But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face,

It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists,

It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees, dress

does not hide him,

The strong sweet quality he has strikes through the cotton and broadcloth,

To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more,

You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side.

– Walt Whitman, “I Sing the Body Electric”

Finding my amorous longings toward men most often reflected in the rhapsodizings of the great queer male writers, I have often wondered whether I’m a gay man who has been rather haplessly reincarnated into a woman’s body: still pronouncedly desirous in a visual and most unladylike fashion, still operating with a male-to-male directness that just doesn’t fly in the straight world.

I am in a sweet agony over the beauty of men.

I told my friend Russ that I feel as if I’m wading through a field of fresh daisies, longing to ‘pluck’ them all…yet I know that in my greed and artless haste I’m very likely to wind up with nothing but grass-stained empty hands. Already I seem to have alienated Rick. He’s pulled a literal and figurative disappearing act ever since I made my sexual feelings plain.

**

I still don’t quite understand how it is that I could be so fascinating and worthwhile to men when I’m benignly indifferent (as I was at two parties last weekend, where I was followed from room to room by doggedly unaware acquaintances) or mildly intrigued (as I was upon meeting this colorful character Rick), but then instantly become repellent the moment I exhibit overt, full-blooded desire. You’d think I was some alluring wood nymph that suddenly morphed into the gorgon Medusa, hair-snakes a-hiss, turning previously warm, living men to stone. That’s really not the kind of hardness I was hoping for.

I’m kicking myself for not taking advantage of Rick that first night, even though I was tired, and not as horny as I had been earlier, and up against a writing deadline. I didn’t know how much worse it would get, or that I wouldn’t have another opportunity. I didn’t know how a dark wisp of hair curling against his neck would pierce me through like a sword (my kingdom for the chance to kiss that sweet spot!), or how his briefly bared, muscular shoulder would make my ovaries ache, or how watching his battered, inelegant hands perform any task whatsoever would make the blood rush blaring from my head like fire engines to the site of a four-alarm blaze. I had no idea I wouldn’t be able to entertain even a passing thought about his more indisputably masculine attributes if I had any intention of maintaining brain function (or dry panties) at work. I want him, that hairy, disreputable, irresistible bastard, who overrode my current taste settings and time-warped me back to 1994.

Desire! — it consumes everything: your time, your concentration, your thoughts, your plans, your best intentions. Like a mirage, it keeps you stumbling across the desert, believing that if you just keep following it, your thirst will eventually be quenched. I find Ms. Johnson’s book is only helpful up to a point now: her thesis is mainly about the love aspect of eros, not the nitty-gritty sexual one. I may be able to court my inner Beloved and find the Divine or the Other or the Outlaw Pothead somewhere within myself, but I’m not about to sprout hair on my chest or face — nor do I want to. I can’t sprout certain other things, either, with which to then perform indecent acts upon myself. The literal, physical hunger for the sexual Other isn’t something you can DIY.

**

The fact that I’ve been spending my recent days as swollen and juicy as a ripe Georgia peach may, perhaps, be why so many other young men at work have been sniffing around me lately, their dog-sense telling them that there’s something to come and get. I can’t tell you how much I love the fact that the beautiful, intense, whip-smart doctoral candidate in history (the first person to actually catch my notice when I walked in the door) has taken to sitting next to me during the evening shift, chatting and joking with a barely detectable but winsome edge of nerdy awkwardness. (And where, as Eliot said, do I begin?) The newest trainee, a classic-heartthrob-looking pup who belongs in 1950s films alongside James Dean and Montgomery Clift, did a mutual triple take before we introduced ourselves, and he has also gravitated to the chair next to mine to play getting-to-know-you. Besides these two obvious beauties in my obvious type-category, there are a few lovely-boned African-American gentlemen who heap their satin-smooth attentions upon me on a daily basis, a stocky, adorable amateur astrologer who caresses me and calls me “sexy lady,” and two affable young supervisors who find excuses to hover around my cube like honeybees.

I love it all, and I love them all, and I am one hundred percent certain that if I tried to act upon any of this in my typical, straightforward, clumsy fashion, it would all go away. Because I have no idea what to do, and never have, as a woman who desires men the way men desire women. (As I said to my coach friend, “Why did God make men beautiful if he didn’t want me to have sex with them? And who do you have to sleep with to get laid around here?!!!!”)

Maybe there are no shortcuts. Maybe I’m looking for an easy way to home plate that doesn’t exist for me as a respectable female, or maybe I just say too g-damn much. Standing dumb in this field of daisies, I clench my hands impotently. How do I reach for Eli (the gorgeous grad student) in a way that doesn’t make him vanish like a vapor? Maybe I shouldn’t even try. Maybe I should just enjoy our sparkling rapport for what it is, and leave him to the nice marriageable girls his own age whose mothers would have paroxysms over him. Maybe out-of-the-box-fresh Mr. Dean doesn’t need to be put on the spot by a shameless cougar wannabe having a midlife crisis. Such lovely, earnest creatures they are. Maybe I should just wait and see if Rick comes around, because he is, after all, the sexy and not-so-nice outsider who triggered this human estrus. I just don’t have a clue. A clue is something I’ve never gotten.

The one thing I am confident of, given how intoxicated I became last Monday when Rick stood a little too close (I had to take a step back just to keep my wits about me), is that I can count on my own arousal, at least with him, and if I can count on my own arousal, the rest would take care of itself. There’s nothing worse than play that feels like work, especially that kind of play. But wanting a man — God! — with that delicious appetite…peeling him bare like an exotic fruit…feeling his rough and smooth textures…smelling him, tasting him…swallowing him deep in your belly…all with the lip-smacking relish you might reserve for a savory meal in a Roman trattoria…it requires no more effort than simple, hearty eating when you’re famished. And he wouldn’t have to work very hard, either. (He would have to let me enjoy him…one of my few complaints about the only truly wanted men I’ve ever had is that they rushed or truncated my slow and deliberate worship of their bodies, not realizing how central it was to my own pleasure.)

But I fear I’ve rambled on too long before the fourth installment (which I decided to post after being urged to continue by a Russian-born fan who likes me better than Elizabeth Gilbert!) — this post will be positively unmanageable. (Poor bluemorpho3, he’ll never catch up!) Here’s the first dispatch I sent from Centro d’Ompio post-James, still reeling from the loss. Of course in the meantime I have a couple of unwanted pursuers of both sexes…naturally!

__________________________

PART FOUR: TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND TOMORROW

“…creeps its petty pace from day to day.”

This week’s diary is a day-by-day log, reflecting the way time trudges on when joy takes a holiday.

*

TUESDAY

This laptop is the best investment I have ever made. Last week I was sitting in a cafe in Orta writing this diary for hours — today I’m sitting on the top of Centro’s mountain, having hiked up to the wooden cross at its pinnacle, looking at the whole of Lake Orta. Diagonally across the lake I can see the red roofs of the town of Pella, and high above them, on a steep cliff, the chalk-white church to which James hiked one day, incredibly. It was a grueling journey, certainly more than I would ever have attempted on foot.

Today (my day off) I slept until eleven o’clock, fading in and out of consciousness, my twin futon like a little raft where I floated on a murky river of loss. There was nothing to propel me out of bed, neither duty nor anticipation. Life for the full-time staff at Centro may be a continuous exercise in nonattachment, but for me, experiencing this place for the first (and probably the last) time, there is now and will forever be a James-shaped hole that no one else can fill. We had only seventeen days together, but in that brief time he became like my best friend. And then he was like the best friend who teased me by coming into the kitchen in nothing but a towel. And then he was like the best friend I wanted to pull the towel off and touch in all manner of delightfully impertinent ways. And then…but you know what then.

Not that the soap opera does not continue. Oh, no. Now I find myself fending off a weathered Georgian war veteran and a nascent lesbian. Vaja, the pool man, who fought in Afghanistan and struts around Bisetti chest-out like its resident rooster, is frequently either trying to catch my eye or touching me in some uninvited way. James practically lionized the man — when I mentioned that Vaja had stroked my hair, he joked “I’ve been wanting him to do that since I got here!” — but his kind of aggressive machismo makes me uneasy. I don’t think he’s actually dangerous, but he really can’t take a hint, and now that my obvious love interest has flown the coop it’s as if it’s open season on yours truly. When all I want is to be left alone.

Then there’s Hanna.

We used to argue good-naturedly about her, the limey and I. Over time I became certain that she felt more than friendly toward me, and that that was the main reason why she regarded him through slitted eyes and spoke to him curtly (if at all). He said that she simply hated him, and that I was horribly conceited. But now that he’s gone, she follows me around and stares at me intensely as if I were a cross between Jesus Christ and a Belgian chocolate truffle. I don’t know what to do. I’ve never had anyone, not even a lesbian, look at me with such adoration and ferocious longing, and, as I told James, the chicks dig me! Also, she’s not “out.” For all I know, the young woman is at a delicate turning point in her life, and I certainly don’t want to give her a bad experience. So I’m not handling it well. Most of the time I’m simply in flight from her and Vaja. Any advice you queer friends of mine (or for that matter the straight ones) can give me is welcome. Aiuto! as they say in Italy. HELP.

Marjorie and Christian have become close. I never had a chance to tell you about Marjorie — there was just too much else going on. She’s a pretty, fairly uncomplicated but very sweet blonde account manager from Bolton, England (near Manchester), who is built, as they say, like a brick house. When she first arrived, my heart sank, but James had no interest in her whatsoever, preferring to spend even more time with me (which was more gratifying than I can tell you). In the meantime Alessandro and Christian attached themselves to her like barnacles. Ultimately, 19-year-old Christian seems to have won out (I think she has about ten years on him), and they are planning to leave early to go restore medieval houses together in San Remo. Their last day at Centro is Sunday. I’m just realizing how much I’ll miss them, and how much I envy them, those crazy kids.

Gina is still here, the voluptuous little Italian harlot (no, I’m sure she doesn’t deserve that) staying in Raffe’s room. When the hell is she leaving, for God’s sake?!! I see her coming and going, and we regard each other briefly, unsmilingly. I can’t help but wonder what, if anything, he said to her in parting. There’s that extremely petty, jealous and injured part of me that secretly hopes it was shattering, so that she knew at once and beyond a doubt that their little romance was all a lie. Gina happens to look a lot like my fourth grade best friend, Adriana Giametti. Adriana and I had an intense love/hate relationship — we were always competing for grades, attention, boys, you name it. I could never stand for Adriana to get the better of me, and I couldn’t stand for her lookalike to think she’d gotten the better of me now. Even if I know she meant nothing to him…I want her to know she meant nothing to him, too. Stupid cow.

Yeah, I know. So sue me. I’m not the Buddha.

At least I have a new friend I can actually talk to, without Raffe’s language barrier or conflict of interest. At the end of last week Finn arrived from Vienna. He’s a slender, easygoing young web designer with sensitive green eyes and a deep baritone voice who practices yoga and plays the guitar. His English is impeccable, honed by years of enjoying English-language films and books. He’s been to Centro before, and has known Robert and Mila for years, having lived with them in Australia. He has a serious girlfriend back in Vienna, so that’s not on the table, in case you were wondering. He’s a lovely person, inside and out, but I really couldn’t go there right now anyway. Almost immediately, just being in his company with others and hearing the way he expresses himself, I knew that I could trust him. He would feel at home at the yoga center (he practices Ashtanga for two hours in the morning) and comfortable at a party with my closest friends. He’s not put off by “girly” things. I wonder what James would have said about him. Would he have thought he was too much of a “pussy?” I’d certainly much rather hang out with Finn than with Vaja.

This morning, after finally dragging myself out of bed, I found Finn reading a book about globalization on the sort of mini-veranda on the second level of the house where the smokers go to smoke. He asked me how I was. “I’m kind of depressed,” I admitted. I would probably not have admitted this, at least so readily, to any of the others. Gina was in evidence just then, getting ready to depart for the day, and I waited for her to leave before I confessed, “I was in love with the Englishman.” It felt good to say it out loud, right there on the premises, and I gave Finn the bare bones of the story, including the reason why I can hardly look at the woman. A little later, after I had showered and dressed, he came to get me for lunch, and showed me the secret back way to hike up to Centro.

The others have seen us hanging out, and I know what they’ll conclude, but what I really need right now, more than anything, is a friend. I feel as if I’ve tumbled almost traumatically from my state of grace. Walking down from Centro after dinner, I felt the loneliness I hadn’t felt since my first night here, and the sudden emptiness of grief. I know that this too shall pass, but I wasn’t ready. Are we ever ready? You find a shimmering pearl, you hold it in your hand, and then you lose it again. Cosi e la vita. Such is life.

*

WEDNESDAY

Padma is a gift.

Her Sanskrit name was given to her by her spiritual master in Costa Rica, where she worked on a commune for several years. She’s probably around fifty, with long, thick, graying hair and an ample bosom, but she seems younger in spirit. Her room is next to mine and Elke’s; at night, I can often hear her picking her guitar and singing some soft Portuguese lullaby. Her room is cozy and inviting, and she has set out to beautify every single common area at Bisetti. She’ll be a full-time kitchen worker at Centro for four months, and explains her Bisetti project by saying “this is my home.” Last night I came into her room and sang along to a Sanskrit chant I recognized from a Krishna Das CD that gets frequent play at my yoga center.

Padma believes that people are healed through music. So I may be coming to her room quite a bit in the near future. Just now she came up to me from behind, and enfolded me in a mighty embrace that reminded me of being a small child in my grandmother’s lap. God bless Padma. I’m never one to push away a life preserver.

*

THURSDAY

My very first friend in Pettenasco is gone.

Mezza Coda, “half tail,” the blind, deaf and slightly lame cat who had resided at Bisetti for nineteen years, or the entriety of Christian’s lifespan, appears to have gone away to die. She’s been missing since yesterday. Finn found her hobbling down the road Monday, and brought her back to Bisetti, but she had probably been trying to go to her final resting place. She never strayed far from the kitchen steps, and countless times since that first night I picked up her small grubby body and held her cradled against my shoulder until she purred loudly and stuck her head under my chin. She loved to be held; she just couldn’t get enough affection. Even James picked her up and petted her, sometimes, although her copious drooling would cause him to utter a stream of hilarious curses worthy of the saltiest English sailor. (I told him that she couldn’t help herself — he had this effect on females.)

Earlier in the day it had hit me, hard, that Alessandro, Christian, and Marjorie are all leaving Monday morning, as is Cosmo (due to some sudden family problem or emergency). The losses are piling up like wrecks on a freeway. Alessandro and I have been spending less and less time together since he moved in with Christian, so I’ve lost him piecemeal. (I really must get a picture of him, so that you can see him.) He’s managed to become something of a sidekick to the comparatively more worldly Norwegian. I never fell under Christian’s spell the way Alessandro and Marjorie did, but he did walk with me all the way to Orta that day, and I decided that he was all right. At any rate, I’m losing most of my original cast, my companions in Oz, my witnesses.

Coming back to Bisetti, I saw the candle Padma had lit for Mezza Coda beside the cat dish, which was now filled with flowers. For the second time I sat down on the kitchen steps, put my head in my hands, and started to cry silently, my shoulders shaking. I had meant to take a picture of her. I had wanted to help clean her up. I never got to say goodbye. And now my little friend was gone, as surely and as suddenly as my other beloved friend was gone.

Marjorie came up behind me from the kitchen, reached down, and stroked my hair, which just made the tears come that much faster. Raffe came along, too, and took my hand (which was welcome), and Vaja crouched down and petted me a little (which I could have done without, but I suppose he means well). “This is life,” he said, a statement which is true, but absolutely never helps at all.

It was only partly about the cat, but her final gift to me, I suppose, was this opportunity to let go in front of the others.

Mercifully, Gina had packed up her things and was retrieving her luggage that night. What I found out from Raffe was that they had had a major falling-out, partially precipitated by the James episode, but not limited to it. Somehow this made me feel better about Raffe. “She has lots of problem,” Raffe explained. “I don’t know she will be back.”

All I have to say is — Ciao, Gina, won’t miss ya, don’t let the door hit your enormous Italian ass on the way out.

Mezza Coda may not have had any claws left, but I guess I still have a few. Me-ow. You may rightly say that I’m directing my anger at the wrong person…but in the end I realize there were no real winners here. Not Gina, and not James, except in that toxic macho bullshit sense of having scored, of having fucked one more anonymous chick. No, I’m just being hateful because of course I wanted to be the one up there, giggling in his room, releasing all that delectable sexual tension we created over time. It ain’t fair, is it? You cook up this tasty international treat, and then some random Maria comes along and dispenses with it in one gulp.

*

FRIDAY

Today I determined that, if it was the last thing I did, I was going to get to the waterfalls.

At the risk of boring you to death…it was one of those places to which a certain Englishman I knew loved to go, packing a lunch of bread and cheese with tomato. And I had not yet been there. He had spoken of bringing me along sometime, but we never made it.

So after lunch, I hiked up over Centro’s mountain and through a good deal of woods to the village of Agrano, and then followed the instructions Finn gave me, walking up a mountain road to a small co-op farm and restaurant called Alpe Selviana. The waterfalls were just a short distance beyond. It took me an hour and a half under a blazing sun.

I was incredibly sweaty and winded on the road up to Alpe Selviana, and stopped to pour water over my head at a freshwater spout by the side of the road. Just then a compact car sped past me, and the person in the driver’s seat looked an awful lot like Adriana Giametti. Her dog barked at me (almost viciously, I thought) out the window.

Of all the places in Lake Orta she could have been, she had to come to the waterfalls on that day, at that time. I had to laugh at the allegorical import of the situation — I had worked and sweated hard to get this far, and she just motored up in her neat little auto. Quality.

“Puttana,” I called after her, for no one’s benefit but my own.

Elke had started out ahead of me, in the morning, from Bisetti, and I found her sitting on a rock platform above one of the pools. I left my backpack with her and ventured down toward the water. These falls were more spectacular than our little waterfall at home. An algae-green river cut through a steep, plunging canyon of wrinkled metamorphic rock; there were myriad platforms and pools for swimming and sunbathing, accessible by climbing precariously over the rocks alongside the water. I had thought the place would be much more isolated and private, but there was one male nude sunbather up above, and another down below. Nearby was an old man in a Speedo. And then there was Gina, sunning herself naked, looking very fertile and National Geographic.

I staggered back from the edge of the rock where I stood, feeling nausea again. Seeing her au naturel was, for me, about as pleasant as seeing the neighborhood dog eat his own vomit. (I think I would rather watch that, actually.) She must have seen me see her, because promptly thereafter she passed by Elke and me, fully clothed, with her dog, uttering a cursory “Ciao” to which only Elke responded.

It was awful, running into her there, and it seemed like too much of a coincidence. I found myself wondering: did he bring her to the falls, his next to last day before he left? I even wondered, like a true paranoiac, if they’d met here before.

I knew I could torture myself with endless speculations (I’ve excelled at it in the past), but what’s the point? I’ll never see the man again, and I’ll be rid of her for good once the plane leaves the runway. Besides, someone had told me that she works in Omegna, the next town over, and none of the locals could be ignorant of the falls.

But some of you will no doubt remark on the synchronicity, regardless. And yes, perhaps the universe was trying to coax (coerce!) me into making some kind of peace with the one character in this story I simply cannot abide, but, as I said — I am not the Buddha. I’m just doing the best I can, dammit.

After Gina had gone I said to Elke with a sigh, “I wish you understood more English. Or I knew some German.” Elke agreed that this would have been a good thing, and haltingly expressed her frustrations with the language barriers she was encountering.

“Elke,” I said, “what’s the German word for ‘broken’?”

“Gebrochen,” she said.

“Gebrochen,” I repeated. Thanks to the Bach chorales I’d studied in college, I already knew the German word for ‘heart.’ “Mein Herze ist gebrochen,” I said.

That she understood. A sorrowful, compassionate expression passed over her open and kindly face. “Oh, oh,” she said, and moved to squat beside me and embrace me around the shoulders. No other words needed be sprachen.

Which was really nice. I think that’s the most significant communication she and I have ever had.

Soon after that, Elke departed for Pettenasco, and I went down to the pool by the elderly Speedo guy. He watched me most intently. I dipped my feet in the pool, and then had the idea to dunk myself fully clothed — a baptism, of sorts — which I proceeded to do. He motioned to me that I should take off my wet things, in response to which I thought — yeah, I don’t think so, Gramps. I climbed back up on the rocks and enjoyed the cool of my sopping clothes for a while. It was so hot that I was dry by the time I reached the Agrano town limits.

**

What a strange week it’s been. I felt a bit knocked off-kilter by my coach friend’s sudden fixation on logistics and finances, things I tend to worry about to the point of losing faith entirely and giving up. I also had my first experience with Bikram yoga — thanks to the free yoga package I scored after writing an article on a Bikram studio — which I found to be an acquired taste. I’m not sure I like holding poses while dripping on the floor in sopping clothes and trying to breathe stifling air.

And then there’s my new friend. I can’t help but think of a funny, jaunty Jazz Age throwback remix track by The Real Tuesday Weld that goes When Psyche meets Cupid/don’t mind me, I’m feeling stupid/and terminally ambivalent over you. (Imagine my amusement when I found that the animated video featured a character in old-school prison stripes. See above link.) In terms of lifestyle, we’re almost comically incompatible, and yet he’s something of a natural philosopher, wholly unpretentious, and frank to a fault. Plus something about our chemistry you just can’t manufacture, even under ideal circumstances. I’ve met a number of men closer to my “type” and probably less “questionable,” but they’re not the ones I’m getting distracted at work fantasizing about. Still, I swing wildly between “This is such a bad idea” and “When the hell is he going to come upstairs and drop those baggy pants?”

Above all, I have to keep reminding myself not to take it all so seriously, and treat him as one treats a friend — allowing him to do his thing, without the over-identification that comes with certain forms of attachment. I’m not responsible for his choices. I can only try to continue to seek common ground where we can meet and enjoy each other.

**

But now on to Part Two of my Italy diary, where you’ll be introduced to James, the Englishman with whom I became so fatally enamored. This is quite possibly my favorite installment, because it includes what I consider one of the loveliest, happiest days of my life — a balmy summer afternoon walking around a small Piemonte city with Alessandro and James. I was drunk on all the beauty, of Italy, of the architecture and the gardens and of my two young male companions.

Somebody should have just shot me right then and there, because it doesn’t get any better than that!

**

PART TWO: I MUST HAVE DONE SOMETHING GOOD

I think they mean to work me to death here. My knees and my joints are killing me — the other working guests are all under 30 and still have all their cartilage — and I have a rash on the underside of my arm from the wrist up past the elbow. It might be from dishwashing several hours a day, but who knows. (I’ve had trigger-happy skin since I was in diapers.) The dishwashing is usually followed by several more hours of housecleaning, raking endless leaves, or working in the kitchen. I enjoy kitchen duty more than the other tasks, having been a prep cook in college. At least there I feel halfway competent, and I get to work with Cosmo, Mila, and Bruno.

Bruno is the chef in Centro’s vegetarian kitchen. He’s somewhere in his forties, decidedly short in stature, and thoroughly Italian in appearance. Shaggy-haired and craggy-nosed, he’s a bite-sized treat. I follow him around like a cocker spaniel, getting in the way and listening to his directions puppy-eyed. He regards me somewhat dubiously, but lets me handle the big knife to cut the watermelon. Above all I try not to do anything which elicits the dreaded “Che fai?!!” – What are you doing?!! — from the grande formaggio.

Socially, things got much better after that first day. Having found some emotional support from Raffe, and comparative facility of communication with Alessandro, the sinfully beautiful Canadian-Italian, I soon had another English speaker to play with.

James, a right smart bloke from a working-class town in England, had been off campus Thursday, but I met him at lunch the following day. He’s a witty and literate political science grad who actually dated someone from my obscure private college in Maryland. Golden-haired and fair, with piercingly blue eyes, he’d be almost too pretty if not for his beard, which butches up his appearance considerably. His eyelashes are a mile long. (I suppose, being in Europe, I should say they’re a kilometer long.) It was a delight to sit with him and Alessandro after lunch, complaining about Bush and explaining to them why many Americans believe he stole the election. (Oh wait, I mean elections.) For his part, James is articulate, well informed, and chock full of Brit colloquialisms that make me snicker. Exactly how mad is a bag of hammers? Who can say. He has more euphemisms for getting drunk than could fill a phrasebook, and more colorful obscenities than a room full of American truck drivers.

So far, these three seem to be becoming my chosen clan away from home. Raffe supplies unconditional, undaunted love and acceptance, regardless of language; Alessandro (about whom I had a dream the other night, in which I kissed him on the forehead repeatedly, which about sums up the nature of my affections) is like a terribly sensitive but perennially depressed adolescent boy; and James is a kindred spirit in intellect and humor. Communicating with him requires no effort whatsoever, which I appreciate after hours and hours of choosing the simplest words possible to inaccurately get my point across. We have a lark, we do, Yank and limey. He curses constantly, and I always laugh when he says “fookin,” as in “I’ve got the fookin dishwashing duties again!”

In the midst of a grinding week of physically demanding work, Monika — a cute young German so free-spirited and effervescent that the boys are all leery of her (I would have thought they would all be lining up to “tap that,” as James would say) — insisted that I lead a yoga class before her departure later that week. I protested that I wasn’t a teacher, I was a student, that I had never taught before, that I wasn’t certified, etc. Almost immediately Bettina, Paola, and Raffe all joined in the chorus: oh, please, please! So at six o’clock Tuesday evening, an hour and a half before dinner (meals are served late here) we congregated in the lovely meditation room on the upper floor of the main building called the “sky room,” and I began to lead four eager students in a series of the easiest stretches and salutations, demonstrating as best I could, and using the simplest words possible. At the end we lay in savasana, and I led them in a brief breath meditation before finishing with three rounds of om and my favorite teacher’s traditional blessing before the namaste. Afterwards they all told me how much they loved it, and Raffe wanted me to do it again tomorrow. Bettina, who is partially responsible for our work schedules, came up to me and suggested that she make leading an hour of yoga part of my work trade here. She also enthused about my teaching abilities (I had mentioned to her that I might take a teacher training when I got back home) and urged me to continue. She is a student of Qi Gong, which she practices every afternoon just before lunch, and has had several teachers. She said I was a natural. Well, well…

By midweek the guests had all gone, including the tantra workshop that had concluded with a ritual dance and the drinking of the “fire drink” (spiced wine, actually). The permanent bartender Robert, an aging American Lothario from California with a mane of heavy-metal hair and a laptop full of eclectic pirated music, delighted in telling us about the predatory atmosphere at the bar that last night. He’s one to talk, having latched onto 22-year-old Hanna early on. The more seasoned working guests here tell me he likes them young and vulnerable, and all appearances would seem to support this hypothesis. Alessandro dislikes Robert intensely because he sees Robert as a popular guy who enjoys success with women — the sort of guy Alessandro has never been, the sort of guy who picked on Alessandro in school. I tell Alex he has a totally distorted view of reality, and that Robert would trade places with him in a nanosecond. This ridiculously pretty baby, more than six feet tall with gorgeous eyes and a perfect bow of a mouth, could make millions modeling for Hugo Boss or Armani, and he doesn’t even think he’s attractive! I hope he gets discovered waiting tables in Roma. Or something. Some kind of external validation greater than my best encouragements can give him. He reminds me of myself in my twenties (although he often lacks the vocabulary for his despair), tending to be depressed, self-obsessed, and merciless in his judgments of himself.

On Wednesday another working guest, Elke, a fiftysomething German friend of Bettina’s, arrived, and the room situation had to be rearranged. I moved into the room that had been Alessandro and Stefan’s to share with Elke, Alessandro moved in with Christian, and James (who was not getting along with Christian) moved into the single room that had been mine. I did some obligatory bitching about it, but Elke has been perfectly lovely, and James is a lot happier in the single.

Thursday I was given the extraordinary gift of a shared day off with my boys, James and Alessandro. We talked about going to Milano, but there were no tickets available to see Da Vinci’s Last Supper (probably thanks to Dan Brown and the new Tom Hanks movie), so James suggested we go to Torino instead. Apparently there’s an incredible Egyptian museum there, the second largest in the world. Frankly, I didn’t care. A day trip anywhere in Italy with mi cari would already be heaven.

That morning they were waiting for me by the kitchen before I had even finished getting ready or gotten something to eat. I didn’t understand their hurry until I saw the 8:55 train leaving Pettenasco station from our vantage point on the hill. I apologized profusely; as a city dweller I’m used to public transporation that’s readily available and frequent, and I hadn’t thought to ask about the train schedule. We checked on the board, and the next departure was at 10:30. James settled on the station’s bench with a Tom Robbins novel, and I accompanied Alessandro down the road into Pettenasco to buy cigarettes.

After visiting the newsstand/tobacco shop (staffed by none other than Pettenasco’s female mayor) we sat down for a little while in the cobblestone square by the tourism office. Alessandro started in with his pet miseries, asking me what I thought of Robert. It was here that (for God’s sake, Alex) I had to tell him that I’d told everyone at home that he was ravishingly beautiful, and that he should give himself a break. I divulged that if I had met him at a different point in my life I would surely have been trying to get him into bed. He started to blush and smiled shyly, showing perfect white teeth. It was as if he’d never heard this sort of thing before. Apparently one of the full-time Centro employees had recently rebuffed him, and he was taking it very hard. I said that the souls who experience the deepest despondencies are also capable of the greatest joys, and suggested some authors he might read, starting with Rilke. When we walked up the hill he was positively hot to find an English language bookstore in the city.

James was where we had left him on the bench, although he had just walked down to the town himself to “take a Nixon” — the meaning of which I’ll spare you all. We all waited together for the train.

And waited. And waited.

We had a look around inside the unstaffed and generally abandoned building. The office had several boxes full of childrens’ textbooks in Italian, dating back to 1993, which engrossed the fellows for a short time. I visited the station restroom, and here I just have to interject – what is up with these Italian holes in the floor?! Do they think women don’t pee? (Thank God I do yoga!) And are they allergic to toilet paper, or what? If I were in a third world country I wouldn’t be surprised, but this is Europe for crying out loud. Even in fairly nice restaurants, where you’d expect something a bit more genteel…Bisetti’s rustic water closets are like the Ritz in comparison. Heaven help you if you’re an old woman, or disabled. I think I’d just as soon use the woods. It would feel so much cleaner.

It was eleven-thirty and the boys were getting cranky. James was ready to say, fook it all, let’s go down to a poob and have a beah. Alessandro was dead set on getting to a bookstore in Torino. I didn’t care what we did, but I hoped I wouldn’t have to choose between going with one or the other. Turning cartwheels by the tracks, I observed that it was a beautiful day in the Italian countryside, and that my companions were the two handsomest gentlemen at Centro d’Ompio. I really had nothing to complain about. James, cheered somewhat, called me a liar, while Alessandro (with uncharacteristic good humor and bravado) countered that it was half true, that half being himself.

Finally we walked down to town. Alessandro had a word in Italian with the mayor, who told him that at certain times of day (as I found, en route to Centro) it’s a bus that runs to the Borgomanero station, from which point one can take a train to Novara and then change over to the Torino line. The next bus came in ten minutes. James, already dreaming of a cold lager, reluctantly agreed to take it — we’d already paid for and validated the tickets, after all. So more than three hours after we set out, we were finally on our way.

The lakeside bus ride was a panorama of gorgeous views. I sat contentedly by the window next to James, brimming with pleasure as he took a catnap and Alessandro spoke Italian with the driver. From Borgomanero we caught the Novara train. I sat facing them and we had a remarkably personal conversation, the three of us, on the hour-long ride. James, who is rarely serious for three minutes, wound up advising Alessandro, like an older brother, about life and women. Alessandro is twenty-five and James barely twenty-seven, but the emotional difference is akin to that between a sixteen-year-old and a thirty-year-old. It warmed the cockles of my heart to see the cagey intellectual Brit sincerely offering his experience and wisdom to the entirely ingenuous blue-collar Italian boy from Toronto. With my typical bluntness I had let them know that I was completely infatuated with both of them, but not prepared to do anything about it (James says “Don’t shit where you eat,” at any rate), so sans that ambiguity, I had the enviable position of hearing some frank guy talk.

When we got to Novara after two o’clock, James convinced us that the trip to Torino would be useless (we’d have to leave after only two hours to catch the last train to Pettenasco) so we decided to stay in Novara. It’s a small city, but one of the largest in the region, with all of the ATMs and gelato shops and other amenities missing from our tiny little mountain town. I insisted on buying the boys lunch, including real Italian thin-crusted pizza (deliziosa!) and a pitcher of beer, because I’d made them miss the train, and because they’re just “so bloody lovely.” James eyed our waitress — randy as all get-out — and proceeded to check out the considerable local talent all afternoon. “It’s only fair,” I sighed — I had them to look at, after all, and none of the local men were anywhere near as attractive as my traveling companions.

We walked around the narrow, cobblestoned streets of Novara, which turned out to be a far prettier town than it had appeared to be from the road or the stazione. The old buildings were embellished with Corinthean leaf and scrollwork cut from stone, and many of the upper windows had wrought iron balconies bursting with cascading plants or flowers. We found several bookstores for Alessandro (although only one of them had a limited selection of English language books), and a graphic novel store for James.

In the center of town sat a magnificent basilica dating back to the 16th century. We went inside, and I was overwhelmed by the Baroque grandeur of it all. Intricate frescoes depicting Biblical scenes lined either wall, surrounded by large, fierce-looking stone statues of saints and apostles. The vaulted dome rose from above the altar, and here I find my descriptive powers fail me. Suffice it to say that its detail and its sublime geometry, with the sunlight illuminating the ceiling of that otherwise dark sanctuary, was suggestive of heaven. The whole structure was imbued with the gravitas of centuries of tradition and history, with its ferocious-looking saints and its painted skeletons dancing on either side of the Crucifixion. Unfortunately I had left my camera in my room at Bisetti, but James got some good pictures, opting for details like the expression on the prophet Joel’s face.

All day I kept pinching myself. Was I really here? In this place? With these guys? Somewhere in my youth or childhood, as the song goes, I must have done something good. I look at how my life was when I was roughly Alessandro and James’s age, how for so many years (verily, almost forty) it seemed like I wandered like Moses in the desert, and now, in my thirty-eighth year, it’s as if life has suddenly blossomed — exploded! — into unimaginable beauty. Even before coming to Italy. Things I no longer dared to dream became not only possible, but manifest.

Walking down the exquisite streets of Novara, peering through gates at hidden urban gardens, flanked by two positively glorious young men, I thought I would perish of delight. It’s really not true, after all, the cynical estimation that said I’d never be satisfied, no matter what. I have simply been lacking in the things that bring me joy.

Better late than never.

The train back to Pettenasco was hot, and the boys lay back against the seats in exhaustion and dozed. With their peaceful expressions and interminable eyelashes they looked like sweet, beautiful children, and I couldn’t help but perform a visualization on their behalf. I took it from Aleta St. James. (Say what you will about New Age hocus-pocus, I can’t tell you why, but this shit works for me.) I imagined them surrounded by hot pink light, like a blanket — color language for unconditional love — and I wished them everything that might bring them the kind of joy they’d brought me. To Alessandro, I said: Love yourself, baby boy! To James, I said: Be happy, darling. Otherwise, there were no words to the meditation, only emotions. James shifted in his seat and lay his knee against mine, and even in the train’s heat I was gratified by that warmth.

Wherever you may hail from, I thank you for joining me on my bumpy journey, and for your (overwhelmingly positive) feedback, both on-site and via email. Who knew that someone besides myself would want to gaze at my navel?

**

This month marks another anniversary as well: three years ago this month I fell madly in love.

I’ll bet you regulars think you know where I’m going with this, and you’re wrong. Yes, it was March 2006 when I took a fateful tumble for a certain someone…but at the same time I was discovering an incomparable young Irish singing/songwriting phenomenon known as Damien Rice.

Only days ago did I return to my beloved after a long absence; I had put away most of my more evocative music about a year ago, in an attempt to banish unnecessary sadness from my life for the purposes of enlightenment. But hearing his good friend from The Frames, Glen Hansard, delivering similarly goosebump-inducing lyrics with equal passion in the movie Once, put him at the forefront of my mind again. I started cruising YouTube for videos of Glen one day, and wound up unearthing this devastating live rendition by Damien of the 9 album song Elephant.

It felt like coming home.

**

Damien delivers a quiver that only the best poets can; he’s like a street Heaney meets Jeff Buckley, strumming the battered guitar he inherited from Nick Drake. His classic, slightly nasal Irish tenor can go from a hearty blast out of the chest to the hoarsest whisper in the space of a second; his anguished falsetto can elicit tears faster than a drunken pub sing-along of Danny Boy. You long to hear him pronounce words like Connemara or Ballyknockan with that lush Irish brogue. But it’s not just his amazing voice, it’s everything: his sense of the harmonics of emotion, the vibrations of naked yearning expressed through chord and melody, the intelligent, melancholy, confrontational poetry of his lyrics. He can howl “horny” or “fuck you” and make the words sound sublime. He reminds me of why I wanted to write, why anyone makes art in the first place.

My faithful reader in Germany accuses me of being too stubbornly stuck on one man, but I will say this: if Mr. Rice showed up on my lawn tomorrow, yelling my name like Stanley Kowalski, I’d be down there in a heartbeat.

The YouTube comments by hetero women about this comely if elfin powerhouse of a man are of course predictable, but I love to read what some of the straight men say: “I think I just went gay for a minute,” jokes one, while another gushes “I am a man and very hetero, and a guitar player myself. But seriously, if I could marry this man, I would, I would turn gay lol (sic) it doesn’t matter life would be complete being around Damien all day anyway.” The comment that makes me laugh out loud reads “I would hump him, he’s so powerful, I’m not gay but seriously, let the dry humping commence.” They don’t know what to do with another dude whose songs arouse shivers so profound and visceral they don’t know whether to cry or to come.

Some artists can cross all boundaries, and touch the raw, pulsating core of a human being. It’s an extraordinary gift.

**

Damien’s first major-release album O was my soundtrack to that spring and summer, and will forever be linked with the events of those warm, heady months. Delicate, its first track, unfailingly evokes for me the image of shoots pushing up through damp ground in early-morning sunlight, while The Blower’s Daughter will always send me back to a beautiful wood-floored studio glowing red in the late afternoon, watching Sonny hold a Warrior pose like a yogic Michelangelo. I can’t take my eyes off of you. (The first dozen or so times I listened to that song, I could not stop crying — I had never heard such a pure and perfect keen of longing.) Cold Water is quiet desolation tinged with faith, an appeal to both God and Other in the face of impossibility, hope against hope (which would turn out, at least momentarily, not to be in vain). I could go on, but suffice it to say that every song on that album is exquisite, and personally meaningful to me.

The only comparable period and soundtrack in my life that I can think of is probably my freshman year of college, falling in love with León accompanied by the heretofore undiscovered magic of Cat Stevens. Appropriately, his music represented youth itself, unbroken idealism charging heedlessly forward. I can’t keep it in, I gotta let it out. Two fine people should love each other.

Damien’s magic, twenty years later, lay in the pathos of broken and wiser experience reaching out to take one more risk, one more time. Love taught me to lie…it’s not hard to fall, when you float like a cannonball. I’m not a miracle and you’re not a saint.

His unflinching, sometimes brutal honesty is part of what makes his songs so compelling and beautiful. They shimmer with ragged authenticity.

**

Whether or not my absentee friend is a miracle, I’m not a saint, and I’ve failed at Damien-grade honesty. I like the image of an iceberg one of my commenters used: all you know about things is the visible tip I’ve shared. There’s a whole lot more underwater, and it doesn’t all make me look like some sterling Victorian heroine tragically seduced by the obligatory dashing cad. (Although I do appreciate your chivalrous impulses.)

No, it actually felt good, a couple of posts ago, to own my own ambivalence, and to point out the tinted filter created by my own insecurities. The things I’ve obsessed about endlessly don’t necessarily have a firm base in reality, other than what happened one summer, and what I, of all people, have no business judging. So don’t go taking all my fears as facts. I feel like I have to come clean about my own barely explicable caprice.

Briefly: only days after a blessed encounter with my beautiful friend, during the first flush of summer, I departed for a preplanned trip to Italy. I had promised to keep him and a small group of close friends abreast of my activities abroad with a weekly email travel diary.

Well, by the second week, my readers were being treated to tales of an attractive young Englishman I’d met in the lakes region. Overnight, I became desperately and fecklessly infatuated with the bloke: he was funny, caustic, and just the sort of ridiculing intellectual who makes me strive so hard to get Daddy’s approval. (He even dated a graduate of my college.) I made no secret of my ardor to anyone on my list, blathering on and on about it endlessly, expecting it to be my grand Foreign Affair. (It wasn’t.)

So, basically, after finally getting close to a gorgeous man with a warm heart and an emotional vocabulary, whom I had summoned out of the ether and then proceeded to coax all spring long, I went right back to chasing my father — publicly — albeit on a different continent.

Who’s the asshole now?

The strange thing was that the whole time I maintained the unshakable, if “irrational,” conviction that our connection was such that it could survive all circumstances and mutations of form…as if he really were, in some spiritual sense, family. I had said as much before, and he may have believed it: he was taken aback and sorry when I reacted violently (and hypocritically) to his own summer misadventures. Here in the States, he had been busy making like Wilt Chamberlain, reliving earlier, wilder days. (A counselor friend of mine observed very counselor-esquely that it seemed as if after touching on intimacy, we both reverted to older, more pathological ways of being.)

Anyway, before you go judging my erstwhile buddy as just another faithless man-slut, bear in mind who else flaked out completely. Yes, women adore the man, and he adores them, but he did commit himself to his last significant other once they got serious. I can’t point to something similarly redeeming in my own recent history.

**

But speaking of irrational convictions…

Last week I started to seriously entertain (for the umpteenth time) every voice, both external and internalized, urging me to get reasonable, to trust outside judges and the dictates of five-sense empiricism, and accept that I’m just another daft female making up all kinds of crazy shit about the way things are. Don’t I know I’ll never be anything but a miserable failure until I train myself to believe only hard facts, and trust other people’s authority and word over my “impressions?”

Like a child I lay on the bed and sobbed from my diaphragm, feeling chills of pain from this negation vibrating through the marrow of my bones, threatening to shatter me. It was as if my brain were trying to kill my entire being from the inside. This was, as Carol Gilligan has said (as did I, in Sing, Goddess), about so much more than one circumscribed situation. This was about my ability to trust myself, or not, to be able to navigate through the world with the “feminine,” intuitive, instinctual, intangible capacities and tools I have always used, and to be able to say that I know what I know, regardless of what the official line is. It’s a struggle I’ve revisited again and again for as long as I can remember.

Sometimes I’ve felt like Angelina Jolie in Changeling, institutionalized and pumped full of dope for saying “That is not my son.”

But it really wasn’t her son.

**

Later, stumbling to the computer, tear-stained and exhausted from trying to vivisect still-living parts of myself, I started searching for music on YouTube by Glen Hansard. I remembered how Falling Slowly and other numbers from the film made me weep gently with the recognition, the reassurance that someone else embraced unsayable emotional realities and could produce almost palpable variations in the rarefied air around a song. I was already getting somewhat soothed by Glen’s music when I saw Damien in the ‘related videos’ column, and clicked on him instead.

Immediately I was flooded with forgotten gratitude for his passion, his acuity, his humming incandescent connection to unseen worlds. I felt myself growing physically stronger, as if the music were transfusing me. Even the most woeful complexities of emotions he brought forth I welcomed like old, formerly estranged friends. Some emboldened voice within me asserted this is who you are. This is where you belong. You don’t have to force yourself to be different…fuck that!!!

It’s something I love in Rilke, too, and numerous other poets: the masterful evocation of what the tools of ordinary perception and reason invariably miss. Somewhere between a trembling note and an original turn of phrase like stones taught me to cry (which makes no logical sense) a delicate universe blooms, populated by whispering existences seen best from the corner of the eye or felt with a sixth sense. As if a portal had suddenly opened up, between the prosaic everyday world that we assume is the only real one and a hidden dimension of limitless beauty that reminds us of how ephemeral our lives truly are.

If that makes no sense, it’s because I’m trying to use words to describe something for which words are almost entirely inadequate. It’s Laurie Anderson’s famous line about trying to dance about architecture.

**

I honed my critical mind to defend myself at the dinner table, but I never got out of fifty books of philosophy what I get out of five lines of Wordsworth. I’m a poet by nature, which makes me by default a madwoman. We’re not journalists; we rely on the messages we get from unconfirmed sources, rumors, the movement of birds. Our bones ache when it’s going to rain. We watch expressions cross faces, the tilt of a head or the placement of an arm, that say the opposite of the words being spoken. We see desire flash in his eyes, and doubt cloud hers. We contemplate the stillness of trees, and listen to see if they speak. There is always more here than meets the eye.

What I really need is what makes me bleed, sings Damien on the haunting track Volcano. It was by pain, after all, that he was driven and enabled to produce works of such deep resonance. If we were all suddenly filled with the nirvanic bliss of oneness, I wonder, would there be any more art, any more reason to confront and grapple with our relationship to the world and other people? Probably not. But what the best artists accomplish through their struggle, ironically enough, is an experience of union for their audience — who get to see or feel or know what the artist sees or feels or knows. In doing so, they no longer feel so separate.

“You do not have to be good,” writes Mary Oliver in Wild Geese. “You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” Defiant words, choosing vulnerable, fallible humanness over the pursuit of perfection. “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.”

I will do just that, by ending with a poem I wrote during a comparable time two years ago when I despaired of everything I thought I knew and everything I knew I wanted. (Another irony: in order to write about my loss of faith in imagination and other vital intangibles, I had to access my imagination and other vital intangibles.)

**

Tie a Knot and Hold On

No place in the world you belong,
and it doesn’t want your gifts,

those labors you laid
at the feet of your wanting
with a pure heart,
your blood offerings.

The sun is too bright
and beauty is nowhere beneath it,

only the tired faces of people
you wouldn’t want to be,
much as you don’t want to be
yourself.

None quicken the heart
or bring the surfaces alive
with gladness.

There is a kind of exhaustion
born of waiting too long
for a star that appears for an hour,

when the darkness is endless
and hard to love.

In this barren landscape,
this exile, beyond faith,
beyond hope,

sit still by the swings
and watch children at play.

Remember that time
before disappointments
and burdens
arrested your skyward arc

and take heart from those
who have not yet lost
that delight, in imagined

heroics, their kingdoms
of sand.

Last weekend I felt like singing out with my pain. A fierce longing unexpectedly knocked me over like a hurricane-grade wave. Having gotten slightly better about neither resisting nor clinging to emotional upheaval, I let this fierce hunger rattle my foundations and then ebb.

I may have overcome some of my lesser addictions, but there really is something almost gorgeous about the suffering of feeling every fibre of your restrained being strain toward what it craves. Even when left totally unsatisfied.

Last time around, I mentioned that I might write a future post about what I meant by the “Karamazov” types for whom I fall so hard. Now seems like the perfect time. Because I’m no stranger to the same drives. I was born and bred to thirst after ecstasy and joy and transcendence and all the things my kinfolk called God. I also possess acute senses, which can isolate and identify the flavor of cardamom, the aroma of lemon verbena, or the chemicals of arousal with equal precision. I love the phenomena of the world at least as much as whatever unifying spirit underlies them. Maybe too much. I’m a junky for beauty and an apologist for inordinate passion. In other words, I’m a Karamazov too.

**

The year before I became obsessed with Damien Moreau, I read the short story “Lifeguard” by John Updike. Its literate blasphemies awakened recognition in me and went a long way toward liberating my imagination; I had spent a great deal of my pious adolescence trying to quash my impious desires. The story’s contemplative narrator/protagonist is a divinity student who spends his summers as a lifeguard, watching women on the beach and entertaining his own prodigious lusts:

There is a great truth in those motion pictures which are slandered as true neither to the Bible nor to life. They are—written though they are by demons and drunks—true to both. We are all Solomons lusting for Sheba’s salvation. The God-filled man is filled with a wilderness that cries to be populated. The stony chambers need jewels, furs, tints of cloth and flesh, even though, as in Samson’s case, the temple comes tumbling. Women are an alien race of pagans set down among us. Every seduction is a conversion.

The God-filled man is a wilderness that cries to be populated. At the time, I found the author’s words a little scary, even though I was no longer a “believer.” The boundaries of a prim and tidy envelope I’d always inhabited were pressing slowly and inexorably outward. The stony chambers need jewels, furs, tints of cloth and flesh…Updike was exhibiting what seemed to me to be a lot of nerve in marrying spiritual depth with sensuality and excess. And yet I felt intuitively that what he was saying was true.

Scandalous as this seemed at the time to a graduate of Vacation Bible School, I would discover a few years later that a professed (if somewhat grouchy and disreputable) Christian had done exactly the same thing a century earlier. One of my favorite passages in all of literature is Dmitri Karamazov’s fevered monologue in The Brothers Karamazov, delivered to his brother Alyosha, after he falls hopelessly in love with the “bad woman” Grushenka and plans to break his engagement to honorable Katerina Ivanovna. Dmitri starts spouting poetry incoherently, singing hosannas to creation that describe angels experiencing “visions of God’s throne” and insects who experience only “sensual lust.” Here is the rest of that incredible passage:

I am that insect, brother, and it is said of me specially. All we Karamazovs are such insects, and, angel as you are, that insect lives in you, too, and will stir up a tempest in your blood. Tempests, because sensual lust is a tempest worse than a tempest! Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed and never can be fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side. I am a cultivated man, brother, but I’ve thought a lot about this. It’s terrible what mysteries there are! Too many riddles weigh men down on earth. We must solve them as we can, and try to keep a dry skin in the water. Beauty! I can’t endure the thought that a man of lofty mind and heart begins with the ideal of the Madonna and ends with the ideal of Sodom. What’s still more awful is that a man with the ideal of Sodom in his soul does not renounce the ideal of the Madonna, and his heart may be on fire with that ideal, genuinely on fire, just as in his days of youth and innocence. Yes, man is broad, too broad, indeed. I’d have him narrower. The devil only knows what to make of it! What to the mind is shameful is beauty and nothing else to the heart. Is there beauty in Sodom? Believe me, that for the immense mass of mankind beauty is found in Sodom. Did you know that secret? The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.

By the time I encountered this masterpiece of a novel, late in my college career, I had had a bit more direct experience with the tempests in my blood, the torments and contradictions and mysteries of beauty and desire, and had done some hard time in the darker places within my own psyche. Dostoevsky’s non-condemning (indeed, bordering on celebratory) understanding made me shed tears publicly in a coffee shop. He knew! He knew how ferocious and voracious human wanting could be, how complementary the lusts for transcendent wholeness and the quiver of a well-formed thigh. Clearly he would have appreciated that wanly singing monotonous hymns in a narrow pew was no real answer for those whom Jack Kerouac called “mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time.” He dared to recognize that the greater a person’s breadth of spirit, the greater was his or her capacity for extremes of both exaltedness and “depravity.” He grasped that the passionate drive toward beauty — toward its experience or its possession — could lead a person to either the sacred (the Madonna) or the profane (Sodom). Possibly both.

I believe this paradox accounts for what seems like a disorienting (for many, distressing) contradiction in the lives of some of our more “enlightened” sages. Those who idealize and reify the late, great Kundalini master Yogi Bhajan would rather ignore his many extramarital liasions with starstruck students. Most of us don’t like to dwell upon our nonviolent civil rights hero Dr. King’s purported indiscretions. Others discount Osho/Rajneesh’s legitimacy as a spiritual teacher because of his flashy fleet of Rolls-Royces and the orgiastic conditions at his insular Oregon compound. And then there’s Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche.

It’s a funny thing about Trungpa…you won’t hear his most devout followers go anywhere near a public discussion of the severe alcohol addiction that eventually killed him, his serial seductions of students, or his other episodes of out-of-control licentiousness. Like the textbook family of an alcoholic, the Shambhala crowd glosses over or rationalizes his problematic behaviors (e.g. as intentional “crazy wisdom”). Papa was perfect, he can’t have been a drunk! On the other hand, detractors dismiss him too easily by debunking his profound insights with inevitable horror stories. We humans like our heroes and villains clear-cut and unambiguous.

Dostoevsky knew otherwise. Ironically, Trungpa himself urged us to be honest about these very things:

We have a fear of facing ourselves. That is the obstacle. Experiencing the innermost core of our existence is very embarrassing to a lot of people. A lot of people turn to something that they hope will liberate them without their having to face themselves. That is impossible. We can’t do that. We have to be honest with ourselves. We have to see our gut, our excrement, our most undesirable parts. We have to see them. That is the foundation of warriorship, basically speaking. Whatever is there, we have to face it, we have to look at it, study it, work with it and practice meditation with it.

A lot of people turn to something that they hope will liberate them without their having to face themselves. This is the ostensible dynamic of addiction, something he doubtless knew intimately. We Karamazovs are prone to addictions. But the external “liberations” can feel so sublime!!! Perhaps the problem comes when — as Rilke wrote about sex — we “apply (them) as a stimulant on the tired places of (our) lives and as a distraction rather than as a way of gathering (ourselves) for (our) highest moments.” Eckhart Tolle recommended that we cease partaking of any pleasure (his examples were wine and chocolate) once the true enjoyment of it has passed. This is sound advice, I think. It highlights the difference between mindfulness and mindlessness. In mindlessness, we don’t even really see what (or whom) we’re using.

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Which brings me back to my own brothers Karamazov. My potent karmic attraction to these spiritual brethren of mine has forced me to look in the mirror that they are, and to be more honest with myself. It sure as hell ain’t exactly been a walk in the park.

I’d like to think that if, for example, you and I were committed to each other in some way, and at the same time ridiculously tasty men were throwing themselves at me on a daily basis, that I’d do nothing that wasn’t okay with you. I’d like to think that I don’t mask my intermittent bouts of self-loathing with mind-altering substances for some other reason than that everything I’ve tried makes me wake up miserably sick. But I also know that my personal tendencies are to want to eat all the proverbial chocolates in the box. If I fault my “brothers” for never being satisfied, well, neither am I. If I fault them for being distractable, well, so am I. Secretive? I’ll tell you whatever doesn’t make me look bad. Kinky? Stay out of my sexual fantasies, please. Looking for an extraordinary high? Why do you think I insist on getting so attached to other Karamazovs? Would I like us to be narrower, to borrow from Dmitri?

That’s the kind of question that brings you to the difference between what mystics and spiritual teachers call love, and what may be just another high: when you’re challenged to accept (or reject) the whole enchilada of someone, disorienting contradictions and all — yourself included. It’s an exercise in being mindful rather than mindless, in honoring rather than objectifying a person according to your own requirements. (And it’s not the norm! Somehow taking care of yourself always gets confused with making the other the bad guy. You can still opt out, without pointing fingers.) I wonder if Lady Diana Mukpo (Mrs. Trungpa) used to look at her husband and think –as Mamie Eisenhower once said of Ike — that he “belonged to the world,” and not to her; that she could fault no one for being enamored of his powerful radiance, insight, and charisma; that his demons were not hers to manage or control.

If I had stayed in the fold and quashed my own Karamazovian tendencies, I might never have gone anywhere near such exercises in nonduality, and I’d be another of those offended people clucking my tongue about what a hypocrite and a charlatan old Chogyam must have been. No, I can’t just dismiss a man who could say

The essence of warriorship, or the essence of human bravery, is refusing to give up on anyone or anything. We can never say that we are simply falling to pieces or that anyone else is, and we can never say that about the world, either.

Word, bro. He should know.

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(UPDATE) My Gen-X contemporary and onetime literary crush, the scruffy genius David Foster Wallace, committed suicide yesterday evening at his home in Claremont, California. He actually touched upon the themes of spirituality and addiction in this 1996 interview with Salon.

There went a broad soul. I’m sorry he felt it necessary to give up on himself, but I understand it, too.

Good night, sweet prince.