The Quaker Meeting (Tunnels 3)

(This writing is related to my last post, with a story in between them which was not ready to be posted)

These are just some of the memories that trickled through my mind as we made our way through the rain.  I wondered what the silence would be like, would my mind wander, would my mind be still.  I felt that in the past year I had been more anxious than before, that my base anxiety level was slowly rising as I aged.  I worried that I would get worse and worse, or at the very least stay this strange ball of nerves I wasn’t familiar with.  I asked myself, is this me now?  My worry only increased as I pondered this, and I often fell into a feedback loop of nervousness.  I was reminded of a line in one of Townes Van Zandt’s songs, a shame that it’s not enough, a shame that it is a shame.

I tried to find the cause to this change.  Was it from all of the years I’d spent working with anxious people?  Had their worries been so constant and normal that they’d washed off onto my own skin?  Was it simply aging?  I pushed these thoughts away and watched the rain hit my window and split off into endless varieties of streams that ran down the glass.

Soon we arrived at the parking lot.  We met Karena’s father and stepmother, the people who first took her to this small building many years ago.  Karena made the usual comments about how it had seemed larger in her memory, how the grounds in the back had felt like the biggest garden imaginable.  I stood beneath my hood where the raindrops made thin tapping sounds and looked at the shiny green leaves shivering.  Where do these places we knew as children go?  What wind carries them away?

We returned to the front of the building and entered a very small entryway.  Beyond the next doors a room open up.  Chairs lined the walls, very few of them holding people.  I only heard our soft footfalls on the rug and the shuffling sounds of our jackets.  After we sat down at the far end of the room I became aware of a slight humming sound.  Soon I was distracted the gurglings and babblings of a baby.  A slim, bearded man had his child in a front pack while he tried to sit quietly.  One might think the baby was unaware of the rule of silence at the Quaker Meetings, but actually you are encouraged to speak when you feel moved to.  Thus we sit in silence until someone stands up and shares something.  The child clearly had things to say, and maybe for this reason, I never felt annoyed or upset that my meditation was being broken.  The sounds were like that of the birds chirping, the wind in the cracks of the door and the rain outside our windows.  At first I tried to meditate, imagining my mind as a calm lake, and whenever  fish though jumped to the surface I acknowledged it and moved on.  This is easier said than done but that act in itself of observing is amazingly calming.  After awhile I decided that my mind didn’t need to be so clear to be here.  Maybe the Quaker let their minds follow the fishes down into the depths.  I opened my eyes and immediately found the source of the low hum I had noticed earlier.  Two large fan spun vigorously from the ceiling, their blades cutting the light cast from the bulbs to such an extent that the place where the wall met the ceiling appeared to be lit with light reflected from water.  The spinning is really a flashing, the flashing mimicking the way light plays on the undulating surface of the calm lip of a lake.  I laid my eyes on this light and felt slightly nauseas, most likely from the ratio of coffee to food in my body.  I held my gaze a little longer before closing my eyes.  Soon I was aware of a dull pain in the middle of my back, of itches on my forehead, my arm and my knee, and strangely enough, the weight of my eyeballs.  The strangest feeling I noticed was after leaning back slightly to adjust my body.  I found it increasingly difficult to keep my eyes closed.  They felt to be naturally pulling open, and I imagined I was on a ship, the sea wind whipping all about, and I was trying to hold a lowered sail down against the deck.  I released my eyelids and watched the watery light on the wall and ceiling across from me.

At some point, after what seemed a timeless amount of moments had passed. A woman stood up and discussed her feelings from watching stories about religious persecution on the news.  She ended with sending her prayers out to those people, especially Muslims around the world.  My thoughts on these people  somehow migrated back towards whales.  More specifically the extended familial structures of killer whales, groups that rivaled that of not just human families, but entire clans.  They travel in matrilines, an extended family based around the mothers, meaning they travel with their mothers, grandmothers, and cousins.  Specific sounds and travel patterns are passed down through the generations, making each matriline distinct from one another.  Each matriline swims together for the rest of their lives with very brief breaks to mate or hunt.  Groups of 4 or 5 related matrilines form pods, which, though they may split off for weeks or months, always link up soon again.  Groups of pods will come together to form a clan, made up of pods who can trace their lineage back a common grandmother.  They speak in similar, but not identical dialects.  Sometimes pods from different clans will commingle to form a community, though they don’t all speak the same dialect.  We have only observed these complex family structures in elephants and higher primates.  The similarities to humans continue with their breeding age of between 15 and 40, and, even more rare among within the animal kingdom, and even species of whale, the females live for decades after they begin menopause.  Their lives seem to be filled with much more than the desire to reproduce before they die.

The Yupiks of central Siberia believed that killer whales and wolves, we deeply connected spiritually.  According to their legends, they were the same beings, appearing as orcas in the summer and wolves in the winter.  In both forms they helped people.  As whales they assisted in the hunting of walrus and as wolves convinced reindeer to let themselves be killed by the humans who hunted them.  The chief difference between their shamanism and that of North America Eskimos was the extreme importance placed on the good treatment of sea creatures.  Even the killing of a whale could only be done by one selected by the spirits, and if successful the hunter gave the dead whale the respect of an honored guest.  Its spirit must be entertained by music and given food, in the hope that it will return again the following year.  These beliefs all seem to suggest a deep connection between all things in nature, where the spirits can become one animal, then another, and even remake themselves after death.  In this way death was rendered not as an ending, but simply veil, a tunnel to a deeper existence.  The Yupiks saw the sky as a curving arch, with stars burning holes through it.  Beyond this blackness was a space of light.  When reading this I was struck by something I had recently come across in a book on physics, which posited that, much like our watery globe, space my indeed curve back on itself, and that if one traveled far enough in one direction the would eventually arrive where they began.

      The First Peoples of Canada and the Americas called their continent Turtle Island.  In British Columbia’s Bella Coola, it was not Noah’s great arc that saved humans from a flood, but a Killer Whale who let the people live inside of himself until the water receded.  The orca’s desire to help may not have been simply altruism, but instinct.  Many of the first people’s believed whales were not only magical creatures, but some of the ancestors of human beings.  They forded the seas in their natural form or as giant canoes, looking for a special place to settle down.  Once a spot was chosen, the came ashore and, after taking on the form of humans, built a village.  In this way, festivals dedicated to whales are not just to appease magical creatures but to honor our ancestors, great travelers who willingly shed their mystical powers to become the human race.

As I sat in that large, cold, peaceful room of silence, and watched the watery light that reflected off the spinning fan blades, I began to not just imagine the whales from afar, but sink down among them.  I was no longer looking at the sun reflecting off the surface of the water from above, but from within below.  I let my mind loosen and travel toward the body of a whale, the beast that so enamored ancient peoples, Melville, Hart, Beale, Ellis, and more recently Hoare, and imagined I was far beneath the surface and gazing toward the strange dancing light that I could see but not touch.  As my deep breaths continued and my body became even more relaxed, my mind began to accept that maybe I was within the sea.  There was then a moment, it couldn’t have been more than that when my acceptance was so deep that I was filled with a panic that caused me to gasp, sit up straight, and break the spell.  I was simultaneously part of the sea, and thus home, and yet afraid of the crushing weight of water.

The brain does not distinguish between real emotions and those created by fiction, nor does the neuron fire differently when hearing music or replaying a song in your mind.  There is a wealth of experience and of living that goes on completely hidden from the rest of the world.  It is not so difficult to imagine that a beast such as the whale, whose environment is so different from ours, lives a life filled with hidden meaning, or at the very least, a secret richness.

When an hour had inexplicably passed, a man stood up and thanked everyone for coming.  He said he was filling for someone.  For a moment I thought this would protect me from being recognized as a new person, but he turned toward us and asked any new visitors to introduce themselves.  I scarcely remember what Karena said, as I was preparing my words.  When it was my turn to speak, I stood up and thanked them for having me.  I said that it was my first time at a friend’s meeting, and that I was able to relax, to sometimes let my mind rest and sometimes let it wander.

Afterward I walked beneath the bare branches, my eye being caught by fragile drops water that survived the ending of the storm.  I imagined I could see the world on the ground taken into its rounded shape, and behind this image that of the gray sky.  The water, like a window, simultaneously portal and reflection.  I smiled at the other who made their way next door to enjoy a potluck lunch and conversation.  I wasn’t ready to join them, possibly because I wanted to extend the solitude a little longer, and I began to think about how these people differed from what I had imagined them to be.  The word Quaker calls up images of men with large hats, much like on the oatmeal container.  Many of the images correspond with those of the Amish; sitting in a horse drawn carriage, long mutton chops, living in moderation and preaching peace.  I didn’t know that their most accepted name was The Religious Society of Friends, and that the term Quaker may have originally been used to mock them.  George Fox, a founder of the Quakers was taking before a Judge on the charge of blasphemy.  Fox kept a journal, where he related that they were called Quakers for asking other to tremble at the word of God.

The Whale (Tunnels 1)

I have some new writing but it isn't ready to post.  Here is a project I've been working on, combining
a few of my interests, and many of the topics of my blog, into a narrative around the theme of how we are fascinated, drawn to, and ultimately shaped by what we fear the most.

The rain was intermittent as we drove south from San Francisco on a Sunday in the Winter of 2011.  The sky had the thinnest of gray clouds, the hue bordering on white in many places. The bushes, trees and grasses blurred together as Karena drove us toward Santa Clara to attend a Friends Meeting of the Quakers.  Her father and stepmother regularly attended these gatherings, and since I had never been to anything of the kind I was curious to see what it would be like.  I have heard that most Quaker events are filled with silence, one moment stretching into the other in a room full of people sitting quietly, meditating in a way, and speaking only when they felt moved to do so.

The rain came and went on the windshield, like water sloshing in and out of a tide pool in the early morning hours.  I found myself drifting into a long neglected memory from childhood, when, as a boy, I stood on a beach in the Marin Headlands north of San Francisco, and looked out into the ocean.  A large group of family friends used to go camping together around the Bay Area.  They all had children who went to, or used to attend, my nursery school.  My friend and I had left the group, and ventured out into the woods leading to the ocean.  We found tall trees filled with naked, horizontal branches of a thickness perfect for climbing.  One could be 50 feet up the tree with little effort and even less fear of descending.  Near these trees were old bunkers, the kind of which dot the nearby coast, remnants of a time the United States felt the need to protect its borders with machine guns and mortar from invading ships.  Some of these rooms were blocked off, keeping us from conditions deemed too dangerous, but most of the rooms we were open to exploration.  Each one was empty, some flooded with ocean or rainwater, but the act of exploring was perfect for make-believe.  Just to the east of these barracks was a tunnel that went directly to a small beach that faced The Golden Gate Bridge to the east, San Francisco to the south, and the infinite expanse of the Pacific Ocean to the west.  I can still recall walking through this tunnel for the first time, and though I could see the light at the other end, feeling much more afraid than when I entered the blackness of the barracks.  I believe this is because I could see the outside of these buildings, and I was past the magical age where I believed the inside of a house could be infinitely bigger than the outside.  I was also of the very next age where one makes a point of not believing in things like that.  Maybe this is why, as we walked through the wet and sinking sand between the climbing trees and explored barracks toward the roaring sea, I didn’t tell my companion of the slippery fear the was rising up to me at my feet.  I can’t remember how I made it to the end, I only remember the wind hitting my ears with a violence one imagines when sailing across the sea.

I think it was more than trying to save face with my friend that drove me forward.  In spite of, or perhaps because of my fear, I was also, simultaneously filled with a powerful curiosity.  It is strange how pulled we are toward what we fear the most.  I pulled myself against the wind, toward the water.  For a moment, just a moment, somewhere near the middle, I imagined water gushing into the cave.  In my daydream I wasn’t pushed the dozen or so feet out towards the barracks, but was suspended in the dark waters, weightless and alone.  This especially was frightening because I never learned how to swim, and the thought of floating deep in the water felt akin to being lost in space.  Even today, I am filled with a deep fear that expands within my entire body when I imagine being submerged.  It is the inverse of claustrophobia, the fear of being trapped in an endlessness.

 Then I am out of the tunnel.  The wind lifted its embrace and instead became a calming breath.  Now out of the tunnel I could hear the waves grazing the shore.  Though the ocean spread out to the right it didn’t seem so open and expansive.  To our left the rust colored Golden Gate Bridge reached toward the sky, dominating the view.  The city beyond it appeared small.  Hills hid most of it, and the tallest buildings were dwarfed by the bridge and the distance. 

            Jason began laughing excitedly and pointing.  I squint my eyes, looking beyond the reflecting suns nearby to the blue waves a football field away.  I could make out a dark shape coming out of the water, then submerging.  It was the first time I saw a whale.  We were too far away to be struck by it’s magnitude or beauty, but I knew all about whales, had read about them and watched science specials on PBS.  They seemed to have intelligence that equaled out own, but lived in the alien depths.

The whale itself that day didn’t strike me, but like a symbol of something, it brought up all of the things I thought and felt about those great mammals of the water.  It’s a whale, I kept saying, over and over again.  We watched the same spot on the moving water for five, ten minutes, barely moving, Jason’s arm still slightly extended out, our chests heaving from the excitement.

            As an adult I continued to study them.  Initially my fascination was with the Blue Whale and other baleen whales.  This class fit in more with how I had always imagined them.  Massive and kind, they sing through the water in beautiful but alien tones.  Instead of teeth they have baleen, like a fine-tooth comb, that helps them catch krill.  They seem like gentle giants, big and smart dogs, our secret companions, that fills their lives with secret beauty.  Somehow the fact that these krill were fish escaped me, and I imagined whales as vegetarians, the antitheses of the murderous shark.  These may have originally be based on drawing of dinosaurs in books I loved as a young child.  The carnivorous Tyrannosaurus Rex and Alosaurus were the villains of the prehistoric world, while the nice vegan Stegosaurus, Brontosaurus and Triceratops were simply trying to eat and live peacefully.  Most likely, I anthropomorphicized sea creatures in the same way.  I don’t blame myself entirely.  If one looks beyond that one dinosaur books, there are hundreds of others, as well as television programs and films, mostly for children, that demonize predators like sharks and t-rex’s, and, to a lesser extent, wolves, most likely because of their similarity with their cousins, our best friend.  Though I understand how imagining other animals to think like humans we would exaggerate certain characteristics that are already there so that a story feels right on a gut level, it is curious that we don’t associate ourselves with the power predators, the meat eaters.  Possibly it is ingrained in us from thousands of years ago, when we were hunted by larger carnivores, or maybe we just prefer to think of ourselves as peaceful people, the kind you might see in the paintings on pamphlets from Jehovah’s witness.  These tableaus of lions and lambs and black and white people always struck me as strange because they seemed to not only solve humanities problems, but those of hungry animals who probably can’t conceive of a world without the food chain.

The Fog

Here is a story I've been working on.  Any comments welcomed and appreciated!  Inspired by the writings of Oliver Sacks.

The Fog

            A dense fog came in from the sea, poised above the houses just a few blocks away, hiding the rest of the world.  Near the border, where the city became nothingness, Colin could make out the wisps of vapor, running like ghosts, as the fog negotiated with open air how far it would creep.  He knew if he approached the fog his view would penetrate it.  He just had to get there.

He scratched his sandpaper chin, surprised at the stubble.  This place is terrible, he thought, it doesn’t even have proper mirrors.  And this glass.  He reached out and touched the window, his focus shifting to the surface itself, where a small grid of threads appeared, the hidden but not quite invisible strength of the glass.  As he did this he saw a man outside, suspended in the air, a flying man who has escaped.  First he felt excited, then a sinking feeling, when he saw the man was hovering, maintaining a constant height.

“Hello Colin,” a voice said behind him.  Colin straightened, first afraid the person behind him would see his secret angel, then let down to realize that the speaker was who he’d seen, apparently hovering, in the window’s reflection.  He turned around.

The guard that called himself Steve was rolling his weight back and forth between his heels and toes.  Colin imagined his thoughts; “Heel, toe, heel toe.”  Colin buried his thoughts of escape, lest his own thoughts could be divined so easily.

“Good morning, Colin.”

“Morning.”

“Nice Day.”

            “Is it?” slipped out of Colin’s mouth.

            “Sure.  I like the fog.”

            “Or course you do.”

            “Love the fog, man, hate sunny days.”  Mr. Davis’ high-pitched voice slipped into the room just before his body.  Colin grimaced to himself, wondering how often he’d be snuck up on today.  Mr. Davis was also the only person Colin had shared his plans with.

            “Mr. Davis,” Steve held up both hands in a strange motion, as if preparing for a hug or miming the lifting of a box.  He looked vaguely like a robot, his arms moving together.  His programming revealed itself.

            “You like the fog, Mr. Davis?” Steve asked

            “Sure I do.  I run hot and I don’t want to get burned.  Hard being out there, connecting these I-beams.”

            “Where do you think you are, Mr. Davis,” Steve asked, then gave me a malevolent wink.

            “You should know Mr. Kowolski, I’m here laying the frame for another one o’ these high rises here on Madison Avenue.  Don’t think I don’t appreciate the job.  I hope you know I take it very seriously.”

            “Who do you think I am, Mr. Davis?”

            “Why, Mr. Kowolski, the foreman.  But I’ll stop dillydallying as you like to say and get back to…”  Mr. Davis looked down at the floor, and then around the room.  “Where’s my hammer?  Where am I?”  He looked back at Steve.  “I thought I was outside.  I’m not though.  And you aren’t Mr. Kowolski.”

            “No,” Steve said.

            “Course not.  I see your uniform.  You the mailman.”

            Steve smiles.  “No.”

            “A doctor?”

            “No, Mr. Davis.”

            “Of course not.  You’re Al Grayson, here to fix the plumbing.  You’d think I could do it myself, but I was never good with pipes.

            “No, Mr. Davis,” Steve said.

            “Well, you must be my neighbor, Don.”  He looked at Colin.  “And his father.”  Colin grimaced.  He wanted to grab Mr. Davis by his shoulders and shake him and yell I’m not the old man, you are, but what would be the point?  He’d forget the whole thing in a few minutes, as he had already forgotten his entrance into the room.  The poor bastard was standing on a steppingstone over to sea of his memory, creating imaginary stones as he went along.

            Steve’s lips stretched into a gargoyle grin.  “My father?  What an honor.”  He winked at Colin, who quickly looked down, afraid to hold eye contact too long.  “Well, I’ll let you two catch up,” Steve said, and Colin watched his shadow slide from the floor.  Colin looked up slowly, afraid he might still be there, crouched and holding on to the ceiling.  He was alone, except for Mr. Davis with his perpetual furrowed brow and half grin.  Somewhere, deep down, did he realize how hard he was working to stay in the present, or did he only know on the surface, between his eyes?

            “Freddy,” he suddenly said, breaking Colin’s gaze, “going to the pool hall?  Wish I could but I’ve got work to do.”

            “Yes, of course,” Colin replied.  He saw no reason to hand Mr. Davis what would only slip through his fingers.

            “Running away are you?”  Colin’s eyes darted to Mr. Davis, then the hallway to see if anyone overheard, then back to Davis.  Had he remembered Colin’s plans?  Why had he been foolish enough to vent, prideful enough to boast?

            “Have you told anyone?”

            “Course not,” Davis said.

            “Well, keep quiet.”

            “Sure Jimmy.  Wish I was going with you but I have to take care of my lil brother.”

            “Your…brother?”

            “I could pack you some peanut butter and jelly.  Wait here.”  Mr. Davis walked into the hallway, looked both ways, then vanished, in search of the kitchen of his childhood.

            Colin’s eyes held to the last spot he’d seen the man, making sure he didn’t reappear, or maybe Steve or that other one.  There were only white walls and linoleum, bathed in fluorescent light, and sounds whose echoes merged together.  Colin closed his eyes, releasing the breath he’d been holding.

            “I’ve got to go now,” he whispered.  “I’ve got to get out of this place.”  He looked out the window one last time, first at the ghostly wall of fog, then bus stop out front.  He didn’t check his pocket for change nor grab an overnight bag.  He simply walked out of the room and down the hallway toward the stairs with the last two words “this place” bouncing around his head.  He paused at the door, his fingertips resting on the wood.  An image flashed in his mind of a man standing just where he was, pushing away the guards and screaming for his parents.  Was it Davis?  No, one of the others.  The apparition faded and he pushed the door open.  The stairwell was as full of silence as the hallway of echoes.  He leaned forward and saw, 2 floors below, the light coming through the window of the front door.  He would be that light now.  He stepped quietly, afraid of his footsteps, and soon was running through the light, pushing the door open, catching his breath at the bus stop.  He checked his watch.  All he had to do now was wait.

The shadows were lengthening.  The afternoon sun had burned off most of the fog, and had now dipped below its frosty layers.  Colin squinted his eyes.  His sighed and leaned back.  The wind was blowing and though he was protected by the kiosk, he watched it dance with the leaves on the trees across the street.  Staring down into the pavement he suddenly realized that there were dozens of ants running around, seemingly randomly, fast and direct.  Colin felt calm watching them, so calm he didn’t hear the hydraulics or the door, or the soft footsteps.  A man sat down next to him.

            “Hello,” the man said.

            “Hello,” Colin said.

            “Beautiful day.”

            “Yes,” Colin said.  “I love sunset.”

            “Do you?”

            “Yes.  Look how the sky turns orange, the sidewalk even.  The skin on my hand…” Colin looked down at the orange tint on the back of his hand and his fingers.  He became aware of the wind, not a cold wind, but not a warm one either, and the impending night.  He wrapped his arms around himself, pulling his bathrobe tighter around his body.

            “Want to come inside,” the man said.  “Have some coffee.”

            Colin nodded, but was looking down at the ants again, who were circling the man’s shoes, confused by the appearance of something new. 

Justice

I had a few different feelings when I heard about the death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of SEAL Team 6.  I felt relieved and a little giddy, but also strange, as if I shouldn't be feeling too good at the death of someone, even ObL.  Not because I felt bad for him, but for us, all of us, those that died that can't be brought back, those who lost loved ones, and all of us here, who still feel good when an eye is taken for an eye.  I have tried to have acceptance for everything and everyone, not to make excuses and say it's okay, but to accept it.  I mean that in the sense that terrible thing are real, they happen and are happening, instead of "I wish that didn't happen I don't want to think about that happening."  I have tried to have compassion for everyone, no matter what, because when we start using our emotions to decide who we should have compassion for and who we shouldn't, that's when people start committing genocide.

So I've got all my ducks in a row to hope for bin Laden's capture and trial, even if emotionally maybe I'd rather he just be killed.  Still, I never imagined he would be captured.  Some people are so hated, so reviled, so wanted for vengeance, that one must accept that they will stay hidden or be killed, with nothing in between.  I have the strange feeling that bin Laden was one of those cases, and even if I can somehow have sympathy for him and those harboring him, and on some level hope he could have been captured alive, I feel like to impose that on others is a stretch.  I do hope we can all have sympathy for all things, for the reasons mentioned above, but I think, right now, we live in a world where vengeance is just a little stronger.  What I mean to say, and it is difficult to find the words, is that my philosophy of compassion must make room for the compassion for those who want vengeance.  Thoughts?

The Soul Intro

Is there a real me? If not, who is my soul?

In one of Oliver Sacks’ most famous clinical stories, he describes, Jimmie, a patient whose memory was stuck decades in the past.  Every few minutes, his memory would wash itself clean, leaving intact the old recollections of youth and early adulthood, all the way up through his time in the Navy and World War II, to about 1945.  He could describe in great detail all the events of his before that point, but everything after had trickled through the sieve of memory.  After Jimmie tells Oliver Sacks that he is 19, and it is Forty-Five, Sacks relates in The Lost Mariner:

            “Looking at the grey-haired man before me, I had an impulse for which I have never forgiven myself-it was, or would have been the height of cruelty had there been any possibility of Jimmie’s remembering it.

            ‘Here,’ I said and thrust a mirror toward him.  ‘Look in the mirror and tell me what you see.  Is that a nineteen-year-old looking out from the mirror?’

            He suddenly turned ashen and gripped the sides of the chair.  ‘Jesus Christ,’ he whispered.  “Christ, what’s going on?  What’s happened to me?  Is this a nightmare? Am I crazy?  Is this a joke?’- and he became frantic, panicked.’

Has Jimmie lat his soul?  Or is his true self still there, evidenced by his old memories?  But what does that say about his new experiences?  Is he still himself?  What about other cases, where people lose everything every few minutes, but also have lost their long-term memory?  Who they were is gone…or is it?

Writers and philosophers and doctors have talked about memory as who we are.  Bunuel said that “memory is what makes up our lives.”  In Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, he equates death with the complete loss of memory, and each thing we forget as a small death.  Rushdie said, “We tell ourselves into being,” suggesting that our idea of who and what we are is a story we tell ourselves.  This is very different from the old idea of the soul, a bodyless consciousness that fills up this mortal coil and leaves it when the shell decays.  What if we learn things, then create an idea of who we are, where we end and other things begin, based on our senses.  What if when we forget these things, we are forgetting a part of the story we tell ourselves, and thus, letting our soul leak out with our memory?  What if the soul is not separate from the body at all, but an amazing creation from our organic hardware?

            First let me say, that I don’t have an answer.  I don’t want to get in a heated debate with anyone who thinks this is false.  There is no proof and will most likely never be.  If I know something is true, hey, let’s argue.  If I believe something is true, then I am using the weapon of a feeling, an opinion, to fight another feeling.  To me this is silly.  But I do believe these beliefs should be debated.  It keeps us honest.

I simply want to follow this train of thought and see where it goes.  A few stops along the way:

Is forgetting a small version of death?

Are we simply the story we tell ourselves?

What else does brain damage say about the soul, as well as good and evil?

 See you next week!

As always, any comments are welcomed, weather you disagree, think I messed up some facts, or are feeling bored, please feel free to let me know.

Dennis Blunden & The Say Hey Kid

The first time I saw someone famous I felt a rush like I’d never experienced.  My heart beat faster, my temperature rose.  This could have been because I was in the same room as one of my heroes, but it was only the actor who played Dennis Blunden, the heavy math whiz on the 80’s high school sitcom Head of The Class.  My feeling of elatedness could be explained by being only about 10 or 11, except for the fact that the giddiness, staring then looking away, and speaking in a hushed voice were characteristics shared by both of my parents.

Is that Dennis Blunden?

I think.  Yes that’s him!

His real name is Dan something.

What’s he doing here?

Quiet, he’s just trying to eat some food.

What’s he eating?

Who’s that girl?

He looks so much better than on the show.

Oh my god, I can’t believe it’s Dennis Blunden.

Do you think he hears us?

Quiet!  Let’s not ruin his date.

Smiles stretched across our faces, except for my younger brother, who just stared, wide-eyed and open mouthed, at a man he had only seen shrunken within the square screen of our television.  He was too young to be excited like we were, to feel the power of being close to someone famous, to worry about them seeing you looking.  He was trapped in the initial feeling of awe, as if he had just seen a dog talk or a piece of paper stand up and walk away.  His awe made me even more aware of the fact that my parents and I were acting almost exactly the same, as if there were only 2 stages to seeing celebrities: Complete Awe, and Teenage Girl Gossiping.  If you have never imagined your parents as teenage girls, it is a strange experience.  Now throw yourself in the mix and imagine you’re sitting across from Dave Coulier or Jaleel White.

Celebrity sightings seemed to come more often when the family was together.  Maybe we created some kind of gravitational pull hitherto unknown in the universe.  Except for the fact that we almost never saw anyone famous.  We lived in San Francisco, not Hollywood, and we ate at nearby restaurants, not the hip ones in Chinatown or Northbeach.  The fact that we ever saw anyone famous was kind of amazing.

Our next big celebrity sighting was Willie Mays.  If you don’t know the first thing about baseball, he’s up there with Hank Aaron and Babe Ruth.  If you don’t know them then I’ll say he’s up there with the best of the best.  Abrahams and Zucker, or Lennon and MacCartney or Lonely Island and Turquoise Jeep.  There, now that my plugs for a google search are out of the way I’ll get back to the story.

Willie Mays was an all around great hitter and fielder, who once caught a ball while running in the other direction.  He played for the Giants in New York, and came with them for the move to San Francisco late in his career.  Candlestick Park is a huge, pitcher-friendly place, and many speculated that Mays would have broke Aaron’s homerun record had the Giants stayed in New York.  Even if he did, Barry “The Cream The Clear” Bonds broke all of their records, as well as my faith in baseball.

Anyway, so the family and some friends are at a game at Candlestick in the 90’s.  We aren’t sitting with the rest of the crowd, braving the bitter cold, as we normally would have.  Instead we have box seats.  Between the upper and lower decks of most sports stadiums, is a row of square rooms.  Facing the field, instead of a wall, is a large window.  Also, between some of the boxes are windows instead of walls.  I’m not sure why this is.  Maybe so that one group of rich people can wave to another, or after a homerun they can do an air high five, from opposite sides of the glass, like when a prisoner’s wife visits him in jail.

I don’t remember much of that game.  I don’t remember who won.  I do remember opening the small part of the window that did open, and yelling “Daaaaarryl” to Darryl Strawberry.  The other thing I remember was that in the middle of the game, my Dad taps me on the shoulder.

“Illy Ays,” he says out of the corner of his mouth, as if people were listening.

“What?”

“Ex Or.  Illy Ays.”  Then he gestured with his eyes, a movement so small I barely saw it.  I leaned forward and looked through the glass.  Next door to, amid a large group of Giants fans watching the game, was the Greatest Giant to ever live.  I felt my pulse quicken and I looked up at my father, who had an excitement in his eye I had never seen before.

“Don’t stare,” he said, suddenly recovering his consonants.  I immediately thought of my brother, the starer.  Would he run up to the glass so close he fogged it up.  Would Willie Mays roll his eyes and look at me as if to say “What a couple of stupid brothers?”  I couldn’t let that happen.

I turned back toward the game.  “Ike.  On’t are.”

“What?” he turned toward me.

“Ook at a  ase all ame!  On’t ook at me!”  I accidently said me.

“What?”

“I ed…”

“What, you’re an idiot?  Okay, Dan.”  He was the only little brother in the world who also picked on me.  I turned toward him.

“Listen asshole, Willie Mays is over there and I won’t let you mess this up for me.”

“Where?”  He stood up, ran up to the glass facing the field and started looking everywhere.  “Is he sitting down there?  Is he buying a malt?  Does he get a real spoon instead of the little flat piece of wood?  Is he playing left field?”

The hitter hit a foul ball.  I jumped and cheered for it as if it were a homerun, then pulled my brother back to his seat.  I leaned close to his ear.  “Don’t look!  He’s next door.  Don’t look!  Willie Mays is right next…”  He was already looking.  I didn’t look to see if Willie was looking, because then I would seem to be connected to my brother, the strarer, and he’s hate us both.  I kept looking straight ahead while attempting to kick my brother sideways.  “Games’ up front, buddy.  Games’ up front.”

Mike turned and faced front.  Amazingly, he seemed to grasp the gravity of the situation.  “It’s Willie Mays!” he whispered excitedly.

“I know!” I whispered happily back, the two of us sharing in the excitement for the first time.

“What do we do?”

“I don’t know,” I replied

“Listen up.”  My father’s voice was barely a whisper, and his was leaning into his pack at his feet.  He picked up a pair of binoculars and pretended to clean the lenses.  “Here’s what you do.  You discreetly watch and when he leaves, probably a little before the game ends, you go out and politely ask for an autograph.”  My father returned the binos to the backpack and looked at us.  “7^th Inning Stretch!” he yelled, then winked.

We had our tickets ready.  We had our pens.  We waited.  When the moment came, when Willie and his old black man bodyguard stood up and went towards the back door, we were ready.  We looked at each other, nodded to our father, and went unto the breach.  By the time we came out of our box, they were already standing at the handicap-only elevator, and looking back and forth.

“Mr. Mays, Mr. Mays!”  We repeated, as instructed.  I don’t have an image of them as we approached, but I have a strange memory of looking to the side to see my brother, bobbing and weaving, standing tall and scrunching down, dodging imaginary bodyguards, calling “Mr. Mays, Mr. Mays!”

His older bodyguard stood a little in front, but he didn’t block us.  Mike handed Mr. Mays his ticket.  As Willie signed it the elevator arrived.  I offered my ticket.  “Mr. Mays has signed enough for today.”  And then they vanished into the handicapped elevator.  “Mr. Mays has signed enough for today,” as if he had been sitting there for hours, accommodating hundreds of people, and not just my little brother.  A sinking feeling filled my guts.  I looked and Mike and forced a smile.  He looked at me with such pity that I felt a little better.  It took years for me to get over missing that autograph by a hairsbreadth, but now my brother’s signed ticket doesn’t mean a whole lot to either of us, except a memento of one of our adventures together.

Follow the Circle Down. Where Would You Be?

Here is a little essay I wrote on Townes Van Zandt.  It is not all-encompassing, but an introduction to his life and music.  The next few weeks I'll be writing about artists and scientists and people I have met who experience the world vastly different than most other people.  This could be because of brain damage, a disease, or simply the way their brains are wired.  The more I learn about these cases, the more I ask, Who is the real me?  Does a real me even exist?  And if not, what does this say about the soul...

Please leave comments if there is anything you'd like to discuss, and if you enjoyed it, felt bored, etc...

“Shame that it’s not enough

Shame that it is a shame”

                                    - Townes Van Zandt, The Highway Kind

Trying to sum of Townes Van Zandt in words is like looking at a mountain reflected in a lake and trying to figure out what it’s all about.  You might get an idea of what it looks like, the same as if you looked directly toward its peak, but you wouldn’t know how the plants smell, what the trees in the wind sounded like, or know the view from the top.  You stare into the reflection and try to figure all this out, and falling leaf sending out ripples reminding you that you’re merely looking at a pool of water.

I’d say Townes battled depression, alcoholism and drugs for most of his life, but these characteristics were so woven into the fabric of his existence that battled feels like the wrong word.  These things poured into him just as music did, weaving a rich and strong and intricate texture that was frayed at the edges.  I think of him often, not because of his struggles, but the staggering poetry of his music. Yet, if he were a simple, happy man, or if he were alive today, would I look for so much in his songs?

Townes, who grew up in Texas, Montana and Colorado, came from a wealthy oil family.  He started playing guitar at 12, after receiving one for Christmas and seeing Elvis Presley on television.  He did well in school and studied among the mountains of the University of Colorado at Boulder.  It was during these years that he was diagnosed with manic depression, and his binge drinking became more pronounced.  I try to imagine him not as a young version of one of my favorite singers, but the strange heir to a rich, powerful family fortune.  His illness was attacked with the best that western medicine had to offer, insulin shock therapy. 

Electroconvulsive Therapy first came to be in the 1930’s.  Researches found that epileptics rarely suffered from psychosis, and vice versa.  Rather than splitting hairs about the difference between correlation (two things are connected in that they are caused by a third thing) and causality (one causes the other), it was assumed that inducing seizures in psychotic people could cure them.  Even reading accounts of this procedure, it is difficult to imagine the horror experienced.  Being strapped down to a stretcher, wheeled into the ECT room, and consciously watching the doctors as they silently attach electrodes to your head, then a drug is administered into your blood.  You awaken later, with no memory of what happened, only a strange soreness in your body, mysterious bruises, and a headache.  You have no conscious memory of going to the ECT room, but some primitive part of your brain fills you with fear when you are wheeled there again.

It was a few years later that the Italian psychiatrist Cerletti began to use electrical currents, which were amazingly much safer than the metazol or insulin induced seizures.  These early versions of ECT were dangerous and often caused death.  Over time, the procedure has become much safer, and shown to be effective with people suffering from depression, though its’ effect on psychotics, the original purpose of the procedure, has been shown to be ineffective.

In the 60’s, mood stabilizers had yet to be discovered.  And ECT hadn’t yet given muscle relaxers and barbiturates to calm the body before inducing dangerous seizures that could cause fractures and dislocations.  ECT has been shown to be very effect with unipolar depression (a cycle which only involves the sad, dark state of depression), but this is not the case with manic depression (a cycle that involves the low state of depression and the high, frenetic, productive, energized state of mania).  Shock therapy did not have the stigma it does today.  Like most suffering inflicted on minorities for the bulk of history, the only ones who don’t like them are the ones experiencing them.  His family probably thought they were doing what was best for him.  Years later, his mother regretted her decision more than anything else.

I don’t know if the insulin induced seizures helped his depression.  I do know that he lost most of his long term memory from the process, and that songs began to come to him, fully formed, in the middle of the night.  I imagine him sleeping in his trailer in the middle of the woods, no running water, but a flood of words and music braided together, stirring him from sleep, pulling his hands like a puppeteer toward his guitar.  Did these songs come from the same cocooned, mysterious place that caused him to reach for the bottle and the needle?  Before he lost himself to the lighting in his mind, he played guitar and he drank.  Losing his memory seemed to cast spotlights on the strongest parts of his life, his music, his addiction, and his loneliness.  Or was his memory hollowed out by currents of electricity, and then filled with a new kind of music and poetry?

On The Highway Kind, he says

My days they are the highway kind

They only come to leave

But the leaving I don’t mind

It’s the coming that I crave

Pour the sun upon the ground

Stand and throw a shadow

And watch it grow into a night

A fill the spinning sky

He takes the image of the highway, the long road of the past before automobiles, and twists it into each day of his life.  Without a past or future he is alone on the road, making up the world as he goes alone.  His depression, his shadow, cover the world and makes it into night.  The evocative image of pouring the sun into the ground may be an attempt to control the spinning sky, time passing, and the earth that turns without us perceiving it.

The attempt to make sense of one’s life by living it in ever moving solitude gives way to an even deeper study of depression.

Shame that it’s not enough

Shame that it is a shame

Follow the circle down

Where would you be

One of the defining characteristics of depression and anxiety is the awareness of one’s strange and painful feelings, and the shame from having them.  I don’t just obsess about cleaning the house, but I know my cleaning is excessive and I feel badly about it.  I have these strange urges I can’t control.  As far as I know, this guilt for being himself is never stated so clearly again, but may be opaquely present, hidden behind the canvas of his sad stories and epics.

To Live Is To Fly, counterpoints the beauty of life with the trappings of the human condition.

We all got holes to fill

And them holes are all that’s real

Some fall on you like a storm

Sometimes you dig your own

The meaning in life becomes filling the painful holes that we feel.  Perhaps he knew this through his art, but it may be the comparison of himself before and after the ECT.  Is our life made up of filling these holes, wherever they originated?  Is everything we see in life, what we call reality, created by the filter of our consciousness.  I am reminded of a quote by the author Anaïs Nin at the Exploratorium, an interactive science museum in San Francisco.  "We don’t see things as they are; we see things as we are."

This brings to mind Franz Kafka, a kindred spirit of Townes who had the holes of tuberculosis and being a Jew in Europe fall like a storm onto his life.  His characters often explored the reality of their perception, or, their perceived reality.  He wrote stories about dogs, mice, moles, and most famously in The Metamorphosis, a cockroach, possibly to show that, like my friend Tom says, “We are all silly animals running around, trying to make sense of things.”  That is to say, a mole lives a moles life (blind, underground, listening for vibrations that warn of an intruder), a dog a dog’s life (seeing birds and flying dogs), and a human a human’s.  We either all are something special in the universe, or none of us are.

In the song Marie, Townes’ focused on the castaways again, this time the homelss.  The song begins

I Stood in line and left my name

Took about six hours or so

Well, the man just grinned like it was all a game

Said they’d let me know

This casts the image of one of Kakfa’s mysterious clerks who are always in the way, a piece of the inconceivable bureaucracy of the government, of life, that makes us feel small and powerless.  The man’s grin stretches long and wide in my mind, and is filled with sharp triangular teeth that fit between each other lke the monster of Where The Wild Things Are.  It is no surprise when, later in the song

Well the man’s still grinning says he lost my file

I gotta stand in line again

Perhaps the most poignant line is when the unnamed narrator imagines a happily ever after with his girl

Maybe me and Marie can find a burned-out van

And do a little settling down

Does he mean create a home or have some privacy when making love?  Can we, the audience of relatively comfortable people with homes imagine not just having a burned out van as a home, but not having it and wishing for it?

Perhaps his most famous song, Pancho and Lefty, counterpoints the story of the well known Mexican revolutionary general with that of a regular guy, the kind of person we don’t write stories about.  He doesn’t have a big exciting life and death, but a life that continues on into old age.

Pancho needs your breaks it’s true

But save a few for Lefty too

He just did what he had to do

now he’s growing old

We see the world in wide grand strokes, certain people stand out in history just as a large tree is more noticeable than the air all around it.  Yet the life we are most aware of I our own, a life we bend over backward to give meaning, and look for this mirrored in the great mena dn women of the world, even as we ignore those most like ourselves, the Leftys who blow through life.

Steve Earle called Townes “a real good teacher and a real bad role model.”  He also famously said “Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world, and I'll stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.”  Townes responded, ”I’ve met Bob Dylan and his bodyguards, and I don’t think Steve could get anywhere near his coffee table.”  Though privately Earle’s quote embarrassed Townes, and Earle later recanted, telling the New York Times, "Did I ever believe that Townes was better than Bob Dylan? No.”  Still, Earle’s words are filled with the adoration of a young man speaking of his hero, except lacking the romance, the sheen of perfection with which we immerse those we admire.  Townes made great music but was also a rambling man, plagued by alcohol and heroin.  Maybe the drink was the only thing that kept him alive though all those years after his mind was set alight.  When his surgery after a bad fall, he had to stop drinking.  After the surgery he was so plagued by the DT’s, the shakes an alcoholic has when deprived of alcohol, that his wife gave him a flask of vodka.  By the time he was home he was acting like himself again, talking and smiling.  He smoked a joint with a friend, had a few Tylenol PMs, and watched television.  Soon after, his old heart attacked him, as if he had held his breath too long under water and his lungs finally gave up.  He died on the couch, found by his youngest son.

Steve Earle has a great version of Marie, which doesn’t feel as overwhelmingly heavy.

Steve’s tribute to Townes written after his death.

Another of my favorites: My Proud Mountains