She again searched the recesses of her mind for her most central conception. “Confections” she called them: ideas that were partly made up, definitely personal, and treated her to the kind of things that other people took for granted, like ‘how did I become matter? And why?’ Since she was a girl, she wanted to know how spirit and matter worked, so she could write a manual for dummies like her. Wouldn’t that be helpful? A guidebook? Being helpful is “good,” she thought. Everyone smiles when she helps.
Today, she searched her memories and recent mental happenings to find a confection —a connection— that would grant her a true blue vacation. Not the kind of vacation where you have to keep track of a bunch of flight times, car rental paperwork, and check out times, or restaurants with oddly processed foods to please everyone. Not the kind of break where you team up with interesting people and get enlivened by vibrant novelty. Nor the kind where you climb mountains, make mud huts, or zip line across ravines (though she loved all of these on a rested day).
She wanted kind of vacation that would give her soul a rest. Profound, maybe even eternal rest. Literally, nothing to do. Nothing to learn, remember, or make, indefinitely. Nowhere to go and no answers to give. Even to herself.
She also realized how this sounded. Oof. Maybe she shouldn’t write these words. She’s just sitting at Starbucks trying to express herself before she makes chicken soup.
The catalog of her mind was full of mundanities 1 of middle-aged life with a few dry channels once overflowing with others’ answers: the Bible, Sermon on the Mount, the Gnostic Gospels, Buddhism, Books of the Dead, Siddha Yoga, Carl Jung, Endless Shambala Publications, Physics, Ram Dass, DSM III, Tim Ferriss, The Arts, and intellectualism. Now she was heaping in David Bowie’s Book Club2 and chasing space travel stories for an added dimension.
Nothing gave her the same peace as a deep sleep in a comfortable bed. That was everything.
She listened to David Byrne3: she was lying in the grass, she could hear the highway breathing. It was her high school yearbook quote. She liked how he just knew things then— in the 1980s— and how now that he’s older, he’s being cheerful and making art about Utopia. He is an art and words and music person too. A multi-hyphenate.4 He is a responsible man.
All these religions and philosophies pointed to endpoints she just didn’t want to aim at, lest she hit again. She’d hit ’em a few too many times. Some pointed to an everlasting life in a brightly lit, cheerful and perfect place. Others promised struggle, then everlasting life with power (and students!). Some herded toward you relatable followers with clicky-click hearts, a few minds, and piles of money. Some said you could have reincarnation and a future opportunity to be a mindless gopher or a well-fed dog (why not? she’d already been a raging queen).
Some paths promised you could give up your pesky ego so completely, that you could merge with nirvanic infinity (and still have students!). Others said, here and now, you should sit asana, with potential end-point of levitating for parlor tricks and notoriety. Some teased you could become special and beloved like the Virgin Mary, who she identified with more than anyone. Clueless and creative. Or crafty and creative. Hard to say.
After all, hasn’t every creative person felt she made something all on her own, with the help of no one but God?
Now she wanted her very own confection/conception. A religion for herself to follow. So she could rest, rest by following, just like she did in 8 am yoga class. She wanted it to be a “good good” only, a confection that explained life in terms of it being:
- Eternal and Cyclical
- Finite. Which means Death equals getting completely subsumed by Earth & Sky.
- Both of the above.
- None of the above: Life is a mystery.
- 42
She wanted to know exactly how these all can be true. She understood they were — Life & Death were two sides of the same coin, but she couldn’t write that book for dummies. She felt that made her a fool5, and though she was glad for it, she didn’t want to publicize her ignorance. PR is supposed to make you look good. That’s what she did as a job.
She had tried to reconcile life & death, and each of these worlds looked exactly the same as the other, but were vastly different. Maybe this continuum was quantum: two states at once, both real, both to be occupied, by her? Surely someone could explore this well and write the book? Or, maybe make art about the practice of trying to reconcile two sides of life at once, and still finish up in time to go grocery shopping?
She wanted to write the book on an immaculate religion, fucked over by no one else’s power games or meanness, or commerce, or hoarding. One that was a ‘good good. ‘A good good would also give to her what she was trying to give others, so she wouldn’t keep getting exhausted from giving too much.
She wanted her confection, her conception to be a “good good.” This is because the truth of her experience had told her if there was “good” there was also “bad.” This crap analysis was unacceptable to her: “better please!” she asked the universe.
20 years prior, she meditated her way into an altered state of consciousness, with Bach playing in the background. As she meandered the streets of Brooklyn and was ushered up into the pigeon-living space behind the clock tower, she knew she’d never rest, and that her only choice was to enjoy her time here, and to love and to laugh. And make stuff.
None of this place is too serious: even a silly pop culture can connect you. Living was magical, full of coincidences and odd people giving quirky guidance at unexpected times.
Life was full of natural and man-made music and ridiculous visual puns. And license plates that precisely match one’s inner life. Symbols and signs abound.
Did she still want to be a sign maker? Pointing at what?
She woke up in the hospital in Brookline, near Boston. Florescents overhead and window blinds splitting sunlight. She was drugged and her body was still. No concerns, nothing to do, nothing to know. No curiosity. She gave up on everything she was minding. Wondering had ceased. She didn’t even know what a problem was anymore. There was no reason to, nor capacity, to ask or answer questions. She heard her own breathing inside herself. It was moving on its own. Loud to her:
Yaaahhhh Wehhhh
Yaaahhhh Wehhhh
Yaaahhhh Wehhhh
Yahweh
That name you are not supposed to say.
- mundane – ities. It’s like “mundane activities,” shortened into one word. See glossary for others. ↩︎
- This is a gem. Both the list of books (Bowie’s compilation, which took place of anything like a memoir) and the podcast about it: http://www.bowiebookclub.com/ ↩︎
- I appreciate this: https://reasonstobecheerful.world/ ↩︎
- I love a multi-hyphenate like I love an em dash (—) , which is two hyphens in a row. My favorite punctuation by a dash more than a mile and written about in this piece ↩︎
- Another not-so-silly-pop culture reference is this song I’ve been mulling over for 6 months now: Dylan’s Idiot Wind. Of course, he seems to take himself very seriously, or perhaps he’s just angry at a woman or a gory not-good song.
I keep thinking ‘blood on your saddle’ means you got surprised by your period and didn’t have a maxi pad handy. A woman would know blood on the saddle was a huge badge of honor. Calvaries and cavalcades of such women are riding all the time.
“One day you’ll be in the ditch
Flies buzzin’ around your eyes
Blood on your saddle
Idiot wind
Blowing through the flowers on your tomb
Blowing through the curtains in your room
Idiot wind
Blowing every time you move your teeth
You’re an idiot, babe
It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe.” ↩︎
