Life’s like Sanskrit read to a pony, Lou Reed raps, in his signature deadpan way, on the album with the above title. He was grieving the untimely death of two close friends, but his lyrics speak to anyone for whom faith becomes increasingly hard to maintain and meaning begins to fall apart. His choice of album title evokes two extremes — or, perhaps more accurately, two poles — between which at least some of us try to navigate our lives with varying degrees of success.
Does “magic” really happen? Or are only the inevitable losses, in these lives of impermanence, real? Some spiritual teachers say that only love is real, and that death itself is an illusion. In my recent isolation and bereavement, having forfeited my communal home but yearning to reach across space and connect, against all odds and reason, when other avenues have failed, I struggle with what is true. Some days everything seems lost — everything I cared about, into which I poured the best of myself, like sand into a sieve. They’ve all said the mass and shoveled the dirt; I’m gone. But instead of moving into the next realm, I’m still trying to talk to Demi Moore.
**
As I’ve often mentioned before, I was raised on magic: tales of the parting of seas and man-swallowing fish and people raised from the dead, as well as the Chronicles of Narnia and the more heretical flying carpets and shriveled wizards I encountered in secular schoolbooks. My own rich imagination conjured up its own lands of Oz, where I could breathe underwater and fly and travel to far galaxies, and I always won the handsome prince…even if it was just Simon, my father’s colleague’s son, who in reality barely took notice of me. I constantly daydreamed and drew comic strips and wrote stories, escaping into worlds of my own creation where I could make anything happen.
Externally, however, I was just a shy A student in her brother’s hand-me-down shirts, beloved of teachers and other girls but like a potted plant to the boys. And then in high school I collided full-speed with scientific materialism, which shattered all of my various faiths into smithereens. That loss was so devastating, I’m amazed I survived. My coach friend always says I’m overly dominated by my rational mind, but so-called rationality was the only thing I retained with which to construct sanity and meaning when everything else imploded. In self-defense, and for a while after that, I was skeptical of everything that wouldn’t have been endorsed by Michael Shermer. Eventually at philosophy school it would hit me — somewhere slogging through Hume, Kant, and Hegel — that the finite human mind and its evolving consciousness is only a limited element within all that exists, and isn’t really in the master position to step outside and be ultimate judge. (Russ will want to argue that point; I won’t.)
But the desire, if not the uncritical capacity, to believe in magic never left me.
**
To my adult self, “magic” describes coincidences that suggest connections too great to be random — but the connections themselves aren’t explicable by rational or traditionally scientific means. Like when you start wondering what happened to your college study buddy after all these years, and on the same day he locates you through Google. Or just when you start thinking about moving to the mountains, a friend mentions in passing that her in-laws are looking for a year-round caretaker for their cabin. Eastern religion and the quantum mystics attribute this to the interconnectedness of all beings (or molecules, or energy), and in recent years, it’s become all the rage (thanks largely to Oprah) to set intentions and attempt to manifest desires in the external world. For those of us used to striving and disappointment, it sounds way too good and too crazy to be true. (Yet I should add that my mind did, somehow, literally triumph over matter once, when I managed to twist and untwist a very hard stainless steel spoon a healthy young man couldn’t budge.)
I’ve been brooding over some very specific instances of this kind of magic that seem too good and too crazy to be true. It seems much more sensible to believe in metaphysical powerlessness…and much more realistic (based on my experience) to believe that this solitary pariah is yesterday’s news, upstaged and forgotten, rather than connected and wanted. After all, what’s more excruciatingly painful than to go ahead and believe in a happy, sappy dream only to wake up to cold, unforgiving facts?
**
A few years ago I came across a book by a woman who was able to realize a lifelong dream and give birth at the age of fifty-seven to healthy twins. I was reading a lot of change-your-life self-help books at the time, feeling stuck and uninspired in my monotonous routines, without any passion or prospects. The book was full of visualization exercises that claimed to utillize magnetic energy and color healing, so I was rolling my eyes a bit, but this woman was the living poster child for her own technique. I took it home.
The author urged me to visualize what I desired most. Without holding back. So instead of envisioning my dream career, like the self-sufficient feminist loner I pretended to be (with all my fulfilling friendships, etc.), I indulged. I indulged like that child who believed in magic. I created a man from scratch, something I hadn’t tried before, loading him up with all the great traits and tastes and qualities I’d never found in one centralized location. I made him my favorite combination of physical attributes, too — the kind of man who would be my feminine version of a wank-fantasy. The kind of man I’d never believed I could have. (What the hell, it was just the sort of escapist fun I’d enjoyed in my youth, and I was bored with my “real” life.) I followed the book’s exercises, with all its imagery of violet light and golden suns and silver orbs.
In the meantime I had started taking yoga classes at a new studio, thanks to the generosity of a friend who wouldn’t have used her gift certificate otherwise. One day I walked out of a class, and there was a guy sitting on the floor waiting to go in. I stared, almost agape. I couldn’t help it. He was my wank-fantasy. In the flesh. Right down to the freaking haircut.
I couldn’t speak to him for weeks, expecting him to be aloof and at least moderately arrogant, the way ridiculously attractive men often are, but when I did work up the nerve to say hello I found myself chatting with an incredibly warm and engaging man my own age who cared about progressive politics and underground music and a host of other things I’d asked for that made our meeting that much more unbelievable.
**
“Can’t you do it again?” asks my life coach friend. Even he is ready to admit that some things may be impossible.
“What, like a clone?” I reply irritably. Assuming you really could conjure a duplicate dreamboat out of thin air, the unfortunate guy would be like Splenda, a derivative and inferior substitute.
Anyone I try to picture now is just a poor man’s Sonny.
**
Most of my friends don’t know that story. (They don’t even know about him, for that matter, or this blog.) But I used those visualization techniques again, a few months later, in an experimental attempt to help my new friend.
At the time, he was trying to negotiate custody with an angry ex who wanted to give him no more than one day a week with the children who are — if there is never another — the true love of his life. I knew that that outcome would break his heart. I also knew already that I loved him, with an inexplicable sense of fatedness, even if the outcome of that would break mine. I wanted for him, at least, to be with his treasure.
Late one night, I imagined a flood of pink light (symbolizing unconditional love, according to the book) flowing out from my heart and surrounding the ex-wife in her bed across town. I gently suggested to this remote stranger that no matter how much she might hate and want to punish him right now, her children loved and needed their father. She knew what the right thing to do was. I blessed her sincerely, turned off the “light,” and went to sleep.
The next time I saw Sonny, he was ebullient. The latest mediation had been a 180-degree turnaround. His usually intractable adversary had been much calmer and infinitely more accommodating, and they had ultimately agreed to a near-equal custody split. Again, I had to keep my jaw from hitting the pavement.
It was enough to make a grownup believe in the Easter Bunny.
**
He posts some family photos on our social network, and I want to weep, he’s so handsome. I’m not strong enough or large enough to withstand that much beauty, or contain this much desire. I can’t bear the way the soft fabric of his sweater clings to the indentation between his pectorals. If he were any more achingly desirable, I would die. You’re just like an angel/your skin makes me cry. Sometimes getting a man naked demystifies his allure and frees you; sometimes once is enough; sometimes once is too much. Then there are those other times.
I can’t help but wonder who else is looking, and aching. It always seems self-evident to me that any other female is likelier than I am to captivate, and it always startles me when I look in the bathroom mirror and see a decidedly good-looking woman (other women say beautiful) blinking back at me. Inside, I think I look like George Constanza. I’m a creep/I’m a weirdo. And there are so many other attractive possibilities for him, like the extremely pretty, slender twentysomething immersed in the studio’s life who is a good friend of his. She’s a wonderful person; I have no ill to speak of her, and what’s more, she’s on the inside of that fence, still spiritually correct and unambiguously yogic. I want a perfect body/I want a perfect soul…
Radiohead may not be Sonny’s chosen soundtrack — he’s partial to more obscure indie label bands and funk and Motown — but he has the same kind of intimacy with his music as I do. Either one of us is as likely to update our status with a song as not. Anyone paying attention can gauge our inner state by what we’re listening to.
**
He did contact me after I broke with the community, both online and via the phone, but we haven’t seen each other, or even talked directly. My message suggesting we meet is still unanswered. I know how busy (and how popular) he is — which is why I’ve also attempted to communicate with him using “alternative” means.
I have a CD my coach friend gave me that uses sound to rebalance the two hemispheres of the brain, and supposedly helps the listener “manifest desires” more easily. At the time of my studio expulsion, I started listening to its ocean waves and picturing meeting Sonny on a beach, the wind scrambling his hair, to say all the things straining the seams of my heart. I do miss the ocean, if nothing else about where I grew up, and being with him, there, I felt nothing was lacking. Meanwhile, in session, my coach asked me where I’d take myself if I won the lottery and could go anywhere (the assumption being, by myself). Still stuck on a theme, I closed my eyes and saw myself lying on white sands by blue water. Alone. I didn’t like that picture; it felt incomplete, and made me sad.
During all of this, Sonny started posting topical content, like lyrics from a song about a seagull. He wrote something about hearing a song about dreams of the beach three times in one day. Then he announced that he intended to win the raffle he’d entered for tickets to Bali, sponsored by my former employer. One of his friends commented “So that’s what all your beach dreaming is about!”
I read that, and burst into tears.
But he hadn’t returned my call, and I didn’t know what to do with that. On my least favorite holiday (see my last post), communing with my music, I made my status a line from the morosely poetic, longing-filled Joe Henry song “Want Too Much” about impossible desires.
Just hours later, he quoted Roy Orbison. “Anything you want, you got it.”
I realize that this is beginning to sound like some adolescent Twitter version of High Fidelity…but you jumped to conclusions with me, didn’t you?
Emboldened by that jump, I sent a message. Nothing confrontational, just something simple and friendly. I didn’t hear back from him right away, but soon thereafter he pasted up nearly all of the lyrics to an old Marvin Gaye song, which gave me a full-body flush twice over — the first from naive pleasure (the child who still believes she could be the princess), the second from that horrifying and familiar misgiving that it was probably not meant for me (the adult who knows better).
Oh you, my sweetest joy
You can afford the best of life
I’m just a heartbreakin’ boy
Oh you’ve given your love to me
Girl, I can’t let you hurt yourself by being seen with me
We’re worlds apart, so close yet very far
So we must hide the love we’re feelin’ in our hearts
We meet in shadows, your friends must never know
That we are lovers, darlin’
Alhough it hurts me so, for your sake no one must see
The press of love you’re givin’ me
But you know, I need you baby…
One day I’ll make the break, my love will start to shine
I can tell the world that you are mine, all mine
Till then we must go on the way we have before
And never let it show without each other’s souls
I’ll never one-way track ’cause there’s no turnin’ back
Oh I need you baby
**
He’s met a fair number of girls in the shadows, believe me. But it’s been a long, long time since that girl was me. For all I know, he has a shadow lover right now, with whom he’s fallen passionately and protectively in love, only a maddening couple of months after the end of the serious relationship I waited out. It could be anyone. All sentient creatures — women, men, children, dogs, cats, goldfish — instinctively adore Sonny. And Sonny adores them right back, especially women. For all I know, it’s that pretty, skinny girl, who gave the song a thumbs-up. And I couldn’t hold it against her.
His reply to my message, when it came, was sweet but short. He was really sad that I was no longer at the studio and wished I would come back. I asked him to meet me.
Radio silence followed.
**
Why do I tell myself these things that happen are all really true/when in my heart I know the magic is my love for you? That’s an old Styne/Cahn tune from the 40s, posted by Sonny while I was doing my visualizations.
I don’t know what’s true. Am I misconstruing the “things that happen” — certain extraordinary coincidences — as magic? Do I have a profound, abiding, inexplicable soul connection with this man, or am I bordering dangerously on delusional? Has he all but forgotten me, neck-deep in other lovers, knowing I’m not what he wants — or does his silence mean he’s as scared as I am? Am I a princess or a potted plant?
Which is more real, magic or loss? Which should I believe in? I’ve waited so long, and waded through the endless bog of my own accumulated garbage because of him…sometimes approaching the closest thing I’ve ever known to transcendence. He’s been my Shams of Tabriz, my provocateur, my mischievous disappearing Friend. Who else, among all the other possible chickadees, summoned him up like a custom order? Who else tried to metaphysically intervene to rescue his family life? And there are so many other less magical things I did on his behalf that he isn’t aware of.
Even if it’s all crazy, I know I deserve to be the princess this time. Even if I won’t be. Even if the real story turns out to be devastating loss.
***
Walking along the charmingly seedy street down my block that, if it were music, would be a Tom Waits song, I pass an old black man in a veteran’s cap and a motorized wheelchair. “Morning, beautiful!” he calls out.
I turn to see him beaming at me. “Morning,” I reply, smiling. He tells me to have a great day. “You too,” I say.
As I turn away, I am reminded of all the people on this earth who handle their losses courageously every day, for whom magic may just mean sitting in the sunshine watching pretty women pass by. I am nowhere near that brave.
You loved a life others throw away nightly, Lou Reed laments at the end of ‘What’s Good,” the song with which I began. Life’s good. But not fair at all.
**
**
POSTSCRIPT/UPDATE: Yesterday I found myself singing “Half a Person” — the Smiths song I had always felt encapsulated my frustrating youth — in the shower. Today Sonny posted a YouTube link to it; it came up on his iPod shuffle. He called it a life-changing record.
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