On November 22nd, 2011, my friend and teacher, Lynn Margulis, died. She was the smartest person I’ve ever known, and also one of the most loving. I’m working on a more personal essay about her, but here is the essay I wrote on her life’s work. She was a world-renowned biologist and thinker, whose ideas changed and continue to change the way we understand life. She had a fearless spirit. You can also find this essay on web magazine,Reality Sandwich.

As Above, So Below: The Worldview of Lynn Margulis

“In the arithmetic of life, One is always Many.”

Lynn Margulis, biologist and Distinguished Professor of Geosciences, composed a grand and powerful view of the living and the non-living. Integrating the work of obscure Russian scientists, DNA pulled from cell organelles, computer-generated daisies, and the hindguts of termites, her vision was wider in scope and more profound in depth than any other coherent scientific world view. At the time of her death on November 22nd, 2011, it is a vision that remains misunderstood and misconstrued by many scientists.

Much of this view came from her uncanny ability to first lean forward and see the smallest inhabitants of the Earth; to hover there, and then to leap back at the speed of thought to conceptualize the entire planet. Lean forward, then stand back. This inner movement, this seeing from soil to space, marked a unique scientific endeavor.

This perspective was earned only through walking through diverse areas of study – geology, genetics, biology, chemistry, literature, embryology, paleontology. Those fields, are sometimes separated by an untraversed distance at universities: they are housed in separate buildings which may as well be different worlds. In Margulis, they found agreement and discussion with each other; they were reconnected, just as they are intrinsically connected in nature.

This journey led her to emphasize in all her scientific work two phenomena – the fusing of distinct beings into a single being: symbiosis; and the interaction of organisms and their environments to create relational “loops” that led to regulation of many Earth systems: Gaia Theory.

Taken separately these concepts have the ability to redefine, respectively, how we understand organisms and the environment.

Taken together, they can redefine our consciousness.

* * *

…neo-Darwinists were…critical of Margulis’s work, some going so far as to say she was “corrupted by fame” – presumably the slight fame she achieved after she popularized the endosymbiotic origin of cell organelles. Anyone who knew Margulis laughed at such accusations. She worked in a small lab with a few dedicated graduate students: The lab was small in part because she resisted funding from corporate and governmental agencies that she thought would damage the integrity of her work. Once she dismissed a potential funder for wanting her to do work whose content could not be disclosed to the public. “If it’s not public, it’s not science,” she said, and hung up the phone on tens of thousands, possibly millions, of dollars. The graduate students were dedicated because she practiced science for science’s sake, and was fond of quoting quantum physicist and philosopher David Bohm, who said, “Science is the search for truth…whether we like it or not.” The truth was Margulis’s concern, not popularity, not big money, and certainly not fame.

Many neo-Darwinist concerns circled nervously around words like “Gaia” and “cooperation” (which Margulis did not like to use). They were, perhaps rightly, concerned that these terms were ripe for religious appropriation. But Margulis herself was outspoken against such mishandling of her research.

Some new agers love to grasp symbiosis as signifying “altruism” between organisms. But it’s much more complex than that – there is something “in it” for every symbiont, just as a state beneficial in some way arises out of each symbiosis. Terms like “altruism” had no scientific value, because they are too single-minded to describe the phenomenon.

New age thinkers also use Gaia as a blanket term. They’ve appropriated it to mean that the Earth is a living organism. Or they refer to Gaia as a “goddess”. This turns Gaia into a sort of Stepford planet by containing its complexity in a simple and inadequate metaphor. This no more grasps reality than “selfishness” does our genes.

Margulis expressed her solution to the error once by saying, “Gaia is not merely an organism.” The Earth is beyond stale conception. It is more magnificent and active than we can imagine. Gaia is object and process. Gaia houses volcanos and every book, every word on volcanos ever written, and at the same time is those volcanos. It is where our greatest loves live, and where every human heartbeat has ever rhythmically pulsed. In this new understanding; that something can pulse with life and yet be beyond our concepts of living, those concepts begin to change.

If Gaia is conscious, it possesses a consciousness of a different magnitude, probably of a different order all together.

Richard Dawkins and his pre-cursors like John Maynard Smith, as well as other misguided neo-Darwinist thinkers could not and cannot understand this lesson: this complexity is impossible to incorporate in a linear and reductive understanding.

Part of their failure lies in a misunderstood version of cause and effect that plagues science. At a certain level of complexity, somewhere just above a billiard ball clanking into a another billiard ball, cause and effect begins to change its shape. This change may be real – that is, it may actually shift in its laws and patterns in nature – or it may be imagined – in other words, it may demand a different sort of thinking . Effectively it doesn’t matter, since we need to contend with the shift in our thinking. To encompass complex systems with our thinking, we must imagine a model that is less like “cause-effect” more like “being-manifestation.” That is, multiple layers and numerous agents of forces unconsciously conspire together, and their conspiring is so intermingled, that it is simultaneously cause and effect, and thus beyond both. For example, the being, or process of Gaia manifests itself as an unstable, constantly correcting level of oceanic salinity. One cannot be said to cause the other, since the oceanic salinity interacts so deeply with the beings and environs from which it arises. Symbiosis and biological forms demand the same sort of thought.

This complexity shames the metaphorical lack of nuance in “selfish genes”. Neo-Darwinists, who so often speak publicly about the erosion of sound scientific thought, have themselves engendered ideas that represent a threat to clear scientific thinking. It’s not merely that Dawkins’s metaphors are incorrect (and they are incorrect), but his whole idea of evolution is too mystical (in the pejorative sense), too imagined, too metaphorical to be correct. Dawkins, who claims to be an atheist, relies on a host of selfish angels within us and the possibility for meme-salvation to justify his theory. He substantiates his magical worldview on a meager past of scientific work.

Margulis on the other hand, worked constantly and tirelessly in her lab, always aiming at and incorporating new pursuits. At the time of her death, she – with her handful of graduate students and a clutch of international scientists as collaborators – was researching cures for Lyme disease and reassessing how treatable syphilis is (both Lyme and syphilis come from spirochetes, which Margulis probably knew more about than any other scientist); she was also writing a book on Emily Dickinson. Her projects often had the unsettling side-effect of forcing us to reexamine our most cherished presumptions. In other words, she was a sort of investigative light where Dawkins is merely polemical shadow: she was a true materialist whose work produced spiritual effects.

Neo-Darwinism is an evolution that people can and have build social theories (memes, for example) out of. But symbiogenesis and Gaia theory, truer versions of evolutionary motivators, require a new philosophy and perspective to understand at all.

It requires the deepening of the capacity to understand.

These concepts are not conveniently, like neo-Darwinism, mirror-images of the current economic system (nor are they, as many confusedly think, a Kropotkian “mutual aid” analogue for socialism) and so have enjoyed no real social metaphor. Perhaps as we – in the newly and deeply connected world of the internet, social profiles, and globalization – witness the dissolution of the cult of isolated individuality and embark on understanding a clearer and more nuanced view of individuality, so to will we ready ourselves for a clearer view of evolution and life.

“In the arithmetic of life, One is always Many. Many often make one, and one, when looked at more closely, can be seen to be composed of many,” said Margulis and Guerrero. Being able to move from one perspectival state to the next – this is a sort of mental phase transition that is necessary to understand life, evolution, and the environment. It is the sort of thinking Goethe advocated; a thinking whose movement mirrored the movement of life itself…

iOccupy

I.
On the front page of today’s New York Times (October 6, 2011), two images, staggered: One, a crowd; the colors are vibrant and varied. There are people, dozens, maybe hundreds, spilling out of the frame and into the world beyond the photo. Sitting, standing, yelling and looking up. Signs held up high read, “OCCUPY-RESIST”, read, “REVOLT.”

Next to it, down the page a bit, is a man against a black background. He’s pale and staring into a screen. He’s seated. Alone. This man could be nowhere but on a stage.

This man, Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, has just died, and with his death, a worldview is dying with him.
The worldview in the other photo, as enacted by Occupy Wall Street has just been born.

Yesterday, one could feel the mass media about to finally present Occupy Wall Street – the movement that is largest in New York, but growing into other cities, echoing Middle East protests, and targeting corporate greed and demanding corporate accountability. Leftist journalist Amy Goodman had showed up on the livestream; documentarian Michael Moore was tweeting away, unions had joined. Surely, no one could ignore the movement.

Then, Steve Jobs died, and and opening had been made for the media to crawl out of or into. A “visionary” as he is being called by seemingly every media outlet everywhere, had passed. Pancreatic cancer – we saw it coming, but, as always with death, still seemed to come from nowhere.

My twitter feed, which had been very slowly filling with Occupy Wall Street-related news, erupted with “RIP Steve Jobs” messages which ranged from the heartfelt (“Your technology has made my life possible”) to the light-hearted but warm (“iSad”). Many recounted their first Apple purchases.

II.
I started earlier than most: My mother bought my family an Apple IIc in the 1980s. With it, I began to write a novel when I was seven years old. The computer, with its clumsy floppy disks and off-white entire-desk-occupying monitor fused with my creative life. I would have never written so much as a child without the computer, and writing so much is what kept the thread going – from writing then to writing now. And the thread is here at this moment; I’m writing this on a Mac.

But despite this early involvement with Jobs’s early, clumsy children, I wasn’t exactly moved by his death. He was and Apple is, unlike prime competitor Bill Gates, notorious for not making charitable donations (at least publicly – Jobs’s apologists, including Andrew Ross Sorkin and Forbes magazine say he may be giving secretly). His company is reported to use sweatshop labor, and last year, materials used for Apple products were traced back to murderous African militia groups. He was as anti-pornography as someone could be while not being a radical fundamentalist. His devices are, according to many public health advocates, spreading cancer. Without even approaching the enormous amount of resource depletion and pollution creation computers are responsible for (and this should not be ignored, should be examined more deeply and more often), Jobs and his work are problematic and cannot hope to present moral value in and of themselves.

On top of that, there was and is, what from any angle looks like a revolution happening, and the mainstream media had suddenly shut it out.
The twitter feeds kept coming in from sources (like @OccupyWallSt ) directly related to the protests; many stating police were corralling protestors to arrest them and worse. Some protestors were being beaten and pepper-sprayed for doing little more than holding those colorful signs and bearing witness to economic crimes against humanity.

While this was happening, people began to march to Apple Stores, not to occupy them, but to grieve, with their glowing devices in hand; mock candles that costs hundreds of dollars. They placed notes. Some cried. Many took photos of each other.

III.
Commenting on any of this in public was tricky business, I learned. When I said on twitter and in a cafe I was worried that people were projecting emotion onto their gadgets, I got a cold “fuck you” and called an asshole more than once. “He changed the world!” Was the most common response, as if change were value-laden, the measure by which a person’s life is gaged. As if we all don’t change the world.

When I said, “let’s not forget Occupy Wall St while we mourn” people scolded me. Didn’t I know, they wondered, that the whole movement couldn’t be happening without Steve Jobs’s innovations? I mused back: maybe these protests wouldn’t be necessary without the corporate and technological running amok. Not much of a response there, only that I was “dismissing people’s sense of loss.”

I was reminded of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s particularly stupid article on Occupy Wall Street just a few days earlier (The New York Times, October 3, 2011). He thinks he’s got some sort of stick-it-to-them line for the protestors: a withered and sixth-grade criticism. He asks one (out of tens of thousands) how they got to the protest. When the response is by plane, he questions more “deeply” that planes are part of corporate culture no? “…doesn’t Virgin America represent the corporations you are trying to fight?” he asks. In other words: don’t these fools know they’re hypocrites? Sorkin’s question is profound, though by no credit of his own. He doesn’t know it’s profound, because he asks with the intent of dismissing the group. The call of hypocrisy is often a child’s game, because it refuses to recognize complexity.

The real weight of this question in light of Jobs’s death is this – where do these gadgets, corporate-built but now woven into the fabric of our being, fit into our lives? It’s not clear that they’re good – good for whom? Certainly not Apple’s sweatshop workers, nor for the millions that can’t afford Apple products. Nor are they good for many of those who can afford them, but brandish them like badges of honor – status symbols in a strange war for whose iPhone is the whitest. Add, again, the problems of resources and social implications of these devices and I’m not so sure they’re good for us or that the way in which Jobs “changed the world” was for the better.
Then again, bad for whom? Occupy Wall St and the movements they engendered or grew from them employ technological advances like no movement before.

Livestreams, twitter, phones with cameras, phones as walkie-talkies, hacking systems, broadcasting to the world, emailing demands. So, like the first apple, to bite at technology renders unto us a gift that is by no means free.

Of course, none of this means that Steve Jobs was a good person. The Nobel Prize was named after the inventor of dynamite, which was subsequently responsible for death after death. The Rhodes scholars take their name from a racist diamond mogul. Works of peace or beauty often come from violent and strange places.

IV.
Sorkin’s other question was “What’s the message?” He writes, “…at least to me, the message was clear,” but then uses the rest of the article to point out just how messy and unclear he thinks the message is. This is as ubiquitous a media sentiment about Occupy Wall Street as “visionary” is about Jobs. But aside from the fact that many of the participants have stated clearly what they want, their detractors miss the point: decentralization is its greatest strength and most profound feature. And this decentralization was made possible historically and practically by technology.

Whereas once there were figureheads and men and women with megaphones fighting the power, now there are waves. The protestors don’t seek a leader, but consider themselves collectively as a leader of a new way of thinking. The movement is the leader, in service to its subjects.

This is possible only because our sense of self is changing; growing more accustomed to connectivity through the internet and globalization, we have begun to define ourselves by our interactions with others, not merely our own pursuits. Self is composed of a vast matrix of others instead of being segregated into Ones.

Of course this has its consequences too – as many media theorists have pointed out; we can become more isolated by thinking the rest of the world is in the computer rather than real. But Occupy Wall Street represents this new sense of self at its most human.
Connecting online before and during the protests, with each other as well as the world, Occupy Wall Street occupies real space, and finds solidarity in virtual space with those who can’t be there.
And this connectedness has given us a vast sense of equality that the protestors want borne out on a global, economic, and political level. A way to understand this is exhibited by the Ever-Shrinking Celebrity. No longer the untouchable black and white movie divas and leading men, celebrities are instead our neighbors, sitting in their living rooms. We’re connected to them and participating in our own exhibition on YouTube and facebook and tumblr. We’re curators of the fascinating museums of our superstar lives; media- and business-selected celebrities are less interesting to us. Even genuine mainstream celebrities like Lady Gaga show a different sense of self; in touch with her fans, she is her fan base, she tells us. Their actions are her blood. Other celebrities are less direct but nonetheless exhibit diminishing old-school fame. They talk to “the other 99%” on twitter. They’re no longer mobbed for autographs at the airport but instead they pose – without pay – for quick cellphone photos. We’re them. They’re us.
If our cherished celebrities cannot withstand the erosion of collectivity, how could our leaders – financial and political – hope to be spared? We’re interconnected enough to know what others need. We don’t need to be “represented” anymore, because we can actually speak to one another.

Famous, brilliant, “visionary” Steve Jobs, alone in the black with his gadget, isn’t quite the hero he would have been even ten years ago. Vitriolic responses to critics of his corporate miserliness can be seen as symptoms of clinging to an old worldview. Since we’re now understanding ourselves as connected, so will we connect moral bankruptcy with technological innovation. The latter will not excuse the former.

The world is fleshing out a new ethic and moral structure as the sense of self changes. Until it resolves (and perhaps it never will; perhaps it will be in this tension for a long, long time), we will stand in paradoxes. This isn’t hypocrisy, it’s a moment of learning, of process. But one of the messages of this moment has already emerged:
If you were famous, you will no longer be famous. If you were uncharitable but innovative, we’ll take the computers and turn them into charitable devices. If you were irresponsible, you’re one of us, and we demand responsibility of ourselves. No more figureheads. No more totalizing centralization. No more celebrities, no more superpowers, no more Wall Street or despots. No more crimes from iron-fisted, power-wielding authorities because there will no longer be any authorities.

The center is everywhere, and we occupy it.

I’m not supposed to tell this story; I should keep it private, I should hold it back. But this story, my story with him, has a life of its own. I know this because it’s still alive.
Sometimes, when I sleep on my left side, my ribs will ache.
If I’m worried that someone will read this and use it against me, somehow, to hurt me, I must remember that my memories already do that. A familiar song, the grass by the Charles River where we once fell asleep draped over each other, the photos of us together – they’re harsher than any person, filled with that living ghost of where he and I stood and slept and kissed.

It was Independence Day when we met, and I’ve often thought of this curious timing. After some messages back and forth, I drove from Amherst to Boston and walked up the back steps of his building and there he was, sitting on the balcony. He was twenty-four years old, drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette and reading a book. His shirt was off. He was muscular and unfailingly Italian. I had never seen and will never see anyone so handsome.
We began kissing immediately and went to his room, where the air conditioning relieved the humidity and we had sex and then had sex again. In the hum of the air conditioner, we were sticky and exhausted. We talked about our lives and joked about too many things.

From there, it was four months of he and I together; back and forth, a two hour drive. Four months: looking forward, it can seem like forever. Looking back, it can feel like nothing. The black asphalt is like nothing, too. That night, there’s no world, no color. This is what nothing feels like, I think, until I feel his knee push down into my stomach.
“I should crack your skull open and leave you for dead.”

But before that night we’d walk in the morning with his dogs. They’d charge past us into the fields behind his parents’ house. They’d get lost and we’d have to find them. They’d return to us wet and happy. The mornings were cold and we’d hold hands. Those hands felt so thick.
Or sometimes we’d walk without the dogs and there were a hundred things to talk about.

Before that night, we fucked on the floor of his parents’ house. He’d just moved back, and I’d helped him pack, carrying furniture down the steps on a hot summer day. Boston was too hard on his own and he wasn’t sure what he’d do. He always thought his life was a mess.
Underneath us was the rug of the bedroom floor. We were covered in each other and cushioned by it.
“I’m so happy to see you,” he said. And then, “Please don’t ever leave me.” Those words stayed with me.
“I won’t,” I said.

That night, before he hit me, I started to cry. I knew I was leaving and moving to San Francisco. “Please, I don’t want to go without you,” I told him.
“Shutup,” he said. “Stop crying, you’re pathetic.”

I feel like it’s important to tell you, this isn’t the “complete” story. I wasn’t innocent of everything, and this is why people get confused: As if you must be completely clean and loving or else maybe you had it coming.
People would ask, “Did he hit you before?” Or, “Have you been in other abusive relationships?” The answer to both questions is no.
Is it so hard to think that the person who gets hit didn’t do anything to deserve it?

They’d ask, “What happened?” Or, more nuanced, “Why did he do that?”
What reason would have satisfied them or me? As if someone could even give a reason.
Because he was angry. Because he was hurting inside. Because he couldn’t cry and so hated seeing me cry. I don’t know. I wonder if people asked me “why” as a sort of protective amulet for themselves. If they knew why, maybe they could stop it from ever happening. Maybe it would all make sense.
But cause and effect lost its value on the asphalt.
Nothing links up, nothing makes sense, there’s only feelings and actions as you’re lost to something bigger than yourself. There is no cause.
In that way, and perhaps in that way only, it’s like love.

Once, I stole his hat. He told me he loved his hat more than he loved most people – a green Boston Red Sox hat that they didn’t make anymore. He came over and when he was drunk, I took it and hid it. I don’t even know why. It was a game or a joke or a grasp for power. I told him I didn’t know where it was, and he was furious. I returned it weeks later, but never told the truth. He knew the truth, he knew I hadn’t miraculously found it, but I never said so. And in spite of everything that happened after, I’m sorry I stole that hat.

Many times I was too upset, I was too dependent, I was too easy to unsettle. I wanted everything to be pure and happy and I shoved it out of balance so often.
Before I met him, I’d planned to move to San Francisco, and I asked him to come with me. He said yes, and we started to talk about our apartment together. We imagined a whole different city. The way the light would be different. What our bedroom would look like in the morning. Those images settled into me and they were like breathing. I became used to them and they kept me going, they woke me up.
Then a week later he said he wouldn’t come, and I had to imagine something different.

I cried and didn’t know where to turn or what to do. We looked at an apartment in Boston together, but it wasn’t the same. The motion of moving west had already seized me.
We’d sit at his dining room table and draw funny pictures together and reveal them, laughing. I was on my way, even then. I kept feeling like it was inevitable – I had to go to San Francisco. Please come with me, I asked too many times. I’m sorry for asking so many times.

And still, we’d spend time together as the end and that night rushed towards us. He told me about a book he’d read in which a lover, locked in prison, tears at the stones of his cell, bloodying his fingers and breaking his bones. He screams the name of his beloved.
“I’ve always wanted a love like that,” he told me. “Completely consuming.”
I could have guessed, then, that I was that love, and that this had no way of ending without blood and broken bones. But I thought we had something different. That maybe there was no cell, no prison, and that we were free. That we could hold each other when we wanted and that nothing was keeping us apart.
A few weeks later, after we got into an argument at a bar, he was lying in my bed.
He stared ahead and said, “I blew it. I feel like I’m losing this intense love you give me that I’ve wanted all my life.”
“You’re not,” I said. “Don’t worry, you’re not.”

I had to call the police and lawyers. There were medical bills to pay. There were charges to be filed. By a blessing, the bills were paid in another way and it never mattered. But before that, I had to call him, to try to get it settled.
“You’re not going to make me feel guilty for this,” he told me. He told me I made him do it. That was the most painful part of all. I thought, Do you hear yourself? Can’t you hear yourself saying what every abusive person has said on television and in every story?
“I’m not an abusive person,” he shouted.

I kept wanting a different outcome. I kept searching for a memory that wasn’t there; one in which he said, “I’m so sorry and I feel so ashamed and I’ll help you pay the bills and I love you.”
But the memory doesn’t exist. I wasn’t sure he ever even saw what he did as wrong.

Years later, I saw his old roommate who had moved to San Francisco. He said hello. He asked to hang out. I had nothing against the former roommate. He was always sort of defensive, but nice enough. He’d never done a thing to hurt me, and he was funny. I didn’t dislike him, even if we were never quite friends. But his presence was a sure sign that I hadn’t “gotten over it.” I could barely speak.
“I don’t,” I said, and stopped.
My sentence lingered and the friend said okay and walked away.
I took a breath and followed him.
“I don’t think you understand,” I said to the friend. “I don’t think you know what happened.”
“He’s my friend,” he said. “So even to hear your side wouldn’t…”
I cut him off.
“The last time I saw ____, he broke my rib. He put me in the hospital.”
His face drained of color – I’ve heard this expression before, but had never seen it. His face was pale. He hadn’t known.
“I don’t have anything against you,” I said. “But being around you is traumatic for me, in a way.”
“I understand,” the friend said. We hugged each other.

Somehow I thought the man I’d loved let everyone know. He was so charming, I imagined him telling people and having them simply shrug it off. Horrible, maybe, but in the past and let’s focus on the good stuff, right?
But the look in his friend’s face. Maybe I just read it there, maybe it was just a look of unknowing. But no, no, it was there. Fear, almost.
So the man that beat me up had never really confessed. He was raised Catholic, maybe confessing was unthinkable.
Perhaps, instead, he’d said he’d gotten into a fight with me. No big deal, people would think. They might even take his side.
Which means somewhere he had a sense that something was wrong, that he had been wrong in hitting me. I’d never even hoped for that before. In concealing the truth, he was admitting it to me.

Once, when we were on my couch, eating cookies, being gluttonous, he turned to me and held me. “You’re like this ginger molasses cookie,” he said. “I’m finished and I want more and more. You’re like,” he kissed me at each word, “my little ginger molasses cookie.”

When you don’t ever have an apology, you’re forced to find your own. Something that will let you rest. You will an apology into being. After you do it, you’ll still want to hear “sorry” in someone else’s voice. You’ll still want to hear that and breathe.
But you keep moving.

In Massachusetts, in the days following the assault (and I have only after years begun to understand that it was an “assault”), I could have forced him into confronting the wrongness of it.
Massachusetts has a zero tolerance policy for domestic violence. He would have been taken to jail immediately. I had the hospital report: broken rib, contusions in my intestines. And the record of everything else – the internal bleeding, the fear of split-open organs. I still have that yellow piece of triplicate paper. It’s in a box, wondering if it will be used.
But if I made the call I’d have to – I was told by the lawyer – face him in a court of law. I’d have to see him again. I saw him every day and when I close my eyes I will still sometimes see him. But to see him in person – those arms and hands, that beautiful face that used to be full of love? I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t brave enough or strong enough anymore. I was only tired and completely broken.
I struggled for so long with that phone call, and eventually it faded away. Instead, I put all my things in my car and drove across the country alone. I met my friends in San Francisco, and I felt safe. I kept thinking – so curiously! – that I hoped he was okay. How could someone be so angry at whoever loved him? How must it feel to hate being loved, and then to have the person that loved you run away in fear?
I should have protected other people.
I should have faced him.
I should have pressed charges.
That’s what I would have told anyone else to do.

Running away was the strongest, most exhausting thing I have ever done and it still wasn’t brave enough to be right.

There’s a short story by Raymond Carver called “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love.” In it, a character explains that he can’t figure out where his love for his ex-wife went. He used to love her, but now he hated her. She was allergic to bees and he’d imagine himself standing in front of the door in a beekeeper’s outfit, opening a hive in front of her and watching the bees sting her to death.
Another character talks about the screaming, the pulling of hair and the threats.
Of course in all cases it’s clear that the love is still there. But it’s contorted. When you hate someone so much, it’s easy to see the inversion and deformity of love. Instead of being pure and clean, it will take the strangest shapes.
The question isn’t, “Is that love?”
The question instead is what to do with love that’s changed form and that threatens you with all the force and passion that used to cradle and guard you.
We’re defenseless against it. Like a dog that turns on you and attacks you after years of being loyal – you can’t erase all those years and feelings you had because of that one moment. But something has to change because everything has.

On our last night together, I drove from Amherst to his parents’ house and we went to the bars outside of Fenway Park to watch the Red Sox game and drink and be close to each other. We were going to spend the night together and I found myself, later, trapped in that expectation, clinging to it because there was no other way to continue.
I’d told him I was going to San Francisco. I didn’t know if it was a bluff or not, all I know was that I had to tell him and start packing my things. Some sort of magnet was pulling at me and when I resisted it, I fell down.
We talked and laughed and kissed, we walked around town and met his friends. At a certain point, I saw him, standing away from me. I saw him there, on his own, talking to someone else in the loud music and dark light, and I thought, “How can this be the end?”
I saw Boston without me and San Francisco without him and the alcohol was blurring it all together the future and its places with us missing.
We walked back to the car, parked on a rooftop parking lot, totally open, empty. We were drunk and decided to sleep so we wouldn’t drive until we were sober. We got in the car and closed the doors.

I know I said I’d start this at the end. That wasn’t true, because there is no end to this story. I know he’s been to California. To LA where he worked, and maybe to San Francisco where I saw his friend.
I worry that I’ll see him around. Four years later. Would I run? Would I say hello or just open up and cry? Would I be able to move or even say a word, or would I feel pinned to the spot, hurt inside, sick the next day?

I woke up hours later and looked at him and then started crying. There he was, my love, my handsome and defiant boy who loved to be drunk and have sex and make me laugh. He’d beam at his huge muscles and I’d kiss them. He’d make clumsy artwork and show it to me proudly.
There he was, asleep.
He woke to my sobbing.
“Don’t let me go,” I said, though I don’t know if I meant it or if I was talking to him or myself or someone else.
He got out of the car and came around to my side.
He opened the door like a perfect gentleman and told me to stand up. He put his big hands, that used to hold me, on my arms.
“You’re thirty years old,” he said. “Grow up and get your fucking life together. Stop crying like a fucking bitch.”
And I had never seen such spiteful anger from him before. We’d yelled at each other and confused each other. We’d lost our way before.
I said things that I shouldn’t have said or at least that in any case at all, I’d regret.
I don’t remember being thrown to the ground, but then he was above me. He had me by my throat. He would kill me, I thought.
“I should kill you,” he said.

Why now? Why should I write about him? Four years later, it’s Independence Day again; the day I met him on his sweaty balcony. I don’t know. I don’t think about him every day, like I used to. I’ve had to work to bring some of the memories back. I’d forgot, for instance, the time we stopped at a gas station and he ran in and got me a rose. He handed it too me; it was so unnaturally red, and kissed me. I still have that rose in a little box. It’s dry now, and would fall apart if you held it too long.
I looked through letters and photos.
We’re laughing with our hats turned sideways. We’re naked in our beds.
His letters to me are full of grand sweeping statements and pained details.
In one letter, he wrote,
“If you ever did write anything about me, good or bad, I’d want it to be about love.”

When I got up, I couldn’t breathe right. I knew something in me was wrong and feverish, but couldn’t feel it. He threw his fist into my side. He screamed nothing, just a sound like a great pain; like the sound I should’ve been making.
He started to walk away.
I was catatonic and said, “get in the car.”
He got in and I drove him home, a half hour away. I pounded at the steering wheel with my hands, crying. I couldn’t think. I pounded and cried to blot out what had happened, the way you might pinch a spot that hurts, trying to overwhelm the pain.
We got back to his place and like exhausted wheels in a machine, it all worked in slow motion.
We walked up the steps to his bedroom.
We took our clothes off.
We turned the light off and lied down in bed.
I put my arm around him and he said, “You better back the fuck off.”
And that’s when, all at once, my body came back to life. I felt the pain in my broken rib, the bruises on my organs. I got up and quietly collected my clothes and walked to the bathroom. I turned the light on and looked in the mirror. Who was I?
I dressed and went back. He turned the light on and looked lonelier than I had ever seen him look.
“Where are you going?” he asked in a quiet voice.
“This will never change,” I told him. “This will never go away.”
We walked downstairs and I kissed him.
“I love you,” I said. “Goodbye.”

Once, we went to the house he grew up in. We snuck past the back yard, into the woods he played in as a little boy. There was a river there, cutting through a hill and lined with rocks. It was almost dried up in the summer heat.
“A woman lived back there,” he said, and pointed to a house farther back, covered up by trees.
“She told me that a turtle fell on its back on one of these rocks. A snapping turtle. And she told me that if I looked for it, I could find the print the turtle’s shell left on one of the rocks.”
He looked around.
“I never did find it, though.”
He climbed up the hill and stood there. The sun was lit up behind him and he looked down into the rocks, searching for the impression he’d never seen.
He was a boy up there. He hadn’t hurt anyone, he was just a boy.

In the hospital, where I spent the whole next day, in the days and months to come where I felt no trust beneath me, no life in me, no air or easy breathing through the pain of my ribs, I’d think of him standing on that hill. I still think of it, of who he was, innocent, before he hit me and would have to hide that night away.

And then, like the negative to that image, I see his face, shameful and angry, as he’s holding me down against the black nothingness of the ground.
The two are, only now, beginning to be the same person for me. The contradiction cannot be resolved or changed.
“You’ll write about this, and I’ll just be another story,” he said spitefully. “I know you will. You’ll tell everyone.”
“No,” I said. “I won’t.”

EMIT TIME

In the dream, I’m sitting on a long couch next to three people: William S. Burroughs, Timothy Leary, and Oprah Winfrey. The room is smoky, and I’m allowed a question.

“How do I take all this knowledge I have and make the world a better place?” I ask. A child’s question, How does this work?

Leary, with whom I am the least acquainted, answers. “You have to find a way to step outside of time.”

I’m about to ask what he means, and in the waking world, a sharp and harsh call pulls me out of sleep. The red-numbered digital alarm I’ve set insists itself. Wake. Up.

I hit the snooze button and when I lie back again, the dream is still there and still complete.

Leary leans toward me. “You see?” He asks. Oprah nods her head knowingly while Burroughs takes a long drag from his cigarette, eyes forward, catatonic.

* * * * *

In the beginning there was stone, or nothing, or God, or the loud unspeakable banging of things. There was an origin. And inside of us, somewhere, is that origin. We couldn’t be here without containing it. Every moment of time and all the interactions of nature have led themselves to us, to the person reading these words in the space they’re being read in. And so the very history of the universe stands in our bones, like a ghost standing inside of a wall.

This is philosopher Jean Gebser’s “ever-present origin” from his book of the same name. The point from which all lines and planes and cubes emerge, the one that still pours forth our being, but which, at some moment, we became unaware of, and which, if we want to speak spatially about such things, we have “grown distant” from.

Somewhere in this great divorce, we developed our current concept of and feeling for time, which so intensely typifies our current way of life, on the peninsular stretch away from origin we live on. Gebser’s focus on time impelled him to write the book.

There’s too much history to go over, too many potshots to take at the thing, and too many expressions of time from culture to culture to get into the nitty gritty of the history of time (for a great and exhausting study of just that, I recommend A Sideways Look at Time by Jay Griffiths). I don’t have time (or space) to do it. But we can look at what time is to us. – how it feels, how it “ticks away”, how it becomes something beyond claiming as it falls into the past. We can, perhaps, even learn to interact with time in a new way. “Time may change me, but I can’t trace time,” David Bowie sang. Oh no?

Gebser claimed that we were entering into a new understanding of time and that it would change our consciousness utterly. He claimed, like the theosophists, anthroposophists, Hindus, and others, that human consciousness has changed throughout our long history. Our new perspective on time would herald a “mutation” – the “integral” – through which we could see the ways we used to think – the past mutations of consciousness. “Mutations” not because they follow the reductive concepts of genetic mutation, nor because they have the same feel as physical evolution; they are, instead, changes in the inner landscape of the psyche and spirit. They are shifts in the pattern of thinking and being that change those patterns utterly. Our selves change in accordance to these mutations; our structures of perception, our personalities, our relationships, all uproot and become undone. That is, they no longer feel finished, and they become again. As goes our structure of consciousness, so goes the world.

Gebser’s arguments – intensely detailed examinations of art history and language – are compelling and powerful, and in themselves contribute to changes in the consciousness of any reader strong-willed enough to make it through the wordy book (for gentler but just as profound renderings of the evidence, see Owen Barfield’s Saving the Appearances, History in English Words, or Poetic Diction). His main point with the integral is that when we change our vision of time, we change our world, and that this perspective is changing whether we like it or not.

Physicist Stephen Hawking speculates that the “‘psychological arrow of time’ is pointed in the same direction as the cosmological and thermodynamic arrow of time…from the past to the future.” Gebser and others ask – what happens when the psychological arrow changes direction? Or we aim the bow upward? Or more than that – what happens when we put down our weapons all together?

* * * * *

I am sitting at the Urban Plaza near 50th Street and 10th Avenue in New York City. There’s a Starbucks and a restaurant nearby and the ground beneath the metal chair I’m sitting on is cobblestone. It is October 20th.

Pigeons fly around the fountain. Everyone is reading and talking to one another or on the phone. Some are eating. A few are doing nothing at all, except listening maybe, or watching the sky.

None of it feels like time.

I can write the word, but it’s distant or even empty, like a bit of nonsense…until I think time is happening.

Or sometimes I’ll get the notion of it when a person leaves. The seat is empty; it didn’t used to be empty. There was somewhere to go! That exclamation point feels like time as I look at it. Moreso, definitely, than the absolute blackness of the period. The exclamation point is an event! It’s an instant! The register rises at the end of the sentence!

I think about when I need this essay done by and there it is. A future. When I double myself -me and me soon – there is time. And here’s a waiter, approaching a table. A man has paid with a hundred dollar bill and accidentally left the change in the folder with the check. Time: What he did then unfolding now.

The pigeons are moving from ground to awning to tree top, and there’s no time until I think about where they were or where they are going.

Time is the animal moving out of sight and into inner vision. It’s an engagement with the invisible.

* * * * *

In 1759, and a pillar of wisdom, mystical and otherwise, Emmanuel Swedenborg reveals that he’d been communing with angels. He was a respected man whore wore a wig. He tended to stutter but besides that was the calm figure of a scientist. He’d engineered bridges, he’d calculated longitudinal axis based on the movements of the moon, and discovered that the two hemispheres of the brain react differently. He was one of the most famous and well-respected engineers and scientists of his time, and he had a habit of entering into the world of the angels and sometimes even into Hell.

It was there that he began to understand time. In the spiritual world, he found that our ideas and concepts had the curious state property of realness – that is, they weren’t simply thought about, but they were factual expressions. Austrian mystic, natural philosopher, educator, architect and seer Rudolf Steiner would confirm this in later years, stating that in the spiritual world, our concepts are “objects”. Time is as real as a chair in the spiritual world, but because in the spiritual world we do not only use the same senses as we do in the material world, “as real” evinces itself as an intense fact of feeling in the spiritual senses.

“A pleasant state,” Swedenborg wrote in one of his many voluminous descriptions of the spiritual world, “makes time seem brief, and an unpleasant one makes it seem long. We can therefore see that time in the spiritual world is simply an attribute of state.”

Even Einstein could not deny this – an attribute of state. Like solidity, density, color, tone. Time is a feeling. Wilson van Dusen, Swedenborg scholar and psychologist would later elaborate by examining dimensionality from a Swedenborgian point of view. Though Swedenborg never schematized the dimensions, van Dusen deduced the implicit dimensionality from combing relentlessly over Swedenborg’s work along with the work of other mystics.

The dimensions start off as mathematical dimensions – they are simple: Point, line, plane, cube. The point is a zero-dimension. It has a distinguished nothingness to it. It’s not even the period at the end of this sentence, though we draw it that way. It’s not a thing, it’s not a spot, it’s not a moment. Instead, the point is a gesture of separation – an instance of being pulled from the whole. This bears a striking resemblance to Gebser’s archaic mutation of consciousness or what Steiner refers to as the Saturnian period of consciousness. The Saturnian being had a consciousness “duller than dreamless sleep” – and occult historian Gary Lachman states that the archaic being was “little more than the first slight ripple of difference between origin and its latent unfolding.”

Van Dusen, in ascending through the dimensions, treats the problem algorhtymically. The line is all the points. For Steiner and the theosophists, the line is instead the point turned or bent. Either way, when one lives on the line-state of consciousness (like in Edwin Abbot’s Flatland), all one can see is points. This corresponds well with – though he did not characterize it this way – Gebser’s theory of magical consciousness, the next mutation in the sequence. The magical mutation is typified by synchronicites. They’re discreet instances of consciousness which do not only relate, but overlay one another. For an example of magical consciousness, Gebser presents an indigenous people who draw an antelope and plunge a spear into the drawing, then spear an antelope later in perfect reciprocity. This may be difficult at first to understand – but understand it as the moment when you are thinking of someone and then they call out of nowhere, only more intense. The thought process and the events are so intertwined that they cannot possibly be seen to be independent. In fact, they are interdependent. (This is why in magical rituals, we still see much iconography – sigils or voodoo dolls are symbolic art created to affect life.)

The second dimension is the plane. All of the lines together cannot help but form a sort of vaster line – thicker and full of itself. For Steiner, we can say that the plane is the line turned. If a line continues on and on, Steiner explains, it “curves” until it meets itself again. In this way, it forms a circle. “…a straight line can be interpreted as a circle whose diameter is infinitely large…we can imagine that if we move ever farther along a straight line, we will eventually pass through infinity and come back from the other side.” Steiner’s way of examining lines, in other words, brings in our experience as a higher dimension which defines the lower.

These dimensions are not separate but in fact beautifully complex in that they all determine each other – they are neither “top down” nor “bottom up”, particularly since in their totality they defy the spatial laws of structure and hierarchy.

On the plane, we find Gebser’s mythic consciousness. The plane pulls the mythic human around and around. A square, not a circle, is the best image for mythic time, because it is a shape punctuated by familiar instances: seasons, directions, colors. Rhythm is felt by the rounding of a corner. In a sense, these corners are the gods. While in the magical mutation of first-dimensional thinking synchronicities “popped up”, in the mythic, synchronicities acquired a new intensity – rhythm. If in magical consciousness synchronicity was punctuated percussing noise, then in mythcial consciousness, at the corners, the noises found a beat.

Infintize the plane, a la van Dusen, or curve it a la Steiner, and we have a cube: the plane that boldly faces itself. And here Gebser’s perspective meets Duhrer’s little squares across the maiden, breaking her form into bits of light and shadow. We became “heavy” with matter as the plane beheld its own eminence. As Gebser deftly points out, (he lays the blame and credit first on Petrarch) we began at this point in history to ascend mountains. No more were the impossible Mt. Olynpuses, where we’d be struck down, even for daring to scale. We started to see a vast panorama of space. We were no longer countrymen, united, but individuals, separated by harsh outlines. And what a view! For proof, look at the dramatic shifts in western art around the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: suddenly, everything jumped out of the frame or slinked backward into it. Light and shadow took the place of color. Instead of color against color: distance and curvature. A perspective of irrevocable spatiality. This is Gebser’s mental mutation, which we’re now in – albeit its “deficient” mode. Deficient because we’ve lost ourselves in it, forgotten the wonder of it.

What’s next on the agenda of dimensions? Time. This was illustrated profoundly to me by a teacher who explained van Dusen’s expressions of dimensions. She held a book.

“This book’s the cube; it’s space,” she said. “What happens when you add all the space and all the space?” Of course I had no idea.

Then she dropped the book.

“When space passes through itself, you have time.”

* * * *

I’m at the Esalen Institiute with about a hundred others. We’re here to spend time with a woman who – how can I put this? – is like a glowing white light.

Her name is Byron Katie, and she has a beautiful comforting smile. She undoes things.

“Good evening,” she says from the stage. We all say good evening back.

“Is it true?” she asks, and those of us who know what’s happening laugh.

What’s happening is this: Katie, as she prefers to be called, describes the world as Epictetus did. “It is not events that upset us, it is our thoughts about events which upset us.” Katie has a system for parsing the two. When people ask her if she’s enlightened, she says, “I don’t know what that means; I’m just a person who knows the difference between what hurts and what doesn’t.” She often wears shawls. If you saw a picture of her, you might think she was a flake or a saint.

The system is The Work. It’s just four questions, and they shine an intense light on the mind of the mental mutation because they use the mental mutation’s own clarity and sharp outlines against itself. The master’s tools dismantling the master’s house (well they’re lying around, anyway, why not?). The questions are applied to a stressful concept – and it’s easier, she tells us, to apply it to someone else before we apply it to ourselves. My husband shouldn’t cheat on me. My children should listen to me. That woman shouldn’t talk so much. My mailman should say hello when he sees me.

Out of context, the questions aren’t so impressive. They are 1. Is it true? 2. Can you absolutely know that it’s true? 3. How do you feel when you think that thought? 4. Who or how would you be without that thought? And they are followed by a “turnaround”, where the original statement is brought back to the self.

For example, “My wife shouldn’t have left me” turns into “I shouldn’t have left me” or “I shouldn’t have left my wife” or even “My wife should have left me.”

What occurs through The Work is obvious around me. We listen to Katie, facilitate with her and then with each other. We cry and light up. There’s nothing phony about it, nothing new age, it’s simply an intense engagement with the mental world. Everything in the world is. There’s no sense arguing with it. A woman, while doing the work with me sees her husband isn’t selfish, but profoundly giving. She also sees that she needs to give herself everything she expected him to give and to set her boundaries with him. I forgive myself for the first time for being crazy around an old boyfriend. I think, I’d like to be a different way around the people I love.

This is postmodernism used to its most profound effect. It’s the deconstruction of thought – but not to the point of meaninglessness – rather to its true essence. We are not our thoughts, but we do interact with them. The thoughts rise and fall within us, like weather. But they do not come from us. It’s as if thoughts are curtains billowing inward – the curtains are blowing in the apartment, but the impetus for their movement comes from somewhere else. When we attach to a thought, that’s when the trouble begins. We stop moving, and we’re caught in Lucifer’s perversion (literally translated as a turning away). Lucifer, instead of turning all the way around to face God once again, stopped and became stuck. And so, evil was born. When we attach to our thoughts, we get stuck and create a fundamentalist belief, and belief can bring pain.

“Anything is true if you believe it,” Katie says. “Nothing is true whether you believe it or not.”

And she’s funny.

It’s much easier to understand The Work by doing, so I won’t record the dialogues here. Go to her website, listen to her audiobooks. But something occurs to me at the conference – Katie is not anxious or depressed about anything. Somehow, she doesn’t seem to feel stress. Doesn’t she engage with time? Looking backward to regret, forward to worry?

“Do you know about time?” she asks us.

“Look,” she begins, each utterance a complete sentence. “I. I am. I am a woman. I am a woman who wants a glass of water. I am a woman who is going to reach for a glass of water. Do you see how I’m creating time?”

Time is the attachment to a thought. The moment we say, “I am,” we position ourselves temporally. And it expands from there into, “I am a man. I am a man who wants.” We begin to create a past – the collection of inherited concepts, such as “man”. We create a future by thinking of what we’d like to have, by becoming, “a man who wants.” And so forth until we’re in the very practical world of someone who is going to reach for a glass of water. This is the world of materialisms – everything happens outside of inner being – “sticking” to itself. All the space and all the space. Katie would say this happens when, “we believe what we think.”

Of course, we’re paralyzed without concept – and there is a rightness to concept. Katie tells us that our feelings are alarms. A stressful feeling is the sign of attaching to a stressful thought. “Keep the dreams,” she says, “and investigate the nightmares.”

* * * * *

Back to the fourth dimension: all the cubes at once. For Steiner, the fourth dimension is the astral world. This presents the first disagreement in dimensionality for van Dusen and Steiner – while for van Dusen time is the fourth dimension, for Steiner, time appears differently in the fourth dimension.

And here’s my leap: human time in the mental mutation of consciousness seems to me to be a combination of the anthroposophical fourth dimension or astral plane and the etheric.

The etheric, as described by Steiner, is tricky business. Not because it’s theoretical but because it’s so apparent to our being, but not our senses. We perceive the etheric with our senses only through the distinction in forms and movements in a developing living being. Plants are perhaps the best example, and it is felt that they reside in the etheric “realm” (that is, their consciousness is an etheric consciousness) most squarely.

With high speed recording, we can “see” plant development – the life of the etheric. But while the etheric evinces itself in the material world as temporal, it stands outside of time. That is, it streams with purpose within a completed whole. In fact, it is not so much “streaming towards” as it is “swirling within”. This is close to what Goethe referred to as the “archetypal plant” – a plant that “contains” all other plants – a living pool of possibility.

Gebser’s origin bears many similarities to the etheric – it is the unmanifest, formless being from which all forms manifest. Imagine a skyscraper building itself into an invisible blueprint, which is pressed onto the ground, the sky, and the workers that carry out the labor, making them part of the whole. Or, if you like, Marvel Comics has a character named Eternity – he has a human form, but is vast, infinite, and in the outline of this form are all the planets and stars and all that has ever happened and will happen. The idea here is that things form themselves within a finality. In this sense, the etheric and origin are the ground-level “proofs” of a teleological point of view. They are fractally experienced versions of physicist and philosopher David Bohm’s “implicate order”

A good way to observe this sensually is to notice the differences between a plant and a rock. Rocks do change, but we do not sense within them an inner growth. Even developing crystals form from the outside. The plants, on the other hand, draw from something within themselves to develop as well as from the outside world. Biologist Wolfgang Schad writes, that the etheric has and is, “…an autonomous capacity to behave within matter, physical energy, space and time in a way different from that of lifeless objects.” Because of this, we must observe that time exists in a different way for the plant – just as time exists in a different way for the animal and human.

This is because the rock and the animal and the human live in different realms of being than the plant. The animal and the human both have an astral body, and the human alone has a mental body (or “ego-organization”) on which I will present more on later (and through which the distinction is made, as opposed to standard evolutionary thinking that humans are animals). The astral body is the body through which we experience feeling and dreaming.

The fourth/astral dimension is a strange place, and when entered into wholly, it is not unlike cartoons where Bugs Bunny goes to a distant planet. Bugs Bunny sees a hammer chasing a nail, a bizarre animal, and people with entirely different rules of living.

Steiner explains, “You must become used to reading each number symmetrically, as its mirror image. This is the basic prerequisite…relationships in time…must also be interpreted symmetrically – that is, later events come first and earlier events appear later…There, the old emerges from the new…It is said of Kronos that he devoured his children. In the astral realm, offspring are not born but devoured.”

Events of great emotional weight also appear backwards. “Imagine, for example, that we see a wild animal approaching us in the astral realm, and it strangles us. That is how it appears to someone who is used to interpreting external events…In reality, the wild animal is an internal quality, an aspect of our own astral body is strangling us. The attacking strangler is a quality that is rooted in our own desires. If we have a vengeful thought, for example, the thought may appear in an external form, tormenting us as the Angel of Death.” The astral world is full of these reverse animals, which feels exact when you remember that the animal is a being of astrality that does not pulse strongly with a mental body.

Time apparently flows backwards in the fourth dimension or the astral realm because of that dimensional “bend” or “curve”. To ascend in dimensionality, the dominant form (point, line, plane, cube) must be algorhytmically added to itself. Easy enough to imagine when we bend a point to make it a line or bend a plane to make it a cube. Bending the cube is not so easy to imagine, but we can understand it through mirrors. When we bend spatiality, we create a mirror image – like a right-handed glove appearing as a left-handed glove in the mirror. Time flows in the reverse to the lower dimensions.

So even as the animal runs towards us to tear at our throat, Steiner reminds us that our being is primary and that our freedom determines the animal. “In reality, everything in the astral world radiates from us…It comes back to us on all sides as if from the periphery, from infinite space. In truth, however, we are confronting only what our own astral body has given off.”

The invention of anxiety – Our astral body is the imagined future. We imagine it, yet it appears to be rushing towards us.

This is what Byron Katie means when she says, “We keep thinking, why is this happening to me? What we begin to understand through The Work is that it is happening for us.”

* * * * *

Just as it’s important to not confuse the fourth dimension with time itself, it’s important to not conceive of the etheric as space, simply because growth flows “into” it.

“Strictly speaking,” Hermann Popplebaum, botanist, writes, “the joining of the forms is the task of the perceiver and concerns him only; nature on the other hand, evolves the individual forms out of the totality, because for her the totality is primary.” That is, the perceiver understands relationships and forms through separateness – a bud and a flower, say – even though they are not separate. Nature works out of totality. Poppelbaum continues, “The temporal succession of forms is the result of an unfolding into the spatial dimension – a true ‘ex-plane-ation.’”

Anthroposophists also assert the appearance of the etheric after death – when “the soul experiences its whole past life spread out before it in a vast ‘panorama’ or ‘tableau.’ The etheric body of man is present as a continuous whole before him…” (Popplebaum) How like Gebser’s observations of Picasso’s work, in which smashed-together faces were painted to present all aspects of time. That is, what we perceive in the circling of a three-dimensional form (a face) presented all at once.

The astral moves backwards, the etheric moves forward. These two movements give us our curious sense of time. The astral: the anticipation of the future brought on by what radiates from us but feels like it is coming at us. The etheric: the notion of the past rushing to meet us when we compare distinctions in form which are present within a whole. Here’s what happens when we put those two together – We get a feeling that the future is coming to us and that the past is always behind us. At curious moments, we feel the collision of the two and a sort of “canceling out.” The collision of the etheric and the astral gives us the present – a sort of no-time, a spot of negation and canceling out of memory and anticipation and inner and outer.

What’s more, with humans, there is the addition of the mental body, which perceives the astral and etheric.  Our sense of time is therefore different than that of the plant or the animal. But it includes those senses of time as well, and we have passed through Gebser’s mutations, so that the effects of time are curious.

* * * * *

How can you be here, reading this essay when you’ve got to get it all done? Shouldn’t you be making a list? And what about yesterday? You didn’t quite get it all in yesterday did you – if only you would have managed it all a little more wisely. Look at all the time you wasted doing things that weren’t really beneficial to you!

There, feel it. It’s in your body, in your heart, in your lungs. Perhaps your hands were a little shaky or you looked away from the words of this essay to contemplate how to better manage the rest of the day. Maybe you were even sweating.

Remember, the experience of time is only “here” when we’re aware of it. We consider time as something that pulses through but time does not really “exist” wholly apart from our experience. For example, for the all-present zen master, there can exist a “space” in which there is only one moment which encompasses everything. Like the room outside the one you’re sitting in, reading this, time’s existence is questionable. When we forget about it (or can’t “see” it in our awareness), it seems to disappear. When we remember it, it appears: The room next to this one exists now internally and springs to being when we enter it again. Furthermore, it feels familiar because we compare it to our memory. When the past seems to match the present, this is looping – the recursion of the imagined, visualized past into the immediate present.

Different societies have different ways of looping. For example, The Australian aborigines, a society for whom the mythic and magical are more diaphanous than our own, sing the landscape into being. The world is interacted with if it is to exist at all. This process only seems foreign to us because our songs are hummed internally. We also sing, but with our memories, hidden and silent.

Just as we “see” familiarity with memory, we sense time with bodies. Think again of everything you need to get done today and feel the changing pace in your chest. Rudolf Steiner describes the heart and the lungs as our “rhythmic system.” The rhythmic system, a system of regularity, is sensitive to our ideas about time. Try to contain the future or the past, and it alerts us to the action by speeding up.

If you’re running and stop suddenly, you will feel the same thing – the forward flow of the past and backward flow of the future have an inertia to them. Hold them in your heart and you’ll begin to shake, shiver, sweat. You’ll feel the heat of the energy you’ve contained. Time only feels good when it passes through us effortlessly. Like food, if time gets caught in you, you will begin to choke.

* * * * *

Popplebaum writes, “The bark of the tree…though it is leaving the etheric realm, is still on the way back to the physical; it has not yet arrived there. Only when it decomposes in the soil has it fully arrived in the physical realm.” In other words, without the astral, the etheric leads back to the physical. When the functioning astral is combined with the functional etheric, the astral is always on the way back to the etheric – that is, the feeling astral is what contributes to growth. When the mental body is added, the mental flows back toward the astral. Thought lapses back into feeling.

So it is for the human being that feeling (the astral) should be dominant – that even though we have a thinking capacity, feeling is so powerful in comparison to thinking without proper training. Thinking is our highest capacity, but thinking flows into feeling just as bark flows into ground.

This is why if we look behind a stressful feeling, we will find a stressful thought. The feeling is the alarm that the thinking is unhealthy – just as the decomposition in soil is the alarm that the bark of a tree is unhealthy.

* * * * *

“Wherever the astral body sets limits to growth, the etheric forces are set free from their original task and are able to become a kind of matrix for the formation of thoughts. The capabilities of thinking (e.g. repetition, variation, logical opposition) reveal the formative activities which were previously working in the physical body.” – Popplebaum

When the astral and etheric become transparent to the mental, that is, when we begin to emit or divest time from our being, we can set ourselves free through intention. We’re not always up to this task: For example, we feel awful because we keep dwelling on a past incident – when we lied to a loved one, perhaps. When we do this rather than confront the wrong and move on, we halt time. A loop, in a sense is created – but a smaller, more constricted one. When, in the human, the astral encounters the etheric without the assistance of the mental, it’s like a skipping record. The astral tries to overwhelm the etheric and becomes stuck in a dark, contracted version of it: Hell. It’s a burning that never goes out. It is how we react when we think that thought and attach to it. It is the feeling of trapped time.

But when we approach time with intention, we become heroic: the mental body (and mutation) engage with astral and etheric bodies or magical and mythical time. The hero enters the cave with an iron sword and slays the dragon. This act as a whole is the entering into the mental body – a place of freedom. There, we become capable of a new way of being.

What is this way of being? Something, God or the angels or I don’t know what, begins to flow into the mental body, just as before the mental flowed naturally into the astral. In other words, the astral is no longer the overwhelming default. Instead of feeling, thinking comes naturally. We may engage with desire (as we know it now) however we please. We do not want out of fear, but rather out of curiosity and interest. Where once there was terror and intensity of mood, there will be loving engagement. Where once there was necessity driven by impulsive feeling, soon there will be freedom.

“…in a space-and-time-free aperspectival world,” Gebser writes, “…the free (or freed) consciousness has at its disposal all latent as well as actual forms of space and time without having either to deny them or to be fully subject to them.”

* * * * *

I am sitting at a Tibetan restaurant. The ting mo – steamed white bread – has just arrived. It’s not supposed to come with the hot pepper oil, but I’ve asked for it. An experiment. What happens when I apply The Work to physical pain? I add as much pepper as possible to the ting mo. A flaring alert shows up on my tongue.

I’m in pain, is it true? Can I absolutely know that I’m in pain? How do I feel when I think that thought – I’m in pain? Who or how would I be without the thought, I’m in pain? Can I turn that thought around?

And the pain is gone. I didn’t compare the moment to the past or the future, I didn’t think, “I shouldn’t feel this way,” or “I felt better a moment ago.” I’m seeing all time states at once and choosing the one that feels the most free to me. And with that, even the physical sharpness of the pepper oil coating the back of my throat and my tongue becomes warming.

To love time, to put down the psychological arrow, is to marry the physical world and the inner world. It’s to see the mineral body’s clearest spiritual face; from afar, from geological time.

“Go inside a stone/That would be my way” poet Charles Simic writes. We must see such a broad field of space and time that it begins to not seem like time at all. In fact, we must, in a way, conceptualize it all at once. When we refer to “geological time” what we mean is the near-absence of the astral and the etheric, the near-abandonment of our notions of time all together.

* * * * *

As a possible doorway to a new time-consciousness, consider money.

“Time is money,” Benjamin Franklin famously said. It’s an often-despised quote, but Franklin was not only a politician but an esotericist. His statement is a mystical truth: money is a time-container.  We focus time thinking onto money because it is meant to hold future promise and past labor. We misinterpret in it the etheric and astral bodies. Money does have its own being, but this being – one of brotherliness – is opaque to us. And so real money is actually invisible. We perceive, instead money as the container of past debt.  The things we desire, when linked with “I don’t have enough money” create a future anxiety.

When we have money, we are still burdened. Again with the constant burning – the money is “burning a hole in your pocket.” Notice this burning in our misinterpretations of time. When we try to contain time, we sweat, we get chills.  The future cannot be held in the present – because it is meant to radiate – when we hold it, we feel its heat.  Dwelling on the past brings a coldness flowing at us, the loneliness and solitude of depression and guilt and regret.

Our misconstrued perception of money is so embedded into the deficient mental mutation that to lose it would be to lose a spiritual arm. If we can learn to shed our perception of money through intention, we can feel a lighter, more integral vision of time. If not, our experience of the integral it will be more like William Irwin Thompson’s metaphor of the speeding car. We’ll slam on the breaks and everything in the back will fly forward and into the front. But even this could be fun. When we’re teenagers (the time when we’re most present in our astral dimension), we drive our cars through empty parking lots and slam on the brakes and laugh.

* * * * *

Time is not a minute or an hour. It is not the past or the future. It is not even the rising of the sun or the blooming of the apple blossoms. All of these, yes, are gestures of time – but they all seem so not us somehow.
Time is the feeling and thoughts we have as the book falls to the floor.

This is good news for us when we realize that those thoughts and feelings are up to us to radiate and attach to or let go of.

“You have to find a way to step outside of time,” Timothy Leary said to me in the dream-world; a world which is woven in its being into the astral world.

Then the alarm, then the snooze button, then the dream again.

“You see?” he asked.

I see. The waking and the dreaming world, combined. The astral and the etheric and the mineral all diaphanous in the illuminating mental at the moment of intention: that snooze button. Not a button to sleep or to wake, but to hover in the all worlds at once, answering our own questions with a slight and effortless gesture.

Bibliography

Bockemuhl, Jochen, edt, Toward A Phenomenology of the Etheric World (Great Barrington: Anthroposophic Press, 1985) (Including Popplebaum and Schad)

Gebser, Jean, The Ever-Present Origin (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985)

Griffiths, Jay, A Sideways Look at Time (New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 2002)

Hoffman, Eva, Time (New York: Picador, 2009)

Katie, Byron, A Thousand Names for Joy: Living in Harmony with the Way Things Are (New York: Random House, 2007)

Lachman, Gary, A Secret History of Consciousness (Great Barrington: Lindisfarne Press, 2003)

Simic, Charles, The Voice at 3:00 A.M.: Selected Late and New Poems (New York: Harcourt,
2003)

Steiner, Rudolf, The Fourth Dimension: Sacred Geometry, Alchemy, and Mathematics (Great Barrington: Anthroposophic Press, 2001)

Swedenborg, Emmanuel, Divine Love and Wisdom (West Chester: Swedenborg Foundation, 2003)

Toms, Michael, edt, Money, Money, Money: The Search for Wealth and the Pursuit of Happiness
(Carlsbad: Hay House, Inc., 1998)

Van Dusen, Wilson, The Design of Existence: Emanation from Source to Creation (West
Chester: Swedenborg Foundation, 2001)

Van Dusen, Wilson, The Presence of Other Worlds: The Psychological/Spiritual Findings of
Emmanuel Swedenborg (New York: Swedenborg Foundation Inc., 1977)

Girth Brooks and Berke Banks’s apartment keeps its furnishings from Girth’s relative, who owns it. It’s a Florida nightmare of a place; everything in the common areas is pastel and frilled. There are prints on the walls of roses and the frames are brass.

“Ever since we put the stripper pole in, Berke has been wanting to have people over late at night. We’ve been getting complaints.”

The stripper pole stands shining and smooth, floor to ceiling in the living room. I can’t describe how perfectly it fits here. You wouldn’t notice it unless you walked into it or someone told you. It’s by sliding glass doors that lead to a balcony overlooking a rolling green hill.

Berke is in the bathroom, and the door is partially ajar. A sliver of him; a side of his body completely bare from head to toe. The side of his ass cheek, one of his cold blue eyes and perfect eyebrows, a long leg, his black hair on his head and on his arm.
“Hey,” he says.

I notice myself lowering my voice when I say hello. I can’t help it. Everywhere I go to meet something new, my voice drops a few octaves. I’ve tried to change this in two ways, by always staying in the loose, natural higher voice and by pushing my nerves down into the deeper manlier one. Neither stays. It’s up and down up and down, whichever man fits the situation. Which one is true?

It occurs to me – if you ever want to learn a real lesson about sexuality, listen to any gay man’s voicemail greeting.

Berke leaves for a few hours before I get a good look at him. He needs to buy Valentine’s Day gifts for his girlfriend. His friend, Ashley Edmonds, a fetish porn star and dominatrix, picks him up. She’s blonde, friendly, and has an intense but still pretty face. She laughs a lot and tells me within a few minutes how much she loves gay porn. “It’s my thing,” she says.
She’ll be the one filming my scene with Berke later and I get nervous because I’ve never had sex anywhere near a woman before.
Girth passes out on the couch with the low, frustrating hum of ESPN coming out of the TV. I look through Berke’s room. It’s straight: A pile of dirty laundry on the floor. A lit-up display case with watches inside and ballcaps on top. A DVD rack. Somehow this is erotic, like nothing has changed in here since the 1990s. I consider for a moment looking through the pile of laundry on the floor for a loose pair of underwear to smell, but I leave it.
I am charged with sex in this room. It smells lightly of sweat. It is still and sleeping and I don’t want to disturb anything except to live here in all of it.

Berke is the sort of guy that literary types and intellectuals and spiritual people think they have figured out instantly and entirely: He’s a businessman, maybe too crass, loves the gym and grooming, has drive and gets drunk a lot. These things are all true, but so what?
His website features him having sex with men in many improbable/too-good-to-be-true situations.
Berke Visits Ashley Lawrence While She’s Filming and Her Scene Partner Recognizes Berke and Berke Fucks Him. Berke Meets A Kid at the Mall Who Asks Him for Directions and He Ends up Fucking the Kid Later
Mine was:
Berke Picks Up Conner Habib after His Scene with Girth Brooks and Gets So Excited Hearing about the Scene That He Has to Get A Piece of the Action
Which is flattering. Mine isn’t one that’s just coincidental fucking – Berke asks me for it.
We’re in Ashley’s car and I suck Berke’s dick in the back seat while we’re driven around. While his dick is in my mouth, Berke talks to Girth in the front seat. This, for me, is the most erotic part.

When I was an undergrad, I swapped head with a guy in a bathroom stall at a bar. He was there with his girlfriend and his buddies and while we were in the stall, his friends walked into the bathroom and started talking to him. “Justin, what’s going on? We want to go.” I jumped up onto the toilet so that my feet wouldn’t show. Through the wall they talked about his girlfriend, who was waiting for him. He was one of the handsomest guys I’d ever had sex with, but the most erotic part was that brief conversation he had with his friends, while I kneeled with a hardon on top of the toilet. I can’t remember the words, but it was like living inside their bodies. This was their world, their life together.
I was invisibly one of them.

The walls at Ashely’s apartment, which is a stand-in for Berke’s apartment, are turquoise. She films live shows here for her fans. People might believe Berke is straight, but will they still believe it if they see that he has a turquoise room with a turquoise couch? Then again, his real apartment has beige couches with floral prints on them.
He unwraps Magnum condoms and puts them aside. His girlfriend shows up. A dog and a cat bound around the room. I ask before we start, shouldn’t we lock them up in a bedroom?
“Oh don’t worry,” Ashley says, “they won’t interrupt. They get the picture.”
Berke is taking a fat burner because he’s supposed to be on the cover of a magazine soon. He says it’s fucking with the Viagra, and we all take Viagra in case you were wondering. Or if not, the guys will inject their dicks with Caberjack or Trimex, which I can’t even think of without feeling a bit queasy, though I’m told it doesn’t hurt. It’s not that we’re unable to get hard, it’s just that we usually have to go for so long.
Instead of the of Viagra, since it’s not working so well, Berke’s girlfriend gives him a blowjob. He’s hard instantly and he jumps up and fucks me; my pants down around my ankles, my head against the bright soft turquoise. And my mind going in a lot of directions – how do I look? Is he enjoying this? I hope I won’t forget to keep my abs flexed, this feels amazing – but mostly, he’s so handsome. God, he’s so handsome.
“The diamonds are coming off my nails,” Ashely tells me, and looks at her diamondless pink fingernails with a frown. She puts the camera near my face, “I like to get right up in there!”
Ashley talks a lot during the filming. “I can’t help it, I’m like the peanut gallery,” she says.
“Does this turn you on?” I ask Berke’s girlfriend.
“I just love watching him,” she says, and I know exactly what she means.
I watch Berke as he drinks his orange juice between different positions.

He holds my legs and my ass up against his chest for my cumshot, so that I’ll hit my own face. He thrusts and moans and I listen and gaze into his face. I feel his thick and solid thigh with my left hand, and it pushes me over the edge.
The girls rewind it on the camera and laugh and say, “he is so cute,” about me while I lie there, drying.
I have dinner with Berke and his girlfriend afterward. They’re friendly and I need them to be because I’m so tired after yachts and fucking.

I may sound like I’m over-idealizing gay for pay guys. It’s just that I haven’t had any trouble with straight guys in movies. I’ve had enough trouble with them elsewhere; getting called “faggot” during some of my high school years, not because I was out but because I had long hair and wore punk rock t-shirts and didn’t play sports. Those words lasted forever until going to my ten-year reunion somehow alleviated all of it. Seeing everyone there with fatter or thinner faces than I remembered, with smiles and happiness – well there were no more nightmares about high school after that. I knew where they all were. We were all doing okay.
But I never stopped pursuing straight men, and from college onward, the straight guys were always offering it up. Kissing during spin-the-bottle games; drunken blowjobs at and after parties; making out on my bed in front of girls who thought it was hot; in locked bathrooms at parties.
Was anyone straight?
I used to tell myself that everyone was gay, though I don’t believe that anymore, mostly because there have been men comfortable enough to try it out and then stop, deciding quite casually that it wasn’t for them.
My college friend Jeff; tall, handsome, Jewish, and straight: We sat on my bed after going to a bar (the same bar I had sex in) and bared our souls to each other and he leaned forward suddenly and started kissing me. Never another gay peep out of him. When I asked him about it, he said he just wanted to try it with me if he were ever going to try it. It made sense.
Sometimes it pissed them off a little. I used to receive intense pleasure from going up to the cutest, jockiest guys at the straightest bars and kissing them on the mouth and then running away. I idolized Bugs Bunny for this, so why not me? Like Bugs Bunny, I figured that I could always talk my way out of it if I needed to. I’m not exactly proud of this guerrilla gayness, but I don’t feel all that terrible about it, either. I was in college, I was drunk, and my head was filled with jingoism about power and revolution. The white straight rich guys could stand to be unsettled from time-to-time, I reasoned. And surprise: None of them punched me, none of them flipped out. The worst that happened was a bit of fury. Once a guy stormed out of the bar past my friends shouting, “Why do guys always kiss me?”

But what about the straight guys that are offering it up for pay in the movies, the ones that aren’t even as kind as the drunken frat boys I got to?
A friend and scene partner of mine told me about the favored golden status of the straight guys he worked with. On the set of one of his shoots, a huge TV screen played straight porn for his straight scene partner. To my friend, they gave a portable DVD player.
“I’m not kissing you,” the straight guy said. They were expected to get erections in separate rooms.
“He had a wife,” my friend told me. “and he had a girlfriend. Neither of them knew he was doing gay porn. And he was kind of a douchebag besides that. Having someone tell you that he doesn’t want to kiss you right before you’re supposed to have sex doesn’t make things easy. Also? The porn that was on the TV was really violent. The men were screaming at the women.”

Usually we all at least get along. I imagine my poor mild-mannered friend, bewildered by the forcefulness of the shoot. “It felt like I was sacrificing myself to a monster,” he said.

And then there’s Toby, who did a threesome with two straight guys, Chris and Jack. He told me that he later found out directors shy away from putting more than one straight man in a gay scene. Something weird happens when they’re together. A bad reaction.
Both Chris and Jack had perfect bodies. They stood on one side of the room, Jack constantly talking about the girls he’d had sex with. “I was in my own universe,” Toby said.
They rarely engaged with Toby at all, and then there came a further twisting in them as they competed to enjoy the scene less. Toby stood on the bed and Chris and Jack were asked to suck his dick. But they were making disgusted faces at each other, Jack barely letting Toby’s dick in.
When the oral sex was over, Toby was angry. “You guys give horrible blowjobs,” he told them. They looked at him with hurt and innocent expressions. How could they be bad at anything?

I’m not sure why guys do this if they can’t handle it. There must be all sorts of interpretations open to us. For example, we can see the scene I did with Berke as a whole. For us to have sex, we needed a camera, two girls, and camaraderie. All the elements were essential. Taken as a whole, that’s a very complex sex act.
Or maybe it’s just acting – but when someone cries in a movie, is he just acting or is he inside that part of him that cries?
Or perhaps, as Gore Vidal has suggested, sex is just about money now. The money is so eroticized that it carries the straight men through the act.

Berke tries to confirm as much at dinner. “I was called in for a jerk-off scene and then they called me back for an oral scene with a guy a few days later. I said no, but then they doubled the amount they offered me.” So he did it and did it and eventually he was fucking and even (once) getting fucked.
But again, this is more complex than it seems, for how long until it all becomes Pavlovian?
The money and the sex and the men become so intertwined at some point; they must. The thought of having money is a tiny bell inside the gay-for-pay performer’s head. And anyway, is it hetero- or homosexual to fantasize about money? Isn’t it just monetary-sexual?
Maybe we don’t even have sexualities anymore.
Our sexual energy is dispersed amongst our things. It could be a dollar bill or a whip or a locker room or a conversation between two straight men. Where is our arousal coming from? We fool ourselves if we think it’s merely a response to bodies. We fool ourselves even more if we think it’s the drive to reproduce, as evolutionary psychologists are fond of pointing out.
I’d like them to explain the evolutionary advantage and history of Berke Banks fucking me in a turquoise room with girls and cameras present. They’d try with their withered speculations and they’d lose the nuance and excitement of it. Indeed with such flat, boring answers, they lose the entire picture.
There’s no clean answer. If you think there is, you’re missing everything.

“I lost some friends over this,” Berke says. “I didn’t realize everyone would find out. And it’s so fucked up because I thought, what if I were gay? They would have hated me for that too. But you just get on with your life.” The restaurant is loud and bawdy. There are men everywhere and a few women hanging on their words.
“I got a DUI and had to go to jail for three months, I can deal with stuff. I just waited it out. You wait your whole week for one video monitor call and that call, that face in the little box, is your whole world. If it doesn’t come, you’re crushed. But I dealt with it.”
We ordered food awhile ago and I’m getting anxious for it to arrive, I’m so hungry. When it comes, it’s mediocre, but Berke loves it.
He seems to love everything.

We go back to the apartment and Berke shows me how to use the stripper pole. He spins upside-down on it. It’s not that hard, he shows me. It’s more about momentum than muscles. Just swing yourself around enough and anyone can do it at least a little. I spend my last evening there at a dive bar in a strip mall with Girth, Berke, and Berke’s girlfriend. A girl hits on me and then realizes I’m gay. “Of course,” she says. There’s a bad cover band with six members playing. People are dancing to alternative songs from the 1990s.
“Do you want to get laid tonight?” Girth asks me. I’m exhausted, and tell him no. He shows me a picture of a friend of his from his bartending job. “I’m so fucking horny,” he tells me. And then, “I can call my friend here for you.”
His friend shows up a little while later, with another man who is even cuter. I want to pay attention to the friend, but the other man, Jason, gets all my attention.
Berke tells me how to pop my abs and pecs for an upcoming event. I wander down a long hallway to the men’s bathroom and don’t lock the door. I don’t understand how I could have another second of sex, but this is Florida, I remember. This is Florida.
Two days ago, I stood in front of a shut-down store in South Beach and stared at the three mannequins, all facing away from me in the window. This is where the homeless are so wrinkled from the sun that they’re not recognizable; more like bunched up blankets than people. Somewhere close to this bar, there’s an alligator pushing itself into muddy water, and a panther stooped in grass.
When we leave, I ask Girth about Jason. “He’s definitely straight though,” Girth says.
“Are you sure?” I ask. “He was massaging your gay friend’s shoulders.”
“Actually you might be right. I have this girl I work with and she’s good at spotting that stuff – she called him out the other day because he does this gesture. He does this, like, gay gesture.”
So you never know.

I’m shooting gay porn scenes with two straight men this week, and I intend to understand this.

They’re roommates and friends and they both celebrated their friendship by getting pirate tattoos on their legs. For these shoots, I have to fly Florida, which is filled with strange animals and plants that have been dying lately from a cold snap. The first straight guy I’m going to be filmed having gay sex with is a friend.

His porn name, I’m not kidding, is Girth Brooks.

We’ve done a scene before, and when his photos were sent to me for the first time, something tugged at my memory, but I wasn’t sure.

His dick is huge, so thick, that your hand wouldn’t fit around it unless you were a monster. That was new to me – but the face; I kept coming back to it. It wasn’t in the middle of the night when it hit me, but instead at a Starbucks. I was fucking around on the internet and an image of one of my students – I used to teach at two different colleges in New England – rose up in my brain. I was anxious and checked facebook. There, in my student’s family pictures, was Girth Brooks. Girth Brooks kneeling next to my student and a Christmas tree, Girth Brooks getting drunk with my student, Girth Brooks with one arm around his mom and another around my student. They were brothers.

And it wasn’t a forgettable student, but one who I would think about after class and masturbate to. He’d be sucking my dick or fucking me in front of everyone else in the class. All sorts of things you’re not supposed to talk about. I get the feeling, even, that we’re not supposed to think about these things. As if there were some way to shut out all desire for a student because it’s inappropriate. As if there weren’t a hundred novels and movies about these things. As if he weren’t an adult. He could go to jail and kill someone for the government, but I wasn’t supposed to think about his naked body.

Him. His brother. Did I mention they look alike?

* * * * *

We spend the night on a yacht, owned by Girth’s childhood friend and her family. It’s not easy.

The father keeps talking about “ragheads” and “the gays”. He looks too much like Mr. Roper from Three’s Company for me to take him entirely seriously, except that he owns a company that builds military stuff for the navy. He wears a baby blue sweater, and I don’t say anything about anything. None of them know that Girth is in porn (or that he calls himself “Girth” for that matter), none of them know that I’m Middle Eastern, and none of them know that I’m gay. It’s like high school, I pass and do my best to blend in without making any specific references to men or women I’m attracted to. We only spend about ten hours together not including sleep, but it’s the longest I’ve gone pretending for…I can’t remember.

We get drunk. I don’t drink often, but sometimes you really do have to make life entirely bearable. We eat horrible food at an Italian restaurant that also has curry on the menu. We go to a bar where girls are dancing on a stage, wearing leopard print bikinis. The whole world seems drunk, actually. We must all be going through something.

On the cab back from the bar, I catch myself making what feel like harmless racist jokes and then even through the haze of alcohol think about the father’s comments and try hard to forgive him. He’s ridiculous and kind underneath the swaggering and mistakes. What can I say?

If there’s one thing I want to remember, if there’s one thing I want all of us to remember, it’s that within each one of us, there are so many people. Porn is generous in this way – it’s a world of doubles. Girth Brooks is not really Girth Brooks, after all. He doesn’t even have sex with men off-screen. And the racist, homophobic, rich, white dad who works for the military also lets a stranger stay on his yacht and buys this stranger dinner and gives him French toast and a hug goodbye the next day. Is that what evil looks like? Is it really that kind?

Am I, then, evil? I sometimes wonder this. Am I fucking up the world with porn? I want the man I’m dating to see me as someone smart and happy and free, but the world is full of doubt and I can never fully know the effects of my actions. None of us live in certainty. We take our clothes off and have sex and usually I feel comfortably seated in this. But why, then, do Girth and I always want my partners to see me as innocent? As a boy? Wouldn’t they just see it if that’s what I was? There are so many questions and without answers to them, we’ll never know what we deserve from our partners or the world, we’ll just have to come out and list our demands and hope they’re met.

Drunk at the edge of the yacht, we watch silver tarpon slip past us. They’re huge and beautiful.
“I want to jump in there,” Girth says.

A tarpon swallows a mouthful of smaller fish, which are dancing in light blue water, lit up by the boat.
“I want to grab that fish,” he says. “Look at it. I want to grab it.”

Recently, Derrick Burts, aka Derek Chambers aka Cameron Reid, came out as “patient zeta” in the HIV/porn industry scare that led to many porn performers being “quarantined” and tested.

I’ve only had brief interactions with him. When we met in West Hollywood, months before this all happened, he was sweet and generous with his words. He was handsome and excited to begin the adventure of being in porn. He gave me a kiss goodnight and sent me funny texts afterward.

In different articles and blog appearances before and after the incident, Burts gave conflicting information. The reportage is confusing and does not add up to a clear picture of the case.

On twitter, as well as in blog comment fields and in conversations, I heard and read that he is a “liar,” a “fucking moron,” “deserved what he got,” because he didn’t wear a condom during sex.

* * * *

In the essay, “Some Freaks,” playwright, director, and screenwriter David Mamet writes, “Sometimes, an individual is thrown up who does not fit the norm…” that individual (he uses the example of a medicine man in indigenous cultures) must take a different path in life, because he can’t help it; because it’s what’s in his head and his heart.

“…and that Individual and Society as a whole benefited. They benefited, perhaps, from his visions and…most importantly, from the endorsement of the notion that all people born into the society are precious.”

In other words, there is worth in the outcast, in the marginalized, in those who are by their very nature “exempted” from a regular way of life. The worth isn’t merely in their contribution, but in their very way of being – because it is through their way of being and the difference it evinces that society finds its compassion. Society must learn compassion if these outsiders who “do not fit the norm” are going to be allowed to live and be content.

This is the homosexual. This is, to a more intense extent, the porn performer.

We are teachers – not because we are all equally intelligent or equally articulate. We are teachers by our action and our way of being. When we come out of the closet, we choose what we love over societal pressure. Instead of living in fear, we pursue what’s in our hearts.
Similarly, when we choose to be porn stars, we express an amplified version of this great step: We choose, against all societal advice, to do publicly what we love and care about.
This is a great lesson to everyone – we are not afraid to choose what is forbidden, because to deny ourselves of what’s in out hearts would be the real crime.

All teachers carry a burden.

At the margins in our work, we salute in the public eye, we have sex with one another, we laugh and share our bodies with the world. In our lives, porn actors demand patience and compassion. Our lovers must be understanding. Our families must accept us. Our world must be willing to allow us this freedom. These things are all reasonable requests, and we are correct to make them, whether we do so consciously or not. But the world hasn’t caught up to this yet. The shape of our lives is, for many, the shape of shame and fear. In fact, many of us still feel this fear and shame, even as we proceed.
Sometimes we forget this; we forget that for many who aren’t in the porn industry, watching and buying porn is still difficult to admit to, much less appearing in it.

Our lives are radical acts that demand radical compassion to be understood.

In other words, though our jobs are about sex, our lives are about and sustained by compassion. Since this is so, who are we and what do we become if we forget our own compassion?

* * * *

And what is compassion?

Three clues for me:

1. Shortly after Proposition 8 was passed, the country’s largest environmental expo – Greenfest – was being held in San Francisco. I’d volunteered months ahead of time to support a (then small) counter-cultural website at the festival. Greenfest was scheduled the same day as the monumental protest in the streets of San Francisco, ending on the steps of City Hall.
The night before both events, someone asked me if I was attending the protest.
“No,” I responded, telling him I was volunteering at Greenfest that day. In a frustrated growl, he said, “How can there be an environmental conference when our rights are being taken away?”
I paused, not knowing what to say, shocked. Not even able to point out that of course the environmental conference had been scheduled months beforehand, I stared into my drink.
“It’s bullshit,” he said impatiently.
“Well,” I reasoned, “gay people live in the environment, right?” I was making a joke, but a light dawned on his face.
“Oh yeah, I guess you’re right,” he said.
I saw this isolated thinking echoed again and again, sometimes blatantly. At subsequent marches, people carried signs saying, “Save the chickens but screw marriage?” referencing a proposition that passed which protected farm animals from torture. I felt sickened by this pitting of issues against one another. Doesn’t our treatment of animals tie into our treatment of each other? What if I’d carried a sign that said, “Fuck clean air, we want the right to abortion!”

2. Later, when the gay teen suicides were (finally) being reported, many people stood up against bullying in schools. They embraced the “It Gets Better” line – and it was true to some extent. It certainly got better for me after I left my small, conservative Pennsylvania hometown.

But as many pointed out (some harshly, some reasonably, and some in pitying tones), it doesn’t automatically get better. “Better” is our lifelong task – it is our individual duty. We may escape our childhood bullies and enter into a new sort of danger. Like getting a driver’s license, we experience freedom coupled with the danger of dying or killing in new ways.

Or maybe just different versions of old ways. Many of the people who tout “It gets better” or “No H8” are on twitter, their blogs, and elsewhere mocking others, nitpicking at faults, gossiping.

These are all human actions – in other words, we can’t expect anyone to never gossip, to never nitpick. But what happens when we escape the bullies and fight for the right to love while unwittingly becoming loveless bullies ourselves?

In the light of bullying and suicide, Perez Hilton issued an apology for his public cruelty. Many said it was too late and that the apology was forced and painful to listen to. It did, indeed, come across as poorly planned and off-the-cuff. But we’ve got to let ourselves apologize again and again for our mistakes and missteps and to constantly begin anew. None of us is immaculate.

3. I remember as an undergrad watching an early examination of gays in the military. A soldier who’d been kicked out of the army said in his defense, “when I’m the showers, I’m not looking at other guys, I’m there to take a shower.” I suppose it’s possible to take some of the showers during your duty with other naked men and not look – but all of them? All the time? He was substituting honesty for what he supposed would get the job done – presenting an isolated issue over the whole truth.

* * * *

In each of these instances, the higher truth – the truth that seeks to perceive the whole, was abandoned.
The state of the world is abandoned in favor of focusing on marriage, leading to a war between righteous causes.
The systemic causes of bullying are abandoned for escape, leading to a forgetfulness and more bullying.
The reality of sexual attraction (not to mention the question of war) is abandoned in favor of the cause of participating in the military, which leads to silence about who we are as sexual beings, and isn’t that what got us into the oppression in the first place?

* * * *

The word compassion comes from the Latin compati, meaning, “to suffer with.”
When we isolate one issue from others, we do not allow ourselves to experience compassion, because we alienate the whole, the “with” of “to suffer with” from our experience. This limits our understanding of the world and our ability to change it.

We’ve got to learn to think interconnectedly, about the whole, in systems, not isolated instances. Our guide to this new way of thinking is compassion, which is the loving inclusion of others – however full of contradictions this may seem. If, for instance, we want to care about gay marriage, how can we be compassionate towards those who don’t want to get married? How can we include them in our argument? If we want to end disease and illness in our community, how can we include those who are already sick? When we divide the non-married from the marriage issue or the sick from the healthy, we quarantine the teachers of compassion.

Similarly, if we want to be in the military, how can we do so without giving up our sexual identity? What would have happen if as a culture we’d say to heterosexuals, “Yes, sometimes we look at each you and have sexual feelings. It doesn’t have to be threatening and we’re not afraid to tell you about it because it’s natural.” Compassion demands honesty: an impulse towards courage to suffer the consequence of being truthful with one another. Honesty is how we act while thinking of the whole. What kind of change would such honesty win us?

* * * *

Since compassion, to suffer with, means understanding issues and people as deeply interconnected so we can suffer with them, it also means forgiving others of their stumbles as they strive to see the bigger picture.

This does not mean we cannot be angry or vent to our friends. It absolutely does not mean we have no right to be critical. But gossip, pettiness, and self-righteousness are deformed versions of criticism.

Philosopher, scientist, and mystic, Rudolf Steiner once declared that,
We cannot on the one hand want to take part in the processes of the cosmos, and on the other hand make derogatory remarks about our fellow human beings in the widespread way this happens in restaurants and clubs in this bourgeois age.

This is not merely metaphorical or moralizing speculation. When we gossip about others, when, for example, we write on Twitter that Derrick Chambers is stupid or deserves his HIV diagnosis, we are distracting ourselves from seeing the connections between him and us by preferring to need him to be a perfect, infallible example of a human being. What’s worse, it’s public, so we’re encouraging others to do the same thing by proliferating this distraction. Instead of suffering with, we laugh at suffering.

I don’t feel comfortable with the contradictory stories that Derrick has given to the public. But I remember him being sweet and happy months ago, and I can only imagine the frustration and fear this sort of media attention has created in him.
How often have we ourselves made the errors that he’s made in our personal lives? How often have we mistaken what we want to be true for what is true?

He may have done the wrong thing by confusing his statements and casting blame in the wrong places. But do I have to do the same thing to feel okay about the situation? Or can I break out of the pattern and create something new?

We are all beyond being purely innocent or guilty.
When we want someone to be infallible, we fall back on our childhood fantasies about our parents – that they will protect and always be there for us, that they can do no wrong.

But as adults, we are obligated with the task finding a new type of relationship – based on the understanding that everyone is full of contradictions, capable of kindness and cruelty, capable of blunders and mistakes. We work on becoming secure with ourselves so that we can interact with others lovingly.

Since we have, as theorist Amber Hollibaugh put it, “chosen desire where desire is forbidden,” gays, lesbians, transgendered people and porn actors have lives that are magnetic to compassion. Let’s not forget it’s what our being is made of, and that we can charge others with compassion if we live out of it.

We must (and actually, this is first and foremost), be compassionate with ourselves. I will, of course, lapse into errant words and stray comments that injure and hurt my friends and loved ones. I will, no doubt, gossip in the future, and insult someone. I’m not proud or excited about it, but I understand that it’s not easy to change a pattern and it’s important to be gentle when learning something new.

The much-repeated statement that “If one person is oppressed, no one is free,” is true even down to our comments in our social profiles. No matter what, we’re in this together. We are all organs of this community – if one of us fails to work, to breathe, to gesture, the entire body fails.

There’s no hope for health unless we take care of one another as individual cells in a living, dynamic system, with a simultaneous love for the individual and a vision and respect for the whole.

I’d like to tell you who I was then, but I have this strange feeling that I was not anybody.

I remember that I wore black t-shirts and listened to angry music. I remember that I’d been inspired to let my hair get a little longer in the front, and to write stories. The stories were violent, everything was violent. I liked to fight with my stepfather and my mom. They were taking my sister and I, along with my stepbrother and his friend David, on a vacation.

I wanted to be independent, so I’d walk to the beach and on the boardwalk by myself. That summer, I watched girls and their boyfriends buy clumsy, oversized t-shirts and make out and play volleyball. I felt an envy for those girls, but didn’t understand.
I’d had this nagging feeling, for awhile, that I wanted a brother. I didn’t know what it meant. My stepbrothers couldn’t count: two lived in Ireland, and the one with us was in his twenties and never around, he had his own life. I didn’t know who he was, and there was either nothing to him or I’d never learn.

A brother.
I felt this acutely; someone, some man, to spend my time with. I thought it must be that my Syrian father was too strange to relate to. He went hunting and spoke Arabic but couldn’t read English or help me with my homework. He built houses and yelled at my mother. My stepfather was in a constant state of boredom. He tried to avoid surprises and new experiences. He ate the same thing every night. I thought it must be a lack of men that drove me to this longing for a brother. Someone to laugh with and be adored and teased by.

I’d had sexual experiences with other boys and girls my age at this point – but there was no understanding of the other person’s role. It could have been anyone or even objects, as every morning I’d push myself into my mattress and consider the strange, warm feeling.
Waves up my chest and in my spine, a chill when I’d cum, a peaceful feeling afterward.
These were pieces of a great, weighty understanding. But they were awaiting some sort of permission to come together.

I think what I mean by all of this: Before you look at a man, really look at one, you’re not awake. Imagine a ghost becoming alive – the form is there, but transparent; then it exhales and becomes opaque.

I walked from the apartment my sister, mother, stepfather and I were staying in over to my stepbrother’s and David’s place.
They were always welcoming and they seemed to me to be eternally happy, but they were probably drunk. The refrigerator had beer in it, there was beer on the kitchen counter, there were empty beer bottles in the garbage can, on the couch. It was one o’clock in the afternoon.

Before you think: They fucked me – They didn’t. Nobody touched anyone.
My stepbrother was in the bedroom. David was in his bathing suit. His pecs were thick and quietly covered in sun-lightened brown hairs. He was tall and had a handsome smile, though I hadn’t yet really noticed all of that. No one was gay or straight because those ideas could not yet exist for me.
My stepbrother and David often made crude jokes and I usually understood them. David made one that I didn’t and then told me he was going to take a shower.
I sat on the couch, and after a moment, David called to me from the bathroom.
He’d forgotten to bring a towel, he shouted. They must have left them around the apartment after they’d taken them to the beach.
He called my name. He said, “get me a towel.”

Why didn’t he ask my stepbrother? Why me? And why did I sit there, not moving to leave or to go talk to my stepbrother in the bedroom?
It occurs to me now that maybe I was waiting. A wiser person inside of me, or a person that needed something decided not to leave at that moment, but instead to sit by myself. There would be a sound or an action or a movement that would give me my instructions, and I can identify David’s call as that, because David gave me those instructions.
There was no stirring from my stepbrother in the bedroom.

I picked up a towel, which was still wet. It was heavy in my hand, opposing with the slowness of its weight, my racing heart, which felt as if it were sparking, starting some sort of light.
When I opened the bathroom door, there must have been the sound of the shower and he must have said thank you and I must have put the towel somewhere like on the sink or over the side of the shower door but I can’t remember any of that. All I know is that I saw, through the frosted shower door glass, his form. I looked right at him. He wasn’t distinctly visible, the frosted glass stopped him from appearing, but he was there entirely. I looked at him. I saw his form, the color of his skin, his legs, what must have been his arms, his ass. There were no clear lines, there were shapes and color. I looked at him, and saw what was there. I felt inside of me something entirely new, the coalition of light and sound and this…feeling.
No time had lapsed, but it had seemed to me there wasn’t much to my life before that moment. I walked out and more than I had wanted a brother, more than I had wanted anything, I wanted to be pressed against that frosted glass from the other side and feel his form and weight behind me, under the hot water, and then I’d be kissing him or on my knees sucking his dick. All this and I didn’t want to see him clearly.
There was something about that blurriness.

I have no idea about the rest of the trip.
After that moment, I began to think when I masturbated. Suddenly, the world was full of men, and I’d look at them when I closed my eyes. There was new meaning to everything.
I’d look at them and remember them and they all became brothers, they all loved me. I’d imagine them touching me and make up stories for why. Before then, I’d only had this body which would sometimes evince a different sensation if I touched it in a certain way. But after that moment with David and the frosted shower door glass, the world became different: a world where the memories of men I looked at are seen by the way my body feels.

This is how we know the mind and body are in love. One creates a story, the other feels it.

I still come back to that image, sometimes in a dream or sometimes when I masturbate.
It’s the exact moment I became an adult and woke up into a different, clearer sort of consciousness. But it’s no so exact, because it’s blurry.

If it’s in a dream, it has, like all dreams, its own logic. Why it shows up some nights and not others, I don’t know.

If I’m masturbating when I think of it, the experience can go dim when I cross the threshold of the shower and stand with him. Because that experience is the purest act of looking I’ve ever done, to add to it, to go beyond that blurriness, takes some of its breath. Like the sun, it’s totally complete. A perfect circle that remains perfect because I can’t ever really see it.

My friend, Trevor Spencer, is dead.

I write “friend,” but when he was alive, I would have perhaps thought that was too strong a word. He was not, I might have pointed out, “really” a friend. Instead he was someone I admired, talked to around town, kissed from time to time, and whose smile I thought about.

As I write this, I don’t know how he died. This morning, I got a text message telling me it happened. Not a call. Nobody would think I knew him well enough to call me, and that’s exactly right. I didn’t.

Even though we’re meant to revere it in all cases, Death gives us different meanings.
If the person that dies is close to us or (please protect me) very close, we might walk around in a haze, not wondering what’s “next.” There isn’t a “next” because life no longer has a succession. Part of our present and our past has been severed. We’re no longer who we were, but something else in a world that has changed entirely.

When my friend Sigrid died years ago, I laughed at first. She was hit by a train and it seemed so absurd that someone could be hit by a train. I hadn’t seen her in years. I walked around for a few hours, seemingly unaffected, and then I fell down, suddenly, and started crying. I called my friend Jim, who used to be her boyfriend.
“I heard,” he said. “But she was a really terrible person. I’m not happy she’s dead, but I’m not really upset either.”
I didn’t know what he was referring to or what she’d done to him. I don’t know who she became in those years between my goodbye to her and her death. She’d driven me home after I got too high and was almost catatonic at an all-night diner; she sang to me on the way to my apartment to calm my nerves. I never saw her after that, except in a black-and-white photo in the Morning Call; black ink dots on gray newspaper.

She was twenty, I think. Or younger, maybe.

I don’t know how old Trevor was when he died. Yesterday. Last night. The last time I saw him, he looked youthful.

Does it make a difference? Does age or expectation of death calm us? My grandfather (mother’s side) and my grandmother (father’s side) died and I felt almost nothing. I breathed slowly. I thought about it for a bit. I went about my day. I didn’t write about it, I didn’t tell anyone about it, and I didn’t cry.

When my mother died, we knew it was coming. We were waiting for it for over a year. A line of cars surrounded the cemetery in procession. They blocked traffic. People stood around the rectangle of open ground, the polished wood, and the family. Me. My sister, my brother. For a year, I had a strange heavy head. I’d turn to the left or right and it felt like water was shifting from one side of my skull to the other. I was absent from life. I inherited money and spent it all in a year on nothing. I drank a lot. I slept in the afternoon.

Look around you.
Everyone in the room will die and if you know them, you’ll hear about it. And still, we’re amnesiacs about it. Death is like the seasons: they come each year, but we’re constantly surprised by their chill or heat. They’re a rhythmic surprise, a pattern we never get used to.

Everyone we know will die and we’ll see it happen, or we will die, and they’ll watch us go.

This includes not only those we’re desperately afraid for – our families, our partners, our children, our friends – but also our facebook friends, our acquaintances, the bartender, our hookups.

When I had a boyfriend, Trevor asked me out, three different times. He always forgot I had a boyfriend. I laughed each time and said no and gave him a big hug. I wonder, now, if I was unlucky or lucky to have said no. Because I said no, he never came into full focus. I might have been spared some of the pain of his passing, but I missed out on the joy of knowing him better.

I have no idea how I’ll feel when any of you die. We’re not prepared for the deaths of the people we know well. But we’re equally unprepared for the deaths of the faces we merely recognize – of those we wanted to or should have known, the people we just missed.

On Trevor’s facebook wall, people have written loving comments. This isn’t new or surprising, as far as he’s concerned – he was always bringing loving words out of us. The comments are addressed to him – “I can’t believe you’re gone,” they say. “I love you Trevor,” they say.

They’re difficult to read without wondering about yourself and how people will react. Depending on what you believe or know, Trevor will or will not experience this outpouring of love. The words may only be for us, as we embrace each other through his life and death; or maybe they’re for him too, their sentiment carried, somehow, to whatever and wherever he is now.

Death is a door or a question or an unwinnable argument or the beginning of nothing. It’s not for you and I to find out. Not for now. Until it is, we’ll give it different lives.

There’s just one photo of Trevor and I together. It’s on Castro Street and he’s holding me up, though you can’t tell he’s holding me. He’s smiling, as usual. The sun is beaming from behind him, as usual. It looks like the sky has opened up for him, or like a halo. That might seem to be only a coincidence for you, and if you didn’t know him that’s understandable. For you, that’s the right answer. For me, that light has taken meaning.

The photo might save someone from disappearing, but only when we look at it. Memory is the same way; because we only remember when we try to, and at my mother’s funeral, I implored people not to forget her.
I quoted Paul Auster: “It was. It will never be again. Remember.”
I only talk to one of my mother’s friends now. They all used to watch me when I was a child. They took me to violin lessons or played games with me or cut my hair. They were hilarious and smart women. I don’t talk to many people in my mom’s family. I don’t talk to my stepfather at all. But I remember them. I’m not sure if this is the “correct” way to live. I’m not sure if this is the “right thing.”

Sooner or later, Trevor’s facebook page will be taken down. The words will be gone.

Is that like dying? Are we like words? We’re spoken; we move; we make a sound and have meaning; but our true selves are never solid or graspable. Once the breath is finished and the word is issued, we’re gone.

The last time I saw Trevor, he kissed me in front of the vitamin shop. He was walking one way, I was walking the other. We stopped and kissed, happily, like funny, overly-eager boys do, on the sidewalk. We exchanged a few words and said our goodbyes.

We knew we’d see each other again.

When someone dies, people will ask you, “were you two close?” If such a consideration matters, and it might, I still can’t figure out why or how it does. If we don’t know how to say goodbye to our parents or grandparents, how will we say goodbye to those people we were expecting to be more alive and more real to us one day?

Those people who show up half-formed as friends, not completely developed as lovers, but not quite acquaintances, how should we say goodbye to them?

Trevor, I miss you, I love you. You were never really here in my life, and you will never really be gone.

Winning

Why don’t we know how to talk about winning yet?
We know how to talk about losing, failing, crying, broken hearts. We know how to write about tragedy, make movies about cancer, document catastrophe.

I won the 2010 GayVN for Best Newcomer, and I noticed that when I sat down to write about it I had no idea how.

Stories of winning are often preluded by stories of abysmal failure – the baseball team sucks, but works and works until finally, somehow, they win the World Series or whatever. Or the nerdy girl who everyone hates finally gets the popular boy after she lets down her hair. Everyone, it is said, loves an underdog.

I’m not generally inclined to point out socio-religio-economic factors in narratives, but this pattern does display the perfect capitalist and communist and Christian/Muslim narrative. That is:
Start poor + effort = A climax in wealth!
Or: Start oppressed + organize = revolution!
Or: Work your ass off + die = Reward in Heaven!
One slanted upward line. Flat without the contours of imagination, we begin in poverty and end in reward.

It’s as if we have to experience hardship to celebrate happiness. Is that a different, forgotten definition of guilt? No one can be alive, happy, excited, privileged, loved, without having a shadow to redeem it.

Worse still, If we never achieve reward, it’s out “fault”. We fucked up.

Connected to this is the notion that we somehow “deserve” our hardships. When someone dies of lung cancer: Imagine the shaking heads when we find out that person smoked. Or when someone tests positive for HIV and people say (sometimes in hushed tones, but other times, loudly, rudely), “Well he should have worn a condom.”

If we step back and look at our friends and our lovers, how can we not be ashamed by this backwards thinking? We praise work and suffering. We blame those in pain. We demand that joy and happiness and success be redeemed by turbulence. What kind of world do we want to live in if we demonize the joy of others?

I’m not sure when this all started. Was there a time when we were happier for each other, more connected when one of us succeeds, more loving when one of us suffers?

It has something to do with thinking of ourselves as intensely disconnected individuals: A win is a win for me, not anyone else. So is a loss. The disconnection that accompanies the isolated individual’s success or failure makes him uneasy with both.

So now, even when we win, when we succeed, we are often afraid.

A friend of mine won a GayVN and I caught his twitter feed later – Someone had asked him if he won. When my friend replied that he had, he wrote something like, “Well yes, but we’re not supposed to talk about it, right?”

Like sex used to be, success is a taboo. Too often, we hate the things that have brought others happiness and pleasure.

I don’t agree with the “death to the ego” notion espoused by Buddhists or new age thinkers. I’m happy I’m an individual and have a boundary and what (at least seem like) my own personality and tastes. I think the individual makes sense at this point in time. But I’m trying to figure out how to be myself – in this case, when I win something – and not feel badly telling you about it.

Look, even here, I’ve talked about failure, fuck up, remorse, redemption because I can’t just say “Thank you.” Because I fear saying, “I really did deserve it,” without experiencing rebuke.

Let me start again.

I won the 2010 Best Newcomer GayVN award. Thank you! I deserved it.

Everyone that got one deserved it.

I don’t care if some performers are better than others or one movie was better shot than another, or if -as was claimed last year – there was corruption in the selection process, or if some studios should have been recognized more, or if the whole ceremony was fucked up and self-congratulatory (it wasn’t).

I felt this great feeling when I went up to the stage – people were clapping and smiling and shouting. It wasn’t amazing merely in the winning – it was amazing because it was clear to me that we’re not isolated individuals. We’re in this together. We were there for each other.

I know I’m not always this clear. I know that sometimes I make fun of people, I forget that we’re friends, I laugh when someone trips, and I blame people for their problems.

But right now, it makes sense.

Thank you for the award. Let’s be in love with winning again.