Late in life, Philip Lamantia drafted fragments of a memoir under the working title

Philosophical Geometry (1972), and a memoir, Al-Kemi: Occult, Political, and 
Private Aspects of R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz (1987), as well as translate, with Nesbit, 
Schwaller de Lubicz’s own writings. In any case, the VandenBroecks went to the 
Aurobindo ashram in Pondicherry, and by July 1963, Lamantia had resumed his trav-
els in Europe, including a period in Italy, before arriving in Tangiers, Morocco in 
1964, where he studied music with his old friend Paul Bowles. At the end of May of 
that year, however, he was arrested for possession of kif and imprisoned for five days, 
before being deported from the country.
Return to Surrealism
Lamantia’s return to surrealism coincided with a reawakening of his poetic powers 
after three years of silence, a period which he later described as his “season in hell.”
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Certainly, he had always drawn upon his surrealist roots, writing under the sign of 
a transgressive and transformative imagination. Nonetheless, he had distanced him-
self from the movement since the late forties; and when he was in Paris in the fifties, 
he had not bothered to seek out members of the surrealist circle there. By 1960, after 
an often tortuous itinerary through the cultural landscape of the post– World War II 
era, Lamantia may have felt that if, as he had phrased it in the title of one of his earli-
est poems, “There Are Many Pathways to the Garden,” he now had no sense of where 
his next path would take him.
After he left Morocco, Lamantia went to Athens, where he made contact with 
the circle of the Greek surrealist poet Nanos Valaoritis and American surrealist 
artist Marie Wilson. Their circle served at that time as a way station for European 
and American youths and intellectuals going on the road to seek enlightenment in 
the Middle East and India. Here, Lamantia encountered a number of past acquain-
tances, including Charles Henri Ford and Harold Norse. And it was here, as a result 
of the stimulus of this scene, and also of the fact the he was beginning to emerge 
from a cycle of depression, that Lamantia composed the first poem that pleased him, 
at least a little, since his renunciation of poetry three years earlier.
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The poem was 
entitled “Blue Grace,” an exuberant hymn to the “resurrection” of his “muse” in the 
guise of the “prophetess,” Blue Grace.
It was also in Athens a few months later that Lamantia met the American poet 
Nancy Joyce Peters— a woman who appeared to him as the very embodiment of his 

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muse. Peters had just arrived in Athens from a sojourn in Egypt. Not only was she a 
participant in the Valaoritis-Wilson scene but she happened to be staying in the same 
hotel as Lamantia: their courtship began when Lamantia sent her a note, asking her 
to tell him everything she knew about the moon.
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Falling in love, the pair left Athens 
to visit the site of the Delphic oracle. Their travels took them to the Greek islands 
and Crete and eventually to Paris; here, Lamantia reunited briefly with Lawrence 
Ferlinghetti, who was reading at the International Festival of Free Expression. This 
meeting was not without consequence: later that year, Ferlinghetti would offer to 
publish a volume of Lamantia’s poetry in the City Lights Pocket Poets Series. For the 
time being, Lamantia and Peters left France and, after a stay in Segovia, settled on 
the southern coast of Spain, residing a year in Málaga and then in Nerja, the fishing 
village where Lamantia had lived near the VandenBroecks.
In Spain, Lamantia resumed his study of Egyptian architecture and symbols 
with Peters, utilizing Peters’s knowledge of French to make reading translations 
of Schwaller de Lubicz’s writings. They made new friends, traveled throughout 
Andalusia, enjoyed gypsy