Pattering

It runs quietly, the little pattering creature. Carrying death in one hand and the sun in the other. Always just ahead of me, always just around the corner.

---

Every time, it is like this. Start over from the beginning. Take it from the top.

Which is wrong, I think. Let's not start over. Let's start from here. Take it from the middle.

What's wrong with starting over? Well, the implicit conviction that in order to proceed, I must erase the past.

---

Warming up the car in the pre-dawn darkness. The upthrust of huge maple roots has made a basin of the sidewalk in front of my neighbor's house. It's full now of dark water. I can't actually see the pool, except where the raindrops strike it, and the circles of water catch their porch light. Pattering rain. A drummer on a dark sparkling snare drum.

---

Friday night. Cherry red vinyl sofas, basketball on the big plasma screen behind us. A din of music, and the roar of inebriated conversation in a large open space with deliberately ruined acoustics. I can hear only half the words spoken to me. The others play shuffleboard and flirt, delighted to be done with finals, in the throes of love or at least desire; the three of us sit on the sofas and talk. Except that I can only hear Tele, sporadically. Her Swedish friend sits very still and self contained, watching everything with mild, benevolent, anthropological interest. Tele is huddled down a bit, even less at home than I in a place that styles itself the "American Cowgirl," with black and white faux cowhide pillows, and elevated platforms with poles for sexy dancing, and video games in which you can shoot at elk.

Clint, as always, moves easily between worlds, joshing happily with the shuffleboarders, wandering over to sit with us and talk about the spa he and his wife are starting up, speculating about the board exams, clowning a bit whenever things seem in danger of getting sticky. In this world but not of it. "I love seeing Dale walking up to school," he says at one point. "He looks so happy."

Tele talks of wanting to be a doula -- she's taking some training for it this weekend -- and she straightens up, loses her huddle, suddenly awash with light, her luminous smile stilling the noise and Ahrimanic frenzy around us. I can't imagine a greater blessing than having her as a doula. Such gifted hands, and so much kindness.

I coax some of her story from her. How she and her husband got together, how they got here from there. When she asks me in return I go blank. All the narratives of my life have collapsed. I have no idea what my story is, and picking up the old ways I had of telling it feels false. A poor return for her warmth and authenticity. I feel old. What twenty years of childrearing has done to me, to us, is impossible to convey. Or maybe impossible to justify? Among other fifty-year-olds, I can feel that having fought life to a draw is honorable, but in the face of Tele's warmth and eagerness I feel ghostly, insubstantial, inconsequent.

Just for a moment. But I am tired. It has been a very long week, and it's not over yet; I have various family obligations to come. I rise to go. Bow to George, and shake hands. Receive warm unexpected hugs from Clint and Andrea and Lindsay. Tele and I agree to email. I'm happy, tired but happy. I make my way past the little knot of American Cowgirl staff at the door and out into the night.

Out into the cool, rainswept streets. I walk the half mile down to Hawthorne, to catch the bus. The free sweet air, the mist settling on my hat, my beard and my eyebrows. And so home.

Making the Space

I'm at the door, about to leave, my hair tousled and a little sticky with oil, my heart rate a good ten beats per minute slower than usual. I can feel its deliberate throb, and the unfamiliar way it's letting go completely after each contraction. I feel at once deeply grounded and deeply dislocated.

"I don't know whether you're more inspiring or more discouraging," I said.

"Why, what do you mean?" she asked.

"I'll never be as good as that," I said.

"Oh, that's just time," she said dismissively. "I've been doing this four -- five years now. You just learn the techniques. And technique you can pick up anywhere." She becomes more serious, and says: "Really it's intention, holding the intention, staying present."

"Yeah." I nod, and add, a little ruefully, "I wasn't talking about technique."

Herbs over the door and windows; little bundles of grasses by the window. I love this room. I've been in it three times now. A square carpet acknowledges the squareness of the room; an oblique mat matches the diagonal orientation of the table. Rice paper blinds, and two lamps, low to the floor: the room glows. For ninety minutes I've been elsewhere, out of the ordinary world. For the first few minutes I tried to make notes to myself -- I'll need to write about this, the stretches and movement -- but the current was way too strong, and anyway I wanted to go with it, so I went.

Where do I go, during a massage like that? More or less the same place I go when I sit shamatha -- nowhere but here, intensely here. It's not really that I've gone anywhere, it's that I've started to pay attention to something other than the continual gloat and fret of the monkey mind, the storytelling mind, all my repetitive coveting and fearing. And switching my attention away from that is so far out of my ordinary experience that it feels like going a long way away.

That's backwards, though. Where I usually am -- that's what's a long way away, tangled up in my stories, in my hypostasized fantasies, preoccupied with the the miscellaneous grab-bag of qualities I've accumulated and assured myself are me. This was just being present.

Or -- it's just the endorphins, you could say. Or a longstanding psychological yen to be mothered. Both plausible stories. But I don't believe either. What it really is, is that there's another way to be in world, and someone can lead you there, if everything lines up just right. Massage is just one way. There's dozens of ways, maybe an infinite number of ways.

But you need to make a space for it. The sage, or whatever it is, over the door -- that's part of it. Setting the wards. And you need to make yourself vulnerable -- that's what taking off your clothes is really about. The ordinary world, the ordinary bounds, the ordinary defenses, all have to be displaced.

I've been so busy, with work and massage school, that I've fallen into the old trap: thinking that I'll just get something done -- something, anything, be it grad school, raising the kids, settling into a career, exercising regularly, massage school, whatever -- I'll get that done, and then I'll begin my real life, the life that's in synch with the dharma, in synch with what I really think is important. But again and again I learn (and forget) that I can't finish anything, not really, without the dharma. Sure, I could finish massage school, and I could begin practicing massage, without it -- but then when it's done it would only be replaced by the next thing and the next and the next. Because I don't just need to have a massage license. I need to have meaningful work. I could turn massage into just another version of my long stint of cubicle-confinement easily. And I will, if I don't meditate, if I leave my spiritual practice for later. To do what Michelle does -- which is what I want to do, and which is why I went to massage school in the first place -- I'm going to need to be grounded and unafraid. Everything converges on that. It's the only thing that really needs to be done. And the only way I've ever found to do it is to meditate.

So it's back to the cushion. All paths lead back there, eventually.

Entrainment

Sadie's got her new dress on, Lord, Lord,
Sadie's got her new dress on.
Momma's done and said
She's old enough to wed,
And Sadie's got her new dress on.

(--Apparently by Connie Leigh? From memory, a bluegrass song heard once, on the radio)

Bursts of light at the corners of my eyes, at the corners of my heart; jeweled ropes dangling just out of sight. Irridescent spangles of joy. My heart lifts, like an old dog lifting its muzzle at the smell of dinner. Happiness.

In this queer rush of my new life, when I do write, I seem to write mostly about being unhappy. Maybe because being unhappy pitches me backwards into the mood of my long cubicle confinement, when I used to blog copiously; the two things are associated in my mind. In any case, it may be giving a skewed impression of my mood and well-being nowadays. I’m so grateful for my freedom; so deeply happy so often. The joy of doing something I really want to do.

(That’s not the heart of it, though, now that I think of it. Actually, it’s the joy of really wanting to do something. Doing it is just the icing on the cake.)

There are two moments I love most of all: the very first moment of laying my hands on someone’s back, feeling the warmth of their skin meet the warmth of my hands through the sheet, feeling the rhythms of their skin and mine start to understand each other, and the moment when I stop, before moving on to another area of the body, and just rest, cradling maybe a foot, maybe a neck, and feel our blood moving together.

Entrainment, they call it: a phenomenon which, I’m told, is established beyond question by objective Western science. The bodily rhythms of people who are touching, or even (to a lesser degree) in close contact, begin to synch up. Breathing and heart rate fall into the same, or related, rhythms; other subtler endocrine rhythms also converge. We are not just psychologically social animals. We’re biologically social animals. Our bodies tune to each other. Maybe the most obvious example, which lots of people notice, is that the menstrual cycles of women who live in the same house tend to converge. Circadian rhythms do too. We deal so much with strangers, in the modern world, that we’ve come to think of it as normal to interact with people with whom we’re physically completely out of synch; but most of our evolutionary history we’ve spent in groups that are physically attuned.

In Tony Hillerman’s Navajo mysteries he writes of a medicine ritual, “the stranger way,” meant to heal the disruption caused to a person’s spirit by being in contact with strangers. I suspect it’s a partly a response to the physical unease of encountering foreign bodily rhythms, and having your own pulled out of synch with your household – an unease to which we are so accustomed that we can’t even perceive it any more. We are so used to being fragmentary and out of tune that it seems normal, and the relief and security established by an hour’s massage can seem mysterious, maybe unsettling, maybe magical.

Everything but the Gift

I was flustered, on Monday. At our staff meeting what I finally said sounded disagreeably shrill in my own ears. I get off-balance, and reach to speak out of my weaknesses rather than out of my strengths: out of my fatal facility with generalization and gift for specious phrase rather than out of my thoughtfulness and openness. It has plagued me all my life. That evening, during a practical exam, I stammered my way laboriously through stuff that I have known by heart for months. Afterwards Andrea, always my testing partner, said, "I was thinking, come on, Dale. I know you know this stuff!"

Tele had brought her evaluation of my massage, and it was warm and sweet and glowing and yet -- yet I hated it. After my day's humiliation I wanted one thing, and only one thing: respect. The only evaluation that would have pleased me would have been one that was awestruck, if not fearful. I didn't want to be a kindly, safe-feeling, nurturing older man. I wanted to be an object of fear and desire. Heathcliff, not Edgar Linton. The ache to be taken seriously was physical, crawling somewhere along my diaphragm and up my ribs. I wanted to be formidable.

Heathcliffs, of course, don't give a damn about being formidable. The desire to be formidable is an unmistakable, universally understood proof that in fact you are not so. That you are Edgar Linton, accomplished in everything that doesn't matter, forever on the wrong side of locked doors, the owner but never the master -- the archetype of the cuckold. You gave me everything but the gift.

There's nothing to do, of course, but nothing. Be still. Let the desire settle, little by little, like stirred up mud settling to the bottom of a pond. There are times when all doing is useless. This is one of them.

But you see, this sometimes lurks behind that apparently innocent yen to express tenderness. That's why for me it's often important to let it be.

I have never found it difficult or awkward to express affection; it's my normal mode of being. I have to watch myself lest I absent-mindedly say "love you, hon" to people at work, people behind counters, people pouring my coffee. But that's a different animal than the desire to cross boundaries, to crowd people, to insist on a level of attention beyond the ordinary. You see it in wound-up little boys, when they're pestering, being loud and intrusive, flinging themselves against people, making absurd boasts. It's the pack-animal's craving for the alpha position. Make me leader of the pack, or slap me down, but don't ignore me!

Betraying Tenderness

Lovely thick African hair, the kinks pushing back against my fingers as I massage her scalp. A small room put together with care, the walls an intense yellowy orange, the white curtains open to a tiny back yard. On the shelves, among anatomy books and yoga tapes, is a card. A Matisse-ish person in persian tunic floats sideflexed in the aether, a small orb floating near her hand. Words straggle through the sky: "If we fail this time," said the angel, "it will be a failure of imagination." And she pressed the world into my hand.

I'm just starting to work her upper back -- neck, traps, rhomboids, the usual suspects for people who work at a computer -- when she says, "So tell me about your art."

Oh. I doodle file cards in class, like my napkin doodles, and a couple of people have been fussing embarassingly about them. I search for words. I'm not very articulate at the best of times, and when I'm doing massage words are particularly scarce.

"When I was young I wanted to be an artist, or a writer," I said. "I didn't really have anything to say."

I'm struggling a bit. "I wanted to be special."

"But you are special!" she says energetically.

"Well, yeah," I say, "I mean, people are wonderful. But not because they can do things, not because they're better than other people. It was bad for me. Thinking of myself as an artist. So art, I don't like to think of myself as doing art, I guess."

"I went to art school," she says. "I could never make what was in my head come out. I don't like to talk about art either, now."

A pause. "I knit. I like knitting. It's not art. I make a sock, and it's not art, it's a sock. You can wear it." An inaudible chuckle -- I can't hear it, but I can feel it vibrating my fingertips.

The light fades; evening seeps into the room. The curtains become ghostly.

She has a dreadful knot in her left shoulder. She's had it for years, she says. It's so hard that she has to assure me that it really is muscle, not an errant piece of bone. I work it every way I know how. "Is it okay if I do some friction on this?" I finally say. "It's not going to release today, but maybe we can talk it into starting to think about it."

Earlier today, Mae fell asleep on my table, snoring ever so slightly from time to time; waking occasionally with a little jerk. I remembered a man I read about who used to kiss his clients on the forehead at the end of each massage. An idiot, I thought, if he really didn't understand that as a transgression; but I share the impulse, that rush of paternal tenderness.

Sometimes I regret that I didn't take up this career when I first seriously thought of it -- when I gave up on becoming an English professor, nearly twenty years ago -- but really I couldn't have done it then. I couldn't have honored the boundaries; I wouldn't have understood the need for them. I found it so intolerable then to leave tenderness unexpressed. I thought that if I didn't express it, it would be wasted, or worse -- even betrayed, or injured. As if it were a delicate soufflee, wasted if not eaten on the spot. Such a deep misunderstanding of what tenderness is, and what really injures or wastes it. Not leaving it unexpressed -- it's craving recognition for it, wanting to reify it and keep it. That's what betrays tenderness.

One More

Never enough. And the long day limps to a close.

I have driven the gods away. Well, then, I just have to bring them back.

Clean the shrine. Light the candle. Take the time. Let go of the ambitions of the moment. I have become small, in the last few weeks, smaller and smaller. Wanting, clutching, fearing.

It's time to unwind all this. Enough.

I carry them both in my pocket, the skull and the bit of sea glass. But I'm starting to forget. At each turning, there's that risk. Though risk is the wrong word for something that's bound to come along. There's no turning that sharp. The whole crew of demons will be along, you can guarantee it. And if you judge whether it's worth doing by whether it drives them off, then -- nothing's worth doing.

Start again.

I have achieved nothing. I have gone nowhere. Which is good, because even to talk the language of achieving and traveling is to ensure that neither will happen.

The wind whips the Columbia into plumes of foam; at the coast the sea is plunging, and the trees fling up their arms in protest. The fishing boats that try to make it over the bar this afternoon will have their work cut out for them. It's a comforting thing -- if none of your friends are on those boats, anyway -- to know that even the Columbia, one the most tamed and manhandled rivers in the world, turns savage at the end.

Which is important, because to bring the gods back, you have to be somewhere that's out of control.

I get frightened, and I forget that.

I need to lift my eyes. I need to let the cold rain slap my face.

I have everything I need, right here, all the tools. Nothing is lacking but the doing.

Going to America

High above the shadowed walls
A bright fist of water
A flickering kingfisher
And the swallows flourishing from cliff to cliff.

Down the rutted dirt roads and across the yellow grass
Out across the open fields where the redtails hunt
Down the Hill, the old quarry,
The collapsing barns and barbed wire,
Down to the green glint of the McKenzie,
The eye still runs down the valleylands, old with use,
To the distant hills, blue and gray and green and gray
And beyond them, in sillhouette, Mt June.

I fell in love with you then. I heard your feet
Running on the paths. I knew that somewhere,
Perfectly beautiful, perfectly free, a girl
Was running, and someday I would meet her,
And by certain tokens we would know each other.
And all laws would be abrogated, and the fierceness
Of our love would feed us and clothe us, and we
Would build a house on the shoulder of Mt June.

To the west it would be made of honey,
To the east it would be made of blood,
To the south it would be made of leaves,
And to the north it would be made of grass.

Beloved. One gray stone after another,
And the glittering McKenzie.

In that house all creatures would be safe;
They would come for refuge, lost and frightened.
And we would take them in and care for them
Till they had their strength again, and then
They would go into the world, not really
Knowing, not really remembering. But they might think,
Before the thought escaped them, "I have been
To their house. I have been
To America."

High above the shadowed walls
A bright fist of water
A flickering kingfisher
And the swallows flourishing from cliff to cliff.

Great yellow caterpillars gnaw the ground;
The roads pool with mudspittle and motor oil,
And strange mishapen brutes waddle
In the half light. Chains tense and shriek,
Gears clash. "I have been," I whisper,
"To America."

We wake
From dream to nightmare.
Days draw long shadowy arms around me,
And breathe in my face, and ask repulsive favors.
Oh yes. I have been
To America.

High above the shadowed walls
A bright fist of water
A flickering kingfisher
And the swallows flourishing from cliff to cliff.

Better, & a Question from the Audience

Ah. I can take a full breath without coughing; stand up without my head throbbing. Life is good.

Still tired, but the emotional backspin, the inclination to snark -- always an early warning sign of illness for me, but one I never recognize till afterwards -- is gone.

I've been impressed in this round of flu without how much of its misery is muscular, and therefore mitigable. (Mitigable? Is that a word? Well, it is now.) I've been addressing the trigger points as they arise, and stretching out even when I'm shaking & miserable. With the result, I think, that I'm coming out of this flu with a lot less residual muscular misery to get through. Rubbing my back on a tennis ball wedged between me and the wall -- think of a bear rubbing its back against a tree -- is great way to address trigger points between the shoulder blades. And what I would have thought, vaguely, were "swollen glands," a year ago, were actually miserably knotted SCMs. Hurts to work them, but it feels wonderful. And besides, it makes me feel like I'm fighting back.

A person should get plenty of rest, but sheer immobility is not how to rest muscles. They need to move.

Sigh. I hate it when I take this lofty didactic tone -- especially silly from one who's come so late to taking any kind of care of his body at all.

So, just what is it, asks the reader in my head, that's going on with the voice of your blog?

Hmm. I discovered over the holidays that a member of my family has been reading my blog. And there's been increasing crossovers of blog relationships into "real" relationships, & vice versa. And on top of that there's the fact that the people I work with now are young and literary, and hence far more likely to wander about in blogland than my old coworkers. They could be showing up any time, too. I write with worried glances backward. One of the pleasures of blogging is having the liberty to -- probably I should say the illusion of -- completely controlling my persona, and of course people in the audience with other sources of information take that out of my hands. I haven't quite recovered a voice. Which in some ways is to the good, I'm sure, but I'm a little wistful for the days when I could present myself as, for instance, a more diligent and inspired Buddhist than I am, without hearing a faint snicker in the virtual auditorium. Possibly I write about massage school more, now, simply because none of my crossovers come from there.

I could always light out for the hills -- start a new blog, take a new name, start a new life. I regard that with suspicion. The Puritan in me thinks that my life should be all of a piece, presented whole and the same to anyone, with a glorious integrity. Why should it need to be spun this way and that depending on the audience?

Both my schooling in rhetoric and my Buddhist practice tell me that a) communication is always, and properly, spun according to an audience; and b) the integrity of the self is a delusion anyway. But that doesn't make me that much more comfortable with it. It dovetails too nicely with my psychological propensity for pleasing others, at the cost of no matter what internal meiosis.

So anyway. Since you asked :-)

Tempting the Gods

I should have known better than to announce I had escaped the flu. It's got me by the throat now, (and, like Goldry Bluszco, by the nostrils.) I float along in a light fever, every once in a while dropping into a sinkhole of chills, spinning down the broad flow of the river, like Huck and Jim, supposedly on a mission of escape, but really drifting deeper and deeper.

Or perhaps I'm being punished for my incivilities, big and little. Hard to say.

My body is quite amazingly jacked. I know the names of all the muscles that are knotted and clenched up, now. Doesn't do me a lot of good, but it's always reassuring to have names for things -- it gives me a spurious sense of mastery.

And sinks down, down, like that sleep
When the dreamer seems to be
Weltering through eternity;
And the dim low line before
Of a dark and distant shore
Still recedes, as ever still
Longing with divided will,
But no power to seek or shun,
He is ever drifted on . . .

Dear Percy. It's you and me, kid. Listening to the tick of the clock and the slow faint rasp of Christmas's breath. One thirty.

Ordinary Light

Suddenly a morning of ordinary light and kindly rain. Sheltering clouds, a light-soaked gray coverlet protecting us from the sun. My heart opens to the sky.

No longer the threat of a debilitating flu. I have just a cold, a little comfortable headache and a runny nose.

There are these times, when the clamps of dread loosen -- moments of sanity, little harbors in uncharted islands where a tattered ship can refit. The voyage isn't over, and we don't know where we are or what we face next, but for now it's calm. Everyone agrees that we can find this place again, if need be, of course we can, and everyone sleeps well-satisfied, each confident that somebody else has taken the sun and written down the longitude and latitude.

The candle lights up the battered, indecipherable wooden face of the Buddha. Far, far from home, after years of knocking about the West as a tourist trinket, he came to rest in this house of huge, stocky, pink-faced Caucasians. They reverence him when it occurs to them. He wonders what exactly they mean when they make their three bows. Not what his own people meant, that's for sure.

The draft from the hall stirs the unblessed Chenrezig thanka. Bordered by unravelling fabric, likewise far from home -- an impulse charity buy to benefit a down-on-its-luck community of Tibetan exiles in India. He carries a "jewel," in one of his four hands, that looks very like the sort of smooth, large black beach pebble that massage therapists use for hot stone treatments. I salute him when I come up the stairs, placing the snuff-surface of my hand to my forehead. I don't know where that gesture came from. Possibly it's just a variation on the greeting I picked up from a poster of Lenin when I was a teenager, a jaunty touch of the fingers to the forehead, and which I have used as a greeting and a farewell ever since.

Reading a book about Western advisors in China. An extraordinary bit about Norman Bethune, a doctor who worked himself to death giving medical care to the northern Communist resistance to the Japanese invasion, doing, at one time, some seventy operations in the course of forty hours. There are two photos in that section. One shows Bethune bending over an operating table with his Chinese assistants, a gaunt old man, looking to be in his seventies or eighties. (He was 47.) Within a year he was dead. His journal burns with happiness at being useful, at the mysteries of cutting up bodies, living at the intersections of death and life, the parts of bodies that can be kept alive and the parts that can't. Finally he knew what he was doing with his life. Finally he was expressing all of a lifetime's bound up love. Death was a trifling price to pay.

And then there is the picture of young Mao, his face alight with good humor, lolling somewhere with a friend, clearly also feeling himself useful, alive, and necessary. Nothing farther from the iconic, serene, impassive Mao of the posters could be imagined. This is a shrewd, mischievous young man, radiating vitality, kicking back with his buddies.

Somehow the two pictures go together. They form a set. A set of mutual incomprehension, of tangential love, of cutting and killing to make well, of the overwhelming impulse to have a life-story that makes sense.

Well. My story makes less and less sense, as it goes along, rocking ever more gently on the black water, gliding to some obscure resting place. I have tried fitfully to make some sense of it, but with no success. It is terribly beautiful, terribly incomplete. Love runs through me "like honey through a sieve." I am maudlin, unstable, unsound.

Happy Valentine's. Forgive a rambling love-letter. The gray light, the rain of my childhood, the February roses. You know.

Cold Coffee

No light yet this morning. Car headlights glide up to the intersection, and then glide on. A low murmur of male voices in the cafe. I wonder why only men have the habit of breakfasting in a cafe at six in the morning? Or is that true only of old-fashioned diners like this one? Women don't start showing up till seven or eight.

Except the waitresses, of course. If there's anything rarer than a female six a.m. regular, it's a male six a.m. server.

The present waitress exasperates me, because she insists on talking to me each time she comes to refill the coffee. She asks me for permission to refill my coffee cup. I'll be deep in writing, or working through my flashcards, and -- "would you like some more coffee?" And it's not rhetorical, either. She's going to stand there and wait until I completely switch my attention to her and give her an answer. Drives me crazy. So much for my Buddhist equanimity. As she walks away I find myself muttering "leave me alone, for Christ's sake!"

It's not as though this solicitousness winds up in me getting what I want. The truth is, I have no idea whether I want more coffee, so I always say yes, and what I end up with, after half an hour or so, is a stone-cold cup of coffee. How the other morning waitress makes her pouring decisions, I don't know; but I can sit here for two hours, when she's on, and never lack for a hot drink at my elbow.

Why, I wonder, am I utterly incapable of giving this waitress simple directions? If it matters to me -- and clearly it does -- shouldn't I just say, "please, when I'm absorbed in my studies, just make your best guess and pour or don't pour; I promise I won't be cranky if you guess wrong." But such a speech-act -- which would really be an act of trust and confidence -- is simply out of my range. So I try to train her by answering her without lifting my eyes from my work, which seems dreadfully rude to me, but is within my range. I murmur "sure" and "thank you" without looking up. This last time she spoke to me, but at least it wasn't a question. "I'll just warm this up for you." It's progress. But how much of the energy of my life, I wonder, gets drained out of my soul by my ridiculous diffidence and distrust?

As someone going into a service profession myself, it's something I'm going to dealing with from the other side, soon. Everyone who does bodywork agrees that clients by and large don't tell you when something doesn't work, or when something makes them uncomfortable -- they just don't come back. Something as simple and easy to fix as an uncomfortably-placed seam on a face-cradle cover, or not liking your music, or discovering they need to pee five minutes into the massage, can wreck the session. Client doesn't come back; you never know why.

Porter-Black

Thick black porter, black as pitch; but hold a glass of it up to the sun and you'll see its real color: in its heart it glows -- not black, and not brown, but deep blood red.

Mae lay on the Thai mats, half asleep, a badger-stripe of blond in her dark hair. I didn't put a hand out to stroke her and soothe her. I didn't tell her my opinion of her has steadily risen. She is someone who understands, while still a teenager, that only kindness is real. I didn't say that either.

Later she sat up, and looked at us with no trace of sleepiness in her face, and there was that porter-black, burning in her eyes; eyes not of a teenager at all, but the serious dark eyes of a woman, a woman who has taken losses that will not be made good. She studied us.

George and Andrea had been alternately squabbling and nuzzling, in that odd hurried way they have, as though their relationship had a deadline, and they needed to get through everything before it fell due. We'd been studying cryotherapy, the use of ice and cold towels and so forth. Andrea, who hates ice and cold water, declared that no one was ever going to use it on her, at any rate. Clint informed Andrea that next summer we would all go camping, and that he and George would throw her into the cold water of the lake. He insisted on it, in his slow rural drawl; for once his easy-goingness and good nature seemed to have rubbed thin, and it was easy to see the young Marine he was fifteen years ago, just back from the first Gulf war, full of trouble but looking for more. "You're scaring me," muttered Andrea, finally -- referring not, as I took it, to the threats, but to his insistence -- and he came back to the present and let it drop. His wide blue eyes, framed with black eye-liner, scanned us. I wondered again how he got here from there. And I wondered what made us so watchful a group. Only George and Andrea, absorbed in the egotism of love, were oblivious.

What I have promised, I will perform, says Eddison's Aphrodite. The infinite regress of longing. How many days, cut across the face with the same lash?

We both know, said a friend of mine, that you don't talk about anything important in your blog

Well, that's true too. But of the things that could be unfolded, so many are better left as they are.

Lisa came over to us. "Any questions about anything?" she asked brightly. She had her hair up in almost-pigtails, and was wearing an orange-red Sergeant Pepper tunic, with a high, tight-buttoned collar. The light winked on her slender gold nose ring. She's younger than most of us, maybe Andrea's age, and I wondered if we were an intimidating group to approach. The little knot of us who came from Debbie's class have kept somewhat distinct: we are older (except for Mae), more confident, more skeptical, more enterprising. Much of this class is -- well, not to put too fine a point upon it, bovine. They seem to have wandered in by accident.

"Yes," said Clint, energetically -- startling her, I think. "Are we supposed to know which muscles are synergists and which only assist?" I asked which authority we should follow, in the tests, when our course notes and our book diverged. Andrea had questions about shoulder assessments.

Now Lisa's eyes, they're as brown as honey, clear and uncomplicated. She is quick and responsive, an automatic smiler. She talks her way to answers for each of our questions, and moves on, flashing a brilliant smile. May all beings be without suffering, I find myself murmuring. I seem to worry slightly about everybody, these days.

High green curtains: faded daylight. Shoulders, clavicle, sternum; oiled skin, gentle hands. The end of a winter day.

Daughter of Mary

for TK

The wind comes down
The long bare hills

Of the high horse country
Far from Ireland

The wind comes up
The raw gray green

Of the Narrows
And Hood's Canal

Bloody-fingered dawn
Opens the sky

Prouder than Lucifer
And less afraid

Two riders meet
The turn of the light

All I Want

The moon rode through the cloudwrack last night. Tamburlaine riding in triumph through Persepolis.

---

Yesterday, Mae put my hand on her shoulder, and did a quick slanty penguin shuffle, revolving clockwise around me. She was trying to do a passive range of motion test -- horizontal abduction of the shoulder -- and since we're evaluated on body mechanics she didn't want to just hold my arm and swing it around at shoulder height. Very reasonable. But the effect was comic, Chaplinesque, and I had to laugh. "Not very professional-seeming, maybe," I said. "But very entertaining: I'd come back for more." She collapsed laughing on the couch.

Her laugh is always puctuated by a piercing squeak at each in-breath, loud enough to turn heads at restaurants; it makes everyone grin. It's irresistable. She's eighteen. She wears all black, punctuated with chains and skulls and silver-studded collars; and she brings pink-frosted cupcakes for the class, and confers affectionately with her mother on her cell at break times.

I didn't hug her when I left. She has a touch of teenage bashfulness and clumsiness about her still, and I carefully maintain a certain distance: I think she likes working with me partly because to her I, being ancient, am completely desexualized. I scrupulously leave that impression undisturbed.

---

The gated city, through the strung pearls of fog; giddy with the turning, turning, turning; one long finger stroking silk as green as grasshopper's leg. If I were to ask now? Nothing. The time is passed, the alignment is gone, the planets are scattering this way and that. I tell myself it's just as well, but I don't believe me.

What would we ask for? Oh, you know, we would ask for our doom and disaster, the end of our world, the end of possibility. "All I want is to live forever in the presence of the Lord," we would say, knowing -- if we thought half a second -- that the living universe, with that kind of dissecting pin driven through its wing, would tear itself to pieces. Not to mention that we would have to be ourselves, forever and ever, forever crippled and wounded and fearful. Do you think, that just because we got what we asked for, we would stop wanting it, and agonizing over the lack of it? Look at how we receive the gifts of God now -- do you seriously think we would receive that gift any differently?

No. If we must ask, before we have learned how to ask, we should at least ask for something that makes sense. Let us ask to be made into someone who could receive such a gift, without destroying both himself and the world.

But better, maybe, to ask for nothing at all.

I don't know. I am tired. The simplicities are escaping me.

All I know is that I'm aching with the wanting. I think of one Rachel, brought face to face, so young, with the mortality of all that burns so brilliantly within her. Of another Rachel, who taught me to see pink string and splintered benches, among many other things, looking into a well of darkness. And I want to protest, object to the very shape and texture of the world. They should not hurt. They should not be mortal. (And, of course, incidentally, they should be mine.)

All I want. All I'm asking. I have learned to view those words as the trademarks of insanity.

Still.

Noted

Well, yeah. I've been gone, more or less. Checking in. Am I still in love with Paula? Sure. Desperately. Does Udge still delight me? Yep. He's commiting second-washbasin acts of rebellion, and adding prayer-vending machines to building designs, and posting in verse.

See, I've got this new used laptop, which accounts for the last little spate of posts. (I'm clever, see? new used? little spate? Clever boy.) But the wireless doesn't work. Not yet. So I'm connected very seldom.

I'm pretty well un-automobiled, now. I walk in the open air. Stand in the train for the short hop from downtown to the massage school, sit in the bus to work, to home. Sing -- I used to sing, as I walked. I'd forgotten that. But I find myself singing again. "Good night, Irene." "Going down to old Maui." Bits of poetry rise up. "Combing the hair of the waves blown back, When the wind blows the water white and black." I pace up and down, waiting for the bus. A sodden tangle of pink thread on dark pavement, a twist of rusty iron on a splintery bench, reach cold and electric hands around my heart.

Ancient anxieties and hopes arise, sepia colored and powerless now, but quaint and engaging. (I need to get back to meditating regularly, though, lest they take color and strength again and tyrannize over me again. Briefly noted. On we go.)

Again and again I find myself brimming over with love, for my family, my fellow-students, my fellow-bloggers. (Even if I am gone, I'm not, too. I'm reading TK's manuscript, and Natalie's book, and I just got Patry's book in the mail. Embarasse de riches (sp.?)). And I sneak looks from time to time, even if I don't comment.

I love you, all of you.

Checklist

Mercifully, it has been many years since I have been seriously tempted by suicide. There was a time when it was a daily struggle. I developed a number of strategies for declining the temptation. One of the better ones was a checklist.

When the temptation first began, I used to tell myself sternly that I simply couldn't commit suicide, that I had responsibilities in the world. Someone would have to find me. It would inflict trauma on my family. That sort of thing. But the trouble with that approach was that for me, suicide was all about getting out of bondage. That train of thought only made my confinement that much more vivid. Made me feel that much more strongly that there was no way out. It tended to make things worse, not better.

So I gave myself permission. I made a formal agreement with myself. I could kill myself, but only after I did ten things.

I no longer remember what all ten things were, and I don't know how useful my list would be to anyone else -- everyone would have a different list. But most of them were very simple things. Sit up straight and take three deep breaths. Go outside and look at the sky. (So what if it's raining? I'm going to kill myself, and I'm worried about getting wet?) Think up and do something, however trivial, that would be a pleasant surprise to somebody, and which couldn't be traced to me. Stroke my cat. Get my heart rate up into the aerobic range for ten minutes. There may have been a couple designed to verify that I was really done worrying about what people thought of me -- ask an acquaintance for a hug, for instance. Maybe one or two minor housekeeping tasks -- wash the dishes in the sink, or clear off a corner of my desk; sometimes in depression a minor knot of clutter could take on a monstrously oppressive aspect for me. But it couldn't be something huge, like clean the whole house or even the whole kitchen. It had to be something that could be done in a few minutes.

Since these were the last things I was going to do on this earth, I had to do them attentively. No rushing through them. But if I got through the full list and still wanted to kill myself, I could do it. That was the bargain. I took it seriously.

Depression is very plausible, very glib. It has an answer for everything. There's no way to win an argument with it. If I tried to tell it that I might feel better if I sat up straight and took three deep breaths, it could crush me with a dozen withering replies that demonstrated, beyond any doubt, that the idea was pathetic and absurd. But it's not nearly so good at coping with the things themselves. So my strategy became to let it win all the arguments -- it was going to anyway -- but make it prove them. Okay, so asking an acquaintance for a hug won't make me feel any different. Let's just go verify it, then. Looking at the sky won't make the world any more spacious. Okay. Demonstrate it. Prove all your assertions, one by one, and I'm your man.

I never made it all the way through the list, and of course I don't know what I would have done if I had. But it was a comfort to have the procedure, and have the permission. There was a way out, and I was free to take it.

Bodied Forth

The bits of anatomy and physiology I'm learning -- "sound-byte science" is the accurate phrase one of my teachers, in an unguarded moment, let fall -- have impressed me above all with how much the body alters, how fluid and changeable it is, how much tissue is being torn down and rebuilt every day. That understanding dovetails nicely with Buddhist contemplations about the impermanence of the body.

Every moment we are creating our bodies. Every moment we sit, as we are right now, dear reader, with our shoulders hunched and immobile, our necks thrust forward, and our heads craned up, our arms poised like a mantis's over mouse and keyboard, we're issuing building instructions. Make a body, we're saying, whose breast can't open, and whose shoulders can't drop. Make a body that holds still by dint of continual muscular effort and tension, rather than by relaxation and balance. Make a body that responds to stimulation by isometric contraction, rather than by motion.

We yearn for our bodies to change, as if the problem were that they were rigid and unalterable. The problem, on the contrary, is that they are all too plastic. They give us, heroically, as long as they are able, exactly what we ask for.

Chittering

I am so tired of being a ghost. It turns out to be harder than I thought, to be anything else. I've forsworn the sacraments of the old rituals that conjured a breathing, blood-pumping body out of the vasty halls of stupor, and I have nothing to replace them with. I drift, and chitter silently, like an ancient flickering film about Indian monkeys. No home. No body.

---

Suppose the burden of the past -- which I feel sit so heavily on my shoulders -- suppose that it's not the burden of a real past, but of an imagined one? It's a real burden, that's clear. It would be pretty comic for someone as stooped and crooked under his load as I am to deny it. But is it actually made of the past? Can it actually be investigated by way of recollection? If I could go back and see it, would I be flooded with understanding, or with confusion? I'm guessing confusion.

Walwe

What can I say that I haven't said before? Othello's occupation's gone.

My eyes are outlined with a tint of rawness; my monstrous heart wallows slowly in its breast. Its outriding thoughts skitter slyly in the margins.

"I am old, I am old," mutters Falstaff.

Love, I suppose, after my fashion.

The light comes earlier now. I ride the bus down to the Foundation, which is on the same block as, but on the corner diagonally opposite to, the great purple octopus that adorns the facade of the Greek restaurant.

I walk in the open air of the city.

Raise my head and look at the moon, as the Chinese poet said. Lower my head and think of home.

Paper

I have travelled backwards in time: I am working as a clerk in a Dickens novel. Inkpots and quills would hardly be more foreign to me than all this apparatus for generating, copying, and shuffling paper. Copiers, faxes, staplers, paper-folders, post-its, envelope-moisteners, file folders, white-out, paper-clips, file cabinets -- it all seems very quaint to me. For years I have worked without paper.

Now, in my new office, I am immersed in it. I printed off 154 thank-you letters, today, each of which will be signed by hand, and 154 envelopes, which I will duly stuff, seal, and stamp tomorrow. I have a ten foot long table in my office, and every inch of it holds piles of paper-clipped, stapled, and post-it-ed papers. Checks. Deposit slips. Stock transfers. Copies, and copies of copies, of letters and notes. I'm learning to change ten-key tapes and refill toner. Learning that pink edges on the credit card machine mean its spool is about empty. I guess if you cut your teeth in a paper office, the huge array of devices and instruments for manipulating paper -- many of them enchantingly clever -- all seem normal. Meeting them all at once, though, is a bit overwhelming.

It's not that they don't have the technology for liberating themselves from paper. Their computers are networked and backed up; they have share drives and email, and they use them, after their fashion. But anything of importance gets printed out. Conveying information to someone else generally means copying a piece of paper, adding a note to it, and carrying it to their office. Or faxing it to some other office, where no doubt it is copied and annotated and carried about again. In a back room down the hall are stacks and stacks of boxes filled with old paper; it all washes up there eventually. And this organization is only ten years old. How much paper do older organizations have, I wonder? And where do they keep it all?

Paper -- well, I love it; a well-bound and printed book is a joy and a wonder, and a notebook of brand new paper has always made my heart beat faster. But. You can't search it. You can't sort it. You can't "sed" it or "awk" it or spell-check it. It just -- sits there. In one place. If it gets filed in the wrong place, your chances of ever finding it again are miniscule. It can fall behind desks, blow out windows, catch on fire. It's horribly vulnerable and unwieldy.

But for now, its quaintness delights me. I'm glad I got a chance to work this way, before it all disappears.

Sex and Massage

I get no sexual pleasure from massage. This may surprise attentive readers of Mole, who will have observed that I get sexual pleasure from a great range of things, from walking in a heavy rain to pouring cream into my coffee. But it's true. I was enjoying watching a woman in one of my classes recently, a dancer, who was leaning over to take her books out of her pack, and it occurred to me that I'd had my hands on her naked body (modestly draped, of course, in the American style) a few times. The interesting thing is that it was the first time that my attraction to her and the massages had bumped up against each other in my mind: they belonged to completely different categories of experience. They simply had nothing to do with each other.

It's not that massage is erotically neutral. It's not. It's antithetical to eros. It moves in the opposite direction. Eros is about narrowing attention and winding it up. Massage, however, is about opening attention and unwinding it. I suppose they arrive ideally at the same place -- a place of stillness, communion, and release -- but they arrive by opposite means. And they don't mix well at all. Massage junkie though I am, I've always been irritated and thrown off if a partner starts massaging me during love play. Likewise, if I begin to have an erotic response to getting massage, which has happened once or twice, it breaks the mood and threatens to wreck the massage -- it is, in fact, a distinctly unpleasant and alienating experience.

The association of massage and sex, which I still encounter from time to time, depresses me. Not because it's a threat to the respectability of the massage profession. I'm not a big fan of respectability. That's not what bothers me. What bothers me is the tactile ignorance and deprivation it reveals. To a starving person all food is alike.

Body

I both have a body and I am a body, and this intimate relation puts my body in a closer juxtaposition with my immediate awareness than any other object that I can possibly contemplate.

-- Deane Juhan, Job's Body

Tendrel

Tendrel is a Tibetan word, variously translated as "interconnectivity," or "dependent arising": a famous emblem of it is the "endless knot." The fact that it is a homophone of the English word "tendril" is, as we say, a happy accident.

In from the rain comes a glory of red hair
Framing slack morning features;
She hums as though this restaurant
Were her own kitchen.

Hair spangled with raindrops, pouring over the shoulders
Of a faded green sweatshirt,
Curling around a mild Irish face
Of placid benevolence.

I think of the previous life we lived together
When she was passionate and Greek
And hated my drinking;
Of the life when she was

An unlucky bricklayer, and I a poisonous woman,
His culminating disaster.
And I would like to apologize
For how troublesome a child

I was, when the Swedes burned everything
The Prince Elector's troops had left
(Which wasn't much) and she my father
Tried to teach us thrift.

But each life peels cleanly from the bone.
In this life we are strangers:
She eats her breakfast, reads her magazine
Contentedly.

Let bygones be bygones. She does not remember
And neither do I.

Solstice

I open the window, and the icy rain blows into my face. Thank God.

I'm reaching for you, across the miles, along the filaments of light spun fine from the crescent moon.

We complain about Christmas, but really it's just what we need: a desolation, a hole in the bottom of the year. How could there be a solstice if we didn't really believe that all the light and love and warmth might really drain out of the world forever and ever? That it might be always Christmas, always frantic, every bond of affection a fetter, every song an insistent interminable jingle, every food cloying, every gathering enforced by loveless convention? It could be Christmas forever.

And then, finally, it's December 26th, and we realize -- as at the climax of all solstice celebrations -- that the nightmare has limits. We don't need the sun to return all at once. We just need to know that it's turned.

In the dark, I press my hands against yours, fingertip to fingertip. Bow my head till our foreheads rest together. Beloved. Stay with me here a moment. It's all we have. But maybe it's all we need.

Even to Me

Frost on the steps like white sand;
The shivering cat complains at the door.
Winter has finally come
Even to me.

Shadow Cabinet

Take a look at Dave Bonta's new site. A gestating book. It's a terrific idea, and I'm seriously thinking of stealing it. (The idea, not the book. The book would be well worth stealing, too, though.)

Kaya

The "professional exchange," they call it. You get a massage from a professional, and give them one, and they evaluate your work.

"Then you get some difficult clients," she said. "People who..."

And I picture men attempting to grope her. But I'm on the wrong track. She looks at me obliquely, as though sizing me up.

"People who start crying in their intake interviews. And, you know, want to hug you all the time."

I make a mental note to hug her sparingly, if at all. But I understand the crying part. The care she takes moves me, makes me feel like a lost five year old who's suddenly found home. She moved my arm in a complicated range-of-motion routine, and I remarked on it (probably unintelligibly; I was already on the endorphin-high I always get from good massage.) "It's really for myofascial stretching, not stretching the muscles," she said. But what had struck me was not that. It was the way she supported my arm, holding all of my arm with all of hers. It reminded me of the far-off days of Contact Improv. It was such a caring way to cradle an arm.

As she talks with me afterward she folds her laundry on the massage table, which creates a casual intimacy that enchants me. I wonder once again how much of what brought me to massage was my impatience with boundaries and formal distances. I have always, like Ahab, wanted to "strike through the mask." And it has sometimes been a destructive impulse, though I've never meant it to be. I read a book recently, The Educated Heart, about the necessity for boundaries and formal distances in bodywork. And I agreed with it, very strongly; but of course the reason we need to fence bodywork and formalize it is because it is already, in itself, a radical dissolution of boundaries, a radical lessening of distance.

Is the body real, or is it just another convention? Buddhist philosophy would say, just another convention. In which case, the dissolving of these boundaries will just reveal the next. The boundaries aren't out there -- they would say -- they're in my mind.

They're right and they're wrong, about that. They're right: I can already feel the impatience stirring. This still isn't intimate enough. The old affliction -- never enough -- that the Buddha diagnosed so brilliantly. And some of her clients reach for an intimacy that isn't there, or isn't there at least as they imagine it. But the Buddhist philosophers are also wrong. It reaches me, this loving touch. In some way it seems impossible to make it inauthentic. Even when a fellow-student touches me clumsily, with wavering attention, the touch marks our relationship, makes it different. All the hullabaloo about whether Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat were going to shake hands -- well, in one way it seemed just silly. The political agreements and disagreements were what mattered. But in another, deeper way, it wasn't at all silly. Once you've touched someone, you will never be in quite the same relation to them again. And everyone knows that.

She's an athlete. I don't think I have ever touched a perfectly healthy body, before. Everything about it worked; every muscle yielded gracefully; massaging her was like reaching for an apple so ripe that it falls into your hand the moment you touch it. Her body was the physical equivalent of a mind of perfect equanimity. You could see why she'd be unworried about subjecting herself to the clumsy ministration of first-quarter massage students -- what could they do wrong, to a body so right in itself?

Windstorm

All night the storm
Danced with the trees,

The transformers blew
With soft brilliant gasps,

My unquiet viscera answered to the gusts,
And my skin fluttered like the leaves.

Trading Massage

As I left the room
She was already undressing,
Standing easily on one foot, and
Pulling a slipper from the other.
She flexed sideways, and her foot
Rose backward to meet her hand;
Her balance so sure that her eyes met mine
With kindly indifference
As the gray wool came free.

Bee

At the moment I cupped the water in my hands
And tossed its glittering suffering into the air
I wondered if I was dashing it to its death.
So delicate. So beautiful. So ill-prepared
For a world of chlorinated water
And savage boys. And then it lay bedraggled
On the cement, in a dark stain of fluid.
How cold, I wondered, is cold water
To a creature so small that it breathes
By letting the air flow through it as it flies?
I shivered and watched, as my groin
Tightened, and the cold gripped me.
"I've killed it," I thought. It lay still.
The wind blew, and dried the stain,
And its four wings trembled.
Then as I watched, one feeler curled
With deliberation. It gathered its legs
Underneath it. I was stung by its gold and black,
By its glistening determination. I am wounded
To this day, by the pain of its survival.
It flew, unsteadily,
Into a grove of bamboo, and I lost it
In the crossing daggers of their leaves.

Breitenbush

I sat in the steaming water, hinting of sulfer, and watched the ghostly sunlight become more and more transparent on the high south ridge, the ridge more distant and more distant, more surreal.

The full moon rose. Crunching feet on the path. Now the sun was gone, the snow was all white with moonlight, and the ridge was closer again. The moon owned everthing.

I didn't look up as the newcomers undressed, or when they came into the pool. White round breasts in the moonlight, silvery with water. The pale gleam of round buttocks wavering in the moonlit water as one of them leaned over the frost-furred rocks at the lip of the pool, looking down at the river. The Breitenbush rushed below us, down a snowfield littered with rocks. Plumes of steam rose from other springs.

This was the silent pool, so nobody had to speak. The distance roared in my ears like the river. My gaze will always be wrong. I will always be outside. I will always be male.

Too long in the hot water. I hauled myself onto the frosty rocks. Steam rolled off my body in clouds. I stared into the water. Lifted my gaze to look at the moon. Only an overpowering sense of the sacred could have raised me above this ancient maleness, this outsideness, this displacement. And there was nothing here but a sign in curly letters announcing that this was a "sacred area."

Wrong from the start. Sacred wells, sacred pools, I could believe in, sure. Sacred areas? No. Not in a million years, not with a changed tongue and a new alphabet. There will never be a sacred area.

I watched Martha get out of the pool, all silver, and stand in the air, steaming, like me. Our bodies were running in dischordant rhythms. I knew that we would connect as friends and confidantes tonight, and tomorrow. But not as lovers.

It was a beautiful night, and a beautiful place. I know that. Maybe I can even convey that, the rush of the water, the moon above the hemlocks, the darkness, the deep ragged weave of the forest. But I was wholly unbeautiful.

In the morning, before breakfast, I came down early, and sat alone in the silent pool. The colors of the sunrise were brilliant, where the moon had been last night. Two ravens flew over, and just before they were out of earshot one gave a hoarse grumbling croak.

By the time the breakfast bell rang, all the color was gone from the sky. I dried myself off and went to wake Martha. We came back to the pools after breakfast, but the silent pool was closed for cleaning, and we were chattered at by a man of striking features and striking banality of thought. And I looked at beautiful naked women and wonder why I ever believed in them.

One woman, all tattoos and pierced nipples, about my age. She and the chatterbox got on, finding opinion after opinion to share. I liked her face, though. I liked the dark nipples of the -- Indonesian? Filapina? -- woman. I liked the chatterbox's pale arms. I liked the cold water in our plastic bottle, which stayed cold, even though it sat a foot away from the hot water.

But it was all very distant to me, unreal, like the ridge fading with the sunlight, and I wonder what moon could ever make it all become real again. Or real for the first time?

I'm too tired to think. I have mistaken so many things. I still have so much unlearning to do.

That night, I told my classmates that I was going to bomb the massage quiz. I couldn't follow the sequences, couldn't remember the instructions. Andrea took me as a partner, and gave me the best massage she's ever given me. To ace the quiz? Or to soothe and comfort me?

By the end of my turn, working on Andrea, I was drenched with sweat. I got thirty out of thirty points. Did I deserve it? I don't know.

This morning, a job interview. They liked me, apparently; they invited me to a third interview on Friday, to meet the whole group. Still nothing quite connects, nothing quite makes sense. But I will write it all down here, moved by the same impulse that moved me to tell my classmates I was going to bomb the test. All you can say is the closest thing to the truth that you can reach at the time. Not very true. But better than nothing.

Sleep

I was seven years old, at the neighbor's house, and I surreptitiously broke off a little piece of styrofoam packaging and chewed on it.

"You shouldn't eat styrofoam," the Neighbor Dad said, his face full of concern. "It's just like glass, it will cut you up inside."

I nodded, full of interested understanding, pretending I hadn't eaten it, pretending he hadn't seen me, pretending he was just introducing a topic of general interest. In my experience if you pretended blank incomprehension long enough, and just refused to inhabit the same world as other people, the other people eventually became nonplussed and went away.

It worked now, too. He went away. I didn't really think the styrofoam was going to cut me up inside. But I didn't know. It might. I've waited, ever since, for that styrofoam to begin cutting. It will serve me right, if it does.

I remember it still, so it must have frightened me pretty badly. His words have sat in my mind ever since, like that maleficent styrofoam, cutting me up inside. Other words sit there in the same way, chance remarks, parting shots from bitter lovers, bits of magazine advice.

My own survival came to weigh on me, after a while. The end of my life and my love had been prophesied so often, so many dooms had been invoked over my blond-white head, that living on -- even thriving, in my queer, viral, parasitic way -- came to seem perverse.

Yet here I am. Apparently indestructible.

Still turned at this odd angle to the world, half in, half out. I open my hands to catch the light, I mold the clay of the hills, shear the coastlines; I take a deep breath and blow, and all the clouds rush away in turbulent swirls. What am I making, here? Why did I shape those trees, this street, that glimpsed face?

I am old, old, old; old with making, old with dreaming. I don't belong here, but nothing has the strength, it seems, to heave me out.

I kiss you gently as you sleep, night after night. I used to long for a real life. Now I know that I was never meant for that. I was meant for something else.

Snowflakes come out of the dark sky, like confused moths, brushing me with their wings. Winter, Summer, Winter, Summer. I can't keep track. The zodiac spins slowly around me; Orion trades with Lyra, Lyra with Auriga. Moments ago it was summer; now it seems to be the dead of winter.

I cradle your head in my hands, working the little muscles of the neck. All that head to hold. Poor little hybrid: head as heavy as a pony's, and just that little monkey neck to hold it all up.

In the middle of the dream your brown eyes open and look straight into mine, our faces upside-down to each other. Your eyes fill with confusion. I'm not what you expected to see. I don't whisper, "sleep, dear. Sleep." I turn your head, softening the scalenes, letting my fingers flow in among them. My other hand works your scalp. Soon enough, soon enough, you'll have the story put together again, about who you are, and who I am, and what light that is, falling through the high window.

Playground Nightmares

Words do not come easily, just now. I've lost my voice. Physically -- I have a wretched cold and my throat is on fire -- but also mentally. Something has shaken loose, in the core of me, and nothing verbal quite works anymore.

So I write, hoping that if I just pump enough words through, they'll wash the obstructions away and my voice will run clear again. It's not exactly that I have nothing to say. It's that I have nothing to say that feels bold or new. I have wandered backward into the nightmares of my childhood. There's nothing adult to be seen here. This is a country of selfish, inflated anxieties, and of endless primping of an ego that's never, quite, somehow, cued onto the stage. I come back to it with a little distance. But I haven't grown out of it all -- I've just been holding it at arm's length.

I wanted to take private yoga classes. A hopeless extravagance, for someone unemployed. But I sense that I've gone as far as I can with sitting meditation, for the moment. These are anxieties that live in the flesh, a hunch of the shoulders and slump of the spine that replicate themselves moment by moment, and they have to be addressed physically. And I don't know how to do that. But the idea of being in a class, on display in my physical self, horrifies me. It's all old, old anxiety, childish stuff, playground nightmares. I suppose I could try to learn yoga out of books. I have some suspicion of that; that it would be like trying to learn meditation out of books, a long laborious roundabout way of doing things.

I know that some of you are serious practitioners of yoga. What do you think I should do?

Confidence Skulls and Incubi

They keep the classrooms locked, so we accumulate in the hall before class, sitting on the carpeted floor, looking over our anatomy cards, chatting about what we did last night.

Kinesiology midterm, already. I drop my pack and settle to the floor. "Dale, here," says Clint, and he tosses me something about the size of a marble. "It's a confidence skull. It's a Buddhist thing." He's brought one for everyone. A carved wooden skull, sans mandible. Tests are not Clint's favorite thing. He's been having nightmares, he tells us, about this midterm.

He's shaved his head, except for an odd forelock. "Like a kewpie doll!" exclaims Lindsey, accurately.

I roll the skull between my fingers, surprised at how strong a gratitude I feel. I wonder what sort of "Buddhist thing" it is, but I doubt there's any information to be gleaned by asking. I'm not nervous about the test. My gratitude is for being included.

You would think it would be the massage class that would be tight, since we lay hands on each other all the time, but it's the kinesiology class that's become our common hearth.

"How old are you, Dale?" asks George, asking as if to settle a bet. "Forty-eight," I answer. Speculation ensues about the age of our instructor, a lithe and beautiful woman past her youth. Guesses range from mid-thirties to mid-forties. She has at least one teenager, we know.

And here she is, looking uncharacteristically worn.

"Where are our cupcakes?" asks Mae. "On my kitchen counter," says our teacher wearily, as she unlocks the door. Meaning she forgot them, I suppose. She has a discipline problem to deal with at home, she says, so she won't be joining us after the test. A chorus of genuine regret. "No cupcakes?" says Mae, mournfully.

We file into the classroom, get settled, several of us fondling our little skulls. Mae has torn off a wisp of her hair and is threading it through hers, producing a surprisingly gruesome effect. Andrea's already threaded hers through a fine chain around her neck. Lindsey springs up a moment later. "I just have to!" she says, and leans over to rub the fuzz of Clint's head. "So soft!"

Just eight of us, now. (Three people have dropped the class, including, alas, the Girl with the Magic Hands.) So we find a partner, and repair to the tables, with the curtains drawn so they're open just in front -- we can't see each other, but the teacher can see all of us. There's a lot of waiting around, during a palp test, and we're not allowed to speak. We sit on the tables and kick our feet, or pace around, as the instructor moves down the line, having one person in turn name and palpate the origin and insertion of some muscle on his or her partner, and run it through its actions.

We can hear George, the other side of the curtain. "The latissimus dorsi originates at the posterior iliac crest, the thoracolumbar aponeurosis, the spinous processes of the last six thoracic vertebrae, and the posterior surfaces of the last three or four ribs," he says, authoritatively. I'm a little amused. George always talks himself down, and gives the impression that he expects to fail horribly, but he doesn't fool anyone anymore. He has it down cold. "...it runs under the arm here and inserts here, at the crest of the lesser tubercle of the humerus. Its actions are to extend the shoulder, adduct the shoulder" -- he'll be moving Clint's arm as he speaks -- "and..."

He stops: he's gone blank. Silence. Andrea and I exchange a glance. He finds his way again. "...and medially rotate the shoulder." Andrea pumps a fist in silent triumph, and we grin at each other.

Mae's too young to drink, so Andrea's reserved a lane at the bowling alley. The rest of us can drink there, fetching pitchers out of the bar, and we sit at a cafeteria table under glaring flourescent lights. Our lane won't be ready for a while. James, who is a movie buff, is talking about other films by the maker of Amelie, which fascinates Andrea and bores George. Mae has found other friends at the bowling alley and is dividing her time between us.

Clint asks me what music I listen to. I find this a difficult question to answer, and what I say is not particularly true; I say I listen to old stuff, Beatles and Stones and Zeppelin. Actually I listen to all kinds of stuff, whatever's on the radio, new stations or oldies stations. There's all kinds of wonderful music. I wonder why the question makes me so anxious. I guess because I no longer know what liking this music or that music is supposed to say about me. Wary, as ever, of being pigeon-holed. If I say Red Hot Chili Peppers or Sarah McLachlan, will I have branded myself as... something? I look at Clint's guileless face and find myself ashamed of my reticence and caution.

Cosmic bowling. The black light picks out the skulls on Clint's wristband and ring, and the white of his boxer shorts as he clownishly wiggles his hips before taking his three steps and bowling. How he can bowl with his pants riding so low is a mystery to me. He can't, very well. George leans over to me and murmurs, "I've never seen a grown man suck so bad at bowling."

A certain moroseness has been growing in George. There's just five of us left when we head into the karaoke bar -- all four men from kinesiology, and Andrea. We're all flirting lightly with Andrea. But for George possibly it's serious; it seems to have an edge to it.

Karaoke. Andrea does a creditable "Son of a Preacher Man." James, who reveals an unexpectedly commanding stage presence, does Metallica's "Sandman." I've never seen karaoke before and I'm delighted by it. It reminds me of blogging: singing for each other, all amateurs together, rather than being passive spectators of remote, professional artists; borrowing the taped instrumentals just as we borrow the professional-looking typesetting of html apps to make a show of being real writers.

"Back to never never land," James growls into the microphone, radiating sinister, and wholly feigned, malevolence. I glance at George's closed face with some uneasiness. Some are born to endless night, Blake whispers to me. I hope not.

But George is the exception. The rest of us are simply having a good time.

We shut the bar down. That strange moment arrives when ordinary lights come up, and tired waitstaff begin to wipe things down, and all the shabbiness of worn carpets and tattered upholstery is revealed, and a sudden quiet hangs in the stale air.

This is the time when the incubus usually settles heavily on my shoulders, whispering to me about the futility of my love and my perpetual isolation. But not tonight. It's absent. We say our good nights affectionately, and I drive carefully home, with nothing, nothing on my shoulders.

Do I Owe You Email?

Hell yes. The first person on my "reply to at once!" list sent their unanswered mail four months ago. If you've heard from me more recently than that, which is very unlikely, you jumped the queue.

Sorry. You're in good company, anyway.

The Moon, Again

Walked out under the streetlights. Eastwards the white lob of the moon, dwindling from full; westwards the illuminated green glass towers of the Convention Center. I shrugged into my jacket, and stopped, resting a knee on the brickwork wall, and looked at the night.

Took a bit of something out of my pocket and touched it to my lips. Doubting all my decisions, and painfully aware of how many moons have already run out under my fingers. An old song from my childhood, about rain-drenched streets, came to my mind. Accidents of time and space. This wall, this knee, this evening. It all could have been different.

I turned my talisman in my fingers. I'm not such an unwary prey of samsara as to believe the whole story of loss and missed opportunity that its refraction of the streetlights told me. But still. You can't help but listen.

Occasions of Joy

A couple weeks ago. I drove through a landscape of fog and suddenly looming, yellow, fluttering leaves, till the sky suddenly cleared and turned bright blue; turned into a little small-town college campus, and walked into the nearest building, and there was Tarakuanyin. She held out a hand to shake, but I hugged her instead. So glad to see her, and to feel her shoulders under my hands.

So we found a little cafe, and talked, and discovered old mentors in common. A beautiful Irish voice, slowed to cowboy cadences. Altogether such a lovely experience, out of the clear blue autumn sky. Pure gift.

(If you haven't read TK, read the harrowing series of posts that begins here. She's an extraordinary writer.)

Yesterday. Half the sangha is gone to India, including all our official teachers. So Peggy was leading a half-day of shamatha. I wish, I wish she did this weekly. She's all business. No long introductions and explanations, no question-and-answer period for people to talk and try to impress the teachers, or each other. We're here to sit; let's sit.

So we sit a full hour -- Peggy also doesn't trim down the time of the meditations -- and it's wonderful, and since we're observing the customs of the all-day sit, there's silence at the breaks, which means I can walk out, at the first break, in silence, all the benefit of the meditation intact, and go home in the quiet morning to prepare my massage room. Life as I have dreamed it could be.

Holding

There have been times, I know, when I have felt loveless. But I know that without being able to revisit the feeling. Nowadays there seems always to be a tenderness welling up in me. Sometimes pleasurable, sometimes painful. But always there.

For much of my life I was troubled by it. Along with the tenderness there used to come a hunger, and a sense that there was something I should do in response to it. I felt all the more isolated: all that love, and no way to say it, no way for it to flow from me to you.

I think that of all the things practicing the Dharma has brought me, the most valuable has been the understanding that there is nothing that needs to be done in response to it. That it already does flow from me to you. I was stuck in a narrow materialism, I believed the boundaries of my self where absolute and impermeable. And I was so alone.

Of course I am usually still hungry. I want everyone for a lover. I want to embrace every stranger who smiles at me, and every stranger with sad eyes. I want to hold everyone, feel them fall asleep in my arms. And the rules that say I mustn't do those things -- well, I guess I accept them now: I understand, at any rate, that those rules have never been the source of my loneliness, and that abolishing them would not have filled my emptiness. But I don't think they will ever feel right to me.

Life is so short, after all, and the gale is blowing all the time, that tearing wind fluttering the hair and grabbing at the clothes, and all we have to hang on to is each other. Someone comes along and says, oh no, you must hold on to just these people. Not those people. And I want to say, for God's sake, don't you feel the force of that wind? Don't you see how important it is, that we be able to hold on to each other?

But no. They don't feel it, they don't know it, they don't see it. All right. Then I just need to hold on another way. I will hold on with words, and with the sanctioned touch of supposed therapy -- as though sickness were what made touch necessary! -- but yes, I will solemnly nod my head and pretend to be a therapist, rather than someone who holds on to people so they won't be blown away by the storm. And so I won't be blown away by the storm.

The Feminism 5

By way of Sage, the question is: what five things has feminism given you?

1) Touch. Permission to be tender with my children, parents, and friends. To hug, ruffle hair, snuggle.

2) Flourishing gay friends. Two old friends in particular come to mind. Both came out in their twenties, and both were transformed. Their voices deepened, they looked you in the eye, their feet were on solid ground, and they laughed from their bellies.

3) Twenty years of life. I'm just guessing. But my grandfather, who worked virtually all the time, dropped dead at age sixty-two. People who can't be soft and can't rest die young.

4) Sex as play. When sex is neither conquest nor performance, it's a lot more fun.

5) Permission to be silent, to dwell in uncertainty, to listen, and to wait.

The Next Thing

Or perhaps I've just added the horror of poverty to all the other horrors.

I don't know how to judge. I only know that I ache with sickness, the horror of a life of accumulated shame and doubt and fear. I feel certain tonight that this clutch around my heart will never ease.

It's good I guess to be brought face to face with it -- this grimacing creature that's mocked me all my life, scoffing my state and grinning at my pomp. I guess. Or maybe I should never have looked up.

But. Get a grip, Dale. The truth of the matter is -- it's not that bad, either way. And it doesn't last that long. It's just one moment, and then another, and then another. It's okay. The clutch eases in fact quite frequently. Only once did it stay for long, and that was long ago and far away.

At this point, kiddo, the best thing to do is walk straight into it. What else is there? After all, this is what you've always longed to do: to shatter everyone's expectations, to fail spectacularly in every particular. So do it. Fail.

But not as a slave. Don't fail that way. Fail as a free human being.

Just do the next thing. Even if that is what you used to tell yourself when you paused by the windows at IBM, having wasted half a day, taking a deep breath before going back to your cubicle to waste the other half. It was good advice then, even if you couldn't take it. It's good advice now. Do the next thing.

Reading

I and Tiel of Knocking from Inside will among those reading poetry Saturday evening at

Missa's Herbal Products and Health Care
6026 NE Glisan
Oct 21 - 7 PM

Yikes! Never done such a thing.

Morning

5:30 a.m. I close the bedroom door and pad quietly downstairs. At the landing I pause, as always, to part the window curtain and see what the sky is up to.

The overcast is starting to break apart. Through one tear in the clouds, I can see Sirius burning, throbbing blue and white and blue and white. Comforted, as always, by knowing the stars are always there, way beyond the reach of greedy hands. Made lonely, as always, by knowing that they're beyond the reach of my greedy hands as well. I drop the curtain and go on downstairs.

Good morning. Wherever you are, the sky will be holding you. Don't forget to look up.

Neighboring Tribes

There lives not three good men unhanged in England, and one of them is fat, and grows old.

Woke this morning full of anxiety about whether, when we reach week three, and are supposed to be giving two massages and receiving one each week, anyone will want
to trade with me. It is a very juvenile-feeling anxiety -- like wondering if anyone will date you in highschool -- which jumbles up particularly disagreeably with the fact that in this case my chief insecurity is that, in this context, I am so old. In both my classes I am by far the oldest student. Quite old enough to be the father of most of them. The young women in my classes are careful not to encourage me -- perfectly civil, but avoiding much eye contact and staying very neutral. Which of course is precisely how I would behave, if I were them, but that doesn't make it less nettling.

The young men, on the other hand, do not seem cautious this way. Altogether the young men surprise and please me. There are a lot of men in my classes -- two thirds in my Massage I class, and half in my Kinesiology class -- and they are comfortable in their bodies and comfortable with touch in a way that I think would have been rare, or even impossible, when I was their age. Some of them of course, like me, were raised in the cultural far-left, children of flower-children. But some are just ordinary working-class guys, who grew up in Tigard or Salem, guys who like to watch football and tinker with their cars on the weekend. Mostly it seems their wives or girlfriends have encouraged them to do this, told them they had a gift for it. Thirty years ago this sort of man wouldn't even have considered it. Now here they are, practicing bilateral tree strokes and shingling on other men with no more fuss about it than the mild acknowledgement that "it's a little weird to do this on guys." It's not a big deal.

Working class. One thing this experience is bringing forcibly home to me is how very segregated my school and work environments have been. In my work life, for years, the only hint I have that there even are working-class people have been the barely visible trace presences -- the crews of dour Hispanic landscapers, the young women with long blond braids who silently appeared to water the plants, the cleaning crews of smiling, but again silent, Hispanic women who showed up and cleaned around you if you were working late. In that environment it was easy to fall into thinking that everybody goes to college and sends their kids to a private school.

These people -- these young men, in particular -- have a sort of openness about them. After the rather pinched and self-conscious academics and software engineers I've grown accustomed to they're lovely to be around -- perfectly willing to make mistakes and be corrected, and full of an oddly old-fashioned gallantry toward the women. No doubt a proportion of them are jerks, but there's something touching about how anxious they are to make sure the women's privacy is respected when they're undressing to get on the table, how careful they are with the draping. Many of them are very big, burly men, and they carry it very gently and -- what? Almost apologetically.

This is not my tribe either. But it's a nice one to visit.

Tabouli

Went in this morning, signed a couple papers, surrendered my badge, my laptop, and sundry keys and passwords, and walked out into the free air of a bright Indian summer day. Done.

Very queer, to have time. So many entrenched habits of haste, and calculating time. Unnecessary at the moment, but I keep finding myself hurrying. I went home and took a nap. Tried making some tabouli, which I'd never made before. The pleasures of touching fresh food, squeezing lemons, chopping tomatoes and scallions and parsley.

All very odd, nostalgic, and not quite real-seeming. I feel like an adult pretending to be a child. How tracking time and eating out of frozen cardboard boxes and tin cans came to represent adulthood to me is a little hard to fathom.

I mostly don't feel free, at the moment, so much as disoriented, and a little at a loss. What now?

School

Hmm. I started off, once again, trying to write something for Qarrtsiluni on education and failing. Once again, it's turned out to be all about me. So now it's a rather unformed blog post.

I have been groping for the analog. At some point, at some point of my life I felt just this way. There was even a similar catastrophe of loss hanging over me.

Finally I got it. Just now. And of course if I'd paid attention to the earworm, I would have known right away. School's... out... for... summer! School's... out... for... ever! Alice Cooper, right? And the image in my head? A blond little boy races up the steps and goes into a school.

Ah. But. The point is, it's not a school. No chain-link fences. No barbed wire. No asphalt to skin your knees on. Not a real school. It looks like a house. Real schools look like prisons.

The image is from a short documentary someone made about the New School, the little private alternative boarding school I attended for two years. It ended up with that song and that image. Liberation. That's what it was about.

I hated school, before that. Passionately. But the odd thing is, I didn't know it. I was bored. Many of my classes were desperately uninteresting. I was "weird," which meant I was mostly friendless. My movements were almost completely prescribed -- sit at this desk in this room, go to this section of the cafeteria; the only time I could move on my own was on that desolate plain of asphalt during recess. And recess was a dangerous time, because bullies too had liberty of movement then. Any sane person would hate all this. And I did.

But, as I say, I didn't know it. I had no conception of freedom.

I recognize it now, now that I'm leaving it. The craven subservience, the regimentation of movement, the good-boy eagerness to please, pretending to want to do things I am completely uninterested in -- what does all that remind me of? Oh yeah. Of course. School.

That was where I trained in this passive-aggressive style, this say-yes-mean-no. Like a beaten dog, I wag my tail and fawn, because I don't dare bite. That's even where I learned to sit like this, slumped and slouching, defeated. That's where I learned to watch a clock. To think of time as something to be gotten through somehow. To live in worlds of imagination because the world I was in had nothing, nothing to interest me. The real world was simply something to be borne. It had nothing to do with desire.

I'm not sure how I let my worklife devolve into this. Sure, my company got acquired by the company which is a stock emblem of dullness and conformity. But that doesn't really account for it. Not everyone here is slumped hopelessly in their cubicle, surreptitiously blogging. Some of them are alive, have hopes and fears and investment in their work. How? How does that work? Why doesn't it work for me?

I'm not sure. But I suspect a piece of it is that I have never connected with anyone here, never felt like anyone from my own tribe was ever in these buildings. I'm pretty sure I'm wrong about that. That there were people I could have made friends with. But I didn't, because it would be too risky. Of all places, the place where you don't reveal yourself is work.

The single most telling moment in all of this was when I told my boss what I was going to do next. "Um... something like, uh, massage therapy or physical therapy." And the next time I mentioned it, it had become physical therapy, which had to recommend it -- what? Well, maybe that it was less touchy-feely. But I suspect that what it really had to recommend it was that it wasn't the truth. It wasn't my real desire. To let my real desire be seen in this environment felt horribly rash. Anything other than the truth would have done. And when he asked me what I was going to do next week -- he was just expressing friendly interest, I think -- did I say I was starting massage school and I was terribly excited about it? No. I said I was going to sleep a lot. "Sleep a lot?" he repeated, in some puzzlement. I nodded, affably, vaguely.

Certainly no one from my tribe was going to find me while I was so assiduously hiding. And nobody, my tribe or not, was going to know me or value me for who I was, if I was carefully withholding all significant information about it.

Writing mole and having people respond to me has been a wonderful step out of hiding. But I would like to appear as myself to everybody. Surely at age 48 one is a little old to be hiding like this. To be so anxious to please.

Embodiment of Grief

While the computer talked to the porcelain-shaping machine, and the dentist and assistant had both wandered off, I sat up and found & massaged a variety of trigger-points in muscles of my thighs and calves and forearms. Stood up and stretched. All my life hitherto, when I've been waiting for dentists to finish something, I've just sat in the chair like a lump, considering myself under authority and therefore obliged to be utterly passive. Screw that.

When they were done I walked out with a new crown, happy that I've discovered that novocaine, while doing not much to mitigate what I dislike about dentistry -- chiefly the noise of the drills rattling the tiny bones of my inner ear -- makes me miserable for half a day after an appointment. Now I do without it, and I walk out of the dentist's office perfectly free. Really done. My face still my own.

---

My fragile mood collapsed at some point. Anger and despair and grief filled me. Bitter denunciations of capitalism, of patriarchy, of monogamy, all the myriad systems by which people establish ownership of other people's time, persons, and affections, rose of their own accord in my mind. Old, old rants, simplistic, out-dated and old-fashioned since the advent of Napoleon, but still rising with huge power. I was filled with malice, like the venemous Rousseau, and believed myself sweetness and light.

Winding myself up farther and farther, wrapping myself up in my own story. There is only one story. Believing in it implicitly. Grieving. Resenting.

This mood too collapsed, and I thought, "why this story? Why not some other, or none at all? Why keep nailing myself to this particular tree?"

I stepped out of the shell of my body. It slumped there like an abandoned rag-doll. I stepped out of the story. Enough already. Let Rousseau simmer in his own juice. I'm not staying here.

---

No sooner had I stepped out than I was awash in love and pain, soaked in it. Missing you horribly, horribly, horribly. What have I done wrong? Another story threatened to step in smoothly and start to shape itself. Guilt, remorse, resolution, all the stupidities.

No. I don't want it. I don't want it. Damned flies, always drawn to pain, spreading pestilence. Go away. I took a breath, watching it from beginning to end, from the stir at the nostrils to the sinking of the ribs. That's better.

There, there below, that crumpled, miserable body, slumped in a cubicle chair. What's to be done with it?

Well. Pick it up gently, first of all. Sit it upright. So. Pinch the nostrils shut and breathe into its mouth. One breath of love. One breath of pain. One breath of love. One breath of pain.

We're here to teach each other, remember?

---

And that mood collapsed too.

It's little enough that survives the wreck. Memory, they say, dies with the body. Thank God for small mercies.

Or you could say, with equal truth, it's little enough that gets smashed up. A little engine droning worn-out stories all day, like some infuriating child's toy. The sooner we're done with it the better. That would be another perfectly sensible way to approach it.

---

But the body brings its own gifts to the party. Its own light, thicker and even more cryptic. Rhythmic hunger. A rush of saliva into the mouth, a rush of blood into the genitals -- renewing the hunger, renewing it multiple times a day. Bringing us back to another kind of simplicity. Back to square one. Muscles hunger for movement. Eyes hunger for sleep.

I close my eyes, feeling the exhaustion in my eyelids. I'm sorry, readers, I know you want me to be suffused with joy and walking confidently into a new future. That will happen, maybe. But just now I am grieving.