Seekin' The Cause

Angelus

By Cynthia Zarin

One opens the book at random, opens the day,
reads the old architecture whose face runs
like a dog along the window while the sun plays
catch with itself, bounding from Sunday

to Sunday, speechless with desire.
What more could there be than this?
The beams of the cottage, the sheltering
bones of your hips, the great abbey

of the afternon that fills as we watch with sound
and the voices trail back to you from the apse,
from the nave, from the shell-shaped hollow
at the base of your throat that even as it says

what it wants, even as it wills it, holds back,
and a great threshing noise saws the air
as the new beams are hewn all over again as
they must be continually, and knowing this

our very words, making and undoing, are torn,
the color of blood. For why are you here before me
after all this time, time which was mine alone
but now, because we have brought each other

here, belongs to you? We talk to each other
as birds do under the eaves, like the swallows
who return and return, and each time find
everything changed, everything different.

.

que sera sera

Clara pulls up a chair next to mine, and the circle is complete again. She is a very tall woman, and remains gracious despite her years. When she dances, she opens her arms wide as if to hug the entire room.

Seated now, her fingers work quickly to fix the crumples in her dress. Then they turn in onto themselves, chipping away at each other.

Suddenly, Clara turns to meet my eyes with a precise and concentrated gaze.

Is today Wednesday? she asks.
It’s Thursday.
So tomorrow is Friday?
Yes, tomorrow is Friday.
Well then, says Clara, throwing her head back and laughing wildly, GOOD SHABBES!!, GOOD SHABBES!!

Then she stops laughing, and seems lost in thought for a moment. She turns her wide shoulders back to the others in the circle. Some are asleep, or staring blankly at the air in front of them. Others are following the flying balloons with their eyes. The most able reach for them with their feet and hands.

HEY! Clara booms into the circle over the chorus of Toombalalaika. ARE WE GOING TO THE CASINO TODAY? CAN WE GO TO THE CASINO?

The balloons fall to the ground, and a long bright orange scarf comes out. We all hold on and push it through the air together. Clara loses interest and walks away down the hall.

Leila wakes up and finds an orange scarf in her hands. She searches for an explanation.

This is Tuesday morning Dance Therapy class in the Dementia Unit of Emmy Monash. I am doing some writing for them. This is research.

Every song that plays on the stereo is plucked from our youth, danced to at endless celebrations. Those who can sing along. The others sing too, you can tell, but they do not move.

Clara comes back and wants to dance with the man on my left. He can’t stand, so she holds his hands high and sways before him.

The music changes from Jewish folksongs to old classics. I am somewhat relieved. I did not want to cry.

A new song begins. All of a sudden, from the circle there rises a chorus of voices. First three of four, then six or seven, then, I can't believe it, they are all awake, and singing…

When I was just a little girl
I asked my mother
What will I be?
Will I be pretty?
Will I be rich?
Here's what she said to me:

Que sera, sera.
Whatever will be, will be.
The future's not ours to see.
Que sera, sera.
What will be, will be...

When I grew up and fell in love
I asked my sweetheart
What lies ahead?
Will we have rainbows
Day after day?
Here's what my sweetheart said:

Que sera, sera.
Whatever will be, will be.
The future's not ours to see.
Que sera, sera.
What will be, will be.

My eyes burn. Clara opens her arms wide.

history of love, page 72

(i found this old conversation with myself scribbled across torn pages, coasters, napkins and magazine ads. dated april 23, 2004)

Going out for a drink alone on friday night. Delay my departure from work. Delay deciding whether to spend the night alone, or alone. Have scrolled through names in phone book. Don’t tell. Have left similar message on two or three answering machines. Don’t tell. 7.30. 7.45. Nothing to do at work. Lots to do at home. Nothing I want to do at home. Lots I can pretend to do at work. 8 p.m. Reapply deodorant, perfume. Touch up blush, make these pale cheeks rosy.

Out the door, into the elevator, out the door, and then the last door. Mist of rain, maybe drops. Back into three doors, elevator, get umbrella, bathroom, don’t stop at mirror, leave work for the final time this week. 8.20.

Walk down 9th avenue. Would get a cab if I knew where to tell him to go. Walk. Raining. Still haven’t opened umbrella. Cab stops at red light in front of me. “Head to the east village please.” Get out on 2nd Avenue and 5th street. Nothing there. Walk. Walk.

Open umbrella now. Think: you said you would publish. Think: you said you would transcribe dedushka’s interviews. Think: you said you wouldn’t think about him, about going back. You said it would be different. You said.

Going for a drink alone on friday night. Think: is this really independence? Or is this defiance? Or is this creating the sensation of hope, giving gaping masturbating inner-demons something else to suckle on other than loneliness or fear of it never ending.

Drink alone on friday night. Maybe you’ll meet someone, and he will be it, the reason for it all, and knowing that will change everything. Will change everything.

Walk over to First. In Standard now. Four couples, three gay guys and me, and the pen I borrowed, and my drink, and this song I don’t know, and the tunes in my head, and the pictures of us, and the memory of “no,” and the answerless void, and the defiance of defensive strength, and my phone placed before me, dark. No one will call. Couples never call.

How many more like me? Like me, right now. Next door? A block away? Should I look for them? Will they look for me? Who is fooled? Who is fooled?

I am fooled. Sometimes. Sometimes.

Bar-gazing now. Corona, Stella, something I can’t read, Amstel Light, Guiness, something else I can’t read. Have ordered many of these for others before. What’s touching their lips now while I remember bringing something to their lips? But not even. They have no faces. I don’t know who they were.

Dewars, J&B, Johnny Black, Johnny Red, Glenfiddich. Same, same.

Too intense to be out alone. Not for me, I am fine. But for the others. It’s a small bar. I am distracting. They’re living life-light. For this minute anyway. I remind them of the pen writing furiously inside them. Of their eyes intensely focused, of other days, when there was nowhere else for thoughts to go.

Don’t want to start writing about you.

Don’t want to start writing about you.

Need to pee.

Have peed.

Sensation. Is that hunger?

I think I’m having a good time, actually. It’s the writing, feel very centered and honest. Truth has its victory and I get to feel connected and unneedy of more than my own words. Have texted Vinnie. He is single and broken hearted. Is that why?

Third Chivas. Why the hell not. Is that hunger?

The difference between up and down is a single thought. More important than anything else is understanding why that is. Nancy. She’ll tell me it’s all nothing. My own figments taking over. She’ll try to set me back on a truer path. A truer path. A truer path. Funny how I want that path and don’t. Funny how I associate it with nothingness, but also the everything that will eventually come.

The bartender is called Robert. Musician. Masseur. Been searching for ten years. Still doesn’t know. Still doesn’t know.

Bar phone rings. Robert says, “Hello Desmond.” You pick up your phone too when you’re working. You do too. Did your phone ring tonight, baby?

Is everything I write actually to you? Bombay Sapphire. Tanqueray. Yeah. Think I might be hungry. Bus boy doing pull-ups on the bathroom doorframe. “Next one’s on me,” says Robert. May be a long night. Maybe Pier 63 afterwards.

Things getting more distant now. Does it really matter what has transpired?

Here I am. Guess so.

Bathroom again.

Hanif Kuerishi. The soulfulness I cannot reach.

230 Park Avenue South. Is it mine? Is it mine?

Will you come there, baby? Will you come, there? Will we understand each other on their 20 year old couch? Will their 20 year old speakers play our song?

Vinnie hasn’t written back. Maybe he’s happy now.

I wonder if I would make a good movie moment. I wonder if I would be the comedy, or the tragedy.

Better drink up. Better drink up. Bus boy lighting candles. Four jars, match burning too fast, two jars done, third - just, fourth candle now, but he’s not going to make it. There’s always another match. So why do we let ourselves burn, to make the first one feel like it lasted?

Don’t want to strike again. Don’t want to strike again.

And if you walked in now? Well, nevermind.

Knob Creek. What the hells is that? Maker’s Mark. Jack Daniels.

And I’m wondering, I have the hiccups now, are you behind every effort? Are you the impurity that makes no thought clear?

I have the hiccups now. Desmond (who’s arrived) says, “should I scare you?”

Yes, please scare me. Scare me more.

fears of our fears

In the confusion of survival it’s hard to decipher where in our drive our fears end and our sincerity begins. Our fears, possessing the sometimes haunted house that we call body, that we call mind. Our fears, so interwoven and hungry that their roots creep deeper into our primal soil while their leaves sprout higher into camouflaged gardens, true cause inconceivable to effect, and so never connected by our consciousness of the daylight hours; kept at bay by wisdom not welcome in the years passing by too fast.

But our third eye knows all, our sixth sense, our heart of hearts, our fears of our fears. An ephemeral finger points a steady hand at unsteady dreams. An unwanted vision deposits wanted clues. An uninvited truth runs its finger down our backs and our hair stands on end. A shiver passes but doesn’t leave. “That cold wind,” we say. Desperation is quite the storm. Brewing deep below the ocean where memories like creatures survive with no light and are sustained with food that would kill anything trying to live life on the surface.

Do you understand what I am saying yet?

Fears of our fears. This is all that can awaken in us the desire to be awakened. Rising like an unforeseen wave to deform sandcastles built too close to stormy waters. Performing a striptease with our gaping neglect of dormant dreams. Neglect revealed through confusion, revealed through epiphany, revealed through tears, revealed through the silence at the end of a day where nothing made sense, and feels like it never will again.

Deepak Chopra's Butterlies

I would not call it a life-changing event. I would not call it a turning point. But then, it wasn’t billed as a Turning Point. It was just billed as “An Inspirational Evening With Deepak Chopra.” And that, more or less, is what it was.

I’ll save you the "Seven Steps to Synchrodestiny" and attendant keys to the universe that Dr. Chopra layed out in 2.5 hrs. Because, frankly kids, it’s just not that easy.

But I do want to tell you a story that Dr. Chopra shared, about why caterpillars become butterflies.

Caterpillars are sleepy, relatively local creatures. Most of all, they like to consume. It makes them temporarily happy, and comfortably sleepy. So they consume, and when the happiness from their consumption wears off, they consume more. They are very pretty consumers, some of them.

The caterpillar’s ability to consume increases with age, and eventually, it finds that it cannot stop consuming. It becomes over-consumptive, and nothing can stop it. It consumes and consumes so much that soon, it starts dying on the inside.

But at the same time as something inside it is dying, something else inside it, as a reaction, wakes up. Scientists call these responders “Imaginal Cells.” Imaginal cells are always present in the caterpillar, but it is the death of the caterpillar’s immune system that drives them into a higher state of activity, or creativity.

By creativity, I mean that the imaginal cells recognize that as they are, they cannot survive in this dying body. So they start to seek each other out. They look for and magnetize towards other imaginal cells. When they find each other, they form clusters. They consolidate their ideas, their strength, their plans. And soon they start to merge. They unite.

The dying body around them becomes the nutrients for their growth. They use their former weakness to grow and reinforce their new-found strength. The imaginal cells can live because they help the old, weakened consumptive body to die.

Day by day, the balance shifts increasingly in favor of the imaginal cells. Emboldened, they become even stronger. Soon, they reach a critical mass, and just as the death of the former consumptive caterpillar had awoken the imaginal cells, now the force of the united imaginal cells triggers the next evolution of the caterpillar’s potential: a sleeping gene that awakes in the ripeness of the moment.

This is the rebirth gene. The destiny gene. The never give up gene. This gene, when activated, releases the information on how to become a butterfly. On how to grow wings.

And due to the work of the imaginal cells, this gene unravels now, after lying dormant inside the caterpillar since the day it was born.

And inside the solitary cacoon where the caterpillar has gone to die, a metamorphosis occurs, and a new life begins.

And that’s how imagination manifests through rebirth.

And that’s how a caterpillar becomes a butterfly.

***

(Editor’s note: it is possible that I have taken some liberties in the telling of this story, although in the core I did stick to the facts provided. it is also possible that Deepak has taken some liberties in his interpretation of a scientific process, although he reassured us that he, too, is sticking to the facts. forgive us, and forgive us easily. the caterpillars don't mind. and the butterflies are too happy to notice.

Short Story: Secret Society

In one hour and forty minutes our lives had forked like a viper’s tongue.

Her fingers scraped across the floor as she hoisted books and bras into an oversized laundry bag meant for our stained sheets and intertwined underwear. On the bed, raped coat hangers and books bought arm in arm, now one ear-tag more mine than hers.

“Jesus Danny, your denial is unbearable,” she seethed, “You’re a human blackout.” Her muffled voice hissed inside the wardrobe: “You and your fucking secret society”

I am a member of the secret Tourette society. We are a motley crew of tapping, humming, rhyming, ticking, eye rolling individuals. We lick elevator doors and caress street lamps, and if you stand next to us on the subway with snow crystals glistening on your hair, we might lick your winter jacket and apologize desperately while tapping you three times on one shoulder, then three times on the other.

“Why are you giving up on me, Mel?” Hissss.

For one year she had been empathetic. But my ticks had become worse in the past months. I lost my job. I found Johnny Black.

You know what I miss? The freedom of a glance, corrected, controlled, diverted. I miss owning my thoughts like as children we owned our imaginations, exploratory but safe. I also miss having sex without mooing like that cow we saw in Costa Rica.

“Your true soul mate will find it endearing,” she said as she dragged her last suitcase to the elevator. Holy fucking shit, I thought. That bitch is right. “Intelligent, independent Journalist, 27, seeks open-minded 20-something for love and friendship. Only those who find mooing endearing need apply.”

I sit on the floor awaiting salvation. She would pause. She would apologize.

My ears and hands, prematurely nostalgic, tingled with the desire to relive every fixation of my infinitely perceptible imagination. To move her hair from my face in the morning. To hear the water falling off her in the shower.

It was time for me to say something. I looked up and saw an empty room, barren and without the seeds of tomorrow. For a moment her sighs were within earshot, but in the time it takes an elevator door to close, I was left alone with my Tourette.

I mooed involuntarily for three hours after those elevator doors closed. I finally went out to get a beer and when the new guy asked me for my ID I showed him my wrinkles and asked for a break. A fake. A rake. A cake. A steak. And fries. And beer. No, only the beer! Give me the goddamn beer! Mooooooo.

Every morning of every day sees the sun rise over another evolution in my tick-eroded personality. Tourette has a whore and that whore is change and change has bastardized my self-determination and left me strange. Two graduate degrees but change is all I got. The change in my ticks. The change in my wallet. And six empty beer bottles, and six empty nights since the elevator doors closed and left me alone.


Inspired by Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem

===

words to wake you

Steve Jobs' Commencement Speech at Stanford Video - Text
(stay hungry, stay foolish...)

Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" Video - Text
(no, we are not satisfied...)

sit back. listen. be moved. do something.

what if i said yes?

Meet Hector Cardenas. He's a New York artist, and the person i thank for one of my most enlightening conversations of the last decade. A little over a month ago, Hector unravelled his latest painting in an exhibit called "What If I Said Yes?" His speech that night was shared with me, and it's so wonderful that i'm compelled to keep passing it on.

Hector's Speech
No NO NO NO.

No, defines me. Saying NO keeps me safe, I know when to say NO and it gives me a sense of self.

When I say NO to something I inhabit the territory that I’ve defined as being me.

I say NO and I draw a border. I place a fence.

I am myself when I say NO.

I defend the confines of what I believe is me by saying NO. As long as I can say NO I have the control I need in order to live in what I understand is me.

I like NOs.

I celebrate NOs.

I respect the NOs from other people.

I respect your border, your frontier your definition of who you are.

Together we go as far as our NOs allows us.

I explore the space of what I define as who I am and when I get to the end of it, when I get to the border, the fence, I feel and think NO. I act NO.

There is a reason for NOs to exist.

I live inside a fence called NO. It’s an encircling long fence.

Thanks to NOs I’ve survived, my parents said NO to colds and illness, to ignorance and pointy objects, NO to hitting someone else, NO to junk food, NO to too much tv, etc.

I inherited a bunch of NO’s.

And everything would be fine if I could just accept and live with the NO’s I got like a perfectly fitted suit.

Oh but like a curious cat the questions arise:

What is beyond NO?

Why NO?

What would happen if I jump the fence of NO?

What if I say yes?

A few days ago, I was walking to school with my daughter Valentina when she told me:

Daddy stop!

She wanted to go back. I turned and saw red fallen leaves on the sidewalk. But she wasn’t interested in the leaves, among them there was a broken dirty old one-eyed power girl doll.

What happened inside me was instantaneous, I thought NO. Valentina had taken me to my NO fence.

But in that time that exists between thinking NO and acting NO, after
feeling NO and before saying anything I asked myself the question:

What if I say yes?

What if Valentina is right?

What if she knows what she is doing?

What is she thinking?

I stopped, kept silence and observed.

That’s when she said: “Look daddy, a treasure!”

The dirty old broken one-eyed power girl doll looked everything to me except as a treasure, that was until I heard what Valentina said.

In her world there was no fence.

I was able to get into her world by saying YES to her decisions.

In her world she was going to school and suddenly she found a treasure. It is the equivalent to me finding $5000 in the street with my name on it.

In order to behave in YES mode, to say YES to someone else, I have to believe it. Otherwise comes YES with reservations, a YES with resentment. A YES with rolling eyes.

In order to have a true YES, I need to shift my faith to the YES.

That becomes the key to open someone else’s world.

I have to believe that the other person is right.

It is my choice to stay in my world with my fence of NO’s surrounding me or say YES, believe YES, and get myself into another world. In this case into Valentina’s world.

Suddenly, my fence moves a little and increases my territory. It expands with YESs and doesn’t expand with NOs

So what if I say YES? What if I believe YES?

For me is an adventure, an adventure into another world, the world of someone else. An expansion of mine.

For the person who receives the YES, YES becomes a little package of love that creates reaffirmation. Recognition and acceptance of that person’s world. And when I hear YES I feel loved. I feel that my world is recognized and accepted. I feel happy.

About a year ago, I was having a conversation with Maddalena, a friend of mine, who is here tonight, and I said that it was very easy to make someone else happy, the only thing needed for it was to say yes. This idea, I said could be applied to any circumstance, like right now for example I told Maddalena you and I are talking, you say something and I’ll say YES. Then, she said:

Oh I love the painting that Erik bought from you (Erik is also a friend of mine and Maddalena’s boyfriend at the time. Since then Maddalena has made him happier by saying YES to his marriage proposal) Maddalena continued, I would love to have a painting similar to that one.

In my mind a flurry of thoughts came and went in a fraction of a second resulting in a simple but meaningful YES. She was happy.

She probably forgot about it. We haven’t mentioned what happened that night since then. I finished the painting this summer and decided to make a big deal by giving it to her as a surprise. I thought it would be fun.

I think we are all treasure chests full of YESs and NOs, each one in different combinations, and the way we are all making that particular combination of YESs and NOs is what makes everyone of us special.

Tonight I’m saying yes to myself, with my YES’s and NO’s and I’m saying YES to you with your YES’s and NO’s

The NO’s for the comfort the YES for the adventure.

It doesn’t matter how I combined my YES’s and NO’s because that it is what makes me, me. That is what is supposed to happen.

I’ll keep my NO’s. Nothing wrong with them, but if I feel adventurous, the answer is right there at the tip of my fingers completely accessible to me. I just have to say YES. To believe YES.

And now I present to you the painting that originated that evening: YES.

========
Another project, full of heart, by Hector: Hearty Shirts
========

the disenchanted ones

I walk into a party and know I should be observing the youthfulness of social chatter and bonding of minds over the clinking of glasses. But instead I scan the room for the outsider elements, feel myself seeking out the estranged emotions in the room, the one’s who prefer to stay in the shadows, the flicker of isolation in a red and tired eye, those who are bored despite distractions, and hungry despite the chips and dip. I walk into a party and instantly look for the disenchanted ones. The pensive amongst the merry, the modest amongst the needy. And I always find them. And they always find me.

wrinkles, wrinkles

Wrinkles, wrinkles.
Such gross manifestations of having lived.
We should sprout flowers for the days that have passed,
not wear time’s stretch marks like scars,
observing our skin’s decay while waiting for life to start.
Lines crawling around eyes trying to shine with youth,
cracking under laughter that makes us hungry for more life.
Wrinkles, grotesque and insincere.
Lies on the surface of our souls.
Cracks in the sweetness of our immortal dreams.

mists & mirages

Saskia resurrected this from the surreal mists and mirages of history this morning via email. I wrote this six years ago, sitting at Valeska on 2nd avenue one unusually warm evening early in the year. my computer was a large black chunky heavy thing that i threw into a dirty orange shoulder bag bursting at the seams and lugged with me to whatever exposed, inspiring corner of my mad city called my name.

Years later now, and so true all over again. More true now than ever. More true even than it was back then.

one true thing about my spirit
How is it that feelings of loss and pain are always accompanied by feelings of pure love not for a person or a situation or an idea (that has touched me and taken a room in my mind for its own visions) but for life just life And how is it that I am so taken with this love with what this love does for my soul and how that love is in fact my spirit and that as much love as there is in my spirit is as much love as I have to give And does this mean that I will always have strength to remain my better self as things fall all around me because in the falling I see love and in the debris I find hope and in the carnage I smell love's hope still fresh and looking for life?

if tomorrow

will you come tomorrow?
my brother is here for a few days. i'll come next weekend.
next weekend.
yes, is that alright?
yes. but i don't know. you better call first. i'm doing radiation now.
oh, of course. is it going well.
very well.
that's very good.
yes.
so i will see you soon.
yes, but you should call first.
i promise i will call.
it's better with you than without you.
i am with you.
seeing you helps my heart.

my heart too victor.
smile your sparkling smile for me.
please don't die.