Kurt Bergstrom :

Kurt Bergstrom ,I met him in the 60's in Torremolinos Spain . He was an incredibly handsome Dane .He did modeling work for Vogue in Paris and for other fashion magazines,but he was not ambitious.he liked to live life and be in the sun.He was drawn to Torremolinos as we all were by the easy life,the easy women and the beauty of the arid sparsely populated Coast del Sol with its ghosts of the Almohads Caliphs who lived in their palaces of black pools and rose gardens .

In 1971 Kurt Bergstrom had come to New York to see his brother and to see America. We were drinking one night up at Elain's restuarant reminicing about our days on the Costa Del Sol when we got into a conversation about magic ..He said there was no such thing as magic.It was only superstition. I told him there was magic .Things happened that you couldn't explain by logic . I recalled to him a story about Ibn Arabi ,a great Sufi master and spiritual genius who lived in Seville in the 12th century .

"There was the story of when Ibn Arabi was in the Great Mosque in Tunis.He had withdrawn in prayer and he composed a poem which he communicated to no one.He did not even write it down .A few months later in Seville a young man unknown to him approached him and recited the verses he had secretly composed .Stunned Ibn Arabi asked him who was the author, and the young man replied the author was Ibn Arabi. The young man had never seen Ibn Arabi and did not know he was standing before him .

"How do you know these verses ?" asked Ibn Arabi .

The young man replied that a few months before ,the very day and hour when the inspiration had come to Ibn Arabi in the Great Mosque, a stranger had mingled there in Seville with a young group of men,and had recited a poem which they delighted in and had begged him to repeat in order that they might learn it by heart.Having done so the stranger had disappeared without making himself known or leaving any trace .That was the story which Ibn Arabi told . Why would a great man make such a thing up ? " I asked

"It was an old story " said Kurt ."How can you believe in those old stories ? " but I wasn't so sure .It was all in the way of seeing .I believed you made your own world,you drew things to yourself by your state of mind. A new land is emerging and America is the major force behind its creation.This land is not so much a physical space as a mental space .

"There is a deeper reality of which the ancient world knew more than we want to admit and in the eclipse of the Sun we are going to see something different ."