White Light (reposted)

This post was originally published on October 31, 2012. I leave you with it, in anticipation to a post coming soon....

It was only after I saw my shrink, today, that I fully understood what I had done.

Resolved the defining challenge of my life.

Defining because, yes, it had ruled me since I can remember. I couldn’t get the sounds in my head out of the cello. I raged, I bit myself—never puncturing the skin, but leaving the indentations of teeth marks for hours. I once broke a bow, slamming it on the strings of the instrument.

I knew it was in there; I couldn’t get it out. And with the rage came the depression. Black days, awful days when the minutes dragged, when no amount of will could banish the demon that lurked in the corner, always crouched, always ready to pounce.

Things I didn’t care about I did well. Teaching, never a problem.

The cello?

An agony that I couldn’t do, and couldn’t not do. I couldn’t breath at the cello, I held my breath until I had to gasp. My shoulders cramped, so tight was I.

I was practicing for hours at a time. There were days it went well. I floated down the street, beaming at strangers.

Most days it didn’t.

Late at night, in Chicago. Raf asleep, Marc alone in an empty apartment. I would be meditating, and almost get through.

I called it the breakthrough. The music would get out, I would get out, the struggle would be over.

I’d win.

Or be free.

I’d masturbate, hoping to use the energy of orgasm to push me through that door. And use Rush, amyl nitrite. I’d see a white light, I’d move closer, the orgasm would stun me. But I never got through.

Last March, I relived the moment I lost my mind, back in December. Had two weeks of struggle, of fierce concentration and mindfulness. It took five minutes to save a document. I washed dishes as if the process were a koan. I retrained myself to do everything.

At the end of the day, I would be exhausted. I’d sit and read what someone else had written.

I’d laugh out loud.

“He’s so funny,” I’d say.

“He makes the most amazing leaps,” I’d say.

I was reading that day’s post in a blog called Life, Death and Iguanas.

“I’m taking the writer to get his teeth fixed,” I told Taí. She was in a storm of worry ten islands down the Caribbean. I made sure he ate. I obsessed about his having water at all times. I needed to take care of him, this gifted guy whom I have nothing to do with.

And everything….

“He didn’t go away, I could have lost him,” I’m telling the shrink. And then, “hey, aren’t you guys supposedly to have Kleenex?”

He gestured to the side table.

Well, they are our confessors, these shrinks. And at one moment, retelling the story, I jumped back, back to a dark apartment, back to a man in agony, back to a man with his brain flooded with chemicals, and a light, a light, a light I could not get to. A light that would recede and leave me so stabbed with alone.

I’m gasping, now, as I was gasping in that red velvet chair, as I was gasping at the cello.

I have just had an orgasm I have never had. Nothing physical, no hands to wash, or floor to wipe. And no, I saw no white light.

I see that white light when I sit in my chair, at five in the afternoon and read the absurd, the tortured, most—the gifted—words he’s written.

He’s filled with that light, and I tell him, “fuck, you’re amazing.”

Is the Closet Ever Justified?

SOMETIMES even I get tired of looking at aggregate data, so I asked a psychiatrist in Mississippi who specializes in helping closeted gay men if any of his patients might want to talk to me. One man contacted me. He told me he was a retired professor, in his 60s, married to the same woman for more than 40 years.

About 10 years ago, overwhelmed with stress, he saw the therapist and finally acknowledged his sexuality. He has always known he was attracted to men, he says, but thought that that was normal and something that men hid. Shortly after beginning therapy, he had his first, and only, gay sexual encounter, with a student of his in his late 20s, an experience he describes as “wonderful.”

He and his wife do not have sex. He says that he would feel guilty ever ending his marriage or openly dating a man. He regrets virtually every one of his major life decisions.

The retired professor and his wife will go another night without romantic love, without sex. Despite enormous progress, the persistence of intolerance will cause millions of other Americans to do the same.

So writes Seth Stephens-Davidowitz in The New York Times, in an opinion piece entitled “How Many American Men Are Gay?” (And the answer, culled from Gallup polls, porn sites, Craigslist, and other sources is 5%....)

The article is interesting, but the anecdote above is what fascinates. Start with the guy’s profession—a professor thinks that men are attracted to men but hide it, and that’s normal? A professor? Has this guy ever read any of the research about gender studies in the last 40 years? Has he even turned on a television?

And then his age. A young man in his twenties—OK, I get that. It can be hard to figure it out, hard to come out, though increasingly people are coming out at younger ages. But to get into your sixties and still be so clueless?

So then we come to the fact that he’s had one gay sexual experience, which he calls wonderful. Oh, and he doesn’t have sex with his wife. Surely a professor could put together those two facts and comes to a logical conclusion?

OK—those of us who are out can be logical: we’ve faced our fears, we’ve come out and dealt with the consequences. Even if rejected by friends or family, it’s at least an external rejection, rather than the self-condemnation of the closet.

But those living in the closet are living in a system of fear that requires elaborate scaffolds of denial to support. And as Michelangelo Signorile writes in the Huffington Post, life in the closet leads to two often-disastrous results.

It’s well known in the gay world: the guy waving the biggest anti-gay flag in the parade (as well as heading it) is the most closeted queer. Nor is it just gay people who have noticed this; clinical psychologists will recognize this as reaction formation, defined here by Wikipedia:

In psychoanalytic theory, reaction formation is a defensive process (defense mechanism) in which anxiety-producing or unacceptable emotions and impulses are mastered by exaggeration (hypertrophy) of the directly opposing tendency.[ 

Nor is it just psychoanalysts and gay people—Shakespeare got it, too. Remember “the lady doth protest too much, methinks?”

The second thing that guys in the closet do is to have risky, stupid sex. Part of it, of course, is because they can’t have safe, protected sex. Because if you see me going into a gay bar? Well, you’re not gonna get much horror or moral indignation from my boss, my friends, my family.

So what does Senator X do? He bottles it in until his need for sex is overwhelming, and then he seeks relief in the worst possible ways—hustlers, Craigslist, porn sites. But there’s something worse. He may well turn to those over whom he has some power—a student, an altar boy, an employee. Sound familiar?  

So far, I completely agree with Signorile in his analysis of the dynamics of the closet. But then he writes the following sentence:

While many people are forced to be remain closeted in a society that is still often homophobic, the closet nonetheless should never be seen as a healthy place.

I’ve known few people who didn’t face obstacles—some of them great—to coming out. In fact, in the great majority of cases, gay people create the supportive family and friends from people who were either un-accepting or hostile. Coming out, in fact, is a two-way street—as any devastated parent can tell you. But is it really true that a person is forced to stay in the closet?

Consider the professor cited above—is it really too late for him? Well, men in their 60s do find love and partners; people do change professions late in life; no one has to live in an intolerant state forever.

I generally toe the established line about outing people: I’ll let anyone be in the closet as long as you’re not hurting—by words or actions—other gay people. But I wonder about this belief that the closet might be justified.

“The saddest experience I ever had as a pastor,” said Pablo, “was of a kid of 14 or 15 whose mother went to her Evangelical church and got the message: gay people are possessed by the devil. So she came home and threw her kid out of the house: she didn’t want Satan in her house. And they lived way out in the country, so there he was, miles from town, walking and sobbing down a dark road toward town. Eventually, he ended up with a couple of gay people who tried to take care of him, but the trauma was too great. The kid returned to the streets, and then dropped out of sight.”

We speculated: was he hustling? Was he in a bordello? If so, could he get out, or was he being held? Drugs or drink?

So, should he have stayed in the closet? Certainly looks that way, doesn’t it? But wait—what if he had come out in a different way? What if he had called a gay hotline, or gone to PFLAG, or found a friend he could trust?

I’m trying to think of a situation where being in the closet is the preferred alternative, but sorry—I can’t. And does it matter?

I think so—because saying that it might be better for some of us to stay in the closet empowers…

…the closet.

My Crazy Country

It’s one of those weird things about living in a place that is and isn’t my country.

I ran into the story on El Nuevo Dia’s online edition. So I read in Spanish the story of an eleven-year-old kid who took a gun to school in Utah. He was brandishing it in the playground at recess, and threatening to kill a group of kids. They took the advisable step of alerting the teacher, who, along with several others, approached the kid and asked for the gun. The child gave it up, after saying that his parents had suggested the idea—never too early to keep a kid safe!

Right—so now we have parents giving guns to their eleven-year-old kids?

My original reaction was ‘nah, can’t be.’

Now, I think it’s probable.

Until you meet one, it’s impossible to imagine the depth of craziness of a gun fanatic. Or the level of fear and suspicion that they exude. And for anyone wondering whether the fabled frontier mentality—trust no one; shoot first, ask questions later; hate those bastards in Washington; you get the picture—is dead, I can tell you, it’s not.

And it leads to the question—will we ever change? How long has it been since the Pilgrims, whom even the Dutch couldn’t put up with, came over to a virgin land, and here we still are, centuries later: just as extreme, as antisocial, as suspicious and untrusting as they.

Look, there’s a lot to like in my country. Living in another land, another place, gives you that perspective. And—a nod to Mr. Fernández here—the fifty states manage to weld some very diverse cultures. Rural Iowa versus Las Angeles Watts, for example.

But there’s a group of us that are very, very fearful. They really think they’re under attack, that their existence is threatened. They’re convinced that Obama was born in Kenya, is a Muslim, and that their kids are gonna be forced to watch Satanic sex films in kindergarten, the way things are going. And suggesting that anybody put any limits on arms is psychic castration.

Right—so we have the crazies. The rest of us? We’re tiptoeing around them.

Maybe it’s sensible—these guys do have guns, after all.

But when an eleven-year-old takes a gun to school because his parents—gee, was it his mother or father?—suggested it, and I read about in Puerto Rico but not on CNN, and nobody apparently is talking about it or discussing it, well, maybe we have gone too far.

It’s a serious question in my mind. Should we stop being reasonable? Or rather, should we start?

I had thought, earlier in the week, that we could at least have a dialogue on assault weapons, background checks at gun fairs, psychiatric evaluations, etc.

But now I think having a rational discussion with a true gun-lover is impossible. And maybe it’s time just to say fuck it, this is crazy. In other words….

You don’t have a right to own a gun. Period. And the Second Amendment doesn’t apply to individuals but to the right of the people collectively—you hear that?—to form militias to protect themselves. And guess what? That applies to hunting, because listen—man is not the only living creature on this earth, and no, you don’t have a right to kill them either. So right now we have a choice between protecting children and mollifying a bunch of crazies who are seriously armed and whom we’ve put up with all these years.

And guess what?

I’m going with the children.   

With a Nod to Shirley Jackson

It’s curious to think about—I’ve probably spent more time listening to this song than Schubert spent writing it. The manuscript is, if the website I stumbled upon can be trusted, a single sheet of paper. It was published some two decades after it was written. Liszt transcribed it—as he did so much else—and Primrose as well. Not surprising, if you’re a violist, you gotta do a little borrowing to fill in the repertoire.

That was a cool, cool paragraph written on the day after a bloodbath. And by cool I mean not hip but emotionally chilly, neutral, stepped-back and slightly ironic.

Which is not how the rest of the nation is feeling. People are in shock. The New Day has discovered that a little girl with connections to a town on the east side of the island was killed. Boricua Blood in the Tragedy screams the front page today.

And people are saying the usual. Evil, we are told by CNN, visited the town of Newton, Connecticut, yesterday.

Yeah?

Or was it a paranoid schizophrenic who had access to semi-automatic rifles?

I’m skipping this one. I’m assuming that if we had wanted to do something about it, we would have. I’m forced to conclude that there is something in my countrymen that wants slaughter, that relishes in the bloodshed, that thirsts to see anguished families and a weeping president and destroyed lives.

Why don’t we celebrate it?

The Spanish—a more honest people—go happily to their bullfights, and delight in seeing the bull downed in a pool of blood.

Well, we could do the same thing. Every Saturday, at random, a school somewhere in the nation is picked—will it be yours? Your children’s? Your grandchildren’s?

No matter, Friday night you will not sleep. Little children will beg to sleep with their mommies. “I’m scared, Mommie,” they’ll whisper.

Go back to bed, it will all be all right.

But you’re not sleeping either.

Because after all, it could be your child, your daughter, your sister.

Right, school chosen. Now we have to know the grade, the classroom.

Hey, do it in real time.

Add some excitement to the game.

How long does it take for the killer to walk from his home to his car? How long is the drive? How long to search for parking, to unload the guns, to pull the mask over his face?

Half an hour?

Forty-five minutes?

Right, so now we have the kids in the school. Everybody is there—teachers, principal, kids. Everybody is in their places.

Waiting for the slaughter to begin.

The media is filming. Relieved parents in other towns all across the country are cracking the first beer.

Better than Monday Night Football!

It’s old, our bloodlust. The Romans, seeing the Christians fed to the lions.

The gentry, viewing the mad raving at Bedlam.

Maybe it’s time to say it. We love to see the young butchered, the blood splattered on the chalkboard, the entails underneath the little desks / seats.

Love it.

Death and destruction and blood and tears.

Makes us feel good.

Or some of us. Because who’s going into that school?

The killer.

Also chosen by lottery.

A card-carrying member of the NRA.

Litany for the Feast of All Saints

Rest in peace, all souls,

Those that have done with care and suffering,

Those that have fulfilled a happy dream,

Those sated with life, those scarcely born...

All who have passed from this world to the Beyond,

All souls, rest in peace.

Souls of loving-hearted maidens,

Those who shed uncounted tears,

Whom false lovers deserted,

And the blind world cast out...

All who have departed hence,

All souls, rest in peace.

And those that have never smiled on the sunshine,

But beneath the moon waited, on thorns,

To see God one day, face to face

In the pure light of Heaven...

All souls that have departed hence,

All souls, rest in peace.

White light

It was only after I saw my shrink, today, that I fully understood what I had done.

Resolved the defining challenge of my life.

Defining because, yes, it had ruled me since I can remember. I couldn’t get the sounds in my head out of the cello. I raged, I bit myself—never puncturing the skin, but leaving the indentations of teeth marks for hours. I once broke a bow, slamming it on the strings of the instrument.

I knew it was in there; I couldn’t get it out. And with the rage came the depression. Black days, awful days when the minutes dragged, when no amount of will could banish the demon that lurked in the corner, always crouched, always ready to pounce.

Things I didn’t care about I did well. Teaching, never a problem.

The cello?

An agony that I couldn’t do, and couldn’t not do. I couldn’t breath at the cello, I held my breath until I had to gasp. My shoulders cramped, so tight was I.

I was practicing for hours at a time. There were days it went well. I floated down the street, beaming at strangers.

Most days it didn’t.

Late at night, in Chicago. Raf asleep, Marc alone in an empty apartment. I would be meditating, and almost get through.

I called it the breakthrough. The music would get out, I would get out, the struggle would be over.

I’d win.

Or be free.

I’d masturbate, hoping to use the energy of orgasm to push me through that door. And use Rush, amyl nitrite. I’d see a white light, I’d move closer, the orgasm would stun me. But I never got through.

Last March, I relived the moment I lost my mind, back in December. Had two weeks of struggle, of fierce concentration and mindfulness. It took five minutes to save a document. I washed dishes as if the process were a koan. I retrained myself to do everything.

At the end of the day, I would be exhausted. I’d sit and read what someone else had written.

I’d laugh out loud.

“He’s so funny,” I’d say.

“He makes the most amazing leaps,” I’d say.

I was reading that day’s post in a blog called Life, Death and Iguanas.

“I’m taking the writer to get his teeth fixed,” I told Taí. She was in a storm of worry ten islands down the Caribbean. I made sure he ate. I obsessed about his having water at all times. I needed to take care of him, this gifted guy whom I have nothing to do with.

And everything….

“He didn’t go away, I could have lost him,” I’m telling the shrink. And then, “hey, aren’t you guys supposedly to have Kleenex?”

He gestured to the side table.

Well, they are our confessors, these shrinks. And at one moment, retelling the story, I jumped back, back to a dark apartment, back to a man in agony, back to a man with his brain flooded with chemicals, and a light, a light, a light I could not get to. A light that would recede and leave me so stabbed with alone.

I’m gasping, now, as I was gasping in that red velvet chair, as I was gasping at the cello.

I have just had an orgasm I have never had. Nothing physical, no hands to wash, or floor to wipe. And no, I saw no white light.

I see that white light when I sit in my chair, at five in the afternoon and read the absurd, the tortured, most—the gifted—words he’s written.

He’s filled with that light, and I tell him, “fuck, you’re amazing.”

To the dungeon with Friends

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 29^th 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.

Madness Revisited

Another killing, another mass killing. This time not in Oslo, but in Colorado atmidnight.

In a movie theater….

OK, you know the facts as well as I. How can you not? It’s all over the news, all of the radio, all over the TV. Twelve people are dead. Fifty injured. The gunman is 24, and is supposed to have acted alone.

Questions arise. The first being, of course, why?

Well, we’ll probably know, or think we know. We’ll get the profile, the backstory, the teachers interviewed, the neighbors quizzed. We’ll see the anguished mom as she races to Colorado to be with her son. We’ll do the whole damn thing.

My take?

The kid had never been alone at night in a forest.

There’s something about it, you know. I used to do it at the Acres—leave the comfortable back bedroom and trot up the hill. Open the shack, blow up the air mattress, and climb into the top bunk.

The first thing is darkness—a darkness so absolute that the old cliché is true. You cannot see the hand in front of your face.

Right. That’s why you have the flashlight.

Second is the sound. At first, it’s the sound of wind high up through the trees. It’s a constant whoosh, varying in intensity, but still constant. You shine the flashlight upward, and see trees swaying.

The forest is communicating. Quite literally—through branches, through roots, through fungi in the soil. 

In fact, the forest is the macro extension of the human brain. The dendrites that form our nervous system? The word is derived from the Greek word for tree.

And so our brain is a forest. And the forest is a brain.

Another sound—the telltale sound of a mouse. You shine the flashlight at the counter, and she’s there. She stares at you. You at her. You give her permission. She goes to the wood box, and retrieves her smallest young. Takes it in her mouth and goes outside. Returns, repeats the procedure. Five times.

On her last trip, she looks back.

It’s not thanks, but acknowledgement.

The eyes are adjusted now. In fall and winter you see stars, more than you’ll ever see in the city. You remember an old friend who climbed to her roof after the hurricane had shut plunged the entire island of Puerto Rico into darkness. She spent hours on her back, at last seeing the stars.

You doze, but not for long. Something is moving, and then snorting. Then a crash through the woods.

Deer.

And yes, they do snort.

I tell you all this because I have seen it, felt it. The experience can be unsettling. What’s out there? Is there something moving, something approaching….

…something I can’t see?

You’re alone. Go outside? Flash on the flashlight?

I’ve done that. And the woods appears normal. It’s just your fear.

Something swoops onto the tree. You remember—the flying squirrel.

I used to describe this to my students, in the days when I was working, had a job. I told them about Franny, who turned off the refrigerator before she went to sleep —it was too loud. And my students?

Most of them slept with the TV on. In fact, most of the TVs were on even as we spoke. They were never turned off.

The question is whether they should ever be turned on. Neurologically, the right side of the brain is stimulated by the cathode ray tube, plasma screens, computer screens. It’s why Internet pornography is so addictive. It’s why volunteers, even if paid to do so, cannot give up television. It’s why your eye is drawn to a TV, if one is on in a room.

Easy to bash television. There’s a 32-inch TV fifteen feet from where I sit. My iPad is charging—I will play electronic Sudoku for perhaps an hour throughout the day.

My worry? This 24 year old kid—which he neurologically is—grew up as skewed as he is because the only reality he saw was provided by screens constantly jolting his dendrites into an alpha state.

He’s never seen the mouse, the young pup in her mouth, the tail hanging down. 

His only reality is a movie house at midnight, smoke bombs, and killing.

Who?

‘It was,’ I thought, ‘living in a state of fear.’

That amused me, so I played with it. Was it a fly-over state? If so, were there people who simply don’t fly over it—who never know fear? Do some people come—maybe to go to the University of Fear—and then go off somewhere else?

Don’t know. What I do know is that yesterday, I visited it. And what a subtle place it was: things appearing that I’d not seen, sizes of objects changing around, interactions skewing slightly.

I came home and wrote about it, and felt a little better. I sent it to Taí, who politely said it was disjointed. I worked hard—doing a post, then rewriting a section of Iguanas. The Zanas were giving me problems—what to do with them? 

The trouble was I wanted to put in more pictures of them than I had of other friends—just as dear, just as devoted. And Franny wouldn’t have liked that. Well, I solved it, but it took me two hours.

Let me state it simply—my abstract from the thesis of UF:

I feared I was losing my mind again, and that I would become a chronic nutcase, always moving in and out of insanity.

And it did look to be the case. Even the things that could be explained were inexplicable. The post I had written, that disjointed thing? Somehow, it had been sent without the ending. 

Speaking of deletions, I did something in a document, and poof—it was gone. I panic and call Taí, who tells there is an “undo” button I click. 

And how many times have I clicked the “undo” button in my life?

My finding in the thesis: my fear was making everything worse.

Well, I’m going out on a limb today, and let the gods be tempted.

I graduated.

And have just done—actually for the first time in my life—commencement.

The first step came at the supermarket, where I stood with my good recyclable bag. The nice cashier, with whom I always speak Spanish, sees my bag, looks away, and then puts an item in a plastic bag.

“I’m crazy,” he says.

In English.

“No, you’re not,” I say.

I don’t have to explain, do I?

Half an hour later, the sun is setting, and illuminates a quite dead bougainvillea. Rather, it irradiates it, and it is now gold. 

I mean real gold. 

Think wedding bands.

And I do not think this is crazy. I know other people do. I know that I can live in their world.

I just have another passport.

Or diploma?

I smile and play Sudoku. And I decide to cheat—which is possible, electronically. The Sudoku is on my iPad, and any wrong number is immediately rejected. The device makes a disgusted sound, and the wrong is counted against you. It adds a new dimension to the game. Oh, you get a score, too.

Well, that’s useful, because I have been testing my mind. Can I still think? Is the logical component still there?

First cheat—and the number sits placidly on the screen. Second cheat—the same. I cheat four times, and yes…

‘Ah, the Puerto Rican God,’ I think. ‘She’s not subtle….’

Nor was she today, at commencement.

Starting my walk, I realize: I’m tired of chamber music, and am definitely not into lieder. I play the only symphony on my iPod.

Beethoven’s Fifth.

And as much as people sniff at it, I love it. More, it has come into my life always at crucial moments. 

So we’re off, Beethoven and I, and we’re walking by the sea. And the Puerto Rican God has provided quite a nice setting. The sky is dark, there is a storm at sea, the waves are high.

Contrasting nicely with the tenderness of the work. Because it is tender. Wistful. Wondering…

And it begins to rain and I am getting wet and I return home.

And the third movement is ending, and I think of the story, probably untrue, of the little boy.

He’s hearing that moment at a concert, and turns to an old man and says “I’m afraid.” The old man takes his hand.

And then the fourth movement crashes in and I step from the area of partial visibility of the sea to open visibility and…

(I can barely go on…)

There is an enormous wave assaulting the stone wall of the fortress that guards the city. And I say…

“STOP IT!”

To the Puerto Rican God.

I walk home, the music joyful until at last I am yards from the entrance to the city. I glance to my right, and see a sturdy wooden door. ‘I’ve not touched the door,’ I think (my homage to Franny)—and dismiss the idea as ridiculous. But I do, anyway.

And somebody gives me the diploma.

Who?