ALCHEMIES OF THE HEART. David Dorian
left that massage session with a stillness and emptiness. My chest kept improving, getting stronger after each encounter with my nurse. Everyone has had, at any given moment, an extraordinary experience which will be for him, because of the memory of it he preserves, the crucial stimulus to his inner modification. Memories of college poetry courses I had taken during a summer session at Columbia University emerged. Poetic lines read by an inspired teacher trickled. The words from the Persian poet Al Ghazali echoed:
Are you ready to cut off your head and place your foot on it? The cost of the elixir of love is your head. Do you hesitate?
*****
This journal would start a dialogue with myself and build new relationships with other parts of my soul. This salvage operation within myself could retrieve sunken ships. It’s through conversations that truths are revealed. Suspects are exposed while chatting. Writing could be a start of a new liaison with myself. It’s still better than slashing my wrists with a rusted razor.
Anchors in the Past
Returning home after a visit with Mantuo Luo, I turned on the car radio. The male voice sounded intelligent and authoritative. He was a Hindu guru named Moksha, which means “release.”
Every time we dwell on the past, every time we return to a painful episode, we increase the possibility of reproducing it. Every time we remember a past trauma, we reinforce the neurocircuit; we rearm it. Instead of progressing, we are regressing. That is the problem with psychoanalysis, the product of a Jewish mind accustomed to be mistreated and persecuted. Freud was the inheritor of five thousand years of trauma. His father endured anti-Semitic remarks in the street of Vienna. He faced academic criticism for his theories of infantile sexuality. Disappointments, sadness, bad memories anchor us in the past. To bypass the past, we should avoid talking about it at all costs, burn photos, get rid of all objects that are associated with painful experiences. We should welcome amnesia. Bad memories, if not revived, disintegrate. The circuit is disarmed.
I was intrigued by his views on mental health. All therapeutic endeavors aim at exhuming the past to neutralize its toxicity. Could all these psychologists be wrong? We believe our memories define us. I am what I have experienced and done. Identity is biography, and biography is psychology. Everyone believes it is so. Our traumas explain us; our remembrances determine us.
If this approach, which is to keep on emerging the traumas, is erroneous and we could find ways to circumvent the traumas without dwelling on them, it would put a lot of mental health professionals out of a job. But without trauma, world literature wouldn’t exist. Literature and art are attempts to deal with trauma. Trauma is responsible for human civilization.
There was a commercial on the radio. An American company was promoting a special brush specifically designed for dogs when they are shedding. It offered 79 percent more hair absorption than the standard hairbrush for dogs. Users of this product were interviewed and expressed in enthusiastic language how that brush literally saved their lives by making the air cleaner in their home.
The interview continued. Moksha recommended to consciously and deliberately block those memories. Do not let your mind visit that emotional injury in your past. Do not linger around events that had become agonizing souvenirs. Forgetting is divine. We are all innate masochists, he claimed, attracted by all forms of suffering. That is a derangement that is common to us all.
Our torment is of our own making. Isn’t enough that we have been hurt by these happenings? Why do we revisit them again and again? Why do we replay those scenes ad nauseam, savoring the hardships we had encountered at some points in our infancy, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood? We are haunted by what has been done to us. Not only we are victimized by what has happened to us, but we are doubly victimized by the memories of the bad things that happened to us. End the persecutions now. This is a self-inflicted martyrdom that has to stop, for our sake, so we can live completely in the present and relish our presence in the world of here and now.
The Whipping Post
Around 4:00 am, the village of Rye, New York, looked like a deserted hamlet with its fossilized streets where time had petrified. The land where the hamlet of Rye was built was purchased from the Mohegan Indians by settlers from Long Island. There was nothing remarkable about that town. Perhaps the most revealing feature was the public post where, long time ago, slaves were bound to be whipped. It was located on the village green close to Christ’s Church. Thomas Ricket was appointed as the town “public whipper.” In 1682 it was a misdemeanor, punishable by flogging, for more than four slaves to meet together. It was reduced to three around 1730. I didn’t know the secret history of that town when I bought my house. I was thinking of moving to another town when I found out that all the hamlets of Westchester County had their own “whipper.”
An eerie breeze was blowing. The night air was glistening. It was scented by the abundant foliage, spiced by the luxuriant lilac bushes my wife had planted in the front yard. My breathing was effortless. I could feel my lungs expanding, sucking in that lush air.
Were there signs of the approaching atrocities, foreshadowings of future calamities? There was no cue, no premonition that the blooming garden of our lives would be decimated by the approaching storm. No hints the gods were offended. No seismograph of the soul would have registered the tremors that were to disassemble our felicitous existence. The lives of all the participants of this play were coming to an intersection, a crossroad that would disorient the most seasoned navigator. Yet how predestined it all seemed.
I was back in the solid geometry of our bedroom. In the massage spa, I had survived an arson to my ordered life, yet I had not pulverized the idols of the hearth. The world didn’t cave in. My cat, Miou, greeted me with a languorous yawn. I slipped under the covers and curled into bed. Eons came and went while I hovered over the suburbs of sleep. I couldn’t fade into that blessed state of unconsciousness. I drifted like a kite tethered to reality only by the memory of her. My joy spiraled into rapture at the anticipation of the next encounter.
The first rays of Sunday molested the sheer curtains, ravished the bedsheets, exposing my fading dissolution. Reality’s hold was de rigueur once again. I drowned in the immense solitude of that compulsively ordered room. My chest reverberated from echoes of a distant bell.
I wondered, lying in the unbearable softness of the comforter, slashed by stalactites of guilt whether I could find a sanctuary in my house. The train of thought, once having left the station, became a runaway locomotive. The room responded with soft sighs of anticipation. Sedition simmered in my heart.
Things I thought as absolute were changing. From a particular optic, nothing shattering had occurred except my unbearable presence in the world. The body I was occupying, although healing physically, was morally less than its former glory. I was a monster hybrid suddenly grafted to an unknown stem. Unrecognized sap flowed in me. What blossoms would bloom from such a graft?
I walked down the stairs to the basement where my wife had installed a mini-gym. I turned on my Samsung 65 Class Slim Curved 4K Ultra HD LED Smart TV with built-in WiFi and mounted my Schwinn AD6 Airdyne cycling machine. The TV spokesperson was commenting about the new dating trends. Dating websites were attracting college students, housewives, and women in middle management. College students in need of cash were flashing photoshopped photographs of their bodies offering companionships for men for a gratuity. The cost of tuition, books, living accommodations was enormous. Financially stressed undergraduate coeds found a pragmatic solution to their economic distress. Girls from Ivy League colleges were interviewed by reporters. Many housewives registered to those websites anonymously, photographs on request. Dulled by the routine nature of their married lives, they spiced up their afternoons with a little dalliance with men dulled by the routine nature of their married lives. Like in Bunuel’s Belle de Jour, they performed sex in the afternoon for a negotiable fee. The narrator addressed the prevalence of single professional women in banking, law, teaching, advertising, insurance, etc. who indulged in special arrangements. They’d didn’t want a “serious relationship,” preferring to hook up with appropriate strangers. The menu du jour was polygyny and polyandry. The analyst then reported the new popularity of polyamory