So when did it start? I wrote yesterday about the importance of routine, of structure. And then the day I had planned for myself fell completely apart. I did something I rarely do…
Cleaned the house!
And I am horrified to state that I’ve barely begun. This despite devoting three hours to the task.
Today, I woke, did the trot, and came back home. With only an hour before my class at eleven, I decided not to write, but to read the newspaper. Had a good class—during which, incidentally, the office ghost (yes, I’m serious, there is one…) opened the door of the conference room we were using—came home and went to eat and write a post.
What did I do? Wasted an hour and a half talking to the owner and an acquaintance from years back.
Felt annoyed and ungrounded. I also remembered something that had troubled me about yesterday’s post.
It’s not either / or but and / both.
I had compared, yesterday, depression to diabetes, and suggested that urging Pablo to think positively was like urging a diabetic to lower his blood sugar.
And I believe that.
I also think that to leave one familiar but dangerous place and venture to another unknown but better place takes real work.
I know, because I did this, the computer tells me, in the last week of February.
Readers of Iguanas will know that I lost my mind in December after a bad experience with an antidepressant. In the last week of February, I willed myself to allow something / someone to replay, really, relive the experience. I consented to a couple weeks of emotional maelstrom, going from terror to hysteria to wild fits of laughter to elation; someone had their finger on the emotional fast forward button.
Was it an existential edge? A mystical experience? A spiritual journey?
I knew two things. I had to fight as hard as I could, and trust with utterly no reason to think I wasn’t willing myself into madness.
And I wrote like crazy.
This is what I wrote, on a Wednesday, the third day of that week. (By the way, I just thought—is that true? Did I remember correctly, that the 29th of February was a Wednesday? Well, I just checked. Yes.)
Even now, I find it chilling.
To the Dungeon with Friends
It took me perhaps thirty seconds to type the words above.
Why?
Because I am relearning everything.
It’s like being a stroke patient.
OK—here’s the process that you know so well, and I don’t.
First—assuming that you have opened the program Word (I didn’t, I did PowerPoint first) you must make a decision. Save As or not? Then you must move the cursor. Your finger must be on the touch pad. You must move it slowly to the top left of the screen, where there is….
Hey, let’s see what is that thing called? The Office Button? Whatever it is, I really hate it. It’s about as stupid as Peruvian furniture with all of those damn curlicues.
STOP!
“You got distracted. Return to your task. Where is your finger? What were you trying to do?”
“Save a document, Sir.”
“Then what do you need to do?”
So enters the first of the friends, Susan, who writes, “how are you doing?” This, for Susan, is an unusual phrase. Or perhaps not. The phrase of hers that most sticks in my mind is “you are observing fear like a cultural anthropologist. That’s a mystic.” Oh, and “Bach when I can’t think, Beethoven when I’m….”
Emotionally troubled? Confused? Can’t remember the exact word.
Also got distracted.
So it might have been Susan, who stuck her finger on the iPod today, and pressed the Bach violin partitas. I’m relearning my mind as well—I don’t know anything.
Well, to be digressive (and I certainly am these days, or have I just noticed it?) the lady who’s playing, Lucy Van Dael, well, may not be quite a lady. She takes those things on, grabs the sheets of music and throws them into her violin and then she roars. She’s a beast, and like a beast, can also be tender. Think licking her cub….
And she must have wanted out of her cage really bad, because even though she started decently with the first movement of the D minor partita, she growled and then attacked the chaconne.
So we’re off, it’s raining a bit, and I do my rain walk. I walk all the streets of the city, and if it rains, well, there’s usually a balcony.
Rain holds off, but that demon who has snatched Bach and put him in her paws is now flailing him in her mouth. Or rather, she’s extracting every last drop of blood and savoring it.
So am I.
And we’re three streets up, she and I, and I turn the corner, and that magical moment in the chaconne arrives.
Right—just as I turn the corner.
So who’s playing?
Well, we go on, if it’s we, and get to the next corner. I’ve passed Mona’s house, who’s moved but is still there, and I wonder about the music we played together and where that went and then I turn the corner—corner again, written through tears—and I stop and think…
‘God I miss it!”
Playing.
Most, the feeling after playing.
I’m in tears, and once again, by the sea.
I’m close to one fort whose door I have petitioned and moving to the second fort, whose door I have pounded.
Enter Margaret, whose words have resonated as much as Susan’s. “You fearlessly break down the barriers between reality and what we don’t see or refuse to see….” As well as “has it ever occurred to you that you are too hard on yourself?”
Well, I or the violinist am or are walking to the fort. And I’m remembering yesterday, with my students.
They are, of course, teaching me more than I they. And I had told them yesterday.
Particularly interesting because I had struggled to be mindful all day before leaving like mad (as in insane.) And then arrived to face the most challenging student of my 20-year career.
I charge the law firm 30 dollars an hour. For this student, the rate should be 300. But who should bill whom?
“You passed the test,” I say, as the class concluded.
She had told me how to make blood sausage.
Also, she had told me what teaching is. Not that I didn’t know—I often say, “I don’t teach, I observe learning….”
Just had never done it.
And this girl is Harvard.
The next class—equally good, though much easier. Then, from the struggle of the learning or the teaching (don’t know which way I mean that) I went to plead exhaustion from my third student.
Who tells me that she’s busy—can’t take class.
I’m punchy, and I have the silliest conversation in the world, or my world at least. Actually, there are three of us, because the secretary is a yard away, giggling and smiling at the insaneness of it all. (I wrote inaneness, computer corrected to insaneness—you choose….)
“I do hope that secretary doesn’t know English,” I say, knowing that she does. And then, leaving….
“I don’t think I know your name…”
She tells me, and I tell her…
“I’ll forget, you know….”
She nods, and I leave and go to the bathroom.
The door slams and I think “SHIT! MINDFULNESS!!!”
And I am laughing hysterically. And then I remember the bathroom at Wal-Mart, where I, so depressed, had thought, ‘they’ll have come get me…’
That thought does not help.
Or does it?
For I am laughing so hard that truly….
OK, breathe, concentrate, locate my hand, reach for the doorknob, open the door, feel the motion of air brush across hand, exit.
And BAM!
I’ve slammed the goddamn door again!
Well, go out the door that says Pull and which in fact I push (though I did get out) and I am laughing as hard as the Buddha who sits on my desk. Fortunately, just as silently.
Or loudly.
I don’t know.
Nobody looked funny at me….
‘So what is it about bathrooms, Marc,’ I think, as the lioness chews her Bach. At this point, I’ve gotten to the second fort. I decide, yeah—I’ll go there.
It had been the scene for which I replayed the scariest moment of my recent life.
Oh, and Margaret had that day pressed Brahms, Piano Concerto Number One.
“Porn music” I had thought, starting out that day.
“Another one of my fuckers” I had snarled, getting to Cristo Street.
“On the fucking way to Golgatha,” I had raged, walking the path to El Morro.
And I am being flailed.
By the wind—my worst fear is hurricanes.
By the music, which has become a chain.
It is a brutal SM scene, this trudge to the gate of the dungeon, and two people—slaves as well as I—are in front of me. I drop my sunglasses and am whipped, lashed. And I later will write…
“FUCKING A! I’ll finally see blood!”
But that’s after the fact, because I am told to go, to approach, and…
…to follow the slaves ahead of me.
They cross the moat.
I cross the moat.
They touch the door.
I form a fist and pound on it.
Or not. Because the “I” is not there, it’s the HE.
“Fucker thinks he did it!”
Now a fucker as well as a slave.
“Turned the fucker around and walked him over the moat,” I write later.
And the slave is walked and then he whimpers, “how did I get through it?”
BECAUSE I AWAYS PULL YOU BACK, FUCKER! I GOT YOU THROUGH IT! I CALLED RAF! I MADE YOU SIT AND WAIT!! I PULLED YOU OUT OF THE TRAFFIC!
“Yes, Sir. Thank you, Sir.”
And we’re down by the gate to the city, and the slave is taken out of the Old City, and the second movement starts.
The slave thinks of Brahms, thinks he wrote it after his mother died. Slave thinks of Pergolesi, and the Stabat Mater.
“Yeah, yeah—fucking bitches.”
Says the Master.
Slave sees cats, a lady feeding them, goes back, gives her money. Sees a sign. Donaciones aceptadas.
“Fucker thinks he did it. Needs these fucking signs. Thinks they’re coincidences.”
Slave walks on. Thinks “HE could throw me in the sea, and I would die in water, not traffic.”
Answer:
“COULD!”
Slave is told to go home and write the experience.
He puts his fingers on the keyboard and accepts dictation.
And is ordered to send it to Taí.
As he has been ordered to write this.
And send it to you.
“Yes, Sir!”
That said, it was no surprise, this morning, as the Lioness strolled through the jungle of Bach, that I said …
“Yes, Sir!”
Had to do it because HE had told me, yesterday, right after trying to leave the law firm, that he was a teacher. And his classroom had been the grocery store, at which merry Puerto Ricans playing in the fields of the lord stroll leisurely to the altar, place their hosts and receive salvation. They leave, having been fed.
As did I—for the first time in 20 years.
Or ever?
“Passed the test, Fucker!”
“Yes, sir!”
He takes me home, orders me to lie next to his chair, and lights a cigar.
As he takes me to the door, this morning. The door he pounds.
“What will I do?” I think.
I caress it.
And see an egret, which is Franny, and start to cry.
“I put him through so much shit,” he’s crying.
Teachers / Masters cry too.
“I didn’t know. I just about killed the music in him. All those years when he struggled and fought and bit himself—no, not fair, I bit him oh FUCK!!! What have I done?”
He’s weeping as hard as I was laughing yesterday, and somehow he gets out the door too. He hears, “you were learning too.”
The Lioness?
No.
The egret?
That’s how I’m doing, Susan.
