This Diary Friday entry is a bit heavy, perhaps. But hey – Sometimes life be heavy. Sometimes life be light. It is from the summer of 1998. It has to do with some revelations (incoherent, at times) that I had, regarding God, love, and loss. So read on, if you dare.
One small Sheila tip: if you ever meet me, and you hear me begin to discuss quantum physics as a metaphor for life and the human condition – know that it is time to shut me up, take me out for margaritas, and go do karaoke or something equally as light-hearted and fun!
August 5, 1998
Walking with Maria and Cashel – we came across a pile of old Interview magazines on a table on 6th and 23rd. I felt like I had discovered buried treasure. I was like a kid at Christmas. So thrilled. I mean, I love Interview magazine unabashedly. I felt the clouds clear and I bought them all – as a gift to myself. Such a small thing! I am almost embarrassed by my elation.
But that feeling comes so rare these days, so I don’t feel like I have the right to judge it or belittle it.
Okay … so you love Interview magazine. All right then.
Do not judge that which excites you.
And then later, on the heels of these ruminations about what excites me, I had a “revelation” (not the right word) – the “revelation” stopped me in my tracks on 7th Avenue. Something came into my head and it was like I hit a forcefield. Boom. Stop.
Well, whatever it was – suddenly this image, or a whole world, came into my head. Like a little movie.
Summer – I was still in Chicago. I had gone home to RI. It was at the height of the P. thing. I was on another fucking PLANET. I could feel it – something huge was coming. But that is just me editorializing it, in retrospect.
What came into my mind on 7th Avenue was just the visuals –
Me walking into the living room, in my big faded purple T shirt, cut-offs, running sneakers – I had been out for a run – I walked in, and Mum and Dad were out on the porch and there were other people there. Not inner sanctum people, I know that, and it tells me what a state I was in, to behave in such a manner in front of random people. Maybe it was a friend of Siobhan’s, or of Mum and Dad’s.
So I walked in, and Dad called out to me, by way of greting, “P. called” – And it was like a nuclear reaction. Those words hit my atmosphere and I COMBUSTED. It was totally spontaneous what happened: I started screaming and staggering forward, as though an arrow had struck me. And I histrionically and dramatically (and truthfully, too!) threw myself down (in degrees) over the armchair – it was like a melodramatic stage death, or like a little kid pretending to get shot. And down I went, shrieking and laughing, over the armchair, and then further down, falling over the ottoman, with everyone watching, and laughing, and then I tumbled down off the ottoman and onto the floor – splat – and I lay there like a jibbering lunatic.
I don’t want to editorialize it or try to explain it.
It is what it is. It was what it was.
P. called my house and talked to Dad, and I promptly became a shrieking banshee in front of people I didn’t know.
That is what happened.
Life tasted more than good. Everything was so exciting. Something huge was coming. I could feel it. And I was ready for it. For whatever it was.
And being THAT excited, and THAT free …
See, I don’t want to analyze this, because then it sounds like a pity party, or a naive nostalgia joy-ride.
But, in that moment, when I fell over the ottoman, there was no fear, no tentativeness, no caution. I look back on my fearlessness in AWE.
And then I leapt to my feet and ATTACKED Dad for details. I grilled him as fearlessly as if he were Ann or Mitchell. “Okay. TELL ME EVERYTHING.”
I was a fucking goofball.
It was high school all over again, only 5,000 times better – cause it was a real love affair.
And Dad was pretty good about it, I have to say – because I was totally OUT of control – Dad became, in the words of Ann and I, “a good reporter”. He didn’t just tell me the facts, he interpreted them. He said, “It sounded like he was getting such a kick out of himself – calling you -” See, that is the kind of stuff I need to hear!
I fired questions at Dad. “And then what did he say?” “And then what?” “Okay, tell me that part again.” “What did his voice sound like?”
I had forgotten all of this – I had forgotten that moment of histrionic fearlessness, excitement, joy – It was just the specific moment I had forgotten. Not the whole era, of course, not that whole crazy summer. That summer becomes a wash the further away from it I get. It is now a phrase, an icon – the words standing in for the whole. Like saying “the 60s” or “the Middle Ages” – and you get all these pictures in your head, just from the words. “That summer” is that way for me.
So much has happened since then. So much.
I really don’t think about that summer anymore. When I fantasize stuff, or daydream, I never go back in time. I never lie around and daydream about that summer, as amazing as it was. I suppose it hurts too much – to recall all that ecstasy – and to know what a fucking disaster was approaching.
Everything is colored by what came after.
But anyway, there it was, on 7th Avenue: a visitation. A wrinkle in time. The past as vivid as the present moment.
And – the “revelation” was about the excitement – that word kept coming up in my mind – the excitement – how excited I was – and then, simultaneously, I thought of the Interview magazines, and Boom – it was as though I had literally walked into an invisible wall. I stood still.
I remembered the excitement of that year – the living breathing excitement – and compared it to the excitement of now – finding old magazines on a table in Manhattan …
All of this happened in a split-second.
Then came the wave – that wave that sometimes comes. I don’t ride the wave. I just let it wash over me.
Actually, no: this was more like a ripple.
God, I just can’t describe it:
It was a very brief moment of paralysis, and something rippled through me – I waited it out – and then I kept going.
I felt a bit shaky – a bit on the edge – aware of the bruise in my heart – all that is left of the original wound. Like a bad spot in an apple – that goes all the way through.
I don’t know – it was sort of startling.
Later, at home, I was thinking about it. Thinking, as opposed to experiencing.
The vision of that summer had nothing to do with emotions, or remembering it – I was IN it. It LIVED. But later, reflecting –
I felt this sort of dying wistfulness. A dying sadness. Like that line from Tennyson:
“Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And grow for ever and for ever.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.”
A “dying echo” – a wild echo flying, and then dying …
Putting it into words doesn’t seem right.
Will I ever feel that again? Will anyone ever engender such hysteria and elation in me again?
No, it wasn’t in a question form, these thoughts. It was more like statements coming at me:
“I will never…”
“That moment was it for me…”
“Now it is Interview magazines …”
I didn’t stay long in this, I put it behind me, and stepped over the abyss again.
A day or so later – I had another moment – on 7th Street in Hoboken –
I’ve been thinking a lot about God lately. Or … no, it’s more of a … which came first the chicken or the egg kind of thing.
I have been drawn to churches since the start of the summer. I see them everywhere, and I go into them. Any denomination. I stand there. Or, like St. Mary’s in Times Square, I go in, and sit, or kneel. I light a candle. I … pray? I wouldn’t give that word to it. It feels more like a shedding, a dropping away of ballast, a time of be-ing. I’m sure religious types would say, “That’s praying.” But if I don’t relate to a word, then I don’t relate to it. I believe in relativity. Not chaos – but relativity. I won’t have someone tell me what words to use. I won’t have someone define the terms for me. Or try to control my language.
So, from this magnetic church thing, I surmise that – I am searching. I am trying to be open to … spiritual guidance. In whatever form it takes. Just the dark flickering atmosphere of St. Mary’s is enough for me. I remember what Sue R. said to me – saying that she thought in a past life I had been a religious fanatic, or a saint. She said, bluntly, “Ya drove God crazy.” So now, I want to know God in my own way. Not in a way organized by somebody else. I don’t even think of God as a … Supreme Being … or anything like that. A “being”, to me, is like a human “being” – something singular, something identifiable. I see God as being all things. Down to the teeniest quantum particle. It’s an energy source. It’s matter. It’s love. It’s science. It’s the stars, the waves. The mystery of the fact that we are actually here. That consciousness has evolved, that we are a race that can question our own existence – to me, that is a miracle. God is impartial, in a way. Tidal waves, death, the cosmos, childbirth – God creates it all.
I get into trouble when I try to put any of this into words. I don’t believe that religions should have anything to do with WORDS anyway.
Jesus said it all best, I think. He’s the one who spoke all of this most effectively. Everything else seems diluted to me, or overly intellectual – or lacking in curiosity.
I’ve always had my most intense spiritual experiences with nature – that night on the beach during the hurricane with Betsy and Kate – stuff like that.
Anyway. Something else is going on now, with me – a more conscious searching, I think.
I’m trying to be open to receiving gifts, messages – I am trying not to close myself off – even though I have a lot of sadness – I remember that piece on masks, read to us at the Happening retreat in high school, about God splashing moonlight onto our pillows, basically screaming at us, “I’m here! Here I am!”
I want to be open to all that. That comfort, that sense of a pattern. I can feel myself becoming bitter. Hard. Mad.
The books I am reading now: Brief History of Time, Schroedinger’s Cat …. Quantum mechanics. Like … WHAT?
Cosmology and quantum physics.
I can’t even begin to understand the arithmetic, but I groove on the concepts.
Like the particles Stephen Hawking describes falling into black holes – pairs – those damn pairs – that keep recurring and recurring throughout nature – pairs, eternally circling around one another – crashing, annihilating, creating – a constant dance of two – and then – one gets pulled into the black hole. They are separated. And the one that is not pulled in, is somehow … well … there is evidence, then, that some things do escape from black holes.
The power of TWO.
I have no idea what the hell I am talking about.
But on a very down-to-earth human level – I can see a metaphor in all of this for the human condition. (Ed.: Hey, Sheila … let’s go grab some margaritas…) It goes all the way down to the micro-level, and we can never get to the center of it.
It’s my “religion”.
It makes me think of Madeleine L’Engle’s Christian books – the one she wrote on “Christian art” – To her, it doesn’t matter if it’s a Jew who produced it – if it’s “good art”, then, for her, it is affirmation of the Christian tradition.
I certainly do NOT agree with this. Who gives a crap if it’s a pagan, a Jew, a Muslim, a Christian, or a raging Marxist freak? If it’s good art, it’s good art. Madeleine L’Engle is a Christian – she’s also an artist – so she feels that she must see all great art through a Christian filter. Yuk. She is searching, in her own way – trying to make sense of why and how someone who doesn’t believe what she believes could make a work of art that she responds to spiritually. There is something very distasteful to me in all of that. However, she is my favorite writer. So I read her theological diatribes about Christian art anyway.
My view is:
It’s all about the search. Regardless of what you believe. If you believe nothing, if you believe in Allah, if you believe in God, if you believe in wine, women and song …
Sam always says to us in acting class – “The question is not: Do I feel it? The question is: Am I searching?”
Or like Tennessee Williams wrote in Camino Real – I think this is my favorite Williams line ever: “Make voyages. Attempt them. That’s all there is.”
Back to 7th Avenue: I was at some sort of nadir. Walking down that street. I felt like I was falling into a black hole. Separated from the other half of my “pair” – now we were separated – by an entire universe –
It was so hot. The air had a still and stagnant quality to it. I remember thinking: How the hell am I going to get through this night?
The sky was really weird – and sort of an optical illusion. It was this musky blue color – spreading across the whole sky – as flat and unmoving as the air. It didn’t look like a storm was coming. The sky didn’t have that unhealthy swollen look. It was flat. TOTALLY flat.
The illusion part was that the blueness I saw was not just the sky – as I first thought – but clouds too. And haze. All pasted together up there. Haze – clouds – sky – all on the same plane. With no depth. What I was looking at was a cloud cover. Not the blue of the atmosphere. But it all seemed to be ONE.
And here is how the illusion revealed itself to me : it looked like there was a rip in the sky.
No. Not a rip. More like – a tear. Or like – something had been ripped, and then pasted back on, or taped on over the blue – and the edges of this ripped piece of blue paper were pink. So high high high up – was this jagged outline.
In all the flat blue monotony – there it was – this bright pink rip – a rip in the sky.
I looked up at it at just the right moment. 20 seconds later, the sky had shifted, and the pink rip wasn’t as dramatic or clear. In seeing that pink, with the musky blue in front of and behind it – I could see that the entire sky was actually covered with this opaque haze. The blue I had been looking at was not actually the sky, it was just an illusion of sky. But without the perspective/context of the pink rip up there, you never would have been able to tell. It LOOKED like all that blue was actually blue atmosphere.
To me, in the state I was in, the crisis, the nadir, whatever – (I’m a little lamb who’s lost in the wood – someone to watch over me) – that bright pink rip in the sky was the equivalent of God splashing the moonlight on oblivious pillows – To me, it was “God” showing itself to me. To all of us, actually. Quietly. No big fanfare. A quiet message, way up in the sky, saying, “Hey there. I’m here.” You might miss it. I might have missed it. Even if you saw the pink rip and thought, “Oh, how cool”, you might miss the deeper truth being revealed.
Sheila – what is that truth?
I think that the truth is not limited to houses of worship, or Bibles, or Torahs, or Korans. It’s about the human race. It’s about love. It’s about beauty in all things. The miracle of life. The unexplained mystery of our universe.
Seeing God up in the sky certainly didn’t change my life, or make things better. I still wonder if I will ever feel excitement like I felt during that summer when all still seemed possible. But, still – it was like I had a moment of awareness. A moment of awareness of love, in the middle of the nadir. Something called out to me: “Look up! Look up!” And I did. And I got a message. I felt like something was communicating to me.
Trying to express this in human words is an exercise in futility. It sounds so … sentimental. Or … new agey. Or whatever.
The Desiderata:
I am a child of the universe
I have a right to be here
With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams
It is still a beautiful world.
That says it best. That says it best.
Parables. Extended metaphors. Talismans. Symbols. Stories standing in for the truth.
The experience of God should be kept abstract.
Let the mystery remain a mystery.
beautiful.