Thinking about Eternity

I've been thinking about eternity lately, reading a book on the history of beliefs about the afterlife and approaching the anniversary of a dear friend's death. I feel like I should be seeing signs and having important dreams where she shares insights and tells me about her whereabouts. Instead, I dream about dancing.

"You begin too stiff," the dream teacher tells me. "but then you get better.  All in all, you're entirely too high strung."   I suppose I am, in some ways, though other parts of me feel saggy and dissonant or just plain snapped.  I come from a lineage of high-strung people.  My great-grandfather played violin in Johann Strauss' orchestra.  He was Czech and hated Germans, I'm told, and brought a tightly-wound sensibility to his family that lingers on, though none of us are musicians in the true sense--the true sense being people who make music, I suppose.  I'm not exactly sure what a true sense is, except a phrase that my mind grabbed out of the air and now wants to hang on to, a way of avoiding what is.

In the dream I am dancing, and dancing is nice, though dancing is one word I try never to use in writing. Everything is always 'dancing this' and 'dancing that', a smile dancing on her face, a snowflake dancing in the wind, and yet I have always found a certain amount of awkwardness in dancing--performance anxiety and muscle cramps, and the horror of partnership--choosing a partner, wondering if he is enjoying the dance or just politely enduring.  My boyfriends never would agree to dancing, though I often proposed it, because alone in the cocoon of my home I enjoy moving, flailing, swaying, and swooping bird-like to music.

Sometimes I hear music in the repetition of the fan blades in summer or in the percussive knockings of the radiator. If I knew how to score it I'd write a suite for oboe and clarinet, plaintive and lonesome.  Something that captures the last journey of a beech leaf to the ground or whitewashed sycamore bark exposed and naked. A piece that calls into the bardo and makes the dead prick up their ears.  Call me on the dream phone, dear friend, and tell me where you've gone and where I'm headed, like Jacob Marley rattling his chains,  "Beware."

It's a symptom of the season.  Things stripped bare, the ground covered with yesterday, the white bark rebuking, "why didn't you notice me before?" What's true demands that I look at it, and I do.  I wish that I could finish this sentence, but the end of things is always just around the corner, out of reach, where it's dark and full of ghosts.

Marks of Existence

We tried to trace it back to the year when she chose thanksgiving as her favorite holiday. No one could remember a time before she claimed it as her own.  And because she loved it so we chose this day to cast her over the bridge, each one tapping her last shards into the wind.  We paused to watch a sliver of glassy jade shatter into clouds of foam as it collided with a small cascade.  I looked for a sign.  Above, the buzzards silently coasted, waiting for us each to take our turn.

Alice-in-Wonderland Syndrome

Today, I am going to write about Alice-in-Wonderland Syndrome which is a genuine condition that I read about on Wikipedia.

Alice-in-Wonderland syndrome refers to a rare kind of migraine aura in which people experience themselves as very large or as very small and perceptions of time, space, sound, and color become distorted and untrustworthy.  It can happen several hours or even days before any headache pain occurs and could make the uninformed feel as if they had gone stark raving mad in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner.  A sufferer might  feel as though the people next to them were speaking in tongues and hear their own speech  being broadcast through a faulty sound system at maximum volume. 

A sufferer of Alice-in-Wonderland syndrome might feel as though the table where they sat had begun to stretch into infinite space and that all of the dinner guests were moving far, far, away.  The wooly hair on Leo the poodle who was angling for a handout might reassure them for a moment, but even he would soon seem transparent and unreal.  They might really really want to lie down.

A brisk walk in the unnaturally warm Thanksgiving air would provide some respite, allowing the sufferer to peer into the enormous windows of this particular neighborhood,  windows that stretch so far into the heavens that no drapery could ever suffice.  The warm  light would pour out into the street inviting glimpses of sleek furniture and tasteful art.  The children would run howling  down the empty streets, beneath a waning moon concealed in black clouds, only to jump from behind bushes and cars screeching.  And the sufferer would humor them by being genuinely scared to death.  Meanwhile some unidentified strollers with their own Leo the poodle would join the outing and it would be awhile before the sufferer realized they were strangers.

Inside, the temperature of the house would be equal to that of Mars, if the temperature of Mars is equal to two times the amount of heat an Alice-in-Wonderland sufferer can bear, and the dessert offerings would radiate a hostility not usually attributed to pie.  The sufferer might really want plum pudding but would ask for pumpkin pie to satisfy some longing for normalcy and in the end would regret it because even pumpkin pie can not stop the nightmare that is Alice in Wonderland syndrome.

Charades would be out of the question.

Later, in the car, the migraine would start its familiar heartbeat throb and the panic would subside and the sufferer would feel some mixture of relief and regret and longing for sleep.

A Dobie Thanksgiving Homage

It's Thanksgiving and we're going to Aunt Bea's. 

Aunt Bea isn't my aunt, but I've been joining her family at Thanksgiving for years now.  Her niece Jenny Dobie and I were roommates at Arizona State in 1977 where I was a student and Jen was just taking advantage of cheap digs in the ASU dorms while she went to Mesa Community College, an arrangement her cousins had used in the past.  Unfortunately, the university got wise and she was evicted mid-way through the semester, but not before I had bonded with the entire Dobie clan.

Jen and the rest of her seven sisters and brothers live in Indianapolis and the whole family caravans to Alexandria for thanksgiving with Aunt Bea.  The whole family, that is, except Jen, who I haven't seen since 1994.  She doesn't like to travel.  Or that's what they tell me, but I have visions of her as one of those wild-haired ladies who hoards cats and throws dung at the neighbors.  I hope so.  Jen always had a shamanic quality and the world needs that now.
Thanksgiving with the Dobies is my favorite event of the year.  A former journalist and director of research for Time-Life Books, Bea is gracious, elegant, witty, erudite and wise.  Her home fills up with her nieces and nephews and their children and a host of people who orbit the family like moons, converging on the fourth Sunday in November to eat and drink and breathe (b.e.d.) .  And to play charades.

Family members begin learning charades pre-natally and by the time they can speak are already expert mimes.  One ill-fated Thanksgiving I ended up with a poet named Dan and five kids under twelve  facing Aunt Bea and all the adult Dobies, a veritable charades all star team.   Up first, Julia, the youngest sibling,  a Spanish teacher with three children, lifted her left hand and rolled her right in the authorized symbol for movie.  Instantly all the remaining siblings yelled, "The Year of Living Dangerously!" 

"We are so hosed," Dan said.

I'm not crazy about games or public displays of anything, but I honor the charades tradition. The world needs that now. 

Wednesday night I joined Aunt Bea's niece Kath and nephew Fred for the pre-Thanksgiving prep fest to chop, peel, boil, and mash everything we could find in the refrigerator.  Kath orchestrates the Thanksgiving event and is the person around which many of the habitual guests, like me, revolve. Her gravitational force is irresistable.  While we worked and laughed and threatened each other with sharp objects, the Beatle's greatest hits played in the background.  At one point Kath leaned back and lamented, "I wish I still believed Beatle's songs."

"All you need is love," they sang.

Don't be fooled.  Kath sent me home at 11 but stayed up until 2 making pie.  She believes.  And the world needs that now.

Commitment

There are things I used used to write, before I became wooed by the novel, not the novel in the sense of the new, the unexplored, but the novel as a long complete work of fiction, a story told from beginning to end, with characters and  plot and conflict-- description, tension, a theme.  Inside the novel are pieces of me, dressed up in characters and scenes, but the pieces I used to write were naked.  I miss writing this way.  It's late afternoon as I write this, approaching 5:33 ( 3:33 Boulder time) and I realize that I write the novel in the morning, and have convinced myself that no good writing happens at night.  But when I look back, I see that this is not exactly true.  For five good years I wrote my best pieces on Wednesday night in Bill Scheffel's basement, and while in the MFA program at Naropa I wrote in the evenings, at lunch time, in the morning, whenever.  I wrote to keep up.  I wrote to understand what was happening.

Here's the truth about me.  I'm not a quick study.  I get bored in the middle of the book and skip to the end. I forget the details but retain the feeling and the images.  Like a David Lynch movie, my mind translates data to a symphonic collage of sound, image, and symbol until a feeling emerges.  Then I write the feeling and somewhere in the process the truth reveals itself and I understand.  This is a good process for writing fiction, but I'm kind of a dud in discussion groups and classrooms.

I feel like a smart, useful person until I try to verbalize my thoughts and hear the crazy words that tumble out.  I used to imagine a tiny man in the center of my heart, bound and gagged, waiting for me to arrive and untie him.  At the moment of his liberation my heart, I imagined, would articulate all the wisdom and compassion that I possess but have not had access to, and be filled with the joyful bliss that just needed uncovering, and I'd enjoy all the orgasms I've faked, a speedy metabolism, and healthy gums.  I would be able to speak my mind.

At some point I forgot about the little man, but yesterday I heard him rattling his chains.  As I read a letter from Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche I felt a humming in my solar plexus.  What is your commitment to practice and study, the Sakyong asked?  What will you offer?  Unbidden, the answer came. Intimacy.

Intimacy, says the little voice, and it is never wrong.  For the last few years I have committed myself to the practice that has benefitted me the most, the one that always brings clarity and insight, the one that turns up the volume on the world's brilliant music.  When I attend to this practice I feel right.  When I don't, I get hostile.  Writing is the practice that has allowed me best to know my mind.   Intimacy is a practice of sharing openly, of holding nothing back.

So, in that spirit,  I will write something here everyday.   I invite you to stop by once in awhile.

3:33

I am startled awake for no reason.  Heart pounding.  3:33.

Sometimes I wake from a dream with the feeling that someone is at the foot of the bed, observing.  I lie still, controlling my breath until convinced I am alone.  The clock says 3:33.  Other nights I sleep fitfully, my back aches, I have intermittent pains in my shoulder or a cramp in my right calf.  My blankets creep toward one side of the bed, leaving my backside exposed and chilly.  I resist, but eventually look at the clock.  It is 3:33.   

I used to have a book that equated times of day with the functioning of internal organs.  The bladder and the kidney and the liver each dominate a few hours.  Grief is associated with the lungs and the lungs have a period of effectiveness and an interval of weakness.  You should shit between 5 a.m. and 7 as a kindness to your bowels.  I don’t know what system is operative at 3:33.

3:33 is a palindrome.  It’s half of the mark of the beast.  Added together it equals 9, which is the age my roommate was until yesterday when she became ten, double digits.  The number five is sacred to Venus, but I don’t know who reveres the number three, unless it’s the earth, third planet from the sun.  I wonder if I am being called back to earth at 3:33 from dreams, or if I’ve been abducted by very punctual aliens.  I look for meaning in these small signs and my roommate tells me, “Not everything is magic.” 

She doesn’t believe that, and neither do I, so I look to the globe for a point in space.  Is there a highway 333?  An x-y coordinate?  If I understood longitude and latitude perhaps I could identify a spot on the map that is calling me home. 

Every night I ask for clarification in my dreams.  But so far I’ve received one message only.  3:33. And it is beginning to seem less like a direction than a reminder.  Each night, the clock reveals to me one moment of equilibrium – an invitation to let go of the regrets and the schemes and the heavy march forward.  3:33. A one second sutra beckoning me into the whole of timeless space with its black nights and the bone-chilling sliver of moon shining without judgment through the bamboo shade.

March 2001