Maya

Who knows why it happened, and anyway, it’s probably not important that it did; any proper Buddhist would term it maya, or illusion.

It could have been the cello, which after five years of not playing, I have started again to play. After three days, I’m an eighth of where I was, five years ago, at my height. I am, however, also eight times better than I was in the first five minutes of getting back to playing.

And it feels good, you know. For many years, the instrument was a battlefield, a thirty-year war in which I struggled to wrench the sounds that I heard in my head out from the cello. In the process, I attacked myself savagely; I screamed insults at myself; I raged and at one point began biting my left arm in frustration. Predictably, it took a physical toll—I began holding my breath until I began panting. My shoulders were permanently tense; my neck ached.

I gave up playing; I went back to it. The day came when I knew: my dream of being a professional musician was over.

What had happened? I choked consistently in three or four auditions. And yes—it was the classic choke. I didn’t play badly—I played horrifically, unimaginably badly. Think a fifth grader with about a year of practice behind him….

After the auditions, I would come home and play perfectly the piece I had massacred hours before. And it lead to a lot of cognitive dissonance—what the hell was I doing? Did I want to fail? Didn’t I believe in myself? Was I sabotaging myself out of guilt? If so, what was I feeling guilty about? Had I not resolved being gay?

Yes, that was how extreme the thinking went. Things about which I have little interest—teaching, for example—I do quite well. The one passion in my life? I fucked up.

It hurt, I stopped playing. Then, a nice lady called me up, announced herself as a neighbor and a pianist, and suggested that we get together and make music. We did, and for years we played every week. We had a tradition: every New Year’s Day, we played the three Bach cello / piano sonatas.

And I healed. I began to look at myself mechanistically, to see that I react with a full fight / flight reaction to the least stimulus. In short, my body, those bad days of the auditions, was flooding and flooded with cortisone and adrenalin at such levels that nobody could have performed.

What does a conservatory teach you? To play, yes, but also to compete. And I had forgone the conservatory—choosing to study privately. So I was an excellent player and a terrible competitor.

OK, maybe what happened this morning—this bit of maya—was because of the cello. Or maybe it was seeing the book in my hands. For the proof of the soft cover edition of Iguanas arrived yesterday, and it looks great.

Or maybe it was what I wrote to José, a man who does me the courtesy of reading this blog and commenting through Facebook. I had written, in response to his comment, that I had great respect for people who devote their lives to religion, and all the questions that implies. ‘Was that true,’ I wondered? Did I mean that?

Well, if I’m a hypocrite, I’m at least a consistent hypocrite. I thought about the acolyte I had seen when I took a three-day retreat in a Catholic monastery in Chicago. He was, frankly, a stunningly beautiful man in his early twenties; I admit frankly that I chose my pew especially to gaze on him, which I may have done rather too obviously.

The fruit, of course, is much juicier for being forbidden—but I think there was something more. This man was giving up what I had or could have, and what I took almost for granted: a home, a spouse, children, sex, and love. In the process, he would wrestle with himself, struggle, doubt, despair, and…what? Because nothing is guaranteed—Mother Teresa, for thirty years before her death, felt the presence of God very little. She was spiritually dry, and also spiritually thirsting. Who knew where, spiritually or psychically, my beautiful acolyte would be, at the end of his life? As bad as failing to become a musician was, wouldn’t it be infinitely worse to fail as a religious? Weren’t the stakes enormously higher?

So I looked at this beautiful man, and offered up a little atheist prayer, feeling a bit guilty as I did. I would hate to tar him with my brush…. 

But mostly, I think the morning maya was because of what happened last year, or a year and a half ago. That’s when I leapt off the existential edge and went into a fall, trusting as hard as the acolyte trusted that there would be celestial arms to catch me. I went willingly crazy—I faced myself and my demons. Or rather, my particular demon—a harsh, hypercritical self who relentlessly raged at myself, who sniped at every effort I ventured on, who lashed me mercifully.

Which is how I experienced him, that first Sunday of Holy Week of 2011 (I didn’t, by the way, know at the time that it was Holy Week). I was at El Morro, I was a slave, I was Christ, and I was walking to Golgotha. And the centurion behind me was a fierce wind, and the Brahms Piano Concerto Number One was the lash.

The week that followed was exhausting. I went into complete Buddhist awareness. In the process, everything that I had done automatically left me—and had to be relearned. I taught myself how to do a copy and paste, how to enter my name and password to the gmail account with the fewest movements of my fingers, how to wash dishes using the least water. Every action I did was scrutinized, analyzed, rethought and retaught.

In short, I was intensely focused on doing everything with complete consciousness. In the process, I learned that I had become the master, the man who was lashing the slave at El Morro. And I was teaching him, and he was learning, and he didn’t need the whip. He was loving, and I was loving, and he needed someone to teach him to do things—like wash dishes or play the cello—and I knew how to do those things. And I had berated him for decades for not being able to do what I hadn’t taught him to do.

Everything shifted. There is a very talented guy who can play the cello and write books. For that to happen, someone has to feed him and clean him and pay the bills and do…well, adult stuff.

And I answer to someone else, whom I call Domine, since that was the name he gave me, or rather blew at me, that day at El Morro. And the wind changed, and I learned to love that too. My biggest fear was hurricanes….

Well, today a tropical storm is scheduled to hit, but what do I care? I’ll just close the windows, and anyway it was a quiet morning, so why not walk to El Morro? It’ll look good, with the glowering sky behind it.

And that’s when the maya hit—in the opening Kyrie Eleison of the Biber Mass that was soaring in my ears as I walked again to the fortress. As much as I had been whipped, those 18 months before—now I was walking joyfully, ecstatically to my home, my fortress. I was sobbing and tourists were passing and trumpets were blaring and the sky indeed was glowering, and I was parading—victorious—to the fortress that awaited me and sheltered me and welcomed me. The music ended three feet from the door; I took the last steps in silence. 

“Can you take care of that?” he said a couple of weeks ago, after he had remarked that he missed playing.

“Sure,” I said, and took the cello to get fixed.

So now it’s back, and he’s playing again.

“Great,” I tell him.

“Beautiful,” I say.

And what does he say to me?

“Thanks.”