What the Hell is This?

Shortly after my last post, I found out belatedly about the untimely demise of a truly lovely artist in her fifties named Iris, who used to attend yoga classes with me at the old studio. We were both great fans of a gentle giant of a man named Mark, who taught the Level One class on Saturday afternoons. Mark was at least 6’5”, bald as a cue ball, and one of the most beautiful men I have ever met. His classes were usually packed mat-to-mat by students of every physical description. (Unlike some yoga teachers, Mark never seemed to bring the elements of comparison or competition — however unwittingly — into class. He didn’t direct us in strenuous gymnastics or elaborate acrobatics; he led us in careful, mindful attention to the breath and body.)

Mark had left almost five years ago (shortly before my own trip to Italy) to teach yoga and practice massage therapy at a spa on one of the Greek Isles. Now he was back in town, and teaching at a new community studio. Excitedly I contacted Iris’ husband (a Facebook friend who was never on Facebook) so he could let Iris know about Mark. I hadn’t seen either of them in more than two years.

Iris’ husband sadly informed me that she had died of lymphoma last summer, after a battle that lasted only a matter of months.

**

I was devastated. Iris had been a source of inspiration to me. She was a vibrantly alive woman in her middle years, a lover of yoga, a maker of delicate, ethereal collages that she showcased in local galleries and venues, a teacher and advocate for educational nonprofits, and a woman madly in love with her husband of thirty years. “I want to be you when I grow up!” I gushed to her at the last art opening I attended.

It seemed so unlikely (not to mention unfair) that she should be gone, just like that.

Mourning Iris with a mutual friend, I heard about how Iris used to station herself at a table in a neighborhood coffeehouse with her journal and a copy of The Artist’s Way. Iris had apparently worked her way through its program. I knew the book well; we could barely keep it on the shelf at the bookstore back in the early 90s when it first came out. Snob that I was, I had always thought it somehow coarse and common. As if any old Joe or Josephine could be an artist! A real artist wouldn’t need someone else’s self-help workbook. The very idea!

Nearly twenty years later, remembering Iris’s utter lack of pretentiousness and her unmistakable fulfillment as both an artist and woman, on the heels of her death (which came far too soon), I thought about my own stuck-ness as an artist. I thought about my age and about how many more years I might have to make my own dreams come true. I thought, maybe I need to take another look at that book.

**

I am now on Week Four of The Artist’s Way. And so far it’s been a very interesting process. My dreams have become more vivid, memorable, even lucid (including one featuring Tony DeRocca the surly music critic, in which I realized I was dreaming my past). I have discovered new sources of inspiration and encouragement. Much of what has happened to me lately has seemed to flow together as a coherent whole rather than a series of disjointed and unrelated events. Even my fundraising numbers have improved. But the most palpable positive effect is that it has restored my sense of possibility.

I have also had some issues — which have threatened to turn into major obstacles — with Julia Cameron’s beliefs and her way of expressing them. But I’ll discuss that matter presently.

I should also mention that I quit the free dating site. For now, at least. I’ve rethought and rebuilt the profile I want to have, most likely on a paid site like Match. The facetious profile I had on the free site may have been entertaining, but it wasn’t helping me find Mr. Right. It was helping me find emotionally unbalanced European scientists, and the occasional married man. (My last chat-buddy mentioned his martial status right before we were going to make a coffee date. “Does that kill it for me?” he asked sheepishly. Uh, kind of.)

**

In the hours before I received that final, unhinged message from Jacek, the Polish chemist, I took myself to one of Mark’s new yoga classes at the community studio.

I had been feeling misaligned and achy, my hip and shoulder out of whack the way they have been on and off for the three-odd years I haven’t had a real health care provider. Brainstorming possible “artist dates” with myself (an exercise from the book), I had found myself wishing I could go get a massage, but a yoga class drop-in fee was already a stretch at $12. I knew that one of Mark’s classes would be good for whatever ailed me. One of his adjustments alone felt like a miraculous laying on of hands.

I arrived to find Mark standing alone in the room, gazing out the window at the street below. No one else had come. He came toward me with arms spread as wide as his smile.

When I say Mark is one of the most beautiful men I know, I mean that the way he inhabits a room and speaks to his students makes him that way. I’m not a fan of extremely tall men (a strike against the chemist); I’m certainly not attracted to bald men (Dad); I almost always prefer brown-eyed brunettes (my brother John). But I’d bet good money that one class with Mark is enough for a woman of any age or orientation to develop at least a mild crush on him. It’s hard to describe how he manages to project an atmosphere of total safety and utmost care into a room as he intones “gentle breath…easy breath” in his resonant baritone. I’ve run into my share of men who tried to pose as enlightened, sensitive New Age yoga gurus, who were given away by a celebrity-sized self-absorption. Mark is genuine.

Sitting cross-legged on the mat, I mentioned the discomfort in my hip. Mark started asking me a series of questions about the discomfort I was feeling there, and then about the pain I referred to in my lower back and my shoulder.

Instead of leading me in the class he’d prepared, Mark had me lie down on the mat and proceeded to give me what amounted to an hour of Thai massage. He was the consummate professional, of course, and I was in bliss. The touch of his strong, gentle healer’s fingers was enough to make me nearly weep with gratitude; I wanted to curl up like a newly hatched chick in one of his large hands. It’s a helluva thing to let yourself be completely vulnerable and in need of help with a man who heals you rather than hurts, diminishes or exploits you, whose only aim is to restore you to a sense of wholeness.

I found myself telling him about my years of depression, the intense agoraphobia and anxiety I had lived through four years ago, and about how Eckhart Tolle’s writings on the mind were the first to break through the leaden walls of my private hell. Mark divulged his own unhappiness upon returning to the States several months ago, fiercely resisting his circumstances. It had taken him a while to quit making himself miserable by wishing things were otherwise. (He had had to return to the States, or risk deportation.) This spontaneous intimacy didn’t feel any more dangerous than letting Mark put his hands on me.

**

I was still glowing from the session with Mark when I came home and found the email from Jacek in my inbox.

I was unprepared for the crazy tale of rage, betrayal, incarceration and general chaos he told, which made my blood pressure surge after all that rapturous relaxation. For brevity’s (and privacy’s) sake, I will only say that the man had done a couple of stints of hard time, and had been legally barred from seeing his ex-wife or their children — in his telling, because his wife was a “frigid monster” who wanted all of his money, and not by any fault of his own. According to Jacek, he was the greatly aggrieved victim in the story, the so-called innocent abroad, with no responsibility whatsoever for his heinous fate, and the American justice system was corrupt, and the damage to the kitchen (evidence of his violence) was negligible, and the bitch set him up, and that “Nigger judge” put him away.

Any credibility his rather incredible version of events might have had was pretty much undermined by the outrageous racial slur.

Well, that and the egomaniacal bloviating in his preamble, where he insisted that before he was so tragically framed, women like me would be lining up to date his handsome, successful catch of a self. (Please, Jacek. I didn’t even find you that attractive. I just was just trying to be fair.)

I did reply. First I told him that if the story were, in fact, exactly as he told it, I was sorry he had endured such an ordeal. However, I added, we are still responsible for whom we choose as partners — which is one reason why I was being so selective. My poor choices in men had led to a great deal of suffering for me in the past, “although not to jail.” But my last paragraph was where I really stuck it to him.

I told him that “the last guy I dated” (Jamal, and I know that’s a stretch) was an intelligent and creative black man who didn’t have all the trappings of external success, but who had a great deal of personal integrity. I wrote that he might have said “Well, Jacek, now you know what living in America is like for a ‘nigger.’”

In other words: Take that, you narcissistic racist asshole. (I wonder if he even got it. I have severe doubts about his level of self-awareness.)

**

Such madness could not have been better juxtaposed with its antithesis in the space of a single day. What have I been talking about? Moving away from crazymakers, emotional batterers, mental gladiators, and the emotionally illiterate and moving toward men who might actually enhance my newly recovered sense of well-being and wholeness. I could not have written a more marked contrast as fiction.

The crux of what I have been groping toward rather ineptly in these past few posts was partially brought into focus by Tom Shadyac, the director of such crowdpleasing hits as “Ace Ventura” and “Bruce Almighty.” An unlikely source, for sure, but the man underwent a sort of personal epiphany after suffering a traumatic head injury that for a time made everyday living pure hell and had him praying for the sweet release of death. He did recover, finally, and went on to make a film entitled “I Am” — which will probably not have one tenth the distribution or one hundredth the audience of his other films. In it, he asks the question: What is wrong with our world?

The answer he pieces together, through interviewing sources as disparate as biologists, Howard Zinn and Desmond Tutu, is that we have been living within a destructive paradigm based in erroneous assumptions about the natural world and our own psychological makeup. The depression with which I (and so many Westerners) have wrestled is a wholly understandable symptom of a culture that promotes separation, loneliness, competition, and selfishness, thanks to a willful misreading of Darwin (giving his “survival of the fittest” idea a larger significance the author never intended, and ignoring all of the symbiosis and cooperation in nature) as well as a macroscopic pre-atomic view of physics (that objects act and are acted upon, but are not intimately interactive). It’s an antiquated Industrial-age model of the world, in which isolated individuals, islands unto themselves, act in ferocious opposition to one another in the scramble to amass scarce resources, rather than belong to a community whose health is integral to their own well-being. The director points out that in early indigenous cultures, taking much more than one needs at the expense of others was viewed as a sign of mental illness. (When our body’s cells do this, we call it cancer.)

This outdated paradigm informs the way we in the West think and behave, the assumptions we make about reality. Including our fashionably alienated postmodern intellectuals, who are nothing if not islands unto themselves. I was trying (and probably failing) to contribute to an online discussion recently — begun by one of our favorite cynics — about the ostensible elusiveness of happiness. Here’s a clear difference between Eastern and Western approaches: as far back as the Greeks, we were asking: Is happiness possible? without ever once addressing the hidden psychological and subjective underpinnings of our premises and our subsequent reasoning. We strained at a gnat and swallowed a camel. It finally took William James, hundreds of years later, to suggest that such factors might actually have an effect on the way we think about things. Whereas the Buddhists have been asking for thousands of years: What is the cause of suffering?

They were way ahead of us. They started on the inside. They recognized how the mind’s existing narratives themselves can perpetuate misery, and strove (through meditation) to quiet that chatter and bring awareness into the present moment, in order to see more clearly. My former therapist used to say “beliefs are like wearing a glove to touch the Beloved.” (She could just as easily have substituted the word “philosophies.”) We get so insulated inside our brains, our versions of reality, that we no longer even touch the world around us.

I can’t even begin to describe the difference between a walk in the park while completely present with a clear mind vs. a walk in the park while chewing on the pain of my past or obsessing about the future. The former used to be a complete impossibility for me; at best, I could only hope to distract myself from the latter. And not very effectively.

So I guess you could say I want a partner who can really walk with me in the park.

**

As glad as I am to be working my way through The Artist’s Way, I’m currently having trouble with the author’s liberal use of the G-word. Julia Cameron is apparently a big believer in a helpful Creator. Now when I reframe this (as she suggests early on, for the atheist or agnostic) and consider that what I’m trying to tap into could also be described as my own creative unconscious, or possibly the collective unconscious, or even some kind of “spooky action at a distance” (to steal from Einstein), I’m fine with it. But I don’t think Julia realizes that for those of us who have been utterly traumatized by fundamentalist religion, when she uses the word “God” she may as well be saying “your rapist.”

In fact, while doing an exercise that involved identifying enemies of my creative self-worth, in addition to my mother (with her horror of my sexual curiosity and stories) and Jeannie (with her refusal to understand or respect why I didn’t want to sacrifice great swaths of time and energy to jobs that would drain away all my energy), I wrote down “the God of the Born-Agains.”

In that punitive parent’s universe, after all, initiative is crushed because you might do or write the “wrong” thing. Everything you might so much as think is subject to a line-by-line analysis according to the apostle Paul’s (or whomever’s) principles of purity and righteousness (with the critical Deity looking over his shoulder, frowning like a humorless deacon in his Sunday suit). There’s even that oft-cited verse in Genesis that talks about the imagination of man being evil from his youth. The message is clear: Watch yourself! It’s no mystery, then, why today’s “Christian” art is so bad.

So I wish she had understood that for some recovering artists like me, talk of “God,” with all its oppressive churchy connotations, can be damn near intolerable. For some reason those religions that speak of a more impersonal and somehow grander God-concept, something not even remotely anthropomorphized, don’t bother me much. Her use of the term, however, is just too close to that big-daddy-in-the-sky idea. The personification that taught some of us to associate “love” with subjugation, capricious punishment, invisibility, and shame…and drove our creative impulses underground. I have a feeling that if Julia had understood all of this, she might have chosen her words a little differently.

As it is, I do my best to work my way around the language. I know that the “trust” that she speaks of cultivating is that same trust in “invisible help” that David Whyte talks about, which he doesn’t associate with a personal deity but with the happy serendipities of a life lived intentionally from the root of one’s being. It may simply be that when one is alert — as our German friend has often noted — the opportunities are more apparent. Or we may even attract them to us, for reasons we don’t fully understand.

Perhaps my greatest objection is simply to the author’s certainty about things that no one is certain about. This bothers me in anyone, be it those who insist there can be absolutely nothing other than the material world (which is not exactly material, when you get right down to it) to those who insist there is one big God and his name is Jehovah and he’s coming to get you.

**

One of the things I’m putting in my profile is that I’m looking for someone who “believes in no god and every god.” That should vet both the fundamentalist fanatics and the Dawkins-style all-religion-must-die atheists, and just possibly find me somebody who recognizes the value in poetry and mythology without being a peyote-smoking shaman.

What do you think the odds are?