FIELD REPORT: here at this happy halfway house is another parking place for your mortal coil

October 19, 2009

The first secret I remember keeping was this woman my grandmother telling me she had bought me my grave.  A grave of my own, tucked under an English Oak tree in a small cemetery in a small town in Virginia.  The plot was small, and there wasn’t room for everybody, but back then there was room for me, right next to her. We went there together on summer mornings and sat on our graves, ate country ham on white bread, and talked about brass bands and duck ponds and green stamps and other trappings of happiness in the face of immortality.

We sat in quiet communion above our un-dug holes in the soil, chatting about the displacement of matter whereby one day we would be underground, and a we-sized pile of earth mounded up on our picnic spot.  As I child, I imagined that as we get older, we get deeper, closer to the earth, until eventually we just climbed down inside it. Rooms upon rooms existed deep down in the dirt, where we would be at home with our angels and ancestors, the same people we’ve always known, just behind different doors, and refined to the elemental.

Visiting those afternoons as an adult, I am grateful for her peculiar methods of indoctrination: it’s all well and good to pound the chest and pray, but we must practice getting down and dirty with the clever realities of our infinity. Sit with our bodies in a state of crazy wonder.

At noon today I observed the exact halfway point of my international residency tour: exactly two months behind, two more ahead. I ate a celebratory sandwich, watched the aspens drop their leaves outside my studio, and as I lingered over the landscape I realized, heartsick, that I’d missed a long-awaited diversion: a day trip riding around the awesome expanse of Ucross ranch and the Crow and Sioux hunting sites whose site lines gaze out over deer and sweetgrass and oil fields.

That means one thing: more hours of solitude and isolation for me.

I have become an art nun.  Instead of vespers, we have an hour round the candlelit table for dinner before retreating back into the studio wormhole to make messy, expressive prayer. Communal life lived within separated membranes, with shared pursuit but separate practice.  Shut behind the doors, each spinning within our mysteries. Interpreting.

The unique intangible lunacies that unfold within these studios bear little witness: what we talk about are the shared solidities – sleeping, crying, reading, drifting, remembering, and the making of marks.  How much time in contemplation of the thin purple vein that runs down the inside of the finger, and the bloody delta of artery that lives within the hand’s web. Only the halogen bulbs know for sure.

All the rest is silence and chasm. We stretch out our arms and open our eyes to whatever it is that lies inside.

Hushing everything that surrounds and clouds in order to hear that beat of one’s own heart. So many months with just my own – imagine my happiness when I listen to others’ again, and breathe shared air once more.

It can come as no surprise to any of us how much we can corrode our lives with what doesn’t matter.  What barnacles fix to our surfaces. As time weaves its illusion of age, the surface dims and we convince ourselves it’s age that does the trick, and not a lack of discipline, scrubbing and excavation, of polishing the organism.  Not grief or dullness at the surrender of that rare happiness which is our birthright.

How helpful to take that pause in mid-three-decades to inventory the barnacles and pluck them off, let the hull breathe and feel the salt sweetening on its flanks – we should all know the eventual consequence before we let anything adhere to the side of our ship.

I’m fortunate to have many of the barnacles riven from my stern by force. In the handful of years since the galactic seizure clusters of ’06 that rearranged me, I’ve had a different brain.  I came out of intensive care with a vacant mansion, echoing and resonant and still mine, but not what it was before – comprehensively re-envisioned, as though some other occupant chose to empty it, haul its contents into the yard and burn them down, and fill the rooms with something more majestic and capricious and mystical – amplified and subtle and indestructible.

Last winter, repeated chemical blows to the brain combined with the neuro-spiritual kinetics of Sikh-practiced kundalini yoga suggested that new internal calibration was unfolding whether or not I wanted it so.  Neurological natural events – like tornados, earthquakes, mudslides, fires –  reminded me that I am an enigma within an organism.

These alchemical events of internal ecology brought me humility, gratitude, and a profound desire to work in greater harmony with this temporary container.  Use it to touch something profound, locate something of the spark that lights us, strengthen it to serve as conduit.

The epilepsy medications that softened the seizures were abruptly revealed as medically dangerous by the FDA, but I already knew them as existentially crippling. I suppose I welcomed the excuse for liberation.  For most of my life, I lived in a maddeningly perpetual undertow, a chemical riptide of the mind, holding onto a flat white pill for flotation – a rescue mechanism that seemed to save, but served only as a means for carrying me ever farther out into the cold and the deep.

The perilous stability these medications brought at the expense of my familiar transcendencies: gorgeous days when I would wake right-sided and yellow would sing to me a song of mustard and gold and lion eyes.  Instead, a line of pharmaceuticals heralded the daily heartbreak of a job that pressed my face into the wall of my disabilities, forced me to rely on the most burned-out parts of my brain, the cauterized field where all the land mines have exploded, and all is silence and grief.

The days spent at my desk, left-sided methodical cataloging of human rights atrocities in jolts and shocks and busts of tears behind the venetian blinds, untangling the angular linguistic distortions of injustice in the courts, while my right side experienced the exquisite geometry of skin cells as scales, watched my limbs turn to fins and swim out into the skies above West Hollywood –  its unholy desecrated altar to plastic surgery and the pain of thwarted human beauty – mine the fish whiskers floating in cloud, feeling an aquatic union with all creation, and utterly committed to the belief that not just healing but true regeneration is available far beyond the reaches of law.

The January night when I realized for a moment this meant I was swimming, and not drowning.  And shortly thereafter, after nearly fifteen years of powerful neurological pharmaceuticals, I finally decided to leave the laws of man and medications behind, and strike out into the yonder unveiled.

Realizing that likely meant the end of my familiar career, I hurriedly applied for these fellowships and residencies – my mission was to spend four months alone in exploration and devotion to this brain. Remove every other imperative in my life, and distill it down to finding a way to reunite with this ferocious ball of grey jelly that with the heart holds the soul.

Every morning that I wake up, I run the diagnostics of my equipment – temporal lobe epilepsy creates a circus of stimulation in the five senses – this morning, how is color? How is sound? how are my eyes? What is the nature of light?  What sounds are the colors making? Do I know the year? Does it matter?

Then the left side of the brain is pocked with surprising chutes and ladders. Perhaps I will hear rhymes, or the spaces between words, or perhaps the lexicon of language will have entirely slipped away. Those are the days for dreaming, and for photography.

It has to begin to be important to grow larger and stronger and more alive as we grow older. To find our fingers turning to fins and know joy at it.

I am using these 120 days to get comfortable with myself, to practice this business of being alive.  And if I can spend one hundred and twenty days bridging the barriers I have within myself, surely I can bridge them with my fellow creatures.  There is a lot of incipient insanity in isolation and creation. The stronger and cleaner and more disciplined the organism, the more that chaos orders itself into a sustainable supply of energy and inspiration.  Practice daily. To be fragile and ferocious and dance like a damn fool. After all, we have infinity before us.

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