Laid low with some undefined, sore-throated energy-drainer of a bug, I’ve worked only a few hours this week. Which has been fine with me; I sorely needed a break from the calling floor. Without Rick or Eli or Dylan to keep my adrenals pumping, I’m getting burned out fast. (The bosses are mixing it up for me by giving me additional duties as a trainer of new hires, so we’ll see how that goes.) At least I’ve had plenty of time to write about my highly uncharacteristic paranormal episode.
You see, I dug in a entirely different variety of dirt this past week. My coach friend “regressed” me — he’s taking a past life regression course, and I was one of his test subjects.
You know by now, if you’ve been reading me for a while, that I walk a fine line sometimes between rationally skeptical and openly curious about “supernatural” phenomena. I’m of the opinion that we don’t necessarily even know what we don’t know. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio…
I have to say I was surprised by what transpired. (But quite frankly I was surprised anything transpired.) There was definitely overwhelming emotion involved that lent the whole endeavor at the very least a sort of mythic or metaphorical aura of truth. If actually true, my “flashback” might illuminate a great deal about the way I experience my current life and its bizarrely recurrent disappointments. If wholly manufactured, it would still parallel this life in such a way that, had I encountered it as a movie or a novel, I would have shed a tear in identification with the protagonist.
But let me take you with me, in the order the images came.
**
What materializes first is a sort of bustling library, in what appears to be a converted church or chapel with a large stained glass window. There are different levels of books connected by wooden staircases. It feels very familiar, as if I’ve spent a lot of time there. The hair of the men is slicked back, as was the style in the ’20s and ’30s; the dress of both the men and the women is similarly retro. I stretch out my hand in front of me; it’s larger, with hair on it, and wears a decorative ring. A man’s hand. Holding up a mirror, as instructed by my guide, I see a man with shiny dark hair slicked back — not bad looking, but not particularly striking either.
Change of scene. A car pulls up, a sleek 1930s two-tone coupe. A good-looking, fair-haired young man, nattily dressed in a suit and long overcoat, gets out and greets me warmly with a handshake, calling me Milton (“old chap”). I am very happy to see him. He is a dear friend. But when my guide presses me about him, I am suddenly, spontaneously crying. Overwhelmed by that all too familiar sensation of hopeless, impotent longing and impossible desire, and shame at my perennially rejectable wrongness and freakishness. Fast, hot tears are wetting my hair at the temples as I tell my coach that I’m pretty sure I (Milton) love this man, and that he will repulse me violently before long, when I finally dare speak its name. My chest is sore with that ripped-open feeling I’ve often wondered about, that deep, acute pain like a knife wound. I’m quite helpless to stop weeping. I know this feeling so well.
My coach lets me cry for a while, and then moves me on to the day of my demise. How old am I? I let numbers spin like a slot machine in my mind several times and each time they settle on the number 54. Where am I? Driving in the countryside in a bumpy old car. It’s a beautiful summer day, with wildflowers blooming everywhere. But I’m grim and resigned. I don’t want to be here anymore. Wherever I’m headed, I sense it will be my final destination. Do I kill myself somewhere out there among the daisies? I don’t actually experience it, but I’m guessing so.
My coach asks me if I have any unfinished business before I leave that life, and I say (weeping again) that I’m sorry to those who were hurt by my leaving, but fortunately “there weren’t many.”
He brings me out of my reverie, and I’m emotionally drained and mentally spacey for the remainder of the day.
**
This week I’ve been listening to bouncy Depression-era big-band jazz on Last.fm and Pandora.com. I’ve always liked that music. Singer Annette Hanshaw comes on Eddie Cantor Radio after Ethel Waters, and I recall sitting next to Sonny in a darkened theater trying not to betray too much emotion as the Betty-Boop-esque character Sita mouths Hanshaw’s songs in the animated film “Sita Sings the Blues.” Hanshaw was partial to yearning torch songs, like her contemporary Billie Holiday, and a couple of songs that were hits for Holiday are on the “Sita” soundtrack. Every road I walk along/I walk along with you/ No wonder I’m lonely…Lover Come Back to Me.
It was the last time I’d spend any time with him, around Thanksgiving of last year. I was so happy to be sitting there beside him, I was giving thanks…and at the same time I couldn’t move. I was afraid I’d ruin everything, somehow, the way I always do.
**
The way I always do. There it is again: the absolute certainty, backed up by way too much experience, that things will go to hell in a handbasket no matter what — that either by reason of faulty constitution or faulty action, I am destined for abrupt and unequivocal rejection. Maybe because I don’t know what to do, or how to “be,” or maybe because I unconsciously emanate something that is the equivalent of Off! repellent for men. I have never been able to figure it out. But I literally beat my fists on any available surface and tear my hair out when some helpful dipshit refers to it as “my pattern.” As if I were some idiot fucktard willingly masterminding the very thing that (more than any other factor) makes me, at least at times, want to kill myself. My rage and despair at such moments is so intense that I could impulsively dash my brains out against the wall.
You may have noticed that I’m feeling some of that intense rage right now. It’s like this: imagine that I’m completely bloody from throwing myself for twenty-five years against the bars of the same barbed-wire cage, and some fucking know-it-all armchair Freud comes and says to me, “Why don’t you just get yourself out of there?”
**
A good friend of my best friend back home has been diagnosed with stage four cancer. I take a book out of the library by a professor of literature at Oxford who, given six months to live, opts out of the controlled poisoning of chemotherapy and instead adopts a regimen of raw food, supplements, acupuncture, and breathing exercises. (He lived eleven more years, at which point he died of a bacterial infection.) His book explores the limits of what we consider “rationalism” in medicine, which really just boils down to what has been arrived at by deductive reasoning (applying what are considered to be sufficiently established principles). Induction, which arrives at what works without necessarily understanding why, is largely derided within the Western tradition as “unscientific.” It’s a delight to read the querulous musings of such a brilliant man, who gambles his life to swim against the current of conventional opinion. His “medical mutiny” is indeed Living Proof that we don’t even know what we don’t know.
I find the book in the inventory of a used book seller in a town near where my friend lives, and have it shipped directly to her house.
**
I am thinking about Milton, the gay Depression-era librarian, thwarted, heartbroken, and suicidal. Whether or not we ever shared a soul, he is nevertheless my soul brother. I feel his profound loneliness, his frustrated desire, his conviction of total un-acceptability. I am all wrong. The ones I want will never want me. Is it odd that I felt this inarticulate angst as early as the first grade (perhaps earlier)? Somehow I just knew it, when I gave my painstaking Lego sculpture to Daniel DuMont and he looked at me as if I were an alien. I knew, without having the words, that I would never win his heart, or anyone else’s for that matter. What came so easily to the rest of the world would require Herculean effort of me, and would most likely still be impossible. I felt this with total certitude.
I was six years old.
On the surface of things, and in the “objective” world of fact, or that-which-is-apparent, this just doesn’t compute. I was a cute kid, growing up, whom most everybody in my class liked. I went through a horribly awkward period in early adolescence when I was little more than a misshapen lump with dorky glasses, but I emerged from that into a teen girlhood that, judging from photos, was far more attractive than it felt from the inside at the time. I had the ability to relate to both the fringe Ally Sheedys and the popular-jock Emilio Estevezes among my peers. What’s more, I was attracted to the “right” gender in both Christian and mainstream expectation (even if I was a bit more enthusiastic than good girls were supposed to be). Yet no one I liked ever, ever liked me back — not when I was six, and not when I was sixteen. I never went on a single real “date.” Not until college, that is, and then a new paradigm emerged.
Which was not unlike what must have happened to brother Milton. You’re loved, all right (“old chap”), you’re the bees’ knees — until you’re in love — and then you’re vehemently spurned. Dropped like a hot potato. I would find out, time and time again over the years, that men would be overtly friendly and interested in me only until I really wanted them, whether that wanting was merely sexual or encompassed other longings as well. It didn’t matter; the outcome was the same. This latest escapade with Rick is nothing new — but somehow I always wind up proceeding as if this time will be different, as if this time I will be like “normal” people.
His desires made Milton an instant deviant, an abomination, at least to his beloved(s); my desires seem to make me an instant monster, a Medusa, to mine.
Driving in the countryside, Milton was weary. Weary of feeling like a social leper, weary of the burning thirsts and longings that smoldered unslaked all those years. He saw no way out of the barbed wire cage except for a gun, or a noose. I’ve felt that same despair. Is it the same despair?
**
Absence of proof is not proof of absence, the renegade cancer-surviving professor writes, quoting his unorthodox consultant Dr. Candace Pert. (She herself has placed herself outside of the mainstream by — among other things — appearing in the film “What the Bleep Do We Know?” as an expert talking head.) There’s no way in Hades I can ever, using accepted scientific methods, confirm a connection between myself and a character who may or may not have ever existed in history. Even if I could somehow prove that he did in fact exist in history. But to the practical question Is this useful? or Can this help me? I may still be able to provide an answer.
I have spent most of my life digging for a reasonable cause of this seemingly fated solitude of mine, for the sexual kryptonite that, once excavated, might allow me to live and love “normally.” I exhausted ten years of weekly therapy, dozens of self-help and psychology texts, books on philosophy, sociology, and religion and that ever-nebulous field called “spirituality.” I meticulously dissected my relationships with my family members and peers, cross-examining my every need and motive and picking at various crusty old wounds. I have diagnosed myself variously as a narcissist, a neurotic, a love addict, a sex addict, an ambivalent-avoidant, a Woman Who Loves Too Much, a religious abuse survivor, an INFP, a typical egoic consciousness, and a Tragic Romantic (Four, in the Enneagram model). In the end I’ve found no ultimate internal “cause” powerful enough to have effected such an unequivocal and consistent legacy of abortive rejection and abandonment. I’ve speculated about external causes (men are X, women are Y), but inconclusively. The puzzle has remained unsolved.
I’ve searched the holy books
Tried to unravel the mystery of Jesus Christ the savior
I’ve read the poets and the analysts
Searched through the books on human behavior
I traveled this world round
For an answer that refused to be found
I don’t know why and I don’t know how
But she’s nobody’s baby now.
Milton gives me an unreasonable cause.
**
Let’s assume, just for the sake of argument, that I was Milton, and Milton is me. And that my psyche is imprinted indelibly with the endlessly painful experience of being attracted to members of the same sex –in this case, men — when such a thing was greater cause for censure and ostracism than it is in our still far-from-enlightened present. (While there was a brief “pansy craze” in urban clubs and entertainment in the 1920s, by the Depression-plagued 1930s a conservative backlash had taken over, which blamed society’s considerable ills on moral depravity — not unlike like today’s Jerry Falwells and their ilk.) A person would have to have had a very strong sense of self to trespass unapologetically, to persist, to find others of his kind, rather than just accept, like our contemporary Ted Haggard, that his innermost desires were aberrant and wrong in the eyes of God and man.
Not only that, but Milton was deeply, madly in love. With a man either straight or unwilling to embrace his feelings toward another man. I’d bet on the latter. It would add an element of complexity to the mix, of that confusion of subtle and mixed signals, of not knowing where one stands, or whether one should act. Let’s say, then, that Milton’s friend may have felt something reciprocal. But that he was constitutionally incapable of acknowledging or acting upon it. And when, one day, “after teas and cakes and ices,” Milton had the strength to force the moment to its crisis, said gentleman recoiled in horror, perhaps used epithets like nancy-boy or fairy, grabbed his coat, and fled. Don’t ring me. Don’t write me. I don’t ever want to see you again. You disgust me.
**
In the light of this hypothetical tale, my recurrent feelings and experiences do make more sense: the deep, deep shame about my fierce unmet longings that I felt even in childhood…the fear that my desires are somehow inordinate, or freakish, or wrong, and that I’m freakish and wrong (why else do I continuously repel the men I want most?)…the bewilderment and knife-twisting pain and humiliation of unexpected, often violent repulsion “when everything was going so well”…the bouts of resignation to lonely, masturbatory solitude (unless I just take what I can get, perhaps like Milton taking an eager female friend to dinner)…the suicidal rage and despair over my apparent barbed-wire cage.
Just imagine for a moment that Milton’s 21 grams of unhappy, aborted chi soon re-immerses itself in the river of embodied life as a little blonde girl in 1970s Massachusetts — but somehow retains the same set of experience-based assumptions it held as the person known as Milton. Without allowing for the fact that it is now an entirely different person in an entirely different situation (and body).
I know it sounds highly unlikely, or at least very odd, unless you believe wholeheartedly in this stuff. But bear with me.
My question then would be, why wasn’t he pleasantly surprised in his new life?
I’m already way out on a limb about this past life business. I’ve certainly never been a card-carrying member of what I call the Omnipotence movement, which insists that you create everything that happens to you (so why’d you manifest those bombs at your wedding, Afghan villagers? ). Try telling that to a nine-year-old with bone cancer, incidentally. This (usually dogmatically delivered) assertion can wind up feeling the opposite of empowering — which it’s actually meant to be, in its annoying New Agey way — and can often come off as just plain assholery.
I do, however, believe in that classic hippie concept, “vibes.” Do I think little AlienBaby had godlike control over which males came into her life when? No. Do I think that the ones that did may have responded to what she was unconsciously projecting about herself because of her assumptions? Now that’s a possibility.
So much of the fix-up work I’ve done on myself has been aimed at addressing these root shames I could never quite get to the bottom of, even with all the archaeological excavation and professional assistance. From what I’ve been able to tell, I really had no precedent for holding such dire beliefs about myself and my desires until experiencing negative reinforcement over and over and over again, from nursery school on. Which came first, chicken or egg? Statistically, it seems improbable I could have been so “unlucky” in love, a born failure, never getting a “break” even once growing up, when I liked so many boys. But how could I be projecting the internalized effects of something that had not yet happened, or was only just happening?
Unless I was truly a born failure.
Say whatever you want about reincarnation — Milton the librarian gives me a powerful precedent. My rational mind still doesn’t fully buy it…it seems crazy…but I wept hard during that session, and I felt what felt like the root of this old wound.
Milton gives me new hope, too: I can now tell myself, That was then, and this is now. You’re a different person, with a different life. You get a second chance. (I’m actually welling up a bit, irrationally, writing this.) For any scoffing materialists out there, you can ease your fretting mind by thinking of this exercise as a placebo experiment. Maybe, at long last, I can put my romantic and sexual failures behind me by putting them seventy years behind me. Maybe I can finally lay them to rest.
Lay them to rest. Yes. Perhaps with a visualization: me, in a pastoral cemetery, kneeling down to place a wreath against a headstone. Milton —, 1900-1954. The inscription reads Thus have I had thee, as a dream doth flatter/In sleep a king, but waking, no such matter. The wreath is made up of red roses, with lots of thorns.
Rest in peace, brother Milton. I’m sorry your life was so painful that you had to end it. We can do better this time…and we will.
I promise to at least get us some hot c*ck by Christmas.
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