Sharon Tate: How to Enter the Mystic

She appears delicate. Her skin, almost translucent. Feminine and maternal. There is an innocence in the deep-set eyes, watchful but wistful, perhaps a playful turn of the lips. We uncover a realism in her persona that makes her noticed. Uncommon. She is unexpectedly nervous.

Her films are forgettable. She needed more time. But her future, and motherhood, ended in a slash of violence decreed by a mentally ill man, trying to raise awareness for his demons.

Her name endures with the crime of her demise. Or does it? There’s more. Others have met terrible exits. Somehow, she’s the fleeting nymph under a diamond sky, dancing unchained from Time. Somehow the crypt has no purchase. It makes little sense. But immortality has nothing to do with material gain. Unveiling that ruse is the first step to entering the mystic.

Perhaps her soul was more powerful than others, far from madding Manson and the broken Polanski. There is no conclusion to her tale. Her film will never read ‘The End’. She always leaves the frame before forfeiting her freedom.

Perhaps people like Sharon Tate hold furtive, flickering candles, wayward ghosts who light the way out of forgotten caverns.

Past is prologue, and prologue just may be that wind-swept bikini-clad woman on a blue-sky Malibu beach, out of touch but never out of reach, leaving no footprints as the pounding white surf pulls her far down the coastline.

 

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Ernest Hemingway: Beneath the Waves

 

“Oh, Jack.” Brett said, “we could have had such a good time together.”

“Yes,” I said. “Isn't it pretty to think so.”

-          Last lines of ‘The Sun Also Rises’

“All stories, if continued far enough, end in death.”

-          Hemingway

Everyone could write like Hemingway. It was simple because his style was simple. But when they tried, there was no magic. Scribes manqué. They had never faced the Big Fear and that was the key.

Hemingway said he followed the iceberg theory whereby most of a story’s meaning is hidden beneath the surface. How he did this has never been determined.

In many of his most compelling tales, if you’re quiet enough, you can hear a mind that’s running off balance, a scattered electricity somewhere, stressed metal that crackles and sparks. There’s a nameless dimension that might flash out of dark corners, unexpected, a tension where there should be peace.

With Ernest Hemingway, cold shadows of Death can suddenly cross the sun of the most benign scene. But you only realize it years later. Things are best when they are clean and well-lighted. Keep away from the shadows. Always. And remember, without death, life would be intolerable.

All the books, the hunting, the accidents, the wives, the drinking, the guns—all of it seemed to mean nothing. He just wanted to stop the pain.

So, he did. A man of action determined to annihilate... action. It all makes sense when you accept that for those who can see beneath the waves, all is darkness.

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