Split from Throat to Belly (a.k.a. Mangled Guts Pretending, a.k.a. What Else is New?, a.k.a. Happy New Year)

It seems funny to me that yesterday started with a weird, surprising, calm and serene feeling of complete acceptance and a fundamental faith that, once again and as always, Julian was right. 

Because, by about 7 last evening, I felt like I was completely falling apart. Chain analysis: I didn't hear from my person all day, after what I thought was a good exchange in the morning. No text, no email, nothing. In a lot of ways, of course, this is perfectly ordinary. I remember saying to my counselor, "Well, she has this way of disappearing and I get thrown. I get resentful, worried, insecure." And, since it's his job to hold some kind of super ego space for my strangeness, of course he asked, "How long does she disappear for?" And I said, "Like hours at a time. Sometimes as long as, like 8 or 10 hours." And he paused a bit and said, "Huh, I thought you meant for like a week or so. Have you ever considered that you might have some attachment disorder and abandonment stuff going on with her?" Because that's the way he rolls. 

Anyway, when I finally did hear from her, she was calm, composed, serene and sounded peaceful and at ease. What the actual fucking fuck???? Does she not realize the *entire universe* is fucking falling apart? How can she be in such great shape? And a tsunami of my most primal fears suddenly completely submerged me. Abandonment, rejection, disposal, complete cut off, good old completely dispensable Percy. Also: no end in sight. She's never going to be available. She's never going to leave her husband. Why would she? And what an idiot I have been to think she would! And now, that we aren't having the affair anymore, NOTHING will keep her even remotely interested in me. And I don't have anything to offer her anyway. So my fears, really on a level of deep down pre-verbal terror, were also spiced up by self hatred. You idiot. You fucking fool. Why did you ever believe she might leave her husband, for YOU? Get real.  

So. That was me, at Sushi Time, finishing my spicy salmon roll and texting her. And I did actually go to a place I have never gone before, ever. Which was texting, "You're never going to leave your husband are you?" Except of course, because it's fucking texting and I suck at swiping, I sent "You never going to leave your husband are you." And then "You=You're. Can't let that horrifying typo stand. I was an idiot to ever think you would." 

I have assiduously avoided pressing her on this issue, all the way along. I know with my higher self how fraught the situation is for her. I know how unfair it is of me to push her on it, and how unfair it is to myself to either expect it or despair of it ever happening. It's basically just wandering into a really toxic, really awful neighborhood in my mind. 

The end result of such "ultimatum" type communication is just more despair. I mean, really, she's going to reply "Oh yes, of course I am going to leave my husband, haven't I mentioned that already?" I mean, it's the kind of thing where a person could say "I have realized that I can't remain romantically involved with you while you figure out what you want and how to go about getting it. My heart is on the line and it hurts to be involved with you when you are not available." That's about as sane as it gets. And it's a way of taking responsibility. But a weird stinkbomb like "You aren't ever going to do this thing that I hope with every fiber of my being you are going to do but that is impossible for you at this time"-- well, that's just not productive. It's really just a cri de coeur. It's more honest to say, simply, I am in excruciating pain. That's that. End of story. 

So I spent the night in turmoil, as you might expect, dear reader. Some productive and "healthy" activities along the lines of reducing surprise daggers to the heart and head and loins included moving all of her photos (and yet, glimpsing at some even so, foolishly) to the external hard drive, putting away anything and everything that reminded me of her— I had collected some precious items in an altar for her well being, and while of course I still want the well being, the items had to be put away. I placed them all in a dark blue plastic bag I had under my sink and tied it tight and tied it tight again and put the bag in a large Sterlite container that has a lot of my past in it. These are the rituals of breaking up. Rolling in broken glass. Blood everywhere. Stiff upper lip, though. Well done. Pip pip cheerio!

okay Phoebe. Will do. Thanks. 

Of course, no matter what outward actions one takes, hiding away reminders, pictures, mementos, letters, the mind and its memory is still there. The endless love letters and erotica we wrote to each other and could never get enough. The visits. The conversations. The epiphanies. The tenderness and discoveries. You can't put all of that in a big Sterlite container or on an external hard drive. 

A friend of mine, with whom I have talked about matters of the heart on and off for more than 30 years, sent this in an email yesterday:

"I don't envy you your relationship. It sounds intoxicating, heady, real. Powerful. It's the kind of thing that drops bombs of blessings & changes lives. I mean, it'll all turn out okay if you're strong enough to hold on through the process. The stakes are high and there's the strong chance of more pain than either of you can imagine. In short: It's dangerous. I don't believe real love is a song or a sexy afternoon between the sheets, it's a blessing that comes from God and (in my experience) it'll pick you up and drop you off in strange new worlds you've never asked to see. God is great. God is good. She doesn't fool around with that shit. But whatever happens, if you stay open and soft and pliable, it'll be okay."

It kind of has to be okay, or not. Either way. 

The same friend also included this excerpt:

“Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?

Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it's not very nice.

God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can't even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It's up to you to do the stitching.

Harper: And then up you get. And walk around.

Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts pretending.

Harper: That's how people change.” 

― Tony Kushner, Angels in America

Sounds about right. 

Another friend emailed yesterday, and talked again about how he and his current partner took nearly 20 years to get real and be together in the open. It was a complicated situation. They tried many different ways to manage it, both by being together in secret and by cutting each other off entirely. His partner felt she had to stay with her husband, with whom she had no attraction, sex, romance or excitement, "for the children," who now judge her thoroughly anyway, regardless of her years of trying to do right by them. He felt guilty and self-sabotaging as he tried to navigate his love for her within the context of his own marriage, which was slowly and inexorably completely freezing to death. 

In particular, he felt authentically that he had absolutely no right to be happy. "Well, we want to be together and build a life with each other, but we can't have it. We're not allowed. We don't have permission. We'd never be able to live with ourselves if we go against these commitments we've made." They are living with themselves and each other perfectly well, thank you. The worst of it seems to be just looking back and ruefully wondering what took so goddamned long. Because none of the things they believed were true and none of the ways they tried to prevent this or that worked. 

Anyway, here it is, the last day of 2017. The year began with me discovering a mountain of unpleasant, alarming things about the man my partner of nearly 6 years was falling in love with. The train went off the rails. She took the first opportunity, when the holidays were over, to arrange to go see him. I tried to hold on. She returned and completely cut me off and wouldn't speak to me for a month and then sent me packing. By the next day all of my stuff was in the living room, ready to go, and the day after that, March 1st, I was homeless and my stuff was in U-Haul storage. 

After a few months of being completely submerged in constant pain, thinking about suicide many times a day, waking in the middle of the night weeping, but finally getting help for depression (after years of intermittent suffering) and starting counseling, I managed to go to Baja for 5 weeks of field work, and to visit friends in San Diego and LA, and then to take the epic trip across the country. (Cf. also this entire blog from the beginning). 

On July 13th, the love of my fucking life and I picked each other up, in the ethers, separated by more than a thousand miles, by 21 years, by currently seemingly unchangeable life circumstances. Thus began the shockingly beautiful, indelible, eye opening, endlessly surprising, achingly loving and tender trip toward each other. 

I wouldn't trade it for anything, even with the end of the affair and the current situation. 

I've since advanced to candidacy in the PhD program, done more field work, moved to a little hermit cave which sometimes feels like a sanctuary and sometimes feels like a minimum security prison cell, kept on keeping on as best as I could, in my weird journey through Hades. I have no idea how I have managed to survive the past year. I still sometimes think about how pleasant it would be to just stop being. Especially to stop being me. To stop hurting, to stop hurting myself, to stop. To just fucking stop. But I am consciously choosing recovery, growth and life along the way, and I'm here, even if just mangled guts pretending. I'll do the stitching. I always seem to. The odds are I will. 

Hello 2018. What the actual fuck?  

Oh Happy Day

When we realize we are going to be okay, or even that we are okay, right now, no matter what happens. Nothing has to be figured out, no decisions have to be made, no terrifying changes are on the day's schedule. When for whatever reason the serenity of accepting things I cannot change simply pays a visit. 

Do you find this inspirational? I have questions. Like- why is she in her underwear? Does serenity not only include being half naked, but also the possibility of plunging to one's death? Does she believe she can fly? I am simultaneously inspired, curious and deeply concerned

It's funny-strange, because within the freedom that comes from accepting what can't be changed, there is that seed of complete despair. And deep within the deepest despair, there is also, in my experience, the seed of radical acceptance. In a darkly humorous way, that is probably why the lyrics from "Don't Let's Start" by They Might Be Giants make perfect sense in spite of the apparent paradox:

"No one in the world ever gets what they want,

And that is beautiful. 

Everybody dies frustrated and sad,

And that is beautiful."

Exactly how everybody saying "Deputy dawg dog a ding dang a depa depa" (twice) fits into this, I am not sure. 

I know I am prone to exaggeration (ya think haha) but yesterday I felt like a strange dull rusty blade was jammed into my duodenum, a weird numinous blade of grief that doesn't do enough damage to cause a person to bleed out, but causes chronic, constant sickening pain. I was walking after my 5K run and reflecting with compassion on those of us who decide to just make a fucking exit from this goddamned planet. Because when we humans are faced with waking up to that dagger every day and that is the best it is going to get, simply in chronic pain at all times, things get bleak. I have lived many days, months and even years in a state of pain like this, and I'm sure my drinking and drugging was an understandable but delusional way of seeking relief. Not my alcoholism and addiction, mind you-- that's a different disease. Long story, not important at this time. 

One for each day of the week! Except Sunday, a day of rest

I know these passages have deep value along the path. For one thing, I am usually forced to reconnect with my Higher Power in the midst of getting beat to shit in this way. My fancy prayers get real fucking simple: "Please. Help me," gasping out loud. But that is often the most effective prayer. I am also forced to reorient myself to how I can think of and help other people. It is one of the most potent antidotes to gut-lacerating despair that I know of. Calling another alcoholic, going to a meeting. 

Or, in the case of the love of my fucking life, letting go of not getting what I want and asking the Universe, capital U, "How can I best be of service to this other person who is also hurting?" In fact, I think the most fundamental problem with "romantic love," or with "being in love," is not the mutual projection, the strong emotions or the other psychic and spiritual and emotional potency. I think it's that the basic condition of being so fucking in love with someone that you can barely breathe is that it also becomes easy to forget to ask how you can actually help them. So much feels at stake, so much in myself feels naked, absolutely vulnerable and tender, that my self-centered fear goes through the roof and I lose sight of the more global, general, truly loving compassion toward the other person. How many times have I professed love for a woman but then sought to burn her fucking life down? Or refused to accept her the way she is? Or wished her ill when she betrayed me or hurt me? Clearly, love is a verb. Fearless on my breath.  




One of the great leaps of spiritual progress for me has been to remember to love someone unconditionally, when possible. One of the things that freed that up for me was realizing that I could still remove myself and get space, if I felt hurt, angry, jealous, abandoned, terrified. That one of the most loving things I can do is retreat when I am about to lash out. 

Anyway, partly because I went to a speaker meeting last night and heard Kate B share her experience strength and hope of 51 years of sobriety, today the rusty dagger has morphed into a gouty bit of uric acid grit under my belly button, still painful but much less alarming. More along the lines of ordinary pain. 

The kind of grit from which a strange, numinous oddly shaped pearl could form, if given a chance. 

13 Ways of Waiting for an Ibis

Noelle S Oszvald, "Prejudice"

I'm observing myself in the current change of circumstances and reconfirming that I am an emotional, sensitive, nostalgic, sentimental and not particularly "functional" person. That I am working my way through a painful separation for the second time in 10 months simply seems absurd. It feels like piling on. Raise up off me! por favor, Universe. (and the Universe replies, "well, you chose all of this.") It's especially weird to separate without ever truly having been able to be together in many tangible ways, and for the exact nature of the change itself to not be crystal clear. It's weird, too, that this one hits at not even six months into the relationship, yet feels more difficult in some ways than the one with A, way back on February 28th. 

Awww, look at how cute February is!

What was difficult about that dissolution with A was the loss of home, security, comfort, routine, structure. And the loss of dignity— betrayal with an old friend of mine, complete cut off, sudden turning of the switch, a severing that felt to me like it was absolutely without compassion. I was unhappy in the partnership, and since then it has become increasingly apparent to me that a major change had to occur, and was bound to occur. In fact, there were many times in the last 18 months or so of that life that I would lie in bed and think to myself "I can't do this anymore. I just can't bear it. I can't do it anymore," and then, like a Beckett character, I would get up and do it. But even with that level of unhappiness, the way the breakup went down was rough as fuck. 

This separation is hard to untangle, in a "chain analysis" kind of way. She hit(s) me like a tidal wave. A few days ago we were talking on Facebook Messenger and we just sort of tumbled past everything into the process of mutually breaking up. It was, like most things with her, completely natural and we understood each other entirely as it unfolded. Simply, I guess she said "I don't want to feel evil and nefarious anymore" and I said "I don't want us to be the cause of you feeling that way, and I love you too much to be having that kind of an affair with you." And that was that, pretty much. 

Realistically, people usually don't leave their existing partnerships or marriages for the person with whom they are having something on the side.  I resist the word "affair," since it seems base and ordinary and of course I want to prop my ego up with something more. Is "love affair" better? Yeah, no. I don't know. Maybe? No. 

It is far more common for people to leave their existing marriages for internal reasons, and that process can take a long, long time and is extremely complicated, many times. And I authentically do not want her to leave her husband in order to be with me. That is a kind of pressure and responsibility I honestly do not want, and that I know would offer far too much material for guilt and self-loathing, acrimony and suffering all around. I also have come to believe a weird little folk wisdom saying I recently heard: "How you get them is how you lose them." Reflecting back on a lot of the breakups I've had, that ends up being true a lot of the time. 

This oddly hilarious link provides a mountain of data (of questionable worth, but since when did that stop anyone?) regarding affairs. I also tend to avoid the word "cheating." All of the language around the deal is cheap, juvenile and stupid, it seems to me. But, as she would say, I am a hopeless romantic, so of course I want to find some poetry in a messy reality. And as I do honestly feel in my marrow, we two were and are up to something altogether different, in spite of the similarities. Yes yes, I hear you snickering. Whatevs. 

Hahahahaha! haha. ha. 

As much as I imagine we two being together "someday" and knowing in my bones that it would be great, I also thought we could sustain a romantic connection while waiting for circumstances to change. It seemed doable for a while. But it became more and more fraught. Especially in light of her husband being a good man, a good father, a provider, stable, grounded, reliable and kind. It makes no ethical or moral difference, probably, when one's spouse is a fucking dick and you cheat on them, but it definitely paves more of a rationalized and at least temporarily forgivable path. 

I guess some people do go on for years in an affair or series of affairs under such circumstances, but maybe that is also without a lot of emotional and spiritual connection. "Just sex" is maybe more forgivable or less devastating to the conscience and to the marriage itself, especially when there is little sexual spark in the marriage. But she and I got way more than either of us bargained for out of this. It seems like actually falling in love with the person with whom one is having an affair is the special thing that makes the affair impossible. Nice.

Has everyone known this shit for decades except me? 

When I did my sex inventory in AA recently, I found that, out of the multitude of entanglements I've had, I've only been involved in an affair twice. And *both* of those times, the affair ended the marriage or relationship of one or both of us and we ended up together, for years. Most recently, A was emotionally cheating on her husband of 11 years with me, but with lightning speed separated from her husband and filed for divorce. We were playing a sort of silly sexual game of waiting until she separated from her husband to become lovers. Looking back, I have to admit that I took credit for her leaving her husband and it was a boost to my ego. It felt like a victory, like I won some kind of ugly competition. She and I had only been emotionally involved for less than a month when she burned her whole life down (for me, I lied to myself). In spite of the usual reassurances, "Oh I am not leaving him for you, the marriage has been awful for years, this was in the works for a long time," which I wanted to believe, I also felt powerful and important, to have such an effect on someone's life. That's pretty unpleasant to get real about, but it's what it was. A was also in the habit of denigrating her ex-husband and talking about how much better I was— a combined potent ego boost and super red flag. "Pay attention to how people talk about their exes. They'll talk about you that way someday," my first AA sponsor told me. Being the language poet euphemizer I am, I pretended I was merely a "catalyst." I was in fact a catalyst, but that is not all I was. I was also a selfish, egotistical asshole. 

My sane and sound ideal would function differently, if I had a time machine and could go back to September 2011. I would have held some ground and said "Why don't you see if you can salvage your marriage? Or at the very least take a year or two to be on your own and heal? Then let's see if we still have something." It's something along those lines that seems to be happening with the Loml, so that's progress. In spite of how shitty I feel and how difficult it is. I woke at 3:30 this morning gasping for breath, in the midst of a nightmare where I was having the skin of my back removed one layer at a time. For example. Which was you know a little unpleasant. 

So what to do. 

Nothing to be done.

Sam you handsome devil, you sure look amused

Yet again, I'm reminded of the first step of Codependents Anonymous: "We admitted we were powerless over others— that our lives had become unmanageable." Nothing says "powerless over others" than to want someone 100% and end up on a back burner. Even when the good, sound, sane and healthy, loving and real reasons for that compartmentalization are perfectly clear and mutual. Even when I myself decided that I no longer wanted to cause the harm of dividing her (who, on our last visit, said she felt like Stretch Armstrong), or enabling a situation where she felt evil and nefarious. For myself, since I am definitely not entirely some kind of noble and altruistic tough guy Rick Blaine, I no longer found it easy to deal with the realities of her existing marriage, or with the constant reminders that I was in practical and understandable but no less jarring ways pretty far down the list, even on the best days. 

Decision trees come to mind. At the top, maybe: are you waiting or not waiting? Yes, I'm waiting. That much is clear. 

But at the very next set of nodes, the ramifications become much more complex. Because there are a lot of different ways to wait. You might be thinking, uh, yeah, Percy old man, you should not be waiting. Give it up. You're out of the picture. That's all well and good. I've thought of it myself, in that kind of impulsive "fuck this, I'm out of here" way, because I don't know about you, but that is one of my defense mechanisms against excruciating pain. But as in so many things, there's de jure and there's de facto. No matter what I would try to do, the fact seems to be that I am waiting, so I might as well accept that for now and figure out exactly *how* I want to wait. 

And that is where I get all spiritual and shit. In a way grounded in recovery, of course. Since July, I've been waiting by accepting the trade off of the boundaries of the affair. We had loosely agreed to see each other every two months. I had even scheduled a 5 day visit to her city before last week's visit was even over. One of the desolate things in the current situation: I keep thinking about going on that trip and then remembering that I canceled the flight and the lodging. So, anyway, fundamentally, I'm not waiting in that particular way anymore. That kind of waiting has been canceled. 

Is it possible for me to wait but without attachment to the desired outcome? Paradoxical as that sounds. It could be 19 years. You know, I could be dead by then, considering the cohort I'm in, even in light of eating my Brussels sprouts and being obsessed with my Fitbit. 

My counselor told me to sit quietly for a while and imagine that what I wanted were available, rather than unavailable, and see how I felt. I did so, and every molecule of my everything hollered hell yes, please, yesterday if possible. He was impressed, since he had been theorizing that I only wanted it because it was impossible. I would jump for it tomorrow, if it were possible. So it seems a precarious position to be in. I can't control the situation or make the desired outcome happen. I can't manipulate or deliver ultimatums or turn my wooing powers up to 11 or any of those things, as tempting as they all are. I can't force myself to close off, reject, become cold and just move on. Well, I could. I have done that before. The truth is, at this point, I don't want to. 

I'm reminded of lines from Eliot's East Coker: 

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony 
Of death and birth.

The two of us have acknowledged that we both want the same thing. There doesn't seem to be any healthy or sustainable way to reach that same outcome anytime soon. And remaining in an affair meanwhile also no longer feels healthy, right, sane or sustainable. So, by necessity, the waiting has to be without attachment to outcome. The other kind of waiting would be quite different. "Just wait for another year, then we can get married." That's the promise of an outcome and a timeline on which it would occur. We're not doing that, at least not at this point, for entirely understandable reasons. There has been wild and impulsive speculation, but it always ends up counterweighed by sobering reality.

Anyway, it is what it is. 

Here's a pic of a baby scarlet ibis to look at meanwhile. I'm sure it will still be adorable, even, say, 19 years from now.  

Percy's Pet from Hades

Pyro Pet, an Xmas gift from the if-possible fiancé, The Loml, with whom I'm no longer in a romantic relationship, provided an excellent thematic backdrop to the past 24 hours. A giant black wax cat with a rad looking skeleton slowly revealed as he melted down. Slow burning!

Funny Story

Have you heard the one about the guy who was too chickenshit to propose to any of the women he loved, for, like decades? 

So he finally meets a woman and falls in love and wants to marry her, wants to be her husband, can't believe it, totally unexpected, even though the situation is complicated, but he figures, well, all situations are complicated. 

He and the woman finally get a chance to be together in ordinary space time and he sees his chance. He stumbles through a bunch of if's— important qualifiers, given the delicate situation and the desire to avoid causing harm—if and if and if. But after those, he finally manages to form the words with his mouth, "Will you marry me?"  



And she says, "Yes, if possible."





And then they break up. 

On the Road from Little Rock to Amarillo, July 16th, 2017

As Constant as the Northern Star

Things much feared and resisted, completely unwanted and absolutely unmanageable often come to pass. 




Because somehow we are like bugs in amber, when it comes to our relationship to time. Trapped, that is. The analogy doesn't really hold water. 

Sometimes there are no words. There's just a dagger in the heart and a rusty knife in the gut. There's a special little room in Hades that offers that. Come on in, here's your dagger, here's your rusty knife. Have fun. 

Why get a tattoo when you can just download the images on Google? Hard to imagine anything like the above image being permanent, or at least as permanent as skin. Which, come to think of it, is about as permanent as a candle flame. Of course, the above image is muy dramatico. Romantical!

The reality is less so. 

Losing My Religion

Well, frankly, it's long gone. 

And every year at Christmas, I am reminded of what I did once believe, at first as a matter of indoctrination and later, fervently and with all the Pauline conviction of one who has had a conversion experience, and then later still, tentatively but in increasingly vague "mystical" ways until— so tentative as to be meaningless, and then poof, gone. 

But even as late as my junior year of college, at age 23, I was trying to rescue Christianity for myself, from it's unlikely and incredibly far fetched and absurd claims. My second semester junior essay was an attempt to encounter the synoptic Gospels in a way which would square with my burgeoning sense of reality, my increasing doubt and incredulity. In fact, I think that enterprise began the process of losing the religion of my childhood once and for all. 

See ya! Wouldn't want to be ya!

To be perfectly clear, I am referring to Christianity here, the religion that claims with a completely straight face that God impregnated a virgin, sent his son as expiation of original sin, that incarnation of the divine in human form actually occurred, that this same God had his son crucified, but this same son came back to life and continues to live now. That is the story in the Gospels-- a lot of other things, equally difficult to accept even on faith, were added by Paul and the church and later accretions. The Second Coming, Armageddon, salvation versus damnation, etc. 

When I was a kid, I just went along with all of it. So I have had that experience of complete unquestioning acceptance of cultural indoctrination. I'm glad I had the experience, because it has helped me understand just how powerful these contexts can be. It seems to me there are a great many people who have stayed with that indoctrination for the rest of their lives, and who were able to accept it entirely on authority and not question any of it. It is shocking to me now to imagine myself at this time with the same religion of my childhood. 

That's nice Kurt. See you in hell. 

Being essentially an aesthete even as a boy, what I most appreciated about Christianity were the trappings-- candlelight, live music (our Presbyterian church spent $250,000 on a pipe organ in 1975-- a sum that is now equivalent to more than $1 million— and, in the face of protests about the expenditure, of course it was all "for the glory of God," which is an argument I am much more likely to accept NOW, but that's somewhat of a different story)— stained glass, amazing stories of magic and power. I liked the idea that I was special enough to be loved by a loving God, and that humanity as a whole was special enough to be worth saving. The Jesus of my earlier years was basically the nice, sort of bland hippie Jesus who you could talk to and who would put his hand on your shoulder and say "It's okay, I forgive you." There's nothing necessarily wrong with imagining the Universe in such a kind form. 

This kind of image on the wall in my Sunday School classroom— then home for a nice dinner of lamb patties with mint sauce

Especially around holidays such as Christmas, I reveled in the full range of color, light, scent, celebration. In spite of it ostensibly being a celebration of the birth of Jesus, it always seemed Dionysian, hedonistic and pagan to me (though I didn't have that language of course). 

Combined with all of this Presbyterian suburban friendly country club white collar Christianity, there were other dimensions within layers of Christmas that I particularly relished. Santa Claus and his inexplicable magic (in the house we moved to in 1967, there was no fireplace- and I was disconsolate, until it was explained to me that Santa also can come in through an attic or even a window, because he's magic), gift giving and receiving, wrapping paper and its colors and shine and designs, the tree and its decorations and lights, candy, cookies, the whole deal. It was also true that my parents and siblings all seemed much more cheerful at least for a while every Christmas, and I observed that the older relatives all partook of cocktails, beer and wine a little more loosely than usual. It all somehow jumbled into a sort of odd pastiche that basically said "well, if this is what religion is, cool. I like it. It's fun and shiny. I guess I'm a Christian." 

I went for many years under the general assumption in American culture, maybe especially back in former times, that the only real religion was Christianity, and that the other religions of the world were quaint superstitions at best, or the road to hell at worst. I believed for a while that, if one was not Christian, one was definitely going to hell for all eternity. I believed I would live forever in heaven if I just had faith in Jesus. These were the simple dimensions of my indoctrinated faith from age 5 to about 12 or so. 

Things began to get complicated as I got older. I've written elsewhere of weird white light mystical experiences that felt like direct contact with the divine. Alongside these same experiences, probably due to conversations with friends who were not religious, I began to have doubts. The more I learned about the mind and the more empirical I became, the more doubtful all of the propositions involved were. Yet I kept having powerful experiences of something sacred in life, and because of my indoctrination, I thought they were necessarily Christian experiences. 

There were darker stretches all of a sudden where I didn't believe any of it. Yet I often pretended outwardly that I did. Alcoholism started to emerge early in my life also, and Christmas through New Year's became the perfect liquid slide, a great occasion to get intoxicated with what seemed like cultural permission. It all got tangled up too in my conflation of intoxication with spirituality, the great yearning for Oneness with the divine that Carl Jung talks about in his letter to Bill W. 

There was also falling in love with my first real Christian girlfriend the very same year we read the Bible at my liberal arts college, as a seminar reading. I was meditating one night in my dorm room with Coltrane on the stereo and had another white light experience. Christianity influenced that relationship in mostly toxic ways for the next several months. 

But by the time I was in my mid-20's, suddenly, Christianity was what I used to believe but did no more. 

This is an awful existential moment. At least, it was for me. Because the indoctrination was so strong, losing faith altogether was equally strong. If we are not saved, if there is no Jesus, no resurrection, no eternal life, then we are nothing, there is no hope and when we die, that's that. For some years, parallel with my increasing alcohol consumption, I grasped in vain at anything that seemed like it would give life meaning. 

Nothing ever reliably did. 

I am very glad I had this dark, hopeless stretch also. I believe it has made me more compassionate and open minded, and more capable of holding space for my own despair as well as that of others. I don't enjoy the company of people who have not crashed and burned all the way to the fucking ground at least once. Fortunately, that's a huge segment of the human race, so it is still possible for me to have friends. 

I also think there is a distinct and very important difference between an atheist who has been an atheist all of their life and an atheist who once was a believer. I am glad to be the latter, because I think the weird trip through belief gave me access to a lot of inspired conflict and torment and complexity that a simpler, more consistent experience doesn't provide. I understand the fevered religious impulse of utter devotion, and I understand the complete despair of not having anything to believe in combined with the conviction that one *has to believe in something*. (If I don't have to believe in anything, then the despair goes away, or is replaced by other kinds of despair). 

Since I got sober 13 + years ago, I have enjoyed cultivating a spirit of devotion, wonder, gratitude, compassion, mudita and reverence without believing in God, and without having any religious beliefs at all, for that matter. My higher power in sobriety is love, freedom, art and inspiration, still a touch of the Dionysian revelry but without chemical assistance, still a touch of hedonism without same, resonating with the wild, with beauty, with music and the planet I call home. I pray and meditate every day. Many of the things I do on a daily basis also are prayers, or are rooted in a meditative consciousness. But none of my practice is conditional on any beliefs in anything at all. 

Sometimes I miss having a set of doctrines into which I could nestle back and just accept entirely on faith. But usually I am quite relieved not to be in the war anymore between my naturally devotional spirit and my naturally skeptical, questioning mind. In order to make a home for myself, I had to leave the home of my childhood decisively. It's funny too that this is also a journey away from all of Western culture, in many ways. 

That is probably worth at least another separate dispatch from Hades, however.  

Do Not Turn Your Head and Look Away

An interesting conversation with someone important to me last week has me reflecting on these strands-- why blog? why tell tales? especially why be bluntly honest (as far as is possible) in relaying disintegration, suffering, turmoil, or happiness, love, "falling in love" (from a great and gruesome height, says Dar Williams), or really-- anything personal. Why disclose? Especially in a setting that is quasi-anonymous, where a core of people (if you can see this linked on FB, you're one of them) know who "good old Percy" is. 

Simultaneously, another important friend began a blog and forwarded the first post to me-- a searing, aching, bold, honest autobiographical narrative of discovering sexual pleasure, discovering the sacred, and the overlap between the sacred and sex, and along the way, being sexually assaulted. Brilliant and tender, naked and real.  

So these two things working together have "good old Percy" reflecting on the written arts of revealing, of autobiography, of disclosure and storytelling. Not on the process itself but on the main question: WHY do it? To what end? 

I have done no research at all on what must be a mountain of discourse regarding these questions. So I'm only free-forming here. 

Self-serving and self-indulgent motives include "processing by writing," the weird dialectic of not knowing what the actual fuck is going on and discovering at least the form of what it is by writing it down. It is a trip from nebulous to somewhat concrete, with all of those attendant dangers. And the trip absolutely does not have to be published anywhere. 

Lies, damn lies, and autobiography. 

Also, to get attention-- like having company in misery. Or to get sympathy. 

Or to seem smart, funny, twisted and interesting. 

There are probably other self-serving reasons. A lot of other self-serving reasons. Revenge, retaliation, self-pity, the desire to shock, etc. As a satirist of Bob Dylan in the Monty Python troupe says: "I suffered for my music. Now it's your turn."

Now of course everything we do is infused with darker motives, like Pilostyles within dyeweed. 

So it's a little bit of an endless and self-flagellating shitshow to be interrogating those darker motives all the time. Useful during therapy, stepwork, "growth periods." But oppressively fraught with constant second, third and fourth guessing otherwise. Eventually we just have to do what we are authentically moved to do and spin that wheel. 

On a more useful level (not as if the self-serving and the useful are mutually exclusive-- in fact, they are probably inextricably interwoven, as if noble altruism is endoparasitized by greed)--

Bearing witness to oneself. And giving other people the opportunity to bear witness. And then to identify, or compare. Maybe even to offer the opportunity for other people to feel better, since some can read and shake their heads and say "well, at least I'm not as fucked up as 'good old Percy'". A friendly Christmas gift?

But on a different level of exchange— one of the central tenets of Zen Peacekeepers, for example:

"Bearing witness to the joy and suffering of the world."

"It is the role of the Bodhisattva to bear witness. The Buddha can stay in the realm of not-knowing, the realm of blissful non-attachment. The Bodhisattva vows to save the world, and therefore to live in the world of attachment, for that is also the world of empathy, passion, and compassion. Ultimately, she accepts all the difficult feelings and experiences that arise as part of every-day life as nothing but ways of revelation, each pointing to the present moment as the moment of enlightenment.

Bearing witness gives birth to a deep and powerful intelligence that does not depend on study or action, but on presence.

We bear witness to the joy and suffering that we encounter. Rather than observing the situation, we become the situation. We became intimate with whatever it is – disease, war, poverty, death. When you bear witness you’re simply there, you don’t flee."-- Bernie Glassman

Now look, I ain't no fuckin' Bodhisattva. "We are not saints," said Bill W, and he knew. 

But I am learning more and more how to make space. And how to take myself seriously enough to demand space from other people in which I have a right to be seen and heard. The poet Norman Dubie used to say to the lyric poets who were his students: "Damn it, you have a right to breathe. You have a right to take up space." Because a lot of those lyric poets live tentatively. As if who they are is a stain, for which they have to apologize. "Sorry for breathing," say a lot of the hypersenstive empaths. "It would be better if I didn't exist, but I'm here, and dying makes a mess, so I'll just apologize every second of my life." 

As a white male, of course, I am given a default pass to take up physical space, the space of discourse and a lot of other kinds of space-- literal and metaphorical manspreading. So it might seem like privileged whining to talk about feeling silenced, censored and relegated to shadows. 

And this is an interesting space indeed-- quasi-anonymous, as befits an arena in which 12 step work is revealed. If "good old Percy" weren't in anonymous programs, this might not even be an anonymous blog. Because the great project of this narcissistic age, where we have instant access to publishing on a scale hitherto unimagineable, is in fact anti-narcissistic: full-glory humanity on display, warts and all, and what used to be considered too shameful or embarrassing to reveal in public? Ha, well, there's nothing off limits anymore. Of course, one could lament the loss of natural discretion that would prevent a person from having a public nervous breakdown, or talk about any of the other most intimate details of their lives. But it's too late. That horse left the barn a long time ago. 

No way this single BLOG POST can get at the root of "good old Percy's" enterprise. (mmmhmmm, I have a BLOG, he said, stroking his chin and imbued with the radioactive aura of precious self-importance)-- 

Somehow I'm reminded of an eerie satirical song by David Byrne, The Accident:

When you see an accident do not turn your head and look away
I can see detectives are sifting through the wreckage we have made

It starts with only one kiss
It changes everything

TV crews arrive on the scene
They say "See the man who lost everything"
He lies shattered like a glass on the ground
They say "Only you can bring him around
& set me free"

I became delirious
Palm trees gently swaying in the breeze
On a desert island, I haven't seen a human being for years

The house where we used to live
Described by witnesses
TV crews arrive on the scene
& the anchormen they break down and weep
Living proof that things are not what they seem
It takes all these wild and wonderful things -
To set me free

Back in Black

So, shit is pretty fuckin' messed up right about now. According to my astrologer friend, this whole Pluto/Moon combo is set to last until November 2018. So good old Percy finally has less than a year for this kind of Hades walk, supposedly, although Percy's astrological natal chart has Saturn conjunct Moon (so it's been a threesome of symbolically heavy, heavy shit my friends) and then Jupiter on the exit of all transits. And I guess the Saturn/Pluto conjunction doesn't even go exact until 2020. I don't have a 21st century ephemeris, so I'm not sure. A rough estimate for the amount of time it takes for Pluto to move through 8 degrees of the zodiac is 6 years. 

Good old Percy's lower midheaven, 8 continuous degrees of heaviness from the Moon through jovial Jupiter

The point is, well, even without regard to the ancient mantic arts, the long slog through the Underworld continues. It's dark down here. Hard to see. Nothing is particularly definite or delineated. Completely not attached to the concrete, daylight world of the solidness of real objects and real structures. Indeterminate, eerie. And even when one lights a match, the shadows are very long indeed. 

The Persephone theme is also resonant. I'm reminded of a weird concept Percy had back in 2008 or so, of doing a completely improvised opera (well, the storyboard was mapped out from ancient myth) of the whole Persephone story. Said opera was performed in a high mountain arts town and I think there might even be video. But the real idea behind the project was about the agency of women. The agency of what Jungians would call "the feminine." 

Proserpina by Rossetti, 1870

Because of course it's not just abduction in that myth— it's complete dislocation to Hades, half the year (or, in the older versions of the myth, a more generous one third of the year). And the weird bargain of a portion of the year above ground, in the warmth, life and light. 

Of course, the ancient agrarian origins of the myth, the vegetative symbolism, the weird way she is abducted, the stupid little trick of the pomegranate seeds, and her relationship with her mother are all...fertile? Ripe? And a good Jungian would point out that, the less definite the archetype, the more powerful it is— and, as streamlined and almost silly as the myth became via the clod-like anthropomorphizing Romans, both Demeter and Persephone go way, way back and have dozens of names in many cultures. 

Anyway, look, flatly speaking, for long stretches of time, Persephone ain't available. Married, in fact. It doesn't even matter that she's married to Hades. That seems almost trivial. There are even interesting facets of the mythology that suggest she loves that part of the year down there in the dark, doling out the curses of the living on the dead, hanging with her fairly badass husband. Queen of the fuckin' Underworld, bro. In a way, it's the best of both worlds. 

Anonymous 19th century oil painting of Hades abducting Persephone while she's out picking flowers and being all maidenly n shit

Anyway, the point is, well, huh, I am now not exactly sure what the point is. I guess I am just saying that the weird journey continues to unfold in weird ways through weird days. Last night's dreams involved tidal waves wiping out entire skylines of huge cities, the kind of dreams that Percy has when everything seems to be completely and totally out of control. Lots of dreams lately have been dark, disturbed, roiled, foreboding, sad and tormented. Cold abandonment, being lost, wandering, running with shithead people who can't be trusted, murder and mayhem, fires, floods and so on. 

So how to end a rambling multivalent polysemic blog post that doesn't even really have a red thread.

Happy holidays! I guess.