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.”

Hounded by Heaven

 The Hound of Heaven

I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat—and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet—
‘All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.’

All right, however bad my day is, it’s a lot better than most of Francis Thompson’s probably were.

I know this because I had to take a quick trot over to Wikipedia, to check in on Thompson, since in fact I had never heard of the guy, whom G. K. Chesterton called “the greatest poetic energy since Browning.”

Well, Thompson got acclaim at the end, but it wasn’t easy getting there. Born in 1859, he studied to be a doctor, became one, but never practiced. Instead, he moved to London, hoping to be a writer, but did menial work. Then ill health struck, and he began taking opium. And that led him to the street—he was homeless and destitute for years, until 1888, when he was rescued by a couple, Wilfred and Alice Meynell. But he remained an invalid all his life; at one point he contemplated suicide, but had a vision of the poet Thomas Chatterton. Chatterton had killed himself a century back, but apparently drifted back to nix the idea to Thompson. Common stuff for poets….

So Thompson had been on the street, writing letters and poetry to the newspapers, who proclaimed that there was a genius greater than Milton walking around out there—but where, exactly? Thompson had no return address, since he was down sleeping with all the other vagrants down by the Thames. Although at one point, a prostitute took him in, and he lived off her earnings.

Finally in 1893 he published his first book of poems, in which the most famous of his work, The Hound of Heaven, appeared. But though he attained critical success, his health was never good; he died at age 48 in 1907.

I am today a refugee from my life, since every annoyance seems to have been pressed on me. Note the word “annoyance,” which I use deliberately. For whatever reason, I cannot wake up in the morning—today I arose at noon, having been up at midnight for an hour or so. And so I missed a class, which I hate doing. My computer is quitting the Internet every thirty seconds or so, and so I am using my spare laptop, which has the feeling of Linus’s piano. There is a major leak in Raf’s bathroom, and guess who has to fix it? The cats have taken to pissing everywhere, and the ficus tree which is growing on the side of the building is shooting its root into our gallery. Which, by the way, has huge pot and pans in it, to collect the water that courses in at the smallest rain.

Two days ago, I was feeling rapturous; today I am holding on by a silk thread. I feel as if, rather than the hound of heaven, the gnats of hell are buzzing around my heads. What will I do?

What I always do, dammit. I’ve lost my mind and found it again, I’ve lost my mother and given birth to her again, I’ve lost my job and found something else. In short, I’m luckier than most; many other people have it much worse than I. I know about iguanas falling from the trees, and I know what they—and I—gotta do.

I wonder, though, how it is that some of us, living yes in London but on the streets, can still hear the feet and the voice of the hound of heaven. And I wonder, as well, about the people who don’t hear. Are they happier?

Here’s Thompson’s answer:

Ah, fondest, blindest weakest,

I am he whom thou seekest!

Thou drawest love from thee, who drawest me.

Will We?

Well, there’s great news this morning, something to lift the spirits of even the churliest (knew that wasn’t gonna fly) of spirits.

Coca-Cola has joined the fight against obesity!

Yup, they’re getting right into the fight, the brawl, the tumult. Here they are, their gloves taken off and their fists swinging!

"…beating obesity will take action by all of us, based on one simple, common-sense fact: all calories count, no matter where they come from. And if you eat and drink more calories than you burn off, you'll gain weight."

Well, that’s reasonable, isn’t it? And they point out that of their 650 beverages, 180 have no calories. You can always drink that water.

"We've never been more committed to doing our part to help address the issue of obesity," Coca-Cola spokesman Ben Scheidler said in an e-mail, adding that "2013 is going to be a landmark year in terms of expanding partnerships and efforts to educate consumers about energy balance."

Whew. Well, it’s good to know that we’re all on the same page, all moving unitedly (stop it, computer) together, all taking this battle on. Now that Coke is on the team, we can really stamp out that little problem afflicting two out of three Americans…their bellies / thighs / behinds.

Nor is it just Coca-Cola that is exercising corporate responsibility and benevolence—look at the latest effort of our friends in the NRA! Here’s Leslie Horn's lead:

Here is some free PR advice for the National Rifle Association: Now is not the time to release a target practice iOS app—especially one intended for kids. According to the NRA, the app is intended for children as young as age four.

Yup, target practice, and not with just any gun. For an additional buck, you can be practicing with an AK47 or an MK11.

Readers of this blog may not be familiar with these guns. OK—fess up. I didn’t have a glimmer of an idea what these things are. So I looked up what the navy seals had to say.

The US Navy MK11 Mod 0 Sniper Weapon System (SWS) is based on the highly-accurate SR-25 automatic rifle. It was originally conceived and constructed to meet a requirement placed by the Navy SEALs. The MK11 is a highly accurate and durable, precision semiautomatic sniper rifle that operates like an M16 or M4A1, and can deliver a 7.62mm round out to 1,500 yards. Due to its high degree of accuracy, (.5 inch MOA), it is has won acceptance by U.S. Special Operations Forces as one of the finest semiautomatic sniper rifles in the world.

Guys? You’ve designed an app for people who have a very poor sense of what reality and non-reality is. Or maybe I can put it simpler. A kid sees a toy gun. He picks it up. He says, “Bam, you’re dead” to his friend Billy, who promptly falls over dead. Hey, fun!

Second scenario. A kid sees his father’s gun. He picks it up. He says, “Bam, you’re dead” to his friend Billy….

You know the rest of the story. Or maybe you don’t. I’m not a parent, but I do.

So what’s with the NRA? How the hell can they be such morons?

I have a little secret for all you guys out there. Despite all the touting about how business is efficient, how—unlike government—it operates like a well-oiled machine, it doesn’t. Trust me, I know. I worked in the biggest company in the world, and saw insanity on a daily, hourly, almost-minutely basis. So I’m not surprised when Coca-Cola makes its grand gesture—coming out slugging against obesity.

Which yes, can kill. And as senselessly as a gun. So isn’t it inconsistent that I laugh at Coca-Cola yet go crazy on the NRA? Aren’t they both killers?

Is it visual? It’s hard to see a death by diabetes, as opposed to the blood and viscera on the schoolroom wall. And a gunshot wound is more immediate than an elevated blood sugar.

Whatever it is, we’ve got a problem. Every time there’s been a tragedy, we go crazy. We clamor for gun control, we march, we write letters and put flowers on the school door and light candles. Then we go back to our lives.

The NRA knows that. And unlike the sane “us,” the crazy “they” are steadfastly passionate. Their guns are their lives, or a big part of them. All they have to do is wait. We’ll go away, until the next atrocity.

Or will we?

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.

On Edge

Tell me again—when did we agree that it was OK to play your music into my ears?

I know, I know—you must be tired of this rant. Look, everybody’s life is hard, and mostly getting harder. You don’t need this.

So here’s the good news. It wasn’t I, this time, who lost control. Just the guy next to me, on a supremely jammed subway train on the upper West Side of Manhattan at 8AM.

Well, we crammed ourselves in, and a black woman and boyfriend were having sharp words. I tuned them out, of course—do I need that? Isn’t getting to the airport on time with two bags in a subway car holding people in the low three figures enough?

Well, miraculously, a seat became vacant. I sat, figuring to chill until Columbus Circle. That’s when the black guy flipped on a transistor radio and treated us all to some (I think / presume) hip-hop.

Let me put this gently, Refined Reader. Every stanza made explicit and very street reference to the pudenda of African-American females.

We all stood it for a couple of minutes. Then the eye telegraphs began among us—the brows furled, the eyes flicking heavenward, the shoulders shrugging. And then the guy next to me said, loudly but politely…

“Would you please turn that down!”

Guess the response…

Second time, and note the absence of “please.”

“TURN THAT DOWN.”

Just realized—it can’t be a response since it wasn’t a response. It was…what? Ignoration? Ignor-ance? Ignorance? You choose….

The guy has the insight to say…

“I’M LOSING MY CONTROL!”

But he doesn’t have the power to act on it. Instead, he lunges across several people to get at the black guy.

I don’t do well in emergencies. I look on, a stunned witness, as the lion mauls me, or the scorpion plunges its stinger into my foot.

So I was not among the group of guys who separated the two.

I did hear, however, the screaming rage of the black woman as she soundly (pun intended) berated the white guy. Must have had some effect—the guy sat down, and then said, “I apologize for my behavior.”

“I am leaving this train,” said the black woman, stomping out of the car. Her boyfriend / husband sauntered out—every movement a “fuck you.”

The man was shaking with rage—I could feel it just sitting next to him.

Well, first question—am I gonna go there?

Nope.

I’m not letting that into my day. Which was very nice—got to the airport with plenty of time, came home, scolded / caressed the cats, talked with Mr. Fernández.

Second question—why did the guy act so explosively?

Well, first there is the…right, it’s not music, so let’s call it “aural incitement.” Because make no mistake, the stuff is there to provoke rage. I once heard a song blaring down the street (started up by the Governor’s mansion, ended down by the plaza) in which the last word of each line was the endearment “motherfucker.” Took twenty minutes of meditation to wash that out….

The city is also on edge. No, not up in Upper Manhattan. But the train was coming from the Bronx. When was the last shower the guy took?

Third question—what about the black guy? Why didn’t he react? Yeah, he was trying to throw punches too—who wouldn’t? But when the situation stabilized—or perhaps was stabilized—he went back to being his insouciant self.

Well, a blogger on his toes would have the answers to all these questions. The Internet, however, is slow these days. The best I can do is to provide the conclusion of a research paper by an admittedly less-than-stellar source—The Journal of Undergraduate Psychological Research. Eliana Tropeano, in 2006, wrote the following:

This study examined whether or not watching a violent music video would provoke individuals to answer questions with violent responses. Eleven participants watched a violent music video, 11 participants watched a non- violent music video, and 11 participants were in the control group and did not watch any videos. It was found that watching the violent music video containing violent lyrics, aggressive behavior, and degrading behaviors toward women did make an individual feel and react more violently with regards to responses to questions about fictitious scenarios. The conclusion was that watching violent music videos does negatively affect behavior.

Well, well, so the dog bit the man. Nice to know.

Now, here’s my absolutely un-researched theory. This music does what pornography does. It blunts you, stupefies you, and puts you into a mindless state of inert violence.

And what happens when there’s a trigger?

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.

Salud mental

“I’m trying to think positively,” said Pablo, “They tell me I gotta think positive, so I’m trying.”

I had asked him how he was doing.

I can do that now. I’m back to normal, back to my schedule of waking, doing the trot, plunging myself in the ocean for five minutes, returning home, writing, cafeing (guess what just happened!) and doing a bit—a very little bit—of housework.

If that comes at the price of eating jellybeans at three in the morning, it’s well worth it. 

I can do it because I have a good shrink—a Harvard man!—and good supports. 

But what about Pablo?

He’s just a kid, maybe 21 or 22. And he’s a cashier at Supermax, the little grocery store in Old San Juan. For reasons that make perfect sense in Puerto Rico and nowhere else, I have become something like a therapist.

Well, not surprising. Happened at Walmart, too. Most of my classes—I confess this now—drifted into group therapy sessions. Motivational talks as well.

So Pablo told me, a couple weeks ago, that he’s depressed and having panic attacks.

‘Why,’ I thought, ‘he’s a kid, he’s good-looking, smart—what’s he got to be depressed about?’

Answer—how old were you, Marc, when you first got depressed?

Sixteen—I was going to kill myself in the gravel mine in Shorewood.

So I told Pablo—“you gotta get to a psychiatrist.”

He agreed wanly. And I knew.

He won’t go.

Could be that he doesn’t have insurance. Could also be that the insurance doesn’t pay for it.

My guess, though, is that he doesn’t go for the same reason I didn’t go.

He’s stuck.

Look, I worked for ten years as a psychiatric nurse, and could I diagnose myself? I had to have a brother screaming in my face before I got help.

And how am I now?

Happier than I’ve ever been.

A lot of that is medicine. I ran out of the drug I was trying to taper off recently, and went ONE night without it. By four the next day, I had started having leg cramps, just as I did when I was trying to stop taking the drug. And no—I wasn’t imagining it. I looked at my calf, and could see the muscle constricting.

Well, I knew what to do. I went to the pharmacy, got the prescription refilled, took the pill immediately after leaving the pharmacy (bought water just to be able to take it sooner…) and waited. Forty-five minutes later, I was fine.

A lot of it is routine. A rainy day comes, and I don’t do my trot? I feel it. I write in the mornings and promote Iguanas in the afternoon. I have a to-do list that is longer than I could possibly do.

A lot of it is support. Between 5:45 and 6:00 every afternoon, the gate below will click, I’ll hear the lock snap, and Raf’s footsteps climbing up the stairs. He does not go to the glen to mix with men—an old phrase from somewhere.

Nor do I.

Now then, let’s run back to Pablo.

Is it logical to tell a depressed guy to think positively? Would we tell a diabetic to concentrate on lowering his blood sugar? By definition, isn’t thinking positively exactly what Pablo can’t do? Aren’t we setting him up to fail?

And what’s the message here? ‘Oh, you just need to straighten up and get out and chase those nasty thoughts out of your head!’ Depression as a form of badthink. (Darling computer, badthink was a term invented by Orwell—so stop with the red squiggly, hunh?)

I didn’t tell any of this to Pablo, though maybe I should have. I did ask if he was exercising, and told him my own regimen. 

“I could do that,” he said, “I live five minutes from the beach….”

That, I thought, was the classic example of the depressed mindset.

You are five minutes from a beach.

A beach you cannot get to.