Travels with Sappho: Into the Flood Again

I left Tempe after the last stint, which I had arranged in order to get Sappho's low beams fixed and get her an oil change, as well as generally touch base with something familiar and maybe grounding, after a fairly chaotic and rough couple of weeks on the road. While in Tempe, I did my laundry, reorganized the car, put a bunch of stuff I had been lugging around into storage, stayed with a friend of mine and got some good human Platonic friendly time as well as some cool time with her two dogs and cat. 

But I knew I was headed out again, and decided to go up to Las Vegas to have dinner with a friend of mine who was in that weird, totally surreal and disconnected "city" for the behemoth Consumer Electronics Show, because she is involved in 3-D fabrication and leading edge new design and manufacturing tech. I wanted to talk with her about possible applications of some of the statistical, machine learning methods I've learned in my Ph.D. program to her project, which is a work force training initiative based at MIT. 

So I found the cheapest but not the sleaziest place I could find in Vegas, and we got together for a nice dinner. She grew up in Newport, RI and McCoy Tyner actually played at one of her birthday parties. She said this with total casualness and as if it were the most normal thing in the world. My jaw had to be held in place via the firmest self control possible. Anyway, there might be some ways I can contribute to her project. Time will tell. 

I left Vegas feeling empty and stupid, unhappy and restless, cold- hearted, self-pitying, and angry. I knew I had to get out into the wild again. I decided to go to Death Valley and see about camping up at Wildrose, free camping but at a fairly high elevation, in the foothills of the Panamint Range. I stayed there two nights, with overnight lows in the mid-20's, and it was a definite cold-to-the-bone winter feeling. Some good solitude though. And a lot of time working in the warm car on the dissertation and preparing an article for submission to Ecology and Evolution. Having the cigarette lighter car charger for the laptop was a major breakthrough. 

Sunrise out the "office" window

 Almost full Wolf Moon from Wildrose

No idea how accurate Sappho's thermometer is but she claimed 26F

 One of my favorite spots in Death Valley is way up here

 Experimenting with Sappho's capabilities on various kinds of roads. Amazed by the way she just prowls along, sure footed and with complete control.

 Old charcoal kilns 

The pinks of a glorious winter sunset being caught by the Panamints to the east. The view from my campsite at Wildrose. 

I realized I had to get back on the grid, sadly, to stay in communication with my dissertation adviser and submit the article, etc. I was dreading being connected again, because over the course of a couple days and nights away from human contact, I had found some serenity and peace in my heart. It was a surprise to be able to access that. 

I decided to get connected again up along the Eastern Sierra, where I had never been before. I have always either headed home from Death Valley or to the coast and the enticements of Los Angeles or San Diego. I had often seen signs for Lone Pine, Big Pine, and Bishop, but had never headed up that way. So that's where I went. 

 The wild combination of the low Mohave and the rising Sierras

Echinocereus engelmannii along CA 168 east from Big Pine

 Full Wolf Moon, Bishop

 Took a break from article formatting to drive up into the mountains as far as I could. 

Loved this place

The best restaurant in Bishop is at the bowling alley

A snowstorm blew in down the Sierras while I was there

I had been hoping to retain my peace of mind and heart while spending three nights in Bishop, but this didn't happen. Which is an understatement. I was able to format and submit the article, and make a series of important contacts, etc, but my sense of being heartbroken and bereft started kicking in again. I was avoiding social media, thinking avoidance would assist in me keeping equanimity. But I was also dipping into Instagram a little bit, and every time, just feeling sad and lonely. By the time I left Bishop, I was really an emotional mess. I had the following strange and extremely vivid fantasy while I was there, triggered, I suppose, by the romantic combination of winter weather, the old motel I was staying at, etc.:

I flashed on a 1950's couple, all dressed up, the man with an overcoat and a suit and cologne, the woman in a fancy blouse and pleated skirt, expensive but understated jewelry, and they had been driving for hours across tiny old snowy 1950s California roads, and they had arrived at this old motel where I was staying and checked in, in the middle of basically a blizzard, and they were madly, totally, completely in love with each other. Youngish, maybe early 40's or so. And when they got into the room, they turned the little wall gas heater on, and it made that igniting sound and rush of warm air, and they started taking off their winter things, and the woman took off her jewelry and very carefully placed it on the nightstand, and they smiled at each other, and there was a perfect kind of radiant, warm, shy, and wordless tenderness between them, and I knew at that moment they were both married to other people, and they had come to Bishop from swanky Los Angeles, to see each other for the last time, ever, to say goodbye, but to sleep together one last weekend, to be with each other one last weekend. It was so incredibly vivid and real-seeming, poignant and true feeling, tender and weird. It was so vivid that I myself felt heartbroken for these two, and I wanted to talk them out of it, see if maybe they couldn't find a way out of their situations, find a way to just make this their life. It still feels incredibly tender, loving, kind, gentle and yet the saddest tale. 

Two side effects of solo travel that I had not counted on: the reliance on public spaces like coffee shops for internet also means hearing endless love songs; and, going to interesting places also means seeing a lot of couples who are having a great time together. I guess these things combined to inflame my imagination. I have no idea who The Lovers of Bishop were, but it hit me pretty hard. I hope they found happiness somehow.  

So I set out for Death Valley again, in the hopes that wildness would get me back that brief sense of equanimity from before the Bishop trip. But I didn't really have the spine for more nights in the mid to low 20's so I tried a couple nights at the $16 Texas Springs campground, at much lower elevation, one of those weird national park campgrounds that is not very well designed, where campsites are right next to each other. My mood just kept crumbling, my heart kept shredding up. I was opening to something that I had been resisting, is how it felt. I'll write more about the utterly ferocious storm of emotions that I was about to go into in another post, when I myself get it a little more clearly. Let's just stick with old Percy's travel tales eh wot. 

starlight, star bright, first star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might. 

The two nights at Texas Springs in Death Valley were marked by the usual shitty human campground behavior. The first night, a couple nearby, where the woman just talked, and talked, and talked, endlessly into the night, and then, when they finally did go to sleep, one of them was a ferocious snoring beast. The second night, a couple of women right next to my camp who were up late drinking and talking, just having a good time, but with utterly no awareness of being in a public campground and no effort to moderate their volume. Volume always goes up as more alcohol is consumed; it's like a Newtonian law of ethanol to volume proportion.They also kept swinging a very, very bright halogen lantern around, so it seemed my tent was being swept by a searchlight every now and then. Bear in mind they were an actual distance from where I was trying to sleep of perhaps 15 feet. It is so weird to be out in the great, vast silent middle of nowhere and have to wear earplugs, but this is almost always the way it is in these public campgrounds. 

I decided I had to go as far from humanity as possible, especially since my state of heart and mind was seriously deteriorating. Again, more on that later. Anyway, I went to a wilderness area and I was the only person camping there for several nights. It was so silent on windless nights (which all were but one), that I could hear my own heartbeat in my head. There were a couple of owls. Otherwise, nothing at all, except for the trucks going to and from a mining site nearby, and those were very few and far between, and only in the morning and at night. 

Now, I am back in the "civilization" of Tempe, uncomfortable in my hotel room, but getting a pre-op exam prior to cataract surgery, scheduling said surgery, meeting with my committee chair tomorrow to discuss necessary revisions of the dissertation before submission for formatting review and sending it out to the rest of the committee. 

I reconnected with a bit of social media and someone asked me, "How are you?" I never know how to answer this question these days. I mean, the honest answer is: I am not well. I feel like I'm totally destroyed in just about every conceivable way. I'm heartbroken, bewildered, anxious, living in total uncertainty. I have felt fortunate to have Pema Chodron's company and her book, When Things Fall Apart. I had somehow thought that the worst passages through Hades had concluded already, and yet, from Bishop to now feels more challenging than anything I experienced previously. More challenging than anything I have experienced in my life, actually. 

I'll write about the dimensions of those challenges another time, or maybe not at all. I am, while experiencing a baffling phase of heart and mind, also finding my entire process absolutely tiresome. I am exhausting myself daily. I have no idea how certain friends have been able to so kindly and generously keep listening to me. I can barely even listen to myself. I keep trying to be kind to myself and I keep trying to call a moratorium and just take a fucking break, but the energies are not cooperating, at all. "Things" I thought I had entirely resolved or at least had really begun to move away from have returned so powerfully that at times I feel like they will kill me. Not exaggerating. 

I guess it's fierce weather, and it's not linear, and who knows what lies on the other side? 

Certain annihilations apply

Of course, having made a plea for the importance and authenticity of the experience of falling in love and the loss often associated with it, I can also see why friends and counselors adopt a skeptical, protective, and rational stance. 

As true as it may be that any two lovers who have fallen in love and who risk the vulnerability, exposure, tenderness, trust, and intimacy of that experience are absolutely unique in relationship to each other, everything dear and sacred about that experience is highly likely to be destroyed. 

Whatever seems special to one's lover will be shared with someone else. Whatever flatters our ego most will be a quality or experience in some other man that will rouse the same response from our lover. The most exposed, shameless and tender of all experiences will be shared with someone else. That's the highest likelihood. Nothing will be protected, nothing will be tended or kept safe and secret, nothing will last and be treated with the protective shield it may deserve, probably by either party. 

The most searing and tender, vulnerable ways we open our heart will be destroyed. Those secret and sacred ways will be destroyed either by oblivion and forgetting, or by outright intentional malice, resentment and bitterness, or by duplicity, betrayal and abandonment. These just seem to me to be lain facts out of 42 years of experience in this arena. I have been unconscionably destructive, sometimes even taking the most valuable and sahing it to the ground without even having a second thought. This has also been done to me. 

So it makes sense that those who would like to keep us safe, make us steady and sure, put us back on some kind of solid ground, or otherwise protect us, would introduce some skepticism and even cynicism. We take what is best and most tender in ourselves and open it to a very dangerous animal indeed. The most dangerous animal, in many ways. Another human being. And all of this in spite of an abundance of evidence that we human beings are fickle, flighty, selfish, unthinking, perhaps essential unkind. Unkind and vicious by nature, with kindness and compassion seeming to require years of work and practice. 

Nevertheless, I still advocate for the authenticity and importance of falling in love and its associated losses. Pema Chodron's sign comes to mind, that she had in her bathroom for years:

“Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.”

Because it is obsidian, and because it is my heart

It may be a somewhat overly dramatic "one liner." Maybe we can find that which is indestructible in some other ways. Maybe the stabbing pain of loss is not necessary "annihilating" but simply difficult. But, regardless, showing up for the open heart when life asks it of us seems to me the only living, pulsing, breathing and real choice. 

Keeping it real

I've been drawn toward getting back into a counseling situation many times since the last series of counseling sessions ended, but there's a key element that brings up resistance in me. 

A heart-shaped rock along the strand at Bahía de Los Angeles

There's a tendency in relationship recovery and in therapy to be skeptical about romantic love, to reject the idea that it is very important or real. It's a side effect of a few different aspects of the 12 step approach as well as how counselors are trained these days. For 12 step people, I think it's just that romantic love causes so much turmoil and relapse that there is a perhaps healthy fear and distancing around it. For counselors, I think they are trained to believe in rational narrative and client advocacy, as in, adhering to a role of being a sort of superego for the client, or wise parent, or otherwise skeptical guide. 

I have never had a counselor or therapist simply say to me, wow, this all sounds like a very powerful experience, and I can totally see why you are in so much pain and experiencing so much bewilderment. They have always gone to trying to get me to re-frame my experience along more reasonable, rational and controlled ways. I have friends who do that too. I've described my emotional experience to friends and had them immediately say things like "well, if this other person were available, you wouldn't even be interested," or whatever. I think these attacks on my experience are rooted in their own fears and hurt, as well as a desire to protect me. If someone is "causing me pain," that person is an enemy, period. This is a ridiculously juvenile perspective, but I can see where it comes from.

The problem there is that then my energy becomes directed toward *defending my experience* rather than finding ways to integrate it and heal from it. I don't want to have to *prove* to a counselor or therapist that my experience is real. Or to a friend, for that matter. 

I want to start from the ground of completely accepting that it's all exactly what I experienced. I want to talk with and work with people who take falling in love seriously and honor it and are interested in ways to make sense of it from that perspective. It seems like this is a somewhat rare thing these days. Our culture in general seems to be much more oriented toward being skeptical and cynical about limerence and the depths of that experience. I can see why, but I'm not interested in that path. 

So how would I go about shopping for such a counselor or therapist? I guess I could just ask, how do you work with clients who have suffered from romantic love and loss? I imagine the skeptics and cynics might say something like "I try to get them to see that their attachment was delusional and get them to be more grounded in reality." The right kind of counselor might say something like, "I acknowledge that these are among the most powerful and profound experiences we can have, and work with the client on grieving authentically and finding ways to integrate their suffering into a greater understanding," or something like that. 

The plain fact for me is that falling in love has provided me with, for one thing, the most direct and immediate experience of the sacred, and the experience has been among the most profound and moving of my life. So when I encounter the skepticism, cynicism and rationality of our contemporary attitudes, which sometimes even bleed over into outright mockery or ridicule, I feel wounded and become defensive, and as if my way of contacting the divine is being mocked and rejected. I have no interest in this dynamic anymore, and I simply want to start from a place of total acceptance that my falling in love is a real and true and authentic experience, and that the loss is real and true and authentic, and that I don't need to talk myself out of either, but, rather, find some way to become whole within the plain reality of it. 

A friend of mine recently wrote, in an email:

"bottomless sadness (love that you call it this)...is...evil...and maybe the answer to everything...maybe one of the most important ways of loving...maybe one of the only places from which i can see myself and others...fucking sucks...fucking sucks...fucking stupid." 

Yes, all of those things. 

With Love and Squalor

One cold, windy, rainy morning, camping on the Gulf of California near Bahía de Los Angeles a couple weeks ago, I was lying in my tent and heard a strange but vaguely familiar sound. "What the hell is that? Seal? Coyote? Dog? Bird?" I realized it was the sound of the woman in the camper about 200 yards away, having sex. I felt a modicum of a sort of combined aversion and curiosity as her cries mingled with the cold air. The curiosity was voyeuristic. The aversion was because it all sounded exaggerated, somewhat fake, and definitely performative. And I felt bitter about that, thinking about people and sex and bad faith, manipulative, fake ass fucking. 

I mean, who knows, maybe this guy was the best ever, the love of her life right?, and maybe it was just real and fierce and amazing and she'd never, ever forget it and either these two would live happily and faithfully ever after in animalistic bliss or maybe she'd go on to fuck dozens of other guys but she'd never forget this one amazing guy who fucked her on a cold, rainy, windy morning camping on the Gulf of California. 

But my thoughts (as her wild vocalizations continued) went much more toward cynicism. Fake ass fucking, cowardice, betrayal, duplicity, lies and more lies, convenience, manipulation, heartbreak and 100% bad faith. Of course, this says a lot more about old Percy Hades than it does that enthusiastic woman and her way of responding to whatever her lover was doing, oh yes, oh my god, yes, yes, oh god. And so, it offered an opportunity to take yet another look at my history, my heartbreak, my jealousy and pain, my "trust issues," and my own resentment, grief, sense of betrayal and abandonment. Hooray!

Sex is so awful, in a lot of ways. Like, both Ye Olde Definition, as in awe inspiring, and the new one, as in gut wrenching and terrifying. At that very moment, camping in a remote spot where I was looking for some peace, I was truly annoyed by being reminded of the whole squalid and lovely reality. The first thought I recall having was "Huh, I wonder who she is cheating on." Haha. Dude, really?

One obvious thing that presented itself is just how much suffering, guilt, hurt feelings, abandonment, betrayal and bad faith sex has brought into my life. I'd say that sex is the nexus of most of my own dishonesty, lack of integrity, duplicity and shame. In the Big Book, there's the famous reference to alcoholics leading a "double life," and I'd say that the most double of all of my lives have always been around sexual dishonesty and betrayal. The front that couples present to the world so often covers all sorts of sexual shenanigans. People who are capable of "just having sex" in order to "get their needs met" but without becoming emotionally attached amaze me, for example. I have never really been able to do that, even though I have tried. Ironically, I have also tried having utilitarian sex within a dead partnership, and I can't really meet that obligation very well, either. 

So I find myself celibate now in spite of a great many opportunities to connect sexually. The Catch-22 is: I cannot be emotionally available right now, but sex always pulls me into emotional connection, so, no sex. I have only recently identified how angry about this I am. I have at various times of my life been livid that I can't just fucking fuck someone and be done with it. Hit it and quit it. I have been so resentful at this plain fact that I have tried, and ended up punishing myself, and causing harm to others. The big lie for me is that I don't care, although of course the other big lie is that I *do* care, which makes it even more complicated. 

Meanwhile, people just go about their duplicitous, rationalized, manipulative, selfish, fake ass fucking as if there's no problem. And I suspect there really is no problem, for most. Compartmentalization, ephemera, existential fucks, weird little flings and temporary, superficial fake drama, tiny little pangs of guilt, but hey, that's the way it goes, move along folks, nothing to see here. Insufferably grotesque yet completely human and understandable. 

My last thoughts as the woman's cries subsided were, may all sentient beings be happy, well, peaceful and at ease, and full of loving kindness, and may these two lovers be happy and well, and may my own bilious, enraged, cynical and stone cold heart forget all of this fucking nonsense. 

Loneliness and Solitude

A simple distinction. Loneliness is a lack, and the feeling tone is an ache, pang, or longing. Solitude lacks nothing, and there's no longing or sense of pain. Uncomfortable alone or in the presence of those who don't get it? That's loneliness. Perfectly happy alone and enjoying one's solitary or unconnected self? That's solitude. To be perfectly happy with someone else might also be a form of solitude, like a solitude dyad paradox, but that remains an open question. 

I keep hoping REI and Subaru will sponsor my transition post Ph.D. So far, they have not returned my calls. You can't see the Yeti cooler that matches Sappho. They aren't returning my calls either.

I was encountering both on my sojourn in Baja and have been, for the past many, many years. There have been long stretches of time when I have had a busy relationship life of one kind of another, either within my family of origin or among friends, or with a lover or partner or spouse, when I have felt lonelier than when I have actually been solitary. I wish there were a specific word for this grinding, bitter, hollow feeling of being surrounded by people or being with one other person and feeling the same, or even an intensified, kind of absence, longing, gap, and the ache of loneliness. To be not gotten but not to know because there;'s no one around is easier in a lot of ways than to be with one's supposed connection and not gotten. 

It is a common refrain among recovering people that "we never fit in and always felt like people just didn't understand us." One of the acute stabbing or dull chronic pains of my life that alcohol and cocaine were a solution for. I distinctly recall feeling that booze in particular lifted that cloud of not fitting in and it seemed like the perfect social medicine for me. 

One of the existential processes that feels necessary for me is to "go through" loneliness to get to solitude. This has often been the case when I go on solo camping trips. There's no immediate experience of blissful, footloose and fancy free complete self sufficiency and enjoyment of my own company. I have to go through stages of longing, grief, some bewilderment and a sense of dis-ease, being alone. 

But once I provide enough space for solitude to start breathing, it becomes established. I sometimes "find myself" free, easy, unattached, not wishing for anyone or anything, simply enjoying what I am doing, on my own. These are extremely strengthening and valuable moments, providing proof especially in painful, lonely or abandoned moments that it is possible to be alone and to be happy. To be alone and to be happy is one of the ways to reconfigure the hardness of heart, bitterness, and mistrust that sometimes characterizes my rejection of the prospect of being connected to others, especially women. 

I have also been reflecting on the free flow of intense emotions that is the normal state of my heart, when I am not trying to dam, redirect, chain, deny or interrogate what I am feeling. I've been especially angry in a lot of ways the past several months, and I tend to try to manage anger in a wide variety of ways, but have really been enjoying just feeling angry, without expressing it to anyone but also without denying it to myself. One of my 2020 decisions has been to be real about my feelings, for myself. To stop being fake and pretending. I was cowed by this prospect at first because it seemed to present as involving tremendous risk of exposure to others. But then I realized I don't have to express what I am feeling, at all, to anyone. The resolution is to simply express it, find it, be with it, and let it be *for myself*. To honor my own feeling life *for myself* and fuck expressing it to anyone whatsoever unless they earn my trust. I have trusted the wrong people for the wrong reasons and have presented too much of my emotional life to people who can't show up for it, but I think this has often been a side effect of simply not showing up for it *myself*.  

I was talking with a friend of mine last night and said "I don't trust people enough to simply say to them, 'you hurt my feelings.'" She said, "well, I don't think it's mistrust for me so much as ego. It's humbling or even humiliating to allow oneself to be a fool in front of another person. And having allowed myself to get my feelings hurt in the first place, I judge myself harshly, and I say to myself 'shit, you are a fucking idiot, how could you have allowed yourself to be hurt?', and then I have to say or do something else to the person who has hurt me. Ghost them, attack them, blame them, manipulate them. It's not that I don't trust them, it's that I fucking hate myself." That gives me a lot to work with. 

In loneliness, there is also a lot of self hatred. If I had the company of someone or others, I wouldn't even have to confront the "problem" of myself. 

In solitude, the soft animal of my body gets to love what it loves (thanks Mary Oliver), I get to feel vulnerable, foolish, hurt, angry, whatever. None of my emotional life needs to be witnessed or validated, except by me. No one is responsible for my emotional life except me, myself, and I. I don't need to perform it, I don't need to share it, I don't need to "trust" any motherfucker whatsoever with any of it. Someone else being "unavailable" or "abandoning me" becomes irrelevant, if I myself am available and do not abandon or betray myself. 

"The most terrifying thing in this culture is to feel," said Cecil Taylor, and it takes courage, that is, heart, to show up for solitude, especially since the descent into loneliness seems like a constant prerequisite. But, really, if there's that solitary, enjoyable, comfortable, safe, autonomous, free ground always available if one is willing to pay the price, this seems like the best treasure. The "solution" to abandonment issues isn't, in this context, to find reliable people who will not abandon me, haha, what a fucking joke really—is there any such thing as a reliable human being? 

The "solution" is to not abandon myself. Such a simple idea but it has taken me decades to get it to form in my heart and guts. 

Wonders

In contrast to the blasted ruins of the human attempts to hold fast on the edges of wild Baja, the unspoiled wilds are astonishing and, of course, the main reason I have always wanted to go back. That, the cacti and succulents, and the food, which deserves a whole post someday. 

I could add a lot more pics, as you might imagine. But it's time to go get Sappho's low beams fixed, and then get back on the road.