has to do, to move beyond, far beyond narcissism to show the transformation and existence natural of art and the feminine, removing those false boundaries, and this is what Willa extraordinarily accomplishes in New Mexico, where I live, in her Death Comes for the Archbishop.
And where my dad, Rawlyn Richter II, and I made a western together, Road to El Paso, in 2005-2007. Taking those trails with him up to Santa Fe from San Antonio, we didn't see it happening, that Willa's novel was speaking. My dad was a minister, as in her narrative.
He passed in 2019.
He is buried on our ranch in Texas in a beautiful live oak grove because he loved the land so much.
It was a green burial, one with the Earth.
It has all gone back to nature, to the natural, even the ranch.
My brother, Rawlyn Richter III, created the original soundtrack for Road to El Paso.
After we made the movie I found myself in
2008 on the same street where Willa had taken a picture of herself--ceiling level--in front of the cathedral of her narrative.
Unbeknownst to me, it was exactly the 500 year anniversary of Michelangelo painting the meaning of my name in the Sistine. At the end of that street is the Garden where the Madeleine comes to life with the birds flying all around her.
Pygmalion, the life-size solid wood rocking horse my dad built.
From my dad, my own life-long Leonardo da Vinci, always building me things made of hearts, c. 2012 making me life-size animatronic wings, just as he had made the camera set-ups, props, and sets, even his furniture and paintings, for making our now forever western together, and his dharma body quite alive.
This is him singing.
Each year my dad would give me a gift of something he had handmade for me of hearts. This is his flower painting he turned into hearts for my 18th birthday.
His album, Face to Face, with Michelangelo's Pieta inspired Jesus on the cover that he recorded when I was a little girl.
"For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known."